Shipwreck

by Gordon Korman

  He could tell he wasn’t the only one. By the next day, Will had virtually stopped talking. He lay on his side under the damp sail, his parched lips slightly apart, drifting in and out of a light doze. If anyone spoke to him, he only answered about half the time. More often than not, his replies made no sense at all.

  When Ian informed Will that it was his turn for shark-bait position, he was told, “You know, Lyssa came in second in chess club, but she lost to Seth Birnbaum in the final.”

  By unspoken agreement, Luke, Ian, and Charla stopped asking Will to take his turn dangling in the ocean. One thing was obvious: If they spent much more time lost at sea, Will was not going to survive.

  From the start, Charla had stubbornly insisted on exercising, doing aquatics, and taking short swims during her shark-bait time. Now she hung off the edge of the raft, gazing at the horizon with vacant eyes and never making an unnecessary move.

  Of the four of them, only Ian seemed to have the energy to talk. He filled the endless hours with a tedious monologue of every single detail he knew about the ocean. And he knew plenty.

  “Hey, Ian,” mumbled Luke listlessly. “Don’t you think it’s time to close up the Encyclopedia Boronica and give us all a break?”

  The boy flushed redder than his harsh sun- and wind-burn. “I talk too much,” he said sadly. “I’m boring.”

  “I was just kidding.” Luke was instantly sorry. “If it wasn’t for you and the Discovery Channel, we’d be dead already. Talk all you like.”

  “I shouldn’t,” Ian conceded. “When you talk, the moisture inside your mouth evaporates, and you get dehydrated faster.”

  “Man,” sighed Luke, “I’d give anything for a Gameboy. Or even a lousy deck of cards.”

  “I’d settle for a piece of string,” Charla put in. “I used to know how to do Cat’s Cradle.”

  “A lot of people don’t know that blue whales are bigger than sperm whales.” Ian took up his lecture. “They said on TV once that a blue whale’s tongue weighs as much as an elephant.”

  “Ian — ” Luke groaned.

  “Seriously,” the boy continued earnestly. “Look at that one over there. It must be thirty yards long.”

  Luke sat up in sudden surprise. “What one over where?”

  “The whale,” Ian insisted. “He’s spouting water twenty feet high.”

  Luke stared. Before them the Pacific Ocean stretched, blue-gray and unbroken, to the horizon. There was no whale. He exchanged a worried glance with Charla and turned back to the younger boy.

  “In that show about shipwrecks,” he asked carefully, “what were the warning signs? I mean, how do you know when you’re not going to make it?”

  “Slow, lazy behavior,” Ian replied. “Too much sleeping. Followed by hallucinations — people see things that aren’t really there.” He pointed. “Look — he’s spouting again.”

  Sun.

  Luke was aware of its harsh glare even through closed eyes. He could feel the pain of sunburn on his face and arms.

  But no. This wasn’t right. There was supposed to be protection. Something white. A large sheet — a sail? Where was his corner?

  He spoke to the others. Cover me up, here. I’m getting fried. Funny — why couldn’t he hear his own voice? Come on, guys. This time he held his hand to his mouth. His lips weren’t moving either. His brain was talking, but it didn’t seem to be connected to his tongue.

  He had been in shark-bait position for two — three — how many days now? He would have loved to stretch out and sleep.

  Hey, Charla, he tried to say. Your turn.

  Was she ignoring him? No, his mouth was still not working. He couldn’t expect people to read his mind — especially not unconscious people. And they were. All three of them.

  Will had been first, even before their second rainstorm. They’d forced water down his throat, but it hadn’t revived him. And anyway, Ian and Charla had gone down the very next day. Poor Ian. None of them deserved this, but the little kid was the most innocent of them all, guilty of nothing more than watching too much TV. Now here he lay, with a bird perched on his head.

  A bird?

  No, that couldn’t be right. Luke’s eyes were playing tricks on him again. There were no birds out here in the open ocean. They had to stay within flying range of land.

  He’d been having a lot of hallucinations. Like a couple of hours ago — days ago? — when he’d had a very clear memory of Reese stashing that gun in his locker. Crazy! How could he remember what he hadn’t seen? Of course, he knew it had been Reese, even though the jerk denied it. So Luke’s hazy mind had put together what must have happened and constructed a fake memory out of it.

  It was not very different from Ian’s whale — the beginning of the end.

  It was a terrible end, Luke decided, because your last thought is the one where you realize you’re losing your mind.

  What was this? His body wriggled with revulsion as a long slimy shape attacked and wrapped itself around his neck. He let go of the raft and tore at it, ripping it to pieces. An eel? The tentacle of a giant squid? Through the fog of his confusion, he struggled to focus on what was in his hands.

  Seaweed. Another hallucination. There was no seaweed in the open ocean either.

  Splashing wildly, he managed to regain his grip on the raft. He had no idea why he was struggling so hard to preserve his doomed life a few extra minutes. What was the point? They were all dead, courtesy of Rat-face.

  Rat-face — what a waste of a thought when there weren’t many thoughts left.

  Luke forced the mate’s picture out of his brain. But its replacement image was too painful — a fleeting glimpse of his parents, who would mourn him. He closed his eyes tightly, but they were still there.

  Make this stop! he tried to exclaim.

  And when he opened his eyes again, he saw the fin.

  Another hallucination?

  Maybe, but this one struck him right in the ribs.

  Shark! He tried to sound the warning, but the technical difficulties between his brain and his mouth still existed.

  The raft bobbed away from the fin. Luke held his breath. The long shape in the water followed.

