Altos Regiment

Story by Albert Shu

| SHORT WRITING CONTEST

The sun beamed down on the island; on the eerie, quiet mountain, marked by the ashes of an old signal fire; on the tottery, leafy shelters, now lying singed and trampled on the sand; on the thickets of fruit trees, standing charred and blackened with fruit rotting at their feet; and on the warm, lushly carpeted glade where butterflies danced in the golden sunbeams. In a mat of creepers at the edge of this enclosure, a gleaming white skull grinned in pieces at the drifting clouds. In the center of a circle of glowering, scarred trunks, jammed in a crevice in the pink rock, stood a stick sharpened at both ends. Atop it was the roughly severed head of a boy with fair hair. Warm crimson blood dripped down the spear, and an expression of fear and horror contorted the pale face. His last scream echoed silently through the dense forest. Below the horizon, a trim British Navy cruiser sailed on.

The flies had not yet found Ralph when a slowly moving procession of brown hair and suntanned skin became visible making its way up the scar. They waved their spears in the air and belted out a familiar chant: “Kill the beast! Cut its throat! Spill its blood!” Over and over they sang their song of slaughter and fun, living in the bloody moment that stuck to their hands and coated their spears.

The two boys in the parade’s center were different by their alikeness. Their identical faces, splotched with black and white, bore equal measures of adrenaline and shock. Balanced on their shoulders was a makeshift stretcher from which dangled a pale, headless, dripping body. Over the pink rocks and across the green island, preceded by echoing voices and followed by a trail of red, Ralph’s triumphant funeral procession continued.

When, at Jack’s urging, the boys had all finished their second helpings of meat, the chief spoke to his hunters.

“Tomorrow we’re going to the burnt patch. We’re going to see if there are any new trails on that side of the island.”

Mutters drifted across the cooling, darkening rock. Even the hunters had an aversion to the unfriendly side of the island. What could be the use of going where all was burnt and rotten, and where no life had yet returned? A sharply raised hand restored order to the tribe.

“Altos, you have guard duty tonight. Tenors, you’re tomorrow, then sopranos…”

“Chief?”

“Yes?”

“What about…”

For the slightest moment before the breeze carried it away, silence lingered on the cool castle rock. Jack’s expression wavered, and his ugly, freckled face crumpled as if he expected to be struck a blow. When the chief spoke next, it was tentatively, as if he, not his savage subject, were asking for reassurance.

“We left it a tribute. A gift. It’ll know.”

And then the final words, spoken so quietly and apprehensively that they might have been a plea to the Lord of the Flies:

“It won’t bother us.”