Savage Island

by Bryony Pearce

  Our bodies shielded the faint green glow. Will crouched under it and held the notebook in one hand, Lizzie’s pencil in the other. He started to write.

  “It’s algebra,” he muttered. “A, B, C, D, E. E plus C equals fourteen. D subtract B equals one.” He squinted closer. “Two B minus A equals one. B plus C equals ten.” He chewed the pencil. “A plus B plus D equals sixteen. A plus D plus E equals twenty.” He stopped again. “This isn’t as simple as I’d thought,” he grunted. “I can’t think.”

  “Forget algebra.” Anxious, I looked around; still no movement. “Just work through the numbers, yeah? If B plus C is ten, then B has to be a number between one and ten, right?”

  “What if some are fractions?” Grady asked. “Or negative numbers?”

  “Say they’re not,” I said.

  “OK, fine.” Will muttered, chewed the pencil and stabbed at the calculator. “I think I’ve got it,” he said after a few minutes.

  “What?” I couldn’t see the paper, it was too dark. Will sat back on his heels. “A, B, C, D, E … seven, four, six, five, eight.”

  “It does add up to thirty,” Grady whispered after a moment.

  “But it doesn’t give an instruction for the locked box, does it?” Lizzie frowned. “Not like fully rotate clockwise, or wind.”

  “Maybe it’ll be clear when we get there,” Grady offered.

  “You want to take that risk?” My head was beginning to ache. “What letters do you get if you change the number sequence into the alphabet?”

  “Nothing that makes sense.” Lizzie squeezed Carmen’s hand as she shifted restlessly.

  “Why aren’t we moving?” she demanded.

  “Soon,” Will soothed her.

  “Is it an anagram?” I pushed.

  “Only one vowel.” Lizzie shook her head. “G, D, F, E, H.”

  We all stared, clueless.

  “We’re going to have to go and look at the box, aren’t we?” Lizzie whispered.

  “Are we all going?” Grady asked. “Only, if it doesn’t need all of us, maybe I should stay here with Carmen.” He spoke in a kind of half-apologetic whisper.

  I gaped. “You want us to take the risk while you stay here and hide?”

  Grady swallowed. “When you put it like that …”

  “I do.”

  “I just thought … if we’re spotted by the box, Carmen will slow us down. But if I stay here with her, to keep her safe, then you guys can run away if you have to and … and meet us back here.”

  “You’re serious?” My mouth gaped wider. “You want us to lead trouble away from you?”

  “He has a point, Ben,” Lizzie said. “It’s what’s best for Carmen and we’re more mobile alone. I’ve got to go because of my thumbprint. I want Will with me… You could stay here, too.”

  “Are you kidding?”

  “You don’t even want to go for the checkpoints.”

  “That doesn’t mean I’m going to leave you on your own. I can’t believe this.” I pushed my fists into my temples as my headache intensified. “Grady is going to stay here, to watch Carmen. You, Will and I are going to the checkpoint. You and Will can open the box while I keep watch.” I rose to a crouch. “We’re leaving our packs here, with Grady, just in case we have to sprint.” I pulled mine from my shoulders with difficulty; it felt welded on, my skin and bone adjusted to the shape of the straps. I dropped it beside Carmen. “Get some more antibiotics in her,” I snapped.

  Will stood up and took Grady’s torch. “We might need this.”

  Grady nodded. “Good luck.”

  I grunted, climbed over the wall and held out a hand to help Lizzie. Will landed beside me, catlike. Although we were heading into a graveyard that could contain an ambush, to open a box that could contain a human body part, it felt good for a moment to be just me, Lizzie and Will, almost like we were in Primary again.

  We scurried from grave to grave; Will kept the T-shirt over the torch, moving it over the ground in search of the box and Lizzie clenched her notebook in one hand while she traced her fingers over names and lingered over the impressions of dates. “Sad,” she murmured.

  “I can’t see the box,” Will growled. We’d looked around every stone; my head pulsed with each movement I made, my knuckles whitened on the axe.

  Lizzie gestured and we ducked behind a large stone that looked as if it might collapse at any moment.

