Island Fire

by Toby Neal

  Nick’s eyes seemed to have adjusted by the time they reached Lanai City, and he was stumbling less on the uneven ground. Periodically he scanned the vault of dark sky for the light phenomena Bea had described from the night before, possibly presaging the event that had happened, but the sky was empty of anything but moonlight and starshine.

  Sam apparently had a limp, and now he was up riding behind Jaden, his arms around the older boy’s pack and waist. Bea walked beside the mare, the rifle in one hand and the horse’s rope in the other.

  They reached the top of the ridge that looked down at Lanai City. The tiny town seemed to have quieted from the scary glimpses he’d seen through flames. They headed down the road. Cook fires flickered in the yards of unburned houses. Off on the right as they passed into the town, half of the Lanai Lodge and its banyan trees were blackened rubble. The main Lodge area still stood, though, and from a distance, Nick could see the moving shadows of people around a bonfire in the middle of the turnaround.

  “I bet that’s where the airplane people end up,” Bea said. “All those folks are off-islanders; they’ll get together.”

  “They won’t have any food,” Sam said, worried.

  “Yeah, but they have money,” Jaden said. “And people will help them.”

  “What good is money now?” Bea said. She shot a quick glance at Jaden. “I mean, with the ferries not running, or planes or anything.”

  Nick kept quiet, conscious of the heavy money belt around his waist. He looked at the Lodge. “Maybe I should go up there. See if that’s where my friends ended up.”

  “No,” Bea said decisively. The uneven light flickered in her large green eyes. “I met a guy there. Tried to steal Rainbow. I don’t think you should go alone. Come with us to Jaden’s house first, and maybe we’ll go up there tomorrow and take some food to the people there. Right, Jaden?”

  Nick glanced at the dark-haired boy atop the horse. Jaden gave a single sharp nod. Nick could tell that now that he’d helped the other boy, Jaden felt obligated to offer hospitality—but he knew if Bea hadn’t spoken up, he’d be hiking alone up to that fire-lit building.

  Looking over at the hotel, Nick thought about the other kids he’d been with until he took shelter in the cave. They’d probably had to keep looking for food, water, shelter, and first aid. They were probably up there at the hotel. The beach didn’t have anything to offer them or the other plane survivors, not even fresh water.

  The disaster, whatever it was, had struck so suddenly. Nick, along with everyone else on the plane and all people on this tiny island, had each been minding their own business, each circling in their own orbit—when suddenly, everything changed. Those left were just lucky to be alive.

  Now the challenge was staying that way.

  This place didn’t seem like it produced a lot of its own food and water. He felt a little guilty for the half loaf of bread he’d stuffed into his stomach before he left the cave—and he dismissed the feeling. The bread might have to last him a while, and it would have gone bad.

  “Maybe if everyone got together, they could chase off the LCBoyz.” Sam was still talking about the gang who’d invaded his family’s house.

  “We’re going to the police with that,” Jaden said. “Nothing but guns can stop guns.”

  “If the police are still doing their jobs,” Bea said.

  “Even if there aren’t many police, I know Lanai City,” Jaden said stoutly. “Most people aren’t at all like the LCBoyz. They want to help one another. We’ll be trading rather than using money if people stop believing in it. And the hotel guests and airplane people can work for their food, too. They’ll be fine.”

  Nick kept his mouth shut. He hoped Jaden was right.

  They arrived at what appeared to be a small cottage, set close to the street with lamps in the windows. Bea tied the horse to the porch rail, and a short woman with long, silver-streaked hair in a bun and a tropical-print dress threw the door open with a cry. “Jaden!”

  Nick stood aside, feeling awkward, as people swarmed out of the little house. Jaden’s mother kissed and hugged Jaden after several other kids had helped him get off the horse—clearly he had a big family. Nick wondered if they were Mexican, realizing he’d never met anyone that looked quite like them in the Midwest.

  Sam was embraced and clucked over by Jaden’s mother and a couple of other girls, while Bea went to Nick’s side and took his arm. She tugged him over to a square, sturdy older man standing in the light falling from the porch.

