by Tim Lebbon
The others had reacted in their own instinctive ways. Max was kicking out left and right, Butch jumping up and down on the spot, Norris scrabbling around on his hand and knees, trying to regain his lost footing. As Roddy’s words registered and the small, gawky birds jumped and fluttered away from the men, the panic eased.
“Scared the living shit out of me!” Butch shouted, laughing with nervousness and relief. Max closed his eyes and shook his head. He looked around, catching Roddy’s eye and smirking. Norris stood and brushed at his filthy clothes. He stretched his neck in unconscious mimicry of the fleeing birds. He did not speak, and when he caught Roddy’s eye he turned away in embarrassment. His knees and elbows were dirty and damp from his frantic squirming on the ground. His face was red from the same. Roddy almost felt sorry for him.
“At least we know we’re not alone,” Butch said, “though I didn’t think much of yours, Max.”
“Scared the hell out of me,” Max said. He was rubbing beaded sweat from his head, flicking it at the ground. “I didn’t realise I was so on edge.”
Roddy thought he was lying. He thought Max was more than aware of the tension squeezing the four men. An anxiousness built up from outside, as well as in, and threatening to snap at any moment. Perhaps the birds startling them had been a good thing, a release valve for the growing pressures of their unforeseen situation.
“Never seen birds like that before,” Butch said. “Like fat chickens.”
“Quails,” Max said. “At least, I think so. Flightless.”
“Why the fuck be a bird and not be able to fly?” Butch asked. His fringe, greasy and lank, annoyed his eyes, so that he had to keep blinking. “Like a fish that can’t swim.” He glanced at Norris, obviously about to come out with some cutting witticism.
Max barged in before Butch could get himself into trouble. “No need to fly, because there are no predators here.”
Butch frowned, causing his eyes more aggravation. “That tortoise was a shit of a predator, if you ask me. It was eating Ernie.”
“A scavenger,” Max explained. He slapped his neck to dislodge a tickling fly, forgetting his sunburn. “Bollocks!”
Flightless birds, Roddy thought. Mutations. The fittest surviving, a mutation in their species eventually eschewing flight. It all added to the strangeness of the place. “More mutants.” Max nodded at him.
“Dinner, all the same,” Norris said. For a few brief seconds, the others had not been paying him any attention. Now they all turned to look, just in time to see him fall back to his hands and knees. He scrabbled in the shallow undergrowth, leaves and dirt spinning around him. For a moment Roddy thought he’d lost it, and a terribly bitter thought passed through his mind. He wondered whether the others would have any qualms about leaving a madman behind, if it came to that. He hated the thought, despised himself for thinking it, but an idea could not be un-made.
Then Norris stood again, cursing some more, and kicked out at a fleeing bird. Luck, or fate, or something more sinister intervened. Norris’s boot connected squarely with the creature’s rear end and launched it on its maiden flight. Straight into a tree.
They all heard the subtle sigh of tiny bones breaking.
“Yeah!” Norris shouted. “Got you! Yeah!” He raised bloody fists above his head.
But the creature was not quite dead. It squirmed at the base of the tree, fluttering useless wings in an attempt to reverse millennia of evolution and regain its flight, lift off and take itself away from its inevitable end. Nature held its secret tightly to its chest, however, and Norris’s heavy boot finished the bird’s struggles. Roddy was sure he saw a hint of something dark in Norris’s eyes as he ground his foot down.
“I’m not eating that,” Butch said. “Roddy said it’s a mutant. Could catch anything.”
Max opened his mouth to explain, but thought better of it. Instead he headed off between the trees, aiming for the sound of running water. In the distance, calls and rustles marked the route of the fleeing birds. They had still not stopped, as though pursued by something inescapable.
“I mean it,” Butch said.
Norris did not know what to do. Roddy stepped past him, frowning, looking down at the dead thing spilling its insides onto the damp forest floor.
“Roddy?” Norris said, and it was the first time Roddy had ever heard the man use his first name. It sounded bitter coming from the cook’s mouth.
