Terminal Island Read online

  NIGHT SHADE BOOKS

  SAN FRANCISCO

  Other books by Walter Greatshell

  Novels:

  Xombies: Apocalypse Blues

  Xombies: Apocalypticon

  Xombies: Apocalypso

  Mad Skills

  Enormity (as W. G. Marshall)

  Short Fiction:

  “The Mexican Bus,” from The Living Dead 2

  Plays:

  Santa’s Inferno (originally performed at the Perishable Theater)

  Terminal Island © 2012 by Walter Greatshell

  This edition of Terminal Island

  © 2012 by Night Shade Books

  Cover illustration by Sam Burley

  Cover design by Victoria Maderna and Federico Piatti

  Interior layout and design by Amy Popovich

  Edited by Ross E. Lockhart

  All rights reserved

  First Edition

  ISBN: 978-1-59780-437-0

  Night Shade Books

  www.nightshadebooks.com

  For Cindy

  Prologue:

  AMERICAN IDOL

  In this game you’re always on the move. It’s like fighting a fire: stay ahead of the flames, don’t trust the floor, and don’t leave anything smoldering—kill it dead. But no matter how careful you are, there is always an element of chaos. Or fate, if you prefer, in which case we’re both just actors on some cosmic stage. Do you believe in free will? Lord knows there were many times I kicked myself for taking on this thing, but I couldn’t stop. That’s government work for you, though: always just a little too good to pass up. As a private contractor you can’t always count on a steady paycheck. But this has become more than a job to me; as they say in the movies, this time it’s personal.

  You know how many people I’ve killed to find you? How many fanatics and fools have tried to stop me? Dead fools, now. But you people are like heads on a Hydra: cut one off and five more pop up. That’s okay, I like a challenge. You might say I was born for this work. Your mistake is that you forgot about me; you got too comfortable. You got old.

  Hell of a place you have here, hell of a place. Look at that view! Did you think nobody could find you out here? Or have you been looking out over the ocean all these years wondering when somebody like me was going to finally show up at the door? I bet you have. Look at you: I bet you’ve hardly gone outside in twenty years—you’re a ghost. That’s why it’s such a tomb in here, isn’t it? You’ve gotten to like the dark, you and her, living like bugs under a rock, surrounding yourselves with this freakshow that would give anyone the creeps. You’ve turned paradise into your own private nightmare, you dumb shit. Open the curtains for God’s sake, let in some sun. Sorry to hurt your eyes. Take a breath of fresh air in case it’s your last.

  Believe it or not, I’m a pacifist by nature, but I’m not afraid of a little blood—you can’t be squeamish in this business, and I been doing it a long time, long enough to know that the human body is a flimsy sack of guts, all too easily ruptured and spilled, and the sooner you remind a man of this, the sooner he is likely to be forthcoming with useful information.

  Also it doesn’t hurt to look like I do. This face has a tendency to make little children cry…and sometimes grown men, too. That’s why I like having a teenage girl make my phone appointments—it makes some guys more inclined to take a meeting, if you know what I mean. You spoke to my assistant, didn’t you? I call her my own personal Siren—that sweet voice has lured a lot of sailors onto the rocks. You’re not the first. They get all decked out like schoolboys about to lose their cherry, and it’s amazing how the blood goes out of their faces when they find me waiting for them—you can just about see their nuts shrivel up inside their bodies. Usually it doesn’t take much more than that to get them talking a blue streak.

  Others require more persuasion.

  Only thing I don’t like about this work is when tax time rolls around. It’s always a pain in the ass, what with all the travel expenses, vouchers, receipts, you name it, and I particularly don’t like having to define what I do for a living. Like most bald guys, I wear a lot of hats. In any given year I might pick up a few bucks working someplace like Iraq or Sierra Leone, or maybe I’ll handle personal security for some dignitary or corporate hotshot, or I’ll do a little private investigative work for select clients in the higher echelons of our government—a little headhunting.

  I guess you’d know about that.

