by Gabi Moore
Up swelled the water and I burst out again. The ship, unbelievably, was now almost out of sight. I watched in disbelief as it listed and tilted heavily to each side, thrown by the waves like it was made of paper, each dip down to the side scooping up whole decks full of water and rinsing off people, who looked like nothing more than mice from this far out.
I blinked hard to get my vision to stop blurring. Maybe I was just paranoid. Maybe I had taken something by accident. It couldn’t have been Charlie. She would never… I would think about that later. For now, I had to get us both to safety.
Like I was summoning each of them from the dead, I commanded both of my heavy legs to start kicking for all they were worth. The effort of dragging myself and Ellie through the raging tail of the storm was so extreme I felt like my heart would burst. Rain still lashed at us from above, but was starting to clear. When I turned to look behind me again, there was nothing but a giant, foamy patch on the ocean surface where the ship used to be. It swirled and rose in nauseating waves, dotted with screaming people and debris. I paddled harder, leaning back and noticing that Ellie’s wound was leaving a fine ribbon of red as we swam on.
“Todd! Todd, come here! Todd!”
I could no longer lift my head up. I felt the tension in my jaw loosen, and no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t keep my eyes open either. I vaguely felt hands on me, and could do nothing but succumb to the feeling of being hoisted up. Or maybe down, and the hands were not my rescuers but the fingers of deep water demons reaching up to claim me and pull me under forever.
“Todd, wake up! Todd, can you hear me? Todd!”
Everything disappeared except the faint ring of that voice. My body shut down, each of the sense switching off, except for my water-logged ears, which could still make out my name being yelled. I shifted my weight and felt my skin squeak. Was I on a raft? Was Ellie still attached to me?
“Todd, can you hear me? Open your eyes if you can hear me,” the voice said.
Was it Charlie? Maybe I was already in hell. In any case, I couldn’t open my eyes. The roar of the rain seemed to settle down to a regular drone. Remarkably, I was still conscious. Barely, but conscious. I felt as though all of me had died, except one small little flicker at the center that was still awake somehow. This little flicker crouched somewhere unseen, while the rest of the world tossed and raged around me. I knew that if I let go of that flicker, I might never get it back. I had the dim sense that my arms were around Ellie. I couldn’t feel them anymore, and I couldn’t open my eyes to see, so I contended myself with the idea that I just wouldn’t let go of her in thought.
***
When I finally woke up, it was to the sound of crying. My eyelids felt salted over but I managed to peel them open. Still dark. Slowly, like painful patches of a picture coming back together, I realized what had happened.
The storm.
The ship had gone down.
Ellie.
I tried to sit up and look around me, but a searing pain shot all the way up my spine and immobilized me again. I pushed through it, dragged myself to sitting and tried to find the source of the crying.
It stopped.
“Todd …Todd, oh my god,” the voice said.
“Charlie?”
“Todd, I’m so sorry…” she said. It was Charlie, but not like I’d ever seen her. And I barely could see her. We were in a tiny inflatable lifeboat, and I could feel the waves of seawater heaving beneath the thin tarp under me. It was dark all around. A little light from the stars and moon overhead gave a hint of an outline of a crouched woman in front of me and …Ellie! Ellie lay crumpled at the bottom of the boat. My eyes gradually started to adjust.
“Ellie, are you awake?” I said and grabbed her. I nearly flinched when I touched her cold skin. I pressed my face to hers and, like a miracle, the delicate rush of air was still entering and leaving her small body. I wanted to cry.
“Todd …Todd, I never meant to. Thank god you’re awake. I’m so sorry. I don’t know what I was thinking. Oh thank god. I never intended for this to happen…”
Slowly my confusion was lifting. And in its place was anger. I took a few moments to find my lungs again, to breathe, to steady myself against all the many miscellaneous pains I was now aware of in every corner of my body. I was cold. And in pain.
“What are you talking about, Charlie?”