They left the bird. Norris stepped away hesitantly, perhaps waiting for the others to turn around and change their minds. But Roddy eventually heard footsteps following them, and the dead bird remained where it had fallen.
Bleeding. Steaming. Taking to the air at last.
Roddy caught up with Max and matched his pace. Butch and Norris followed on, muttering profanities at each other.
“More mutants,” Roddy said. They walked in silence for a few moments, but Roddy could not bite his tongue. “What’s wrong, Max? What’s bugging you, mate? I hate seeing you like this.”
Max did not answer for so long that Roddy thought he hadn’t heard. He was about to cover the tracks of his last statement with something banal, but then Max turned to him, and his eyes were dark, and even the sun glinting through the trees did not imbue them with any real hope.
“The whole world’s populated with mutants,” he said. “That’s the real philosophy behind Darwin. Everyone is different, so simultaneous faith is a foolishness. Ernie was a fool, but he was a real believer, and he had devout faith. And he loved his faith, and it all came to nothing for him. It fooled him in the end. Drove him to do what he did.”
“He was a fool because he believed so much in God?”
“No,” Max said. “No. He was a fool because he let his belief rule him. His faith stagnated, didn’t allow for progress, something new. It’s an arrogance, I suppose, but this place has nothing in common with what he believed in. When we came here, he thought he’d been abandoned. So he used his knife on himself, and gave in without a fight.” He rubbed his neck, wincing as the dead skin flaked and opened up bleeding wounds. “That’s what’s wrong. If faith can’t save you, what can?”
“I have faith,” Roddy said, but Max looked at him, and Roddy felt foolish.
“Faith in what?”
Roddy did not answer. His words echoed back at him, like the best lies always do. They walked together in silence and Roddy realised that, even after all this time, there was something he still had no inkling of. “You’ve been a sailor all your life,” he said to Max. “You’ve been around. Shit, you’re older than my uncle. What do you think? What’s your faith?”
Max shook his head, but not in denial. He simply could not answer. It was as though the question of his own beliefs had never raised its head. Until here. Until now. A question with no answer, because a man like Max never revealed himself fully to anyone. He was as much a mystery as the complexities he mused upon. Wasted in war, Roddy had always thought. A man like Max should be creating, not destroying.
They came to a more overgrown portion of the forest. With moisture collecting and dripping from palms, and flashes of colour hinting at the secret assignations of birds high in the trees, it looked more like a tropical jungle. They paused for a while, catching splashes of water on their tongues, listening to the steadily increasing murmur of life around them. Roddy tried to tell himself that it was because the sun was rising higher; the island was coming to life. But he could not help but identify a hidden amusement in the alien banter, a titter here, a low, throaty chuckle there. The animals, now that they had taken the opportunity to examine and test these newcomers, knew the limit of their threat and were laughing at it.
“This way?” Max suggested, pointing along a gentle dip in the land. Nobody had an opinion, so they headed in the direction he had indicated. The sound of the stream was becoming louder, so it seemed that they were moving in the right direction.
They had to pick their way through low thorn bushes, the thorns positively carnivorous in the subdued lig
ht. They looked around for something substantial to eat. There was nothing. The heat was wafting at them now, as if blown out from some invisible orifice in the island, seeking them through the trees. Their filthy clothes were soon pasted to their bodies, aggravating their already cracked and sore skin.
Each way they turned, they were presented with more difficult obstacles to overcome. They decided to climb the steep bank of the dip and encountered a slope of sharp, cruelly exposed stone. It resembled slate but glittered with buried quartz, showing off the richness of nature on the island. Keen edges kissed lines of blood into unprotected skin.
Roddy was certain that they were the first people ever to land here. They must be. The place felt so untainted, so elemental, so pristine. If someone had been here before them, there would be signs of it in nature; but what existed here was a pureness of environment, with no sign of outside influence whatsoever. Roddy had always had a respectful fear of the sea, but that was different. Man’s natural state was not floating in a metal coffin, putting himself at the mercy of the waters. Here, on the island, he felt even more out of place. These four puny survivors of a terrible war were succumbing to the dominant party.
