Welcome to Chapter 5.

A quick thanks to my amazing editing team. Your grasp of the English language allows these stories to be what they are. Thank you to the rest of you for your comments, feedback, and high ratings for each chapter as well.

Now, on with the story.

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The morning had dawned in much the same way I imagined it had done on the Island for centuries. The crisp morning breeze drifted inland from the endless expanse of the Pacific, and the tropical birds in the trees sang their greetings to the rising sun. The soft winds were hardly cold; they were just that perfect degree cooler than the ambient air that wafted lazily around my skin as we climbed the path next to the waterfall and up into the clifftop. The gentle mists of the cascading falls were infuriatingly pleasant, and our group slowed to a near stop to enjoy them for as long as possible.

Everyone in the group had been outfitted with a sling made out of tied-together shirts, and each sling held a few bottles of water and some food. Liz had been clear that she hadn't seen many fruit trees on her last trip inland.

It was an odd revelation. Since arriving on the Island, I had never been further away from our landing area than the point where I had been woken this morning, just on the other side of the lake. But looking back over the area that had been my home for the past four days, I realized just how small it was. From this elevated position, it looked like the distance from the orange life raft on the beach was little more than two football field's length away from the waterfall; it only took as long as it did to walk from one to the other because most of the trek was spent walking around trees. As the bird flew, the two points were surprisingly close to each other. From this height, I realized that I had not even explored the entire beach.

"Looks like Steve is back," Liz said as she stood beside me, nodding to the dark shape sliding effortlessly through the water just beyond the shallows.

"Yeah, that greedy asshole has been fed every time he has turned up here," Ray said, looking back over his shoulder as he climbed up the last of the path. The rest of our group was strung out along the path behind him. I could already hear the giggles of my girls as Hayley and Robyn recounted the previous evening's festivities. "He is gonna keep coming back if he keeps finding food, and he is gonna get fat." He finished.

"Blackbird Betty," Liz chuckled to herself. Ray and I just looked at her questioningly. "Sorry, something from my college years."

"Well, we have time," I said. "Tell us about it."

Liz giggled again, subtly inching a little closer to me. "Okay, there was this goth chick when I was in college. Her name was Betty; she was a lovely girl. Every morning she would walk from her dorm to class, and on the way, she would stop at this bench and feed the birds. Crows and Blackbirds, mostly."

"You shouldn't do that," Zoe or Caroline said slightly breathlessly as they joined us from their ascent up the path. "Those birds are crazy smart. They can remember human faces."

Liz laughed again. "Funny you should say that because that's exactly what happened. After a few weeks, the birds would be there waiting for her, and the flock got bigger over time. Eventually, they sort of back-followed her to find out where she lived. By the end of the first semester, she would wake up every morning to find a flock of Blackbirds waiting outside her dorm for her, and they would follow her to school. It was like something out of The Omen. A goth chick walking through the park with a sky full of crows following after her. It freaked a lot of people out, which she thought was hilarious.

I chuckled, but Ray shook his head. "Yeah, I'd rather not turn a fifteen-foot Tiger Shark into a conditioned pet. All things considered, I'd rather have a dog."

"Ewww," Caroline or Zoe said, pressing into the other side of Ray. "I'd rather have a cat. I don't like dogs."

Ray just looked at her. "Nope, sorry, that's a deal breaker," he teased. "It was a good run, high fives all around, but I'm definitely a dog person. I don't trust anyone who doesn't like dogs."

I nodded in agreement, laughing along with Liz.

The four girls in my group, along with a smirking Amy, topped the path and joined us, only Tom and Louisa still making the climb behind them. "What has you all looking so happy?" I chuckled, looking at them.

"Oh, just hearing about your escapades last night," Amy smirked a little wider.

"What about you?" Hayley grinned, sliding in beside me and changing the subject. "What are you talking about?"

"What would you prefer as a pet: cats, dogs, or sharks?" I asked as my arm slid almost subconsciously around her.

"Sharks?" Hannah blinked, glancing out over the treetops toward the sea as she stood on the other side of Hayley.

"Is that an option?" Katie asked.

"Apparently," I shrugged with another laugh.

