Chapter Eighteen
Gavin
Two days had passed since I had crashed on the second island and I was starting to greatly regret leaving the raft behind and starting on my quest across the rocks. This is not what I was supposed to be doing with my life. I didn’t spend all of those years in the military, beating myself into the ground to accomplish the Special Forces standings and learn about what I was supposed to do if I ended up in this type of circumstance only to end up here because I had fallen into this career path. If I hadn’t been discharged…
I forced my mind out of that train of thought and focused instead on the rocks ahead of me.
The endless fucking rocks that never fucking ended because apparently the whole fucking shore was made of fucking rocks.
Fortunately, I had managed to find a few narrow trickles of water that cracked through the rocks, but the meager food that I had been able to scrounge hadn’t been enough to make me feel not like shit and the sun beating down on me wasn’t helping circumstances. I sat in the shadow of a large boulder and took the shirt that I had dipped into the water of the last creek out of the waistband of my pants to press it to the back of my neck. It cooled me enough that I didn’t feel like I was going to die right then and I closed my eyes, resting my head against the boulder. Just as it always did when I had too much time in the quiet to myself, my mind wandered back to my military training and to the excruciating training exercises that we had gone through, then to the night that it all changed and the morning I stood in front of my commander, facing the discharge that had been my greatest nightmare.
I opened my eyes, letting the glint of the sunlight bouncing off of the minerals in the rocks around me to dissolve the image in my mind. There wasn’t anything more for me to do but keep going, so I peeled myself up off of the rocks and continued on. I figured at some point I would either loop back around to the beach or die, and either way I would have finished something.
I combed my hair back off of my forehead and used my hand to block the sun out of my eyes so I could look around. Like I did what felt like a thousand times a day, I scanned the horizon for ships, didn’t see any, looked up to the sky to look for planes, didn’t see any, and looked down at the jungle for predators who might want to have me for a snack. I didn’t see any of those, either, and I kept walking. It could have been minutes or it could have been hours, the whole time thing had become pretty arbitrary since my entire life had become trying to survive on the second island that I had ended up on in the course of a week. That was a personal life accomplishment that I wasn’t really thrilled that I had managed. The next time I looked up, however, I noticed something different ahead of me.
It was such a shock after seeing essentially the same thing over and over again for two days that I stopped in place and just stared ahead of me. I closed my eyes tightly, wondering if it was possible to see a mirage on an island like this. I knew that a desert island wasn’t exactly the same thing as a desert, but maybe there were enough similarities that when a person got tired and overheated enough they could have the fun of some hallucinations to usher them on into the death a little more gently. Of course, two days of scarce eating wasn’t really enough for me to be at that point, but that explanation seemed far more viable than the other possibility. I squeezed my eyelids down until I saw lights bursting against the backs of them and then opened my eyes to check what I thought that I had seen.
Yep. There it was.
You have got to be kidding me.
****
Virgil
“What do you mean she’s missing?”
I gripped the windowsill so hard that I felt like my knuckles were going to break. I kept my eyes trained through the panes at the darkness ahead of me, knowing that if I turned around I was going to strangle the men who were standing behind me. There were chairs in my office, but I hadn’t invited them to sit and they wouldn’t dare do something that I hadn’t offered them. They would stand just as they were, hovering close to the door, on into Armageddon if I required it of them, and at that moment I felt like that was an entirely possible situation.
“I’m sorry, sir,” one of the men said.
“I don’t want to hear that you’re sorry,” I growled. “I want to know what happened.”
“We tried to get her.”
At that point, I whipped around to face them, not really caring if I did end up throttling either one of them.
“What do you mean you tried?” I demanded. “You’ve tried a dozen times. I can understand some of those failures. Getting her out of the mall after the fuss that she put up would have brought far too much attention. But this? This is absurd. You were on a cruise ship. Floating around in the middle of the ocean. She literally couldn’t get anywhere.”
“She jumped off.”
The man I only knew as Blue and didn’t care to know any more about said the words as if he thought it was his only chance to say them. I blinked a few times as what he said sank in.
“She what?” I asked, my voice lower now.
“She jumped off of the cruise ship. We chased her and the man that she was running with up onto one of the decks. I thought that we were going to be able to get her, but they jumped.”
“They jumped?” I repeated.
I knew that I was aggravating him, but I didn’t care. I bought and sold him. He would stand there and say what I wanted to to him and he would take it. He really had no choice.
