Conner holds his palms up, asking for patience. “We can create a raft to float across the lagoon if someone really needs to get to the rest of the island.”
Pamela steps forth from the crowd. “And what’s to prevent Action and his men from creating their own rafts to cross the lagoon and attack us?”
“We are,” Conner responds with a flinty smile.
Despite their obvious dismay, the other guests respond to Conner with timid nods. Most of them make poor warriors, and they seem to know it, but they have no other option if they want to survive.
“We’ll need to make weapons,” I say, brainstorming ideas. “We can use gasoline to make Molotov cocktails, and steak knives taped to the ends of sticks to make spears.”
Conner rubs his hands together in approval. “Exactly. Right, and the sooner the better.”
Jonas snaps to attention now that he has the chance to assists our plans. “Come, we have cans of gasoline in a storage shed—we can make those cocktails you spoke of.”
“And everyone else, look around the resort—gather anything that can be used as a weapon. Rocks, sticks, knives—anything,” Conner decrees.
As we disburse on our errands the tower across the bay collapses into a blazing heap.
Dawn. It has been well past twenty-four hours since I had any sleep. It is a wonder I am still standing. A moment ago, I was alert; scrounging up empty bottles for Molotov cocktails, but now weariness descends on me like an avalanche. I stumble to my bungalow to rest. Candle light already glows from within.
I push open the door to find Gwen gathering the last of her things.
“Oh, I didn’t think you’d be leaving so soon,” I say. I do not know why I am surprised—Gwen said she would be leaving, but the suddenness of it has me unprepared.
Gwen dumps a handful of beauty products into a bag. “I thought about it and realized you’re right: Pamela shouldn’t be alone right now. My company will be good for her. I ran it past her and she agreed.”
“Yes…yes, of course,” I stammer. “I just thought this would come about later.”
She smiles softly. “I’m sure you’ll be glad to finally have me out of your hair.”
Gwen seems so nonchalant, as though were are not man and wife severing the last symbol of our marriage, but something akin to college roommates, looking to the future with jaunty cheer as we part company at the end of the school semester.
“Well, it will be a pleasant change not to have all your lotions and perfumes cluttering up the bathroom,” I quip, affecting a jovial spirit I do not really feel.
“There you go,” she laughs. Was there a trace of sadness in her tone? I cannot tell.
She lugs her baggage to the door.
“Here, let me help you with that,” I offer.
“No, no. I got it,” she declines, but then stands in the door looking over the room, a rueful expression on her face.
“Gwen?”
She blinks and the expression disappears. “Just checking to make sure I didn’t forget anything.”
“Ah, okay,” I nod, and as she turns to leave I add, “Hey, by the way, we were a good team out there.”
“Out there?”
“Yeah, you know—out there with the dogs.”
She nods slowly. “Yeah, Phillip, we were a good team.”
Then she hauls her baggage away.
Late morning. I sit on the beach under the shade of a palm pouring gasoline into empty bottles and fitting the caps with strips of torn sheets. Smoke from the smoldering hotel spreads a sulfurous haze across the bay. The stench of burnt things is strong enough to taste it. This is the first morning since my arrival at the resort that the clouds of white butterflies that flit by the shore fail to arrive. No doubt, the smoky fog keeps them away. Dellas sits cross-legged in the sand and helps me create the incendiary bottles. While she works, she sings an island song about a man happily cheating on his wife only to discover at the end that his wife has been doing the same to him. Each time she reaches the end of the song and its ironic twist she chuckles to herself. Meanwhile, Rhodesia crawls nearby in the sand, wrapped in an old dishrag as a makeshift diaper.
We pause from our work to see Robby sail towards shore on a hobie cat. I help Robby drag the hobie cat to shore.
Robby is visibly shaken. “The people in the hotel…all dead. I only sailed by, but it doesn’t look like anyone was spared. There’s bodies all over the beach, man. I even saw bodies in neat rows, their heads lying elsewhere in the sand. They lined those poor folks up and executed them,” he makes a chopping motion. “Just like that. It’s fucking sick, man.”
