The Dark Atoll: The Castaways: Book 1

by Marilyn Foxworthy

  When Christie was done bathing me with her lips, she looked up and I invited her to climb up and lie against me on my lap.

  She said, “Oh, that was nice. And in case you couldn’t tell, I liked it, and yeah, I had two nice orgasms. I like that.”

  I asked, “You can have an orgasm, just with me in your mouth? I wasn’t even touching you that much.”

  She hugged me and nuzzled my shoulder and said, “Yeah. I love you. I get aroused just touching you. Even like this. And having you in my mouth like that was so exciting. Some girls do that. At least that’s what some of my friends said. Some said that it was gross and that they’d never do that, but one girl said she really liked it and the others were stupid. She was right. I really liked it. Thank you.”

  I said, “Oh no, thank you! It was fantastic.”

  I was startled when Allie said, “It’s raining but not that much.”

  I said, “Oh, Allie! Um, I…”

  Allie said sweetly, “You guys were beautiful. It was the best thing that I ever saw. Golly, the movies were never like that. It was like when you kissed me before, but Christie kissed your penis. And you kissed her back. It was like true love and stuff. It was wonderful.”

  I said, “Oh, good.”

  Christie crawled off of my lap and the three of us lay down together. It was getting dark. The lights were on in the house now, but it was time to sleep. We’d been working hard all day weaving mats and we were tired.

  I kissed the girls goodnight and we slept well. Before I fell asleep, I wondered what the morning would be like. Who would I wake up with? Lana or Allie? Christie my lover or Christie the mushed? What would the next day be like?

  When we woke up, I found out. Allie was better than ever. She remembered me; she knew that Christie was alive and well; and she was still in my arms in the morning.

  Christie was already up. She had removed the woven curtains from the windows and when I looked for her, I found the girl standing silently, looking out toward the west.

  When she heard Allie and I waking up, she looked over her shoulder at us, and said, “You guys, come here. There’s something to see.”

  Allie and I got up quickly. I hoped that we didn’t have visitors on the beach or a war party attacking from the water.

  Christie led the way out the front door and onto the porch. I didn’t know what she was going to show us, but we followed her around the end of the house to the east side at the back. We kept walking until we came to the beach.

  Christie faced south east and pointed at the sky.

  Oh my gosh! She was right. For the first time in 18 years, there was something to see. The clouds had thinned, and for the first time, we could almost see the sun. A bright orange ball showing through the remaining haze. And it was lighter than we had seen in a very long time. We had seen a less overcast sky a week or two ago, but this was even brighter than that. And it felt warmer.

  We stood and watched for a long time. At least a half an hour, just staring at the sky. We were in awe of the sun. I felt a small breeze on my neck and shuddered where it tickled the hair at the back of my head. This was amazing.

  But a moment later, as my subconscious training bashed against the door of my bliss, I shouted, “Oh crap! Hurry!” and I started running toward the house.

  I wasn’t certain but the phrase “differential heating” repeated over and over in my mind and we needed to hurry. I could be wrong, but the sun was warmer than it had been and the overcast, and therefore the ash clouds, were dissipating, and the weather was certainly going to change. And it might be drastic.

  I ran to the front of the house with the girls at my heels and looked up at the sky to the west. It was at least as bad as I had feared. I could see the sky swirling and rushing northward. The sun was coming out. Not just on our island but over the entire south pacific. It was heating the ocean and the air, just a little but it was enough to create a massive low-pressure system where there hadn’t been one for a long time. Low pressure here meant that higher-pressure from colder climates much farther south would push heavier air from the south northward into the center of the void being created as the warmer air rose from the warmer region. I didn’t know everything about weather, but I knew enough, combined with my physics classes, to theorize that the rising air would be accelerated upward by the winds coming in from the higher-pressure areas. That would create even lower pressures and the cycle would become even more intense very quickly. There were a lot of factors but basically it was simple: warmer air sucked in colder air and it created a massive updraft in the atmosphere. And at the edges, where the cold met the warm, there’s be rain. There’d probably be hail. There was certain to be thunderstorms and lightning.

  I looked for a plan. Did we need to take the branches and mats off the roof? We didn’t have much time if my guesses were right.

  I yelled, “There’s going to be a big storm! We have to get ready. Christie, pull the mats off the roof and throw them in the house. Leave the branches. Allie! Allie, listen to me!”

  Allie was staring at the sky dumbfounded but at my insistence, she turned to look at me.

  I said, “Allie, make sure that the mats are off the windows and door and open the windows wide. Try to block the door open with something so that it can’t close.”

  I knew that if we had a hurricane that the house wouldn’t survive. The atmospheric pressure outside could change dramatically within fractions of a second and if the windows and doors were closed, the house could either explode or implode. At least if the house was open, it might have a chance.

  My next items of concern were the canoe and the water tank. Should I empty the tank, or leave it full? Would the weight of the water make it more stable in a heavy wind, or would that make it more likely to fall over? I didn’t know the answer, but I reasoned it out this way: a strong gust would cause the tank to sway; swaying would slosh the water; the water would rock the tank; and more gusts would make it worse. Maybe if the tank were empty, it would actually be harder to knock over. It might be different if the tank were low on the ground but up in the air, I decided to take a chance that emptying the tank was the best idea.

