Survivors (Stranded)

by Probst, Jeff

  “What is that?” she asked, peering through the rain. Straight ahead, a heavy stream that hadn’t been there before was washing downhill. It came from high on the slope to their left and continued all the way down to the ocean, somewhere off to the right. Most significantly, it ran directly across their path.

  “Can we keep going?” Jane asked.

  Buzz looked up and down the hill. “Do we have a choice?” he asked.

  “We could go back if we have to,” Vanessa said.

  “And then what?” Carter said. “Carry all this stuff over the rocks? Leave it behind? I don’t think so.”

  Nobody argued with that. Vanessa could tell they were all as anxious to reach the ship as she was.

  “All right,” she said. “Everyone hold on to each other. And be careful.”

  Vanessa took one end and locked arms with Buzz. He had Jane on the other side, with Carter at the opposite end. It was awkward going as they waded in, but it was better than trying to forge the gully separately. The water rushed by at a surprising speed, and the ground underneath was mush.

  Vanessa lifted one foot and then the other, picking up her knees with each step. Her makeshift pack was soaked now and twice as heavy. She struggled to hold on to it with her outside hand.

  “I don’t know if I can carry this,” she said.

  “Just keep going,” Carter said.

  On the next step, Vanessa’s foot landed in an unseen hole. Her leg sank deeper than ever, all the way up to her waist. When she tried to pull herself out, the mud at the bottom sucked her sneaker right off.

  “Wait! I lost my shoe!” she yelled over the rain.

  Buzz had been trying to keep hold of her arm, but now they’d been torn apart. Carter stumbled forward, too. He grasped his own pack with two hands and heaved it onto the ground at the far side of the gully. As soon as he did, he yelled out in pain and clutched his bad hand close to his chest.

  “Carter? Are you okay?” Jane asked, but he didn’t answer.

  “Vanessa, here!” Buzz said, and reached to take her pack from her. As she handed it over, the knotted blanket came undone. One pillow and several precious coconuts washed downhill, immediately out of reach. Buzz threw the rest onto the bank.

  “We have to go!” Jane yelled.

  “I need my shoe!” Vanessa yelled back. She reached down, feeling for it, but found only handfuls of mud.

  “It has to be there,” Buzz said, his voice edged with impatience.

  “I’m trying,” Vanessa said. She knew they had to go, but a shoe wasn’t something you could do without so easily around here.

  Then, looking up, Vanessa saw something that erased all of her other concerns. A giant wall of mud had begun rolling downhill. It was headed toward them at an alarming rate.

  “Vanessa!” Jane screamed. She’d seen it, too. Everyone had. Buzz started pulling on the group to get them going again.

  “Leave the shoe!” he yelled. “Let’s go!”

  Vanessa couldn’t move. She’d sunk too far now. She had no leverage to get herself out of the hole anymore. Buzz was straining, pulling on her arm, getting nowhere. Carter tried for her, but his hand was just out of reach.

  They were running out of time, and the earth itself, it seemed, was pouring down in their direction.

  CHAPTER 9

  July 9. Day 11 on Nowhere Island. Two weeks(!!) since we left Hawaii.

  Dear Mom and Dad,

  It seems like forever since I saw you. I know these letters aren’t real, but I like writing them anyway.

  It’s been three days since the mudslide, and we haven’t been able to get back to the old camp since then. Not even along the rocks.

  The problem is, our old beach is where the coconuts grow. We’ve been all over the woods around here and haven’t found a single one. No other fruit, no nuts, no nothing. Not even another snake. The one thing we have left to eat here is snails. And you know how I feel about those! Still, I eat them, and it feels like nothing in my stomach. You should see how different we all look now. I think maybe we’re starting to starve, for real.

  Vanessa’s working really hard trying to catch fish, but I don’t think they want to be caught. She thinks maybe if we build a raft, we can get out to the reef and find more of them there. So far, we’ve cut down a bunch of bamboo from the woods (too bad we can’t eat bamboo), and we work on the raft a little bit every day. It’s hard to get much done with just a few snails for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.

