three packages wrapped in khaki plastic. The boys fell up them.
Morning followed on but a seeming few minutes away. Dawn saw two mysteries revealed. Firstly, the Plain of Weapons, as they called it, ended in an abrupt gully of close-tumbled boulders. More desert bloomed grey and red beyond the gulch. But commanding both their attention (and the very sky itself) was a pillar of water, its skin juddering foamy wave crests that slashed against each other. The pillar contorted wildly like tethered lightning. Then a huge span of water, hundreds of metres thick, branched out over the boys’ heads. It was close enough that gobbets of spray flecked their heads.
Nathan thought at once that the pillar must be alive. Ian was yelling something to them, when the sea-limb sucked back to the trunk as an explosion of frothy plumes.
“-fell on us!” Came Ian’s voice, filling the roar’s absence with a frailty the boys winced at. Jeremy spoke quickly.
“There must be millions upon millions of tons of water in there. If it fell on us, we would be instantly crushed.”
Death stood beside them.
“What’s that?” asked Nathan, pointing.
“He can’t speak, you know, Nathan,” said Jeremy tiredly.
“But he understands us. Is it another weapon? One from the future?” That barren stare fell upon the boy. Nathan fished the frog from his pocket. In the adventure games on his computer, there always came a moment where the key you had picked up 10 screens ago would have to be employed. No further progression could be made without a close inspection of your inventory for the appropriate amulet or talisman to slot into the idol of frosted jade. Ian clasped his shoulder. Nathan looked at his friend and smiled, saying:
“I think the frog is part of this.”
Jeremy’s voice was excited.
“Like in Return to Evermore Hills where you had to throw the badger into the pool of flaming spiders.”
“He’s not getting thrown,” said Nathan firmly.
Jeremy spoke, but the pillar loomed outwards near them again, one flank boiling with surf as it descended; Nathan thought of Scott and his father for some reason. He wondered what they would make of the Plain of Weapons. He felt disappointment and guilt all at once.
Not even a real machine-gun in the whole lot, he thought. He imagined his teacher standing above him as she had on more occasions than he could recall, her upper lip curling in disgust at the sight of his pen outlining an assault rifle with integral proximity-fused grenade launcher. Jeremy and Ian had learned to place their drawings of weapons in the context of a futuristic war or mad scientist’s laboratory. But Nathan had long since abandoned such ruses. Instead, he threw himself into gun design tenfold. He made intricate sketches and notes for each creation that detailed ignition chambers, scope mounting points and helical magazine housings.
“Every journey requires a sacrifice,” said Jeremy then. Nathan looked up at his friends. A certain shine was about Ian and Jeremy’s faces. Nathan recognised it at once from their hill. It was the glare of anticipation just before they repelled a new attack; directed over the parapet at their enemies’ onrushing horde. The boy bowed his head again.
Is that what I look like too? He wondered. The frog flexed its legs a few times and he stroked its back.
“It might be that in this world, the frog can die,” he mused. “That’s what I’m afraid of.”
Jeremy nodded.
“Well, that would make sense. We could test it again, of course.”
Nathan swallowed hard. When the frog’s unkillability was unquestioned, he had revelled in the test of mortality. Now nervous excitement, viscous and cold, was seeping through the chambers of his heart. He was aware now that his grip on the frog was steadily tightening, and the irony of that was not lost on the boy. He smiled.
“There’s a kind of harpoon gun over here and a clunky old pistol, too,” said Ian.
Jeremy voted immediately for the harpoon as a method of testing. Nathan agreed, and the trio placed their frog upon a large rock at the gully’s edge. The harpoon gun was three feet of dull steel and cracked leather. The frog was soon betwixt its crosshair of gilded metal. Ian snapped back the hammer. Nathan looked towards the frog, then away to the pillar. It was flattened upon one side, wave tops showering away into the sun, as if a typhoon was rending its body to particles of luminescent gold. He next heard the gun’s blast and a yelped curse from Ian. The boy’s explanation tumbled from him.
“We shot it, but there was a ricochet and the spear took it clear over the gully!” A thread of spun gold trailed from the gun’s barrel. Ian began to haul it back, but Nathan stayed his hand with his own.
“If it was shot - ” he heard Jeremy mutter impaled quickly – “Impaled by the harpoon, we might lose it on the rocks somewhere if we drag it.”
