FULL MOON ISLAND Read online

  FULL MOON ISLAND

  By Terry Yates

  TEXT COPYRIGHT-2012 TERRY YATES

  FOR: Mom, Dad, Tim, Rowena, Taryn, Alyssa, David Moore, Cash Cooper, Mark Cooper, Wes Williams (Also cover art), Imelda Zamora (For constant encouragement), Tom Lenaghen, Stephen King, my Esther, and all those who like to get the Heebie-geebies.

  CHAPTER 1

  The heart monitor beeped loud and steady, the brainwaves seemed normal, and the oxygen bag moved in a slow but even beat. Dr. Richard Kyler scratched his head. This guy should have been dead hours ago. Hell, this guy shouldn’t be alive at all. He should be down in the island morgue with the rest of the body parts that the rescuers had fished out of the ocean earlier that day.

  He had been setting a broken leg when he’d heard a roar so loud that he, Nurse Walling, and even his patient, twelve year old Michael Blum had to cover their ears. Before any of them could scream, “What the hell was that!” the small island hospital was nearly rocked from its foundation. Both doctor and nurse fell across their patient’s injured leg, causing the boy to scream in agony. Something large had crashed into the ocean causing the whole island to quake.

  Nurse Walling ran to the window that faced the ocean and pressed her face against the glass. It was 10:00 a.m., but the sky was getting darker by the hour. The oncoming storm would be there by evening. She could make out people racing down both sidewalks on Main Street toward the beach, the wind knocking most people under a hundred and fifty pounds sideways.

  “Can you see anything?” Kyler asked, ignoring the groans of the Blum boy who was attempting to rub his leg through the new cast, but was instead leaving claw marks in the damp plaster.

  Nurse Walling peered out toward the ocean. She was pushing sixty and her eyes weren’t what they used to be. Through the mist, she saw something large and silver sticking straight up out of the water.

  “My God…it’s a jet!” she exclaimed, her voice trailing off as she spoke.

  Kyler raced to the window, this time knocking Michael Blum sideways off of the gurney and onto the floor. Once more, he screamed in agony, but the doctor and nurse were too busy for Michael Blum and his broken leg. They both began to pack emergency supplies into two large medical bags.

  “Where are you going?” the boy grunted through gritted teeth, his round glasses hanging off of one ear and lying across his cheek. He was leaning on his shoulder while still trying to rub his aching leg through the new cast.

  “To the beach,” Kyler answered as he jumped over the boy and out the door.

  “But what about me?”

  “Take an aspirin,” Nurse Walling answered for the doctor. She too jumped over the boy, but not being as young as Dr. Kyler, who was half her age, her right foot didn’t quite make it over young Blum’s head, and the toe of her shoe poked him in his right eye. He squealed as the nurse’s shoe dragged across his eye, then his ear, and finally the nape of his neck, pulling every little hair out by the root. Surprisingly, Nurse Walling didn’t fall. She stumbled a few steps but quickly righted herself, then followed Dr. Kyler out of the room, leaving the little rich snot to his own devices.

  Outside, doctor and nurse ducked their heads to the wind and began to make their way toward the beach. Kyler saw for himself the tail of the jet sticking out of the water. It was leaning slightly to the right, the left wing protruding from the water. There was no right wing. He could see it lying on the beach with several pairs of mangled legs and an arm sticking out from under it. Dark smoke was billowing from the top of the plane as well as the one engine that was still visible. The front third of the 747 was charred black from fire and smoke. The ocean seemed to have put out most of the fire forcing what was left through the top of the jet and whatever holes had been torn in the sides.

  As they moved closer, Kyler noticed two overturned jeeps, one on its side, and the other completely upside down. The jet crash had caused the ground to shake violently. The jeeps had had enough trouble staying righted through the gale force wind. Once the jet landed in the ocean, the shockwaves intertwined with the wind and the jeeps fell over. Kyler saw that several injured soldiers were being attended to by other soldiers and a few civilians. Seeing that no one was too seriously injured, Kyler and Nurse Walling continued to the beach.

