Wrecked (20 page)

Jonathan started to feel like he was suffocating.  

A mad scramble started, everyone trying to get some fresh air at once.

“Wait, stop!  Try not to push up on the tarp.  I think it has rainwater on it that we could drink,” said Jonathan.

“Holy crap, I need some air,” whined Sarah.

“Just wait a second, I’m working on it,” said Jonathan.  He turned to start unfastening the snaps and straps behind him.  “Candi, help me get this tarp off on the edges.  Try to save any water that’s up there though.”  

He and Candi carefully crawled around the edges of the tarp, releasing it from its fastenings, bending the tarp towards its center.  They folded up the edges trying to capture whatever water was on top, channeling it into the middle.  They took a couple of minutes to add that water to the water bottles they had emptied earlier while handing out water rations.  

“This water may have a little ocean water in it, but maybe not.  We might as well save it now and check it later,” explained Jonathan as he screwed the cap on the last bottle.

The first thing they noticed was the sun.  It was out as if it had never left – as if the storm that had tossed them around like a cork on the sea for eight hours had never come; but the liters of water that had been centered on the tarp told a different story.

Then they noticed the cloud of flies that was buzzing around their heads.  They were smaller than regular flies and bit their exposed skin.  The bites felt a little like mosquitos, only sharper. 

“Ouch!  Those bugs are annoying!” said Candi, slapping her arm.  “I can barely see them, they’re so tiny.”

“Mother fu… ” shouted Sarah, as she swatted her legs with both hands.  

Kevin let out a low moan.  “Where are we?” he asked weakly.

Jonathan was surprised to hear him sounding so frail and looked down at him for the first time since they had the tarp opened up.

“Oh crap, Kevin, look at your hand.”

The split on the knuckles from hitting Jack’s nose was bright red and swollen, with puffy white-looking skin around the edges.  His eye didn’t look much better.  It was swollen and bluish-greenish in color.

“It’s infected,” said Jonathan.  He looked at Candi, and noticed fear in her eyes.

“What does that mean?  I mean, what should we do?” she asked.

Sarah sat up and rubbed her eyes, and before she stopped to think said, “We need to get him some antibiotics.”  

Candi looked at her with an exasperated expression, silently scolding her.

Sarah had the grace to look chagrined.  “Sorry.  What I meant to say is that we need to clean it really good and do what we can to get the infection out.”  She nodded her head to add some affirmation to her words.

“Oh, shit, I don’t feel so good,” moaned Kevin, holding his stomach.  He sat up and vomited over the edge of the boat.  

He heaved over and over again, making Jonathan only slightly worried that Kevin’s guts were going to come out and float away.  He’d never seen anyone so violently ill.

Candi leaned forward and patted him on the back, clearly at a loss.

“Kevin, what’s going on?” asked Jonathan.  This wasn’t normal for a hand wound as far as he knew.

“I don’t know,” gasped Kevin.  “I think I ate something bad on the ship at dinner.”  He gulped uncomfortably.  “Did anyone else eat those … god, I don’t even want to say the words … raw oysters?”

Everyone looked at each other, shaking their heads.  Jonathan answered for all of them.  “Nope.”

Kevin wiped his mouth off with his hand and dipped it into the water.  Then he fell back into the boat, landing on his back, moaning.  “Fuck me.  I’ve been poisoned.” 

Candi’s eyes bulged out of her head.  This was not good.  

“Kevin, you need to drink some water.  You’re going to get dehydrated quickly if you do have food poisoning and keep vomiting like that.”  Jonathan turned his attention to Candi.  “Candi, get the water bottle and get at least four ounces of water in him over the next thirty minutes.”

Candi nodded her head, moving to follow his instructions.  

Sarah just sat there numbly, looking worried, nodding her head at nothing in particular.  Then she stopped nodding and started squinting at Candi, examining her, as if seeing her for the first time.

“What?” said Candi.

“What do you mean ‘what’?”

“I mean, why are you staring at me?”

Sarah shrugged.  “No reason.  I was just thinking that you look like total crap.”

Candi got immediately offended.  “Well, thank you very much, Miss Thinks She’s Perfect, and may I say that you don’t look so hot yourself!” 

