Kong: Skull Island Read online

  And there was the ape, and the squid. Those monstrous things he had seen played on his mind, haunting him with violent memories, and walking went some way to divert his attention from those memories.

  An hour out from the crashed chopper, he started talking to himself. He wasn’t sure why, because he’d never done it before, but his muttered words were somehow calming. It made his alien surroundings just a little less alien.

  “Dear Billy. Sometimes life’ll punch you right in the balls.” He smiled as he thought of what Billy’s reaction would be to those words. He’d be surprised, but he would also laugh. More than anything, Billy was Chapman’s reason for surviving.

  He heard something behind him, moving back in the shadowy trees. He froze, breath held, listening, watching… nothing. He was skittish and nervous, waiting for something horrific to come for him. So much so that his mind was making ghosts. He didn’t want them, didn’t need them, and he started talking louder to drown out their chatter.

  “Dear Billy, one day—”

  His radio buzzed, but when he replied he received only static. He crouched down and tried to adjust the radio, lowering the volume and turning the frequency knobs. He moved over to a fallen log, making himself more comfortable, and placed the radio close to his ear. Ghostly voices came through. Perhaps he didn’t really want to know what they had to say.

  As he turned the dials, the log beneath him moved.

  He froze and looked down. It moved again.

  Chapman launched himself from the trunk as it shifted upright, rising high above him, its base digging into the soil as it lifted a heavy weight up into the sunlight overhead.

  He staggered backwards, still holding the radio but ignoring the voice crackling through it. Terror took away any hope of understanding. His feet almost tangled in undergrowth, but somehow he remained upright as the giant stick insect lifted itself to its full height.

  It must have been twenty feet tall. Its legs were thick and heavily spiked, its head the size of a man, bulbous eyes rolling in different directions as it took in its surroundings. All of its attention rested on him and it faced down at him and hissed. He could smell its breath, and he had smelled death many times before.

  Still gripping the radio, Chapman scrambled back the way he’d come. He thought of pulling his pistol, but didn’t think it would have any effect on something so huge. The bullets would barely graze its thick carapace. He could not fight this. Panic had gripped him, and flight was the only reaction that made any sense.

  The beast kept pace with him easily. Its monstrous legs slammed down around him however fast he ran, and he knew this was a race he could not win.

  He tripped and rolled down a slope, smashing against a tree. The wind was knocked from him. Billy, he thought. Oh, Billy, I’m so sorry that I couldn’t make it home.

  He grabbed his sealed bag of letters to Billy from his jacket and pinned it to a tree with a knife. He wrapped a red neckerchief around it, in the vain hope that someone might find it and make sure Billy got to read those words at last. They suddenly meant so much.

  Chapman scrambled around to face his fate. Pulling another knife and his pistol, ready to fend off the imminent attack, seemed like a hopeless gesture. But he refused to lie down and die without a fight.

  The stick insect punched its legs down either side of his body and leaned in close. Its head was even more horrific this close up, like one of those 50s monster movies given life. Its teeth were long and sharp, and he imagined them piercing him, lifting him so that those powerful jaws could snap him in half with one bite.

  He gripped the knife harder. I’ll aim for the eyes, he thought. Blind the bastard. Then perhaps—

  The stick insect suddenly froze above him like a fallen tree, almost vanishing into the surroundings again, such was its perfect camouflage.

  Seconds later it started backing away.

  Chapman kept his breath held. He didn’t move. Maybe it couldn’t see him when he was still! Maybe it thought he was dead! It backed further away, then turned around and rushed into the trees, gone as quickly as it had appeared.

  Moments later Chapman had to question whether he’d even seen the thing at all. He couldn’t contain the grin that spread across his face as death stalked away through the jungle, leaving him behind. As if to join in his celebration, the radio buzzed again.

  “Chapman, this is Fox Leader, do you read?” It was Packard, sounding desperate.

