"So this is proof that others have been here before us," Joseph said.
"And died," Colt said.
Ken stepped out towards the stones, each foot falling slowly and carefully. He approached the third stone and hunkered down next to it. Colt watched him, wondering what he was up to. That's when he realized that Ken was not looking at the gravestone, but something else on the ground.
"What is it?" Colt asked.
"A message, maybe?"
Colt and Leslie crowded in around him while Joseph walked from gravestone to gravestone with unbridled excitement on his face. Colt looked down to the ground where Ken was looking and saw another decent-sized stone embedded directly beside the gravestone. The name on this stone was GENE HOUSTON and it seemed that whoever had placed his body here (presumably) had left a very simple message by Gene's stone.
On the small stone by the grave, a single word had been engraved.
DIG.
Below these three letters, a small and crude arrow pointed out towards the ground that they were standing on.
"Where do we dig?" Leslie asked.
"Dig?" Joseph asked, suddenly very interested in what they were doing.
"I'd assume very close to the stone," Ken said. "I don't think it would be such a simple message if we were supposed to dig somewhere further away."
"But these are graves," Joseph said. "What in the hell would we want to dig up graves for?"
"I don't know," Colt said. "But these three grave markers suggest that we don't have much of a chance to get out of here. If this is a clue or something that's going to help us not die, I say we dig."
"Seconded," Leslie said.
"Thirded," Ken said.
Joseph gave a shrug and dropped down to his knees. He flexed his hands and said, "What are you guys waiting for?"
All four of them started to dig, tentatively at first but then with a speed and urgency that was infectious. Several times, Colt's fingers jammed against a rock and he instantly feared that he had struck a bone from the body of Mr. Gene Houston.
It was Leslie that eventually discovered their hidden treasure. She had been digging roughly two feet away and to the left of the grave. She'd gotten no further than a foot and a half underground when her hands struck something made of metal.
"I found something, guys," she said.
Right away, the three men joined her, helping her to dig further to unearth the object. Colt was pretty sure he knew what it was right away. He'd seen several of them in his grandfather's cellar when he was a kid. The object they were unearthing was green and shaped like a rectangle. When they uncovered what looked to be a latched lid, Colt knew that his assumption was right.
It was an old ammunitions box. It was made of metal, was about two feet long and a foot or two deep. It was military green in color and there was a faded white writing along its top. With the top cleared and a decent amount of dirt removed from along the sides, Colt reached down into the small hole and found the metal handle on top of the lid. With a hefty tug, he removed the metal box from the ground."
"Is that an ammo container?" Ken asked.
"Yeah," Colt said. "But this one is light. There's no ammo inside."
After no one said anything for roughly two seconds, Colt realized that they were all waiting for him to open it. It sat directly in front of him and, like the gun, they were giving him authority over it. He wasn't sure how he felt about this, but he reached down and unlatched the top of the box anyway.
It pried open with a screech and falling flakes of rust. Inside, there was nothing more than a single notebook. It was coated in some sort of grime and the bottom of it seemed to be partially waterlogged, but it was in decent shape. It was smaller than a typical notebook, a standard memo notebook that could be found in countless offices back in the 50s or 60s. Colt took it out carefully and opened it up to the first page. There were scribblings and what looked like coordinates on the first page and the few that followed it, but they had all been crossed out by harsh black lines from a pen.
Beyond these, the pages began to look like a journal and it was clear that this was what they had been told to dig for.
The first page was dated March 07, 1949. Colt flipped through the next few pages and saw that there were seven pages of content, some of which had been scribbled through.
"We don't really have time for light reading, do we?" Ken asked.
"No," Joseph said. "But there could be some vital information in there that could keep us alive."
Colt nodded, going back to the first page of writing. It was probably the smartest thing he’d heard Joseph say since boarding his plane.
"Colt, read it so we don't have to huddle around, would you?" he asked.
Colt was happy to do it, but it was hard to do so with much confidence. God only knew when another stampede would come stomping through.
But he read anyway, reading as fast as he could but not so fast that he couldn't be understood.
"It's just me. I'm alone now. Donald is dead. He was bitten a few days ago and bled out today. I tried to save him, but there was nothing that I could do. I'm not going to be stupid about this. I know that I'm going to die. I have enough food for maybe two weeks, but I'll probably die before then. The things know I'm here. Some of them seemed to have been hunting us.
"The things…well, if anyone is reading this, I guess you've already seen them for yourself and know what they are. Dinosaurs. Sounds ridiculous, but what else could they be? It makes the legends behind this island become much more than a scary story the pilots tell over beers.
"Assuming anyone that reads this doesn’t know the legend behind the island, I'll do you the favor of skipping the myth and tell you what happened to me and how I came to be here.
"My name is Tom Ridley and I'm a fighter pilot for the United States Air Force. I flew out for a standard test, a routine exercise over the Indian Ocean. I'd done it countless times before without a problem. There were two others with me and we all saw the same thing. An island that had never been there before. We'd been over this same slice of ocean more than a dozen times, in training and actual combat, and this island had never been here. But there it was while training…more than just a sandbar that popped up overnight. An actual island. We'd heard that the Japanese had ghost stories about land that came and went as it pleased in this area of the sea but assumed it was just spook talk to mess with the heads of their enemies. They blamed it on nuclear testing, doing something to the atmosphere around it.
