by Elle Casey
The other two came running over. Sure enough, there were small, girl-sized footprints in the sand, leading into the trees about twenty yards down from the campfire.
“Why would she go into the trees here?” asked Jonathan, confused.
“Who knows? Maybe she was too drunk to realize what she was doing.”
That comment made Jonathan feel twice as bad as he already felt. He responded meekly, “She seemed to know what she was doing before she left.”
Kevin gave him a narrow-eyed stare. “Oh, she did, did she?”
Candi put her hand on Kevin’s arm to calm him down. “Not now, guys, we need to track her down. Can you tell which way she went?”
“Luckily, she walked through here like a wounded elephant,” said Kevin. “Look at all the broken leaves.”
“Do you think she’s wounded?” asked Candi in a worried voice.
“No, it’s just an expression. I mean, she wasn’t walking very delicately. Come on, let’s follow her path of destruction.”
They all followed Kevin single file through the trees. The route they took turned left and right indiscriminately. If Sarah had been following some sort of path, they couldn’t see it. She seemed to be wandering, not knowing where she was going, heading in the opposite direction of the treehouse.
They continued on for an hour. It was hard to walk quickly in some of the areas because the trees were so dense. Eventually it started to thin out; they could see sun coming through the canopy above. They could also hear the ocean again.
“I think we’re getting near the northern coast of the island,” said Jonathan.
Just then they stepped into a clearing, and sitting in the middle of it was a very bedraggled and tired-looking Sarah, still wearing her coconut bra top and grass skirt. The top sat on her chest, slightly askew.
“Well, there you are,” she said impatiently, standing up and brushing herself off, trying to adjust her coconut cups so they were straight. “Finally. I thought I was going to have to light a friggin’ signal fire or something.” She walked over to meet them at the edge of the clearing.
Jonathan stepped over to stand in front of her. “Are you okay?” He searched her face for clues of her mood.
Sarah reached up and stroked his cheek, then slapped it lightly. “Fell asleep, didn’t ya?”
Jonathan ducked his head in shame. “Yes, I did, I’m so sorry, Sarah. I left you out here alone. I don’t know what to say, but I totally understand if you hate me right now.” His heart squeezed in his chest at the idea of her not wanting him anymore.
“No, I don’t hate you. You and I both had too much to drink, and we have bigger problems to worry about right now, anyway.”
“What do you mean?” asked Kevin, looking over at Jonathan with an expression that said he wasn’t going to let him off as easy as Sarah had.
“Follow me, peeps. You are not going to believe the shit I found.”
CHAPTER TWELVE
Interlopers
Sarah led them through the trees until they reached an area about thirty yards wide that seemed to be cut into the jungle with a giant cookie-cutter. There were no tall trees here. The entire squared-off area was filled with plants, none of which were more than five feet tall. They also weren’t palms or guavas or any of the other plants and trees they were used to seeing on the island.
Sarah held out her arms, presenting the plants with a flourish of her arms. “Voilà!” She stood there silently waiting for someone to make the connection.
No one said anything. They just looked at the plants, then back at her.
She tried again, throwing her arms out more theatrically. “Voilà!”
Then she saw Kevin’s eyes nearly bulge out of his head. “Holy shit. Is this what I think it is?”
“Yes, hello, finally the light bulb comes on,” said Sarah sarcastically.
Jonathan and Candi stood there with their light bulbs still off. “I don’t get it,” said Jonathan. “It’s a field of short plants.”
Kevin smiled. “Look a little closer, Wikipedia guy, see if those plants look familiar to you at all.”
Jonathan moved closer and took one of the large, seven-pointed leaves in his hand. “These look like ... ”
He didn’t finish. He just turned to look at Sarah and Kevin. “Are these what I think they are?”
“What?!” yelled Candi. “Why am I the only one who doesn’t get what’s going on here?” She looked from Jonathan to Sarah to Kevin. All of them were just staring at her expectantly. “What? Is this like alien landing fields or something? Crop circles or whatever? What?! Tell me!”
Kevin put his hand on her shoulder. “Babe, this is a giant field of marijuana.”
“Yeah, and there’s more,” said Sarah, all seriousness now. “It has watering pipe things everywhere and just farther that way is some camping equipment.”
Candi was finally putting all the pieces together. She put her hand up to her mouth and whispered, “Oh my god ... oh my god ... there are people here.” Then she started jumping up and down, “THERE ARE PEOPLE HERE!!” She was smiling and laughing, beside herself with excitement. “We’re going to be rescued!”
The others just stood there, looking serious. They weren’t excited at all.
“Why aren’t you excited about this?” She stopped jumping and stood there, looking confused again and a little bit deflated. “Guys, what’s wrong? Aren’t we going to be rescued now? Isn’t this a good thing?”
Sarah went over and put her arm around Candi’s waist. “That’s what I thought when I first saw everything. I was like, ‘Yay! We’re going home!’ – but then I realized that the people who planted these drugs are criminals ... and these criminals probably wouldn’t be very happy about a group of kids, who are already assumed to be dead, knowing about their massively illegal operation here.” Sarah waited a second for what she said to sink into Candi’s brain before continuing. “So we are not going to be rescued by these guys. We are probably going to be killed by these guys, unless we can come up with some kind of plan.”