What about the shape under the trees? he thought, but dismissed it immediately. Shadows. Just shadows. Anything else was simply too terrifying to consider.
They made it up the sharp bank and found themselves elevated, overlooking the stream where it gurgled merrily in a small canyon. The sides were steep, but not unclimbable, and it was only about twenty feet to the bottom.
As he watched Max beginning his descent, Roddy started shaking. Something squirmed in his stomach, scraping at his insides with claws so sharp that he wondered whether he’d swallowed something else along with the water from the jungle leaves. Every step they took, their route was becoming more difficult. Plants sprang out of nowhere, rocks sharpened themselves on their fear, trees melded trunks to form almost impenetrable barriers. Everything conspired to make their progress more hazardous.
Yet he felt guided, by an insistent and heavy hand.
He knelt down gently, head swimming, and then he knew that he had been brought here to die on this small cliff. He would fall and smash his skull on the rocks below, and while Max tried to scoop his brains back into his head Roddy would look up at the sky, and see a moon he did not recognise slowly appearing against the blue, a ghost emerging from the mist, mocking him as his world went dark.
“Roddy!” Max called. The others were already scrambling down the slope, and before his panic could take hold Roddy slipped and slid down to the gully floor. He did not fall, he did not die, but neither did he feel elated. He sensed the land laughing at him, amusing itself with the mild deceit it had planted in his mind. The stream was the sound of that laughter.
It was gently flowing, cool and fresh, and at its deepest it came up to their chests. It twisted and turned in its little valley, disappearing downstream around a rocky corner curtained by overhanging plants. The men stripped and bathed. There were no dead things here. Perhaps the remains on the beach had been drowned further downstream, to deter any visitors from venturing inland. But here, the air was clear of the taint of decomposition, and the sun still found its way through the leaves and branches to speckle their damaged skin.
The water was fresh. Butch tasted it, then gulped it down. Even Norris smiled and refrained from passing some derisory comment.
“Water, water, everywhere,” Max said. Roddy smiled, because he knew what Max meant, and Norris grinned in confused acknowledgement of his eventual acceptance. They all drank and swam, and washed away dried blood and caked dirt.
When they had finished, they climbed from the gentle waters to lie out on the bank and let the sun dry them. Butch remained in the stream. He bobbed in the current, floating a few feet, standing, doing it again.
The surge came from nowhere. Without even a sigh to announce its appearance, as if air and water conspired to fool the men’s senses. Butch turned and stared upstream at the rolling, tumbling, refuse-laden wave of water ploughing towards him. It frothed, like a rabid sea monster angry at the irony of its affliction.
Roddy stood, absurdly conscious of his nakedness. He opened his mouth but nothing came out. He felt a draining flush of hopelessness, the same feeling he had experienced watching his ship split and sink. No hope, he had thought to himself then, no hope at all for anyone left inside.
Now he thought the same. Except he whispered it as well, like a prayer to the dying. “No hope.”
Just before the water lifted Butch from the stream bed, he glanced at Roddy, and suddenly his eyes were very calm, his expression one of equanimity rather than fear. It was a split second, the blink of an eye, because then the wave swallowed him in a flurry of limbs. His head broke surface several times, but he could only utter bubbles. The men watched helplessly as Butch was tumbled away from them, mixed in with the wood and weed and dead things also carried along by the surge.
Roddy started running along the bank. Stones snapped at his bare feet. Breath caught in his throat, possessed of sharp edges. But Butch was firmly in the water’s grasp, and it held him close and low, attempting to drown him even before he struck the wall of the gully further downstream. Roddy tried to shout, but his voice was lost in the angry white-water roar. He sensed the others following him. Their company made it all seem more futile.
He could have made it, Roddy thought. He could have swum to shore. It was impossible, of course. But it seemed that for Butch, even the intention to survive had been absent.
