by Shade Owens
“What’s going on, sweetheart?” Rocket asked.
Wiping her eyes with the back of her arm, she sucked in a glob of mucus and fought to catch her breath.
“You can talk to us, you know,” Rocket said. “We’re your family now.”
This seemed to upset Elektra even more. Sniffling, she dug her head into Rocket’s neck. It was a sad thing to see, especially being that Elektra surpassed Rocket by at least a foot in height. She trembled as she cried, her back hunched and her long arms wrapped around Rocket
“You don’t have to talk about it if you don’t want to,” Rocket said. “But I want you to know that we’ve all lost people we care deeply about. It’s so hard. It hurts.” She pulled Elektra back and patted her heart. “In here, it hurts. Are you hurting?”
Elektra nodded, her slobbery bottom lip trembling.
“She… she took care of me,” Elektra said.
“Who did, honey?” Rocket asked.
“Leah, my big sister. Mom was… Mom was always too fuzzy.”
Rocket forced a playful smirk, no doubt trying to make Elektra feel safe. “Fuzzy?”
“That’s what Leah called it. Mom took lots of pills and drank strong stuff all the time. I… I was too young to know what it was then, but I guess it was like that moon stuff you guys drink sometimes.”
“Alcohol?” Rocket asked.
Elektra nodded and with her arm, wiped her eyes. “One night, Mom got so bad she hurt me. I don’t remember all of it, but I remember my face and my wrists hurting a lot. Leah came running downstairs when she heard us. She was sixteen, older than I am now, and bigger than Mom. So she tried to stop her.” She swallowed hard, cleared her throat, and gazed up at the sky as if watching her memory form in the clouds. “Mom had a gun in the kitchen drawer. I don’t know why she reached for it when Leah came running down, but she did. I guess Leah’s footsteps scared her, or something, and she… she shot her. It was so loud it hurt my ears. I remember thinking they blew up and I’d never hear again. I was only a kid. Five or six, I think. I didn’t know what was going on.” Elektra pulled in a long, quivering breath. “Then, Leah fell against the wall and there was blood everywhere. I started screaming so much that Mom pointed the gun at me. But she didn’t use it. Instead, her hands started shaking. I think that’s when she realized what she’d done, and she put the gun in her mouth and pulled the trigger.”
Everyone remained silent, including Rocket, whose eyes were bulging so far out of her skull they looked like they were on the verge of drying and falling out. How had we not known about this? The poor kid had seen something no child should ever witness. No wonder she had issues.
“Oh my God, Elektra,” Rocket said. “I-I didn’t know. I’m so sorry you went through that.”
Elektra shrugged as if trying to brush away her feelings. “After Mom shot herself, I ran to Leah. She was still breathing, and she grabbed my hand and told me, ‘No matter what happens, I’ll always be with you, sis, and I promise I’ll see you again soon.’ I knew she was leaving. I’m not sure how, but I knew. So I hugged her until I fell asleep. When I woke up, my shirt was covered in blood, Leah was under a black plastic tarp, and people in uniforms were everywhere.”
Swallowing hard, I averted my gaze.
“Is that why you ended up in foster care?” Rocket asked.
“Yeah,” Elektra said. “But no one wanted me. They kept saying I was nothing but trouble.”
Rocket grabbed Elektra by the face, and with her thumbs, wiped away the tears sliding down her cheeks. She planted a firm kiss on Elektra’s forehead. “We want you, you understand? I know we can’t replace your big sister, but we’re your family now and we want you.”
Smiling sweetly, Elektra’s big watery eyes rolled toward the rest of us.
“That’s right,” Biggie said.
Coin, having no doubt forgiven Elektra’s attack after that story, stepped forward. “We aren’t goin’ anywhere, kid. And don’t worry about what I said. I’m scared o’ ghosts so I like to pretend they don’t exist. Anyone who thinks ghosts aren’t real is an idiot, you hear me?”
Elektra chuckled and wiped her bloodshot eyes again.
When her gaze fell on me, I winked at her. “Once a Hunter, always a Hunter. You’re part of the pack now.”
