I took up the slack in the line and secured it to the cleat. Racing aft, I grabbed another line from one of the seat lockers and looped it around the stern cleat. Taking the free end, I jumped off the back and tied it off to the pine at the edge of the beach.
Daniel stood in the cockpit, studying the shoreline. I wondered if he had already started regretting his decision to come along. The strip of sand had few enticing features. Barely deep enough to call a beach, the bay looked like a trash dump. Bottles, jugs, bits of foam cups, torn sections of netting, and other debris littered the strand as far as I could see. Nestled among them, huge clumps of dead reeds and rotting grass painted a thick black swatch along the line where water met island.
“Well,” I said under my breath, “we’re here.”
I didn’t have time to consider anything else. Brush rustled behind me. I turned as a man and woman stepped out of the undergrowth. Both looked lost somewhere in their twenties.
The man waved. He stood close to six feet tall, had wild brown hair reminiscent of a Rastafarian, and a thick beard forming on his face. He wore shorts that had been cut from a pair of jeans. Time and the washing machine had left the edges raggedy at the bottom and laced with a white fringe that stood out against his deeply tanned skin. The light breeze drifting in off the ocean ruffled through a sleeveless white t-shirt that looked two sizes too big. His bare feet left a perfectly defined trail in the wet sand.
The girl wore a pink hooded sweat shirt, flip flops, and what appeared to be a thin pair of man’s sleeping pants. Despite the extra clothing, she looked cold. She had her hair pulled back into a tight ponytail. Her face carried a pinched and worried look.
“Name’s Joshua,” the man said, walking forward and holding out his hand. “I guess you’re stuck too, huh?”
I studied them both warily. On a city street, I wouldn’t have given either a second thought. The brain expects social interaction in those situations. It doesn’t on a secluded beach miles away from anything else. The pair stepping out of the bushes had triggered alarms on both the flight and fight sides of the fence.
Fortunately, sometimes reading people isn’t much more difficult than looking them directly in the eye. His didn’t waver or shift, and carried a sense of contentment.
I reached out and shook his hand.
“Stuck?”
The girl frowned.
“You haven’t heard?”
“Heard what?”
She licked at lips that looked raw from sun and salt.
“The President banned travel this afternoon - all of it. If you can’t get home by noon tomorrow, you are required to stay where you are. After that, no one can travel more than five miles from their present location. The government also instituted a curfew. Anyone caught out past ten at night can be arrested.”
“That’s not the word he used,” Joshua broke in. “He said, ‘detained,’ like in a camp somewhere - and that’s if they don’t shoot you.”
The look on his face festered somewhere between rebellion and fear.
I wanted to ask them why they were on Portsmouth in the first place. The news had carried threats of a travel ban for two weeks. Interstates had been virtually empty on my way down, perhaps in some degree from the constant warnings, but more so from the threat of the disease. The philosophical and I’m-ok, you’re-ok types could ruminate all they wanted about positive reinforcement. Fear was a powerful motivator. Nothing drove the learning curve quite as succinctly as the thought of dying.
I wanted to ask them, but couldn’t without enduring the same scrutiny. After all, I was stuck with them.
“When did he make the announcement?”
The girl pulled her arms across her stomach. “About thirty minutes ago. The National Guard, police, Homeland Security, and FEMA are all mobilizing to enforce the ban. They’re setting up distribution points for food and emergency supplies.”
“You said ‘noon tomorrow,’” I pointed out. “What happens between now and then?”
Joshua hitched up his shorts.
“If you can get home by then, you’re supposed to go. At noon tomorrow, all travel stops.” He took a deep breath. “We heard that they’re expecting a thousand people to be dead by nightfall.”
I wiped at sweat starting to bead across my forehead. “They say how long the ban would be in place?”
His shoulders moved in a slight shrug.
“The government is estimating four to eight weeks, but no one really knows.”
Something flickered at the corner of my vision. I turned to see Elsie standing in the stern with Daniel.
“We don’t know if they’re going to make us stay here,” the girl said. “We’re going to have a meeting up in the old town tonight. You’re welcome to come.”
“Who’s we?” I asked her.
“There are six of us. A small group of kayakers has been camping down near the water on the backside of town. There are three of them, two men and a woman.”
She hesitated. “We’ve not talked to them yet. Joshua and I were heading down when we saw you coming in.”
I pointed to Daniel and Elsie. “There are three of us. We saw a group down on the southern end. I counted nine there. We passed three camps spread across about fifteen miles of beach. I only saw people at one of them though.”
The point at the end of the island had been clear when Angel had passed a few minutes earlier.
“Where’s your camp?”
Joshua pointed back towards the ocean. “We’re up under a willow at the edge of the beach. Like Denise said, we saw you pass. We thought we’d come down and say hello.”
I nodded, trying to remember the stretch of beach just before the inlet. I couldn’t. I had been too focused on navigating the narrow waterway.
“What time are you folks meeting?”
“Seven o’clock,” he noted and turned to point up over the brush. “The old town is wide open. The houses are scattered around with a lot of room in between. We’re going to meet in the center.”
I looked back toward Angel.
“Well, let me talk to them. They’re local. I imagine we’ll be heading back tonight. If not tonight, then we’ll be under way before dawn in the morning.”
The girl raised her eyebrows in a questioning look.
“I can get them home before noon tomorrow if we leave early enough,” I explained. “We made the crossing today in about five hours. I don’t think the woman will want to leave tonight. If not, we’ll be at your meeting.”
Joshua took her by the arm. “Sounds good. We’ll let you get settled.”
I watched them go, waiting until they had disappeared into the brush. When they were out of sight, I undid the line I’d brought ashore and headed back to the boat.
Elsie watched me approach with a frown. “Why you bringing the line back in? Who were those people?”
“Campers,” I told her. “We need to talk, Elsie. The president issued a travel ban at his news conference. You have until noon tomorrow to get home. The only question is, are we going tonight or leaving early in the morning?”
Life is funny. A decision that seems sane and reasonable at the moment can look idiotic later. I knew how fickle the weather could be along this stretch of coast. Elsie knew better than I. We should have left that night, dealt with the darkness, and made the crossing back to Atlantic.
We didn’t. Everyone was tired. Everyone wanted off the boat. She wanted to walk Daniel through the old graveyard and point out the family who had lived and died there. Elsie reasoned and I agreed with her, that we could leave early, make most of the run in daylight and have time to spare.
With the sun hanging low across the sound and a chilly wind springing up out of the east, the plan sounded good. To be honest, anything sounded more appealing than turning around and running the same stretch of water that we had just crossed. I hadn’t slept much past five a.m. in twenty years. To me, the plan of action had simple bullet points: get up early, make a pot of coffee, an
d do a full speed run back along the same route we had followed coming over.
Six hours tops, I thought as I added up the times in my head. If we left by six a.m., I should have them on the mainland by eleven, and headed back before noon.
It seemed simple.
I hadn’t trusted simple math. I don’t know why I chose to trust a simple plan. All the decisions, all the points on a timeline that required the fates of three people to converge at exactly the right moment, had conspired to put me on the island with Elsie and Daniel.
In the weeks to follow, I often wondered if the gathering of the right people at the right time had been more than chance. By the time I learned the truth, I didn’t want to know the answer. I wanted something I would never have again.
Freedom.
Author’s note:
I appreciate all the kind comments. Visit my website at http://www.michael-stark.com/ .
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The Island - Part 1 Page 10