For a time, he’d become obsessed with his own death. He’d planned and plotted it out, the time of day, what he would have for breakfast, even the trajectory of his brief flight before the end.
Now, he knew the best way to honor those whose lives were ended by his mistake, was to live well and do right by people. He didn’t want to die, and he’d do his damnedest to make sure the people under his protection weren’t killed, too. He’d failed with Sashi, but he was determined to safeguard Talia and Mahdi.
Winston, on the other hand, was on his own. And Rowan carried no guilt about Emmei’s or even Chugy’s demise. Sashi might have been part of the conspiracy, and she might have even been a liar like Winston said, but she had been under his care at the time. He could have fought harder.
A spear fell in front of him, narrowly missing Talia’s leg. This time he would fight harder.
He snatched the spear from the ground. One of its many barbed tips fell off, but that did nothing to reduce the weapon’s lethality. “Keep going,” he shouted. “I’ll slow them down!”
Talia stopped. “Rowan.”
“Just go!” Rowan turned to face their pursuers. “I’ll find you at the beach.”
Respecting his desire to protect them, she gave a sad nod and resumed her course, falling in line beside Mahdi, Winston now in the lead.
Strike and move, Rowan told himself. He wasn’t planning on making some kind of last stand. He just wanted to give the others some breathing room, and Talia some time to find someplace to hide. Rowan could fight, but in the jungle, Talia’s instincts and experience would keep them alive long term, or at least until help arrived.
The jungle separated and gave birth to a black, fast moving blur. Rowan jabbed with the spear, felt a moment of resistance, and then the many prongs, designed for snagging fish, slipped through the belly of his attacker. The impact knocked Rowan back. To keep from falling, he planted the back of the long spear against the ground. It jerked to a stop, and kept him upright. The sudden jolt also plunged the spear further into his attacker—a woman.
She was four feet tall and couldn’t have been more than eighteen. Despite the spear in her gut, she glared at him.
It’s not real, he thought, fighting a mix of guilt and revolt. Guilt for spearing a young woman, and revolt because despite the way she stared at him, he knew she was really dead. At the very least, she was dying, painfully. No one could have such a single-minded focus on their target. Not the toughest Ranger. Not the Sentinelese.
Unless it’s the smoke, he thought, wondering if her clouded mind could even feel pain, or the life leaking out of her.
The jungle parted again. This time it was a male warrior, bow in hand, arrow drawn back. He focused on Rowan, and then ran headlong into the woman’s backside. The impact shoved the spear through the woman’s back and into the man’s abdomen. He slumped over her, and Rowan thought them both doomed. But then the man stood, still impaled, and drew the bowstring back.
Fighting a skewered man felt wrong. It was far from chivalrous. But they were far from civilization, and even further removed from such romantic views of battle. Rowan planted one foot and kicked with the other. The woman’s chest flexed and cracked, but the rest of the strike’s energy propelled her and the man back. The arrow fired into the trees.
The couple fell back, while Rowan tugged on the spear. Slick with blood, the weapon slipped free of the two Sentinelese, but was missing all but the central tip. The rest of the pronged spear tips remained in the pair, binding them together on the ground where they tried to pry themselves apart, despite mortal wounds.
Rowan turned to run, but he was struck in the back. He feared it was a spear or arrow that hit him and knocked him into a tree, but either would have punched through his body, and there was nothing protruding from his chest. That was when a second wave of pain exploded from his shoulder.
He reached up without looking, grabbed hold of something fleshy and yanked. When it came free, several layers of skin went with it. Raising the spear, Rowan turned to strike his newest attacker, but he stopped when he saw the infant rolling on the ground.
Mortified, he took a step toward the writhing child, but stopped when its eyes snapped up at him, filled with very adult loathing.
He stumbled back. It’s a hallucination, he told himself, but the blood and tooth marks in his shoulder were real. It was impossible to tell what was real and what was the world’s worst trip, but he didn’t want any part of either.
The baby flipped onto its hands and feet.
“Don’t,” Rowan implored, his heart breaking. Even if this wasn’t real, he would be haunted by this for the rest of his life. “Stop!”
