The small boat putters along through quiet turquoise waters. An old woman carries a toddler in a sling, one arm wrapped protectively around him, her other hand maneuvering the boat's motor. This is it; her empire is in ruins, her reputation unsalvageable. This is all she has left, now—her grandson and this tiny, uncharted island.
But, she thinks, that just might be enough. She's getting on in years; why should she need anything more than that?
The island is in sight, and Jade English's lips quirk into a frown. There's an odd noise coming from somewhere, a sound that wasn't audible until now. A steady monotonous ticking, almost like...
Her eyes go wide and she dives from the boat, pressing Jake's face into her chest to keep him from inhaling. Not a jiffy later an explosion rocks the air and churns the water. She turns back to look at the remnants of her vessel, now nothing more than so much flotsam.
Jade sighs. She back-strokes the rest of the way to the island, Jake still resting peacefully at her bosom. She has to keep going.
Jade wasn't expecting to find much on this island. Just the old, abandoned summer home she built and sporadically inhabited in her younger days, and the odd ruins with the frog statue on top which she's quite looking forward to more thoroughly exploring now that she has the time.
But she finds more than she bargained for as she drags her soaked self and her still-sleeping grandson inland from the ocean. (For fuck's sake, she wonders, how can he sleep so well at a time like this? The kid's rugged, she'll give him that.) She's barely made it a hundred yards before she hears an ominous rustling of branches nearby. She stops, listens, looks, and that's when the giant fucking spider comes lunging at her.
She'd unthinkingly left her rifle behind on that exploding boat, so she's completely unarmed. Briefly, she considers swinging Jake by the ankles, but then a more practical solution occurs to her and she rips a skinny, sharp-looking branch from a nearby tree. They're horrendously mismatched, but Jade isn't about to go down without a fight. Not when she has Jake to protect.
The spider is humongous and pure white, so she's half expecting its internals to be either white or translucent. She's taken by surprise when she stabs the branch through one of its eyes and cobalt blue comes pouring out. Biologically speaking that doesn't make a lot of sense, but Jade supposes biology stopped being a thing that mattered when she was attacked by a creature which, by all rights, should have collapsed under its own weight. She stabs again and again, until it falls down and twitches and goes still.
Jade and Jake are both coated with its blood, and still Jake doesn't stir. Smiling wryly, Jade thinks she prefers him quiet like this. She continues her trek toward the house. She has to keep going.
It doesn't take long to adjust to life on Hellmurder Island, as Jade has taken to calling it. Long ago, she'd considered calling it English Island, but times have changed. She's not sure where these frightening fauna have come from. They're probably her fault, but no matter the cause of the infestation, this is home now, so Jade deals.
Jake deals even better, probably since he hasn't really known much else. He grows into a strapping young lad, taking quite well to the 2xpistolkind abstrata Jade bestows upon him. But in the end he is still only a child, no higher than Jade's kneecap, and he tuckers out quite easily.
"I'm tired, Grandma," he complains after his third kill in a row. This one's a crab monster, as pure white as the other beasts on this island but with blood nearly the same shade as a human's.
With a wide smile, Jade leans down to ruffle his hair. "It's not even dusk yet, Jake. What do you say we go for one more kill?"
"I'm tired," he repeats with a pout. "I'm exhausted. I'm... I'm so pooped you could flush me!"
Jade barks out a surprised laugh. "All right, all right. You deserve a break after how well you've done today." She scoops him up and captchalogues his guns—no way is she going to let a boy his age dual-wield flintlock pistols outside the strictly-set parameters of their training montages—and they return home to fry up some crab. Tomorrow, they can keep going.
Jake grows. He's a fairly awkward child, but he takes to his pistols like any other boy would to riding a bike.
As he grows, Jade seems to shrink. She hunches over more, her body weaker by the year. Almost imperceptibly, their outings shift; where once Jake would be complaining of fatigue and begging to head back inside, Jade now is the one who needs to rest early. Jake frowns at her with his big green puppy-dog eyes, and she indulges him until she can no longer keep going.
The trail of blood leads him to her. He doesn't know which monster would have left those three perfectly-spaced puncture wounds in her, and oddly that's the thing that worries him most at first. Is there another kind of beastie on this island that they were unaware of? Is that how she was taken unawares? Because she had to have been ambushed. In a fair, head-to-head fight, nobody could defeat his grandma.
Really, he just doesn't want to think about the fact that he's staring down at her lifeless body. That she'll never stand back up. He's seen death every day on this island, but it never occurred to him that it could just as easily strike Jade.
She was supposed to be invincible.
Empty green eyes stare up at him, and he quivers.
He decides to burn the body. There's nothing else he can do with it in a place like this. He'll preserve her ashes like he saw not long ago in a particularly tear-jerking film, and he'll store them in those ruins that she loved so much.
He doesn't let himself get beaten down by this. He keeps going.