“Your beer,” she said quickly. “I put something in it.”
I groaned. It was all too much.
“Is it gonna fucking kill me?”
“Todd, I’m so sorry…”
“Well, is it?” I snapped.
“It was just a roofie, Todd. Just a stupid mistake. But I pulled you from the water. You and the girl. You had passed out…”
She was speaking so quickly I was having a hard time keeping up. My eyes still weren’t doing a good job focusing on the surrounds in such low light. It was dark, and it was wet, but beyond that I was having a hard time orienting.
“I’ve bandaged her head,” she said, now flapping the lower half of her torn jeans at me to show me. I squinted my eyes to look, then examined Ellie again. Yes, I could now make out a crude bandage over her wound, made of stretchy denim material.
“How long…?”
“We’ve been floating for a few hours. I haven’t seen anyone else, Todd. I’m so scared. The ship’s gone. It’s just …gone” she said.
“Charlie, calm down. You’re in shock.”
I was gradually finding the energy to look around the boat. It looked pretty miserable. Nothing to keep us warm. Nothing at all. Just us three, this wet rubber, and the incessant rain.
“Todd, I’m sorry.”
“Will you shut up? You’re fucking crazy, you know that? I could have died out there because of …let’s just figure out how to get out of this mess, OK?”
“It’ll be morning soon and--”
“Just shut up.”
I hated speaking to her like that. But I hated even more the sensation of not having any control over my body. Of not being able to do the things that I needed to do, right at the most crucial moment I needed to do them. She could have gotten me killed. And what if I had passed out before I could strap Ellie in a vest and carry her away from the wreck?
I lay my broken body down beside Ellie on the cold rubber and huddled next to her. Charlie sat on the far side of the boat, still crying.
“Ellie,” I whispered into her ear. “Ellie, wake up.”
Her breath snagged and caught, then she took another deep inhale and cracked her eyes open slightly. Even in the darkness I could see the light green of her iris swivel around to focus on my face.
“Todd?”
“I’m here.”
It was all I could think of to say. She drifted back out of consciousness and her eyes flickered closed again. I didn’t know how we were going to get out of this. I didn’t yet know how to keep her warm, or how we were going to find dry land. But I was here. That much was true.
Chapter 7 - Anthony
I looked down at them huddled together on the floor of the raft, sleeping fitfully. Folded into one another’s arms, their backs against the harshness of the reality around us. That should have been Ellie and I. We should have been here, on the raft together, holding one another for comfort.
The rhythmic bobbing of the raft had been making my stomach turn all night, but what was really sickening me was the thought that the last thing we had done together was fight. About something stupid. About a dumb fancy dress party that would have cost me nothing to go to, and would have meant the world to her, and it was all just monumentally stupid, and this very instant she was probably sinking down to the floor of the Pacific Ocean and everything, absolutely everything, was wrong now.
Through narrowed eyes I looked over at the chopped surface of the ocean. How much water was in an ocean? How many millions of ocean liners could disappear inside it? It blew my mind, just staring at it all, at the unbearable flatness of the whole situation.
The sun had just peeked a glowing tip over the horizon and everything was flooding over in gentle yellows and pinks all across the sky. But this perfect, tranquil seascape was pure horror to me, because I knew what was underneath it. I knew what was hidden down there, inside all that blue and green that had violently toppled and gobbled my whole life just a few hours ago.
It was like a joke, watching the quiet water now. It was just a big, vulgar joke to see the two of them together, devoted lovers, still entwined while my Ellie was nowhere to be seen. I wanted them to never fucking wake up. I glanced over at the kid on the other side of the raft. He had his knees pulled high up to his chin and was gazing far out, like me. He looked like some kind of skinhead, couldn’t have been older than 21 or 22. Not that it matters how many years you’ve gathered up when life comes to cruelly slice you down. We weren’t dead, thank god, but floating here on this pitiful raft was damn well close to it.
