Sadie Walker Is Stranded (11 page)

*   *   *

Whether we liked it or not, a destination had been chosen for us.

In a way, it was just like we planned. Find land. We found it, all right, forcefully.

I’d like to think we were fortunate. The storm had thrown us into a cove of sorts, with a curtain of green trees covering us overhead. Everything smelled piney and crisp. When the rain finally died down we poked our heads out to find that we weren’t doomed to drown or wash up on shore. But the boat had taken a beating, the hull badly scraped and torn from being smashed against the rocky coast of the island. There was no beach, just a sheer rock face with fringes of mossy grass hanging over the edge at about our head height.

Shane trembled in my grasp, peering up with unblinking eyes as we both found ourselves in more or less one piece.

“See?” I said weakly. “All over.”

He climbed out of the cockpit with me, shifting his grip to my left hand. Thank God he was all right—shaken, sure, wet and rumpled, but definitely not fish food. When I limped to the starboard side of the ship I could reach out and run my hand along the gleaming pale pink stones. The storm had appeared, tossed us around, and then left, leaving behind a creepy absence, birds singing happily as if nothing at all had happened.

“I can’t believe it,” Andrea said, appearing at my side. She, too, reached out to touch the rocks, as if checking that they were real and not in a dream. “We’re alive.”

Miraculously, nobody was seriously injured. Noah had jammed his wrist pretty bad trying to steady the wheel in the cockpit, but other than that there was nothing to report but bruises and minor abrasions. We gathered at the railing, taking stock of our cuts and bumps and sneaking glances at the island itself. So close to the shore it was impossible to tell how big it truly was.

“Do you think we should explore a little?” Noah asked. He bounced on his heels. It was obvious he was eager to be on land again.

“I don’t know,” Andrea said, “maybe we should wait and spend the night here, see what happens.”

“You mean see what comes crawling out after us?” I countered.

“We can’t stay,” Moritz said, rubbing his jaw. He had the beginnings of a beard. “We might drift back out with the tide.”

“The boat won’t go anywhere if we tie it to the trees,” I said. “We can’t stay here. That was never the plan, right? We should get onto land while we have the chance.”

Andrea shot me a look. “And when the tide goes out it’ll beach.”

“Look, it was your idea to land anyway,” I replied. “And now we’ve done it.”

Not very gracefully, I didn’t add. Trying to navigate the boat back out would be touchy, especially with the hull wedged up onto a sandbar. You didn’t need to be Vasco da Gama to see the problems inherent in trying to push a boat off of the sand
and
manage to scamper onto it in time. The sail was tangled, the outboard motor sticking up out of the water … Leaving didn’t seem like much of an option.

“Fine,” Andrea said, throwing up her arms. Her hat had fallen off in the storm. She began searching the deck for it. “But we need to find a beach. I’m not camping in the middle of a forest.”

We got down to the business of transferring what was salvageable off the boat. Personally, I was glad to feel firm earth under my feet again. Shane seemed to like it too. Even before The Outbreak he hadn’t been a complainer, but living on short food stuffs, you’d think the kid would eventually gripe about eating rice for almost every meal. But he never uttered a peep of discontent. You had to look close, like now, to see that the barest hint of a smile was the only indicator that he liked this situation better.

Walking on stones and dirt felt natural, comforting. And the smells were different, as lush as a savage, prehistoric forest. The air was clean and filled with the wintry scent of wet trees. Feeling optimistic, I tracked down my garbage bag, which had snagged on a nail and managed to stay onboard. The things inside were more or less ruined. The sketches hadn’t fared well, washed out by the water, and the food was soaked. We had Arturo’s port, some old sodas from the hold under the cockpit and some random bits of food that had managed to stay dry. Shane puttered along behind me, collecting a shell, a broken pencil, Andrea’s hat …

Noah’s books had spent the storm in the cockpit and, while dampened, remained readable. Most importantly, Arturo’s huge supply of matches for his cigarettes had weathered the storm, untouched. He kept them in a plastic zip bag. That decision could very well end up saving our lives.

There wasn’t much to scavenge, so we boosted each other up onto the rocks and into the tree cover. Noah and Andrea took the tie-up ropes and looped them around the sturdiest pines. Shane scampered onto my back, hooking his arms around my neck and his heels alongside my ribs. I almost felt a pang of regret as we put the boat to our backs and headed into the forest. Almost.

