Fractured Tide

by Leslie Lutz

  I ran my hand down the metal tube until it thickened and attached to the cart. The gun was at least seven feet long.

  I searched around the base of its two wheels, which came up to my chest and had sunk an inch deep into the sandy earth.

  “Why would anyone put this here?” Steph asked.

  “Maybe some weird anarchist or something?” I moved the dead fronds next to the wheels, looking for ammunition, careful not to blow us both up.

  “I thought all of those guys were in South Texas.”

  I thought about Graham’s strange delusion, his belief that it was 1943 . . .

  I kneeled and crawled underneath. Nothing but more fronds. I lifted a few and a glint of dark metal caught my eye. Long, thin, and sharp. I scooted out and handed it to Steph, who took it gingerly with two fingers, her expression pinched.

  “That’s a bayonet,” she said.

  “Yep.” I nodded toward it. “Ben’s going to want that.”

  She threw it beside the wheel of the howitzer. “I don’t think we should encourage him.”

  I picked it back up. “It’s a tool, which means it’s useful.”

  Steph stood with her arms crossed in front of her chest, staring at the gun. Then she chuckled.

  “What?”

  “Ben. He’s absolutely gonna love this.”

  I ran my fingers over the numbers near the base of the cannon. You’d love it too, if you were here.

  ENTRY 19

  WE GATHERED MORE BITS and pieces of weirdness on our search, scattered in the still borders of the palm forest. A canteen with a canvas strap. A metal fork. A length of rope. And down the beach, another howitzer just like the first. Again, no ammunition, tucked back in the foliage, hidden under a tarp, slowly decaying in the elements. We likely would have found more, if we hadn’t run out of water.

  When I kneeled by the second gun, investigating, I noticed a few vines had climbed up the wheels, twining their fingers in between the spokes. An image of the Andrews flashed in my mind, how the red scale grew on its skin. How nature takes everything back into itself, makes it beautiful again. I touched the gun’s cold metal. Is that what death would do to me? Transform me? What would I look like when nature took me back into herself?

  That’s when a weird prickling ran up my neck, down both arms, and stopped my breathing. The beach. Visible through the thick hashed trunks. White sand and blue water. It was supposed to be empty. And suddenly it wasn’t.

  I stood, my back to Steph, who was rooting around in the undergrowth for supplies just out of sight. I rubbed my face. Blinked a few times. My eyes were lying to me. They had to be.

  There on the beach, bathed in full sunlight, were three guys dragging a dinghy out of the surf.

  I dropped my bag and rushed into the glow. Rescue. Finally. I was so caught up in that swell of hope, my brain barely processed the rest of the details. That there were two more soldiers standing just a little farther down the beach, leaning against a large wooden crate. That they were all dressed the same, like Graham but cleaner. That two of them had canvas belts holding holstered guns. And then there was the shimmer. Like a mirage on a Florida highway, the details wavering just a hair.

  Once my feet touched the hot sand, the scent of gasoline from the boat engine hit me. One man turned to the other and spoke, but the crash of the surf swallowed their words. Another turned and looked directly at me. I could swear he was Graham’s twin. I had enough time to see the shock register in his face before all of them disappeared.

  I skidded to a halt, the prickle of heat over my skin replaced with salt spray. Both ends of the beach were empty. No dingy. No guys. But I would swear on your life that they were there, as much as I was there.

  The soft push of feet in the sand came from behind. “Sia, did you actually leave me alone in there? Real nice.”

  I didn’t answer, staring at the surf and rubbing my eyes. My bag shifted, and something heavy dropped to the bottom.

  “Found another canteen. This one has a better strap.” Steph stood beside me and fell quiet for a second. “Thank you so much, Steph. That’s a good find. Gee, you’re welcome, Sia.”

  I turned to look at her. “What?”

  Her annoyed expression shifted into concern. “Are you okay?”

  On our way back to camp, I didn’t tell Steph what I’d seen. When Ben’s form materialized in the distance, I wondered if he was really there, or if that was the real Felix at the water’s edge, throwing pebbles into the surf. I helped Ben unload the bag of supplies while Steph went into great detail about the howitzer, like she’d been the one to figure out what it was.

