A/N: I guess this isn't a true one-shot, but it's as close as I could get. I challenged myself to write something much shorter than I normally do, in less time than I normally do, and to post it complete. It's my Gilligan's Island crossed with Lost crossed with who knows what fic. . . . Actually it's not much like either one of those shows, it's considerably grimier, for one thing, and there's no radio made out of coconuts. Some crude language and sexual situations.
Three Weeks
It was hot, but then it was always hot. It would get hotter yet, and then the others would return to the shelters to sleep or, if not sleep, then sit or lie in the shade until the angle of the sun was lower. But she wouldn't allow herself the luxury, there was too much to do. There were snares to check, and water to lug back from the spring, and, though the others thought it futile, a trip to the highest point on the island where she would flash distress signals into the sky. She carried a small mirror in her pocket, and she would hold it up, directing its reflection toward the faint exhaust trails of planes that had passed overhead. She would repeat the code for SOS over and over until her arms grew tired. The sunlight would be hot on her arms, her head, her face, but she had gotten sunburned so many times the first few days that the burns had eventually darkened and deepened. She would just freckle - more.
Squatting, she peered at the first of the snares, putting the bucket she was carrying to her side. There weren't many animals on the island, which was a mixed blessing, she supposed. They didn't have to worry about predators, but on the other hand, there wasn't much in the way of prey. The most common animal was a small, weasel-like looking thing. They had learned or, rather, Helena had learned to bait the trap with pieces of fruit, bananas or mangoes, and Helena had been the one who had made the snares, cutting lengths of vine and knotting them into nooses that would slip over the . . . weaseling . . . a leg, its neck, and hold it, suspended, over the fruit it had never had a chance to eat. Of course, whoever checked the snare would have to kill the weaseling since, even if the noose had slipped over the animal's neck, the noose wouldn't have drawn tight enough, but she had grown used to doing that. She had grown used to doing a lot of things she had never imagined doing.
No weaseling yet. She stood up, peering into the darkness of the undergrowth. There were more snares set deeper in the jungle; the weaselings didn't often venture outside it. The farthest they would go was the fringe of young trees and bushes that marked the transition of the island's grasslands to jungle. Helena had been the one to learn that, too. It was the smell of a fire that had given Helena away, that had introduced Myka to the weaselings. Myka had found her, sitting next to a small burning cone of wood and grass, picking at an even smaller carcass spitted on a piece of wood. The meat had smelled oily and musky, but Myka had discovered that she was salivating. She had crouched next to Helena.
"You can't do this," she said. "You can't sneak off and eat food that you're not willing to share."
Helena had looked at her flatly. Then she turned her attention back to the meat, pulling at it, swearing softly as it burned her fingers. "I catch it, I get to eat it. I don't see anyone else here trying to catch one of these disgusting little creatures."
"If we operated on that logic, Steve and Pete would get to eat all the fish, and Claudia and I all the fruit. We share what we gather."
"Since you're here. . . do you want any?" Helena offered her the spit of wood, and Myka was tempted to yank it from her and bite into that burned chunk of island rodent - whatever it was. But she bit down hard, instead, on her bottom lip and waited for the painful twisting of her stomach to stop.
"Of course, I do, but I'm not going to keep this secret between us. I'm going to tell the others that you're trapping whatever these things are." Myka gestured at the carcass. "So when you come back down to the beach, you better be carrying one or two, or you'll find that there won't be any fish or crabs for you."
"But there will always be a banana or a papaya, right? Claudia might let me starve but not you." Helena was smiling, but her tone was contemptuous. "You worry too much about everyone else."
Myka flushed, but she didn't look away. "I'm not worried about me. The others like me, they'll look out for me." Helena tipped her head back and dropped a long, stringy piece of meat into her mouth. It looked gristly and smelled worse, but Myka's stomach was growling, loudly. "No one likes you, Helena, including me. Ever wonder why I'm the only one who finds you when you've gone off for hours on end? Because I'm the only one looking. You might want to remember that."
When Helena had returned to the beach at twilight, she carried four dead weaselings on a vine. She didn't offer to skin them or clean them, she merely dropped them in the sand in front of Artie and then walked away toward the ridge of rocks, which extended beyond the bay into the ocean. They were large and smooth, worn down over millions of years by water and wind, and Myka and the others used the ones closest to the beach to dry their precious few items of clothing. Helena would frequently sit on the ones at the end of the ridge, gazing out over the ocean. She would be battered by the surf as she sat on the rocks, but she didn't seem to care. Myka wondered if she realized that if she were to fall off the rocks or a wave were to sweep her off that she would be carried out too far for even Pete, the strongest swimmer among them, to reach her. But maybe Helena didn't care about that either.