  “This is Nick. He escaped from the crashed plane, and he’s been helping us.”

  “I’m Matteo Apucan.” He shook Nick’s hand. “Jaden’s father.”

  Jaden joined them in front of the porch. “My mom, Jiselda. These are my brothers, Joseph and Jeremy. My sisters, Jasmine and Jenna.”

  Everyone eyed Nick. The older sister, Jasmine, had a flirty smile and long, shiny black hair. He’d never felt so white and awkward in his life. “Glad to meet you all. Does anyone know what happened?”

  “Let’s go inside,” Mr. Apucan said. “We can sort out everyone’s stories there.” The backpacks were unloaded and taken inside. Nick saw Bea lead the horse around the back of the house. Mrs. Apucan exclaimed happily over the contents of the backpacks. Clearly, food was already an issue.

  The family ranged around several couches in a small living room with a dead TV in the corner. Nick sat down, and the little girl, Jenna, plastered herself against him.

  “You’re so tall,” she said admiringly. Nick couldn’t help smiling.

  “Jenna!” her older sister frowned. “Give the guy some room to breathe! Sorry, Nick. We don’t get too many haole Mainlanders in our living room.”

  “That what I am?” Nick lifted his brows in surprise. “What’s haole?”

  “Caucasian. White person,” Jenna said. “Mainlander is from, like, anywhere not in Hawaii.”

  “And what are you?”

  “Filipino, and proud.” Jaden was the one to answer that one, and Nick didn’t think he was imagining the hard note in the other boy’s voice. Once Bea had returned, Jaden got his father’s attention.

  “We need to call the police.”

  “What’s going on, besides the disaster?” Mr. Apucan asked.

  “The LCBoyz took over the Whitelys’ house. They ran off the airplane survivors who were squatting there and shot one of them. They scared us off, too.” Jaden told the story of what had been going on with contributions from Nick as Bea wedged herself onto the couch between Jaden and Jenna.

  “Well, I have some bad news there. We had only three police officers on duty here on island when the solar event happened, and they aren’t enough to keep peace and order without backup. So we’re helping them. We’re working with our Neighborhood Watch to walk the streets and keep people from looting and such. We wondered where the Boyz went.”

  “They seem to be making our house their headquarters,” Bea said. “They have guns.”

  “Joseph,” Mr. Apucan called over to a teenager who looked younger than Jaden. “Go get Police Chief Roberts.”

  “Sure, Papa.” The teen trotted out, puffed with pride at his errand. Meanwhile, Jasmine propped up Jaden’s ankle and wrapped it in an Ace bandage.

  “Too bad we don’t have any ice,” she said. “We have some aspirin, though.”

  “I’ll take some,” Jaden said. “So, Papa. Like Nick asked—does anybody know what the explosion was? Why it knocked everything out?”

  “We think it was a solar storm, an electromagnetic pulse wave sent out by the sun flaring up. We were hearing about the special effects in the sky on the radio before it went down. Doc Padilla thinks it’s an electromagnetic pulse burst—the sun sort of had a hiccup, he says.”

  Jaden turned to Nick and Bea. “Doc Padilla worked for the University of Hawaii. He’s a retired astronomer and lives over here.”

  “How bad was it? How far does the damage go?” Bea asked. “Is it just on Lanai? It seems like it must be
bigger. The pulse brought down that plane on Keomoku Beach.”

  “We don’t know, but we assume it’s affecting at least all of Hawaii. So far we haven’t had anyone contact us—not that we have any working equipment they could contact us with. We haven’t seen any planes. The only communications from the outside have been a few sailboats over from Molokai. So—where’s your father?” Mr. Apucan asked Bea.

  “He went off the road in his truck during the event. I found it, and it was empty. He—we don’t know where he is.”

  Mr. and Mrs. Apucan exchanged a long glance, and Nick saw her nod before Mr. Apucan said, “You can stay with us as long as you like.”

  Nick wondered if he was included in the invitation. Mrs. Apucan’s eyes had gone to the pile of food they’d brought on the counter, and a little line appeared between her brows.