  Is this what my parents died for, this little ivory statue? Is this your good luck charm? Your people out there seem to think so—they swore I’d never get near you while you had this thing. Did you also think it was protecting you? That’s a shame. Anyway, it’s mine now, my own American idol. And while we’re at it I also need names. I need you to I.D. these faces for me. I need phone contacts and offshore account numbers and file access codes. I need cold hard facts—solid evidence of everything you people are doing out here, the whole sick playbook. It’s the only way you’re gonna outlive your wife.

  You may think that these things won’t be admissible in court, fruit of a poisoned tree and all that, but we’re not following strict legal channels here. I’m just a private citizen doing his patriotic duty. Consider it a family matter. As for the old lady, she shouldn’t have tried to cut me—I don’t like to kill senior citizens, not even ghouls like her.

  So talk, old man. Speak to your long-lost nephew. Unburden yourself while you still can. I’m giving you five seconds to decide, and then I tape your mouth and flick on the old Zippo. Your next chance won’t be for ten long minutes. Yes? No?

  Time’s up.

  PART I:

  DISINTEGRATING

  NICELY

  Chapter One

  LABOR DAY

  Running. The two of them running in the spotlight with nowhere to hide. Dark cliffs above, a dark sea below, and a paved ledge of a road in between. No escape from that insane glare, which follows them like the beam of a giant magnifying glass—a magnifying glass in the hands of a sadistic child—

  Blink and it’s broad daylight. Night is replaced by the early morning hubbub of a departure lounge—he’s been daydreaming again. Henry Cadmus is taking his family to Catalina Island to visit his mother.

  I’m taking my family to Catalina to visit my mother. I’m just taking my family to Catalina to visit my mother Vicki.

  He’s said it aloud a few times already, to people at work and the stewardess on the plane from Chicago, but it still doesn’t sit right.

  Hey, I’m only taking my wife and daughter to Catalina Island to visit grandma and do a little sightseeing—what’s so weird about that? That’s better.

  Weird?—nothing. The answer is nothing at all. It’s a perfectly ordinary thing to do—just look around the ferry terminal at all the Labor Day tourists and daytrippers with their beach gear. No big deal. So why is his stomach wrung tight as a wet dishrag?

  “Bootykins, are you okay?”

  “What? Sure—sure.” Henry smiles reassuringly at his wife’s HD camcorder, embarrassed to be caught in a private moment. Ruby is his soul mate, his savior, the light of his life, and even after five years of marriage he’s still blown away by her creative energy as well as her darkly angelic beauty, but right now he could do without her need to compulsively record their lives for posterity, as if in her husband’s personal traumas she sniffs an Oscar for Best Documentary. That’s what he gets for marrying a younger, cooler woman. An artist.

  “Just a little jetlagged, I guess,” he says.

  “Are you sure that’s all it is?” The camera zooms in close.

  Oh come on. It’s his own fault for being a sucker for art. Even before Henry fell in love with Ruby, he had been seduced by her taste in paintings: the walls of
her alternative therapy practice were decorated with dark Goya prints, violent and alarming pictures that acknowledged the horrors of life and thus made slightly more bearable his chronic pain. Between the pictures and the candles and the slightly eerie, atonal music, Ruby’s studio was such an immediate relief from the clinical white hell of the VA medical center that Henry had pointed to Goya’s black Sabbath and joked, I think I need a witch. To which Ruby had replied, You’re in luck, cheerfully explaining that she was actually a lapsed Wiccan priestess—a fact later proven by her twining Druidic tattoos and discreet body piercings. Guess I went a little crazy in college, huh?

  Henry loves that about her, the casual laughing-off of the awkward past. It is something he would like to be able to do himself, especially right now, when his own idiotic demons are scratching at the door. It is almost time to start boarding the boat. Throwing Ruby an Oedipal bone, he says, “It’s just my mother. The usual.”

  “I know, but it’s going to be fine, I promise. I’ll be right there.”

  “It’s just weird to have to track her down like this; she’s never done it before, just moved without telling me or anything. Not answering my letters. Obviously she doesn’t want to talk to me.”

  “Well, it’s not like you haven’t done the same thing to her,” she says brightly, holding the camera in one hand and their leashed toddler in the other.

