Survival (8 page)

“It’s possible that no animals were killed for those,” Ian mused. “You can cut a rhino’s horn off and it will grow back. It’s actually a type of hair. Then it’s ground up and sold as medicine.”

By this time, Charla was shaking with outrage. “They probably killed those poor rhinos anyway — just for the fun of it!”

Satisfied that the shipment was in order, one of the newcomers went over and stepped inside the single-engine plane. A moment later, he reappeared, helping an enormously fat man dressed in an all-white silk suit that gleamed even brighter than the ivory.

“Mr. Big,” snickered J.J.

“Yes,” Ian said seriously. “I mean, that’s probably not his name. But he seems to be in charge.”

Sweat poured in streaks down the man’s face and neck, and he mopped himself with a sopping handkerchief, fighting a losing battle to stay dry. In his free hand, he carried a small suitcase. He was accompanied by the biggest Doberman pin-scher Luke had ever seen.

“What’s up with the suitcase?” asked J.J. “Is he moving in?”

Then Mr. Big opened the luggage. They goggled.

“Money!” exclaimed Charla in a strangled voice.

The bag was filled with neat bundles of bills, packed side by side, end to end, and on top of one another. It was a fortune.

Suddenly, the big dog stiffened. Then it began to bark, a loud raspy baritone that cut through the jungle like a hot knife through butter.

“It smells us!” rasped Lyssa, terrified.

“Let’s go,” whispered Luke.

Charla jumped up. “You don’t have to ask me twice!”

Luke grabbed her by the shorts and pulled her down again. “Slowly,” he insisted. “And stay low till we’re well into the woods.”

The castaways crawled back up the slope. They could still hear the barking when they reached the top and ran into the depths of the jungle. There was a panic to their flight, and they scrambled through the vines, tripping and stumbling as the foliage grew thicker.

“Slow down!” ordered Luke.

“But what if they come after us?” asked Charla, who was thirty feet ahead of everyone else.

“They probably think he was barking at a lizard or something,” said Luke. “Come on, somebody’s going to break a leg.”

“I’m sorry!” Charla was almost hysterical as she stopped to let the others catch up. “It’s just so horrible! Those poor animals!”

“Hey!Heyl” J.J. cut her off. “We have no proof that any of that stuff is real. Those tusks could be plastic!”

“So how come you ran too?” she shot back.

“The dog probably isn’t in on the hoax.” J.J. grinned sheepishly. “Every year hundreds of actors wind up with stitches because stunt animals don’t know it’s just a movie.”

“That’s no stunt animal.” Luke was angry now. “And this is no stunt!”

“Every time it seems like we’ve hit bottom, something even more awful happens,” Lyssa agreed miserably. “Will goes crazy, or more smugglers come, or their dog smells us! How could it be worse?”

She got her answer when they followed lan’s trail back to the inflatable raft. The contents of the survival pack were scattered all around the lifeboat and the surrounding jungle. Precious supplies were opened and strewn every which way.

“Look!” Charla pointed down. There, amid the dozens of sneaker prints, were animal tracks.

Ian squatted to examine them. “Boar,” he concluded.

“Uh-oh.” Lyssa rummaged through their gear. “Whatever it was, it took the mac and cheese.”

“That’s impossible!” Luke exploded. “It was freeze-dried and vacuum-packed! It didn’t smell any different from the first aid kit. There’s no way a pig could be smart enough to go through all this stuff and decidethat was food!”

His fellow castaways stared uneasily back at him.

Their last meal — their safety net — was gone.

“I don’t know which one of us is the bigger pig,” mumbled Will, crunching uncooked pasta.

Beside him stood the boar, its snout pumping up and down as the two savaged the freeze-dried macaroni and cheese straight out of the package.

“You know, Ratface, it’s a lot better when you boil it,” commented Will to his new companion. He picked up a fistful of orange powder and crammed it in after the macaroni. “The cheese is supposed to be hot and gooey. If I ever get out of here, I’ll come back and bring you some.”

Ratface obviously thought it was just fine the way it was. The animal never missed a swallow as it tore at the plastic bag with one sharp tusk.

“Hey, stay on your own side!” snapped Will. “After this, it’s back to bananas, you know!”

Day 6, 5:35 p.m.

