Mark read her thoughts and put an arm on her shoulders. “Whoever it was, they haven’t been here in a long time. Months maybe. I don’t think we have to worry about them coming back this particular weekend just to spoil our party!”
“C’mon,” Billy said. “Let’s see what’s on the opposite shore. This island isn’t that big; it can’t be much farther.”
They continued walking, but everyone seemed a bit quieter than an hour before. The leaves made the only sound as they shifted in the slight wind.
“Have you noticed there are not even any birds here?” Mark said at one point. “It’s so quiet—no bugs buzzing, no birds calling…”
“It is still,” Billy agreed. “Probably just cuz we’re so far out from the mainland. Think of it this way, that’s just more proof that it’s an uninhabited island.”
“There are spiders,” Jess declared. “Freakin’ ugly spiders.”
Just as she said that, the group stepped through a stand of bushes and were suddenly out of the foliage and back on open beach.
“No spiders here,” Billy said, and pointed to the white sand that extended from the edge of their feet into the crystal clear water just a few yards away. “Anyone want to see if there are fish?”
With that he took off running towards the water. Casey joined him. “Last one in,” she called. Mark and Jess laughed and followed. When they were all chest deep in the water, Casey turned to Jess and pointed to her bikini top, noting, “Um, these costumes don’t really cling very well.” Her naked breast broke the surface of the water briefly, as she demonstrated that the tan triangle had slipped easily to the side.
“Exhibitionist,” Jess accused. “Mine stayed on just fine.”
“Mine could use a little adjusting,” Mark suggested, rubbing up against her thigh to make it obvious that his privates had also slipped out of his loincloth after their short swim.
She reached down and encircled the stray organ, and with a smile, slipped him back inside the fabric. “Down boy,” she laughed.
Mark shook his head and bent to kiss her. “Nuh-uh,” he answered.
From behind them, Casey called out, “We’re going to swim for awhile.”
Mark grinned, and pulled Jess back out of the water towards the beach.
“Right now?” she whispered, glancing at the two playfully wrestling in the water behind them.
“They’ll stay out there awhile,” he promised. “Probably doing the same thing.”
“Ew, with the fish?” she grimaced.
He pulled her into the shade of a bush and kissed her, hard. His hands roamed the wet skin of her back and thighs, trailing up between the cleft of her ass and then cupping her behind to pull her even tighter to him. When he broke the kiss, Jess’s eyes were on fire.
“OK,” she breathed heavily. “Right now.”
She pulled the tie on her bikini and he did the same, just before kneeling to suck one dark nipple gently between his lips. He bit down playfully, and she moaned. “Pick a position,” she whispered. “Cuz one of us is getting sand in their ass.”
“Missionary,” he said, and helped her lay down in the cool sand.
“You’re such a gentleman,” she said, but didn’t protest. She laid down on the sand and opened her thighs provocatively.
“I won’t be a gentleman in a second.”
Jess cried out as he entered her, and stifled herself with a finger.
“You can let go,” he encouraged, “No one will hear.” And soon enough, she did. Her heels dug in and pressed against the sand, and she raised her knees to let him in deeper. It was strangely erotic, to be pressing her feet through cool sand as he dripped warm salty water across her chest. She pressed her feet deeper into the sand until her toes met something that didn’t shift. Cold. A rock. She curled her toes around it as Mark cried out his own finish, and smiled as he wilted against her, resting his head on her chest.
Then as the fog of pleasure faded and the world suddenly took shape again around them, the sand began to itch between her ass cheeks and she gently pushed him up. He rolled to the side and she sat up, looking for her bikini top in the much-disturbed sand.
It lay just beyond her knee, and as she bent forward, she saw the rock that her foot had been massaging. Only, it wasn’t a rock.
“Oh god,” she whispered. “Mark?”
Mark had rolled on his back, but he opened his eyes at the tone of her voice. “What’s the matter?”
“Tell me that isn’t what it looks like,” she said, pulling her foot as far away from the white thing in the sand as she could.
Mark reached out and pulled the thing from the sand and stared into a pair of open eyesockets. Yellowed, bare teeth grinned back at him. Human teeth.
“OK,” he agreed, his voice cracking a bit. “This isn’t a skull.”
“Fuck, fuck, fuck!” she swore, leaping to her feet and pulling her bottoms on. “I’ve been playing fuckin’ footsy with a dead guy for the last five minutes.”
Mark dropped the skull. It rolled to the side, and he could see the back of its braincase was broken. It almost looked chewed…
“Better or worse than a spider?” he offered, but she didn’t hear. She was already running for the beach to call to the others.
In The Air
Billy and Casey moved into shallow water, both of them clumsily trying to push their coverings back into some semblance of covering as they stumbled to shore.
“What’s the matter?” Billy said when he reached Jess, who waited impatiently at the water’s edge.
“There’s a dead guy back there!” Jess announced.
Moments later they had all gathered around the skull. Billy reached down and gently pushed sand away from the area that the skull had come from, and soon had uncovered the bleached vertebrae of the neck, followed by the shoulders, collarbone and ribs. Then abruptly, he stopped.
“This guy hasn’t been dead that long,” he said, making a face.
“He’s nothing but bones,” Jess argued.
“Maybe up-top, but not down here.” Billy grimaced and wiped something dark, cool and sticky off the back of his hand on the sand.
And then they all made faces as the smell reached them, a stench of rotting meat mixed with the sour of bad fish.
“Jesus,” Mark said, stepping back.
As Billy stood up they could all see that just below the first couple of exposed ribs, a blackened gory mess yawned under the sand.
“But…what took all of the skin off his head?” Casey asked.
“Not just skin,” Billy answered. His voice sounded grim. “Something took hair, muscle, eyes, fat… without leaving a trace.”
“Fucking gross,” Mark said. Two hands grabbed his arm and squeezed. Jess.
“My foot was on him,” she said. Her voice sounded close to breaking.
Billy slapped a bug on his neck absently. “Well, at least you only touched the clean part.”
Casey echoed Billy, hitting her thigh with her palm. The air around them seemed to hum.
“So much for no bugs,” Mark said. He swatted at a tiny fly or gnat that circled his face.
“Um,” Casey said. “I think we should go.”
Billy turned to look at her, and then his gaze followed her arm, which pointed to a cloud of insects at the edge of the trees. They glittered like a violet constellation in the bright sun. Black and shimmering purple, the horde of tiny insects expanded from the forest in a cloud that grew broader by the second. The co-eds all began to slap at tiny bites as the buzz grew around them, and the air suddenly was alive with tiny beating wings.
“I think we should go now!” Casey screamed, and ran straight through the cloud towards the path of broken branches they had forged. The others followed close on her heels.