Kong: Skull Island - The Official Movie Novelization

TWENTY-SEVEN

They moved everything down to the lake. It was difficult work, even though it was mostly downhill. The napalm barrels could be rolled, their descents controlled with ropes, but the evening heat was intense, and the work was backbreaking. Their food rations were dwindling, and Mills didn’t feel he could trust any of the berries or nuts they’d seen growing on the island. The animals here were inimical to man, it only followed that the plant life would be too.

“Night’s falling!” Packard said. “Hurry it up. We don’t have long.”

They went to work setting their traps. They were experienced at setting booby traps, but not for an enemy so large. They worked on the idea that all the basics were the same, all it took was more firepower.

With everything done and the sun dipping to the horizon, they settled into their assigned positions, checked their weapons, and waited.

“You think he’s losing it,” Cole said from Mills’s right. It was not a question.

“It’s not up to me to doubt the old man’s orders,” Mills said. They only ever called Packard ‘old man’ when he couldn’t hear. He wasn’t even that old, but he had at least twenty years on all of them.

“Still,” Cole said. Silence fell for a while.

“So what do you think?” Mills asked at last.

Cole shrugged. He didn’t reply.

Mills looked across the clearing by the lake shore at Packard, sitting quietly between two large piles of fuel-soaked sticks and branches. Losing it? he thought. I think it’s already lost. But I’d follow him to the ends of the earth.

Looking around, the idea settled that they were already there.

Conrad couldn’t bear admitting it to himself, but he was lost. Somewhere in the past half an hour they’d left the route he’d intended taking, and now there was a steep slope rising up on their left, a fast-flowing stream to their right. He didn’t recognise either of them. It stood to reason that following the stream would take them back to the river and Marlow’s boat, but that was easier said than done. Not far from where they stood, the stream turned into a torrent, entering a narrow canyon with no safe way through. The water became so violent that it threw up a mist that drifted back to soak them, diffracting the setting sun and making false rainbow promises of hope and beauty.

“Get off this rock alive, huh?” Weaver asked as she stood by his side. At least she was good enough to keep her voice low.

“Sarcasm isn’t a survival skill,” he gave back. He looked around them, spotting what might have been an easy route up the steep slope. Once up there he’d be able to take a bearing from the setting sun and determine which way they needed to go.

“Stay here,” he said to the group. “I need to get up top.” He remembered the last time he’d done something like this, the snake he’d come across. Such encounters would not always end in his favour.

Most of them nodded, seeming only too pleased to take a rest. As he headed into the mist and started climbing, he sensed someone behind him.

“Wait up!” Weaver said. She held her camera in one hand, using the other to grab onto branches and roots. As he glanced back at her she took a quick snap of him from down below. Probably not his best angle.

Conrad smiled. He was pleased for her company.

They headed up the slope, and as dusk fell it became even steeper. What had looked like a low ridge seemed to grow the higher they climbed. A fall would not be too dangerous, because the slope was so heavily overgrown with hardy trees and shrubs, but the plant growth made the going hard and slow. Their physical conditions didn’t help. Conrad was thirsty and hungry, and he knew that if he was tired, then the others would be close to exhaustion.

He and Weaver helped each other up the slope, and eventually they reached the ridge line above, falling on their backs and breathing heavily with exertion. After a couple of minutes Conrad tried to look down below to see how the others were faring, but they were out of sight behind the sloping mass of trees. Even if they’d lit a fire he didn’t think he’d be able to see it from this high up.

Weaver nudged him, turned, and pointed out over the landscape. To their right the setting sun was bleeding across the primeval horizon, and the moon was already out, casting a silver snake across the land perhaps a mile to the south.

“There,” Conrad said. “The river. Not far to go now.”

Weaver started snapping pictures.

Conrad froze. He opened his mouth to breathe out, trying to figure out just what he’d sensed, heard, or smelled on the air.

Weaver raised an eyebrow. He held up one hand. Wait.

A stillness settled around them, a heavy silence, as if all jungle sounds were being absorbed by something close by. Something huge.

Kong’s head rose before them, breath misting the air, his eyes fixed on them both as he pulled himself easily up the other side of the ridge line.

Conrad had never seen anything so magnificent, nor felt so miniscule. Beneath this creature’s gaze he was a whisper of his former self, all memory and experience wiped away as he faced the undisputed king of this island.

Weaver stumbled back and he caught her arm, felt her galloping pulse as he pulled her to his side and they shared comfort in contact. We’re really seeing this, he thought. He could smell the giant ape and feel his heat. He was more real than anything Conrad had ever seen or known before.

Kong moved closer as he stared at them, frowning as if in concentration. Closer, closer, his breath washed over them. Conrad could feel the beast’s warmth, and hear his booming heartbeat. He had a sudden shocking image of the ape’s mouth yawning open and him sucking them in, drawing a breath that would drag them from their feet and down into his monstrous stomach. He remembered Randa slipping down the Skull Crawler’s throat, the flash of his camera marking his progress through the monster’s thin amphibian skin.

