No matter what he tried, Marek couldn’t get the faces out of his head. He tried to think of home, his family, Amy, anything… but the red-raw faces and their skinless, toothy grins surfaced to dominate his mind’s eye again and again.
What could possibly have done such a thing to those soldiers? And why?
No one had said much while they were walking around the paratroopers. Marek supposed that like him, everyone else had been lost within their own thoughts as they tried to process the gruesome spectacle. And anyway, some things just seemed best not to talk about. To talk about it would only cement it in reality, in a way that he didn’t particularly want to do. Better to keep silent and leave it in the past, as some intangible vision, with no more weight in the real world than a half-remembered nightmare.
But if it was only a nightmare, it was a vivid one. The bodies of the paratroopers had retained a certain homogeneity in death – there had been slight variations in size between them, but in place of their military fatigues they had all been given a new uniform of wet, ragged flesh, slathered crimson. Their lidless eyes had all been wide, as if in shock, but also dull, completely devoid of any lifespark. It was a strange juxtaposition, and one that Marek wished he had never seen.
He wanted off this godforsaken island, and he was sure everyone else did too. At least Rulio had the dog tags, so they could get back to the Port Authority, turn in the mission, get their Expedition Points, and never return to this place for as long as they lived. And the sooner, the better.
He shuddered as the grinning faces flashed in his mind again.
Altogether, Marek was feeling quite ill; his revulsion at the situation compounded by his self-criticism. Just like during the fight against the Japanese scout ship, he had completely frozen up and done nothing to help – apart from conserving his ammunition, he supposed. True, he had managed to kill one of the Japanese sailors during that skirmish, but only because he had still been convinced that he was caught up in some kind of out-of-hand roleplay. On top of that, he hadn’t realised what it would actually be like to kill someone. He didn’t want to feel like that again, but he knew he would have to if he wanted to be of any use in this brutal world that he found himself in. Or simply survive.
Although he desperately wanted to know, it was pointless to question why or how he had arrived in this place – this time, this world, or whatever it was. Now the best thing to be done was to take the timid boy, and forge him into a man of capability. No one was more aware of that necessity than Marek… but that still didn’t make it any easier to actually do it.
He knew he needed to draw a line in the sand. And he would.
He resolved never again to simply watch on while others risked their lives. No, next time he would do – well, something. Anything, except for standing there uselessly.
And he would continue to train and practice. And in time, he would surely become the person he wanted to be, and needed to be.
He continued walking onwards, his pace quickening slightly as a newfound sense of resolve rose within him.
It was sometime later, after he had descended into his thoughts once again, when something suddenly caught his eye – a flash of a pale, bloodied face amongst the trees – but a blink later it was gone. After staring at the faceless gap among the trees for a moment longer, he looked ahead and chuckled to himself unconvincingly.
It was obviously just his mind seeing patterns where there were none, still on edge after the whole disturbing situation with the paratroopers.
That’s what he told himself, anyway. The other possibility was too terrifying to entertain.
Glancing ahead, he saw that they had emerged into another clearing. In front of him, all the way across the other side of the open expanse, was a large tree, larger than he thought a tree had any right to be. And instead of leaves, it was covered with weird spiky luminescent shards, like some kind of demented glowing cactus.
He stopped to consider the strange sight in front of him, before asking “What is that?” out loud.
Rulio and Beck stopped and gazed at the tree with him. Neither of them responded to his question.
Marek scanned his eyes across the abundance of crystalline shards sticking out of the tree’s boughs. And then among all the varied but mostly equally sized shards, he spied it. A large, deep purple crystal – the particular shade of which he had never seen before – that periodically flashed a searing blue and white across its surface, as if generating lightning through some internal mechanism.
He immediately decided that he wanted it.
The instinctive decision was soon followed by an emerging, vague awareness that he was moving towards the tree.
Was he walking? He supposed had to be, but he hadn’t realised that he was until now. It was unlike him to be so audacious. But just what was he walking towards?
A half-formed fear coated his mind, but surely enough his legs continued to move him on a path straight towards the tree, and they seemed strangely sensationless beneath his waist. But despite his apprehension, he still had the sense that his legs were doing what he wanted them to, on some primal level, and taking him where he needed to go.
There was something about the tree, and those strange crystals embedded in its pale wood…
He still didn’t know how or when he started walking, but he was glad he had. He wanted that crystal, and his hands were feverish in their desire to hold the shimmering shard. A sensation was surging up inside him, a deep yearning that steadily overwhelmed his mind, until all that remained in the world was the tree ahead. It seemed to be pulsing at him – not with any kind of sight or sound, but with a sublime heartbeat that resonated through his flesh and bones, unseen and formidable.
Marek stood at the base of the tree, squinting up at its lofty heights. He could no longer see the very top, which was hidden within the sun-glared silver fog above.