“Come on,” Rocket said, grabbing her hand. “Let’s go find that plane and figure out how to get off this island. When we’re outta here, I’ll buy a big fancy house and we can all live together. All of us. We’ll be a big Hunter family.”
Coin scoffed but quickly changed her tune when Rocket shot her a death glare. “Y-yeah! Rocket’s right.”
We all laughed, cleansing the dreadful atmosphere. Around us, everything had begun to darken, and through the trees, the sun was setting over the ocean water’s horizon, looking like a giant ball of fire.
“Sun’s going down,” Coin pointed out.
Despite my pain, I didn’t want to stop moving. If the plane had landed, there was no telling how long the visitors would be staying. What if this was it? What if this was our chance to escape the island? This plane—the pilot, and whoever sat inside—was our link to the outside world, and therefore, our ticket off this island.
If only the plane had flown above us earlier during the day, we wouldn’t have been forced to camp out for the night. Traveling in the dark was an incredibly stupid thing to do. If we didn’t somehow end up on Ogre territory, we risked running into a wild animal without even knowing it. Jaguars, I’d learned, were most active around dawn and dusk.
I’d never forgotten this because Rocket and Fisher had gotten into a heated argument about it.
* * *
“You think I don’t know anything about them?” Fisher snapped at Rocket. “One of them ate my fuckin’ girlfriend. You think I’m an idiot? Those motherfuckers are nocturnal. That shit should’ve never happened. We were hunting in the middle of the day!”
No one else dared get involved in the argument. Instead, we all stood staring as if watching some championship wrestling match.
Rocket stood in front of Fisher with crossed arms and an overly elevated chin to stare at her opponent. “Fisher, I’m not trying to start a fight. I’m only telling you what I saw on Jill Norman’s Discovery Channel.”
Fisher scoffed. “Fucking geek. Don’t believe all the bullshit you hear. Maybe if you’d pull your head outta your fuckin’ ass—”
“Whoa, okay,” Flander cut in. “Ain’t no need to get rude, ladies.”
“Mind your fuckin’ business, Flander,” Fisher said.
She was so angry her face seemed warped. I didn’t blame Fisher for getting so upset—any time the topic of jaguars came up, she blew up. Who wouldn’t? She’d watched her girlfriend get dragged up into a tree and munched on by one.
“Okay,” Rocket responded. “Well, Jill knows her stuff, and she—”
“I don’t give a flyin’ fuck what she said!” Fisher snapped.
She swung around, jabbed her spear into the jungle’s moist earth, and stormed off.
Trim gave Rocket a look that translated to, Was that necessary?
Rocket shrugged and made her bright eyes go big. “What? It’s a misconception people have. They think jaguars are nocturnal. Apparently, they aren’t. They’re more active at dawn and dusk. Did you know they’re also good swimmers? Who would have thought?”
Trim shook her frizzy-haired head and pinched the bridge of her nose. “I don’t care what the truth is, Rocket. You know how Fish is. Don’t bring this up again, okay?”
CHAPTER 4
“Man, this is bullshit,” Biggie said, jabbing her spear into the crackling fire. “We ain’t got no idea where that damn thing landed. How long are we supposed to keep walkin’?”
Elektra peeled open a banana and took a bite out of its tip, her right cheek ballooned as she chewed. “You think they came back for us? You think we’re going home?”
It was nice to hear Elektra refer to the real world as home. Up until
today, all I’d known about her was that she’ been in the foster system before being dropped off on the island. I hadn’t known anything about her real family, and now that I did, I felt more compelled to include her in everything we did.
I thought of my mother and wondered if she still thought about me. How long had it been? Three or four years now? Were riots being held? Were people coming to their senses and realizing that prisoners weren’t returning? The sentence I’d been given was three years, which had now passed. Was my mother searching for me? Was she putting up a fight? Or, was she drowning herself into oblivion, having lost the only two people she cared about?
How was she holding up, anyway? She’d already had a difficult time taking care of herself with her fibromyalgia, I didn’t want to imagine how much worse her condition had become with the added stress of me murdering her boyfriend, and me being sentenced to serve time on a remote island.