  “What do you think? Is it somewhere else?”

  “It has to be here,” I said.

  Lizzie frowned. “What if we have to dig for it?”

  I shook my head. “There’re teams ahead of us. We’d have been tripping over holes all over the place.”

  Will was shining the light on one of the graves. “Some of these have stone slabs in front of them. One could lift.”

  “But which one?” An aura flickered around my vision. The vision in my left eye blinked in and out. An oncoming migraine. Already I was feeling clumsy and thick-fingered. Unlike myself. I pushed the feeling away. “We can’t lift every stone here.”

  Lizzie was staring over my shoulder, reading. “Bessie Tait, Elspeth Tait, Sinnie Tait, Garthe Duncan, Eaner Galdie, Johne Galdie…”

  “Say that again?” Will turned like a whip.

  “Bessie Tait, Elspeth Tait, Sinnie Tait, Garthe Duncan—”

  “That one.” Will stopped her. “Where is it?”

  Lizzie pointed. “Just behind you.”

  “Any other Duncans?” Will started to crawl towards the grave.

  “I…” Lizzie frowned. “Actually, I haven’t seen any. It’s dark, so I might be wrong, but all the rest I found are in family groups: the Taits, the Galdies, the Frasers – Garthe’s all alone.”

  Will stopped in front of the grave. There was a stone slab sitting cockeyed on the hard earth.

  “Garthe Duncan: Farmer, Engineer, Husband,” Lizzie read quietly. “Your love will light my way.”

  Finally, I saw what had caught Will’s ear. “G, D, F, E, H,” I said. “It’s the clue.”

  Lizzie nodded. “So we try to lift this stone?”

  In answer, Will put down the dimmed torch and jammed his fingertips under one corner. I handed the axe to Lizzie and bent to help him. The stone lifted more easily than I had expected.

  “We aren’t the first to get here,” I murmured.

  We propped the stone against the grave. Beneath it lay the checkpoint box.

  “Open it, Lizzie,” Will said.

  The clue to the locked-room game had been written on the gravestone: light. Will shone the torch on the screen and the lid popped open. The geocache box inside was wider and shorter than the previous one. “What do you think is in it?” Lizzie whispered, once she had finished copying the engraved coordinates and clue into her notebook.

  I swallowed.

  “We could open it and find out.” Will stroked the lid. “We don’t have to tell Carmen.”

  “I don’t know.” Lizzie shook her head. “We don’t really need to see, do we?”

  “Don’t we?” Will asked. “What if it’s a normal geocache this time?”

  Lizzie’s eyes brightened as she said, “You think that’s possible?”

  Will shrugged. “If the first caches were sabotaged, they might have given up changing them by this point.”

  “We can only be certain if we’re first to reach one,” I pointed out.

  “It’s about the right size for a compass again.” Lizzie poked the case.

  I looked at Will, but said nothing as he picked up the box. He handed the torch to Lizzie and opened the latch. Although I didn’t want to, something made me lean close.

  Chapter Sixteen

  In the sick green light, a human ear nestled on a large piece of cotton wool. Tiny hairs frosted the edge. Blood stained the cotton black.

  Lizzie put her hands over her face.

  I grabbed the box from Will and closed it, then put it back in the larger box, snapped the list shut, pressed Lizzie’s unresisting thum
b against the screen to engage the lock and dropped it in the hollow under the stone.

  “It’s not going to end, is it?” Lizzie whispered. “Either the saboteurs aren’t giving up … or it’s meant to be like this. Something has gone wrong with the game.” She looked at Will. “We’re going to die!”

  Will patted Lizzie tentatively. “Ben won’t let that happen.” Then he swiftly withdrew to the other side of the gravestone.

  Lizzie watched him retreat and took a deep breath. “You’re right. We’ll be fine. Thanks, Will.” As Will moved further away and started to scan the graveyard, she put her mouth close to my ear. “I’m sorry – I didn’t mean to scare him. I sometimes forget he’s younger than we are.”

  “You didn’t frighten Will.” I raised my voice to speak to him. “Can you see anyone?”

  He shook his head.

