Looking back on it, all I really see are these
fragments of memories, the narrative isn’t clear and my sense of self is so
shattered that I don't think I will ever find one, and if I do, I shudder to
think what colours now paint me. There is nothing native about this place, so i
can’t have gone native; i am left wondering if i have grown into something new
or if this is who i was all along.
The wind howls as it prowls through the trees,
I'm exhausted, panting for breath as i desiccate my already dry mouth. The
light is ebbing away and I can see something out the corner of my eye moving.
Before: Cold, the wet cloths weigh me down,
holding close to my unkempt form sucking the heat from my skin like leeches.
The world tilts gently as the raft sways upon the shore side waves, a flash of
lightning breaks the darkness of the cloud ridden night and we see four hunched
forms running up along the coast in tandem.
Bloody gore splatters my face as i swing the
axe, they stumble back, tripping as they fall off balance, the world around me
has faded to naught as i straddle their grotesque body, i stifle a giggle, a
gleeful childlike elation as i bring the weapon down to finish the job.
Before: It’s my first night since the crash,
my friends take me by the hand and lead me to their shelter, lights flicker in
the distance, and I'm still covered in my own drying blood. I feel like a
newborn, fed and waters then cradled as the night’s terrors begin to encroach,
hominid forms charge from the tree line like the last act of Macbeth and throw
themselves upon our fortress walls, the fighting is savage, our defenses as
much a liability as an aide. A man, clearly untimely ripped, is cut down and
carved up for food. Our tyranny goes on another day.
I spend the next day along in silent
contemplation, in what feels like a world of my own. I hunt for the first time,
and like learning to walk I stumble constantly. I shelter up for the night and
sip from an innocent looking pond that quickly clears out the stomach’s
contents. While I perch upon a cliff’s edge peering into the forest, watching
for shapes moving through the brush. If they see me they don’t approach, which
is worse somehow. The singular point becomes a fearful waveform that is pushing
me back sure as the tide is washing in along the rocks below.
I soon rejoined the others, safer in numbers.
Most of my self was broken away very slowly, eroded like rock, or worn out like
old jeans, though that day there was a tear. It had more limbs than one ought
care to count; though i did anyway, seven legs in total. A rampaging tree
tilting behemoth, full of noise and excitement: signifying nothing. The fight I
hardly recall; other than I was staring fixedly upon it, standing like a deer
in the headlights feeling it’s strangely leathery skin wrap around my own soft
cuticle and slowly begin to drag me down to it’s depths. I heard them shouting
behind me, and noticed only then that I'd been pacing towards it.
A friend, far more adept than I had been
planting effigies about our fort’s edge. He claimed they would keep away the
men that came at night but they never seemed to; I was too sane to even attempt
to build something like that then, though they seemed to help in a roundabout
way. To calm his fraying nerves even as they sapped my own.
Like a rat in a maze I'd only feel safe once
I'd poked my head into each and every nook and cranny this land had to offer,
so to start, we made inroads up the coast. Finding, first a yacht, then a
series of containers strewn carelessly along the beach, we were quickly
surrounded and pushed back into the sea; from where we made our way home on a
stormy night atop a small raft.
The raft was a form of salvation. While I was
away they built another larger craft; almost a fort unto itself, with the
sloshing waves for a moat. It was from this craft we worked our way to the
highlands. A bloody disembarkation became a feast as we carved their bodies and
threw them upon a hastily thrown together campfire. This was not the first
piece of long meat I had seen nor even the first I had partaken of, for when
one hardly chooses when the alternative is starvation; this was the first time
I had viewed it as a convenience. Normally prey runs away not towards you and
with so much meat to cook a single body was enough to keep us alive, yet the
four we gathered made for a sumptuous feast.
One of our number claimed to see a light atop
the mountainside as dusk gave way to night, though we all thought nothing of
this. Our feet fell through the loosely packed snow necessitating snow shoes
and torches to hold off the gnawing cold. Upon the witching hour we found that
we had come searching for the plane's cockpit. As we were all near frozen and
once again becoming hungry another band of miscreants set upon us, nearly
killing one and forcing us to shelter for the night.