What about the others? As I searched my friends around the fire, I wondered if any of them would be returning to a life of homelessness should we ever return. Who would want to hire a felon who’d spent years of their life living in the jungle? Maybe the host of a reality TV show.
“We could be walking for a while,” Rocket said. “Hopefully we actually find the plane. I mean, it could be anywhere. It could also be anything. What’d you guys think it is?”
“Could be a drop,” Coin said. “But what kinda drop?”
Biggie shook her thick-haired head. “Naw, man. I doubt it’s a drop. Why would the plane land on the island?”
“What makes you think it landed?” Rocket asked.
Biggie made her eyes go big as if to say, Weren’t we listening to the same thing?
“The damn thing was loud, and then it wasn’t,” Biggie said. “It was obviously descending. That’s what you do. You reduce the throttle. Engine slows down, you start gettin’ more drag. So, like I said, it was landing. I’d be willin’ to bet you bitches twenty pearls on that one. The only thing I’m wonderin’ is, who is it? ’Cause no one flies that close to the island. It ain’t allowed. Y’all know that.”
Everyone stared at her, likely thinking the same thing as me—how did Biggie know so much about planes?
“What?” Biggie said, staring back at us. “My grandpapa had his own Cessna. He let me fly it a couple o’ times.”
Elektra finished her banana and threw the peel it the dead forest. She then stuck her head inside her little suede bag, nodded, and came back up for air.
“Still got three left,” she said.
She was likely referring to her bananas. I’d warned everyone that traveling through the Dead Zone meant that food would be scarce.
Biggie sighed. “Man, I wanna go home.”
I inched closer to the fire. “We have to keep exploring. You guys all agree the sound was coming this way, right? So we’ll find it. We have to keep moving forward, that’s all.”
Everyone nodded, and Rocket bowed her head, the fire’s orange glow making her cheekbones seem more prominent than they were. “Well,” she said, lowering her voice, “a plane would only land on the island for one reason—to search for us, or to drop off a big load. If it were anything else, like an emergency landing, it would’ve been shot down.”
Elektra swallowed so hard I heard the gulp.
Coin sucked on her gold tooth that looked brown in this darkness, stared into the fire, and didn’t say anything.
As much as I didn’t want to believe it, Rocket was right. Every other one of the island’s drops had taken place over the ocean water. Women were tossed out of a helicopter and forced to swim to shore. The idea of a plane landing on the island didn’t sit well with me.
If they were dropping something, it likely wasn’t people. So what could it be? A poisonous gas? Oh God, why was my mind jumping to the worst-case scenario?
As much as I didn’t want to admit it to myself, the idea of a plane coming to our rescue wasn’t exactly plausible. If that was the case, why only bring one plane? Why not have media coverage during the event? Something was wrong, and until we uncovered the truth, I had to prepare for the worst.
The fire’s heat warmed the tip of my nose. “Are your weapons sharpened?”
Everyone nodded.
A cool humid breeze swept through the jungle, sending shivers up my arms and down my back. How far could the plane have landed? How long would we be walking? We’d already spent several traveling and my feet were aching. I wasn’t used to trekking long distances anymore. Ever since I’d stopped going out for hunts, I’d lost a great deal of endurance.
Taking a gulp of water from my water bladder, I stood up and climbed into the temporary, lightweight hammock Coin had constructed. It was smooth against the skin and stretchy like a giant elastic band.
I should have thanked her for building us beds out of the few vines she managed to find, but I was too preoccupied thinking about our survival in the Dead Zone to say anything. So instead, I ordered them to put out the fire. The last thing we needed in a forest with barely any leaves was to make ourselves an obvious target by sitting next to a bright orange dot in the middle of absolute darkness.
Closing my eyes, I breathed in the smell of burning wood and became hypnotized by the eerie silence of the Dead Zone—insects hummed, but nothing more.
CHAPTER 5
“Brone! Brone!”
My body shook from side to side and I jolted upright. Elektra stood beside my hammock with eyes bulging and her mouth wide open. I jumped so fast out of my hammock that I almost fell to the ground. At the same time, I snatched my bow and loaded an arrow.
