Her mouth had already opened to give the pilot a piece of her mind for letting the vines fall behind her, but Laila's mouth clamped closed. Tight and pursed, her forehead wrinkling not in confusion, or disgust, but with a wave of sadness that she rarely felt for others. So many bodies, dressed in army uniforms of some kind, who looked as though they had been almost cut to shreds by bullets. Not jungle creatures. She could almost smell the stench of the gunfire.
The pilot moved with care through the carnage, taking cursory glances down at the bodies, some laying on top of others, as though protecting them but, more likely, falling in random places. Some laying on top face down, hands outstretched as though trying to crawl forward, others on their backs, staring with unblinking eyes to the unbroken blanket of blue above. At one body, the pilot crouched, reaching for something held in a cold, unfeeling hand. A sword.
Laila didn't want to move, as though her mere passage through the bloodbath could desecrate the scene, and she found her hand had risen to her mouth, stopping her from making a noise. After a while, when the pilot had passed too far ahead, she decided to make her tentative way through the bodies, stepping one way and then another to avoid standing in the puddles and pools of blood that spread out from the dead like dark, black spilled milk.
"Japanese." As Laila reached the pilot, the woman stood up. She had taken something from the body, performing some action with it.
"I ... I didn't know the Japanese were at war." A gun. The pilot had taken a pistol from the body holding the sword and now examined it with practised ease.
"They aren't." The pilot had opened the revolver, looking down the barrel before snapping the cartridge back into place, slipping it into the back of her pants. "The Japanese haven't been at war for eighty years."
She crouched again, hands moving over the body of the soldier holding the sword and slipped the belt from the dead man's waist before returning to her feet and fastening it around her own, far thinner, waist. The pistol transferred to a holster, high on her hip, and she moved away, treading across the ground like a cat and looking as dangerous as that cat would to a mouse. Stalking. Though what the pilot stalked, Laila couldn't imagine.
Beside another soldier, the pilot dipped again, picking up a long rifle, thin, long bayonet attached, which the pilot removed and placed in a convenient hoop at her waist. At the same time, she unfastened what looked like a scabbard, probably for the sword, and placed it, carefully, on the ground. All the while, the pilot's eyes roved around the area and Laila got the sense that the pilot knew exactly what she was doing and what she looked for. Once again, in silence, the pilot dipped, checking pouches on a body, taking what looked like bullets from them and adding them to pouches on her own belt.
"I don't understand. If they aren't at war, why are these ... people here? Dead. With guns." Laila looked down at a rifle near her own feet and considered picking it up, but the last time she had touched a gun, it was at a range and things had not gone well. "Should we be here? This looks fairly recent. Maybe whoever killed them is still here?"
"It does look recent. And that's the problem." For the first time since entering the clearing, the pilot looked at Laila and then used the rifle barrel to point to a patch on a uniform. "Imperial Japanese Army. From around 1945."
Laila couldn't tell one patch from another if someone sat her down, explained things to her and then gave up and simply put up a video on her cell phone. History wasn't one of her talents. Her talents were confined to performing, to entertaining and, to some small degree, business. She had to take the pilot's word for it, which she didn't like to do because that would mean admitting the pilot wasn't an idiot.
But the pilot wasn't an idiot, she had shown that far too many times, but Laila gripped onto that thought through stubbornness and a need to feel superior. As the pilot checked the rifle, in much the same way she had checked the pistol, Laila took another look around. The blood was almost fresh. If she were disgusting enough, she could dip a finger into one of the pools and it would still drip from the tip. The bodies, too, looked almost as though they had just laid down for a picture, skin still holding some colour, clothing still fine, if a little rough, unrefined and filled with bullet holes.
"Cosplayers?" She moved to stay close to the pilot, even though she couldn't tear her eyes away from the dead. "People cosplay as me all the time. They could be like, uh, Civil War guys? Or Ren-Faire people, dressing up as knights and kings and ..."
She had started to babble. Which of course she would. The pilot might think nothing of walking through a field of dead bodies wearing costumes from some long-gone war, but she had only ever seen one dead person before. Well, after Genna, she supposed she should say two. The first one was her grandma, not so long ago, passing peacefully to her final sleep with the entire family at her bedside. No blood. No bullet holes. No crabs threatening to eat her with those, what are they called, pincers?
"They aren't cosplayers. Stay behind me." The pilot raised the rifle to her shoulder and lowered herself to a half-crouch, waving the gun in several directions. "There's something just inside the jungle over there."
If it was even possible, the pilot acted even more determined as she made short, careful, but fast steps toward what she had seen, leaving Laila behind in a circle of bodies that, of a sudden, didn't seem like cosplayers at all. It all felt very real and, if someone could do this to soldiers, then she didn't want to think what they could, or would, do to an international singing sensation superstar, who was on course to win so many awards she would need to build an extension to house them. Or get another house.
