by catt dahman
The air marshal thought, his eyes going a deeper grey. “I’ve asked that a thousand times. How could they lose a commercial airplane? It makes no sense. Think of yourselves. Didn’t people know where you were? Why is no one looking for you? And have you noticed we never see planes over head?”
Alex was glad it was brought up in this way and with everyone. Some had asked the same questions earlier.
Stu slapped his knee and said, “I told you. The yellow fog. And then here we are with dinosaurs that died millions of years ago. No one is searching. Doesn’t that sound weird? It isn’t natural. Something happened.”
No one argued this time.
“So am I right?”
Helen nodded and added, “You may be, Stu. I’m sorry we laughed before.”
Stu sat, anger distorting his face. He had known it, but no one believed him until now. It made him furious.
Joe showed the marshal the knife Joy had found, but he had cleaned off the rust, so it was sharp and shiny. “Have you ever seen this?”
“No. We had no knives on the plane.”
“Then someone else has also been here or is here. We found this the other day,” Tyrese said. “I’d like to explore the beach: walk and walk and see how big this place is. Maybe we’d find more wrecks.” He had to add the death of Mrs. Big Brown and say that Mr. Big Brown was still out there.
“I’d like to follow the beach if I could be included with a team that goes,” a man named Mick offered.
“We can plan something, right, Marshal?”
“We sure can.”
The new people found places to sleep as the others moved around and slept closer together. Kelly felt little as she checked Tom; Joy was right beside him, protectively watching. His stub looked better, and Kelly was convinced the burns almost looked as if they were healing. Kelly left some water for Tom to sip and told Joy to bathe the sore stub with the water before re-bandaging.
“Kelly,” Helen hissed, “look at Amanda.”
Amanda’s back was still charred in places and raw, but Kelly had to remove the stitches in those places that looked much better. “How are you?”
“The pain is better. Whatever you’re doing, keep it up. It’s much less painful. I can lie here and not pray to die now.”
Kelly bathed the wounds again and gave Amanda a long drink of the water mixed with coconut water.
Where Amanda lost her fingers, pink skin was forming beautifully. Kelly just shrugged at Helen, amazed and happy.
Pamela swore her face hurt less, Vera said she felt an itch down deep that was like a healing itch, and Kelly promised the stitches could come out the next day if that continued. Durango didn’t show a difference.
Shelley was in labor, but it was an easier labor with the pains far apart and only gradually becoming closer. She had more color to her skin.
Alone, Kelly slept well that night. Each time she glanced out of the wreckage, she saw the marshal on guard duty, watching and ready to fight. Kelly stopped checking and slept hard.
Chapter 9: Day Five
Only Scott, Helen, and Alex from the old group went on the trip to explore the beach because the marshal wanted to remain at camp and Tyrese wasn’t sure about leaving him alone with their people yet. They liked him, but new people presented new potential problems. Mick, Andrea, and Lilly went along from the new group, so Stu joined them as well.
Far down the beach, they found remains of people and parts of the yacht. They couldn’t determine how many people were left, given that most had been eaten by crabs or compys. They took a few pairs of shoes and dirty clothing they found because it could be washed, and they found pieces of metal that could be used as weapons, but mostly, it looked as if broken furniture had landed at that spot. Broken sofas and chairs had no use right now, but if they wanted them, they knew where they were.
“Did you feel anything before you crashed?” asked Lilly.
“Like what?”
Stu thought and said, “I don’t know. We were nervous about the storm, but it felt creepy, too.”
“The sky was yellow,” Lilly said.
“Same for us.”
Lilly shrugged and responded, “I felt scared. It looked bad. It’s crazy, but I thought about the stories about the Bermuda Triangle.”
Stu nodded, “Me, too.”
“That’s stupid though. I know that’s fake,” Lilly said.
“Is it? We’re here, aren’t we?” Stu glowered. He walked ahead.
“Is that….” Helen gripped Scott’s hand.