Tears sprang into Candi’s eyes. “Oh, my god ... killed? We’re going to be murdered?” She looked around her in fear, suddenly whispering, “Are they here on the island now?”
Kevin glared at his sister. “You didn’t need to be that harsh, Sarah.”
“Well, sorry, but it’s true. And no, they’re not here now, otherwise I’d already be dead. I found this crap as soon as the sun came up, and I’ve been freaking out about it ever since. You’ve only had to freak out about it for five minutes. Talk to me at one o’clock, and we’ll see where you are with it.”
Jonathan held his hands up. “Okay guys, this is not the time to fight. We need to assess the situation and figure out what we can do. We’re a team; we can figure something out, I know we can. We didn’t come all this way to give up now.”
“Jonathan’s right,” agreed Kevin. “Let’s look around and see if we can gather some intel from what we see here and at that campsite Sarah mentioned.”
They all spread out, looking to see if they could find any other trails, footprints, or signs of the interlopers who had planted the pot. Their search turned up nothing helpful.
“Sarah, why don’t you show us the campsite you found,” suggested Kevin.
They walked for about five minutes until they reached the spot. There was a tent, some pots, and a tarp.
Candi stared at the pots enviously. “I don’t suppose I can take any of these things, can I?” she asked.
“No,” said Jonathan. “We have to erase all evidence of our presence here. We don’t want them finding out about us and hunting us down. Our treehouse is hidden, but it wouldn’t be too hard to find. We’ve practically cut paths leading from the south side of the island right to it.”
“I think the one thing we have to do right away is figure out where they’re landing on the beach – where they park their boat. Then we can spy on them when they come,” said Kevin.
“I agree
,” said Sarah.
“Okay, Kevin, lead the way.”
***
Kevin headed off in the direction of the west coast of the island, realizing quickly how close they had actually come to this spot the day they had gone out into the trees to explore and found the guavas. He was kind of glad they hadn’t found the drugs until now. They would have never had such a fun prom night if they had known about this threat to their lives.
They easily found the place where the drug dealers, as they were now calling them, anchored their boat. There was a protected cove not five minutes from the pot plants, and the beach held evidence of old campfires.
“Now what?” asked Candi.
“Now we go back and put our plan together,” answered Jonathan. “We have to stop off at the prom beach to clean up our stuff there. That area would be very easy to see from the water. I’m not sure what side they approach the island from, but we can’t assume anything. We don’t even know where this island is on a map, so we don’t know if these guys are coming from the north, south, east, west ... .” He stopped for a second and then continued with a frustrated look on his face. “There are just too many variables to accurately estimate anything; it’s making me crazy.”
Kevin grabbed a few palm fronds from a nearby pile. “Take one of these, each of you. Use it to wipe our footprints away, if you see any.”
They all walked together in a line back to where they had come from, doing their best to swish palm fronds around the ground, erasing their footprints and hiding the evidence that anyone had been there. They broke some branches in other areas around the pot grove, in case someone saw the other ones, hoping maybe it would throw the criminals off the trail of where they had originally entered the area.
They got to the prom beach after lunchtime and spent an hour cleaning it up. They stowed the bamboo poles deep in the trees and buried the campfire leftovers.
“What are we going to do about the lifeboat?” asked Candi.
They all looked out to the water where they had left it weeks before. Only the tip of the bow was still visible above the beach’s surface. The ocean, tides and sand had nearly finished claiming it as their own.
“I don’t think we need to do anything, the sand will continue to cover it. Within two weeks it will be completely buried and invisible,” said Jonathan.
They went back to the treehouse. A somber mood hovered over their heads, turning the rest of the day into one filled with anxiety and fear. Each was lost in thought, worried that they might have gone through all of this, only to lose each other at the hands of modern day pirates.
***
Candi, unable to take the stress anymore and needing to clear her head, went fishing. She came back with two decent sized fish. She hung them on the tree and stowed her spears in the workshop, calling out to everyone as she reached the bottom of the ladder.
“Hey, guys, I want to talk to all of you for a second. I’m coming up.”
She climbed the ladder to the treehouse, finding them all sitting at the table together.
“I was thinking about our situation, and I think I came up with an idea.”
“We were just talking about that, but we couldn’t come up with one that didn’t involve death,” said Sarah morosely.
Candi sat down and began to outline her plan.
“When these drug dealers come to the island, they’re either going to come just to check on their plants, or they’re going to come to harvest them. Either way, it’s going to be more than one guy probably, maybe even several, and they’re obviously going to come by boat; so, maybe when they come, we can hide at the edge of the trees, and when they’re in the forest with the plants, we can swim out and get on their boat radio and call for help.”
They mulled her idea over in their heads for a minute. Sarah was the first one to speak. “Why don’t we just steal the boat?”
“Yeah, I say we steal the boat and get the hell outta here,” said Kevin.
“Boat radio, eh? Hmmm,” said Jonathan.
