by Tom Nicoll
“Did I win?” she asked hopefully.
“Oh no, of course not, mate,” said Ronald. “You flipped your quad bike and broke your arm. As impressive as that looks in a slow-motion replay, it’s a terrible tactic for trying to win a race.”
“Viewers at home should be able to see that replay on screen now, by the way,” added Donald. “And we’ll have it up on the website in a few minutes.”
A smug-looking Nigel Cruul was sitting on his quad bike, parked on the other side of the finishing line. Despite her broken arm, it was clear the anguish on Lexi’s face was from the realization that she had lost. The medical crew lifted her on to the stretcher. As they passed us, Lexi glanced at me. In that single look she said everything that needed to be said. I was on my own now. It was up to me to stop Cruul from winning. No matter what.
But just to be sure, Lexi shouted out, “Avenge me, Sam. AVENGE ME!”
“Um… OK,” I said.
There were potentially only two challenges left – the final Elimination Challenge tomorrow and, provided I won that, the last Golden Challenge the day after. Team Accelerate only had to win one of those to win the show. I had to win both.
“Where’s Lexi’s bike?” Milo asked Ronald and Donald. “I’d like to take a look.”
“Don’t worry, we’ve already got our top guys investigating it,” said Donald.
“Are these the same guys that have been investigating all the other ‘accidents’?” I said.
“Not sure, could be,” said Ronald.
“Are we still pretending that someone’s not trying to kill our team?” I asked.
“Now, Sam, seriously, mate,” said Donald. “No one’s trying to kill you. I’ll be the first to admit, you are on quite a run of bad luck at the moment but you shouldn’t go throwing around accusations like that.”
“I suppose you think it was me,” said Cruul, giving me a patronizing smile. “Maybe I put a bomb on her bike, is that it? Yes, even though it was Lexi who picked her bike, I suppose I somehow knew in advance which one she would go for. Is that your theory?”
As hard as I tried to think of an explanation, I had no reply for Cruul. I looked desperately to Milo but all he offered was a brief shake of his head.
“Well, thanks for your help,” I said, then walked away.
“Sam, wait!” said Milo.
“Oh, let him go!” Cruul laughed. “Let him enjoy his last night on the island by himself. We’ll all be going home tomorrow after our team wins.”
“We’ll see, Cruul!” I shouted back.
“Yes, we will see,” agreed Cruul.
“That’s what I just said!” I yelled.
“Yes, but I’m saying we will see in a way that suggests we’ll actually see that I’m right, not you,” he said.
“Well, we’ll see, won’t we,” I said.
“Yes, that’s what I’m— Oh, whatever!” shouted Cruul.
It was strange arriving back at camp. Seeing both tents it felt like everyone else might still be around. But after a few seconds it sunk in that I was completely alone. Well, completely alone in a reality TV sense. Bill was still there, filming me from a distance.
Feeling my stomach rumbling, I decided to get a fire together. It took much longer than before, probably because I had never done it all by myself. But finally I got a pretty decent campfire going, one of the few things I had managed successfully on this stupid island.
“Bon appetite,” I said out loud as I tucked into a tin of beans.
Once I’d finished, I sat watching the flames jumping around, casting strange shapes on the sand. Every so often I glanced over towards the part of the beach where I had first seen one of the hooded figures.
I wish I had found a way to tell Milo about the night Lexi and I discovered that cave. If only I hadn’t spent all my time arguing with my friend, he might have made sense of it all. The cave painting, the hooded figures, the fact Cruul and I were still on the show – I felt certain that they were all connected somehow.
Now that this was possibly my last night on the island, I knew I had to find those hooded figures before it was too late.
I went inside my tent, took off my mic and waited for the sounds of Bill packing up for the night. Once I could no longer hear anything, I grabbed Lexi’s torch, pressed the button on the Time-Out device and slipped back out.
I headed for the jungle, switching on the torch only when I was sure there was no chance of anyone seeing it from the beach. I decided to try to find the cave again since it had been close to where we had last seen the hooded figures. I thought I knew roughly how to get there.
I had been walking for about twenty minutes when I heard something up ahead. A twig snapping. I killed the torch and ducked behind a tree. Then I waited and watched, fearful that the sound of my own heart beating would be enough to give me away.
Nothing.
I was about to put it down to an animal when a cold hand reached from behind me and clamped itself over my mouth.
“Mmpf!” I tried to shout.
“Shh! You’ll give us both away!”
I spun round. “Milo!”
“Seriously, will you shut up?”
“Sorry,” I whispered. “What are you doing here?”
“It’s Cruul,” he said. “He’s on the move. Now keep your torch switched off, that’s how I saw you. We’re lucky Cruul didn’t. Come on … this way.”
Milo shot off back into the jungle. Confused, I followed after him.
“Where’s he going?” I asked, once I had caught up.
“I don’t know,” admitted Milo. “But someone just showed up at his tent—”
“I thought you were in the same tent,” I interrupted, pushing past a leaf the size of my head.
