It was a gigantic pile of human bones.
The boy wasn’t quite dead yet, but his meat was so tender it practically fell off the bone. They feasted, filling their bellies to bursting, fighting among themselves for the juiciest parts.
Though they hunted as a pack, they had no bonds with each other. Their broken minds reduced them to something less than human, driving them to fulfill their base needs at any cost. Higher mental functioning was gone, leaving only a compulsion to kill, to feed, to kill again.
If there were no strangers on the island, they showed no reluctance in attacking one another. For food. And for something just as primal; the unquenchable desire to hunt and kill.
This was a compulsion buried deep within all creature’s brains, as primitive as the first vertebrates to inhabit the planet, eons ago.
In most human beings, this compulsion was repressed.
In them, it had been liberated.
When the urge came upon them, they couldn’t control it. And if there was no fresh meat to hunt, they hunted each other.
But now there was fresh meat on the island. Plenty of it.
And though their hunger for food was momentarily sated, their hunger for death was not.
When Laneesha was a little girl, she wanted to be a big girl. Or more precisely, an adult. She found children her own age boring, much preferring the company of grown-ups. Dolls and games of tag weren’t nearly as stimulating to her as learning to cook, sew, and knit from her mother, change the oil on the car and spackle drywall like her father, bake like grandma, and repair appliances like Uncle Ralph.
Uncle Ralph wasn’t actually her uncle. He was a friend of Dad’s. He was also the nicest adult Laneesha knew, treating her as an equal even when she was as young as six. He never talked down to her, never reprimanded her, never was anything but 100% cool.
When Laneesha turned sixteen, she realized the next step in adulthood was motherhood. She babysat all the neighborhood kids, and wanted one of her own. So she decided to get pregnant. To accomplish this she sought out the one person who she knew would make an excellent father, and after riding with him to a house to install a satellite TV system, she seduced Uncle Ralph in the back seat of his repair van.
He resisted, at first. But she was legal, and insistent, and Ralph didn’t have a girlfriend at the time. The affair was short lived—a guilt-ridden Uncle Ralph broke it off after only three trysts. But three was enough. Laneesha, now pregnant, assumed that stand-up Uncle Ralph would do the right thing. She was mature enough to know he wasn’t going to marry her, but expected child support and shared custody.
Instead, her father beat the hell out of Uncle Ralph, ordering him to never see her again, and then insisted she terminate the pregnancy. Laneesha refused, and her father kicked her out. Uncle Ralph also refused to see her again, offering her the money for an abortion and nothing else.
Laneesha had no friends because she’d never bothered to make any. She was forced to live in shelters, and eventually gave birth to her beautiful daughter, Brianna. But welfare checks didn’t stretch very far for a young mother. Without a babysitter she couldn’t get a job, and without a job she couldn’t get a babysitter, so she took to shoplifting to survive.
Chicago had many chain department stores, and Laneesha kept her strategy simple. She’d steal something at one store, then return it at another store for the cash. If they refused to give her cash, as they sometimes did without a receipt, she traded the item for something she needed, or something she could pawn.
It worked for several months. Laneesha began looking for a place of her own, and was planning on getting a job and a nanny once she saved up a thousand dollars. She was only sixty bucks short of her goal when a dumb department store clerk became distracted and left a pair of expensive diamond earrings on the counter unattended. It was only for a few seconds, but Laneesha couldn’t resist the temptation. She grabbed them, shoved them in Brianna’s diaper, and beat a hasty retreat.
But she was caught. Even worse, the store had tapes of her stealing four other items over the course of several months. It had been a trap. They pressed charges for grand theft, social services took Brianna, and Laneesha wound up at the Center.
The Center made her realize two things. First, people her own age weren’t so bad. Meadow, for all his frontin’, was actually a pretty good guy. Not daddy material, but they developed a bond that Laneesha could honestly say was love. Second, Laneesha was more determined than ever to get released and get Brianna back. And she was on track to do so. A hearing was coming up, and Sara was going to recommend parole, and once she had a job she was going to begin the steps to reclaim her child. Maybe Meadow would even be in the picture.
But staring at that huge pile of bones after half an hour of listening to Meadow’s tortured screams made Laneesha doubt she’d ever get off the island alive.
Laneesha clung to Sara, digging her carefully manicured nails into the psychologist’s arm, staring at the most horrifying thing she’d ever seen.
“How…how many you think?” she asked.
“Thousands,” Sara whispered.
Martin took the light from Sara, moved closer to the pile. “These bones are old. Really old.”
“Who are they?” Laneesha asked.
Martin shook his head. “I don’t know.”
Sara began to back up, pulling Laneesha along with her. “Martin, those…
Martin went rigid, then whispered. “I think they’re already here.”
Laneesha felt like she stuck her finger in a socket, electricity jolting through her and prompting her to run somewhere, anywhere. She broke away from Sara and dashed into the field of bones.
There were no trees here, and the moon was bright, so Laneesha could move much faster than she had in the woods. Part of her brain registered Sara yelling her name, but Laneesha wasn’t going to stop. Not for Sara. Not for anybody. While Laneesha feared those crazy cannibal people, she had more to think about than just her life. If she died, Brianna would be motherless.
Not a day, not an hour, went by when Laneesha didn’t long for her beautiful daughter. Being separated from Brianna was a physical ache that dominated Laneesha’s every action, every thought. She would see her daughter again, and love and protect and raise her, and nothing was going to stop that. Not now. Not ever.
Laneesha turned a quick corner around the mound, kicking something that she realized was a skull, switching directions again and seeking out the woods. She could hide in the trees, wait until morning. Then she would find the camp, radio that boat guy, and live to be with Brianna again. Hopefully, Sara and Martin and the rest of them would make it too. But a part of Laneesha, a large part, also made her understand that if those cannibals were busy eating the others, they would have full bellies and be less inclined to track her down.
But stupid as it was, she couldn’t find the trees. Earlier, she thought she’d be stuck in the woods forever, never seeing the clear sky again. Now all she saw was sky and bones.
The bones were everywhere, a giant garbage dump of various-sized mounds, some only as high as her hip, others too tall to see over. There was no real path, no real direction, and Laneesha took another turn and found herself standing on top of an unstable pile. She stopped, turned, and her foot got stuck. Lanessha looked down, saw she was caught in some sort of trap.
Another spark of panic made her cry out, kicking the foul thing off her foot, pushing onward through the bone field. There was no ground any more, no dirt. She waded, calf-deep, through bones. When she tried to get on top of them, they wouldn’t support her completely. Laneesha had a ridiculous thought about Chuck E Cheese, that children’s pizza slash arcade with the room filled with thousands of plastic balls. It was impossible to stand up in that room, and almost as difficult standing here.
Laneesha attempted to backtrack, feeling bones snap under her weight—