"Um, yeah, I'm gonna go with a dog," Katie said slowly as if she was trying to avoid a trick question.

"Me too," said pretty much everybody else, apart from whichever of the Zoe/Caroline twin-like girls hadn't suggested a cat in the first place. She opted for cats, too, unsurprisingly.

"Alright, I give up," I said, turning to Ray's companions. "Are you two related or something?"

"Err, no, why?" One of them answered.

"Are you sure? I'm sorry if I offend you, but I honestly can't tell you apart. You look almost exactly the same."

The two of them looked at each other appraisingly. "No, we don't," one of them said. I had officially given up trying to guess which one of them it was. "She's got darker hair."

"And her eyes are green. Mine are hazel," The other said.

"And her boobs are bigger." the first one said again.

Ray and I looked at each other. He was standing between and slightly behind them, his eyes flicking back and forth between them before raising to mine, giving a comical little wince and shaking his head.

"So... what you are saying..." I squinted at them, unsure that any of those observations were true, or at least not dramatically different enough to be helpful, "...is that the only way I am going to be able to tell you apart is if you are standing right next to each other and I am comparing your chests?"

One of them rolled her eyes as the other girls giggled. "What? Do we need name tags?"

"Yes, that would be very helpful, thank you," I grinned.

"You can tell us apart, can't you, baby?" One of them purred, turning and pressing herself against Ray.

Ray glanced nervously at me. His eyes flashed to mine for half a heartbeat before going back to her. The look in them was unmistakable. He had no idea which one was which. "You are both gorgeous to me," he grinned. I snorted loudly.

"Good answer," one of the newly-named twins giggled before kissing him.

"I can't believe she bought that," Liz whispered with a giggle of her own. "Okay, c'mon. Time is a-wasting."

Tom and Louisa were last up the cliffside pass, not through being slow or unfit or anything else like that. They were simply lost in conversation and were happy in just each other's company. With neither of them needing a break or a rest, Liz turned the group to follow the river inland.

Looking back towards the sea, I was able to see the entirety of my existence for the last four days, but looking inland was like gazing upon a new world. The only thing I could compare it to, in my admittedly limited experience, was looking out across the Serengeti, the great plains of Africa. Long grass, the occasional copse of trees dotted around, and the winding, calm, crystal clear river snaking its way between the foothills to our left. The land was almost perfectly flat around the ancient volcano, like the harsh ocean winds and wild Pacific storms had scoured any character from the landscape. It was only the lack of roaming wildebeest and grazing gazelles that reminded me of where we really were.

What was most surprising, however, was the size of it all. Liz had been anything but inarticulate in her description, but a statement like "it is about four or five miles across" will only ever be an abstract concept until you see it for yourself. The mountains blocked out our view to the left, but straight ahead and to our right, the land seemed to yawn out forever. I could make out the hazy shadows of hills to the far right, but without consciously reminding myself that the land was swallowed up by the ocean just beyond it, it was very easy to think that it just kept going. Straight ahead was a different story. The grasslands, as Liz had termed this part of the Island, entirely engulfed the SouthWest part of it. The winds seemed to forbid the growth of anything other than the most resilient of trees, but beyond that, in the shadow of the mountain where those wind currents were deflected by the slopes, the darker green outline of thick forests covered the entire northern horizon.

If I believed in that work of fiction, otherwise known as the bible, I would have said we had washed up on the shores of the Garden of Eden.

Well, if Eden was devoid of any form of land-dwelling life.

It felt like ours were the only feet that had fallen on this land in eons. Despite having no idea whatsoever if that was actually true, I allowed my feet to follow Liz, leading us along the sandy banks of the knee-deep and gently moving river and further inland.

I maintained my belief that, from the beach, the volcanic crater looked like a single large mountain. But after walking for the better part of an hour - or at least what felt like that long without any way of being able to measure the passage of time - we had moved far enough around it for me to be able to see what Liz had meant when she called them a series of mountains rather than just one big one.

