Breakpoint - Part 13

Part Thirteen

Len

The jungle at night was normally a terrifying enough thing on its own, but tonight was especially threatening. The decision had been made that the team needed to function on off-hours for a week, starting their day in the early afternoon, and running until dawn the following day, staying up all night and exploring the island under the cover of darkness. There were several reasons for this, not the least of which was that no one was quite sure who else was up and about during those hours.

As the sunlight faded, the diffuse glow of neon lit up the village, shading the green foliage with all the different hues of the rainbow. The sea of light up signs cast plenty of light against the darkness, making it clear how it stood out among the vast emptiness of the South Pacific. In every direction from the edges of the island, as far as the eye could see, there was nothing but blackness of the ocean. They were so far from any other civilization that even light plumes weren’t visible on the horizon. It made the neon light bed stand out even more among the inky velvet.

There was something so remarkable about the neon that Len couldn’t help but wonder what had led to it being the predominant source of external lighting across the island. There were so many other ways that the village could’ve been lit up, from standard spotlights to even just basic strip and track lightning around the exterior of the barren concrete structures. It was such a strange contrast, the lush vibrancy of the neon signage versus the stark brutal flat walls of the buildings. And the wide assortment of colors painted with nearly every color of the rainbow. Every time he looked at the village, he wondered if the neon had been grafted on after the buildings were originally constructed, or if the designs had called for the adornment to be affixed.

Once you got away from the village, though, the jungle itself seemed to consume all light, and you were left with the inevitable blackness, especially on nights when the moon was thin, and the light it cast was disappointingly weak. The glow of the neon in the distance could be used to light the path back, but even then, it offered little in the way of warmth or comfort, because the jungle could devour any stray rays of hope.

Except, of course, that there were some people moving around the jungle at night with flashlights, and that was enough to draw Len out to investigate, even if he had to do so in the least optimal ways. He couldn’t bring the team out with him, and if he had, they didn’t have any way to communicate. The lack of radios on the island was the thing that drove him the craziest. He could handle a lot of the other things – no communication back to the mainland, no idea of where, exactly, they were, no way out, no steady flow of information in, no way to tell the good guys from the bad guys … all of that he could manage. But being unable to communicate well with his team had been an utter bitch of a thing.

The foliage would shake as three or four men would move past him, their flashlights in one hand, machetes in the other, trying to clear paths for themselves as they made their way further into the island’s center, or at least that’s the direction they hoped they were travelling.

Len had been eavesdropping for the better part of an hour, and the group, five men in total, had been doing their best to drive a path through the jungle in a straight line away from the village and in the general direction of the mountain, although it became clear to Len early on that they were trying to veer to the right of the mountain, not hit it straight on, not that he could see the mountain through the dense foliage that covered them. It felt like that was the path they were treading, though.

The five men weren’t anyone that Len knew – people were surprisingly reticent to share their information with others on a place where anyone could be a spy working for the other side – but four of them seemed to be taking orders from the fifth, a man named Lane.

Lane was a tall, lanky yet muscular man, limbs thin like stilts but still strong enough to bolster a sense of fear and respect. He wore drab olive-colored clothes, not quite camouflage but close enough to let him still blend in amongst the jungle undergrowth. He was the one Len had almost missed when the group had set out on the expedition an hour and change ago, just around midnight or so, with time still being the sort of thing people had to guess at.

“C’mon, let’s get moving,” Lane said, his voice bearing a South African accent. “We don’t have time for you lot to sit around whinging all night long. We need to get to the other side of the island before daybreak, and the last thing I want is to hear you lot complaining instead of actually doing. Because I’d rather not hear you at all, if it comes to that.”

“What’s over there, top?” one of the men, a square shaped muscular brute asked him.

“It’s not a question of what’s over there so much as what isn’t over there that I’m interested in,” Lane said. “Let’s pick it up, pick it up.”

The goon squad certainly took his words as an implied threat and got back to work. They weren’t making much effort to high their efforts, which meant it was easy enough for Len to stay in pursuit of them without getting spotted or heard, although a couple of times they came close, because the jungle is an unpredictable place, and sometimes a stray branch just appears.

