Survival

by Gordon Korman

  Ian built three more stills, so one person had to maintain the fires and keep adding seawater to the pots. This assignment also included emptying the bowls of freshly distilled water into the lifeboat’s keg.

  Each fishing trip began with a spirited round of rock-paper-scissors to determine who would perform the disgusting task of baiting the hooks. This was a job nobody wanted, because, as Luke put it, “The worms are bigger than the fish.”

  Charla didn’t use bait at all. She preferred the challenge of swimming in the ocean and snaring her fish with a lightning-quick hand.

  J.J. volunteered for fishing every day, but spent very little time with his hook in the water. He had discovered sea cucumbers, and was fascinated and delighted by their life process.

  “Picture a bag of guts with a hole at each end,” he explained. “The water goes straight through it. But when some poor sap gets beached, it just sits there, full of water. Watch this.”

  He picked up the creature, aimed it like a water pistol, and squeezed. Instantly, the sea cucumber emptied itself in a thin stream that hit Charla full in the face.

  She pushed J.J. into the surf and held him under.

  Lyssa hauled him out of the drink. “I guess Charla isn’t interested in marine biology,” she sympathized.

  Ian was in charge of food gathering because he was the only person who could tell what was edible. The good news was that food was everywhere, even on the walls of their home. They would wake up each morning to find the lifeboat covered in giant snails.

  “They’re a delicacy, you know,” Ian told them, gathering an armload, “and a good source of protein.”

  “In your dreams,” said everybody.

  But after bananas and coconuts three times a day, most of them were ready to try anything.

  When she wasn’t in the jungle looking for her brother, Lyssa spent most of her time tinkering with the lifeboat’s scorched and broken radio. She was a straight-A student with a real knack for electronics and machinery.

  They were surviving, keeping busy, over-coming obstacles. The depression would come suddenly, unexpectedly, without warning. Charla might reach up to smooth her hair, feel the stiff, salt-encrusted tangle, and burst into tears. The crying would sometimes last for hours. Or Ian would grow suddenly silent and sit for half a day, staring morosely out to sea, visualizing who knew what. Any mention of Will could set Lyssa off.

  For J.J., it would start innocently enough. He’d be talking about a great pizza place he knew in L.A. But then, forty-five minutes later, he’d be sitting there on the sand, his arms wrapped around himself straitjacket-style, still mumbling about double-cheese and pepperoni.

  Charla ate less, exercised more, and blew up at anybody who dared mention it.

  “Why don’t you just keep on swimming?” J.J. suggested. “At your pace, you should hit the Oregon Coast in another three years.”

  “I should hit your ugly face in another three seconds,” she retorted.

  “Take it easy,” soothed Luke.

  J.J. turned on him, blue eyes blazing. “Who died and left you God?”

  And before Luke knew it, he was shouting, “The captain did, that’s who! And if you hadn’t decided to run up the sails in a gale, he’d be alive, we’d still have a boat, and none of us would be having this conversation.”

  Luke watched in angry satisfaction as J.J.’s face drained of all color. It was the one topic J.J. couldn’t smirk away. The tears were already on the way when he started running. At the edge of the trees, he turned and spat a single word back at Luke: “Convict!”

  And then Luke was chasing him, intent on war. But the low vines tripped him up and he landed hard, raging at the sky. “No!!”

  Wasn’t this just perfect? Now — now, of all times — everyone was going nuts! Didn’t they see that they had to hold it together if they were going to find Will and get off this rock? Why can’t they be more like me? Luke thought. I’m calm! Steady! Balanced! Sensible —

  At the sudden pain in his hands, he looked down. His knuckles were skinned and bleeding. With each thought, he had been having a boxing match with a tree trunk.

  Sensible and steady. Yeah, right.

  J.J. didn’t reappear until late that night. He stepped into the lifeboat and tapped Luke on the shoulder. “I’m on fishing tomorrow.”

  “Okay,” Luke replied. “I’ll work the stills.”

