Tim Lebbon - Kong - Skull Island

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.

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.