If you imagined the crater as a clockface, the beach, and the mountain looming over it, were covering the ground from about the six o'clock position, right around to about the eight. We were currently walking past the five o'clock point, and that part of the crater had already been worn down to almost ground level. The land started to rise again by the time it had circled around to four, but not before it had been carved out by the flow of the river, which wound its way into the depression between the ring of mountains. Dozens of smaller streams flowed down the hills, moisture caught and trapped by the sudden elevation of land trickled into flowing tributaries and mini waterfalls as they cascaded down the slopes and into the river. All of that water was being caught by the waterway and caressed out to sea. The entire scene was very tranquil. Even the growing heat of the day was soothed by the gentle winds that blew from behind, tenderly prompting us forward.

"Alright," Liz said, spinning around to face the group. Conversations between individual members of our band of intrepid explorers had continued for the entire journey, but I had found myself walking in silence. I was happy just taking in my surroundings. Hayley had retreated back to join the others, apparently wanting to be a little more vocal in her appreciation of our journey than my silence was providing. Liz had stayed close but seemed to appreciate the quiet. "We have a choice. We can go up..." she turned and pointed to the mountains we had just passed. "...or we can keep following the river and go in. Going up will give us all a much better view and a better idea of the lay of the land. That might be good for spotting good locations for camp. But I warn you, that climb is a lot steeper than it looks."

"Oh God, yes, it is," Hannah groaned, remembering her own climb of it a few days earlier.

"We wouldn't need to go as high as Hannah and I did," She grinned teasingly at the brunette stewardess before continuing, "and it may be more useful to climb the northernmost mountain so we can get a good look at what is beyond it. But that is going to take all day, which means finding a spot to camp out here tonight before exploring the inside of the crater tomorrow. Or we do the crater today and the mountain tomorrow."

"Do we have to do both?" Ray asked

"Yeah, I'm afraid so," I answered this time. "Being able to spot a good place from the top of the mountain is a good start, but I would need to get down there to actually see if the ground is good for building on. If it makes you feel any better, technically, only I need to do both."

"Oh good," He grinned at me. "These are sea legs, not mountaineering legs. I'm voting to head to the crater." A few of the others nodded in agreement; the rest of them looked at me.

"I suppose we could go into the crater today and then hit the north mountain from the inside," Liz said after some thought. "But I have to be honest; I don't like the idea of the group splitting up until we are all orientated. You would be amazed at how easy it is to get lost if you lose sight of the major landmarks, and the only one we have is the river."

"Don't want to be too far away from our man, eh?" Katie grinned.

Liz grinned and wiggled her eyebrows to the giggles of the others. Ray rolled his eyes teasingly but was quickly distracted by one of his girls whispering something into his ear before sucking his earlobe into her lips.

I just chuckled and looked ahead to our decision, but I didn't fail to notice the blush on Amy's face as she and Hannah whispered something between them.

These girls are going to kill me... oh well, at least I will die happy.

"They are seeing you for what you are, my love," the voice whispered into my mind suddenly. "They recognize your place in the group. All women are attracted to power. You shall see soon. Hurry, I can feel how near you are."

Well, that's the decision made, then.

"Alright, let's do the crater first," I said, starting to walk forward. Surveying the whole site after looking at the land was counter-productive, but to be honest, I was trying to follow the voice to the western edge. "We can go in, find a central point for everyone to meet, then Liz and I can take that hike up the mountain. Once we have gotten the lay of the land, we can rest up and survey the possible construction sites in the morning before we head back to the beach." I turned back to look at them. "You coming?" I grinned, suddenly feeling confident in this new role leading the expedition.

"Not yet, I'm not," Katie smirked back. "But I had better be cumming hard later."

The rest of the group giggled, even Ray snorted before they started following behind me and Liz fell in step beside me. "Katie had her chance," she whispered with a purr. "She could have fucked you the other night, but she only blew you... Now she can get in line. When we get up that mountain, you are mine!"

I groaned quietly, adjusting the growing bulge in my shorts which, in turn, earned another sultry purr from Liz before we all got back to the task of walking.

********

Alright... I said to myself a few hours later as the group looked around our impromptu campsite. A clearing on the bank of the river at pretty much the center point of the crater. Which way, in the name of Satan's sweaty ball sack, is west?

Yes, yes, I know. The sun. It rises in the east and sets in the west; most children know that. But at that moment, the fucking thing was smack bang directly over our heads. It wasn't in the east. It wasn't in the west. It was just... up. And was being entirely unhelpful.

