Immortal and the Island of Impossible Things (The Immortal Series Book 4)

by Gene Doucette

  “This is not how it’s supposed to happen.”

  “According to the prophet.”

  “Yes. He was to die in combat, and you and I are to continue to the camp alone.”

  “Look, you can’t have it both ways. If his death was predicted and it didn’t happen, that should tell you the future isn’t nearly as preordained as you thought it was. Besides, I thought he was the only one who knew the way.”

  “I had to say that to make sure we got to this point. I know the way just fine. And the only reason it didn’t happen as it was supposed to is because you tried to intervene.”

  “Because that wasn’t supposed to happen either.”

  “Now you understand.”

  “So rather than recognize maybe your prophet isn’t a hundred percent correct, you’re going to do everything you can to reset things to match what she said was going to happen. By letting him die.”

  “By allowing him to die as he was supposed to.”

  “Right. Fine, then you’re going to have to go over there and kill him, because if you don’t do that I’m going to put something together to carry him on, and tomorrow we’ll be looking for help, whether you’re with us or not.”

  She looked past me at the still-breathing Bruno, and it looked like she was considering it.

  “All right,” she said. “I’ll help. But only if we carry him back to the camp. We have a doctor.”

  10

  A stretcher is one of those things I know how to make from scratch. It’s possible I made my first one more than fifty thousand years ago, at a time when we certainly didn’t call it a stretcher, or any other word, because we barely had words.

  What we did have was a regular need to transport large, heavy, awkwardly weighted collections of meat great distances using the combined strength of more than one ambulatory person. Typically, we were carrying dead animals, so there was no need to worry about things like whether we tied them to the log too tightly.

  Every now and then, it turned out the animal in question wasn’t entirely dead, which led to the kind of fun you just can’t have nowadays. (I’m being sarcastic. It was terrifying. Kind of funny in hindsight, but not at all pleasant in the moment.)

  Very occasionally, we would apply the same technology to get a member of our own hunting party back to the rest of the tribe. When doing this we did have to care about the wellbeing of the person we were carrying, so the technique was a little different. Instead of being lashed to the bottom of a log, they had to be tied to the top of two or three logs, and for the most part we had to be a lot more careful about keeping them stable and as levelly horizontal as was reasonable. And in the event of a larger predator turning up at the sight of an easy meal, we couldn’t just drop the tied-down meat and run, and then circle back and kill the predator.

  (This happened a lot. We had a word for it, the rough translation of which would be trading up.)

  We didn’t do this all that often for people in our hunting party, because of the whole large predator problem. Traveling with someone immobilized put the whole party at risk. A wounded man on a six man team could mean we were guaranteed to return with only five men, or we could take a real chance that none of us made it back. Usually, then, if someone was carried it was because they were considered important.

  When it was my turn on the stretcher, thankfully I was considered important enough.

  My point is not that Bruno was especially important, though, it’s that I knew how to make a good stretcher. Unfortunately, that knowledge was based on my standing in an African equatorial jungle. These were different trees.

  What kind of trees? I don’t even know, just like I didn’t know what the names of the African trees were. But I knew how to spot limbs that were sturdy enough for use but weak enough to snap off the trunk without anything sharper than a slightly pointy rock, and I knew how to turn thin twigs and vines into rope.

  In Africa. We weren’t in Africa.

  After about an hour of looking, I was able to come up with two passably utile long sticks, but nothing I could use to make rope from, which made the sticks not at all useful. Then I remembered we also had a sleeping bag and a blanket.

  By morning, Bruno was wrapped up in a cocoon with sticks on either side. Given there was no support underneath, the setup was especially sensitive to movement, so the trip was going to result in him being in a lot of pain.

  In my opinion this was better than dying from a combination of exposure and whatever wild animals were out there that liked the taste of incubus flesh. I can’t say for sure Bruno saw it the same way. By morning his head had cleared up enough for the words from his mouth to start to make a little bit of sense, which was both good and bad.

  “You bitch, you bitch, you bitch,” he muttered over and over.

  “Hey,” I said, after a good hour of this. “Enough with that.”

  I was holding him at the head end of the stretcher. Gordana had the feet. She was leading the way, which meant she held the stretcher behind her as she walked. This was awkward, so we switched positions regularly, with her directing me from behind. It was slow-going no matter what, because while it was a gorgeous day, it was also hot, the kind of day Mirella would have spent just diving into the ocean over and over, to wet her skin and let it cool in the cliff-side breeze.

  The heat made everything feel heavier. We had the two backpacks tied to the poles underneath Bruno, who was already a dead weight, and we were all sweating, and quickly running out of bottled water.

  “She knew,” Bruno said. Then he gasped in pain from a light jostling caused by uneven ground.

  “Who knew? Your prophet, or your sister?”

  “She’s no sister. I have a real sister. She’s a bitch too.”

  “I told you to stop saying that.”

  “Cunt, then.”

  “Not any better.”

  “She was told to expect my death.”

  “So she was. And she didn’t tell you.”