"We radioed it back in to base and no one believed us at first. Then there was some hesitation from base and we were told to abort the exercise and get back to base ASAP. So we turned tail and did just that, and that's when enemy fire started pouring in from behind us. We were then faced with the decision of trying to outrun them and lead them in the direction of base, or engage them. So we engaged. We got lucky…there were only two of them. Had there been any more, there's a good chance that I wouldn't be alive to write this.
"One of my friends went down in the ocean and I never saw him again. My own plane was hit, as was my partner. We went down, but not before bringing one of the enemy planes down. The other crashed on the island with us. This was on the far west side of the island where there's mostly just rocks and not much beach. When it was all said and done, there were four of us: the one surviving Japanese pilot, a guy that told us to call him Ichu, Donald, Gene, and myself. We held Ichu as a prisoner for a while but then it became apparent that we were in over our heads.
"All attempts to contact base failed. Everything on my plane was busted and the few electronics we did have functioning just wouldn't work. It took us about two days to figure out that we were somewhere extraordinary. We gathered up the few supplies we could ransack from the wreckage and then looked for high ground. It was during that search that we saw the first of the dinosaurs. It was, I think, a stegosaurus. It was roaming by itself and when it saw us, it charged but looked as startled as we were.
"But
then there were the large lizards, something that Ichu said he thought were called "trail dragons" in some boyhood fables he had heard as a boy. Whatever they were, they were nasty and violent. Gene was killed by one and we managed to reclaim what was left of his body the following day. We buried him in this underground cave that I will be burying these words in.
"I am writing this on my eleventh day here. I have been living on only water for five days. I am the only one still alive. Ichu is in decent shape, as he died from falling during our descent into this enormous cavern. I have thought about eating him but can't bring myself to do it. So unless someone from base miraculously finds me, I'm going to die here. I have three bullets left in my sidearm, and I think one of them is for me when I get to the very end.
"I'd like to tell anyone reading this that there is some other way out. But we searched this place all over, costing the lives of the men I came in here with. We found no way out, just the large deep hole through which we came in. There are no weapons. There is no food. Some of the plant life might be suitable, but the few times I have tried, I got stomach cramps and vomited.
"Here's hoping God grants any readers a blessing. May He provide you with a way out. I believe He did not do so for me because of the lives I took in this stupid war. So maybe this is Hell. That would make sense. But I feel that it is not. I am dying within a myth, an island that should not be here. So what will become of my body when the land disappears again…"
"That's enough," Leslie said.
"Yeah," Ken said. "The dude is clearly going crazy there. I don't think you should keep reading. It seems indecent."
Colt got to his feet, dropping the notebook back into the container. Joseph wasted no time in picking it out and placing it into his book bag.
"That's wretched of you," Ken said.
"Perhaps," Joseph said. "But it is also staggering evidence. And if we can find the wreckage of those planes on the other side of the island…"
"Stop right there," Colt said, "or I'm going to shoot you. In the balls. Maybe the screams will bring out one of our dinosaur friends and they can have you for dinner."
Joseph said nothing. He only scowled at Colt as Leslie and Ken looked on awkwardly.
"What do I care anyway," Colt said. "You heard what the pilot wrote. There's no way out. We're dead."
"If we can get back to where we came in, though," Leslie said. "It would be next to impossible to get back out, but we can try."
"Yeah," Colt said, slowly starting to accept the fact that he would likely die down here. "We can try all we want. But if trained military personnel couldn’t get out, what does that say about us?"
He didn’t even wait for an answer. He started walking forward, the way they had been headed when they came across the gravestones. He didn't bother looking back to them to see if anyone followed him. He walked on and started wondering who would be left among them to bury the bodies and put up the gravestones.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Colt was surprised at how dauntingly simple it was to get lost in the cavernous forest. He could see frustration on Ken's face as he tried to make sense of the place. On occasion, he would seem to light up as he saw a certain tree or outcropping of rock from the ground that looked familiar but it always turned out to be nothing. While Ken would not come out and say that they were lost, Colt was starting to feel like that's exactly what had happened.
"I don't get it," Ken said, roughly twenty minutes after they had left the gravestones. "It makes no sense that we're getting lost. It should be a pretty straight northern angle straight to the place where we came in. But we should have already gotten there."
"We didn't go very far in, did we?" Leslie asked.
"Not at all. Maybe three miles and probably not even that."
"So what's the issue?" Joseph said.
"I don't know," Ken said. "It's just hard to keep my bearings without a sun or horizon. So I think our best bet for now is to just head slightly to the left. If you look closely, you can sort of make out the edges of the walls. I say we just head there and walk along the walls until we find where we came in."
"Sounds easy enough," Colt said.
"Yeah, let's hope so," Ken replied.