But the little Sentinelese child didn’t stop. It lunged, fingers hooked, wide jaws open, arcing toward his neck. A strong bite, a severed artery, and it would all be over. But Rowan couldn’t kill it, whatever it really was—a trained monkey, perhaps—so he swung with the spear and batted it to the ground.
He didn’t wait to see if it recovered, or if the speared couple freed themselves. He’d seen enough, and he could hear the rest of the tribe approaching like a rush of wind.
The trail left by Talia was nearly impossible to find, but Winston had left a path of destruction in his wake. Rowan picked up speed as he moved through the cleared trail, but he was no longer alone. He caught sight of a man with a bow and a woman with arrows behind him on his left, and a lone warrior carrying a bow, ahead of him on his right.
The man on the right had no arrows, so he focused on the left pair, and just in time. The man took an arrow from the woman, nocked it as he ran, and quickly fired.
Rowan dived and rolled. The hard roots on the jungle floor were merciless to his bare back, but preferable to an arrow. He heard the projectile soar above him and strike something hard. He was back on his feet as quickly as he’d left them, and continued running.
As he turned to look back at the couple once more, he caught sight of the man on the right, who now had an arrow nocked. Where did that come from? The man on the left did, too.
Rowan juked like a football player, feigning in one direction and then moving in the other. The arrow fired from behind missed, the arrow fired from ahead slipped through the soft flesh of his side, moving so fast that the entire three-foot, featherless length, slipped in the front of him, and right out the back.
He shouted in pain, but kept moving. That was when he saw the man in the lead slow down, yank the arrow that had missed him from a tree trunk and nock it.
He’s using the missed arrows, Rowan realized, and is a better shot than the warrior behind me.
Rowan lobbed his spear toward the man and broke left.
The warrior abandoned his shot to avoid the spear.
With a layer of jungle between them, Rowan stopped hard, turned and swung. He couldn’t see the approaching bow and arrow team, but he could hear them. The chop struck the man’s throat, lifting him off the ground and flipping him backward. The woman emerged behind him and was airborne. Her fingers grasped Rowan’s head, nails digging into skin, while her legs wrapped around his waist.
They went down together. As the woman dug trenches into Rowan’s scalp, he used their momentum to lift his legs, wrap them around her head and yank her in the opposite direction. As she fell back, Rowan sat up, snagged one of her dropped arrows and plunged it through her shoulder and into the ground.
He rolled away, clutching more arrows, and stole the bow before the gasping warrior could recover. He nocked an arrow, drew the bow string back and let it fly toward the sound of slapping feet.
The second bowman stumbled through the brush, hands wrapped around the arrow jutting from the center of his chest. He fell to his knees, and Rowan felt relieved by the look of impending death in the man’s eyes.
Then the warrior gripped the arrow and pulled it free. As blood oozed from the wound, he didn’t fall forward and die. Instead, he turned to look at Rowan and began standing again. Rowan fired a second arrow into the man and then ran
.
He made it twenty feet before realizing he was no longer being pursued by the Sentinelese; he was running among them. He could only see bits and pieces of dark skin between the branches and brush, but they were there. And when a shadow moved past him on the ground, he knew they were above him, too.
At least the jungle is hiding me, he thought, angling his trajectory so that he was still moving downhill and toward the coast, but on a path that would separate him from the Sentinelese.
Just as the sounds of running, climbing, and clawing fell behind him, he burst through a stand of ferns and into the manicured jungle. The sudden lack of vegetative resistance spilled him forward. He rolled back to his feet, keeping a grip on the bow and two arrows he’d commandeered, but when he heard nothing behind him, he paused to look back.
The Sentinelese were there, too, stopped like him, and staring right back.
He took three slow steps back, and then sprinted away.
Out in the open, running over cleared ground and roots, he could no longer hear the Sentinelese chasing him, but he could feel their presence growing, could sense the doom closing in.
Just get to the ocean, he thought, and then swim…swim until you reach India.
A shadow fell over him again, and this time, when he looked up, he knew that no amount of swimming would help. The Cherub, wings fully formed, framed by lightning, flew over the canopy.
