by Leslie Lutz
He unwrapped the bandage around his leg. I had seen him down by the water, rinsing his wound and changing the dressing, at least four times a day. He never took it off in front of us. I hadn’t seen the wound since that first day.
When the last piece of cloth fell away, the smell of rot hit me so hard I almost gagged.
The gaping red trench ringed his thigh, an inch deep. I made myself lean closer, trying to breathe through my mouth. Pus, a lot of it. Red lines spread from it, as if searching, probing.
Ben leaned back on his hands and grimaced. “I’ve taken enough biology to know I’m going to die of infection in about a week.”
“You don’t know that. Maybe we could find a natural remedy in the palm—”
His hand on my arm quieted me. “There’s nothing we can do. We don’t have an axe.”
I felt sick at the thought. An axe. What had happened to us?
“I’m not sure I could live through that anyway.” He rubbed a hand over his face and chuckled humorlessly. “And the gun was there, and I kept having these strange . . . dreams, memories. I don’t know what to call them.”
“Yeah, I’ve had them too.”
He closed his eyes and rubbed the line that had appeared on his forehead. Trying to rub something out.
“In this dream, the gun is nothing but trouble.” He looked out into the waves again.
Nothing but trouble. I blinked and digested that. His expression told me everything. He didn’t have a doctor, or an axe, or a bottle of penicillin. But he had a gun to end it now, before the pain got too bad.
A salt breeze picked up. We sat together and watched the waves roll in, and I thought about what it would be like to lose this person I’d just met. I couldn’t. I wanted to know him when he wasn’t here, in this horrible place. Hang out with him over burgers and fries. Go to a B movie with him and talk about it until dawn. Bring him to meet you, if he’d come. I think he would.
He turned to me then, and all that emotion he kept so controlled unraveled right there in his eyes. “I’m not afraid of death,” he said. “No one in my family is. So that’s not what I’m afraid of.”
“What are you afraid of?”
He didn’t answer at first, his gaze back on the water. “It’s different than I expected.”
“What is?”
“The way it feels to know it’s coming.” He met my eyes again, and there was no peace there. “I thought I’d have another seventy years.”
“I guess none of us know if we’ve got that long. I guess—”
“Sia, I’m gonna end up wandering around the palm forest. With all the others. Because that’s what’s wrong with this place. Nothing ends here. Not really.”
His voice faltered on the last word. Part of me broke with it.
That was it, what terrified him. Not that he was dying too soon, or that he didn’t get a chance to have kids or fall in love. He was afraid of going on forever.
We sat together quietly and watched the fairy terns plunge down into the surf, their feathers catching the breeze and the salt spray.
Ben squeezed my hand and I rested my head on his shoulder.
When he brushed the top of my arm with his fingers, I thought, yeah, this is a guy who would walk through the gates with me, sign his name in the prison log, and call you sir. In another life maybe.
We stayed there, leaning against one another, until the sun fell past the horizon and dove into the sea.
The next morning, when the sun finally climbed high enough to cast shadows, I fished in a spot far down the beach. I found only one lobster, a small one. I was halfway out of the surf when the Sense rose up, and I knew I wasn’t alone. Something was coming out of the waves. Something behind me.
I dove sideways, the lobster bucking in my hand. I’d caught only a glimpse, but it was a girl this time, one of the dead. She hadn’t seen me. And what would she do when she did? I didn’t want to find out.
I turned, twisting underwater to face the threat. White foam slid in the chaos above my head. My knees digging into the sand, I surfaced slowly, holding my breath. My eyes broke the waterline, and I stopped to watch her make her way to shore.
Later I would piece together the details. That she wore a Maroon 5 T-shirt. That her blond ponytail hung over one shoulder, trailing water down her front. That she was one of the divers who backed out at the last minute because the seas were rough. But I couldn’t wrap my mind around how she ended up here, when she’d never even gotten close to the wreck that started all this. All I could see while hiding in the waves, the lobster scrabbling at my hand and the salt water burning my tongue, was that half of her right arm was missing.
