Kong: Skull Island - The Official Movie Novelization

TWENTY-FOUR

They headed inland. Conrad had taken a compass bearing on the flare, and he paused every few minutes to make sure they were still on course.

He would have much preferred to be on his own. This was his world—navigating through hostile territory, moving in silence, remaining alert in the face of unknown dangers. He had done this many times before. Although the surroundings and perils were different, the methods he used were the same. His bushcraft was his own, developed over years and adapted to suit his own strengths and talents. Bringing the others with him threatened to make all his talents redundant.

He knew, however, that they were safer together. Leaving them alone on the boat might have been to doom them to death. He didn’t want that for any of them.

Especially Weaver.

He was already missing the relative comfort of the boat. Heat hung heavy, insects buzzed, plants scratched and irritated bare skin, mysterious rustlings and slower, more measured movement seemed to come from all around. He saw shapes scurrying for cover, and worried that they might be dangerous spiders or disease-laden vermin. Conrad knew more than most how dangerous a jungle could be. This island had to be one of the deadliest places he had ever been, and by far the strangest. Giant apes, giant snakes, giant vultures…

What would come next?

He steered them down into a shallow creek so that they could follow a water course upstream, hoping that the going would be easier. With less foliage to hack their way through, they could move faster towards where Packard and his group were hopefully still waiting for them.

The stream flowed and tumbled along its rough path, splashing from rocks and throwing several small rainbows ahead of them. Conrad remained alert, trying not to get distracted. Dragonflies buzzed across the stream in rough formations, frogs leapt at the marshy edges, and he saw the silvery flashes of fish darting beneath the surface.

Weaver viewed the world through her lens, as usual. He wondered what she’d truly see of this place, and of him, if she was forced to confront it without her glass and plastic safety net.

Something rustled. A bump. He froze, hand held up to halt the rest of the group. There was sound all around—splashing, rustling, bird song and insects buzzing—but something about this sound was different. It was made by something or someone attempting to be quiet.

Conrad lifted his gun and aimed it across the stream at the dense jungle on the other side. A cloud of insects had taken off and were flying in a chaotic, angry mass.

A shape appeared in the shadows. Conrad squeezed the trigger.

The shape became a man, and Colonel Packard stepped out from beneath the cover of trees.

“Colonel Packard.” Conrad sighed, remaining alert as others emerged behind Packard.

“You’re a sight for sore eyes,” Packard said. He almost smiled. “Even you, Miss Weaver.”

Slivko and his fellow soldiers greeted each other with shoulder-slaps and banter, relieved to be together again. They still carried the stain of loss in their expressions. Conrad knew that feeling well.

“Thought for sure you’d be monkey food by now, Slivko,” Cole said.

“Sorry to get your hopes up, Cole,” he replied.

Randa stepped around Packard and splashed across the stream, shaking Brooks’s and San’s hands.

“I thought you were crazy,” Brooks said.

“Yeah, right now I wish I had been,” Randa replied. Conrad saw the lie in his eyes. He was delighted at just how right he’d been.

“Me too,” Brooks said.

“You aren’t hurt?” San asked in Mandarin. Perhaps she thought no one else in the group could understand, but Conrad had spoken the language for years.

“Barely a scratch, dear,” Randa replied in the same language.

Marlow had drawn his katana sword at the sounds of rustling, and now he sheathed it and stepped forward towards the soldiers.

“Good to see you, fellas,” he said. “New faces sure are a treat.”

“Who the hell is this?” Packard asked. He was looking at Marlow like he was something he had stepped in on the sidewalk, and Conrad could have swung for him right then. He’d already marked Packard as arrogant and dangerous. Seemed he was pompous and superior, too.

“Picked up a hitchhiker,” Conrad said.

“Lieutenant Hank Marlow, sir. Forty-fifth Pursuit squadron of the Fifteenth Pursuit group out of Wheeler Army Airfield, Hawaii.”

“You been here since World War Two?”

“More than half my life,” Marlow said.

“I’ll be damned,” Packard said. “Snap to, Lieutenant!” He saluted.

Marlow snapped a salute back, no longer looking like an old soldier.

“I’m getting him home,” Conrad said. “I’m getting all of us home. If we follow the river, his boat should take us close to the north shore in time for extraction.”

“Good to know,” Packard said, nodding and smiling. “But we’re not leaving yet.”

“Not leaving?” Randa asked. “We need to get away from here, get back home with this information while we still can. It’s important!”

“I’m not leaving Chapman,” Packard said.

“He’s still out there?” Conrad asked. “Alive?” He’d assumed that all survivors had gathered together. The idea of one man being out there on his own was awful.

“Last contact was yesterday,” Packard said. He pulled out his map and spread it on a rock so that Conrad and others could lean in to see. “He’s stayed with his downed Sea Stallion to the west… round about here.” He pointed to a spot on the map. Conrad reckoned it was less than two miles from their current location.

“Uh, no,” Marlow said. “You do not wanna go that way. Trust me on this.”

“Why?” Randa asked. “What lives there?”

“Nothing we can’t handle,” Packard said.

“Like you handled Kong?” Marlow asked.

“The monkey has a name?” Packard said.

“He’s an ape, not a monkey. And yes, of course he has a name. Look, if you go there—”

Packard cut Marlow off mid-sentence, advancing on Conrad and talking into his face. “Isn’t your job tracking down lost men?” he asked.

Conrad did not back down before Packard’s stare. He’d faced men like this before. They were bullies, and deep down all bullies were weak when they were dished some of their own medicine.

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.