“Hey,” I whisper, and both boys go into some kind of spasm, like they’ve just been on the receiving end of a taser, trembling arms, rolling away and very nearly screaming.
“It’s me!” I say, still trying to whisper, but also trying to be heard over their thrashing. I sit up, my outstretched palms urging calm. “Keep it down!”
Both boys end up on their backs, breathing hard, smiling up at me.
“That was awesome,” Daniel says. “How’d you sneak up on us?”
“Sneak? Did you not hear me calling you?”
The boys look at each other. Geniuses both, but in the wild, it wouldn’t be long before they went the way of the dodo bird. In their world of laboratories and computer labs, there’s no reason to be on guard. But out here, and even more so among the darker bits of human civilization, their good natured naiveté could get them in trouble.
“Why are you worried?” Daniel asks.
“We crash landed on an island that none of us knows anything about.”
“It would be rare to find large predators on an uninhabited Pacific island,” Daniel points out. “If that’s what you’re worried about?”
“First, you don’t know how large this island is. Second, you also don’t know if it’s uninhabited. There could be roving bands of cannibals, for all you know.”
“Roving bands of cannibals?” Gizmo looks amused. “This island seems normal enough to me.”
I sweep my arm out to the empty landing site. “Does this look normal to you?”
“Looks like a traditional Unity landing pad to me,” Daniel says.
“Then why were you whispering?” I ask.
They have no answer, and honestly, neither do I.
“Let’s check it out,” Gwen says from behind us, making all three of us flinch and spin around.
This place has me spooked. Given the fact that I’ve nearly been killed several times, I’ve hallucinated and I’m lost in the middle of nowhere, a little paranoia is understandable. But something about this place is making me squirrelly. Like I can feel danger and I should be in a tree, twitching my tail.
The others don’t seem to feel it, though, and they start down the cleared hill without a second thought. After a moment of scanning the jungle on the far side of the valley and finding nothing to cause alarm, I follow them. I keep my hand on my holstered gun, like I’ve done this before. Like I know how to fight. I’m pretty sure the only thing I’d be able to shoot is a vision of Howard.
“You guys aren’t hallucinations, are you?” I ask.
Daniel just chuckles and continues on with Gizmo.
Gwen pauses and looks back at me. She notes my hand on the gun. “Feeling okay?”
“Just making sure,” I say.
I’m about to joke it off. Gwen is starting to feel like a younger-than-me mother. Always concerned for my wellbeing. Always ready to help. She probably would have been a great mother, but she wasn’t any of mine. And I don’t want her to be now. But before I can speak, an inhuman shriek echoes through the valley.
9
The gun is heavy, but I still manage to lift it into a two-handed grip, the kind they use in movies. I assume that’s something actors are taught from people who know. I can picture the scene. The camera moves around me to the left, shooting in slow motion. I spin to the right, looking over the site, eyes squinted, scanning for danger. Cue the sweeping music. Turn on the fans to blow my hair. And that’s how it plays out for about a second. Then my weary arms start to tremble, and long before I’m sure Gizmo’s scream was unjustified, my arms drop.
At least no one saw my dramatic-turned-feeble display. Unless we are being watched. I look at the jungle perimeter surrounding the valley.
Gizmo and Daniel look down at a stand of tall grass, faces screwed up in fear, but bodies rooted in place. Gun back on my hip, I follow Gwen to the scene, expecting to see a snake. In fact, if it’s anything less than a snake, Gizmo’s going to need some kind of ‘man up’ pep talk. But who’s going to give him that? Daniel? Maybe. He didn’t scream.
The boys step aside, and as I once again think of them as ‘boys,’ I decide to cut Gizmo some slack and not mention the scream. While my childhood was cut short by about a decade, I understand the importance of playing—and innocence. Judging by the look on Gizmo’s face, he’s losing his right now.
