White and Other Tales of Ruin (37 page)

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, what were all mutations.

“
Roddy, take a look,” Max said again. His bald head was blistered and crazed from the sun. His confidence was still there in his voice, camouflaged beneath dull shock.

Ernie was a mess. Where his blood had not been disturbed, it still speckled the sand with spray patterns. He tried to avoid looking at the face because there was little left to see. He noticed a pulped book lying at the dead man’s side, and wondered how the hell Ernie had kept his Bible through everything that had happened.

He saw the officer’s left hand. Wounded and cut, the blood already dried and caked into a black mess. He looked at the right hand, bent and lifted the cool arm, just to make sure that what he was seeing was not imagination.

“
Cut his wrists,” Roddy said.

“
What?” Norris asked. Butch looked up.

Max turned and walked a few steps before sitting down, facing away.

“
He slit his wrists,” Roddy said. “In the night. Must have done it a while ago, the blood’s already clotted.” He spotted something glinting on the blood-soaked sand by Ernie’s hip. He knew how useful a knife would be, but he could not bring himself to pick it up.

“
God-fearing fool decides to off himself instead of facing up to what God had given him,” Norris muttered. “We could live here for years, and he tops himself as soon as we’re out of the sea.”

“
I heard him, I think,” Roddy continued, trying to ignore Norris’s dismissive tone of voice. “I woke up in the night. Half woke, anyway. He was mumbling, moaning. It wasn’t very nice.”

“
What was he saying?” Butch asked. He was staring wide-eyed at the corpse now, as if he could accept death dished out by a victim’s own hand above that caused by something unknown. In a way, Roddy admitted to himself, it wasn’t so bad. It displayed a weakness in Ernie, not a strength in this unknown place.

“
I didn’t listen for long. I can’t remember. I was tired. I was dreaming. I went back to sleep.” Did I? Roddy thought quickly. Straight back to sleep? He glanced at where he had seen the shape beneath the trees, but there was nothing there.

Nobody said anything. Even Norris turned away and walked off towards the stream.

Roddy sat next to Max where he was making vague shapes in the sand.

“
I think we should go inland,” Max said sullenly. “See if there’s any sign of life here. Any inhabitants.”

“
I don’t think there will be,” Roddy said, and Max did not argue. They both knew what he meant. This was the most inhuman place either of them had ever seen.

“
Still, I think we should move. Don’t you? Don’t you think we should move?”

Roddy nodded. “We’ve no supplies, no cover, no weapons. No radio. No hope, unless we find something we can use.”

“
Weapons against what? Use for what?” Max looked up at him, and Roddy felt his heart sink. He’d always regarded Max as educated, wise in the ways of the world, if not academically. Now he just looked confused and lost. And maybe scared.

But Roddy did not want to see that, so he turned away and blanked it from his mind.

“
What did you mean about mutations?”

“
Sorry?”

“
Yesterday, just before the boat went. You said ‘all mutations,’ or words to that effect.”

Max shrugged, then smiled. The expression was so unexpected that Roddy found himself smiling along with him, though he didn’t know why. “It’s a thing Darwin said. When we landed here it reminded me of what the Galapagos are supposed to be like.”

“
Isolated,” Roddy said.

Max nodded. “When he and his colleague came up with the theory of evolution, they said it all depended on variation in a species, caused by mutation. So, by definition, we’re all descended from mutants. And the stronger ones among us...”

“
All mutations,” Roddy finished. Max nodded and Roddy shook his head. “Max, you have a way of losing me and scaring me at the same time.”

Max shrugged. “It’s not relevant. Just the idle ways my mind chooses to occupy itself, I suppose. My warped sense of the interesting.” He stood. “Maybe we should bury Ernie. Before this place eats him.”

The four of them buried Ernie on the beach, his bible on his chest. Max pocketed the knife after wiping it in the sand. Butch was silent and intense, trying to catch their eyes to take comfort in contact, but hardly succeeding. Norris was quiet and distant. Max and Roddy worked side by side, and Roddy took immense comfort in the smells and sounds around him. Human smells, human sounds.

By the time they had finished the sun was rising, hauling up the temperature. After they drank from the stream, trying their best to ignore the dead things washed up on its banks, Max suggested they go inland. Butch agreed willingly, and Norris said that it was as good an idea as any.

It was strange leaving the beach. Just under the trees there was a line of rotting seaweed stretching along the sands, drawn there by the last storm. It marked the demarcation line between sea and land, a barrier between two utterly different worlds. Roddy did not want to cross it. He looked around at his bedraggled, hungry companions, and saw that the feeling was mutual.

“
What’s wrong?” he said, but with awkward questions came hard answers.

“
You tell me,” Max replied.

Nothing more was said. Each buried in his own thoughts, the four men moved away from the beach and into the island.