  “Why shouldn’t I curse her then? I already knew her as a bitch, this only secures it. Tell me I’m wrong.”

  “You both follow the same lunatic, don’t you?”

  “Don’t call her that. But yes.”

  “If this prophet told you Gordana wouldn’t live to see the camp again, but that you had to keep that to yourself, wouldn’t you have?”

  “Yes, of course. But that’s different. Her kind is useless. A biological accident. Her death would be a correction.”

  “I’m beginning to think she had a point about leaving you to die.”

  “She was right.”

  “Was she? Because we could still do that.”

  “No.” He hesitated. Or, he was in too much pain to continue right away. “Thank you for trying to help. If I don’t sweat to death in this oven you’ve constructed for me or suffocate from my internal wounds I doubt it will be worth much, but I appreciate you trying.”

  “Well you’re welcome. Don’t take it too personally, though, I really don’t like you.”

  He laughed, coughed, cried out in pain, and then didn’t say anything for a while.

  * * *

  “I have to stop,” Gordana called out, after another hour. “He’s too heavy.”

  We’d been going uphill, and the path—which was hardly a path at all—didn’t have much in the way of clearings or flat space. So, we just stopped where we were, slid the stretcher to the ground between two trees, and sat on the uneven mossy earth.

  I unzipped the side of the sleeping bag. Bruno gasped.

  “It is a thousand degrees in this, thank you.”

  His body was still a twisted mess. Before sealing him up in the bag I’d done what I could to splint the broken limbs with branches and torn bits of clothing, but he still looked as if a giant had picked him up and crumpled him into a ball like a piece of paper. He was also covered in sweat, and steam was rising off.

  I put a bottle of water into his good hand and propped up his head so he could have a little.


  “We are going to run out of water soon,” Gordana said.

  “Then we’ll find some more.” I said.

  “Where?”

  “One thing at a time.”

  “We’re not going to make it to the camp before sundown,” she said.

  “As I said, one thing at a time.”

  “Our leader said…”

  “Don’t. I don’t care. For all we know, she told you what she told you so that what’s happening now ended up happening. Trying to align yourself with fate is a waste of time.”

  Bruno was getting greedy about the water, so I had to take it away before he made himself sick. If he had any crude words to say about this, they didn’t come out.

  “Last night,” I said, to Bruno, “you tried to describe what attacked you. Do you remember?”

  “Do I remember describing it, or do I remember what attacked me?”

  “Pick one. What was it?”

  “I never saw anything like it before. Short, slimy. Very strong. He had no feet.”

  “What was he standing on?” I saw enough to recognize that the thing in the forest the night before was a biped.

  “Legs? I don’t know. Tubes. Macaroni. I didn’t ask.”

  Bruno rubbed sweat from his forehead, and then something weird happened. His fingers came off gummy. Like mucus was coming out of his pores.

  “Would you look at that. On top of all else, I think I may be melting.”

  * * *

  I had almost no understanding of the medical intricacies of his species, but it was pretty clear that what was happening to Bruno was decidedly atypical. Gordana clearly never saw this before, based on her expression—something between surprise and disgust, but not familiarity—so if this was how they died normally, she’d never seen a member of her own species perish. Given their lack of proper family dynamic, this was entirely feasible.

  Possibly, incubi melted as they died. That sounds a bit loopy, and I get that, but I also know some of these impossible beings actually do melt, albeit after death. That’s what happens to demons. When one of them dies the body breaks down almost immediately. I don’t know why or how, it just happens. Bruno wasn’t a demon and he wasn’t dead, so his gradual dissolution still didn’t make a lot of sense, but notionally it wasn’t entirely out of bounds.

  Thinking maybe the heat was causing it, we didn’t bundle him back up in the sleeping bag, even though it made him much harder to carry. Instead, we zipped the bag up and put him on top of it. Short of stripping him down naked and using his clothes, though, we had nothing to tie him down with, so we did our best to keep the stretcher flat and went a little more slowly.

  But then the climb got a lot steeper, and it became pretty clear pretty fast that we were going to require another solution.

  “We have to leave him,” Gordana said for probably the eighth or ninth time. She wasn’t bothering to say this quietly any more, perhaps hoping Bruno would volunteer to die sooner. He was lying at an angle on the forest floor a few feet away, muttering curses under his breath and humming show tunes in an odd, atonal way. It wasn’t clear he was fully in attendance. “We’re only a half-day’s walk from here. If we hurry, we’ll make it before dark. We can return for him in the morning, with more people to help with the transport. If he’s well-hid... don’t look me that way, it’s the best we can do.”

  “I’ll stay with him. You go; I’ll be waiting for you.”

  “That’s not how it’s supposed to happen.”

  “It’s either that or you give me some very good directions and I’ll go ahead while you wait with him.”

  “Directions.”

  “Like, make a left at the big tree, go straight when you see the leaf.”

  “I don’t think that would work.”

  “I don’t either. I thought the sarcasm made that obvious.”

  “You would have to keep the rest of the water and the food, and ration both. You will still run out before morning.”

