The Island

Happy New Year, everyone and welcome to chapter 12.

An enormous thanks to my editors and supports who have made this, and my other series, what they are. Lets hope 2023 continues to be as fruitful as the last few months of 2022 have been.

Anyway, one with the story

********

As Amy had predicted, the next day was long and tiring, made even more tiring by the lack of sleep the night before. The time spent listening to Dr. Walker in the bunker had taken a few hours, the time spent fucking Amy to within an inch of her ability to walk had stretched that time even further, and the rest of the night was marked by the complete inability to sleep. Dr. Walker's account was pretty worrying, but it was Amy's sudden change that really bothered me. We were

in

the room with the voice recorder when she reverted back to her non-lucid state, yet she had no memory of anything she had heard.

That little contradiction plagued my mind all day. Freja, the Goddess of lust and sexual desire, had seemed so genuine; I had trusted her so implicitly that I had immediately left the vision with her and done my level best to impregnate not one but two of the women I was stranded on this Island with. There was still a huge part of me that wanted to believe her, even if it was only because her explanation excused the fact that I had basically taken advantage of these women. Now, though, I was starting to wonder. Dr. Walker had changed during the times he was recording, not once, but twice. Shifting from what seemed to be a lucid, logical, worried medical expert into the same lust-driven madman that I had become so many times. That voice, the one he had used to command the women he had been on this very island with, was so obviously identical to the voice I had felt leave my lips to command Hayley and Robyn at the lake that it sent a shiver up my spine.

Yet, according to Dr. Walker, that voice, or at least the control that it represented, was a threat to the lives of everyone on this island.

Then there were the other contradictions. Amy had followed me into the bunker the previous night, and she had not only been able to see the room with the recorder in it, but she had also shared my concern and joined me in listening to it. But only a few hours earlier, Hayley had told me that

she

was having a lucid moment but still couldn't see the room despite being only a few feet away from its entrance.

Then there was the fact that the voice had been conspicuously silent since we had found the bunker. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn't shake the feeling of concern and apprehension from my mind; I needed to hear more of the doctor's story.

The day was a blur. Filled with the mundane and menial tasks of clearing out the rest of the large interior room and gathering supplies to fill it with. Katie and one of the Zoe/Caroline twins spent the morning finishing their repairs to the mattresses. They repaired twenty of them in total, but they were both even more surprised than I was with how well they had survived the decades of waiting in the bunker. I suppose the lack of exposure to the open elements and sunlight prolonged their life expectancy well past anything that could be normally expected of them.

Louisa, Hannah, and Ray's other brunette twin kept bringing arm-fulls of soft grass to the pile just inside the gun emplacement until late afternoon, by which time it had grown to about ten feet tall and just as wide around the base. They guessed it would take a week or two to dry out enough to be used to stuff the mattresses, but they were happy with their efforts.

Hayley, Robyn, Liz, Amy, Ray, Tom, and I finished hauling the scrap furniture out of the bunker and into the junk pile before taking the long walk back to the beach to carry back the clothes and other useful items that had been pulled out of the luggage. There was some conversation to pass the time, a lot of it trying to tackle the problem of how to maintain a light source within the bunker's room without starting a larger fire or killing us all from smoke inhalation, but I kept myself out of most of it. I was simply too preoccupied. My mind couldn't multitask the minutiae of idle chit-chat while it struggled with the mysteries bouncing around inside it.

People noticed; Hayley most of all. But they accepted my explanation that I'd not slept well and was feeling a little worse for wear. A soft smile and a gentle squeeze of her hand were enough to put her mind at ease and with Hayley convinced, the others didn't press the issue either. All of them seemed to understand what had happened between Amy and me the night before, but no big deal was made of it, and nobody - even jokingly - suggested that my nocturnal activities with our Island's medical professional were the cause of my lethargy.

Realistically, there was only one way to get out of this funk, and that was to get back to that room and listen to the rest of what Dr. Walker had to say. The problem with that was that the sun seemed to be taking its sweet-ass time moving through the sky. Every single hour dragged out to rage-inducing durations.

"Jesus fucking Christ,"

I found myself thinking as I watched the sun

finally

touch the top of the western mountains. "

It has been sunset for at least a week now! Hurry the fuck up and get dark!"

It felt like I could have hit two birthdays in the time it took the light to finally start fading and the group to start to settle down. The longevity of the day and the hard slog that everyone had put into making this bunker into something of a home base had wiped all the usual energy out of the group. Tom and Louisa didn't even bother moving to their normal spot away from the rest of us before Louisa was sleeping, her head resting on Tom's shoulders as he dozed off too. The girls, this time including Amy and Liz, cuddled into me and each other and quickly fell asleep. Ray and his brunettes were the last to succumb to the efforts of the day, talking quietly just inside the gun emplacement, but soon their voices faded away to nothingness as they, too, drifted off.

Almost every fiber of my being wanted to join them, to cuddle into the heap of soft feminine flesh, close my eyes, and lose myself to sleep. I was exhausted beyond measure. Yet, after waiting long enough to ensure I was the last one awake, my impatient mind pulled me to my feet and dragged me back towards the bunker... and answers.

********

"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.

The speakers clicked off.

I blinked at the shadowy outline of the recorder for the few seconds it took for Dr. Walker's voice to return. I racked my brain; I know my memories, just like everyone else's, were being messed with, or at the very least, I had more than enough grounds to doubt their reliability. But I could not remember seeing a dark-haired woman aside from the ones who had landed on this island with us.

There was another click, and Dr. Walker started talking again, but this time it was different. He was panting, his breathing coming heavily enough to almost distort the words he was trying to say. The man was terrified.

"

This will be my last recording. I think I am going to die today. I need to get this down quickly before they get through the door."

There were a series of loud bangs through the speakers, the echoes of something heavy hitting the solid steel door that guarded the entrance to this room.

"

It has been eight months since Doug's death, and most of the women have given birth now. I have another five children, with three more on the way. Sally is pregnant again too; she imprinted onto Richard after they killed Doug. I don't think any of them even remember him anymore. But the third person contributing to our notes was Susan. She cracked the whole thing wide open. If you survive this, it will be thanks to her. Mother found out about her research this morning. Richard and the others killed her too. They lynched her! They tied a rope around her neck, threw it over a branch of a tree down by the river, and pulled on it until she stopped kicking. There was nothing I could do.