Tim Lebbon - Kong - Skull Island

Soon, he would meet with Weaver and the others again. He already knew what their next move should be.

Go home.

Packard and the few survivors he’d found moved quickly through the jungle. They had discovered many bodies at the several crash sites they had visited. A couple were still alive, bleeding out, horribly wounded and doomed to die. His men. His comrades of war, slaughtered all around him, crushed like insects into the soil. In all his years, he had never seen such carnage brought down upon the men he loved.

As the beast had fled, Packard imagined that they had locked eyes. In that moment he had silently vowed revenge.

The beast had roared laughter at him and then walked away, dismissive and aloof. A mocking departure. A challenge.

Bastard , Packard thought. I’ll get you, bastard .

They found Reles beneath a tree. He was battered and bleeding but alive, even though he did not appear eager to accept the fact. As he saw Packard and the others approaching, his smile broke into a grin.

“Reles, come on, your heart’s beating,” Packard said, waking him with a slap to the face. “I can hear it from here. Get up. That’s an order.”

“Colonel.” Reles clambered to his feet, groaning and wincing.

“You okay?”

“We were just attacked by…” He couldn’t bring himself to finish his sentence.

“Yeah, I know. You’re okay. See if you can get me a radio that works.”

Packard looked around at the men he had left. There weren’t that many. Shocked, bloodied, wide-eyed, he had to rally them and lead them. That’s what he was here for, and they’d be looking to him for comfort.

He couldn’t give them that. Maybe he could give them something else.

Reles appeared by his side, shaken but pleased to be with his companions again. He handed Packard a survival radio.

“Group, this is Fox Leader, request situation report. Group! This is Fox Leader… any station! Radio check, over!”

“Leader… this is Fox Six… Chapman…”

“Chapman!” Packard said. “Come in. Say again your last position.”

“Leader… Flores KIA… I’m lone survivor. My location at crash site… four klicks west, highest mountain peak. November Alpha, bearing three-zero-zero.”

Packard tugged a grid map from his pocket. Formed from Landsat photos, it displayed some of the landforms known, and also contained the codenames allocated to them by his team.

“Roger your last, Chapman. West, highest mountain peak. Over.”

“Roger,” Chapman confirmed. “November Alpha three-zero-zero.”

“Fox Six, stay put,” Packard said. “We will come to you, Chapman. There’s enough ordnance in the Sea Stallion to kill that thing. Survey your radius and scout for an ambush site.”

“Fox Six confirm,” Chapman said. “Scouting radius. Holding near Sea Stallion. Heading—” His transmission broke into a series of crackles and white noise.

“Fox Six, come in,” Packard said. He tweaked the frequency control. “Chapman, come in. Jack?”

The signal was gone.

Packard glanced sidelong at Reles, standing close by with his pistol drawn. Despite the shock at what had happened to them, he and the rest of his men were acting like the professional soldiers they were. Three had taken defensive positions around the crash site. Others were searching the wreckage for ammunition and supplies. One of the men gathered dog tags from the dead.

“Looking for an R and R day, specialist?” Packard asked Reles. “Or are you ready to move?”

Mills sat on the ground with his back against a tree. He had his M-16 resting across his legs, but every time he looked at it he laughed. He’d once killed a man with this gun, gut-shot him from a distance and then moved in closer to put a bullet in his head. It hadn’t felt good. There had been none of that gung-ho bravado that some men displayed, and Mills firmly believed that few people could kill a man without dying a little themselves. Kill or be killed was never an all-or-nothing exchange.

He’d had nightmares about that killing ever since.

He looked at the gun, thought of shooting the beast that had brought them down, and laughed again.

Cole approached from the crashed Huey. He’d been rooting among the still-smoking wreckage, even though it had burned and exploded soon after they’d got away. He had a ration can in his hand. It must have been thrown clear in the blast.

Mills could hardly believe that Cole was actually eating tinned fruit.

“What the hell is wrong with you, Cole?”

“Eating’s for the living,” Cole said.

“We just got taken down by a monkey the size of a building!”

“Ape.”

“Huh?”

“It was an ape. And yeah, that was an unconventional encounter.”

“That’s it? That’s all your brain is doing right now?”

“There’s no tactical precedent,” Cole said, shrugging. He spooned in another mouthful of fruit. “We did the best we could in the situation.”

Mills stood and was about to say more when he heard a sound behind him. A rustle in the undergrowth. That thing wouldn’t rustle , he thought, but he crouched and span around, bringing his M-16 to bear.

“Hold your fire,” Packard said as he pushed into view from behind some hanging branches. Reles and some other guys were with them, lugging arms, survival kit, and other supplies.

“Jesus, sir, I’m glad to see you made it,” Mills said.

“Unless this is heaven and your ugly asses are the angels,” Packard said. “How many other survivors?”

“Seven from our squad,” Mills said. “Three confirmed KIA—Hodges, Saraf, Galleta. A few others missing, but I saw some of their Hueys hit and go down, and…” He held out three dog tags. Packard took them and shoved them inside his jacket. More letters for the colonel to write , Mills thought.

“What about the civilians?” he asked. “Where’s Randa?”

Mills jerked a thumb over his shoulder. “Back there. Sitting on a rock. He’s gone kinda quiet.”

“Quiet,” Packard said, and Mills had never seen such an expression on the colonel’s face before. He hoped he never would again. “That’s okay, Mills. I’ll make him talk.”

Weaver hated breaking her camera equipment. These were her tools, and cracking a lens felt like losing a limb. She saw her world through the camera, and sometimes she wondered whether true reality existed only on the other side of the lens. Perhaps it was a buffer between her and the cruel truth. A safety system, like a heavy glass screen between a watcher and a wild animal enclosure. She felt confident only when she was behind the camera, and that was when she was at her best.

She didn’t like to think about what might happen if that shield was ripped away.

She sat to assess the damage. The lens must have been cracked in the crash. It was ruined, but she was lucky that she carried two spares in her strengthened and waterproof camera bag. The rest of the camera seemed in good working order, and she changed the film and pocketed the used one. It was precious. It might already grace the future cover of a National Geographic .

She noticed that her hands were shaking, and she rested the camera on her legs and clasped them into fists. She was stronger than this. She’d proven that again and again in the field.

“You okay?” Brooks asked.

“I’m fine.”

Brooks, San, and Nieves had joined them at the crash site, arriving dazed and dragging their equipment. She guessed that none of them had witnessed violent death before. Or if they had, certainly nothing like this.

No one had witnessed anything like this before.