The thought had occurred to me to just wait, loiter for a few hours to allow the sun to move, and then go from there. But time was a factor, and the more of it I wasted here was less time being able to look for the source of the voice. I was getting nowhere trying to work it out for myself, and the more I spun on the spot, trying to work it out, the more disorientated I became. In the end, I did the only thing that I felt would help the situation.

I asked Liz.

"Yeah, I'm lost already," I smiled sheepishly at her. "Which one is the north mountain again?" What? I didn't think advertising the fact that I was hearing voices was a particularly good idea, which in turn meant I had no justification for looking for the west. Look, I'm proud of that feat of mental acrobatics... Sue me!

She giggled and pointed it out, purring as she leaned in a little closer. "If you play your cards right, that is where I am going to beg you to fuck my ass. I've always loved anal, and I have heard good things about your cock." Liz giggled as she took in my dumbfounded expression and glanced down at the bulge in my shorts. "What? Do you think that only men like that? You are about to be shown otherwise." She grinned and walked off, sashaying her ass as she went and leaving me to wonder if the voice was worth it and if that girl would consider marriage. She looked over her shoulder and winked at me. "Shall we say an hour to rest? Then we can get going."

"I... um... yes, that sounds... like a plan," I gulped hard.

I caught Ray's eye. He was watching me and smirking mirthfully. We seemed to have fallen into something of a pattern that, under most circumstances, could be called a friendship. Friendships were something I had always struggled with. Lewis had been the exception, but we had grown up together. The rest of our friend group had been a mix of people one of us had worked with, other regulars in the various bars we had drunk in who had joined us over the years, or people we had met in the never-to-be-repeated and rarely-to-be-discussed dalliance into Sunday league football. They were a group of men who I would say I was friendly with, not friends. Aside from a few general tidbits of information, I knew next to nothing about them, and I was certain they knew even less about me.

But then there were those intangible factors, more than proximity and familiarity, that couldn't be defined. Ray and I seemed to have a lot of those. We had survived the crash together; he had literally saved my life. Not just by getting me out of the sinking aircraft seat but by being cool-headed enough to get us to the life raft through the tempest of the storm. He had done it again by stopping me from running away at the first sight of Steve. His calmness under pressure was something that I deeply admired about him. Yet as soon as we were out of the water, he seemed to defer to me. We had found ourselves on a deserted island together with one other guy and nine women, and yet our thoughts on the dilemma before us were exactly the same.

I had no doubt in my mind that Lewis would have been one of those guys who wouldn't have given the moral implications a second thought and would have been happy to take advantage of the women. He also would have been greedy and possessive about the supplies he found in the cases and, by now, would have been extremely jealous over more of the women showing me attention than him. The more I thought about it, the less Lewis seemed like an actual friend and more like he was just some guy I had known for a while and fallen into a routine with.

And that was before you considered the fact that he had been screwing my wife behind my back.

Ray, on the other hand, seemed to take an inordinate amount of pleasure out of the teasing repartee we had between us when it came to our interactions with the island's female population. One thing was abundantly clear from the get-go, he was as clueless about the opposite sex as I was, and I took as much joy out of his ignorance as he took in mine. There was more than that. I knew he had my back, just like I had his. I had no idea what could happen that would require cashing in on that trust, but it was good to know it was there.

The only thing I could really compare it to, without having the slightest amount of first-hand experience, were the bonds that developed between men who had seen combat together. That feeling of putting your life in someone else's hands and knowing theirs was in yours. There may have been no combat, but there was still a hell of a lot of life-handling to go around.

All things being equal, Ray was my kind of human.

"Mmmm, I want to look over that way," Tom announced, snapping both Ray and me out of the moment and pulling my eyes momentarily back to Liz's swaying ass and then to Tom. He immediately turned and started walking off. Even this soon after their 'coupling,' it surprised nobody that Louisa didn't hesitate for a second in following after him. But Ray and I did notice the flush in her cheeks and the spring in her step as she did. There would be no second guesses needed for what they had in mind. Nothing on this island constituted an official relationship, but Tom and Louisa were together as much as I was with Hayley. Considering what she had been through, I was happy for them.