The theft of their last meal changed the castaways’ approach to food. No longer could they depend on eleventh-hour runs for coconuts and bananas to stand between them and malnutrition. They needed protein. They needed vegetables. They needed well-balanced meals.

The equipment from the survival pack helped. Suddenly, they had pots and pans. They could fish and cook what they caught. Even durian seeds were tasty when roasted over the fire.

Two forked sticks with a crosspiece allowed a pot to be hung over the flame by its half-hoop handle. This enabled them to boil taro, a native root, which resembled a cross between a yam and an overloaded electrical junction box.

“You know,” said J.J. in genuine surprise, “this isn’t half bad. It’s almost like mashed potatoes.”

“It gets very soft when boiled,” Ian agreed. “But you have to cook it well to kill off a poisonous chemical that could be fatal to humans.”

J.J. spit a mouthful halfway across the beach.

“It’s fantastic,” beamed Luke, digging in. “The only thing that tastes better than food prepared by your own hands is food prepared by somebody else’s.”

Taro was plentiful; the fresh water to boil it in was very scarce. While it seemed to be raining constantly, it never rained for very long. No matter how many coconut shells the castaways set out — now over a hundred — the yield was never more than an inch or so.

Ian tried rigging a still — something he had seen onNational Geographic Explorer . They boiled a pot of seawater under a three-sided plastic tent made from a rain poncho. The water vapor rose as steam, recondensing on the sides of the tent. Then the droplets ran down the inside of the plastic and collected in three bowls on the ground. The salt was left behind in the pot. This was fresh water.

“Seems like a lot of work for a dribble,” commented J.J.

“You got a busy social calendar?” laughed Lyssa.

“I could have,” sighed the actor’s son. “In California.”

“That’s why you got kicked out of California,” Luke butted in. “You were having too much fun.”

JJ. glared at him, but had to admit Luke wasn’t exaggerating much. His reputation as a wild Hollywood brat had grown almost as large as his famous father’s movie career. Gossip columnists used to call to ask about Dad. Now they wanted the details of JJ.‘s latest escapade. It had been a great source of satisfaction to him. His brow clouded. Until Jonathan Lane had chosen CNC in the hope that it might straighten out his flaky son.

“How could you dothis to me?” he screamed at his father in tortured dreams every night. But the next morning he always awoke knowing that he’d given Dad a lot of help making the decision.

Their social calendars may have been blank, but the castaways had plenty to keep them busy. Two patrols per day — morning and afternoon — were dispatched to comb the jungle for signs of Will or his camp. They all took turns searching, with Lyssa leading the group every time.

Ian built three more stills, so one person had to maintain the fires and keep adding seawater to the pots. This assignment also included emptying the bowls of freshly distilled water into the lifeboat’s keg.

Each fishing trip began with a spirited round of rock-paper-scissors to determine who would perform the disgusting task of baiting the hooks. This was a job nobody wanted, because, as Luke put it, “The worms are bigger than the fish.”

Charla didn’t use bait at all. She preferred the challenge of swimming in the ocean and snaring her fish with a lightning-quick hand.

JJ. volunteered for fishing every day, but spent very little time with his hook in the water. He had discovered sea cucumbers, and was fascinated and delighted by their life process.

“Picture a bag of guts with a hole at each end,” he explained. “The water goes straight through it. But when some poor sap gets beached, it just sits there, full of water. Watch this.”

He picked up the creature, aimed it like a water pistol, and squeezed. Instantly, the sea cucumber emptied itself in a thin stream that hit Charla full in the face.

She pushed JJ. into the surf and held him under.

Lyssa hauled him out of the drink. “I guess Charla isn’t interested in marine biology,” she sympathized.

Ian was in charge of food gathering because he was the only person who could tell what was edible. The good news was that food was everywhere, even on the walls of their home. They would wake up each morning to find the lifeboat covered in giant snails.

“They’re a delicacy, you know,” Ian told them, gathering an armload, “and a good source of protein.”

“In your dreams,” said everybody.

But after bananas and coconuts three times a day, most of them were ready to try anything.

When she wasn’t in the jungle looking for her brother, Lyssa spent most of her time tinkering with the lifeboat’s scorched. and broken radio. She was a straight-A student with a real knack for electronics and machinery.

