by Gabi Moore
“And just who the fuck do you think you are? Back off. Let her speak. Ellie, who the hell is this guy?”
Ellie could do nothing but sniffle and cry some more, her face twisted in pain as she tried to balance on her busted leg. It was an infuriating thing to witness. This must be her fiancé, back from the dead. And that was good news for me, at least. Very good news.
“Todd, just get out of here, OK?” I said and marched forward, shoved him aside roughly and grabbed the girl to help her to her feet. Stunned, she stopped crying and looked at me as I bent down to pick her up before walking over to her fiancé.
“Just take her,” I said.
He obeyed.
She folded down into his arms, her stupid leg still bound up with half of my jeans. For long lost lovers, they sure as hell didn’t seem all that excited to see one another, but I couldn’t care less at that moment. None of my business. I looked at the expectant faces all around me. As usual, it would fall on me to take charge of the fucking mess. Again.
“I’m Charlie, by the way,” I said curtly and nodded at him.
“Anthony. Anthony Coates,” he mumbled.
“Great. That over there is Todd, and I see you and your, uh, fiancé, already know each other. We came in on an emergency raft last night after the ship went down. We didn’t think there were any other survivors.”
They all just stared at me.
“Now, I don’t mean to be funny, but today is going to fly by, and if we don’t start looking for a smart way out of this mess, we’re all going to die here. If you assholes could hold off on trying to kill each other for a minute, that would probably help.”
A small, wiry looking guy stepped forward.
“My name is Carl and this is my wife Livvy.”
He was covered in aging tribal tattoos on his arms, had a soft little pot belly and a serious shirt tan. The woman waved her hand timidly and made eye contact with everyone else.
Great. By the looks of them two it meant that Todd and I were the only two truly capable adults here and it would be up to us to sort this shit out. Too bad Todd was so distracted.
“Are there any more of you?” I said.
They all looked at the ground.
“We also came in on a raft, just us, but we had another guy with us, a younger guy,” the woman said to the sand between her toes.
“And…?”
“Unfortunately he didn’t make it,” Anthony said quietly, and I thought it so strange how hard he was trying not to look down at that fat cow he was miraculously holding up.
I shrugged and tried to think.
It was sad, but I don’t think it had escaped anyone’s attention that basically nobody on the ship had ‘made it’ either. Hundreds of people, gone. And only we remained. Fine, I could handle that. Out the corner of my eye I noticed more black and green clouds growing far on the horizon, threatening to overtake the current blue.
“OK, well, six is a good number. We can make this work. Our best bet for fresh water is to look in the interior – who still has shoes?”
I looked down at Carl’s beat-up flip-flops.
“OK, you and you wife can go into the forest and start looking for fresh water or at least some tubers. Don’t be too fussy, though, we’ll need every calorie we can get our hands on.”
I turned to Anthony. He didn’t look like he was in the best physical condition of his life but at least he stood tall, was paying attention and didn’t cower like those other two.
“Anthony, can you fish? Are you a good swimmer?”
He puffed his chest up and nodded. “I can check out the coast all around the island and see if I can find some food. With rocks like this, there’s a good chance of mussels or maybe snails. I’ll try and get a sense of how big this place is while I’m at it.”
“Good man, that’s good,” I said, pleased that at least someone else had their head in the right damn place.
I turned to look at Todd, who stood a little back from the group, chewing on his lips.
“Todd, you and I should get to work on building a shelter. It’s probably going to storm again tonight, if those clouds are anything to go by. I sure hope you were paying attention in training, because I’m going to need you to magic up some fire out of thin air, OK?”
He said nothing but I knew he was onboard. He had to be, it was the most sensible plan. It was the only plan. The couple seemed a little hesitant, like they didn’t appreciate a strong woman taking charge of the situation. But fuck ‘em. It wasn’t my goal to win friends and influence people. It was to survive. If they wanted to die three days from now, that was their prerogative.
