When everyone had climbed out of the fissure, Wood got Eva to lift Bella up using a rope she had brought from the pack. The poor animal whimpered and looked a sorry state in the wind and rain. Her long fur was matted and clung to her scant form, ribs exposed and bones jutting.
Using the same rope, Wood ordered them to help her up.
Eva initially thought about telling her where to go, but having a rifle aimed at your face kind of knocked the sass out of a girl. The wind blew Dillon’s scraggly hair across her face when she climbed up to the surface. She pulled it back behind her ears and gestured with her rifle for the group to get moving.
They moved on, trekking over the giant boulders and cobbles from hell, inching ever closer to the cliff face. Much like the first time they’d looked at it, the scant moonlight showed only a few random pieces of structure going up its surface. She thought that perhaps they’d have the opportunity to fling Wood off the side, or drop something on her.
Marcus, a few feet ahead of her, stopped suddenly and turned to his left, his hand over his eyes to shield them from the driving rain and wind.
‘Keep moving,’ Wood yelled.
‘Are they mates of yours?’ Marcus said, pointing to a dozen people walking towards them. They wore what looked like rubber burkas, or perhaps Klan robes without the pointed hoods. Either way, they struck a grim aspect there in the dark, the glossy wet-weather gear reflecting what little light penetrated the cloud cover.
‘No,’ the scientist said. ‘But they’ll do for now.’
Their excited voices were carried on the wind, but Eva couldn’t quite make out what they were saying. They had recently been, or were about to be, involved with something unpleasant, she guessed. Just something about their body language, the way they were tensed up and close together, like conspiratorial ravens.
Wood raised her hand to them and yelled, ‘Hey, hey! Over here! I’ve got intruders.’
Eva spun to face her, but Wood had anticipated this and Eva took the full force of the rifle’s butt in the face, sending her sprawling to the hard ground.
‘You bitch,’ Duncan said, spinning round. Wood had recovered and fired a shot. Eva was still seeing her own personal fireworks show and couldn’t tell if anyone was hit, but there was no scream or shout so she assumed Duncan – and everyone else, for that matter – was okay.
By the time she had regained her balance and the initial burst of pain had receded to a dull thud, she saw a dozen pairs of feet appear in her field of vision. She lifted her head and looked up to see the group surrounding Wood.
‘Ladies, gents,’ Wood said, all smarmy charm. ‘Look, I’ve brought gifts . . . Think Gracefield will want another trial, eh?’
One of the group members stepped forward and held his hand out for the rifle. The person – Eva couldn’t tell if they were male or female – didn’t speak, yet Wood gladly handed it over. They shared a few words that she couldn’t make out over the howling wind.
‘Get up,’ Wood said to Eva.
With considerable effort, Eva got to her feet. She stared at the figure beside Wood, the one wielding the rifle. She realised the hood/poncho thing was actually a piece of tarp, perhaps scavenged from one of the many boats that had landed on the island. It had holes cut into it that allowed her to see the person’s eyes and nose. Thanks to the many thousands of mug shots she’d seen over the years, she could tell they were male, and that beneath the covering he was smiling; the edges of the eyes were the giveaway.
The man moved up the line, seemingly inspecting everyone.
When he got to Marvin at the front, he spoke, saying just one word of recognition. ‘Admiral.’
Marvin didn’t respond. Not initially anyway.
The hood-covered man turned his back and made to move back down the line. Marvin sprang forward with a speed that belied his age. He quickly disarmed the man, shot him in the back of the leg and screamed for everyone to run. The group of hooded men and women panicked for a moment as they scattered.
In the melee and chaos, Duncan, Annette, and Victoria ran one way, Marvin the other; his actions demanded the majority of the attention. Marcus grabbed Eva by the arm and pulled her along with him, heading west.
Wood spotted them and moved to intercept them.
Marcus bent to grab a rock and before Wood could arrange herself to raise her pistol, the Londoner slammed the rock into her head, sending her crashing to the ground.
