War of the Island

They came for his blood. They didn't expect the island to want it back.

Jack Kamping brought his wife to a lake that isn't on any map. On the second night a helicopter took out the Wi-Fi and left them there.

Sixty men land at dawn. They've been told Jack is the only target, and that whatever else lives in the water stays there until dark.

But the island is awake, and so is the lake, and both have been waiting for him since he was twenty-one. What comes out of the canopy has wings, and it takes memories when it bites. What lives under the water is a hundred feet long and moves whole shorelines when it turns. Neither will tell him why they rise when he moves.

And something is happening to Jack that nobody planned. Every hour on that island he is a little less than he was-the strength, the endurance, the thing in his blood the whole world has been killing for. Whatever is down there put it in him. Now it is taking it back, and it isn't asking.

Sixty men have three hours of daylight.

The island has ninety-five years.

Jerry Leake is an Associate Professor of Percussion at Berklee College of Music and the New England Conservatory. He leads the world-rock-fusion octet Cubist that performs compositions from his acclaimed 2010 debut CD. Jerry recently released his third Cubist CD, Prominence, where African songs and melodies are woven into contemporary designs. He is a founding member of the world-music ensemble Natraj and performs with Club d'Elf and the Agbekor Society. Jerry has written eight widely used texts on North and South Indian, West African, Latin American percussion, and rhythm theory. He is former president of the Massachusetts PAS Chapter, and was a presenter of his "Harmonic Time" method at a 2011 TEDx Seminar in Cambridge, MA. He has also written over 30 articles for PAS magazine. Sand and Ceremony is his debut novel.