by David Moody
“And what if it’s one of us?” Paul says, focusing on the computer again.
“What?”
“What if we work out how you can tell if someone’s about to turn, and then it happens to one of us three? What do we do then?”
Natalie shuffles nervously from foot to foot. “I’ve still got the bow and arrow. I’ll do what I have to do.”
Paul doesn’t look up. “Yeah, I don’t doubt it. That’s all well and good, but what if you’re the one who’s lost control?”
“We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.” Her answer is reassuring and disconcerting in equal measure.
Paul focuses on the computer, sensing this is another impossible conversation they could probably all do without. His eyes are darting around the screen now, checking the cluttered desktop for a shortcut to the camera program or some kind of archive. “Got it.” His mouth is dry with nerves. His hands are clammy. He double-clicks and opens up a separate viewer with a long list of date-stamped video clips, then scrolls through the files. Natalie pulls down a blind to reduce the light coming in from outside.
“Try and find early Monday morning,” she suggests as Paul wheels through the surprisingly long list of dates and times. “It had to have happened when they were close enough for the currents and tide to drag them onto the island. Chances are they’d have drifted out to sea otherwise.”
The file-naming convention is difficult to fathom. Paul goes back way too far initially, and the screen fills with a scene neither he or Matt expected to see. It’s their own trip to the island late last week. Matt sees himself sitting reading, with Joy just in front of him leafing through a magazine, face like thunder. Ronan is bending Frank’s ear, and Rachel and Gavin are laughing about something inconsequential.…
Paul clicks another file without comment.
It doesn’t take long for him to find what they were looking for.
The next few clips Paul loads up all look pretty much the same: a scene of devastation, captured shortly after the Heavenly Vision hit the rocks. He keeps backing up to a while before impact, and as the boat cuts through the waves, subtle changes occur in the shadows and lighting. Everything else on the screen remains unnaturally still. Frozen. Dead. Paul glances back for reassurance.
“This is after the attack but before the crash. Keep going,” Natalie tells him.
Paul jumps further back in time at five-minute intervals until he sees movement on board. It’s jerky and indistinct, almost like a time-lapse. He goes back a little further still.
“Sweet Jesus,” Matt says as another file opens and pixelated black-and-white chaos fills the computer screen. They’re watching from the outside camera now as three young kids scramble up onto the deck from down below, desperately trying to escape their inevitable deaths. One of them loses her footing and crashes down onto her backside, only to end up tumbling to the edge of the deck as the boat bucks the waves, then falling overboard in an uncontrolled flurry of arms and legs and panic. Somehow Matt finds watching the girl falling more disturbing than the massacre he assumes was taking place elsewhere at the exact same time. He can’t get the image of that poor child out of his head. She was only a dot: no older than the kid who lives next door to him and Jen. He imagines the shock of the unbearable cold. The terror as her lungs filled with salt water and the current dragged her down. Unable to scream. Fighting to get back to the surface but sinking ever deeper, knowing she was going to die. Petrified. Helpless. Alone.
It’s hard watching this stuff, but they know they have to do it.
A handrail chain being used like a whip.
Kids and adults sacrificing each other to get out of the way of the killer. Every man, woman, and child for themselves. Role reversals. Adults hiding behind kids. Kids hiding behind one another. In the chaos it’s impossible to discern who’s the killer and who are the victims.
After viewing a few scenes the initial shock wears off and they start to become immune to what they’re watching. After all, they’ve seen worse firsthand this week. They start looking for details in the destruction.
“Where’s that kid?” Matt asks. “The one Nils got rid of. The killer.”
“He shouldn’t be that difficult to spot.” Paul selects another file to open. The boy was awkward and gangly limbed, uncomfortable in his own skin. Floppy hair. Bum-fluff chin. Spots. Loose-fitting, baggy clothes. Paul cycles through the cameras repeatedly, but never quite manages to catch more than a glimpse of any of the killings. Victims stumble in and out of frame, corpses are pushed away to the side or trampled underfoot. The camera resolution is low (Matt thinks that’s not a bad thing), and the deed remains largely unseen.