  “Then I hope you’re right about it being only a half-day from here.”

  She sighed, and was perfectly lovely when doing so.

  I have maybe not underlined this enough, but being in the middle of the tropics with a succubus—where there is little clothing being worn and what is worn is soaked through with sweat—is under almost every other circumstance the definition of paradise. My luck to end up in one of the only times this was a bad thing.

  “She will be angry with me for leaving you.”

  “You can tell her I was too stubborn to go and you weren’t strong enough to overpower me. It’s the truth.”

  “I haven’t tried to overpower you via every available means, Adam,” she said, smiling.

  “Well, I appreciate that. But I prefer my sex recreational, not coercive. You understand.”

  “Better than you think. All right. I will go. If you must move... if there is danger, I mean, try and move uphill. I expect to see you here in the morning, alive.”

  “I’m all in favor of that too.”

  “And if you aren’t here, we’ll look for you. Oh, gods, I’m going to be in so much trouble for leaving you here.”

  “I can take care of myself.”

  “Just stay safe. Hide.”

  She hugged me, I hugged her back, and with nothing more than a side-eyed look of disgust directed to Bruno, she headed up the hill.

  I watched until she was no longer visible, which happened pretty fast. The jungle was thick.

  Then we were alone. I sat down and pondered the fact that I didn’t know where I was.

  It was pretty alarming to think that I could travel on foot for only a day, on an island I’d called home for over two years, and end up completely lost. I mean, you can go a long distance in a day—longer if you run most of it, which I certainly had in me—but we were talking about an island. There was only so far to go, and only so many ways to get lost. I grant that a largely undifferentiated jungle setting differed significantly from an island like Manhattan, with its numbered streets and right-angles, but this island was also smaller than Manhattan.

  I checked on Bruno. He was still oozing, or melting or whatever, but seemed to be sleeping somewhat comfortably for the moment. Well, or he’d passed out from the pain or lapsed into a coma, but sleeping seemed like a nicer option. Plus he was still muttering things, and people in comas didn’t tend to do that.

  With him looking about as okay as he got, I climbed the tree under which he was resting. It was the best way to figure out where the hell I was.

  All I could see from the top of the tree was water on one side and the high point of the island’s miniature mountain on the other. No lower island, no village. And I was really upset about this for about five minutes until I realized I was looking at water because we’d walked around to the back of the island at some point. Tsunami or not, I would have had the same view.

  That made plenty of sense. If you can see enough of the future to anticipate a tidal wave, it’s a good idea to camp out above the water line, but an even better idea to pick a spot on the blind side of the island. This side didn’t get much tourist traffic either—it had beaches, but they were rocky, and the way down to them was steep and unpleasant—so there was less chance of being discovered. Plus I’m told the sharks preferred that side.

  I imagined that the point in which our trip went from a slight incline to a steep one coincided with the point at which the path we followed turned for the direct climb up the mountain.

  A half-day’s travel from that point was probably just short of the top, where all the best estates were. I wondered how a group of squatters managed to go unnoticed on that land.

  I was about ready to climb back down when some movement caught my eye. To the right and downhill, treetops were moving in a pattern contrary to the push of the wind. It was slight, but not incidental: something large was traveling below the canopy over there. In a leisurely sort of way, it was heading towards us.

  I slid down the tree. It was time t
o hide.

  * * *

  There was no natural depression in the ground to work with this time. We were basically where Gordana and I jointly decided we could no longer continue to carry Bruno, and it was an exposed area. Rather than try and figure out a way to move him, I spent the afternoon collecting what loose plant life I could from the forest floor, and then I essentially buried him under it. I could have, at that point, tried burying myself, or at minimum disguised my scent with some dirt and moss, but decided it made just as much sense to climb back up the tree and hide out there for the evening. It would hardly be the first time.

  “There is a box,” Bruno muttered.

  “What’s that?”

  His voice was barely audible.

  “A box, I said. Metal. A tincture. In my pocket.”

  “Hang on.”

  I had to unbury him a little to get to his pants. It was in the back pocket.

  “Ah yes, thank you. Could you open it? Carefully.”

  I sat beside him and slid the top of the container off. There was a yellowish substance inside.

  “Sulfur?” I asked. It smelled like it.

  “And some other things. I don’t want to be a bother, but could you put some of that on your finger and hold it under my nose?”

  I did, somewhat reluctantly. He whiffed it up, held it for several seconds, and then started breathing normally again.

  “Yes, that’s good, thank you,” he said.

  “Is this like snuff?” I asked. People used to inhale finely ground tobacco, and they called it snuff. I know, it sounds dumb.

  “It’s a palliative. It wouldn’t work on you. Particular to my kind.”

  “You made this in the hotel room.”

  “I did, yes.”

  “And it’s a drug?”

  “Closer to aspirin than to heroin.”

  “Medicinal, not recreational.”

  “Yes, that’s it,” he said. “I’ve been fighting a cold.”

  He drifted off into something that should have been a laugh, but laughing hurt too much, so it was mostly a wheeze and a gasp.