Chapter Nineteen
I scramble across the boat to get to her.
“What do we do?” Jackson asks.
“Move!”
I grab Emmy’s shoulders and turn her on her side. The foam building in her mouth runs down the side of her cheek, but her airway clears. Her eyes have rolled back into her head.
“How long has she been seizing?”
“I don’t know. Not long.”
I start counting seconds in my head. The foam had just started building up in her mouth, so I add an extra thirty seconds.
It’s not a scientific way to measure what’s happening by any means, but there’s a time limit on seizures.
Anything over five minutes is bad. Like, classified as a medical emergency, “could totally fry your brain and deprive you of oxygen for so long that you don’t wake up again” bad.
The seconds pass like hours. Every time Jackson tries to talk, I shush him and keep counting. At the 139 mark, the convulsions start to slow. She shakes one final time, then slumps. I wipe the foam from her mouth again and slowly set her on her back.
Her seizure lasted about two minutes and nineteen seconds, including my thirty-second buffer. Nowhere near the five-minute mark. I think she’ll be okay.
I brush my fingers down her face, and she blinks up at me. Her chest rises and falls normally. She’s coming around.
“Hannah, what the hell was that?” Jackson asks anxiously. “What just happened to her?”
“She had a seizure,” I say, finally pulling off the dive mask. I don’t rip my scalp with it, but several strands of hair are yanked from my head.
“Why?”
“I have no idea, it could be a lot of things. She could have hit her head when the boat rolled. It could be the fever. High temperature spikes can sometimes bring on seizures. Or maybe low blood sugar? Without tests and people who know a hell of a lot more about medicine than me, there’s no way to know for sure. ”
“Is she going to have another one?”
“If we don’t stop whatever’s causing it?
Probably.” I rip open the first aid kit but the only things inside are a bottle of calamine lotion, a plastic container of knuckle Band-Aids, a packet that says “sting relief,” and a single-serve packet of Tylenol.
No bandages. No gauze. Not even an ice pack.
At least I can give her the packet of Tylenol.
“Can you grab the open water bottle from my bag?”
He sits back and sinks his hands into his hair. “But we don’t know what’s causing it.”
“Correct,” I say, nodding toward my bag.
“So what the fuck are we going to do about it? And why are you so calm?”
For the love of… I get up and get the water myself.
When I return to her side, I try not to snap at Jackson, because I know he’s scared.
“Freaking out won’t help her, will it? All we can do is get her fever under control, get some food and water into her, and hope that addresses the problem, but we have no hope of cooling her down on this boat with no shade. ”
“So we have to get her to shore.”
I nod and help Emmy sit up so she can take the two little pills. “As fast as possible. This Tylenol might lower her fever for a few hours, but we need a longer-term solution for keeping her temp down.”
I don’t bother mentioning that if she has a head injury, there’s nothing I can do for her—here or on shore.
We stand a much better chance of signaling for help if we can light a fire, so getting to the mainland is still the best plan, but if Emmy has a serious brain bleed, she’ll be gone before anyone finds us. Maybe before we reach the shore.
Emmy lies back with a sigh. I stuff the empty water bottle in my bag in case we need it later and turn my attention to the life raft. Inside the fluorescent green bag, the raft itself is encased in a white hard-shell case with instructions printed on the side. Pictures too.
I read them three times. I can’t mess this up.
Tie the “operation line” to something strong. Unhook the safety that’s keeping the release closed. Toss the backpack shell into the water. Pull hard on the operation line until the CO2 canisters inflate the raft. Inflation should take between fifteen and thirty seconds.
I lug the case up to where the water laps at the front of the boat and quickly tie the operational line to the railing.
I follow the directions to the letter, and when I yank on the cord, a bright green octagonal raft unfurls with a hiss.
It’s about eight feet across, with a fluorescent canopy that pops up automatically, filling the inside with the first bit of shade I’ve seen since I woke up floating in the water.
Jackson comes up behind me and nods toward the growing line of trees in the distance. “How far do you think it is?”
I wring my hands together. “I read once that the human eye can only see three miles. The curvature of the earth cuts off after that.” I shield my eyes with my hand and squint into the distance.
“If we’re squinting, I’d say it’s right up against the three-mile mark then,” he says.
“Yeah. Maybe two and a half. Either way, it’s going to be a swim.”
“How heavy is the raft?”
I frown. “It said sixty pounds on the carrying case.”
Jackson looks down at me, but he doesn’t say anything.
He doesn’t have to. Emmy needs to get in the raft.
There’s no way around that. But pushing her almost three miles through the current with the added weight of the raft isn’t going to be easy.
The raft doesn’t seem to have any oars. There’s definitely no motor.
We only have two sets of tired legs attached to hungry, sleep-deprived bodies.
Emmy mumbles something and Jackson goes to check on her. I grab the first aid kit and my bag, and toss both into the far side of the raft before I join him. I check Emmy’s pulse, and it’s strong. At the touch of my fingers on her wrist, she turns her head and cracks open one eye.
“Hannah?”
“Hey, Em. I’ve got you.”
She shakes her head, but I get the feeling she’s not fully aware she’s doing it.
I slip my arm under her shoulders, and she groans.
“You’re going to hate me in a second,” I tell her. “But you have to get up, okay? As soon as you’re in the raft, you can lie down for a long time. It’s only a few feet. You can do this.”
She makes all kinds of noises, but after four attempts, I get her up.
We half fall, half stumble our way across the boat, while Jackson hovers anxiously behind us, shouting warnings about the slippery fiberglass.
The Be-Yacht-Ch lets out another horrible groan, like it’s shouting goodbye, and all I can see in my mind is it sucking us under with it when it sinks.
