Breakpoint - Part Eight

Part Eight

Harry

“You have any idea how much money we’re probably looking at right now?” Harry said to the two women with him. “I mean, assuming we could get it out of here and back to civilization of some kind.”

“It’s not like it’s a wall of diamond,” Stella said to them.

“No, it’s probably more valuable,” Calisto replied. “Rubies, in large size and of high quality, they’re incredibly rare, so oftentimes if you’re comparing precious stones, a ruby will sell more for a diamond of around the same size. The Hope Ruby was like 32 carats and sold for almost seven million dollars.” She glanced at the wall again almost in astonishment. “How many carats would you guess are in that?”

“Too many to count,” Harry replied. “I bet if we dig around there, we’ll also find a bunch of sapphire too, since technically they’re the same stone.”

“They’re what now?” Stella asked.

“Ruby and sapphires, they’re both corundum, just colored differently,” Harry said. “Rubies are red because of the chromium in them, which gives them that glow in the sunlight. It’s also hard as shit, with only a couple of things harder than it on the planet.”

“Diamond being one of them,” Stella countered, clearly hoping to prove she knew something in what they were talking about.

“Yeah, and moissanite being the other,” Harry agreed. “But to find a wall of ruby of this size, I mean, Jesus, it’s completely unheard of. There’s nothing like it in any history that I know about. I don’t even know what to do about it. I mean, I can tell everyone back in the village about it, but it’s not like they can really do much trying to get anything from it.”

“Oh, like hell we’re going back without trying to get at least some kind of rock from there to haul back,” Calisto snorted. “I want to have a great big hunk of that shit the size of my head, just to plop it down on Tex’s bar, so I can ask him how many drinks it’ll buy me.”

“I thought everything on the island was free,” Harry said.

“Nobody asked you, limey,” Calisto said. “Now let’s get over there.”

Making a path around the outside of the cove border was much more complicated than it looked on first pass, simply because the foliage was so thick that they were doing their best to shove it aside where they could, cutting it away when they couldn’t. Harry didn’t really understand why guns were banned on the island, but knives and machetes were plentiful, but he guessed there wasn’t really any way to completely restrict residents from having any way to kill one another. They were all on an island with dozens of trained killers; for most people there, something as minor as a nail could be a deadly weapon. But with a bit of time, they were able to make their way around and over to the top of the waterfall without incident.

As they approached, Harry was fairly certain nobody from the island had made their way over to the waterfall before, as everything had a completely undisturbed vibe to it – no cut marks, no footprints, no paths, no carving markings, nothing that showed humankind had been over near it any time recently. There weren’t even any animal tracks or bird nests, which had very much surprised him. Most waterfalls had loads of bird nests near them, but this was stark deserted.

Even more eerily, Harry was fairly certain he could hear a high pitched humming in his ears that he felt like had to be coming from the wall of ruby, although he didn’t see it affecting either of the two women, so he wondered if it was just something that he alone could hear. Different people had different hearing ranges, and it was entirely possible neither of them could hear the vibrations that were ringing in his ears.

“Can we just sheer off a chunk of this?” Stella asked.

“Sure, what’ve you got that’ll cut through it, keeping in mind what we told you just a little bit ago about it being one of the hardest things on the planet?” Calisto sneered.

“Fine. We’ll just look for a loose chunk then, I guess,” Stella said.

“The best bet is to dive down and look around in the water beneath it, see if there’s a chunk down there we can haul up,” Harry said.

“You see an easy way down there?” Calisto asked.

“I could just jump,” he suggested.

“Harry, our lives are reliant on you deciding to keep one of us alive, so maybe you j–”

That was about all the reminder Harry needed to launch his ass off the cliff and down towards the water, so in the middle of Stella’s sentence, he flung himself down towards the ocean without even taking much into account about the height. As soon as he was in the air, he guessed it was probably around thirty to forty feet, which meant if he didn’t land right, or if the water was too shallow, he could do some serious damage to himself. Thankfully, Harry had more than his fair share of training for this kind of thing, and while it hurt like a son of a bitch when he connected with the water, he slipped into the correct posture before he did and didn’t do any damage to himself as he sunk down towards the ocean floor right along the beach beneath the waterfall.