My clothes had dried to a salty crisp on my skin, and now felt supremely dirty. We were plainly exposed to the heat and wind, and if the sun decided to rise any further, we’d have absolutely zero protection from its rays.
I had no idea where we were, and how we were going to get to anywhere else. The only place my mind could travel was back: to all the missed opportunities. To the moments I could have made her happy but didn’t. I had done things to her that I wasn’t proud of, and now it was too late. I could have relented on my stupid rules once in while. Could have gotten off her case about her work, about all those endless niggles that seemed so unimportant now. Could have made love to her more. Why hadn’t I made more of an effort to love her? Because I’m a fucking idiot, that’s why.
The boy caught my eye.
“This is like, some action movie shit,” he said.
I was appalled.
The waves seemed to bob us forward a little, bob us backward a little. It was hard to tell if we were moving at all, but with miles and miles of blue in every direction, it was hard to even conceive of travelling anywhere.
“Looks like there was a little pack attached here,” he said, gesturing to some empty clips on the wall of the raft, “I’ve seen ‘em before, they have like, a paddle in it and some emergency gear. And whistles and flares and things.”
“Well, where is it?”
“Gone,” he said.
It was infuriating just how little there was on the raft with us. When it had first careened straight into my head as I floated and flailed in the center corridor, I had clung to it for dear life. Chairs and suitcases and cups and shoes and every kind of item you can imagine swirled and whizzed around me as I hitched a ride and tried to cower from the rain and falling debris. But now, none of that stuff was left. Not a single teaspoon or deck chair. Not a button. Nothing.
“Now, the sun’s over there, right? So the coast has got to be off over to that direction,” he said, gesturing broadly over to one side. “There are plenty of islands around, but unfortunately I don’t know them or where they are.”
This guy was getting on my nerves. His voice roused the couple and they stirred, sat up, rubbed their eyes and looked around at the bright morning scene with the same dread I had felt a moment before.
“Good morning,” I said.
They nodded at me. The woman didn’t seem too concerned that her shirt had torn straight down the middle and was halfway to revealing her navel. Ah well, not like any of that mattered now. We sat in silence for a long while, each of us far gone in our own thoughts. It wasn’t a long process to think through. Every possible solution to our problem stopped short almost instantly: we were stuck at sea, no food, no water, no paddle, fuck all. But we sat and thought about it all the same.
“Baby, if we don’t make it out of this alive, I wanted to let you know that I love you, and I’ve always loved you, and nothing will change that, not even death.”
The boy and I exchanged glances and then looked with curiosity at the older guy, who now had his partner’s hand in his, and was delivering this teary speech as she looked on wide-eyed. She sniffled and wiped her nose with the back of her hand.
“Baby, I know, you don’t have to say. I feel the same. I’ve always felt that way. We’ve come a long way together, you and I, haven’t we? It hasn’t always been easy, but it’s always been worth it. Always. I don’t what happens after this life but Livvy, I swear--”
“Jesus, do you mind?”
They both turned to look at me.
“I’m sorry but, right here? Now? I think that’s just a little inappropriate.”
The boy was laughing quietly in his corner.
“Inappropriate? You’re kidding, right?” The woman was already looking a little sunburnt.
“Look, I’m sorry, I know this is an emotional time, but please could you not?”
The frown on the guy’s face was so deep it looked like he was about to snap his eyebrows off.
“Look, buddy, I don’t know what your problem is, but this is my wife and this has fuck all to do with you, OK?”
“I’m sitting two feet from you.”
“So? You don’t like it, go somewhere else,” he said, and turned back to his wife. The kid was giggling again.
“Baby, I want you to remember the good times, OK, no matter what happens from here on out--”
“Do you know how inconsiderate you’re being?” I said, and shifted my weight so heavily that the boat rocked and swayed. It was an awful feeling, knowing that just this flimsy piece of plastic was suspending all four of us above miles and miles of solid ocean water.