‘Quick,’ Eva said. ‘The pack of supplies.’
Marcus reached out and grabbed the backpack Wood had taken. Inside were three grenades among the water and food supplies. Eva and Marcus sprinted off in search of the others, but in the sudden chaos it was hard to see where they had gone.
The wind and rain had increased so that it was difficult to stand upright. Eva couldn’t see more than a few dozen metres in front of her.
‘Where are they?’ she said.
Marcus, squinting into the wind, shook his head. ‘Scattered somewhere.’
A gunshot fired somewhere in the dark. Then another, this time aimed at them. The bullet struck a boulder just a few feet away.
‘We have to find cover,’ Marcus said.
The two of them continued to run west until Marcus spotted a gouge in the island’s surface. He ducked down into what Eva could only describe as a natural foxhole. Eva joined him, panting, her heart pounding.
Peering over the edge, they saw two hooded figures approaching. One was armed with a pistol, the other a knife. They were searching around, shining a flashlight, and sweeping it across the landscape.
‘You take the one with the knife,’ Eva said quietly into Marcus’s ear. ‘Wait until they’re real close.’
They didn’t have to wait long. The one with the knife, approaching to the right of them, had obviously remembered the foxhole and was making a beeline for it. When he got close enough, Eva made a distraction by throwing a stone out onto the surface.
Marcus sprinted out as soon as the person’s attention had shifted. He kicked them in the gut, grabbed the knife, and drove it into their leg before spinning around them, using them as a shield. The opposite figure, approaching on the left, spun towards their mate and raised a pistol. This gave Eva time to spring from her position behind the rock formation and grab the gun-wielder in a rear chokehold.
Marcus smashed the butt of the knife against his opponent’s head, knocking them unconscious.
The one Eva was choking fired their pistol twice, both rounds missing wildly. Marcus darted out of the way, using the rocks for cover. Within a minute, Eva felt her attacker weaken and fall to their knees – they were out.
She took the pistol from them and headed off to find Duncan and the others. Marcus grabbed the backpack and quickly followed behind. ‘Good work,’ he said.
‘We need to be quick about this. No hesitation, okay?’
‘I hear you,’ Marcus said as they ran in search of the others, using the flashes of lightning as intermittent guidance, each flash giving them a freeze-frame reference of the landscape. Eva kept her vision sharp, concentrated, in the hope of spotting Duncan and the others.
CHAPTER THIRTY
No one drowned. This is good; this is the best outcome, Jim thought. Don’t go worrying about things that aren’t a threat, old boy. Just get your crew together, find somewhere to dry off.
Ahead of him, on the rocky shore, the rest of the crew lay on their backs, or crouched on all fours, coughing up water. Bernita was hugging Patrice and shaking in his arms. The poor girl had barely spoken to Jim since they’d returned from the base. He knew it was likely the fling with Duncan – which his son had told him about. Or perhaps it was just the pain of everything.
Given the trauma everyone had gone through, he was surprised they didn’t all have extreme PTSD – maybe they did and just didn’t know about it yet. Maybe, when all this was over, they would finally succumb to it.
There you go again, creating more problems for yourself that don’t yet exist.
It didn’t belong in him anymore. It belonged at the bottom of the sea, in the flooded basements, with the bodies and the fish, and God knows what else, that now made those places home.
He dragged the sack of supplies onto the shore and collapsed onto his arse, knackered from the swim. Although the water wasn’t as choppy as it could have been, given the storm, it was still a challenge to swim to shore. The crew had replaced their masks, their faces looking like something from a low-budget horror film each time the lightning flashed.
‘Anyone hurt?’ he asked, looking around at his compatriots: Karel, Brad, Ahmed, Bernita, Patrice, and, of course, Gloria. She smiled at him and shook her head. She had surprised him with the strength of her swimming, until she had revealed that when she was younger, she had swum for her state in various competitions.