  “Yeah, but…” He shakes his head as if to disperse the reflexive spasm of guilt that comes with anything having to do with his mother. “This is not like her, though. To just disappear and not tell me. Who knows what kind of crazy scam she’s mixed up with this time—I keep thinking of that phony Mexican property she bought a few years back. By going there we might get stuck bailing her out again.”

  “God, this carpet is filthy,” Ruby says, zooming in on Moxie’s black-smudged hands and knees, then panning across the foot traffic of the departure lounge as if to emphasize the parade of filth. The smut underlying the sunny myth of the California Dream. “Maybe your mom’s just trying to show you how it feels to be cut out of the picture. You know what a shock it was to her when you moved away.”

  “That was twenty years ago! I’m a middle-aged man, for God’s sake.”

  “Not in her mind.” Wrestling the uncooperative toddler, Ruby says, “Some help!”

  “Oh, sorry.” He takes the wipes from her bag and goes to work.

  “My guess is she’s just giving you a taste of your own medicine.”

  “But that’s not fair, I have a right to my own—” Henry stops himself, disengaging from the well-worn groove. His wife is just baiting him anyway, for dramatic purposes. “Hey, whose side are you on?” he asks.

  “Just playing devil’s advocate,” Ruby says sweetly.

  “Oh, thanks. Thanks, that’s what I need: a viper in my bed. Anyway, I don’t think so. She’s too needy to pull off something like that for long—if she was doing it out of spite, she’d have caved by now and sent me a big ranting letter. You’ve seen her letters; she’s never been one to suffer in silence. This is something new.”

  “You know what I think?”

  “What?”

  “I think you’re jealous.”

  “Poopiehead!” Moxie shrieks, straining against the leash.

  “Jealous?”

  “I think you’re afraid your mom has got her life together and doesn’t need you as much. Maybe she’s found love—or gotten married.”

  “Hey, if only. You know how long I’ve been wishing she would do something like that? Take the burden off of me.”

  “Maybe so, honeybun—” Ruby sets Moxie back on the floor, turns the camera off, and sits on Henry’s lap, resting her slender bare arms on his shoulders “—but sometimes you can be the eensiest bit judgmental, especially with her. It wouldn’t surprise me a bit if she didn’t want to tell you she had moved in with some old guy because she was afraid of your reaction. I wouldn’t really blame her—you can be pretty hard on her, you know.”

  “It’s her judgment that’s the problem, not mine. She makes very bad choices.”

  “Maybe so, but it’s her life.”

  “Just so long as it doesn’t become our problem.”

  During the monotonous, two-hour ferry ride, Ruby wanders the decks with Moxie and that camera, interviewing strangers, while Henry stares absently out the window at the passing waves. This is Ruby’s first trip to California, Moxie’s first boat ride, and they’re excited. Henry is glad for them—why shouldn’t they be? Why shouldn’t he be having fun as well? Just because of something that happened a long time ago—it’s silly.

  Feet up on their luggage, half drowsing, Henry has plenty of time to think about things, and what an utterly different experience his first trip to the island had been: like going to another planet, as exotic and beautiful and…he dozes off.

  Meat. A supermarket display of raw meat. Rows of ruby-red cutlets, steaks, chops, roasts, sausage, all glistening under fluorescent lights, garnished with sprigs of holly and berries. Going down the refrigerator case, you see something black and bristly on the bottom shelf—a huge boar’s head. Fascinated, heart thumping, you look closer, but your breath fogs the glass; you can’t see. Impatiently wiping it, you find that the head is gone…or perhaps was never really there at all.

  Something drips on your scalp. You turn around to see that hideous pig head staring down at you, its long snout wrinkling at your scent. Big yellow teeth, so human, line its drooling jaws. The pig has a man’s body; the body of a butcher wearing a bloody apron and holding up a great, gory cleaver—

  Someone bumps the back of his seat, and Henry awakens with a shout.

  Chapter Two

  TERMINAL ISLAND

  “Maybe it’s not coming.”

  “It’s coming. Be patient.”

