I have to hide.
He wasn’t a predator, he was prey, and if he couldn’t outrun the monsters at his back, perhaps he could elude them the way prey animals around the world survived—underground. Digging a burrow wasn’t an option. He’d only have time to carve out a foot-sized hole before they descended on him. But he also couldn’t take refuge in a large cave. The Sentinelese would surely dwell within, and he’d already seen what kind of horrors lived in the darkness. Something natural, something easily overlooked.
Brush shook behind him, the leaves caught up in a frantic shimmy dance, the squeals growing louder. The child-things sounded more agitated now, more energetic, too.
I’m not supposed to be here. But what choice do I have?
Hope blossomed as he reached a stream flowing across his path. It was three feet deep, five wide, and framed by hanging grasses, roots, and fallen branches, which unlike the outer garden, had not been cleaned up. He slid into the water, bristled at the chill of it, and slogged downstream.
After a quick glance back to confirm that the short killers had yet to spot him, he lowered himself into the water. Roots scratched his skin as he slid against the shore, a carpet of hanging grasses enveloping him like a blanket, holding him, comforting him. Deep in his liquid cocoon, the water seemed to warm. With his face half submerged, he opened his mouth and drank. Cool water slid down his throat, easing him deeper into a sense of relief.
They’re going to pass me by, he thought, and then he heard them splashing through the stream. He couldn’t see them, but his imagination had no trouble conjuring images of the bent-legged, almost insectoid children with the wide and broad jaws.
The image had no effect. In fact, his memory flitted back to what they’d looked like before climbing away from the obelisk. Their large eyes. A smile dipped his lips beneath the water again. Cute, he thought, and then he fell asleep.
He woke to the sound of rain, hissing on the canopy leaves, dripping in the stream. He rolled, pulled in a mass of grass and coiled around it, content as he ever had been lying in bed with his wife, Yamina.
He felt guilty for feeling it, but the stream swept the emotion away.
“Comfortable?”
Mahdi’s eyes blinked open. Nearly closed again. Then he saw Winston, in the water on the far side of the stream, his face poking out from behind a curtain of hanging grass and vines.
“You nearly got me killed,” Winston said. “Leading them here.”
“I didn’t know you were here.” Mahdi kept his voice to a whisper, while Winston seemed confident in their solitude. Mahdi had no idea how long he’d been sleeping, but if Winston had been awake the entire time, he’d have a much better situational awareness. And if he was talking loudly, perhaps they really were safe.
“Did you see it?”
“It?” Mahdi had seen a lot. It barely began to cover them.
“Eight foot tall. Four eyes in the front, two in the back, hopefully with a nasty limp. Best I can tell, it’s the savage from the beach. The one I popped. But he’s not dead. Again. And he’s a might worse to look at now. Bastard chased me here. Hid from him the same way you did.”
That the man from the beach was still alive wasn’t really surprising, but it was disappointing. “That’s not what was chasing me. They were a lot smaller.”
“They?”
“Children.”
“You were being chased by children?” Even on his side, hiding in a stream, and covered by greenery like a tucked-in child, Winston managed to sound condescending.
“They weren’t children. Not really. They looked like children. At first. But they didn’t move like children, and their faces…” A shiver ran through his body.
“What did they move like?”
“Crabs,” Mahdi said. “Mouths like…like a manticore.” The mythological creature was the only comparison he could come up with. That’s not what the children were. They didn’t have lion bodies. But they couldn’t be human, either. Not fully human, anyway. Their ability to move along the ground, and the structure of their jaws, meant their genome had undergone dramatic changes since separating from the rest of humanity. But why? He saw no benefit to such adaptation, aside from being unnaturally frightening.
“So killer crab kids and a starfish face. Good news for you is that you can still get off this devil’s asshole of an island. Just stay with me.”
“And the others?”
“Let ’em die,” he said. “It’s why we brought them here. So what if it’s Sashi instead of you. End result will be the same, though I’m going to recommend they just carpet bomb the place. Shit here is hard to kill.”
