The Island

“Doug is dead.” The doctor’s voice was hollow and weak; I could feel the exhaustion and the pain filling every syllable that echoed through the speakers. “It’s been months since the last time I was here. Grace followed through on her promise. She didn’t say anything, but I knew she was suspicious after finding me in here last time, and she made sure that I was never alone after that. So much has happened since the last time I recorded. But I think I have a little time to lay it all out.

Under Grace’s orders ... I assume because she suspected I was having lucid moments more than she realized and wondered if the others were having the same ... the other team was pulled out of the airfield and brought back to the bunker. Doug, Richard, Sally, the two aides and the four women who were with them - although one of them was now with Richard - all joined us at the main base. I suppose I shouldn’t have been surprised. The reason for keeping them isolated from each other was now a moot point considering that none of the people who had been here before us were being kept in the holding pens anymore, and the tests had pretty much stopped.

Everything became about sex.

A few days after the other staff returned, Grace herded up all of the women who had become pregnant by men no longer alive and took them to the hospital with Sally. I don’t know how she knew who the fathers were, but she knew that she was pregnant with my child, and so was Susan. Sally was carrying Doug’s child, and Sylvia was carrying Richards. The other three women from their group were pregnant too, but one of them had been knocked up before the aides arrived and was taken to the hospital with the others.

Richard was put on guard at the door. Jesus, he was like a robot. I can’t imagine what Grace did to him, but it was like his personality was just ... gone. He wouldn’t answer when spoken to, he would only guard that door, and the one time I tried to get in, he damn near broke my arm. I should point out here that Richard was a rifleman in the 1st Marines. That man hit the beaches of Guadalcanal and survived the duration of Peleliu. He is not someone you fuck with. I didn’t try to get into the hospital again after that, but the women were in there for more than a week.

In the meantime, the rest of the women seemed to be going out of their way to keep me occupied. The lucid moments were still coming, but they were just as erratic and unpredictable as before. Every time I had a moment, I was with one of them. Every night, at least two of the women would come to my room and lock the door behind them, fuck me to exhaustion, then wake up the next morning and fuck me again until someone came, knocked on the door, and we would go about our day. When lucid, I knew I was a prisoner, but the rest of the time, it all seemed so normal. I loved every single one of the women that had imprinted onto me without question, and spending time with them was the most natural thing in the world.

When the women finally came out of the hospital they ... I don’t know how to say it any other way ... but they weren’t pregnant anymore. Grace and Sally had terminated every pregnancy fathered by someone who wasn’t alive anymore. It was against every code of ethics that a medical professional holds dear. It was abhorrent, there was nothing medically wrong with any of those children or their mothers, and she killed them all anyway. It was cold-blooded murder. I’m not anti-abortion by any means, but that is not what this was. This was the same clinical disregard for life that the Nazis possessed.

And none of us noticed.

At least until my next moment. I felt sick to my stomach, but it was like trying to remember a bad dream. It’s like anything and everything that would make us angry, or upset, or even mildly unhappy, becomes increasingly hard to recall, be that our memories of home, the names of loved ones, or the murder of unborn children.

Three of the women who had been in the hospital joined me that night, and I fucked every single one of them until we all passed out. They had been so long without my seed that they were practically frantic with need, and it was my duty to sate them. The following night, Grace stayed with me to “thank” me for performing so well.

I can still feel her body against mine; I can still ... no ... I need to stay focused! Think of Doug, dammit, remember what they did to him.

Doug. I didn’t know it before then, but almost everyone, except maybe Grace, was having these lucid moments as well; it’s just that I was never lucid when they were, or I didn’t notice if they were, and the same went for them when I was lucid. That morning with Doug changed all that. Doug, Sally, Betty, and I were asked to go to the river to collect water. Betty and Sally were in full froth that day. They were acting like the harlots you read about in the stroke mags we read during the war. They were doing everything in their power to drive us crazy, but neither Doug nor I were biting, so they decided to put on a girl-on-girl show for us. I was distracted. I had realized that, if my math was right, my son’s birthday was that week, and I missed him terribly. I’m not sure what Doug was thinking about, but it was clear he wasn’t really in the mood either. Eventually, we both just fucked them so we could get back on task. It will forever be to Doug’s credit that he spoke first.

“You’re here too, aren’t you?” He asked me. I know exactly what he meant; I almost wept with relief, knowing that I wasn’t alone. We knew we had to talk quickly. We had no idea how much time we would have, but I told him about the room with the recording equipment in it, and we decided that we would leave each other notes, communicating without the others noticing.

By the time we were halfway back to the bunker, he was gone again, and I wasn’t long behind him.

