by Daniel Hurst
I cautiously approach his body while at the same time wishing that there was some other way to check on his pulse that didn’t involve me kneeling down beside him and putting my fingers onto his skin. But by the time I reach him I still haven’t thought of any and so I have no choice but to get close to him for one last time before I can leave here.
Keeping the gun squarely aimed at his torso, I crouch down and tentatively put my free hand on his neck, praying that he remains still but well aware that he could easily reach out and grab me now.
But there is no movement from him, and as I touch my fingers against his neck, I feel no pulse from within. He is dead. His skull was dealt a sickening blow and was apparently no match for the tough, round shell of the coconut that lies on the ground beside him and is still completely intact.
I’ve read stories online before about the dangers of falling coconuts and what could happen if they hit someone on their way down to the ground. Now I have seen it for myself. They are seriously tough customers.
Don’t fuck with coconuts.
And definitely don’t fuck with me.
My relief at saving myself from Michael is quickly tempered by the realisation that I am now completely alone on this island in the middle of nowhere. Just because there is no one chasing me anymore it doesn’t mean that I’m safe. Not by a long stretch. I know that somebody is coming here in the morning and I need to get out of here before they arrive.
I need to find the boat that Michael and his partner brought me here on and then I have to hope that I can figure out how to use it to sail myself away from this godforsaken island.
I pick up the torch that Michael dropped when I bashed his head in a few moments ago and am grateful for the light it provides me when I shine it into the dense jungle ahead. I made it this far in without any light, but it will be a hell of a lot easier to find my way out with a beam to guide the way going forward.
After taking one last look at the body in front of me, I step over it and head back in the direction from which I came, towards the beach house and hopefully towards the boat that will help me get out of here.
The torchlight on the ground in front of me is as erratic as the heartbeat inside of me as I hurry forward, wishing that there wasn’t somebody coming here at daylight but also thankful that I at least know about it and so could make my exit beforehand.
As I move through the jungle, I think again about who it could be that had hired Michael and the other guy to bring me here. It must have been the person on the other end of the phone, the one who told me to get off the yacht. But who was it? One of Sebastian’s colleagues? Someone else who knew about what I did to him? Or perhaps it had nothing to do with him. Maybe this was just an act of terrorism against influencers.
There were so many on that yacht. It was targeted. It was professional. Somebody had gone to a lot of effort to kill all of those people. But then why did they spare me at the last moment? And why did they arrange for me to be brought here?
If they wanted me dead, why have they given me a chance to escape?
I am emboldened by the fact that whoever has arranged all of this will have never expected me to find a way out of it. Having two trained men to keep watch over me on a secluded island would have seemed like a bulletproof plan to keep me imprisoned yet I have shown my resolve and escaped from the situation.
Almost.
I still have to get off this island after all.
The torchlight bounces over several palm tree trunks before suddenly showing me the side of the beach house up ahead. I break through the tree line and it’s a huge relief to be out of the dark, overgrown mess and back on clearer ground.
Wasting no time, I run past the side of the house and around to the front, where I hope to see a boat waiting by the water that I can use to put distance between myself and this place.
I round the house and then I see it. A white boat, sitting on the moonlit beach, with a black chain trailing off it, tied to the end of a metal pole sticking out of the sand.
I rush down towards the water and feel euphoric as I untie the chain and free the boat. Using my adrenaline-boosted strength, I push the boat the half a dozen metres that it needs to go until it is off the sand and into the water. Then I jump aboard.
I feel the waves bobbing beneath me as I look at the black box of the engine and try to figure out how to turn it on. I see a pull cord poking out of the side of it and figure that is a good place to start.
Yanking hard on the cord, I expect to hear the engine burst into life and the boat to be filled with a stable vibration from the energy source that would help me get all the way to the next nearest inhabited island.
But nothing happens. The engine doesn’t spark into life, so the boat is still only being moved by the power of the sea. And if I don’t get the engine on soon, the waves will quickly have me back on the beach.
I try again. And again. But nothing. The engine just won’t start.
I figure I must be missing something obvious, so I inspect the rest of the bulky black box that holds the engine, but nothing is visibly apparent to me. If pulling the cord didn’t start it then I don’t know what will.
The boat suddenly hits dry land again and I am back on the beach, the waves having easily carried me back in after my failure to start the engine. I know now that I can’t even hope just to float out of here. The waves will just throw me straight back towards the island.
As I slump back against the edge of the boat, I realise what must have happened. Michael must have disabled the engine somehow, in case I made it here before him. Perhaps there is a spare part on him that he had taken out before he chased me into the jungle. Or maybe there is a key. It is probably in his pocket. I will have to go all the way back and search him.
The thought of going back into that dark overgrown place and rummaging through the pockets of a dead man fills me with dread. But I have no choice, not if I want to get off this island before the morning.