“But her daughter…”
“Will marry a rich, fat, prick of a perv. What are the odds the man can even get it up still? Then he’ll die. Maybe she’ll kill him. And the keys to the castle will be hers. Hell, I might take the high hard one a few times to get that kind of payoff.”
“Then you must have a way off the island?” Mahdi asked, hoping the man would be truthful. The idea of escape was tantalizing, but could he really walk away? Again? What scars would he be left with then?
Winston grinned, sideways and toothy. “Just stay close and do what I say, when I say it.” He began to slide out from his hiding place.
“Can’t we stay a while longer?” Mahdi asked. He wanted to go back to sleep. To return to his dreams, of which he could only remember soft white light and a deep voice. What was it saying?
“Flaming sword.”
Winston paused, his face glowering. “What?”
“Flaming sword,” Mahdi said. “It was written on an obelisk. The children were huddled around it before…” He grew less comfortable. Fear let him feel every prickle of detritus poking him.
Winston freed himself from the vines holding him against the damp wall of mud. He rolled into the stream, looking more like a fully clothed manatee than a man. “Before what?”
“Emmei is dead,” Mahdi said. “They killed him.”
“Huh.” Winston pushed himself onto his knees, scanning the area, no fear in his eyes. “Just the two of us then.”
“He died horribly,” Mahdi said. “They cooked him in one of the—”
“Don’t care.”
“How can you not—”
“We weren’t friends.”
“You’re not worried about being thrown in a fire?”
Winston held up his pistol. “Won’t come to that.”
“You can’t kill them all with a gun,” Mahdi pointed out.
“Near as I can tell, I can’t kill a single one of them.” Winston ejected the magazine, inspected the rounds and slapped it back into the grip. “These are for yours truly, and you, if you’ve got the balls. Not many better ways to go. Quick and painless. Pretty sure that’s not how the Captain’s life came to an end.”
It wasn’t. Not remotely. For most of his life, Mahdi had been afraid of guns. They were a part of life in Palestine, present during the hardest strife, and even the happiest of celebrations. To him, they represented what they were built to accomplish: death. But now…if there was time for a choice, he would welcome a bullet’s salvation before being plunged into fire.
“You have a plan?” Mahdi asked.
“Streams lead to the ocean, right?”
“Or a lake.”
“No lake on the satellite imagery.”
“No streams, either.”
Winston scrunched up his face and then glared. “Get your ass out of there.”
Mahdi considered staying, but then thought better of it. Winston would either forcibly remove him or leave him, and Mahdi had no doubt he’d eventually be discovered. He lifted his vegetative blanket away and rolled into the river. The water was comfortable. Mahdi rolled onto his back, looking up at the swishing canopy, rain gathering into small fountains before falling to the ground, or the stream, gurgling music. A grin came over his face, or perhaps it had never left. If Ambani got his way and turned this island into a resort, no one
would ever want to leave. He’d make a fortune.
His eyes lingered on the treetops, where yellow birds flitted through the swaying trees, their songs drowned out by the white noise hiss of falling water. The storm above was nearly black, but a spear of light shone through the clouds for a moment, its position parallel to the stream and definitely not where Winston intended to go.
Mahdi felt drawn toward the light, but his eyes were pulled toward movement. The tall, twisting tree trunks were covered in large, dark growths, like mushrooms. One of them had moved. Or perhaps falling water had splashed off the top. He watched for a moment, and then the calm instilled in him by the refreshing waters washed away.
All that remained, again, was fear.
“The children,” Mahdi screamed. Winston turned toward him, impatient. “They never left.”
The large man’s eyes slowly turned upward, as the children uncoiled from their perches high above. They’d waited patiently for their prey to emerge, and instead of one target, they now had two.
Winston said nothing. Just started running downstream. Mahdi took one last look back toward the light cutting through the storm, felt drawn toward it, and then ran through the water in Winston’s wake. The children unleashed themselves from the trees and plummeted to the ground, landing and then running on all fours.