  For once, he was grateful there were so many chores.

  There was one final task that all the castaways kept up day to day. No matter what other job was in progress, five pairs of ears were always listening for the drone of airplane engines that would mean the smugglers were leaving the island. Until those men were gone, the shipwrecked crew of the Phoenix could not light signal fires, or write distress messages in the sand. They would never be rescued if they continued to be forced into hiding.

  “When are they going to scram?” asked Lyssa in exasperation. “They’ve got their tusks and their horns. What are they waiting for?”

  “That’s what we have to find out,” Luke said decisively.

  So the next morning, Luke and Charla set off for the other side of the island to spy on their unwanted neighbors. Two hours later, they returned, trembling.

  “They’re searching the jungle!” Charla rasped. “They’ve got that Doberman sniffing the ground to pick up our scent!”

  “You mean they know we’re here?” asked Lyssa in horror.

  “The dog definitely smells something when it sniffs someplace we’ve been,” Luke told them. “But those guys can’t be sure what they’re looking for.”

  “The island’s not that big,” Ian said nervously. “Sooner or later, I mean, even if it’s just by dumb luck — ”

  He never finished the sentence. He didn’t have to. The five castaways stood rooted in the sand as the thought began to sink in.

  They were being hunted.

  They called it the two-minute drill.

  The signal came from Charla, atop a palm tree — the hooting of an owl, a sound that would never be heard on a tropical island. That set the vanishing process in motion. The fires were extinguished, the stills folded up and buried in the sand. A few sweeps of a giant fern and their footprints were gone too, leaving a deserted beach.

  Two quick kicks took care of the supports for the sun canopy, and the lifeboat lay flat. Ready hands drew a leafy blanket of woven vines and palm fronds over it. Suddenly, the black rubber craft was gone, replaced by the green-brown colors of the jungle. Finally, the castaways themselves disappeared, melting into the dense underbrush.

  There was the electronic beep of a digital stopwatch. “One-fifty-seven,” Ian reported. “Our best time yet.”

  Subdued cheering and a few backslaps as the heads popped up again.

  Luke wasn’t happy. “We can make ourselves disappear, but we can’t hide our smell. The dog’s nose won’t be fooled.”

  Ian looked thoughtful. “What if we set out a few fish heads and tails and guts on the beach? That would be a strong enough scent to confuse the dog.”

  “It’ll also gas us out of here,” Lyssa noted, making a face.

  “We can keep it wrapped up in one of the ponchos,” Luke decided. “We’ll open it only when we hear the signal.”

  It was agreed that two-person scout teams would be dispatched to keep an eye on the smugglers. Lyssa objected. This would distract them from the search for Will. But the others overruled her. They hadn’t seen Will in five days and had no idea where he was. For all they knew, he was on the other side of the island where the floatplanes were beached. They were as likely to spot him there as anywhere.

  “That’s another reason to spy on those guys,” Luke argued. “To make sure they haven’t found Will.”

  Luke and Ian had been scouting for over an hour before they spotted the Doberman. They immediately pulled back, ducking behind a dense stand of ferns. Red Hair had the dog on a leash, and two other men were with him. All three were armed.

&nbs
p; “You were right,” whispered Ian. “They’re looking for something.”

  They followed along for a while, making sure that nothing was moving in the direction of the castaways’ camp. When the dog began to run in circles, barking excitedly, they knew they had to retreat.

  Ian frowned. “Three of them out here. How many are with the planes?”

  Luke shrugged. “One way to find out.”

  They backtracked. Staying low, they eased themselves down the slope to their spying place overlooking the cove. The two boys counted and delivered their tallies at the same time: three — two men on the beach, and Mr. Big sitting half in and half out of the smaller plane. They couldn’t see his face, but his thick legs and white suit identified him.

  In all this time, not one of the traffickers had changed clothes. Which meant …

  “They weren’t planning to stay here,” Luke whispered. “They’re only hanging around to make sure there’s no one else on the island.”

