A Place of Rest

Luke Spychalla

A Place of Rest

Smashwords Edition

Copyright 2010 Luke Spychalla

This novel is dedicated to my Aunt Mary

Epigraph:

Akan Legend of Death, Ghana,

As retold by A.W. Cardinall

Long, long ago there was a great famine in the world, and a certain young man, while wandering in search of food, strayed into a part of the bush where he had never been before. Presently he perceived a strange mass lying on the ground. He approached and saw that it was the body of a giant, whose hair resembled that of white men in that it was silky rather than woolly. It was of an incredible length and stretched as far as from Krachi to Salaga. The young man was properly awed at the sight and wished to withdraw but the giant, noticing him, asked what he wanted.

The young man told about the famine and begged the giant to give him some food. The latter agreed on condition that the youth serve him for a while. Agreement having been reached, the giant said that his name was Owuo, Death, and then gave the youth some meat. Never before had the youth tasted such fine food and he was well pleased with his bargain. He served his master for a long time and received plenty of meat; but one day he grew homesick, and begged his master to give him a short holiday. The latter agreed on condition that the youth bring another boy in his place. So the youth returned to his village, persuaded his brother to go with him into the bush and gave him to Owuo.

In course of time the youth became hungry again and longed for the meat which Owuo had taught him to like so much. So one day he made up his mind to return to his master and, leaving the village, made his way back to the giant's abode. The latter asked him what he wanted and when the youth told him that he wanted to taste once more of the good meat, the giant bade him enter the hut and take as much as he wanted, but added that he would have to work for him once again. The youth agreed and entered the hut. He ate as much as he could and went to work at the task which his master set him. The work continued for a long time and the boy ate his fill every day. But, to his surprise, he never saw anything of his brother, and whenever he asked about him the giant told him that the lad was away on business.

Once more the youth grew homesick and asked for leave to return to his village. The giant agreed on condition that he would bring a girl for him, Owuo, to wed. So the youth went home and there persuaded his sister to go into the bush and marry the giant. The girl agreed and took with her a slave companion, and they all went to the giant's abode. There the youth left the two and went back to the village.

It was not very long after that he again grew hungry and longed for a taste of the meat. So he made his way once more into the bush and found the giant. The latter did not seem over-pleased to see the boy and grumbled at being bothered a third time. However, he told the boy to go into the inner chamber of his hut and take what he wanted. The youth did so and took up a bone which he began to devour. To his horror he recognized it at once as being the bone of his sister. He looked around at all the rest of the meat and saw that it was that of his sister and her slave.

Thoroughly frightened he escaped from the house and ran back to the village. There he told the elders what he had done and the awful thing he had seen. At once the alarm was sounded and all the people went into the bush to see for themselves the dreadful thing they had heard about. When they drew near to the giant they grew afraid at the sight of so evil a monster. They went back to the village and discussed among themselves what they had best do. At last it was agreed to go to Salaga, where the end of the giant's hair was, and set it alight. This was done and when the hair was burning well they returned to the bush and watched.

Presently the giant began to toss and sweat. It was quite evident that he was beginning to feel the heat. The nearer the flames advanced, the more he tossed and grumbled. At last the fire reached his head, and for the moment the giant was dead.

The villagers approached him cautiously, and the young man noticed magic powder which had been concealed in the roots of the giant's hair. No one could say what power this medicine might have, but an old man suggested that no harm would be done if they sprinkled some of it on the bones and meat in the hut. This was done, and to the surprise of everyone the girl, the boy and the slave at once returned to life.

The youth, who still had some of the powder left, proposed to put it on the giant. But at this there was a general uproar as the people feared that Owuo might come to life again. The boy therefore, by way of compromise, sprinkled it into the eye of the dead giant. At once the eye opened and the people fled in terror. But, alas, it is from that eye that death comes, for every time that Owuo shuts that eye a man dies and, unfortunately for us, he is forever blinking and winking.

PART ONE.

I.

