by Greg Keyes
And then he began his long journey back to the surface, to find the itch in his scales and end it forever.
Skull Island, Present Day
Kong woke to the sound of leafwings overhead, his arms aching as if he had been climbing. He could not remember what he was pursuing, but it had drawn so far ahead of him he could neither see it nor remember anything but depths and darkness—and a light, of some sort. A light that stung his eyes and flesh and had color like the brightest of skies. And there was an outline, a shape in the clouds. He should know what it was, but he could not quite remember. But he somehow felt it was out there, circling his territory, looking for a way in.
And he felt wrong. Slow. Everything slow, and not bright enough. Nothing exactly the right color, and the smells all wrong.
It had been like this. He remembered the rain, the fire in the sky, the water rushing across the land, the stink of everything dying, rotting. Everything darker, wetter, every day. The land bleeding like a wounded thing into the dark waters all around. The enemies from beneath came up, and he killed them, one by one or several at a time. And though they tasted foul, he ate them, for there was little left to eat.
Then, one morning, the sky was clear, the jungle green and alive, as he remembered it. But small, somehow. Not the way it had been. And the colors, the smells…
He looked up at the sky, clean and blue, and for some reason it made him angry.
* * *
Jia woke, shivering, pushing a dream away, trying to keep it from her waking thoughts. She didn’t want it here, with her, in Mother’s house. Let it stay in the strange place between true sleep and waking where it belonged, with the other bad things.
But then she knew; her dream had not been about herself; it had been about Kong.
She went to the window, pushing aside the drapes and looking out into the jungle, but she didn’t see him. She glanced at Ilene-Mother, sleeping, and then made her decision. She grabbed her unfinished Kong totem, slipped out the front door and ran, barefoot through the jungle. Here she knew all of the trails, and she had no fear of the bad things. She remembered them, of course, but they were gone now, or far away. She had not believed it at first, but then she had come to understand. The bad things were gone. Along with everything else.
Kong was starting to understand, too. When he did, he would be upset. When that happened, she should be there. And although she could not remember her dream, or the sound that had wakened her, she had a feeling about it. That today might be the day.
She found him, but he seemed okay. She noticed a little clearing, and a rock to sit on. She waited there, working on the little Kong totem. Just in case.
* * *
Kong shook the last of the dream from his eyes, from where it had settled like dust on his fur and limbs. He found the running water and waded through it until he came to where it fell in a great rush from high above. He put his head into the falling water, then his whole body, let it beat down on him, flow through his fur, cooling him, bringing him further out from the place he sank into when his eyes were closed.
He looked at the sky again, at the bright light of day. He scowled, thumped his chest once. The sky and the sun did not respond to his threat. That was nothing new, but somehow, today, it felt as if they might. As if they were somehow an enemy that had sneaked up on him.
In the nearby forest, he picked out a tree of the right size. He grasped it and heaved it from the dark soil, tested its weight. He twisted off the part that went into the dirt and then he stripped off the limbs and broke off the top part, which was too thin. He began grinding the light end of the shaft against a stone, until it formed a point. He hefted it again.
Then he saw her, the little one. She stood looking up at him, holding up an even smaller thing toward him. For a moment, he felt his anger lessen. He remembered her kind, the little ones. Finding her in the tree and taking her under his protection. He leaned down near, making eye contact, so she would know he saw her and was glad that she was there.
But even she could not make him forget his purpose. He stood back up, lifting the thing he had made from the tree. Then he took aim at the sun.
When he was smaller, he had done that many times, and also thrown things at the dimmer orb of night. He did not like things that were out of his reach, and although he had always been disappointed his missiles fell short of their radiant targets, he had thought one day he would hit them. When he was bigger and could throw further.
Then he’d had other concerns and stopped thinking so much about the round-sky things and how to hit them.
But he was bigger now and had taken a dislike to the bright circle and the sky that held it aloft.
He let the tree fly, grunting as he put his whole body into the throw.
Up it sailed, high above the trees, the cliffs, far into the blue sky. He watched, concerned it would fall short once more, but hoping it would not.
Then the tree hit the circle light of day, with a sound like stone cracking.
Kong stared for a moment, unsure what had happened. Weird patterns of light flickered above, and the dead tree stayed where it was, stuck in the circle of daylight.
He roared in anger, staring at where he had wounded the sky, at the strange way it bled.
* * *
Jia stopped, looked up to where the tree was stuck in the sun. Even though she knew, even though she understood, it was still strange to see. Kong kept looking at it, making angry, uncertain noises.
She ran up close and got his attention again by shaking a sapling near him, then waving her arms. He resisted looking down at first, but then he noticed her. He tilted his head, and his expression softened a little.
I know it’s strange, she signed. It’s okay. It’s okay.
His hand came down near her. He extended one of his fingers, carefully. She placed her hand on it.
Try not to be mad, she signed, touching his hand. He looked at her, then back at the fake sun he had stabbed, then turned his head to take it all in.