It is only when I climb out of the boat and put my feet back onto the sandy beach that I realise that being stuck on this island until the morning might not be such a bad thing after all...
#LooseEnds
Anna Akari
I’m seriously pissed off. I should still be in Tokyo, enjoying the fruits of my labour. Racing cars. Drinking cocktails. Seducing gormless men and maybe even killing a few of them. But instead I am on board a plane and flying back across the Pacific Ocean because Ivan has told me that somebody might have made it off that yacht. An eye-witness said they saw a woman being pulled from the sea and taken away in a motorboat. At best it was some random person from the party.
At worst it was one of the eight people that I was paid to kill.
This has never happened to me before. There are never loose ends after any of my hits. No evidence. No eye-witnesses spotting survivors. No angry phone calls from the person who paid me to do the job. Only total, absolute, finality. Except now. Now, there might be a loose end to tie up after all.
Hopefully it is nothing, but just to be sure I am going back to The Bahamas to see for myself. I will scour the news reports when I land. I will check the hospitals on the islands. I will even track down the eye-witness and make him describe every single detail about the person he saw being taken on the motorboat.
Depending on the quality of the information he gives me, I may let him live when he has finished talking.
I don’t have to do any of this of course. I could easily just tell Ivan that I did my job and am not responsible for what comes after it. It’s not as if he can contact a customer support service somewhere and ask for a refund.
Assassins don’t exactly give out receipts.
But I am a professional and so I will follow up on this new information that has come to light. Because I gave my word to Ivan that all the people on the list are dead. But mainly because the thought that someone I wanted dead is still out there alive is enough to ensure that I won’t get much sleep until I know for sure.
I love to end life. There is no other way to dress it up. The power that comes with deciding whether another human being lives or dies. The adrenaline rush that hits when the time of death is near. The feeling of satisfaction in getting away with it. The different ways to do it. The fact that so many people in the world pay for my skills. The sense of confidence that I embody from knowing that I am at the top of my game in my chosen field.
All of this means that there is no way I can rest easy, let alone take on my next job, until I know that this one is definitely finished. It’s not going to be simple to track down the people on that motorboat, especially if they don’t want to be found. But I make my living in the underworld, so I have plenty of other tools at my disposal should I need to utilise them.
I will do what I can on my own but if I need to enlist the help of a friend to help me track down the mystery girl on that boat then so be it. I already know who I will call. It will be the woman who turned me into one of the best assassins in the world. The woman who showed me how much talent and skill it takes to end another person’s life and get away with it time and time again. It will be the woman who trained me and taught me everything that I know.
She told me that if I ever needed her help then I was to send her a message and she would come to me. But this wasn’t the kind of message that you write on a piece of paper or send via some electronic device. This was an indirect message but one that would be impossible to miss.
She had told me that if I ever needed her then I was to assassinate one of the four parliamentary leaders in Japan. The news reports from such a crime would flood the airwaves in our home nation, so she would not fail to see what I had done. Then she would come to me and I would be able to use her for whatever problem I had.
So far, I haven’t needed to use her. So far, every job I have done has gone perfectly. This is the first time that I may have overextended myself and might need a little guidance to correct my course. I might need her to help me find the mystery girl that made it off that yacht.
But I am going to do my best to resolve this issue myself first before I go out and assassinate any politicians and send my country’s media into a frenzy. Because after all, it is my fault that this has happened in the first place.
It was a mistake to try to kill all eight of the influencers in one hit. I suspected it at the time but my ambition and over-confidence made me attempt it anyway. If I had gone after them each one by one then I have no doubt that I would have been successful. But I didn’t.
I wanted the glamour and the thrill that would come with such an eye-catching display of brutality and I had pulled it off. Or so I thought. There is still the chance that nobody made it off that yacht and that every single person on that list is dead. That is still the most likely outcome. But I will double-check. It’s the least I can do for Ivan considering how much money he paid me to complete this job.
If it all turns out to be okay, then I will fly back to Japan and carry on enjoying the money he paid me while I wait for my next task to come in. Maybe I will kill that parliamentary leader just so I can see my old boss again and say hi. It has been a while since we last saw each other.
I recline in my seat and close my eyes, feeling the vibrations of the plane’s engines all around me as it propels me back towards North America, and smile at the thought that maybe somebody did make it off that yacht. Maybe it was one of the influencers on that list. Because if it was, then by the time I board the plane to fly back home again then I will have killed again, and I know by now that nothing gives me a greater thrill in life than that.
So whoever you are, and however you made it off that yacht, you are a dead.
You can’t run from the grim reaper. Especially when the grim reaper is me.
