Falling Prey

by M. C. Norris

  “Hi, I’m Tara.” The girl smiled, cocked her head, and folded her arms across her chest. “The man with us is Nate, and the other boy my age is Peanut.”

  “Peanut? That’s cute.”

  “Yeah, he’s something.”

  “Do you guys know each other from school or something?”

  “Yeah, we go the same high school. We’re art students. There were a bunch of us on that plane,” Tara said, her smile fading.

  “I’m sorry. This has been so awful for everyone.”

  “I know.”

  “Well, I’m really glad that you found us. I was hoping for some new faces around here. As you can probably tell, the people in this camp are kind of—mean.”

  “Really?” Tara scrunched up her face.

  “Yeah. You saw how they treat me. I haven’t had anything to eat or drink since the accident. They won’t share anything with me.”

  “Why?”

  “Basically, they hate me.” Margot nodded in self-affirmation, tightening her lips, looking off to one side, and … there were those tears, right on cue. She sniffed, and wiped them away. “Sorry,” she said, giving a halfhearted chuckle, “it’s just been hard.” More tears streamed her cheeks, as she let her face crumple.

  “Why do they hate you?”

  “They didn’t tell you all about it? I’m surprised.”

  “No. I mean, well, you know, they said something about it or whatever, like, at the fire last night … I guess that guy fell, and got attacked, or something?” Tara said, gesturing toward Dr. Kimura.

  Margot started to roll her eyes, but caught herself, and pretended to wipe tears from them again. She nodded, and cleared her throat. “We got attacked last night, by this gigantic thing.”

  “So did we.”

  “You did?”

  “Yes.”

  Margot gasped, feigning horror, and covered her mouth. “Oh my God.”

  “Yeah,” Tara said, nodding as tears filled her eyes, “it was pretty much the worst night ever. Kind of hard to talk about.”

  “I’m sorry.” Margot gave the girl a half-hug. “Yeah, pretty much the exact same thing happened here. But, that thing came charging into camp, you know, and everyone just scattered. Everyone was screaming, pushing, scrambling everywhere just trying to get out of the way, and he crashed right into me! He tripped over me, and fell. Well, today they’re all mad at me because I didn’t stop, and like, help him up, and for that I am truly sorry, but hello? When something like that is charging at you, it’s not like you have tons of time to think clearly.”

  “Well, no.”

  “So, I didn’t even think to stop, or stop to think, or whatever. I just ran, just like everyone else. Yeah, I should’ve stopped, and I should’ve helped him up, but I didn’t, and now I guess I’m paying with my life for that reaction, because they’ve cut me off completely.”

  Tara eyes widened with empathy.

  “They ran too, let’s not forget. All of them did. But I guess I’m the bad guy because I just happened to be closest to him when it happened.”

  “Didn’t the other lady like, grab a burning log though, and like, hit the howler over the head with it?”

  “Yes,” Margot said, unable to refrain from rolling her eyes that time, “and for that, I admit, she is a hero. I am not. I’m just a regular person, and I was scared out of my freaking mind.”

  “We swam clear out into the sea to get away from ours, and when we did, this huge—”

  “Can I ask you for a favor?”

  Tara cocked her head, and frowned. “Sure. What—”

  “I am so thirsty, honey. They won’t share with me. I haven’t had a drink in two days. I saw you guys brought in some drinks of your own.”

  “Sure,” Tara replied. “I don’t care if you have one of ours. Yeah, we found a whole bunch of cans this morning, and bags of peanuts.”

  “Dale said that I wasn’t allowed to have any peanuts.”

  “Pshh. I found some of them. I guess I’ll share my peanuts with whoever I darned well please.”

  “Oh, my God. Thank you so much.” Margot’s hands were trembling as she cracked open the can of soda, and peeled off the metal tab. She choked as the first swallows of warm cola rushed down her parched throat. It was so sweet and delicious. It was the most wonderful drink of anything that she’d ever taken.

  “Hey!”

