September 23, 2013
"Come on, get up! Get up before the ship sinks!"
A man had bellowed in the dark over the din of loud knocking. There are muted sounds of splashing and roaring.
" . . . What the fuck . . . ?"
" . . . I'll get it, I'll get it, since I'm down here . . . "
A rustling of cloth is heard, followed by the sound of bare feet slapping against a bare floor. A click of a switch and a lightbulb brightens to reveal a small room no bigger than a walk-in closet that consists of a bunk bed, a pair of closets, and a porthole window with a white curtain pulled across it. The person who turned the light on via switch next to the door is a girl in her late teens as she winces at the sudden brightness. She is White with long strikingly red hair and blue eyes. And as is typical of redheads, she is pale. She is wearing pyjamas consisting of thin cotton yellow pants with blue flower prints, and a matching long-sleeved top. In the top bunk is another girl, now sitting up groggily as she rubs the side of her face, who is also White but with a slightly darker complexion, grey eyes, and long black wavy hair parted in the middle.
"Everyone up. Now!" That man shouted outside once again as he runs up and down thumping on more doors.
The redhead opens the door and peeks out into a long narrow hallway with various other young people emerging with bewildered but groggy looks. All of them are dressed in close-fitting nightwear.
"A storm just came up out of nowhere!" That man shouted from down the hallway. He is White with long light brown hair fasten into a pony tail and green eyes shielded behind aviator glasses. "You were all warned about something like this! Come on, get dressed and get to the main hall!" He bellowed even louder and more desperately.
They rush back inside. Before taking this journey, they were instructed that whenever they go to bed, they are to always dress in close-fitting nightwear so that they can quickly put on their storm gear if ever an emergency should arise during the night.
"And it was such a beautiful day today!" the redhead fumed as she dresses in dark green waders that go up to her chest with straps and a bright yellow vinyl hooded jacket. She also puts on her LCD watch.
"Linda, did you honest believe that we were always going to have clear days and nights out over the sea for the rest of our semester?" Her dark-haired roommate said sarcastically as she is putting on bright yellow vinyl pants, hooded jacket, and black rubber boots.
They are soon dressed and out to meet their captain, as are the rest of their shipmates. He takes a role call and everyone calls out their presence. They are university students and the boat they are on is a sailing vessel. It is part of their History curriculum at Florida University, with their professor also their captain. Early this morning, they had left from the port of Miami with a clear sky, which continued for the rest of the day as they headed into Bahamian waters. Then that storm had blown up in a matter of minutes.
"Okay. Everyone ready?" Their professor asked intently.
"Can't we just wait out the storm, Professor Parkman? We did send an emergency signal," a Black male student asked.
"He's right. It's too dangerous out there," another student piped up, an Oriental girl.
"No choice. If we don't do something, we'll sink," Parkman stated. "Now let's get to it."
They quickly scurry outside and go to work battening down the hatches. It is dangerous work as not only is there the wind, rain, and rocking to contend with, but also the large waves that wash over the boat time and again.
Linda awakens with a gasp and discovers that she is alive and floating around in the Atlantic Ocean, courtesy of her life preserver. The last thing she remembers was a massive wave washing over the ship, especially upon her.
She looks around to see that the sky is overcast and the storm has mostly blown over. She takes notice of an island that looks to be a couple of miles away. Visual distance is impossible to gauge upon the ocean or any other large body of water. She checks her watch, thankful that it is waterproof up to 200 meters and even more thankful that she had thought to put it on in the first place, to see that the time is 8:34 a.m. and that today's date is September the twenty-fourth.
Linda starts swimming, but the waders prove troublesome and knows that she will need to shed them in order to swim better, even if it means leaving them behind. The problem is that they are not hers to begin with, but her father's as he had assumed that she would return them afterwards.
With a groan, she attempts to undo her straps, but is unable to so because her life preserver and jacket are in the way, even after opening the jacket snaps. Do she dare remove her life preserver to get this done? Staying afloat will be harder, raising the possibility of drowning.
