by CJ Williams
“They’re just like a family now,” Cassie suggested.
Katelynn nodded. “It reminds me of watching old movies.”
Russell agreed. “Very nostalgic. It’s a Wonderful Life and Miracle on 34th Street. But there’s no miracle at the end of their story, and you can tell they know it. They’re settling in and making a new life. I think they’ve lost hope of being rescued.”
“Don’t say that,” Katelynn said. “Isn’t the navy still looking for them?”
“Supposedly, but their definition of looking means they’re only trying to correlate observable stars. What does that even mean? One million down, two hundred fifty billion to go? If they don’t fix that sailboat, they’re going to grow old and die on that planet.”
“Thanks for the Christmas spirit, Russ,” Cassie remarked sarcastically. “The Grinch couldn’t have said it any better.”
“I’m not trying to be mean,” Russell protested. “I hope they get rescued and I don’t want people to give up on America’s famous castaways.”
“Not just America,” said Katelynn. “You can include Germany and Japan in that list.”
“And Australia,” Cassie added. “I read that new mothers are naming baby girls Kyoto and Hannah.”
“Don’t forget China,” Katelynn said. “They are glued to their screens too. They believe Alyssa’s figurehead is a Chinese dragon.”
Cassie nodded. “That pretty much has the world covered.”
“I’m like everyone else,” Russell said. “I want them to find a way home. This isn’t just a news story anymore.”
Katelynn smiled. “For you to admit it means miracles still happen.”
“Amen,” Cassie whispered.
*.*.*.*
A week after New Year’s, Kyoko expanded her afternoon coconut harvest to the far edge of the jungle. The last time she’d been this way, she’d noticed a particularly lush palm tree. It was growing out of a crevice in a broken lava slab that was part of the ancient caldera. The jagged ridge was about fifteen feet higher than the main jungle floor.
She put a rope sling around the tree and hitched up the trunk like a telephone linesman. At the top where the fronds branched out, her knife sliced through the tough, fibrous stems and the fruit fell to the ground. This was a good crop, and she’d gotten here none too soon. Another couple of weeks and the white meat inside would start turning dark and bitter.
When she was half done, she shimmied around to the other side of the trunk to reach the last cluster of ripe coconuts. As she stretched out, she had a sensation of falling. She grabbed onto the trunk and realized it wasn’t her that was falling, it was the tree itself. Her swaying back and forth had been too much for the small root ball in the cracked lava bed. It had given way and was toppling off the ledge.
She rode the tree down in a shower of dirt and rocks and hit the ground hard. She curled herself into a ball and hoped the whole cliff didn’t come down on top of her. When the noise stopped, she opened her eyes. A human skull lay just inches from her nose, glaring at her disapprovingly. She flinched away to find herself covered with bones and pieces of skeletons. The lower portion of an arm lay at her feet, the hand grasping her ankle.
The tree shifted slightly, and two more skulls bounced down the rocky ledge with hollow clunking sounds. One of them landed in her lap, making the jawbone chatter as though angrily disappointed with her intrusion into its slumber. Kyoko levitated straight into the air with her feet churning. It took a hundred yards before her voice returned and then her scream reverberated back and forth inside the crater rim.
*.*.*.*
Gus was walking along the crater’s ridge when he saw the tree topple over, followed almost immediately by a blood-curdling scream that echoed up from the jungle. A dust cloud rose from the caved-in portion of the caldera. His initial concern evaporated when he spotted a white blur streaking away at top speed, moving through the trees toward the spa. It was Kyoko. She must have found one of the skeletons. She was okay, or she wouldn’t be moving that fast.
The spectacle made him laugh out loud. He’d come across a couple of skeletons in that area but hadn’t told the girls about it because he didn’t want to upset them. Finding the remains confirmed what Alyssa had said about her former crew. Their camp had been over the cave-in. When that part of the caldera collapsed, it must have taken them with it.