  “Yessir!” Chapman said. “This is Chapman, I copy you, I—”

  A shadow consumed him from behind, flowing around the tree he sat against. A coolness washed across him, and he thought it had little to do with the dappled sunlight being shut out from view. This felt like the icy touch of evil.

  Chapman turned his head slowly, not wanting to see but compelled to look.

  A monster stood behind him. He had never seen anything like it before. It was no known beast, alive or dead, yet it breathed and stared, saliva dripping from its open mouth, eyes wide and unblinking, reflecting his terrified self in their orange glow. Its head was six feet across, much of its vast body still hidden back in the jungle from where it had crept this close to him.

  Close enough to touch.

  “Chapman?” Packard said.

  Chapman dropped the radio and grabbed his dog-tags with both hands.

  “Billy,” he said.

  * * *

  Packard sat apart from the rest of his group. Three guards were posted around the small riverside clearing, the rest of them were taking a break and a drink. They all kept their weapons to hand. Since the encounter with the spider and Jammers’ horrific death, they could not let their guard down for a second. He tried to keep his voice down low, but now that contact had been made with Chapman, he wished he could reach through the radio and save his friend.

  He needed saving. Helpless, horrified, Packard heard Jack Chapman’s final agonised screams, and then the sickening crunching sound that marked his end.

  He turned away from the group and stared into the jungle as he finally let the signal fade out.

  “Sir?” Reles called over. “Anything?”

  “Still out of range,” Packard said. He packed away the radio and stood, decision made. This would destroy them. And besides, there was still work to be done.

  Chapman’s death didn’t mean that their destination should change.

  “Come on, ladies,” Packard said. “We got miles to go before we sleep.” He watched his men hustle the group together again, efficient, determined, the soldiers he had always wanted them to be.

  He was furious. He was grief-stricken. And he knew that their greatest battle was still to come.

  TWENTY-TWO

  Weaver felt some sadness at leaving the Iwi village behind. Everything on this journey so far had been new, but many of the new images framed in her lens had been terrible or traumatic. The Iwi were not. They were mysterious and enigmatic, and she would have happily spent several weeks staying with them, documenting their lives and existence and building a photographic portrait of this unknown, untouched tribe.

  Marlow had lived with them for over three decades, and even he admitted to not understanding much of their history. He admitted that he had always been just a visitor with them, never really belonging.

  As the boat worked its way north with Marlow at the helm, she took advantage of the calm moment and checked her equipment. Her used films were sealed in film cartridges, then double-sealed in plastic bags to make sure they didn’t get wet. She kept them in a shoulder bag slung tight across her chest. The cameras and lenses were still clean and serviceable, apart from the one lens she’d cracked. She still kept that one tucked away in her bag, just in case it became a last resort.

  With a limited supply of film, she had to choose her moment to take pictures. Yet every moment and place on this terrifying, amazing journey seemed picture-worthy. She wandered the boat’s deck, framing new moments with each step.

  Slivko finally finished leve
lling his record player, using slivers of wood to prop corners. He lowered the needle on a record, and the first strains of ‘Fly Me To The Moon’ drifted across the deck.

  “Least there’s music,” Slivko said, glancing up just in time for Weaver to snap his image. He blinked, then looked away. She was used to the guilt of intruding on a moment. Most of the time, she considered it part of her job.

  “Slivko,” Conrad said. “Remember those things with teeth?”

  Slivko looked across the water at the jungle pressed close to the shore and turned down the volume.

  “How can you listen to music at a time like this?” Nieves asked. Weaver wondered if everyone found him as annoying as she did. “And why are you carrying that stupid record player, anyway?”

  “Calms the nerves, man,” Slivko said. “Tunes got me through the Tet Offensive.”

  Weaver turned away and aimed her camera elsewhere. San approached Brooks and handed him an MCI ration.

  “Thanks,” he said.

  “Thank you. For before. For protecting me when I… you know.” She started to open another ration tin.

  “Trying, anyway. Lemme get that for you,” he said, taking the container. He flipped open a knife and promptly cut his finger as he attempted to open it.