  I ran to the side of the house and opened the drain all the way. I checked on Christie and helped her drag down the remaining mats and the two of us rushed to throw them in the house. Allie was done with her task by then and I had both girls run down to the water with me. The three of us grabbed the canoe and dragged it as far up the beach as we could, stopping when it was part way under the house.

  The wind was definitely picking up.

  We hurried back in the house and the girls wanted to know what was going on.

  I said, “I think that the overcast and the ash clouds are dissipating. The weather is going to change We might have a hurricane, or something we have never seen before.”

  Allie said, “Like when we first got here?”

  I said, “Yeah, maybe. Anyway, we need to try to be sheltered. I don’t know if the house will be safe or not but it’s our best bet, I think. Grab all of our mats and take them into the middle bedroom. We want to be away from the doors and windows. Girls, I really don’t know how bad this will be. Christie, help me get all the mats and Allie, you get us some food and water. Bring it all to the bedroom.”

  The three of us rushed to our final tasks. When we were done, I checked the windows and confirmed that the door was jammed open, and then we retreated to the bedroom.

  I said, “Leave the door open for now. We’re going to take our best guesses about what will be safest. Pile some of the mats on top of the bed-frame. We might end up hiding under there. Put the food and water under there for now, too.”

  The girls were taking all of this well. There was no surprise there. All of us were used to violent weather, devastation, and death. What they weren’t used to was planning and preparation; I was. The fact that we had a plan seemed to make them excited, as if this was a game that we were getting ready to play. That made it a lot easier on
me. I’d seen plenty of panic and people frozen in place at the prospect of even minor adversity, and this was refreshing. I had worried that I would have to do all the work and take care of two paralyzed and frightened women. Instead, I had a functional team. It gave me a lot of hope for our future survival.

  I realized that I was a bit frightened though. I wasn’t afraid of dying. Truthfully, I wasn’t even afraid of one of the girls dying. But I did have a lingering fear that I didn’t think that I had ever faced before.

  When we had all of our provisions stored in the bedroom, we went back to the porch and sat and watched the sky. It rolled and blew in ways that we had never seen. I tried to explain the weather theory to the girls, and they understood quickly enough. They were very intelligent. They had good high-school educations, and now that they were safe and thinking more clearly, they were easy to work with. That gave me a good measure of hope as well. We had things to accomplish here and I could use as much help as I could get.

  That took me back to my thoughts about the girls plan for us to have more members in our family, or our tribe. I was seeing the utility in that more and more. Right now, Bebe was acting as my agent, handling communications and surveillance with the locals. She was enlisting the people that she trusted to expand her reach on my behalf. Yeah, I couldn’t do what needed to be done if I was alone.

  I felt compassion for Bebe. She had said that she wasn’t happy. She had told us quite a bit, hinting at her situation during our short conversation. Hints and clues were familiar to me. You had to listen to what was said, what wasn’t said, and what wanted to be said but couldn’t be. Everyone had a secret code. What was Bebe trying to tell me? The reason that it was a code was because we often wanted to communicate things that we wouldn’t even tell ourselves.

  Bebe had told me that she was afraid. She needed rules and some kind of order. She wanted to trust me and believe that I would provide leadership, for her if not for everyone. She felt that I could trust her; she had said so. And she had told me something about her alliances and relationships. Clues. The girls in her tribe, the ones in her canoe, didn’t want to come to see me. Bebe wanted to come but they didn’t. That probably meant that they still felt an allegiance, or maybe a bondage, to the men who had the power to make their lives more hellish than it was. Bebe was willing to break that bondage and risk herself for a chance at a better life where I was more in charge. Bebe was giving me power over her and taking it away from the other coaches. That gave me a responsibility to take her under my protection.

  Unless I didn’t want her. I don’t mean sexually. I mean that we don’t always accept a plea for belonging just because someone wants us to. A lot of people here could come and ask for shelter but if I knew that I couldn’t trust them, I’d feel no responsibility to help them at all. Actually, Allie had said it when we had met Bebe and her tribe a week ago. It wasn’t that I couldn’t trust them, it was that I could trust them to do what they would do. So, if someone came and I knew that I could trust them to be selfish or to steal from us or to betray us or to make our lives harder, then I would turn them away. Like Allie had said, I could trust Bebe to be Bebe.

  What did I know about her? What could I trust? I had some ideas. But back to her relationships and alliances. She had declared that her alliance with me was now stronger than her bonds with her own tribe. She had said that she wasn’t happy and didn’t really like them and that they might no longer really trust or like her. She wasn’t acting the way that they wanted her to. And it sounded like she didn’t actually consider any of them her partner or lover. What was she really doing?

  My grandfather taught me what he called his “secret formula” for always knowing exactly why someone acted the way that they did in any specific circumstance.

  He said, “People always do what they perceive to be in their best interest and within their power.”