“But Action and his men…are they still there?”
“The only thing I saw moving was gulls picking at the corpses.”
A long column of black smoke rises from the lagoon. Walking over to the lagoon, I find Conner, Jonas and a few other men staring at the far end of the lagoon bridge, which they just set ablaze.
I join the group. On the far side of the lagoon, two island men appear from the shrubbery. Tall and thin, they walk around the welcoming center and the end of the bridge burning nearby.
“What are they up to?” Jonas asks.
“Scouting,” I reply. “They’ve come to test our defenses.”
The men stroll past the welcoming center, seeming to search for a way around the lagoon, but on either side, it soon becomes impassable for them. They give up and head back on the only road leading to and from the resort.
“They’ll be back,” Conner stands shirtless with his hands on his hips, almost challenging the island men to return.
On the way back to the beach I pass the fitness center and spy Gwen, Pamela and some of the other women making weapons.
“What have you got there?” I inquire of Gwen.
She holds forth a steel twenty-pound plate for weight lifting. “I had an idea that if we knot a rope through the center holes on these plates we can swing them at somebody if we need to.”
“Sort of like a mace,” I remark. “We’ve just got to be careful when we swing that thing around—we don’t want to knock out the good guys in the process.”
Alexandra strolls by the window. At the edge of the lagoon, she picks a flower from a trumpet vine, gazes at it with dreamy wonder, and then tucks it behind her ear. I leave the fitness center and approach her.
“The women in the fitness center could use your help making weapons,” I say.
The closer I get to her the more fragile she appears, moving about like a wisp of smoke that the slightest breeze could blow apart.
“It was nice to meet you,” she looks at me and clasps her hands to her lips to hide a childishly innocent smile. “You should give us your address and we can write to you when we get home.”
“Home?”
A wry smile indicates she finds it amusing that she needs to explain herself, as though I were an adorable though forgetful child.
“Yes, home. I can’t wait to get back. Our flight leaves today.”
Perplexed, I search for something to say. Conner walks over.
“I thought I told you to lie down,” he takes her by the wrist and leads her to their bungalow.
“I don’t feel like resting anymore,” she whines. “If you’re coming back to the bungalow with me then you can help me pack.”
I look to him for an explanation, but he brushes past me and says to Alexandra, “Later. First, I want you to rest some more.”
I watch Conner lead Alexandra away.
“Something’s wrong in her head,” Gwen stands behind me. “She’s been acting strange—talking like nothing has happened at all and that she’ll be going home soon.”
“I hope she snaps out of it,” I add with concern.
Alexandra sulks behind Conner, pouting as if she was a child denied a toy.
Mid-afternoon. Captain de Salle’s pirate ship replica sails around the rocky cape. Within a minute, nearly all of us stand on the beach or on the restaurant deck. Jonas stands beside m
e wearing a rumpled, untucked dress shirt and linen pants rolled nearly to his knees. The ship sails as near to shore as the jagged reef will allow and then drops anchor.
On the deck of the ship, a man wears a large captain’s hat better suited to the 18th century. Without anyone telling me, I know this man is Captain de Salle. He climbs into a speedboat that the E.M.P. blast reduced to a simple rowboat. They reach the shore and two men hop out to drag the boat in the rest of the way. Captain de Salle steps off the ship and doffs his hat to reveal thinning white hair pulled into a twig of a ponytail. He is as tall as Jonas, but not nearly as slender. Light skinned with a reddish hue, the captain is a mix of races.
“Jonas,” he shakes Jonas’s hand.
Our predicament is too grim for Jonas to smile in greeting. “Any news?”
“Stay out of Rio Galera.”
“We already know that,” Jonas replies. “Some of us found that out the hard way. You can see what happened to the other resort last night.”
