25. Adrian
TWENTY-FIVE
ADRIAN
In my dream, Freya is laughing. Her head is thrown back, arms stretched wide, and she laughs. Rain keeps falling all around her, but she doesn’t care.
“Dance with me.” She crooks her finger, beckoning me closer.
“It’s cold,” I say.
She laughs. “Dance with me,” she repeats.
I step out. Something wet lands on my cheek. I ignore it and walk toward her, but no matter how many steps I take, I can’t get closer.
“Frey?” I call out.
She’s standing there. I can see her. But when I try to take her hand, I only grasp air.
Another drop of water hits my cheek.
I blink my eyes open, and Freya is gone. The only thing left is emptiness.
I don’t even have time to wake up properly before the sky opens up and dumps what feels like all the water in the world on us.
“What the shit?” Dylan yells over the roar of the rain.
“Drink,” I shout, because what the fuck else is there to do, and we both sit up and tilt our heads back. The coconut shells fill up, and we drink the water from them, then let the rain fill them up again.
It doesn’t rain for long, but it soaks everything. The only dry spots in our general vicinity are the two ass prints we leave in the sand.
Our clothes are sopping wet, and we have to abandon our sleeping spot under the trees, because water keeps dripping down on us from the leaves.
It’s not morning yet, and the lack of sunshine combined with our wet clothes means it gets very cold very fast. We’re both shivering so hard we can barely speak.
“F-f-fucking rain,” Dylan says through chattering teeth while he scrubs his hands over his upper arms in an attempt to get warmer. It doesn’t work. I know, because I’m uselessly doing the same thing.
The dream about Freya is still in the back of my mind, making me feel even emptier. The backs of my eyes burn uselessly.
By the time the sun comes up, I’m sleep deprived and hovering between being seriously pissed, ready to cry, and increasingly desperate for warmth.
My head is pounding and my eyelids are heavy.
I sit on the damp sand, my side pressed against Dylan’s, sharing the little warmth we have left. He suddenly goes rigid.
“What’s that?” he asks, lurching to his feet in the same breath.
“What’s what?”
He’s already moving. At first, I follow him with my eyes, but eventually I let my gaze move over the beach.
And then I push myself to my feet and rush after Dylan.
“There,” he says when we both reach the water’s edge.
I stare at the water and some kind of metal plate that’s barely visible in the distance. An occasional wave breaks over it, but the thing stays put for now.
“Is that the—” Dylan says.
“The plane,” I finish his sentence and squint to try and see better before I turn my head toward him sharply. “You think it might be?” He looks at me, eyes wide. I’m not sure what I’m feeling. Some kind of dull shock. It’s enough to make me forget how fucking cold I am.
Dylan turns to face me. “Do you think it’s the whole thing?”
“I don’t know.” My heart has picked up speed, but I’m approaching this thing with caution.
I don’t want to get my hopes up if all it’s going to be is a chunk of metal.
Also, if it is something bigger, the fuck are we going to do anyway?
It’s not like we can drag the thing to the beach, and I highly doubt our suitcases will be neatly lined up inside next to a working satellite phone to call for rescue.
“Maybe it’s going to wash ashore.” Dylan tilts his head to the side.
“Or sink. Or be pulled back out to sea.” Calm down. Don’t get too excited. It might be nothing . “Maybe it’s just a rock that looks like metal.”
Dylan raises his eyebrows at me. “Chill out, Mr. Optimism. Leave some hope for the rest of us.”
I drag my palm over my face. “Sorry.”
“Don’t be. You should be a dick more often. Makes you seem more human.”
I take a deep breath and try to think, but my brain feels too sluggish to accomplish anything other than contemplating all the ways things have gone and could still go wrong.
So much for staying positive.
“Come on. Let’s go check it out.” Dylan starts to unbutton his pants. Once that’s done, he peels his shirt off.
I stare and try to catch up. “Right now?”
He stares back for a bit before he widens his eyes at me, nods, and slowly enunciates, “Yes.”
I wade into the water after him. Dylan’s always been a better swimmer than I am, and that hasn’t changed.
Well, it has. He’s gotten a lot better. He’s lucky I didn’t drown him when that plane went down.
I mean, I’m a decent enough swimmer, but Dylan is fast. He cuts through the water like a dolphin.
He’s already bobbing up and down next to it by the time I make it to the hunk of metal that used to be the plane.
“So?” I call out while I wipe water out of my eyes and study the… I think it’s a piece of wing. “What is it?”
