Survival (2 page)

But mist shouldn’t be visible in the blackness

Thinklhe ordered himself.

The last thing he remembered, he had been on the plane bound for Guam and Charting a New Course. His sister, Lyssa, got the extra peanuts and — big surprise — refused to share.

Peanuts. He sure could use some peanuts now

Forget the peanuts! Think!

Guam. This must be Guam! But what happened to Charting a New Course? And where was Lyssa?

His freckled features formed a nervous frown. His parents had sent him and his sister halfway around the world for CNC. The trip was supposed to teach them to get along. It was a huge deal to Mom and Dad — big money too. If he missed it, they’d never forgive him. Lyssa was already their little darling. That would only get worse if everybody was mad at him.

He felt white-hot rage. Lyssa did this! She set him up so he would miss the trip. Only — why couldn’t he remember her doing it? Why couldn’t he remember how he got here at all?

He stood up — muscles very stiff. How long had he been sleeping? Wait a minute — these weren’t the clothes he’d been wearing on the plane! He was clad only in shorts and a T-shirt, both absolutely ruined.

Oh, Lyssa was going to pay for this one

He began to explore the beach — slowly; his feet were unsteady. He felt as if he might overbalance and fall flat on his face at any moment.

There was just enough light for him to make out the ocean on one side and a jungle of palm trees on the other. What he couldn’t make out was anything else — no people, no buildings, nothing. Guam wasn’t exactly New York City, but it was a place with towns, an airport, a marina where thePhoenix , CNC’s boat, was supposed to be parked.

Not parked, he reminded himself. Moored.

He stopped in his tracks. How would he know something like that? He was totally clueless when it came to sailing.

“Will?” came a voice from the distance.

Lyssa?

No, the voice was male.

“Will, where are you?”

Nowthat one was definitely a girl.

“Lyssa?” He broke into a sprint. “Lyss, I don’t know what kind of a joke you think this is — “

He pulled up short. Two boys and a girl were running across the beach, staring at him as if he’d just come back from the dead. Lyssa was nowhere to be seen.

“Who are you?” demanded Will. “Where’s my sister?”

They froze, eyes widening.

The first boy — the leader? — took a cautious step forward.

“Will, it’s me. Luke. And Charla and Ian.”

Will squinted at the strangers. Should he know these people? They seemed to know him. “Listen, I think I’m lost. I’m looking for a boat called thePhoenix . Know it?”

The three exchanged an uneasy glance.

“ThePhoenix sank, Will,” said Luke. “We were all on it.”

“What are you talking about?” Will stormed. “I’ve never been on a boat in my life! Where’s Lyssa?”

“She didn’t make it,” Charla said gently. “The four of us managed to get on the raft, but we never found Lyssa or JJ.”

“I don’t know any J.J.! I don’t know you! Where’s my sister?”

“Will, think!” urged Luke. “You have to remember! We were all together on the CNC trip. There was a storm and then an explosion. We’re lucky to be alive!”

“Listen,” Will said impatiently, “you’ve got the wrong guy. My boat trip hasn’t started yet. I don’t know anything about any shipwreck!”

Charla tried reason. “Please, Will. Try to remember! We were shipwrecked together. How else could we get to this island?”

“You mean Guam?” Will was exasperated. “Iflew here! With my sister!”

“This isn’t Guam,” Luke said soberly. “We don’t know where we are.”

“That’s your problem!” He looked past them into the gloom. “Lyssa!Lyssa !”

“It must be amnesia,” Ian said in a low voice.

“You’re crazy!” exclaimed Will.

“No, really,” Charla pleaded. “You were so sick on the raft! You were unconscious for days — “

“That’s a lie! What have you done with my sister?”

Luke stepped forward and put a comforting hand on Will’s shoulder.

Wild with panic, Will shook him off and staggered back.

“Will, don’t!” Charla cried. “We can help you!”

Like a hunted animal, Will stared from face to face. They were lying, all three of them. They were trying to trick him into — what?

He had no way of knowing. He was lost — so lost. But whatever was going on, these three were mixed up in it somehow. He was in trouble, and who knew what had happened to Lyssa!

Animal instinct took over. With an inarticulate cry, he wheeled on the sand and sprinted down the beach.