In the waters, jumping from the foam, speckled red for brief instants, Roddy was sure he saw tiny snapping things. It may have been the boiling water itself, spinning Butch in its violent grasp. Or it could have been something in the water with Butch, but surviving there, belonging there, revelling in the violence.
Butch was swept under the overhanging trees and plants, just before the stream twisted out of sight. For the instant before he was pummelled into protruding rocks Roddy saw him, eyes closed, mouth wide open. His bruised face had been struck by something, and he was drowning in blood as well as water.
The wave struck the rocks, scouring its contents across the blackening surface, then surged away downstream. It left behind its load, floating in the suddenly calm waters: a tree branch, stripped of bark; a bird of paradise, bobbing like a drowned rainbow; and Butch, still spread on the rocks, his snapped left arm wedged into a crack and holding him there.
His head lolled. He looked like he was falling asleep, and at any moment Roddy expected him to look up and his bashful grin to appear. His head fell lower, however, until his chin rested on his chest. And then they could see the damage to the back of his head, and Roddy knew that he would never be smiling again.
They had to cross the stream to reach him. Roddy could not bring himself to enter the water, even though it was back to its normal self, as if the bore had never been. He wanted to mention the snapping things he had seen, but he felt foolish; there were no apparent bites on Butch’s body, only cuts and scrapes. He watched nervously as Max and Norris waded across, arms held wide for balance.
Max paused in front of Butch, his attention focussed on whatever was beyond the rocky outcrop around which the stream disappeared. He was still for a long time. Roddy was on the verge of splashing out to him, shaking him awake and shouting at him, when he turned.
“No sign of the wave downstream,” Max said casually. He looked briefly back upstream, indicating to Roddy the wet, scoured banks where the freak surge had made its mark. Norris seemed not to hear, or understand the implication. He was staring at Butch, disgust stretching his face out of shape.
Roddy was glad he had not gone in. This was not a normal stream, not like the ones in the forests and valleys back home. It was a wrong stream, one which could conjure a wave from nowhere and then suck it back into itself, without having to spread it further along its length. It was flowing at its normal gentle rate once more, carrying away the detritus left behi
nd. The colourful dead bird spun slowly as it headed for the beach.
Roddy thought the wave must be waiting somewhere. Tucked on the stream bed, pressure building, ready to appear again when the time was right. Like now, while Max and Norris were trying to free Butch’s trapped arm without touching the bone protruding through the skin.
But perhaps that would be too easy.
“Get him out,” Roddy said, “get him out, now, get him out.” He rocked from side to side, wincing at the pain from his gashed feet but enjoying the sensation at the same time. It told him he was still alive, his brain was connected. He looked down at his pathetic body. His ribs corrugated his skin and his feet bled onto the rocks. His blood was a black splash on the ground. It seeped between stones and was sucked in quickly, the land as desperate for sustenance as they were.
The two men eventually backed across the stream with Butch trailing between them. Norris seemed frantic to keep Butch’s head up out of the water, as if a dead man could drown. They reached the bank and Roddy helped them haul the body out. They lay Butch down on the wet rocks. His head was leaking.
Roddy had seen worse sights than this when the ship sank, but now it was different. Just as Ernie’s death had hit them badly, the sight of Butch lying cooling in this cruel place felt like a punch to the chest. He had been a survivor, one of only a few left from the ship’s crew. He had been valuable. A friend.
“Just where the hell did that wave come from?” Norris asked. “What caused it? There aren’t any clouds, no rain. The stream’s back to its normal level. I didn’t feel...” He prattled on, but Roddy soon cut out his voice. He was becoming aware of the expression on Max’s face.
The big man looked defeated. His arms hung by his sides, shoulders slumped, water dripping from his ears and nose to splash into rosettes on the rocks around him. Pinkish sweat, coloured with his own blood, dribbled down his forehead and around his ears. The burns and scabs on his head were open to the elements. His eyes were shaded from the sun. They looked dead.