31
They stood in the water, covered by it, dark statues beneath the waves. Undulating waters gave them the illusion of life, but not one of the Sentinelese showed any signs of movement. Not the men, the women, or the children. But they had to be alive. Corpses couldn’t stand upright, underwater, as waves rolled past overhead.
Rowan gave Talia’s wrist a tap. “Take the lead. Keep Sashi with you.”
“And go where?”
“Someplace we can get lost in. Or a choke point. If we need to fight, that’s our only chance.”
“My own personal Leonidas,” Talia said. She was tense, but still smiling. The woman’s feathers were hard to ruffle. Rowan tried to show the same level of bravery, but mostly he found himself not wanting, but craving a drink.
“Leonidas died,” he pointed out.
“Then do better.”
He smiled at that, but it quickly faded when a turtle shell of close-cut black hair rose through the waves. The Sentinelese man rose from the water as he walked toward shore, his face without emotion, his eyes locked on Talia. He stopped, waist deep, his skin goose-bumping as a chill wind swept down from the swirling sky. “Lazoaf.”
Rowan looked from the man, to Talia. “Is he…is he talking to you?”
A slow nod. “I think so.”
“That’s the same thing he said before. What does it mean?”
She glanced at him. “Leave.”
“You speak their language?” Sashi asked.
“They speak mine,” she said. “It’s Hebrew for ‘leave.’ But that doesn’t mean that’s what he’s saying. In fact, it’s impossible. He’s communicating something, but it could be, ‘give up, ’ or ‘die well,’ or any number of things.
A gentle splashing drew their full attention back to the man, who was still waist deep in water, but now hissing and thrusting his midsection. Dozens of dark bodies beneath the waves shifted forward.
“Go,” Rowan urged. “Slow until you hit the jungle. Then run like hell. Try to stay on the roots. Don’t leave a path.”
“How will you find us?” Sashi asked.
“I’ll be right behind you. I just need to slow them down first, since they already know where we are.” He flicked the assault rifle’s safety switch off and looped a finger around the trigger.
“Don’t kill them,” Talia said.
“Really? Still?”
“I don’t know what they are, but we’re the ones in the wrong. We shouldn’t be here. And it’s not their fault that we are.”
“I’ll aim for their legs,” he said, expecting a fight, but none came.
Talia took Sashi by the arm and led her toward the jungle’s fringe. Rowan glanced back at the sound of shifting leaves, watched them slip out of sight, and then turned back to the Sentinelese rising from the water. The men carried bows and spears. The women held bundles of arrows. And the children…as they reached the shallows, they dropped down and walked on all fours, their arms and legs spread wide, like four-legged spiders.
He took a step back and then remembered the weapon in his hand. The FN SCAR fired up to 600 rounds per minute, which would have been great if the magazine wasn’t limited to 20 rounds. He had two spare magazines—the rest were either gone, or buried under the mash of food and medical supplies. He could swap out the magazine in seconds, and he wouldn’t have trouble emptying all three in sixty seconds. The problem was that no one could put that many bullets in this many people in sixty seconds. But in that same amount of time, the Sentinelese could rush him and overwhelm him without losing more than ten of their total number, which looked close to forty.
But maybe if he hit the right people, they would slow or stop their approach. All he needed to do was buy time for Talia and Sashi behind him. He hoped he’d be able to follow and rejoin them, but he wasn’t counting on it. Lives had been lost because of his mistakes. This was a step in the right direction, but atoning for those mistakes would be a long path.
He looked down the sights, zeroing in on the first man out of the water, still gyrating as he walked through the now knee-deep water. Instinct pulled the gun’s sights toward the man’s chest—two rounds would put him down—but Talia’s voice in his head tugged his aim toward the man’s thigh. She was right. He didn’t deserve this fate. None of them did.