As expected, there were a number of large chunks of the gemstone wall that had been knocked loose over the years and he swam down as quickly as he could to try and find one that wouldn’t weigh him down too much, a crystal about seven inches long by seven inches wide by about five inches thick, and despite the relative small size of it, it still felt like it weight fifteen to twenty pounds. The stone had been somewhat polished by the constant barrage of water pouring down into it, but it was still one big damn heavy rock.

Harry realized he probably should’ve stripped out of some of his layers of clothing, but it was too late now, and he swam up towards the surface, clutching to his massive ruby a little bigger than half of an American football. He wasn’t sure the actual value of the stone he was carrying, but some part of him knew it was the most expensive thing he’d ever held in his hand. It mostly smooth and rounded, like a giant egg or an incredibly oversized opal, and when his head broke the surface of the water, he could see that Stella and Calisto were both making their way back over towards a portion of the cliff face that started to slope downward. He moved up to get along the coastline itself and then started swimming along it, slowly working his way around the edge of the island until he could see it start to dip downwards. Every so often he would take a short break and pin the incredibly large stone against the stone cliff, just to let him catch his breath.

It took the better part of twenty minutes before the land had receded enough that there was an easy enough portion for the women to climb down and space for him to climb up, as he stripped off his shirt and wrung it out before pulling it back on again, the large stone shining brilliantly at his feet in the fading sunlight of the afternoon that was stretching into evening. “Well, that was bloody heavy,” Harry grumbled as Calisto and Stella moved over towards him.

“Are you insane, jumping off a cliff like that?” Stella scolded. “You could’ve been killed and we would’ve been killed with you!”

“What? From a little hop like that?” Harry laughed, moving to sit on a rock before tugging his boots off, peeling his socks off one at a time so that he could wring them out as well. “Not hardly. Might’ve sprained something if I’d landed wrong, or worst case broken a bone, mayhap, but I know how to safely dive into water from that kind of height. Anyway, here’s your ridiculously oversized stone, although considering we don’t have locks on doors, I don’t know how you’re going to keep it safe, shy of burying it.”

“It’s not like I think we’re planning on taking it off the island, Harry,” Stella said, as she picked up the large stone from his feet. It shimmered and sparkled massively in the sunlight, although Stella wasn’t sure how to hold it. “I just want to have something to show the others, so people know we’re not full of shit when we tell them about the waterfall. Nothing dispels uncertainty like holding a big ass ruby in your own hands to validate what we told ya.”

“No playing footie with the giant precious stone,” Harry said as he saw Stella giving it little tosses, almost hefting it to check the weight, causing the woman to giggle a little bit. “You’d only break your foot or some such.”

“You may as well take your pants off as well, wring them out, otherwise you’re going to be making mud all the way back,” Calisto told him. Harry wasn’t particularly thrilled by the idea, but peeled off his pants and balled them up to give them a hard squeeze. “And since we’re here…” she said as she dropped to her knees, reaching into his pants to fish his cock out before she began running her tongue along the length of it.

“Good lord, woman,” Stella said, shuddering a little bit, as the pleasure signals were being relayed through all three of their brains. The giant ruby tumbled from her hand and plopped back down into the sand again. “You’re going to do whatever you have to in order to ensure he chooses you to live, aren’t you?”

“Survival of the fittest, bitch,” Calisto sneered before she pushed her head down hard onto his dick, swallowing as much of his shaft as she could before pulling her head back to gasp for air, laughing wildly. “I’m gonna do whatever I fucking have to so that I don’t just snuff it.”

Harry hadn’t exactly been a top tier ladies’ man when he’d been on the outside working, and now that he had two women vying for his attention, it was hard to keep his focus when they had turned their affections onto him. Both of the women were trained in using their bodies as a weapon, and Harry was doing his best to keep his head clear, but he was fighting a losing battle in that regard.

