Shipwreck (9 page)

“I was with him for a few seconds,” Ian added. “Then the mast came down and we got split up. But he was definitely okay. I heard him calling for me.”

“Did you see him after that?” asked Luke.

Ian shook his head. “But I don’t think he went down with the ship. I mean, the heat was unbelievable. The fire was spreading — there was nowhere to stand. Sooner or later, he would have had to jump.”

Charla looked alarmed. “Then why didn’t we see him in the water? Or at least hear him? And what about Lyssa?”

There was a sober silence, broken only by theslap , slap of the water lapping at the wooden platform.

Then Will spoke. “Aw, Lyss, I knew you’d bust it.”

Luke gazed at him in concern. “Will? You okay?”

“That’s the last thing I said to her,” he replied quietly. “She rebuilt the engine on guts alone, and that was the thanks she got from me.”

Nobody could offer a single word of comfort.

Will looked out over the miles of empty sea. /should have been an only child . How many times had he said it? How many more had he thought it? And now

If Lyssa’s okay, he vowed,
‘
/ —

Automatically, his mind sorted through the dozens of promises he might offer up. Suddenly, they all seemed so meaningless — a collection of tacky New Year’s resolutions.

He finally settled on the one he feared he might not get the chance to make good on:

If Lyssa’s okay, I’ll never be mean to her again.

Wednesday, July 19, 0030 hours

Night was the worst. The, darkness closed in like an endless canopy of absolute blackness. With no moon, Luke couldn’t even see Charla a few inches away.

“Ian, what time is it?” came Will’s voice from the void.

“It’s twelve-thirty,” Luke said irritably. “We just checked two minutes ago.”

“I don’t really care about the time. I just want to see the light.” He was talking about the tiny light on lan’s watch. “Every time I fall asleep, I dream that I’ve gone blind. I need to see something.”

“Try looking at the stars,” suggested Ian from the water beside the raft.

“I can’t sleep on my back.”

Luke was growing impatient. “You might have noticed this isn’t the Hilton. Make do.”

As Will struggled to roll over, he kneed Charla in the thigh. Reacting in shock, she elbowed Luke in the ribs. And as he jackknifed in pain, the edge of the raft dipped, dunking Ian underwater. The tiniest move had a ripple effect through the whole group. It was that close and uncomfortable.

Sputtering, Ian checked his watch. “Twelve-thirty-three,” he reported.

“Do it again. I missed it,” said Will.

Although the temperature never dropped below seventy degrees, the night felt almost bone-chilling after the burning heat of the day. Taking turns in shark-bait position kept the castaways soaked to the skin, and the six-hour shifts out of the water did little to dry them off. The seas had picked up, and even the smallest waves washed over the cabin top.

They had tried again to find an arrangement where all four of them could sit on the raft at the same time. But after repeated dunkings and one real scare — the raft had almost bobbed away — they had decided that three riders and one shark bait was the only way to go.

Secretly, Luke didn’t mind his shifts in the water, especially at night. While the air cooled down, the ocean stayed warm. It also provided protection from the wind. In fact, the only problem with shark-bait position was exactly what the name implied: sharks. Dangling there, you were a sitting duck for any sea creature that wanted to take a bite.

They had seen fins cutting the surface around the raft, but Ian insisted they were dolphins. “A

shark fin is larger and more triangular, with a small slot near the bottom.”

The kid was an endless fountain of information that nobody wanted to hear. “Carcharadoncarcharias , the great white shark, could destroy this raft in a single bite. A really big specimen can swallow a person whole.”

“Let me guess,” said Will. “They did sharks onNational GeographicExplorer .”

“Don’t knock it,” mumbled Luke. “Those guys make one heck of a watch.”

“I’m more afraid of the tiger shark,” Ian went on seriously. “They’re pack hunters and they can go into what’s called a ‘feeding frenzy — ‘ “

“Enough,” interrupted Charla, who was in shark-bait position at the time. “I don’t want to hear another word about it until you’re hanging down here like a worm on a hook.”

With the heat of the second day came thirst — thirst beyond anything they had experienced before in their lives. It was a familiar feeling at first — like the desire to hit the water fountain after a long boring class on a steamy June afternoon. But then it transformed into something deeper and stronger. There was no water fountain; there never would be. Throats burned. Lips cracked and bled.

