only the disappearing skull was visible above water the boys knew could only be a hand's-breadth deep.
"Come on!" urged Nathan. "Soldiers of Death don't know fear.”
Ian pushed him aside and ran in. He felt the ground fall away beneath him as chill wetness massed about his legs and chest in a rush. Then his head was enclosed fully by the cold dark and he was conscious of the ground leaving his feet. His eyes remained closed for a second or so before he surfaced. The boy fought to control his panic, for he was not a strong swimmer, and began a dogpaddle.
Lifting his head, he saw that the morning sky had vanished. In its place was a ceiling of clouds, yellowish-white as before a summer storm. His mouth was stung with salt; his feet touched a hard surface. A shore of cubed rock was before him. As he reached for it, Ian heard a spluttering cough behind him. Jeremy and Nathan appeared.
"We were stupid, jumping in like that," said Nathan.
"You didn't jump, Nathan," scoffed Jeremy. "You tip-toed in like a little girl.”
Nathan was undeterred.
"I mean we should have got all our supplies.”
Jeremy started to speak but Ian cut him off.
"Soldiers get kit and weapons, they don't have to bring their own. That makes sense.”
Jeremy clambered ashore alongside his friend.
"I want a scythe that shoots homing missiles!" he yelled.
They stood upon a thin isthmus that rose just above the waterline. Grey chunks of crushed stone made up the promontory, which stretched before them to a nearby cove. Thin white trees were spaced along its spine. Death was nowhere in sight.
As the boys picked their way along the rocks, they saw the water on either side was crystalline. Nathan nudged Ian and pointed. The wreck of a great ship lay there, its antenna masts probing for the surface. Eddies of kelp swept over the hull. In its shadow flew clouds of tiny fish. Then the peninsula became a broad swathe of beach.
The ship's prow was driven into the sands, its foredecks swamped with the wash of low waves. Only a raised portion of the bow itself projected forlornly above the sand. There was a narrow strip between the vessel and the surf, which encroached upon the metal in a hissing rush. Nathan lead the boys there. Standing with his back against the pitted steel, he pictured the unseen length of the ship, now rusting far out beneath his feet. Without warning, the surf soared up around his waist. He yelped in panic and scrabbled for a handhold upon the ship's corroded flanks, but found no purchase there. As in his dream, the wave sucked him back and down into a bubbling slurry of sand-thick water. From this vantage, he could see the blue wall about to rise resurgent.
"Come on, lads," said Jeremy. "Before the next one comes.”
Their knees plodding into wet sand, the boys crawled to their feet and ran before the wave could mature and thunder down upon them. They struggled to draw breath. Nathan had no doubt that the wave could have smashed them against the bow with ease.
"It's not like I had imagined the Underworld to be," he said. "I mean, it's got a beach and the sun is shining.”
"Yeah," said Ian. "I don't like it.”
Jeremy pointed out that the near side of the ship's prow bore a strong resemblance to a landing craft shattered by artillery fire. This lead to a long game of Storm the Beach, with the boys re-enacting the Normandy landings in faithful detail. Finally Ian eased the bolt forward on his German machine-gun.
"Ask him if he wants to play," shouted Jeremy.
Death was behind him. Ian did as Jeremy had asked, but the thing gave no response. The boy hefted the weapon from its tripod and unloaded half a belt into the skeleton's robes. Then the screams of his friends came in loud as they rushed his position. He leapt from the emplacement and grabbed a driftwood rifle. The battle was resolved when Jeremy called in an artillery strike upon the whole beach, describing the immolating fires in exact detail. With play over, the boys lay upon the cooling sand.
Gulls spun high overhead, the sea breeze bearing them against a sky now devoid of cloud. Nathan thought the sunset unremarkable, nothing like those he knew on their hill.
"I'm hungry," said Jeremy flatly. "Is there a mess hall here?”
"I didn't see one," said Nathan. He looked at Death, then his voice faltered with the impudence he felt hanging wetly from his next words:
"Can … can we have something to eat?”
Death turned and walked away. The wind gusted for a moment and his robe billowed around his shoulder blades.
"Come on," said Jeremy, and the boys trooped behind Death in single file.