  Ben pulled out the bayonet. “What are we supposed to do with this? That thing’s barely going to feel it.”

  Steph patted him on the shoulder. “I don’t know. Open clams with it.”

  Ben put the bayonet down and turned to me to say something. Then he stopped and gave me an appraising look. “You okay?”

  I nodded, absently scratching at my forearms, which had been itching since we’d started back. I thought of those anatomy books you had in your office, the ones that had the different organ systems drawn on layers of plastic film, each one perfectly aligned to make a complete body. Some force had shifted one of my pages, I was sure of it. My insides felt wrong, out of whack.

  “I’m going out hunting again,” I said, my eyes on the waves.

  Everyone was hungry, so no one argued when I grabbed the snorkel gear and waded into the surf. Once my head ducked under the waves, the image of the five men on the beach dimmed and my body felt better. I came up and fed everyone. Again.

  I dried out under the shelter and listened to your voice in my head until the sun sank low in the sky, wondering what you would think of everything I’d seen over the last few days. Wondered if you’d be able to make sense of any of it.

  All those tiny pinpricks of light were out early tonight, before twilight had faded. That and some forks of lightning far out to sea, each a brilliant vein in the sky.

  As I watched the show, that camping trip we took when I was nine, when the thunderstorm washed out the road, played in my head over and over on a loop. I remember us huddling together beneath the overhang of that old barn you found. We couldn’t see the stars through the clouds, so you had me counting imaginary dolphins. One, two, three, you’d say. Watch them, Sia, leaping over the limbo stick. Four, five, six. That lightning’s just fireworks. Watch the dolphins.

  You smelled like fire smoke and the sort of sweat you get from being outdoors all day, doing good, honest work. Even now, I imagine that scent and I feel safe.

  One, two, three. I counted the stars slowly brightening above our island. Drew lines between them. I imagined those lines were pathways. I would walk them like tightropes to get back to you. Time was elastic here. Anything was possible.

  Ben didn’t seem to care that night was coming on, instead sketching in the journal, coming up with spiked traps made from felled palm trees. Steph, being the practical one, had told Ben she wasn’t going to help him one bit. Instead, she helped Felix with his SOS message, each letter as big as a two-story house. Graham lay a few feet away, tied up in the far recess of the sun shelter, stinking up the place.

  I started to get up to join Ben down by the water. Lie beside him and draw my own plan on a fresh page. I’d been forming a monster trap in my head, which included dropping an empty howitzer on it. At the very least it would make Ben laugh.

  “You’re not what I expected.”

  Graham’s voice made me jump. I turned to find him watching me. “What did you expect?”

  He shrugged, looked out to the ocean again with that long, farm-boy look, as if he were predicting the weather or planning the harvest. “You going to untie me?” he asked.

  Texas. It was more obvious now. The western half. The long drawl, a guy in no hurry to get the words out. Like they’d been baking inside him.

  “I could help,” he said. “Scout for food.”

  “Y
ou could hit me over the head with a rock and steal all our stuff.”

  A smile. The first one I’d seen from him in two days.

  “I won’t hurt you,” he said.

  I nodded west, toward the water and the buoy marking the wreck. “Tell me what happened out there. How you got here.”

  “Does it matter?”

  “It might help me figure out what’s going on. How we can get home.”

  He sighed and looked at the heavens. “Graham Fitch, serial number—”

  “Enough.”

  He smiled again. “Okay, okay. I’ll lay off. Just havin’ some fun.” His attention went down the beach, to where the surf made the sand dark. I wasn’t sure if he was checking out our boat, which he could raid for supplies, or if he was looking at the white buoy way out there, bobbing in the waves. Or planning to kill “the enemy” with a rock, Piggy-style.

  “All right,” he said, and rolled his shoulders like dust had collected in the joints.

  “All right what?” I asked.

  “All right, I’ll tell you.”

  He took a big breath, as if preparing for a speech.

  “I enlisted in the Navy at fourteen. Lied on my application and said I was seventeen.”

