White and Other Tales of Ruin

“Take a look,” Max said, nodding at Ernie’s ruined body.

Roddy shook his head, started to walk away. He had seen enough. He was not yet twenty-five, and he had seen a thousand dead men. Max grabbed his arm, and Roddy wondered once again what he had meant last night, what were all mutations.

“Roddy, take a look,” Max said again. His bald head was blistered and crazed from the sun. His confidence was still there in his voice, camouflaged beneath dull shock.

Ernie was a mess. Where his blood had not been disturbed, it still speckled the sand with spray patterns. He tried to avoid looking at the face because there was little left to see. He noticed a pulped book lying at the dead man’s side, and wondered how the hell Ernie had kept his Bible through everything that had happened.

He saw the officer’s left hand. Wounded and cut, the blood already dried and caked into a black mess. He looked at the right hand, bent and lifted the cool arm, just to make sure that what he was seeing was not imagination.

“Cut his wrists,” Roddy said.

“What?” Norris asked. Butch looked up.

Max turned and walked a few steps before sitting down, facing away.

“He slit his wrists,” Roddy said. “In the night. Must have done it a while ago, the blood’s already clotted.” He spotted something glinting on the blood-soaked sand by Ernie’s hip. He knew how useful a knife would be, but he could not bring himself to pick it up.

“God-fearing fool decides to off himself instead of facing up to what God had given him,” Norris muttered. “We could live here for years, and he tops himself as soon as we’re out of the sea.”

“I heard him, I think,” Roddy continued, trying to ignore Norris’s dismissive tone of voice. “I woke up in the night. Half woke, anyway. He was mumbling, moaning. It wasn’t very nice.”

“What was he saying?” Butch asked. He was staring wide-eyed at the corpse now, as if he could accept death dished out by a victim’s own hand above that caused by something unknown. In a way, Roddy admitted to himself, it wasn’t so bad. It displayed a weakness in Ernie, not a strength in this unknown place.

“I didn’t listen for long. I can’t remember. I was tired. I was dreaming. I went back to sleep.” Did I? Roddy thought quickly. Straight back to sleep? He glanced at where he had seen the shape beneath the trees, but there was nothing there.

Nobody said anything. Even Norris turned away and walked off towards the stream.

Roddy sat next to Max where he was making vague shapes in the sand.

“I think we should go inland,” Max said sullenly. “See if there’s any sign of life here. Any inhabitants.”

“I don’t think there will be,” Roddy said, and Max did not argue. They both knew what he meant. This was the most inhuman place either of them had ever seen.

“Still, I think we should move. Don’t you? Don’t you think we should move?”

Roddy nodded. “We’ve no supplies, no cover, no weapons. No radio. No hope, unless we find something we can use.”

“Weapons against what? Use for what?” Max looked up at him, and Roddy felt his heart sink. He’d always regarded Max as educated, wise in the ways of the world, if not academically. Now he just looked confused and lost. And maybe scared.

But Roddy did not want to see that, so he turned away and blanked it from his mind.

“What did you mean about mutations?”

“Sorry?”

“Yesterday, just before the boat went. You said ‘all mutations,’ or words to that effect.”

Max shrugged, then smiled. The expression was so unexpected that Roddy found himself smiling along with him, though he didn’t know why. “It’s a thing Darwin said. When we landed here it reminded me of what the Galapagos are supposed to be like.”

“Isolated,” Roddy said.

Max nodded. “When he and his colleague came up with the theory of evolution, they said it all depended on variation in a species, caused by mutation. So, by definition, we’re all descended from mutants. And the stronger ones among us…”

“All mutations,” Roddy finished. Max nodded and Roddy shook his head. “Max, you have a way of losing me and scaring me at the same time.”

Max shrugged. “It’s not relevant. Just the idle ways my mind chooses to occupy itself, I suppose. My warped sense of the interesting.” He stood. “Maybe we should bury Ernie. Before this place eats him.”

The four of them buried Ernie on the beach, his bible on his chest. Max pocketed the knife after wiping it in the sand. Butch was silent and intense, trying to catch their eyes to take comfort in contact, but hardly succeeding. Norris was quiet and distant. Max and Roddy worked side by side, and Roddy took immense comfort in the smells and sounds around him. Human smells, human sounds.

By the time they had finished the sun was rising, hauling up the temperature. After they drank from the stream, trying their best to ignore the dead things washed up on its banks, Max suggested they go inland. Butch agreed willingly, and Norris said that it was as good an idea as any.