Nick wondered what his wife was doing right now. Probably tumbling about with little Brian on the carpet in front of the couch, getting her hands covered with slippery baby drool.

He thought of the game he and Lydia had invented, in which they played stiff-limbed orangutans batting away legions of stuffed animals to get to Brian. Finally they would seize upon their expectant son, at which time he was given a double raspberry on his plumb belly. How he giggled and kicked his tiny feet, safely confined within the attached booties of his one-piece yellow sleeper suit.

Nick laughed to himself at the thought of it. Then he looked down and frowned. The reconnaissance fatigues he was wearing also consisted of a single piece, only his were drab olive green and covered with cargo pockets.

He looked around at his similarly dressed colleagues, talking in small groups on the benches of the swiftly moving craft. Nick wondered if he stuck out as a loner in their eyes. He had only trained with them a half dozen times since being shipped out to the Florida base from Minnesota, where Lydia and Brain awaited his return.

He couldn't garner much excitement for missions like this anymore. In fact, there was a growing ulcer of dread expanding in his gut at the thought of what awaited him on San Avellino. In the past five years he had worked on nearly ten biological contamination sites since joining the U.S. Biotech Safety Commission, and each had been a thrill. Being young and working for a high profile agency like the BSC superseded the risks of the work he was doing. Talk about bragging rights: most of his friends were pale as the office papers they shuffled past their expanding bellies and saw him as some sort of secret agent.

Perhaps the secret agent part was going a bit far, but at least it was true he’d never be pale. Nick was often teased for the extraordinarily deep color of his skin and eyes, to the extent that he was nicknamed ‘The Phantom’ by his team back up north. This was because his teeth and the whites of his eyes seemed to glow from his cleanly shaved head, and with his towering height and lean frame, his appearance was quite striking indeed.

Nick folded up the video of Brian's first birthday on his flexscreen computer. Before stuffing it into his top breast pocket he caught the image of his mother and father sitting in lawn chairs, their hair backlit by golden sun. He sighed deeply.

Here's to happier times, Nick thought, and then began running over protocol in his mind.

One by one the team came through the portal from the readying room, where their hazmat suits were sealed, sterilized, and triple verified. On a mobile lab like this only one crew member could be accommodated at a time, and each took almost ten minutes to emerge from the airlock. Nick grew restless as he waited and cranked up the AC on his suit in increments until his bones began to rattle from the chill.

At last their chief, Alan Goldberg, briefed them with a final slew of reminders and trite encouragements, and then the floor ramp lowered to a few inches above the ground of the island. The smooth and rapid travel of these new labs still stunned Nick: door closes in Florida, door opens an hour later in the middle of nowhere without any indication of movement.

He peered out at the growing wedge of grass and patchy soil. Actually seeing the contaminated site always shot Nick through with a swirl of vertigo. He had spent so many months pouring over maps and data on every last detail of this place that the island had become a fiction to him, part of a lackluster storybook. He had to remind himself that the danger to be had here wouldn’t take kindly to daydreamers.

The first pair hopped out, a guy named Rodriguez and an older man who Nick perpetually forgot the name of. The older man stopped and turned, and his smile spread across the rest of the team in a quick crescendo. They had all heard it: a bird call, echoing through the trees. A very good sign.

Two stops later Nick bounded down the ramp, his boot soles at last touching the surface of the island. Ah, the forbidden planet, Nick mused. In his imagination, even the early morning light touching this cloistered world seemed dangerous and alien. His company was the first to see the place in over fifty years, since the island had been quarantined after a lab accident. It looked like a tropical paradise, far from the remote deserts and abandoned city blocks Nick was used to working in. Some part of him wanted to strip off his forty pounds of equipment and make for the beach.

To the north were the gradations of blue leading out from San Avellino Bay into the choppy waters of the Atlantic, starting at turquoise and blending into a deep aquamarine. Scattered about were remnants of the island’s resort past: closed up boathouses and a row of bathhouses, overgrown paths paved with blue brick, and grungy white marker posts relating historical information. Around the bend of the coast to the west was the hotel facility itself, a perky pink block singing gaily under the sun’s intense blaze.

