Fractured Tide

by Leslie Lutz

  “We’re gonna die here,” I said. “And then we’re not. That’s what I saw.”

  ENTRY 23

  WHEN I FINISHED MY STORY, Ben didn’t say anything. I stood beside him, bare feet in the wave fingers and wet sand, and watched a wisp of a cloud slide over the full moon, which hung low over the island like a bright eye.

  “It’s not possible,” Ben finally said.

  “How is it that, after everything we’ve seen, you can’t bend your mind around this?”

  He sighed and rubbed his face. Somehow, the idea of Marshall roaming the palm forest bothered him more than anything else. A creature attacking our boat, the weird time loop we saw on the horizon—he accepted it. But a dead guy walking? Apparently, that was one degree of weird too much.

  “When people die, that’s it. They move on.” Ben made the motion of a bird flying up, his gesture caught in the moon eye. “What’s left behind isn’t them. It’s an echo.”

  “I know, but—”

  “A memory. People don’t get up from the table they’re lying on. Or walk. Or look at you.” As he made his list, his voice became more and more adamant. He wasn’t just talking about Marshall. He was talking about the family business.

  “I guess on this island, the normal rules don’t apply.”

  He shifted in the sand and stumbled. I slipped my arm around his waist to steady him. He looped his arm around my shoulders. At first, I thought he needed a moment, that the pain had thrown him off balance. But he didn’t take his arm away. We stood there for a while, the cool ocean breeze pushing against our faces. Voices drifted from the fire down the beach, too low to make out.

  He shook his head. “You know, I’ve had three days to think about you being dead.”

  “I still can’t believe I was gone three days. Sorry I wasn’t here to catch dinner.”

  “You think that’s the reason I missed you?”

  Something in his tone stopped me, made my heart flutter. Adrenaline, the kind I feel when I jump into the water after too long on land. That sweet pulse of anticipation that hits me when I’m airborne and about to break the surface.

  He took my silence for confusion. “You’re really slow, Sia. Like, glacier slow.” There was a smile in his voice. It was contagious.

  “I am. It’s true. Why don’t you spell it out for me?”

  He let go of my shoulders. I thought I’d said the wrong thing. Something homeschooled and awkward. Then he turned me to face him. The moonlight lit up the waves and the angle of his jaw. His warm brown eyes. The pulse inside my chest told me that for once, I hadn’t said anything wrong.

  A small voice to my left made me jump. “T?”

  I let go of Ben.

  “Yes, Felix. Hi. Felix, yeah, what’s up?”

  “I—I wanted to make sure.” He closed the distance and reached for my hand, his small face turned up toward mine.

  “Make sure of what?”

  “That you were still here.”

  Felix led me back to the fire. I glanced at Ben on the way, who limped alongside us, his face a stoic mask. Suddenly I was glad Felix had interrupted us. I don’t know what Ben was going to say. Or do. Kiss me, or tell me we were all going to die. Or that he’d gotten back together with Steph. I wasn’t sure I was ready for that news—or a kiss, for that matter. Not in this place, when the world was falling apart.

  We got back to the fire, and I checked on Graham, fully taking in the damage to his face. I reached out and touched the edge of the gash above his eye. He winced.

  “They put anything on that while I was gone?”

  Graham blinked with his good eye, the right side of his mouth turning up into a half smile, the other side too stiff to move. “Yeah, Ben took care of it. Put some kinda paste, yeah, like it would help or something.”

  “So you do know his name.”

  He shrugged. “I like getting a rise outta him.”

  “Why?”

  He considered that for a moment. “You know what they never told me about being a prisoner of war?”

  “You’re not a—”

  “How boring it is.”

  Strange how his words hit me. I saw you again, rising out of the sand like a ghost, taking your seat next to Graham. Your hands tied, your face a mess of bruises. And you looked into my eyes and I knew what you’d done. Started a fight in gen pop because you were bored. To add texture to the day. Then you melted into the sand, and it was just the five of us again.