He had never been a big tree-climber, but that didn’t seem important now. He knew he had only to begin his ascent, and then his hands and feet would carry him upwards with an inevitable surety.
And so, he began to climb.
Hand over hand, foot over foot, he ascended, not conscious of his route, or of the fear and self-doubt that he would usually be experiencing. The task at hand was just something he had to do, an obstacle to be surmounted on his way towards a greater purpose.
Up and up and up he went.
In the branches above him, large translucent grubs the size of his forearm were clinging to the rough bark, their bodies gently stretching and undulating as they moved.
When he reached the bough where the purple crystal was embedded, Marek cautiously shimmied along towards it. Once he was straddling the bough right next to the purple shard, he reached up to touch it, but hesitated. His initial bravery was waning, and his common sense warned him that the long crystal spike might be dangerous in some way.
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Still… what was the worst that could happen?
The urge to seize the crystal was overwhelming. If there were to be any consequences or ill-effects, he would just have to live with them.
He looked towards Rulio, who was standing on the ground below and staring up at him, transfixed. He couldn’t say why, but he was seeking some kind of approval to continue – maybe so that if something bad did happen to him, it would tacitly be the Captain’s fault.
Rulio nodded up at him.
Alright. Nothing else for it then.
Marek took a deep breath, steadying himself.
Then he reached out and touched the crystal.
It immediately shot through with a bright light, and he rapidly withdrew his hand as if from a hot pan. The shard’s light instantly dimmed.
Well, he’d lived.
He reached out again.
Once more the shard’s luminosity surged as his hand met it, crackling with a fierce blue and white light, and it hummed under his hand with some exotic power, an inner warmth and energy.
He slowly began to pull upwards on the pulsing crystal.
The shard gradually slid out of the tree with surprising ease, leaving behind a smooth hole in the bough. It was about as long as his arm, about half as thick, and was cylindrical in shape, with tapered ends. It weighed less than he had expected, and was oscillating slightly, the inner incandescence having subsided once it was free of the tree.
He had done it. Somehow, he had done it. Whether it was by way of some external force, or an innate capability within him that had finally emerged, he couldn’t say for sure.
But whatever the cause, he had gotten the shard, and that was all that mattered.
He cradled it in his arms, beaming down at Rulio and Beck. He felt on top of the world. He’d finally done something.
Then he frowned, as his current situation fully dawned. His ascent of the tree had been a blur.
But now he had to get back down.
He threaded the shard through the back collar of his shirt, pushing it down along his spine until it was secured within his pants against the tension of the belt. The shard was warm against his skin.
Gingerly, he began to scramble back down the tree. It was a great deal more difficult than climbing up, as he was effectively moving blind, his legs searching hesitantly for footholds.
After a few minutes of steady travel, he was only a few metres from the bottom – at which point his feet slipped away from him, and he slid the remaining distance, hugging the tree like a firefighter whipping down a pole.
He hit the dirt rather hard, but tried to pass it off as a deliberate manoeuvre. Once he had regained his composure, he chanced a furtive glance at Rulio and Beck; Beck looked like she might have been impressed, but Rulio had a knowing, incredulous smile.
Marek made his way over to them, brushing his mildly abraded hands against his pants to get rid of the bits of bark.
Rulio and Beck smiled as he drew closer, and he couldn’t help but grin back.
“Not bad,” Rulio said to him, nodding approvingly.
Beck pointed at the shard, which was poking up from behind his head. “What is that thing?” she asked excitedly, her face full of wonder and curiousity.
“Oh, yeah,” Marek mumbled, before retrieving the shard from under his shirt and holding it out for everyone to see.
As it had been when last he’d looked, the shard’s dark violet light was still subdued, with only an occasional crackle of blue or white light to disrupt its uniform surface.
Beck let out an audible ooohhh as she leaned in towards it, while Rulio appraised it from a distance.
“What does it do?” Beck asked.
Marek had taken the shard because he had in some way known that it was important, and would be useful – but thinking about it now, he didn’t know what it was, or what it did, or what it could do. “I’m… not sure,” he replied hesitantly.
“Oh,” Beck said, still staring at the shard cradled in Marek’s arms. “Well, it’s still very nice.” She paused, thinking. “And I bet it would be worth a lot of money, anyway.”
“Yeah,” Marek said, though he dismissed that possibility out of hand. He had a feeling the shard wouldn’t prove most useful for monetary gain, but for another purpose, currently unknown.
Rulio was still regarding Marek with a strange look. “Good work, Marek,” he said finally. “This might come in handy later on.” He reached out a hand, his finger poised to touch the crystal. Then he stopped, and quickly dropped his arm. “We should keep moving.”
Marek and Beck nodded in unison, and they continued on their way back towards the ship.