Ahead to the south loomed the high hills of the central region of the island, with the enormous Manor Hill to the far west, topped with an eighteenth century plantation house, and Mill Hill further to the east, with its restored windmill. The last spell of preservation had long since worn off from these structures, and, along with all else that was manmade on the island, cried out for attention. The appetites of the tropics were constant and voracious, and it looked as if this island was a meal already half digested.

Out of view were the hundreds of acres of fields along the southern coastal plain, where sugarcane and coffee had once been grown. Also occluded from Nick’s sight was the eastern end of the island, which was never developed during any span of the island’s history. There the lush jungle gave way to a region of karst, famous for its cave systems, which led to sheer cliffs dropping off into the sea.

Over the intercom, Nick’s partner Gladys raddled off the temperature and wind speed, and waited for him to catch up to her side. They would be covering one square kilometer slightly inland of the north central coast, taking random soil and vegetation samples while the cameras on their helmets filmed the scene in three-dimensional high definition. Their suits were set to about two-thirds gravity, so bounding about the island was quite effortless. Shouldn’t be more than two hours, all said, Nick assured himself.

He extracted the vial kit from his pack. There was plenty of commonplace flora growing about, and all of it looked quite healthy and lush. Packs of five-fingered leaves waved to him in the slight breeze, and ahead he spied the red-orange fire of hibiscus. With Gladys about ten meters away from him they began to comb through the foliage in tandem, collecting snippets of relevant material. Nick recorded various observations as he labored, and occasionally switched into the intercom to check up on his partner. Within a half hour's time the tension had oozed out of his joints and Nick found himself fully engrossed in the work, his mind prattling forth genus names as his vials became filled one by one.

Nick noticed something on the edge of a steep bank leading into a cleft in the earth to his right. He knew that if there were birds, chances were that the island would have lizards; before contamination, the published ratio had been 10,000 reptiles to every 7 birds on this island. Sure enough, he found a rock iguana staring at him languidly from the side of its head, willing its earthy brown coloration to keep it hidden. He had been catching flashes of movement out of the corner of his eye all day that might have been quick-moving sphaeros or anoles, but there was no denying this bad boy.

He radioed to Gladys and went over to introduce himself. What a rare treasure indeed, Nick thought as he stationed himself on the decline to retrieve the animal. This little friend could teach us volumes about how things have progressed since the accident.

It was then that the alarm went off in his suit.

His eyes shot to the readout on his right wrist: a leak, the seal at his left ankle. He looked down at his leg, at his foot bent at a cumbersome angle to accommodate the steep bank. His heart skipped a beat.

How was this possible? There was no visible fissure, and his suit had just been checked. He dropped his pack and rifled through it, finding the spray-on sealant. A net of thick liquid oozed over the indicated spot at his foot and froze instantly. Gladys' long horse face came into view, her mouth hanging ajar in horror. He waited, motionless, staring at his wrist readout as the sealant cured. The yellow diode flashed three more times, then went red.

Outside gas had found its way into the interior of his suit. He was contaminated.

II.

Nick sighed deeply as he disconnected his communications link from the chief in Orlando. The samples collected on the island had all come up negative for exotic biological contagions. This was the good news. The bad news was that Nick wouldn't be leaving the island for at least two weeks as his case made the rounds in Washington. Nick strongly suspected this was a formality and that he would be released after the appropriate signatures had been gathered, but a lingering fear still haunted his mind.

The worst case scenario would be detainment until a secondary assessment of the island had been concluded. This one would be done by an agency other than his, since the second, more thorough round of tests was required by law to be an impartial third party to the legal owners of a biohazard scene. Since the island had been in the government’s hands at the time of the accident, they could not be the ones to sign off on its safety. In fact, owners were supposed to be allowed to investigate their property only after the third party analysis, but no one knows their way around the law better than the lawmaker.

