Power Games (23 page)

You’re still here
, she thought, knowing it surer than she knew her name.
You’re still with me.

Her vision swimming, one eye stained red, stinging liquid when she blinked. Alone, she flinched at the sounds and snaps that crackled in the foreign, backwards world, frightened she had tricked her fate and it could still be stolen from her. She heard her father’s voice seep out of the trees, Terry sighing her name as he had at her bedroom door all those years ago—’
Eve, are you in there
…
?
’—and she spun round, breathing hard. Only leaves, the vibration of heat.

Are you in there …?

Orlando’s name sailed through her, a paper boat on a stream.

She remembered a night they had spent together; moonlight
spilling into his London townhouse, his gentle breathing and the hand he had kept in hers all night.

So far, so faint: another universe.

I want you here. Why aren’t you here?

She started to cry and hated herself for it.

Kevin Chase lurched through a fresh door in his nightmare—and it was a nightmare, no question, because he had been here before. Only before it had never gone this far, it had always ended, the smash but never the detritus, and now the corridors were multiplied, the horrors doubled, new scenes playing out with no end or beginning.

He squeezed his eyes shut and told himself to surface. It was a dream, just like the others. The crash had been a dream. The fire and the screaming and the plummet through the trees had all been a dream.

Wake up wake up wake up …

No dream.

His bedroom, back in LA—curtains blowing, the radio on …

Wake up! For God’s sake, wake up!

Trey would be licking his face. Joan would be pissing him off. Sketch would be calling, about another promo, another gala, another junket … Kevin wanted it to be real so much that it was a physical pain, a throb that only at the last moment identified itself as an actual thing, the ache in his side where Jacob’s bulk smashed into his.

Kevin could not sustain the other man’s weight for much longer. He could barely stand himself. His feet tripped and staggered, his arms stung, his head banged.

Angela, on the other side, heaved them both. Kevin wondered what she would say if he gave up and lay down, refused to move from this spot, just sat and waited for his mom to
come get him: Joan, with her big hugs and her soppy kisses.

You are coming … aren’t you, Mom? Please come.

For all the times he had wished her gone, he only wanted one thing.

Home.

Kevin’s face crumpled in misery. Home. His people. The world he knew and hated and loved—living, sparkling, plentiful, safe.
Mom, I want to go home.

Tawny was screaming. She didn’t know how long she had been screaming, only that her screams weren’t working, because normally if she screamed something happened—anything happened—to make the bad things go away.

Shapes were coming through the forest. Voices: a rescue party.

Even in her delirium, or perhaps because of it, the thought crossed Tawny’s mind that one of them might be a hot guy. She hoped her mascara hadn’t run down her face, that her clothes weren’t too torn, that her tint hadn’t smudged and her hair wasn’t a total bush. She hoped there were no cameras. That no journalists that had gotten wind of it. Give her an hour, some time to reapply her lotions and potions because, right now, it wasn’t Tawny Lascelles in the middle of the jungle.

It was something …
ugly.
Something like Tawny Linden.

The scream turned into a burble. She would sue whoever was responsible for this so fast their asses dropped off, the airline, the pilots, the fucking organisation that had invited them out here in the first place, she would sue every goddamn party that had come within a thousand miles of this sonofabitch trip and, once she’d sued them, she would sue anyone who dared ask her a single fucking question about it until
she’d had at least a year in a recuperation spa and was feeling back to her old self.

Her old self …

Tawny had a habit of never quite engaging with the scene she was in, rather always observing it, as if she were a spectator to the movie of her life. Here, now, she saw one person and one person only: the girl she used to be.

She crawled towards voices, rescue, return, and reached out to the light.

Senator Mitch Corrigan used his upper body to lever himself free from whatever was holding him. He expected the feeling to come straight back into his legs but it didn’t. He tried to move his toes. He had visions of a doctor, in a clean, pristine hospital back in Texas, knocking a spatula against a heel.
Can you feel that?
No. No, he couldn’t.

Mitch hauled out into the open. Outside, the heat was intense. The light was faint. The air pulsed. Why wasn’t he dead? Why was he still breathing?

