rest of the crew was following suit, plugging their noses with cotton wads. This done, they began passing out plugs to the male passengers.
“What’s that for?” Krysty asked an islander handing out cotton.
“Not for you,” was all the answer she got.
“If there’s danger, we want some, too,” Krysty told the man, holding out her hand.
“No danger for you. You are safe. So is she.” The crewman quickly moved on, ripping the batting into small tufts.
Krysty started to follow him and insist, but Mildred stopped her. “If there’s some kind of poison in the air, nose plugs made of cotton aren’t going to help us, anyway,” she said. “Look around. Nobody’s covering their mouth. It makes no sense. Breathing toxics or corrosives through your mouth will get you just as dead as breathing them in through your nose.”
“If it isn’t poison or acid, then what is it?”
“Your guess is as good as mine.”
“What do you suggest?” Krysty asked. Up near the bow, Ryan was accepting a pair of nose plugs from a crewman.
“Wait and see how it plays out…” Mildred said.
Avoiding the suckhole obstacle course brought the ship to within a hundred yards of the island’s shore. Closer in, deep blue water shoaled, changing to a light turquoise color. The island’s summit was a rounded, low mound of sun-blasted rock and dirt. Below an eroded bluff a broad, shallow cove was fronted by a narrow beach. Along the base of the cliff stood four crude stone huts with no glass in the windows and no doors.
“I can’t tell which island it is,” Mildred said. “There’s so little left of it. It has to be one of the bigger ones, though. Either Santa Cruz or Santa Rosa.”
The breeze sweeping across the island carried the scent of perfume, although there was no evidence of flowering plants. Indeed no evidence of plants of any kind. The scent got stronger and stronger.
“Ooof!” Krysty exclaimed, instinctively averting her face and covering her nose with her hand.
The odor was pungent and cloyingly sweet. Like rotting fruit.
When Krysty looked back at the shore, she saw white forms eerily rising from the beach stones. Human forms. Four beautiful, young, naked women beckoned languidly, invitingly, holding out what looked like plates heaped with food and pitchers of drink.
The male passengers along the rail were drop-jaw riveted by the sight; some were obviously sexually aroused, pitching tents in their BDUs.
“Men can be such triple stupes,” was Krysty’s comment.
“It’s not their fault,” Mildred said. “There must be something in the perfume.”
“It’s not doing anything for me…”
“Me, either,” Mildred said. “The islanders seem unaffected, too, maybe because they know what to expect, or how to fight it. That scent must contain pheromones, chemicals that selectively stimulate the male of the species. Look around. Our fellow passengers are getting turned on, despite the nose plugs. Dammit, that island’s giving off aerosolized Viagra.”
The crew stepped in before things got way out of hand. They brutally shoved the dazed men to the starboard side of the ship, and forced them at blasterpoint to look the other way.
“Atarangi,” a passing islander told Krysty, gesturing at the beach with a collapsible brass spyglass. “Not what they seem.” He opened the telescope and offered it to her.
When she looked through the lens, she saw the lovely faces were not faces at all. Blotches of dark pigment formed seductively lashed eyes and smiling mouths. They had discernible heads, necks, breasts, waists, hips only from a distance. Up close, they were just white oblong shapes, ingeniously shaded to look human. Their long flowing hair was made up of frantically waving filaments, like the tendrils of albino sea anemones. The plates of food held colored rocks; the jugs were empty.
“Not real wahines,” the islander said. “Set foot on the beach, you find that out, quick. Looks like four, but there’s only one. They are fingers on a hand that hides beneath the sand and rocks. Hand is evil. Its smell is sweet and loving but it eats men. Sucks the blood and marrow from their bones.”
At that moment two of the passengers yanked out their nose plugs and jumped overboard. They swam around the stern of the ship, through the wake, stroking hard for the island. To forestall a further stampede into the water, the crew fired their AKs in the air.
All the passengers lined up along the stern, watching the deserters grow smaller and smaller, still swimming with great determination toward the alien and deadly shore. Even Ryan seemed fascinated by their slow, steady progress. Krysty noted with satisfaction that her lover displayed no spectacular trouser effects from the pheromones.
The ship sailed on, turning southeast, and the cove slipped out of sight. By the time the swimmers reached the beach, they were too far away for their screams to be heard over the wind singing in the lines.
That same sea breeze blew away the last of the sirens’ perfume. Some of the passengers began weeping into their palms, as if they had lost their true loves. Krysty was amazed to see crazy, murdering scum acting like brokenhearted teenagers—grieving, inconsolable, their humanity revealed by an illusion of biochemistry.
Gradually the bereft bastards recovered their senses. After an hour, they couldn’t remember any of it. Not the island, not the sirens, not the pain of separation. Total brain fog. The less dramatically affected passengers remembered, though, and taking the public displays of sorrow for signs of weakness marked the criers for an early death.
Driven by a steady twelve-knot wind, the ship plowed on. The fore and aft rocking motion and the hiss of the hull was soothing, even stupefying after the sleepless night. Krysty dozed for hours in the warm sun. When she awoke, Mildred was by her side, watching over her.
Krysty rose from the deck and took in an even more dismal vista.
“That’s where Los Angeles used to be,” Mildred said, her voice gone suddenly hoarse with emotion.
It looked positively primeval. Plumes of molten lava and caustic smoke jetted from the black tips of emerging seamounts. A rain of superheated ejecta swept across the sea, hissing like fifty thousand snakes. Scattered lakes of flame danced on the surface from petrochemicals that had oozed up from the bottom.
On the land, volcanic cones thousands of feet tall spewed ash clouds, creating a low ceiling of gray that blocked out the blue sky to the east. Everything in that direction was tinged with yellow, smoke-filtered light. The bases of the Sierra Nevada in the distance were barely visible for the haze of sulphur and particulate matter.
“It’s a graveyard,” Mildred said after a moment, “for as far as you see. Millions of people died here on nuke day. There used to be a central core of skyscrapers and gridwork streets filling the great basin, edge to edge, stretching to the desert in the east. Whatever the fireballs and nukeblasts left behind, geologic forces have toppled and buried. Los Angeles has been scraped clean of everything human and everything made by human hands.”
“What about the radiation?” Krysty asked. “Is the place poisoned?”
