"The Island"

Lying in the hold, listening to the bombardment, there is no sleep. The booming of the guns travels through the shivering metal of the ship. Hour after hour, without end, the arsenal of democracy rains down on the tiny island. What could it be like for the Japs huddled in their bunkers? Surrounded. Doomed. Do they know they have no hope? Do they expect death? Do they wish for it? Death. The island is death. Waiting for them. Ancient. Waiting since before they were born. Thousands of young men have crossed vast oceans to come to her, following paths they could have never foreseen. Thousands of young lives will converge on her shores. Converge and end. After three days of round-the-clock bombardment, a clear and bright morning. Whispers through the hold about problems with the shells. Many of them never exploded, disappeared in the air. There have been stories of bombers being cut in half. Of bomb crews emerging limbless from their planes. What is on the island? Some new kind of weapon? Something the Japanese have been saving until now? Just talk. The men feel the death out there, waiting on the island. The landing vehicles ride through the waves, and the Marines climb out onto beaches of ash, an alien surface, crumbling under their boots. There is no fire. No sound but the motors and the clinking of gear and the sergeants shouting, urging them on. No movement from the interior. Then screams. Bloody stumps. Men cut in half. But still no fire. How is there no fire? More men screaming. Groups of men on the ground, howling, bright red lumps where limbs had been. How? No sign of the Japs. No fire. No shells. More vehicles land. The beaches become a crowded, screaming nightmare. There is something here, something beyond their understanding. Invisible. Killing at will. Is it the island itself? A few men manage to advance up the steep beaches and across the rocks, but soon they are cut apart as well. Other men follow and advance farther. They have been trained to advance. Take the beach. Forward. Always forward. Slowly, the men find their way farther and farther into the island interior. Through horrible trial and error, they begin to understand. They don't speak of their discovery. They don't believe it. But their overwhelming will to go forward and their overwhelming fear of death teach them what their minds cannot accept, teach them a lesson about the island. They notice tracks through the ash and rock where there is no grass. These tracks are not foot trails, but deep tracks carved at strange angles, striated like dry streams, places where it seems the ground is simply missing. They realize they must avoid these tracks. If they step onto them, or let any part of themselves pass over the them, that part will disappear, whether it is their fingers or feet or limbs or even their heads. Sometimes parts of their bodies disappear even when they don't cross the tracks, and they realize that there are unseen tracks through the air, invisible boundaries they must not cross. If they lose a part of their bodies, the blood does not flow, but there is pain, pain beyond flames or knives or bullets. Pain unbearable. Unholy. Inhuman. There are screams all around them, of men who have accidentally run afoul of the invisible power. There is no time to understand this, to reason it out. They simply adapt. Moving carefully, holding out blades of wild grass or shirts or gear, probing, waiting for part of the object to disappear, then stopping, testing for a way forward. Sometimes they find it. Sometimes they are forced to turn back. In less than an hour, they have forgotten entirely about the artillery and snipers and bayonets. There are no soldiers. Only entrances to empty bunkers, abandoned pieces of artillery, some cut in half, but no enemy. They are playing a new game now, taught to them by some unseen teacher, playing it with total concentration. Playing and winning. The Marine wounded, with their strange unbleeding wounds, are taken away. Their screams fade. Orders from command are unchanged. Take the island. So they move forward. Up. Towards Mt. Suribachi. The mountain is shaped like a bowl. A dead volcano. They approach by various paths, each man following another, taking a narrow path of safety. Makeshift markers are set up to show their boundaries. A Marine turns and sees, floating like a butterfly, a severed human arm. It turns and floats away and disappears altogether. Minutes later, a disembodied pair of legs scrambles past. The Marines curse and speculate and even giggle, but keep moving forward. There is no time to understand. They expected to spend weeks taking the island. Now it seems that could have it in a couple hours. A shot rings out, the first shot since the confusion of the landing. A Marine is firing at the mountain. Others peer through their binoculars and spy a man sitting on the rim of the mountain. Simply sitting. Alone. Just a vague shape. Snipers are called in and they fire on him, but the island's air seems to swallow the bullets. The man is untouched. They press forward. The deadly tracks wind around them, growing more numerous. Some of the men find themselves at dead ends. One Marine slips and disappears entirely without so much as a shout. They come to the foot of the mountain. It is small but rugged and steep, and the lone man sits over them, looking down on them. They hear the sounds now, coming from the other side of the ridge, coming from within the giant bowl of the mountain. Human voices. Many of them. Thousands. The sounds of laughter, giggling and cackling and howling laughter. Like a wonderful party where somebody is telling a hilarious story. The Marines listen to it dumbfounded. Slowly the laughter fades, and there is a new sound, a strange rushing roar that quickly breaks apart into discrete sounds: screams, shouts, gasps, weeping, terror. The sound rises and rises, and the Marines shudder. This too fades and the laughter returns. And so these two sounds trade places over and over, fading in and out above the sound of the waves. A Marine trains his binoculars on the mountain again. The man is still sitting there. Japanese. Wearing a uniform. His head is floating several feet above his body. The body is in several pieces with lines of sunshine between them. His face, sweat dripping over the smooth eyelids, shows no emotion. Slowly, he raises his hand, as if wave to them, and his fingers float away from his palm.