Steeling herself, she starts untying the main string to her life preserver. Since it is a bow, it is easy to undo and the life preserver floats up to her face as if about to by pried off. She discovers that maybe she doesn't need to remove her life preserver as only the main string was in the way. Linda removes her vinyl jacket and slips out of it, then fishes around for the wader's clasps and undoes them. She pushes the waders off, kicking for good measure to get them off her legs. With that done, she takes the main string and rewraps it around her body. Unable to make a bow, she instead does a double knot.
She relaxes now that she had tied it back on. She now feels guilty that she had lost her father's waders and hopes that he will understand. Then gets vexed over being unable to put her jacket back on and cannot take it with her.
Linda clears her head and focuses on that island and starts swimming. It is easier now that she had shed much of her garments, although her life preserver still interferes a bit. She knows, however, that she will need it if she is to ever reach that island. The next of her fears to surface are sharks showing up from being attracted by her splashing.
The morning passes into noon, then afternoon. The sky has since cleared, revealing the sun in all its glory. At least the water is keeping her cool, if not hydrated. She takes breaks every now and again and wonders if she will ever make it. At least the island now seems to get increasingly larger to her. It is still far though. No sharks as of yet, just other smaller fish instead. Some swim away from her while others make no haste, as if unafraid. At one point, a hawksbill turtle swims by. But thankfully no sharks.
It is late in the evening and Linda stops once again as that island looms before her. Her muscles ache and she is exhausted. Her throat feels like sand paper from thirst and she has a headache that feels like a jackhammer inside her skull. It looks as if it will be another few hundred feet before she can tread upon that shore. She sizes up that island to find that it is small, probably less than a mile wide, and like a hill. At least there are trees and vegetation on that island, meaning that there is adequate rainfall. That in turn means drinking water. On the other hand, food may be an issue.
She checks her watch to find that it is five pm. A couple of hours before sunset to be followed by brief twilight. Despite her aches and pains, she resumes her swim. Her limbs feel like lead. She looks toward the beach to see that it is a rocky one as far as she can see in either direction. Linda knows she will have a difficult time as bare feet upon hard rocky ground means pain.
Eventually, the ocean floor gets closer to her. That moment when she treads the bottom is the moment a surge of relief floods through her. It is a rocky bottom too, much to her chagrin, so she opts to remain swimming forward.
She is next startled by something scurrying away from underneath her. It is large and narrow. A shark judging by its shape, a nurse shark to be exact; not normally dangerous because they are slow-moving predators that pray only upon equally slow-moving or stationary creatures such as shelled invertebrates. They have molar-like teeth for crushing instead of biting, making them incapable of tearing flesh. Yet they can still inflict a very painful bite that will leave deep teeth marks in human skin.
The bottom gets increasingly shallower. Her fingers finally tread the rocky bottom, but she continues to go forward, crawling now as she can now get her hands firmly on the shoreline. The momentum of the waves carry her ashore until she is upon the rocky shoreline and can no longer move forward, causing the waves to splash up into her face. Linda repositions herself and sits upon the rocky shore, dreading what is to come next. In the meantime, she reaches up and starts to untie the strings of her life preserver. Between the wetness of the strings, her exhaustion, and the double knot that she tied in the main string, it proves a difficult task. But she manages to do so and slip it off over her head and throw it ahead of herself where it lands a few feet away.
Linda next leans her head back while slicking her hair back with her hands. She looks around at the canopy of trees, wondering how she is going to make her way through all that. She needs a drink badly. With all this vegetation, there must be a stream around here somewhere.
She finally forces herself to stand and winces with pain with a gasp as her soft feet press against the hard rocky ground. She knows that in order to survive, she will need to bear this pain. It is a torment that causes her to make a soft gasping ouch with each step, made all the worse by her general tiredness and soreness. She checks the time to see that it is now five thirty-two.
