The Dark Atoll

by Marilyn Foxworthy

  I said, “No, not that. That’s fine and all but the way I was raised, well, we didn’t, I mean my family didn’t have sex with just anybody. We really believed that sexual relationships had to be permanent. My grandpa had six wives and all of them…”

  She interrupted me and said, “What?”

  I said, “What? My Pops, my grandpa had six wives, and my dad had two, but they would never have sex with someone they weren’t married to. I know lots of people thought it was just something people did all the time but there’s like this really emotional connection that’s supposed to happen and…”

  She said, “Um, wait. So, your grandfather had six wives and your dad had two?”

  I said, “Well but they were all really happy. Oh! Oh no! I forgot. Oh crap!”

  Allie smiled a little and said, “What’s wrong?”

  I said, “Um, I forgot that in my Pops day that having that kind of family was um, unusual. It’s kind of the only way I knew. They really loved each other, and it was the only way for my moms and my grandmothers to be really happy. See, they were all in love with my Pops and my dad and it just really worked for them.”

  She said, “So, it wasn’t part of a cult or a religions thing or something?”

  I said, “No. We were really rich, and they were in love and it was just really great.”

  She asked, “Why didn’t you ever have a girlfriend or a wife? Were your dad and grandfather and their wives married?”

  I said, “Yeah. It was like a family rule. No sexual relationship unless it was permanent.”

  She said, “And you?”

  I said, “Well, I was young before it all happened, and I was studying and training for how to survive, and there weren’t any girls my age around. My Pops and my dad had a girl picked out for me, before I left on the boat, but she was too young and it would have been years before we could get married.”

  Allie was quiet for a few seconds and I waited.

  Finally, she said, “Hey, stay here. I need to go pee. If you need to pee, go that way,” and she pointed.

  Allie walked away and I stayed where I was. If the conversation hadn’t taken what I thought was an uncomfortable turn, I would have admired her butt as she left with her back to me.

  CHAPTER Four - OK, I Can Do That

  When Allie walked back into our tiny clearing she said simply, “OK. I can do that.”

  I said, “What? What did you do?”

  She looked puzzled but then caught on and said, “No, I mean I can do that. I can decide that if I am in love with you that we should be married and that we should have other girls if they love you too. Just girls, right?”

  I said, “Yeah. Um, just girls. But Allie, it’s a little different than what you said. It isn’t if another girl loves me, it’s if she loves us. Um but we don’t even know yet. Do you think that you love me?”

  Allie sat down next to me this time. She was quiet for a while and we just sat there. She sat close enough to my side that I got the definite impression that there was a relationship forming here.

  Was that normal? I’d only known her for a few hours, if that. But that fit, right? We were both acting like teenagers. We had both been arrested in our development as teenagers, me by the intense preparations that I had been working on, and her by whatever trauma she had suffered since coming here. She had an obvious crush on me developing quickly. That wasn’t unheard of. If we had been in high-school, we would have acted almost exactly like this. We would have had an attraction to each other, worked up the courage to go on a first date, and if things went well, start thinking about a lifelong fairytale romance. It wasn’t a great foundation for a lasting marriage, but I could think of worse. Clark and Irene probably never felt this way about each other at all. And it wasn’t like ‘love-at-first-sight’. We actually had taken some time to get used to each other.

  We were only in our early to mid-thirties. Before the cataclysm, that had become an average age for marriage, what little of it there was by then. Rationally, I should take this slow but suddenly we both seemed to be having a surge of hormones that made love-at-first-sight seem perfectly rational. If we weren’t hot and heavy with each other by morning, I’d be shocked.

  I wasn’t going to take advantage of her because of our situation at all but I was taught to see patterns and outcomes. There was nothing wrong with this path. We liked each other. She didn’t feel like she needed me for anything, and our budding relationship wasn’t based on need. She probably knew everyone here and every prospect that she had for a mate, and she was attracted to me, not any of them.

