The Islands at the End of the World

by Austin Aslan

  My lungs burning for breath, I push for the surface, dragging my pack with me, and finally arise, gasping.

  “Lei!” Dad yelps. I clear my eyes and follow his voice. We’re pushed farther downstream by the current. Suddenly my feet are brushing against the boulders of the bottom. Behind Dad I see a dog scrambling down the steep slope of the embankment, growling and barking, delighted by the hunt. Dad and I swim frantically downstream.

  Two other dogs join the first. All three of them stop before the body of the woman turning aimlessly in the water. The dogs are torn—inspect their earlier prey or pursue us? One jumps into the river and paddles toward us with patient desire, eyes on us as it concentrates on its difficult task. It could almost be returning a tennis ball to me. But it wants to retrieve me for its master.

  Dad plants his feet into the pebbly floor as if applying brakes. He grips me by the shaft of the arrow protruding from my pack and steadies me. The dog overshoots us and begins to paddle against the current in vain. The current will carry it away any second.

  Now there’s shouting above the waterfall. Dad shakes my shoulder. He snaps the arrow loose and discards it. “Play dead.”

  I go limp, letting the swift current drag me into another accelerating funnel. I see four men rise into view, silhouetted against the ledge of the waterfall. The second man holds a compound bow. He points at us and shouts orders. The fourth man lifts a handgun and fires at us. I don’t move. There’s nothing I can do.

  We tumble over another waterfall. This one is a longer drop, the water below shallower, but we both land on our backs, packs cushioning us from the rocks beneath the water.

  Dad coughs and grunts. I take a deep breath. My eyes are everywhere at once, focused and keen. No dogs. No hunters.

  “Up the far bank.” Dad pulls me along. We trudge through the water as if running in a nightmare, going more slowly the harder we try. The dog that swam after us surfaces before me and I stifle a cry. But the dog is dead. One of us may have landed on top of it. I push the limp carcass away.

  I see a space behind a patch of hanging brambles. “Dad, in here. Quick!”

  His eyes light up as he spies the hole. It’s our best bet; we can’t outrun the dogs, and I don’t know how many waterfalls we can survive.

  Dad snatches the red collar of the dead dog and drags it behind him. We press through the narrow opening between a boulder and a ledge and duck beneath the vine. We’re suddenly huddled in a tiny alcove carved into the rock: me, Dad, a couple of backpacks, and Fido. In water up to our chests. One big happy family.

  I eye Dad. He whispers, “If they find the dog, they’ll expect to find us. If none of us are around, they may continue downstream, or figure we were sucked into a rock tube.”

  I bite my lip. My lungs are burning, my thigh is on fire, and my bruised arms feel as if I’ve used them to shatter bricks. The horror settles in, and I hold Dad tightly. This is insane. They attacked us!

  “Shhh. Stay quiet. They’ll miss us. We just need to wait it out.”

  “Are you hit? Are you hurt?” I whisper.

  “No. Are you?”

  “Bad dog bite on my leg, I think.”

  “Jesus,” Dad mutters.

  “What the hell, Dad? Why are they doing this?”

  “Shhh, honey.”

  It makes no sense. I can only close my eyes and clench my jaw.

  “Lei, your bag’s open! You’re losing stuff!”

  I turn to secure my pack, and my stomach sinks. A shirt and a blister pack of iodide tablets rush away from our hiding spot on the strong current. “No!”

  “Stay here.” Dad pulls me back. “Too late.”

  “I know, but … if they find it, they’ll know what we have.” Dad shakes his head. “Too late. Shhh.”

  The voices approach and then drift away. We are as silent and still as the rocks for several minutes. Then the voices sound nearer. Dad and I shrink against the back wall of our hollow.

  A gunshot.

  Barking.

  The voices grow agitated—and more distant.

  Machine-gun fire. Screams.

  What’s happening?

  Far away, a car horn honks. A motor fires up; then the sound is lost below the rushing water.

  “Dad, should we go?”

  “No. Could be a trick. Just wait. It’ll be dark soon.”