"I'm boiling," Hannah announced. "I think I need to cool off in the river." Every other girl immediately agreed. Amy almost purred at the idea, and, as one, they all got up and headed into the water. Only Zoe/Caroline stopped and looked back at Ray.

"Are you joining us, baby?" She called back to him.

"No, angel face," He smiled back. "I'm getting old, and that walk didn't do any favors for my knees. I am just going to lay back and relax a bit, but I will join you later."

'Angel face' just nodded, smiled and turned to follow the others.

"Nice save," I grinned as I walked past him.

"Oh, they are going to be wearing my balls as earrings when they figure out I don't use their names for a reason," he chuckled back with a cringe. "Fuck, one of them needs to get a tattoo or a haircut or something. I'm running out of pet names."

"Good luck with that, man," I laughed. "I'm gonna get a headstart on exploring."

"Why?" he looked around before lying back on the ground. "What's wrong with building right here?"

I kicked the ground with the toe of my foot. "Flood plains," I answered simply. "Too much moisture in the soil, liquefaction, general instability, not to mention you will wake up under about two feet of water during monsoon season."

"Ah, well, as reasons go." he shrugged.

"My gut instinct is that the best building land is going to be on the lower slopes of one of the mountains," I said. "Better drainage up there."

"Good luck with that. Wake me when you're back, and I can... stay seated here and feel old."

"You got it," I laughed before heading off toward the west. It was not, in any way, lost on me that everyone else in the group had suddenly become busy, nor had any of them been concerned about me heading off on my own. There was no doubt in my mind that the voice, and whatever control it had over us, had made that happen. Apparently, she wanted me to come alone.

The inside of the crater was slightly different, environmentally speaking, from the rest of the grasslands. The harsh Pacific winds that scoured the southern part of the island clear of most foliage didn't seem to reach here. The inside slope of the southern side of the rim looked like it was completely covered in thick vegetation. It wasn't hard to imagine finding the same fruit trees there as the forest on the beach. But just like the outer slopes, the web of capillary-like streams stretched up into the hills on every side. Like the blood vessels of a circulatory system, they seemed to be everywhere, and their silver reflections shone the sun back at me everywhere I looked. Water would not be a problem if we were to set up home here.

By the time I had walked a few dozen yards away from the rest of the group, I was starting to feel something. A pull, like a magnet acting on a compass, urging me in a certain direction.

"Yes, my love, you are so close. It won't be long now. You are almost here. You are almost home."

There was a part of my mind that knew I should at least be frowning at that, even if I accepted the whole concept of a voice in my head without complaint. But that part was as silent in my head as the screaming complaints had been since the day before. The voice was haunting in her seduction; I could feel the knot in my chest growing, not in fear, but in anticipation. My legs were carrying me in whichever direction they saw fit, and all I could do was offer as much or as little resistance as I deemed necessary; as it happened, that resistance was close to zero.

Despite everything, despite the loss of control, despite the taking advantage of the girls, despite the blackout and the pain before it, despite the loss of memories and of the emotions that made us human, despite it all... I wanted to meet her.

Minutes passed, each one accompanied by the steady drumming of my footsteps on the ground. One after the other, my footsteps progressed as inexorably as each minute. Time, it is said, waits for no man. Apparently, my feet were following time's lead and were dragging me along at a rate that strongly suggested they knew where they were going.

And then they tripped over something.

I hit the floor with a grunt, landing hard and knocking the wind out of my lungs. I coughed hard, struggling to suck in that first relieving breath when I finally saw what it was I had tripped over. Suddenly the struggle to breathe was replaced by my mind's inability to wrap its head around what my eyes were seeing.

It was a shovel.

More than that, it was a trenching shovel. Shorter than a normal one, perhaps only two feet long rather than the standard four, and with a metal handle instead of a wooden one. I frowned at it. To say it was completely out of place on an island devoid of any human habitation was an understatement of monumental proportions. This was the equivalent of Neil Armstrong landing on the moon to find a Burger King waiting for him.

I reached out and picked it up. It was real; I wasn't imagining it. To be honest, for the briefest of moments, I had started to reconsider the possibility that I had actually gone stark raving mad and was currently in an asylum somewhere, screaming at the walls about the importance of air safety. But no, it really was a fully intact, human-made shovel.

