Stranded

by Melinda Braun

  “Where is everyone else?” Chloe asked, her teeth chattering. “They should have gotten here by now.”

  “I don’t know.” We held hands, but the water was so cold I could barely feel hers. The sky above us boiled with colors. Acid green and orange. Dirty purple and yellow. “I think . . .”

  The sound of a runaway train drowned out my words. All around us the air flattened down, descending from the sky like an enormous fly swatter with a whistling thwack. Trees ripped from the ground and tumbled forward like bowling pins. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. There was no funnel cloud. No twister. No rain. Something sharp hit the back of my head.

  “Duck!” I screamed. “Hold your breath!”

  I went under and tugged at Chloe’s hand until I felt her submerge next to me. Count. Just count. Stay under. Hold your breath. One, one thousand . . .

  I made it to twenty-seven before I surfaced.

  The wind was gone. Waves around us subsided into ripples, the sky overhead mottled like an old bruise. I saw Oscar fifty yards out, treading water. He stared back at the campsite with hard eyes. Amazingly, his glasses had stayed on.

  “Wh-what was that?” Chloe shivered next to me, squeezing my palm. “That didn’t look like a tornado at all.”

  “I know,” I said, spitting out a mouthful of water. “I have no idea what that was.” We waded back up to shore still holding hands.

  “They didn’t come out?” Oscar trudged up beside us.

  “No.” I stared at the destruction in front of us. Huge trees snapped in half and logs the size of small cars littered the slender stretch of beach. A weird blue stick poked up from the sand by my feet. A toothbrush. My toothbrush.

  “This is bad,” Chloe said to no one.

  “I’ll go look,” Oscar said quietly. “You guys stay here.”

  I shook my head. “I’ll go.” I knew not seeing wouldn’t help me. My imagination was always worse.

  “Me too.” Chloe nodded.

  “Hey!” Isaac was about ten yards from shore. “Wait up!”

  I didn’t want to wait, not for him. “C’mon,” I said to Chloe, and tucked my toothbrush in my soggy shirt pocket. There were no more trails back up from the beach, no trail anywhere at all. We had to squeeze single file through the mess, pushing over and under a fallen canopy of leaves and branches.

  The campsite was gone. It was now littered with rocks and resembled a dynamite testing ground. A sleeping bag dangled from a snapped limb thirty feet in the air. A bag of marshmallows impaled by a stick, a lantern with all the glass busted out of it. My eyes glanced over a huge fallen timber, a nylon tent crushed underneath its massive trunk. But when I saw a hiking boot with the leg still attached peeking out from the destroyed tent, I realized I had been wrong.

  Very wrong.

  This time my imagination wasn’t worse. Reality was worse. Much worse. I would never have imagined this. Not in a million years.

  I exhaled as if punched; my legs wobbled underneath me. I’m gonna be sick. A throbbing shudder traveled from my butt up my spine, clicking my teeth together. I had somehow collapsed to the ground. Blinking, I looked up to see Oscar peering down at me.

  “Emma? You all right?”

  “No.” My voice echoed in my ears, like an explosion had gone off next to my head. “No, I’m not.”

  He bent down and gripped my shoulder. “You’re going to be okay.”

  “No,” I said, fighting down the gagging sensation in my throat. “No, I’m not.” I’m never going to be okay.

  Day 3

  Morning

  Don’t look over there. Don’t look don’t look don’t look. Just don’t.

  It was like one of those weird psychological games—don’t think of a white elephant. Or was it a purple hippo?

  Don’t think about the three dead people twenty feet away.

  Dead people. But they weren’t just dead people. They were Chris and Wes and Jeremy. They had families. Friends. We were their friends, even though I only knew them for two days. I needed to think about that. Or maybe I shouldn’t. Maybe that was the worst thing I could do right now. To think about them as people. I didn’t want to start crying. If I started, I wouldn’t be able to stop. I would start screaming instead, that kind of gut-wrenching howl you see people do on the evening news. But I understood their wailing. It vibrated inside me, ready to break through at any moment.