Sarah reached up to touch her chapped and salty lips.  Her fingers glided over the skin of her face, which pulled tight every time her mouth moved.  It had a layer of salt coating it that Jonathan knew from his own face, felt like a fine, dry crust.  She shrugged.  “I probably do look less than my best, but at least my hair doesn’t look like there’s a family of rats living in it.”

Candi laughed bitterly.  “I wouldn’t be so sure about that, if I were you.”

Sarah frowned and then reached up to touch her hair.  She pulled some of it forward and stared at it, obviously surprised to see that a light salty coating had come to rest all over it, making it go from blond to nearly gray.  She reached up with both hands to feel her entire head of hair.  “Oh.  My.  God.  It feels like teased cotton candy.  What the hell … ?” 

Jonathan wasn’t paying any mind to what they were saying.  Something he saw off in the distance was grabbing his attention.

“I think I see land!” yelled Jonathan, suddenly.

“What?!  Where?” said Candi, twisting around as far as she could, to see where Jonathan was looking.

“There!” answered Jonathan, pointing off in the distance.  “It has to be.  Otherwise there wouldn’t be flies.”

“I thought it was seagulls that flew around land,” said Sarah sarcastically.

“Yeah, but flies too,” said Jonathan, ignoring her attitude.

Kevin sat up with obvious effort.  

“Land.  Cool.”  He laid back down and closed his eyes.

Jonathan began rustling through one of the boat’s storage bins behind him.

“What are you looking for?” asked Candi.

“I think we have my small telescope here, don’t we?”

“I don’t think you need one – it’s definitely land, I can see it from here.  We’re getting closer.”

Sure enough, the current seemed to be driving them towards the land at a rapid pace.

“Sweet,” said Jonathan, a smile breaking out across his face as he confirmed Candi’s assessment.  “I guess we can just sit here then and wait until we wash up on the shore.”

“What shore is it, though?” asked Sarah, trepidation in her voice.  “I mean, where in the hell are we?”

“I have absolutely no idea,” said Jonathan, “but we’re about to find out.  Do you have any idea how lucky we are right now?  To have run into an island like this?”  He couldn’t stop himself grinning from ear to ear.

“Are there any, like, wild cannibal tribes out here that eat people and shrink heads and stuff like that?”

Jonathan frowned at her.  “Don’t be silly.  We’re in the Caribbean.  You’d have more trouble with pirates and drug runners than cannibals out here.”

“Ha!  Pirates!  That’s a good one,” said Sarah, looking out at the island with a smile.  “Johnny Depp can come after my treasure any day of the week.  I’ll barely even put up a fight, I promise.” 

Jonathan broke into her daydream with his serious response.  “I’m not joking.  There are modern day pirates out here that hijack and steal from unwary boaters and do all kinds of other things that we probably don’t want to know about.”

Sarah was instantly pissed again.  “Are you serious?  Because that’s just great, Jonathan.  Great. 
Pirates! 
And I thought sharks were our biggest problem.”

“Sharks are definitely a problem; but there are also poisonous jelly fish, barracudas, venomous snakes … ”

Sarah’s face grew more and more alarmed with every word that came out of Jonathan’s mouth.  

“Okay, Jonathan!  That’s enough, we get it now!” said Candi.  

“Did you hear that, Kevin?  We’re getting out of the frying pan and heading right into the fire,” said Sarah, bitterness lacing her voice.

“Mmmph, fire … ” was all they heard in reply.  Then Kevin started singing, very out of tune, “ ‘Come on baby light my fiiiirrre, try to set the night on fiiirrre … ’ ” He petered out at the end and went quiet again.

“Kevin?” asked Candi, tentatively.  He sounded so out of it.

Jonathan reached over and put his hand on Kevin’s forehead.  “He has a fever.  I don’t know if it’s that hand or the food or what, but he’s burning up.  Seems kind of soon after the injury to have an infection that bad.  We need to get him to that land over there and cleaned up and hydrated.  Let’s put the tarp up over his part of the boat to give him some shade.  Sarah, you see if you can get him to drink some more water.”

Candi began securing the tarp over Kevin to give him some shade.  

Sarah wasn’t registering Jonathan’s orders.  “Are my eyes fooling me, or are we moving
away
from the land now?” asked Sarah.

Jonathan looked up at the horizon and saw that she was not mistaken.  “Oh crap, the current is moving us parallel to the shore.  If this keeps up, we’re going to miss the shore completely!”