  “We’re not sure what we’re going to do, but thanks for taking us in tonight,” Bea said, and she looked right at Nick when she said it. Nick felt his chest constrict with a strong emotion—gratitude and something more. Bea had taken him in like a brother, but the feeling he was beginning to have about her wasn’t brotherly. She’s brave, strong, kind, and pretty. He’d never met a girl like her, and she was treating him like he mattered.

  That hadn’t happened often.

  Jeremy, who looked around Sam’s age, tugged on Sam’s arm. “Want to come see my comics? I heard you like comics.”

  “Sure.” Sam slid off the bench to follow his new friend.

  “You kids need to go to bed in the next half hour,” Mr. Apucan said. “We have to save the lamp oil and candles.”

  That gave them time to get organized in bedrooms. Mrs. Apucan was putting Sam in the boys’ room and Bea in the girls’ room. “We don’t have enough futons,” she said, frowning, as Nick helped pull linens out of a tiny closet. “You’ll have to sleep on the couch in the living room.”

  “That’s fine, Mrs. Apucan. Thanks so much.” Nick followed her, carrying a load of linens, and helped make up the extra beds. Then she covered one of the couches with a sheet and handed him a hand-sewn quilt.

  It wasn’t long before the small three-bedroom cottage, full to the brim with people, was settling into sleep. Nick, comfortable on his couch, felt himself fully relax for the first time since he’d gotten on the plane days ago on his journey to Hawaii.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Bea woke up before dawn in the girls’ room. Her sleeping bag on a futon on the floor had been comfortable, and she’d slept with the total blackness of the exhausted. Beside her was a bunk bed containing seventeen-year-old Jasmine, and Jenna, aged eleven, Jeremy’s twin. Sam slept in the boys’ room on the bottom of two bunks housing Jaden, Jeremy, and Joseph, and she knew Nick was in the living room.

  Bea looked up at the old-fashioned lath-and-plaster ceiling, which muffled the drum of rain on the tin roof. It would not have been fun to be trapped in the cave, or even down on the beach in that leaky fishing shack, while a summer downpour soaked the thirsty island and snuffed out the last of the fires.

  It felt strange to be so surrounded and absorbed by the family. She wasn’t sure how she felt about it. But she was clean, her belly was full, and for the first time in months, she felt safe.

  Guilt followed that realization. Her dad was missing, and in spite of the disaster, she felt safer in the Apucans’ house than she had at home. It made her realize that, disaster or not, things had reached a breaking point with Dad.

  Jasmine had told her last night that the first thing the Apucans had done when the town’s water system failed after the disaster was build a rooftop catchment system. Bea could hear water rolling off the tin roof into gutters, siphoning through a screen into big plastic barrels around the house.

  The rain couldn’t have come at a better time. She wondered about the plane people—according to Mr. Apucan, they’d ended up at the Lodge with the other hotel guests—but the townspeople were helping them, bringing up all the food and water that they could spare on a rotating basis. Plans were being made to convert the hotel grounds to food gardens, but everything took time, and they were all still hoping for some sort of rescue.

  Lanai City wasn’t the lawless free-for-all Bea had feared. Her dad had been wrong about the town, and she wondered what else he’d been wrong about. She closed her eyes, remembering the talk with the police chief at the Apucans’ dining room table after the younger children had gone to bed.

  “We don’t have the manpower to get the LCBoyz out of your house.” Chief Roberts’s uniform was filthy, streaked with mud and soot. He’d taken his hat off, and thinning brown hair was plastered to his head. “Some of the Neighborhood Watch people, like Mr. Apucan here, are now deputies. Our priorities are keeping order, keeping the looting down, getting first aid to people hurt in the disaster or the aftermath. Frankly, we’re glad the Boyz are out of town, but I’m sorry that it was your house they moved into.”

  Bea had folded her lips tight and shot a glance at Nick, who was frowning. “They shot someone from the plane,” Bea said. “They have guns.”

  “All the more reason that we have to leave them alone for the moment.” Chief Roberts turned red-rimmed, tired eyes to her. “We have only a few firearms, and our first aid responders are totally overwhelmed. The last thing we need right now is a firefight with the Boyz. If they start coming into town, harassing people, we’ll deal with them.” He took a sip of water from a glass Mrs. Apucan handed him. “I’m sorry it’s not better news, but it’s good to know where they’re located. You kids have been through a lot—and I’ve added your father’s name to the list of the missing.”