During his confinement, however long it should last, Nick was ordered to continue the investigation of the island’s safety. Perhaps his findings could save some face for the BSC, making lemonade, in the chief's words, from the lemons they had been handed. Nick humorlessly supposed there was no better place to do so, as he had seen the citrus trees and knew that the island had been a cane plantation early in American history. If only Goldberg had thought to include a pitcher in the field kit.

Hell, forget the pitcher. I should have asked for a promotion.

Nick knew the role fate him dealt him was proving mighty convenient to his bosses. He was the canary to the agency’s coalmine. If he checked out clean after two weeks of continual exposure to the island’s ecosystem, months of testing would be shaved off the timeline before this location could be returned to use, plus the public would much more readily accept the agency's declaration of safety. But if he didn’t check out clean… Nick shook his head. Gotta be careful, that’s all. It’s just two weeks.

Secure within his hermetically sealed tent, Nick replaced his hazmat helmet upon his head. It wasn’t enough, however, to keep the worms of worry from finding a place to nest. Images he had seen of bioterrorism victims drifted up to his conscious mind, the horrific effects of some of the engineered bugs from the war. Whatever had been released by the lab accident had had fifty years to evolve on the island and hopefully lose its virulence, but who knew for sure. So he left his helmet securely in place and settled into his bed roll to look up protocol documents on the helmet’s visor screen, searching for anything pertaining to a predicament such as his.

He awoke at twilight, his cheek pressed against the tiny cylindrical microphone of his askew helmet. After he had prepared and consumed the innards of one of the food packs (roast beef and potatoes, not half bad), he again found himself sitting idle. He had no desire to page through the BSC documents any longer, so he suited up. This was a considerable effort, as the tent was not quite tall enough for him to stand in. He wondered how adept this flimsy secondary hazmat suit would be at maintaining a seal. It wasn’t equipped with monitoring gear so he guessed he’d never know.

Best not to second guess or I’ll never get out of this tent. Death by bioengineered microbes seemed a far better fate than sitting idle for someone as restless as Nick. Lydia often spent her mornings in a cloud of pouting annoyance when she found that Nick had transferred to the downstairs couch during the night because he couldn't lie still beside her. Worse yet, his last review from the BSC had cited his tendency toward compulsive decision making as ‘an important point to be improved upon’. I'll start improving tomorrow, he thought. The plastic zipper purred and the flap gave way to the tiny irradiation chamber leading out of the tent.

For over 200 years this island had been used as a sanctuary for the rich the world over. He could understand why. It was a tropical paradise, like what they said the Latin American states looked like before the western hemisphere had coughed up its lungs. It looked like those pictures one saw on the old-time 2D documentaries from the History Channel, with the sloths and lemurs and other bizarre creatures. Today they existed only as plush toys.

There weren't more than a handful of pockets of nature like this left on the planet, and each was so heavily regulated that one had to be royalty to get a glimpse of it. Of course, there were many who called the idea of vast untamed wilds existing on Earth within the current millennium a conspiracy, manufactured by governments to guilt their populaces into having fewer children, but Nick knew better.

He pulled up a map on his visor, keeping one eye on the ghost of a trail he was following. According to the map, if he continued pushing through grass and saplings he would soon emerge into a grove that had been a topiary when the island had been in business. Not a bad place to watch a sunset, Nick thought, looking up into the dimming blue dome of the sky. It was tinted in the west with a wash of pink and cracked by veins of flame. He was just in time for an exquisite show.

The golden hour was fast dwindling as Nick entered the topiary, an expanse haunted by the ghosts of ballerinas, giraffes, and dinosaurs. Nick passed between broad trees and shrubs that appeared like enormous mushroom caps come up from the earth. As he rounded their sides he imagined warm yellow squares of light set into them, little windows for hobbit inhabitants. He continued through the rolling greens, admiring the rows of impossibly tall, thin spires of Cyprus-like trees, making the island into a tropical Rome. Although a feral understory was developing in these bastardized acres, Nick had no trouble picking out the specimens that had once been on exhibit on account of their exotic architectures, their glossy berries and flowers. Yesteryear's botanical aristocrats, here to comfort him with the fingerprint of mankind.

