28. Chapter 25 - Marley
I’d watched the skies all morning. Every bird in flight held a promise in the distance, before the collapse of wings against the breeze dashed every hope I had.
Our rations were gone. We were solely relying on the fruits of the rainforest for our sustenance, save for Madman’s hidden candy stash he’d likely kill a man for touching.
The rainwater I’d painstakingly collected and boiled for our water rations barely had a sip left for each person, and yesterday, the storm that had hovered over our heads like a violent threat had somehow held off, making the air far heavier today.
I clung to the probability of rain like a lifeline, like each humid dewdrop clinging to my skin. Without rain or rescue today, we were fucked. Thunder rolled in the distance upriver, fueling the little hope I had left.
I’d been prepared to keep our passengers as safe as I could in the window of rescue, and I’d convinced myself it would take five days to do it. Was that even Aileron’s established timeline, or had I made it up?
I couldn’t remember anymore.
Shifting from my position on my mat, my hands trailed over the usually bumpy earth where Maddox had buried his treats, only to find it perfectly smooth. Clawing my fingers into the dirt, expecting the plastic ridges of suckers or other sweets, I found it empty.
So, the candy was gone, too. We’d survive off of fruit and our own sweat until we faded away to oblivion.
Come to think of it, I hadn’t seen Madman all morning. Where was he?
A wounded retch echoed across the dusty sand.
Wincing, I stood from my mat in search of Vanessa.
She’d shed at least ten pounds since we’d crashed, and she didn’t have ten pounds to lose.
Her thin body was now a frail bag of bones.
She wasn’t keeping anything down, and Tessa had desperately tried to get her to suck on small pieces of mango all morning.
“You should probably leave her be,” Ambrose mused from the other side of me, who’d laid on his mat after he and Nikki collected more fruit for the day.
He’d checked his laptop three times, and all three times he’d viciously snapped it closed, as if expecting his battery to survive the steam room we’d been trapped in was perfectly reasonable.
“What?” I snapped, my patience frayed as much as my sanity.
“Vanessa.” He motioned toward the tree line along the river where I’d last seen her and Tessa. “There’s nothing you can do for her. Let Tessa take care of her friend.”
But there was something I could have done for her. I’d chosen not to use antibiotic cream on her wounds, to save it for people I’d deemed more important, and now this woman was near death.
She would die because of me.
“Tessa isn’t responsible for our passengers,” I mumbled, taking a step in that direction before Ambrose’s hand clasped around my ankle, his grip hot and tight against my sweaty skin.
“Why are you torturing yourself?” The question was quiet. I slowly met his gaze. The somber amber looked lost and sad, but I couldn’t tell if it was for me or for him.
A bitter laugh escaped my throat, stinging my already dry palate. Tears pricked the back of my eyes, burning the corners of my eyelids, but I held them back by sheer stubborn will alone.
“This is all my fault, remember?” I spat through gritted teeth.
“You said it yourself. Vanessa dies, it’s because of me.
” I lifted my foot up with an aggressive kick to get his hands off me.
“You die, it's because of me. The only person who has any idea what happened is missing and could be dead, and for all I know, that’s also my fault.”
A single tear slipped through my defenses and trailed down my cheek.
I angrily wiped it away. My faith in Jamie’s reappearance—alive, safe, and full of answers—was as shaken as my faith in a rescue plane dropping from the sky.
Breathing through my nose to stifle the wave of emotion, I willed my mind to go blank, but every meditative practice in the world couldn’t quell my spiraling thoughts right now.
“Marley …”
Ambrose’s tone was resigned, but there was no apology in it. I was sure it was because he still felt that way. He had looked me in the eye with utter disgust and told me this was all my fault within the first hour of us crashing. He’d been right.
“Fuck off, Ambrose.”
Stalking toward Vanessa’s location, I took a quick glance around the group.
Danny was lying on his side on the other side of the fire, still responsive, but that was the extent of his abilities.
Whatever infection was raging through his body kept him in the chokehold of a vicious fever, and he hadn’t moved since we awoke this morning.
Diaz had kept to himself after yesterday’s incident, clearly smart enough to know when to shut up.
Brooks and Nikki were keeping busy somewhere farther down the riverbed.