It was an older ship, wrecked on the rocks that split the beach. Although the wood was ruined, it still was there, attesting to the fact that the ship had been well built from very good wood. Someone had had a good sailboat that had crashed and wrecked there; it felt all too familiar.
Puslane grew on some of the rocks, and algae covered the rest. The wood was old and grey from the elements, rotten and worm eaten, and covered in slime and seaweed, but the ship was easy to make out, with the sails long since washed away. The masts were broken and lay in the sand, and the ropes were long gone.
“Is it old?” Andrea asked. She hurried to catch up with Stu, who ignored her.
Alex said he thought the ship had been there a long time, maybe five years or maybe as long as seven or eight.
“I don’t see anything we need. If there were anything, it’s long gone,” Stu said. In a way because the ruins were large, the scene gave him the same feeling he once had when he saw a dinosaur skeleton; he felt awe and curiosity. He didn’t think the old bones of monsters were very interesting now that he had seen the real things, alive. It was far different to see hungry creatures than it had been to see dusty bones.
Scott carefully climbed into the husk, soaked by the ocean and was careful to watch his footfalls so he didn’t break an ankle. He didn’t delve into the darker interior that was littered with rotten beams. Trapped between two heavy boards was what looked like an arm bone, long ago picked clean of flesh. “We’re the fossils,” he muttered.
If anyone survived this wreck and he couldn’t guess, but the violence suggested that no one had, at least not for long. The crash onto the rocks would have felt like crashing a car at seventy to a hundred miles per hour while being tossed around.
“Scott, come on,” Helen yelled, “hurry; come see.”
He relaxed as he realized they weren’t under attack. Crawling out of the wreck, he found Helen waiting, but the rest were down the beach, and he understood where all of them were going and why they were running.
They had been so shocked and interested to see the ship on the rocks that they didn’t really look farther down the beach since the wreck was before them and there were no predators. Helen and Scott rushed to catch up.
Far away was a fascinating, but chilling sight.
The beach had been carved away, it seemed. From the water to the tree line was a deep, crude trench, enormous and old. Rocks and sand had been tossed and pushed away violently to make a small bay that the water filled. It could have been strange, but natural except for the sheared off rocks and the huge airliner that sat in the trees. The force of a jetliner had changed the shape of the beach.
They could only see parts even though it was large. The back looked good, old and weathered, but whole. A wing lay toward the back end, left by the force of the crash when it was ripped away from the airplane and burned. What was left was a black mess of warped metal and little else; that it retained a semblance of its shape was surprising. The side, where the wing had been torn, was wide open with sharp metal edges that were wickedly gleaming with a razor sharpness.
Vines grew all over the wreckage. Around the burned wing, the sand was still black, brittle, and melted. Jet fuel had burned hot and brightly there.
A row of seats, filthy and covered in moss and rot, hung sideways, half in and half out of the plane. The seats had long ago lost their fabric but had bits of stuffing with living vegetation all over them. As the group angled around to see
, it was clear that the forms in the seats had once been people but were just moss-covered skeletons now. They had died and remained in their seats.
The trees were broken in this area, some uprooted and thrown to the sides. A few were deeply scared and grew in odd ways, and others were burned husks. The airplane had done a lot of damage but took more in response when it hit the thick tree line that held tight.
“I think he tried to land in the damn trees,” Mick said.
“Well, he knew he couldn’t, so I bet he was hoping for anything. It should have crashed and burned,” Alex mused. He didn’t understand how this airplane had managed to stay intact.
“We would have, too, but we didn’t crash as badly as we should have. Maybe the yellow air cushioned us,” Lilly said.
“That’s kind of stupid,” Stu said, “it can’t do that.”
“Something saved us, and you have to admit this plane is in better shape than expected,” Mick said. He didn’t want to fight with Stu, but he frowned, and asked, “How do you know what can do what?”
“Alex, do you think yellow air can make a plane land better?” asked Stu as he laughed.
