What if the only possibilities are equally impossible?

Mystery of Sawnerve Island Chapter 3 - Occam's Razorburn by Jijillian and Kyosuke

Chapter 3 - Occam's Razorburn

Sunrise found the boys cuddled together under a wing of the wrecked plane. It had gotten cold in the night and they had instinctively sought what warmth they could find.

Mitch dreamed of being back in Palmdale, north of Los Angeles, dreaming of dating one of the cheerleaders, knowing he was dreaming but unaware that he was dreaming that he was dreaming. "Oh, Jessica," he whimpered.

The voice right in his ear woke Jerry from a sound sleep to wide awake terror in a moment. Something was squeezing his chest... A hand was squeezing his chest in a place that he shouldn't even have chest to squeeze!

"AAAA!" Jerry screamed, shoving Mitch away from him and scrambling back away from his friend in a panic.

"Geeze! Mom!" Mitch exclaimed, annoyed at being awakened just as the dream was getting to the good part. "I'm getting up! You don't have to scream in my ear and shove me out of the bed!"

Mitch looked around, his surroundings reminding him where they were. Before he could mentally catch up with that idea, he saw Jerry looking in his direction in wide eyed-panic, and turned to see what was behind him that had Jerry so frightened. "What? Where is it? What?" he yelled as he backed toward Jerry.

"My ... your ... on ... on your chest!" Jerry said, still not coherent.

"What?" Mitch exclaimed, as he swatted at his chest to get rid of whatever, even before his eyes moved down to see what it was. Mitch's hands made violent contact with two sensitive portions of his anatomy just as his eyes confirmed their existence. "AAAAaA?" screamed Mitch from the combination of the unexpected lumps on his chest, and the pain from hitting them.

"AAAAAAaa!" screamed Jerry again. He jumped up and started to run back toward the beach. In his panic he tripped over a vine, performed a full 270 degree flip in mid air, and landed on his back in the stream.

Mitch turned back toward Jerry just in time to see his friend's competition quality gymnastic performance, and the sight made him pause long enough to get a grip on himself, though when he realized what parts of himself he was gripping he almost panicked again.

Jerry, had landed in a deeper part of the stream, and was thoroughly soaked, but unhurt. The combination of the impact and the cool water shocked him out of his panic. He stood up, a bit shakily, and turned around looking for Mitch.

When he turned, Mitch saw what Jerry had on his chest; the t-shirt had turned almost transparent. "aaaAAAAAAA!" screamed Mitch, pointing.

"aaAAAAaaAAAA!" screamed Jerry, gargling a bit. He'd got his mouth full of water. He looked down and saw something he'd never seen before, and never hoped to see from such a personal angle. He screamed again. "AAaAAAaaaAAaAA!", and tried to back away from them. He tripped again, not so spectacularly this time, and sat down in the stream, blowing a thin stream of water from his mouth.

Mitch made strangling noises looking at him, and he hadn't even fallen in the water.

Jerry considered getting up and running again, but he was finally waking up all the way, and he decided that he'd done enough impromptu gymnastics for one morning. "Mitch, Cut that out!" Jerry yelled.

"But man! Our chests! They're gonna grow 'til they explode and aliens pop out!" Mitch said, still a bit panicked.

"Okay! Okay! Now you're being silly! It's just an allergic reaction to the stuff we ate."

Mitch stopped waving his arms around and looked at Jerry. "You're nuts!"

"Think about it," said Jerry. "Which is more likely, alien infestations or hives?"

"Don't use Occam's Razor on me, you schlub!" He stopped and rubbed his jaw. "Huh?"

Jerry rubbed his jaw too. Neither of them shaved regularly yet but both had a few chinny-chin-chin whiskers. Or had.

They looked at each other. They're faces had changed little but their skin seemed smoother, less blemished and certainly hairless. They looked inside their shirts, even skimpier than before, both gasping at the apple-sized breasts, tipped with large, rosie nipples, but then groaning when they confirmed something else.

"My chest hair is gone!" said Jerry.

"Well, you only had one! My whole 40-acre plot has been plowed under!" Mitch had been very proud of his furriness, though not much more than Jerry had been of his more meager accomplishment. He looked down at his legs, "My leg fur is gone too!" Neither mentioned it but their skin everywhere seemed smoother.

About that time both realized that more of their clothing had been unraveled again, too.

"We're growing and our clothes are shrinking," complained Jerry as he regarded the work of the clothing thieves. Their jeans now only reached to mid thigh on them, and their shirts were now sleeveless, and stopped just under their new breasts. "Those birds are perverts!"

"We're growing boobies!" said Mitch. "And I don't mean blue-footed ones."

"I'm almost afraid to look in my pants," muttered Jerry.

"You're the one who thinks this is an allergy to green eggs and pink cantaloupe!" Mitch pointed out.

"Yeah, well, I just don't believe in chest-bursting aliens." Jerry said. "We're gonna have to find out soon anyway, I've gotta pee."