  I know we’ll figure something out, but I really (really, REALLY) wish we would hurry up and do it. All we think about is food these days. I shouldn’t even be writing this right now. I should be getting ready to go out into the woods and start looking before the sun gets too high.

  Maybe this will be our lucky morning. I hope so.

  Miss you, love you,

  xoxoxoxo to infinity,

  Jane

  Buzz knelt down next to Carter’s bunk and put a hand on his arm. Carter’s skin was hot to the touch. He definitely had a fever, and he’d been sleeping more than anyone.

  “Carter?” Buzz shook him gently. “We’re going out scavenging. Can you come up and watch the fire?”

  Carter stirred and came half awake. “I wanna come hunting,” he slurred.

  “We need someone to watch the fire,” Buzz repeated. It wasn’t totally true. On a sunny day like this one, Buzz could easily use his little glass lens to restart the fire. In fact, he’d gotten really good at it. But everyone agreed that Carter needed to rest as much as possible.

  Carter sat up and stretched. “I’ll go out and get some wood, at least,” he said.

  “Already did it,” Buzz told him. “There’s a ton of it in the wheelhouse. Just make sure the fire doesn’t go out. There’s a bucket of oil up there, too, if you need it. And I left some water. Make sure you drink a lot.”

  It was strange, telling Carter what to do. Not that long ago, it had been the other way around most of the time.

  But Carter didn’t argue. “I’ll be right there,” he said.

  Buzz left him in the cabin and walked up the passage to the middle deck’s central room. From there, he climbed onto the table, stepped onto the steel trunk they’d found in one of the cabins, and climbed up through the hatch to the wheelhouse above. It was enough of a makeshift stairs that even Carter could do it with one hand. But for how much longer, Buzz wasn’t sure. That hand wasn’t getting any better. The only thing they could do now was try to get some food into Carter, to keep up his strength.

  And that was proving harder than anyone had thought it would be.

  Inside the wheelhouse, Buzz picked up the axe and the backpack they used for scavenging. The pack was loaded with a sharp knife, a length of rope, and two empty bottles they’d fill at the stream on their way out.

  Stepping outside, he could see Jane down by the water’s edge, writing in her journal. Vanessa was there, too, looking down at a row of bamboo she’d been trying to puzzle into a raft.

  And out by the ocean, at the mouth of the cove, Buzz could see their new signal fire. He liked looking at it. It was the one thing that had come together well in the last three days. The tall tepee-shaped pyre of wood and kindling was similar to the signal they’d had on Lookout Point. It didn’t have the advantage of being up high like the last one, but if another plane or a ship came by, they could at least get to this one to light it in a matter of seconds.

  “You guys ready to go?” Buzz called down to the girls.

  Jane stood up and closed her journal. “What are we looking for today?” she asked.

  “Cheeseburgers,” Vanessa answered. It was a daily joke now. The day before it had been pizza, and the day before that, chocolate cake.

  “Think we’ll find any?” Vanessa added.

  “Probably,” Buzz said. “But we’d better get moving bef
ore they run out.”

  Vanessa led Jane and Buzz into the woods, hacking at anything that stood in their way. It wasn’t necessary to take out quite so much brush, but the entire jungle was getting on her nerves today.

  The air here was a thick stew of humidity and stillness. It was like breathing through a wet washcloth. The shoes she’d borrowed from Carter for the morning were too tight, and the mosquitoes were always terrible in the woods. She didn’t even bother trying to wave them off anymore. There was no point.

  She stopped and scanned the area, hoping for a flash of color that might turn out to be something edible. Bananas would have been amazing, or papaya, or mango, or any of the other things Jane said grew in this part of the world. Even coconut or another snake would have been more than welcome. But so far all they’d brought back from these morning hikes was firewood and kindling.