  When they reached the beach, the normally white sand was now brown in color. The splash back from the impact sent the water well over the tide level turning the beach into mud. Strewn corpses washed up with the tide, the blood giving the beach a rust color. Hands, legs, torsos, heads, and objects that were unrecognizable to either of them littered the beach.

  “My God!” Nurse Walling exclaimed, her mouth remaining open.

  Kyler’s mouth was fixed in the same position as the nurse’s. He was a three-month resident fresh out of medical school. The ink wasn’t even dry on his diploma and there he stood, he and a nurse two months from retirement, alone, the other doctors and most of the nurses having already been evacuated by helicopter. They had missed their turn when Michael Blum had ridden his bicycle into a tank after a gust of wind had knocked both boy and bicycle sideways. Michael had rolled over the top of the tank and landed on the hard cement, his left leg bending back under his body. The sound of the bone breaking had caused a soldier to vomit violently right on top of young Blum’s shirt.

  When the last trio of helicopters had landed, they took most of the hospital staff with them. Several nurses and MPs were the only ones left in the hospital. About thirty civilians and a handful of soldiers still remained on the island. The helicopters wouldn’t be back for another couple of hours.

  “What do we do?” Nurse Walling asked, overwhelmed by the carnage before her.

  “We’ve got to check for survivors,” Kyler answered.

  Nurse Walling looked from the jet, to the doctor, then back to the jet again.

  “You mean…swim out to the jet?”

  Nurse Walling looked like a woman who had just been told that she had won the lottery, but to collect, she would have to kiss a cobra that someone had been poking with a stick for a good hour.

  “What other choice to we have?”

  “Look at those waves.”

  Kyler didn’t answer her. He had dropped his medical bag next to her and had begun to wade toward the wreckage. The water was cool because of the oncoming storm and the waves beat against him, twice almost knocking him backwards, even with the jet acting as a windbreak.

  The closer he got to the plane, the redder the water became. He was doing his best to dodge heads, hands, and the other unidentifiable body parts while keeping his eyes averted. He tried to dodge as many body parts as he could, but the relentless waves kept knocking them into him. He was fine with it when the water was around his knees, but as the water began to hit him at stomach level, he had no choice but to look at the human debris. He threw up once at chest level when something floated toward him that he thought to be a dead fish. As it bumped against him, he saw that it was the right side of a human head that had been split into, the right side of the face mostly intact, the left side almost completely gone, the left eye dangling from the shredded cheek by a single tendon. As it bobbed around in the water, he saw that the still intact right side was that of a young rosy-cheeked girl, a pink bow still attached to her once long, brown hair that was trailing behind it like seaweed. A look of shock and surprise was still etched upon the half of her face that was still intact. His stomach had already been all the way up to his throat. It didn’t need anymore coaxing. He vomited long and hard, his whole body convulsing. They’d really be proud of him at Stanford right now, seeing him spewing his guts from his mouth and his nose. He would like to see any one of them, student or doctor, wading through the red, sludgy muck that he was plowing through a
t that moment. He would defy any of them to put themselves where he was now. They’d all be blowing chunks for days, even Doctor “Metal Rod Up His Ass” Phillips who had ridden his back for the last three years of med school. His nuts would be up in his throat right now, too. Kyler thought on this for a moment, then realized that no, Dr. Phillips would be out here swatting away the body parts and barking orders at any sharks that might still be in the area.