“The two of them jumped,” he said. “They jumped down into the water and swam to another boat.”
“What boat?” I asked.
“There was a smaller boat,” the other man, the one I referred to as Green, told me, taking his turn in trying to explain their epic failure. “It was a few yards away from the cruise ship and they got onboard.”
That didn’t make any sense. Other vessels weren’t allowed to get near commercial cruise ships. It was illegal and could cause serious problems for whoever had allowed their boat to wander too close to the path of the liner.
“What did it look like?” I asked.
“Just a small boat,” Green said. “Large enough for a cabin, but not as big as commercial boats.”
“So not a tour boat or a fishing vessel?”
“No.”
I tried to process what they were telling me had happened. It sounded absolutely preposterous. Yet, the call that I had gotten from the cruise security team had mentioned that there had been an accident and I needed to meet the ship at the next port. Could the men be telling me the truth? Could Eleanor have actually evaded them yet again by throwing herself down into the ocean? I knew her well enough to know that she didn’t like the water and only went on cruises because she knew that the decks, particularly the luxury decks where she always reserved her cabins, were well above the surface of the water. They had mentioned that a man was running with her. Who could that be, and why did he jump with her?
“You have to find her,” I said. “I don’t care what you have to do. You find out what happened to that boat and where she is now. I’m supposed to meet the cruise ship in two days and when I do, I want to make sure that she really is missing, if you understand what I mean. We don’t need her talking to the authorities finding out what possessed her to throw herself off of a perfectly good cruise ship.”
Both men nodded solemnly and I dismissed them, sinking down into my desk chair and clawing my hands through my hair. How could this have gone so wrong? I had no choice but to find her. With any luck, she never made it out of that boat, but if she did, I needed to make sure that she never had the opportunity to tell her story.
****
Gavin
“Please let someone live there. Please let someone live there. Please let someone live there. Please let someone live there.”
I still hadn’t encountered anyone to listen to me, but I had been talking to the jungle for two days now and it had been a pretty good listener so I figured I would just keep going. I had climbed down off of the rocks and was now moving as fast as I could through the trees in the direction of the shack that I had seen from the ridge. I couldn’t believe it when I had seen it and now that I was down on the ground it was concealed by the trees, making me worry that I really had imagined it, or that I was going in the wrong direction and wouldn’t actually be able to get to it.
A vine hanging from a tree tried to grab me and I swatted at it, quickly realizing when it moved out of the way that it wasn’t a vine but a massive snake dangling down in hopes of scooping a snack from the jungle floor.
“Oh, shit.” I said, ducking out of the way and starting at a faster clip through the trees. “Please let somebody live there. Please let somebody live there.”
I was nearly to a clearing ahead of me when a figure jumped out in front of me. I almost swung at it before I realized that it was a man so wrinkled it was entirely possible that the jungle sun had turned him into a raisin.
Almost not alive, but I’ll take it.
“Are you alright, son?” the man asked as I leaned over and rested my hands on my knees to draw in a few calming breaths.
I shook my head. I had actually intended on nodding, but apparently my mind had decided to mutiny and just go ahead with whatever it thought.
“Lost,” I managed to say.
“Well, I would say so,” he said. “I didn’t think that we had any neighbors around these parts.”
“We?” I asked.
“Of course. Me and the Mrs. Come on. I’ll introduce you. You look like you could use a cup of tea.”
Tea?
I straightened up and followed the crinkly man through the trees toward the clearing ahead. When we stepped out from the cover of the trees I immediately knew that I had seen what I thought that I had. The shack looked much larger when I was standing a few yards from it than it had from the vantage point of the rocky ledge and I noticed signs that the man and his wife had been there for some time scattered across the clearing around it. There were baskets woven from leaves that were far more complex than the ones we had managed on the other island, stacks of cut stalks, and piles of fruit. A firepit to one side had a spit over it that held two large fish and a chunk of something that I could only assume was meat of some kind.
We were a few steps away from the shack when a tiny woman who looked even older than the man came out holding another basket filled with what looked like loaves of bread.
Here I was thinking I was a badass survivalist getting through the few days on the two islands and these two ancient people are just going about their lives, making baskets and baking bread and shit.
“Well, hello,” the woman said with a cheery smile. “Who do we have here?”
The old man looked at me, his face scrunched up as he searched his brain for the name that I hadn’t given him.
“I’m Gavin,” I said, walking toward her with my hand extended.