Charla held the empty rubber hat. “Did that show about shipwrecks mention what to do if it doesn’t rain?” she asked Ian.

“It’ll rain,” the boy promised.

The other three noticed, though, that this was one statement with no backup research from television.

There was hunger too — they hadn’t eaten for a full forty-eight hours. The hunger mingled with the thirst to produce a never-ending dull ache that gripped each survivor from head to toe. It was a pain that radiated lack — lack of water, lack of food, lack of sleep, lack of comfort.

As the afternoon progressed, a few clouds appeared overhead. The castaways cheered them on as if the Super Bowl were being played out in the sky above them. A cool wind picked up, creating a chop on top of the water.

“All right, rain!” croaked Will. “Let’s see what you’ve got!”

“We should trap water in the sail and drink it as it runs over the sides,” Ian lectured. “Get as much as you can while it’s still raining, because the hat won’t hold a lot.”

Luke had his hands out, palms up, waiting for the downpour.

It didn’t come. Or, at least, not to them. They could see it raining a quarter-mile ahead of them, but they didn’t get a single drop. There was genuine agony on the cabin top when the overcast thinned out and the sun broke through once again.

“No fair!” Will moaned, addressing the clouds. “Come back! Come back! Where’s our rain?”

That night, Luke hung over the side, drifting in and out of an uneasy world of half-dreams. You never really slept in shark-bait position for fear of slipping off the raft and being lost forever. Suddenly, he heard a strange gurgling noise. It sounded like — drinking?

Will had edged his way forward and was now lying with his head over the side, swallowing greedily.

Aghast, Luke grabbed him by the collar and pulled his face out of the water. “Don’t do that, Will! It’s suicide!”

It was so dark that all Luke could see were Will’s eyes. They seemed dazed, glassy, and feverish. “It’s water, man! Who cares if there’s salt in it?”

Luke shook him angrily. “That salt dehydrates you worse than going thirsty. You might have just cut a whole day off the time you can hold out! Maybe more!”

“No, it’s okay!” Will insisted urgently. “Listen,

I figured out why we never found Lyssa and J.J. — they’ve been rescued already!”

“It doesn’t make sense, Will,” Luke argued. “How could rescuers spot them and miss us?”

“JJ. was right all along!” Will explained. “The captain and Radford are watching us! The others were in trouble, so they moved in and saved them. They haven’t saved us yet because we’re doing okay.”

“Okay?” Luke repeated. “You call this okay? We’re starving —dying of thirst! One of us has to hang in the water or we all drown.Think! A shark could bite me in two this minute, and the rescue boat would get here in time to save three and a half people. Thereis no bigger trouble than what we’re in right now. If there were rescuers out there, they’d be rescuing us!”

Will looked at him pityingly. “Take it easy, Luke. Everything’s under control. Don’t panic.”

Luke stared back at him in growing horror. The kid was totally serious. There was only one explanation for this: Hunger, thirst, grief, and fear were causing Will Greenfield to lose his grip on reality.

How long would it be before the same thing happened to the rest of them?

Thursday, July 20, 1645 hours

When it finally rained, everybody was unprepared. Luke and Charla both pulled the sail canvas in opposite directions, spilling most of the water onto the raft, where it rolled off into the sea. Will had the shakes and the dry heaves from drinking salt water. He tried to stand up and catch the drops in his cupped hands but succeeded only in tumbling off the cabin top headfirst into the ocean. By the time they managed to haul him back on board, the tropical cloudburst was over. The rain hat held about an inch and a half of water. It was enough for two mouthfuls each.

The water was warm and tasted a little salty — the rain hat, along with the raft and everything on it, was crusted with sea salt. But it was freshwater — their first in three days.

“Every little bit helps,” muttered Luke in disgust. “What a joke! It’s better to have nothing than a thimbleful.”

“This was just enough to remind us how much we need and we’re not getting,” Charla agreed mournfully.

Will’s stomach was in such bad shape that he couldn’t even keep his share down. He took one gulp and spit up over the side.

The other three looked on in agony. To them, nothing could be sadder than the thought of wasted water.