Shaking her head to bring herself back to the present, Myka started pushing herself through the bushes and vines to check the other snares. For a few seconds, she walked nearly blind as her eyes adjusted from the sunlight to the darkness. The constant chittering of insects and birds stopped as they heard her approach and then resumed once they identified that she wasn't a threat. She had to keep an eye out for snakes and there was one particular leafy. . . thing, she wasn't sure whether it was a bush or a tree or a flower, because it had tiny white flowers tucked deep between its leaves, that burned her skin every time she brushed against it, but otherwise she felt safe being in the jungle, this jungle, anyway. There were other rainforests on the island, but they took longer to get to, so she wasn't as familiar with them. Helena and Steve had explored them, Helena because she had a naturalist's bent, or so she said, and Steve because he was always looking for a new place to meditate.
It wasn't that Myka never wondered about what she saw, for instance, she wanted to know the name of the plant with the white flowers that would leave the stinging welts on her skin, but there was never time enough to examine a leaf or a bird's nest, let alone meditate. When she finished sending up her SOSs and brought the dead weaselings and water back to their camp, she would go sit with Artie in the men's shelter. Half the time he wouldn't even acknowledge her presence, but sometimes he would talk to her, never calling her by name since that would be admitting that he knew she was there and that she knew he was lonely and wanted to talk to someone. He spent too much time by himself, like Helena, but for entirely different reasons, Myka suspected. When he talked, it was usually a lament, either about how it was all his fault that they had ended up on this island or about how his wife, Vanessa, would be left to shoulder the burden of their debts.
"She runs a clinic back home." Back home being the island, one of the American protectorates in the Pacific, that the tour boat had departed from the day of the storm. "Provides care to anyone who walks in the door, whether or not they have insurance, whether or not they can pay. She gets donations and the occasional grant, but sometimes there isn't any money." He rubbed his face with his hands. "God knows I wasn't bringing much money in. No one wants to see paradise on my little tub, but what I brought in, I gave to her. Now she won't even have that." He rolled back on his pallet, one of three in the shelter, which was no more than a crudely constructed shanty made from hacked lengths of bamboo, vines, and leaves. She, Claudia, and Helena slept in an identical one a few feet away.
Myka addressed the worry she felt she could speak to. "Artie, it wasn't your fault that the storm blew up like that. There hadn't been any warnings." Tour boats wouldn't leave the harbor, or they would curtail their tours if storm warnings had been issued. There hadn't been any issued before they got on Artie's boat, and the sky had been a blue so clear and deep that it had seemed an ocean in itself.
"But Pete knew," Artie grunted. "When he gets his hunches, he's almost always right. He said we shouldn't go out, but I was too desperate to listen. Ever since MacPherson started up his tour business, I can't get anybody. Can't blame 'em, who wouldn't want to be on a shiny new boat with wait staff offering champagne and cheese plates?" His eyes slewed toward Myka, and one corner of his mouth drew up in a sour smile. "I saw you counting through your money. If you'd had enough to afford one of his tours, you'd have been on that boat." As Myka blushed, he said gruffly. "That's all right. What I can't figure out is why the princess got on my boat. Hell, she could have bought one of MacPherson's boats." He sighed, lacing his fingers on his generously rounded abdomen. Everyone had lost weight on the island except Artie. "She's said she's going to sue me if we ever get off this rock. I don't doubt that she will."
Now that they were into their third week on the island, and it seemed less likely that they would be found anytime soon, Artie was less worried about Helena's threat to sue him. His concerns centered more on Vanessa, whether she was working too long and too often at the clinic so she wouldn't have time to worry about him. To take his mind off his fears for his wife, Myka tried to get him to talk about happier times, when they had first met, when he had known he was in love with her. Sometimes it worked, and sometimes he turned on his side and said he was tired. It was always a toss-up, which Artie she'd see. Yesterday had been one of his turn-his-face-to-the wall-days, maybe today he would talk to her.
Myka rose from checking the last of the snares. No weaselings. That was odd, but maybe Helena or Steve had been here before her. On this side of the rainforest, there was the spring. So far they hadn't located another one, at least not any close to where they were camped. She would stop on her way back and fill her bucket. It wasn't a large spring, and she was terrified that they were going to drain it dry somehow. If that ever happened, they were going to be dependent on rainfall, and though it rained every day on the island, trying to collect enough water for the six of them to drink. . . . She shook her head again. Just like there were things she could do that she had never imagined doing before, there were things she resolutely refused to think about.