  Chloe cried. Quietly. She wiped away tears with her shirtsleeve, sniffling softly. Oscar’s face alternated between shock and exhaustion. Every few steps he needed to stop and hold on to something. Isaac didn’t speak, at least not as much as normal, especially after he had held up his hand when he found two bodies. Or I should say, parts of bodies.

  “Don’t!” Isaac’s sharp voice tingled my ears. “Don’t come over here.”

  Chloe obeyed. She sat down on an uprooted trunk, eyes blinking.

  I did not.

  Neither did Oscar.

  But after I saw, I wished I had listened. Something pink and glistening lay in the dirt in front of us.

  “What is that?” My voice sounded dangerously close to shrieking.

  Oscar inhaled sharply, then covered his mouth with both hands.

  “Something that’s supposed to be inside someone’s body,” Isaac said. “Not lying in the dirt.”

  “We should try to find everything,” Oscar suggested. “And wrap it up.”

  “Wrap it up?” Horrified, I stared at him, thinking I had heard wrong.

  “There’s a bunch of . . . stuff missing.” Isaac waved his hands. “Do you want to go and look for it? Put it in a baggie?”

  “I don’t know.” Oscar shook his head. “We can’t leave them like this.”

  “Yes, we can,” I heard myself say. “They’re dead, and there’s nothing we can do about it.” I pointed at the dirty pink thing. “I’m not touching that!”

  Oscar and Isaac stared at me as if I was the one missing my brain. Neither of them spoke.

  We stood that way for a while, and I wondered if this was just another nightmare I couldn’t wake up from. I was afraid to break the silence, afraid to move, afraid that this really had happened, was happening right now. “What about Chris?” Oscar asked finally.

  Is he asking me?

  “There’s no way we can move that tree.” Isaac crossed his arms. “It would take a bulldozer.”

  “Can we dig around underneath to get him out?”

  “Maybe. But what are you going to dig with? Your hands?”

  Oscar shrugged, mouth open, bewildered and defeated. It didn’t seem right to leave Chris like that. But what could we do about it?

  It was a horrific situation, but horror can last only so long. Eventually it runs out of gas, and then you’re just left feeling sick and exhausted. Shaky. So tired it was like being drunk. Dr. Nguyen called it an adrenaline hangover. The aftershocks. The tremors. The headache. A physical earthquake inside—the sour stomach, snaking coils of ice, waves of sweat, a thick, swollen tongue in a dry mouth. We’d all been wandering around in circles for hours, and now the sun was up, the morning light only illuminating the disaster. Isaac kept walking around saying, “Jesus Christ.” And “Jesus Mary Joseph, son of a bitch.” In some way it sounded like a prayer.

  But Jesus, Mary, and Joseph weren’t coming. Not today.

  I felt nothing. Numb and dumb. That was me—a robot. I didn’t know if it was a good thing, but it was definitely a defense mechanism. I couldn’t think of what to do. I had no plan.

  I stared at the ground, not really seeing anything definite, just blobs of color and light. A silvery sparkle caught my eye, and I bent down. Tinfoil. A log of something wrapped in tinfoil, barely dented and covered by leaves and dirt. Food. An enchilada, I thought. I picked it up and put it back in the dirty cooler. Food. I should pick up the food. It sounded a lot better than looking for missing body parts.

  Chloe slid off her stump and joined me. In twenty minutes we had gathered the following:

/>   A pack of marshmallows (only a few holes in the bag).

  A box of Quaker instant oatmeal (variety pack).

  Three tinfoil-wrapped enchiladas.

  A box of chocolate chip granola bars.

  A squashed package of cheddar cheese slices.

  Five bruised apples. A spotty banana.

  A tin of smoked sausages.

  A single-serving bag of Cheerios.

  A fork, a tin pot with a broken handle, and a stainless-steel coffee mug (Chris’s).

  A half-empty bag of trail mix.

  A four-pack of fruit-cocktail cups.

  We walked around like that, silently gathering anything we could. Oscar picked up strewn clothing, T-shirts and sandals and plaid flannels. A pair of swimming trunks. A bottle of sunscreen. A bottle of saline solution. A flashlight. A box of tampons. A dented can of Off! Sunglasses with one lens missing. Sleeping bags. A shredded flap of tent.