Tall grass bends as I approach, keeping the secret a moment longer, the reeds shushing in the breeze. Is the thing in the reeds warning us away, or luring us into a trap?
Gwen steps to the side, letting me closer. She can’t see past the grass yet, either, but with Mandi over her shoulder, she can’t do much about it. I raise a foot next to the grass, and Gizmo takes a step back like whatever is in there might leap out and attach itself to my face. “Am I safe doing this?”
“Yeah,” Daniel says, leaning forward for a second look, despite his obvious fear.
I move my boot through the grass, bending it over.
A face stares up at me, bleached white with hollow eyes. A human skull is half-buried in the earth, grass growing from its void sockets, as though it were a plant pot. Gwen fails to contain a gasp, and Daniel flinches, despite knowing what was coming. Gizmo is penguin-stepping away, eyes wandering everywhere but down. But he looks, and nearly screams again, when I bend down, take hold of the grass growing from the skull’s eyes, nose and mouth, and pull. The green tendrils come up with balls of dirt held in place by tangles of roots. I toss the vegetation aside, revealing an unobstructed view of the unfortunate deceased.
Earth holds the jaw open in a permanent scream, but it’s not the only thing that suggests a horrid ending to this person’s life. There’s a neat hole in one side of the head, leading to a jagged, baseball-sized opening on the other.
“He was shot,” Daniel says.
Gwen shuffles on her feet. “You don’t know that.”
“Pretty sure he’s right.” The bullet hole is impossible to miss, and the jaw structure is pretty masculine. I put my hands beneath his chin and drag the soil away. A chunky band of dirty bone is revealed. This isn’t just a skull. There’s a whole body here. I look up at Daniel. “Help me.”
He doesn’t say a word, but he starts pulling up grass when I do. We work downward from the skull, clearing a three-foot-long, two-foot-wide rectangle. Far enough, I decide, and I shift to dragging dirt away. Daniel stops helping me. Touching something like grass is probably a foreign experience to the boy, never mind dragging dirt away from a rib cage. Not that I’ve ever done it before. The question of why I’m doing it now rattles through my head, and before I can answer the question for myself, Gwen asks it aloud.
My response is a grunt and a doubling of effort. The soil working its way under my fingernails feels familiar, reminding me of a half dozen backyards, where I spent a good portion of my childhood. But that dirt probably wasn’t full of a dead person’s lingering bits. When the thought of having someone’s DNA trapped under my nails starts to make me shiver, I lean back.
The rib cage is exposed, and like a shaman divining with bones, the white arches rising from the ground tell me a story—but this one reveals the past, not the future.
“Holy crap,” Gizmo says, working up the nerve to look again.
Something heavy and sharp cleaved a path downward through the right side of this man’s rib cage. The bones are bent downward, a jagged gap separating the two sides. It would have been a mortal blow. Whoever killed him either shot him in the head and then savaged his body, or swept a blade through his chest and then finished the job with a gun. Either way, the man I’m now thinking of as a victim wasn’t just killed, he was overkilled.
The gun in my go-pack makes a little more sense now. This island, in the recent past, has been a violent place.
But is it now?
I’d rather not find out.
“Any of you have forensic training?” I ask.
Daniel takes a step back. “Eww.”
“I think what killed him is clear
enough,” Gwen says. A scowl now resides on her face.
“But we don’t know who he is,” I argue, and then correct myself. “Was.”
“He’s been out here for a while,” Daniel says. “There isn’t any clothing left.”
It occurs to me that the man might not have been wearing clothes. This could have been an execution. We’re also in a jungle that’s buzzing with insects. Given the humidity and temperature of the place, the body could have decomposed and been consumed within a few weeks. The only real passage-of-time indication is the grass growing from his orifices. But grass spreads and grows quickly. Best guess, he’s been out here between six months and two years. Tops. I keep these thoughts to myself.