He stole a quick glance over his shoulder.

They were gaining on him! The girl ran like a cheetah. “Leave me alone!” he yelled. Desperately he made a right turn and disappeared into the jungle. Charla was hot on his heels.

“No!” cried Ian. “If we get lost in there, we won’t even find one another!”

Charla stopped just inside the trees. “We can’t just leave him!”

“We can’t help him if we’re worse off than he is,” Luke argued. “We’ve got to stay cool.”

“But — ” She began to cry. “It starts bad and just gets worse and worse! Losing the captain was terrible enough. I keep seeing it in my sleep. Then Lyssa and JJ. And now Will — “

“We haven’t lost him,” soothed Luke. “Maybe the bugs will drive him out of there. They did it to us.”

“And maybe they won’t!” she sobbed. “He could trip and break a leg. He could fall unconscious again. There are wild boars out there!”

“They’re not hunters,” Ian put in. “The Discovery Channel did a show on them once. They can be nasty, but they won’t hunt a fellow animal for food.”

Charla was bitter. “Will’s not an animal; he’s our friend.”

“In the jungle, we’re all animals,” Ian said seriously. “We have to hunt and forage to survive.”

Luke eased himself down on the soft sand. “A wild pig means only one thing to me,” he said, rubbing his stomach. “Bacon.”

Charla sat beside him. “We can’t even open a coconut. You expect to track a boar, kill it, skin it, and cook it? We don’t even have a fire.”

“That should be job one,” Ian said positively. “A big bonfire would signal ships and planes that we’re here. Then we could get Will to a doctor.”

Charla looked out into the great blackness of the sea. “Do you rea//y think we have a chance of being rescued from this place?”

Luke considered the problem. “The whole CNC thing is about isolation. They start you in Guam, which is nowhere, and they take you out to nowhere squared. And this” — he gazed around the beach — “this has to be even farther than that.”

“But they’ll definitely look for us,” Ian argued. “I mean, they send in half the army when some balloonist or mountain climber gets lost. They’ll search for us when we don’t show up back in Guam.”

“Searching and finding are two different things,” Luke pointed out. “In case you haven’t noticed, it’s a really big ocean with thousands of islands that look exactly like this one. Who knows how long it could take to track us down?”

“Months,” Charla predicted mournfully. “Years. Never, maybe.”

Her words seemed to hang there for a long time, underscored by the steady pounding of the ocean.

It was Ian who finally broke the gloomy silence. “It’s not impossible, you know. There are thousands of stories of survival in places like this.”

“Maybe so,” Luke said grimly. “But I’ll bet there were even more that didn’t get told because the people were never rescued. Remember, the Discovery Channel can’t interview you when you’ve vanished off the face of the earth.”

Day 2, 11:55 a.m.

A single ray of tropical sunlight caught the left half of Ian Sikorsky’s glasses. Carefully, the boy angled the lens to reflect the intensified beam onto the pile of leaves on the sand in front of him.

There was a breathless silence. Then —

“It’s not burning,” Charla observed, worried.

“The leaves are still a little damp.” lan’s eyes never wavered from the tiny dot of light concentrated on the brush.

“No, they aren’t,” she said. “We’ve been drying them out on the beach for three hours.”

“You’ve seen how it rains here. They’re wet.” A tiny but clear note of exasperation — Ian had little patience for people who disputed what was obvious.

There was an almost inaudible sizzle, and a tiny curl of smoke rose from the pile. And then — a newborn flame.

Charla let out a sigh of relief and realized she’d been holding her breath.

Luke was hard at work using vines to tie together a framework of branches for a lean-to shelter. He ran over to help Charla and Ian arrange kindling in a pyramid around the pile of burning leaves. Soon the fire was going strong. Larger and thicker pieces were added and the flames grew.

“How big does it have to be?” asked Charla.

“Big enough to be spotted from a distance at night,” replied Ian.

“It’ll be harder to see during the day,” Luke pointed out.

“True,” agreed Ian. “But if we notice a plane or boat, we can pile on wet leaves. That’ll make a lot of smoke.”

Wood gathering was a problem. Since they had no cutting tools, their fire had to be fueled by fallen branches and other deadwood. Stumps and thick logs were rare. Thinner twigs were plentiful, but they burned quickly. That meant a huge amount of wood had to be stockpiled to keep the fire going.