Like not getting rescued and living out her days on this island. She grimly marched through the grass, not being as careful as she should because there could be snakes here as well. Just yesterday Steve had nearly been bitten by one on his way back from meditating. Snakes were the worst, worse than the sand mites that bit them at night, worse than the bats that she would startle on her way to the latrine. Worse than the latrine, which was a shallow ditch they all worked to dig in the hard-packed earth. It was just inside a small grove of trees, far enough away that they couldn't smell it at camp but not so far away that getting to it was an issue. She could feel the scratches on her legs stinging from her sweat. The grass was long and thick and some of it had serrated edges; she wasn't sure her skin would ever become tough enough to withstand the grass, she wasn't sure she wanted her skin to become tough enough.
The high point of the island was relatively close to the end of the island where they were camped, a couple of miles away at most. From its top, she could see the rest of the island, longer than it was wide, narrowing like an arrowhead as it disappeared into the ocean. There were no other islands in sight, no ships against the horizon, no evidence that any human had been here before or would be again. Except for the vapor trails. High, distinct from cirrus clouds only in that they were straight, like tracks. She had never seen a plane, and she knew the fact that there were vapor trails didn't mean that the planes flew near them - the island might actually be miles upon miles away from the trails. It was also unlikely that so far up the reflections from her mirror could even be seen. But she wouldn't think about that, she told herself as she dropped the bucket, and took the mirror from the pair of old board shorts that Steve had given her to wear. She held it up to the sun and began to signal, three short flashes followed by three longer flashes and ending with three more short flashes.
When she returned to the camp with her full bucket, she wedged it into the sand next to the other two buckets under a palm tree. Pete came out of the men's shelter and picked up one of the wooden spears that he and Steve used for fishing. Catching sight of her, he waved and danced across the hot sand toward her. Of the six of them, he was the one who never wore shoes. Probably that had something to do with the fact that he had lost one when he had been helping them into the life raft, but as they shared food and the scarce toiletries that they had managed to save, they shared shoes. But everyone's shoes were too narrow for Pete's very wide feet.
"Wanna come fishing with me?" He didn't wait for a response, hopping back for another spear. Sighing she followed him down to the water's edge and slipped off her sandals. She had been looking forward to the shade of the men's shelter, even if Artie pretended that she wasn't there, but she also wanted to make time for Pete. While he made her laugh with his bad jokes and was the only one of them who hadn't descended into self-pity at one time or another since they had washed up on the island, she sensed something fragile about his optimism. Although she had never been quite able to capture it, she thought she saw a woundedness in his eyes, even in the midst of his joking and clowning. But this afternoon, he seemed completely at ease, teasing her, as he often did, about her "Girl Scout sense of duty." Laughing, and he always seemed to be laughing, he said, "We're on a freakin' tropical island, Mykes, you need to kick back some."
He had nicknames for everyone. She was Mykes, Claudia was Claude, Steve was Buddha, Artie was Skipper, and Helena was Princess. The only nickname that had caught on with the others was Princess. "You do know that we're the only ones on this island, right? There's no resort the next hill over. There's no bunker where there are supplies from the 1970s, like in Lost. We're on our own."
"But you don't even take a siesta, man. And you come back all red-faced. I keep thinking you're going to have heat stroke out there. And if you kicked the bucket, who would bear my children?"
"Mmm, your next best bet would probably be Helena." Myka took a spear from him. They were out about waist-high, and though the waves were relatively gentle, they were still strong enough to rock her as she dug her toes into the sand.
"I'm not sure that very important parts of me would survive the encounter," Pete said, scanning the water. It was so clear that they could see to the bottom. "What's that urban legend thing about women's, you know, having teeth? Hers would be fangs."
"It's not an urban legend, Pete. It's folklore." But in all fairness to Pete, Myka asked herself, what were urban legends but contemporary folklore? And it was true that Helena was barely civil to him. Trying to imagine Helena being pleasant to him, let alone seductive, would take more effort than she was willing to expend. "On second thought, your 'you know' wouldn't even get close enough to Helena's 'you know' for you to find out."