“We’re losing daylight,” Gwen says. Her words have an immediate effect on the boys. Their shoulders lower and they look away from the body. Her words have given them permission to move on. When she meets my eyes with the most serious gaze I’ve seen from her mostly-serious face thus far, I know that her disinterest is a charade.
“We need to search the area before leaving,” I say.
“What?” Gizmo’s voice has raised an octave. He wants to get as far away from the dead man as possible. “Why?”
“If this landing pad was built by Unity, there might be a way to contact them nearby. A callbox. Emergency beacon. Supply drop.” I’m fishing for reasons, but Gizmo and Daniel look sold already, until I point further inland and say, “You two check that end. Gwen and I will search down here.”
“Why are we splitting up?” Daniel asks, trying and failing to mask his fear.
“Faster we search the area, the sooner we can leave,” Gwen says.
We’re on the same page.
“Just walk the perimeter,” I say. “We’ll meet on the far side. If you see anything weird—”
“Like another dead dude?” Daniel asks.
“Or a way to call home—” I’m trying to keep things positive, Daniel. “—just call us over. We won’t be far, and we won’t lose sight of each other.”
A dejected looking Gizmo tugs on Daniel’s arm. “Let’s just go, so we can leave.”
Daniel squints at me, letting Gizmo pull him. He knows something is up, but he doesn’t say anything. “Make it quick,” he says, and then turns to follow Gizmo.
When they’re out of earshot, Gwen steps atop the concrete pad and heads in the opposite direction. Walking on the smooth, flat landing pad is both harder on the legs, and easier. While my ankles get a reprieve from the constant twisting of uneven ground, each step sends a jarring impact through my bones. What I wouldn’t give for an island-sized trampoline.
“He hasn’t been dead very long,” Gwen says, supporting my conclusion. “Maybe a year.”
“Yup,” I say. “But it doesn’t change much for us.”
Gwen’s reply isn’t emotional, despite the content. “How could a brutally murdered man not change much for us?”
“One body doesn’t mean we’ve been dumped on an island with a tribe of head hunters, cannibals or even a serial killer. For all we know, the person who killed him was acting in self-defense.” The grass along the length of the landing pad grows even and lush, so I stop looking at it and focus on the end of the concrete slab, still fifty feet ahead, where the grass is uneven. “Besides, what could we do differently? We still need to find food, shelter and water.” And Sig. “If there’s a reason to be afraid for our lives on this island, we’re not going to spot it if we’re running around like frightened turkeys.”
Gwen lets out a little chuckle, and it catches me off guard. When she sees me looking, she explains. “I grew up on a farm. We had a lot of turkeys. Dumbest animals on the planet, I swear. Get them worked up and they’d practically throw themselves on the chopping block.”
I can picture rugged Gwen on a farm. Working the land. Bored out of her skull. She’s been lugging Mandi around all day like she’s accustomed to carrying sacks of potatoes.
“I’ve seen what kind of force is needed to cut through bone, Effie.” She gives me a sidelong glance, her smile retreating. “Whoever did that back there... We don’t want to meet him.”
“‘Him?’”
“Call me a sexist if you want, but I’ve never met a woman capable of doing that to a man. Not even my mom, and she was a big woman.”
I’m not sure if she means physically capable or emotionally capable, but I don’t argue the point. While I haven’t met any women physically or emotionally capable of such a thing, I have met men who are both. Are there brutally savage women in the world? Without a doubt. But I’ve never met them, which leads me to believe that the male variety are far more pervasive. History and its wars agree. Even now, women generally aren’t on the front line or part of any special forces. What kind of women would want to be?
Feet scuff over concrete as Gwen and I slow to a stop in unison. We’re just five feet from the far end of the landing pad strip, and the flecks of white hidden among the uneven grass are easy to see.
Now this...
This changes things.
SUPPORT
10
“How many are there?” Gwen hovers at the edge of the landing pad, while I wade through the tall grass, counting.
“Too many,” I mumble, still counting. “Way too many.”