  Ian was confused. “Where do they sleep? There’s no campsite. And they can’t all fit in the planes — not lying down, anyway.”

  It was a good question. They eyeballed every inch of the cove. There was the lagoon, the rocky jetty, a narrow beach, and coral bluffs leading up to the edge of the jungle. No camp.

  “We’re missing something,” Luke murmured.

  And then he saw the footprints in the sand. They were mostly heading in one direction. They ended where the beach did, of course. But Luke could envision the trail leading up the slope and into the jungle. The entry point was perhaps a quarter mile from where he and Ian lay hidden.

  There had to be something there — something that was important to these men.

  Carefully, silently, they picked their way around the apron of the cove. The jungle became so dense that they were doing more wading than walking. Their progress slowed to almost nothing. That was why Luke didn’t injure himself when he bumped straight into it.

  “A wall?” Ian gasped.

  Three steps before, it had been invisible, knit into the fabric of the rain forest. But here it was, the curved corrugated metal siding of a Quonset hut. A big one.

  Luke and Ian stared at each other in mute wonder. Their island — isolated, deserted, and empty of any hint of civilization — had a building on it! It was mind-blowing.

  Luke put his finger to his lips. Then the two of them crept down the length of the structure. Cautiously, they turned the corner and found themselves facing a gray metal front with a door and two windows. A rusted sign, faded and barely legible, read: UNITED STATES ARMY AIR CORPS.

  “An Air Force base?” Luke breathed. “In the middle of a jungle?”

  Ian pointed to the sign. “Army Air Corps. They haven’t been called that for fifty years. This area could have been clear back then, and the jungle just grew up around it.”

  Luke sidled up to the streaked and smeared window and peered in. The jungle was growing in there too, blasted up through rotted floor planking. There was no one inside.

  “Let’s check it out,” he whispered.

  They opened the door — someone had recently oiled the hinges — and slipped through. Desks, chalkboards, filing cabinets. Yellowed old papers and file folders were scattered everywhere.

  “Look!” exclaimed Ian.

  Sleeping bags were spread out on the old benches. A few beer bottles, empty food cans, and dozens of cigarette butts littered two desks that had been pushed together. The place smelled of stale smoke.

  This was the traffickers’ camp, all right. This — what was it? Military, definitely. Old and abandoned, for sure. But a base? It was more like an office.

  Ian touched Luke’s arm and pointed to a bulletin board suspended from one of the curved walls. Tacked up there was a faded diagram of a hut exactly like the one they were standing in. Two other huts, much smaller, stood behind it. These three buildings seemed to be the extent of this installation.

  “Did they have bases this small?” Luke asked.

  The younger boy shrugged and drew Luke’s attention to something else on the board — a map of the Pacific. Tiny pins representing boats and planes were stuck all over the chart. Fallen ones lay on the floor in front of it.

  “World War Two,” he noted.

  There were a couple of private offices and, farther back, a barracks room with lines of bunks. Luke wondered why the smugglers were sleeping on hard benches when real beds were right here. Then he got a closer look at the mattresses. They were ripped to shreds and alive with thousands of bugs. He shuddered and returned to where Ian was flipping through file folders.

  “Find anything?”

  Ian shook his head. “Requisitions for toilet paper and shaving cream. They needed a part for their movie projector in 1945 — ” He picked up an envelope marked TOP SECRET that had once been closed with an important-looking seal. A dozen or so stapled pages were inside. The first line caught his eye: Re: Deployment of Junior.

  His eyes widened like saucers. “Junior!”

  “Junior?” repeated Luke. “Who’s Junior?”

  The sound they heard next drove every other thought from their minds — the barking of a dog.

  They ran for the door. Gruff voices outside. The men were right there! Luke grabbed Ian and spun him around.

  The terror was plain in the younger boy’s eyes. He mouthed the words, Back door?

  As they sped to the rear of the building, Luke knew that the answer to that question would mean the difference between life and death.