He got up and shook off his backpack.  “Come on, we have to start rowing!”  There was no mistaking the panic in his voice.

The girls scrambled to help him lock the oars in place and put them out over the water.  “I’ll get this one; you two get the other and row together,” ordered Jonathan.

This was one of those live or die moments.  They were going to have to row their asses off and not waste any time arguing.  

They got the oars locked in quickly and sat in position, side by side, preparing to pull back on it. 

“Go!” yelled Jonathan, heaving back on his oar.

The girls rowed in tandem with him, meeting him stroke for stroke.  Jonathan was able to take quick looks back every minute or so to check their progress.  

“I’m going to need … some serious paraffin treatments … after this,” grunted out Sarah.

“It’s working!  Keep it up!  Don’t stop!”  Jonathan gasped out.  They had cut the distance in half with twenty minutes of steady rowing.  They could have been closer but they were forced to row diagonally to their goal to fight the push of the current.  All of them were wishing Kevin were in shape so he could help, since it would undoubtedly have been a much easier chore with his strong back and arms; but he was out of commission for sure.

Kevin tried to sit up, but his head bumped up against the tarp that Candi had secured over him.  “Lemme help, guys, you can’t do it all by yourselves.”

“Just save your strength, Kevin, you have a fever.”

“Don’t be silly, I don’ hava feeve … ” The next thing they heard was Kevin slumping back down into the bottom of the boat.

“That’s not good.  We have to get him to land, guys, row harder!”

Sarah and Candi put their backs into it.  Candi moved her hands to a different spot on the oar, and said, “Try to switch your hand position so you don’t pop any blisters!”  

Jonathan followed her orders.  All they needed was more infections.  He wasn’t convinced this land they were seeing was inhabited.  All he had seen was green, green and more green when he glanced back over his shoulder at the shoreline.

Finally, after thirty more minutes of rowing, they were within forty yards of the shore.  Jonathan told them to stop and locked the oars in place.  Sweat was pouring off his body and running into his eyes, stinging them and making them burn.

“Untie the rope, quick.”

The girls did as he asked without question.  

He jumped into the water, yelling to the girls, “Tie the rope to the front of the boat and hand me the other end with a loop in it!”

Candi rushed to do what he ordered.  She threw the loop out to him so he could start pulling the boat in.

Sarah was staring out to sea with a look of heavy concentration on her face.  Jonathan wrestled with the loop trying to get it around his body as Candi looked at her and asked what she was doing.

“Watching for sharks.”

“Oh, good.” 

“Jonathan, if I see a shark, I’ll yell ‘Shark!’ and then Candi will haul you back into the boat by the rope.”

“Fine!” he yelled, turning to swim for shore.

***

Candi smiled, a little bit relieved to have a plan.  “Good idea, Sarah.  Okay.  Cool.”  She felt a tug as Jonathan began dragging the boat behind him.

Candi kept an anxious eye on him, while simultaneously watching the shore come closer and scanning the water’s surface for the gray triangles of death.  As her eyes passed over her brother’s swimming form, she wondered how he could possibly have the energy to do this.  He’d had hardly any water or food, and was as exhausted as she was.  She decided the first thing she was going to do when they reached shore was give him the biggest hug of her life.

“Shark!!”
yelled Sarah from the back of the boat.

The fear raced up into Candi’s throat and threatened to choke her.  “No!” she gasped, as she leaned over to take the rope that was connected to her brother.

“Yes, look!” yelled Sarah, pointing off to the side of the boat.  

Candi’s hand was on the rope, ready to use the adrenaline coursing through her veins to haul her brother back into the boat like Superwoman.  

She hesitated a moment.  She looked to where Sarah was pointing.  “Wait, that’s not a shark … ” She peered through squinted eyes at the movement of the gray body under the water.  

“It’s another dolphin!”  

She had noticed it swimming in an up and down motion and not the side-to-side, zigzag motion of the sharks from the day before; plus the fin was rounder or more curved.  She took a split second to silently thank Mother Nature for including this telltale difference so right now she didn’t have to be overwhelmed with visions of her brother being eaten while she tried to rescue him using strength she didn’t have any more.

The dolphin chose that moment to leap out of the water and flash them a trademark dolphin grin.