  Still guzzling, Margot glanced through the corner of her eye at the form of Donovan, marching around the bend. She knew that he’d probably try to grab the can from her, so she intended to drink it down to the last swallow before he snatched it. Already, Tara was squaring up to him, probably ready to defend her own actions more so than the can of soda, but any line of defense was helpful.

  “I knew it. I friggin’ knew it. Soon as we left, I told Sandy, she’s going to raid our stash. She’s going to steal all our stuff. Boom. Here you are.”

  “Excuse me,” Tara said, “but those are not your supplies. I collected that can, and that bag of peanuts. They’re both mine, and I gave them to her.”

  “See, that’s where you’re all wrong, kid. There ain’t no ‘I’ in ‘team,’ and there ain’t no ‘Margot’ in this one. All supplies belong to all of us, and they ain’t to be shared with her!” Donovan brushed past Tara, and he slapped the can hard right out of Margot’s hand. What remained of it vanished into the sand.

  “Are you crazy?” Tara shrieked. “You just wasted soda!”

  “No, you did. You wasted it on her.”

  “She’s a human being!”

  “Not in my book. That was a human being right there.” Donovan pointed at Dr. Kimura, who tried to sit up, but slumped back down. “He was the only doctor on this whole friggin’ island, and she threw him to the beast! No. We don’t reward bad behavior with soda and treats. Give it here.” Donovan raised his upturned hand to Margot, and beckoned for her bag of peanuts with a fluttering gesture. “Hand ‘em over.”

  “She gave them to me,” Margot said, looking to Tara with pleading eyes. “They’re all I have. I haven’t eaten anything since—”

  “I said hand over the nuts, or things are going to get ugly.”

  “Please!”

  “Leave her alone!”

  “Hand them over!” Donovan drew back his hand, and seized Margot by the collar with his other. “I swear to God, I’ll slap the taste of that soda right off your lips.”

  “I said, leave her alone!” Tara grabbed hold of his wrist, and attempted to yank it loose of Margot’s shirt, but Donovan reached across her, and slapped Margot across the mouth. Tara screamed, raking at his face with her fingernails.

  The truth was, the slap hadn’t really hurt Margot all that much, and she was so glad that it had happened. Donovan was playing a more corroborating role to her side of the story than Margot could’ve imagined if she’d written a goddamned script, and handed it to him. She clutched her face, wailing, and collapsed dramatically into the sand, balling her body protectively around her bag of peanuts. She noticed the can of spilt soda. While Tara and Donovan grappled, she reached between their legs for the tipped can, and returned it to her lips. Little sandy around the rim, but she managed to salvage another couple of swallows. A fleshy smack from above brought a screech of pain and surprise from Tara, who fell to the sand beside her. Blood dripped from her lower lip. Margot fought back the crazy urge to snicker, because he’d actually struck her pretty hard. This was all playing out so perfectly.

  “Donovan … stop it.” The feeble voice of Dr. Kimura could barely be heard over the fray. He’d managed to prop himself up on an elbow, but it didn’t look like he’d be upright for long. Flies swarmed around him. His head wagged like a rotten mushroom on its stem.

  “You broke the rules! You both broke the rules!” Donovan shouted, stabbing an accusatory finger at the two girls lying in the sand. “This camp has rules that you obviously don’t respect, so you can both get the hell out of here. Want to steal our food like a couple of rats, huh? L
et’s see how you like living out there in the jungle with all the other frigging rats. Get out! Now!” Donovan kicked sand into their faces.

  “I was just trying to help her!” Tara cried.

  “Yeah, you were. You fucking rat!”

  “Donovan … please.”

  No one turned to acknowledge Dr. Kimura. They heard his voice, thin and wavering in the humid air, but they behaved as though they’d heard nothing at all. His health was fading so rapidly that some part of them already dismissed him as being dead.

  “But, they all left to go get water,” Tara said, “and they’re going to wonder what happened to me when they get back.”

  “Don’t worry. I’ll tell them all about it. You’re done in here, and there ain’t no coming back. Got that? Both of youse. Done!”

