by Zugg, Victor
“His right leg is broken,” Mason said, as he swam up to the raft and took hold.
The Hispanic man and one other grabbed the injured man and eased him into the raft.
Mason pulled himself up with both arms and flopped into the bottom among feet, knees, and several bottles of various beverages. A soft-sided pet crate containing a Chihuahua was inches from his face. The trembling dog stared at Mason through the loose-weave mesh. Mason followed the hand and arm holding the crate up to the eyes of a woman probably in her late sixties, with short, blondish hair and graying streaks. A drenched, flower-patterned, short-sleeved dress clung to her skin. She had apparently been one of the last out of the rapidly filling plane. She stared blankly at the open sea.
“We need to start paddling to shore,” Mason said, as he rose up.
“Paddle with what?” the man in the Beach Bum t-shirt asked.
“With your hands,” Mason said. “Everyone needs to work together.”
The white sand beach gleamed at least two miles in the distance.
He waived at those on the emergency slide. “Head for shore,” he yelled.
Karen raised a hand to acknowledge and set about getting everyone paddling including a now conscious Lisa.
Several in Mason’s raft began talking and shooting questions at the same time. He finally raised a hand to quiet them. “I’ll explain everything I know as soon as we reach the shore and tend to everyone’s injuries. For now we need to paddle.”
Reaching the shore took longer than Mason expected. The problem was everyone trying to paddle a basically round craft. They ended up turning in circles more than they made any headway. The off-shore breeze basically did all the work. By the time they reached the shore, the sun was closing in on the southwestern horizon.
With everyone finally on solid ground, Mason beached the raft and walked over to Karen and her group. She had just finished counting heads. “How many?”
“A total of thirty-two,” she said, as she shook her head. “Out of a hundred and eighty passengers and crew.”
Mason took a deep breath, exhaled, and nodded. He knelt next to Lisa sitting on the edge of the emergency slide. “You okay?”
“Karen said you carried me to the raft.”
Mason dipped his chin with a slight smile.
“Thank you,” she said.
He put a hand on her shoulder and stood up as he scanned the passengers gathered around. Nearly everyone was drenched. Most had visible bumps, bruises, cuts, and abrasions. Several trembled even though the air temperature had to be around ninety. Several hunched on the sand sobbing. “First of all, any chance we have a doctor or a nurse among us?”
Everyone looked around. No hands went up, but then finally a slightly overweight woman wearing a black and white sweater, gray shorts, and sneakers hesitantly took a step forward. “Nursing student,” she said. She wiped tears from her cheeks.
“Excellent,” Mason said. “What’s your name?”
“Gail Thomas.” She stepped closer to the front of the crowd.
Mason pointed at the man with the broken leg. “Sir, what is your name?”
The man, lying flat on the sand, rose up on one elbow. “Tom Green.”
“Tom has a broken leg that needs to be set,” Mason said. He turned to Karen. “First aid kit?”
Angie stepped forward with a red, soft-sided case. She walked over to Gail and together they knelt next to Tom.
Mason walked over to Captain Anderson still lying on the slide. “How’s he doing?” he asked Karen, as he bent down and put two fingers against his neck.
“Breathing, but he hasn’t woken up. He looks very pale. I think he might have internal injuries.”
“Not much a nursing student can do about that,” Mason said, as he unbuttoned Anderson’s shirt. Deep, red bruises across his chest matched the pattern of the seat harness. Mason focused on the tree line, thick with pines, hardwoods, palms, and palmettos. He motioned for some of the passengers to gather around. “Let’s move the entire slide with him on it into the shade.”
The group grabbed hold and dragged the slide across the sand to a clearing a few feet inside the trees.
The woman in the flowered dress walked up with her dog on a leash. “We’d like to know what happened. And when will the emergency people be here?”
Mason took a moment to search for the right words. “I don’t believe anyone will be coming.”
The group gasped in unison.
Before anyone could ask another question, he continued. “I’m the federal air marshal on this flight, and I was in the cockpit when we flew over Savannah, Columbia, Charlotte, Wilmington, and Charleston. With the possible exception of Charleston, there was no infrastructure visible where those cities were supposed to be. No buildings and no airports.”
“What are you saying?” Beach Bum asked. “We were off course?”
“What’s your name?”
“Nathan Sims.”
“Nathan, we were on course,” Mason said. “We verified it with the instruments and from landmarks visible from above. There was no question about the course or our location. But we did lose all contact with the outside world when we passed out of that weird storm with the blue light. No radio contact with ground control, no GPS, and no radio beacons. It’s like everything and everyone outside of the airplane just vanished.”
“That can’t be,” the woman with the dog said. Several others agreed.
Mason stared at her for several moments.
“Mildred, Mildred Spears.”
“Mildred, right now you are standing smack dab in the middle of Myrtle Beach, South Carolina.”
Everyone’s head turned in unison. The beach was completely deserted and desolate in both directions.
“There’s no way,” Nathan said, as he shook his head.
The back and forth continued for several moments until the young dark-complected woman from first class spoke up.