Ian’s face was flushed. He examined the weapon’s breech, twisting it to and fro to peer within.
“I can see … like a wheel with the wire wrapped around it,” he reported. Jeremy was quick to make his own inspection.
“There looks like a cartridge behind it that powers the harpoon,” he said.
Nathan felt impatience rising. He was about to register a protest, when he was overcome by epiphany. Unnoticed by his friends, he backed away to the maze of tables and was gone.
Our frog might be impaled on a rock, and they’re just playing around again, he thought.
“I think the lever ejects the spent cap, and you can reload another manually,” he heard Ian say. “I wish it had a forward magazine, and then a pump action to it so that you could shoot faster.” Jeremy smiled.
“But then, you would still have to retrieve the harpoon each time, so it would offer you no advantage.”
Ian thought on this, and the obvious solution appeared to him.
“A backpack, then, with hundreds of harpoons feeding off a belt.”
“Then you would need another backpack with an equally large number of propellant caps feeding off the other side,” offered Jeremy.
This increasing complexity meant nothing to Ian. The boy shrugged, and said if that what was required, then it had to be. The boys replaced the gun beneath its case. Ian was careful not to scrape its surface on the table. Their recent glee at smashing the tables struck Jeremy. He shot a glance back at Death, and leaned close to Ian, whispering:
“Are you scared of him?”
“He does have a plan for us,” Ian said. The boy smiled as if he and the ghoulish thing shared a secret joke. Death gave no acknowledgement of Nathan’s existence. Jeremy shifted uneasily, and looked to where the gold wire was lost from view between two rocks. A small figure was rising up the gully slope a hundred metres distant.
“Nathan!” shouted Jeremy.
Nathan knelt and looked back. Jeremy imagined that a smile crossed Nathan’s face before a vast blue palm of water tore downwards and smashed the gully bank. A shockwave of displaced air blew Jeremy and Ian backwards and they lay stunned. When they recovered their senses, the bank gave no sign of their friend. They could not reach agreement upon whether Nathan had met his end.
“Death wouldn’t have brought us all this way just to smash us like bugs,” mused Jeremy. “Not his new recruits.”
“Perhaps it was like a training thing, and Nathan failed the test,” said Ian sadly.
Hearing his friend’s tone, Jeremy spoke quickly to mask his own doubts:
“We are going to get as many weapons together as we can, the most advanced ones.”
Ian was almost heel-clicking with glee.
“And then we are going to hunt for Nathan,” he said. “Anything that stands in our way will –“
“Be put in the hurt-locker” said Jeremy brightly, quoting a favourite movie line. Ian pondered the pillar of water. It swayed and shimmered in steady turmoil, flexing its limbs intermittently. Tears clouded Ian’s eyes and Jeremy stared intently now at the pillar’s heart.
“He’s not dead, you know. Not in this place.”
Ian said nothing, merely ki
cking at the discarded harpoon gun with his sneaker. The boy was framed by the roiling sea wall. Jeremy imagined that he and Ian were speeding above an ocean in the bomb-bay of a B-52 as its doors widened into hostile skies. Ian would be rolling from a rack of ordnance towards an onrushing island, with himself to follow. Then a sensation of falling overtook him; only a groundward glance could overcome it. A billow of salty mist erupted from the pillar and swamped the boys. Ian studied it for a moment.
“Imagine if there was a whale inside, swimming around. It could get tossed out on top of us if it wasn’t careful.”
“I don’t think there’s anything alive inside,” said Jeremy. A second of unexpected awkwardness passed.
“Except for Nathan,” he added quickly. “He is probably swimming in there somewhere.” Ian picked the harpoon gun up and peered into its chamber.
“What if there was a submarine lying around here somewhere? Then we could get it into the waterpipe and find him. And if it had missiles on it then we could fire them off too, like a bonus.” Jeremy began to point out his logistical objections to the plan, but the concept of the missiles had already overtaken him.
“They could be launched horizontally,” continued Ian, “If they were nuclear, we could pop the hatches and watch the explosion!.”
So the boys agreed they would require a nuclear attack submarine, several hundred cranes and a space vehicle of at least Energia rocket capacity. This last item had been Jeremy’s choice after a ten minute span of intense, brow-wrenching