#SeizeTheDay
Emily Bennett
They say that it is always darkest before the dawn but I’m not sure about that. As I watch the sun peeking out of the horizon across the ocean, I have a feeling that things are going to get a lot darker with every minute of daylight that passes by. Because it’s a new day and that means that it is time for the mystery person to come to this island to get me.
I could have got away from here during the night if I had really wanted to. Even if I couldn’t have got the engine working on the motorboat, there are two plastic oars in the outhouse that I could have used to row myself out to sea. But I have chosen not to. I have chosen to stay on the island and now my window for escape has passed.
I have chosen to stay here because I need to see who is coming for me.
It occurred to me while I was trying to get the motorboat to work that even if I did make it off the island and back to safety, I would still be in danger. Because whoever it is that is coming here today won’t give up if they don’t find me here. They will just pursue me elsewhere.
So that means I can’t just go back to civilisation, let everybody know that I’m alive and then expect everything to be okay after that. I will still be a target. I need to know who is coming for me so I can figure out how to get the target off my back.
Of course I want nothing more than to get off this island and phone my mum to tell her that I’m actually alive after all. I want to be on a plane flying over this vast ocean that currently surrounds me, heading back to England and back to the comfort and safety of my childhood home. I want to curl up on the sofa while my mum makes me a cup of tea and then I want to sleep in my old bed and try to put the terrible events of the past few days behind me.
But I know that isn’t the wisest thing to do. Because not only would my life still be at risk if I were to do that, but my mum’s life would be too. And I just can’t live with that fear. The fear of wondering who is out there, watching me, biding their time before they make another attempt to kill me. I have lived with that fear before and it took a hell of a lot for me to put an end to it.
But that is what I must do now. Put an end to this. And as far as I can tell, there is only one way that I can do that.
I need to know who wanted me here on this island. I need to see their face. I need to see who I am up against. And then I will make a plan to beat them just like I beat Sebastian. Only then will I return home and fall into the comfort of my mum’s arms.
The sun has barely shown itself but already I can feel my skin being warmed by its early rays. It feels comforting to have daylight on my side now, even if it signals that the next threat to my life is now closer than ever. But if all goes to plan then I won’t have to tackle this mystery figure today. Unlike with Michael, who I fought in the claustrophobic setting of a dark jungle only a few hours earlier, there will be no need for weapons and good fortune now. I will simply remain in my hiding place and hope to catch a glimpse of the person that arrives here soon. Then I will let them leave again and only when I am absolutely certain that they have gone will I crawl out of my spot and find my way off this island.
There are a few places that I could hide as I wait for the mystery guest to arrive. The jungle is the obvious one. Even in daylight it is a formidable mess of trees and vegetation. But I have spent enough time in there to last me a lifetime, so that is out of the question.
I could find a hiding spot in the house but that would leave me at risk of being trapped indoors should I be discovered. And just like the jungle, I have definitely spent enough time in there over the last twenty-four hours.
I could hide behind one of the large rocks that sit embedded in the sandy shore, but I don’t know from which direction the visitor will be arriving and so the last thing I need is him sailing up behind me and spotting me looking out in the wrong direction.
I could bury myself in the sand. I could climb a palm tree. I could even swim out to sea and tread water as I wait to see who arrives. But they are all risky too.
In the end, I have decided that the best place for me to hide, with a good enough vantage point to see whoever comes here, is in the place that I already know is a good spot.
The crawl space under the h
ouse.
And so that is where I am preparing to go into as I make the final checks around the house to ensure that whoever comes here shortly will have no idea about any of the things that happened here overnight.
As soon as I had made the decision to stay on the island until dawn, I knew that I had some work to do before sunrise. The first thing to do was hide Michael’s body, because if the person coming here saw that then they would know that I had definitely escaped, and I want that suspicion to be delayed for as long as possible.
Forcing myself back into the jungle, I had located Michael’s corpse and done my best not to look at his fractured, bloodied skull as I painstakingly dragged his heavy body into a patch of overgrown weeds, where it was completely out of sight should anybody pass through here.
With that job ticked off, I had then returned to the house and set about trying to put the floorboards back into the hole that I had pulled them from hours earlier. I knew that I could access the crawl space through the grate at the back of the house, but it would be no good hiding in there if there was a huge hole in the bedroom floor hinting at where I had gone.
It wasn’t a perfect job but I had managed to get the floorboards roughly back into the spots that they had previously occupied and as long as the mystery person didn’t go stomping around all over them when they arrived then I expected them to stay in their place.
It was imperative that I made it seem like absolutely nothing had happened on this island in the last day or so because then it might seem like I had never been brought here in the first place. I knew that if this mystery person turned up and just found an empty beach house then they may think that I had been taken elsewhere. I certainly hoped they wouldn’t suspect that the two men they had paid to hold me here were dead and that I was hiding underneath the house, peeping out at them and making my plan for revenge.