  Heart sinking, he faced the back wall. No door; just two windows. Jammed and warped, the first one wouldn’t budge.

  The smugglers clattered in the front door, accompanied by their barking dog.

  “Shut up, mutt,” came an unfriendly growl.

  The second window moved only an inch before seizing up against a thick vine.

  Ian began to shake.

  That was when Luke looked down. The metal wall of the hut had come away from the decaying floor about eight inches. It was their only chance. Desperately, he shoved Ian into the gap and followed. The two wriggled through to the outside and crawled off into the jungle. There was no running. The foliage was far too thick. But however slow, it felt like escape — desperate movement, propelled by panic. And when the underbrush thinned, they sprinted headlong, tripping and falling, and getting up to run some more.

  They were halfway home before Luke managed to get his hands on Ian’s shoulders to slow the boy down.

  “Ian!” he panted. “What was all that back there? Who’s Junior?”

  Still clutching the top-secret envelope and papers, Ian struggled to catch his breath.

  “A bomb,” he wheezed finally. “An atomic bomb.”

  Luke stared at him. “An atomic bomb?”

  Ian nodded fervently. “It was all in this documentary on the Manhattan Project, where they invented the first nuclear weapons back in World War Two. They were supposed to build three bombs, code-named Fat Man, Little Boy, and Junior. But the war ended after Fat Man and Little Boy were dropped. So Junior never had to be built.” He waved the envelope in Luke’s face. “That installation was going to be used to launch Junior, the third atomic bomb.”

  Luke looked doubtful. “And the Air Force just forgot this place?”

  “It wasn’t a real base,” Ian reasoned. “There were only bunks for about twenty or thirty people. All they needed were a couple of planes and someplace to land them.”

  “The concrete!” Luke exclaimed. “That was their runway, right? And it just got busted up and overgrown after fifty years?”

  “Probably,” Ian agreed. He looked scared. “You don’t think they’re going to miss this envelope, do you? The smugglers, I mean? That would tip them off that we’re here.”

  “They don’t care about paper,” Luke assured him. “Not unless there’s money printed on it. But, man, was that a close call, or what?”

  “I’m still shaking,” Ian admitted.

  Soon they spotted C
harla in the lookout tree. “What took you guys so long?”

  “Don’t ask,” groaned Luke.

  The powwow was held on the beach over bananas and coconut milk.

  “You know, this is a really fascinating history lesson,” yawned J.J., “but who cares about what happened in some ancient war? Come up with a fully charged cell phone, and you’ve got my attention.”

  “Unfortunately,” Luke said grimly, “that old war affects us more than we think. Tell them, Ian.”

  “I’ve been going through those papers,” Ian explained tragically. “As near as I can tell, this installation was so top secret that they picked an island that was never on any maps. So I don’t think we should depend on anyone coming to rescue us because — technically — we’re nowhere.”

  Luke could almost hear a slurping sound as the very last ounce of hope was sucked out of the castaways.

  They fell into a gloomy silence that was broken only by the steady lapping of the ocean.

  * * *

  Will’s stomach yawned wide open, sore and empty.

  It was the mac and cheese, he thought miserably. Before that day, he hadn’t known how starved he really was. But the mac and cheese — that beautiful, delicious, terrible mac and cheese! Bliss for a few hours. And then the payback.

  The meal had served only to awaken the monster of his hunger. That’s how it seemed to him — a living creature, loose inside him and impossible to control. It had started as a rumbling in his belly and had grown to a roar that was drowning out everything else around him. He had tried gorging himself on bananas — dozens of them. But the sheer quantity had made him sick. And still his hunger raged. No, it was beyond hunger now. It was desperation.

  A numbing terror rose from the tips of his toes as the fact of his helplessness became clear. He was becoming weaker every hour. Soon he wouldn’t be able to act, to rescue Lyssa, or even to save himself. All alone in the jungle, there was only one place this could lead, one way it could end.

  He was going to die.