He noticed that Stella had her hand down the front of her own pants and could feel that she was fingering herself through whatever weird empathic link they currently shared, because it was lighting up nerves that Calisto had and he didn’t. He’d been doing his best to try and keep a clear head about it, but when he was getting double blasted by pleasure sensations, there was very little he could do to force his focus to stay on.

Within moments, he was spilling his seed into Calisto’s mouth, his orgasm cascading into triggering Stella’s, which triggered two in Calisto, all three of them getting lost in the cross-talking waves of pleasure rolling through their bodies for a minute or two.

“That’s never going to be not weird,” Stella muttered as Harry tucked his limp shaft away and pulled on his still damp pants back on.

“Well, it’ll stop being weird when one of us is dead,” Calisto grumbled, moving to get off her knees. “And, no offense sister, but better you than me.”

“Same to you, missy,” Stella said as she picked up the giant ruby again. “Now let’s get back to the village. I want to drop this thing on Tex’s countertop and watch his eyes bulge out.”

Mick

His head hurt.

A lot.

It wasn’t just his head, either, because he could feel bruises all over his body, the result of a number of beatings he’d endured at the hands of his captor before they’d strapped him into the table where they’d injected him with loads of drugs and flashed all sorts of lights and images into his face, although he couldn’t remember what any of the images were.

More annoying, he realized he couldn't remember what an orange tasted like.

He’d always loved oranges, and finding the memory missing from his stable was infuriating, but he had more important things to worry about than finding an orange to reacquaint himself with his favorite fruit.

“Well, you’re moving,” he heard Len’s voice say to him. “That’s progress at least.”

“Was I not moving before?” Mick heard his own voice say out loud, the tone of it surprising even him a little, as he realized he’d forgotten what his own voice sounded like. It had a harsh London city boy accent to it, because of course it would. Unlike Len, Mick hadn’t started out as an American. He remembered that much for certain. Mick hadn’t opened his eyes yet, simply because he was trying to figure out how many people were in the room first. It sounded like just one, but it didn’t hurt to be sure. The more information he could keep in his back pocket, the better.

“Nope,” Len said. “They beat you up pretty good then left your body for us to find. You and some woman I’d never seen before.”

“Well,” Mick said, starting to move a bit in what felt like a bed, “if you’ve never seen her before, then she couldn’t be at all important, could she?”

Len chuckled somewhere across the room. “That’s not what I was saying at all and you know it. Dick. I’m just saying she isn’t someone I recall us ever encountering in our work, so I have no idea if she’s a civvie or just some operator I’ve never met before. You know who she is?”

“No idea.” He opened his eyes and his eyelids immediately hurt, but he decided to keep them open anyway. It looked like he was in some sort of small one bedroom apartment that had been decorated in 1964 and gone untouched since then. “Never saw a woman the entire time they were working me over. Just the same three or four men in those ridiculous pig masks. Are we where we’re supposed to be?”

“We are,” Len said, moving over to sit down on the edge of the bed. “How do you feel?”

“Like I got the shit knocked out of me three or four times while falling down over and over on a treadmill,” Mick groaned as he turned to look at his best friend. “Tell me you got her. Tell me all this wasn’t completely for nothing.”

“I got her,” Len said, placing a hand on his friend’s shoulder. “She’s here, she’s mostly fine and she remembers me.”

Mick lifted his dark-skinned hand and placed it on top of Len’s lighter flesh. “Well, hoo rah, amigo. Let’s hear it for one solitary thing going right.”

“Harry and Rin are both here as well,” Len said. “Harry’s a bit dinged up, but Rin got here first, so she’s been getting the lay of the land. They’ve both got some holes in their memories, but they both remembered me and you, so I guess we can be glad they didn’t take that from us.”

“That’s just great, but who’s Harry?” Mick said, struggling to sit up. He grinned a little bit, seeing the nervous look on Len’s face. “Relax. Fucking with you.”

“Don’t do that, man,” Len sighed. “The memory holes are nothing to joke about. I’ve spent more time than I want to admit for the last week trying to remember my mother’s real first name, and I still don’t have it in my brain.”

“Evelyn,” Mick offered.

“Evelyn!” Len cheered. “Oh, thank fucking God you’re here, man. That would’ve driven me absolutely mental give much longer.”