The guy lowered his wife’s hands, took a deep breath and then gave me a stern look. I knew I was being an asshole. I knew it. But I couldn’t watch them do that, not now. Not with my head in pieces the way it was.
“Look, buddy, I don’t care if we’re the last four people alive in the world, you will not tell me what the fuck to do, OK?”
“Yeah? And if I do? You gonna sue me or what?”
“Are you seriously being this much of an ass right now?” he said, and glowered at me.
“Baby, please, we’re all just a bit scared, let’s not fight,” the woman said.
“Oh, I’m not fighting…”
“Hey, don’t you dare come over here, what do you think you’re doing?”
“Guys!”
We all spun to look at the kid who had pepped up and was now excitedly leaning over the edge of the raft.
“If you all would shut up for a second, maybe you could help me look over there. Am I seeing things? Tell me I’m not seeing things.”
We all trained our eyes on the strange fuzzy edge of the horizon. It definitely looked like land. Trees, even. I wouldn’t believe otherwise. We must have stared at it for a minute straight, all of us, in silence.
“I thought you said the coast would be that way?” the woman said.
“Guess I was wrong, lady,” the kid said, and instantly leant over, dunked his hands in the water and began paddling for all he was worth.
We all joined him without any encouragement, and soon the quiet ocean air was filled with the sound of frantic splashing. It felt, of course, like we were going nowhere, but we paddled all the same. Within ten minutes we couldn’t deny it. We all checked with one another: had the fuzzy patch on the horizon really grown bigger? Yes. Yes it had. We were going to be OK. We had found land. We just had to paddle like our lives depended on it. Which, of course, they did.
Chapter 8 - Ellie
My world went from deep, soft black …to blue.
My eyes were opening. I stared straight up, or what I thought was up. Nothing but a depthless, cool blue, and a wisp of cloud that told me it was the sky. I wasn’t dead. That was air – normal, clean air in my lungs – and I wasn’t dead.
All at once every one of my muscles shot to life and I sprang up, then recoiled instantly in pain. It felt like a hot, burning knot had taken the place of my foot; I looked down to see it tightly bundled in various rags. Worrying sensations radiated from some unseen spot on
the back of my skull, and when my fingers went to explore the ache there, they touched more of the same rough bandages. I hurriedly examined the rest of my body: I was alive, but felt like a lumpy bag that had been kicked down a hundred flights of stairs.
After I was satisfied that my limbs were mainly intact, I turned my attention to the world around me.
Sand.
Sea.
I was on a beach, surrounded by all the elements of a tropical paradise except it was all far, far more frightening. The sand was too white. The air too thin. Some seagulls wheeled up overhead but it hurt to lift my gaze to the sun and look at them. Wincing, I tried to remember.
Todd.
The storm.
The storeroom.
Was I the only one who had survived?
I looked down again at my body. The silk over the bodice of the best dress I ever owned was ripped and hanging in ribbons off me. The salt water had matted my hair in one loose dreadlock which was now pasted to my back, and crunchy with beach sand. I was struggling to sit up when thought hit me. A thought so devastating it was like watching the whole accident happen all over again: I had nearly cheated on Anthony.
Or had I?
I sat back down again, head suddenly reeling.
Was the storm the only reason I hadn’t gone through with anything? What would have happened if that storm never came? Would I have just gone back to the room, back to my life with him, back to California and straight into the marriage that was waiting for me like a wolf in the forest, licking its chops?
I looked down at the shreds of my dress.
The irritating fact was, I didn’t know. I liked to think that I would never have jeopardized my relationship with Anthony. And yet, why did I feel so guilty? How could I feel so bad about something that never happened? Never got the chance to happen is not the same as not happening, though, is it? It all seemed so pathetic now. So sordid in the hot morning sun. Suddenly, as though I had been kicked in the stomach, I folded over to the side, retched and threw up all over the sand. Sitting up again, I felt no relief. I wanted to cry but felt too dry inside. Too tired.