“What about me? What can I do?” Ellie said, and she flashed those big Bambi eyes my way.
I smirked.
“I don’t know, what can you do?” I said.
Maybe in some prehistoric times a chunky bitch like her would have stayed home as the village brood mare. Maybe she had the genes for basket weaving or some shit. But right now, she just looked like a big, fat liability to me.
“I can, uh… I can’t move much but I can …dig!” she said. She tried to wriggle down from Anthony’s arms.
“Dig?”
“Yeah, dig. I can stay here with you guys and dig a nice, deep hole that we can cover over with sticks and fronds, and that’ll make a nice shelter. Going underground a little will help keep us cool as well.”
She was at least trying to make herself useful, I’d give her credit for that. I looked down at her pink nail polish and pointy nails.
“And what are you going to dig with?”
“That’s my problem to solve, isn’t it?”
“OK, fine. I won’t stop you. But if you can cover up a little and stop stirring up drama, that’d be great too,” I said and gestured towards her bare cleavage.
She looked mortified. Good.
I glared at the couple and they quickly sprang to action and walked off towards the center of the island. I watched as Anthony carried Ellie off a few feet, gently placed her down and exchanged a few hurried whispers with her. They both looked so tense. Almost embarrassed about something. She was doing everything she could to avoid eye contact with him. Interesting. Then he stood, leant forward to kiss her brow and disappeared off towards the ocean, not giving Todd or I a second glance.
“I’ll be back to check up on you in an hour,” Anthony yelled after her.
Water, food, shelter, warmth. We had less than 24 hours to secure all of life’s essentials. And just as soon as we did, I had another plan.
Todd.
It was a bit of a joke, really. Something you’d never imagine would happen. The middle-aged woman was married and didn’t count, and as long as her fiancé was around, that bitch Ellie didn’t count either. In effect, I was literally the last female alive for Todd. And it was just a matter of time before he realized that he wanted the same thing that I wanted.
Chapter 10 - Anthony
Well, we were certainly having our ‘adventure’ now.
I consider myself a cool, collected man. A rational man. But the last few days felt like I had been blasted with ten years’ worth of emotional turmoil and I had no idea how to process it all. The landscape all around felt empty compared to the tumult inside my head. Just as soon as I grabbed hold of one thought, another, completely different one beckoned. And when I grabbed hold of that one instead, yet another one popped up to taunt me.
On the raft, I had felt nothing but pure, intense devotion to Ellie. It felt so obvious and easy at the time. She was the perfect woman, my future wife, nothing less than an earthly goddess that I’d chosen to be the mother of my children. But there were ugly scratches on this vision, and the fact that we had fought the night of the storm hadn’t escaped me. And now those ugly thoughts were as plain as the day in front of me, unavoidable.
What had she been doing… before the storm hit? Was she doing it with …him? What exactly had happened on the raft? Whatever she was doing that night when I told her to leave
me alone and go and find adventure if she wanted it so bad… why had she chosen to do it wearing that dress?
I pushed the thoughts out of my mind for the time being, hoping I would come to some sort of resolution in the background while I focused on the more pressing problem: food. The truth is, I had never fished for any damn thing in my life and even if I was a pro, I’m not sure how I was supposed to do anything with my bare hands. I waded out into the water till my knees. The water was blue and clear. And empty. I waded further out to my neck, dunked my head in and opened stinging eyes to peer underneath. Still nothing, and now my eyes hurt.
I waded back out of the water again.
I had died and gone to hell, that was what was happening to me. I had spent my life setting myself up as a high earner so I could provide for my future family. I had painstakingly made long term investments, devoted myself to earning an education in a field I knew would be the most lucrative and was soon going to buy a three bedroom house with a garden for Ellie to sit in and read during her pregnancy.
And yet, none of that mattered now. It was just me, my pasty ass, and the blinding fact that I was going to starve soon if I couldn’t conjure up some real sustenance.