“No problem. You have an orange handy?”

“We can probably go down to the cantina and get one,” Len said. “Why, is it important?”

“It might be the most important thing in the world to me right now, but it’ll keep,” Mick said. He checked himself and realized that while he was dressed in a boxers, a pair of shorts and a t-shirt, he also had loads of bandages wrapped around his arms, legs and torso. “Was the Mummy Returns treatment really necessary?”

“We weren’t sure if any of the cuts were deep, so better to be safe than sorry out here in the goddamn jungle,” Len told him.

“We’re in a jungle?”

“We’re in a jungle, on an island,” Len said. “South Pacific most likely. Most definitely a good way out of any shipping lanes.”

“How big an island?”

“Nobody’s entirely certain? Best guess, maybe half the size of Tongatapu?”

“So, what, a little more than a hundred square kilometers?” Mick asked.

“Maybe?” Len said. “It’s… well, it’s pretty fucking complicated.”

“It’s a geographical feature, Len,” Mick grumbled, putting one of his feet down on the ground, then the other, before moving to stand up, finding his legs a little uncertain and wobbly. “How the fuck is geography complicated?”

“Well, it’s on a volcano, first off, and second off, there’s some pretty specific weirdness going around here that has to be seen to be believed.”

“Weirdness is just people’s way of saying they saw something they couldn’t reasonably explain,” Mick countered. “You know that. What’s so weird that you can’t explain?”

“Nazis. Dinosaurs. Vatican gold. Praying mantises the size of horses.”

Mick squinted at Len with an annoyed look. “Are you sure you’re not the one who got beaten up here?”

“I know how it sounds, Mick, so you’re gonna have to trust me on this, but I can show you the knife the Nazi had on him, or a letter he’d written to his girl back home. The paper, the ink, the style of handwriting… everything about it screams non-modern. I’ll show you once you’re ready to start exploring the island a bit.”

“So, what you’re telling me is that this mysterious island prison we’re on, the one that doesn’t exist on any maps that we can find, that doesn’t show up on any satellite scans, in addition to all of that, it’s time travelling?”

“Parts of it. Yeah.”

Mick shrugged his massive shoulders. “Yeah, fuck it. Why not. It makes about as much sense as anything else regarding this place. You learn anything about the people who’re running it yet?”

“They call themselves Management, but beyond that, I got absolutely nothing.”

“Then tell me about the island.”

“It’s had its share of residents over the years,” Len told his friend as he moved to sit down at a wooden chair in the little living room area. “We think the Germans were the first to find it, back in World War 2, but even that we’re not entirely sure of. We also think the Japanese had a military station on here for a while, but that’s also guesswork. The last real residents here had to have been here in the sixties or seventies, at least until Management started using it for its pocket prison. There’s hydroelectric power, again we think, being generated somewhere beneath us, which charges everything. All the vehicles on the island are electric, but they aren’t exactly brand new.”

“How do you mean?”

“They’re like electric golf carts from the 1990s,” Len said. “They’ll hold charges for a while, but it’s not like they’re Teslas or anything.”

“Well, that’s something, I guess. Electric carts seem better than walking.”

“In the places you can use them, sure, but that’s mostly just around the village, and to and from the dock.”

“We have a dock?”

Len nodded. “It’s a small one, with a single boat on it. Electrically charged as well, although they use batteries for it that they can swap in and out. I think it’s mostly just so management can generally toss things out of the sky with parachutes and we have to go out and fish them out of the water before they sink. We can’t try and storm a plane if there’s never a plane on the ground.”

“Smart thinking,” Mick agreed. “So that’s how we all got here?”

“Well, that’s how most of us got here. I think nearly everyone but you woke up being shoved out of an airplane strapped into a life raft with a parachute. You, my friend, decided that wasn’t flashy enough for your entrance.”

“It’s not like I remember any of this, Len,” Mick frowned. “So if I wasn’t thrown out of a plane and parachuted down onto the ocean, how the hell did I get here?”

“There’s a big metal hatch along one side of the dormant volcano that never opens. We’re pretty sure you got tossed out of that.”