Paul’s close to giving up when Natalie spots something. “Wait,” she shouts, making both him and Matt jump with surprise. “There. Back up.”
Paul does exactly as he’s told, and then he sees it too. The kid. He’s standing in a doorway, little more than a silhouette with little visible detail apparent, but it’s irrefutably him. “Yep,” Paul says, even though Natalie doesn’t need his confirmation, “you’re right. That’s our man.”
“How can you be sure?” Matt’s still squinting.
“Because he’s the only one left moving,” Natalie says. “He’d killed all the rest of them by this point.”
Paul’s not sure. “No, wait a minute.…” He replays the last few seconds of footage again and taps his finger on the bottom right-hand corner of the screen. A brief flicker of movement is there, little more than a fleeting shadow. Paul notes down the file reference, then navigates to another camera feed—same time, different perspective. Now they’re watching from the next nearest camera angle. A girl, half the killer’s size, is running for cover. She’s wearing a coat that looks too big, and its size emphasizes her childish fragility.
“I can’t watch this.” Natalie looks away. “Poor little mite. I’ve seen enough. I don’t want to watch her die.”
The girl moves with far more speed than the gangly youth who’s hunting her down. She’s remarkably stealthy and races through the stillness with athletic ease, clearly desperate to get away. Again, Paul’s not sure. He feels like he’s watching a horror movie, waiting for the inevitable jump-scare. “Jesus, she’s not running away. She’s running straight toward him.”
“Wait, what’s that?” Matt asks. “Quick, freeze it.”
Paul does as he says. Backs up a few frames. “What’s the problem?”
“What’s she got in her hand?” Matt leans in closer and adjusts the angle he’s watching from. “Can you sharpen the picture? Change the contrast or something?”
“Give me a sec.” Paul adjusts a slider at the top of the screen that controls the brightness, then messes with the contrast.
“What is that she’s holding? It looks like a metal pipe, something like that? It looks like a weapon.”
“Smart kid,” Paul says. “Self-defense. Looks like she wasn’t ready to go down without a fight.”
Natalie shakes her head. “I think you’re wrong.”
“What are you saying?”
“For fuck’s sake, don’t you get it? She’s not interested in self-defense. Look at her! She’s on the prowl. She’s on the attack!”
As they watch, the girl on the screen is distracted by something happening beyond the reach of the camera. She sprints out of shot with sudden predatory speed like a hunting animal about to pounce.
Cut to the third feed. Overexposed. Too much light. The brightness balances out when the girl springs into view. They watch her chase down a man who towers over her, holding on to his legs the way a cheetah hangs on to the flank of a gazelle it’s caught, jaws locked and teeth sunk deep into flesh, never letting go. The man hits the deck with a body-shaking thump that’s not audible but is certainly visible, and though he tries to fight her off, the girl dodges his clumsy attacks with ease. She’s lightning fast, anticipating his every desperate move. Before he knows what’s happening, she’s on his back and he can’t reach her o
r defend himself. With one foot planted down hard between his shoulder blades, she caves in the back of his skull with the metal rod.
Another frantic flurry of movement, then it’s over.
There’s just the girl left moving on-screen now. A Hater. No one says it out loud, but they all know that’s what she is.
Paul flicks between feeds again. It all looks deceptively calm. There’s barely any other movement. Shifting shadows. Rolling waves. No one else left alive.
“So there were two of them,” Natalie says. “That’s how they managed to do so much damage.”
“Still, two wild kids against about thirty normal people. They should have been able to stop them, shouldn’t they?” Paul says, sounding unimpressed.
“You’d have thought.”
Paul continues to stare at the computer screen as he chews over the situation. He flicks through the camera feeds, advancing through chunks of time, then stops suddenly, his attention piqued. “Wait a sec.”
“What is it?”