He chuckled as he approached the house until it occurred to him that not warning anyone about the bones in advance might have been a mistake. Carol didn’t like surprises; the girls might have the same idea. But then again, they were young and always kidding around. And it was pretty funny after all.
*.*.*.*
Kyoko waved her arms angrily to shut off Gus’s explanation. “Just stop!” she shouted. “Don’t say anything!”
She couldn’t believe it when he came into the house with a smile on his face like the whole thing was a joke. He had actually known about the skeletons!
“It’s no big deal,” he explained hurriedly. “I didn’t want to upset you, that’s all.”
“Upset me?” Kyoko replied angrily. “Are you insane? I’m stuck on a deserted island with a crazy German and a geriatric pensioner, and you thought I couldn’t take some bad news?”
“Well, I…” Gus looked to Hannah for support, but she just rolled her eyes.
“Get out!” Kyoko yelled, pushing Gus out of the house. “I don’t want to see you anymore. Just go away.” She leaned on him until he was off the porch and then she stomped back inside.
*.*.*.*
For the next two days, every time Gus came near the house Kyoko shooed him away.
“Why is she so angry?” he asked Hannah when he saw her at the galleon. “Can’t you talk to her?”
“Dummkopf,” was all she said.
That much German, he understood.
The third day it stormed. The rain came down in buckets. Around noon Gus snuck onto the front porch to get out of the weather. Kyoko opened the door to glare at him for a minute and then sighed. “Come on in,” she said.
The three exiles spent the rest of the day inside, quietly watching the storm. No one spoke of skeletons.
*.*.*.*
Gus examined the dry dock in disgust. It was now apparent that the flat wooden spacers under the ship’s hull had once been short boles made from tree trunks. Thousands of years of being squashed by sixty or seventy tons had mashed them into oblong planks.
He could see now, how the original crew had pulled the galleon out of the lagoon. They had set the anchor about two hundred feet up the beach and then, using the capstan, cranked the ship up onto the lava bed using the tree trunks as rollers under the hull. It must have taken the entire crew. Back then, to refloat the ship, all they would have had to do was release the brake—he’d seen that too, a wedge of lumber jammed under one of the rollers—and the ship would have rolled right back into the water. Simple.
But now what? That was it as far as he could see. Those rollers were never going to move again. In fact, they had turned into jack stands. There was no way to raise the ship up to replace them with new rollers. He had argued with Alyssa to use her gravity drives just from her present position to the water, a distance of maybe twenty yards until he was blue in the face, but she would not consider it, claiming program blocks prevented her from doing so.
So now, sitting on what had effectively become oversized railroad ties, the boat wasn’t going anywhere. He was stuck, and damn well permanently. After once again raging against the AI for over an hour he gave up.
The ship was still a resource to be thankful for. The tools and implements had gone a long way toward making his life more comfortable. And thanks to Nineteen he could send messages to Carol every day. That was something.
*.*.*.*
As weeks became months, the three castaways concentrated on the minutiae of day-to-day living. Sometimes the handiphone would sit unattended for several days. It was getting too difficult to send the messages back to loved
ones they might never see again. It was hard on the people on both ends. Gus gave up on the galleon. There was no way to move it into the water, and he quit talking to Alyssa altogether.
No one spoke about rescue anymore. Once in a while one of them would let slip a remark like “I’ll be glad when we get back, and I won’t have to…” whatever it was—scaling fish, climbing trees, stoking the oven fire. But that was rare anymore. It was clear that each of them, in their own hearts, accepted they would live on the island for years. Maybe someday they would be found, but it seemed less likely all the time. Once in a while, Hannah brought up the idea of moving to the galleon but it always made Kyoko angry, and Gus didn’t really listen.
Then unexpectedly, it was taken out of their hands.
6 – The Galleon
“Ay, tear her tattered ensign down!
Long has it waved on high,
And many an eye has danced to see
That banner in the sky;
Beneath it rung the battle shout,
And burst the cannon’s roar;
The meteor of the ocean air
Shall sweep the clouds no more!”
