The Island Birds

"Hello friend or Savior!”

Wallace was in no shape to be anyone's savior; he could barely stand upright on the mysterious beach which he had only arrived at an hour earlier. The words of the message appeared blurry from underneath a cracked pane of glass, presumably to guard the yellowed sheet of paper from rain. All of this was affixed to the side of a beached motorized yacht, now coastal wreckage-as-monument to the frail man standing before it. “The Golden Corona” was painted on the jutted remnants hunkering over the dark sand. Still, the badly-damaged vessel was in better condition than the battered raft that had barely carried Wallace to the island. He had struggled against an unforgiving current for hours before arriving at the Corona, and he was weaker and hungrier than he'd ever been in his life.

“Please help yourself to one of the bottles of freshwater I’ve left for you.”

Wallace was already on his third bottle, having thrown up a good bit of the water from the first. All of them, around thirty in number, had been placed in a neat row at the base of the yacht. Had Wallace been the sort of person that paid attention to world events, he would have recognized the boat and known its owner. In some circles, The Golden Corona was as famous as the Argo.

“There’s a building on the northwest corner of this island. It’s a real building made of concrete and steel. The biologists that used to live here have vacated this tropical prison, but I’m here now. My name is Rylan McCay. I have one warning for you: don’t eat any of the birds. They carry a very rare disease. I have plenty of information and research here that will explain everything. Get here as soon as you can.”

That was the end of the note. The words were as much of a premature admonishment as they were a promise. The caws and cackles from inside the forest of the island, which otherwise appeared bereft of fruit and other such nourishment, had given Wallace hope for a meal after days without. After the initial scout which led him to the Corona, he was going to set out for a hunt, hopefully build a fire close to a source of clean water - if there was any to be found.

The letter quelled his imagined feast, but this information was like rising up for oxygen. If Rylan had survived on the island more than a week or two, then perhaps there was a life to be had here. At the very least, there was someone with whom to await rescue.

Wallace judged the sun and headed northwest.

He couldn’t have known it, but Wallace’s trek mimicked, almost step-for-step, the exact course Rylan had taken the previous summer. The surrounding currents had put Rylan on the same basic path. Only in his case, the Corona was heavier than the life raft, and had found purchase on the beach quicker.

An explosion at sea had killed everyone but Rylan, transforming the Corona into a powerless scrap adrift on the Pacific Ocean. After two days, he had to ditch the remains of the crew to suppress temptation to feast upon their spoiled meat. But fate brought Rylan to the very island he’d been seeking, though its secrets were still a mystery to him then.

It took Wallace about an hour to reach the northwest corner. Wallace’s legs were still cramped from dehydration, and the sun grew brighter and more intense as it began to set. Once he was within range, he cut into the island through a thicket of trees. The bird noise was much louder once he was under the forest canopy. The discord was jarring after so many days of silence, but Wallace had a mission and a destination.

For his part, Rylan had reached his grim destination months earlier. Before he had even spotted the island, a seagull landed on the edge of the Corona, signaling that land would be nearby. Rylan devoured the diseased bird immediately, all but its beak and toes, and thus became an unwitting host to an angry mob of viral parasites.

A quarter mile into the island forest, Wallace met up with a trail which led him to a small, one-story building. It was grey and cylindrical, perhaps decades old. Moss and vines covered the lower part of one side, but it appeared that Rylan had cleared the growth away for visitors, revealing a large metallic door which he’d propped open a few inches. Wallace grabbed the edge and began to pull it toward him.

Wallace never got a good look at the thing that Rylan had become since he’d started down the path to decay. He'd barely had time to set the trap: water to keep his prey alive, a siren song disguised as a welcome letter. Rylan's face and body had been remarkably changed by the poison inside him, poison which both killed him and kept him alive.

Wallace had obeyed the letter’s instructions, he'd ignored the island birds. Rylan-as-creature would have sensed it if he had, and then it would have had nothing to eat. It grabbed Wallace’s hand from inside the building, ripped his whole arm off with a torturous snap. The malformed and insane birds cried out from above, alarmed by the screams that followed.