The three castaways made dozens of trips into the jungle that afternoon, returning with armload after armload of wood. It was backbreaking work. The sun was searingly hot, and the crushing humidity weighed them down as if they were wearing hundred-pound packs on their backs.

Luke was amazed they were able to do it all. Just yesterday, they had washed up on this island, more dead than alive. It showed what a long drink of water and some solid food could do.

In that area, things were improving. Just down the beach, a single spike of coral stuck out of the sand. Charla gave it its name: the can opener. Coconuts, tough, round, and stubborn, broke like eggs when smashed against it. That morning, she had shown why she was one of the country’s top young athletes. She had shinnied up a thirty-foot palm tree as easily as she strolled the beach. From there, she sent a dozen coconuts plummeting to her friends on the ground. After durians, coconut meat seemed as delicious and substantial as a twelve-course meal. The sweet milk tasted better than any triple-chocolate shake Luke could remember.

They had also discovered banana trees. Finger bananas, Charla called them, because they were small — about as long as an index finger. They were light and sweet and plentiful. It was starting to look like starvation would be the least of their worries.

But that was only because they had a lot of worries, Luke reminded himself. Will

He shook his head to clear it. Will was probably okay. They had to look after their own survival first. Then they could search for Will.

By midafternoon, the shelter was complete.

The three were as proud as if they had just built a skyscraper. It definitely wasn’t beautiful, but it was a very functional structure. The framework of branches and vines was propped and tied against two trees at the edge of the jungle. Into it, they had tightly woven palm fronds to create an angled roof.

“It won’t keep out the rain,” Luke had said to Ian, who was the lean-to’s designer.

“We’ll put pieces of tree bark on top,” Ian decided. “If you pile them thick enough, it’s perfect for waterproofing.”

Luke grinned at the boy. Ian had been sent on this trip because his parents were worried that he had no friends and spent all his time watching TV and surfing the Internet. But now, those hundreds of hours in front of the Learning Channel andNational Geographic Explorer were starting to pay off. Without lan’s know-how, Luke reflected, they would all probably be dead.

Luke and Charla took the raft that had carried them to the island and propped it against one open end of their new home. The opposite side, which was going to serve as the entrance, they draped with a large, slightly charred piece of sail from thePhoenix . This had been saved by Ian from the burning boat and used as sun protection on the raft.

That left just the back end — the space between the two trees. There, Luke and Charla placed another framework of branches, with palm fronds basket-woven through the twigs.

“It’s not exactly the Hilton,” Luke said with a shrug, “but it’ll keep us dry. The sand should be comfortable for sleeping.”

They had been working nonstop since the sunrise had awoken them ten hours earlier. Now the castaways allowed themselves a thirty-second period of relaxation.

They were exhausted from their labors, and still weary from their ordeal on the raft, but when their eyes locked, there was perfect understanding and agreement among the three.

“Let’s go get him,” said Ian as they headed into the woods to search for Will.

Day 2, 4:40 p.m.

At that moment, the three might not have recognized Will even if they’d found him. In a single night, their friend had changed. His face had been bruised by branches and scratched by the sharp edges of palm fronds during his frantic escape in the pitch-black. He couldn’t believe how thick the foliage was here. At one point he had stumbled into a stand of ferns so dense that he’d been thrown back as if the plants themselves had pushed him away.

What was left of his body after that went to the mosquitoes — clouds of them, coming in waves like the Air Force on a bombing run. He’d tried slapping them away at first. But there were far too many — and too much of his skin left uncovered. Eventually, hundreds of bite-bumps grew together into a horrible shell of puffy red mottled skin. His face felt expanded, deformed. His eyelids were swollen partway shut. The discomfort was unbelievable — far more than itch. His entire body crawled with a churning irritation that scratching only made worse.

Sleep? — Hah! Who could sleep in a state like that? Curled into a miserable ball on the ground, roots digging into his side, ants parading over him, mosquitoes

Ugh, mosquitoes.

He had broken down during the night, screaming, “Howcould you dothis to me ?!” At that moment, he didn’t care who heard him or even what happened to him. It was all so useless! He didn’t even know who he was yelling at.