by Victoria Fox
Angela stirred and moaned, turning in her sleep. Mitch stilled. He waited. He had to be sure. He didn’t want anyone following, not where he was going.
The torch was lit. Mitch turned to the raven forest. It welcomed him, the noises deep inside calls to a dark and curious part of his soul.
With barely a ripple, the trees swallowed him.
Inside, the tropical air was singing. Animal cries whipped through the canopy, impossible to separate or identify. Monkey screams and livid birdcalls, a flutter of wings and the shake of a branch, vibrating undergrowth swarming round his feet—and, at a lower, more menacing pitch, a suffering yowl. It was caught in the throat, thick, mournful, melancholy, close to a growl but not quite. At intervals it seemed horribly close, at others far away, but then Mitch reminded himself there could be more than one creature making it. The forest was rife with nameless plagues.
Flame held aloft, he began the trek to the mountain. It was easier than the first day. Others had taken the route since, flattening the vegetation into a path. Though the night brought with it new menace, nothing could be as bad as the heat of high noon.
After a time he emerged on to the plateau. Up here the starrich vault seemed close enough to touch, and the crisp, clear moon was dimpled with craters.
He crossed the plinth, without hesitation scrambling down the side of the mountain, gripping the holds and footings that broke up the lethal gradient. Several times he stumbled, slipping on loose dirt, and grabbed a clutch of weeds, careful not to drop his torch for fear of setting fire to the dry, sun-baked moss.
Finally he was spat out onto the beach.
It was an unfriendly shoreline; the crags were cruel and the sea bruised and heaving, swelling around clusters of hostile, skull-splitting rock and churning white froth against the cliffs. He remembered a movie he had shot in the eighties, his renegade character on a mission to rescue his lost love. Mitch had punched pirates, leaped into writhing breakers and abseiled down precipices. Tony Gunn. He hadn’t thought of the character’s name in years.
Across the sand, the mouth of the cave grinned back.
Mitch advanced. What footprints he had seen would have been washed away—unless a new set had been made. He felt fear, but he also felt deliverance. If they were here, he would find them. He could not be the hunted any more.
He had to become the hunter.
Even before Mitch entered the fissure, he could feel how freezing it was. Guided by torchlight, he stepped into its damp, slick interior. It smelled of salt. Stalagmites rose like witches’ fingers from the pitted sand, lifeless yet organic, the misshapen bulges that millennia had spawned, one lonely drip at a time.
Drip, drip, drip …
Sound echoed through the cavern, ghostly and thin. It must connect with another cavity further up, some flue where the wind got in.
Drip, drip, drip …
Mitch moved deeper. To think of this hollow as unexplored since the sun first warmed the Earth. To think that he was the first person to enter …
Or was he?
A snake of sand, twisting between rocks, and there, illuminated by the glow, was a chain of footprints. Fright slid under Mitch’s skin. Ahead was darkness, into which the prints meandered then disappeared. He held the flame high, his knuckles tight, afraid to look further in, afraid as a child of what might soar from the shadows.
Drip, drip, drip …
His torch was being extinguished. Dribbling stalactites pit-patted on the stick, making it falter and fizz. The glow around him shrunk, closer and closer, and died.
A sour lump rose in his throat.
Turning, Mitch saw he had been lured in deep. The entrance to the cave was a remote pinch in a stifling canvas and he dashed for it, stubbing his toe on the uneven ground and tripping in his haste. The aperture of open beach trembled closer.
A cry of wings! Black terror. An explosion around his head, hitting him, slapping his face, clawing his hairpiece, as the cave sprang to frenzied life. A rush of air punched him forward and knocked him flat. Fragments of black fog assailed him, leathery and swift and hectic, and beyond his own cries of alarm wheeled a shrill, ceaseless squeak. Mitch buckled his arms over his head, his mouth filled with grit, as the stampede prickled and shivered across his back. With horror he realised that something had attached itself to his head. It whipped and pulled, twisted and tore, trying to break free. He could feel its claws rip through his toupee, tangled in the thick crown and yanking it free. A colony of bats shot out into the night and he reeled after them, yanking his rug with one hand and the other flailing its way in the dark.
