by Tim Lebbon
Weaver grinned at that. Brave thing for a man to say to someone holding a razor at his throat.
“I’m an administrator,” Nieves said. “And this would be a lot easier with an electric.”
“Electric razor?” Marlow asked.
Nieves rolled his eyes and carried on shaving. San and Brooks lowered their voices even more. Weaver turned her full attention to the tripod, camera setting, and the shot she was aiming to get.
She didn’t see Conrad until he was almost standing beside her.
“The most dangerous places are always the most beautiful,” he said, and she nodded, thinking of her encounter with Kong just hours before.
“Going for a long exposure,” she said. “But my flashlight broke.”
Conrad flicked a lighter open and closed. She flinched back a little, then checked out the lighter he placed in her hand. It bore a Royal Air Force insignia.
“Thanks,” she said. “Royal Air Force?”
“You doing that reporter thing on me?”
“Just curious.” She smiled.
“My father’s,” Conrad said. “He tossed it to me from the train as he rolled off to fight the Nazis.”
“Did he make it home?” she asked, but when she looked up and saw his face, she knew. “Oh. Sorry.”
Conrad looked over to where Marlow was still being shaved and tended by Nieves, chattering all the time, soaking up all the new information he could about the old world he’d left behind for so long.
“Marlow reminds me of him. Could be the jacket. His plane went down outside Hamburg. MIA. I always believed I’d see him again. He was like John Wayne to me, some kind of mythic hero, tall and broad and… In his perfect uniform. Those polished shoes.”
“Lose your dad in one war, so you spend the next one trying to bring people back?”
“So you’re an analyst as well as a photographer?”
“Just telling you what I see through the lens.”
“I guess no one comes home from war,” Conrad said. “Not really.”
“So is this worth it?” she asked. “All that money they paid you?” Conrad frowned at her, as if disappointed. He knew that she knew it was never about that. “Oh, yeah, I forgot,” she said. “You don’t get invested in outcomes.”
“Almost dying does make you feel alive though, doesn’t it?” he said.
“Next you’re going to tell me you want to stay here,” Weaver said. She felt a pang saying that, as if she was revealing something about herself. Did she want to stay? She didn’t think so. But this island was like a drug, and she wanted more and more.
“No,” he said. “Not at all. This island belongs to Kong.”
“It does,” she said, remembering standing in that great ape’s shadow. “We shouldn’t be here. We have no right to be here.”
“We better hope this thing can get us away, then,” Conrad said.
Weaver turned back to her camera and prepared to take the shot.
* * *
Randa was exhausted. Packard had led them on a hard hike through the jungle, with danger all around and death threatening at any moment. And Randa was nowhere near as fit as the soldiers he hiked with. He’d always meant to do something about his weight and lack of physical fitness, and he wished more than ever that he’d done so. His muscles ached, he was soaked with sweat, chafed and bruised and cut, and leaning against a tree, he wasn’t sure he could move another step.
Packard was stoking a small fire, readying to prepare some ration packs. Their rest would be brief, he’d said. This was simply refuelling.
“What you’re doing…” Randa gasped. “This mission to the crash site… is folly.”
Packard glanced up at him then back down at the fire. He said nothing.
“I understand going after your man, but the rest of it? I have a feeling this will not end well.” Randa wanted more than anything to be back on mission, gathering evidence and information about the ape and the other incredible creatures on this island, then ensuring that they escaped. That was the absolute priority. Escape, get off the island, and take news of what they had found back to the world.
Back to Monarch.
“You don’t like the way I’m handling things, there’s the door,” Packard said, pointing at the dark jungle around them. He didn’t even look up from the fire.
Randa sighed and closed his eyes. He said no more. He needed every moment they were here to catch his breath.
TWENTY
Dawn made the grounded steamer seem less of a ruin and more part of the world. It was as if it had been there always, growing from the rock of the land instead of being washed up decades before, crew already dead or doomed, a place of tragedy and death. Conrad preferred the different interpretation. The grounded ship was almost beautiful, and even where the dawn light probed through holes created by rot and time, it looked like it was meant to be.
He walked along the shore towards the ship, alert for noise and movement around him. Some of the Iwi people watched him passing through the village, their expressions as impassive and calm as ever. He was starting to see a deep knowledge in their eyes rather than the emptiness some of the others suspected. They survive, Marlow had said. To survive for this long in such a place took deep wisdom as well as grit. They carried weapons, but nothing that could hurt the things they had seen, and the other things that lived here. It was knowledge handed down from generation to generation that kept them alive.
He climbed into the ship through one of the holes in its hull and approached that strange central room. Something drew him, and he wasn’t quite sure what. He didn’t necessarily believe there were answers there, but perhaps the place might prompt the asking of wiser questions.
Besides, Marlow slept aboard the boat, and Conrad had many questions for that old pilot.
Closer to the spring room, he heard the first whispered words. He couldn’t quite make them out, because they echoed through the metallic cathedral space, scratching away to nothing. He edged closer and saw Marlow.