‘We’re good,’ Brad said, breathlessly, speaking for himself and Ahmed, sitting with his head between his knees, his back heaving with deep breaths. The old engineer raised a single thumb, giving the sign that despite his lack of fitness and powers of recovery, he would continue to live.
One by one, the group checked themselves for injuries and reported that they were okay.
Jim wanted to hurry towards the bonfire, which was obscured by a pile of rock that, in profile, resembled the outline of a vase he had once bought for his wife as a wedding anniversary gift. The lightning X-rayed its profile against the dark plastic sky.
Your world is broken, this particular X-ray said. Fucked up beyond all repair. Sorry, no plaster cast, no pins and screws. You’ve done it now. This is terminal, good buddy. Broke, forever, and there’s not a damned thing you can do about it.
Much like the awful vase he had bought. God, what on earth had he been thinking back then? During the late eighties, there was a brief trend of cut crystal glass with gold bits hastily thrown in for good measure. His wife hadn’t even liked flowers that much, so only God – or, in that case, the Devil – could explain his decision to buy it. It wasn’t bought out of a lack of care or as a last minute panic buy either. No, to make matters worse, he had planned a purchase for weeks, trawling the shops in the high street: the jewellers, the home interior showrooms, even a car showroom – on that front, he had realised quickly enough that his salary as a first mate on a cruise ship, although decent, wasn’t new car decent.
And yet, despite all that foresight and planning, he had still bought the damned thing.
And here it was again, right in front of him, less than a hundred metres away, mocking him in geological form. But he couldn’t look away. While the others were getting their supplies and weapons in order, he kept looking at that profile, even as the thunder clapped overhead, shaking the organs inside his skeleton, and a streak of lightning blasted the small island with a flash of God-light. He looked, because just behind the outcrop was the bonfire.
‘Smoke,’ he muttered, the wind and rain snatching at his words. ‘Beyond the outcrop,’ he yelled. ‘The fire – it’s still smoking. We should move.’
Someone, he didn’t know who, groaned, but he let that go. He understood that they were tired and relieved to have escaped the sinking sub without injury. He knew this was difficult, and yet, he knew they still had to go and see what had happened to those two people, tied and kneeling in front of the fire.
Gloria came to him, helped him to his feet. She had put one of the packs on her back and carried a rifle in her hands, the barrel pointing down at an angle. She resembled a marine, he thought – one of those war-weary soldiers who kept on trudging through, regardless.
‘Good to go, Captain,’ she said, with a half-smile. Rain dripped down her face, but to him she looked no less beautiful.
‘I’m glad you’re here with me,’ he said.
‘Okay, you two, enough of the romance. Let’s get moving before we’re struck by lightning.’ This was Brad, smirking from behind Ahmed. Next to them, Bernita and Patrice helped each other with their supplies. When everyone was ready, they trudged to the outcrop, doing the best they could to avoid slipping on the wet rocks.
‘You feel that?’ Gloria asked him about halfway. ‘The pulsing in the ground?’
‘Yeah,’ he said. He had noticed it the moment they’d hit land. At first he had considered it might have been his own heartbeat from all the exertion. It could well have been, given how tired he was. The pulsing, though, was unmistakable. It was as though the entire island was a huge creature that had come up out of the ocean and anchored itself in place so it could snooze.
‘It’s Gracefield’s project,’ Gloria added so the others could hear. ‘Victoria found reference to a similar effect in the Pentagon files.’
‘Why’s it still being used, and why here?’ Patrice asked.
‘Good question. I’m not sure – yet.’
They approached the outcrop and crossed a crack in the rock until they faced the bonfire on the flat shoreline. It was a small bay, crescent-shaped and with a dock made from a variety of ship parts. The flat, stony area could well have been a luxury beach in another time – a time when sand could gather.
No chance of that now, though.
The charred wood of the bonfire stood at least thirty feet high, Jim guessed. They approached until they were close enough to feel the heat coming off it, even with the wind and rain lashing down around them. A trail of smoke eddied up, dragged this way and that by the capricious breeze.