  “Allow me,” San said, smiling.

  “You should see me in the library,” Brooks replied, which made San laugh.

  Weaver snapped her laughter, and Brooks with his finger to his mouth. It was a moment frozen in time, speaking volumes. The art of what she did was ever-present, but the philosophical impact never ceased to amaze her. People went through life believing that they were constantly on the move, yet she knew that every life was an infinite series of frozen moments. Passing them by with life’s riot as a distraction, few people recognised the limitless potential and fascination of these instants.

  “Hey, you guys,” Marlow said, raising his voice above the music. “So when the man on the moon got up there, did he find the man in the moon?”

  “Nah,” Nieves said. “Just shadows of lunar dust seas, higher mountain ranges, that sort of thing. The human brain has a propensity to extrapolate images that don’t exist from random images. It’s called pareidolia.”

  “Yeah, well, whatever,” Marlow said. “My mother used to tell me the moon was a foolish boy chasing the sun across the sky, forgetting to eat ’til he waned away to nothing.”

  “That comes from an Inuit myth,” San said.

  “Myths are the stories we tell to explain things we don’t understand,” Nieves said.

  “Kinda sad when we lose those things to rocket ships and cameras in space,” Weaver said, stepping up beside Conrad. She liked him being close. It felt safe.

  “Until the myth decides to eat you,” Conrad said.

  They fell quiet after that, perhaps all remembering the worst parts of their day.

  Weaver framed the river ahead of them, jungle on both sides, darkness its destination, and took a picture of their future.

  * * *

  Ever since passing under the wall Conrad had felt nervous. Or rather, even more nervous than before. The others seemed to be enjoying the relative calm aboard Marlow’s boat, and the stranded pilot’s eccentricities. For a man isolated so long from the world he called home, he seemed largely undamaged. Indeed, rather than just survive he seemed to have flourished. Conrad sensed a deeper sadness in him, but guessed it was more to do with the death of his friend, the man who was once his enemy, than anything else. He’d left a wife and son behind, but this felt so much like another world that their absence was probably remote, like the memory of a fading dream. The Japanese pilot’s death must have felt like losing a family for the second time.

  Conrad paced the deck keeping watch. Slivko’s music played, the scratched records providing a strange soundtrack to their journey. Weaver was at the bow, camera aimed ahead. Occasionally she turned it around to focus on the passengers. She seemed as nervous as him.

  “We have no idea what’s out there,” she said.

  “We’ve got some idea. Big bad things.”

  “Let’s just hope we can pass them by.”

  “Yeah,” Conrad said. “The island can’t be that big, though.”

  “Comforting,” she said.

  Conrad shrugged. It wasn’t his job to offer false optimism.

  The needle jumped on Slivko’s record player. The soldier cursed.

  “What do you think will happen when—” Weaver began, and the needle jumped again.

  “Choppy waters,” Conrad said. He stood and looked over the bow at the river they were slicing through. The water was heavy with mud from recent rains, but there was very little chop. It was wide and slow here, subject only occasionally to swirls of current.

  He looked back at Marlow.

  Steering the boat, the pilot was suddenly tense, staring down at the river ahead.

  “Hey, try to keep this hulk steady!” Slivko said. “This is Zeppelin, man. You don’t want to scratch the Zep.”

  “The water’s not choppy,” Marlow said, and Conrad knew that they were in trouble. It was the knowledge in Marlow’s eyes that convinced him. They’d hit something.

  “Everyone stay alert,” Conrad said. “Keep your weapons close.”

  “Huh?” Nieves said.

  The boat jumped, and the record player’s needle scratched right across the album. Slivko stood and grabbed his M-16 just as the shape flung itself up and over the starboard railing and curled around his leg. It pulled, he went down, and the boat’s forward motion meant that he was instantly dragged towards the stern.

  “Help me!” he shouted. He struck the stern railings and his finger squeezed the trigger, sending a volley of shots across the boat to ricochet from the wheelhouse.