Without a watch, Marek’s sense of time was indistinct. Coupled with the pervasive glowing haze created by the fog, reality seemed to be passing by him as a viscous stream as he walked through the grey pall – barely moving, if it was at all. He walked and he walked, while the world stayed still.
The events since they had landed – the battle with the dogs, the discovery of the paratroopers, the strange tree and his retrieval of the shard – existed in his mind as islands of motion in an otherwise stagnant sea of un-time generated by the swirling mists around him. He was moving through the fog, but it didn’t feel like he was travelling forwards, or even backwards. He felt his existence as only a distinct and limited viewpoint, distilled from some wider vastness, now manoeuvring arbitrarily amongst a stream of aberrant events that were in some way uncoupled from the outside world.
How long had they been in this fog? Had it even been a day yet?
He knew now that a part of him had always been here, on this island, and always would be. There was a fragment of himself that was tied to this time and place, even before he arrived; a temporal residue that he was only now finally experiencing, but would soon never be able to return to except in memory.
It was strange. Everything in his life recently had been entirely unpredictable – but now that he was here in this place, how could anything else have ever happened?
If only the future could be remembered as easily as the past.
He jolted back into awareness after nearly walking straight into Rulio. The Captain had stopped, his hand raised to halt Beck and Marek. “We’re not alone,” he whispered.
A moment later, the sound of slow clapping drifted out of the trees ahead. Then a man dressed in a deep black officer’s uniform stepped out from the jungle, and swaggered slowly towards them. His hands were resting on the hilts of two long revolvers, holstered at each hip.
He chuckled. “I see your hearing’s as good as ever, Captain.” He twisted the final word into a pejorative.
The man didn’t look very old, perhaps in his late thirties at the most, and of an age with Rulio, but his long hair was the colour of dark steel, and flecked through with strands of pure white. He was wearing a black peaked officer’s cap, embellished with a gold cord above the brim, under a large metal eagle insignia. A silver ring glinted on his right hand.
“You look like a German.” Rulio said to the man coldly.
The man grey’s eyes flashed for a moment, but then he laughed. “Is that meant to be insulting?” He shrugged. “What can I say? They do have better fashion sense.”
Marek wasn’t sure what was happening. It was evident that Rulio and this new man knew each other – but whether as friend or foe was as yet unclear.
Rulio’s eyes narrowed. “We weren’t expecting company. How did you find us?”
The other man raised his eyes in mock offense. “You don’t seem very grateful for another set of hands.”
“So that’s it? You came to help us?”
The man grinned, revealing a set of straight white teeth. “No.”
Rulio shifted his posture. “Then what?”
The man drummed his fingers against his guns. Then he pointed at Beck. “Her.”
Rulio scrunched his face. “Her? What about her?”
“That girl has a reward out for her return. Her parents would dearly like her back.” The man smiled. “So really, it seems like I’m the good guy here, Captain.” His expression hardened. “And besides, this isn’t any place for a young woman to be running around. Now, just let her come with me, and we’ll be on our way.” The man gestured at Rulio’s utility belt. “And I’ll take those dog tags, too.”
Marek saw Rulio’s hand slowly moving towards his waist.
The man in black held up a cautionary, wagging finger. “Ah, ah, ah – none of that, Captain.” He motioned to the jungle behind them. “I suppose you didn’t hear them, but I have two men placed in those trees behind you. I implore you, Captain, to back away. You, and your friend. There is no ending here in which you are both satisfied, and still alive.”
Rulio slowly turned his head and eyed the shadowed foliage behind them. There was no way to be sure if the man in black was bluffing, but Marek didn’t think Rulio would want to risk it.
As if reading Marek’s mind, the man shouted “Jonny! Show the Captain that I’m not lying.”
A loud, short burst of automatic gunfire crashed out from the jungle, deafening against the usual silence. The man in black stared at Rulio, his eyes burning, and then pointed emphatically off towards the jungle. His meaning was clear.
Marek felt like he had to at least try to help, though he didn’t know what he could do. Whatever was happening here, he felt completely out of his depth. And whatever history they had, Rulio and this man were definitely not friends.
“Captain, is-” Marek had barely begun to speak when Rulio sharply raised his hand, cutting him off. He was looking thunderous, but even Marek could see he was powerless to do anything. The Captain’s pressurised frustration and exasperation were unmistakable.
Then Beck spoke, her voice soft with resignation. “It’s alright.”
Long moments passed, until finally – “Come on, Marek.” Rulio’s voice was just above a whisper, but his expression could have cut glass, and his face was trembling with rage as he stared at the man in black.
The man in black stared back at Rulio, unperturbed. While the corner of his mouth had twisted into a triumphant half-smile, his eyes remained saturated with menace.
Rulio unclipped the pouch containing the dog tags and tossed it at the man’s feet. Then he turned and stormed off into the jungle without another word.
Marek hastened after him, and they began their long, miserable walk back to the ship.