  We wait. And we wait. Tiny fish nibble occasionally on my thigh, and I cage the wound with cupped fingers to keep them away. The mosquitoes don’t have any trouble finding us, and my face soon feels like a pizza. We wait until nightfall before we wade across the river, shivering and starving, stumbling once again into the jungle, this time without even a blade to clear our way. The pain in my leg is exquisite, but more than that, I am tortured by every twig snap, terrorized by the thought that it will trigger another onslaught of dogs and murderous foes. But we must take that step. And the next. One after another into the endless swarms of bloodsuckers, through the night and beyond the dawn.

  It is our only way home.

  CHAPTER 24

  The zombie apocalypse is upon us. Dad and I trudge all day through the dark underbrush like the undead, me dragging a hurting thigh and plucking stitches from my forehead, Dad hunched over with exhaustion. We’re covered from head to toe in mosquito bites. We’d make a great outdoor-outfitter ad: sporting our baggy, tattered, dripping-wet quick-dry shorts and button-up shirts, smeared with soils of every color and matted with fern fur. A snapped arrow shaft juts out from my ragged pack.

  In the afternoon we stumble into a clearing in the jungle. A dirt road with a wide shoulder on a steep slope cleaves the forest into halves. We have a grand, uninterrupted view of the Pacific Ocean to the north or northeast.

  We see a long train of naval ships. Dozens upon dozens of craft—from smaller red-and-white Coast Guard boats all the way up to battleships—are clustered in a great flock ten miles off the shore, travelling away from Maui at a slight angle.

  Dad says, “That’s the entire Hawaiian fleet out there.”

  “Wow,” I mutter. “Maybe … they’re deploying some defense.”

  “What if we’re at war?” Dad thinks aloud. But he concludes, “No. They wouldn’t be taking Coast Guard tugboats into battle. This doesn’t make any sense.”

  I remember what Aukina said to me at the Marine Corps Base the afternoon before we escaped: “We’re out of gas. Unnecessary flights have already stopped. We need what’s left for something big. Our orders are to …”

  But he had trailed off. And finished by saying, “I’d take you and your dad with us if I could.”

  I’d take you with us.… Something big … “Dad,” I say. “These are the orders Aukina was hinting at. They’ve been ordered to leave. They’re just … leaving.”

  Is Aukina on one of those ships? Did he take his family with him? I hope he’s safe.

  “Lei, the US military’s not going to leave Hawai`i. The generals wouldn’t ditch this state. The reason these islands were occupied to begin with is their strategic significance in the Pacific. They’re going to clamp down on supply lines and farmlands and snuff out all the bickering. People don’t abdicate power for no reason.”

  “Dad. That was all before. Everything’s changed.”

  We sit down and watch in silence as the distant battleships grow smaller.

  As I see all that power and might drift away on the open sea, I’m reminded, absurdly, of how I felt the first time my parents left me alone to babysit Kai. I watched their car pull out of the driveway feeling scared and excited. I was on my own.

  There’s no excitement now. The United States has ditched us. The barbarians who hunted us yesterday might cheer. But what if an enemy shows up on these shores?

  “We’re no longer part of America,” I whisper.

  Dad’s eyes widen.

  I cough. Tiny droplets of blood spatter my fist. I wipe the evidence away. “Where are they going? San Diego? What are they going to find?”

  “
Klingons.”

  “I’m serious, Dad.”

  “We may never know.” Dad scratches his beard. “We may never find out what the hell has happened to the world. Who’s going to flee to Hawai`i?”

  I shrug. “The Chinese?”

  Dad soaks up my comment for a moment. “Can you imagine?”

  “Hysteresis,” I say.

  Dad gives me an approving wink. “You’re right.”

  Hysteresis is another ecology word I’ve heard at home. It describes when things are harder to fix than they were to break in the first place. Like a rubber band: they stretch a lot, but when you pull too hard, they snap, and there’s no going back to the way it used to be.

  No doubt now: Hawai`i has snapped.

  * * *

  We can only march forward. Dad and I press on.

  We break through the trees as dusk begins to fall and find ourselves standing along the edge of a one-acre clearing planted with pakalōlō. Rows upon rows of marijuana plants. Dad tosses his bag to the ground, falls to his knees, and declares, “We are done for the day.”

  “We can’t stop here! This belongs to someone. What if they come along and find us?”