  I frowned. “Shouldn’t someone have found us here by now?”

  Will came back, pushed up my sleeve and directed the light on to the face of Grandad’s watch. “It’s 2 a.m. Everyone must be asleep.”

  I pulled my arm back. “We can’t be the only ones moving at night.”

  “The moon’s going down, the sun isn’t rising.” Lizzie looked up. “We could be the only ones.”

  “Or maybe instead of staking out the checkpoints, they’re looking for camps,” Will said. “Fools building fires.”

  I smiled then, suddenly, and said, “You’re telling me we got away with it?”

  Lizzie grinned back. Then her smile died. “We’d better get to Carmen and Grady,” she said.

  We kept low and, despite my throbbing head, I managed to leap soundlessly back over the wall, surprising Grady, who was still sitting with Carmen, leaning back on the stones, his eyes half-closed.

  “Great guarding, Grady.” Will frowned and touched Carmen’s cheek. “She’s shivering.”

  “She’s got a fever.” Grady got to his knees. “Did you find the next coordinates?”

  “Yeah.” I checked Lizzie’s notebook, then held the torch over the map and my gut twisted. “It’s bad news.”

  “What?” Grady scrambled to see.

  “The next box is on the north-west headland.” I closed my eyes to banish the flickering aura that had settled into my vision. “There’s no cover.”

  We were determined to get to the moorland below the summit point before dawn. I crunched bitter migraine-relief tablets as I marched into the darkness, grateful that my eyes weren’t fighting the sunlight.

  “There has to be somewhere to hide,” Lizzie repeated. “A cave or something.”

  I said nothing. I was focusing on putting one foot in front of the other. My belly was nauseatingly empty, my head pounded, my knee ached, my gum was still sore and my vision flickered – tiredness or traces of the migraine battling the tablets, I couldn’t tell any more.

  When I knocked into Grady, I realized I was weaving from side to side. He pushed me away with a grunt.

  “Sorry,” I mumbled.

  The sky to the east was starting to lighten. The birds weren’t calling yet, but I could sense them stirring. Insects were crawling over my boots and I was beginning to see where I was stepping more clearly.

  As pre-dawn started to lift the darkness, I felt increasingly exposed. I shivered, dank night air creeping under my jacket and making my skin feel cold and clammy.

  Ahead of us the ground was rising more sharply. I stumbled on to the slope and walked on, exhausted.

  “Keep a look out for somewhere we can hole up.” Lizzie touched my arm. “Ben? Are you listening?”

  I lifted my head. “Somewhere we can hide. Yes.” I blinked at the hill in front of me.

  My chin dropped again and I kept walking. The others could search. If I stopped concentrating, there was no way I’d be able to put one foot in front of the next, in front of the next, in front of the…

  “Ben. Stop!” Grady this time.

  I reeled to a stop and looked up. Will had Carmen in a fireman’s lift: her head bobbed on his rucksack, both arms dangled down his back.

  Lizzie and Grady stood beside them. Behind them, a rockfall. Beyond that, a tree with deep, twisted roots and under the roots…

  “Another cave?”

  “I only found it by crawling inside the hollow under the roots,” Grady said, smug. “It’s well camouflaged.”

  “And defensible.” Lizzie clutched her broken spear. “The entrance is narrow.”

  I nodded. “Let’s go then.”

  Lizzie guided me into the smell of tree roots, damp earth and insect husks. She switched on the torch, still covered with the T-shirt, and helped me take off my rucksack. The cave was more of a fissure; the roof made of snarled roots, the ground stone-pitted earth. In one corner, water trickled between rocks, leaving pockets of thick clay among the mud. The space was just big enough for the five of us and our gear – if we squeezed together. I sighed and Lizzie touched my forehead.

  “Your face is all screwed up. You’ve got a migraine?”

  “It’s better,” I lied.

  “You need to sleep.”

  Will dumped a feverishly protesting Carmen on to my rucksack. I helped her into a more comfortable position and she opened her eyes. “Where are we?”

  “Cave,” I said. “Sort of.”

  “Don’t worry,” Lizzie said, sitting beside her. “We’re not staying.”

