Kong: Skull Island Page 19

  “Uh, no,” Marlow said. “You do not wanna go that way. Trust me on this.”

  “Why?” Randa asked. “What lives there?”

  “Nothing we can’t handle,” Packard said.

  “Like you handled Kong?” Marlow asked.

  “The monkey has a name?” Packard said.

  “He’s an ape, not a monkey. And yes, of course he has a name. Look, if you go there—”

  Packard cut Marlow off mid-sentence, advancing on Conrad and talking into his face. “Isn’t your job tracking down lost men?” he asked.

  Conrad did not back down before Packard’s stare. He’d faced men like this before. They were bullies, and deep down all bullies were weak when they were dished some of their own medicine.

  But part of what Packard said was right. Conrad could not deny that. He didn’t want to leave anyone behind.

  “If we reach that position and he isn’t there, no wild goose chase,” Conrad said. “We make it back here by nightfall. Understood?”

  “Loud and clear,” Packard said, smiling and turning away. “You heard the man!” he said, louder, and his men started to hustle.

  Weaver came to stand by Conrad’s shoulder, camera pointed at the soldiers as they shouldered their kit and weapons and prepared to move out.

  “Don’t forget to remind me that I knew this was a bad idea,” he said. Her only answer was to turn and snap a quick photo of his face, close up, as if to record his moment of doubt.

  The two groups now one, Conrad felt that they were one step closer to finally leaving the island that had almost killed them all. Readied, the soldiers and civilians turned to him and waited. He was their tracker, their de-facto leader, and he wasn’t the slightest bit comfortable with such a responsibility.

  * * *

  Colonel Packard was on a mission, and nothing would stop him or slow him down. Not even this latest sheer ridge they were being forced to climb.

  It was yet another wrinkle in the skin of this freakish island. The going through the jungle was consistently hard, but Conrad always seemed to find the easiest way through. Packard couldn’t help but admire the man, even though he would privately admit that there was a tension hanging between them. Whether it was simply a matter of military testosterone or something deeper he wasn’t sure. Packard knew he could never trust Conrad completely, but also that was due in some measure to his own ongoing deception. It wasn’t Chapman they were going to the Sea Stallion to find. The captain was already dead, his loss as deep and burning in Packard’s gut as that of every one of his men who’d died on this island. Packard was a soldier at war, and he needed weapons.

  The minute Conrad suspected his deception, Packard knew he’d have a problem. The ex-SAS man exuded an outward calm, even a softness, but that was just to impress the woman photographer. Packard was certain that if the need arose, he’d be the hardest, most brutal killer among them.

  As they struggled up the side of the ravine and topped the ridge at last, Packard felt a chill of fear and hopelessness settle in his stomach.

  In the valley beyond was a scene of horror. Unlike the rest of the island it was almost denuded of trees, those that remained growing in isolated copses, some of them stripped of leaves and life and standing like lonely gravestones across the landscape. The ground was holed with fissures, and from some of them heavy yellow gases rose from deep down. Here and there the gases were driven upwards with explosive force, intermittent blasts sending siren-sounds at the sky on pillars of boiling steam. In one or two places the glow of volcanic fires scarred the land, open wounds that pulsed with the land’s considered heartbeat. Nothing living was visible across the wide valley.

  The only things there were dead.

  There were many of them, huddled corpses and skeletons large and small, dead creatures piled together in bone pyres, some of them lying or crouching alone in their final moments. Many of the dead were unidentifiable from this distance; smears of grey, white, and brown where skin and hide still clung.

  A few were large enough to make out, even from this far away.

  Weaver was so stunned that she’d forgotten to lift her camera. They all were. Packard tried to hold in his shock, struggling to shut out the sight, as if to recharge his purpose and refocus on his destination.

  “What the hell is this place?” Slivko whispered.

  “I’ve taken enough photos of mass graves to recognise one,” Weaver said.

