Author's note: I don't own Lord of the Flies.
The boat doesn't come, and neither is the forest on fire.
Ralph lay flat on his back in the sand, breathing heavily. His race was almost completely run. He knew this in his bones. He could hear them coming out of the forest now, cackling in manic glee. The savages. It was Ralph's fighting spirit that let him last this long, and it was forcing him to last at least a little longer. He scrabbled down the beach into the salty ocean. He plashed out through the surf until he was up to his knees, then waded out further, and started doing the backstroke out to sea. The savages were standing at the water's edge, watching. He suddenly realised why they weren't coming after him; the paint all over them was a mark of respect among their tribe, and they didn't want it to wash off.
"Where are you going to go, Ralph?" Jack called from the water's edge. He had gained an arrogant swagger. His spear was deliberately held carelessly. "You can't swim around faster than we can run around. Wherever you decide to try and land, we'll be waiting for you."
"I don't know what I'm doing." he mused. "You know what, I think I might've swum here to drown myself."
Jack laughed. "Nobody can drown themself. It's been proven. You always force yourself to keep on going as soon as you decide to stop swimming."
"Well, let's try it out, anyway." Ralph called back, who had stopped swimming and started to tread water.
Jack sat down on the sand. "I can wait." he called pleasantly. The others followed suit in sitting down.
Ralph tread water for twenty minutes, his captors unmoving. His muscles were sore and exhausted, and he was starting to shiver, even though it was a hot day. He thought, "They're not going to get the satisfaction of killing me. I'll drown right now." And he stopped treading water. Not having to make continual effort flailing his limbs was a great blessing to his overworked muscles. The water felt cool and clear as it rose up above his face, eyes shut. Ah, bliss. He felt a pang in his chest from lack of air. He felt another, stronger one. He powerfully swam back up, broke through the surface and breathed faster than he ever had before, repaying the oxygen debt. The air was ringing with the savages' laughter. "Five seconds underwater. Not exactly a world record." Jack guffawed. The others laughed sycophantically.
"That was a trial run." Ralph insisted stubbornly. "But this is the real thing. I really am going to drown myself this time, because you lot are all a load of killcrazy bastards too gutless to admit to yourselves that you miss how things used to be, so to keep your mind off your grieving mums you kill each other. Goodbye, cruel world. A plague on all your houses." Ralph turned his head to the side and started hyperventilating, building up the oxygen level in his blood. He looked back quickly. Jack seemed impassive, even smug, and he hadn't moved once in the last twenty minutes. The others looked a little unsettled at his remarks. Ralph breathed in deeply, bent over so his head was underwater, and swam straight downwards. He swam for quite a long way downwards, then turned and swam off to the side once he was sure that the others couldn't see him.
He opened his eyes. He ignored the fiery stinging the saltwater brought them as he hazily looked around at the murky depths. He swam off, skirting along the side of the beach, careful to not breathe out even the tiniest of air bubbles, for it would give away his escape. His lungs were impatiently demanding that he breathe, even if he breathed only water. Up above he saw a dead, rotting tree, floating on the sea after it fell in because the soil around it eroded away, but not floating away because some of its roots remained stuck into the island, acting as a tether. Ralph swum up to this urgently, his lungs screaming for air. But he forced himself to slow down once he was within armslength of air, so that he wouldn't make a sound when surfacing. Silently he passed through the barrier right underneath one of the wide tree leaves and sucked in air quietly. He breathed as much as he dared, then submerged again. He stayed under for as long as he could bear, then surfaced, breathed, and went under for a third time. He did this twice more until he was absolutely certain that the savages had all gone. Then, shivering, exhausted and stretched to the absolute limit, he crawled up onto the sand and collapsed, unable to move.
As Ralph sprawled there, letting his muscles repair themselves, letting his lungs and heart return to their normal rhythm and letting the sun warm him, something had changed. His eyes were no longer wistful and sad, they were hard and angry. His eyes were a window to his mind, and his mind was broiling.
Midnight. The tribesmen had laid down to sleep in a little clearing where they had killed and eaten a pig, before making bedding by tearing broad leaves off trees and assembling them into a personalised clump. Of course, Jack had forced a few of the littluns to make his bed, and his bed was twice as comfortable as anyone else's because it was made with four times as many leaves. They had assigned a littlun as a 'watchman for the Beast', and the littlun had agreed because he was ecstatic at finally being included. He sat on a tree branch, trying to stay alert despite the brainmelting boredom. He'd already been watching for four hours. The kid rubbed his face slowly, trying to scratch an itch underneath the warpaint without cracking the paint. His other hand held an extremely shoddy spear, which he had made by snapping a branch off a tree, without sharpening it any more than that.