“We were until Bruiser left, then it made sense for one of us to move,” he said. “It was a bit harder then to keep an eye on him during the night so I built an intruder alarm that would wake just me if anyone entered or left our camp. I told him it was for catching mosquitoes. It’s actually quite clever. It’s coconut-based—”
“Milo!” I said.
“Sorry, so yeah, the alarm went. And I heard a guy’s voice telling Cruul that they’d found it.”
“Found what?” I said.
Milo stopped suddenly as if he had heard something. After a couple of seconds he started moving again. “I think they went this way,” he said.
“Found what?” I repeated.
“I don’t know,” he said. “But whatever it was, Cruul seemed pretty excited. He left the tent immediately. And I started following.”
“What about the cameras?” I said. “Won’t you have been seen?”
“Unlikely,” he said. “Remember those toilets I told you about? I built one of them on a blind spot and put a secret back door in it.”
“So you mean they’ll have you on camera going into a toilet and not coming out again for ages?” I said.
“Yeah,” said Milo. “Luckily Cruul’s been doing a lot of cooking recently. And hour-long trips to the toilet afterwards are not uncommon…”
I tried to put the image that was conjuring up out of my mind. “Did you see who Cruul was with?” I asked.
Milo shook his head. “It was too dark,” he said. “And he was wearing robes. It could be the same guy you saw on the beach that night.”
I quickly brought Milo up to speed on my and Lexi’s other discoveries.
“Why didn’t you tell me any of this?” he said, sounding annoyed.
“It hasn’t exactly been easy to speak to you,” I said defensively. “I couldn’t just use the Time-Out button any time I liked without people noticing. And there were other things going on, like someone trying to bump off our team.”
“Which I had nothing to do with,” said Milo firmly.
“Obviously I know that,” I said. “I’m sorry about what I said to you. It’s just—”
“You thought I wasn’t taking the mission seriously,” said Milo. “You thought I was l
etting myself get taken in by Cruul. You thought I’d let him be my manager. You thought becoming famous had changed me.”
There was no point in lying. “Yeah,” I said.
“Well, you’re right,” he said.
“What?”
“Not about taking the mission seriously,” he clarified. “Or about Cruul. But you’re right, being in Aftermath has changed me. It never would have taken the old Milo this long to realize this entire show is rigged.”
I almost tripped as we stepped over a stream. “You think the show’s rigged too?”
“Has to be,” he said. “How else do you explain you avoiding the Elimination Challenges? You broke into our tent and went off at me for winning the Golden Challenge.”
Even though I agreed with him, it wasn’t the most flattering thing to hear. “Well, I don’t get why you didn’t just lose,” I said. “Then this would all be over.”
“We don’t know that,” said Milo. “I didn’t throw the challenge because we still had no idea what Cruul was up to. If the show had ended, we wouldn’t have been able to complete the mission. We needed more time. I thought you’d understand that.”
“But…” I began before trailing off. “But Lexi told me she got people to vote for her by saying horrible things.”
“She fought an alligator,” said Milo. “They’d have to have been pretty bad for her to get voted ahead of you.”
We stopped in a clearing where light from the full moon had turned the jungle an eerie silver.
“Great,” Milo groaned, looking back and forth. “We’ve lost him.”
“Milo, I’m sorry,” I said. “I should have trusted you. Do you forgive me?”
“Yeah, you should have,” agreed Milo, then, after a pause, he added, “Course I forgive you, you muppet. It’s being on this island, it messes with your head. Probably why I ended up telling Cruul about leaving the band.”
“So you’re really leaving?” I asked.
He nodded. “You mad?”
“Why would I be mad?” I asked.
Milo looked confused by the question. “Well, it’s like Cruul said, this was your band in a way. You put us all together. I put off telling you because… I dunno… I thought I’d be betraying you or something.”
I grinned. “Now who’s the muppet?” I asked. “I only put you guys together because I thought you all deserved a shot. And you’re so talented I thought that’s what you wanted too.”
“It was … for a bit,” he said. “But being on tour made me realize what it is I actually love – science and inventing stuff and actually having time to hang out with my best mate.”
“I miss that too,” I said. “Though if we want to hang out again, it’s probably best we stop Cruul from bringing back the Four Horsewomen of the Apocalypse.”
“But how are we going to find him? He could be any—” Milo broke off. In the moonlight I could see his eyes darting back and forth. I knew that look – he had something.
“What is it?” I asked.
“The cave,” he said. “Do you remember where it is?”
“I think so,” I said. “There was this stream… I was heading that way when I bumped into you.”
“We need to go there right now,” he said.
“You think that’s where Cruul is?”
“No…” he admitted. “But from what you’ve told me, I have a feeling it might reveal his whereabouts.”
“That’s it!” said Milo. “I know where he’s going.”
It had taken some time to find our way back to where Milo had jumped out on me but once we got there it didn’t take long to find the stream and the cave. In less than ten minutes we had found the gap in the wall that Lexi and I had squeezed out through. Only this time the gap was much wider. Not only had someone been here but they must have taken a sledgehammer to the entrance. After switching the torch back on, Milo and I had entered the cave with caution but whoever had been here had already left. And now we were staring up at the painting. Whatever Milo was seeing, though, I wasn’t.