In much pain and now dragging her life preserver, she shambles down the shoreline, looking for a source of freshwater to drink. Birds can be heard through the forest and so far the beach is a rocky one. No sign of freshwater yet.
It is close to sunset when she finally comes upon a stream several inches wide and roughly half as deep. She gets down upon her knees, wincing at the pain of the rocks against her flesh and bones as she plunges her hands into the cool stream. She lifts her cupped hands full of water to her mouth, slurps deeply, and drops them with a sigh of tremendous relief feeling revitalized once again.
Repositioning herself to sit upon her buttocks so as to be less painful, she drops her hands in and scoops up more water to drink. She repeats it again.
And again. And again. And again . . .
By the time she finally finishes, her stomach is full of water. She groans from the feeling of nausea and hopes not to vomit. At least she doesn't feel thirsty anymore. Linda looks up to where that stream is flowing from, noticing that there is a wide path through those trees. That path was not made by that stream.
She gets back up, wincing at the pain of the rocks and decides to walk up it to discover that it seems to be a trail. Like the shoreline, the trail is also rocky. She is soon led to a large single story building made of concrete. The stream runs off from the low hill behind and near it. The door and windows are still intact, though vegetation grows around it; meaning that while this place wasn't vandalized, it has not been lived in for a very long time. Linda walks up to the door and tries the knob to find that it is not locked. It would have been irrelevant for this place.
Before entering, she looks down and fingers her soaking wet pyjamas and wonders if to really take them off? There's no one around and by the looks of this place, nobody had ever been around for a long time. With a sigh, she peels off her pyjamas, revealing that she is not wearing anything else underneath. She feels so vulnerable now and wants to put them back on.
As Linda fights with her modesty, she wrings out her pyjamas then decides to hang them up somewhere out here to dry. She doesn't think that anything could come along and take them. After locating a tree with an adequate branch, she throws them over it. Her life preserver she ties next to it. She rubs her arms and feels as if any second now, a man or even a group of men will come walking up that trail.
She turns around and opens the door, the hinges creak with rust. Upon entering, that rank smell greets her nose, showing that this place had been barred up for a long time. She enters, feeling the chill of the concrete floor against her bare feet, to look around at the large room she is within. There is a large blackboard on one side of the wall and there are open doors in the other walls to reveal other rooms.
With what little is left of the daylight, Linda checks the place out. At first, she thought it had been a school, but dismisses such a notion as there is no village here. Most of the rooms seemed to have once been sleeping quarters as they have rectangular plywood boards set into the wall and raised on stilts. Other rooms were once a kitchen; washrooms with stalls, toilets, and sinks now missing; and a shower room with its stalls and sinks also missing. There are also some cabinets around the place and she searches through them to discover that not everything had been cleared out as she finds an old rusty cutting knife, a small box full of white chalk, and a chalk eraser. The last two she takes and puts out on the blackboard shelf.
Linda tries to figure out the purpose of this place, but is unable to know what that could have been. Although there does seem to be some sort of militaristic feel to it. Maybe that blackboard was for writing down plans? She stares up at the light fixtures and concludes that this place must have been powered by a diesel generator. She returns outside and goes around to the back to find a room with the door facing in the opposite direction. A search inside turns up nothing, save for the connections that would have once belonged to such a generator.
Linda returns inside the building. She next stares at that blackboard, then at her watch. An idea forms in her mind and she walks up to the blackboard, picks up a piece of chalk, and prints a sentence.
Linda Jones was here from September 24, 2013 to.
But stops, leaving the end blank and puts the chalk back down on the shelf. She next removes her watch, places it at the other end of the shelf, and looks toward one of the sleeping rooms. The prospect of sleeping naked in a place like this makes her feel even more vulnerable. She enters one of those rooms and lies on the cot. The wood is firm, yet yielding.
Linda continues to lie there as the daylight fades with the setting sun, which slowly passes into night. There she lies in that state on that bunk, curled in on herself. Never had she felt so vulnerable and alone.
She begins crying.