  “But it’s late!”

  “No, my watch is fast.”

  “I’m scared. What if it doesn’t come?”

  “It’ll come. I promise.”

  “You promise?”

  “Yes, honey. I promise.”

  San Pedro in the ’60s was a railway terminal by the sea, an industrial wasteland in which mile-long chains of freight cars, some with two or three locomotives at each end, clanged slowly along a creosote-smelling harbor front that was the Pacific gateway into America. This passage bustled day and night with massive cargo ships and muscular little tugboats, all plying the channel beneath the spindly arch of the great Vincent Thomas Bridge.

  Overlooking this scene was the first of many crummy lodgings Henry Cadmus would occupy with his mother: the Del Monte Hotel, owned and operated by his grandparents.

  For them, it was the last of their ill-fated ventures, which had begun with their migrating from southern Italy to the Belgian Congo in search of a better life, only to be interned as enemy aliens at the outbreak of World War II. When the war was finally over they and their twin daughters were deported to Brazil, where the prospects were not much better, and then made their way to the United States. In America they embarked on a final, futile stab at innkeeping, squandering their meager savings on a slum hotel that provided lodging to hardship cases and sailors and longshoremen sleeping off a bender.

  That was where Henry Cadmus was born.

  The Del Monte Hotel of Henry’s earliest memories was a huge, dim catacomb; a Spanish-tiled behemoth bracketed by sooty palm trees, deserted except for loving giants who loomed out of the dark to spoon-feed him mashed soft-boiled eggs and cut-up orange wedges weeping sugared juice. As he graduated to more substantial food, there were oily sardines and olives, crumbly goat cheese, imported chocolate coins and marzipan, pry-top tins of black prune paste or golden malt syrup, polenta, amaretto-flavored cookies, creamy avocado on buttered toast—flavors he would always associate with childhood. He remembers once choking on a butterscotch candy, and the gargantuan who was his grandfather hoisting him up by the ankles and shaking him until he expelled the lozenge. Another time he swallowed a penny—a wheat penny—which wa
s never seen again.

  As Henry got older and began to roam the hotel’s corridors, he took great interest in the gloomy surroundings, and was unperturbed by sights such as huge wharf rats crossing from one doorway to another, giant cockroaches and red centipedes in the showers, or clutches of blind pinky mice about to be flushed down a toilet as part of the ordinary housekeeping routine. He caught vague glimpses of bloody floors being mopped and his grandfather running up and down the stairs with a shotgun. Most vividly of all, Henry recalls once hiding with his mother under the bed as a strange man knocked on their door, calling softly, Vicki, open the door. Henry? Come out here, boy, I have a present for you. I can hear you in there—I know you’re both in there. Henry, come open the door so I can give you your birthday present. Come on out and we’ll go get cake and ice cream. After the man left, Vicki waited a good long time to make sure he was gone, telling Henry it was all a game, just a silly little game. When she finally opened the door the hallway was full of thick smoke—there was a fire somewhere. Trying not to breathe, they made their way out of the building to the front sidewalk, where she told him to sit still while she ran back in to help her parents and the other few tenants get out. Amid the commotion, Henry noticed the hotel’s big gray tomcat lying dead in the middle of the road. As firemen and policemen came and went, and Vicki flirted with them, he sat on the curb watching the cat’s curious metamorphosis from a familiar cat shape to a mangled pink pulp and finally—traffic taking its toll—to bits of flattened pelt curing in the sun.

  The fire was blamed on Gladys. And since Gladys died in the fire, she made no defense. Of the mostly faceless tenants, Gladys was only one Henry ever remembers feeling close to. She was a hugely fat, sweet-natured African lady who was close friends with his grandparents and doted on him, always having a piece of butterscotch candy ready when wee Henry visited her squalid room. She told African stories and sang African songs and read people’s fortunes and had a collection of African masks and other artifacts that were deeply fascinating to Henry. Because of Gladys, he can never look at Aunt Jemima or any other mammy stereotype without a guilty rush of affection. Poor Gladys, who died smoking in bed…or so he was told. And why would they lie?