"Billy?" she said in a voice that was not much more than a whisper.
"You're awake then," said a voice behind her.
She turned around to see Billy standing there. She almost jumped on him. "Where have you been?" she said, her voice betraying more anxiety than she would have liked.
"I went to see if I could find us something to eat," he said. "I'm starving."
The lack of food in his hands suggested that he hadn't been able to find anything. "You should have woken me," she said.
He shrugged. "You didn't have a good night, I thought you needed the rest."
She was touched by the thought but shook her head. "You can't just go wondering off by yourself, okay? We don't know where we are or how dangerous it is. What if you'd been attacked?"
"By what?" he said.
"I don't know, lions."
"There aren't any lions here," he said.
"That's not the point. Something could have attacked you." He looked like he was about to shrug but she headed it off. "Something could have happened to me."
"Oh. I didn't think of that. Sorry."
She wrapped her arms across her chest and looked around the clearing. "We should get going."
"Get going where? You want to go back down the beach and see if we can find anyone?"
She shook her head. It seemed reasonably safe to assume they were on an island. Billy had said there was no land within four days of their previous position but a small island might have gone unnoticed. If that was the case then their priority was to find fresh water and food.
"We'll head inland," she said.
"Shouldn't we stay by the beach?" he said. "What if a ship passes by?"
She shook her head. "We'll come back. We might be able to catch fish but we'll dehydrate if we don't find fresh water."
He nodded. "What about the others?"
What others, she thought. There had been more than a thousand people on the ship and so far they hadn't seen a sign of any of them. Maybe there were others and but she wasn't about to let looking for them kill her. "If there here we'll find them," she said.
"You're the boss," he said.
She liked that. She was recovering from the shock of it all and feeling more like her old-old self again. She was the boss.
"Lead the way," he said.
She looked back at the beach which she could just see though a gap in the tree line. It seemed impossible that an island could just exist that no one knew about, but it seemed impossible that she and Billy had been the only survivors from the shipwreck. Yet here they were and here it was.
"This way," she said and led Billy into the forest.
10
Trevor unzipped the orange shelter and looked out. The rain was still falling but with less force. He would have liked to stay beneath the canopy but he had been desperate for a piss since sunrise and thought his bladder might actually explode if he held it any longer. He had considered using one (more likely two or three) of the empty water bottles but he had enough sense to realise that he would probably need to use those later to collect water.
He crawled out of the shelter. He shrank at the force of the sun; despite the rain it was uncomfortably hot. He could feel his skin shrivel and crisp like bacon.
The raft had hit land on a rocky outcrop and been punctured. He'd dragged it up the coast and now it was beneath a grey rock. He could see out to the horizon. The last of the ship had sunk beneath the water but he could still see bits of debris drifting towards the coast.
He scrambled down the side of the raft and almost slipped on the wet rocks, but caught himself just in time. More cautiously he edged forward to the cluster of bushes he had identified as the site of his toilet.
Trevor unzipped his trousers and looked down. Between the grey rocks there was a fine granular substance. It looked like someone had spilled freshly ground coffee on the floor. He relaxed and released himself. He watched as his urine cascaded down the rocks towards the black substance. To his surprise he watched a hole appear and the black stuff appeared to climb up the rocks. It looked like it was trying to avoid his piss.
Smiling to himself he chased the black stuff across the rocks until his stream ran dry. He didn't hit it once.
Thinking no more about it he did his trousers up and made his way back across the rocks to the raft. By the time he arrived the rain had stopped and the sun had baked it off his clothes and hair.
He pushed himself up into the raft and reached into the shelter. While the weather was dry he needed to try the radio. He didn't hold out much hope of it working. His phone hadn't switched on and his watch had stopped running. The red beacons that came fitted to the raft were useless too. But he wouldn't feel happy until he tried the radio.
It was a heavy black box. Fully waterproof and rugged enough to survive a thirty-story drop onto solid concrete. He placed it on the rock in front of him and was amused to see the black dots circle around it, almost as if they were investigating what it was.
The speakers crackled and hissed to life and he was surprised to find they did that much. He turned the frequency dial and could hear the modulation of the static. "Hello?" he said.
There was no response.
He wound the dial around until he'd tried all of the available frequencies. None of them provided better than ghosting.
Trevor looked at his surroundings; sea on one side and a tall slab of rock on the other. What he really needed to do was get to higher ground.
There was no point in waiting around. The sky was clear and he guessed he had a couple of hours before mid-day. He probably wouldn't be able to get the radio to work but at least he could say he tried and he was curious about his surroundings. He pulled the radio strap over his shoulder and dug out a couple of bottles of water from the raft. He shoved three energy bars into his pocket and set off.
He walked along the rocks until they gave way to white sandy beach. He could see the tops of trees on the cliff. They were unfamiliar to him but he was hardly an expert. He chomped on an energy bar and slurped down mouthfuls of water as he walked on into the sun.