Bernita stopped short and gasped. There, on the shore, lay two men, unmoving.
‘Are they alive?’ Patrice whispered.
Alone, Jim approached. The others stayed back, probably out of respect, maybe out of fear. Jim, though, had to know, needed to know for certain who they were, and whether they were in fact dead. He crept closer, shining his flashlight on the two forms.
They were dark, almost black, plastic tarps around their bodies. He bent down to the first figure and carefully placed two fingers against its wet, cold neck.
He waited for at least a minute and felt no pulse. The same with the other man. When he lifted their heads, gripping their hair for purchase, their cold, pale faces stared back at him, each one sporting the same exit wound in the forehead – much like the scientists back at McKinley.
‘Well?’ Gloria asked, raising her voice against the wind.
Jim turned to his group and shook his head. ‘They’re not ours,’ he said.
Gloria carefully stepped over the wet pebbles and joined Jim. She inspected both men and sighed heavily. ‘A couple of the Brazilians,’ she said. ‘Part of a group of five. They were loyal Gracefield supporters back at McKinley – God knows what they did to deserve this.’
One thing Jim did know, however, was that despite the tragedy of losing two more lives, he was relieved this wasn’t Duncan, Eva, or one of the others. Jim inspected them more closely, trying to ascertain any background information, or reason why they had been executed like this.
The first man wore a number of necklaces made from wooden beads that now looked like ebony raisins. The other man was very heavyset and bald with large jowls. Even in death he looked like a kind man, Jim thought, like a wise old vicar or something.
Although not a religious man, Jim said a short prayer for the two men and hoped that they had died without pain or too much suffering. He couldn’t imagine the state of mind of the people who had done this to them. The voice in his head kept asking, over and over, Why? Why? Why?
‘Why indeed,’ Jim said to himself. He turned and rejoined the rest of his group.
‘Well?’ Brad asked. ‘Anything we should be worried about?’
‘Plenty,’ Jim said, ‘but thankfully the poor souls there aren’t any of the crew. Duncan and the rest of the team are out here somewhere. We need to find them, and quickly. If the people her
e are capable of doing that to people they know who were once loyal, what would they do to strangers who aren’t?’
‘They weren’t like this before,’ Gloria said. ‘The A20, I mean, and most of Gracefield’s followers. Sure, when it came to Gracefield, they got a little intense at times, but nothing as savage as this.’
‘You’ve not read Lord of the Flies, then?’ Brad asked. ‘Charismatic leaders and group dynamics can do weird shit to people, especially if you already have a few unbalanced personalities in the mix. It’s not like we had a smooth time of it on the flotilla, with Faust and Stanic.’
While the group talked and caught their breath, Jim noticed the thunder and lightning had eased. The rain and the wind, however, still blustered hard. He could deal with that. Not having the threat of being struck by lightning was a rare piece of good fortune in this sorry mess.
‘Come on,’ he said to the others. ‘I can see a path leading round the west side of the island over there.’ He pointed across the crescent bay to a rise of sharp, flat stone. A covering of mud, made from silt and decayed seaweed, leading from the bay showed a set of footprints. Jim assumed the path led around the shoreline to the deeper interior of the island – perhaps where Gracefield and the rest of them had shelter and facilities.
He checked that his pistol had a round in the chamber and placed it in the holster on his belt. He kept the flashlight in his hand, although in that moment, with the cloud movement, there was enough moonlight to see where they were walking, and he didn’t want to draw excessive attention to the group.
Gloria stepped up by his side, rifle at the ready.
‘You’re a strange woman,’ Jim said to her. ‘You seem so comfortable with all this.’
‘I’m scared shitless,’ she said. ‘I just hide it well. It’s all the years of training in the government. Never show fear, never admit to anything, and, if possible, always have a loaded gun nearby in case of an emergency.’ At that last statement, she flashed him another smile, and this filled him with both confidence and determination.
Soil (The Last Flotilla Book 2) Page 23