  “I didn’t mean for you to go that far back, Graham.”

  “Just wait, Baby Doll. Be patient.”

  He leaned back and put his tied hands behind his head. Like a teenager hanging out, watching the waves. And it was then I got the feeling he was used to all this. All his life, something had always been in his way, causing bruises. So a day or twelve or thirty on a deserted island guarded by some horrific sea monster from hell didn’t faze him that much.

  “So I had to be seventeen to join, but I thought, hey, three years don’t matter, especially when you’re big like me. Back in Lubbock, wasn’t that hard to fool the paper pushers, not after Pearl Harbor.”

  “Pearl Harbor. You’re serious.”

  “They needed bodies. Cannon fodder. All I had to do was get past the dentist and I was Seaman First-Class Graham Fitch.” He turned his head to meet my eyes. “Teeth don’t lie. So I looked that dentist in the eye and I say, ‘You really think I didn’t see you letting those two guys before me pass? I go to school with them. They’re both sixteen. You really gonna stop me? Won’t you get in trouble if I tell?”

  I sat with my mouth open. All this time and not a word. And suddenly he wants to spill his whole history.

  “After basic, which was great—what with all the food, which there wasn’t much of at home with all seven of us fighting for whatever Momma could scrape up from the church or the ladies club or whatever charity was doing good deeds that week—well, the food was good. Three squares a day. After basic, I got myself on the USS Andrews.”

  I leaned forward, a chill running through me. The image of that ship wrecked at the bottom of the ocean flashed in my mind. The huge tear on the side.

  “First real home I ever had, that ship.” He nodded to the white buoy. “Loved that girl. We all did. After a few years, I became a gunner’s mate, a loader on a five-inch thirty-eight-caliber gun mount. I can see that doesn’t mean squat to you, but it’s a big deal, gunner’s mate. Saw action too, lot of it. Ryuku Islands. Philippines.” He sat up and with bound hands raised the cuff of his pants, exposing a nasty red scar on his ankle. “Got that when a kamikaze winged us and set the aft section on fire.”

  “Stop stalling. What happened out there?”

  The light that had been in his eyes through his whole story dimmed. He broke eye contact. Fear, maybe. Guilt. I couldn’t make it out.

  I rose, grabbed the bottle of water from the opposite corner of the shelter, and handed it to him. “Two sips.”

  He paused before uncapping it. I decided to play along.

  “It’s not 1943 anymore, Seaman First-Class Graham Fitch. The war’s been over for seventy-plus years. You won’t be breaking some code or betraying your country if you tell us the truth.” I waited and got silence. “If we don’t get off this island, we’re going to die.”

  He shook his head. “I can’t tell you. They said no matter what, keep quiet about this. It’s treason to talk about it.”

  “It’s not. It’s called living. Past next week. Just tell me this—do you know a way to get off the island?”

  “No.”

  My heart fell.

  “Do you know why we’re here?”

  He nodded.

  I was about to pull out the big guns, the heaviest guilt trip I could muster, jam a crowbar right in the crack of his resolve, when a rustle came from the palm forest. And with it came the faintest scent of a clogged drain.

  ENTRY 20

  THE SHARP SOUND of breaking wood startled me, jolted me upright.

  I watched the edge of the palm trees, which started thirty or so feet from our shelter. Between the trunks, the shadows lay thick and deep. The feel of that place rose in my mind, the unnatural stillness sweating through the vines and palms that drifted up from the thick mat of rot and dead insects that lay underfoot.

  Crack. Something moving beyond the shadows. I put my hand on Graham’s shoulder. Stay quiet. A rustle, a brittle sound, like the forest was saying shh and the dead things in there were singing to us in a chorus.

  I checked over my shoulder for Felix and found his slim form bent over the bottom of the giant O he’d built in the sand, adding rocks to the edges of his SOS message.

  “Untie me,” Graham said, his focus on the forest.

  I stood. “Why?” I whispered. “What is it?”

  He held his hands out. “Untie me. Now,” he said, his eyes pleading. I shook my head, and the pleading look turned to fear.