I held my breath for the next minute and a half, hoping the ocean’s roar masked me. The bright white of my rash guard. My long black hair swarming around me, pulled by the waves like a flag, waving, Here I am! Come and get me.
She moved slowly, staggering only an arm’s length away. A wave knocked her over more than once. The girl struggled to her feet every time, her face turned toward the palm forest. Hiding there in the surf, I surfaced twice to get a breath, forgetting about my ten-minute rule.
She finally passed me and staggered her way onto dry sand, heading toward the trees like she had someplace she needed to go. I then stood, still in waist-deep water, a piece of driftwood nudging me in the back every time the waves rolled in.
I would follow her. Into the palm forest. Find out where she went. A strange flash of a dream lit my mind, like a grainy five seconds of a film. The Sense again, giving me memories of something I’d never experienced. A clearing ringed by palms, the girl heading to the center where the shadows from the trees pooled, forming what looked like a pond, or a small lake, or a—
A sting on the back of my calf made me jump. Something had brushed me, as hot as the lit end of a cigarette. I turned and backpedaled toward the beach, scrambling across the soft sand. A breaker hit me full in the face, blurring my vision. But I could see them. Clear ropes, as thick as cables, rising from the chaos of the waves. Trembling in the sunlight, as if tasting it. I watched as it reached toward me, wrapped around the driftwood instead, and dragged it below the surface.
A second later I was out of the water and stumbling onto dry beach, hugging the lobster to my chest.
It took a long time for me to stop shaking. So close.
And then another memory came, not of the strange clearing and the shadows that pooled like water. This one was of the girl with the blond ponytail helping me build a signal fire. Putting a bandage on Felix’s leg while he cried. Helping me make water converters.
Zoe; that was her name. She lasted one week on the island before the accident. She’d gone out to fish for lobster, and she hadn’t come back.
I sat back in the dry sand and cried, my brain trembling, ready to split apart. Something sharp cut into me. A part of me realized it was the lobster. The rest of me didn’t care.
A dream, that’s what Zoe was. But I cried for her anyway, and the others I now remembered, if only for a moment.
As I made the long trek back down the beach toward camp, I felt all wrung out. My lobster had gone quiet. I had held him too tightly.
Thirst hit me hard, as it always did after a long swim, like it used to right after my swimming lessons with my grandmother. The clouds moving over the island, out to sea, were swollen with rain. But somehow, I knew it wouldn’t come. The storm always blew past, our hopes for rainwater dashed.
This place is alive, Dad, and has a will of its own: the palm forest, the sand, even the passionless stare of the sky—huge, endless, the kind I’d always loved but now hated. Too big. Too remote. And I remember thinking, It won’t give us what we want. No, those clouds will blow by like the others.
When I got back, Steph was gone, and Ben and Felix were down in the wrecked charter, trying once again to get the radio working. Useless activity, but you know how Felix is happier when he’s busy. And I didn’t want Felix to see me until I had shaken off my encoun
ter with the dead girl, and that thing.
I threw our tiny breakfast onto the fire. Graham was a couple of feet closer to it than usual, sweating, his face buried in his bound hands. I searched the beach for a flash of red hair. She did this on purpose. Dragged him close to dry him out, kill him before I came back from the free dive. Zoe’s image came into my head again. All the others we’d lost. I wondered again how she’d ended up here if she’d never left the dock.
“C’mon.” I reached under Graham’s armpits and pulled. “Let’s get you under the sun shelter and out of the heat.”
He pushed with his legs to help me—awkwardly, since they were tied together—and I got him away from the fire and under the patchwork construction of boat pieces that had become our home. I settled him, trying to ignore how filthy he’d become. Our time here felt so much longer than a few weeks. Maybe we’d been here years, and I just couldn’t remember.