The remainder of the cabin smouldered on the tangled, rotten floor. The supermodel was screaming, a constant alarm. The Italian was gone.

In the distance, three outlines were approaching.

Mitch strained to see. A woman and two men: an apparition, distorted beyond being human. Their movements were unnatural, the one in the middle taller, but stooped, his head lolling forward on his neck. Mitch had seen them before. Where from? Then he realised, and with it came relief, for there were no accidents.

These were the same creatures that had abducted him that night in 2012.

Blinking through the hallucination, Mitch backed up and slumped against a tree.
You found me.

He waited to be taken. He always knew it would happen. Rossetti had known it would happen. If he would not go to them, they would bring him in.

‘Mitch?’ said a voice.

His addled brain told him it was Melinda. His wife, his best friend, as she had been on their wedding day twenty years ago, soft lips and warm hands,
Melinda …

‘Mitch, it’s Angela, open your eyes.’

The dream evaporated. Reality hit.

34

T
he wreckage the others had been caught in carved an open space through the thicket. A hulking scar dashed back through the forest, a ghostly passage of flattened foliage and punched shrubs. Hazy, humid heat soaked the air. The surrounding wall of jungle creepers was dark as night, pockets of sun flashing through in winking bursts. So lofty was the canopy that it hurt to look up: a distant, dappled aperture to an out-of-reach sky. Down here, daylight barely penetrated.

Tawny’s screams had guided them. The supermodel was hugging her knees to her chest, her mouth an open gash of despair. Angela shook her. She screamed louder.

Angela slapped her round the face, eliciting a shocked yet fleeting silence.

‘Kill me,’ whimpered Tawny. ‘I’m begging you. Kill me now.’

‘Like hell I will. You’re stuck here like the rest of us.’

‘I thought you were them!’ Tawny cried. ‘Rescue!’

Angela dragged a stick through the ground. Her mom, Orlando, Luca, Dino, did they know yet what had happened?
Noah.
Right then she would have given up all hope of rescue for the chance to tell him she was all right. She could not stand the thought of his distress or his grief, of losing his smile for just one second: of his unhappiness.

‘They’re coming for us,’ Eve said. ‘Any second. Rescue is coming.’

Minutes passed. The heat was fat and cloying, busy with insects.

‘We need a plan,’ said Angela. She tacked on, ‘Just until they do.’

The cockpit was obliterated. Eve helped Angela lug the captain from the deck, reeling under his weight. She had never touched a corpse before and it surprised her how cold it was, even in the oven of the jungle. Across the clearing Tawny gagged, choking saliva onto the stinking ground.

They deposited the body behind a mound of earth.

‘We have to find the other one,’ said Eve. ‘The co-pilot. He might still be alive. He could help.’

‘How?’

‘Radio. Flares. Emergency supplies. I don’t know.’ Stuff she had read, random lines and warnings, anything to keep her moving, keep her
doing
, even if half of it was from some idiotic daytime movie she might have once seen. It didn’t matter. She was here. This was now. The others could do what they liked. They could scream and panic, they could freak out and fall apart, but not Eve. All she cared about was getting her baby home. She would take down anything and anyone who stood in her way.

‘What about the attendant,’ said Angela, ‘the woman?’

‘Her, too.’

Away from the others, Angela asked: ‘Are you OK? Is everything OK?’

Her meaning was clear. Eve pretended it wasn’t.

‘I’m fine.’

She didn’t stick around for the useless sympathy in Angela’s eyes, the same Silvers eyes that had regarded her pityingly
over dinner at The Ivy the month before. Instead she turned, felt her weight on the ground, her roots in the soil, and glared darkly into the trees.
We’re in this together. We don’t need anyone else.

Why should she? Eve never had.

Time drained. It felt like hours, but they couldn’t be sure. Eve’s was the only phone they could locate and she grappled with it, hoping against useless hope, as if the crumpled lump of metal might miraculously fix itself.

She thought of all her contacts hidden inside, the conversations, the emails, the arrangements to meet; the one time Orlando had put a single kiss on the end of his text message and she hadn’t commented on it, and anyway it had never happened again, but Eve had liked it and kept it where she deleted so many others.