Finally we’re close enough that I can pull the raft close and ease her inside.
“You next, Jackson.”
He looms over my shoulder. “Aren’t you going to need help kicking to shore?”
“Later. Right now I just want to push us away from this cursed boat.”
He nods and brushes past me, wedging himself between Emmy and the food bag, leaving as much room for me as possible. I untie the rope from the boat, take a running leap, and launch myself into the raft.
The momentum sends us spinning, and we drift away from Captain Keith’s boat. It feels more final than anything else we’ve done so far. After being trapped on that neglected thing this whole time, it’s strange to leave it, even when it’s half submerged.
The sun beats against the canopy, turning the inside of the raft an eerie green. Still, it’s a relief to have a break from the sun. I peek out the opening in the canopy and watch us drift farther from the Be-Yacht-Ch. It lets out another groan. It’s sinking for real this time.
It’s time to start swimming like hell, but I’m stalling. Jackson notices.
“Take your time,” he says. “There’s no rush.”
“There is though. I just hate the idea of sinking my legs into miles of ocean again.”
“We’re closer to land. It might only be a mile now.”
I glare at him.
He laughs and reaches out to take my hand. “I’ll be right there with you. One more swim, and we’ll be on shore. It’s going to suck, but you can do it. You can get this raft to the mainland.”
I exhale. I can get this raft to the mainland.
I look down at Emmy. For her, I can do this.
Jackson goes in first, sliding his feet out the canopy opening. He holds on to one of the ropes that circles the outside of the raft and waits for me. I slip in beside him, hating every single second, and with a good grip on the raft, we start swimming.
This is a marathon, not a sprint. We’ll burn out if we swim too fast, so instead we opt to kick at a slow and steady pace, and surprisingly, the wind seems to help. It catches inside the canopy, and I can feel it taking some of the weight off.
Unfortunately I can also feel when the wind shifts, making it monumentally harder to make progress. But I focus on the simple mechanical movement of kicking. My muscles burn, and my heart beats wildly in my chest, but we keep going.
Jackson’s a machine. Head down, hands fisted beside mine on the raft supports—he never seems to slow. Still, even with his help, it’s harder than I expected.
Every time I have to stop to catch my breath, I feel like I’m wasting progress. Every time the wind changes and it gets harder to kick, it feels like we’ll never reach the shore. Every time I peek to see how much farther we have to go, my heart sinks.
“Stop it,” Jackson says, glaring at me.
I glower back, but I’m too out of breath to respond.
“I know what you’re doing. Stop being so hard on yourself. If you need to take a break, take a break. It doesn’t make you weak.”
Tears prickle at the backs of my eyes. “Fine.”
He grins and bumps me with his shoulder. “You know I’m right.”
I do, but I won’t admit it.
“Look behind us,” he says.
When I do, I see the Be-Yacht-Ch off in the distance. It’s nothing but a little white blip, and it’s a lot farther away than I expected.
“Holy shit.”
“See? You’re doing great. Catch your breath and keep going.”
So I do.
The sun climbs overhead until it’s shining directly onto my back. I should have put more sunscreen on before I got back in the water, but there’s nothing I can do about that now.
After what’s probably hours, I peek around the raft and a smile breaks out across my face.
“We’re almost there!”
I can clearly see land now. It stretches out in either direction as far as I can see. We’re close enough that the Sierra Madre mountains emerge from the haze, rising into the distance like sentries. If I squint, I can even see the palm trees lining the shore.
“Told you,” Jackson says. “You’re in the home stretch. Take another break, and then we’ll power through.”
I climb back into the raft to check on Emmy again. She’s been asleep every other time I checked on her, and her eyes are closed now too. I want to shake her awake, tell her that we’re almost back to shore, but she needs her rest. She’s still far too pale.
I ignore the worry in my chest. The moment we get to land, we have to find a way to keep that fever down.
Once I’ve caught my breath, I sink back into the water and start kicking again.
Something drifts around my ankle and sends a skittering tingle along my skin. My whole body shudders, and I kick faster. This is not the moment to lose my cool.
When I feel the same tingle farther up my leg, I look down, but I can’t see anything. The ocean is far from clear after the storms, and the sun glints off the surface, making it almost impossible to see underneath.
The tingle appears at my elbow and again by my knee.
I kick out and feel it on the other side of my leg, stronger this time.
Like little electric currents pinpricking the length of my calf.
I reach down to brush my hand along my leg, and feel the sting along my forearm, then the underside of my arm.
“Ouch! Fuck! What’s in the water?”
Jackson startles at my shouting. He cuts a hand through the water, hand splayed. “I don’t feel anything.”
The stinging is along nearly every piece of my skin beneath the water.
It doesn’t hurt hurt. It’s more annoying than painful, but the salt water makes it worse.
Soon everywhere I felt the tingle begins to burn.
I kick down, wondering if it’s sharp seaweed floating in the surf. Is that a thing? Sharp seaweed?
A new pain sears the underside of my wrist.
When I pull my arm from the water, it’s covered in dime sized welts that are rapidly shifting from pink to red. They climb my arms, and undoubtedly both of my legs, like irritated Dalmatian spots, some much larger than others. One welt twists around my wrist in a long thin line.
“Hannah,” Jackson breathes, letting go of the raft with one hand to run his fingers down my skin, following the red line to where it stops by my wrist bone. “What the hell is this?”
This time, when I look down, a translucent blob about the size of a half dollar floats beneath the surface beside me. As I watch, the outline of another, smaller blob appears, and then I understand.
I swear under my breath.
“We’re trapped in a swarm of jellyfish.”