She hadn’t understood at first, either. She had seen the ships, the flying machines, the odd houses the Awati built. But this had been more than she could imagine, at first. A house so big it looked like the jungle. Outside, the sky was dark, even in the day, and the storms never stopped. Inside, the sky was blue, and the sun shone down.
But it was not real. She had known it for a while. And now Kong knew that, too.
* * *
Dr. Ilene Andrews had only been asleep for an hour when her phone began to ring. She considered ignoring it for a moment, until it entered her sleep-fogged brain that—in this remote location, with this degree of security—she couldn’t be receiving an outside call. Something was wrong, here, and now. She sighed, rolled over, and picked up.
“Andrews,” she said.
“Dr. Andrews,” a voice came back. She thought it was Forteson, one of the techs. “There’s been a problem. Kong breached the biodome.”
She was fully awake now.
“Breached? What do you mean ‘breached’?” She went to her bedroom window and threw open the shade, but the jungle outside closed off her view of most of the valley.
“He, uh, made a spear out of a tree and threw it at the ceiling. He put a hole in it.”
“In the ceiling,” she said. “Is he still in there?”
“Yes,” Forteson said. “But I think he’s figuring it out.”
“Yeah,” she said. “I’ll be right there.” She was about to hang up when another thought jolted through her.
“Jia!” she called. “Jia!” Phone still in hand, she bolted to the second bedroom. The bed was empty. She put the phone back to her ear.
“Do you know where Jia is?” she demanded.
“She’s with him,” Forteson said. “We spotted her a few minutes ago.”
Of course she was.
“Should we send someone in there after her?” the tech asked.
“No,” she said. “Absolutely not. I’ll handle this. Get Ben and
have him meet me there.”
“Yes, Doctor.”
She pulled on pants and a shirt, then grabbed her blue jacket. She had let her long brown hair down for the night. She preferred it tied up in a bun, so it didn’t get in the way, but she didn’t have time for that.
* * *
She saw Kong almost immediately, long before she saw Jia. He was the tallest thing in the place, with the exception of the cliff with the waterfall. He was at or near his full growth now, over three hundred feet tall.
When she spotted Jia, Ilene slowed down; the girl was standing in front of Kong. Her best guess at the girl’s age was that she was about ten; she had light brown skin, black hair, and a heart-shaped face. She was wearing a white shirt and dark pants that Ilene had given her, but she had tied her red maiden shawl over the shirt so it formed a cross on her chest. That, the leather circlet on her head, and her necklace of leafwing teeth were all that remained of her original wardrobe, and she rarely went anywhere without all three of them on.
She had seen Jia and Kong like this before, silently communing, and she had wondered if the bond was merely emotional or if they were somehow conveying real information to one another. Whatever they were doing, Ilene was afraid that if she moved nearer, it might upset the delicate balance of Kong’s mood. He tolerated Ilene, indulged her attempts to teach him sign language. But if he was in a bad mood, he was not necessarily at his best around those he considered strangers. And although she had been working with Kong for ten years, she knew that in his mind she still fit that category.
Not so Jia. Jia was a member of the Iwi, the indigenous people of the island. It had once been Ilene’s dream to study their language, or what was left of it, even though it was exceedingly hard to coax the Iwi into speaking it. They seemed to have little use for vocal communication to the point that some early observers had reported they had no spoken tongue. However, a few Iwi had demonstrated the ability to learn English, and an earlier linguist had determined that they did have a spoken tongue, but concluded that the Iwi had replaced almost all of their verbal communication with signs, facial expressions, and body language.
In her decade on the island, Ilene had confirmed that. It was a fascinating and possibly unique situation among human groups, most of which communicated primarily through the spoken word.
In the last few years, and especially since taking Jia under her wing, she had begun to develop a theory, although she wasn’t yet sure enough of it to commit it to writing, much less present it for peer review. It seemed possible that their extensive use of non-vocal communication might stem from their close relationship with Kong. The Titan’s vocal cords weren’t suited to producing anything like human language, but his facial and body expressions were as versatile as those of humans. It might be that in emulating their god, and in learning to communicate with him, they had developed an interspecies pidgin that had no verbal component and had gradually adopted it as their day-today language. Of the few words recorded before she came along, a few showed Oceanic origins, almost certainly brought to these shores relatively recently by Polynesian wanderers. But the core of their language did not seem to be related to any other Pacific languages, or indeed, any known language whatsoever. It was a puzzle she had been excited to tackle. She’d had a little success, recorded about a hundred words, and worked out a descriptive grammar of their tongue. But that took years. She’d begun to realize that the spoken language was more like a fossil than anything else, that the truly relevant questions should be about the way they actually communicated and their relationship with Kong—and then tragedy struck.
The storms that had once hidden the island from the outside world had intensified and moved inland. Massive flooding and mudslides ensued, and the dangerous species of the island went berserk for the several months it took most of them to die off from lack of sustenance. She had tried to get the Iwi to relocate, either to the biodome they were building for Kong or to another island. They resisted, and when she returned to their village for one final try at persuading them, she’d found that the whole lot of them had vanished. Since that time, no member of the Iwi had been spotted alive, and she had reluctantly come to believe that they were extinct.