  I didn’t have to think about it much either. If she was pleasant, eager, attractive, and compatible; if she could be a partner and shares our goals, it was fine. It wasn’t like our views of money or politics or religion were going to be an issue. Our families weren’t going to be a problem, that was for sure. According to the books, sexual preferences and differences in libido could be a problem for a couple but we’d find out about that soon enough I supposed. Our spending habits and views on money didn’t apply here either. I wasn’t ready to pull out a ring and ask her to marry me just yet, but I wasn’t terribly opposed to it. Of course, if I did pull out a ring and drop to my knee, she probably wouldn’t know what I was doing any more than I had known what kind of custom I was trampling on when I offered her my shirt. Marriage was rare and the old ‘wait for a few years and then propose’ traditions were long forgotten. That and so much of wedding tradition had been essentially abolished even before the cataclysm.

  I said, “Allie, so you were on an airplane and the weather got really rough and you crashed? Here?”

  She said, “Yeah. It’s kind of a blur. I guess the plane went in the ocean and then we were scrambling for life rafts and then we drifted for a long time. Then we finally ended up here. Do you know where we are? I don’t think that we ever knew.”

  I said, “I was near the island and atoll of Rangiroa when I fell off the boat. It’s about 2500 miles south of Hawaii. I have no idea why your plane would be going that direction. Could you have been headed for Antarctica, or southern Argentina, or something?”

  She said, “I don’t know. We were a bunch of girls and sports teams. We probably didn’t pay any attention if we were even told. Florin, can we talk about other stuff?”

  I said, “Sure. But we are going to grieve. I just lost everything I knew, and you just remembered a lot of what you lost. It’s going to take time to adjust to that. That’s one reason that maybe we want to take it a little slow, you know, before we…you know, go farther.”

  Allie said, “With sex? Yeah, probably so. I sure don’t feel like it right now. Florin, I’m kind of scared of it. They all do it, and the others all do it but vegetables, you know, we never did. Um, vegetables…I guess us vegetables are virgins. We got called vegetables because they said…um, I don’t know why. You aren’t a breeder. I can tell.”

  I asked her what that meant, and she didn’t know quite how to answer me but assured me that I wasn’t. Yeah, the ‘Breeders’ were men and women but somehow not families. She really wasn’t interested in explaining it right now. Things were getting depressing and we need to change the subject.

  I said, “Allie, I want to stay with you. I like you. I’ve never had a friend like you, and I feel really happy being with you.”

  She said, “Florin, this won’t work. I like you too, but this won’t work.”

  I sat quietly and waited for an explanation.

  She continued, “The Coaches will kill you; probably. We can’t hide forever. We’ll have to trade to stay alive. If you had your boat, we could leave but if you can’t leave, either the Coaches or the Boy Jocks are going to kill you. And then they’ll punish me and turn me into a Mush. And if I get the chance, I’ll kill myself instead of being a Mush.”

  I said, “Allie, I really don’t like to see people mistreated. It sounds like these people are evil. I won’t let them hurt you. What kind of weapons do they have? How many of t
hem are there? And I’m afraid that I don’t even want to know what a Mush is. I promise, I won’t let anyone hurt you. Do they have rifles or handguns? or bows and arrows?”

  Allie said, “No, they have their fists and the knives that they found in the buildings. There were a few guns, but they ran out of bullets a long time ago. I wish they were dead. Everyone does.”

  As much as we both wanted to talk about something else, now that the door was open, Allie couldn’t think about anything else. She explained a lot over the next few hours.

  Apparently, the Coaches were exactly that: men and women who had been in charge of the teams. After the passengers of the airplane that she had been on made it to the atoll, there was a struggle for power and the pilot and several others had been killed in the first few weeks.

  The plane had carried various athletes from several schools, both high-schools and colleges. Allie’s cheerleaders, some football teams, some soccer teams, both men's and women’s, and the same with basketball. There were also a number of vacationers who were ‘lucky enough’ to make it onto the plane.

