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 light. 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