  “Then we’ll all get baked together.” He grins. He’s serious. “Lei, we have to stop. I can’t keep going. We have to clean out your dog bite. We both need medical attention. I can’t think of a finer apothecary on all the islands.”

  “Medical attention?”

  This is the stupidest idea I’ve ever heard. I’ve never smoked pot, though plenty of kids at school regularly do. I don’t have an opinion about it, but this strikes me as insane.

  “We all have our limits, Lei. I was going to stop anyway. This just makes it all the more worthwhile. Why don’t you pitch our tent somewhere nearby? I’ll be over to help in a few.”

  “You can’t smoke freshly picked pakalōlō. Even I know that.”

  “It’s the end of the world, Lei. And we’re both exhausted and in pain and homesick and hunted and hungry and chafing and swarmed by mosquitoes and thirsty and infected and angry and half-crazed. We’re in the middle of the jungle. The big boys just jumped ship. Savages carry the badge now. Body snatchers control the president. We can do whatever we want.”

  I wander away and set up camp. I know when I’m beat. Truth be told, I was ready to ask that we do stop. If Dad wants to get a bad high off damp weed, what do I care?

  Later in the evening we’re crouched low in our small tent. The stars shimmer through a dusty atmosphere and the persistent glow of the Emerald Orchid. I’ve just cleaned my dog bite again with alcohol wipes when Dad presents me with a bong made out of an emptied tuna can. Dad found plenty of long-dried flower buds and plant tips to fill his invention. “I insist,” he says.

  Will wonders ever cease? I hold it up awkwardly. “What about my epilepsy?”

  “Is this really your first time?”

  “Are you lōlō? I’m a good girl, Dad. And epileptic! My meds worked. I wasn’t going to jeopardize that.”

  “Yeah. But pot won’t interfere with your meds. Some people think it actually helps.”

  I stare at him.

  “I looked into it once. In case, you know, you ever did smoke.”

  “Are you trying to talk me in to being a pothead?”

  Dad laughs. “No. Forget I said that.”

  He shows me what to do, and I do it. I finally get the hang of plugging and releasing the choke as I draw in my breath. For a long time I feel nothing but the urge to cough. Then it hits me. My aches and pains and fears are soon forgotten, and I’m riding an emerald wave of another sort through the stars.

  “Maybe this would help my social life.”

  Dad doesn’t say anything. He probably doesn’t know how to respond. “Awkward!” I sing, and then I laugh.

  “I knew you were having a tough time. I never knew it was that tough.”

  “It’s okay. It’s not your fault. You asked, and I always lied. Aside from Tami … Hilo’s impossible. People aren’t mean; they’re just too tight already to bother putting in the effort. It’s hard to fit in with light skin. And fits …” I add with a giggle. “It’s too hard to fit in with fits.”

  “I’m glad you didn’t have any issues with that yesterday,” Dad says. “I was worried.”

  “Yeah, can you imagine?” I try to picture losing it like a washing machine, in that cramped alcove with the dead dog, while bad guys searched for us. I grow panicky just thinking about it.

  “But,” I say, “I can’t wait to get back there. Hilo’s home. And it can’t be harder than here! Or O`ahu!”

  “Amen to that.”

  “You know what else? Pele taught me something. You can’t just wait around for others to accept you. You have to go out and get it. Defend your turf.”

  “Pele taught you that?”

  “Yeah. She did.”

  “K’den. Amen,” Dad says.

  Now I feel the electricity in my brain, stored there like a humming, thrumming power plant. I’m at the center of a ball of lightning, ready to roll down the slope of a giant hill in my fiery zorb. I crackle and I sizzle and I spark. Blue arcs spit off my fingertips and out through my stitches and my hair is standing on end like I’m the Bride of Frankenstein. I am Pele: goddess of fire and volcanoes and lightning and all things that “rock.” I am the Emerald Orchid. Leilani. The Flower of Heaven. I sewed the green lightning and cast it over the night sky, and I rest upon the mantle of the Earth, a queen in a fine, green silk gown, looking out upon the destruction that I’ve wrought. But I am greater still than Pele. For I know the day, the hour, the moment of the end. I am the goddess of the cosmos. I come when it suits me. I do as I please. My stormy brain obliterates satellites and circuit boards. I take it all away. Now you’re back to warring and smiting and pillaging.