Boredom became as much of a problem as hunger and thirst. Minutes rolled into hours, which rolled into days with a dreary gray sameness. The overwhelming dullness canceled out every other emotion — even, at last, fear. It teamed up with the body’s weakness to sink Luke into an almost sleepy fog.

A couple of days before, his every thought had been of rescue. Now it seldom crossed his mind. He didn’t expect to be rescued; sometimes he was so numb that he couldn’t have cared less whether he was rescued or not. There were moments when the Coast Guard could have rear-ended the cabin top and he probably wouldn’t even have noticed.

He could tell he wasn’t the only one. By the next day, Will had virtually stopped talking. He lay on his side under the damp sail, his parched lips slightly apart, drifting in and out of a light doze. If anyone spoke to him, he only answered about half the time. More often than not, his replies made no sense at all.

When Ian informed Will that it was his turn for shark-bait position, he was told, “You know, Lyssa came in second in chess club, but she lost to Seth Birnbaum in the final.”

By unspoken agreement, Luke, Ian, and Charia stopped asking Will to take his turn dangling in the ocean. One thint) was obvious: If they spent much more time lost at sea, Will was not going to survive.

From the start, Charia had stubbornly insisted on exercising, doing aquatics, and taking short swims during her shark-bait time. Now she hung off the edge of the raft, gazing at the horizon with vacant eyes and never making an unnecessary move.

Of the four of them, only Ian seemed to have the energy to talk. He filled the endless hours with a tedious monologue of every single detail he knew about the ocean. And he knew plenty.

“Hey, Ian,” mumbled Luke listlessly. “Don’t you think it’s time to close up the Encyclopedia Bor-onica and give us all a break?”

The boy flushed redder than his harsh sun-and wind-burn. “I talk too much,” he said sadly. “I’m boring.”

“I was just kidding.” Luke was instantly sorry. “If it wasn’t for you and the Discovery Channel, we’d be dead already. Talk all you like.”

“I shouldn’t,” Ian conceded. “When you talk, the moisture inside your mouth evaporates, and you get dehydrated faster.”

“Man,” sighed Luke, “I’d give anything for a Gameboy. Or even a lousy deck of cards.”

“I’d settle for a piece of string,” Charla put in. “I used to know how to do Cat’s Cradle.”

“A lot of people don’t know that blue whales are bigger than sperm whales.” Ian took up his lecture. “They said on TV once that a blue whale’s tongue weighs as much as an elephant.”

“Ian — ” Luke groaned.

“Seriously,” the boy continued earnestly. “Look at that one over there. It must be thirty yards long.”

Luke sat up in sudden surprise. “What one over where?”

“The whale,” Ian insisted. “He’s spouting water twenty feet high.”

Luke stared. Before them the Pacific Ocean stretched, blue-gray and unbroken, to the horizon. There was no whale. He exchanged a worried glance with Charla and turned back to the younger boy.

“In that show about shipwrecks,” he asked carefully, “what were the warning signs? I mean, how do you know when you’re not going to make it?”

“Slow, lazy behavior,” Ian replied. “Too much sleeping. Followed by hallucinations — people see things that aren’t really there.” He pointed. “Look — he’s spouting again.”

Sunday, July 23, 1320 hours

Sun.

Luke was aware of its harsh glare even through closed eyes. He could feel the pain of sunburn on his face and arms.

But no. This wasn’t right. There was supposed to be protection. Something white. A large sheet — a sail? Where was his corner?

He spoke to the others. Cover meup, here. I’m getting fried . Funny — why couldn’t he hear his own voice? Come on,guys . This time he held his hand to his mouth. His lips weren’t moving either. His brain was talking, but it didn’t seem to be connected to his tongue.

He had been in shark-bait position for two — three — how many days now? He would have loved to stretch out and sleep.

Hey, Charla, he tried to say. Yourturn .

Was she ignoring him? No, his mouth was still not working. He couldn’t expect people to read his mind — especially not unconscious people. And they were. All three of them.

Will had been first, even before their second rainstorm. They’d forced water down his throat, but it hadn’t revived him. And anyway, Ian and Charla had gone down the very next day. Poor Ian. None of them deserved this, but the little kid was the most innocent of them all, guilty of nothing more than watching too much TV. Now here he lay, with a bird perched on his head.