“Hello, Gavin,” she said, shaking my hand with the gusto of a woman who was no stranger to hard work, but the softness in her eyes of a grandmother that should be baking apple pie. “I’m Sophie, and this old coot who was so rude to not introduce himself is Edwin.”
“It’s nice to meet both of you.” I didn’t think that I had ever said anything more sincere.
“Can I get you some tea?”
Again, with the tea.
“That would be nice. Thank you.”
I followed her around the side of the house toward another firepit. A pot was settled in the glowing embers and she reached for the leaf-wrapped handle. She poured boiling water into a worn cup and tucked a linen-wrapped teabag into it before handing it to me.
“Here you go, sweetie. Drink this. It will make you feel much better.”
The smell coming from the cup was strongly floral and I could only imagine that this was not tea that she had picked up at the grocery store on the way out on her tropical vacation.
“Thank you,” I said.
“So, what brings you to our neck of the jungle?” Edwin asked, laughing at his own joke.
I rapidly went through the story in my head, trying to figure out how I could trim it and present it so that it wasn’t as offensive as it would be if I told them the truth.
“I was on my boat and got caught in a storm. I crashed on an island a little ways from here and then I used a safety raft to get here. Did you get stranded here, too?”
The two stared at me for a few seconds before shaking their heads slowly.
“Nope,” Edwin said. “No, can’t say we did. We’ve been homesteading this place for a little bit now. It was kind of a dream of ours as young folks.”
“How long have you been here?” I asked.
“Oh. Well…” Edwin sighed and looked into the distance as if trying to calculate. Apparently, time had gotten out of his grasp, too. “Seems to me like it’s been about…. oh…. forty years.”
Holy shit.
I tried to withhold my grimace.
“I guess you don’t have a boat?” I asked.
“No. That’s one thing we don’t have,” Sophie said. “We just never saw need of it.”
My head dropped and I rubbed my fingers into my forehead.
“How am I going to get out of here?” I asked, not really intended on saying it loud enough for them to hear me.
As nice as they seemed, I really didn’t relish the thought of becoming their tribal neighbor.
“Why don’t you just use the phone?”
My eyes snapped up to look over my hand at Edwin.
“The phone?” I asked.
Was this a coconut shells and vines situation?
“Sure,” Sophie said. “You go right ahead.” She gestured toward the shack. “Oh, wait. I’m going to have to come with you.”
I let her go in front of me and I fell into step behind her, letting her guide me to the front door of the house. As soon as I stepped inside I knew that I was not dealing with people quite as crazy as I thought. In front of me I saw a long table set up with various pieces of equipment, including a satellite telephone.
“Now, you’re going to have to give me just a minute to get the juices going. When it’s ready, keep in mind that it’s not going to sound super clear.”
“Get the juices going?” I asked.
“Here you go, Sugar Dumpling,” Edwin said.
I looked up and saw the elderly man dragging what looked like and old bicycle out of a room to the back of the house. He brought it up to the side of the table and attached a cable on it to a generator sitting on the floor.
“Thank you, Sweetie Lump,” Sophie said, walking toward the bicycle.
What the hell is going on here, Coconut Pants?
Edwin took Sophie’s hand carefully and helped her up onto the bike. She grasped the handlebars and positioned her feet on the pedals. Her pedaling was slow and labored at first, and I had my doubts that she had the strength to really get going, but then she seemed to get into a rhythm.
“Um,” I started, “what’s happening?”
“I haven’t fueled up the generator in a bit,” Sophie said as though that completely explained everything.
“Are you alright?” I asked. “Do you want me to do that for you?”
Sophie waved me away and made a few little sounds that reminded me of a chicken.
“Don’t be silly. This is what keeps me young. Gets the joints going.”
Perfect.
I had downed the entire cup of tea by the time that she was finished on the bike and I was questioning what she had put in it. I could have sworn I was feeling a bit of a buzz. Edwin picked up the receiver on the phone and held it out toward me, then pulled it back to hold it against his chest.
“Is it long distance?” he asked.
He stared at me for a few awkward, stony-faced seconds and then dissolved into a cascade of tobacco-laced giggles.
“Oh, you,” Sophie said, whacking her husband playfully in the center of the chest.
Edwin handed me the phone and gathered Sophie into his arms for a decidedly sloppy kiss. I couldn’t decide if that was adorable or sickening, so I turned away from them and dialed the number, drawing in a breath as I prepared to explain to my client what was happening.