Survivors

The argument that followed was long and very hard. Tempers were so lost, at times it felt like they would never be found again. In all honesty Luke always knew he was going to be on the losing side because even he saw there wasn’t really an alternative. They were going to have to work with Jack to contact the HFS and then they would have to go with him. Even though in his heart of hearts he’d known this, it didn’t mean he had to like it or make it easy for the others. In fact he was determined to make it bloody difficult.

He didn’t want to go back to being just a kid, being told what to do. These last few months in the base he’d been in charge, he’d made the decisions and no way was he going to start taking orders from anyone just because they were older.

Holly and Joe didn’t know all of this, mainly because Luke didn’t tell them, so they found his attitude and behaviour completely baffling. They were desperate to get away. From what Jack had said the island sounded brilliant. It was sunny, there was fresh sea air, there was fresh food to eat and best of all you weren’t under the constant threat of bumping into a Alien every time you went round a corner. So when Luke eventually agreed to go they were absolutely jubilant. Holly rushed off to tell Jack the good news.

“It’ll be the end you know” said Luke bitterly.

“What do you mean?” Asked Joe exasperated and exhausted.

“It’ll be the end of us”

“Don’t be ridiculous”

“It will be the end of us as we are” said Luke emphatically “Do you think things won’t change when were suddenly surrounded by hundreds of other people. How many other boys of our age do you think there will be? And when the lovely Holly sees them, how well do you think you’ll measure up little brother?!”

Joe seemed completely crestfallen, then he looked at Luke with a mixture of sadness and pity. “Do you know Luke, if you weren’t my brother there are times I don’t think I would ever speak to you again. I’m going to find Holly and Jack, and you, you can do what the hell you want to”.

The next couple of days were pretty busy as they planned, tested and planned again. The cause of all this activity was the need to contact the FHS and more importantly how to do it without bringing half the Alien army straight down upon them. In the end they decided it was impossible, well not actually impossible, but impossible to do without a good deal of risk. No matter what they did the Aliens would be able to spot them as soon as they made contact.

In the end it was Joe’s idea that they went with. The three of them would fly to three separate locations. These locations would be at least fifty miles from each other. First Joe, then Holly and finally Luke would send the same message at half hour intervals. Once their message was sent they would fly like the clappers to a designated safe place and then hide. The safe place would always be in the opposite direction to where the next message would come from. This would mean that by the time Holly sent her message that Joe would be at least seventy five miles away.

They were to stay hidden in their safe places for twenty four hours before carefully returning to the base. This, they believed, would give the Aliens the least best chance of finding them or the base. It was a reasonable plan, but it was risky, very risky but it appeared very risky was the best they could come up with. By staggering the messages they hoped to distract the Aliens from the first and second searches. Luke had volunteered to send the third message with such arrogance and such a sneer in his voice that Joe had almost argued with him, but Jack had interrupted saying “Yep that makes sense, you’re the oldest and strongest, you’ve got the best chance of making it out alive. Agreed! Let’s move on”.

They had begun to realise that when Jack said “Let’s move on” that it was usually time to ...move on!

The messages couldn’t be encrypted and couldn’t be made very secure, so it was pretty safe to assume that whatever message they sent the Aliens would be able to pick it up. They needed to come up with a plan to ensure that even though the Aliens could intercept the message, that they wouldn’t understand it. Jack was doubtful that they would be able to come up with any sort of code that the Aliens wouldn’t be able to crack and the people at the FHS would. It was Holly that came up with an idea for this one.

“I remember a Sherlock Holmes story where the code was linked to a book. There was a string of numbers, like 100, 6, 12, which meant the word you wanted was on the 100th page, line 6, word 12. I doubt the Aliens have read Sherlock Holmes so they wouldn’t have a clue”

“And how would the people in the FHS have any more of clue?” Sneered Luke “For a start they wouldn’t know what book to look in would they!”

“We could tell them the book” snapped Holly defensively

“I think it’s a great idea” said Jack beaming. “Let’s look at some of the books we have here and I’ll try and remember what books I saw on the island”.

“No need” chirped Joe “Just remember any book and we’ll go and find it. We know where there’s a whole library just sitting there doing nothing”.

They discussed which book they should use for ages and eventually settled on one called Jaws by Peter Benchley. Jack was 100% sure he’d seen a copy on the island, it was a paperback and he could describe the cover in some detail. All of this meant that when they went to the library they not only knew the book they were looking for but also had a pretty good idea of the edition. This massively increased the chances of their references matching up with the ones in the island version of the book. The other good thing about Jaws was that they were going to send the title in morse code. If the Aliens hadn’t come across morse before they would only have four letters worth of code to use to decipher its meaning which was virtually impossible.

“Are you sure your mates are clever enough to get this?” Asked Joe.

“What?” Replied Jack

“Will they know that a message that just says Jaws, followed by a load of random seeming numbers means they need to look in a certain book on a certain page and so on. I don’t think I’d work it out, just how smart are they?”

“They’re pretty smart” smiled Jack “And I think that when the message arrives they will do their absolute best to work out what it means”.

“So in percentage terms, how confident are you that they’ll get it?”

Jack thought for a while “Honestly” he said “I think it’s about a 70% chance, which in my book for this type of mission is pretty good odds”.

“I guess it’s the best we’ll get” sighed Holly.

“So what’s this message going to say” asked Joe.

“We need to give them a location a date and time for the evac. Plus an idea of how much transport we need”.

“Transport?”

“Yeah to carry the guns” sneered Luke “Or had you forgotten what the important cargo is!”

“Of course the guns are important” replied Jack “But so are you. We want you to be safe and we need to understand what makes you so ... Special”.

“Don’t think anyone’s doing any experiments on us when we get to this island of yours” shouted Luke leaping to his feet “Because we won’t let them”

“But what about all the things we could learn from you. If we understood..”

“No! No! No!” Bellowed Luke “You’ve already said that nobody you’ve got is as brilliant as Bretnel and we know that you didn’t manage to get his research. So it doesn’t matter how many tests your scientist mates do they won’t really understand what they find. Darius used to say that biologists could dissect a frog and tell you how it worked but they couldn’t ever give one life. Well I’m not going to be anyone’s frog!”

There was a moments silence which was suddenly broken by Joe bursting into a snorting fit of suppressed giggles. The giggles were almost instantly taken up by Holly, then Jack and even Luke eventually smiled.

“He’d rather croak than be a frog” spluttered Joe between giggles.

“He won’t get toad to do anything he doesn’t want to” added Holly with tears of laughter rolling down her face.

“He knows everything you know” squealed Joe almost helpless with laughter “Because he’s reddit!”

“Very funny” smirked Luke “Why don’t you two comedians hop off and get this book while Jack and I spawn the rest of the plan”.

They all groaned loudly and then went back to laughing. It wasn’t that any of the jokes were funny, (not sure I needed to say that!) But the tension that had built up during the planning had found its release and they all felt better after having a really good laugh.

As everyone began recovering their composure Jack said “Have we finished with the corny frog jokes because it was driving me a tad up the pole!”

“Oooh, that was the worst of all” groaned Joe.