  That thought stopped him cold, the water almost up to his mouth now. Sharks. They had not crossed his mind at all since he began moving toward the crash site. Now it was all he could think of. Blood plus body parts plus ocean, equaled a virtual smorgasbord for the dead eyed bastards. Common sense told him that the crash itself had probably scattered every undersea creature for miles, but common sense didn’t seem to play into the situation right then. All he could think at that moment was “Jaws I-IV”, “Mako-Jaws of Death”, and “Blue Water White Death”. He tried to think of something else. They were just movies, he told himself, meant to scare the movie going public. That was it. No shark would be anywhere around here right now. He had almost convinced himself of this when the ill-fated USS Indianapolis flashed before him. She had gone down during World War II. The men drifted in the water for days before being rescued. Many of them had sat in the water and been picked off one by one by sharks. Robert Shaw had mentioned this in the movie…Jaws.

  “Shit!” he exclaimed out loud. “Stop thinking about sharks, Kyler!”

  But the more he tried to convince himself that there were no sharks in the vicinity, the more sharks kept popping up all over the place. They generally tended to be pieces of luggage or parts of the jet that were floating toward the beach.

  By the time Kyler made it to the tail section, he was completely underwater. He had been forced to swim the last twenty feet. He closed his eyes and tried not to think of all the things that his hands and legs were kicking as he swam. He just paddled until he touched metal.

  The plane was tilted making the tail section easy to climb onto, plus the jet was imbedded in twenty feet of sand. There was going to be a massive crater when they finally pulled this bastard out of the water.

  Kyler climbed up onto the tail section, his shoes slipping on the silver metal. The right rear door had been torn off. Kyler slid along the right part of the tail and stretched his arm out. He was six feet one, but his arm was still a few feet short of the door. He stepped to the very end of the tail section and extended his foot along a small metal ridge that ran along the side of the plane. He stretched one last time. He thought he felt his spine cracking as he extended his middle finger, which couldn’t have been more than two inches from the door.

  “Come one,” he grunted, “just another inch.”

  For a moment, he felt his finger actually reach into the open hatchway, but before he could grab hold of anything, his feet gave way and he fell once again into the ocean, this time straddling the corpse of an old man.

  “Oh shit! Oh shit! Oh shit!”

  His weight sent the twisted corpse down into the water, but it immediately bobbed back up, it’s head crunching him under the chin, then staring at him eyeball to eyeball, their noses actually touching at one point. He could see gray hairs sticking out the man’s ears. He would’ve liked to vomit again. He wanted to vomit again, but he had nothing left in his system.

  He pushed the body away, then reached for the door, putting both hands inside the doorway and then hoisting himself up. He rolled into the jet and laid on his side trying to catch his breath. As he wheezed, he could feel the salt water running into his closed eyes and dripping down into his mouth. The silence inside the twisted wreckage was deafening. The only sounds he heard were those of a few seagulls hovering overhead probably looking for shelter from the oncoming storm and faint screams from the shore. He didn’t want to open his eyes. If the sights outside the jet were any indication of the sights inside the jet, he’d just as soon remain where he was.

  Kyler slowly opened one eye. In the darkness, he could make out a passenger seat that had been dislodged. It was a single seat, probably the flight attendant’s. God, he didn’t want to see anymore, but he was here, and the only doctor. The chances of anyone still being alive were absolutely nil. He hadn’t heard so much as a moan or a groan from inside the jet.

  “Open both eyes, chicken shit,” he told himself.

  He decided to count backwards from ten, and open his eyes. At three, he closed his eyes tighter. By one, they were shut so tightly that he thought that they would pop straight through the lids. But by “zero…blast off…” his mind was made up, and he opened both eyes and sat straight up, water dripping down his face. His eyes had to re-adjust to the dark, but surprisingly he stayed calm, sitting there, feet straight out, peering down the aisle. Technically, there was no aisle. Everything left inside the plane was evenly scattered about. Seats, luggage, and of course, body parts, were piled throughout. He could also smell burned flesh throughout the jet.

  “Hello…” he said aloud, his voice echoing.

  The sound of his echoing voice startled him. Knowing you’re the only living soul in a dark room full of corpses who, just minutes before, had been living souls was a little disconcerting.

  Slowly, Kyler stood up. The tilt of the jet made him feel like he was standing on the side of a dark hill. There were a few holes in the roof where little bits of cloudy light shown through but for the most part, it was pitch black.