Onto the beach he flew like a madman, thrashing his head until finally, disastrously, the rodent broke free, taking off into the night with a thick slap of wings.
Its silhouette flew against the moon, that heavenly orb as round and bald as the man now gazing up at it, for clasped in the fruit bat’s toes was the senator’s chestnut wig.
46
Angela found refuge in closed eyes. There, she could be with him.
She tried to capture every detail, the crease in Noah’s cheeks and the way his eyes lit up when he laughed. The day he had picked her up in his friend’s car, the first time they had gone to the lake, and she had spent the whole ride watching his hands on the wheel and wanting to hold one.
In her mind they were together. It didn’t matter where they were, so long as they were together. She was buried in the warmth of his chest and could smell his skin, that safe, Noah smell. Sometimes she captured it so sharply that she could almost believe it were true, and when she woke in bursts to the eternal sky and remembered where she was and what had happened, her heart almost stopped.
A marble moon gazed down, watching them, curious, these creatures that didn’t belong, childlike in their fumbling for answers.
Noah, where are you?
Angela was just a person, ordinary, average, unremarkable, and never more so than out here. They had all been stripped of their decorations. Now they had to see what was left.
Who could adapt, and who would survive?
I’ll try, she thought. I’ll try for you.
Always, his name flew back to her.
Noah.
It was sweet on her tongue, like a lullaby.
47
America
Noah Lawson arrived at LAX amid a stampede of photographers. Security did all they could to keep the paps at bay but it was no use: in the aftermath of the disaster the press had been hurtled into apocalypse—just one name on that doomed list would fuel ample stories for a lifetime. And it was one name they were concerned with.
‘Noah, are you going for Angela? Are the rumours true?’
He lifted a hand to shield his face—partly because that was how he did things and partly as a promise to management. They had advised him against the expedition, of course: there was nothing to be gained from entering the fray except a load of speculative press. The authorities were doing all they could and the rescue effort had not waned, despite what Noah believed. But he hadn’t budged. He hadn’t given in. When they finally realised he could not be stopped, he undertook to stay closed on the matter: no comment, no sound-bites, nothing to toss the press. Let them make of his silence what they would. Fictions would be told in any case, inaccuracies blown up and supposition rife, so that any nugget of truth would soon be lost.
They wanted a love story. Given the reach of the crisis, it was hardly surprising that an old contact from Hank’s, someone Noah hadn’t spoken to or heard from in years, had crawled from the woodwork to disclose the friendship with Angela.
Despite her engagement to Dino Zenetti, which, if anything, only made the anecdote more exciting, Noah was tagged the love-struck hero.
Half of that was true. Angela Silvers had struck him like lightning when he was sixteen and he had never recovered from the bolt.
It was why he was here. It was why he had to act.
‘Noah, do you think there’s still a chance?’
&n
bsp; He wouldn’t be boarding a plane if he didn’t.
Across town, closeted in her son’s Bel Air mansion with the blinds drawn and the windows bolted, Joan Chase blubbed into her toffee popcorn bucket. She had taken refuge in Kevin’s home movie theatre, spending her days (or nights, for the two had become indistinguishable) watching footage from his gigs and stuffing her face with junk and alcohol, until such a time came as she passed out for a few merciful hours.
Her prince stalked across the stage, reaching out to fans, spinning through his routines and crooning his number-one ballads. This was her personal favourite, a love song called ‘Always With Me’, which Joan privately thought was about her, not that Kevin had ever said so. She reassured herself of it now, with the dual effect of bolstering her spirits and scraping the scab off her torment so it bled afresh.
‘I’m always with you and you’re always with me; we’re always together, how can it be any different, you know I want it too, I always want to be with you …’
Joan wailed. She tossed the bucket across the room and a confetti of kernels exploded against the screen. She couldn’t go on. She couldn’t do it!