  A whisper of palm leaves. Snap. A dry swish of dead underbrush swept aside. Closer now.

  I’m sure you would’ve left him tied up. Because Graham Fitch was dangerous. Unpredictable. He’d tried to rob us. Maybe kill us. You’d say to yourself, him or Felix? Easy choice.

  I didn’t think about any of that. I bent down and fumbled with the ropes at his ankles.

  Crunch. The wind blew through the trees toward us. The scent of a bitter sea came with it, a caustic smell, like bile and low tide.

  I’d trussed him up well in your fancy handcuff knot. My fingers strained on a tight loop until it finally gave way.

  “Hurry!” Graham said, holding his hands out, kicking his feet until the ropes slipped off. I stood, my eyes on the jungle. A glimpse of a yellow stripe moving in the shadows.

  At first, I thought it was a colorful bird. I squinted, and no, it was too big. I had this weird jolt of panic, a feeling that whatever it was had smelled us, and that’s why it had come.

  Graham was up, pulling at my arm. “C’mon!”

  But I didn’t move. Yellow stripe. Yellow stripe on black. Not an animal. The stripe moved again in the shadows, moving away from us. And I caught the unmistakable shape of a person attached to that stripe. A person walking the edge of the forest, all in black.

  A wet suit.

  Mr. Marshall’s wet suit.

  And I was running. Toward the forest, aiming for the inky gaps between the trunks. Shouts followed me. Graham, his warnings lost on the strong wind coming off the ocean.

  Mr. Marshall was alive, and he had been on the island with us all this time.

  I crashed into the palm forest and tripped over a root, landing face-first in the rotting undergrowth. I scrambled up, tasting blood but not feeling a thing. My voice echoed in the stillness and shadows.

  “Mr. Marshall!”

  Two cuts on my hand and tree bark imbedded in both knees. Reckless, you would say. Running into the forest like that. I’d have to use our precious tube of Neosporin. But I didn’t care, because Mr. Marshall was alive somehow. And you of all people understand what drove me to run after him, ignoring the warning signs.

  As I moved deeper into the palm trees, the temperature of this place finally registered, fifteen degrees cooler than the beach. Like I’d walked into an ai
r-conditioned cottage after being roasted in the sun all day. My arms broke out in goose flesh.

  Five minutes of threading my way through the trunks and peering into the shadows for the yellow stripe and I still didn’t get it. How still the air was. The unnatural quiet. The shimmer of sunlight caught high up in the canopy. Fluttering of green. Patches of blue sky.

  As I made my way into the trees, I felt like a coward for avoiding the forest for so long, sweating it out on the beach. The ache of the ocean swell had left my ears for the first time in three days. The drain cleaner scent was gone. I didn’t even recognize that it was the wrong time of day, that it had been twilight when I’d entered.

  “Marshall?” I called out. God, he was alive. He must’ve been only stunned. He’d had his reg in when they found him, and it had still been in when they surfaced. He’d been breathing air the whole time and we didn’t know it. In a coma, perhaps. And Mom was no EMT, so she’d missed the faint pulse.

  “Mr. Marshall?” I yelled, but the sound moved strangely between the palm trunks, as if the distance swallowed it up faster than it should. I had this feeling that no matter how much I screamed, they wouldn’t hear me on the beach. But I was too excited to think about what that meant.

  I stepped over roots, around boles of palms, pushed through a weedy undergrowth that showed up in patches. The place shifted, smelled old, like the corners of that abandoned fishing shack I used to play in as a kid.

  “Mr. Marshall? It’s Sia. From the Last Chance. Remember?”

  Poor guy, under the tarp all that time, probably moving around and moaning when we were asleep, and none of us noticed. Poor Mr. Marshall, I remember thinking. He must’ve thought we’d buried him alive. Then the boat capsized, and the shock of hitting the water woke him up, and . . .

  I kept that in my head for a while, spinning theories. As I moved deeper into the thickening shadows, the Sense hit me again, the one that had followed me around the beach, into the water, down into the reef and back again. The thin tendrils of thought sliding up out of the deep, telling me this had happened before. Or some version of it.