  We sat quietly until the moon dipped below the line of palms. My stomach growled. Four days on the island—no, six, was it six? Maybe it’d been ten—and already Felix’s cheeks had hollowed. Steph’s legs looked thinner. The small pile of fish bones by the fire said Steph had caught something with her net. From the size of the bones, it didn’t look like much.

  Felix huddled up against me; I could feel his ribs through his shirt. He’d always been skinny, but this . . . You’d have gone crazy, trying to get something to eat for him. You would’ve cut off your arm and given it to him.

  That thought made me a little sick, and I scanned the black ocean for boat lights. The whole moving mass of water had become nothing but darkness and sound. The signal fire, was it even worth it? Was anyone out there at all? That Sense I’d felt earlier hit me hard in the brain pan.

  All of us, lost forever.

  Something brushed over my skin. A familiar feeling now, as if someone stood too close, breathing on my neck. Near the water a silhouette appeared, then a second. As soon as I realized who it was, my heart made its way up my chest and into my mouth. My mother. There on the beach, watching the waves.

  I almost got up. Then I saw the second figure turn away from the surf. A girl with dark hair, wearing my rash guard. Mom was talking, and crying, the girl listening.

  I was listening.

  That was me, down there on the beach, standing next to Mom. Which meant what I was seeing wasn’t real. Or maybe it meant that I wasn’t real.

  The other Sia turned to look toward our fire, and we locked eyes for one heart-wrenching second. Then both figures melted away.

  I buried my face on Felix’s tiny shoulder.

  “What do you think Dad is doing now?” he asked.

  Felix’s voice was so small, his question so earnest, I felt something deep and painful gather in my chest.

  “It’s dinnertime. He’s eating with all of his friends.”

  Felix watched the moon, which still hung low above the palm forest, fat and white, shedding a pure light over the beach. “Does he have a window in his cell?”

  Out of the corner of my eye, I caught Ben glance my way.

  “Yeah, a little one by his cot. After dinner he’ll lie on it and watch the sky.”

  “Like we used to when we went camping?”

  “You remember that? You were so little then.”

  He didn’t bristle at the word little this time. “Yeah, I remember I helped him catch that fish and he made a fire and he cooked it. That was fun.”

  I hugged him a little tighter. “And Mom fell asleep in the hammock, and you put a lizard on her and she freaked out.”

  He giggled. “Did I do that?”

  “It was awesome. I laughed so hard I almost peed my pants.”

  He giggled some more and fell silent. The wave song pushed its way in around us, circling the fire and filling the air, an endless tune of swell and fade. I listened to it, lost in the completeness of it, until I felt Felix’s body shaking. When his voice came out again, it was thick with tears. “I don’t like it here.”

  “It’s all right.” It wasn’t, but I didn’t know what else to say.

  “I want Mom,” he said through a sob.

  I let him settle his head on my lap and stroked his hair as his small body shook. I held him there on the beach in the middle of nowhere and let him cry. And I cried too, for you in your cell with your view of the moon, and let the tears blur the fire until it was nothing but color, and pretended it was your fire, and all of us were t
ogether, camping on the beach.

  ENTRY 24

  I’M SURE YOU’VE GOT a daily schedule in your cellblock. This is mine:

  Gather driftwood.

  Tend the fire.

  Continue building the world’s biggest SOS message.

  Give Graham his rations. Fight with Steph about it.

  Search the reef for crab and lobster while Steph fishes on shore and catches almost nothing.

  Find just enough to keep us from eating our own fingers.

  Race back to shore before I’m eaten alive.

  And the sun goes up and the sun goes down, but we’re stuck here on an endless loop, like that exploding cruiser on the horizon. Ben has put away his diagrams and sketches, and he watches it every night. The last movie in the world, he says, and I sit with him, mostly to keep him company. Felix calls them island fireworks. Steph and Graham refuse to even look.

  Ben and I don’t talk about the night I came back from the dead, about what he almost said. Or did. But when we watch the island lights, I lean against his chest, and he wraps his arm around my waist. Like we’re together, even though we’re not. I’m pretty sure if I didn’t have Ben, I would absolutely lose my mind.