  “Can we burn this?” Jane’s voice came from the other side of a scraggly thicket.

  “What is it?” Vanessa asked. She ducked under a tangle of vines and worked her way over to where Buzz and Jane were looking down at a large dead tree on the ground.

  “We could get a lot of firewood out of this,” Jane said.

  “Does rotten wood burn?” Vanessa asked. She put one foot on the tree and buried the axe blade into its bark three times. On each swing, it landed with a soft thud that didn’t sound too encouraging. The wood only broke open and fell apart where she tried to cut it.

  “Come on, let’s keep going,” Vanessa said.

  “Wait!” Buzz said. The excitement in his voice stopped her. She turned back to see him kneeling right on top of the tree.

  “What is it?”

  “Jane, hand me the knife,” Buzz said. Already, he was picking through the crumbly bark with his fingers. Jane opened the pack on his back and handed him a six-inch serrated blade. He took it and plunged the tip into the soft wood, working the knife around in circles to open up a hole.

  Whatever Buzz was doing, Vanessa could see he was onto something. His eyes were still and focused, his mouth set in a frozen line of concentration. Before Nowhere Island, the only time she’d seen that expression was when Buzz sat on the couch at home, deep inside a game of FarQuest or Reverb Alley.

  “What are you doing?” Vanessa asked.

  “I thought I saw a grub,” Buzz said.

  “A what?”

  He withdrew the knife now and stuck two fingers inside. When he pulled them out, he had a pinch hold on a lumpy white worm the size of his pinkie.

  Buzz dropped it onto his palm and held the thing out to show them. “These little suckers are pure protein,” he said.

  Jane leaned in to see. “We’re supposed to eat those?” she asked.

  “I’m not saying they’re candy bars,” Buzz told her. “I’m just saying they’re edible. And there’s probably a lot more of them here, too.”

  The grub was more like a caterpillar than a worm, Vanessa realized. It had a shiny dark head at one end and tiny legs that sent it wriggling across Buzz’s palm. Snails were one thing, but the grub was ten times as big and probably twice as disgusting.

  Her empty stomach seemed to fold in on itself. She knew exactly what she had to do, and she didn’t like the answer one bit. It was another island moment. That’s how Vanessa thought of them now.

  She was going to eat grubs. Not because she liked them. Not because she thought it would be fun. But simply because there was one thing about them that mattered more than anything else.

  They were edible.

  CHAPTER 10

  Carter startled himself awake.

  He’d been dreaming—about what, he wasn’t even sure. Something had been chasing him. Something getting closer. Reaching out to grab him. And then—

  He sat up on the deck, breathing heavily and remembering where he was. This fever wasn’t doing him any favors—that was for sure.

  The campfire had burned down while he slept. Its embers were still bright orange, but he needed to feed it soon if he didn’t want to lose it. With Buzz, Vanessa, and Jane off sweating in the jungle, it was the very least he could do.

  Carter shuffled across the deck and into the wheelhouse for more of the dry wood Buzz had stacked there. His bad hand was swollen stiff, but he could still grip certain things like pieces of firewood, as long as they weren’t too small. He bent down, grabbed an armload, and stood up.

  His head swam. The room started spinning. Carter dropped the wood, leaned against the wall, and slid back down to the floor.

  Tears squeezed out from the corners of his eyes. Even standing too fast was a problem. It was beyond frustrating. When they’d landed on the island, he had been the strong one. He had been the one they could all count on to get the most done. But not anymore.

  Without thinking, he pounded the steel deck with his bad hand. It sent a nauseating bolt of pain up his arm, and he screamed—as much from the frustration as anything else. He took up a piece of the firewood with his good hand and flung it as hard as he could, not caring where it went.

  A small crash sounded from the other side of the room, followed by the sound of broken glass falling onto the floor. Carter looked over to see a row of framed photographs above the wheelhouse windows. Two of them were smashed, their frames splintered at the corners.