  The girls glanced at one another. Margot was amused to see that Tara wore an absolutely mortified visage, as if the whole snowball of events that led to their sudden exile was the first time in her charmed life that she’d ever been publicly humiliated. Probably a good lesson for the little bitch to learn. Welcome to the real world, Margot thought, barely able to conceal her smug vindication. “Come on,” she said, picking herself up out of the sand. She jammed the sack of peanuts down the front of her shirt, glaring straight at Donovan while she did it. “Let’s go, and find ourselves a higher quality of people.”

  ###

  22-D

  “So, what do you do for a living, Dale, if you don’t mind me asking?” Nate said, trying to catch his breath in the jungle humidity. Sometimes it felt more like water in the lungs than air. The new group members had all endorsed Dale as being the most suitable guide for their mission, touting his abilities as an expert woodsman, but “expert” was a relative term. The people endorsing him had only known him twenty-four hours for crying out loud, and now, Nate worried whether or not he’d made the best decision in allowing Peanut to come along. If anything happened to the kid, he didn’t think that he’d be able to live with himself.

  “Hogs and logs, man. Hogs and logs.”

  Dale had a terse way of communicating. It seemed to be a trait that was pretty typical amongst the men of small town America, almost as though they didn’t want to say too much, and risk appearing foolish in some way. That, or Dale just preferred to bait his listener into doing all of the talking while he heckled them. If that was his strategy, it was effective. If most guys from small towns employed the same bait-and-heckle technique, it was no wonder why nobody ever said much. However, it didn’t seem like there was very much was at risk. Nate wasn’t a proud person, and he preferred some friendly conversation over silence. “So, you have a hog farm, do you, and some sort of a logging operation as well?”

  “You’re a good listener.”

  “I guess you’d probably know a thing or two about trees then, wouldn’t you?”

  “Not these ‘uns, if that’s what you’re getting at.”

  That was, in fact, what Nate was getting at. Seemed like every conversational direction he took, he ran straight into another wall. “So, you don’t see any species of trees or plants around here that you recognize?”

  “Not a one.”

  “Interesting. I’m an engineer. I design submersibles for marine research. My wife is … she was a marine biologist. She could identify every fish, every animal living in or around the sea. She was a remarkable woman. I lost her in the crash.”

  “That’s a damned shame.”

  Nate nodded. “Yes, I certainly thought so.” He didn’t know why he was talking, or what he was even trying to say. He hadn’t had a chance to open up to anyone about his loss, to vent some of that emotional toxic waste that had been building up in his core since the moment Dawn disappeared beneath the waves. In truth, he hadn’t even really begun to process his wife’s death, and what it meant to his world. He was still in a sort of numbed phase that had been following his initial shock and horror, and he wasn’t sure what phase ought to come next. “She was eaten by a mosasaur.”

  “A whose-a-what’s-a?”

  “It’s a—a kind of prehistoric reptile that used to hunt the ancient seas.”

  “I’ll be dogged.”

  Nate nodded, ducking beneath a thorny branch. “It’s extinct. Well, at least it should be. It hasn’t existed on earth for millions and millions of years, and there appears to be a whole breeding population of them in the waters all around this island.”

  Dale snapped a twig off a bush, and sniffed the broken end. He wrinkled his nose, and made a face. “We tell y’all about that woolybooger we seen last night?”

  “The uh, the … yeah. We’d been calling them howlers. The kids were. We had quite a run-in with one ourselves, down on the beach last night.” Nate cleared his throat. He almost hated to bring up the next point. Even by the light of day, it still rattled him to his core. “I’m sure that you noticed the two moons in the sky last night?”

  “Yep.”

  Nate slipped a little on the muddy trail that they were following. Dale referred to it as a game trail. It slithered all through the jungle in what seemed a pretty purposeful manner, rounding boulders and thickets only slightly to maintain a steady bearing. Dale seemed pretty certain that it would lead them to water, eventually.