  The Coaches were anyone who had been able to carve out a tribe that would follow them. They were basically small tribal chiefs, but several had been coaches from the men’s or women’s sports teams; they were the ones who had been most capable of getting strong followers to do what they told them to. And those imposed and enforced their wills on the others.

  From the description of the plane that Allie gave, I estimated that there were maybe 400 to 500 people on board when they crashed. The number still alive after almost twenty years was lower, not because of aging, since we all expected to live at least 200 years but from attrition from injuries, wars, and murders. It sounded like there had been a fair number of suicides as well but that had tapered off after the first six or seven years. Now there were about 10 small independent tribes consisting of 15 to 30 people each. Those were still struggling with each other for territory and resources.

  It started getting darker again. We were near the equator and the days would be short anyway, but it was also the clouds.

  Allie said, “No storms tomorrow. We can stay here. Florin, can you fight?”

  I said, “Yes, I can fight.”

  She said, “I like you. You’re a good boyfriend. I’m glad you came here. You look tired.”

  I sighed and said, “I think I am tired.”

  She asked, “Did you eat enough grapes? Tomorrow we can find a fish. Florin, I’m happy but I’m scared. Not scared like normal scared. Scared like something else. I like you.”

  I said, “Are you scared of me?”

  She said, “No. I think I’m scared because I like you. And I’m scared that you will get hurt. Do you really know how to fight?”

  I said, “Yes, I really do know how to fight.”

  Allie said, “I’m still scared. If you fight and lose, I will be turned into a Mush. I don’t want to be a Mush. Um, we can’t have sex until you fight.”

  I said, “Oh, OK. Who do I have to fight?”

  She said, “I don’t know. But if you lose and we are already were a family, like you told me, forever, then I’d be alone again, and they’d make me a Mush and then I won’t be with you forever like you told me.”

  Allie was back to speaking her local dialect again and I found it a bit hard to follow.

  I said, “Allie, do you mean that if we have sex, then you’d be my wife and if something happened to me that you’d be alone again, and you don’t want to take that chance?”

  She said, “Florin, you’re my boyfriend. If we are a family forever, then if you aren’t here, it isn’t forever. Maybe I would kill myself. If you fight, if you win, we can stay together. Then we can be a family. If you lose, they’ll make me a Mush and I won’t be able to kill myself.”

  I faced he question finally and asked, “Allie, what is a Mush?”

  She looked despondent as she said, “A Mush doesn’t have a brain. She can’t do anything except what she’s told. She can’t kill herself unless someone tells her to. My friend Christie got Mushed. Boys get Mushed too. If you can’t fight, they will kill you or mush you. But they will kill you. They can’t Mush you. I can tell. If they can’t mush you, they will kill you. The Coach will be able to tell if he looks at you if you can be Mushed or not.”

  I said, “Allie, I can fight. How many do I have to fight?”

  She said, “Maybe three.”

  I said, “With what weapons?”

  She said, “No weapons.”

  I said, “OK, I can do that. I can fight three at once.”

  Allie snapped her head in my direction and said, “At once? No, one at a time. Fight one and if you win, maybe another one challenges you. If you win that, maybe a third tries. If you win three times, they will stop. You think that you can fight three at the same time?”

  I said, “If I have to. Look, there’s no way I’m letting you get Mushed, whatever that is. I like you too. Um but what does it mean for me to win? Um, do I have to kill them?”

  Allie said, “It’s probably easiest if you do. They would kill you or Mush you…but they’ll kill you. If you win but don’t you kill them, then they get mushed and then they would want to be dead. It’s stupid.”

  I asked, “So, if I fight…”

  She interrupted me and said, “Unless you swim to Hawaii, you have to fight.”

  I said, “OK, when I fight, I can kill whoever I’m fighting and…”

  She interrupted again and said, “Good.”

  I said, “But, if I kill them, will I be in trouble? What will happen if I kill someone?”