  “Are there many people missing?” Bea asked.

  “Unfortunately, yes. We’ve lost people in the fires and in vehicle accidents. Some of the boats in the harbor burned, too.” He must have seen something in Bea’s face, because he squeezed her shoulder. “If he wasn’t in the truck, he made it out alive and he’s somewhere on the island—unless he took a boat to Maui or Molokai.”

  Bea perked up. “Boats are going there?”

  “Yeah. There have been a few taking people back and forth. For a fee, or trade.”

  “I need to get to Maui. I was on my way to meet my grandparents there,” Nick said.

  “Well, we haven’t had any boats from there yet. I suspect things are in pretty bad shape over on Maui—so many more people in trouble.”

  A long pause as they all considered the situation on Lanai, magnified a hundredfold on the bigger island with a population of a hundred and fifty thousand, plus another several hundred thousand visitors. Bea suppressed a little shiver and glanced over at Nick. He was looking down at his hands. His face looked tense, and his eyes were opaque as blue china.

  “What’s happening in the rest of the world?” Jaden asked.

  “We don’t know much. Other than a few boats getting in from Molokai who were planning to come anyway, we haven’t heard anything. Molokai was hit much like we were. Without any electricity, communications are completely down, and we’re really worried about how far the damage goes. It’s not a good sign we haven’t had any planes or been able to communicate with Maui.” Roberts stood, set his hat on his head. “I’ll let you know if I hear anything about your father,” he said to Bea. Turning to Nick, he said, “I advise you to sit tight until we know more about what’s happening on Maui. You could be going from the frying pan into the fire over there.”

  “Thanks,” Nick said. Bea wanted to pat his shoulder, but she saw Jaden frowning at her, like he was jealous or something. Mr. Apucan walked Roberts to the door, talking with the captain about his shift on the Watch, as they were calling the group of civilian deputies that were on duty each day.

  “It seems like the Boyz are going to get away with taking over our house,” Bea said.

  “Just for now,” Jaden had said to her as they’d headed to bed. “See? It’s not as bad as you thought it was going to be. People are pulling together.”

  Jaden had been right on so
me things, and Bea was right on others. For now, here in a comfortable bed, with protection and food, was the right place to be. She wriggled a bit on the futon, turning over in her sleeping bag. She wondered where Beosith was.

  Right here. The dragon sent her a mental picture of the inside of the Apucans’ garage, a structure used as a workshop and storage area. Beosith was curled on a pile of full chicken-feed bags. It’s a good thing they have all this—they can cook this corn for people to eat.

  Bea unzipped her sleeping bag. She wore a clean pair of sweatpants and a fitted, scoop-necked T-shirt that belonged to Jasmine and fit just right, along with the bigger bra that she’d hoped for. She tiptoed through the house, glancing over at the dim humped shape of Nick and making sure he hadn’t moved. She went to the side door leading to the garage, unlocked the door, and tiptoed down the wooden steps.

  Hey, buddy. I’ve missed you. She sat on the feed bags beside the dragon, who’d curled into a coiled ball. Beosith cracked his eyelids, emitting a faint glow. He had a slightly musty smell she’d always liked. She scratched between his brow ridges, and his scales lifted and fluttered with pleasure. “I’m so glad you’re still with me.”

  I'll be here as long as you need me.

  “So why do you think we should go to Molokai?”

  Your family is there.

  “The Apucans are treating us like family. And Dad can come find us here.”

  Your family is there.

  The slight emphasis on “family” made her frown. “Did Dad go over there?”

  No answer from the dragon.

  “We’re tired of running around. We’ll see what happens tomorrow.” She stood up. “I want to go up to the hotel and check out the situation with the plane people.”

  Hide the horse.

  “You got that right. I’m not letting anyone take her away.” Last night she’d turned Rainbow loose in the Apucans’ fenced backyard. Bea opened the door into the backyard to check on the mare.