“So what are you saying?”
Mason shifted his attention to her. “I can’t explain it, but we now find ourselves alone. I doubt we will be able to count on anyone outside of this group.”
The woman looked up and down the beach. “Myrtle Beach hasn’t been this deserted for over three hundred years,” the woman said.
Mason stared at her and cocked his head.
“My name is Dorothy Weiss. I’m a graduate student at UNC Charlotte. Anthropology major. Masters in anthropology and history.”
“Three hundred years?” Mason asked.
“Charleston was settled around 1670. Trading posts were established up and down the coast after that. It would have been well into the eighteenth century before this area was settled, if in fact this is Myrtle Beach.”
Nathan turned to Dorothy. “What are you saying?”
“Simply that if we’re standing on Myrtle Beach, it hasn’t been this deserted for over three hundred years.”
CHAPTER 4
Mason slipped out of his rucksack, removed his sopping sports coat, and took a seat on the edge of the emergency slide next to Karen. The empty black shoulder holster blended in with his black t-shirt. Tattoos covered his right arm down to the wrist which was adorned with a stainless steel memorial bracelet. He watched as she finished checking Captain Anderson’s pulse.
“Weak,” she said. “And his color is worse.”
“Is there anything we can do?”
“He needs a hospital,” Karen said.
“If there were going to be any rescuers, they would have been here by now,” he said. Mason watched the other survivors as they stood or sat in groups talking amongst themselves under the shade of the trees. “Were you able to save any food?”
“There was no food,” she said. “Just a few snacks. Pretzels mostly. I focused on the water we had on board. And there are a few sodas.” She scanned the passengers. “I think they’re still in shock.”
“We all are,” he said, as he watched Nathan walk over to the raft and pick up one of
the liter bottles of soda. Mason stood. “We need to ration what we have to drink,” he said in a voice loud enough for everyone to hear.
They all stopped talking and turned their attention to Mason.
He pointed toward the trees. “There’s plenty of fresh water out there, swamp water. But we can’t drink it without sanitizing it first and we have no way to do that. The water in those bottles is all we have for now.” He eyeballed Nathan as he started to turn the cap on the bottle he held in his hands.
Nathan twisted his lips, shrugged his shoulders, and dropped the bottle back into the raft.
Mason felt the bite of a sand fly on his neck. He rubbed at the spot. “Noseeums are already coming out and there will be plenty of mosquitoes tonight. There’s not much we can do about it except maybe light a fire. The smoke might help.”
“Are we just going to wait here?” Nathan asked in a sarcastic tone.
“For tonight,” Mason said. “We’ll decide what to do tomorrow.” He returned to his spot on the slide next to Karen. He unzipped his rucksack, opened the ziplock bag, and retrieved his Glock and two of the magazines. He holstered the pistol and magazines. “This is going to be a long night.” He retrieved a lighter from his ruck and stood. “I’ll check back.”
◆◆◆
A squirrel barking in the distance and the surf breaking against the beach brought Mason to consciousness. The smoldering remnants of the previous night’s fires filled the air with the odor of burnt pine. He scratched the itching on his neck and face. He examined the bug bites covering his arms and hands. So much for the fires. His eyelids were heavy from lack of sleep.
He scanned the scene without moving from his position next to Karen, Lisa, and Captain Anderson on the emergency slide. The other survivors were all scattered in various states of repose. Some reclined against trees, some were on top of the flipped-over, yellow life raft, and some were just curled up on the ground next to one of the three fires. Several were scratching at various parts of their bodies. He sympathized with those with bare legs and arms. He watched everyone bounce as Dorothy rolled from one side to the other.
Her eyes opened, and she slipped on her glasses. Suddenly she raised her head slightly as though she had caught sight of something in the thick stand of pines.
Mason followed her gaze until his eyes rested on three men standing in the mist and dim light of early morning. Mason focused on the men for several seconds and then slowly raised his torso to a sitting position. In unison the three men turned their heads toward Mason’s movement.
These men were not like any Mason had ever seen. All three were bare-chested except for some type of necklace gathered around their necks. Their only articles of clothing were a loin cloth and moccasins. Two of the men had their black hair tied in a ponytail and adorned with a couple of feathers; the other man wore his hair loose around his face. Two of the men held what appeared to be a flintlock rifle loosely in one hand at their side. The other man held a bow with a quiver of arrows attached at his hip.
Mason blinked several times and refocused. He glanced at Dorothy as she slowly rose to a sitting position mesmerized by the three figures. When Mason looked back to where the three men had been, they were gone. Without making a sound they had simply vanished leaving Mason to wonder if he had been dreaming or hallucinating.
Dorothy got up, walked over, and knelt next to Mason. “Did you see that?”
“I saw something,” he said, “I think.”
“No, they were real,” Dorothy said.
Karen stirred. “What’s going on?”
“We had visitors,” Mason said. “Native Americans.”
“I think it’s safe to call them Indians,” Dorothy said.
Karen rose up and swiveled her head in all directions.