  “It’s not a grave,” Conrad said. “It’s a lair.”

  Packard had been thinking the same. He and the special forces guy swapped a glance, then he took them down from the ridge, eager not to provide a silhouette for anything that might be stalking or hunting them.

  Especially not for whatever this lair might belong to.

  As they moved down they mounted another small stand of rocks, Conrad steering them through a gap between massive boulders. On the other side he stopped again, staring.

  Even Packard experienced a moment of disassociation from the world he knew. The island was strange and dreadful enough, but this was otherworldly, like having a glimpse at an alien heaven never meant to be seen, or an alien hell waiting for them all.

  From their new position he could make out two giant ape skeletons. Both seemed larger than the beast Marlow had called Kong, and they had died deaths that even Packard had to admit were sad and mournful. They held each other’s skeletal hands.

  “Those bones are stripped clean,” Conrad said. “They didn’t fall here. They were brought here.”

  “Something’s wiping them all out,” Randa said.

  “Skull Crawlers,” San whispered.

  “What the hell is a Skull Crawler?” Packard asked.

  “Things from beneath,” Marlow said. “Devilish beasts, Colonel. You really don’t want to know.”

  “Kong is the last one standing,” Brooks said.

  “Yeah, well, the crash site should be just beyond this valley,” Packard said. He won’t be standing for long, he thought. Not if I have my way. I’ll leave this island with one more skeleton melting down into its soil.

  “Uh-uh, this place is a real no-no,” Marlow said. “We need to go around.”

  “If we take a longer route, we risk not making it to the northern shore in time,” Packard said. “And every moment Chapman’s alone is more risk to him.”

  “We should be going there right now!” the Landsat guy, Steve, said.

  “And you’re welcome to do that, son,” Packard said. “Alone. I’m not leaving Jack out there a minute longer. Who’s with me?”

  His men glanced around, nervous but not keen to go against their colonel. Reles stared straight ahead across the hellish valley.

  “We can make it if we stay together,” Conrad said.

  Surprised, Packard nodded his thanks to the tracker.

  “You heard the man. Stay tight, two columns. Let’s move out.”

  They checked their weapons, then Packard and Conrad led the way down into the valley.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  Weaver had come to her senses and started using her camera again. It might have been the first time in her career that she’d been so shocked by what she was viewing that she forgot to take a photograph. She was rectifying that now.

  As they moved across the hostile, alien landscape, she realised that she needed something to give scale to the images she was recording. She tried concentrating on the people around her, as opposed to simply photographing the remains of these creatures almost beyond imagining.

  Brooks and San were collecting samples, tucking rocks into their increasingly heavy rucksacks, filling plastic bags with sand and ash. They seemed unsettled but excited, glancing around like nervous children as they saw things more unusual, exciting, terrifying. They barely remained in the same place for more than a few seconds.

  She framed Randa against a huge skeleton she could not identify and snapped a photo. As she did so, Randa was using his film camera to record the scene. His mouth hung slightly open
. She guessed that he was as shocked as them all about how right he’d been.

  Conrad paused beside a pile of bones, the remains scattered and splintered. They contained marks that could only have been made by teeth and claws, and in the ground beside him were more claw marks.

  Marlow stood beside him and also stared down, terror in his eyes. Weaver assumed they were Skull Crawler marks, and she felt a shiver as she photographed the old pilot.

  Cole lit a cigarette. She snapped him with smoke drifting around his face, while in the background a column of coloured steam rose from a vent in the ground. He looked almost serene.

  “Cole, what’re you doing, man?” Mills said. “Put the cigarette out, we don’t have time for that. And what if they smell it?”

  Cole stared at his fellow soldier for a moment, then sighed and flicked the butt into a nearby vent.

  The explosion was sudden and shocking, a flare of fire blooming from the vent and roaring at the air. Mills stumbled away from the blast and fell onto his back, and Weaver ducked down, catching glimpses of horrific memories—men with burned faces, and children with charred skin.

