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By the time I made it to the huddle of huts, I was scratched and bruised from forcing my way through bushes and climbing over the rough trunks of fallen palms. I was so busy looking down at my bleeding shins and wondering if I should have detoured past the villa where my clothes were, that I almost didn’t notice the huts until I was upon them.
Or rather, the hut. Because there was only one left, and even that one was barely standing.
The one-to-one booth and the rec room had both simply gone—there was nothing left apart from the rectangular concrete foundation slabs and, far across the clearing, the wicker chair wedged into the leaves of a banana tree, like some surreal fruit.
The kitchen had lost two walls and part of the roof. The remaining walls and roof section had folded in on itself, like a cardboard box that someone had stamped on. All around the clearing were scattered boxes of food, exploded bags of snacks, and big square bottles of water—the five-liter kind. And in the center, a small patch of rust red that had soaked into the sand, and which I didn’t remember from the previous day.
As I stood there, looking at the devastation, a bright green snake leisurely unwound itself from the shade of a box of cookies and slithered unhurriedly across the clearing. I watched it go, fighting back my revulsion, and then forced my attention back to the one hut that was still standing—the radio shack. Part of the roof had been ripped off, and the huge hole in the window, where the coconut had come barrelling through, looked even more shocking than it had last night—but it was still there. I didn’t recall seeing a first aid kit in there, but if it had been stored in one of the other huts, it was probably long gone, so I hurried across the clearing, pushing thoughts of the green snake out of my head, and opened the door.
Inside, everything was covered in splinters of glass and wood from the shattered window, but the radio was still there, and the LED was still gleaming in the dim light. Although I was conscious that Santana and Dan were waiting for me, I picked it up and pressed the button on the receiver.
“Hello?” I said, experimentally. “Hello? Is anyone out there?”
I let go, and just as last night, there was a brief crackle, but no response. I sighed. Fuck. Maybe people were listening but not coming in because they didn’t recognize me. What were you supposed to say in these situations? Mayday? Or was that only for ships? At this point I didn’t really care.
I pressed the button again.
“This is an emergency Mayday call. We are stranded on an island in the Indian Ocean after the storm last night.” Well no shit, anyone listening would be in the Indian Ocean, so that wasn’t exactly very helpful. I tried to think how to describe our position more accurately. “I don’t have any coordinates, but we flew into Jakarta and sailed southwest on a yacht called Over Easy. The yacht is gone and we have no idea what’s happened to it.” What else. Something to make them realize our plight maybe? I had no idea if the others were still alive, but it seemed likely that Santana and Romi weren’t the only casualties after last night. “Several of our group are seriously injured and need medical help. I don’t know how long the battery on this radio will last, but if anyone can hear me, please send help. I repeat, this is an emergency Mayday call for medical assistance.”
I let the button go. Again it crackled, and again, nothing else happened.
“Can anyone hear me?” I said, fighting to keep the desperation out of my voice. I wanted to scream down the receiver—get the fuck out here, people are dying! But screaming wouldn’t bring help any faster, and losing control now would be the worst thing I could do. All my life I had been the logical, analytical person in any group, the one who didn’t shriek at the sight of a maggot in her apple, who didn’t cry when my professor told me my paper wasn’t up to scratch. Even as a little girl I’d been the person who carried the daddy longlegs out of the room when my mum was standing on the sofa with her hands over her hair, holding the fluttering thing gently in my cupped hands and telling myself, it’s fine, it’s just a crane fly, tipula paludosa, they don’t bite or sting and they don’t have any transmissible diseases. No. I was the person who kept it together and sorted everything the fuck out. That was my role. That was who I was. And I was not about to lose it now. “Can anyone help? Over?”
I waited. Nothing. Nothing. Fuck.
Knowing I couldn’t afford to play around with it any longer, I let the receiver drop, and with a last look around the cabin, I went back out into the glare of the sun, which was beginning to feel even hotter than yesterday, in spite of the vestiges of the storm winds, still blowing off the sea.
There was no first aid kit in the kitchen, or not that I could find, but I picked up one of the big water bottles, the package of Oreos that had split, and were attracting a small crowd of excited ants, a roll of janitorial paper—the blue kind that’s used for drying your hands in industrial kitchens—and, almost as an afterthought, a roll of duct tape that I tripped over on my way out of the hut. It wasn’t exactly perfect, but it would do to tape the wound shut until we could get Santana to an actual doctor.
I was almost across the clearing when something attracted my attention. It was the sound of buzzing flies, coming from a thicket of bushes. There was something ominous about the noise, and I was half afraid of what I might find, but I stepped off the path, towards the sound, pushing aside the leaves as I went.
The hum was getting louder, but it wasn’t until I pushed aside the last frond of banana leaves that I saw what was making it—and when I did, I dropped what I was carrying, and covered my nose and mouth, my shocked cry escaping through my fingers.
There was a body lying under the bushes, the flies already swarming, and the face was one that I recognized, though I didn’t know the woman’s name. It was one of the producers from the day before, and her head had been cracked like an egg. There was blood everywhere. She had evidently stumbled through the bushes before collapsing and bleeding out.
So there had been a staff member left on the island, just as Camille had promised. I shut my eyes, counting to ten in my head, trying not to give way to the panic and revulsion that was pulsing through me. Instead, I tried to piece together what had happened. She’d been hit by some flying object, maybe a coconut, that much was obvious. But had she been dead before I even arrived at the radio hut? Or had she been stumbling through the storm in the opposite direction, even as I was trying to find her?
It was impossible to know, but thinking back to the rumpled bed and cold mattress I guessed that she’d probably been the first casualty of the storm—dead before I even left the water villa. Perhaps she’d been trying to make it to the radio shack and had been hit by some storm debris, then had stumbled blindly through the clearing and into the undergrowth to die.
I opened my eyes, forced myself to look at her face one more time, making sure that she was really dead, and then I turned. There was nothing I could do for her. It was the living who needed help now, and I had to get back.
BACK AT THE villa, I found Santana lying with her eyes closed and looking even worse, blue-lipped and with her hair stuck to her sweating forehead.
“Thank fuck,” Dan said as soon as I pulled open the door. “What took you so long?”
“I came as fast as I could,” I said. I let the water thud to the floor, followed by the kitchen paper. The face of the dead producer kept flashing in front of my eyes, but now wasn’t the time to bring it up. We had enough to deal with here. “Do you have anything sharp, Dan?”
“Sharp?” Dan looked blank.
“I’ve got some spare syringes,” Santana said. Her voice was croaky and faint, but she opened her eyes and propped herself on her elbow. Then her gaze alighted on the cookies I was holding. “Oh my God, Oreos, can I have some? My blood sugar is really low.”
“Of course.” I pushed them over to her, cursing the fact that I hadn’t looked for soda or anything faster-acting. “I think a syringe will be too small, I was thinking more like a ballpoint pen, or a pocketknife.”
“I’ve got a pen,” Dan volunteered. Digging in his pocket, he brought out a metal-tipped Biro with a fine point. I nodded.
“Okay, well when you’ve got a bit of sugar in your system, come through to the bathroom, Santana, and we’ll make a start. I warn you, it’s going to hurt.”
“I’m ready,” Santana said through a mouthful of crumbs. She swallowed, with an effort. “And it hurts like a bastard now, so I doubt you’ll make it any worse.” She hauled herself upright with a sickly smile and followed me into the bathroom.