He shivered. "If the princess and I end up the last two on this island, we're going to stay the last two on this island." He jabbed at a shadow that seemed to ripple between them, and Myka jumped hastily out of the way, nearly falling backward into the water. He grabbed her hand to steady her. "Damn, missed it. You've gotta take care of yourself, Mykes. You're my only hope." He grinned, and she had to admit that he was attractive, raffishly attractive with his dark hair curling down his neck and his beard (so far he was keeping it trimmed with a pair of scissors). He was the only one of them who hadn't burned, his skin turning not red but the color of the coconuts that grew so tantalizingly out of reach. She could admire that he was well built, acknowledge that she had always had a fondness for a piratical look, concede without hesitation that he was one of the most good-natured people she had ever met, and yet know without the slightest doubt that she had no interest in him. Not as more than a friend, anyway. Perhaps it was still too soon after Sam's betrayal. Maybe a few years on the island would change her mind, if it came to that. She devoutly hoped that it wouldn't.
He held a finger to his lips and pointed to another shadow edging closer. Myka thought she saw a tail flip and then Pete was driving his spear through the water and bringing it up, a fish wriggling on its end. "Dinner," he said with satisfaction.
Ultimately they ended up with three fish, Myka spearing one of them. They brought them back to the beach, cleaned them, and then, because there was no storing them, they cooked them. There was always a fire going in the camp, and there were wide, flat stones they used as cooking stones nestled among its coals. The others were emerging from the shelters, not because they sensed that Myka and Pete had returned with food but because they all were always hungry, and any movement in the camp raised the hope that food might be associated with it. Claudia took a couple of leaves from a pile they kept for the purpose, and Myka wrapped the fish in them and put them on the stones.
It didn't take long for the fish to cook, and Myka cut the fish into equal portions. That and some bananas and sections of a strange citrus fruit that tasted like a cross between an orange and a lemon was their dinner. Their meals didn't vary much. If Steve and Pete went fishing in the morning, they would have fish and fruit for breakfast, too. There wasn't much conversation, the focus was on eating. As Myka shoveled the fish into her mouth, feeling it burn the tips of her fingers and seeing the others gobble the food down just as quickly and messily, she recognized there wasn't much in the way of table manners either.
Dinner over in a dismayingly short amount of time, they sat silently for a few minutes, and then Steve and Claudia rose, saying they were going to collect wood and more fruit for tomorrow. Helena pushed herself up and started walking toward the rocks, and Pete rubbed his stomach and announced that he was going to lie down. Artie stared morosely into the fire. The light already seemed thinner and weaker, though the sun was still above the horizon. Once the sun started slipping below it, day would quickly turn into night, and there would be little to do then but sleep. Myka took some driftwood from their small store and fed it into the fire. Then she cupped some sand in her hand and sprinkled it on the cooking stones; using some leaves and a scrap of cloth, she tried to clean them of the fish without burning herself in the process.
"We're never going to make it off this island," Artie said suddenly.
"What makes you say that?" Myka scooped more sand onto one of the stones.
"We've been here three weeks. How long are they going to keep searching? Let's face it, except for our families, no one's invested in our return. Oh, there's probably more interest in the princess, but her phone's at the bottom of the ocean. There's nothing we have, except that damn mirror of yours, that can send out a signal. No phones, no computers, no GPS, no radar, nothing." He flipped a leaf into the fire and watched it burn. "We're stuck."
"I'm not ready to give up, and neither is Pete. If you're not willing to believe me, then believe him. You say to trust his hunches, and he believes we're going to be rescued." Actually Pete had said only that he wasn't ready to believe that they would never be rescued, which wasn't the same thing. But Artie didn't need to know that.
Artie shrugged, but he didn't say anything more, which, since he rarely said anything positive, meant that he wasn't saying anything negative. Small victories, Myka, she counseled herself. He remained at the fire as she went into the water and swam out a short distance and submerged herself several times. It was something she did every morning and every evening. Not a bath so much as a rinse-off, but with no soap and precious little shampoo and just a few safety razors, it was all she would allow herself on a daily basis. Shaving and washing her hair were weekly treats, and they probably wouldn't last that much longer.