  Isaac sat on a stump, alternating between watching us salvage and watching the sky.

  “Don’t you want to help?” Chloe asked finally. She picked up a plastic comb in front of him. It was hers and she slid it into her back pocket.

  “Not really,” Isaac said.

  “Do you always have to be a dick?”

  “Only on special occasions.” Isaac tilted his chin back up. “I also like to make sure that if a tree limb falls down it’s not going to land on me.”

  That made us all look up.

  I hadn’t thought about that. Really, how many people do? Most people never look up, too busy with what is in front of their face.

  I scanned the snapped limbs above me with renewed interest. There was a light breeze, but it was cool, not like the muggy wind from the storm. The sky was clear, a smooth and solid blanket of blue. No clouds.

  I sniffed. Lake water. Ferns and pine. Cedar and moss. If I closed my eyes, I could convince myself the storm hadn’t happened. Whatever it had been—a tornado or a freak wind—was gone.

  “What about the canoes?” Chloe glanced from the treetops to Isaac’s sullen face.

  “What about them?”

  “We’ll need at least one to get back.”

  “Back?”

  “We can’t stay here.”

  “Yes we can. And we should,” Isaac said. “They know where we are, and they’ll know where to find us.”

  “I found one canoe,” Oscar said. “It looked like an aluminum can someone stepped on.” He pointed into the underbrush. “There’s another one over there. But it’s about a hundred feet up in a pine tree.”

  The kayak was crushed as well, the Kevlar hull shattered underneath the same enormous trunk lying on Chris’s tent. What would have happened if I hadn’t needed to go to the bathroom? Would Isaac and Oscar have woken us? Doubtful. I turned in a wide circle, recognizing nothing. Branches were everywhere, limbs stacked on top of each other like fallen dominoes.

  Would we have been crushed? Impaled? Would a tree limb have skewered me like a human kabob? Would my skull have been cracked open like a coconut?

  Stop it. Stop it now. I sat down on the cooler, suddenly hot with nausea.

  “There’s one more, then,” Chloe said. “We need to find it.”

  “Be my guest.” Isaac swept his arms open.

  Chloe shook her head and stalked past me, muttering, “Useless.”

  I got back up and continued my scavenge, tugging the cooler behind me as I walked. A flip-flop. A bar of soap. A contact lens case. A stainless-steel wristwatch. It must have belonged to Chris. Nobody I knew wore watches anymore, at least no one under forty. Everybody used phones. I checked it. Still worked, ticking the seconds at a steady pace. His family will want this. It’s not much, but it’s something. I tucked it into my pocket.

  “Phones.” I straightened up, suddenly hopeful. “Phones.”

  Isaac looked at me like I was mildly insane. “What’s that?”

  “Where are the cell phones?” I didn’t wait for his answer. “That one bag. The orange one. Waterproof, right? We need to find it.”

  “I’ve been looking,” Oscar said, walking back into the campsite, his arms full of dirty and wrinkled clothes. “I haven’t seen it.”

  “It could be anywhere,” Isaac said. “It could have blown into the lake.”

  “No,” said Chloe. “It was probably in Chris’s tent.”

  Nobody responded. Because nobody wanted to go back over there.

  “If they are,” Isaac said, “they’re probably destroyed.”

  “We should go and look.”

  “I did.” Isaac stared at her, disturbed. “They aren’t there.”

  “How can you be so sure?”

  “I am sure.”

  “But you—”

  “Go yourself if you don’t believe me!” Isaac roared. “Go and look! I dare you.”

  I sat back down, feeling like I should eat something. Or maybe I shouldn’t eat anything. I needed water. I wished for something a little stronger. Bourbon. Vodka. Gin. I wanted to puke. I leaned forward and pinched the bridge of my nose.

  “You okay?” Oscar sounded concerned.

  Do I look okay? “Mmm-hmm.”