She had considered driving out to the Sixth Street Bridge and tossing herself off, but there was a problem: Joan was too afraid to leave the house.
Hysterical Little Chasers camped at the mansion gates twenty-four-seven, clutching each other and sobbing. They left flowers and notes that declared their devotion: while Kevin might have been robbed from this life, he would always live on in their hearts, and their hearts, like their love, were indestructible. There had to be thousands, clinging to the railings, weeping and lashing and imploring the sky for Kevin’s safe return, though anyone with half a brain knew that was wishful thinking.
If Joan were to step outside, she would be mobbed, if not by Little Chasers then by a legion of paparazzi. All on board the Challenger jet were mourned, but there was something about the youngest, the boy wonder, that struck the resounding chord.
His mother cut a tragic figure: shoulders stooped as she was glimpsed at the mansion, the one time she had dared to slip a toe onto the porch and the army had gushed like a tidal wave. Joan had been snapped peeking fearfully out from beneath a baseball cap bearing Kevin’s name, clutching a dachshund in a trench coat.
She had taken to making Trey clothes from the ones left behind by her son, in the same style, with the matching accessories that Kevin had loved: belts and scarves, booties and chains. She would press Trey to her aching heart in the hope that wherever Kevin was, there might be a scrap of him still here, with her, in the life he had always known. Trey, unmoved, endured these ministrations with patience and dignity, but nevertheless refused to wear hi-tops, even if they were fur-trimmed.
Joan staggered up to the kitchen.
The buzz of the refrigerator drew her. Opening it, she helped herself to a packet of ham, unthinkingly folding layer after layer of the pink chiffon onto her tongue until the whole thing was finished. She glugged a carton of milk, then stuffed in a peanut chocolate bar. Was this what people did when they were grieving?
At first, Sketch didn’t allow it—’We’re not grieving, Joanie; we don’t know anything yet’—but even he had since given up on that tired line. Nearly a week after the disaster, the language of tribute was subtly eclipsing any assurances of rescue.
Already it was becoming a cash cow. A charity single was getting fast-tracked. Talks were happening around a movie, possibly a TV series, and a chain of documentaries being commissioned. Conspiracy theories flourished. Publishers were signing book deals. Never before in the modern age had there been such an outpouring, Kevin himself by virtue of his youth immortalised as a quasi-religious figure, a saviour of sorts, martyred by his lost life and frozen in history for ever.
Joan closed the fridge door. Trey was on his bed in the corner, licking his ass.
‘What am I going to do, Trey?’ she asked him.
‘What in God’s name am I going to do?’
Melinda Corrigan took one look at her cell phone’s text history and barfed into the porcelain bowl of her French-chateau-inspired bathroom.
Last night was hot. You’re hot. Let’s get hot again? G x
It was Gary’s last message, sent minutes before the news broke.
To think she had been with him while her husband was … While he was …
She could not bring herself to say it, not even in her head.
Dying. That’s the word you’re looking for, you adulterous bitch.
Shaking all over, tendrils of her usually immaculate tresses clinging to her sick-soaked chin, Melinda crept on all fours back to the master suite. Since the impossible struck, she had alternated between states of extreme nausea, disabling sorrow, sheer incredulity and a paralysed, blood-freezing shock. Her husband. Mitch.
Yes, they had suffered their differences. No, their marriage wasn’t perfect. But he was her partner, her friend, her ally … the father of her children.
Melinda groaned. The kids were in the play den, tended to by the nanny. They didn’t understand. How could they? Mitch was away from home so often that they had become used to not seeing him. This absence was nothing new.
Some channels reported they were searching for survivors, others for wreckage. Melinda was no fool. Her husband’s jet had vanished in the middle of the night. It had been lost over the ocean. One report alleged that signal had been abandoned way before they came down, because the captain’s last missive betrayed nothing untoward. The chance of life prevailing was minimal. Mitch was never coming back.