Captain de Salle glances at the smoking heap across the bay and shakes his head. “These are dark times, my friend. Bands of marauders roam the island, killing anybody they chance upon. It was safer for us to put out to sea rather than staying at port. The murdering scum can keep Isla Fin de la Tierra. We’re leaving. It’s why I am here. We sail for Barbados. There is space onboard for fifteen people, provided they can afford the passage.”
“I’ll give you ten thousand pounds,” a British man immediately shouts.
“Fifteen thousand,” shouts another.
de Salle purses his lips in contempt. “No paper. Gold. Jewels and gold. Platinum is good, too, of course.”
“You sail for Barbados now?” Don asks.
de Salle nods.
Don huddles with his wife, whispering heatedly. It is a discussion repeated throughout the crowd, husbands and wives cataloging what possessions they have to barter.
“We want on that ship. Don’t leave without us,” Don advises de Salle, and then hustles back to his bungalow with Amy to grab her jewelry from the safe.
They set off a stampede that has other guests running to do the same. Pamela stands near Gwen. For the first time since Bill’s death, there is a focus and awareness in Pamela’s eyes. I know she is calculating what jewelry she possesses to trade for a space on the ship.
“Wait, Captain, you’re making a mistake,” I step forward. I think of Dawson Hartford and the radiation cloud he sailed into that ruptured the cells in his body as though he boiled from within. “There’s a poisonous radiation storm out there. You’ll never reach Barbados. This is a suicide voyage.”
Captain de Salle turns to Jonas as if to ask, Who the hell is this guy? Before de Salle can say a word, an old British woman snaps at me, “Mind your own! Stay if you want. Those of us who can afford to leave should go if we choose. Don’t you listen to him, Captain.”
The old British woman looks as though a rough sea tossed her about and then belched her up on the beach. Her lower jaw protrudes like a bulldog. Any second I expect her to lunge at me and gnaw my ankle off. The crowd steps away from me. I hold my ground.
“Listen to me. Please, do not sail for Barbados,” I urge, my voice becoming strident. “On the ham radio there’s been no contact from anyone in Barbados.”
“That doesn’t mean anything,” the same old British woman brushes my argument aside with an angry swat of her hand.
“You weren’t on Dawson Hartford’s boat,” I respond. “You didn’t see how the radiation affected him.”
Jonas places a gentle hand on my shoulder. “Be that as it may, Phillip, why haven’t we seen these poisonous clouds? Don’t you think they would have been here by now?”
I pause. It is an excellent question. I’ve been watching the horizon for signs of the deadly clouds. Why haven’t they come? Then something I read about in the National Geographic magazine about Isla Fin de la Tierra comes back to me.
“I think the reason the radiation clouds haven’t hit us is because of our location,” I explain. “This island is located in the middle of a wind tunnel that channels air from the south central Atlantic, towards the Caribbean Gulf Stream and up the coast of North America. The wind tunnel is the reason, for instance, we’ve got swarms of butterflies flying by every day. They’re using the wind current to facilitate their migration. It could be that the wind tunnel shields us from the radiation clouds.”
“And it could be that you’re talking out of your arse,” the old British woman scoffs.
The crowd around me grows increasingly hostile. For the first time since the E.M.P. blast, someone offers them a way out of this hell; they will not allow me to squash it. Still, if they decide to take this voyage they need to know the dangers they face. Despite the eagerness of the crowd to dismiss my warnings, the captain hesitates. Perhaps after many years studying the mercurial interaction between wind and sea, and knowing that a mistake in judgment when you are miles away from dry land can be fatal, the captain appears to mull over everything I said.
Just then, the first of the guests determined to sail for Barbados returns from their bungalows clutching handfuls of glittering jewelry, which they eagerly thrust towards the captain.
de Salle takes one look at the proffered loot and turns to me. “At the first sign of any poisonous clouds I will turn around and return.”
I am about to say something more when Conner pulls me to the side and whispers, “Shut up. Let them go. Look who’s trying to get onboard—the old and the weak. He can have ‘em. They won’t be much use defending this place from the islanders, and besides, it’s more food and water for everybody else left behind.”