  It was a powerful principle. And I had found it to be true. The key was that the thing that people felt was in their best interest was almost always whatever would relieve their immediate anxiety. Look for their anxiety and how what they were doing was meant to alleviate it. Then evaluate that within the context of what they felt it was within their power to accomplish. Most often it was our long-term issues that truly needed to be addressed but most people focus on the immediate. A simple example was saving resources. If people were hungry, they ate what they had, even if that meant having nothing to eat the next day. They might be better off to ration what they had and suffer a bit of discomfort for a greater good but to do so took wisdom. Really what it took was to be more anxious about the future than the present. Misers and hoarders would deprive themselves of all kinds of things because of their anxiety for the future. Certainly, it was possible to live a balanced life, investing and consuming, planning and enjoying but to do so you needed a life that was mostly free of immediate anxiety.

  Bebe’s immediate anxiety was fear, based on there being no leadership among the tribes. I bet that she also had anxiety about possibly being alone from now on. Things were changing and she had told me that she no longer fit with her tribe. The coaches were no longer in charge and she was no longer safe. Coach Brown had been murdered. That meant no one was safe now.

  According to the “secret formula”, she had come to me because she felt that it would alleviate her immediate anxiety. Coming to me would provide safety and order. And she had given us another clue about her thinking in all of this; she had asked how people became part of my tribe. That wasn’t idle curiosity. That was to find out whether or not it was “within her power” to become part of my circle of protection. Perhaps even my circle of caring and family. She saw Allie and I take Christie, not because Christie was a trophy but because we wanted to help her and care for her. Bebe had said that she believed that I had the ability to “un-mush girls”. Bebe had to be afraid of being mushed. Their law was “get mushed or die”. Bebe was feeling like she didn’t have a tribe. She needed one because she didn’t want to get mushed or die. There was no secret about why Bebe had come or what she was thinking.

  I laughed to myself for a few seconds. I had read a lot of classic adventure stories over the years. How much trouble would those characters have saved themselves if they’d just sat down and asked why other characters had acted the way that they just had. How much less trouble would Carson of Venus have had if he’d been able to sit down and ask, “Why is the beautiful Duare acting this way?” Or if Dian of Pelucidar had the capacity to ask why David of Earth wasn’t acting according to the local customs? She might have realized that the dude wasn’t from Pelucidar, duh, and was trying to do the best he could and maybe where he was from that’s how you told a girl you like her, and maybe he was insecure because he was infatuated and his immediate anxiety was that he would be rejected by her, and maybe she wouldn’t have done exactly that. And they could have spent the book solving problems together, rather than constantly missing each other's intentions. But Dian always did what was in her best interest too. By rejecting David over some imagined offense, she relieved her anxiety over wanting to be mated to him.

  Crap. This meant that I had to find a way to bring Bebe into my family, if that’s what she truly wanted, and pretending that it was anything else was just drawing out a story that was obviously going that direction. But it still had to be right. Timing was still important. Just because it was what was probably going to happen didn’t mean that it happened right now. And it didn’t mean that I should tell either Bebe or the girls that it was happening, either. Not yet.

  The storm wasn’t as bad as I had feared that it might be. There was a lot of wind but nothing over 40 or 50 miles per hour. The water tank and the roof both held up and there wasn’t any damage to speak of. The wind was steady, blowing toward the north, all day long. The wind caused waves about four to eight feet high, but they were wind driven and moving parallel to our beach, not toward it, so they weren’t a threat to the house. Things calmed down around midnight.

  C
HAPTER Eighteen - Tribal War

  The next morning was trade day. Allie, Christie, and me were in the canoe headed for the trade village about two hours after sunrise. The plan was to arrive about noon.

  I had woken up early and went to the beach and practiced some meditation and Qi Gong to prepare myself before the sun was even up. Today would be different. Today, I would have to fight again. And more than that, I expected to have to negotiate.

  About an hour into our journey, the wind picked up again. This might be a new pattern. A thirty mile-an-hour wind at our back made the trip much faster and easier. We didn’t have to paddle as much but we did need to steer as the waves drove us forward. There were times where we rode the downward slope of a wave for a mile or more at a time, like a surfer. It was only a twenty-mile trip and we arrived on the village beach about an hour and a half before noon.

  There wasn’t a set time for this, but we were earlier than I had planned. It didn’t matter. There were plenty of canoes here on the sand already but no people. We found them at the circle, the old driveway of one of the resorts near the waterfront. I’d say that there were about a hundred people, both men and women. A fight was currently underway.

  When the girls and I approached, a man yelled for quiet and stopped the fight.

  He marched into the center of the circle and shouted, “Well, well. The mighty Kong. Kong, you’re shit, and we aren’t going to take it. You killed Coach Brown and things won’t be the same until you’re dead or mushed. Coach said you can’t be mushed but he was wrong. You will be. I swear, you will, and it won’t be pretty like it usually is. You’re going to bleed and beg.”

  I listened to him talk. When I didn’t move, he continued.

  He said, “So, it’s going to be hard for you. Real bad. You’re going to suffer. Bad.”

  Bebe was right. These people had no leadership. This guy had no plan. He was blustering but had no idea what to actually do. I think that he expected that eventually they’d just mob me, and the people would take care of it, beating me to a pulp as a group.