Islanders

by John Barlow

  “Ah...” Silver said quietly, her face flooding with dread.

  “You know what this is!” Ben shouted.

  “I...,” she said, “I...”

  Four pairs of eyes pinned her to her seat.

  “I... I’ve heard about them. To be honest, I thought all these things had died out. Most mutations did. Plus,” she lowered her voice, “I didn’t want to worry you.”

  Worse lost his temper: “Tell us! Now! And anything else you thought might worry us!”

  He grabbed Coby’s paddle and held it out as if her was going to swat her with it.

  Ben tried to grab the paddle off him.

  “It’s okay, Ben,” Silver said. “He’s right. I should have said. I should have told you everything. It’s another mutation. A piranha-star. You remember starfish? From the books at school? Somehow or other, they mutated. The germs must have filtered out as far as the sea. Look.”

  They all stared down into the water. The shining silvery star had a set of teeth at the center, lurking inside a snarling, lip-less mouth. It was ugly, about the ugliest thing you could imagine. So ugly it was cute.

  “Apparently, the Survivors came across one or two of them washed up on the beach, right after the war, years ago. Mutations don’t normally survive long. I guess there’s always an exception...”

  “Piranhas!” Worse whispered. “Fish that can eat through anything, greedy little things!”

  He leant over the side and watched the star-shaped monster float peacefully in the water. Then he gave it a gentle prod with the paddle. Suddenly, it’s fishy mouth jerked wide open, and its tiny teeth, pearly white and as sharp as razors, snapped with incredible speed, becoming a blur as they took a chunk out of the wooden paddle in a split second.

  “Whoa-ho!” Worse yelped, leaping backwards and tumbling onto the floor of the boat, upside down, his legs high in the air. He held up the paddle, which was now a bit smaller, and started laughing.

  The others didn’t find it so funny. Especially Silver.

  “Are they...?” Ben asked.

  Silver nodded. The others turned white.

  “Are they what?” Worse said, still grinning. “What?”

  “Carnivorous,” Ben said, and huddled down in his seat.

  They were still a couple of hundred yards from the shore. Who was going to do the paddling now? The piranha-star floated next to the boat, its large eyes staring up at them, those deadly teeth hidden away under its grotesque mouth. Then it began to spin. It rotated slowly, flipping its five arms as it moved in a circle. It got faster and faster, until you could no longer make out the separate parts of it, spinning so quickly that it started to whirl and buzz as it went.

  “Wow!” Bad said. “That’s cool!”

  The others were too amazed to speak. But it was pretty cool.

  The piranha-star swam in front of the boat and then stopped. It hovered there, just below the surface of the water, its black eyes looking back at the boat. Then it started to turn again and spun a few feet further away.

  “Is it...?” Coby said, a little embarrassed, “is it, is it telling us to follow?”

  “It’s a fish, you dope!” Worse said. “I mean a star... ehm, I mean, it’s a piranha... it’s a...” He stopped. He didn’t know what it was.

  “Look,” said Ben. “It can’t harm us from there. If it swims towards us, we’ll hear it buzz, right? As long as it stays ahead, we’re not in any danger.”

  Worse grabbed a paddle. “Let’s get to the shore. Come on, it’s not far now.”

  Bad took the other paddle. The boat moved in the direction of the piranha-star, which spun a little further off, keeping a short distance between them.

  The mainland was now so close that they could see the sand on the beach, which ran far into the distance in both directions. It was just like the beach on the Island, but longer, going on forever. Behind the beach was a cliff. Then, just visible above the cliff head, clusters of trees.

  As the boat got closer to the shore, Ben’s eyes were fixed on those trees. Because whatever was there, whatever dangers lay in wait for him, they were there, beyond the trees, the same dangers his dad had faced. And now he must face them too.

  The boat ran aground. They had made it. They were on the mainland.

  For a second nobody moved. The only sound was the lapping of the water against the boat’s sides. The piranha-star floated nearby, hovering silently in the water.

  “Right,” Worse said, untying the paddles from the rope and handing one end of it to his brother. “Tie this onto something, and I’ll pull the boat into shore.”