It’s not real. It’s not real. He repeated the mental mantra over and over, but each time it felt like a lie. They had stepped on land forbidden to mankind, and now they were going to pay the price.
41
Despite the manicured jungle being blanketed in hallucinogenic smog, Talia could see the beach ahead, or rather, the light of day reflecting off its sands. She glanced up. The rain still pelted the wind-swirled canopy. Thunder and lightning ruled the sky like Thor had grown weary of Valhalla and migrated to the Midgardian tropics. But ahead, there was sunlight, carved up by the tall trees, painting the forest floor in long streaks of light and dark.
She ran in the dark whenever possible, but the course ahead was winding.
The slap of feet and boots pursued her, but they belonged to Winston and Mahdi. She hadn’t looked back at the two men, but both were loud, and their pace unwavering. At their current speed, the trio would reach the sand in a minute. Then, a swim.
She was winded, and she was sure the less fit men behind her would be, too. Drowning was a possibility, but many of the reefs created shallows that could let them catch their breath…perhaps just long enough for a swimming Sentinelese to catch up…or a shark to sense them, or a salt water croc to take a bite. The ocean wasn’t much better than the island, but if they got free of the smoke, they would, at the very least, be able to discern reality from drug-induced hallucination.
Beyond the footfalls of the two men behind her was a more gentle tapping. At first, she wrote it off as large drops of rainwater falling from the leaves overhead, but the regularity of them, and the fact that she could only hear them behind her, conjured pictures of tiny Sentinelese children and babies, scurrying over the forest floor.
And the sound was steadily growing louder.
But was it real?
Children couldn’t run like insects. Babies couldn’t leap between trees or survive being thrown like living grenades. There was no biological benefit for having mouths that wide. Natural selection didn’t create children whose jaws seemed able to unhinge, an ability that seemed to be lost in adulthood. None of it made sense, unless it wasn’t real.
But the creatures had made physical contact. Had left wounds on all of them. So while there might not be any ancient killer angel on the island, something had pierced her sides. The Cherub had to be a large Sentinelese man, or perhaps a few of them acting together. And the children… Animals wearing masks. A species of Macaque. They weren’t known to live on the island, but they did populate other islands in the Sea of Bengal. And who was to say what species lived on the island, aside from the Sentinelese? In the past 60,000 years, not a single biologist had set foot on the island.
Real or not, whatever was chasing her would kill them all if they were caught. Sashi might not have been torn apart by an ancient protector of some fabled land, but she was dead. So was Emmei. All notions of protecting the Sentinelese at the cost of her own life had faded. The Sentinelese didn’t need her help. A platoon of Special Ops soldiers wouldn’t be able to take the island. And Ambani, if he tried again, would never succeed, especially without the Indian government’s genuine support.
A shout from behind flinched her back to the course ahead. Just thirty seconds more and there would be sand beneath her feet. She nearly kept going when she realized the shout had come from Mahdi.
She spun around just as Winston barreled past, no concern for the man in trouble.
Mahdi stumbled forward, thrashing with each step, fighting a baby clinging to his back. The small thing—not a real baby—had a fist full of Mahdi’s hair, and its other hand hooked into his shoulder. Its broad mouth was open, lowering to clamp down on Mahdi’s neck.
Talia opened the case holding her blow darts. Muscle memory allowed her to act without taking her eyes off the creature. Despite Mahdi’s bucking, the large teeth lowered toward his neck. There was no time to load the blow gun, and she’d never be able to hit the moving target. So she gripped the dart in her hand and charged.
“Mahdi, get down!”
He saw her coming through wide, wet eyes and obeyed, dropping to the ground. The sudden shift in direction flipped the baby onto its back, but it didn’t let go, and the flip didn’t erase the anger from its eyes.
Talia stepped over the child and hesitated for just a moment. She thought, It’s not a baby, and then she poked the dart, and its deadly poison, into the thing’s neck. The wheezing started immediately. Its small fingers released Mahdi and scratched at its chest. The sight of it broke Talia’s heart.
Did I just kill a child?
“Look out!” Mahdi shouted.