After an hour of walking the land began to even out and ten minutes later it was completely flat. The plateau was vast. It would take a day or more to walk across it. The forest was distant and there was no place to shelter from the sun between the two.
Trevor dropped the heavy radio off his shoulder onto the grass. There didn't seem to be much point in walking all that way just to try out a radio that he was almost certain wouldn't work. He sat down on the grass and pulled another energy bar out of his pocket. He ate it and wondered what to do.
He looked down at the ground and saw the same black dots in the soil beneath the grass. They moved like liquid. Experimentally he reached out to touch the ground and as he did the dots parted to let his hand through. He put his whole hand flat on the grass and the little black dots gave him a couple of centimetres to spare.
He moved his hand around and watched them keep the exact same distance. It was as if his hand was a magnet repelling them. It was a strange thing but not particularly alarming. Trevor sat and played with the dots until the sun became too hot.
He tried the radio again. There was static and ghosting but no actual voices. He switched it off to conserve the battery and wondered what he was going to do now. He had enough food and water to last him for days but eventually he would run out. For the first time Trevor began to consider the possibility that escaping from the sinking ship did not mean that he was safe.
11
She wasn't sure when the sweat replaced water in sticking her clothes to her back and arms. Bright shards of sunlight hung in the air and it almost physically hurt to pass through them. The air in the forest was moist and too close.
The trees buzzed with life. She could hear branches creaked as birds took flight with flaps of feathered wings. Strange creatures called to each other in foreign tongues and seemed to laugh at them.
Samantha stopped and wiped away the swea
t that dripped from her forehead into her eyes. Billy was some distance behind her, crashing through the vines and bushes that she had passed with barely a sound.
They had been walking for two hours. The beach was a long way behind them now. They had found no rivers or rock pools but the fact that there was so much animal life suggested that there was fresh water somewhere.
Billy stopped beside her, panting and dripping sweat. His blue t-shirt clung to his chest and revealed that he was in better shape than she had thought.
"Have you found something?" he said.
She shook her head. If she could climb up one of the trees she might be able to see where they were. She was reasonably sure they weren't walking in circles but she couldn't be sure.
The curve of the beach had suggested that the island wasn't very big but no longer seemed to be the case. She had hoped that the land would rise further inland but it hadn't.
Billy's breathing returned to something like normal and she could feel the raging heat of her skin dissipate. "Come on," she said. They weren't going to find food and water if they didn't keep moving.
Time seemed to lose cohesion as she fought her way through the twisting vines and overgrown plants. The light continued unchanged and at some point she realised they could have been walking for hours or just a few minutes. She would have been able to make much quicker progress if she had her knife but hunting knives had not been permitted on the cruise ship.
"Stop," said Billy. He sounded tired, verging on exhausted. She thought he was going to ask for a rest and she was glad of it. Instead he said in a whisper, "did you hear that?"
She held her head up and listened. She heard birds tweeting in the branches above and she heard insects chirruping in the dark green bushes. She heard a gentle wind rustling the leaves and she heard her own breathing. Nothing out of place. She shook her head.
Billy held a finger up to his lips and gestured for her to follow him. She walked silently behind him and caught the bendy branches as they snapped back behind him. He bent his back to keep low and she did the same.
He stopped and held up his hand. She crept forward to see what he was looking at and on the other side of the bushes she saw two small black animals.
They were the size of a small dog but fatter and with snouts. They were little pigs, rooting around in a small clearing no bigger than a car. Her stomach rumbled and again she wished that she had her knife with her.
"Look at the ground," said Billy.
It was covered with a translucent slime and large shards of grey-white shell. The little pigs were eating it.
"What do you think it is?" said Billy.
She watched them for a moment longer but nothing came to her. "No idea," she said. "Let's keep going." She wasn't sure why but the place had bad vibes. It didn't feel safe. On the other hand, if there were pigs here there had to be water. Her mouth was dry and her tongue stuck to the roof of her mouth.
She turned away and after a moment Billy followed her.
12
Grace was woken by the siren. At first she wasn't particularly alarmed. In her opinion the sensors were to sensitive. She had told plenty of people this but no one listened to her.
She had worked the night shift so the fact that it was mid-day wasn't a problem. The problem was she had another night shift coming up and if she didn't get her eight hours it would be a nightmare. Not that the work was particularly difficult, exactly the opposite in fact, there really wasn't any work. The hardest thing she would have to do was stay awake.
She rolled out of bed and pulled her combats over her night shirt. She wasn't planning to stay out of bed for any longer than it took to find out what was going on. She grabbed her glasses from her nightstand and walked out.
The corridor outside her room was as busy as Paddington Station at rush hour. People in black uniforms charged along it clutching tablets and notebooks. Grace pressed herself against the wall and narrowly avoided being mowed down by a sergeant with blinkered vision.