  He’d walked by those photos a hundred times without ever really noticing them. Now he saw that they were fishing pictures. In one, several men were casting off the back of a boat. In another, someone stood on a dock next to an enormous swordfish.

  It was a painful reminder of Carter’s own empty belly and everything he hadn’t been able to accomplish here. He picked up another piece of wood and took out two more of the photos with one throw.

  For a long time, Carter didn’t move. The anger that coursed through him was a paralyzing feeling. His muscles and his mind seemed locked up together inside of it. And who was there to blame for all this? No one. Not even himself.

  They’d done nothing wrong. This was all supposed to have been a fun sailing trip, a week on the boat with Uncle Dexter. Their parents thought it would be a chance for the four kids to get to know one another better, as brothers and sisters. Now, here they were, fighting for their lives instead. And it sure didn’t feel like a fair fight.

  Slowly, Carter’s thoughts evened out. He remem-bered what he had to do. He took his time standing up, gathered another armload of wood, and headed for the door.

  He was nearly outside when he stopped again. Something about the fishing photos had caught his attention. One of them was different than the others, and he stepped back for a closer look.

  The picture was an underwater shot. It showed a man in swim trunks, holding a spear of some kind. Instead of gripping the spear near the base like a regular weapon, the man held it near the barbed tip, with a long strap stretched all the way along its length. The whole thing seemed to be cocked like a slingshot, ready to fire.

  It was nothing Carter had ever seen before, but as he looked at it, the spear made perfect sense. Vanessa had been talking about making a raft to get them out to the reef for fishing. It was a good idea, but what if they could get down to the reef as well? That’s where the fish really were, after all.

  Carter went outside and stoked the campfire, then jumped off the ship and headed straight up into the jungle. Vanessa had been harvesting bamboo for the raft, and he went right to the grove she’d told him about.

  When he got there, he scouted out a long thin piece. It was nearly six feet high where it grew. Perfect for what he had in mind. Using his good hand he grabbed hold of the cane, angled his foot against the base, and snapped it free.

  Back at the ship, he reentered the wheelhouse. There, he turned his attention to the row of windows at the front of the room. Most of them had broken or missing glass, but they all still had the black rubber weather stripping that ran around their frames. When
he poked at the material with his finger, it seemed spongy, and maybe even stretchy enough for the job. He reached up and peeled away one of the strips, being careful to keep it all in one piece.

  Already, Carter felt completely exhausted. He knew he didn’t have much more in him, but he wanted to get this done.

  With the bamboo wedged between his knees, he looped one end of the rubber strip around its base and used his teeth to grab the other end, cinching it tight. He repeated the process, tying it off with one of the knots Uncle Dexter had taught him on board the Lucky Star. Now he had a big lasso of rubber attached to the end of his would-be spear.

  There was just one more step, maybe the most important one. He grabbed one of the sharp knives and whittled away the tip of the bamboo until he’d created a strong, sharp point.

  Even in his feverish state, Carter felt just a little bit better. The others had been working hard while he’d slept next to the fire. But now, in less than half an hour, with just the materials he had on hand, he’d worked up a pretty good fishing spear. It was simple and crude, but if it worked, it would change everything. They wouldn’t have to starve, because they’d be drowning in fish.

  The only thing left to do was test it out. But not right now. As much as he wanted to keep going, Carter’s swimming head and fuzzy thoughts told him otherwise. Reluctantly, he took some more wood out to the fire and lay down to close his eyes for a quick rest.

  Just a few minutes, Carter thought. Then he’d be right back at it.

  When Buzz got back to the ship with the girls, Carter was up on the main deck, dozing next to the campfire. It looked as if he hadn’t moved from his spot in hours.

  He sat up and rubbed his eyes as they all set down their armloads of fresh firewood.

  “Any luck?” Carter asked.

  “Well, the good news is, we found something to eat,” Buzz said.

  “What’s the bad news?”

  Buzz reached into his pocket and set down a handful of grubs.