They were surviving, keeping busy, overcoming obstacles. The depression would come suddenly, unexpectedly, without warning. Charla might reach up to smooth her hair, feel the stiff, salt-encrusted tangle, and burst into tears. The crying would sometimes last for hours. Or Ian would grow suddenly silent and sit for half a day, staring morosely out to sea, visualizing who knew what. Any mention of Will could set Lyssa off.

For J.J., it would start innocently enough. He’d be talking about a great pizza place he knew in L.A. But then, forty-five minutes later, he’d be sitting there on the sand, his arms wrapped around himself straitjacket-style, still mumbling about double-cheese and pepperoni.

Charla ate less, exercised more, and blew up at anybody who dared mention it.

“Why don’t you just keep on swimming?” J.J.

suggested. “At your pace, you should hit the Oregon Coast in another three years.”

“I should hit your ugly face in another three seconds,” she retorted.

“Take it easy,” soothed Luke.

J.J. turned on him, blue eyes blazing. “Who died and left you God?”

And before Luke knew it, he was shouting, “The captain did, that’s who! And if you hadn’t decided to run up the sails in a gale, he’d be alive, we’d still have a boat, and none of us would be having this conversation.”

Luke watched in angry satisfaction as JJ.‘s face drained of all color. It was the one topic J.J. couldn’t smirk away. The tears were already on the way when he started running. At the edge of the trees, he turned and spat a single word back at Luke:“Convict!”

And then Luke was chasing him, intent on war. But the low vines tripped him up and he landed hard, raging at the sky. “No!!”

Wasn’t this just perfect? Now — now, of all times — everyone was going nuts! Didn’t they see that they had to hold it together if they were going to find Will and get off this rock? Whycan’t they be more like me ? Luke thought.I’m calm! Steady! Balanced! Sensible —

At the sudden pain in his hands, he looked down. His knuckles were skinned and bleeding. With each thought, he had been having a boxing match with a tree trunk.

Sensible and steady. Yeah, right.

J.J. didn’t reappear until late that night. He stepped into the lifeboat and tapped Luke on the shoulder. “I’m on fishing tomorrow.”

“Okay,” Luke replied. “I’ll work the stills.”

For once, he was grateful there were so many chores.

There was one final task that all the castaways kept up day to day. No matter what other job was in progress, five pairs of ears were always listening for the drone of airplane engines that would mean the smugglers were leaving the island. Until those men were gone, the shipwrecked crew of the Phoenix could not light signal fires, or write distress messages in the sand. They would never be rescued if they continued to be forced into hiding.

“When are they going toscram ?” asked Lyssa in exasperation. “They’ve got their tusks and their horns. What are they waiting for?”

“That’s what we have to find out,” Luke said decisively.

So the next morning, Luke and Charla set off for the other side of the island to spy on their un-wanted neighbors. Two hours later, they returned, trembling.

“They’re searching the jungle!” Charla rasped. “They’ve got that Doberman sniffing the ground to pick up our scent!”

“You mean they know we’re here?” asked Lyssa in horror.

“The dog definitely smells something when it sniffs someplace we’ve been,” Luke told them. “But those guys can’t be sure what they’re looking for.”

“The island’s not that big,” Ian said nervously. “Sooner or later, I mean, even if it’s just by dumb luck - “

He never finished the sentence. He didn’t have to. The five castaways stood rooted in the sand as the thought began to sink in.

They were being hunted.

Day 9, 10:10 a.m.

They called it the two-minute drill.

The signal came from Charla, atop a palm tree — the hooting of an owl, a sound that would never be heard on a tropical island. That set the vanishing process in motion. The fires were extinguished, the stills folded up and buried in the sand. A few sweeps of a giant fern and their footprints were gone too, leaving a deserted beach.

Two quick kicks took care of the supports for the sun canopy, and the lifeboat lay flat. Ready hands drew a leafy blanket of woven vines and palm fronds over it. Suddenly, the black rubber craft was gone, replaced by the green-brown colors of the jungle. Finally, the castaways themselves disappeared, melting into the dense underbrush.

There was the electronic beep of a digital stopwatch. “One-fifty-seven,” Ian reported. “Our best time yet.”