It was a little over a week before the first note appeared in the drawer of the desk here. It turned out that Doug had been having much more lucid moments than I had and had quietly been continuing his research into the infection. He had noticed Grace’s suspicion of me and tried to be as careful as he could in carrying it out.

His notes were meticulous, but his conclusions were worrying. Whatever was controlling us was acting with a high degree of sentience. This wasn’t like rabies, as we had originally thought before we arrived on the island; this was more like brainwashing. What was more worrying was that he suspected there was not one source of control.

There were two.

Grace had been talking about “the Goddess” for months by now, and when I thought about it, she seemed to go out of her way to ensure everyone was cared for and happy. As long as we were trying our best to procreate, we were living lives that most of us would have considered a fantasy. An idyllic island with people we were in love with, not a care in the world aside from semi-regular reports back to Pearl, constant sex, and the occasional need to gather supplies.

But there was a darker side to the control as well, like the termination of those pregnancies, the behavior of Col. Williams, and the deaths of the people who had been removed from this Island. Very little of that could be blamed on Grace. It wasn’t only her that pulled them into the hospital, Sally helped, and more than that, the women themselves seemed more than happy to undergo the procedure. Doug hypothesized that there was something else going on. He just wasn’t sure how to categorize it.

Our back and forth went on for a few weeks. We would both note our observations and detail any tests we had been able to perform during our lucid moments. Then one day, a third person joined in. I don’t know who it was, but I guessed that Doug had clued them in, and they seemed to have a much better grasp on things than we did.

Most importantly, they had performed tests on the various plants on the island, specifically the red flowers that seem to cover vast, huge swathes of the open land here. Botany is not my subject of expertise, but apparently, there is something very strange about the pollen of this plant in that it acts more like bacteria than that inanimate plant stuff. Whoever it is, they promised to investigate further.

Doug, in his notes, was becoming more and more concerned with the two variations of control over us. He started asking about “the dark-haired woman.” Neither our third partner nor I had any idea what he was talking about, but we all noticed that our lucid moments were becoming less frequent.

A few days later, I saw her.

I wasn’t lucid, it wasn’t one of those moments, but I saw her. Since his role as hospital guard had ended, Richard had been mating furiously with his woman, Sylvia, between carrying out his normal duties. But one day, I walked into the mess, and he was just sitting there, talking to this dark-haired woman as if he had known her all his life. She was touching his arm and preening for him while Sylvia watched on, smiling. The woman was ... she was beyond beautiful. She was the walking, talking personification of all things womanly. She was perfect. I could feel her drawing me in, I wanted nothing more than to talk to her, but - for whatever reason - I didn’t.

The next day she was with Betty and Susan. The day after that, she was with Sally. She just seemed to appear out of nowhere, interact with a few people, and then vanish. She was like a ghost. Anytime she was around, she was the center of the world to whoever she was spending time with, but as soon as she vanished, it was like we all forgot about her.

On the fourth day, Doug confronted the group. He stood in the middle of the room and yelled at all of us, asking who she was and why none of us were concerned with some random person inexplicably turning up on the Island. I don’t think they saw me; I was in the hallway, but the dark-haired woman just stared at him. Jesus, her eyes ... they were ... they were evil.

Richard lunged for him, pinning him to the ground before the rest of the women piled on as well. They dragged him down the other hallway and outside and held him down. He was kicking and screaming. I knew it was wrong, there was something in the back of my head screaming at me to put a stop to it, but my body didn’t want to listen. Betty, Susan, Sally, and Sylvia pinned him to the dirt, and Richard...

Richard smashed his head in with a rock.

He just kept hitting him and hitting him until there was nothing left. They turned his skull into wet mulch. His legs were still twitching when the attack stopped. They tossed his body into the sea and went back to their meals as if nothing had happened. My god, Richard was eating his rations with Doug’s blood and brains still all over his hands, all over his clothes, all over his face. Fuck, all of them were caked in it.

What was worse, I joined them. I had watched, I had seen it happen, but my mind refused to allow me to acknowledge it. I could still hear his screams and the grunts as Richard turned his skull to mush ... They killed him. And I was sitting there with them, eating and chatting, as if nothing had happened.

And then that night, Sylvia asked if I had seen him. Fuck, she had helped hold him down! AND I SAID NO!!

The voice faded for a second, the silence broken by the sounds of soft sobbing. “My God, I think he was married, I ... I can’t remember anything about him. It’s only been a few days, and I can hardly remember his face. Were there others? Have we killed other members of our team and just forgotten about it? If this ever gets back to his wife, I need her to know how sorry I am...

I ... wish I could take it back. Whatever is happening here, the dark-haired woman is evil. If you see her, don’t question her, and don’t draw attention to yourself. They will kill you if you do. I need to go now. I need to compose myself before the others get back.

I’m so sorry, Doug.