  “So, the kids and I were discussing a few possible scenarios this morning,” Nate said, “with respect to where we are, how exactly we got here, and we all basically came to the same conclusion—given the two moons—that something pretty extraordinary has happened. Given all of the evidence that’s all around us, it doesn’t leave a person with much choice but to at least consider the possibility that we’re not simply stranded on a remote island that supports a variety of unique species. I mean, I hate to be the first to come out and say it, but unless a second moon just popped into existence overnight—and I’m not saying that’s not what happened—then there’s at least a possibility that we’ve somehow—”

  Dale made him jump when he suddenly pressed an index finger to the side of one nostril, bent slightly at the waist, and jettisoned a great rope of snot from the other. The glob cartwheeled through the air to stick to the trunk of a tree. He smeared his bare arm beneath his nose, sniffed, and kept right on hiking.

  It was hard to believe that another human being in the same unfathomable circumstances could appear as unaffected as though he were tramping through his own logging woods back in Arkansas. Nate was awed by this incongruity. Dale’s reticence was bound to be contagious, because you could only talk to a snot-covered tree for so long before falling into silence yourself. Nate had been quietly hoping that their search would turn up more than just water. He was hoping for new people, other survivors, maybe a big group of them who’d fared better. Not that he disliked Dale, or his group. They just seemed to be struggling. There was a whole lot of tension back in that camp, and he wasn’t exactly looking forward to spending the night in their cloud of funk.

  He wasn’t sure what to make of John’s tale. The mutilated hijacker had seemed just a little out of his head, expressing far more worry over those other people with whom he’d run afoul than the more obvious threats of the howlers, dehydration, starvation, or lack of medical treatment for his injuries. By Nate’s estimation, any chance of there being other people on this island was nothing but a good thing. A local tribe of indigenous people would have all of the knowledge and survival skills that the castaways were lacking. If there really were natives, then they could be their salvation. The nutcase who’d fired a shot at them had screwed-up royally, that much could not be denied. However, there was no doubt in Nate’s mind that if the opportunity presented itself, he could lead a peaceful negotiation into some sort of a truce with them, but he’d probably have to gag Dale and Donovan before doing so.

  “When do you think we’ll find water?” Peanut asked.

  Dale stopped. He turned to the boy, as if this new subject matter actually had some value. “The jungle critters who made this trail are taking us on the most direct route to it,
little buddy.” He pointed through the trees at the jagged mountain ridge that loomed ahead. “See the way them peaks are kind of corrugated? Like an old sheet of tin roofing?”

  Peanut frowned. “Yeah.”

  “Well, them furrows were all carved out by water. Fresh water, from the sky. We’re headed for that deepest one, right-smack in the middle where all them other little ones converge. You follow a game trail that’s aimed for the deepest hollow, then I guarantee you’ll find yourself some water.”

  “Cool.”

  “Trouble is, we ain’t going to be making this hike back and forth every day.”

  “What do you mean?” Nate asked.

  Dale shook his head. “Well, it makes a whole lot more sense to me to move our camp right to the water, than to keep hauling water back to camp. You want this to be your job, starting tomorrow?”

  “No, I guess not.”

  “See what I’m saying? There ain’t enough manpower to keep firewood stocked, to haul water, and hell, we ain’t even started to talk about building a shelter, a big fence, and learn to start hunting and trapping …”

  “I’m ready to start hunting,” Peanut said. “I want to kill a howler, for Alex.”

  “Wait a minute. So, you’re in this for the long haul?” Nate said. “I mean, you’re talking about building a permanent fort way back there in the jungle. There’s not going to be any hope of being spotted by a ship or a plane back in there, and that pretty much drops our chances of getting rescued down to zero.”

  Dale looked Nate up and down. “There ain’t going to be anybody left to rescue if we don’t move our camp closer to water. That’s the long and short of it.” Dale set his jaw, and resumed hiking, as though the conversation was finished.

  Nate skipped to catch up with him. “If we decide to do what you’re suggesting, then how do you propose we transport our injured clear back into those mountain valleys?”