Chapter Twenty-Two
The boat gently rocks in the wind. I stand at the helm, watching the white sails billow out above my head against a sky full of stars.
It’s beautiful, but every once in a while, the star I’m looking at will vanish.
I shift my gaze to another, and then that one snuffs out too.
Soon it seems like the sky is half as bright as it was.
“You better be careful.”
I jump. Captain Keith stands over my shoulder. He’s shirtless, and the slowly dimming moonlight barely illuminates the tattoo across his chest. Only now, instead of “NICKELBACK,” it says “BETRAYAL.”
“You never know what’s waiting for you out there.”
I frown. “What do you mean? Up in the sky?”
He shakes his head and gestures toward the side of the boat.
I blink again, and the helm is gone. We’re on the sand, staring at a wall of jungle. A small light comes from inside a bright green raft beside us, but when I take a step toward it, something inside growls.
I freeze, and Captain Keith laughs. “You shouldn’t worry about what’s in there. You should be worried about what’s out there.”
I follow the direction of his shaking finger, toward the jungle.
Except we’re no longer looking at it from the shore; we’re pressed right up against the trees.
They loom above us. I take a step back, but Keith wraps a hand around my upper arm and holds me in place, tsking at me.
“Hannah, Hannah, Hannah. Don’t you know?
What the jungle wants, the jungle gets. And the jungle wants you. ”
A pair of yellow eyes opens in the darkness right in front of my face. They narrow, and before I can scream, a panther leaps from the shadows, claws extended, and tackles me to the ground with a snarl.
***
I scramble backward, screaming my head off for a full ten seconds before I realize it’s not dark. I’m not standing by the trees. There is no panther. I’m lying in the sand beside the raft, and the sun has long since risen.
I get to my feet and look around, pressing a hand against my heart.
God, it was only a dream.
If I thought I was scared of the jungle before, I’m terrified now and I don’t even know if panthers are native to this part of the jungle.
I run my fingers through my crusty, greasy hair—careful to avoid the scalp flap—and let out a sigh while I wait for my body to recognize there’s no immediate danger and unlock the rest of my muscles.
I shake out my arms and roll my shoulders, moving toward the edge of the water.
I look up and down the beach. It’s quiet except for the gentle crash of the waves as they roll in and slide over the tops of my feet.
The sound of the water eventually calms my heart rate.
The sun is up over the trees at my back.
If I had to guess, it’s probably somewhere between eight and ten in the morning.
I have no idea when I finally fell asleep, but as tired as my body feels, it couldn’t have been too long before dawn.
I feel like a towel that’s been wrung out one too many times.
My stomach clenches painfully, and I wrap my arms around myself.
I have to make Emmy eat and check her wound again.
She’s probably due another trip to the stream before I start on this fire bullshit again too.
If I manage to get it started this time, one of us is going to have to bounce between her and the fire all day while the other hikes down either side of the beach to look for help.
But with the stream and the fruit alone, we’re so much better off than we were on the boat.
All we have to do now is survive long enough to be rescued.
I climb into the raft, and I stop in my tracks.
Something’s wrong.
Emmy is fine. She’s still warm, but not as feverish as she was on the boat, and her pulse is strong. I peel back the mango leaf, and her wound is disgusting, but it doesn’t look any worse. The sunlight glints off a piece of her bone, and I quickly cover it back up.
Jackson, too, is fine. He’s sleeping soundly beside his sister. Neither of them seem to be the cause of the alarm bells ringing in my head. My gaze slides around the inside of the raft, and I do a double take.
My bag is gone.
I lunge forward and run my hands along the bottom of the raft, which is ridiculous, because if I can’t see the coral-colored mesh in this little space, it’s clearly not here.
That doesn’t stop me though. I climb back out of the raft and run around the outside, checking the sand in case Jackson moved it—though I don’t know why he’d do that.
No bag.
It’s gone, and with it, all our remaining cans of food, the mangoes we collected, my water bottle, my useless phone, and the first aid kit.
The jungle looms over our little campsite, and I feel eyes on me. I scan the trees, but nothing moves beyond them. I scramble back to the raft and shake Jackson’s leg until he sits up, blinking hard. I wave for him to follow me, and he does, blearily rubbing his eyes.