  Another bump! Luke braced himself for the ripping, tearing bite that was to come next. But when he looked down, he saw the bottle-nosed snout of a dolphin.

  This time it nudged the raft, and Luke was pulled along. He remembered somewhere in Ian’s rambling lecture stories of dolphins pushing drowning sailors to safety. Surely this was the final hallucination, the last desperate brain impulses of a dying mind. He was amazed at how vivid it was — the white water roaring around him, the pounding of surf, the sudden thump of his dangling feet onto shallow sandy bottom.

  Instinct took over — instinct and a frantic desire to die on dry land. Luke pushed the raft with every ounce of strength that remained in his exhausted body — kept on pushing, even when the cabin top dug into the beach and would move no more.

  It was a drenching rain, a downpour, a deluge. As Luke slept, he dreamed that hundreds of tiny jackhammers were working on his face. The water quickly puddled up in his eye sockets and in the hollows on both sides of his nose. The trickle found his lips.

  Water. Real water. Drinking water.

  He sat bolt upright and stared around him in confusion. Palm trees. Jungle. A sandy beach.

  He leaped up too fast, toppling over and landing in the surf. As he lay there in the shallows, an amazing sight met his eyes. The cabin top was jammed into the heavy sand just above the tide line. Will, Charla, and Ian lay upon it, still unconscious. Between Ian and Charla sat the rain hat, propped up by their bodies and full to overflowing with freshwater.

  Luke crawled through the surf, bent over the raft, and stuck his head into the hat, drinking greedily. Nothing had ever tasted better. He could have happily remained there, draining the hat dry. It took a gigantic effort to pull himself away.

  Carefully, like he was handling nitro, he picked up the hat and held
it to Will’s cracked lips.

  Luke watched the precious water roll down Will’s chin. Finally, a tiny amount managed to find its way into his mouth. It dribbled down the back of his throat; he choked suddenly. Poor Will still couldn’t keep anything down.

  He moved on to Charla. He propped her up on the sand and began by wetting her lips with water from his finger. The girl opened her eyes and her mouth at the same time.

  “Where — ?”

  “Drink,” Luke interrupted.

  And she did, gulping so deeply that she ended up choking too, although not a drop was wasted.

  The two attended to Ian. The younger boy smacked his lips at the first taste. Then he swallowed and kept on swallowing. He sat up, grabbed the hat, and chug-a-lugged.

  In the spot where he had been lying, the raft still said NIX.

  “Save some for Will,” ordered Luke.

  Charla looked worried, still disoriented. “I don’t know,” she said nervously. “Will’s really messed up. He hasn’t moved in days.”

  Luke spilled water on Will’s upturned face and forced some past the parched lips. The boy choked again, but this time the water stayed down. Luke dropped to his knees and gently slapped Will’s cheeks. “Come on, Will. Join the party.”

  No response.

  All three hunkered down and tried everything they could think of to rouse their friend. No amount of shaking, pinching, chafing, and massaging had any effect.

  “He’s definitely alive,” concluded Ian, “but there’s no telling when he’ll snap out of it. It could be five minutes from now; it could be never.” He flushed at Luke’s angry look and explained, “I saw it on the Learning Channel.”

  Charla looked around. “What is this place?”

  “Who cares?” Luke replied. “It isn’t the raft. It’s land, and that’s all that matters.”

  “It must be an island,” mused Ian. “There’s no way we could have drifted far enough to reach continental land. This is a miracle! To hit an island in this part of the Pacific is as unlikely as two bullets striking each other head-on. We lucked out.”

  “Luck had nothing to do with it,” said Luke. “It was that dolphin.”

  They stared at him. “Dolphin?” repeated Charla.

  “You must have seen it,” Luke insisted. “It pushed us in to the island. Just like you told us, Ian. Dolphins try to help people. This one saved our lives.”

  “You must have been hallucinating,” Ian said kindly. “There wasn’t any dolphin. A big wind blew us here. Don’t you remember? One minute we were drifting, and the next we were being carried along by a hot wind. It felt sort of like the dryer in a car wash.”

  “You’re both crazy!” exclaimed Charla. “Nothing brought us here. We swam in. We lined up along the raft and kicked like crazy. When I close my eyes, I can still see us doing it.”

  They stared at one another, bewildered, as the rain beat down.

  Ian seemed to choose his words very carefully. “I think maybe we’re all right — inside our minds.”

  By that time, the rubber hat was full again. Charla drank some more and passed it around.

  Luke raised it like a champagne glass. “To us, man! I can’t believe we made it!” His face fell suddenly. “And to those who didn’t make it.”

  It was a painful thought, one that packed the wallop of a sledgehammer. But the castaways had more pressing problems — the need for food, the need for shelter, the need to help their unconscious friend. So they set aside their grieving and made plans to explore the island that had risen from the sea to save their lives.

  GORDAN KORMAN is the author of The Hypnotists, and six books featuring Griffin Bing and his friends: Swindle, Zoobreak, Framed, Showoff, Hideout, and Jackpot. His other books include This Can’t Be Happening at Macdonald Hall (published when he was fourteen); The Toilet Paper Tigers; Radio Fifth Grade; the trilogies Island, Everest, Dive, Kidnapped, and Titanic; and the series On the Run. He lives in New York with his family and can be found on the web at www.gordonkorman.com.

  Copyright © 2001 by Gordon Korman.

  All rights reserved. Published by Scholastic Inc.

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  First Scholastic printing, June 2001

  Photography: Kelly La Duke

  Cover design: Ursula S. Albano

  e-ISBN 978-0-545-63074-0

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