  “Hard astern!” Conrad shouted. He slid along the deck towards Slivko. Brooks and San were already there, holding the man’s arms as the thing wrapped around his leg tried to pull him off and down into the river.

  “What the hell is it?” Weaver shouted. She was by his side, having grabbed a machete from a storage locker on deck.

  It looked like a snake or a suckerless tentacle, wrapped tight around Slivko’s leg and squeezing hard. As the boat slowed its pressure seemed to lessen, but it was still trying to haul Slivko from the deck and down into the water.

  Marlow threw the boat into reverse and the engine screamed, smoking as it fought against their forward momentum. The screw bit in and water churned behind them, splashing dark brown and then bright red, and the creature loosened its grip and dropped away. Brooks and San fell back and dragged Slivko with them. He kicked backwards until he was as far from the water as he could get, sat against the wheelhouse, and aimed the M-16 between his feet.

  “Marlow?” Conrad called.

  “Beats me,” he said. “Lots of stuff in this river. Churned it up nice though, eh?”

  “It was trying to eat me!” Slivko shouted.

  “Nah, don’t think so,” Marlow said. “Reckon it wanted to pull you in, drown you, then stow your body til it started to rot. Then it’d just pull bits off of you whenever it got hungry. That’s how crocs eat, you know.”

  “What? What?”

  “That was no crocodile,” Weaver said.

  “Sure wasn’t,” Marlow said. “Keep your eyes peeled, we’ll head off any—”

  The shapes emerged with barely a splash, several of them leaping up from the river’s surface and landing on deck along the starboard side. At first Conrad thought they were long, thin water snakes, a dozen feet long with fine webbed fins and elongated heads ending with small, suckered mouths. Then he saw that they all trailed back into the river.

  They met together at a dark mass just below the water’s surface.

  “Squid!” he shouted. “It’s a giant squid!”

  That wasn’t quite right. The tentacles were strange, not covered with suckers but heavily ridged with muscle. The ragged stump that had first grabbed Slivko was back, spewing blood across th
e deck.

  “Go!” Weaver said, and Marlow leaned down on the throttle.

  The creature had learned. This time its limbs were not caught in the spinning screw, but the good hold it had with a few of its tentacles dragged it along with the accelerating boat. Conrad drew his gun and started firing down into the water, then Slivko screamed again.

  “Gimme a break!” he shouted, almost manic as he was dragged once again towards the deck’s edge.

  Weaver started hacking at the tentacle with the machete, careful not to strike Slivko in the leg. The blade seemed to skim from the slick skin, striking the deck and throwing sparks. Brooks held his arm and tried to prevent him being taken, and Conrad looked around for Nieves. The Landsat guy was huddled against the wheelhouse, staring wide-eyed. He’d be no help.

  “Where’s San?” Conrad asked. “Where the hell is San?” For a second he thought she was gone, and he felt so sad that she’d died without any of them even noticing.

  Then she reappeared swinging Marlow’s katana sword. It sliced through the tentacle six inches from Slivko’s foot, rebounding from the deck with a sweet metallic note and sending the other tentacles into an agonised dance.

  Conrad was struck across the face, and he ducked and rolled backwards before the tentacle found purchase around his neck.

  “Faster!” he shouted at Marlow.

  “I’m giving her all she’s got!” Marlow said, and Conrad imagined him screaming it in a Scottish accent. He laughed, almost hysterical, then scrambled to his feet.

  Several tentacles were grabbing hold of various parts of the boat, and as they pulled tighter they dragged the body of the beast up out of the water. It broke the surface in a frothing wave, the water churned brown with mud and red with the creature’s leaking blood. Conrad grabbed at the railing and looked down, just as the squid—or whatever the hell it was—reared up even further.

  He looked it in the eye. Its barbed beak opened as if to laugh at him, or curse.

  He shot it in the eye, and the massive fluid sac burst and spewed into the river like a bloody slick.