She wanted her phone back to make those calls but she also longed to see those names, to prove she hadn’t imagined those people and those lives and that her own life thus far hadn’t been one long strange fantasy that was now at an end.

Across the clearing Jacob Lyle began to moan, turning his head, disorientated, as he broke into bursts of troubled consciousness. His injuries were severe. Angry red welts obscured his face, ragged wounds singed with black, the skin tender and raw. Celeste Cavalieri sat with him and took his hand. She spoke to him softly, in Italian. Gradually he returned to silence, a temporary peace.

Eve’s heart did not bleed. Sympathy was energy and she needed all she could get. Besides, in a way, Jacob was spared. He did not have to see it. He did not have to meet the nightmare.

The heat was incessant, the jungle a sweltering snare. Angela brought water from the tail, but the bottles went dry and in the hottest part of the day it was impossible to contemplate a return trek. Thirst tortured them.

They waited for the sound of helicopter blades: the charge of the search and the reassuring buzz of human conversation, the safety of stretchers and the medical team that would carry them all back to civilisation.

The helicopter blades didn’t come.

They waited to hear their names cried out.

Their names didn’t come.

They waited for the call of a ship.

The call didn’t come.

Kevin said: ‘How long is it going to take?’

‘I don’t know,’ said Angela.

But she did know, then, that not all of them were going to make it out of here. Not all of them were going to survive.

35

K
evin snivelled. He stripped off his T-shirt. His narrow, bare chest glistened with muck and oil. ‘We’ll die here,’ he said. ‘We’re all going to die.’

‘You might,’ said Eve. ‘I’m not. They’re coming.’

‘When?’

‘Soon.’

‘How d’you know?’

‘We’ve got a US senator with us. This is going straight to the top. They’ll throw everything at it. It’ll be soon.’

Kevin swiped his tears away with the back of his hand. He wished he wasn’t such a crier. Chicks were meant to cry, not tough guys like him! Still, he was only a kid. Joan always called him her
special boy
, her
baby prince
—technically he wasn’t an adult till he was twenty-one, and that meant he needed looking after.

Mitch Corrigan was watching the forest. The senator reminded him of Sketch, only fatter and balder. Mitch’s hair, so carefully arranged at Jakarta, was now sliding off the back of his head like a flattened animal. ‘We should get out of the jungle before nightfall,’ he said. ‘It isn’t safe.’

Nightfall.
Kevin shivered.

‘But they’ll be here by then,’ insisted Tawny. ‘Before it gets dark.’

‘We’re in a remote group of islands.’ Celeste spoke for the
first time, her voice quiet but her words deafening. ‘Rescue might take days.’

‘Days?’

‘Maybe.’

Tawny started crying. ‘Oh, what would you know?’ the supermodel lashed. ‘I mean, who the hell are you anyway?’ A shape scampered in the undergrowth and she shot up, eyes bugging. ‘I can’t do it!’ Tawny blubbed. ‘I can’t make it five minutes in this shit-pit—I can’t make it
days
, I hate the outdoors. Rats and spiders;
snakes
—!’

‘Snakes and spiders are the least of our worries,’ said Celeste.

‘What is that supposed to mean?’

‘Leopards. Tigers. Orangutans.’ A pause. ‘Crocodiles.’

‘OH MY GOD!’

Angela stood. ‘This isn’t helping,’ she warned. ‘Before we get carried away, we make a reasonable guess about where we are. OK? Then we do this one hour, one minute, one second at a time if that’s what it takes. We’ll make shelter. We’ll build fire. We’ll use what we can from the aircraft. People survive in worse conditions. Our best assets are each other and if we work together we can pull through.’

The group eyed one another suspiciously.

‘We should explore,’ said Angela. ‘Find the highest point. That’s what we should do. Who’s coming with me?’

Kevin considered it.
No fucking way!
Who knew what was out there?

‘I am,’ said Eve.

‘Not you.’

‘Why?’

Angela challenged her with a gaze. ‘Tawny, you’ll come,’ she said.