Chapter Six
Gavin
I climbed to the top of the rocky ridge, muttering as I went as if that would somehow convince the jagged edges to smooth out, or at least for the steep incline to have the decency to lessen for me. When I finally reached the top, I pushed aside the palm fronds that crossed my path, and discovered that I most certainly had not reached the top and that the trees had been concealing an even more treacherous path ahead of me. At the back of my mind I had been expecting to see a hotel in the distance, or at least the rope fences and small wooden signs that companies used to gently guide tourist exploration of the islands so that they could feel as though they were being wild and adventurous but didn’t become insurance liabilities. Instead I saw only more thick, untouched jungle.
Dammit all to hell. This is not what I signed up for.
I had been exploring the island since moments after we had first arrived, and so far, I had found no signs of human life. Hunter’s assumption that this island was one of the trail of little day stops on the cruise line tours had given me some hope. I figured he must be right. That storm couldn’t have jostled us so far away from the cruise ship that we would end up on an island that was totally uninhabited. There had to be at least a juice bar or tiki torch somewhere. But, no. Nothing. I had stalked my way through the jungle and along the rocks for what felt like hours and I hadn’t found anything but just more jungle and rocks.
Concerned that I would get myself lost if I tried to venture any further without something to mark my way, I turned around and started back toward the beach. I had the strange compulsion to thank the palm fronds as I walked away from them, thinking it was almost as if they had tried to protect me by shielding the view of how much further the ridge rose ahead.
Holy shit, I’m losing my mind already.
I was nearly back to the sand when I noticed that Hunter was back on the deck of the boat, moving toward the cabin. I ran toward it, shouting Hunter's name as I went.
"What are you doing?" I demanded.
Who did this man think he was climbing onto my boat uninvited not once, but twice? He was the reason we were stuck on this --- I can’t believe these words are even coming out of my mouth --- desert island, and now he was poking around on my boat trying to find…. what the hell did he think that he was going to find? Did he somehow know who I was and what I had been doing floating around in the dark water near the cruise ship?
Hunter stepped back away from the cabin door and glared down at me as if I had no right to be asking him about his actions. The fire in the look surprised me. My first impression of him had been that he was nothing but a nerdy little guy whose greatest concern was probably color coordinating his pens with his belt. Between the struggle with the storm and the way that he was looking at me now, though, I was wondering if there was actually more to him than just that.
"If you haven't noticed,” he snapped at me, “there is no one else on this island. Not a tourist. Not a researcher. No one. We have quite literally gotten ourselves stranded on a deserted island, and with a trashed boat and no communication system, we are essentially screwed for the foreseeable future."
"What does that have to do with you rummaging through my boat?" I asked as I crossed the water again and was climbing onto the deck to face Hunter.
"I was hoping to find some supplies that we could salvage to help us get through however long we are going to be here."
I forced my mind to calm and my heart to stop racing.
He didn’t know.
My papers were hidden far enough in the recesses of the cabin that no one would be able to find them without my help, and if Hunter knew about them, he would have already confronted me. All he was trying to do was find the things that we would need to help us through this situation. I gave a short nod.
"I'm sorry. You're right. Go ahead."
Hunter ducked into the cabin and reappeared a moment later with a large black trunk on his shoulder.
"What's in here?" Hunter asked.
"Clothes," I told him.
"That's it?" Hunter asked.
He sounded suspicious, but not as though he actually knew what was hiding in the cabin. It was more likely that he could feel the heft of the bag and didn’t believe that it was twenty pounds of underwear and socks.
"A couple of knives. Some cash."
"Well, I don't think that we are going to be hailing a cab out of here anytime soon, so the cash is probably useless. The knives could be helpful, though."
Hunter hoisted the trunk off of his shoulder and handed it over to me. I took it and carried it over to the side of the boat so I could toss it down into the water. The boat had created enough of a temporary tide pool near the sandbar that I wasn't concerned that the trunk would float away, and I knew that the water wasn’t going to seep through. I returned to the cabin and we spent the next several minutes tossing the cases and trunks that we could salvage down into the water. When we were finished, we both jumped down and started dragging the cargo up onto the sand. I was getting strangely accustomed to flinging myself off of the boat and I figured that could be just one more skill I would be able to add to the “special talents” section of my resume if I survived getting off this damn island.