Talia turned in time to see a second child, this one older, leap over Mahdi’s supine body, arms and legs splayed wide, ready to wrap around her. Instinct guided her hand back down to her last remaining dart. She pulled it free and jabbed.
The boy struck her head on, wrapping around her and taking her down to the ground. The grip of his legs was crushing. His fingers raked across her back, unleashing rivulets of warm blood. Then he sat up and wheezed, eyes going wide before turning back to Talia with a ‘how dare you’ expression.
Tan hands slipped under the boy’s armpits and hoisted. He came away, his body loose. Rather than throw him to the side, Mahdi demonstrated the kind of man he was by lowering the boy to the ground, bracing his head in his hand.
“They’re coming,” he said. He spoke the words in a calm, matter-of-fact way that reflected none of the panic he should have been feeling. The Sentinelese were closing in, but there weren’t nearly as many of them as Talia had expected.
Movement pulled her eyes to the right. Rowan ran through the forest, still heading toward the beach, but angled away from their position. The majority of the Sentinelese tribe charged behind him, a wave of inhumanity. Lightning flashed, casting a large moving shadow on the forest floor, but when she looked up, the canopy had shifted once more, filling the green ceiling’s gaps.
Mahdi took her arm and pulled her up. Gave her a shove. “Run!”
Talia obeyed, watching Rowan as she moved, until he slipped from view. Then she focused on saving her own life again and made for the beach. Fifty feet from the glowing wall of brush that separated jungle from beach, an arrow flew past. Then another, and another. The shots were wild, made while running.
Spears flew next, joining the arrows. The sudden hail of projectiles felt off. It felt desperate, like they knew the chase would soon end. Talia agreed, but she saw the impending outcome as victorious for the Sentinelese. They could bide their time. Save their ammo. Spearing a swimming human would be infinitely easie
r than skewering the small fish they caught on a daily basis.
So why the hurry?
She heard the answer ahead.
A motor. A boat motor. It sounded small, and familiar.
“Is that…” Mahdi said. He didn’t need to finish the question. They both knew what it was.
“The dinghy,” Talia replied, rushing toward the wall of brush, looking for a weak spot. When she spotted a gap between two shrubs, she pointed and shouted. “There!”
Mahdi took the lead, aiming for the clearing.
The sun’s brightness was diffused by the vast amount of white smoke in the air, but it was still powerful enough to make her squint after a day spent in the island’s storm-and-canopy-dimmed interior.
Two steps past the green wall separating them from the beach, a spear flew over Talia’s shoulder. By the time she had opened her mouth to shout a warning, it had plunged into Mahdi’s calf.
He screamed and staggered forward, but didn’t hit the ground. Not right away. Talia barreled into him from behind and tackled him through the foliage. They landed in soft sand, which kept Talia from sustaining injury, but it did nothing to sooth the bleeding hole in Mahdi’s leg.
The spear, now lying between Talia and Mahdi, had been jarred free during the fall, its bloody tip coated in sand. She snatched it up, and held it toward the jungle, waiting to jab the first Sentinelese to leap out.
But the predatory tribe chasing them down had gone silent, and invisible, no doubt hunting from the shadows like they preferred. Talia scanned the beach in both directions. Aside from rivers of smoke, streaming out of the jungle and rolling out over the water, the sands were empty. Behind her, Winston stood in knee deep water, waving his hands like a wounded bird. Beyond him was the dinghy, racing toward shore, carrying six passengers, two of whom she recognized: Rattan Ambani and Chugy.
At this point, she didn’t care who was in the dinghy. If the Devil himself was steering the boat, instead of Chugy, she’d hop on board.
A trickle of rain on her back drew her eyes up. The storm had formed over the island, a swirling, angry cyclone, but the sea beyond it was bathed in the late day sun’s light. Above, thin clouds spun around the island, the rain here closer to a mist. The sky behind her was dark and furious, raging with lightning. And while the wind pushed tendrils of smoke out of the jungle, the ocean was calm and unaffected. And in the ocean, anchored beyond the reefs, was another yacht, just as gleaming white and spectacular as the Sea Tiger had been.
Forbidden Island Page 27