I set him up against a pile of wet suits we used for pillows and gave him his ration of water. He swallowed, watching me the entire time. The smell from the neoprene was comforting—to me, at least—and I sat next to the pile and drank my ration and watched the waves roll in.
“Why are you so nice to me?” Graham asked.
“Haven’t heard you talk in a week. I’m honored.”
“I didn’t expect it, you know.”
“Yeah, well, Merry Christmas.”
Something about my comment sent him back into silence, and I figured our fragile peace was over. But then he rolled onto his side, toward me, and that surly side I’d seen so much of melted. “Is it already Christmas?”
“No, of course not,” but as I said it, suddenly I wasn’t sure. Had we been on the island for weeks, or had it been months? Could it be December? I rubbed my temples, feeling that strange stretched feeling that had been dogging me for hours.
He lay on his back again and stared at the ceiling of the shelter. “Best Christmas I ever had was on that ship out there.” He pointed to the water without looking at it.
“You’re kidding.”
“Nope.”
“Did you have a tree?”
“We didn’t need one. We were happy because we had something else.”
I waited for him to tell me what it was. He didn’t.
I sat there beside Graham and thought about what that something else was. For me, I mean. Last Christmas, with your being in prison bringing in a big fat goose egg into our accounts, we couldn’t afford anything beyond Felix’s presents. And yours (Mom insisted). But I didn’t want to share that kind of family stuff with a guy who had, not that long ago, held a gun to my head.
“My bunkmate, he always liked Christmas,” Graham said, his gaze far away.
“You mean the one with the dreams you found so ‘entertaining’?”
Graham looked at his hands. “Yep.”
“I get the feeling something bad happened to your friend.”
“He wasn’t a friend.”
“Then why are we talking about him?”
We sat for a long while, not speaking. Hot sand, the swell of surf, and his farm boy face taking in the horizon. I got the feeling he was about to spill something important, maybe some clue to why we were here, and why we couldn’t leave.
“Even if we find a way off the island, I’m not sure I can go home.”
“Why not?”
His expression took on a heavier cast, but he didn’t answer. Instead he smiled at me, as if trying too hard to forget something. “If you didn’t go home, and if you could live anywhere in the world, where would you go?”
“Fiji.”
“Where on God’s green earth is that?”
“About a six-hour flight from Australia. White beaches, beautiful reefs. My family and I, we’re moving there, when Dad gets home.”
“Why would anyone move to Fiji?”
“Dive charters. Big business over there.” I took another sip of liquid happiness. “My family and I, we’ll be set up for life, taking out a bunch of fat wallets to see pretty fish. Felix gets to grow up in paradise. And I get to spend every day underwater.”
“And that makes you happy?”
“A lot of things make me happy.”
“But diving, that’s it for you?”
“Everything makes sense when you’re breathing through a regulator.”
My response stumped him, and he went quiet for a while, focused on the Last Chance, where Ben and Felix still fiddled with the dead radio. Then he looked down the beach, toward the spot where Steph gathered driftwood, a small figure scavenging in the distance.
His gaze came back to the wet suits. “That equipment you got on the boat, the tanks, you can stay underwater a long time with that?”
“Why?”
“Humor me.”
I shrugged. “Maybe ten hours of bottom time in all those tanks. I don’t know. Depends how deep you go.”
He pressed his lips together as if deciding whether or not the next words were worth it. “I know where we can get more food.”
I stopped with my water bottle halfway to my mouth.
“A lot of it,” he said. “Canned food. We could eat for months.”
I stared at him, stunned. “All this time, you’ve had a stash of food and—”
“No, no, not like that.”
“—and you didn’t tell us?”
“Will you shut up and listen? I couldn’t get to it. But with the diving equipment, maybe we could.”
I looked out to the crashing surf and beyond, where the sea stretched out blue and long to the horizon. “Do you mean the USS Andrews? Two hundred yards offshore, past that thing, we’d never—”
“No, Sia, not out there.” He nodded to the palm forest.
