Chapter Twenty
We keep swimming, because what other choice do we have? And soon, as quickly as the stinging began, it disappears again. The welts still burn like a bitch, but the sensation of being jabbed with little razors stops.
We must have made it to the other side of the swarm.
I’d sigh with relief if I had any hope of catching my breath.
A wave crests behind us and nearly face-plants me into the raft. I stay there for a second, face pressed against the fluorescent green material, wishing I could close my eyes. Only for a month or two.
“Keep swimming, Hannah,” Jackson says, nudging my shoulder. “You’re almost there.”
By some miracle, my legs keep moving. Though I don’t think I’ll be able to stand upright once we reach solid ground.
The waves pick up as we get closer to shore, and they save my ass. Each one grabs the raft and propels us closer to dry land. We’re so focused on plowing ahead that I don’t realize how close we are until my toes graze rock and sand.
I look up in shock. The beach looms a hundred or so feet ahead of us.
Oh my god, we did it.
A particularly large wave all but spits us up onto the wet sand. We use the last shred of our energy to give the raft one final push, and it comes to a stop just out of reach of the waves.
I stumble, dizzy and exhausted, onto the sand beside the raft, and my legs give out as predicted. Between the sunburn and jellyfish welts, it feels like rubbing sandpaper along every inch of my furious skin as I lie down. I gasp for air, staring straight up into the pink sky.
The sun is already going down.
It was midday when we started.
My fingers curl into the hot sand, and I hang on like someone’s going to come along and drag me back to sea.
“Jackson?”
There’s a long pause, then, “Yeah?”
“You okay?”
“I’m okay.” He sounds winded for the first time since we set off, his voice barely audible from the other side of the raft. “I knew you could do it.”
Despite everything, I smile.
My muscles ache, and I’m certain I’ve never been this tired in my entire life, but I have to get up. I have to help Emmy. With a groan that comes from my very soul, I roll into a sitting position and crawl toward the raft opening.
Inside, Emmy’s still curled into a fetal position, the shoulder of her life vest serving as a pillow. She mumbles under her breath. I lean closer.
“…too hot…in the water…he’s in the water…”
“Em?”
She shakes her head. “Can’t get him out… It’s on fire.”
I want to crawl into that raft with her and sleep, but I can’t rest until she’s okay. I grab my bag and dig around for my metal water bottle. If the seizures were from dehydration, she needs water. Lots more water than we currently have.
“Stay with Emmy,” I say, peeking at Jackson around the back of the raft. He’s flat on his back, knees bent. When he hears my voice, he turns his head. “I’m going to see if I can find a stream or something.”
“Will the water be safe?”
I shrug. “I don’t know, but we don’t have a lot of choices.”
“No, I guess not.”
“Keep an eye on her. If she wakes up, see if she’ll drink that last bottle of water?”
He nods and sits up on his elbows. “Please be careful?”
I tip the water bottle toward him. “I’ll think about it.”
His laugh follows me down the beach. “You’re a punk, you know that?” he calls after me, and despite the stress residing in every inch of my body, I grin.
For the first time, I really take in where we are.
White sand stretches out on either side of us with absolutely no sign of anything resembling civilization.
The trees begin about thirty feet from the water, and they get thicker and thicker until they form a wall of green in front of me.
Mountains tower behind them, layered with a dense blanket of jungle foliage, and I suddenly feel very small and vulnerable.
The sand burns the bottom of my bare feet. I pick my way across the beach as fast as I can, but my muscles are Jell-O wrapped around toothpicks. I’m lucky to be walking at all.
Angry red welts cover nearly half my legs, and a mean-looking sting wraps around the back of my knee. Every time I take a step with that leg, the skin pulls, and I wince. I didn’t even know Mexico had jellyfish. Just my luck I’d swim through a whole family of them.
The edge of the jungle is silent, but deeper in there’s a low hum of bugs. I stay close to the tree line—no good can come from venturing too far in—and slowly pick my way through palm trees until the vegetation gets thicker.
I hope more plants mean more water. It’s a shot in the dark.
I round a clump of trees as tall as me and almost step on a bunch of yellow blobs on the ground.
It takes me a second to realize they’re mangoes.
I rip a fresh one off the tree so fast it sends the branch springing into the air when the fruit detaches.
I bite right through the skin. I don’t know if mango skin is edible, but I also don’t give a shit.
The fruit’s nowhere near ripe; it’s like chomping into a hard peach.
Still, it’s the best thing I’ve ever eaten.
The mango juice makes my mouth water, and I rip off a piece of the peel and press it to my cracked lips with a sigh.
I eat two more all the way to the pit before I force myself to resume my water search. I take several with me as I reluctantly stagger away, though. If Emmy wasn’t in that raft, I’d probably sit here eating these until I threw up.
More vegetation blocks my path, and I weave around a particularly fat palm tree and run straight into a stream.
I gape at the water and have another mirage moment, but sure as shit, clear water runs over dark rocks, slowly headed for the ocean to my right.
All the mangoes fall from my arms. I drop to my bruised knees and plunge my hands into the water, acutely aware of the layer of salt covering my body.
The stream is only about two feet deep in the middle, but the water is blissfully cool, and soon I’m submerging my arms and legs as far as I can reach, gently running the water over the jellyfish stings.
I dunk my sunburned face. The relief is instant.
The stream feels like it’s purging the sweat and dirt and salt and heat from every place it touches.