  Because something on the island has changed. I have this feeling I’m inside a car, and someone’s just put their foot on the gas pedal. And every day, I watch the dead—the ones who died that day the creature attacked us, the ones who should be lying peacefully in Davy Jones’s locker—wander out of the surf and walk right onto the beach.

  The first time it happened, I was alone, a mile from camp, scouting a new dive spot just past the section of the beach where the big boulders start. These rise up taller than you, pushing themselves from the crashing surf, lying in random patterns scattered across the white sands.

  Up in the dunes, my back to the waves, sitting on my heels in the sand as I adjusted a strap on my mask, the brace of the wind against my rash guard lulled me into a false sense of security. The sand was a rough cat’s tongue on my shins, the bottoms of my feet. I was thinking about all the delicious things clustered at the base of those boulders. My mesh bag would split, there’d be so much. If the ocean let me. If I had time.

  I didn’t realize he was there at first. The soft push of footsteps in the sand had become a familiar sound. Like surf crash and the cries of the herons near our camp. When any of us moved about the shelter, or around the fire, there it was, the muffled push of heels, toes, the balls of our feet. None of the surfaces here stay still. Not the ocean. Not the beach.

  I started to turn, expecting Steph or Felix. Coming down to make sure I was okay.

  The breeze shifted before I finished my rotation. The salt scent disappeared. What replaced it was the smell of a clogged drain.

  I didn’t even look. I just ran.

  I threw myself behind a boulder. Held my breath. Peeked around the edge.

  A teenage boy stood with his back to me, about a car’s length away, feet planted in the sand. The kind of stance I would see on the basketball court. Just a guy waiting for a teammate to pass him the ball.

  He wore a pair of baggy nylon shorts with a blue stripe up the side. His T-shirt had a logo emblazoned on the back. Camp Tahona. His clothes dripped with seawater, and his skin gleamed pale in the sunlight. I had an urge to call to him. I tamped it down my throat and put my hand over my mouth.

  He turned, and I froze.

  Underneath one of his dark brows was a ragged hole. Even from this distance I could see that the other eye had a milky cast, like Marshall’s. The image of him making his way across the sea floor, fish feeding on him as he traveled to us from the wrecked Ruby Pelican, filled my mind.

  I wanted to stop watching. Turn away. I had interrupted a private moment somehow. Like I had wandered into an undertaker’s office and I didn’t belong. Ben’s family would know what to do; I didn’t. And I was afraid if I turned away, when I looked again he would be standing a few feet away, peering down at me.

  The dead boy walked across the sand toward the jungle, like he had a mission in there.

  My heart started to slow. He hadn’t seen me. He wasn’t here for me. I stepped out from the shadow of my boulder and watched him make his way into the shadows.

  We’re all connected, I thought.

  I didn’t know where those words came from. Maybe they came from Mom, or Yiayia. Or you. But I had this feeling—that the boy had a destination. I thought again of what I’d seen when I was perched on top of the palm tree, a line of shimmer between that thing and the dark patch in the middle of the island.

  Connected.

  I stepped into the fringes of the palms, about to follow him inside, to see where he would lead me. Then the smell of the shadows—the underside of a rock—hit me. The fear of that place, mixed with my hunger, was enough to turn me back to the ocean.

  The five of us don’t talk about the dead. Felix pretends he doesn’t see them. And the rest of us—the ones still alive on this island, the ones who don’t belong—we have the same argument over and over, about what will happen if we touch one, whether they can think, whether they’re zombies, ghosts, or something else. Problem is, none of us want to test our theories. Our prisoner keeps his trap shut about what they are and where they go. And we live with it, with them, because what else can we do?

  The only good times—other than my stolen time with Ben—come at night, when we gather around the fire and conjure weird theories about time funnels and sea monsters. Steph talks about the Coast Guard and I let myself believe for a little bit.