Would he and Weaver know the same feeling? Would they survive long enough to be squeezed into Kong’s gut with the remains of his last meal, a stew of acid and diced flesh?

Even as his fears traced cool fingers down his spine, everything changed.

Weaver took a step forward, reached out, and touched Kong. Her fingertips brushed the heavily textured, knotted skin of his nose. She pressed her hand flat against him. Her breath was held and for a while it was just her and Kong, beast and woman, a connection across aeons of evolution. The rest of the world seemed to revolve around them, and Conrad felt very small and far away. Time ceased making sense.

In the distance, a heavy boom thumped through the air. Conrad knew that noise. He’d heard its like far too many times before, and Kong’s reaction only confirmed his fears.

He dropped down and back, moving almost silently for such a massive beast. One moment he was there, the next he was gone, vanishing back and down into the evening mist shrouding the valley.

Weaver was left with her hand out and fingers splayed, still touching the memory of Kong.

Another explosion sounded from far away.

“They’re trying to draw him out,” Conrad said.

“They don’t know what they’re doing,” Weaver said, her voice almost dreamy. She lowered her hand and turned to look at him. “Conrad, they have no idea. We can’t let them. We can’t!”

“We won’t,” he said. “Come on.” He turned and headed back down from the ridge, Weaver following him. They scampered quickly, barely thinking about hand- or footholds, grabbing onto trees and roots, vines and wild shrubs, clambering over rocks and jumping across cracks in the steep valley wall. Conrad felt his heart pounding with wonder and dread at what he had seen, and what he knew was about to happen.

He felt more explosive impacts through the ground, the noise shielded by the mass of the ridge, but the shockwaves travelled across the island, ripples calling Kong to his possible doom. Packard and his soldiers had failed to take him down that first time with the helicopters, but they’d been unprepared, caught off guard.

This time might well be different.

“Conrad,” Weaver said when they were a short way from the camp. She grabbed his arm and held him back, pulling so that he turned to face her. They stood face to face. It felt like they’d known each other for years, not days. “I feel… changed,” she said.

Conrad nodded. He knew what she meant. Going up that hill had been an attempt to find out where they were and navigate a safe way off the island. Coming down again, everything felt different.

“We’ve got to help,” she said. “That’s what you do, isn’t it? Help people?”

“I’ve killed a few, too,” he said. He wasn’t sure why he’d spoken so frankly. It felt harsh, but Weaver didn’t seem fazed.

“A few?” she asked.

“More than a few.”

“And that’s why you save people now.”

“I do it because I’m good at it. But… I don’t save everyone. There was this girl, Jenny. We rescued her, and we were bringing her out when she was shot in the head.” He found it difficult to continue. He’d never talked to anyone about Jenny, not the friends he still had in the services, not the women he occasionally spent one night with, talking into the early hours knowing they’d never see each other again.

“You blame yourself,” she said.

“Of course not,” Conrad said, feeling the lie burn on his face. It was such an obvious lie that to admit the truth would have felt more so. “What about you?”

“Me?”

Conrad nodded past her up the hill they’d just descended. Why do you need to save him? he wanted to ask.

“My father,” Weaver said. “He was a good man, but never someone I could impress. I think… he was trying to make me the person he wished he’d been, but I could never live up to that.”

“So you remove yourself from the world so you can’t fail anymore.”

“Partly,” she said. “And I follow all the bad stuff because…”

“It makes you feel like a good person.”

Weaver shrugged. “I don’t think he’d be proud.”

“So stop trying to please him,” Conrad said. “Start to please yourself.”

“We have to help Kong!”

“We will,” Conrad said. Neither of them had a choice.

They moved off to find the others. Conrad eased back as they approached, knowing that they’d be on edge. As they emerged from the shadows, Brooks lowered a big branch he’d been wielding, relief evident on his face.

“Did you see the river?” he asked.

Conrad tried to speak but could not. Everything before him—the people, the place, the fear on their faces, the shadows crowding in—seemed so false set against what they had so recently witnessed.

Out of all of them, Marlow understood. “They saw Kong,” he said.

“What’s he talking about?” Brooks asked. “Which way are we going?”

“You three need to get back to the boat,” Conrad said, pointing up the slope they’d just descended. “That way, over the top and down to the river. It’s getting dark, but you have to keep moving. Use your torches. Treat every shadow as a threat, and take it slow. Wait for us until dawn. If we’re not back by then, you go.”

“You don’t have to twist my arm,” Brooks said.

“Where are you two going?” Marlow asked Conrad and Weaver.

“We’re going to save King Kong,” Conrad said.

Marlow shook his head. “Not without me, pal. Not without me.”

Conrad nodded. Marlow knew what he and Weaver had faced, understood what they were feeling. Besides, he knew this island better than any of them.

In the growing darkness, with distant explosions reverberating like thunder, the three of them set out into the heart of the island.