Mick’s frown deepened. “Which means what exactly?”

Len shrugged a little. “My best guess is that they’ve got a submarine pen somewhere underneath the island, and that there’s a small compound inside the volcano where Management keeps tab on us all locally. There’s cameras all over the place, but nobody knows where they go. I suspect they brought you and your friend in on the submarine for whatever reason, and then threw you out of the big metal door. I’m not sure why they would’ve wanted to draw attention to it, though.”

“How do you mean?”

“We got a note telling us to come pick you up, when they could’ve just hauled you out and thrown you into some random apartment while you were unconscious, and then we wouldn’t have had any proof that that door opens,” Len said. “But now we know for sure it does, because while we were picking your body up and loading you onto a cart, the door opened again behind us, pitched out the lady we found with you and closed again before we even got a chance to see. Just heard the loud clanging sound of the door slamming shut again, so they must’ve moved incredibly fast.”

“What did you do with her?”

“She’s in the apartment next door.”

Mick chuckled, nodding as if this was expected. “You lock her in there?” He wasn’t particularly stable, but he started walking around the apartment a little bit, trying to get the lay of the land, and get the layout of the place committed to memory as quickly as he could.

“There aren’t any locks anywhere on the island.”

“You’re joking,” Mick said.

“You hear anybody laughing?”

“No locks on anything?”

“Nothing. Everything is completely unguarded. Not even so much as latches on bathroom doors to keep them locked from the inside for privacy, so get used to the idea that there really isn’t anything or any place secure on the island, other than that bigass metal door they threw you out of.”

“It’s locked?”

Len shrugged. “It’s unopenable. There’s no handles, no latches, no hinges we can see, no mechanism to open it. Working theory is that it’s only openable from the inside of their little compound.”

Mick’s eyes had been slowly scanning the room before his gaze finally landed on the two tubes that ran along the wall in the living room, with the small chamber for catching things empty. “This can’t possibly be what I think it is, can it?”

“Pneumatic tube system,” Len confirmed. “Fully functional. They use it to send messages across the village. It’s also how we found out about you being outside of the door. Management sent us a note that we were to come and collect you.”

“They couldn’t just call you on the telephone?”

“No phone lines here. No radios either. No computers. No firearms.”

Mick laughed. “You’re fucking having a laugh. No firearms?”

“Nope,” Len shrugged. “You want to kill someone, you’re gonna have to probably use your bare hands, unless you’ve got a knife on you. There’s a number of those on the island, although I think most of them are either used for cooking or clearing foliage.”

“You figured out what the hell they want from us yet?”

“I assume it’s just the usual – information, by hook or by crook,” Len said. “Of course, nobody’s really been asking much in the way of questions yet. In fact, up until Harry showed up a bit back, Management had apparently been pretty hands off, beyond their weekly supply drops, but when they dropped Harry off, they included two women with him, one from Portugal’s SIED, the other with South Korea’s National Intelligence Service, although both of them claim they’d left their respective agencies a few years ago.”

“That certainly sounds familiar,” Mick said, his hand smoothing along the length of the heavy clear plastic tubing that ran down into the floor. “He believe them?”

“It’s Harry, y’know?” Len laughed. “He’s always been the Pollyana of us, trying to see the best in everyone, no matter how shit they can be.”

“Sure, but the kid’s got good instincts.”

“Well, they’re a little rattled right now.”

Mick shrugged. “Being dumped onto a remote desert island prison’ll do that you.”

“No, that’s not it,” Len said, standing up. “Management gave him a message before sending him to the island that one week after he got here, they were going to make him decide which of the two women came with him lived and which one died.”

“Christ on a bike, what kind of sick Saw shit is this?”

“It gets even weirder,” Len said. “Harry tells me that somehow, they linked their nervous systems, so whenever he feels pain or pleasure, the two women feel it as well, and vice versa.”

Mick turned to glare at Len intensely. “What kind of weird world shit have you gotten us mixed up with?”

“Look, if I known even half of this shit, I wouldn’t have suggested you all come with me. I’d have gone after Mira on my own.”

“But you said she’s here, she remembers you and she’s mostly fine?”

