Red Sand (14 page)

...We're having trouble keeping the ports closed! The rain is pouring in. There's something blocking them... We can't...
A keening, high pitched shriek filled the headset like feedback.
Trying to.... There's water building up on the floor now...
 

More screeching...

"I can't hear you. You're not coming through."

Static.
 They weren’t singing now.

He switched over to Channel 2. "Julia, John is having trouble in his boat. Can you see it from there?”

Julia’s voice came back…
we’re getting rainwater in here from somewhere… the wind keeps opening us up... Sit down! Sit down! Stay away from the walls!... Everyone is scared. I’m trying to prevent panic…

“Can you see John? Can you help him?”

…There’s no way I can get to him in this. It’s dangerous… What? What’s wrong?... they’re having trouble with.… 
Static.

“Julia?”

The radio came on, but it was just the wind, screeching, howling. It seemed to pause for a breath and then screeched again. 

He switched back to John.

"John, come in, are the windows closed?"

.... Can't... There's something...
[Keening screech]....
Oh my God!.... it's in here with us… Oh, God!.... 

Static...howling...

"John?" he switched, his hand shaking, "Julia?" he switched through every channel. “Anyone?”

Channel 2. The wind screamed.

Channel 3. The wind screamed.

Channel 4. The wind screamed.

"Goddammit, somebody tell me what the
fuck
is going on!" On every channel he heard wind and rain. No one answered.

Back on Julia’s channel, the wind seemed to have died down. It was only in the background, now. Something made a “huh, huh, huh” noise, but nothing followed. The radio worked, but Julia wouldn’t.

That night, no one on the ship slept.

There wasn’t a level surface to sleep on. Rain washed the floors like a waterslide. It filtered in from everywhere at once. The ship rocked unevenly. Rather than a gentle sway, it floated up and then slammed back down, floated up and slammed back down. It was like sitting on the business end of a hammer. On every rise, Tucker held his breath, thinking the ship would drift back out to sea and sink. Every descent knocked that breath out of him.

They holed up back where they started, near the engine room, as low in the ship as possible. They quickly learned that the closer they got to the center of that inverse pendulum, the better. The noise was horrific. They wore earphones and earplugs, but it was a sound that could be felt. The minutes tortured them. They no longer feared nor hoped. They endured.

Tucker felt double the torture. Left with nothing else to distract him, his mind replayed the last few days over and over again. Would anyone here suspect he had tried to steal the ship? No. Impossible. He was certain. Did that matter? Not really. They’d be found, sooner or later. He’d go to jail, if he lived that long. Miraculously, he still had the full loyalty and respect of the crew. He’d handled himself admirably all along. They had no reason to doubt him.

Except one.

“Everyone knows where I am”, he’d said. That was a grammatical error only a guilty man would make. An innocent man would have said “where
we
are”.

The storm didn’t hit them straight on, his one stroke of good luck. The eye of the hurricane missed the island, and the boat. The storm abated after 4 am. The ship settled. Tucker stood up.

He wiped the steam of the window with his sleeve. Outside, a sheen of moisture gleamed on deck. Everything looked the same, though canted. Even a hurricane couldn’t do much to destroy a steel ship.

Blue luminescence hissed along the bow. St. Elmo’s Fire. It flared up on every radio antennae and sensor bristling across the upper decks. Tucker had seen it before, but tonight it looked like the ghosts of a thousand dead had come back to haunt the ship.

When the wind and rain died down, he wanted to tell the crew to check for damages. Why bother? How much worse could it get? There was nothing for them to do but wait till morning.

He continued to try the radios. Only dripping water answered. The radios were still on.

As soon as the sky lightened, they piled into their one remaining lifeboat. Tucker made sure he was the last to board the skiff. As the little motor puttered away, he stood aft to survey the damage.

“How does it feel to leave your ship, Captain?” Mike didn’t attempt to hide the resentment in his voice.

“’Now would I give a thousand furlongs of sea for an acre of barren ground.’”

“You’ll get that in spades.”

Tucker turned to his new home. The sun shed light on a most barren island. Short of waving grasses, nothing cut the horizon until the steep black skirts of the mountain.

The prow bit into a sand bank about twenty yards from the beach. Colin and Angel jumped out and pulled it further in. Tucker and the rest waded through the waves.

The beach lay decimated. The sea carved new channels in the shore, cutting away chunks all the way back into the dunes. Splintered debris from the ship tangled in seaweed and coral. Every manner of fish rotted in the morning sun. Insects crawled over black and crispy scales. The flies bit his men.

Tucker tripped over a pink plastic pony strangled in seaweed. "Why is it so quiet?"

"’Cause Colin bit off his tongue."

"No, I mean, the storm is over. I gave orders to come out of the shelters and assemble on the beach."

Nothing moved. No one shouted, screamed, laughed. No one staggered over the dunes in jubilant relief. No birds sang. Only the wind blew through dry beach grasses as if man had never set foot on the island. The sand squeaked as new dunes obliterated whatever the revelers left behind. Nothing lived.

"Maybe the sand buried them and they can't get out. Let's hurry. "

They ran across the beach and crested the first dune. Orange roofs stood out clearly against the white sand. They hadn’t been buried, they’d been exposed. The doors and windows lay wide open, some of them broken or missing altogether. Even from a distance they could see there were no people inside.

Clothing littered the site leading up to the life boats, tangled up in some kind of vegetation. Like everything else, it had withered and died.

"Looks like we missed one hell of a party," Mike said, picking up a pair of shorts. A vine threaded its way through the pant leg. He broke it free, shattering the vine like dust. Tiny spore drifted away on the wind.  

