Derelict Crew Clean Up at Fern Forest.

By Marie Alohalani Brown

     One late afternoon, a pristine, white GMC Sierra pulled into the parking lot at Hirano’s Store on Volcano Highway. Bubba and Bobby Ray, two middle-aged vagrant brothers formerly of Calhoun Falls, South Carolina, now squatters in Fern Forest who subsisted by thievery, sat at the green picnic bench to the left of the store’s entrance. They were regulars. The brothers watched the truck arrive as they sat drinking cheap beer from bottles concealed in brown paper bags. When they saw who stepped out of the truck, they immediately sat up straight, sucked in their bellies, and ran their hands over their unkempt grizzled hair and beards. She must have been about six feet tall they reckoned, and she was a beauty. She wore a black sports top and short yoga tights. As she walked towards them, their eyes roamed the curves of her body framed by her thick, hip-length, dark-brown hair.    
​     She noticed them staring and winked at them. After she entered the store, they relaxed their stomachs and grinned at each other. 
     “Her pants were so tight I could see her religion!” said Bubba with a low cackle.
     “Butt like a forty-dollar mule,” replied Bobby Ray, nodding his head.
     They sipped their beers in silence after that, each lost in their own thoughts about the woman, all of them inappropriate. 
    Sometime later, two employees made several trips to and from the store to load the woman’s groceries and other supplies in her truck. Bubba and Bobby Ray noted that she had purchased a good amount of hard liquor, wine, and beer—none of the cheap stuff either. She had several propane tanks, which were goods they often stole to sell for cash. 
     After the employees loaded the groceries in the truck and returned inside the store, the woman walked back to the entrance, but instead of going back in, she stopped at the picnic bench.
     “Hey guys. I just bought a place in Fern Forest. By any chance, could I hire you to help me unload my supplies—twenty dollars each for an hour’s work?” 
    “Throw in a bottle of whiskey and drink some with us, and you got yourself a deal, lady,” said Bubba.
     She laughed, and agreed to their terms.
    The brothers couldn’t believe their luck—an opportunity to earn easy cash and maybe even get lucky tonight if they could loosen her up with some liquor. It wouldn’t be the first time they had taken advantage of a drunk female. In fact, they were registered sex offenders. The brothers put their old bicycles in the back of the woman’s truck, and climbed in. They slapped the side of the truck to signal she could go, and off they went. 
     Fern Forest was a sparsely-populated undeveloped subdivision seaside of Hirano’s. Property was cheap there for a reason. A good number of odd folks lived there, a few of them downright creepy. It was a haven for antisocial preppers, meth dealers and addicts, and registered sexual offenders. Screams and gunshots occasionally disrupted the normally quiet nights, but Fern Forest’s inhabitants rarely called the police—they either had something to hide or feared retaliation for snitching on their neighbors. Moreover, buying land could be a hit or miss purchase. People might buy and then clear land only to find it riddled with lava tubes, and thus unstable for house construction. Forest old-timers were fond of saying that if you ever killed anyone on your property, there were plenty of places to hide them. 
   The woman, whose name was ʻĀpiki, lived in the most secluded area of the subdivision, off the dirt road named Jungle King Avenue. Her home was on the edge of Kahaualeʻa Natural Area Reserve, less than five miles from the Puʻu ʻŌʻō lava cone on the eastern side of the Kīlauea volcano crater. She had bought five adjacent three-acre lots, but had only cleared one, and then half of another, the latter of which, according to the man who had cleared her land, was full of horizontal and vertical lava tubes, including one with no discernable bottom. For the moment, she lived in a twenty by forty canvas tent. She wasn’t afraid of living alone there. Although she had two extra-large brindled pit-bulls trained as attack dogs, they were not the reason she was unafraid. Simply put, she was scarier than anything anywhere. 
    ʻĀpiki kept her word. She gave the brothers twenty dollars each and drank a bottle of whiskey with them. When that one was finished, she opened another. When the second bottle was nearly finished, ʻĀpiki didn’t seem to be affected at all, but Bubba and Bobby Ray were slurring their words and seeing double. At one point, the brothers thought they were seeing things. More than once, out of the corners of their eyes, ʻĀpiki’s face seemed almost lizard-like, and once when she yawned, they thought they saw sharp triangle-shaped teeth. Unfortunatelty for them, they weren’t imagining things. As Bubba and Bobby Ray were about to discover, much to their dismay, she was an apex predator. Men were her favorite prey and her beauty was her bait. Because she was cautious, she only hunted the dregs of society, men no one would miss.
​    The last thing Bubba and Bobby Ray saw before they died was ʻĀpiki’s transformation into a huge Komodo-like reptile, which then opened its jaws impossibly wide. 
     Sound travels far in Fern Forest, and although residents heard screams that night, no one called the police. 
     A few weeks passed before the owner and employees of Hirano’s Store realized that they hadn’t seen Bubba and Bobby Ray for some time. As more weeks passed, they noticed something else too. Across the store was a small park where the local riff-raff of Fern Forest, nicknamed the derelict crew, hung out day and night. The number of men who hung out there had dwindled. But because the derelict crew were a mix of drug dealers, addicts, and thieves, no one wondered or cared what had happened to them.