  The fire receded as quickly as it had come, as if sucked back down into the earth.

  “Watch those fumes!” Randa shouted. “The whole area’s honeycombed with vents, and who knows what’s wafting up from below.”

  Weaver recovered quickly, pleased to see that the soldier was not badly hurt. Shock had thrown him to the ground rather than the force of scouring flames. She snapped a few more shots of Cole helping Mills to his feet, brushing themselves down and checking for any scorched areas. They’d been lucky.

  “Listen to the eggheads,” Cole muttered.

  Weaver smiled and turned away as Conrad led them further across the valley. In places the entire ground was covered in crumbled bones, so that their boots crushed down, crackling over cracked bones and making them even smaller. Perhaps the sand beneath was also the remains of old bones, a generational process that might have been occurring ever since the world began to spin.

  She saw a brood of normal-sized vultures resting on a massive skull, heads hunched down as they watched this mysterious group pass. Her camera flashed in the gloom caused by the increasing clouds of steam.

  “Mind if I borrow one of those?” Randa asked. His film camera still hung around his neck, but Weaver handed him her flash camera and took out another from her bag. The more photos of this place, the better.

  The soldiers moved cautiously, sweeping their guns left and right just as Weaver and Randa moved their cameras. Fear and fascination, weapons and tools.

  They passed a long, huge ribcage, Packard leading his men through the hollow space where some unknown creature’s insides had once existed. Weaver followed Conrad towards a small lip, the dip beyond hidden until they reached its edge. When she stood beside Conrad she gasped.

  They’d seen it from a distance, but close up the giant ape’s skull looked even more amazing. It was huge. Much larger than Kong’s, she was sure, and she wondered at what might have killed such a massive beast. Past it was the second skull, smaller and scarred by vicious claw marks that might have been the cause of death.

  Weaver panned her camera, looking for an angle that would take in the soldiers with the giant skulls behind them. And there’s the book cover, she thought, clicking off several pictures as the soldiers looked around in wonder and dread.

  Something growled. The sound seemed to come from all around, confused by landscape and mist, and Weaver did a quick circle, camera held ready at her chest.

  The soldiers scattered, hiding within and around the skulls, gesturing for the civilians to do the same. They aimed their guns into the mist.

  Weaver and Conrad ran together, crawling inside the largest skull and peering from a savage wound in its side. The bone was surprisingly smooth and clean, and it smelled of nothing. Whatever might have been left to decay had long since rotted away.

  I’m where its brain used to be, she thought, and it was a shattering idea.

  Conrad touched her arm and pointed.

  A shadow moved against the mist, swirling it into agitated shapes, and then a monster appeared. She had only seen this Skull Crawler before as a wall image, a carved representation with careful colouring in the spring room of the beached wreck. Witnessing it in its full, shocking glory made her skin prickle and her blood run cold.

  It was a diabolical merging of newt and Komodo dragon, its scaled skin scarred from ancient conflicts, damp with slime. Spines lined its backbone, several of them snapped off in old battles. Its claws were the length of a human’s forearm.

  Weaver prayed that Randa did not try to take a picture. The camera she’d lent him had an automatic flash, and she had no doubt it would attract this thing’s attention. She could not believe that the soldiers could ever fight it off.

  Slowly, its massive mouth unhinged. Its tongue flopped out, long, leathery and scarred. Its stomach heaved, sides sucked in one moment, inflated the next. A heavy drumming sound accompanied the movement as it performed it several more times, and then it brought up the skeletal remains of its last meal.

  Two human skeletons, bones ripped apart but skulls and spine stems whole. The skulls were stripped clean, the flesh melted from faces by the monster’s stomach acids. A leather belt wrapped some of the bones. A combat boot still contained slick meaty remains.

  Weaver slapped her hand across her mouth, biting down on her palm.