Why hadn’t I ever spent more time at the gym? If that buff army asshole thought he was such hot shit, why wasn’t he out here, ‘fishing’? I wanted to say Ellie wasn’t capable of that. She wasn’t the kind of woman to be impressed by some hot jock and throw away a promising life with a real man. But maybe, you know …maybe she was.
After unsuccessfully trying to find something swimming in the water and realizing how hopeless that was, I drifted further out and found some rocks. I could try pick mussels off them or find a crab in the pools or something. The thought was truly appalling but I sure as hell wasn’t going to turn up to the group empty handed.
I cast my eyes back to the island.
I couldn’t see anyone. For all I knew she was spreading her legs this very minute, letting that asshole take advantage of her. I picked up a rock and hurled it to the ground with a scream, shattering it into shards that went flying into the rock pools. Sea birds overhead peeped and cried but a second after my tantrum the world was exactly the same as before. I shook my head to clear it, told myself to just man up and look for something to fucking eat.
I had hit her once or twice, sure. If I could imagine myself in a court of law right now, defending my actions, I’d be hard pressed. But we had moved on from all of that. She knew that I didn’t really mean it, that I just had a problem with managing my stress and she just had a problem provoking me when she knew I needed to be left alone. She knew it was all just an accident. We had both realized how dangerous alcohol was for me, and we’d moved on. Or at least I thought we had moved on.
My eye caught the beautiful blue gleam of mother-of-pearl on some black rocks. I hobbled over, the sharp rocks cutting me underfoot. There were a few clusters of mussel shells wedged in the cracks of some rocks and I crouched down to examine them. I had never been so happy to see something in all my life. My stomach growled.
With shaking, sore fingers, I got to work tearing the mussels off, watching some of them slowly and sinuously shut their shells on me. I stuck my fingers in one, wrenched the shell open and took a look inside. It was a wet, pale ball that looked like snot. But it was food.
There was enough here for all six of us. I peered around, and decided I’d have to make some kind of container to carry them back to the others. After some thought I pulled my shirt off, knotted it at the open end and made a makeshift bag. I stuffed this so full of mussels it made the cotton bulge and stretch. Clutching the bag like Santa, I waded back into the water and swam slowly back to shore, feeling a little more upbeat. Maybe it wouldn’t be so hard to play Robinson Crusoe out here after all.
The sky was blue overhead, and the water felt delicious and cool on my bare chest. She had looked beautiful, I’d give her that. As I swam I let her image float into my mind. The torn bodice of her dress. The way her hair was all wild and knotted around her face. Her wide open eyes and god, those tits. Nevermind tropical beach paradises, Ellie’s breasts were the real heaven on earth. By the time I arrived back at the shore, I had settled on my next move: I would forgive her. Then I would have to fuck her.
It was predictable, I know. But I had to claim my territory. Call it the brute in me, I was guilty as charged. But all the old rules of my life didn’t seem to hold here anyway. I’d find her, take her somewhere quiet, and let her know that it was all OK, that I was going to take care of her, and I forgave her everything. None of it mattered anymore, not after the brush with death we’d both endured. Marriage is all about compromise, about adapting to the challenges life throws your way and making the best of it that you can. I would do that for her. She was afraid. She had made some bad decisions. But that was all in the past now.
By the time I waded onto the dry sand an hour later, I was horny as hell and could think of nothing but taking her, right here and right now, under the sun.
Thankfully, I found her alone. She was sitting in a sea of green, and as I walked closer, I could see it more clearly: she was surrounded by palm fronds. She was sitting in an awkward cross-legged position, a long frond over her lap as her little white hands worked quickly over the torn leaf ribbons. She looked up at me and tried to smile.
“Where did you learn to do that?” I asked her and looked down at the woven leaves. It was remarkable.
