Island Of The Cryptids

29

"You alright there Captain?" asked Carlin, who was hunched over a now conscious Tucker. He breathed rapidly, wheezing out each breath.

"Yeah, just had a bad dream," he explained. Carlin sat down.

"I pulled out the gas pump and the plane is now actually recharging. Power should be back on in a bit," he said. A moment of silence filled the room.

"Why are you scared?" Carlin asked him.

"Who wouldn't be scared now?" Tucker replied. Carlin nodded.

"Fear is a powerful emotion. It drives all of the other ones. It influences how we live our everyday lives. Most people don't understand it though."

"I think I can relate."

"Of course you can, everybody gets scared. Even me."

"Bullshit," Tucker commented, his voice now once again filled with loopiness. Carlin shrugged.

"We just express it differently. Cope with it in other ways. I know my fears. I won't ever tell anyone because that shows weakness."

"I got my fears sorted out," Tucker said smugly. He smirked. Carlin nursed a walkie-talkie in his hand. He held it with such an iron grip Tucker thought it might break.

"Why do you have that?" Tucker asked at last.

"Connection," Carlin simply answered. He leaned backwards, revealing the scar on his neck. Then he swallowed.

"I don't like connection," he explained. "It's how I got this scar. I got too close. And no, even though I was a marine, I didn't get it from combat."

"How then?"

"I had an ex wife. She supported me throughout my military career. We met in high school. We were both seniors, and I had moved from a distant school, so it was nice to make a new friend. We fell madly in love with each other, and it was perfect. I joined the military straight out of high school. In order to keep our relationship, I went out to the local jewelry store, this little shop called 'Rose's Jewels' and bought her this nice ring. I proposed to her down on one knee in her apartment. She was baffled, and she couldn't help herself but say yes."

"So then I got shipped off for four years. And to say the least, what I saw during my enrollment changed me. I never looked at the world the same. Some people called me a lunatic. Some people called me a severe hard-ass. No matter what, I was a pretty fucked up guy, if you know what I'm saying. So I came home and was greeted by this wonderful, mature woman. My wife. We had talked quite a bit whenever we had time when I was away, but it was difficult still. She helped me with my problems. She dealt with my night terrors. And those were pretty bad, after what I had seen. The doctors say I have PTSD, but who gives a fuck about what they say, right? They're all just a bunch of limp-dicked rich dudes who think they're so posh and perfect and that they understand how the world works more than we do because of how important they are. But they don't know shit, that's the truth. Nobody knows the half of it."

Carlin paused, biting his nails. He shook his head at a laid-back Tucker.

"I'm sorry. I got carried away there. Anyways, we lived our happy little life out for a while. But with time, the anger and fear inside of me boiled like a tea kettle. I got a little to fucked in the brain. I lost control of myself a few times. You can guess what happened next." Tucker coughed.

"Where is this going, and why are you telling me this story?" he asked. Carlin ignored him.

"When I was a boy," Carlin began again. "They called me 'Creepy Carlin' and 'Crazy Carl' and shit like that, I don't remember half of them. Nobody liked me. It's actually the reason why I had to change schools. The ridiculing got that bad. But, I can't blame them. They did it for a good reason."

Tucker cocked his head at him, puzzled.

"You see, I had this little thing for animals. Not the kind of beastiality that you assume, but a little different kink. I love playing God. It gives you so much power. Animals are helpless. They need a God to survive. Their life hangs in the balance of everything around them. And I liked pulling the strings."

"So there was this one time, my grandmother had a cat. Its name was Tammy, a cute little thing. Skittish sometimes, but if you wrangled her up she would purr so hard it would make your heart melt a little. Her fur was so soft and it was a golden orange, a really sweet cat."

"One day when Grandma went out to the store, I took the cat upstairs to the bathroom. She followed me intently, blissfully unaware. I turned on the faucet, filled the tub, and then drowned it. It mewled for its life, kicked and squirmed and hopped around. I had to get all of its legs wrapped up in my hand, then I dunked it under the water and shook it until its head lolled freely off its neck."

"I buried the body in a field not too far from my house, about a block's bike ride away from it. I came back a week later, dug it up, and was met with a sopping wet, decaying corpse that reeked of the worst thing I had ever smelled up to that point. I reached into my pocket and used some pliers to rip its tooth out. I kept it as a trophy, of sorts, and after I buried the corpse again I went home and washed the tooth in the sink, all nice and careful, and then put it in a velvet lined mahogany box."

Tucker looked terrified. Terrified enough to not even notice the pain return to his body as the morphine wore off slowly, taking him out of his high.

"I did this to a couple of other neighborhood pets. Some kids caught on, and started spreading rumors. Of course, they couldn't do anything about it to me since they had no meat to them. So I got away scot free."

"What-"

"So then one day, my wife found the box I kept my tokens in," Carlin said, cutting off a dismayed Tucker. "She went ballistic. Called me the worst obscenities you could ever formulate, worse than any of the nicknames the kids at school gave. Argument got heated. She attacked me. Sliced right through my jugular. I almost bled out, but we had training for these kinds of situations in the marines. I knew how to handle myself. I survived, obviously."

Tucker was now trembling viciously as Carlin stood up. He stretched, pausing his story. The darkness of the cabin made Carlin look like the figure from his dream, walking down the aisle, coming to get him.

"All the while that I played around with the pets, I had this insatiable lust for something. I wanted to do it to something bigger. To something that had emotions. That knew the dangers of the world and feared them. Fear. That was the key element in this scenario."

Tucker's face dropped. Carlin smiled.

"It was clear-cut self defense, the police said. I got attacked first, so that was all that mattered to them. They didn't even care how I stabbed her forty times, watching her pained and betrayed expression each time I jousted her. They didn't care that I had a raging hard-on when I described the details of her attack. The didn't even care that I showed no remorse or guilt in the brutal slaughter of another human being."

Tucker whimpered. He pointed a finger at Carlin.

"You... You are a sick person. You are a terrible human being- You won't get away with this, you fucking sicko." Carlin smiled a wicked beam.

"I see you're running low on meds," Carlin said playfully. He held the needle and bottle of morphine in his hand. "Be a good boy and stay quiet, and then you can have your dessert."

Tucker moaned at his sudden realization. Carlin smiled. A smile just like that of a murderer.