The siren continued to blare, the lights flashed and turned the windowless grey walkway red. This was unusual for a false alarm. Normally they were discovered quickly and called off within minutes. The people running manically along the corridor looked as if they thought something had really happened.
Grace was unwilling to believe it was anything more than a false alarm but when the coast was clear she headed off in the direction of the lab.
The lab was on the other side of the complex and everyone else seemed to be going in the opposite direction. This, and Grace's conviction that nothing was actually wrong, meant that the usually five minute journey took closer to fifteen.
She swiped her security card and typed in her password. Each button had an embedded fingerprint scanner to further identify her. Once she had been approved the door slid open and she walked into the darkened laboratory.
The water in the tank filtration system bubbled and the air conditioning units hummed. The lighting was in strips along the floor, illuminating the path she was supposed to take and warning her not to stray into somebody else's experiment.
She glanced into a few of the coffin sized tanks as she passed. Amorphous green skin pulsated and bubbled. In one tank she saw nothing but slimy black eyes.
Grace was a junior lab technician which basically meant she cleaned up and prepared things for the 'real' scientists. A position she was grossly over qualified for. In the real world she would have been senior scientist somewhere or running her own lab. A point she had made very clear when applying for the job.
The only reason she had accepted the job was the promise that one day a position would open up and she would be able to play with The Grigori's near infinite resources outside of any country's laws.
She found the rest of the lab staff in meeting room one. The door was locked and her clearance wasn't high enough to get in. Embarrassingly she had to knock.
"About time Fisher," snarled Jack Micano. His suit jacket was wrinkled and his shirt was untucked. He looked like he had just rolled out of bed too, despite never having worked a night shift in his life.
Jack was the head of Bio-Sci on the island and, seeing him look so distressed, it finally dawned on Grace that whatever was going on it wasn't a sensor malfunction. She muttered an apology and slunk into the packed room. There were no free chairs so she joined the rest of the junior technicians against the wall at the back of the room.
Jack closed the door behind him and walked to the top of the board room table. "As I was saying," he looked across at her and Grace sunk into herself. Suddenly she was very aware that she had her pyjamas on under her uniform.
She looked around the room. A lot of the faces were familiar to her as people that worked in the lab day in and day out. They all looked dishevelled and wore looks of fierce concern. Some of the faces she had only seen in passing, high up figures who came up with experiments but hardly ever put in lab time. Whatever was going on it was serious.
"At zero three-hundred hours today a cruise ship called the 'Lady Pacifica' was caught in a cyclone about twenty miles off the coast. The ship contained twelve-hundred civilians and a crew of seventy five."
Grace stood to attention. She had been working at three that morning and she didn't know anything about a shipwreck. Granted, it wasn't her job to monitor the coast but she was sure Micano would find a way to twist it so she was at fault.
"We have monitored the evacuation of the ship and the majority of passengers and crew are travelling away from us. The authorities have been informed and they will be picked up within the next twelve hours. Unfortunately more than two-hundred people went down with the ship."
Grace nodded along with the rest of the people in the room but may have been unique in wondering whether The Grigori had done anything to help the people who had ended up going down with the ship.
"What concerns us is the fifty-two bodies who have come ashore at various points across the island."
Some people muttered to each o
ther anxiously. Grace turned as the vague shapes of people walking past the frosted glass wall caught her eye. She knew the protocol.
The Grigori operated outside the law but the things that happened on the island went well beyond that. Governments might be persuaded to turn a blind eye to the occasional abduction but the things that happened on the island would not be overlooked. They were doing experiments that might take decades to show results and centuries to gain social acceptance. They weren't always nice things, and they wouldn't be understood, but they were important.
As they sat in the conference room discussing what had happened soldiers would be spreading throughout the complex preparing to destroy it. She knew it was what had to be done but all of those experiments felt personal and to destroy them seemed like such a waste.
"Security have been tracking the survivors since they landed and several of them seem to be making their way inland. I don't need to tell you the danger this poses to us and our work here.
"We are prepared to evacuate. Right now boats and helicopters are on standby and security are preparing the self-destruct protocol. If the survivors breach our compound the security team will attempt to kill them but if that fails we will evacuate and the island will be detonated."
Grace thought about Mikey. He wouldn't know what was happening. He wouldn't understand. Poor thing, he was just a baby really.
"Are there any questions?" said Micano.
Grace shook her head, she had tears in her eyes. No one else had anything to say either.
"Good, then I suggest you all get some rest, grab coffee or something. We should know more in the next few hours."
Grace followed the rest of the lab techs out of the room. The alarm had stopped. They spread out around the lab to check on the experiments they were responsible for. Grace kept walking. The experiment she cared about most was out there, on the island, and that was where she was going.
Three Stories Tall Page 18