Tim Lebbon - Kong - Skull Island

They stood close together, huddled like kids waiting to be told what to do next.

Where the hell is Conrad? she asked herself yet again. He was the most able among them, and she’d seen a change in him since the crash. Quietly and without fanfare, he seemed to have taken control. He was also the only person among them who she felt comfortable with. She wasn’t used to feeling like that with a trained killer. It was strange, but she didn’t question her instincts.

Slivko had been fiddling with a handheld radio since the crash, checking batteries, searching channels, turning it up and listening for voices in static. She could have told him half an hour ago that the radio was toast.

“All units, is anyone airborne? I say again—”

“They’re all down,” Conrad said. He emerged from the trees, breathing heavily. He swapped glances with Weaver as she stood. “Every one of them.” He nodded to Brooks, San, and Nieves, and assessed the equipment they’d brought with them. Weaver saw something different in him, but she wasn’t quite sure what it was. He’d seen or experienced something out there. She’d ask him later.

Everyone remained silent, waiting for him to speak. He was that type of guy.

“Right, listen to me. We’re on the south side of the island, and the place is bigger than we first thought. There’s a river, couple klicks from here. If we stick to the banks it should lead us to inland, and from there we’ll make it to the northern shore.”

Slivko was staring at him, mouth open. He looked around at all of them.

“So that’s it?” he asked. “We’re not gonna… talk, or anything?”

Conrad was already approaching Brooks and San. “You two. What was that thing? What do you know?”

Nieves was staring past all of them. He had been since they’d arrived at the crash site, and Weaver was surprised to finally hear him speak. She thought perhaps he’d gone into shock, and she knew that could be a deep, dark place.

“I… I should be sitting at a desk…” he said. “I’ve got pictures of my family. My own pencil sharpener. Sometimes, I link paperclips together until…” He smiled at the memory, then the smile dropped at more recent ones.

“You all right?” Conrad asked Weaver.

“Yeah,” she said. “That was… I’ve never…”

“Yeah. Nor me. And there’s more. I just had a run-in with a snake. Fifty feet long, maybe more. This island’s like nowhere we’ve ever seen before. The ape, the snake, that means there’s plenty more here, too. Stuff that just wants to kill us or eat us, or both.”

Weaver stared at him wide-eyed.

“Looks like your suspicions have been confirmed,” he said.

“In all the wrong ways.”

“If you’re not there you can’t get the shot, right?”

“The money they paid you,” she said. “I hope it was a lot. And I hope you’re worth it.”

Randa had a cut on his finger. He was focusing on it. The wound was not too deep, and to him it looked something like a question mark, curved at one end and long and straight at the other. A question mark or a crook. Perhaps a scythe. The skin was neatly sliced, not ripped. Probably a shard of glass had caused it, and he hadn’t even felt it until he’d noticed blood dripping onto his shoe. It was his only wound from the crash. That was so unlikely that it bore deep consideration. The cut. It was his whole world right now, because to expand his horizons beyond the cut—to see and hear further, to think on what had happened and what was yet to happen—would invite in madness.

I invited it myself , he thought, when I knew what we were —

This was what he had always wanted. His whole life had been working towards this. His childhood years had been filled with disappointment and bullying. As a teenager he’d been troubled, bookish and distant when most of his contemporaries were playing sport or considering their career options. Later, as an adult, he’d constantly searched for something he knew was out there, some place where he could be himself and triumph. And then when the Lawton had been hit…

Here, at last, he had found triumph. But triumph had also brought tragedy.

He shook his head and stared at the cut again. A bubble of blood formed. It was almost perfect, its colour quite beautiful. The stuff of life. His life.

He still had a life. He remembered those choppers going down, crushed by the beast, beaten to pulps, and thought of the blood that would be bubbling and burning and squeezing through wounds in flesh and metal right now across the jungle, this jungle that—

A shadow fell across him, darkening his blood. Heart fluttering, fear chilling him, he looked up.

Packard was standing right before him.

“Are you okay?” the colonel asked.

“It’s a deep cut, but yes, I’m fine.”

“Oh good, that makes me feel much better.” Packard pulled up a crate and sat close in front of Randa. He made himself comfortable. Randa smiled at him, but Packard did not smile back.

The colonel drew his pistol and aimed it directly at Randa’s face.

“You’re going to tell me everything I don’t know, or I’ll blow your head off.”

Randa forgot his cut. Fear burned in his throat, tears welled in his eyes, but he was afraid that if one spilled then Packard would go through with his threat. Weakness wasn’t what he needed to show now, nor was a need for pity. The soldier would respect neither.

“Monsters exist,” Randa began, trying to ignore the gun’s dark barrel.

“No. Shit.”

“Before today nobody believed that,” Randa continued, warming to his subject. “Yesterday I was a crackpot, but today…”

“This was never about geology!” Packard shouted. “You dropped those charges to flush something out.”

Randa only stared at him.

“Who the hell are you?” Packard asked.

“Another man on the front line, just like yourself. My agency is known as Monarch. We specialise in the hunt for Massive Unidentified Terrestrial Organisms.” He tried a smile, but it felt strained.

“You knew that thing was here,” Packard said, sitting back, lowering the pistol, aiming it at Randa’s stomach.

“Not for sure. But… I was hoping. Not for this outcome, of course, but for evidence. Evidence that we could use to determine the threat. Evidence that might help us understand that the world is a much bigger place than we ever imagined. The holes on this island are more than just entryways to a hollow earth. They are portals for creatures beyond imagination.”

“You put my men at risk. Some of my men died because of you.”

“I did, and I’m sorry. This was a reconnaissance mission, and now it’s a battlefront far more important than the one you left behind.” Randa looked at his finger. The wound had stopped bleeding. Still, he applied the bandage. “The world doesn’t belong to us. Ancient species owned our planet long before mankind, and if we keep our heads buried in the sand, they will take it back.”

Packard stood, holstered his pistol, and turned to walk away.

“Get us home, Colonel,” Randa said. “I’ll take care of the rest.”

Conrad was assessing the people with them, and he was doing his best not to get too pessimistic. But other than Slivko and Weaver, he thought the others were added weight. Brooks, San, and Nieves weren’t like any field operatives he knew. They might be good at digging holes and taking samples, but he was pretty sure that if he asked them to build a fire or hang a hammock, they’d be screwed.

And believing themselves screwed meant that they’d already given in to the Big Guy. That was how he’d started thinking of the giant ape. For all he knew it was a female, but Big Guy still seemed to suit it.