Conner continues to grip my arm, staring me down, daring me to protest any further. Over his shoulder, I see Don and Amy come out of their bungalow. I shirk Conner’s hand off and head towards them. Amy drags a hastily packed suitcase and the front pocket of Don’s shirt bulges with bracelets and necklaces. I repeat my warnings of the radiation clouds. Don huffs but stops to hear me out, while Amy anxiously looks at the throng around Captain de Salle, each haggling for a spot on the ship.
“Don, c’mon,” she urges.
I stand before them knowing they are already gone—that my entreaties will not sway them.
Don regards me with sad, kind eyes. “Listen, kid, I’m an old man. I’m not cut out for war with the people on this island.”
Amy prods Don by pressing her hand on his back.
“Phillip, we’re sorry to leave you like this,” her voice catches. “I wish we could all leave together. Believe me, as soon as we reach Barbados we will send help back for you.”
I respond with a grateful nod.
Nearby on the beach, de Salle appraises the jewelry offered in trade.
Pamela remains near Gwen, making no effort to get on board de Salle’s ship.
“Don’t you want to go?” I ask her.
She looks to the anchored ship and shields her eyes against the sun. “I thought about it. Then I thought about what you said—that you couldn’t get hold of anyone from Barbados on the radio and that there are radiation clouds. Sailing for Barbados is a big risk, just as staying here is. Without Bill, I guess it doesn’t much matter either way.”
Nearly a third of the guests vie to sail with de Salle. Of those who do not, I estimate half seem like they desperately want to sail away but know they have nothing to offer to buy their passage, and the rest seem interested in the drama but have no desire to risk their lives on the open ocean.
Don plops a fistful of jewels in de Salle’s hand, easily purchasing space onboard the ship for Amy and himself. More people haggle to get onboard than there are spaces. It comes down to two elderly couples—one British and one American. The value of the jewelry offered by the American couple puts them in the lead for the final spots, but the old British husband turns to his wife and says, “Evelyn, I’m sorry, love, but we must.”
Evelyn, a tiny, white haired woman, wraps a protective hand around the large, ant
ique diamond wedding ring she wears. She cannot even form a word, her only protest being an anguished little squeak.
Her husband gently takes her hand, looking as tenderly in her frightened eyes as he probably did when they first married so long ago.
“Love, please,” he says. “It is only a stone and some metal. It does not matter so long as we have each other.”
Slowly, she gulps, removes the ring, and hands it to de Salle. He gestures to his men to allow Evelyn and her husband aboard the ship.
“Pardon me, Captain,” Evelyn says with a tremulous voice. “How long is the voyage to Barbados?”
“With a good wind—two days.”
Evelyn’s husband, a slight man with fine, delicate features like a sparrow, licks his thin lips and asks, “And you have food to last us?”
de Salle places his hands on his hips. “Not for you. There’s only enough for me and my crew.”
The fifteen guests lined up for the rowboat that will take them to the anchored ship all get the same idea at once and head towards the restaurant supply room.
Conner leaps ahead of them and blocks their path. “You’re not taking our food.”
The fifteen guests suddenly halt.
“It’s our food, too!” One of them argues.
Conner clenches his fist, making it clear he has no qualms about beating any of them senseless. “It’s not your food anymore. It belongs to the people of the resort. Sail away if you want to, but the food stays.”
The elderly guests hurl curses at him, but none dare try to push him aside. The rest of the guests, those remaining behind, say nothing and do not intervene. It is wrong to send these elderly people off without so much as a drop of water, but some selfish part of me—a part focused only on my self-preservation—sides with Conner. It shames me, but I must admit that I want to keep as much of the supplies here with us as possible.
Trying to keep the peace, Jonas approaches Conner, but Conner shrugs him off.
“I don’t give a shit,” Conner growls to Jonas. “They bought their ticket out of this; we’re left behind. The food remains with us.”
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