(Oliver Wendell Holmes, “Old Ironsides”)
Gus completed his morning catch, re-baited the poles, and laid the traps back in the lagoon. He carried the fish to the spa area for Kyoko’s meal preparation and found her doing laundry at the lip of the pool.
“Dinner,” he said in greeting, holding up his stringer.
“Thank you. Put them down here and I’ll—”
A ground tremor cut off her words. The earth shook enough to throw Kyoko off balance. She slid off the edge into the water with a startled shriek and then screamed in pain. Gus grabbed her outstretched hand and with one jerk pulled her out. The skin on her legs had turned bright red.
Scalding water shot into the sky. In an instant the comfortable spa had turned into a boiling geyser, and superheated steam gushed from every bubbling pool in the area. The air was becoming difficult to breathe.
Gus threw Kyoko over his shoulder and ran toward their house. He had only gone a few yards when the roof landed on the path in front of him followed by basketball-sized-chunks of rock falling from the sky. He veered off and headed into the jungle, trying to get away from the deadly rain of stone and debris. He didn’t stop to put her down until they were well into the brush.
The geyser screeched like a steam whistle at shift change, shooting boiling water thousands of feet into the air until it vaporized and billowed into a vast mushroom cloud.
Kyoko had to shout to be heard. “What happened?”
Gus peered through the trees at the destruction of their island home.
“I don’t know,” he said. “Someone turned up the heat. Hope it doesn’t last too long, or we’re in trouble.”
“Where’s Hannah?”
Gus gestured toward the other side of the lagoon. “She left for the galleon about an hour ago. We ought to head in her direction. This is going to bring her running.”
They met her just coming down from the ridge. After mutual assurances that everyone was okay, they waited until the shrieking subsided before continuing to their homesite.
The house was demolished. Two of the floor supports were still standing but nothing else. The gentle spring that used to trickle from the hillside behind their house had turned into a blast furnace and shot right through the middle of their living room.
The destruction was complete. A freak of aerodynamics had thrown the roof a hundred yards down the path. The dining table lay on the far side of the clearing with two of its legs broken off. The chairs were so much kindling. The storage cover was gone, and the supplies under it were scattered everywhere. Only the oven remained.
Gus cursed silently at the damage. All the work they’d put into the place had been wasted. He worried there would be another eruption, but for the moment the island was calm. After a while, the thick fog of steam dissipated. A deep hiccup rumbled up from the ground, and they poised to flee back to the jungle, but there was only silence.
“Does this mean the volcano’s going to erupt?” Kyoko finally asked, voicing their shared concern.
“I have no idea,” Gus admitted. “If that’s the case we’ll know within a couple of weeks. Usually when these things reawaken it can get pretty violent. I’m hoping this is more like Yellowstone, just an old geyser that periodically erupts.”
“You think it’ll happen again?”
“I would imagine so,” Gus said. “But there’s no knowing when. Five hours? Five months? Could be years.” They walked through the rubble, gathering up everything that could be salvaged.
Gus looked at his front yard in a new light. The natural clearing signified the reach of the steam jet that blasted from the spring behind the house. When he started building, he merely thought it was convenient that no trees had to be cleared from the land, giving them a pretty view from the front porch. But the jungle had long ago learned trees wouldn’t grow in the clearing. Any that tried had been routinely boiled.
The reality was he had built their house on top of a death trap and all around were signs of the danger; he just hadn’t seen them. He followed the path down to the spa. New boulders, still hot to the touch littered the area; another sign he had ignored on their arrival. To him, they’d just been a convenience. He didn’t have to dig up stones or drag them from the mountainside; they lay everywhere.
If he’d had the wit to realize it, they were actually a warning sign that said, “Danger. Falling rocks.”
The lagoon’s peaceful tranquility belied a sudden death. The bathing pool they enjoyed was empty of water at the moment, but heat still emanated from the stone on every side. No wonder the rock was so smooth. It had been sandblasted periodically with thousand-degree steam pressure. And Kyoko had been standing in the middle when it started. They had come within a hair’s breadth of losing her.