Her phone rang. Melinda staggered up, collapsing onto the bed as she saw whom the call was from. Gary. What did he want: to say he was sorry he had been boning her up the ass while her husband choked? She couldn’t contemplate speaking with him, let alone seeing him. At what point had Mitch expired—as she was coming, as she had pumped up and down on Gary’s hard cock? As she had lapped at their neighbour’s balls? As she had rode her illicit lover like a jumped-up jockey?
Inconceivable. Mitch should be ensconced in his office downstairs, the kids playing outside and the sun streaming in through the conservatory window.
This was real life—not one of her husband’s movies.
Melinda put her hands over her ears and screamed.
48
Day 7
Dawn broke and dawn faded. Night-time came and went. Hours slipped into days. There was no way of telling the date, how many suns had risen and fallen in the time they had been here, was it four, five, six, more? Flies buzzed over sleep-deprived bodies. Everyone lay limp in the heat, unable to move, watching the ocean and every so often roused to life when they thought they saw a boat or a beacon, running to the shore and screaming at the others to follow, only to find they’d been tricked.
The sun got hotter. The sea rolled on.
Once, an airplane passed overhead, far up, where the bright sky became a deeper blue: a tiny silver dagger on the cusp of the atmosphere. They had shot across the beach, waving their arms and shouting, realising afterwards the futility of their exertions. The plane was an unreachable totem from the old world, and a sign that the planet was still in operation. It was only their lives that had stopped.
Eve suggested a signal on the beach, as big as they could make it. Half a day was spent arranging rocks in three letters: a giant SOS. It was the kind of thing they had seen in the movies, some grim providence that assailed other people, ill-fated souls who had run to the ends of their ideas. But they had to do something.
Anything.
Or they would surely go mad.
Early afternoon. The sun tilted off its midday axis. Angela stepped onto the rock.
The group was transformed from the glamorous creatures that had met at Jakarta a week ago. Everyone had lost weight, their bones poking through in hard lines and nodules, elbows and ribs sharpened, shoulders and knees pronounced.
A diet of berries and coconuts was taking its toll. Their supply of the latter was endless, a
nd despite Tawny’s initial ecstasy that her LA health spa’s beloved coconut water was being served here of all places, the group was soon sick of the dense, white, too-sweet harvest. Several had been ill, their stomachs unaccustomed to the new diet, and had shed half a stone in a day. The water supply was set to run dry.
Angela surveyed each of her companions. She wondered what she herself looked like. The kind of girl Noah would glance twice at in Hank’s Hardware? The kind of girl Dino Zenetti would be proud to parade at the Parisian?
Or neither: a new person, nothing to do with them?
Tawny’s hair was bleached and coarse, her nose and forehead pink, and her shoulders had turned a dark, nutty brown. Eve was pale and lethargic, though her green gaze still shone bright. Celeste, thin to begin with, was light enough to snap, and her eyes appeared even huger, peering out from beneath a fringe that to start with had been coal-black but was now warmer treacle.
Jacob was slowly healing, sheltered from the furious sun beneath a cover Celeste had fashioned of fronds and twine. Yesterday, Angela had taken him fruit and he had named her before she had spoken—the faintest shape, he said, but it was a start.
Mitch had lost his toupee in the jungle. He maintained it must have escaped when he bent to collect firewood, and now he was totally bald. Angela thought he looked better without it, but Mitch was understandably humiliated. He believed the piece had looked authentic and no one had suspected the fake—even when, in the heat, it had slipped halfway down the back of his head, or he had scratched it and the whole thing ramped back and forth like a mop on a kitchen floor.
Kevin, however, was the most puzzling. Unlike the others, the pop star seemed not to be losing weight but gaining it—or gaining muscle, at least. Kevin’s bare chest was bulking out at an alarming rate, his calves thickening and his neck getting wider. Even his hands seemed bigger; his shoulders and back rippling. Angela couldn’t fathom it: their diet thus far had been strictly vegetarian. It wasn’t as if he had been doing much manual work, either: Kevin was second laziest in the group, eclipsed only by Tawny.