“Have to go under to get a better idea. Give me a second.”
He’s gone before I can say anything, fueled by some new burst of adrenaline that lets him forget we’re slowly dying of thirst and hunger. I move my arms and legs to keep myself afloat and count the seconds. It feels like forever before Dylan’s head reappears next to me.
He wipes the water off his face. “It’s something like a quarter of the plane? Maybe less. The wing and some of the body. It’s torn clean off from the rest of the plane.” He sends me a grim look. “How the fuck did we come out of this alive?”
The only thing that question does is make me think of Dylan dying. Not that we’re lucky, even if we are that. The only thing I see in my mind’s eye is Dylan lying at the bottom of the ocean, out of my reach, eyes blank, an empty shell of a body.
I try to breathe in, but it’s more of a wheeze than anything else.
Dylan zeroes in on me immediately.
“What’s wrong?” he calls over the roar of the waves.
I shake my head. “I’m fine.”
He throws me a worried look. He knows me too well to believe me.
“Fine,” I say it louder, grit my teeth, and focus on the wing again. “What do we do with this? Leave it?”
“Let’s get a better look first,” Dylan says. He dives in again, and I wait and try to force the images of dead Dylan out of my head.
It takes forever for Dylan’s head to emerge. “There’s something stuck underneath it, wedged between rocks. Some kind of case. Come and take a look?”
I breathe in deeply and follow him under the water. Everything around me is deep blue, and the water is clear, so visibility is not an issue, and it’s not impossibly deep. Maybe fifteen feet or so.
It looks like the wreck of the plane has gotten stuck on a reef.
It’s the wing and a piece of the side of the plane, one window still attached.
It looks like it’s been torn off from the rest. Did I see it happening?
I have no idea and no memory of it. I only remember the panicked effort to get to Dylan.
I kick hard to get deeper.
I’ll run out of air soon. I can already feel the need to breathe getting stronger and stronger.
Dylan catches my arm just as I’m about to go back to the surface and points at something excitedly. A bright orange case is pinned down by the remnants of the plane against a reef. I nod and gesture up before I kick again and swim to the surface.
I gasp and take a deep breath once I break through. Dylan emerges a few seconds later.
“What do you think?” he asks.
“No fucking clue what’s in it, but I guess we can try and push the plane off it?” I say. “Not sure how heavy that piece is, and it might be stuck there too.”
Dylan nods slowly, his gaze aimed somewhere toward the horizon.
He’s silent for a bit, seemingly deep in thought.
“The life raft,” he suddenly shouts, slapping the water for good measure.
I blink at him. “We don’t have one.”
“No, no. I’m saying that case might be the life raft. Planes have them, don’t they?”
“You think?”
“It’s bright orange. If you had a life raft, you’d make that case easily visible in water, yeah?”
I’m starting to get the sudden excitement that’s come over Dylan. A fucking life raft!
“There might be supplies in there,” he continues with excitement bordering on mania. “A first aid kit. A flare of some kind? Maybe?”
I laugh. “You had me at life raft. Okay, we’re getting that case.”
“Fuck yeah.” Dylan holds his hand up, and I high-five it.
A rush of energy surges through me. We’ve been waiting for rescue, and while that’s probably the sensible thing to do in this situation—I think, but who the fuck really knows?
I didn’t get a handbook for this—it’s so much better to do something.
It’s taking back control instead of passively waiting for things to happen.
For right now, I feel like myself again.
I’ve missed me.
“How do we do this?” Dylan asks.
“Go under and push the plane out of the way?” I shrug. “I don’t think we can make it any more sophisticated than that.”
He snorts out a laugh. “What? You mean to tell me you didn’t pack your crane and scuba equipment? Wow. If I knew you’d come into this that unprepared I would’ve picked somebody else to be stuck here with.”
I splash water at him, and he splutters and laughs.
“On three?” I ask.
He nods. I count us down, and then we both take a huge gulp of air and dive. It takes us mere seconds to reach the bottom. First, we both move to the left side of the plane and try to push the wreck out of the way.
We swim back up.
Try again.
It becomes clear pretty quickly that it’s not working. The thing’s wedged between the rocks.
“You push, and I’ll lift from the other side,” Dylan says after yet another failed attempt.
I’m getting slightly frustrated, but I still take a deep breath and back down we go. I swim back to where I was before. Dylan goes lower on the other side of the plane and grabs the metal edge just below the wing.
He meets my gaze and nods.
I push.
He pulls.