Gus searched for the girls. Hannah had taken a load of their material to the galleon. He found Kyoko adding to a pile of goods near the oven. She wore cutoffs and one of his sweatshirts.
“What do we do now?” she asked plaintively. “Wasn’t it enough that we’re stuck here?”
Gus didn’t have a comforting answer. Instead, he helped her gather things up. They could not afford to lose any of their meager household goods, especially the kitchenware and the tools he’d stored under the canvas shelter.
The foggy mist dissipated, but the sky above began clouding over. A thunderstorm growing on the horizon was headed in their direction. Kyoko followed his glance and reached the same conclusion.
“It figures,” she grumped. “What next? And where will we sleep tonight? Nothing is safe anymore.”
Kyoko rarely visited the galleon because of her fear of ghosts, and after finding the skeletons, she’d sworn never to return. Instead, Gus and Hannah brought back the items she could use.
But the time had come for all of them to rethink.
“We would at least be dry on the ship,” he said. “You know that’s what Hannah will push for.”
“It’s so dirty,” Kyoko argued.
“You know that’s not true. Hannah cleaned it up quite a bit. And you may as well face it; there’s not another option. That geyser may go off any second. And it’s too muddy in the jungle.”
It took her a minute to yield to the inevitable.
“All right,” Kyoko said glumly. “But let’s at least take the clean blankets with us. I want something between me and all that grime.”
Hannah showed up and agreed with the decision. She told Kyoko, “Ich habe die Heizung eingeschaltet.” I put the heat on.
They sorted out the most essential items, storing what they could not carry in a pile, hopefully out of the path of danger. Gus found the padded box with the handiphone. Kyoko and Hannah gathered around while he took it out to inspect.
When the Power LED came on, Hannah exclaimed, “Danke Gott!” Thank God!
“I was so worried about that,” Kyo
ko agreed. “Can we send a message now?”
“Let’s wait,” Gus said. “I don’t want to show my wife all this mess; she’ll freak out and so will your families. Let’s send an update once we get settled in on Alyssa, and they can see that we’re all fine.”
The sun had dropped below the horizon by the time they reached the crater rim. The sky turned from deep purple to black with only one of the moons illuminating their path. The ship’s silver outline shimmered in the lagoon and the masts stuck up like dead tree trunks in a burned-out forest, draped with cobweb ropes.
Through the leaded glass windows of the captain’s cabin, a lonely flame flickered forlornly inside a ship’s lantern.
“This is going to be horrible,” Kyoko muttered.
When they reached the hull, Hannah scrambled up the ladder for Gus to hand up their bundles. He followed, but Kyoko stood on the ground, one foot resting on the bottom step. A freezing drizzle started, and she looked up at Gus unhappily.
“Come on,” he called to her. “It will be fine.” After a moment, she began to climb up. “Give her a hand,” Gus told Hannah. “I think she’s about to come apart.”
Misery etched Kyoko’s face as Hannah helped her over the railing.
In the fading light, the main deck looked much the same as her first visit. Piles of ropes lay carelessly strewn around the base of the mast. “Is this where we sleep?” Kyoko asked in a grim voice.
“Nein, hier entlang.” No, this way. Hannah took Kyoko’s hand and led her through the door into the passageway for the officer’s berths.
The ship’s interior now had a musty odor that reminded Gus of his grandmother’s attic—an old garlic smell mixed with furniture polish. For Gus, it brought back pleasant memories, but Kyoko still looked shell-shocked.
Hannah gestured to one of the officer berths she had turned into bedrooms. Gus peered in from the passageway off the main deck. Hannah helped Kyoko off with the overcoat and pulled a thick dry sweater from the sea chest, now stuffed with clean clothes. Hannah slipped it over Kyoko’s head and held her, rubbing her back until she stopped shivering.