"Damn," Mitch replied. "Now I've gotta pee too."

By unspoken agreement the two boys moved to opposite sides of the crashed airplane to relieve themselves.

Jerry spoke first. "Maybe it's a dream," he said with out much hope as he began to pee from his diminished equipment. It didn't even sound right.

"If it is, we're both wetting our beds," replied Mitch. "Are your balls gone too?"

"Yes." Jerry couldn't quite keep the whimper from his voice. "Is your ... thing ... smaller?"

"Yes," came the sad reply.

The two boys finished their morning bathroom break quietly, too tired from their earlier histronics to panic again.

They retruned from their disappointing journeys of self-discovery and sat down on a sandy spot next to the jet.

"What's happening?" Mitch asked.

"I don't know," said Jerry. "This doesn't make any sense."

They sat and thought for some time. Back home, wherever home might be at the moment for two such peripatetic military brats, both boys read everything they could find when they weren't out risking their lives climbing volcanoes or sailing into typhoons. Unfortunately, their favorite literatures, science fiction and comic books, had too many horrific examples of what might be happening to them.

Mitch still favored extraterrestrials, "Aliens, some kind of alien, uh, pervert. Like those tentacle monsters in the hentai manga."

Jerry had his doubts. "I don't think we know enough to make an hypothesis. It could be magic or psionics or, or, just weird chemistry on this island."

"Weird chemistry that turns birds into fashion designers?" Mitch snorted.

"And, uh, yeah...." Jerry trailed off.

Mitch reconsidered. "Nope, it has to be a human agency. I mean, we're," he paused to swallow, "uh, starting to look like girls...." He trailed off. Now that he'd said it, it seemed even more unbelievable.

"And what use would an alien have for boys who, who -- uh -- look like girls?" finished Jerry.

"Exactly," said Mitch. "Precisely. Indubitably. Elementary. Some perverted sonnuffabitch humans are, are, playing with us!"

"Are you saying we're victims of lesbian terrorists?" Jerry asked.

Mitch got a thoughtful look on his face and said "Hey, you might be on to something! This is the kind of thing that Sgt. Maple would do to us if she could!"

"Uh, well, it's not a bad guess. Better, um, I hate to say this, but it might be better if it is some woman getting revenge on us for being guys. Think of the alternative."

"I already did," said Mitch looking down at his chest. "I mean, chest-bursting aliens might even be nice -- compared to some of the, the weirdos out there."

Jerry nodded in agreement. "Well, we're not going to figure out much just sitting here talking. Let's look around. Maybe there's a survival kit in the jet here."

They clambered onto the twisted remnant of the fuselage, using part of wing for handholds. Almost none of the plane had rusted, it held very little iron or steel being made of space age metals for the most part. They found a name stenciled under the pilot's cockpit window. "CPT A. Stuart" it read in two-inch high black letters. A second name under the gunner's window read "1LT R. Donaldson".

Mitch glanced inside. "No bodies."

"Yeah," said Jerry, "no leather or cloth either, and no bones." Jerry looked around in the cockpit some more. "I think someone salvaged the stuff from the cockpit after the crash. There should be some personal stuff, and maybe a gun or something."

"Pretty empty," agreed Mitch. "But the ejection charges are still under the seats. What's left of the seats." Which wasn't much, mostly rusty steel frames.

"Maybe they survived the crash?" Jerry speculated. "If they did, they probably made a camp somewhere. Maybe we can find it."

"That's assuming they didn't get eaten by cannibals," Mitch said, his voice squeaking.

Jerry looked at him curiously. "I think cannibals would starve to death around here."

"Yeah, well." Mitch stood up, moving to the front end of the fuselage sticking out of the sandy soil. "Where's the canopy? It's not even here. Maybe they blew it off while coming down and didn't have time to eject."

"Uh-huh," Jerry agreed, clearing his throat. "I think the plane bounced or even spun, coming in. Look how those trees there are leaning. And why is it the nose that's sticking up?"

Mitch sighed. "Maybe there's not much use looking for survivors." He turned to look out over the atoll. The wreck lay along what passed for a ridge on the low-lying island. With the additional height of standing on the wreckage, Mitch could see across the island to the lagoon, and across the lagoon to the reefs that completed the circle of the atoll.

On one of the reefs, another much smaller island, in fact, he thought he saw a human figure. Or at least the upright upper body of a human. A female human. He squinted, trying to get a better look. "Hey," said Mitch, pointing.

Interlude 3

As Jerry looked up, the dark man watching from the jungle muttered to himself. "Tony! Tony! They've spotted Jeannie. She's sunning herself on Little Sawnerve. Damn!"

Answering himself in a calmer voice, he replied. "Don't panic, Roger. The Major will take care of it."

The first voice whine. "But we need a distraction! We don't want them to go running across the lagoon. Not that they could, it's water, so they couldn't run across...."

The second voice interrupted the babbling digression. "Calm down. I tell you the Major has a doozy of a distraction planned." He chuckled, then turned and disappeared deeper into the jungle.