At one point, about three hours in, the group agreed to take a short break to recover, nothing more than fifteen minutes, but it was just what Len needed to scurry up one of the trees and get high enough into the foliage in order to get a peek out across the island, which resulted in a handful of surprises for him.

The first of which was that he could tell where the village was, because while he couldn’t directly see any of the signs, they indirectly lit up the foliage above them, causing an area of the jungle to have a soft glow, enough that it could be used as a landmark of how far they’d travelled.

The second surprise was that not only were they past the mountain, there was a series of glowing, throbbing red lights at the rim of the pinnacle, four across, and he had to wonder if they went all the way around the rim. The mountain also happened to be an inactive volcano, and as tempting as it had been to climb up and look into it, so far temptation hadn’t gotten the better of him. He also wondered why he’d never seen them before, and he had to suspect it was because they were only visible when they were lit up, which lead to his next question. Why were they lit up now?

That led to his third surprise.

Overhead, he could see a plane flying low and across the top of the island, and just before it crossed over the top of the volcano, a crate with a parachute and a flashing red beacon light on it dropped out of the back of it, and sailed down, disappearing as it fell into the inactive volcano and away from sight.

Len wanted to stick around and keep watching, but the plane was already heading off into the distance, and he could hear the sound of the group of men below him rustling, preparing to embark once more on their journey. To lose them now would be to put the entire night’s work down as nothing, so he made his way to slide down the tree as quickly and quietly as he could without being detected.

It seemed like the people he was following, however, weren’t all that intent on making sure they weren’t being followed, because they were already starting to move again, without so much as even pausing to clean up their temporary rest spot. They were people in a hurry, and it made his trailing them that much easier.

He’d been a little bit bothered by how much the island wildlife seemed to be avoiding them – the five men were rustling around and making plenty of noise, which should’ve been enough to draw in any number of predators – but he wondered if maybe the constant sweeping of the flashlights was keeping the creatures from getting too curious. The neon had done a good job of mostly keeping creatures from invading the village, so he had to consider that was why the men were constantly sweeping the flashlight beams through the foliage. It was something he made a mental note of, not that he had access to a flashlight of his own anyway.

The group continued their rampage through the jungle, carving themselves out a path when needed, but trying to mostly just keep moving forward in their chosen direction, Lane clearly having some way to guide them, but Len being unable to see it from his vantage point.

When Lane’s group had started making late night rustles, Len had known it would be worth his time to pursue them, simply because most people were safely within their beds in the relative security of the village. Lane’s group had other plans, though, although what those plans were, Len still wasn’t entirely certain.

“Top,” one of the men said. “I think I can see a break in the trees up ahead.”

“Good,” Lane replied. “We’re just about there then.”

Len wondered what the hell ‘there’ even meant under such circumstances, but decided it was only a few more minutes of being patient, and he could afford that. In for a penny, in for a pound, and he was in for a lot more than that.

The group of men pushed forward and out of the forest, stepping out onto a high precipice. Len did his best to make his way towards the edge of the forest as well, but off to one side, hoping to avoid detection. They were looking out over a portion of the island that Len had yet to see, and there in the distance, flickering like some sort of ghostly image… was another village.

“What the actual fuck?” Len whispered to himself.

“We’re in time,” Lane said to the men. “We’ve got about three hours to get there, get in and get out, and anyone not outside of their borders within that time period gets left behind, you hear me?”

“Yes boss,” all the men said, and they began to try and hurry down through the tallgrass, making their way towards the village on the other side of the island.

He needed to wait until they had sprinted a good distance, but once they were clear, he broke free of the tree line and started trying to keep pace with them while still staying out of their vision. Based on the distance, he was fairly certain that he could stay out of detection but he also needed to be moving quickly, because getting down there in a reasonable time frame was going to be a challenge, especially since Lane hadn’t been real specific on what “out” meant beyond “outside of their borders,” so he was hoping the other village, like their village, had a clear delineating line circling its perimeter.