He reached the northwest corner of the expanse and stepped through a break in a barrier of hulking trees. A path led downhill to an appealing adjoining field, but Nick chose the upward direction to what there was to see. He soon found himself at a gardener's cottage built of sandwiched layers of limestone, doubled in mass by the mess of spiders, soiled webs and cocoons that covered its sealed wooden shutters.

Beyond the building was a steep drop-off, beyond which stretched a broad plain of wetland. Nick heard the distant call of a marsh harrier, and wondered if the blurry speck of black he saw in the distance was the bird itself. The moon, alarmingly massive, was crushing the tree line on the far side of the swamp as it attempted to hoist its bulk into the sky.

The canned air Nick was breathing began to catch at his lungs like a tangle of miniature fish hooks. How he wished he could lift his infernal helmet just for a moment and breath in the moist tropical air, take in the living floral essence of this wonderland. He felt like he was watching his experience on an imager. He wanted to make direct contact, to really be present. He wanted to sink his toes into the sand of a beach, let the waxy leaf of a fern pull through his fingers.

A short distance from the little building began a great terrace of broad, uneven flagstone slabs, rough and organic in aesthetic. Nick strolled across it, passing an unadorned circular pond that was clogged with lily pads and tropical reeds. He settled onto the splintered surface of a long bench running below the immense teak beams of a trellis. He did so carefully, as though he were mounting a spine curving through the towering ribs of some prehistoric skeleton which might come apart at any moment.

A song from a twentieth century music appreciation course he’d once taken came to his mind, a song called Sloop John B. Something about corn, and then Let me go home / Why don't they let me go home / This is the worst trip I’ve ever been on. God, wasn’t that the truth.

Lydia would have gotten the news by now. He imagined her twirling a chunk of ebony hair between her fingers as she conferenced with her mother in Maine, her smooth face puffy and wet. How he would like to laugh at her and take her in his arms, squeezing her into submission. It was part of her nature to assume the worst at the first indication of trouble. Thankfully she had never really understood the impending danger of these missions, or if she did, she never said anything to Nick.

As the father of a young family, Nick was unable to himself ignore the risks he faced in his work. He had recently talked to his superior about shifting to a training job, or transferring to some other division, but his request had been red flagged for the time being. At 32 there was little chance of a move of this type, especially with only a master's degree under his belt.

He wondered what would happen when he got home. He knew now this would be his final mission with the BSC. He would pressure his boss for another way out and hope the execs would be understanding given his present service, but he could easily imagine another ‘no’ being passed down. Even if Lydia went back to substitute teaching while he looked for something new, times were going to be hard. But he knew they would get through it. He had just needed a warning experience like this one to make his path clear.

As the weight of Nick’s helmet suddenly recurred to him, he realized how far ahead of himself he was getting. Here he was, the boy in the plastic bubble, quarantined in the middle of the Atlantic, alone, with who knew what nasty bugs floating about. Perhaps they were already in his bloodstream from his suit breach, dividing, readying their attack. Tomorrow he'd do some more testing, get to know how deep in it he was.

Even though he needed to act from the standpoint of a worst case scenario, in his heart Nick couldn't really believe in it. It was like feigning the Christmas spirit by believing that the settling of the house was hooves on the rooftop. Not only had all the plant tissue samples come up clean, with life clearly abounding all around, but the remote sensing data was favorable as well. He took a deep breath to relax himself.

Nick sat for a long while without thinking much. He stared off into the palms and meandering vines which swayed to and fro in the warm breeze, like the wandering tentacles of a sea anemone. Funny about anemones, how beautiful and placid they seem, so vegetative, more of an exotic ocean floor ornament than anything else. At least until you discovered that they were actually carnivorous animals, rife with neurotoxins and gaping mouths. So misleading they are, spoke the biologist in Nick.