"Don't go over there!" She hissed a harsh whisper, but it seemed to magnify around the clearing. "You'll antagonise them! Maybe they're only angry at these people? Stop! Do not go into that jungle!"
Laila had started to think the woman suffered from at least partial deafness because she never seemed to hear any of Laila's orders, and she really should, considering that Laila was the employer here and, therefore, in charge. Except the pilot had made it clear right from the beginning of this mess that she took orders from no-one, especially Laila. Which was odd, because there was no-one else here to separate Laila from the ones the pilot would not especially ignore.
But she couldn't stay here alone, which seemed the prevailing choice she had had at every point up to now. If she had hit at least some of the targets at that gun range, she could at least not appear so feeble and pick up a gun herself, but she relied, for this, at least again, entirely upon the pilot. Which meant having to keep up and not get left behind in a field of slaughtered, wartime, Japanese soldiers.
"Careful." The pilot's hand fell back as Laila caught up, pressing against her waist and keeping her behind. "Rusted metal. Don't want to cut yourself on that when we're who knows how far from a hospital."
Laila could see what the pilot had found and it didn't make any sense. She felt certain they called it a 'machine gun nest', though why she could never imagine. What that seemed to mean was that a small group of people could sit behind sandbags and barbed wire with a gun that could fire hundreds of bullets in the time it took one or two to fire four or five bullets back. No wonder the bodies in the clearing looked torn apart. They must have come up against something like this.
Not this one, of course, because this one had sat here for, it must be, decades. The barbed wire was, indeed, badly rusted, rotting and could fall to dust at the lightest touch. The sandbags had rotted, sending sand cascading down like dust waterfalls, creating miniature dunes at the foot of those bags that remained somewhat intact. But it was the bodies that told Laila how old they were. Or, rather, it was the skeletons.
One looked as though they had slumped over the machine gun as they had fired, the other little more than a pile of bones leaning against the sandbags at the other side. A trail of ammunition on a belt arced up to loop into the gun, the bullets weeping and corroded and, behind the skeletons, several boxes of more bullets set into belts, ready to feed into the greedy gullet of the death-dealing weapon. How very odd that two battles would happen in the same place.
"They must think this island is worth fighting for if it had two sets of armies fighting for it at different times." From behind the pilot, clutching on to the woman's new belt, Laila went nowhere near the rusted metal. "Maybe that's why you didn't know it existed? Maybe it's a military thing? Top secret. Like that bay in Cuba that's so secret everyone knows about it, but this is really, really secret."
"I don't think it's from two battles. Look where the machine gun is pointing." Holding the rifle upright with one hand, not moving too close to the 'nest', the pilot pointed a straight-fingered, straight arm, back toward the field of bodies. "I think it's the same battle."
"You're being ridiculous." Now Laila felt on more solid ground, because this clearly showed how stupid Laila wanted the pilot to be. She flashed a hand back to the Japanese soldiers and then to the skeletons. "They clearly died, like, hours ago. These clearly died way-back-when. Days of yore. A long time ago on an island far, far away. Or here. Whatever. You get what I'm saying?"
"And I'm telling you, it's the same battle! Except for them over there, it's just happened and for these here, it happened eighty years ago." The pilot's forehead grew so furrowed she'd need a ton of moisturiser just to begin with. If she used it. Laila gave a slow, sad, shake of the head. "I can't explain it, it doesn't make any sense, but that's what it is! Those Japanese were killed by the same calibre bullets as this gun! The area of suppression is right there. Those soldiers are wearing 1940's uniforms and so are these. It's the same battle!"
Laila could do nothing but feel pity for the woman. It had to happen, eventually. She couldn't keep that amount of intensity up for so long and this island had a way of burrowing into the brain. Laila had suffered it, but only a little, back on the beach, and now the reality of the situation had come crashing down upon the pilot. Frankly, it was only a matter of time. No-one could walk around with a stick that big, that far up their ass without it causing very definite medical problems.
Continuing to shake her head, Laila looked away. She didn't want the pilot to feel self-conscious about her irrationality, especially considering she now had guns, so Laila had to treat her with kid gloves until she could, somehow, get rid of them. Her head stopped shaking, however, when she caught sight of something a little further away. Easy missed with the sand and the undergrowth that seemed to have grown around it. It looked like a hand.
As she moved toward it, the pilot followed, pointing that silly gun around as though she was some kind of soldier herself. It was probably only one of the dead people, who had managed to crawl away. And then, for some reason, decided to turn around in the jungle and crawl back. That sort of thing happened. Probably.
Taking great care, as she seemed to do for everything, the pilot hooked a hand under the hanging vines and leaves and branches before lifting them up to reveal what lay beneath and Laila screamed. She hadn't screamed the entire time they had spent on the island. She had howled, wailed, yelped a couple of times, but she hadn't screamed. Seeing this, though? There was nothing else she could do but scream, and it seemed to send the entire bird population of the island into the skies, casting flickering shadows over a body half-skeleton, half-flesh. And the flesh looked almost as fresh as her own.