The cold water brings down the temperature of my sunburn, and I sit up with a gasp. This is how I’m going to bring Emmy’s fever down. I quickly gulp down a couple handfuls of water, refill the water bottle, and sprint back to the beach.
Emmy’s in the same spot.
Jackson is not.
I skid to a stop in the sand and spin in a circle looking for him, but he’s nowhere in sight. “Jackson?” My voice carries down the beach, but there’s no response.
A spike of fear courses through me, but there are no drag marks in the sand.
It’s not like he got hauled off by a wild animal.
He’s probably walking along the beach, scouting for help.
I climb into the raft with Emmy. If he’s not back in ten minutes, I’ll freak out, but right now I need to focus on her.
I unbuckle the straps of her life vest and gently tug it off her. She doesn’t react at all. I put my hand behind her head and lift her face toward me. Her eyes move behind her closed lids, but she still doesn’t open them. I dump half the contents of my water bottle down her face.
She spits water everywhere and gasps, eyes lazily locking on me.
“Stay awake,” I say.
I grab the coral bag and pull Emmy up until she’s sitting. She blinks about a dozen times, and her eyes don’t really focus on my face, but she stays upright.
“Come on,” I say, turning to wrap her good arm around my neck.
She barely has a grip, so I clamp one hand on her wrist and the other on her hip, and stand.
It takes every last bit of my energy to get up and out of the raft with her on my back, and I stumble to the side.
Black dots blink in and out of focus around the edge of my vision, but I don’t pass out and I don’t fall over.
It takes me three times as long to trudge back to the stream half walking and half staggering with Emmy. At the water’s edge my knees finally give up, and at the last second I drop my shoulder and all but dump Emmy into the water.
Her eyes fly open, and she gasps and claws at me like she can’t quite tell her ass is resting on the bottom.
I hold her head above the surface and seat myself behind her shoulders.
I whisper soothing things to her until her spine relaxes.
I slowly tilt her head back until her hair is running down her bare shoulders and her scalp is cool to the touch.
I dip my hand in the water and press it against her forehead, her cheeks, the underside of her chin, as the sun sets in front of us.
Slowly, I feel the temperature of her body drop.
The relief is so intense that I almost burst into tears.
When Jackson appears at my shoulder, I do.
He crouches beside me. “Hey! What’s wrong?”
“Where did you go?”
He points toward the beach. “Emmy wouldn’t wake up long enough to drink anything, so I walked down the beach to see if I could find help.”
“Did you?”
“No, but I didn’t want to leave her alone for long, so I didn’t go very far before I turned back. Scared the hell out of me when nobody was there, but I saw your footprints in the sand.”
I pool more water in my hand and run it down the top of Emmy’s scalp. “The stream is keeping her cool. I think I can keep her fever from spiking if I can treat her arm, but I don’t know how to do that with knuckle bandages and sunscreen.”
Even I can hear the frustration in my voice.
“You don’t have to save her all by yourself, Hannah. You just have to keep her alive long enough for someone to find us. She doesn’t need you to turn yourself inside out trying to create medication from tree bark. She needs you to get her to an emergency room, high-dose antibiotics, and IVs.”
I almost laugh. “So what you’re saying is, I have to stop channeling Grey’s Anatomy and lean more…Cast Away?”
Jackson smirks. “Something like that.”
The gears start turning. We’re on shore. We have more resources at our disposal than we had on the boat. We can start a fire. A big fire.
Jackson is right. I don’t need to perform medical miracles out here.
I have to make us easy to find.
Slowly Emmy becomes more alert. I get one of the cans of peaches from my bag and make her drink all the syrup, to get some sugar into her system.
The more she drinks, the more color comes back to her face.
She even manages to chew up most of the peach slices.
I convince her to finish our final water bottle.
Once that’s gone, I switch to the stream water.
We probably sit there for upwards of an hour. Long enough for the sun to sink below the horizon and the sky to dim. I would have stayed all night if it meant she didn’t have another seizure.
When her skin is almost the same temperature as the stream, it finally feels safe to pull her out. The running water cleaned a lot of the sludge out of her arm too. I pull a wide leaf from the mango tree and press it against her wound to keep sand and bugs out of it.
She walks almost all the way back to the beach, and seeing her hold her own weight has me grinning from ear to ear. She’s still exhausted and not entirely coherent, but it’s a huge improvement. The second she’s back in the raft, she lies down again, and I don’t stop her.
Jackson climbs in beside her and rubs her back while she drifts off. “You should get some rest too,” he suggests. “You’re dead on your feet.”
My body is practically screaming at me to listen to him. The thought of closing my eyes for even an hour sounds incredible, but there’s one more thing we need before it’s fully dark.
“I’ll rest as soon as I get a fire going.” I dig the calamine lotion out of the first aid kit and quickly slather it all over my jellyfish stings so I’m not scratching my skin to the bone while gathering firewood. When I’m done, I slather it on my sunburns too, then toss it at Jackson for his.
He sets it on the bottom of the raft with a frown. “Do you have enough time to start a fire?”
I stand and eye the horizon. With the sun gone, the sky is getting darker by the minute.
More stars blink into view above my head.
“I have Ben’s lighter, and the beach is littered with driftwood.
It shouldn’t take too long to get it going, and we’ll be a lot safer this close to the jungle with a fire. ”
Even now, the shadows grow between the trees. Soon it will be a wall of darkness.
Jackson gets up to help me, but I hold out a hand to stop him. “Stay with your sister. She shouldn’t be by herself if we can help it. I’ve got the fire handled.”
“Are you sure?”
“Positive. How hard could it be?”