“Not sure…”
He flicks backward and forward—same camera shot, different time stamp. It’s one of the cameras belowdecks again now, postwreck, and everything appears motionless. The violent impact of the ferry and its unnatural listing has thrown the corpses around. Front and center is the pile of dead kids they found when they first boarded the boat. He taps his finger on the image of a girl lying sprawled on her back on top of the pile, staring up at nothing. A dark smear of blood is splashed across her white T-shirt. “Look. These bodies have moved.”
“So?” Matt says. “That was a hell of an impact. Anything could have happened.”
“Yeah, but that doesn’t explain this. That girl fell up.”
“What?”
“Look at this.” Paul takes a couple of screen shots from the same camera at slightly different times and compares them. Same angle, same bodies, one major difference. In the earlier footage the girl they’re looking at is facedown on the floor. Later, she’s on her back on top of the heap. “So how did a dead body manage to fall up the pile?”
He goes back to the clip where the body’s facedown, then lets the footage run.
There’s movement among the dead.
“What is that?” Natalie asks.
“Can’t see…” Paul struggles to make it out.
All becomes clear.
It’s the boy they saw earlier, the boy Nils killed. He’s burying himself under the bodies, trying to hide. Clearly struggling with her weight, he drags the girl in the white T-shirt on top.
Paul cycles forward now, eating up time in large chunks, advancing way past the moment of impact until the image changes again. He clicks PLAY and they watch the boy crawling back out. Blood-soaked. His movements are the polar opposite of those of the murderous girl they were just watching. Where she prowled, he creeps. Where she was confident, he’s afraid. Where she seemed to have the strength of someone double her size, he has half. He can barely move now, the weight of his nightmare situation dragging him down. He edges cautiously forward, then waits, then he runs for his damn life.
Matt’s struggling to get his head around all of this. “So what was he hiding from?”
“That girl. Has to be. She was the only one left.”
“Wait, so are we saying he’s not a Hater?”
“Looks that way.”
“We don’t know for sure,” Paul quickly interrupts. “The cameras are really limited, don’t forget. There could be loads more going on that we’re not seeing.”
“I didn’t see him attacking anyone,” Matt says.
“Like I said, the cameras are limited.”
“But he was hiding for Christ’s sake.”
“We don’t know that for sure.”
“No, you’re right, we don’t. It’s a pretty safe bet, though.”
“It would explain why Nils didn’t think twice about killing him, wouldn’t it?” Natalie suggests. “Nils was one of them, the boy wasn’t.”
Paul cycles backward, then stops when the camera begins shaking uncontrollably, the brightness and contrast temporarily off the scale. The moment of impact.
When the picture settles again, it all looks familiar, like it is now. The same unnatural angles. Paul leaves the footage running. “I reckon we’ve seen enough.”
“We’ve barely seen anything,” Natalie says.
For several minutes the same picture remains on-screen. Nothing happens. Nothing moves. Paul double-checks that the video is actually playing, that they’re not staring at a freeze-frame. Then there’s movement in the bottom right-hand corner, almost out of shot.
“What is it?” Paul asks.
“It’s that girl again.”
There she is—the killer. She’s sprawled on the ground, only coming fully into view when she finally picks herself up. “What’s she doing?”
“She looks hurt. Must have happened when the boat hit the rocks.”
As they watch, the girl staggers forward, then drops to her knees. She manages to get up again and takes a few more unsteady steps. Her oversize, blood-soaked coat falls from her shoulders leaving her cold and painfully exposed. This is the first clear view of her they’ve had. The first time she’s been relatively still and fully in shot.
Natalie freezes. “Wait, wait, wait…” She’s panicking. “Oh, no. Fuck, no…”
“What is it?” Matt asks.
“Don’t you recognize her?”
“No.”
“It’s the girl we found. It’s Louise.”
“It can’t be.”
“It is.”
“Jesus. Are you sure?”
“As sure as I can be with these shitty images.”
“But she’d been attacked, hadn’t she?”