  “You are,” Will said.

  “What?” Lizzie looked up.

  “You, Carmen and Grady are staying right here. Ben and I are going for the headland.”

  I rolled my head towards him, too tired to lift it.

  Will stretched out his legs beside me, winced and moved a sharp stone. “We can move faster and more quietly alone,” he explained. “But we need some sleep. It’s half three. Work out that riddle and wake us at four.”

  “Riddle?” Grady asked.

  “It’s a good one,” I said, fighting my drooping eyes. “What grows when it eats, but dies when it drinks?” My head pounded.

  I fell asleep.

  “You’ll need this.” Lizzie pressed a lighter into my hand.

  I put it in my top pocket. I’d had just enough sleep so my brain had stopped feeling like it was filled with wasps and I could think again, but I was still light-headed.

  Will crawled between the tree roots and I started to follow.

  Lizzie caught my arm. “Don’t get hurt.”

  “I’m not sure I can promise that.” I smiled weakly.

  “Try,” she insisted.

  We looked at one another, suddenly awkward.

  “This is best, isn’t it?” she said abruptly.

  “Yeah. You need to rest your ankle. Carmen needs time for her fever to break. Grady can watch Carmen and guard you while you sleep.”

  “When do I sleep?” Grady cried.

  “We’ll take it in turns, Grady.” Lizzie’s voice held an edge. “An hour each.”

  Grady folded his arms and I turned to go.

  Lizzie cleared her throat. “Come back safe, Ben and—”

  “Watch Will?” I raised my eyebrows.

  She snorted. “Hah, no… If you can’t get to the box without being seen, then leave it.”

  “What about Carmen? What about getting to the end of the route?”

  “We’ll have to think of another way to find help.”

  Lizzie’s fingers hung in mid-air between us, as if she wanted to touch my face. Did she? What if I was misreading things? Especially after our last conversation.

  “Ben?” Will hissed. “Come on.”

  “I-I’d better go.”

  “Right.”

  I crawled out to meet Will.

  Outside, the sky was still dark grey, but the stars were fading. It was half past four.

  I hoisted my axe on to my shoulder, glad I wasn’t carrying my rucksack.

  “Can you run?” he whispered.

  I nodded and we started towards the headland.

  We soon left the moor beh
ind us, but were careful to keep the hill at our back.

  “There’ll be other teams around,” Will huffed as he ran.

  Jogging beside him, I silently agreed. Fires would be sleepy embers by now; we’d have no smoke or flame to warn us we were heading for a camp, and there could be teams already moving, trying to get to the checkpoints ahead of everyone else. Our feet crunched on pebble and gravel, unmade sand. Behind us the cliffs cut off as if sliced through.

  We ran in step. Will was only a little shorter than me, and he kept his arms pumping in time with mine. His skin was blotchy with exhaustion, but he seemed as calm as ever.

  In the far, far distance another island showed pinpricks of lights – streetlights or glowing windows … early rising farmers perhaps. If we set off a flare, someone might come to help. But if they did pay attention to the firework, would they reach us before the hunters did?

  The headland was turning into a beach with flat rocks to the left and right. I caught my breath as I saw movement among the rocks, then realized there were seals around us, their dog-like faces curious but unafraid. I saw heads break the surface of the water. Barks warned others of our presence.

  We kept going. The sky was lightening further now; pale grey, the stars washed out altogether.

  “Ben, look.” Will pointed and we stopped. In front of us, picked out on the sand in larger, darker rocks, was a single word, in human-sized capitals: HELP. I had almost tripped over the tail end of the letter P.

  “Someone was here before us.” Will rubbed his chin. “But they weren’t going for the checkpoint.”

  “There’re people out there like us,” I gasped. “People who don’t want to play the game any more.”

  “Looks like it.”

  “Well, where are they?” I looked around. “They left their message and then ran away?” I shivered. “Maybe they were chased off.”

  “Or maybe they realized it was pointless,” Will said.

  “Pointless?” I stared at him.

  “Have you seen anything fly by that wasn’t a bird?” Will pointed upwards. “I don’t think there are any flight paths over the island.”