* * *

2. INTO THE TREES

Roddy had expected a long, harrowing journey through dense jungle. Snakes dipping down from trees to kiss his shoulders. Spiders in his hair.

They were all equally surprised when, within five minutes, they emerged from the cover of trees onto a wide, undulating plain. The four men paused to rest and take in the view, their bodies weaker from their ordeal than they had at first thought. Hearts thumped, blood pumped through muscles jaded by five days of inactivity, hunger and thirst. The sun continued its attack, relentless and indifferent. Burnt skin peeled and revealed raw pinkness below to the heartless rays.

Roddy knelt on the ground and ran his hand through the rich grass. It looked almost like a meadow or hillside back home in Wales, but there were no daisies here, no dandelions. The grass felt sharper than it should, angry to the touch. It bent stiffly and sprang back with a rustle, shaking itself at his audacity.

“
Anyone for cricket?” Butch asked, but he received no reply, not even a rebuke. Instead, they walked out into the grassland.

Ernie was dead. So were the rest of their crew, but Ernie had been a survivor. He had been one of them, if only for five days. That length of time had set them apart from the rest of the ship’s compliment, and losing Ernie was like losing the ship all over again. Their hopes, however vague and troubled they were, seemed to have sunk with him. The men were silent. They walked immersed in their own worlds. Ernie was with all of them, in all their thoughts; either lifelike and spouting prayers, or dead and bleeding into the sand.

For Roddy, Ernie was still the gibbering shadow in the night, talking himself into a hopeless death while a shape moved under the trees, trying to shout out and encourage him. Or perhapss to tell them something through the silent dark.

Roddy had not mentioned his hallucination. He put it down to hunger, but subconsciously there was something else there. Something with a pleading mouth and flayed, torn skin.

None of them had been able to say a prayer over Ernie’s grave. Roddy hated that. He felt as if they had let Ernie and themselves down. God must not be too happy with them today.

Four sets of feet whispered through the grass, kicking up angry puffs of insects. From the position of the sun Roddy could tell that they were moving north, towards the highest point they could see from here. He reckoned the mountain — hill, really — to be a thousand feet high, its gentle lower slopes wooded, the higher parts splashed with clumps of colour like an artist’s well-used palette. It was smooth topped, well worn by time, speckled with outcroppings of a dark, sharp rock. It dominated their view in one direction, hiding whatever lay beyond. In the other direction, west and south-west, the grassland drifted away towards a hilly, heavily wooded area. Steam rose from this jungle, drifting straight up into the air until it was caught by an invisible breeze and condensed into wispy clouds. A few birds swung to and fro high above the island, rarely flapping their wings. They circled higher, swooped down, circled again. Roddy felt observed.

“
This is a horrible place,” Norris mumbled.

“
Why so?” asked Max. His voice was a drone. It sounded as though he needed to hear other voices, without caring what they said. Even if it was Norris doing the talking.

“
Don’t know,” Norris shrugged, apparently disappointing him. They walked in silence for a while, then Norris spoke out once more. “Just feels horrible. Like a hillside before rain. Loaded.”

“
Loaded with your bad luck,” Butch muttered, but for once Norris did not retort.

“
Where are we going?” Roddy asked. He looked back the way they had come and saw a series of wavy lines marking their progress. It could have been scattered dew, but the grass was dry.

“
What, you want a plan?” Butch said, almost smiling.

“
To the top of the hill,” Norris said, nodding north. “If it’s a small island we’ll see all of it from up there. If we’re lucky enough to have landed somewhere more substantial —”

“
What, like the moon?” Butch quipped.

“—
then we’ll be able to see where to head for,” Norris finished. He ignored Butch, much as an adult disregards a permanently annoying child. Maybe that was why Norris was not really liked. He had no humour.

“
Let’s stop and rest,” Max said. “Have a think about it.” They sat in the grass, only fifteen minutes after setting out from the beach. Norris remained slightly apart. Butch picked a blade and slipped it into his mouth, but spat it out with a disgusted grimace.

“
I’m so hungry,” Max said, verbalising all their thoughts.

Roddy closed his eyes and leant back, supporting himself on outstretched arms. He was aching all over. His flesh felt weak and weighed down by hunger. “We must eat, Max,” he said. “Let’s leave finding out where we are for later. For now, we’ve got to eat. And drink.”

“
Wonder where that tortoise went,” Butch said. All four men quickly stood.

They headed across the meadow to where they thought the stream would be, hiding itself beneath the lush covering of trees it had encouraged. Where there was water there would be food, fruits and berries at the very least.

Roddy felt the silence turn from intimidating to threatening, as though they had passed an invisible boundary. He thought of what Norris had said, the calm before the storm, and looked up into the sky. But the unfaltering blue depressed him, holding no promise of shade from the sun or fresh water to catch in their cupped hands. The thought of the stream made him go weak, because he had seen the dead things in it. And he had drunk the water.

If the island would kill its own, then what of the invaders?