So they all sat and watched the boat bob closer to one of the gaps in the reef. Roddy felt helpless and exposed. He recalled a time in his childhood when his mother had seen him away on a bus for a school trip. He had not wanted to go on his own, he so wanted her to come, but control was snatched from him totally the instant he boarded the bus. His mother waved and he wanted to wave back, but his arm seemed not to work. He could only cry as the bus pulled off, taking him further away from comfort and safety, hauling him towards whatever imagined doom those in charge deemed suitable for him. He had sensed the vicarious running of his life even then — his mother, the teachers, the bus driver with his mass of hair yellowed by cigarettes — and he had felt it again throughout his time in the navy. Sent here, ordered there, guided not by the hand of fate, but by the sadistic whims of war.
Never had the feeling of impotency been so strong as when he watched their boat drift away.
He felt an incredible emptiness inside as the boat was dashed to shadowy shards on the reef. Their last tenuous link with the outside world had been broken. Or cut.
There was nothing they could do. The darkness seemed to inhibit conversation, so they soon slept again. As he finally drifted off, Roddy realised that he had not slept properly for over five days. The haunted silence of the island gave them the sensory peace they needed to sleep, if not rest.
Crazy ideas juggled around in the nether regions of sleep. Like maybe the island wanted them gone for a while, so that it could do whatever it had to do. All mutations, Max had muttered. Even mutants had need of food.
Sleep was wet and waterlogged with dreams. Twisted images of violent waters corrupted with oil and refuse and blood, grumbling torpedoes slamming in to finish the job, limbs floating past fins, cries drowned out half-called, hope sinking away beneath them, pulling them down, sucking them into the dark. Roddy thrashed in the sand, working it into skin split by five days of sun, choking on it as he dreamt of teeth shattered by the pressures of deep water.
A voice came from the void, clear and high above the tormented sounds of hot metal warping and snapping. Its words were hidden but its meaning clear, the panic evident in its troubled tone. Thoughts, ideas and sentences flowed together into a collage of desperation. God was mentioned, prayed for and then discarded, with an outpouring of tears greater than the troubled world should ever allow.
Roddy surfaced from sleep like a submarine heading for the light. He saw a twitching shape along the beach. Ernie, jerking in his sleep as jumbled catechisms fell from his mouth to be muffled forever in the ageless sand. Pleas to God and denials of Him in the same sentence. Faith in salvation and a piteous, hopeless resignation. It was horrible to hear because there was no sense, and Roddy thought he should go and wake Ernie, drag him from whatever depths of nightmare he had sunken to.
But he was afraid. Scared that once he reached him, Ernie would already be awake.
There were other noises around them in the dark, a background mumble and chitter from the island that had not been there when they first arrived. Secret things were happening. The whole place had been waiting for them to sleep before coming back to life.
Roddy glanced towards the jungle and saw a shape under the trees, a shadow within deeper shadows. It was a woman, naked and flayed by disease, and she was holding out her hands, her mouth open in a silent scream. Joan, he thought, but it was not her. The tortured woman wanted to tell them something, but she could make no sound. As the palm fronds moved in the sea breeze so her arms wavered, drifting in time to the shadows. Her jaw worked in synchronicity with the sea, and sighing waves mimicked the voice she could not utter.
Then a cloud covered the moon and the image vanished into leaves and shadow.
Ernie muttered on. The sea stroked the land. More clouds passed overhead and clotted the moonlight, and as total darkness fell Roddy closed his eyes to hide from it all.
“Get away! Get it away! Oh God, help him!”
“Kick it! Use a rock or something, kill it!”
Roddy was woken from monotone dreams to a bloody red nightmare. Max and Butch were standing next to him, looking along the beach, stepping back and forth and shouting. He leapt to his feet and cringed as his wounds and burns reminded him of their existence.
Then all pain went. Feeling fled, replaced by a numbness of mind rather than body.
Ernie was lying in wet sand, but it was not wet from the sea. It was dark and cloggy, lumpy and glistening. A layer of flies flickered across its surface like a black sheet caught in a breeze; lifting, landing, lifting again. Ernie twitched redly in the morning sun. Something was eating him.
“Uh!” Roddy could not talk. He could hardly move, and he stood there as his legs cramped beneath him, oblivious to the pain, hardly conscious of his spasming muscles.
The thing was huge and grey, its head darting in to snap delicate mouthfuls of flesh from Ernie’s throat and face. Its body was almost as long as Ernie, where he lay in a smear of his own blood. It glanced at them as it did so, expressing no fear or trepidation. It’s eyes were lifeless black pearls in the thick probe of its head. It wore a shell, scraped and scarred, patterned with smears of its breakfast’s blood. The beach stank of aged dead things.
A series of thumps came from behind. Roddy spun around in terror. Norris dashed past him with a length of wood held high, rusted iron fitting still visible on one edge. He hit the creature and fell back as the vibration jarred his arms.
“Come on!” Max shouted, running forward to help. He grabbed the length of splintered wood from the stunned Norris and smashed it down on the shell, careful not to strike the giant tortoise’s head in case he drove it deeper into Ernie’s face. It had no apparent effect. He turned the board over so that the iron fitting faced down, and brought it arcing over his head once more. It left a bright splash of scarred shell, urging Max into greater effort.
Butch had found a rounded stone the size of his hand and he threw it at the tortoise, retrieved it when it rebounded, threw it again.
The tortoise snapped another mouthful of raw flesh from Ernie’s face. Roddy thought it may have been his nose.
He looked around for something to use as a weapon, but could see nothing. His heart was thumping in his chest, his tongue sandy and swollen and raw. He needed a piss.
Ernie was dead.
He stumbled next to Max and kicked sand at the creature’s head, spraying it across Ernie’s open face in the process.
“Careful!” Norris shouted at him.
Roddy almost laughed. “He’s dead,” he said, still kicking, dodging away when Max brought the board down on the shell once more. The wood splintered and cracked, the heavy end dropping next to the tortoise’s front legs.
The thing turned and left. They were all surprised at its speed as it hauled its weight up the beach and disappeared into the foliage beneath the trees.
“Bastard!” Butch shouted after it. Roddy had an unsettling feeling that it had left because it was full, not as a result of their ineffective attack. The way it had looked at them, as though they were little more than the trees it rubbed against as it retreated back inland, turned Roddy cold.
“Oh Jesus, where the hell have we ended up?” Butch gasped, stumbling backwards until he tripped over his own feet and fell onto his back. Humour was his defence mechanism, but sometimes even that could not work. Sometimes, things were beyond a joke. Butch’s hands were bleeding.
“Big tortoise,” Norris remarked. “Make a hell of an ashtray.”
“Shut up,” Butch said, “just shut up, you bloody jinx. It’s your fault we’re here anyway, if you hadn’t — ”
“What?” Norris demanded.
Butch did not reply. He turned and stared out to sea, shaking, his grubby shirt pasted to his body with sweat. He licked blood from his hands and spat it at the sand. The movement was animal, Roddy thought.
“Take a look,” Max said, nodding at Ernie’s ruined body.
Roddy shook his head, started to walk away. He had seen enough. He was not yet twenty-five, and he had seen a thousand dead men. Max grabbed his arm, and Roddy wondered once again what he had meant last night,