Alex hated being in the middle, but he shrugged, “I don’t know. Stu, you’re right that it may be part of this, and we don’t know what it does if anything. I agree that it’s crazy for this plane or any plane to survive this type of crash, but if there was a storm and the plane wafted in instead of just blazing in, I just don’t know.”
The belly of the plane was lost in the sand and soil that it pushed to the side and was partially hidden by the ruined trees that the group climbed over, under, or around. The plane, even intact, was terribly battered and bent. Forward of the wings, the plane was twisted at a forty-five degree angle where the trees bent it. The skin of the craft had bent and pulled apart, spilling more seats among the broken trees. The force had tossed people out into the jungle with and without the seats. In fact, as they were thrown, the seat belts had actually cut a few people in half. A pile of very old, brown bones lay scattered, but they were rib cages and skulls; the rest of the corpses were left to rot in the hanging seats.
Andrea tripped over a rib cage and skinned her palms as she caught her fall.
The nose and front section of the plane was smashed, the metal crumpled and rusted, and it looked half the size it should.
“Like our plane,” Lilly said, “the front was smushed like this. Everyone was crushed into blobs of bones and blood. Just a steaming pile of flesh that didn’t look human anymore….” She remembered their crash, and seeing the random hands or fingers that stuck out of the mess made no sense. She still had nightmares some nights about what she saw when they crashed. Blood had poured from the remains of the plane.
The other wing was gone. They looked around, but there was no sign of it, and it was clearly torn off the plane, but was nowhere in sight. They searched, but the wing was either deep in the jungle or had just vanished for no reason. Scott whooped when he saw an old sled that hung in tatters. It was from the emergency exit and meant someone had used it to leave the airplane. That meant there had been survivors.
“I wonder how many made it out?” Andrea asked.
“Or if they were injured so baldy they couldn’t survive?” Stu muttered. “We just know at least one person came out alive.”
“Even if only a small percentage survived, that would mean, what a dozen?” Helen asked. “Where would they go, and what would they do?”
“Wait for help,” Alex said, “that’s normal. So maybe they camped on the beach.”
Unable to get into the plane and seeing no reason to try, they walked back down the sand, wandering around the giant rift that the plane made. After some searching, they found pieces of wood and a few old, broken bits of cups that looked as if it might have been a camp. It could also have been junk that was washed up by the sea.
“I would think this would draw predators. If so, they may have been attacked. If they were, they ran to the trees. Regardless, this wreck is old. Look at the vines. They aren’t new ones but thick and gnarled. I’d say this one is twenty years old since the plane style is really outdated,” said Scott.
“I wish we knew the name and details. I bet it’s a plane missing from the Bermuda Triangle.”
No one said anything to Stu. It was possible.
Stu yelled and pointed. He had good eyesight because he saw what the rest only visualized as a dark spot on the beach. He was excited and had to be talked into stopping to have a meal and to drink water while they were safe. He wanted to see what was lying all over the sand around the curve of land.
“Let’s be sure we are full and hydrated just in case we find trouble. We can use this time,” Scott told Stu, “please, wait.”
“I’ve studied this since I was little,” said Stu.
“Studied what?” asked Scott.
“The Triangle. Damn. Are all of you dense? This is it. This is where everyone ends up.” Stu finished eating and stood, ignoring everyone who asked him to stay a little longer. He set off alone.
“Tyrese would have set him straight,” Scott said. He wished he knew how to lead, but Stu Jones was a wild card. His mind was set.
They finished eating and rested a bit, talking about the airplane and the broken ship back on the rocks. They couldn’t disagree with Stu, but nothing made them feel he was right. It was just a tale, an excuse for every missing vessel. It wasn’t real. They decided it, but they didn’t say it with conviction.
In a little while, they walked down the beach. Scott said that after this, they had to go back. This was their halfway point until they prepared for an overnight venture. If Stu refused to return to camp, he would be left alone. There was nothing else they could do.
As they grew closer, they began to run. It was unbelievable. It was a ship graveyard.