As we retreated, heads hung low, at first
light, making our way down towards the lowlands we came across a crocodile and
while I watched admiring its savage beauty my band set upon it with spear and
axe impaling its carcass and carrying its head off as a trophy.
I heard whispers around the campfire of caves
and the things that lay within them, so, foolhardy as I was, I set off to find
one. That was the easy part, once inside i found myself trapped in a lobster pot,
i crawled around for days subsisting on chocolate and pop left in abundance
away from the surface, each time i doubled back i came upon a new pathway so
that i ricocheted from one to the other in a pinball-esque fashion. Here alone
with my thoughts in the darkness I felt myself ferment, the sweet sugars of
mind becoming a pungent poison. When I emerged I moved differently, hunted more
savagely, prowled the land dodging patrols and became predatory in
mindset.
The attacks upon the fort had taken their toll;
it was hardly a safe space and would often become overrun if lightly defended.
It was during their period that a friend and I scouted through the forest
looking for an ideal location where to lay new foundations. During a storm that
took hold that night we were startled to see one another's fist glowing with
grossly incandescent light, loud as a thunderclap, with this fist shattering
the night we found our new home.
Taking only what we could carry we relocated
to a series of poles atop a goose laden lake. We strung them together with
walkways, and a zip line to it. Soon enough we had our own hanging home, a
truly safe space where we formed the nucleus of our operation to this day.
I often left to hunt lizards, to use their
scales as armour, proclaiming myself to be the dragon man as I charged them, spear
draw and bloodlust on my baited breath.
We began to venture into caves more often,
moving swiftly as a party unleashing bouts of unkempt violence in stochastic
encounters as we came upon yet more twisted forms, some fetal others ogre like
in aspect all of which took their tolls on my mind as we set up their bodies.
We gathered from those depths the means to proceed yet further into their
seemingly endless bowels.
I needed an outlet, a means of creative
expression, something simple that wasn’t in aid of survival. One morning when
sulking past the washed up faded red cargo containers I found one of the
aggressors, standing while looking out to sea. It was trivial to bring my club
to his skull and remove it with an axe. I repeated this several more times and
in a moment of Pollock-like creativity set about arranging the limbs upon a set
of rocks and sticks, forming a Shiva-like figure that I let burn it brightly
accentuating its beauty.
We took our gathered means, and made our way
down to the bottom of a large sinkhole. Meeting fierce resistance our now well-oiled
party pushed on unperturbed. We pushed through caves, leaping from sheer rock
faces and landing the otherwise with a hair's breadth to spare. Eventually the
cave gave way to a building, a laboratory in which we saw yet worse horrors. A
coffee machine, and some processed food held me transfixed for the longest
time, they felt like alien objects to me now, the entire building was eerie and
unnatural, not for its placement but the manufactured essence of it.
We found a device, a kind of artifact, its
purpose still eludes us; but inside we found a boy from the plane crash, purportedly
the son of one of our party. We turned on our cassette player and watched,
while numbly chewing chocolate bars and listening to the tinny sound of 80’s
pop-rock, as the father pulled his dying son from the iron maiden spikes of the
device's core.
After another battle with a little girl, during which I was unconscious, we climbed swimming through a flooded cave, though
this time the red paint we wore was not washed off, no water could clear us of
this deed. No oceans could wash the blood from my hand; no instead my hands
will stain seas scarlet, turning green waters red.
On and up we found ourselves at the peak of
the mountain. There was a strange device ready to shoot down another plane,
just as we had found ourselves done by. A glowing light that if glimpsed could
have been seen from the highlands now far below. If we didn’t shoot down the
plane our son would surely die.
This moved me not at all. My heart had grown
white, and all this was simply a threat to my way of being. I longed to be back
in the forest captivated by the thrill of the hunt. A child, a plane load of
people; All these were elements that would dilute the closeness I'd found in
nature, a form which only my mind could see, even the others held on to too
much of the old world. They sat talking about morality, sophists pontificating
and ignoring the natural law and it’s simple stipulations. It was with honeyed
words I won them round, to let the plane fly on and the boy pass.
In the words of Marlon Brando: I've seen
horrors... horrors that you've seen. But you have no right to call me a
murderer. You have a right to kill me. You have a right to do that... but you
have no right to judge me.
.