“I don’t understand,” I said. “All I can see are loads of people in hoods following the Horsewomen.”
Milo took the torch from me, then pointed it towards an area on the wall with a gathering of hooded figures. Flowing between them was a river. He then swung the torch to another section, where some more figures appeared to be assembled round a tree. “Look familiar?” he said.
“Is that the river where Lexi won the first Golden Challenge?” I asked. “And, yeah, that’s the tree from the second one, isn’t it?”
“Exactly,” he said. “This isn’t just some drawings on a wall, it’s a map.”
“A map to what?” I asked.
“There are two more places where the figures – and I think it’s safe to say these are Apocalytes – seem to converge,” he said, pointing towards the volcano in the middle and what looked like a giant hole to the east. “Cruul was heading east, he must be heading towards that pit. How much do you want to bet that the final Golden Challenge is going to involve the volcano?”
I shook my head. “But there is no volcano,” I said. “We would have seen it.”
“We have,” said Milo. “We see it every day, except that it’s either dormant or extinct now. I’m guessing at the time these paintings were made, it was a lot more active.”
“The mountain?” I asked.
“Right,” he said. “Come on, we need to find Cruul.”
As we hurried back out of the cave, Milo glanced up at the sky. “There’s the North Star,” he said, pointing at a gleaming dot in the sky. He turned ninety degrees clockwise. “So east is this way. It’s a giant hole, we’re bound to notice it.”
We moved as fast as we could, pushing our way through the dense vegetation. We had been walking for about half an hour when suddenly Milo grabbed the torch and switched it off. I heard it too. A low humming noise.
“Where’s it coming from?” I whispered.
“Up ahead,” said Milo.
We stepped carefully towards the sound. The closer we got, the louder the humming grew. Eventually we came to the edge of a valley and instantly saw the source of the noise.
Apocalytes. Dozens of them. Maybe as many as fifty. Standing around a giant pit, chanting.
“You hear that?” whispered Milo.
“The chanting?” I said. “Yeah.”
“No, not that. Something else. Coming from the hole.”
I listened carefully. There it was. A faint scream coming from somewhere beneath the earth.
“Who—” I began, before breaking off as I realized something must have changed within the pit. The screaming had ceased and now several of the Apocalytes were rushing to help pull up a rope. After several minutes, a battered and bruised Cruul emerged. He could barely stand as two of the Apocalytes supported him while another untied the rope from his waist.
“I did it!” cried Cruul, sounding delirious. He raised his right arm in the air. Clutched in his fist was a solid gold dagger.
“What’s that for?” I whispered.
“No idea,” said Milo. “But I don’t like the thought of Nigel Cruul being armed.”
As Cruul and the Apocalytes began to leave the valley, luckily in the opposite direction to where we were hiding, I turned to Milo. “We should get down into that hole and take a look around.”
Milo shook his head. “There’s no point. It looks like Cruul’s got what he went for. And now I need to get back to camp before he does.”
“What?” I said, horrified at the thought. “You can’t go back there now. He’s got a knife.”
“If his plan was to kill us he could have done it a hundred ways by now,” Milo reasoned.
“What is his plan then?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” said Milo. “But that’s the third Golden Artefact found. And from the cave painting we pretty much know there’s a fourth. You can guarantee that the final Golden Challenge will happen. Which is good news for you, I guess.”
“How do you figure that?” I asked.
“Because it means that no matter what you do in tomorrow’s Elimination Challenge, you’ll definitely win,” he said.
“But if that’s true,” I said. “Then that means—”
“Someone from the show is working with Cruul,” he said. “Given how many of those hooded figures we saw, maybe everyone on the show is. We can’t trust anyone until this is over.”
“So what do we do?” I asked.
“We have to play along,” said Milo. “Try and get a message to the AIA. But those artefacts must be the key to this. And there’s one more to go. What I don’t understand is this: it looks like they only found out the location of the dagger tonight. So that’s what they must have been looking for. But if they knew where the others were, why build a whole reality show around them? Why not just fetch the artefacts themselves?”
Milo was right. It didn’t add up.
“There’s one thing for sure, though,” he said. “We can’t let anyone get their hands on that last Golden Artefact.”
Voice: Sam, I don’t understand. That coconut you’ve brought along looks nothing like Katy Perry.
Sam: Or was it Lady Gaga?
Voice: Sorry?
Sam: Taylor Swift! It looks like Taylor Swift!
Voice: Sam you’re acting very str— Actually, you’re right it does a little. From a certain angle…
I wasn’t optimistic that my message to send help at once would make it to the AIA. And I still didn’t feel much better about the fact that Milo was alone with Cruul, who now possessed a dagger.
When the time for the Elimination Challenge came, I held my breath as I entered the cave. But there he was, sitting next to Cruul.
Cruul was slumped in his chair and looked like he had just run a marathon, without having done any training. Since I wasn’t supposed to know what he’d been up to last night, I realized it might be strange if I didn’t ask him why he was in such a state.