  The beast shook its head, spattering spit and blood across the ground and the ruins of the more ancient dead. It stalked away, disappearing into the mist with a heavy scampering sound, gone as quickly as it had arrived.

  Conrad was already sliding from the skull, knife in his hand and reaching for one of the skulls that had rolled their way.

  “What are you doing?” Weaver hissed.

  He waved back at her, reached forward, snagged a set of dog tags tangled around the skull’s jawbone. He lifted them, paused, then presented them for Weaver’s attention.

  ‘Chapman’ they read, along with his military number.

  Weaver frowned, trying to work out what this meant.

  “Packard?” she asked.

  “Don’t tell me you’re surprised,” Conrad said.

  Weaver wasn’t sure what she was feeling. Could the colonel be lying to them? His major was already dead, consumed, and digested. Their journey towards the crashed Sea Stallion was a wild goose chase.

  “Fall in, fall in,” Packard said quietly as he and his men emerged from cover. They moved with caution, panning their weapons around them and creating a close perimeter. The colonel stood tall, glaring around to ensure that no one had been lost. His eyes settled on Weaver and Conrad and the human skulls at their feet, and Weaver held her breath. She glanced sidelong at Conrad, but his knife was sheathed, the dog tags already stowed somewhere out of sight.

  Packard nodded once, then headed off into the mist. Marlow was close behind, Katana sword still drawn.

  Weaver and Conrad followed. She tried to catch his eye, but he was staring at Packard’s back, frowning, and giving nothing away.

  We’ve got to confront him, Weaver thought. He’s leading us into danger and we need to know why. But perhaps doing so whilst making their way through a monster’s lair was not the time.

  Weaver noticed Randa off to the right, standing still and scanning the mist for the vanished beast. He had the flash camera she’d lent him raised, panning it left and right like the soldiers holding their weapons. She felt a momentary kinship with Randa, brusque and single-minded though he was. They were both seeking something, committing themselves fully to their quests, and perhaps shutting out the rest of the world in doing so.

  “Randa!” Brooks whispered, but his boss didn’t seem to hear. He was turning a slow circle, camera at the ready.

  “Get over here!” Packard said, louder. Weaver winced at the volume of his voice.

  Randa raised a hand in acknowledgment, but as he took his fi
rst step, something moved behind him.

  Weaver caught her breath. The shape appeared over the top of the smaller of the great Kong skulls, silhouetted against the mist, crawling up and over the skull’s curved dome and down towards Randa with barely a sound.

  It was the Skull Crawler, its wide reptilian head tilting sideways as if to get a good look at its prey.

  Randa turned around slowly and stared right up at it. “Well look at you,” he said, and then the monster struck.

  It moved fast for such a huge creature, flipping itself over the skull, scooping Randa up in its tail, turning onto its back, and dropping the stunned, silent man into its gaping mouth and swallowing him whole.

  San screamed.

  As Randa fell he must have triggered the camera’s rapid shot function, and he disappeared into the mouth head first, seeing what awaited him. The Skull Crawler’s open mouth was illuminated by a flash, and Weaver’s last sight of Randa was his legs disappearing between long, cruel teeth.

  The camera continued shooting, and the poor man’s journey down the creature’s gullet was marked with flashes through its translucent skin.

  “Get down!” Conrad shouted, grabbing Weaver and pulling her to the bone-strewn ground just as the whole world erupted into a storm of gunfire. After the relative silence it was a shock, and she pressed her hands to her ears, rolling onto her side so that she could still see what was going on.

  Conrad was firing his sidearm, switching aim with each shot as the creature circled them in the mist. Only vaguely visible in the haze, the faint flashes that accompanied its shadowy movements must have come from the camera that Randa had been holding. The idea of him swallowed and whole in the creature’s gullet, perhaps even still alive for a few seconds more, was both grotesque and fascinating.

  Wish I could get that film, she thought.

  Several heavy blasts thumped at Weaver through the ground as grenades were lobbed at the circling monster.