"Sashaying with septuagenarians sounds like fun to you?"

Mike held a pair of woman's cutoff denim shorts. "
These
sexy things didn't belong to an old woman." He inspected them, sniffed them.

"Try to stay focused, Mike"

Mike's hand pulled away and dropped the pair. A long, gooey string stuck to his fingers. He laughed. "Oh-ho! Splooge! What a party!" Immediately his face soured. "Wait, no, what is this? Ow! It burns a little!" be wiped his hands on his pants and blew on the fingers. 

Angel squatted to look at the vines. "All the clothing has this mucous on it."

Sammy peered at it up close. "Gross."

Ados pulled a plastic bag out of his pocket and started taking samples.

Dragos ducked into one of the boats. He came back out almost immediately. “No one here, sir." He swiftly inspected the next boat. "Just... clothes. And this.” He held up a radio. It was still on. It hissed, quietly, like a cornered animal. That was Julia’s boat.

Tucker grew angry. "So what are you telling me? A thousand people decided to go skinny dipping in a hurricane?"

Ados shrugged. "Mass hysteria, perhaps?"

“Maybe the wind pulled them out of the boats," Mike contributed.

"And out of their clothes?"

Dragos put his hands on his head. "This... This... Something bad happened here."

“No shit, Sherlock,” Tucker snapped. He took a breath. He needed to regain composure. He surveyed the damage. "I thought we'd have a few casualties, but not
everyone
. This is impossible. There aren't even any bodies to bury.”

He pulled himself together and went back into command mode. He was still the Captain. “I want a search of the island. Especially the rocks. See if they fled to a cave somewhere.
 “

"Wouldn't they have come out by now?"

“I don't know. Maybe they're trapped; maybe they're hurt. Dragos, take Colin and go find them. Mike, set up a base camp here with food and water for anyone who wanders back. You can't just loose a thousand people. Someone will come back.”

Tucker shuddered. He knew those last words were wrong. Everyone was dead. He refused to believe it, but he knew it. He heard it on the radios last night. He convinced himself then it was just the wind shrieking in the background.

It wasn't.

They were screaming.

It’s in here with us.

Three days passed without a sign of the missing passengers or a rescue.

They lost hope. Tucker kept the crew busy collecting supplies of food from the ship and moving it onshore. The ship still had power, so the meats and vegetables would last some time. They had canned supplies to live off of after that.

The air behind the hurricane brought a chill at night, carried in from Northern waters. The crew built a fire out of anything combustible and sheltered around it.

"Now we're stuck on a desert island. So far, not too bad." Mike burped up a can of Coke after a light snack of
fois gras
and crackers.

Ados gave him a scholarly look. "That's a common misperception. The phrase is 'deserted island'. Most castaways landed on tropical islands."

"Well, this island is both."

Sammy piped up.  “It’s an uncharted island. If they hadn’t found it before, they won’t find it now.”

The fear of being discovered, of his plan falling to pieces, gradually left Tucker. He focused now on mundane daily tasks:  finding water, preserving food, building shelter.

The Prince Edward hadn’t always steamed across the Atlantic. Shortly after its construction in St. Nazaiere, France, Tucker ran her on the route between Florida and the Bahamas. That route worried him. Between the Bermuda Triangle and the fate of the
Sea Venture,
he never felt comfortable in those waters.

He laughed at the irony.

Mike, scratching at his sunburned arms, waving away flies, didn’t look amused. “What’s so funny?”

“We’re the
Sea Venture
.”

“Come again?”

“The
Sea Venture.
It was a Virginia Company ship back in 1609. A hurricane hit it off the coast of the Bahamas and they took on water. Fearing sinking, Admiral George Summers, deliberately ran it into the reefs off Gate’s Bay. He and his crew made it ashore and founded what would eventually be Bermuda. They scavenged parts from the ship to produce two smaller ships to escape the island. Over the years, the remainder of the ship was scuttled down to nothing.”

Mike wasn’t impressed. “So I guess that makes us real estate tycoons.”

Tucker never pictured himself starting a colony. Scuttling the ship, though, sounded like a good idea. He laughed out loud. “Well, I did say I’d retire on an island.”

He couldn’t stop laughing.

“Captain?”

The Prince Edward cost $300 million to build. Ship breakers get $350 a ton. At 30,000 tons, the Prince Edward was worth ten million dollars to the Liberians. His cut was $1.5 million, now sitting in a bank account he might never see.

They couldn’t live on the ship, but they could bring everything on shore. For seven people, they had supplies equivalent to a small city. They had all the clothing and personal possessions of 800 people. They had a fully stocked infirmary, vitamin stores, and canned fruit to prevent scurvy and other ailments until they could grow a garden. They had a full shipboard library with everything from technical manuals to literature. They had all the tools necessary both to take the ship apart and to make repairs. They even had metal from the ship itself to make more tools. If he could wish for anything, he wished the ship had solar panels like the newer ships in the line.

He thought about the leather and cherry wood-paneled walls and trompe l’oeil ceilings of the steakhouse on Deck 10. He thought of the plump, cushy chairs in the card room. He remembered the skin creams and lotions in the spa, the weights in the gym, the paintings in the Fine Art Gallery. He thought about the fine china and silver candelabras in the dining rooms. He remembered the downy soft beds in the first-class cabins. Once they transferred all that on shore, theirs would be the finest appointments enjoyed by any castaway in history. For the next year, at least, he might even live better than he would have on his share.

Best of all, he couldn’t be stranded with better men. They were already used to spending long periods of time together under stressful conditions. As the days wore on, even Tucker’s last fear melted.