Spears of sunlight illuminated the large area, cast down through holes rusted into the ceiling and walls. The well at the centre—a spiritual place for the Iwi, and a hole into depths Conrad suspected contained more than simply shadows—shone with that same strange phosphorescence, moss growing on the rocks glimmering in the fresh day’s light.
To one side, Marlow knelt in front of a shrine-like arrangement in one corner. A frayed, tattered Japanese pilot’s uniform hung on the wall. A katana sword stood vertically from the shrine, held in place in a carved rock. Sunlight caught it, dazzling, shimmering, almost as if the metal were alive.
Marlow froze, then spoke without turning around. “His name was Gunpei Ikari. We crashed here on July seventh, nineteen forty-four.” He stood slowly, aged knees creaking. Still he faced the shrine. “It was the last date that meant anything to either of us. We tried killing each other in the sky, almost succeeded, then we tried again when we were on the ground. But you take away the uniform, and the war, and we were like brothers. That’s what we became. True brothers. We swore to never leave the other behind.”
Conrad felt a lump in his throat, the burning of emotion the likes of which he hadn’t felt for some time. It wasn’t that he was an emotionless man, but sometimes it got in the way of the job he had to do. This old pilot had stripped away his defences. Instead of living in the past, he and his enemy had moved on to become what all people aspired to be. Good, honest, loving. Wars were manufactured by empires, and it was down to the single man or woman to end them.
“It’s dawn,” Conrad said, voice catching. “Let’s get you off this island.”
Marlow grabbed the sword handle and slowly, carefully, drew it from the shrine. It came out with a whisper like a forgotten voice.
* * *
“You know we really shouldn’t be doing this, right?” Brooks asked.
San was staring into the well. Everyone else was down at the dock, quietly preparing the boat for departure. She appea
red lost in thought.
“San?”
She blinked, as if stirring herself from some deep introspection. The water in the well seemed to illuminate the huge hold, adding to the sunlight streaming in through rents in the hull. It was a strange place. Brooks didn’t like it one bit.
“The year I was born we split the atom,” San said. “Just this year we spliced the gene. Everyone believes our knowledge gives us power over nature. That all the greatest mysteries are solved.”
“Aren’t they in for a big surprise,” Brooks quipped nervously. In truth he was more than nervous. He was terrified.
San leaned forward and dipped her canteen into the glowing liquid that filled the well.
Where the hell does that come from? Brooks wondered. Is it even water? He wasn’t about to drink it to find out. In his imagination he dropped into the well and fell, deeper and deeper into the mysterious bowels of this island, his descent lit by the glowing liquid he drifted through, until he reached the bottom and…
He heard a gentle shuffling sound behind him and turned, startled.
One of the village children had entered the chamber and stood watching them, as silent and expressionless as ever. She was a young girl, beautifully dressed, skin already marked with those strange symbols and decorations that camouflaged her against the village surroundings.
She stared.
San slowly screwed the cap onto her canteen and slung it around her neck. Then she put her finger to her lips in the universal sign for silence. Shhhhh.
The village girl screamed.
From beyond the chamber and outside the grounded ship, Brooks heard voices raised in response, a strange language he could not hope to understand. It was the first time he had heard the villagers say a word.
“Okay,” he said, grabbing San protectively, “now we run!”
* * *
Even Conrad wasn’t sure whether the boat would work. It was an impressive construction, and he could only marvel at what Marlow and his deceased Japanese brother had achieved during their years marooned here. The boat they’d built—constructed from the ruined gunboat, salvaged parts from their two crashed aircraft, as well as wooden elements from the island and pieces taken from the beached Wanderer—was a whole story in itself.
Now, with Slivko finished working on the engine, they were about to find out how that story ended.
Slivko was covered in grease, hands scraped and cut from the many times his wrench and other tools had slipped. He was tightening another of the engine bolts when Conrad heard a sound that made his skin prickle.
The gentle thunder of running feet.
He looked up, stepping past Weaver and Nieves to the boat’s railing, and looking towards shore.
Marlow had already seen them.
“Start the boat,” Conrad said. He rested his hand on the gun at his hip.
“What is it?” Slivko asked. His head rose above the engine hatch. “Ah, great.”
Brooks and San were running for the boat. Behind them, streaming along the shore from the village, were at least thirty villagers. They didn’t make a sound, but most of them were carrying spears in a way that Conrad knew meant trouble. These were people on a hunt.
“Oh, goodness,” Nieves said. “What’s happened?”
“Start the engine!” Conrad snapped at him. He ran for the bow rope and started untying it. Behind him he heard a mechanical cough, then Slivko shouted in pain from down in the engine hatch.
“Not yet! Gimme a minute here!”
“Sorry!” Nieves said. He was in the cockpit, hand hovering above the engine’s ignition switch. Conrad caught Weaver’s eye and he nodded towards the stern. She ran that way and started untying the stern docking rope. Even if the engine didn’t start, maybe they could push themselves away from shore and float into the river. Problem was, the flow would take them the wrong way.
Brooks and San pounded along the wooden dock and leapt onto the boat. They were both sweating and wide-eyed. Brooks looked petrified.
“What happened?” Weaver asked.
