by Ronan Cray
“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 jus
t 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.
It turned out none of them looked forward to rescue. Colin had run a ship into an island. He faced shame and possibly prosecution back home. Dragos went where Colin did. Like most Eastern Europeans his age, he lived life half-drunk, and anyplace is home in that condition. Mike, without the impending doom of returning to his wife, seemed almost delighted. Sammy, a former Tamil Tiger, knew how to survive anywhere. After the horrors of jungle warfare, he likened this experience to a resort. Angel didn't care what ground he stood on. He firmly believed there wasn't a force on earth that could kill him. "It's been tried," he said, and smiled his evil grin. Life was his for the taking. Ados never disclosed his intention to stay, but he hadn’t returned to Portugal for some time. He must have had his reasons. Moreover, he relished the scientific implications of an uncharted island.
Seven seemed like a lucky number. So, why not? Fuck the world and their rules. Here we live as kings and masters of our own fate.
Braggadocio sounded good, but they had a lot of work ahead of them. He’d have to get all of that on shore with seven men and one working boat. No one would pay him for the ship, and no one would pay him for the scrap. That must have made him one of the poorest millionaires in the world.
What could he do but laugh?
“Sir?”
“Don’t call me Sir. I’m not a Captain if I don’t have a ship. Call me Tuk. That’s what my friends call me back home.”
He noticed, over the years that followed, this small act of bringing himself down to their level resulted in even more respect and admiration for him. It saddened him to see their trust misplaced, but he exploited it when he could. That simple, humble move from leader to friend cemented his authority for six years, until that little bitch Emily came along and ruined everything.
BOOK THREE
THE H.M.A. VERNE
CHAPTER SIX
Carter couldn’t fly.
Bleeding into the grass of his parents’ front lawn, his eleven year old shin sprouted a freshly broken bone. His lifelong delusion ended. The leg would heal. His dream would not.
Not many eleven year olds practice transcendental meditation. Three hours a day for three months, alone in his room, he focused his center of gravity into a tiny, feathery ball near his heart. Yogis in India had, through their blogs, imparted upon him their knowledge of levitation.
Every night, he lay in his Superman sheets, wearing his Superman underpants, reading Superman comics or watching Superman videos on TV. Superman had dozens of amazing powers. He had laser eyes. He possessed superhuman strength. When he flew fast enough, he could reverse time. Then there were the standards: stopping bullets, crushing coal into diamonds, not to mention leaping tall buildings in a single bound.
Carter had no powers. Without his glasses, he couldn’t see past his hand. He couldn’t lift the family dog. When he ran he only lost time. At best, he could stop a dodge ball cold. On a good day he could escape recess without a black eye.
What he did possess in abundance was the faith in his own ability to achieve Superman’s most coveted power – flight. Not on an airplane. Not with feathers glued to his ass. No.
Through levitation.
If he studied long enough, concentrated hard enough, wanted it badly enough, he, Carter, could fly. That was his power.
He stood on the roof of the garage, arms out, eyes closed in concentration, toes dangling over the edge. He had this. He believed it. He focused on his core weight, 87 pounds, brought it down to 0. Weightless. Nothing. Light as air.
Or not.
The brutal landing shocked his young life. What went wrong? How was he misled?
Later, retiring on the deck, his leg bound up in a great wooly cast, his skin crawling and impossible to scratch, he mourned as he watched hummingbirds flit effortlessly around the honeysuckle vines. Ponderous honeybees puffed past his head, laughing at physics. Grasshoppe
rs caromed off the fence in their own clumsy defiance of gravity. He cried.
He set about to study the matter more thoroughly, from a taxonomic approach. When his leg healed, he set up a collapsible net around the backyard bird feeder. He strained his patience for two hours, sipping root beer. At last, a starling fluttered carelessly toward the seed. He sprung the trap. The starling flapped precociously, beating its wings at the net. It had no hope of departure. It merely wished to infuriate Carter by flaunting what it had. Carter resented this. Extricating the bird in his crushing hands, he carried it back to his room. It did not struggle. It took pity on Carter. It would give up its secrets willingly.
A cork board lay across the desk. It used to hang on the wall, nearly invisible behind layers of tacked up Superman paraphernalia. Immediately upon his return from the hospital, he replaced his idol with plain white sheets, white underwear, and Popular Science reading material. This cork board now served as his biology lab.
He had some difficulty stapling the bird’s wings to the cork. The miniature steel bonds wouldn’t hold muscles accustomed to freedom. He resorted to long pins from his mother’s sewing kit inserted into the several joints of the wings and feet and then bent sideways along the back of the board. This incapacitated it, but the little starling could still move its head left and right, left and right, with lightning speed. The beak gasped opened and closed but made no sound.
Now what? He inspected the tattered feathers with a magnifying glass. The botched stapling job had mussed up the mechanism. He hoped that didn’t interfere with his investigation. This was a lot of bother to go through again.
Unenlightened by his examination of the wings, and remembering his Yogi training, he decided the ability to fly must come from more than the bird’s appendages. It came from the soul. He would find that somewhere near the heart.
Without the foresight to steal a scalpel from the school science lab, he resorted to a pair of his sharpest scissors. Using the bird’s anus as a convenient entrance, he crunched up around the center of the bird’s chest. It twitched violently but remained immobilized. It bled and excreted a white mess on his cork board. This conflicted with his pure contemplation of the soul, but he pressed on.