Nathan looked at the sun just as it fell into the ocean. Above the water hung a diaphanous curtain of spray, through which he could watch the shimmering disc without pain to his eyes. Just after the last sliver of golden light dipped beneath the water, he saw a brilliant flash of green that spanned half the sky.
Then the sun was gone, leaving the whitecaps to churn beneath the awning of his beloved twilight. Nathan kept this vision secret, and never spoke of it to the others.
Beyond the beach was a low hillock. Death cast no light about him, yet the boys could see him clearly. The evening gloom was delineated from the blackness of his dress by nothing at all; it was simply that his being exerted too strong a claim to the dark. They followed him, watching for the hollow of his progress within the deepening night. Jeremy took point, his scowl not visible to Ian and Nathan.
If this is a mission, he thought, it sucks. We should be on a base or something, bayoneting dummies, or at least trying on uniforms.
He pictured a custom outfit of his own, with a stylized skull on the back and red flames down the arms. The missile-shooting scythe in a black leather holster on his back. They would roam the Earth doing Death's bidding. What this might be was of no consequence to Jeremy. Again, the trench rent by shrapnel and flame crowded his mind.
That's what Death does, he takes life away from people, thought Jeremy. And we will too.
The boy stopped walking, for his feet were now unmistakably tramping on metal. It gave slightly under his sneakers as he trod. Death had stopped a few feet ahead. Whether the figure was looking at him or staring ahead he could not tell.
"Is it another ship?" whispered Ian.
"Can't tell," Nathan replied. "Can we have some light, please?.”
Before Nathan had finished his words, a long bank of oval lights snapped on. Their pattern and shape was obvious after a second: a grounded jetliner, and they were standing on its wingtip. The boys instinctively stepped back, never having encountered an aircraft this from this vantage or at this proximity before.
"It's huge," whispered Jeremy. "A 747 at least.”
Death was striding to an open door in the fuselage, bending his head as he entered. Timidly, the boys followed. To their disappointment, no cobwebs barred their entry, nor did skeletons sit gape-mouthed in the dusty aisles. The plane's interior was factory-fresh, almost suggesting plastic covers had been whisked from the seats a second before their arrival. It smelt of newness, and every surface held a high buff polish. Behind the antiseptic tang was the aroma of food. Three packaged meals lay upon seat tables. The boys fell upon them without a word.
Halfway through his meal, Ian peered into the elastic pocket backing the seat before him. There was an emergency card in there which he eagerly fished out. Scanning it, his excitement quickly ebbed. There was no surreal quality to it, no winking skulls or emergency slides crewed by zombies. Jeremy was saying something about checking the cockpit for bodies, but Ian felt tired. Not long after they had finished eating, the lights dimmed and their world was dominated by the hum of a generator within the bowels of the fuselage.
When Nathan woke, the sun was streaming through every window on his side of the plane. A food trolley was in the aisle, and he could see steam fogging the clear plastic cover of three airline breakfasts. He took the meal container and went straight for the door. The jet could not have possibly arrived at it
s current position by a crash. Below the wing's silvery sweep, which lay almost flush with the yellow grass, was embedded the humps of four huge engine intakes.
There was no rust nor stain upon the aircraft's body, save the tracks of their own feet. His meal finished, Nathan dropped the distance of his own height to the ground, executing a flawless Combat Roll upon landing. The trio had practiced Combat Rolls the previous summer, leaping off tree branches every day for a week. Despite his increased bulk, Nathan had proved the most adept at this. Jeremy had felt more aggrieved than usual at Nathan's victory, for he had introduced the paratrooper paradigm to their group. In Jeremy's mind, the boys had been wasting their time in the juvenile notion of The Army as a homogenous entity. But the paratrooper was an elite, who jumped under fire, casting his body between hammer and anvil. So a jump school was instituted, along with screenings of D-Day movies to bolster their training.
Jeremy employed the pause button liberally when the Sergeant issued his monologue.
"Confusion and disorder reign on the battlefield," he would repeat to the TV screen, as if intoning revelation. When the movie finished, his pupils were wide and face reddened. Jeremy had enjoined them to redouble their efforts as they tumbled through the undergrowth. Those days, suffused with heat and war-play, passed quickly.
A minor competition had arisen between Nathan and Jeremy for the highest jump necessitating a Combat Roll. It was decided definitively one