Biggie and Coin were still sleeping, but Rocket had heard the commotion and was now climbing out of her hammock and reaching for her knife.
Elektra slapped a finger over her mouth, grinned, and pointed toward shore.
What had she found? And why had she gone off venturing on her own?
“What?” I mouthed.
By the excited look on her face, I knew we weren’t being attacked. So why the hell did she wake me up like that?
She scooped the air to say, Come on, and darted toward shore. Rocket and I exchanged a glance and at the same time, chased after Elektra. I clapped twice as loud as I could to wake Coin and Biggie so that they could catch up.
Morning dew licked my ankles, and I shivered as I brushed past leaves covered in cold water droplets.
The moment we stepped out onto the beach, Elektra pointed toward the water. “Look!”
With gentle waves crashing, I couldn’t see what she was pointing at. But then, the broken raft came into view—long planks of wood and frayed rope spread messily across-shore. Beside it was a body with sun-tanned skin, countless black-ink tattoos, and well-defined though not overly large muscles.
“Is that—” Rocket said.
“A man,” came Biggie’s voice.
“What the f—” Coin mumbled.
With my loaded bow, I moved forward, aiming my arrow’s point at the man’s chest. He lay in the sand with broken pieces of wood around him as the ocean’s water slid up and down his body.
“Why ain’t he movin’?” Biggie asked, rubbing her tired eyes.
“Maybe he’s dead,” Coin said.
I rushed closer to the body. “Come on.”
When we reached the man, it was obvious he wasn’t from the real world. His dark brown hair was short, tangled, and covered in powdered salt and wet seaweed. His jaw, an oval shape, was masked behind a short scruff full of hairless scars. It was almost as if he’d cut himself time and time again trying to shave with a dull knife.
His skin was so tanned that it had taken on a leathery look. He appeared to be several years older than Eliot, maybe in his early thirties. Across his chest were two intricately detailed angel wings; they ran all the way to the sides of his pectoral muscles and disappeared under his armpits. Dozens more tattoos ran down his arms, around his wrists, and over his knuckles. I could tell they’d once been black, but they’d faded to a dark gr
ay—no doubt the result of so much sun exposure.
“Is he alive?” Elektra asked.
Coin stretched a leg out, extended her big toe, and picked his shoulder.
At the same time, Rocket nudged her away. “Don’t touch him.”
Clearing my throat, I leaned forward, my arrow still aimed at him. “Who are you?”
No answer.
Clearly, he was unconscious. Yet I saw something. His lips, both heavily cracked, had turned a cloudy blue.
“Shit,” Rocket muttered. “He’s either dead or he’s about to be.”
Dropping my bow, I rushed to his side. At that moment, this man wasn’t the enemy or a threat—he was a human being who needed help. I pressed two fingers under his jawline and waited.
“I can barely feel his pulse, but he’s warm. He must’ve drowned.” I pulled hard on his shoulders and grunted. “Help me.”
Everyone rushed around him, grabbed him by his limbs, and dragged him away from the cold water.
“All right, back up,” I ordered.
Climbing on top of him like a horse, I tilted his head back, opened up his mouth, and placed my ear next to it.
Nothing was coming out.
Without wasting any time, I placed two flat hands on his chest and started compressions fast, and hard. “One, two, three,” I whispered.
Pinching his nose, I pressed my mouth against his and breathed in until his chest ballooned.
While I didn’t have any sort of real-world certification, Iskra had taught me how to perform CPR, and I’d since made it a mandatory training for everyone in the Village.
I kept at it, cycling between compressions and breaths until my arms became sore.
Why wasn’t he waking up?
A gentle hand touched my shoulder. “Brone, he’s gone,” Rocket said.
I shrugged hard, pulling away from her touch, and continued compressions. Why did I care so much? I didn’t even know the guy. For all I knew, he was a monster. But, after the number of people we’d lost to the war and the number of dead bodies I’d seen over the last few years, death was something I wanted to avoid at all costs.