“That was what we assumed. Nils said he reckoned she’d been hiding near the top of the beach and then she got attacked, but what if the opposite happened? Look at her, she’s hurt. What if she managed to kill Joy, then was overcome with the cold and exhaustion and collapsed?”
They watch as she disappears from view again. She can just be seen climbing down the side of the boat, her arms and head visible briefly before she drops from view.
“But she could never have got up off the rocks in that state,” Matt says.
“She could if she used the path around the headland. It branches off. One way heads up, the other takes you right round from here to the jetty.”
“Shit, Nat. It must be her.”
Natalie doesn’t need his validation because she knows she’s right. She makes for the door, pausing only to snatch up her belongings and her weapon. Matt’s close behind.
“Where are you going?” Paul asks.
Natalie’s dumbfounded. “What? Do you really need me to spell it out to you? There’s a Hater in the base with them, a bloody psychopath. We have to tell them about Louise before she comes around.”
“Fuck ’em.”
“You can’t be serious,” Matt says.
“They didn’t seem to give much of a shit about you yesterday, did they?”
“None of us knew what was going on. Heat of the moment and all that.…”
“We can’t just leave them,” Natalie says. “If she wakes up and kicks off, who knows how many people she’ll kill.”
18
Three people need to get off the beach with only two climbing ropes. Matt takes the long way around. The narrow footpath is no less precarious. The rocks are craggy with plenty of foot- and handholds, but the constant rain and the spray from the crashing waves leave every surface feeling unnaturally slippery, like they’re covered with grease.
It’s a lot easier to spot the route from the bottom looking up than it was from the top looking down. Matt’s passed the fork in the path, but while the route around to the main beach and the jetty appears relatively gentle and clear, the option he’s taken feels almost as steep as the rock-face climb he came this way to avoid. He’s barely halfway up, and a hell of a drop is already to his left. The nar
row footway curls and weaves around the edge of the headland, constantly climbing, but never direct. There’s barely enough room to put one foot in front of the other in places, but he can’t go back. The way ahead is largely hidden by the mist and the swollen bulge of the rock face, but his only option is to keep climbing.
The other two are waiting impatiently when he finally reaches the top. He drags himself over to them on his hands and knees, thankful, and not a little surprised, that he’s made it in one piece. “I hate heights,” he says, but there’s no chance of any sympathy. One look at Natalie immediately focuses him on the task at hand. She has her bow and arrow ready.
The three of them march across the island in silence, grouped together against the tireless wind and rain. They’re in full view of the base because there’s nowhere to hide and no way of approaching unseen. “Stay close,” Natalie tells them. “United front and all that shite.”
Panting with effort. Racked with nerves.
The buildings look just as they left them yesterday, and that’s a relief. Lights are on and they can hear the steady chugging of the generator in it’s shedlike outbuilding. “Reckon they’ll let us back in?” Matt asks, genuinely unsure.
“Who knows,” Natalie replies. “Anyway, it’s not them we need to worry about.”
The door to the main building is shut. They approach it with caution. Matt reaches for the door handle, then stops and looks to the others for reassurance. Paul nods at him, urging him on, but Matt changes tack and decides to knock first. He hammers with his fist. “We don’t want them freaking out and going off at us half-cocked.”
When there’s no immediate reply, he does try the handle. That the door’s not locked catches him off guard. Opening it takes a fraction of the effort he expected, and he grunts with surprise, losing his balance and almost falling into the building. He picks himself up and goes inside.
“Hello…?”
Nothing.
His eyes adjust to the harsh lighting. He takes a few steps forward, then stops.
“Oh, Christ.”
He finds Frank first.
He looks like he’s been in one hell of a fight. The right side of his face is swollen and misshapen, broken teeth mixing with bloody drool, which dribbles down his chin and drips into his lap. He’s sitting in a heap on the floor like a Saturday-night drunk who’s lost his battle with the booze outside a club. Natalie crouches down to see to him, even though she already knows she can do nothing. She carefully puts one hand on either shoulder and pushes him back, but she can tell from the way his head lolls forward heavily and without any control that he’s dead.