“This? It’s just braiding. If I can make a few layers of these, it’ll make a nice roof. I don’t know how waterproof it’ll be, but if it’s slanted, like this, and I put a few more fronds on top to channel the water off, it’ll hopefully keep us all dry.”
Maybe we’d never speak again about the wreck. Maybe we’d just live the rest of our lives talking about this and that. Maybe we’d live here forever.
“Ellie? Ellie, I’m sorry,” I said, dumped my bag of mussels on the sand and came to sit beside her.
“I’m sorry too,” she said, and her fingers kept working, flicking the long thin leaves up, over and down again. I tried to help by feeding her the next branch when she reached the end of her current one. We worked together for a while like this, in silence.
“What happened, Ellie?”
Her hands paused.
“I went out. I met up with him. He saved my life. Nothing happened.”
I hated that she seemed to be using as few words as possible. At least she knew how bad it looked.
“You dressed up,” I said quietly. Her dress seemed to be disintegrating all around her. I had the wild thought of it falling to pieces completely, leaving her some kind of wild beach woman with a coconut bra and a grass skirt. I hated that I still wanted her. Badly.
“I’m not mad, Ellie.”
“Good, you have nothing to be mad about.”
Silence.
“I fetched some mussels for us.”
“Great. Once Todd makes some fire, we can cook them.”
Fucking Todd. I bristled at the mention of his name.
“Ellie, can we… let’s go somewhere private. I just want to speak to you, alone.”
She looked at me.
“We are alone.”
I sighed.
“I just want some privacy…”
She seemed to understand what I was saying. She gently let the frond fall from her fingers and stroked her hands over her thighs.
“Of course. Can you carry me though? My foot is really fucked up.”
I caught her eye and we stared at one another for a moment. She was the same Ellie as always. Only now there was an entire storm between us. And there was Todd, taking up too much fucking room.
I leant forward, gently took her in my arms and she dutifully linked her own arms around me and rested her head gently against my chest. Without a word, I carried her into the dark green forest at the heart of the island.
It was a dream. A dirty, delicious fantasy. My woman. Half naked, unable to flee. I was hungry, and
angry, and who knew if either of us would see another day.
She was heavy, but I knew she was sensitive about her weight and so I tried as hard as I could to not show any strain. None of us had had a drop of fresh water or a bite to eat since the night before, but I wasn’t going to let that get in the way. I picked my way over twisted branches, and the light grew dimmer around us as we crept deeper and deeper into the growth. It was an alien landscape, all broad leaves and twisting plants that clamored over ones another, so that you couldn’t make out one individual plant in the whole mess. Maybe she’d be more thrilled to come out here with me if I was brandishing a manly machete.
“Is this really happening, Anthony? How did we even get here? I still can’t believe that any of this is happening. Like this is all just a dream and any second I’m going to wake up in my bed, on the ship, and you’ll be there with me and none of this would ever have happened…”
We had come to a clearing in the trees, and I lowered her down onto a soft mat of moss ringed loosely with ferns. It was completely shaded, silent, and cool in this place.
“It feels like a dream to me as well,” I said.
It was the kind of landscape out of which a jaguar could appear, or else a mysterious pygmy warrior. And ancient place. All around us was shadowy, and smelt like damp wood and crushed leaves. I crouched down beside her and stroked my hands down her legs, lingering gently over the scratches and bruises on her pretty skin.
She was strange. Receptive, but different somehow. She couldn’t look me in the eyes, but her hands easily went to mine and followed my tracing, guiding them up higher on her thighs to lift the ragged lace of her dress. There was nothing but the sound of our breathing. Even here the wind and soft roar of the ocean was muffled by the wall of vegetation surrounding us.
“I never want to lose you,” I said, fingertips finding her naked skin.
Her only response was to lay back a little, and pull her knees up closer around her. She looked like she had something just on the tip of her tongue, something she wanted to say. When she didn’t speak, I cleared my throat and spoke myself.