When we’re more than a dozen feet from the raft Jackson pulls me to a stop by the water’s edge. “What’s wrong?”
“Did you move my bag?”
He shakes his head.
There goes my best-case scenario. “The food is gone.”
Jackson takes a full four seconds to respond. “What do you mean?”
“Our tiny collection of food? All our hope for survival? Everything we had? It’s gone. My bag isn’t in the raft anymore.”
He runs a frantic hand down his face and turns away, like he means to check the raft himself, then thinks better of it. “Well, where did it go?”
“That’s a fantastic fucking question, Jackson. How the hell should I know?”
He glowers at me.
I sink to the sand and drop my face into my hands. “Sorry, sorry. That was rude. I’m just stressed out. I don’t understand what happened.”
“Maybe an animal smelled the tuna and dragged it off?”
That hits a little too close to my dream for comfort. The idea of some animal emerging from the forest and getting close enough to grab a whole bag of our food without waking us is the stuff of nightmares.
We need to get the hell out of here before whatever animal big enough to cart off a bag full of cans comes looking for more and we’re all that’s left.
I jump to my feet, grab Jackson’s arm, and drag him toward the trees. “Come with me. We need some drier wood. We’re getting that fire going even if it kills us.”
Jackson winces. “Interesting choice of words.”
We pick our way through the edge of the jungle, skirting giant rocks and clusters of trees until the canopy overhead is so thick that the vegetation on the ground is drier than anything we’ve seen so far.
I grab a collection of larger branches and brush, tucking dried leaves on top of the pile.
When my arms are full, I run back to the relative safety of the beach.
I make a pyramid shaped pyre with the brush and dried leaves underneath and pull Ben’s lighter from my bathing suit. The metal is warm from my body heat. I light several of the leaves, blowing on the tiny flames to get them to spread.
“You got it,” Jackson says, carefully watching the fire beside me. “Put more leaves there at the bottom. And another smaller branch too. It needs to fully catch on the little stuff before the larger chunks will burn.”
I do what he suggests and watch in amazement as the flame actually builds against the larger wood pieces this time.
The drier wood makes a world of difference.
I should have known not to trust anything on the beach to be dry all the way through.
After a few minutes, the fire is small but growing.
Once everything in the circle of stones is engulfed in flame, I rip several fresh branches off nearby bushes and smaller trees and lay them across the top of the fire.
Right away the green wood starts smoking up a storm, and I watch in satisfaction as it curls toward the sky.
While I wait for the fire to spread through the green branches, I dig giant letters into the sand beside the fire with my hands.
H E L P
“What are you doing now?” Jackson asks. He pokes at one of the logs with a stick and sparks fly up in the air, intermingling with the smoke.
“If there’s a search party out there, I want to make it easy to find us. I’m going to make the fire as big as I can, but if the smoke catches anyone’s attention from the air, I want them to know right away we’re not here by choice.”
“How very Cast Away of you.”
“You know, I’ve never actually seen that movie,” I say, finishing up the E and clapping sand off my hands.
“It’s pretty sad. The guy has nobody to talk to, so he makes friends with a volleyball.”
I heft a rock from the tree line and stop to stare at him. “Wait… really?”
“Really.”
I drop the rock in the middle of the L and go back for another. “Too bad we’re fresh out of volleyballs.”
He pokes at the fire again, and another spark shoots off. “You don’t need a volleyball. You have Emmy.”
We both look toward the silent raft, and I take a step toward it.
Jackson shakes his head. “Finish your letters. I’ll check on her.”
A few dozen trips later, my message is clear as day, carved deep into the sand and covered in dark rocks from the forest. Each letter is about as big as the raft. If we can get the smoke high enough, someone might spot us. By boat or air, I’m not picky.
The sun is almost directly overhead, and it’s humid as hell as I cross the scorching sand to get back to the raft. Jackson’s worrying at his lip beside Emmy when I climb in.
The empty space where my bag used to sit taunts me, and I scowl at it while checking Emmy’s fever.
As if I don’t have enough on my plate already, now we’re going to have to scrounge up more food and water too.
And without a water bottle to hold it, keeping us all hydrated is going to be a hell of a lot harder.
I can’t wrap my head around what kind of animal could drag my bag out of here without any of us hearing it. The thing was full of metal. How did it drag all that away without clanging up a storm?