The atmosphere was subdued and depressing, and I didn’t have it in me to rally our troops with optimism I didn’t have in my own heart.
Even Nikki couldn’t maintain his smile for long today. His normally rich bronze skin held an ashy pallor that worried me, and his quick smirks didn’t reach his nose, let alone his eyes.
My brows furrowed at Madman’s continued absence. It wasn’t like him not to say good morning.
“Don’t worry about him, Marl,” a soft, familiar sigh whispered in my ear. “You need to be worried about you right now.” Charlie’s ghostly face, too similar to my own, smiled back at me with melancholy eyes.
Another retch, this time sounding like Vanessa puked up an internal organ.
I picked up my pace, rounding the corner to where Vanessa hovered over a sunken spot in the mud, her back turned to me.
Yellow bile and chunks of orange fruit landed in front of her with a squelch.
Next to her, Tessa’s face was streaked with dirt and tears and she stroked a hand over Vanessa’s back, attempting to soothe her through a bacterial exorcism.
The stench of stomach acid, excrement, and something musty and raw like rotting flesh hit me in the face.
Fuck. Fuck.
“She won’t stop,” Tessa sobbed, her voice barely above a whisper. “She can’t stop, Marley. She’s covered in blood!”
Walking around the two of them to get a better view, I stopped in my tracks.
Vanessa’s mouth was rimmed in dark red, and flecks of crimson and dark purple dotted her bare arms. Her pretty face was so sunken it was vampiric, and the haunted fear in her bloodshot green eyes stole my breath from my lungs.
Internal bleeding. If there was a hell, I was going to be banished there as soon as I died.
“There’s nothing we can do for her now,” I whispered, guilt and dread burning through my gut like I’d swallowed fire. “The best we can do is keep her comfortable.”
But with what? How the fuck did I keep her comfortable? Had Maddox gotten rid of Diaz’s stolen cocaine yet? They gave morphine to palliative patients, didn’t they?
Dear God, even I wasn’t prepared for this level of desperation.
A rip echoed through the sky above us, and before I could snap up my head, a barrage of hot rain hit my head in a torrent.
Rain. Water. We needed to collect it immediately.
“Help her stand in the rain to get clean.” The only thing I could possibly suggest, I realized. I motioned to Tessa before turning on my heel in a run. “I’ll be back!”
When I’d raced back to the outpost, Nikki, Brooks, and Ambrose surprised me by already having the bottles lined up in a row on the flat earth beyond the fire. They were stringing up the canopy Ambrose had painstakingly woven over the fire pit to protect the embers from going out like last time.
I shot them a grateful smile. At the same moment, the fat drops transformed into full sheets of water and the force of it stung my skin and rocked me on my feet.
It was like standing beneath an endless waterfall, but there was nowhere to go to escape it. It filled the bottles quickly, and for the thousandth time, I wished for a metal pot to pour them into. All this good, life-saving water wasted with nothing to capture it.
My clothes sagged against my body, saturated within minutes, and my boots grew more water logged while Nikki and I hurriedly capped each bottle.
“We need to put them higher,” I shouted and pointed to the river’s edge, a few feet off the ground. We’d placed most of our things there a few days before. He nodded and collected a handful in his arms alongside me. Ambrose grabbed the last three and followed behind.
The water was rising fast, too fast. We were walking in a muddy soup and the warm rain rose to the tops of my ankle boots, filling every gap where shoe met skin.
Would it shut off like an abrupt faucet like last time?
Foreboding filled my limbs like a heavy weight and I fought to see through the curtain of water warping shadows and light.
The force against my body felt heavier, not lighter, with each passing second.
The water reached the bottom of my calves now, yet Danny hadn’t moved.
“We need to get Danny off the ground,” I shouted in Nikki’s general direction. “I’ll get the girls.”
I was halfway to their previous position when a rumble akin to thunder but far more ominous vibrated beneath my feet. A crash of water hit my knees in a wave.
“Marley!” Tessa’s scream snapped my eyes forward. She waded toward me with a struggling Vanessa in tow. The two of them stumbled like penguins as violent waves pushed them forward.
A distinctive rush, similar to a waterfall, echoed through the crackle of pouring rain. Our riverbed was flooding. But I was a minute too late as the horrifying raging tide swept toward me.
“Run!” I screamed to the women now only five feet away.