“Yeah, she’s got memory holes, like all of us, and I don’t know how deep any of them run, but she remembers enough for her to remember how she and I met. And she remembers you and Rin and Harry, so, small miracle there.”

“And you don’t think she’s been compromised?”

“Don’t let me sway your judgement on that, Mick,” Len said. “I might have a clouded opinion, since I wanted her back so damn badly. Other than me, you knew her best out of Scarab, so you can size her up for yourself and see what you think.”

Mick moved to step into the bedroom, smiled and leaned his head back out to give Len a grin. “Well, now I know you remember me, because otherwise, I doubt this would’ve been here.” Inside of his bedroom was a slightly beat-up six string acoustic guitar resting on a stand. Mick picked it up and carried it out into the living room. “This isn’t contraband?”

“There was one included in a supply drop a while back, but nobody requested it, and apparently nobody else on the island plays guitar, so it’s all yours,” Len said. Mick had been known to play blues guitar during their downtime, and while Len couldn’t play any instrument to save his life, he had a solid enough singing voice. “Anyway, that’s enough briefing for right now. I’m just glad you made it here okay, and you don’t seem to be too fried in the head.”

“Well, you know how brain injuries go, Len,” Mick said. “You never know the extent of them until you start realizing what you’re missing. How’s Rin? Still as quiet and cryptic as ever?”

“She’s on our side, Mick.”

“Oh, I know she is, but that doesn’t make her any more communicative with us than she is with the enemy,” Mick said, a dry amusement to his voice. “Girl naturally keeps secrets from even the people she trusts the most. Well, now that we’re all here, and you’ve found Mira, what’s first on the agenda? Trying to find a way off the rock? Or are we trying to pull back the curtain and meet the wizard?”

“I don’t know about you, Mick, but I’d like to know who the hell has the money to fund this kind of operation, and just what the hell they’re doing with it.”

“Any leads? Any threads we can start by pulling on?”

“Once you’re up and running, we can go explore the island together, see what you make of any of the stuff we’ve already found.”

Mick set the guitar down on the table and then moved over to the couch, slumping down into it. He was sore and ached but not so much that he felt he would be down for long. “And you got no idea who the woman you found with me was?”

“She looked Mediterranean, maybe, but beyond that, I got nothing. We can go over and talk to her if you want, although frankly, we should probably get you something to eat.”

“Fuck yes,” Mick said. “I need to relearn what oranges taste like.”

He went to grab some socks and shoes to put on, and when he walked back out into the living room, the pneumatic tube vibrated for a bit and then suddenly a plastic capsule shunted into place, waiting for Mick to pick it up.

“Tex, the guy who helped me bring you here, he said he was going to tell the Post Office you were here, so that’s probably just a standard greeting message from him, giving you the basic rundown of the island.”

Mick opened up the chamber, pulled out the capsule and then closed the tube back up. After opening the capsule, he pulled out a small clamshell jewelry box from the plastic enclosure. He opened it up slowly, just enough to peek inside before snapping it shut again sharply. He glanced up at Len, his face almost aghast. “The woman who came with me… you see any tattoos on her back?”

“Yeah,” Len said. “She had a comedy/tragedy mask tat on her back right shoulder, except–”

“Except the eye holes on the masks had cats’ eyes in them,” Mick finished.

“How the fuck would you know that?”

“Because…” Mick opened the box and turned to show a large white gold ring inside of it, hanging from a long silver chain that was mostly tucked beneath the pedestal the ring was on. “This is my old wedding ring. Which means that the woman next door is my wife.”

“Wait, your dead wife?”

“Presumed dead wife,” Mick corrected. “She’s been gone six years now, but nobody ever found a body, and she was the last one to have my wedding ring… we used to lend them to each other for good luck charms.”

“Well then,” Len said. “We’d better go check and make sure your wife’s okay.”

Mick scowled. “This isn’t too weird for you?”

Len chuckled. “A couple of days ago, I was looting Vatican gold and yesterday before I hauled your ass over here, I killed a time travelling Nazi with his own knife. At this point, weirdness is all pretty relative.”