Lycans Don’t Surf

Caleb boated to the forbidden spot, alone and in the dark, on the borrowed rigid inflatable. His boss, the owner of the Maui dive shop, would never have approved if he’d known Caleb was taking it to surf Molokai. The island had a hard-core reputation against outsiders. More than once Caleb had heard that visitors to the island were greeted with, “What’s your name? Where you from? When you leavin?” And that was before the government had turned the leper colony on the island into the largest lycan reservation in the country.

Caleb figured if it was only him, and not a whole crowd, perhaps they would let him surf in peace. After all, he was arriving at the crack of dawn. He didn’t know a whole lot about lycans—let alone the infection that had created them—except that they weren’t really werewolves, more like wolf people. Caleb thought they slept in the daytime, so what they didn’t know wouldn’t hurt them. The whole reason the government had taken over the island was to separate them from the human population, since a bite or even a scratch from a lycan usually resulted in another one. Worst-case scenario, if he saw unfriendly red eyes on the beach, he could paddle back to the inflatable and hightail it away from the island.

Edging into the cove that was now part of the Molokai Isolation Camp, Caleb peered into the waning darkness. He couldn’t see the wave yet, but he could hear it—boy could he hear it—sounding like a whip or a thunderbolt. The weather report had called for double overhead surf. With the incoming tide push and the rising south swell, Caleb thought it might turn out to be the best day he’d ever had, especially since he’d be scoring the waves by himself, with not a single local to cut him off or yell at him to get out of the water, as was frequently the case on Maui.

Caleb had moved from the mainland after spending his twenties and most of his thirties bouncing between the coast and the mountains, unable to decide which type of bum to be: surf or ski. There was more money in teaching skiing, but the series of bloody attacks in Aspen and Beaver Creek—ground zero of the zoonotic infection—had made him reconsider the colder climate (and high end resorts) they seemed to favor. Go someplace hot, he thought, and with a lot of water. He’d heard they weren’t keen on water. When he saw the ad for a school for boat captains, he’d moved to Maui. He’d been as shocked as anyone when the government had started rounding up lycans, regardless of whether they’d committed a crime, and began shipping them off to his own backyard, the island of Molokai.

With the GoPro camera mounted on the front of his board, one personally autographed by eleven-time surfing champion Kelly Slater, Caleb put on his leash and paddled from the inflatable to the break. He sat for a moment in the lineup, his eyes adjusting, his mouth agape at the pristine waves rolling through, all unridden. A wave like this on Maui or Oahu would’ve had over fifty ultra-competitive and unfriendly surfers in the water, many of them pros. For the first time, Caleb wouldn’t have to fight to get a wave. He could have any—and every—one he wanted.

About an hour in, the early morning Hawaiian sun was already beginning to fry his skin, and the south swell had really turned on. Fun six- to eight-foot surf had transformed into thick, twelve- to fourteen-foot monsters. Caleb almost wished there was someone else out, not only to witness him killing wave after wave, but in case something happened.

And then something did.

Paddling back after a dredging right, Caleb saw a great-looking barrel coming his way. He turned to go for it, but the wave continued rising, surpassing anything he’d seen that morning. He...