  When that talk dries up, Ben recites the script of a movie—he has a freaky memory for things like that. So far, we’ve made it through every Star Wars film ever made, even the bad ones, and The Godfather, because Ben takes requests. I’ve caught Graham staring at him with a kind of fascination, and Felix sits next to Ben like he’s finally gotten the big brother he always wanted.

  When Ben is through, or walks in that painful-to-watch gait toward the surf to clean his leg, Felix snuggles next to me and asks me to talk. I try to tell him Peter Pan and Transformers, but all he wants are bedtime stories about you. So I tell him all the good things I can remember, until we fall asleep next to the lowering fire, under a million stars.

  A few mornings after the dead boy wandered into the jungle, I woke to the sound of a gunshot.

  I jerked upright; so did Graham, who slept a few feet away. Steph stood and peered toward the beach, confused.

  Even Felix sat up and rubbed his eyes. “What was that?”

  The sun had barely begun its climb, and the world smelled of seaweed and salt. It was hard to see anything in the gray morning light. The sea was dark.

  Another gunshot sounded, from down the beach. Graham jolted. And this time my eyes picked out the green glow. And a silhouette standing at the edge of the farthest boulder, the one I told Felix to avoid because of the deep water on the other side.

  Ben.

  I was up and running, kicking up sand, Steph only a few steps behind. I think Felix yelled out behind me, but I didn’t stop. The world jagged in my vision. Ben had somehow made his way across the gaps to the last rock, where he’d positioned himself at the edge that jutted out into the water. A familiar green glow lit up the surface not far away. Ben pointed the gun toward that glow.

  I didn’t have time to wonder why. I just yelled his name. The wind took it from me. He fired again. The kickback of the weapon made him stumble this time, and he almost slipped over the rocky edge, into the waves.

  I thought he hadn’t heard me, but when I came to a halt and started to climb, his voice cut through the wave song. “Don’t come up.”

  “Have you gone insane? Get down from there!”

  He pointed into the waves again and shot. The green glow moved another foot toward him.

  “You’re too close to the water! It’ll pull you in.”

  “I’m gonna kill it.” Two more shots, dead center.

  I clambered up the rocks, leapt from the on
e to the next, wondering how he’d managed. His leg must have been in agony. By the time I reached him he’d fired again. Two tentacles slid over the surface of the rock toward his feet. I grabbed him from behind and both of us went down. I almost fell off the side. The gun tumbled from his hand, clattered across the boulder, and disappeared over the edge.

  I pulled him up and helped him across the gap to the second boulder, then to the first. A few minutes later we were both lying on the sand, a few feet back from the water, our chests heaving. The green glow floated out from the rock and dimmed.

  Steph’s voice came from behind us, soft and questioning. “Ben?” Felix stood next to her, his eyes wide.

  Ben sat up, wincing as he did. “Steph, just take Felix back to camp. I don’t want to talk to you right now.”

  “But—”

  “Just do it!”

  Steph put an arm around Felix, her expression confused and hurt, and they left. But he didn’t ask me to leave.

  “You want to tell me why you just wasted all the ammunition in our only weapon while shooting into the water?” I asked him.

  “I just wanted to do something.”

  “Well, that certainly was something.”

  His gaze drifted away from the ocean, as if he couldn’t bear to look at it.

  “I’m glad it’s gone.”

  At first, I thought he meant the creature, and I was about to tell him it wasn’t gone. His bullets had done nothing but piss it off. But then a creeping sensation ran over my skin. A memory, something that hadn’t happened yet. Ben, on the boulder, with the gun in his hand. Different this time.

  The gun. He was glad the gun was gone.

  I sat next to him, stunned into silence, trying to figure out what that meant.

  “Steph doesn’t understand, but you need to,” Ben finally said. “We’re about to have one less mouth to feed.”

  I shook my head, and I think I said something. No. You’re not going anywhere. Stay with me. God knows what I said. But I already understood. I understood why he’d climbed up on the rock, why he’d emptied the cartridge into the ocean.