Ted Kosmatka - Prophet of Bones

“Can you swim?” Paul asked.

“Now you ask us?”

“I’d unbuckle if I were you.”

The jeep hit another rock, metal grinding on stone. Then the sky traded places with water and everything went dark.

Water surged through shattered windows. Paul caught half a breath before the river knocked him into the backseat.

His head slammed into something jagged, and he was suddenly upside down, underwater, face crushed into the jeep’s roof. The river was a cold fist on his back, holding him down. The sound was deafening—rending metal and breaking glass, the scrape of stone on steel just beneath his cheek as the vehicle dredged the stony river bottom. Then the jeep rolled again, a violent movement, and the rear door flew open, twisted from its hinges—and he was suddenly out, flailing in the water.

He sucked in a lungful of air, trying to stay at the surface.

Gunshots came from behind them, bullets zinging across the water, and Paul ducked beneath the surface. He went deep, letting the cold river carry him. His shoulder slammed into a submerged boulder, knocking the air from his lungs. He surfaced again, gasping. More shots, farther away this time. Somewhere behind him, he heard the jeep slam into a rock. The cold fist of the river carried him forward.

Paul saw James paddling a dozen feet ahead of him.

“James!”

“Here!” came the answer. James coughed and splashed.

Then a moment later, from somewhere behind him: “Paul!” It was Margaret. The jeep loomed close behind, rolling in the frothing water. A battering ram ready to crush anything in its path.

“Stay to the side!” Paul shouted. “Let the current take you.”

But behind Margaret the jeep hit a boulder, turned, wedged itself sideways. Water roared up and over the top, pinning it in place. Margaret kicked away.

Paul kept his feet out in front of him to fend off the rocks. Up ahead, a sound Paul knew. The roar of water, and the river dropped away.

“Jesus,” James said.

There was no time for anything else. James was swept into a narrowing and then was gone, over some hidden edge. Five feet or a hundred.

“Look out!” Paul called behind him to Margaret. He sucked a deep lungful of air, and the river swept him over the falls.

There was no sense of falling, only of being in the grip of the river.

He hit and was pulled deep, spinning upside down. Kicking his way to the surface, he broke free and took a gasp of air. The current pulled him forward.

The river flattened over the next few hundred meters. Trees hung low over the water in a broad green drape, and the rapids slowly died away.

They dragged themselves out of the dark flow several miles downriver, where a bridge crossed the water. It was the first sign of civilization they’d seen since leaving the camp. For a long while, they lay on the rocky shore, just breathing. When they could stand, they followed the winding dirt road to a place called Rea. From there they took a bus. Margaret had money.

They didn’t speak about it until they arrived at Bajawa.

“Do you think they’re okay?” Margaret asked. Her voice wavered.

“I think it wouldn’t serve their purpose to hurt the dig team. They only wanted the bones.”

“They shot at us.”

“Because they assumed we had something they wanted. They were shooting at the tires.”

“No,” she said. “They weren’t.”

Three nights in a rented hotel room, and James couldn’t leave—that hair like a great big handle anybody could pick up and carry, anybody with eyes and a voice. Some of the locals hadn’t seen red hair in their lives, and James’s description was prepackaged for easy transport. Paul, however, blended—just another vaguely Asian set of cheekbones in the crowd, even if he was half a foot taller than most of the locals.

That night, staring at the ceiling from one of the double beds, James said, “If those bones aren’t us… then I wonder what they were like.”

“They had fire and stone tools,” Paul said. “They were probably a lot like us.”

“We act like we’re the chosen ones, you know? But what if it wasn’t like that?”

“Don’t think about it,” Margaret said.

“What if God had all these different varieties… all these different walks, these different options at the beginning, and we’re just the ones who killed the others off?”

“Shut up,” she said.

“What if there wasn’t just one Adam but a hundred Adams?”

“Shut the fuck up, James,” Margaret said.

There was a long quiet, the sound of the street filtering through the thin walls. “Us or other,” James said softly, not a question but something else, the listing of two equal alternatives. After another long quiet he said, “Paul, if you get your samples back to your lab, you’ll be able to tell, won’t you?”

Paul thought of the evaluation team and wondered. He said nothing.

“The winners write the history books,” James said. “Maybe the winners write the bibles, too. I wonder what religion died with them.”

The next day, Paul left to buy food. There was no choice. When he returned, Margaret was gone.

“Where is she?”

“She left. She said she’d be right back.”

“Why didn’t you stop her?”

“How was I supposed to do that, hold her down? She said she wouldn’t be gone long, and then she left.”

They ate in silence. Noodles and fish.

Day turned into evening. By darkness, they both knew she wasn’t coming back.

“How are we going to get home from here?” James asked.

“I don’t know.”

“And your samples. How are you going to get them off the island? Even if we got to an airport, they’d never let you on the plane with them. You’ll be searched. They’ll find the samples and they’ll be confiscated.”

“We’ll figure out a way once things have settled down.”

“Things are never going to settle down.”

“They will.”

“You still don’t understand, even after everything that happened.”

“Understand what?”

“What these bones could mean,” James said. “When your entire culture is predicated on an idea, you can’t afford to be proven wrong.”

Out of dead sleep, Paul heard it. Something. At the edge of perception.

He’d known this was coming, though he hadn’t been aware that he’d known until that moment. The creak of wood, the gentle breeze of an open door.

Shock and awe would have been better—an inrush of soldiers, an arrest of some kind, expulsion, deportation, a legal system, however corrupt. A silent man in the dark meant many things. None of them good.

Paul breathed. There was a cold in him—a part of him that was dead, a part of him that could never be afraid. A part of him his father had put there.

Paul’s eyes searched the darkness and found it: the place where shadow moved, a dark breeze that eased across the room. If there was only one of them, then there was a chance.

He thought of making a run for it, sprinting for the door, leaving the samples and this place behind, but James, still sleeping, stopped him. He made up his mind.

Paul exploded from the bed, flinging the blanket ahead of him, wrapping that part of the room, and a shape moved, a theoretical darkness like a puma’s spots, black on black—there even though you can’t see it. And Paul knew he’d surprised him, that darkness, and he knew, instantly, that it wouldn’t be enough. A blow rocked Paul off his feet, forward momentum carrying him into the wall. The mirror shattered, glass crashing to the floor.

“What the fuck?” James hit the light, and suddenly the world snapped into existence, a flashbulb stillness—and the intruder was Indonesian, crouched in a stance, preternatural silence coming off him like a heat shimmer. He carried endings with him, nothingness in a long blade. The insult of it hit home. The shocking fucking insult, standing there, knees bent, bright blade in one hand: blood on reflective steel. That’s when Paul felt the pain. It was only then he realized he’d already been opened.