Except for Jia. The way the girl told it, Kong had rescued her when some of her people were trying to make it to higher ground. Ilene had found her with the Titan and brought her to live with her.
The girl was deaf from birth. She used her own sign language based on Iwi non-verbal communication, but there were limits to that. She was a quick student, however, easily mastering the American Sign Language that Ilene had learned in graduate school, and together they were able to communicate with a mixture of the two.
Like all of her people, Jia had a connection to Kong, a complicated one. Early visitors to the island had seen that the Iwi worshipped Kong as a god, and that was true enough. But it went deeper than that; they believed that Kong was Iwi, and the Iwi were Kong. Symbiotic; one people with different forms. It was not unheard of to find such belief in indigenous cultures—the idea that animal spirits and gods were also relatives—but the Iwi–Kong bond seemed especially tight. And Jia’s connection to Kong was another thing again. At times, she swore the girl and the Titan could read each other’s minds. At the very least, Jia often had a calming influence on him.
But at times like this, when Kong was agitated, Ilene worried, nevertheless.
The Titan could crush the girl with his pinky and might not even notice until it was too late. The size difference was just too great, and Kong’s mood too mercurial. Jia never seemed to feel in danger, but children were often unaware of the dangers around them, especially when they were trusted, familiar, and had been a part of their lives since birth.
She turned her gaze up to where Kong’s makeshift spear still hung at the top of the dome. The illusion of a “sun” was broken. It could be repaired, but Kong would remember. His cognitive level was high, and his memory had proven to be very good indeed—especially when it came to things that had caused him pain or pissed him off. Kong had been born with a chip on his shoulder. He could hardly be blamed for that: his parents were killed by Skullcrawlers just as he came into the world. So he knew how to hold a grudge.
She heard the sound of an automobile approaching, and moments later a Jeep came to a screeching halt. Her assistant Ben hopped out, wild-eyed, looking from the damaged dome, to Kong, to her. He adjusted his glasses.
“Dr. Andrews, did you see that?” he asked.
“This habitat’s not going to hold much longer,” she told him.
“No kidding.” He ran his fingers through his short black hair. “I mean … look at that.”
She watched him pace nervously.
“We need to start thinking about off-site solutions,” Ben said. “Someplace where he can’t, you know, break the freakin’ sky.”
“The island is the one thing that’s keeping him isolated,” she said. “It’s his territory. Most of the other Titans seem to recognize that, including the big guy.”
“Except that bat.”
“Camazotz was different. He was challenging Kong for the island itself. And that was our fault. If Kong leaves here, it’s like he’s signaling he’s in the mix for the planet at large. If he leaves, Godzilla will come for him. There can’t be two alpha Titans. The whole theory of an ancient rivalry stems from the Iwi mythology.”
“He’s gotten too big, over time,” Ben said. “This environment won’t sustain him much longer. It’s too unstable.”
Ben was right about that. Cut off from the sun by the perpetual storm, the landscape stripped by constant flooding and deprived of the sunlight, the once lush island was a rotting mess. The flora and fauna in the biodome were all that remained. The biodome provided full-spectrum light to sustain the plant and animal life in the dome at healthy levels. But an animal the size of Kong required an enormous amount of food, far more than the limited ecosystem could naturally provide. Already they had to ship in meat to satisf
y his hunger, megatons of it. Clearly the Titan suspected something; he had attacked the “sun” on purpose. The illusion wasn’t good enough to fool him anymore. Once it really sunk in, what would he do next? Probably find one of the walls and start pounding on it. The structure could handle that for a while, but between the relentless storms and Kong’s attack on the artificial barrier that sustained this place … well, it was only a matter of time. But what she’d said about Godzilla was also true. It was an impossible situation, and she couldn’t see a clear way out.
To her relief, Jia had noticed her; she’d left Kong and was coming their way. Ilene smiled, trying to keep her troubled thoughts to herself.
She gathered Jia in a hug. She didn’t have any children of her own, but she had started thinking of Jia that way, and she believed the girl reciprocated, at least to a certain extent. She realized she was hugging almost too tightly; she had been more frightened for the girl than she had been willing to admit to herself.
After a few seconds, Jia pulled free, stepped back and started signing.
He’s angry, she said.
Ilene glanced over at the scowling Kong.
Go wait for me, sweetie, she signed. She didn’t want to continue her discussion with Ben with Jia nearby. She was learning to read lips, Ilene knew.
Jia’s face shifted subtly into an Iwi expression that Ilene interpreted as, “Whatever, Mom.” But she did as she was told and got in the jeep.
Ilene glanced at Ben. “Off-site would be a death sentence,” she said.
“You don’t think the King could take care of himself?” Ben said.
“Beat Godzilla in a fight?” she said. “Maybe.” Probably not, given what she knew of the other Titan. Either way, she did not want to find out. Kong was the last of his kind. She could not tolerate having the extinction of his species—or the death of him as an individual—resting on her shoulders. Her job was to keep him from harm, not to mention shield the world from the kind of collateral damage a Titan battle could produce. She would do her level best to do both of those things.
