I combed my hair back off of my forehead and used my hand to block the sun out of my eyes so I could look around. Like I did what felt like a thousand times a day, I scanned the horizon for ships, didn’t see any, looked up to the sky to look for planes, didn’t see any, and looked down at the jungle for predators who might want to have me for a snack. I didn’t see any of those, either, and I kept walking. It could have been minutes or it could have been hours, the whole time thing had become pretty arbitrary since my entire life had become trying to survive on the second island that I had ended up on in the course of a week. That was a personal life accomplishment that I wasn’t really thrilled that I had managed. The next time I looked up, however, I noticed something different ahead of me.
It was such a shock after seeing essentially the same thing over and over again for two days that I stopped in place and just stared ahead of me. I closed my eyes tightly, wondering if it was possible to see a mirage on an island like this. I knew that a desert island wasn’t exactly the same thing as a desert, but maybe there were enough similarities that when a person got tired and overheated enough they could have the fun of some hallucinations to usher them on into the death a little more gently. Of course, two days of scarce eating wasn’t really enough for me to be at that point, but that explanation seemed far more viable than the other possibility. I squeezed my eyelids down until I saw lights bursting against the backs of them and then opened my eyes to check what I thought that I had seen.
Yep. There it was.
You have got to be kidding me.
****
Virgil
“What do you mean she’s missing?”
I gripped the windowsill so hard that I felt like my knuckles were going to break. I kept my eyes trained through the panes at the darkness ahead of me, knowing that if I turned around I was going to strangle the men who were standing behind me. There were chairs in my office, but I hadn’t invited them to sit and they wouldn’t dare do something that I hadn’t offered them. They would stand just as they were, hovering close to the door, on into Armageddon if I required it of them, and at that moment I felt like that was an entirely possible situation.
“I’m sorry, sir,” one of the men said.
“I don’t want to hear that you’re sorry,” I growled. “I want to know what happened.”
“We tried to get her.”
At that point, I whipped around to face them, not really caring if I did end up throttling either one of them.
“What do you mean you tried?” I demanded. “You’ve tried a dozen times. I can understand some of those failures. Getting her out of the mall after the fuss that she put up would have brought far too much attention. But this? This is absurd. You were on a cruise ship. Floating around in the middle of the ocean. She literally couldn’t get anywhere.”
“She jumped off.”
The man I only knew as Blue and didn’t care to know any more about said the words as if he thought it was his only chance to say them. I blinked a few times as what he said sank in.
“She what?” I asked, my voice lower now.
“She jumped off of the cruise ship. We chased her and the man that she was running with up onto one of the decks. I thought that we were going to be able to get her, but they jumped.”
“They jumped?” I repeated.
I knew that I was aggravating him, but I didn’t care. I bought and sold him. He would stand there and say what I wanted to to him and he would take it. He really had no choice.
“The two of them jumped,” he said. “They jumped down into the water and swam to another boat.”
“What boat?” I asked.
“There was a smaller boat,” the other man, the one I referred to as Green, told me, taking his turn in trying to explain their epic failure. “It was a few yards away from the cruise ship and they got onboard.”
That didn’t make any sense. Other vessels weren’t allowed to get near commercial cruise ships. It was illegal and could cause serious problems for whoever had allowed their boat to wander too close to the path of the liner.
“What did it look like?” I asked.
“Just a small boat,” Green said. “Large enough for a cabin, but not as big as commercial boats.”
“So not a tour boat or a fishing vessel?”
“No.”
I tried to process what they were telling me had happened. It sounded absolutely preposterous. Yet, the call that I had gotten from the cruise security team had mentioned that there had been an accident and I needed to meet the ship at the next port. Could the men be telling me the truth? Could Eleanor have actually evaded them yet again by throwing herself down into the ocean? I knew her well enough to know that she didn’t like the water and only went on cruises because she knew that the decks, particularly the luxury decks where she always reserved her cabins, were well above the surface of the water. They had mentioned that a man was running with her. Who could that be, and why did he jump with her?
“You have to find her,” I said. “I don’t care what you have to do. You find out what happened to that boat and where she is now. I’m supposed to meet the cruise ship in two days and when I do, I want to make sure that she really is missing, if you understand what I mean. We don’t need her talking to the authorities finding out what possessed her to throw herself off of a perfectly good cruise ship.”
Both men nodded solemnly and I dismissed them, sinking down into my desk chair and clawing my hands through my hair. How could this have gone so wrong? I had no choice but to find her. With any luck, she never made it out of that boat, but if she did, I needed to make sure that she never had the opportunity to tell her story.
****
Gavin
“Please let someone live there. Please let someone live there. Please let someone live there. Please let someone live there.”
I still hadn’t encountered anyone to listen to me, but I had been talking to the jungle for two days now and it had been a pretty good listener so I figured I would just keep going. I had climbed down off of the rocks and was now moving as fast as I could through the trees in the direction of the shack that I had seen from the ridge. I couldn’t believe it when I had seen it and now that I was down on the ground it was concealed by the trees, making me worry that I really had imagined it, or that I was going in the wrong direction and wouldn’t actually be able to get to it.
A vine hanging from a tree tried to grab me and I swatted at it, quickly realizing when it moved out of the way that it wasn’t a vine but a massive snake dangling down in hopes of scooping a snack from the jungle floor.
“Oh, shit.” I said, ducking out of the way and starting at a faster clip through the trees. “Please let somebody live there. Please let somebody live there.”
I was nearly to a clearing ahead of me when a figure jumped out in front of me. I almost swung at it before I realized that it was a man so wrinkled it was entirely possible that the jungle sun had turned him into a raisin.
Almost not alive, but I’ll take it.
“Are you alright, son?” the man asked as I leaned over and rested my hands on my knees to draw in a few calming breaths.
I shook my head. I had actually intended on nodding, but apparently my mind had decided to mutiny and just go ahead with whatever it thought.
“Lost,” I managed to say.
“Well, I would say so,” he said. “I didn’t think that we had any neighbors around these parts.”
“We?” I asked.
“Of course. Me and the Mrs. Come on. I’ll introduce you. You look like you could use a cup of tea.”
Tea?
I straightened up and followed the crinkly man through the trees toward the clearing ahead. When we stepped out from the cover of the trees I immediately knew that I had seen what I thought that I had. The shack looked much larger when I was standing a few yards from it than it had from the vantage point of the rocky ledge and I noticed signs that the man and his wife had been there for some time scattered across the clearing around it. There were baskets woven from leaves that were far more complex than the ones we had managed on the other island, stacks of cut stalks, and piles of fruit. A firepit to one side had a spit over it that held two large fish and a chunk of something that I could only assume was meat of some kind.
We were a few steps away from the shack when a tiny woman who looked even older than the man came out holding another basket filled with what looked like loaves of bread.
Here I was thinking I was a badass survivalist getting through the few days on the two islands and these two ancient people are just going about their lives, making baskets and baking bread and shit.