It was dark now, and his adventurous spirit had evaporated with the last of the daylight. Tiny tendrils of dread now wove their way through his skin. He shouldn't have stayed out so late, on an island largely unfamiliar to him that was potentially swarming with danger. He stood, and skirted the squat stone retaining wall that held back the flow of inky plants from the terrace beds.

Soon he was at the crest of the sloping trail he had followed up from the old topiary. A tree from the field at the bottom of the hill called out through the dark, the white blossoms of its low outstretched boughs glowing like small moons. As Nick started down he caught a flash of movement from around the tree. One of the blossoms, caught by the net of gravity? Or perhaps it was some sort of animal.

Despite his inhibitions, Nick made his way down to the field to check it out. He hadn't seen anything other than birds and lizards thus far; it would go a great deal toward calming his nerves if he could witness a fellow mammal. The strain being developed in the lab before the accident was, after all, tailored to mammalian biology.

Then he remembered that San Avellino had no large indigenous mammals in the wild. Mongooses and bats were all that could be found here, aside from the domesticated animals, which would have been euthanized shortly after the disaster. That would have been one hell of a mongoose, Nick thought.

The weather was shifting. Nick came upon a sea of swimming beasts: trees and bushes beating back and forth in an odd rhythmic sway. Somehow their movement seemed to have nothing to do with the wind. His heart beat faster. He stepped into the field and walked beyond the tree that had enticed him here. He looked back uncertainly to the trail that would lead him to the relative safety of his tent. When he directed his gaze forward again, several of the trees seemed to have changed positions. Nick knew better than to allow such paranoia, but like the flu, once it was with you there was little you could do to dispel it.

His skin felt clammy. The sound of a building storm came up around him with deathly swiftness, as storms often do in the tropics. Probably something coming in on the trade winds. It is hurricane season here after all.

But it was as though he had brought the change in weather with him, merely by stepping foot into this field. He felt his presence was opposed, that he did not belong. That this slumbering island was now awakening, and already quaking with rage at his trespass. In another moment the air became littered with plant debris. Leaf clusters and sticks pelted Nick’s suit mercilessly as if he was under attack from enemies hidden in the treetops.

He was preparing to heed his instincts and flee, no matter what that said of his rational bearing, when something came forward through the dark. It was white and moved swiftly through the branches. Nick’s heart iced over and he found himself unable to move.

After a moment of stillness Nick came back to life and made the difficult choice to follow it. Whatever this thing was, he needed to know, for it could make a world of difference to his case. He sprinted into the field, glad now for the lightness of his suit. He spun around, eyes hungrily probing the night. There again, the movement. He cut to the right in pursuit, desperate to come upon his target quickly, to have the element of surprise working to his advantage. Shifting patches of lightness spilled across the grassy floor as the roiling clouds shrouding the moon were torn apart and then collided once more. He blinked forcefully, trying to redefine his perception of dark and light.

He’d lost it.

He paused. Lightening cracked the sky, a first warning shot. Fat drops splattered upon his visor shield, glue for blowing petals and leaves. Nick held his breath.

Lightening arced above the trees a second time. There, in the back of the field, a shape in white, beside a thick ceiba tree. It did not move. Seconds passed. Does it see me? Does it know I can see it?

In the instant of a third volley of blinding light it took off in a dead sprint. Nick started after it, but within a minute he knew. He felt it rather than sensed it: he was alone. Completely and utterly alone in this field. Nick cursed.

It had happened so quickly he’d been unable to respond. All he was now left with was an impossible image swimming the surface of his mind.

It had stood upright. Then, after a moment, the conclusion dawned on him, like the fatal bite that inevitably follows the cat’s pounce.

I am not alone on this island.

III.

You sure you're good, LeMay?

Absolutely, chief. Business as usual here on the island. I'll check in with you again at 1700 hours.

Roger. You’re doing good work for us out there. Keep it up, buddy.

Nick disconnected and pushed his fingertips against his temples. If it was discovered that he had come across last night's event and not reported it, his employment outlook would be toast. The urge kept flitting