Stu sat on a log, looking at the ships, some small, some larger, some old, and some new that were tangled in metal, wood, and seaweed. He was just looking at all the wreckage with a funny expression.
“Can you believe this? Why? How?” Lilly said, catching her breath.
“They washed up. I think most were wrecks and came ashore but didn’t crash like we did. They were already torn apart. Those…the ones that were already wrecks, no one made it. I guess they died in the ocean. Maybe in a storm like ours,” said Scott.
Scott sat next to Stu, and the rest sat on the sand and got drinks out.
“How many are there?” asked Andrea as she looked at the massive wreckage: boats that were battered and twisted into one another, and a mess of ruins that covered the beach and was piled high into the air.
“Five? Six?” Mick suggested.
“I counted at least eight. Maybe ten,” Stu told them, “so you see that one? The one that has some red paint? That’s the Saint Christine. She vanished after she left Beaufort, South Carolina four years ago. That other one? You can see the masts. I think it’s the Dance O’ Tropics that disappeared from the west coast of Florida.”
“I’m no expert, but how could they land here? I mean, we’re nowhere near there and West Florida? That’s a long way,” said Mick as he shook his head.
“It was right off Beaufort. I know that for a fact, and you can see as well as I can what her name is. Get closer. There’s the Violet Marie over there, see? She’s blue and a newer craft,” said Stu.
Lilly’s jaw dropped. “I know that boat. Kids talked about it in class…that it vanished. I know because we were planning a senior trip to the beach, and we said we wouldn’t get on a boat. It was the second to vanish off the Florida Keys that summer, and that’s where we went.” She took a breath. “We didn’t go on boats, but we went on the trip, and it was on the news constantly. Everyone was looking for it, and it wasn’t far off the coast when it vanished or something.”
Stu nodded and said, “She was thirty nautical miles off the coast out of Daytona Beach and an expensive, nice boat named after the owner’s daughter. John Littleton of the Internet gaming
industry owned it. People looked hard for him and his family, but there was nothing. Some said they picked up a storm for a little while, but others said no there wasn’t one. It was like the storm was there and then gone within minutes, and it was a huge mystery.”
The Violet Marie was there. Like the storm, and then, same as that storm, it was gone without a distress call or any word. When she was overdue, the search began, and the mystery started to take shape. Thousands of miles were searched, but there was nothing found: no junk, no wreckage, no survivors. It simply vanished.
While the searchers looked everywhere and people worried about the boat of scuba divers, a few days later, the Havin’ a Fling, a small boat with six people aboard, vanished in almost the same place.
Experts ruled out pirates and thought there had been some water anomaly but couldn’t decide what happened. A month later, the search for both was called off, and the occupants were declared dead. Nothing ever washed ashore, and for half a year, people avoided the area when they could.
“I think those are boats that have gone missing in the last five years, some maybe a little longer. One way up there? It looks old. I would say it’s been here rotting for twenty or thirty years. There may be a dozen in that wreckage for all I can tell,” Stu said.
“I figured you’d be happy to put the pieces together,” Helen said. She felt faintly sick at seeing so many boats.
“Naw. I thought I would be, too, but it doesn’t feel good. I mean I liked the mystery,” said Stu.
Helen said, “And this is real. Now you know.”
Stu shook his head with a frown and said, “No, not that. It’s…don’t you see? We are just one of them. One of the missing. They were never found. We won’t be, either.”
“Does that mean the waters are…I mean is it supernatural? Haunted? Is this like that?” Andrea asked.
Alex had been thinking. “There are wrecks with boats all over the place. It sounds supernatural, but it is and isn’t. We have one thing: a freaky storm comes up and takes planes and boats. It deposits some of them here. We don’t know about all, but some, for sure. Do we understand the storm? No. We can call it supernatural and haunted, but it may be something we don’t understand. At one time, we didn’t understand electricity and penicillin, and you could call both witchcraft.”