  Without thinking, Bad did what he was told.

  Worse stood on the very end of the boat. “Stay here. No point all of us getting our ankles bitten off by a piranha.”

  With that he splashed down. He sprinted through the knee-high water, the rope in his hand. Had a person ever run so quickly through water before? Probably not, because in an instant he was on the beach, gasping for breath. In fact he was a good ten or fifteen yards up the beach, just to make sure that the piranha-star had not followed him.

  He turned around, hands on his hips, panting.

  “A-ha!” he said between breaths. “I’m the first! The first! Number one! Look, I’m a mainlander now!” and he emphasized the point by stomping around and kicking sand into the air. It was as if he had actually discovered the mainland, as if it was all his.

  “Come on, then, pull us in!” his brother said, unable to conceal his annoyance that Worse had been the first one onto the mainland. Bad knew that he would never be allowed to forget it. How brave your brother is! people would tell him, when they heard the story. Nobody would ever forget this. Worse, they would say, the bravest one of all! Bad’s good, but Worse is better!

  Worse yanked hard on the rope, tugging the boat within a yard or two of the water’s edge. From there, the other four could jump right onto the sand without getting as much as a toe wet.

  Once on dry land, they tried to pull the boat up onto the beach. But it wouldn’t budge, and would have to stay there, sitting in the water.

  “Well,” Silver said, looking out over the wide stretch of sea that they’d crossed, hardly able to see the tiny dot of the Island on the horizon, “that wasn’t too difficult, was it?”

  “Difficult? It was easy!” Worse said, sitting down, then stretching out on his back, hands behind his head, as if he were sunbathing. Even Coby laughed, and took a seat on the soft, dry sand.

  Then there was the buzzing sound again. The piranha-star was hovering as near to them as it could, in the shallowest water, right next to the boat.

  “Look,” said Silver, pulling a small potato out of her pocket. “I was going to give it to him before. Do you think he’ll like it?”

  “A potato?” Ben said, blinking with amazement. “You’re gonna give a potato to a piranha.”

  “To celebrate a successful voyage across the water! And, it’s a piranha-star,” she corrected him, before edging cautiously up to the water and dropping the potato near to the boat, then rushing back up the beach out of harm’s way, giggling.

  The piranha-star flapped its arms, moving closer to the strange object in the water. Twice it swam around the potato, inspecting it from all sides, tickling it with the tips of its star-arms.

  Then the water turned into a bubbling wash of sea-spray. The piranha-star had gone mad, tumbling everywhere, flapping and splashing about as it devoured the potato.

  “Wow!” Silver said, as Worse and Coby stood up, and all five of them took a few steps backwards. “Piranha-stars like potatoes!”

  The water got noisier and noisier, as the sea was churned to a froth. More piranha-stars swarmed in, dozens of them, attracted by the action. The noise became unbearable, a kind of high-pitched screaming whiz above the watery splashes. They flipped up out of the water, colliding with each other in mid-air, their savage mouths snapping mercilessly as they broke the surface, those horrific teeth glistening in the sun, one fat
piranha head banging right into another in the mayhem, spinning out of control.

  “They’re fighting!” Bad said, not quite sure whether to laugh. They all moved further and further back up the beach.

  “Cool!” Worse whispered, and looked around for something to throw at the pack of fighting fish to see if they’d eat it.

  But he didn’t have to throw anything. As the bubbling, seething mass of piranha-stars became a mob—there must have been a hundred of them at least—a scraping, rumbling sound could be heard. They were attacking the boat.

  It rocked and turned in the shallow water. Stars sprang out of the water, propelled by their big, muscular star-arms, crashing into the side of the boat and dropping back down. Then there came a sharp, splintering sound of cracking wood: they were biting the boat to pieces. The sound was frightening to hear, a terrible drumming sound, the sound of voracious, unstoppable destruction.

