Tim Lebbon - Kong - Skull Island

“Going for a long exposure,” she said. “But my flashlight broke.”

Conrad flicked a lighter open and closed. She flinched back a little, then checked out the lighter he placed in her hand. It bore a Royal Air Force insignia.

“Thanks,” she said. “Royal Air Force?”

“You doing that reporter thing on me?”

“Just curious.” She smiled.

“My father’s,” Conrad said. “He tossed it to me from the train as he rolled off to fight the Nazis.”

“Did he make it home?” she asked, but when she looked up and saw his face, she knew. “Oh. Sorry.”

Conrad looked over to where Marlow was still being shaved and tended by Nieves, chattering all the time, soaking up all the new information he could about the old world he’d left behind for so long.

“Marlow reminds me of him. Could be the jacket. His plane went down outside Hamburg. MIA. I always believed I’d see him again. He was like John Wayne to me, some kind of mythic hero, tall and broad and… In his perfect uniform. Those polished shoes.”

“Lose your dad in one war, so you spend the next one trying to bring people back?”

“So you’re an analyst as well as a photographer?”

“Just telling you what I see through the lens.”

“I guess no one comes home from war,” Conrad said. “Not really.”

“So is this worth it?” she asked. “All that money they paid you?” Conrad frowned at her, as if disappointed. He knew that she knew it was never about that. “Oh, yeah, I forgot,” she said. “You don’t get invested in outcomes.”

“Almost dying does make you feel alive though, doesn’t it?” he said.

“Next you’re going to tell me you want to stay here,” Weaver said. She felt a pang saying that, as if she was revealing something about herself. Did she want to stay? She didn’t think so. But this island was like a drug, and she wanted more and more.

“No,” he said. “Not at all. This island belongs to Kong.”

“It does,” she said, remembering standing in that great ape’s shadow. “We shouldn’t be here. We have no right to be here.”

“We better hope this thing can get us away, then,” Conrad said.

Weaver turned back to her camera and prepared to take the shot.

Randa was exhausted. Packard had led them on a hard hike through the jungle, with danger all around and death threatening at any moment. And Randa was nowhere near as fit as the soldiers he hiked with. He’d always meant to do something about his weight and lack of physical fitness, and he wished more than ever that he’d done so. His muscles ached, he was soaked with sweat, chafed and bruised and cut, and leaning against a tree, he wasn’t sure he could move another step.

Packard was stoking a small fire, readying to prepare some ration packs. Their rest would be brief, he’d said. This was simply refuelling.

“What you’re doing…” Randa gasped. “This mission to the crash site… is folly.”

Packard glanced up at him then back down at the fire. He said nothing.

“I understand going after your man, but the rest of it? I have a feeling this will not end well.” Randa wanted more than anything to be back on mission, gathering evidence and information about the ape and the other incredible creatures on this island, then ensuring that they escaped. That was the absolute priority. Escape, get off the island, and take news of what they had found back to the world.

Back to Monarch.

“You don’t like the way I’m handling things, there’s the door,” Packard said, pointing at the dark jungle around them. He didn’t even look up from the fire.

Randa sighed and closed his eyes. He said no more. He needed every moment they were here to catch his breath.

Dawn made the grounded steamer seem less of a ruin and more part of the world. It was as if it had been there always, growing from the rock of the land instead of being washed up decades before, crew already dead or doomed, a place of tragedy and death. Conrad preferred the different interpretation. The grounded ship was almost beautiful, and even where the dawn light probed through holes created by rot and time, it looked like it was meant to be.

He walked along the shore towards the ship, alert for noise and movement around him. Some of the Iwi people watched him passing through the village, their expressions as impassive and calm as ever. He was starting to see a deep knowledge in their eyes rather than the emptiness some of the others suspected. They survive, Marlow had said. To survive for this long in such a place took deep wisdom as well as grit. They carried weapons, but nothing that could hurt the things they had seen, and the other things that lived here. It was knowledge handed down from generation to generation that kept them alive.

He climbed into the ship through one of the holes in its hull and approached that strange central room. Something drew him, and he wasn’t quite sure what. He didn’t necessarily believe there were answers there, but perhaps the place might prompt the asking of wiser questions.

Besides, Marlow slept aboard the boat, and Conrad had many questions for that old pilot.

Closer to the spring room, he heard the first whispered words. He couldn’t quite make them out, because they echoed through the metallic cathedral space, scratching away to nothing. He edged closer and saw Marlow.

Spears of sunlight illuminated the large area, cast down through holes rusted into the ceiling and walls. The well at the centre—a spiritual place for the Iwi, and a hole into depths Conrad suspected contained more than simply shadows—shone with that same strange phosphorescence, moss growing on the rocks glimmering in the fresh day’s light.

To one side, Marlow knelt in front of a shrine-like arrangement in one corner. A frayed, tattered Japanese pilot’s uniform hung on the wall. A katana sword stood vertically from the shrine, held in place in a carved rock. Sunlight caught it, dazzling, shimmering, almost as if the metal were alive.

Marlow froze, then spoke without turning around. “His name was Gunpei Ikari. We crashed here on July seventh, nineteen forty-four.” He stood slowly, aged knees creaking. Still he faced the shrine. “It was the last date that meant anything to either of us. We tried killing each other in the sky, almost succeeded, then we tried again when we were on the ground. But you take away the uniform, and the war, and we were like brothers. That’s what we became. True brothers. We swore to never leave the other behind.”

Conrad felt a lump in his throat, the burning of emotion the likes of which he hadn’t felt for some time. It wasn’t that he was an emotionless man, but sometimes it got in the way of the job he had to do. This old pilot had stripped away his defences. Instead of living in the past, he and his enemy had moved on to become what all people aspired to be. Good, honest, loving. Wars were manufactured by empires, and it was down to the single man or woman to end them.

“It’s dawn,” Conrad said, voice catching. “Let’s get you off this island.”

Marlow grabbed the sword handle and slowly, carefully, drew it from the shrine. It came out with a whisper like a forgotten voice.

“You know we really shouldn’t be doing this, right?” Brooks asked.

San was staring into the well. Everyone else was down at the dock, quietly preparing the boat for departure. She appeared lost in thought.

“San?”

She blinked, as if stirring herself from some deep introspection. The water in the well seemed to illuminate the huge hold, adding to the sunlight streaming in through rents in the hull. It was a strange place. Brooks didn’t like it one bit.