“Well, I thought about stealing the boat, but then I realized: one, we don’t know how to drive a boat; and two, even if we could drive it, we have no idea where we are, so we won’t know where to point the damn thing. We could try to rescue ourselves and end up going towards Africa. It’ll probably be a powerboat that’ll just run out of gas before we get anywhere, anyway. And I don’t know about you guys, but I don’t want to die out in the middle of the ocean.” She thought about it for a second and then added, “Gee, I hope it’s a powerboat because I have no idea how to sail.”
“What you’re saying makes sense, but what if there are guys who stay on the boat?” asked Kevin.
“Well, if that happens, we’re screwed. We need to get to the radio and do it without them seeing us, because once they know we’re here, we’re dead. They’ll hunt us down and find us ... and then, well, you know what happens next.”
They all sat there letting her words sink in. Now all of Jonathan’s dire warnings of pirates didn’t sound so crazy. These guys might not officially be called pirates, but it was the same concept.
“You know, Pirates of the Caribbean is very misleading,” said Sarah angrily. “I saw those pirates as being all sexy and funny ... I was rooting for them; but they were criminals, and they killed people and stole crap! Why was I rooting for the bad guys?”
Jonathan laughed. “That’s Hollywood for ya. They can convince us to do anything, I think. I was a big Jack Sparrow fan too.”
“Yeah, well I’d like to have a word or two with Johnny Depp, that’s all I have to say,” grumbled Sarah.
“So what’s the deal then, what’s our plan?” asked Kevin. “Jonathan?”
“Well, if I hear you all correctly, we’ve agreed to keep our eyes out for the bad guys to come. We wait for the boat to anchor. Then one of us swims out to the boat and gets on board to use the radio and call for help.”
“Yes,” joined in Candi, “and when we get on the radio, we say who we are and explain that the night of the ship sinking there were huge rogue waves that pushed us very far away and so they need to search outside the normal area. And we tell them that the island is shaped like a giant peanut with rocks on the south side.”
“Anything else?”
“Yes,” said Sarah, “tell them there are drug dealers here and to hurry the hell up and rescue us.”
Kevin and Jonathan nodded at each other. Kevin added, “I suggest we add long distance swimming and holding our breath under water training to our morning exercises.”
“Agreed,” said Candi.
“Fine,” sighed Sarah.
***
Kevin took charge of their new exercise regimen, which included not only swimming over and under water, but also tree climbing. They all agreed that the best place to hide when they were watching out for the bad guys was up in a tree. They took shifts every day, watching the beach where they thought the drug dealers had probably anchored their boat before. Whoever saw the boat on their watch was supposed to run back and tell the others, putting their radio contact plan into action.
“You guys are doing great,” said Kevin, treading water next to Jonathan and Candi. “That was a full two minutes for you, Candi. Jonathan, you did two minutes and twenty seconds.”
“Holy crap, Jonathan, I didn’t know a person could hold their breath for that long,” said Candi, still a little breathless from the strain of not breathing and then treading water for so long.
“We need to be able to tread water for at least twenty minutes,” said Kevin.
“What?!” complained Candi, “I can barely do it for ten!”
“It’s just a matter of training, Candi, you can do it,” encouraged Jonathan.
“Let’s go back now, I have to go relieve Sarah anyway,” said Kevin. Even he was a little tired of treading water for so long. He had thought before they started this that he was in the best shape possible. Now he realized there was always room for improvement.
They swam bac
k to the beach, each of them practicing cutting a clean line through the water with a freestyle stroke and then swimming underwater making no surface disturbance. They were getting pretty good.
***
While Kevin headed off to relieve Sarah, Jonathan and Candi cleaned themselves off and prepared for lunch.
“They haven’t come in the three weeks we’ve been preparing,” said Candi. “Do you think they’re coming at all?”
“Yes. I don’t think drug dealers go to the trouble of putting in all those plants and installing an irrigation system just to walk away and leave all that money in the ground.”
Candi sighed. “I know, I was just hoping you would say something else.”
Jonathan chuckled. “Just because I say it, doesn’t make it true.”
“Yes it does,” argued Candi. “You’re smart and you tell the truth. What you say always comes true.”
She was feeling sorry for herself – for all of them. She was in love with Kevin, and she knew he was in love with her too. Knowing that they were in mortal danger had caused them to come together much quicker than they probably would have in another time and place. They were even sharing a room now, while Jonathan and Sarah shared the other. Candi couldn’t imagine what she would do if something happened to Kevin – or Sarah or Jonathan for that matter.
Sometimes she and Kevin lay awake at night talking about it, and about their lives together. He was even more worried about her than she was about him. He told her that he had an overwhelming need to protect her that was instinctual. If she didn’t stop him, he’d serve his own guard duty and then go with her while she served hers, getting almost no sleep. She had to remind him over and over that they needed him well-rested and ready to fight if necessary.
Jonathan put down the cups he was carrying. “Listen, Candi ... we are going to get out of this. We are going to win, I promise.” He went over to her and hugged her close. She hugged him back fiercely.
Just then, Sarah came crashing through the trees. “They’re here!” she yelled in a frantic voice. She stopped at the campfire ring, bent over trying to catch her breath.