The first crate that we opened was from the galley, and I spread the supplies out on the sand to evaluate them. Unfortunately, the crate that these had been stored in wasn’t watertight and many of the containers weren’t designed with an afternoon swim in mind, either. The food inside had been ruined, but we had basic cooking tools. Suddenly I was reminded of the fact that I hadn't eaten anything since well before I pulled up beside the cruise ship the night before and my stomach rumbled angrily.
"We should try to find some food," I said as Hunter came up beside me and pulled the first trunk up to open it. "It might take a while to prepare anything worth eating." I pulled my kit out of the crate and spread it out, pulling out my flint and feeling a shimmer of hope as I realized it was still intact. "I can get the fire started if you and Eleanor can go see what you can find in the jungle. I saw some fruit trees back there."
I could see Hunter bristle slightly, but then he nodded and stalked off toward where Eleanor stood in the sand, staring out over the water. She turned to him as Hunter approached and I saw them start off toward the trees together. I contemplated them as I watched them, wondering what had led up to them running along the deck of the boat together and tossing themselves down into the water. They didn’t seem like the type of people who would have any real reason to know each other, yet there was a somewhat tenuous connection between them that told me that they hadn’t just met when they were on the ship.
Could he be one of her little boy toys?
That didn’t strike me as being likely. Hunter didn’t seem exactly like boy toy material. Even with the anger and aggression that he had shown, there was still an aura of awkward, nerdy shyness around him that made him seem like the opposite of what I would imagine an exorbitantly wealthy divorcee would look for in a younger man she wanted to string along purely for entertainment purposes. And now that I thought about it, I hadn’t ever heard mention of her having any such relationships. They might be common among women of her age and means, and Eleanor was definitely beautiful enough to have plenty of willing participants, but it seemed that she hadn’t gone that direction since her divorce.
Could they actually have a relationship going?
That seemed pretty unlikely as well. While Eleanor and Hunter seemed to know each other on some level, there wasn’t enough between them to suggest that they had that level of connection. I thought that I had seen a spark of attraction between them, and there was definitely concern in Eleanor’s eyes when she thought that the younger man had been killed in the storm, but I wouldn’t jump so far as to say that she looked like she was in love with him. Besides, I was fairly certain that if there was such a relationship happening, I would have been told about it when I got my instructions for this job. Having a man around always made things like this more difficult, and I would think that I would have been told so that I could prepare my approach differently.
They had disappeared into the jungle and I turned back to the flint in my hand. It wasn’t going to just create a fire spontaneously. I got up and started gathering rocks from the edge of the beach. I formed a circle in the sand and filled it with dried palm fronds and wood. It took only one try for me to use the flint to spark the pit into a blazing fire.
Good to know that some of my skills are still intact.
The thought brought uncomfortable feelings into the back of my mind. It had been awhile since I had done a job. After the last one had gone the way that it did, I had taken some time off, sinking back into anonymity for a bit so that I could shake off of the heat and the guilt. Anonymity had its perks, but it also had its drawbacks, a very distinct one of which was a distinct lack of income coming in, which is what had brought me to this boat and the water just off the cruise ship. There was money to be had, but I had to finish the job first, and that was going to be decidedly more difficult from an island in the middle of nowhere with a witness who now had the fairly intimate knowledge of me that came with staring a watery death in the face.
This left me in an uncomfortable position. I needed to finish what I came here to do in order to get paid and be able to keep on surviving for the next few months, which I had become rather fond of doing, but I had also just helped these two get through the storm and was now stuck on an island with them. They had both seen my face and I had been stupid enough in the moments of fearing for my life to actually tell them my real name. I was definitely a bit rusty, but that wasn’t going to excuse me. I didn’t know what I was supposed to do, but I was going to need to make a decision quickly, because this situation was only going to get more complicated the longer that we were here, and from the looks of the empty horizon, beached and completely destroyed boat, and untouched sand, that just might prove to be far longer than I would have liked to think about.