  He began to slowly walk forward. As his eyes adjusted to the darkness, Kyler could see chair after chair crumpled to the floor. Under those chairs, he could see more corpses. More than he had seen in the water. And just minutes ago, these were living people who were laughing or reading, or talking, or doing crosswords, or talking on their cell phones. One minute you’re there, the next minute, you’re not.

  “Is anybody still here?” he asked aloud, feeling stupid. He knew that no one could survive this. He’d heard of jet crashes, he’d seen pictures of jet crashes, he’d watched the twin towers fall, but until this very moment, he had never realized the extent of a jet crash. First of all, jets were huge. How something this large could not only rise into the air, but stay up there for hours at a time was, at this moment, completely unfathomable to him.

  “Hello?” he asked again.

  He tried to move a seat that was blocking the aisle path. It was too heavy so he stepped over it. In doing so, his foot landed on what he knew to be a shoulder. He could feel it give as he put his weight on it. He brought his other leg over the chair, almost slipping on the wet, tilted floor as he did. He began to move forward again, peering left and right looking for any sign of life.

  By the time, he got to the middle of the plane, he could see a little better. A large portion of the plane’s roof had been torn away. He looked up through the hole. The sky was darkening. This was going to be a bad storm. A cool breeze was blowing though the hole in the roof. He hadn’t realized how close and compact the inside of the jet had been. He closed his eyes and let the breeze flow over his face. It was at that moment that something grabbed him by the foot.

  CHAPTER 2

  No Name Island sat off the southern coast of Florida. It was a small island, only eight square miles in diameter and almost invisible from the air. It was located thirteen miles from Miami and was home to several hundred army personal and their families. About three hundred and fifty civilians also resided on the island, most of them running the stores and shops, although several worked on the base itself, usually in some computer capacity. Computer geeks seldom joined the military these days. No one on the island and very few on the base itself knew what the base was for. Most civilians thought that anything from alien craft to nuclear missiles were stored in its underground bunkers. Cell phones were almost impossible to use on the island, which also gave everyone reason to pause as to what was truly going on there.

  When the base received the news that there was going to be a hurricane, the army began evacuating the residents, s
tarting with the civilian residents and the army wives and children that resided on No Name. There were three helicopters for the evacuation. Each helicopter could sit eight passengers, ten if they really crammed them in. Very few of the islanders were allowed to bring anything with them. Miami was too busy to help. They had trouble enough of their own preparing for the storm, so No Name’s three helicopters had to move everyone off the island twenty or twenty five at a time.

  Colonel George Patton Potts was the base commander. He was a short, stocky, humorless man who had quit high school to join the army believing himself to be the next Douglas Macarthur. Once, when a civilian asked him why he didn’t reach for a higher goal, like Napoleon Bonaparte, he responded, “Because Bonaparte lost”. The fact that Harry Truman replaced Macarthur for failing to follow orders was lost on him. He was entering his thirty first year in the army and entering his eighth year as a bird colonel. He had no time for anything nonmilitary. He ate, slept, and shat military. He didn’t even like the fact that the hospital was made up of civilian doctors and nurses, but the base had been put together so haphazardly that there was no time to just bulldoze the civilian population and replace them with army doctors and staff. This would’ve caused people to complain and cry about why they had to leave their homes, and then it would’ve gotten to the higher ups, whom Potts thought were more politicians than soldiers. They, in turn, would have to answer to the real politicians…and then Hollywood would get involved…and then the singers…and then all of the liberals who protested cruelty to animals, releasing mass murderers who simply claimed their innocence, and then turn around and kill their unborn babies just because they couldn’t keep their legs closed would be singing songs like The Ballad of No Name Island or The We’ve Lived Here Our Whole Lives Rag. God, he hated civilians. He had no time for people who didn’t blindly love Uncle Sam and do exactly what he ordered them to do.