I was given a handgun and a holster to keep it in. It’s not a tool that I was unfamiliar with, but that did not mean I was at all eager to have it in my possession. Jerry had been given one as well, but more as a formality, I think, than anything else.

We were told that a ship had been spotted drifting across the mouth of the bay. All attempts to contact it remotely had yielded no results, so a boarding party was being assembled to investigate further.

“Surely this is something the military can handle on their own,” I said – more of a question than a statement, really. But the Lieutenant Commander only gave me a far off look and murmured, “It’s hard to guess what the sea might have vomited up this time.”

To be fair, he was not wrong.

We were escorted onto a small steam-powered ship. I had been on one or two before, but not many – coal was expensive and of limited supply. The soldiers that had been gathered on board with us (…soldiers? …seamen? I never knew exactly how to properly address military types, so out of a sheepish sort of embarrassment I was doing my best to avoid eye contact…) They seemed nervous, Restless. Like men afraid that they were being sent to their deaths.

Standing among them, listening to them speak, it became apparent that their fears were not unjustified. The ship we were on our way to inspect had a history. It had left port twenty days previous, its hold filled with goods destined for the other islands. It returned two days later (far sooner than expected but not unheard of), drifting and silent, just as it was today. When it was boarded, the crew was found raw and deranged, stinking of blood and offal and charred flesh. They rushed the boarders, killing three in a scant matter of seconds. Two more were lost as they fell back. The ship had been subsequently torpedoed and sunk to the bottom of the bay.

And yet, here it was again.

“What if they’re back from the dead,” whispered one of the sailors, and there was a silence that followed. It was obvious that they had all been thinking it, but now that someone had said the words out loud, they hung heavy in the air, quickly growing to fill any empty space on the deck until even the sound of the engines seemed distant and muffled. And then the one standing next to me spoke.

“I was stationed off the coast of an island,” he began, quiet and hesitant. But the more he said, the more quick and unguarded his words became. He told of a perpetually fog drenched island in the middle of the sea where every seventh day the dead would be recalled to life.

At first I had thought he was speaking nonsense, perhaps trying to frighten his crewmembers, but the conviction in his voice and the details that he shared were…

I admit here that I am hesitant to write down the things he said. Just thinking them makes my stomach turn, and not because they have a scary or ghoulish nature – quite the contrary! They make me feel ill because they serve as a reminder that human beings are capable of casually committing such terrible atrocities. And that is why I MUST write them down. Because I too am human. Because to look the other way when confronted with the horrible things that other people have done is to deny the horrible potential that lies buried within the core of my own being. It is something that I must… that we ALL must be vigilant of within ourselves – because to look away is to risk letting those things slip lose and break free.

He said that the objective of that particular post was to storm the island every seventh day and return the dead to their rest. The islanders had weapons and ammunition, but they were always outclassed and always fell easily. Each and every time they rose again, they were slaughtered to the last man. The most wearying part of the job, he explained, was that there would always be a handful of individuals who had hidden out in the woods and were trying to escape to the back of the island. They were unarmed; they never fought back; they only ran. Searching them out and cutting them down would often take the better part of two days.

I wanted to ask why they needed to kill these few if they were not a threat. I waited for him to pause so that I might get my question in, but by this point in his telling of the story, he had picked up enough nervous momentum that his words were not about to stop.

There was a girl in particular that he mentioned having to kill in the woods on that island over and over again. She was not even remotely a threat to them, and as the length of their deployment stretched on, he and a few of the others stationed with him took to dispatching of her in increasingly more elaborate and demeaning ways – frequently taking steps to strip her of all her dignity and then raping her in turns before ending her life in what ever was the most gruesome way they could conceive of at the time.

With rushed and anxious words he spoke of the the horrified look in her eyes as he spread her knees, and the satisfying crunch of her skull being pulverized with a rock while one of his companions was still inside of her. And then in mid sentence he suddenly stopped and looked around himself. His face turned green with the realization that he had let his tongue become too lose, as if he had only just become aware of the fact that there were other people present to overhear the terrible things he was saying. His face still had the softness of youth; he lowered his eyes and made an expression akin to childish embarrassment.

We rode the rest of the way to the ship in silence.