Suddenly there was noise behind him. He whirled around, speartip raised. "Whoa," said the person with the spear pointed at him. It was only because the moon was strong and they were in a clearing that the watchmen recognised he was one of his fellow savages. "Just going out because I need a piss, that's all." He continued walking. The littlun returned to his original pose, heart still booming. For a second he'd thought it was the Beast. Of course, he could be the Beast, he might be its next host after it drowned its last one, Ralph. But he hadn't acted beast-like yet. Things were so confusing when you're a grown-up. It would be best to ask for Jack's judgement on the matter, in the morning.
The person who went out to water the plants respectfully went quite far away. The watchman heard him exclaim a strangled coughing noise. The watchman giggled because the cough sounded stupid. He waited patiently for the tribesman's return. Twenty seconds later his dark, spear-carrying figure marched through the trees again. "Hey, don't make so much noise when you're walking!" the littlun whispered. "Some people are trying to sleep! And you sounded so stupid earlier when you c-" His sentence was cut short when the figure rammed its bloodstained spear clean through the watchman's throat. Astonished, the littlun opened and closed his mouth, but with no sound. He half-heartedly tried to stab back with his spear, but the figure parried the thrust with his arm. The littlun fell limp. The figure grabbed the corpse and its spear to stop them making noise by hitting the ground, and gently lowered then down. He pulled his spear from the watchman's neck.
As he stood up again, the moonlight glittered off Ralph's hardened eyes. He was not the conch-holding civilised leader he once was. He had made a stone-tipped tough spear during the course of the afternoon and evening, far away from Jack Merridew and his braindead followers, and had visited the old campsite to cover himself in camouflaging ash; his warpaint wasn't ceremonial or a statement of toughness, it was purely practical and cunning. He'd already killed two people in the past few minutes, but only because they got in the way. He only wanted to kill one more person.
Noiselessly Ralph padded barefoot over the leaves. He had one of his eyes closed, preserving the night-vision, while the other roved over the sleeping figures. He came to the largest bed of them all, with Jack Merridew lying contentedly in it. He was smiling, eyes closed. Ralph stepped on top of Jack's weapon, put his other foot on Jack's chest, waking him up, and put his spear to Jack's eye. "Good night, Jack Merridew." he muttered coldly.
"It's the Beast!" Jack screamed hysterically. "Wake up, kill it!" The others jerked awake and scrabbled for their crude weapons.
"Anybody steps closer and Jack dies!" Ralph thundered. Everyone stopped moving, or at least slowed down. Roger was drawing his spear back slowly, and didn't think Ralph could see. He was wrong. "And no, Roger, it wouldn't be a good idea to throw your spear at me either." Ralph continued. "Look at how I'm standing and holding my spear. If I fall, Jack gets impaled through the face. That might even be what you want, me out of the picture and Jack's job as chieftain open. But even in that case, your treachery would instantly spark off a leadership struggle, while your spear is yards away, stuck inside me. No matter how you look at it, you don't want to try anything at all."
For several moments only Jack was moving, still howling, "Kill the beast, cut its throat, spill its blood!"
"Good." Ralph approved of the others' complacence. "Right, to business. Jack, you have one second to shut up or you die." Jack stopped yelling mid-sentence. "The rest of you, it's time you were let in on a secret. Yes, there is a beast. That's what I've realised. His name is Satan. Yes, he has been possessing some of us - but not the ones we killed, he possessed us. I mean, look at us!" Obediently the others looked around at each other, taking in each others' appearances. "Warpaint and spears? What the hell is all this? Back home, we were nice choir lads. But here we chant and dress up like primitives and kill each other. That is the work of the Beast. When the Beast is in you he makes you claim the Beast is in others, and he makes you kill them. That's why Piggy, the person least likely to have a beast inside him, died. The Beast is strongest in Jack. That's why my tribe failed, because this island is the Beast's island, and it gave much more power to the people it possessed than to me." Ralph plunged the spear downwards, killing Jack before he could even cry out. He pulled his spear out. Blood welled up inside his eye cavity and spilled out like tears. "Now, because I borrowed some of the power of the Beast, I have conquered the Beast. Jack is dead, so all that is left of the Beast is what is left inside of you. We can defeat him! Just say 'no' when he tells you to kill. Do it. Do it now! Do it now, and we'll have beaten the Beast!"
There was quiet for a moment. Then one of the littluns broke into sobs, threw down his weapon, and fled the clearing. Several others joined him. The older kids didn't cry, but looked ashamed and disgusted. They dropped or snapped their weapons, threw aside their primitive necklaces, and raced after the mob out of the clearing. Ralph wondered where they were all going. Then he realised. He grinned, cast aside his spear which had killed three people, and charged after the others down to the beach.