  “Fine!” Chloe shouted, and stomped over in the direction of the tent. She climbed over the limb on the far side and disappeared. I tried to think about what she would do when she saw it. Scream? Faint? I didn’t have to wonder long.

  When someone vomits, it’s a unique sound, and even though everyone does it a little differently, no one needs an explanation. Like the wailing on the news, there’s not much lost in translation.

  After a few minutes she climbed back over the tree and wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. She didn’t look at us, and we didn’t look at her. We all just stared at the ground. Thankfully, Isaac didn’t say anything. No one did.

  Day 3

  Evening

  My shadow dissolved slowly in the sand, and I when I finally looked up, only a half-light was left in the sky, fading with each passing second.

  Chloe sat down next to me. “How you doing, Em?”

  Em. Like my friends used to call me. Lucy always called me Emmy.

  I shook my head and swallowed.

  Chloe sighed. “Yeah, me too.”

  We looked for movement on the water. No loons. No frogs. No fish jumping the surface. Not even a bug.

  “I think we’ve picked up as much stuff as we can,” she said. “No thanks to Captain Asshole, of course.”

  I snorted, burying my face in my elbow. I shouldn’t laugh at a time like this. Then again, maybe that was the only thing left to do.

  “Did the captain decide on a course of action?”

  “I guess we’re staying put for now.”

  “Do you think anyone knows what happened?”

  “I hope so. Chris said . . .” Chloe’s voice cracked on his name. “He said we were remote, and we haven’t seen anyone for a whole day. But you think there would be a few campsites close by?”

  “Maybe Oscar knows,” I said. “He was looking at the map a lot last night.”

  “That’s what we really need to find,” Chloe sighed. “The map.”

  “You didn’t find it?”

  She shook her head. “It’s probably ripped to shreds, or stuck up in a tree somewhere.” She kicked her boot in the sand. “Or we need a compass. Or a phone. My phone had a compass. A GPS.”

  “Mine did too.”

  The setting sun was a fireball in the sky, sinking quickly behind the trees, and we watched it turn from a bright half circle to a glowing crescent to a sliver of hot orange fingernail. “That must be west, right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “What are you two doing?” Isaac’s voice was loud. “Lezzing out?”

  “You wish.” Chloe flipped her finger at him, not bothering to turn around.

  “Whatever,” Isaac grumbled. “It’s time for a powwow.” He didn’t wait for a reply but slipped back over a log.

  “Who died and made him king?” Chloe asked. And
then I immediately realized the literalness of the question. Someone had died. Three someones, actually. And our leader was dead.

  I got up. “What happens now?”

  “Maybe Captain A has a plan.”

  “I hope he came up with a good one.”

  “I doubt it.” Chloe shook her head, unconvinced. “But I guess there’s a first time for everything.”

  “I guess there is.” I pulled her up; she squeezed my hand, and we walked back to the campsite in silence.

  Isaac stood where the center of the campfire had been, the ground charred black under his boots. Oscar sat next to the refilled cooler and the pile of now folded clothes, and I went and stood next to him. Chloe pressed her back up against a trunk; the splintered wall of broken limbs and sticks around us made me think we were trapped in some sort of prehistoric bird nest.

  “Okay,” he began. “We’ve gathered as many supplies—”

  “You did?” Chloe crossed her arms. “I thought you were just supervising.”

  “I was thinking.”

  “Oh. I see.”

  “And I’ve decided we should stay put.”

  “Is this gonna be a vote?”

  Isaac shrugged. He clearly didn’t care about being democratic. To him, this was a dictatorship.

  “Shouldn’t we go back?” Oscar asked. “At least to an area that’s not like this?”

  “We don’t have a map,” Isaac reminded him. “We don’t have canoes. Even if we had one, we couldn’t portage over that.” He pointed at the wall of broken trees. “One canoe for four people? And our gear? Someone would have to swim every lake. That’s hypothermia in twenty minutes.”

  Chloe looked down at her boots. None of us could argue with that.

  “So we agree?” Isaac asked. “We stay here and wait.”

  “How long do you think it will take them to find us?” Oscar examined the contents of the cooler, obviously concerned with the food-and-water situation. My stomach growled.