She saw Helena sitting on the rocks, but she made no attempt to swim over to her. Helena treated her with a little more civility than she did Pete, but the fact that she didn't snarl when she said "Good morning" or "Thank you" could hardly be interpreted as friendly overtures. Which was just as well, since Myka would have felt honor-bound to respond to them, and she honestly didn't like Helena. It seemed silly to say it, but Myka didn't like her because Helena wasn't nice. There was another reason Myka didn't like her, but she wasn't ready to examine it more closely. Not nice was reason enough. If Helena didn't air her threats about suing Artie in front of the rest of them, she didn't hide her contempt, claiming multiple times that if she had known that "that scabrous little boat was about as seaworthy as a cardboard box" she wouldn't have gotten on it. And when Pete would snarl back that no one had forced her to get on it, she would glare at him and then stride off somewhere, sulking for hours until Myka would feel compelled to find her, just to reassure herself that Helena wasn't hurt or lost. While she would help when asked or was browbeat into doing so, she almost never volunteered. And then there was the whole business with her and the weaselings. The only time Helena was really bearable was at night, when she was asleep.
Myka hadn't recognized who Helena Wells was until Claudia had told her. They had been collecting fruit one morning, not long after they had arrived on the island, and Myka had said the words, in reference to Helena, "Who does she think she is?"
"Helena frakkin' Wells." As Myka had looked at her blankly, Claudia said slowly, "Do you not know who she is?" in the way that people did if they thought you didn't speak the language. And maybe Myka didn't, because she didn't read the gossip columns or the entertainment news or the kind of potboilers Helena Wells wrote, and she hadn't watched the few movies Helena had been in before she decided she'd try her hand at writing, and she didn't flip through the style magazines that Helena had modeled for when she had been no older than Claudia. "She's been making news lately because of the scandal with" and here Claudia had dropped her voice although Helena was nowhere near them - in fact, she was back at the camp having declined to help them gather fruit, which was what had occasioned Myka's frustrated "Who does she think she is?" in the first place. A scandal involving a famous director Myka also hadn't recognized and the director's equally famous wife, another actress. "She was sleeping with him, and his wife is so peeved she releases all these letters and e-mails Helena had sent her, and then he's mad because he realizes Helena's been getting it on with his wife as well. It's been everywhere, you can't get away from it. Although since you're completely clueless, that can't be quite true. No wonder she ran to that resort on -" Claudia didn't say the name of the island they had all been on, she just jerked her thumb over her shoulder in its general direction. No one said the name of that island anymore, it had a sort of sacred quality to it, as if to mention it might invoke lightning from the sky or maybe another storm that would sweep them all away again. "She was being hounded. The director hated her, the actress hated her, and the world was eating it up. I'm sure she just wanted to go somewhere no one would know her or, if they did, they wouldn't care."
"So we're sharing a shelter with a celebrity?" Myka had mused. "I wonder if she knows she grinds her teeth when she sleeps."
"Probably because she thinks she has Artie's balls between them." Claudia had grinned wickedly at her.
Looking at Helena now, leaning on her arms, her legs stretched out in front of her, Myka grudgingly conceded that she still looked pretty good, even after three weeks of no soap, no make-up, and no change of clothes. She still wore the capris she had worn on Artie's boat, but she had exchanged the short-sleeved sweater she had worn for a turquoise sports bra Claudia had given her. She wasn't much taller than Claudia and about as slim, but her breasts were definitely bigger, and the sports bra, despite its spandex, was challenged. She had even acquired a light tan once the last layer of sunburn had faded, and she made for an arresting visual, the tanned skin, the dark hair, the turquoise bra. Myka wondered why she bothered to notice, but, considering how little there was on the island to distract her from basic survival, perhaps there was no need to wonder at all.
She and Claudia had long since retired to their shelter by the time Helena crept in. Claudia always dropped off to sleep, but sometimes Myka didn't, even though she was usually exhausted by the time night fell. She liked it when all three of them were in the shelter at night, that way she didn't have to worry about where the other two were. Usually if one of them was missing it was Helena, still gazing out at the ocean or wandering the island, although that was as careless a thing to do at night as to sit out on the rocks when the tide came in. The shelter was small and their pallets, consisting of little more than branches covered by jagged pieces of the life raft and equally jagged strips of the few blankets Pete had tossed into the life raft with them, were, of necessity, placed close to each other. Helena's knee knocked against Myka's leg as she brushed against her crawling onto her pallet, not an uncommon occurrence, as Myka's pallet was between Claudia's and Helena's, though Myka suspected the bumping wasn't always an accident. It was as if, even in the smallest things, Helena wanted to make sure that her misery in being on the island was known - and shared.
But she couldn't let her dislike of the woman get the better of her, that would be disastrous, so Myka said softly and as pleasantly as she could, "Goodnight, Helena."
She could hear the surprise in Helena's voice as she responded, "Goodnight, Myka."