As he worked his way down the steep hillside, he could see that the buildings in the other village were, like their own, covered in neon signs. As he grew closer, though, it became clearer that the neon signs weren’t in English, but mostly in Japanese, although he was certain he spotted some German mixed in there. Unlike their own village, however, this village seemed to have little in the way of foliage above it to tamp down the light pollution, allowing the glow to just radiate into the night. Also, unlike their village, the lights seemed to flicker a little, tiny little flutters, causing the light to feel less coherent, less stable.

It took the better part of an hour to make an approach to the village, and when they got close, it was clear that if there was anyone inside of the buildings there, they were either fast asleep or long since dead, Len wasn’t sure which. The whole village felt far more reclaimed than theirs did, with vines having grown up the sides of the buildings, not plucked away like they’d done for their own.

Len made his way to the border of the village, looking down at the clearly visible heavy copper wire that marked the line between the village itself and the jungle surrounding it, not crossing it, as his eyes took in as much detail about the village as they could.

The buildings were of similar size and construction to their own, but looked a little older, maybe like their village was a second pass and this had been the first prototype. The construction was a little less refined, the buildings less naturally structured and more artificially organized, with the streets all sort of crisscrossing like they’d been done straight off some blueprint that had been developed thousands of miles away, without incorporating the local terrain or features. They also showed less signs of use, the dirt around the pathways having been heavily encroached by foliage again, although it seemed like the concrete itself in the center, a feature their own village didn’t have, had withstood the resistance of mother nature, not cracking or caving to time’s ravages.

Len’s eyes glanced down at the copper line in the earth that separated being inside of the village from being outside of it, and for some reason he couldn’t explain, he felt himself desperately not wanting to cross it. It wasn’t anything he could explain or put into words, but he’d long ago learned to trust that little voice in the back of his mind that would occasionally put a bad feeling somewhere his frontal cortex could notice.

He took a handful of steps back away from the border and did his best to try and blend in with the foliage, grabbing some of the loose vines to pull them around his body like an improvised ghillie suit, letting him disappear among the undergrowth.

From his concealed vantage point, he could watch as the men hauled out crates from the insides of the buildings, almost all a deep olive green, painted in jungle camouflage, but the writing on the sides was too small for him to read at such distance.

The men were moving methodically from building to building, doing their best to search them as quickly as possible, taking out anything they thought that might be of value or use. Some of it was things he expected to see – building materials, tools, raw metal – but then there were some things he didn’t expect to see, like a box of explosives (he could recognize the warning symbol on the side of the box) and a handful of firearms, nothing modern but still WW2 era rifles and side arms, which made him all sorts of nervous.

The men also seemed to be grabbing any amount of paper they could – books, loose leaf, whatever they could find. They were, however, trying to keep the paper shielded from the elements, tossing them into a large trunk, which they would close each time they added paper into its bounty, and kept the trunk near the edge of the camp, like it would be the thing they would grab first if they were going to make a run for it.

After a certain point, they began to move some of the things from inside of the village borders to outside of them, setting them on the other side of the copper demarcation. At one point, one of the men grabbed a couple of the rifles and started walking for the line, and as soon as the man was approaching the border, Lane’s voice called out sharply. “Stop!”

The man turned back and looked at Lane with an annoyed glance. “You weren’t serious before.”

“Deadly serious,” Lane said, standing just outside one of the buildings, his hand resting on the hilt of the knife he had strapped to his waist. “Put it down. We don’t take firearms with us.”

The man dropped one of them where it was, then shifted the other around, grabbing the handle of the gun, lifting the rifle up to point it in Lane’s direction. “Maybe you don’t, but I’m going to. I’m going to take this rifle, that pistol and maybe a handful of those grenades back with me, because I’m tired of having to try and fall asleep each night knowing that somebody could just walk over and cut my throat, that I don’t have a way to take out an enemy I know is standing just a handful of feet away from me.” The man lifted the rifle up, pointing it in Lane’s direction. “Are you that man, Lane? Are you that threat?”