"What the f...."

The words that were about to fall from my lips were caught in mid sentence. My eyes, which had been closely examining the tool in my hand, seemed to spot something in their peripherals. It was something square, almost completely hidden in one of the few clumps of trees, and it was much too close for this to be the first time I had seen it. Vines and greenery had grown to cover almost the entire thing. But I seemed to know immediately what it was.

The vines covered stark grey concrete walls, faded from decades of exposure to the elements. A door hung off its hinges on one side of it, the vines hanging over it in just the right way to make the opening almost invisible, and a long horizontal slit stretched across the wall of the opposite side.

What I was looking at, despite it being the last thing I had expected to find, was a genuine, honest to god, World War II pillbox.

I looked behind me. The slit, from where a machine gun would have once pointed, looked out over almost the entire valley of the crater, and with three-foot thick, angled concrete walls, this thing was designed to not only dominate the area, it was built to take a pummeling. The strength of its construction was probably the only reason it had survived this long. For more than eighty years, this structure had stood sentinel over the lifeless expanse of deserted island in front of it.

I pulled myself to my feet, keeping the shovel firmly in my grip, and walked toward the building. The surprise at finding the shovel and the concrete pillbox seemed to snap me out of the daze induced by the voice, and my mind was firmly back in engineer mode. I know the voice wanted me to go inside, and I was happy to follow it, but I was going to make damned sure the roof wasn't going to fall in on me first.

I circled the building. It wasn't big. The inside space couldn't have been large enough to hold more than three or four people, less than that if they wanted to be comfortable; it was never going to replace the need to build something new, but it was shelter. If the shovel in my hand was anything to go by, there was the much more valuable prospect of more tools to be found.

I peered in through the slit. The engineer in me was amazed at how well the bunker had stood the test of time. The Pacific ocean winds were full of salt from the seawater that surrounded the island, and salt was not the kindest of friends to concrete. Yet despite this fortification showing some signs of its age, it was in remarkably good condition. I mean, it probably wouldn't ever have survived a direct hit from a naval bombardment, but it didn't look like it was about to suffer from imminent collapse either. The few cracks in the walls, even at the wall joints, didn't look structurally compromising, more like the result of settling that all buildings underwent after construction, The ground shifting beneath it under the new weight.

I circled around to the back side of the bunker, to where the door was hanging off its hinges. The ground behind it had grown back over in the decades since its construction, but I could still make out the indentations in the land of what had once been a small trench system, complete with mortar pits and dugouts. I glanced down at the shovel in my hand. Suddenly, its presence was starting to make a little more sense.

It was a complete system of fortifications, yet I couldn't for the life of me work out what it was supposed to be defending. The only thing beyond the pillbox was a mountain.

This is going to need some more investigation.

"Please, hurry, my love." The voice whispered, almost pleasingly., snapped me back to the reason I was here in the first place. "You are so close. Come inside; all will be revealed."

I turned back toward the bunker and stepped closer. I peered through the doorway, careful not to knock out the door. The last thing I needed was for that thing to fall on my head. The floor of the interior was a gray dust-like sand, and boxes, in various degrees of disintegration, were stacked up against one of the walls. More importantly, there seemed to be a few more tools propped up against the wall underneath the slit. I could make out another shovel, and at least one pickaxe as my eyes squinted to adjust to the lower light.

With a deep breath, I stepped through the doorway and into the bunker.

"You are home, my beautiful man. Welcome."

The buzzing sound of a swarm of insects suddenly announced itself behind my eyes, the world around me shifted, and a deep groan fell from my lips.

Well, that was predictable.

I promptly passed out.

********

And that's it for chapter 6. Thank you for reading.

Stories are released to a schedule which can be found on my profile. The next chapter of the Island will be submitted on Monday, and the newest chapter of this flagship series, NewU will be submitted Thursday. As it stands, I do not foresee any interruption of that schedule over the Christmas period, but there may be a delay in the time it takes lit to post them to you.

Please feel free to rate and comment as you see fit. Authors thrive on the feedback of our readers.

In the meantime. You are all awesome...

Nova