Then again, they were also not exactly human…
So…
He eyed the children, moving faster than the adults, scurrying onto the sand on either side of him.
Out of time, he decided, and pulled the trigger.
The rifled barked out a bullet, punctuated by a lightning streak and a thunderclap.
A plume of red burst from the target’s leg: blood and bits of flesh. Rowan had seen men take similar hits. Hardened soldiers. They all went down. No matter how tough you are, when a bullet turns the meat of your body into ground chuck, it stops you cold. You might get back up again, you might even run and fight through the pain. But when that bullet first carves a path through your body, you drop.
Unless, apparently, you’re a Sentinelese warrior.
The man showed no reaction to being shot. No shout of pain. No flinch. And no limp as he continued toward shore, ever gyrating his genital warning…or superiority…or whatever the hell it was meant to communicate.
Rowan adjusted his aim, just slightly. Pulled the trigger again.
Red flesh and blood, combined with white bone fragments, popped from the back of the man’s leg. Inability to feel or care about pain or not, remove a man’s knee and he’s going to drop. Blood soaked the sand as the man fell to one knee, but he still showed no hint of pain.
The rest of them kept on coming, their pace easy, but increasing with each step. By the time they reached the jungle, they’d be running. If the others didn’t care enough about the warrior to stop and assist, perhaps there was another way. Rowan adjusted his aim. The gunshot shook the air, and his heart. One of the women dropped into the waves, her leg shattered.
Rowan felt horrible for shooting a woman. He was an old fashioned Yankee at heart. But neither the woman, nor the Sentinelese cared. They just kept on coming, their feet splashing through the shallows.
He adjusted his aim again. Same tactic, different target. The trigger slid, but not far enough to punch the round out of the barrel. Rowan pulled his finger away and lowered his aim away from the child. The kid was creepy as hell, scurrying toward him across the sand, looking more like an enraged, tailless Komodo dragon, but he was still a child.
“Shit,” Rowan said as the Sentinelese broke into a run. He slid the rifle over his shoulder, sprinted toward the jungle and crashed through the brush. He’d been in situations like this b
efore, bugging out as enemy combatants closed in. But there was always a chopper waiting to evac, his brothers by his side, and Apaches en route to clean up the mess. All he had now was the jungle ahead, which eventually ended as an identical beach on the island’s far side, and a whole lot of ‘nope’ closing in from behind.
The jungle opened up. Rowan sprinted through it while trying to keep his feet out of the soft soil and on the firm roots. Talia and Sashi had done a good job hiding their escape route. He caught a glimpse of them ahead, cresting a hill toward the island’s core. Then they were gone.
At the sound of shifting leaves behind him, Rowan altered course. He ran parallel to the beach, the forest floor clear of brush. The Sentinelese followed him, the silence of their pursuit somehow more horrifying than if they’d been hooting and banging on tribal drums. This was more primal, the way animals hunt, without fanfare. Just the chase, and death.
Sprinting warriors slipped in and out of his peripheral vision, running along the beach, separated from him by just ten feet of foliage. He angled inward, trying to distance himself from them while staying ahead of the angry mob behind him.
An arrow hummed past his head, a narrow miss. It struck a tree and dug deep. He zig-zagged back and forth, a frantic slalom run through the trees, exposing himself as little as possible. Spears and arrows fell around him, some coming close, most hitting trees. The Sentinelese were skilled hunters. He’d seen their aim. But they apparently had little practice with a moving target.
A thunk resounded from his back, the impact toppling him forward. He tucked and rolled. Just a moment before striking the ground, he realized it might have been the wrong move. But it was too late. His body rolled against the roots and the steel assault rifle, each impact like a baseball bat against his body. Momentum carried him forward and back to his feet, in pain, but still mobile. He glanced back and saw the women first, some gathering thrown spears, some tossing fresh projectiles toward him. They worked in shifts, gathering, running, throwing, running so that there was always something headed in his direction.
Forbidden Island Page 21