“I’m telling you, Marquez,” Lane said, his hand curled around the hilt of the blade. “If you don’t put that weapon down right now, you’re not going to be around to regret it tomorrow.”

“Oh yeah? Because of some weird space-time bullshit that you can’t even fully explain, Lane? That somehow you just know that firearms are going to do some kind of damage?” Marquez said, staring down the sights of the barrel, focusing intently on Lane. “Because even without having shot a gun in months, Lane, and never one of these old antiques, I’m damn sure I can shoot and kill you from this distance. So that’s what I’m going to do if you try and stop me from taking this gun out of this village, so help me Christ.”

“And I’m telling you if you take one more step towards that border with that weapon in hand, Marquez, I am going to end that miserable life of yours and leave your corpse here rotting for the beasts and the maggots to feast upon.”

“Is that so?” Marquez chuckled, adjusting the stock of the rifle to get it tucked into his shoulder a little more. “Then maybe I ought to just put you down here and now.”

“You think you’ve got it in you?”

“I’ve killed far better and worse than you, Lane.”

“Then let’s see it,” Lane said, taking his hand off the hilt of the blade, stepping forward a little more, putting his hands up. “Show me exactly how tough you are, killing an unarmed man.”

“You can’t fool me with that shit, Lane,” Marquez said. “Even without a weapon in your hand, you’re not unarmed.”

“Then take your shot, Marquez,” Lane challenged. “C’mon and take the opportunity you’ve clearly been lying in wait for since we disembarked hours ago. Or maybe you remember something I did to you back in the real world, some price you paid, something I took, or someone… Ahhhh. That’s it. That’s that glint of recognition I knew I could rely on. I killed someone important to you, didn’t I?” The thin man grinned, almost as if he was pleased with the thing he clearly couldn’t remember. “Well, you have me at a disadvantage there, don’t you? In that you remember something of who or what I was like in the outside world, while I don’t have any of those memories available to me. But I know loss when I see it, so it must have been someone very important. Mother? Father? No. Wife? No. Sibling then. There we go. Sister? Brother, it seems. Did I kill your brother, back in the real world, Marquez? Is that what you think you remember? Are you sureyou remember what you remember, and not what they want you to remember? I’ve been nothing but open and honest with you since we got here, and I told you what we were coming here to get and why, and what we weren’t going to take, and why not. Now… either drop that gun or pull that trigger, but either way, you’re wasting time I do not fucking have, so just get on with it.”

The other men were stood completely still, and for a long moment, it looked like Marquez was genuinely torn between dropping the weapon and pulling the trigger. He seemed to vacillate for a few seconds and then Len heard the distinct thunderclap of a gunshot and got to witness for himself what Rin had told him all about.

From Marquez’s shoulder, the inside chamber of the gun seemed to blossom into a splatter of color, ripping tears in the world, blistering lightning bolts of fury and disruption, a rainbow of disco freakout beams erupting in every direction, cutting through the man’s body, slicing off a portion of his head, the shattering beams dicing his body and cutting trenches in the ground although it seemed like the beams stopped as soon as they reached the copper border. And, as quickly as the maelstrom had appeared, the storm of light and color disappeared, and the man’s flesh fell into a pile on the ground, the weapon in tiny fragments.

The other men continued to stand and stare in fear before Lane clapped his hands. “C’mon, boys, let’s get moving!”

After a few more seconds, they were snapped out of their trances and started hauling stuff out of the area. Lane looked over as one of the men ran back in to get one last load, yelling, “Watkins! Leave it! We need to go!” The lights of neon were starting to flicker hard, and Len glanced at the buildings, and they were strobing in and out of reality.

“I can—”

“Now Watkins!”

The man dropped the box and ran towards the edge, but about halfway to the copper line, he and the buildings starting flickering faster and faster, and the man suddenly stopped still, blinked in and out of existence for a dozen times and then disappeared, the entire village gone, and only a clearing left in its wake. From his hidden spot, Len looked down and could see the copper border was glowing, like it was lit up with heat.

Lane shrugged and grabbed his stuff, motioning for the men to follow him back. “Win some, lose him,” he said, cryptically.