  The boat tipped. From inside, a vicious piranha head flapped momentarily into view: they had eaten through the bottom. Bits of wood floated off on the water’s foamy surface. Then bigger chunks came away as the crazed fish bit and bit and bit. Holes appeared in the side of the boat, and as quickly as a hole was made, twenty pairs of piranha teeth attacked it, chomping at its edges, tearing off mouthfuls of wood until, after little more than a couple of minutes, the boat creaked under its own weight and collapsed in two.

  The feeding frenzy now got even worse, as the contents of the boat—all of Silver’s bags, the eggs, the cheese and potatoes, and the many ingenious bits and pieces that she had brought—were all chewed up and spat out. Even her canvas bags were devoured, turned to soggy, chewed-up fluff in a matter of seconds.

  Before long there was nothing left but the crippled remains of a red rowing boat.

  Chapter Eight

  After the piranha-stars had spun away, Ben and the others crept slowly up to the water’s edge. On the surface floated chunks of red boat-wood, scraps of rope and canvas, and other bits of unidentifiable stuff, all lost forever.

  Ben shivered. His confidence had drained away, like water from a sink. He looked behind him, at the ridge of rocky cliffs, and he tried to imagine what lay beyond them. Whatever it was, whatever the mainland had waiting for them, they were stuck with it.

  He turned back and looked down. There was a glint of light. He looked harder. Again he saw it, a twinkling of bright, golden light coming from beneath the water just ahead of them.

  “The magnifying glass!”

  It was about three or four feet from the edge, lying at the bottom on the sand, reflecting the sunlight that shone down through the water. There were a few other things, too.

  “Even a piranha-star can’t eat glass,” Silver said.

  “Or metal!” Ben added.

  They peered down at the sea bed. No one moved.

  “What about our sheaf-knives?” said Worse. “They’re metal, but I can’t see them.”

  “Probably been dragged out to sea,” said Silver. “Or buried in the sand.” She grinned: “Fortunately, I have kept this!”

  From the pocket of her jeans she got out a penknife, one of those with about fifty different things on it: bottle-opener, tiny scissors, nail file, screw-driver... “I, ehm, borrowed it from my dad. It’s his prize possession!”

  The others looked at it with a mixture of amazement and jealousy.

  “And,” Silver said, noticing the look in their eyes, and returning the penknife to her pocket, “I think it’ll be safe enough with me! You lot can have the other stuff.”

  They all looked again at the water.

  “Well...” said Ben.

  “Well what?” Worse snapped. “Don’t look at me! Someone else can get ’em!”

  Before they could argue about it, Coby splashed into the water with both feet and plunged his arm right down to the bottom. He grabbed the magnifying glass and threw it over his shoulder. Shaking with fear, he plunged his arm in again, looking all around him for approaching piranha-stars, and retrieved a small, square billy can and the catapult. He sprang out of the sea as if it were a trampoline. The whole thing took no more than a second.

  He flopped down on the sand, shaking visibly, terrified at what he had just done. Hanging his head between his knees, he said:

  “Right. Don’t any of you expect me to do anything else like that today. Okay?”

  The others simply stared at him, astounded.

  “Did you hear me! I said, don’t...”

  “We heard you,” Ben said.

  Worse laughed, but he was impressed, no matter how he tried to hide it. They all were.

  If Coby had known just how close he had come to danger, to something far worse than a sea snake, worse perhaps than a piranha-star, he would have died of fright. Because right there, exactly where he had trod, lurked the head of a giant mutant sea python, buried just under the sand near the water’s edge. It was fast asleep, and its enormous black body stretched thirty feet out to sea. Sea pythons lay under the wet sand to keep cool. And they are definitely carnivorous.

  Meanwhile, Bad an’ Worse cleaned the water and sand off the magnifying glass and the little cooking tin. The piranha-stars had eaten the rubber sling of the catapult, so it was useless. But they cleaned it anyway. Silver, meanwhile, couldn’t resist messing about with her penknife.

  Ben, though, was thinking.

  “You know,” he said, making sure they were all listening, “I think we should all look after one of the things we’ve got.”

  No one argued. But, of course, Bad an’ Worse both wanted the penknife.

  “Coby, why don’t you look after the billy can. It’s not very big, but I reckon it’s gonna be really useful. We need someone to make sure it stays with us, whatever happens. Okay?”

