Survivors (Stranded) (4 page)

The ground here was too rocky for digging, even if they’d had a shovel. Instead, they’d gathered all the big stones they could find and formed a mound over the skeletal remains. Jane said the mound was called a
cairn
, though she couldn’t remember where the word came from. After the last of the rocks had been stacked, she’d picked several white and yellow flowers from the woods and placed them on top.

Now everyone stood around, shifting on tired feet. “Should we say something?” Buzz asked. It seemed like the right thing to do, but he wasn’t sure what to say.

Then quietly, Jane started in.

“You died here alone, and nobody ever knew it,” she said. She was facing the cairn and clearly speaking to whoever was inside. “Now we know it, and if we ever get out of here, other people will know it, too. Nobody’s going to forget about you. That’s a promise.”

“Also, thank you for the ship,” Vanessa said.

It was a strange thing to say, Buzz thought, but it also seemed right. He hadn’t thought of anything to offer himself, although several questions had been running through his mind for the last hour.

What happened here? Why were these people never rescued? What had they done wrong?

Maybe the answer was . . . nothing. Maybe they’d done everything they could. But if they
had
made a mistake, Buzz thought, and if he and the others could figure out what it was, then maybe—just maybe—it could bring them a step closer to getting rescued themselves.

And if that happened, then maybe these people would have died for something. To help save the four of them.

Buzz realized
that
might be a nice thing to say, once he’d thought it. But the moment had passed. Carter, Jane, and Vanessa were already turning away, headed down to the ship.

It was time to get back to work.

C
arter reached up with his good hand and pulled himself onto the deck of the abandoned ship. With the funeral behind them, his thoughts had turned back to whatever might be waiting for them on board.

Vanessa, Buzz, and Jane scrambled up behind him, and they worked their way toward the ship’s two-level wheelhouse. It sat like a small building on the main deck, with doors on either side, port and starboard.

When Carter reached the port entrance, he saw at a glance how dead the place was inside. An instrument panel near the door was smashed and dented, its old glass gauges covered in a thick layer of grime. Vines grew in through the spaces where the windows used to be and ran in a tangle all around the room.

“I think this is communications over here,” Vanessa said. The first thing on everyone’s mind was the radio—but it didn’t take long to rule out that possibility. Vanessa flipped several switches and turned a few levers, but nothing happened. It was all just junk by now.

Carter went straight up a set of steep metal stairs to find the captain’s wheel on the top level. A dead clock above the broken-out windows had stopped at 10:35. There seemed to be some navigation equipment as well, but it was just as lifeless as everything else. He didn’t see any paper charts, either.

“There’s more stairs over here,” Buzz’s voice came from below, followed by a metal groan and echoing footsteps.

Then Carter heard Vanessa call out. “Buzz, slow down,” she said. “Wait for me.”

“Well, come on, then,” Buzz answered back. “I think there might be—”

Whatever he said next was swallowed up by another metallic groan, a loud snapping sound, and then an enormous crash.

Carter raced back down to the main level of the wheelhouse. Jane stood alone in an open hatchway at the back, looking into the space below. If any stairs had been there a minute ago, they were gone now. All Carter could see was the hole left behind and a cloud of gray dust.

“Buzz?” he shouted. “Vanessa?”

Vanessa struggled to catch her breath. The fall had knocked the wind right out of her. Buzz started coughing first. As the cloud of dust and particles cleared, she could see him on the floor, rubbing his head.

Her own first breath turned into a cough as well. She covered her mouth and hacked up a lungful of dust while Jane and Carter scrambled down to reach them. The ceilings were low here. It wasn’t a far drop from the main deck to this one.

“Is everyone okay?” Carter asked.

“I think so,” Vanessa said. She was getting used to being banged up in a way that she never would have shrugged off at home. They all were.

As the dust continued to clear, the space around them revealed itself. They were in a small plain room, with portholes on either side. There were two long tables with matching benches, and a line of framed maps on the wall, mostly with broken glass. A stack of wooden pallets sat in the corner. Vanessa recognized the gray, cracked planks right away. They matched the wood of the grave marker up in the clearing.

“We can use those for firewood,” Carter said.

“And we can push one of these tables over,” Vanessa said. “That’ll make getting back out of here easier.”

Working together, she and Carter dragged the collapsed staircase off to the side and pushed the nearest table into place, under the hatch door above.

From where they stood, narrow passages extended away in both directions. Toward the stern, Vanessa could see several open cabin doors.

“Here’s the galley!” Jane called out from the other direction. Immediately, Vanessa turned and followed the boys back that way to see.

It didn’t take long to ransack the tiny kitchen and come up empty-handed. There were some pots and pans, and dozens of utensils, but that was it. Anything resembling a food locker was disappointingly empty. Whoever had been shipwrecked here before them had obviously gone through everything there was to eat.
Before they died,
Vanessa thought. It was depressing, but there was no use dwelling on it.

“Let’s keep moving,” she said, and peered down the corridor in the opposite direction. “What do you think’s over there?”

Jane followed the others into the corridor that led toward the stern of the boat. There were two cabin doors on each side, all of them open.