“They saw us taking a sample of water from the well,” San said.
Conrad leaned on the railing and drew his pistol, keeping it held down by his leg. For now.
“They know we’re trying to leave,” Marlow said. “To go back out there.”
“Shove off!” Conrad said. “Slivko, we need power!”
“I’m trying!” he shouted from the engine pit. Weaver was at the boat’s stern, pushing at the dock with a wooden pole. Marlow did the same at the bow.
The villagers stormed along the dock, and Conrad’s heart beat loudly, blood pumping, fear settling in his stomach. He had never been afraid like this before. Usually his enemy was clearly defined—shadows in the trees, screaming men trying to kill him. Here, he did not know his enemy. These people rushing at them with spears at the ready were innocents, and Conrad and his people had invaded their space and abused their trust. His fear wasn’t only for himself and his friends, but for these people who had done nothing wrong.
He lifted his pistol and fired three shots into the air above the villagers’ heads.
Almost at the same instant, Slivko shouted, “Now!” Nieves pressed the button and the old P-51’s engine spluttered into life. Smoke billowed from the engine compartment, and it roared and coughed like an old man waking from a long sleep.
Marlow glanced back at Conrad, his eyes wide and glimmering. It was the first time he’d heard that old engine in decades.
Conrad nodded and kept his eyes on the villagers… but the boat was not moving. There was a central rope securing them to the dock, and it was wrapped around a short post right at the villager’s feet.
They stared across at the boat, spears raised, eyes cool and calm. Most of them were looking at San.
Conrad raised the gun again, but he could not bring himself to aim it at these people. He would not, could not, shoot first.
Marlow stepped past Conrad and approached the railing, and something about the villagers changed. Conrad couldn’t quite make out what it was, but he swore that for a moment the whole world grew quieter.
“Please,” Marlow said into the silence. “It’s time.”
The villagers all focused on Marlow, and after a long moment of silent exchange, they lowered their weapons.
“What’s happening?” San asked. She was still clasping her water canteen to her side, the cause of this confrontation in the first place.
“They’re letting me go,” Marlow said. He drew the katana sword from his belt, lifted it, and smiled at the people who might have been his family for almost three decades. Then he swung the sword down and severed the last rope connecting the boat to the dock.
In their eyes, Conrad saw the villagers smiling back.
“Come on,” Marlow said, suddenly excited. “Upriver! Let’s get this boat up to speed!” He darted into the wheelhouse and shoved Nieves aside, not unkindly. He was enthused now, piloting the craft he and his friend had made over many years, beaming at them all in the bright dawn light.
The villagers were now moving along the riverbank while the boat chugged towards the wall. The motor was loud, the boat shaking, and Brooks and San were sent below to use the manual pump to try and battle the water gaining ingress through cracks and bolt holes. For now they were keeping the balance, but any more holes would make it a losing battle. Marlow told them it was good for building strength.
Conrad joined Weaver at the bow. She was snapping pictures, as ever, switching between the villagers streaming along the riverbank, to the wall looming ever higher ahead of them.
“I only hope we’re going the right way,” Weaver said.
“North,” Conrad said. “The only way there is.”
They continued north, against the gentle flow of the river and towards the massive wall. Entering its shadow gave Conrad a chill.
The villagers were there first, swarming across the wall where it spanned the river and rose high above. The section over th
e water was wood, great carved tree trunks arching from left and right and meeting in the centre. Conrad could barely comprehend the know-how required to build such a monolithic structure, or the time it must have taken. Centuries, probably. Maybe even longer.
As they neared the wall, he expected Marlow to slow. He and Weaver remained at the bow, and she was using the zoom on her camera to check for the low-tide route beneath the wall that Marlow had alluded to. But there was nothing there.
Just as Conrad began to get worried, he heard a great grinding sound, and a wide spread of the wall’s lowest edge began to rise. On the banks the villagers had taken up ropes, two dozen on each, and others were higher up on the wall, hanging onto spurs and turning cogged wheels. The section rose slowly but surely, and as the boat approached he saw Marlow giving one final long, lingering look at the people who had been his adoptive family for so long.
Then the wall swallowed them up, and they passed into virtual darkness.
Conrad felt the sheer weight of the wall above them, almost compressing the air where it pressed down. The water seemed to flow faster here, and when San and Brooks aimed torches at their surroundings they saw heavy spiked structures, thick tree trunks that had been there for generations, with scary shadowy faces formed in the construction.
At last they were spat out the other side. The island opened up before them, river stretching north, mountains and ravines and valleys contouring the land and hiding most of it from view. Much of it was covered in jungle.
Out there also, things that offered only danger.
Behind them the heavy door eased back down. They were in the wild, cut off and on their own once more.
Marlow stood stiffly at the wheel, the captain of this ship.
TWENTY-ONE
Chapman walked.
Part of him had wanted to remain with his crashed Sea Stallion, but it was still smoking, and its impact had stirred up the jungle. Making it back there, he’d been uncomfortable waiting by something so large and so obviously not of this island. Waiting, not knowing if anyone else knew where he was. There were things that might still be making their way to the location to see what had caused the commotion.