  Coby nodded, pleased with his new responsibility; he had never been given anything to look after before. He strung the belt of his trousers through the handle of the small tin, and from then on wherever he went, a little square cooking tin went bobbing on his hip.

  Bad an’ Worse didn’t mind about the tin, either. It was useless.

  Ben continued:

  “Silver,” he said, “why don’t you let Bad have the knife?”

  “NO WAY!” she screeched. “Not a chance. No, no, no!” her voice getting louder with every word. “Give me one good reason!”

  Ben waited for her screeching to stop. Then, very gently, he took the penknife from her and opened the main blade. It looked sharp and pretty dangerous.

  “Imagine we meet something that’s not very friendly,” he said, turning the blade in his hands so that it glinted in the light. “Who’s gonna fight it off, Silver? Who do you think should be holding the knife when danger comes our way?”

  She looked at Bad, tall and strong and ready for anything; she looked at her penknife, so shiny and clean, the only weapon they had.

  “Huummph!” she said, and turned her back on the group.

  Ben gave Bad the penknife. Then he went on:

  “Worse, you take the catapult. I know it’s useless now, but if we manage to fix it, you’ll have a decent weapon as well.”

  “Why can’t I have the penknife?” he said.

  Ben thought for a moment.

  “Because,” he said, “you’re Worse.”

  “And?”

  “You’re tough, aren’t you? Tough enough to fight? If your brother has the knife, we need someone else, someone with his hands free, if things turn nasty. You understand?”

  Worse grunted, trying to conceal his pride. “Yeah,” he said, “but I want the first new thing we get.”

  “Deal.”

  Now all eyes fell on Silver, who still had her back to the group. Without even turning round, she said:

  “And I suppose nice sweet Silver, the girl, gets the magnifying glass, so she can start a little fire every evening and make supper for all you big brave men!” She spun round, her face red with anger. “Well I’m not going to! I’m not! It’s not fair!”

  “No
,” Ben said, calmly. “I’m gonna keep the magnifying glass myself.”

  Silver gulped with surprise.

  He reached into his shirt pocket, and took out the compass, which he had put there during all the commotion with the sea snakes on the boat.

  “We need you to be in charge of this,” he said. “You’re the only one who knows how to use it properly.” He gave her the compass, a thick disc of metal, about as big as her palm. “Whatever happens, we have to know how to get back here, to the coast, so that we can get another boat and go back to the Island. As soon as we find a safe place to live, we have to go back and get everybody from the Island. It’s the most important job, Silver. Without this, we’re doomed. Everyone is.”

  Silver closed her fingers around the compass, and said nothing.

  “You better have this, as well,” and he took the map from his pocket, the one from the boy in the boat. “It doesn’t look like much, but you might as well keep it.”

  Silver took the map, unfolded it, and looked.

  “This isn’t a map!” she said. “It’s a cross on a piece of paper! And the ‘N’ at the bottom, below the cross? If it were a map, North would be at the top. This is nonsense!”

  “It’s from the boy. The boy who washed up on the south beach! He brought a message about my da...”

  “It’s a cross on a piece of paper, Ben.”

  “But...” said Ben.

  He snatched the paper back and put it in his pocket.

  Suddenly there was a deafening noise, so loud that for a second their ears stung and buzzed with pain. Sand and water were falling from the sky, covering them in cold, wet sludge. Without looking to see where it had come from, they started to run up the beach, so afraid that they couldn’t feel their legs moving beneath them.

  Finally, doubled over and gasping for air, they stopped and looked back towards the sea. An enormous black snake was writhing about in the water. It was throwing great waves of salt water up into the sky, as well as tons and tons of sand, as it howled and twisted about in agony. Attached to its long, black, shiny sides were piranha-stars, gorging themselves on its flesh, which fell off in dark, scaly strips as a thousand razor teeth devoured the slippery monster. Bit by bit the frothy sea turned pink, as the sea python’s flesh was torn from its bones, the vicious gnashing of teeth like a high-pitched song of death.