We stayed near to the edge of the rock cliff, with the water on our right. From the compass Noah had taken, it showed us heading south, southwest. It was hard going. The trees were thick, wild and the terrain shifted constantly with the rocky ledge swerving in and out. Stumbling was inevitable. A few times I heard Shane grunt in protest as a low-hanging branch swiped at him. Guessing where the next good place to land a foot was touch and go. But the proximity to the water helped us find a beach with relative ease, and after half an hour of constant walking we followed the slope of the ledge down to a clearing and then a shallow beach.

“Not bad,” I said, trying to remain hopeful. “We should mark high and low tide, just to make sure we set camp far enough up the hill.”

“Right,” Andrea said, momentarily surprised by my suggestion. I didn’t like the idea that she wanted to be the only one rubbing two brain cells together. She adjusted her sweater and walked back up the hill, finding a pair of long, pointed sticks. Shane had given her the hat back and it sat crooked on her head. She broke off the extra twigs and marched down to us, then hammered one of the branches into the pebbly sand with the handle of Carl’s knife.

“We still have one fishing rod,” I said. We stood in a half-circle, our backs to the water. “And enough food survived to last us a few days. We’ve got the sail covers, and those could insulate a lean-to if we can set one up.”

“We’ll need a fire,” Moritz added, “and drinking water, and we’ll have to take turns keeping watch at night.”

“Enough for a start,” Noah put in.

It was bolstering to know that once we finally got back onto land, our collective IQ rose by about two hundred points. Survival seemed manageable at this point, even probable. Beyond that, who could say? I glanced back northeast, in the direction of the cove and Arturo’s boat. I doubted if she would ever sail again and our optimistic plan to wait out the panic in Seattle and return felt like a cute but flimsy notion. Behind us, other islands dotted the distance. The possibility finally dawned that they could be inhabited, and not just by animals or the undead.

“Why don’t you and Shane go with Cassandra to gather firewood?” Andrea suggested. I whirled around, finding that she was talking to me. Firewood collector? Come on. I thought I had earned something better for my clever high tide suggestion.

“I’ll try to get some kindling going,” she added, “and Moritz and Noah can start on the lean-to.”

I looked at Moritz, who seemed utterly confounded by the idea of building anything so complex. His suit was now beyond bedraggled, and he looked more like a homeless man than a hoity-toity art critic and collector. He chewed down on his lower lip, his big, earnest blue eyes filled with sudden regret. I stifled a scoff. Yeah, I thought, let him build the lean-to, he’s a regular Bear Grylls.

Andrea caught on to my private sneering and tossed me a stainless-steel glare. I grinned and headed off at a clip for the woods with Shane and Cassandra. Team spirit, I reminded myself, go—fight—win.

It wasn’t as bad as I expected. Shane didn’t bother to help gather wood, instead picking up whatever interesting tidbits he found on the ground. Traveling the perimeter of the beach gave me a chance to orient and to look for any bits of string or washed up detritus that could help us.

“Did you get banged up in the storm?” I asked Cassandra. We found a small deposit of dry-ish driftwood on the northeast side of the beach.

She looked back at me, one arm loaded down with wood. With her wild red curls in her face and her bloody scrubs it was difficult to judge whether or not she had actually sustained any wounds in the wreck.

“A bruise or two,” she murmured in response. “I’ll live. You?”

“Same.” I put down my growing stack of wood and wiped at my forehead. Even in the brisk weather I was breaking a sweat. “Sorry we haven’t … We haven’t talked much yet.”

“You have your boy to look after,” Cassandra replied calmly.

“Well … yeah, my nephew.” I cringed. I really had to stop making the distinction.

“No difference,” she said. “Little boys need lots of looking after.”

“Yeah.” I looked at Shane and felt something weird, a swelly feeling, like my heart was trying to beat too fast or there was too much blood in it. I had gotten us this far and that was something, right? Sure, I wasn’t Supermom and I’d taken a few stupid risks and nearly gotten myself pulled down into oblivion, but I wasn’t exactly going for style points. Shane turned at the waist, a sandy shell in his palm. He flicked the grains off, holding it up close to examine it.