"So what will we do when we find where we came in?" Leslie asked. "I know we talked about it before, but let's be realistic. How hard is it going to be?"
"It'll be hard as hell," Ken said. "But not impossible. We have the repelling rope and I have some climbing gear in my pack. I'll climb out and kick on the automatic feed on the rope. It'll bring the rest of you up slowly. My climb out will take…well, it'll take a while. A few hours, at least."
"Promising," Leslie said.
"Better than nothing, though," Colt pointed out. "Can you really climb that far up?"
Ken rolled his eyes. "Yeah. I've made higher climbs on worse terrain. This won't be an easy climb by any stretch of the imagination, but I've fought much worse."
They left it at that as they headed in the direction of the wall. By the small pinpricks of light spilling in from very far overhead, Colt could see it like a looming shape through fog. It was eerie and surreal to know that those walls closed off this entire hidden world from the topside world.
"You know," Joseph said, breaking the silence after five minutes or so, "I wonder if it's more than a coincidence that there was a Japanese fleet of planes flying over this area, like the American pilot said in his journal."
"Why would it be?" Colt asked.
"Because the one serious competitor I have always had in finding this island is the granddaughter of a man that was once a higher-ranking official in the Japanese military. From what I've been able to gather over the years, this man slowly became obsessed with finding this island. I don't even think he had any real idea what was on the island…he just wanted to find it to capture a piece of folklore."
"Well sure," Colt said. "Who wouldn't want their very own island that slips in and out of existence?"
"About that," Leslie said. "Ken, do you think that might be why you feel that we're getting lost?"
"I don't follow you," Ken said.
"Well, if this place slips in and out of existence—there one minute and gone the next—what happens to us if we're on it when it disappears again? Maybe we can’t find our way back out because the disappearing aspects of the island sort of move us around?"
"That makes no sense," Ken said.
"Well," Colt argued, "we're on an island that disappears at will. Nothing about this entire scenario makes sense."
"Any speculation about that, Joseph?" Ken asked. "Why do you think this place is here one day and gone the next?"
"As I've told a few of you before," Joseph said, "there's speculation that it has something to do with nuclear testing in the 40s. The only reason this theory falls flat is because there is no record of the island being here prior to the 40s. So that then led some others with widely open minds to assume that this island was never a part of our world. Or, if you want to really explore some fringe science, maybe it was part of our world but it existed in an alternate timeline."
"So we need to be on the lookout for smoke monsters and polar bears then?" Colt asked.
Joseph rolled his eyes. "These are some of the legitimate theories out there."
"And you believe them?" Ken asked.
"I don't know what to believe."
"Yeah, let's just go with nuke testing," Ken said. "I don't mind pinning another of my hardships of the government."
"Yes," Leslie said, "but then again—"
"Guys," Ken said, stopping in his tracks. "Look…"
He was standing still and pointing to their left. They all turned slowly, unsure if they needed to be ready to run. Colt only saw the tops of trees at first but then he noticed that one of them was moving.
"Brontosaurus?" Ken asked.
"Yeah," Leslie said.
Colt's legs wanted to run but there was nothing menacing about this creature. It was simply going along on its way, its
long neck stretched out above the trees. It was the first time they had been able to observe one of the dinosaurs among them without the fear of being killed. Colt studied the brontosaurus like a child, admiring its leather-like skin and its simple eyes. It was beautiful and oddly majestic. It was walking away from them, already a good one hundred feet away or so.
Ken snapped a few pictures with his camera, smiling. "This is amazing."
Joseph stared in awe and if Colt had to guess, his eyes were probably just like the millions of cartoons he'd seen featuring greedy characters: there were likely dollar signs dancing where his pupils should have been.
Leslie, on the other hand, looked like she might weep. She stood perfectly still and simply watched. Seeing the way she looked at it made Colt appreciate this place in a new way. It was more than just something to be feared; it was something to respect and be in awe of. They were literally walking through another time period, getting an insane glimpse into the past that no one else would ever get.
"Come on," Ken said. "We're almost at the wall."
They all started walking…except for Leslie. She was still staring lovingly at the brontosaurus as it walked further away.
Colt reached out and gently took her by the arm. "Let's go," he said.
She gave a bemused smile and followed. She looked back once more, looking at the remarkable creature, and then fell in behind the three men.
"You okay?" Colt asked her.
"Yeah," she said. "I lost myself for a while. The ten-year-old girl I used to be came out for a bit. She was obsessed with dinosaurs."
Colt glimpsed a longing in her eyes that made him sad. But he knew that there was no time for such emotion. Right now, they needed to get out. Insights and a time to wax poetic would come later.
So they filed on in a single file line, walking towards what they hoped was the place that would lead them out of this unpredictable slice of history.
"There's another one," Joseph said, pointing in the same direction. "No…two of them."
They all looked back in that direction and saw two more tall shapes towering above the trees. These seemed to be moving faster, as if trying to catch up with the first brontosaurus they had seen.
Jurassic Island: A Prehistoric Thriller Page 9