“Everyone take a cabin,” Carter said.

Jane turned and stepped over the raised sill of the doorway on her left. The tiny room looked more like an office than sleeping quarters. Besides a single porthole, the walls were covered with wire mesh shelving. A mess of old rotted cardboard boxes sat on some of the shelves. Others were piled in the corners. A quick look showed her they were all too stained and mildewed to be of any interest.

Jane turned her attention to the metal desk bolted against the wall. On the desktop, several old books sat in a stack, but the titles on their spines were written in an alphabet she didn’t recognize. There was also a clear plastic paperweight with a sand dollar inside, and several empty metal cups. In one of the cups, she found a broken-off pencil, and immediately stuck it in her pocket.

On the wall over the desk was another framed map. Looking more closely, she saw that it was crisscrossed with longitude and latitude markings, and that several cities on the map were marked in English: Busan, Pyongyang, Seoul. It was the last one that Jane recognized.

“I think this ship is from Korea!” she called out to the others. She could see Carter across the hall, rooting through one of the sleeping cabins.

“Check it out!” he said. He held up a metal spool of some kind. “I think this is fishing line. And if we can find some wire, we can make hooks!”

It was a thrill, starting to unearth some of the ship’s left-behind treasures. And its secrets, too.

Jane started opening desk drawers next, and she quickly found the one thing she’d most been hoping for. In the bottom left drawer, a stack of four leather-bound journals sat waiting for her. As she took them out and thumbed the yellowing pages, she saw more unfamiliar handwriting—Korean language, she supposed.

Best of all, each book had at least a few blank pages at the back. She could use those to restart her own journal, after losing the last one in the fire. It was tempting to sit down and start writing right away.

For the first several days on Nowhere Island, she’d recorded everything on video. It had begun as a report for her fifth-grade class. But after the shipwreck, it became more like a diary of life on the island.

When the camera’s batteries ran down, she’d switched to writing by hand, in Uncle Dexter’s captain’s journal from the
Lucky Star
. Somewhere along the way, the journal became something else again—a way of not going crazy, maybe, or just a way to capture it all and hold it in one place.

Whatever it was, Jane hugged the journals to her chest, feeling happy for the first time in days. After a truly horrible morning, the afternoon was turning out to be much, much better.

Fresh water, a dry place to sleep, and a new journal. It wasn’t a lot, but it sure felt that way.

“Hey, you guys!” Buzz shouted from his cabin down the hall. “Come look at this!”

He stood in one of the three sleeping chambers, staring at the floor. A manhole cover of some kind was sunk into the roughly textured metal deck. He’d seen several throughout the ship already, each one of them tightly bolted down.

Until this one.

Whoever had been here before had left it open for some reason. Half a dozen loose bolts and an old rusted wrench lay on the floor nearby. Two more bolts were half screwed into their holes, holding the cover in place.

Vanessa appeared in the door. “What is it?” she asked. Carter was there now, too, and Jane squeezed between both of them to see.

“I don’t know,” Buzz said. “I was just going to find out.”

He picked up the wrench and fitted it to the first bolt. It was stiff and took some effort, but soon it loosened right up. He was able to finish taking it out with just his fingers.

The same was true on the second one.

With the bolts removed, there was still the matter of prying the big steel disc out of its place in the floor. Carter, Vanessa, and Jane gathered around, and they all crammed their fingers into the small space the bolts had left behind.

“Ready?” Carter said. “One, two, three—”

Buzz heaved along with the others. The cover was snugly fitted. It seemed to have formed a seal over the hole, or whatever was down there. It took several tries before it came up even a fraction of an inch.

“Again!” Buzz said. “It’s coming!”

They all lifted again. With a scrape of metal and the sound of sucking air, the cover finally came free. They shuffled it to the side, then let it drop onto the deck with a huge clang.

The next thing Buzz noticed was the smell. A harsh chemical odor poured up and out of the dark space beneath the floor.

Jane gagged. “What is that?” she asked.

“Oh, man!” Carter said, backing up. “Did we just open a sewer?”

“I don’t think so,” Buzz said. He lifted the collar of his T-shirt over his mouth and nose before he looked down inside.

Just below floor level, he could see the top of a ladder built into the side of whatever tank they’d just opened. An old stained rope was tied to the top rung and extended down into the darkness. For about the hundredth time in the last week, Buzz wished for a flashlight.

Instead, he reached down and grabbed hold of the rope. It was greasy and also sticky in his hands as he started to pull.

“Buzz? What are you doing?” Vanessa asked.

There was some resistance on the line at first. Then it gave way all at once. A bucket appeared out of the black, hanging on the end of the rope. He could see it was filled with a thick, dark liquid of some kind.

Buzz’s pulse quickened, thinking about what this might be. The others all stepped back while he lifted the full bucket up and out of the hole.

“What is it?” Jane asked.

“I think it’s fuel,” Buzz replied.

“Fuel?” Carter asked. “Like, gas?”

Buzz shrugged. He didn’t know what these boats ran on. All he knew was that they’d just found something that
might
make life around camp easier. Which, in a place like this, was like striking gold.