“You’re kidding me.”
“It’s in the middle of the island.”
“There’s no water in the forest. I looked.”
“You didn’t explore as much as I did, then. And before you say anything, it’s not fresh water, so you can’t drink it.”
Food! I imagined what might be in those cans, and my mouth watered. Thought about eating, really eating, and my hands went up to my own ribs. I could feel them through the rash guard. And Felix looked even worse.
“And there’s something else.” He looked toward the Last Chance, where Ben labored over the radio. “Antibiotics. Real ones.”
I actually hugged him, despite the BO that hung about him like a fog. We could save Ben’s life, which at the moment was more exciting than the food. All I knew was for once, the island wasn’t a thinking, self-aware monster hell-bent on our destruction. It was just an island, and we were just shipwrecked survivors. And it was about to give us what we needed.
He huffed an awkward laugh, and I let him go before he could push me away.
I stood, ready to grab a mesh bag and fill up. “How do we find this place?”
His expression darkened and he broke eye contact, looking toward the fringe of the forest.
And that’s when the dream rose in my mind again, the girl who’d come out of the surf with one arm missing, making her way through the palm forest into that clearing ringed with palms. Not a dream. A memory. And I remember following her, something I’ve never done. In that memory, I hid behind a trunk and watched her step into the pool of shadows, until she disappeared, until the earth swallowed her completely.
He finally met my eyes again. “We follow the—”
I cut him off, the dream a sharp piece of glass in my mind. “We follow the dead. That’s where they all go.”
ENTRY 25
THE SINKHOLE’S MOUTH yawned open to the sky, its dark surface still, like a pond. From edge to edge, it was about the size of a four-bedroom house. The hole plunged into the earth for at least a hundred feet—or so Graham said, though he still refused to tell me how he knew. And I couldn’t shake the feeling I’d been here before.
I leaned over the edge to stare into the shadowy water. Even with the sun dead center above me, I could only se
e twenty feet before the murk stole the details.
“Don’t know why it happened,” Graham said, squatting down next to the water and peering in, “but one day the lab was normal—here, above ground—and the next, I go off to the ship, and while I’m gone, the lab just disappeared into the ground, like something had sucked it under. The whole thing flooded. Everyone inside died.” He rubbed his cheek and looked out into the palms. “I think.”
“What’s a lab doing here?”
“That’s classified.”
“Unclassify it.”
“Sorry, Baby Doll.”
I peered into the water. “The dead all come here?”
Graham nodded, his face turning a shade paler.
My stomach squeezed as I leaned over the water to peer in. All I could see on the oily surface was my own gaunt face reflected. My braid fell over my shoulder, and when the tip touched the water, I drew back, suddenly afraid something would reach up and grab it like a rope and pull me down.
“Do you know why they’re attracted to this place?” I asked.
Graham shook his head. “That’s beyond my paygrade, sweetheart.” He looked up at the crowns of the trees, the patch of blue sky. “All of this is.”
The footsteps said Steph had arrived, but her steps were short and her breathing labored. She had one of the tanks from the Last Chance over her shoulder, and she set it down next to the others. The small duffel I’d given her to carry was still over her shoulder, and I nodded to it. She handed it over without a word. Then she gave Graham a look you would recognize, an “I’ve-got-a-shiv-up-my-sleeve” side-eye, the kind you get across the yard when you’ve done someone wrong.
Ben emerged limping from the palm forest, two regulators slung over his shoulder. Felix followed, one mask in his hands, the other perched on his head like he was ready for a snorkeling excursion. I’d brought the rest of the things I needed, and the fins lay at my feet, as well as the mesh bag I’d rescued from the head.
Steph put the tank down with a grunt. “This is a bad idea.”
“No one asked you,” Ben said as he dropped the two regs.
“I’m so hungry,” Felix said, sitting down next to me and peering into the sinkhole. “Do you think there’s pizza down there?”