“They’re gone,” Mason said. He turned his head to Dorothy. “You’re the historian, what do you think?”
“If this is in fact Myrtle Beach and those men we saw are Indians— ” She left the statement unfinished.
“Let’s assume we just saw three Native Americans, Indians, reconnoitering our camp.”
Dorothy twisted her lips as she thought for a moment. “This is just too impossible to believe.”
“I get that,” Mason said. “Anything else?”
Dorothy thought about it. “Given they didn’t seem all that surprised to see a bunch of white people would indicate there are other white people around.”
“What does that mean?” Karen asked.
Dorothy shook her head. “Three hundred years.”
Mason raised an eyebrow encouraging her to continue.
“The only large settlement in this area at that time was Charleston, Charles Town.”
Mason ran his fingers through his hair as he stared at the ground.
“The large English settlements were Charles Town, Boston, New York, and Philadelphia. The Spanish occupied Saint Augustine in Florida.”
Karen got to a sitting position next to Mason. “Do we need to worry about Indians?”
“There were a lot of different tribes around here then,” Dorothy said.
“Wait,” Mason said. “So we’ve accepted that we’ve somehow been transported three hundred years into the past.”
Dorothy turned her head in a wide arc and flung both hands in the air. “A deserted Myrtle Beach and Indians. What other conclusion is there?”
“You’re absolutely sure this is Myrtle Beach?” Karen asked, as she stared at Mason.
Mason exhaled. “Yes. The landmarks were all visible from the air. This is Myrtle Beach.”
“Then somehow we are no longer living in our time,” Dorothy said.
“You were saying about the Indians,” Karen said, as she turned to Dorothy.
“The Cherokee much farther north and the Catawba to the south of them were mostly friendly except during the Yemassee War in 1715. The war for the most part ended in 1717. They traded with the settlers before and after. There were plenty of coastal tribes, such as the Kiawah. But many of those tribes dwindled from disease after contact with the colonists. By the early seventeen hundreds the Kiawah, for instance, had been reduced to a few braves.”
“What were the three we saw?” Mason asked.
“I don’t know,” Dorothy said.
“Did they speak English back then?” Karen asked.
“Some did, they had to. Trading in skins and pelts was a giant enterprise.”
“That would explain their possession of rifles,” Mason said.
Mason looked around at the other survivors now starting to stir. He thought about how different everyone looked, especially their clothing, from the people in Colonial America. He peered at the tall basketball player and glanced around at Angie. “What about slaves back then?”
“Booming,” she said. “Charles Town was a major player in the African slave trade. Indians too. The only blacks here would have been slaves. In fact, in the early eighteenth century African slaves outnumbered everyone else. Except the Indians.”
Mason got to his feet. “I suppose we need to get everyone up and decide what we should do.”
Karen twisted around and put a hand on Captain Anderson’s chest.
“How’s he doing?” Mason asked.
She shifted her hand on his chest and then placed two fingers against his neck. She shook her head.
Mason nodded and closed his eyes. He wondered how many more they would lose. He opened his eyes, tightened his lips, and walked over to Tom lying awake on top of the yellow raft. “How’s the leg?”
“Hurts like hell,” Tom said. He reached down and adjusted the splint just below the knee. “Gail and Angie did a good job but there’s no way I can walk on this.”
Nathan approached scratching his arm. Several others stood behind him. “I guess you’re in charge. What are your orders?”
“We wait for help,” Mildred said, standing there with her dog on a leash.
“There won’t be any help,” Mason said, “at least not the kin
d we’re used to seeing.” He told everyone about the loss of Captain Anderson and proceeded to describe what he and Dorothy had seen only a few minutes earlier. And he told everyone what Dorothy had said about the time period.
The prospect of having been transported back in time was met with total disbelief. Everyone began talking at once.
“We were off course,” Nathan yelled, “simple as that. Anything else would be impossible.”
Several people agreed.
Nathan turned to Mason. “Why can’t you admit the plane was simply off course? Is there something you’re not telling us?”
“You know everything I know,” Mason said. “The facts are this. The pilot and copilot verified the position of the plane with the one instrument on board that still worked. It was an internal system based on dead reckoning. They also verified our position based on visible land marks that cannot be disputed. I saw them as well. We are in fact standing on Myrtle Beach. And according to our history expert, Myrtle Beach hasn’t been this way for three hundred years.”
“Bull shit!” Nathan yelled. “We’ve traveled back in time. You expect us to believe that?”
“I don’t care what you believe,” Mason said. He swung his arm in a wide arc. “Look around. An airliner just crashed. Where are the rescue helicopters? Has anyone seen or heard any planes? This is a major air corridor. There should be contrails up there.”
Everyone mumbled.
Nathan glanced skyward as he walked away whispering to another man.
“The first thing we need to do is bury the Captain,” Mason said. He approached the Hispanic man standing in the crowd and extended his hand. “Mason.”
The man took Mason’s hand. “Manny Hernandez.”
“I appreciate your help on the plane,” Mason said. “And with the raft.”
Manny nodded.