  She said, “If you fight, and they die, maybe you don’t have to fight anymore. If they stop challenging you, you get anything that they have, and they don’t bother you anymore. Then we can come and go, and they leave us alone.”

  We sat quietly for a while, thinking about what this would mean. Allie was sure that if we were going to survive that I would have to prove myself in some kind of life and death acceptance ritual. I had to beat some tribal champions or something in order to gain the respect of the others here. That didn’t bother me. It seemed like a stupid economic theory though.

  Practically, if one man needed to kill three others to be allowed to live in peace, then the population would go down by two men. One would be added but three would be dead. It was like paying three dollars for a one-dollar bill. Well, I guess it was up to three; it might be just one or two. If I was going to design this, we’d just add a new dollar to the economy and not subtract any. Maybe they had a resource scarcity issue and adding more people was costly. Maybe if I subtracted three from the population, it was actually good for the economy. But it seemed to me that because I was likely going to kill the best fighters that they had that their tribe would get weaker this way.

  I knew that it didn’t really work like that though. That’s what it would be if this were a rational societal design. The real issue was that these people were prideful and vicious and cowards and bullies if I interpreted what I’d been told correctly. I knew how this was supposed to work. One area of study that had been just as important as science and philosophy and farming and everything else that I had been taught was the classic adventure stories. I knew what was supposed to happen here.

  Actually, there were several scenarios but only one that worked for me. One was to hide out here, moving from place to place, island to island, trying not to be discovered. That was ultimately a losing strategy. Another was to avoid the inevitable until it was thrust upon me and I had no choice. If I was weak or injured, I could hide until I had healed and grown stronger and had taught myself to fight, and then I could face the danger when I was ready. But my best option was the one that let me choose my fate.

  My best option was to march into whatever village was the capitol of this little kingdom and challenge the champion for the right to live here. I’d kill him quickly and repeat the cycle until I’d paid my citizenship fees. A variation would be to search out the smalle
st and weakest group first, destroy or subjugate them, and work my way up the ladder until I finally reached the top. That would work if my goal was to become the king here but that wasn’t my goal. What I wanted was to establish the fact that I wasn’t someone to be messed with and that I needed to be left alone to pursue my life without interference. Of course, if I could establish cooperative trade relations, that would be a bonus.

  Could I fight? Yeah, I could fight. Could I beat whoever was here to fight? Yeah. These guys might have been a football team 20 years ago, or maybe even a wrestling team, but I bet they hadn’t been training and staying in shape. And based on the culture of dominance that Allie seemed to be describing, they were bullies, and bullies were essentially cowards. Could I fight? Yeah. Could I kill my opponent? If he insisted.

  Maybe that would sound arrogant. I wasn’t arrogant, I was confident, and my confidence was based on my training and skill, not the idea that I was just tougher and badder.

  No, I wouldn’t let Allie or I be hurt. Did I care if a few people died to ensure our safety? Not at all. I wasn’t taking anything away from them. I wasn’t robbing them and stealing food from their children. I wasn’t abusing anyone or in some way taking advantage of the weaker ones. If they chose to fight me to the death, then that was their choice, and their death. The other choice was to let Allie, and me, be abused and killed. Not gonna do it.

  As I thought things over, I was glad about Allie's declaration that we couldn’t be married, or whatever, since marriage wasn’t exactly a thing but bonded, I guess, until we were safe and relatively assured of a longer life. That made sense. Why commit to a lifelong relationship that might only last another day? Yeah, historically people often took ‘final hour vows’ and got married the day before they shipped off to war, but I was glad that Allie had more sense than that. When things were settled, then we’d make commitments. And sexual relations were a commitment in my mind.

  When we settled down to sleep, since Allie didn’t have any clothes and she wouldn’t wear mine, we both slept naked. She asked if it would be OK to lie next to each other, with her in my arms against my chest, and that was fine with me. It felt nice. I had never slept with anyone else before, and I found out that I liked it.