  Smiting. I laugh. Hilarious word.

  That Lord of the Flies Jackie-Jack sheriff yesterday loved to use his fancy compound bow, yeah? Smiter extraordinaire. I know what it’s like to be hunted, the fear of the prey. But Jackie-Jack doesn’t know what it’s like to hunt me. I’m no Piggy. No stupid boar. I’m just as smart as you are. I hacked a two-headed beast in half with a sword, and I kept my cool. I was tested by fire, and I kept my cool. That’s because I am the goddess of fire, the rainmaker of hellfire, I can hear the gods—even if I have no idea what they’re saying—and I surf the Emerald Orchid.

  I take another hit from the tuna can and pass it to Dad. I cough into my fist, then wipe the blood spatter on my shorts. I never want to touch this stuff again—but right now, it seems like a great idea.

  “Is the iodide getting to you?” Dad asks me after a few minutes—or hours—of silence.

  “Yeah.”

  “I wish I knew what to do. Everything we know is second- or thirdhand. I don’t even know if it’s worth it. Man, what’s happening out there?” Dad says. “What’s happening in Greece?”

  “Greece?” I giggle.

  “Yeah. Greece. What’s happening in France? Kansas? Iran? How are the Mongolians dealing with this? Who’s out there wondering about Hawai`i?”

  I crack up. “Aloha, Hawai`i. Howzit? Please send more macadamia nuts.” OMG. Bad joke. But I can’t stop laughing.

  Dad heroically rediscovers his train of thought. “Are tourists stuck in Peru ever going to find their way home? How long do you suppose the food lasted in Manhattan?”

  “I just care about Mom and Kai. That’s what drives me crazy. I want to know what they’re doing.”

  Dad leans forward and seems to sober up a bit. “Lei, they’re all right. I promise.”

  “It’s been five weeks now, Dad. Thirty-five days.” I wipe tears away before they can pour down my cheeks. “But who’s counting?”

  He squeezes my shoulder. “Hey. They’re with Grandpa. They’re better off than we are. The Big Island is now the land of milk and honey. Plenty of food. Wild pigs. Folks could eat coqui frogs. The island has one of the biggest ranches in America. People will adapt. W
e’ve been eating less … and surviving. Everyone will be getting by on less. There hasn’t been enough time for everything to unravel.”

  We’re silent, and my thoughts shift to that pyre smoke we saw behind the Maui airport. Tell that to the first round of losers.

  “The point is we can handle it,” Dad continues. “And you know Mom. She has those chickens and that garden. And our neighbors. The Millers would take a bullet for her. She’s got a good family name, too. Grandpa’s kahuna. Lots of friends in those parts.”

  “They’re probably running the island, for all we know.”

  “Ha! Wouldn’t surprise me. See? They’re fine. Kai pops eggs each morning, coqui frogs for dinner, and a nice salad for lunch. They probably have luaus every couple of days with the pigs your grandpa hunts.”

  I laugh again. “Remember that time Mom went spearfishing with that marine-science guy and stabbed his shoe when she tripped over the lava?”

  “She’ll never live that down.”

  We cackle with laughter for what might be hours.

  I’m feeling better about them. Still, Mom has to be worried about us. We’ve been hunted, attacked, shipwrecked, shot, held prisoner. I’ve leapt from a burning building, and I’m coughing blood and high on pot. She could hardly have feared any worse. I just want her to know that we’re still here, and that we’ll hold each other in our arms soon.

  “Hana in the next day or two. We’ll find some way to get across the gap, and we’ll be there, just like that.”

  “I really hope you’re right. I can’t take much more of this.”

  “Oh, but you can. And you’ll have to. We both will: this is only the beginning, Lei. Hunters and gatherers. Tribal serfdoms. Survival of the fittest. We’re not going to be at the top of the food chain. We don’t have what it takes to be powerful. Mean. It’s groups like that sheriff’s posse that will be in charge. Shoot first, questions never. Fighting for what’s ours is the new norm, hon.”

  I can feel panic returning. What happened yesterday was so wrong. I can scarcely grasp it.

  I clasp on to images of Mom and Kai. “As long as we’re all together.”