“You have kids?” I asked casually.

“Little boys need lots of looking after…”

“Yeah, I heard that bit.”

Cassandra ducked down more quickly, the sticks in her arms jabbing her in the arm and throat. “Lots of looking after,” she repeated, her gaze falling on Shane. “Lots of looking after.”

SEVEN

Water would be a problem. Water was always a problem.

Honestly? It doesn’t matter how many
Man vs. Wild
marathons you’ve embarked upon or how many times you were forced to watch
The Voyage of the Mimi
, and it certainly doesn’t matter how often you tell yourself, “Sure, I could do that! I know how to build a fire and whittle a weapon with a knife the size of a dill pickle. And hell, I could spear a fish and roast it over my own hard-won flames!”

Because when it counts, when that moment comes you’ll forget everything. Wherever he was, I was letting my dad down. This was nothing new to me. I had camped, fished, roughed it in some pretty intimidating forests with my father, but that didn’t mean I could magically make drinking water appear. He and I would either wind up near fresh-water lakes and use a filter, or bring bottled water of our own. Arturo either hadn’t owned a distiller or it had gotten lost in the wreck because now we had no way to get drinkable water of our own.

And unfortunately, Mother Nature, in her infinite wisdom, had not seen to it that we landed a stone’s throw away from a freshwater spring. That first night, with a fire actually going (that one wasn’t so bad with matches and my camping experience) and a lean-to fifty percent finished, I glared out at the endless sea surrounding us and scowled, really scowled.

“Water, water everywhere and not a drop to drink,” Andrea muttered.

“Thanks for the reminder.” I chewed through a piece of fish the size and texture of belt leather. I spat out a speck of grit that had stuck to the jerky. “This salty fish sure does go down smooth.”

We had pooled the food, cutting off a square of sail tarp to make a waterproof satchel. Pro tip: Eating an entire meal of dried meat is a speedy way to turn your mouth into the Sahara. With darkness settling around us, there was no time to solve the water conundrum, but I would bet good money that every single one of us around that fire was trying to figure out a way how. Maybe dehydration was shrinking our brains, turning them to sawdust. If so, the zombies might actually leave us alone. Then I remembered something actually useful, something my resourceful father had taught me how to dew.
Do
.

“Dew,” I whispered, awestruck at the idea. “We can set out some leaves to collect dew,” I said, louder. “And in the morning we can walk around in the grass and wring out our pants.”

“That will not yield abundance,” Moritz said, reasonably. “But it’s a start.”

Eat your heart out, Les Stroud.

We picked straws for taking the watch. Selfishly, I’ll admit, when it came my turn I was relieved to draw the longest one. Moritz had drawn the shortest straw (or blade of grass in this case). He now had the dubious honor of taking the last watch, but he offered to stay up and keep me company for a while. He wasn’t sleepy and neither was I. In fact, being on land again had given me a buzz.

“Doing all right?” Moritz asked. We had moved to the edge of the clearing. Around the outer limits of the camp, Noah and I had rigged up a primitive twine trip wire connected to a pair of sardine cans. If we had unwanted visitors, be they bear or the undead, we would know. (That was Noah’s idea so unfortunately I can’t take credit.)

Meanwhile, Shane slept in the shelter of the lean-to, exhausted by a long day of collecting shells and asking me what animals lived in each one.

“Peachy,” I replied. “I can’t tell you how glad I am to be off that damn boat.”

“Agreed. But what will we become here?” he asked. “We can’t stay forever.”

“Give it a chance, Moritz. It hasn’t even been twenty-four hours yet. Sure, it’s not the Edgewater, but you could give it some time. Maybe it’ll grow on you.”

I set down Carl’s knife on the ground between my knees. That was the one weapon given to me for the watch. A few feet away, the gas canister and a matchbook waited, just in case things got seriously hairy. I had brought
The Maltese Falcon
, too, but the firelight didn’t reach and I would need a flashlight.

Moritz and Noah had gotten enough of a shelter up to keep the tarp secured over a carpet of pine branches with blankets on top. Andrea stoked the fire, giving it one last prod before the job of keeping it up fell to me. That was part of taking the watch too. Under the sail cover, Noah and Cassandra slept at opposite ends of the shelter.