In some places it’s hard to tell one skeleton from the next. These people were either dumped here, or they were killed in a very small area, landing atop each other as they fell. Both scenarios seem possible, as the cause of death is pretty clear.
Bullets.
And a lot of them.
Parts of bones have been chipped away. Holes in skulls. Ribs fractured. Someone held the trigger down on these people and didn’t let go until they were pulp. I half expect to find the ground still stained red, but nature’s cleanup crew has done an efficient job. There’s no way to know if these people died at the same time as the first man we found or not. Could have been weeks or months earlier, or later.
But the savagery of both attacks seems consistent. They could have been killed by the same person, or by a group of people.
The gun on my hip suddenly seems very inadequate. They should have sent me with a bazooka.
“Seven,” I say, but I’m not sure. “Give or take one or two.”
“Give or take?”
“Some of these skulls are in more than one piece.” With every new bone uncovered from the grass, my anxiety grows. But I’m not worried about me; I’m worried about Sig. If she’s alive on this hellish island, she might not be for long. I rip through the grass, looking for any signs of what happened here, aside from the obvious.
“Move slower,” Gwen says. “They’ll know something is wrong.”
By ‘they’, she means Daniel and Gizmo. “We can’t let them see,” was the first thing she said after we recognized the flecks of white for what they were. While I agree that panicking the boys won’t help us at all, my conscience is struggling with not giving them information that could make them more alert, and more likely to spot danger.
I glance back at Daniel and Gizmo, searching the far end of the landing site. Every few steps, one of them flinches and the other follows suit. Their imaginations must be running wild with visions of killers, monsters and the dead. To be honest, mine is, too.
Gwen is right. They don’t need to know.
I wish I didn’t know.
My eyes catch sight of something that isn’t brilliant green, dark, earthy brown or sun-bleached white. It’s a sliver of gleaming yellow.
“Found something.” Crouching in the grass, I brush away the dirt. With each sweep of my fingers, my stomach clenches. By the time the object is clear enough to see, I think I might puke.
“What is it?” Gwen asks.
When I look up to tell her, I see motion in the background. The boys are walking toward us, leaning to the side, trying to see me around Gwen.
Daniel sees me looking. “What did you find?” His shout echoes in the valley, making me cringe.
/> I shout back. “A little privacy! I’m peeing!”
Daniel frowns and turns around. Gizmo spins away so fast that his legs get tangled and he tumbles over. He recovers quickly, scrambling to his feet, embarrassment muting any pain he might be feeling from the fall.
When I’m positive the boys aren’t going to look again, I lift the triangular object from the ground and show Gwen. When she reels back as though electrocuted, she nearly drops Mandi, and I think it’s too much for her, too. But then she snaps her fingers at me and extends her open hand. “Let me see it.”
She holds the pendant close to her mouth and blows away the remaining grit. Then she polishes it and rubs it on her thigh. When she lifts it up again, the black and orange pendant looks almost new. It’s just like the one I found in my go-pack, except that it’s a Support symbol.
“Could you have known them?” I ask.
She shakes her head, in a daze. “I think they’re older than three months. I don’t remember any kids I knew leaving.”
While I hear all fifteen words she’s just spoken, only one of them sticks with me.
I return to the ground, furiously tearing away grass and brushing dirt. It’s sloppy, rushed work, but the image starts to emerge, and it’s exactly as I feared. The man we found was clearly a full grown specimen. At least eighteen, anyway. But these small-boned bodies, some no more than four feet tall...
These were kids.
Like us.
While I’ve found only one badge, I think it’s safe to assume that these kids were dropped off on this island, like we were supposed to be, and someone slaughtered them. The question is, who? And why? The where and how seem pretty obvious. The when is close enough to now to make me nervous.
Really nervous.
“They were Unity,” I tell Gwen. “Like us. A bunch of kids.”
She looks a little pale. “What do we do?”
Unity Page 6