All the remaining kids were diving into the ocean, frantically washing off their warpaint and blubbering as they repented their sins against human decency. The scene was Shakespearean in its portrayal of purest sorrow. A lot of them were choking out words with their sobs, and all of them included the word 'Piggy'. Ralph took a running start and dived headlong into the ocean to wash off all his ashes. Upon surfacing, he flipped his wet hair back and looked back at the beach, doing the backstroke. He was forcibly reminded of how he did exactly this earlier that afternoon, but that time these same people now pleading for Piggy to come back to life had been staring at him malevolently through their masks of paint. He rolled over and swam back to shore in front crawl. He emerged from the ocean clean as a whistle, reborn, as did all the others.
Ralph held a home-made knife, a short length of smooth tree branch with a sharp bit of stone wedged into it. He was exceptionally proud of how the others had made this knife from scratch. First they took several dozen fist- sized tough rocks to the top of the cliff and threw them down to the bottom. After a few goes like this they often shattered on the jagged rocks at the bottom. Any sharp fragments were kept, forced onto the ends of sticks as very good, very tough blades. Then they invented this kind of knife handle, where the blade on it could be easily exchanged for another blade if it went blunt or broke. He took great care with this particular blade, because it was exceptionally sharp and would last a long time.
He brought the knife down into the body of the pig he'd been assigned to carve up. Through nothing but trial and error over the years he now knew exactly which parts were edible and inedible, perishable and preserving, good-tasting and bad-tasting. He divided everything into the aforementioned sections over the next half-an-hour. He threw the inedible parts into a pile, some of which would be used as bait in the traps, he salted up the perishable parts to eat in the winter (using salt they collected by drying out seawater), he put the bad-tasting parts into the bait pile, and finally he sorted the really good-tasting stuff for tonight's Full-Moon Feast. He loved these feasts, because they were the only time when one was allowed to eat anything other than fish and berries. The Elder's Council had wisely limited the amount of the livestock killed so they wouldn't become extinct.
Soon after the death of that crazy bastard Jack Merridew, Ralph's leadership skills had united the entire island under one harmonic banner (speaking figuratively). He denied the request of several that he rule as their Chieftain or King or Czar, and instead formed a Council of the Elders and a democratic system for the littluns. The Council of the Elders made all decisions with little consultation of the littluns' opinions, but Ralph also made it law that a two-thirds majority littluns' vote they could overrule a Council decision they deemed unfair. So all of the islands' jobs that needed doing, from food work to construction work to weapon-making to hunting & foraging to the undesirable jobs, were distributed fairly, first criterion natural talent, and second criterion a rota. Penal measures the Council installed never had to be enforced because everyone helped everyone else.
Everyone had given up any hope of a rescue mission coming by, of course. It had been more years than people could remember (it didn't help that nobody had thought to formally count the years, so nobody could remember for certain whether three, four, five or six winters had passed) but Ralph would hazard a guess that he was now fifteen or sixteen. Yet hope of leaving the island wasn't completely dead. By luck a littlun with keen eyesight one day saw a ship in the far distance. He sprinted back to the camp and screamed the news, causing instant uproar. Many of the Elders went up to the highest point on the whole island to have a better look. It was indeed a transport ship. An Elder's Meeting was immediately called on that very hilltop, where it was unanimously agreed that the ship wouldn't take notice of anything short of a nuclear explosion at this distance, so lighting a fire would be pointless. But the ship passed very regularly, once every season, so regularly that the day it came by could now be predicted with complete accuracy. It was decided that a wooden ship would one day be built and they would sail over to the ship's plotted course and be rescued by it. It would have to be a big ship, for more chance of being noticed, and it had to float not only all of the kids, but also several days worth of rations in case they inaccurately predicted the date the ship sailed. And building a great ship from scratch is no mean feat. For example, to chop down a fairly slim tree with stone blades usually took two people, a full day of work and twelve changes of blades each, let alone the scores of very strong trees that would have to be felled to build such a ship and the great amount of pine resin needed to waterproof it. So 'one day' was still a long way off. So everyone was still being conservative with natural resources.
Ralph still felt immensely proud of how he had conquered the Beast, even though he had to take three lives to do it. On the other hand, if he really had drowned himself near that beach instead of escaping, plotting revenge and exacting revenge, very possibly the only person left alive on the island by now would be Jack Merridew, because his insatiable bloodlust and bizarre talent of inciting fear in others would've made him pick off every member of his tribe, one by one, until only he and Roger were left, and then he'd stab Roger in the back. At the time Ralph had no good choices to choose from, but still he chose the right one, and he liked that fact.
Ralph also liked how he'd set up a prosperous, ordered society out of pure chaos. He liked his nice little life of serving everyone and himself, celebrating the Full Moon while waiting patiently until he could go home, and learning firsthand how humans had used their minds in conjunction with hard work to rise to such worldwide greatness from primitive squalor. He suspected (and he was right) that he was now wiser than most living people. He closed his eyes and imagined that scared little boy named Ralph who had landed on this island. He smiled benignly and told him, "Don't worry... everything will be okay."