Chapter 11:
Chuck awoke to the smell of smoke underneath the overturned zodiac. His clothes were missing, and it was a little chilly; the stone under his back had leeched away a lot of his body heat. After a little groping around blindly in the dark, he found his boxers and cargo shorts and wriggled awkwardly into them before tipping the zodiac up to let some light in.
His clumsy groping in the darkness had happened to reveal a notable lack of blond goddessy fellow castaway. The light revealed where his shirt and his swim shoes had gotten to during the fray last night. Chuck crawled out from under their shelter, and sat on the upturned hull to slip his footgear on. He scanned the beach and spotted Sarah, back turned to him and sitting cross-legged on the sand halfway down the beach. The smoke was curling up in front of her, so she must have had some waterproof matches or something in her emergency pack. Her hair hung in a loose pony tail halfway down her back, mostly bare except for the bow tie of her string bikini. She had put her wetsuit back on, but it was pooled around her waist.
He tugged his shirt on over his head and started over. After two steps he froze, and went back to find his rifle. It was probably perfectly safe to leave it with the zodiac, but it was a reassuring weight hanging from the sling on his back.
She heard the crunch of his feet on the black sand beach. "We've got crabs!" Sarah said cheerfully over her shoulder.
"Wh-wh-what?" Chuck nearly choked on the words, staring at her in shock and freezing in his tracks.
Sarah turned to look at him more fully, frowned momentarily, then clapped a hand to her mouth, blushing. "No, not... I mean... for breakfast," she turned back and pulled a skewer out of the fire, with a largish crab carcass spitted neatly. After a moment he recognized it as one of the spears from the spear-gun laying beside her in the sand. He breathed a sigh of relief and went and sat down next to her. She glared halfheartedly. "Seriously? That's where your mind goes first?"
Chuck shrugged uncomfortably. "I just... you said 'we've got crabs.' There's not of a lot of alternate interpretations involved."
"Yeah, just the one that involves seafood, considering we're on an island?"
"Okay. I'm sorry my mind went to the bad place. Could you at least admit to a poor choice of words and we'll speak no more of this? We've got to have more pressing concerns, right?"
"You're probably right. Here," she said, holding the skewer out to him, "I already ate."
"You mind if I ask how you managed to scare up actual food so quickly?"
She snorted a laugh, "They burrowed in under the zodiac with us. I woke up while they were playing tug of war with my bikini top. You were out like a light; you didn't so much as roll over when I yelled in surprise."
"Yelled in surprise. You mean you screamed."
"I stand by me version of events," Sarah said, "Anyway, let's do an inventory of supplies."
She began laying out the contents of her emergency backpack while Chuck started his breakfast. Two canteens, two boxes of energy bars, a handful of glow-sticks, a small flare-gun and a couple of flares, the dead sat-phone in its waterproof sleeve- a small square orange package caused him to raise an eyebrow and point questioningly-
"Emergency blanket," Sarah explained, as she kept pulling more gear from the bag. A survival knife with a 10 inch blade, which she passed wordlessly in Chucks direction. There was a compass in the pommel, and sure enough it screwed off to reveal a handful of matches and needle and thread, fishhooks and line. Chuck grinned.
"I feel like Rambo. Do I get a bandana?"
Sarah rolled her eyes, and kept pulling out survival gear. She passed him a bright green bracelet which puzzled him for a moment before she explained. "12 feet of milspec para-cord. Always good to have." Chuck spotted a similar bracelet on Sarah's wrist, though in neon orange. Next came a pair of small flashlights, made of clear plastic. His curiosity got the better of him, and he scooped one of the flashlights up. As he tilted the plastic tube a weight shifted inside, and he frowned, making a more thorough examination. "Oh, cool," he said when he got it. "The weight is a copper wire loop, and there are a couple magnets inside. Magnetic flux induction. Never run out of batteries!"
"Yeah, if only that would work on the sat-phone."
Chuck blinked. "I probably can make that work, actually; might even be easier than trying to draw from my cell battery, when I think about it. Lower current than my cellphone, means I won't need to figure out how to jury rig a specific ohmage resistor."
"Homage? What?"
"O.H.M.S., are the unit of measurement in electronic resistance. I'll spare you the intro to electrical engineering seminar and say these flashlights turned like a week-long project into maybe a day; two at the outside."
"You would have thought of it eventually."
"I'll still want to draw all this out in the sand before I wire anything up, so I don't mess up. And we'll use my cell as a test-bed before we risk the sat-phone," he reined in the huge grin that accompanied figuring out a way to send for help. "That's assuming we know where to send the coast guard when we call in?"
Sarah had been pulling more gear out as he spoke, laying a 9mm pistol and the handful of spare shotgun shells out on a small last thing out of Sarah's emergency back was a small set of nautical charts laminated against potential water damage."That's my department," Sarah declared. She uncapped the cracked Bic pen; despite the lack of ink, the tungsten ball-point would score the laminate plastic with ease. Finding the coordinates of Sarah's dive was the simplest part. From there, they didn't know for certain which direction they had gone; Sarah had spun the wheel to try and swamp the pirates' smaller boat, and then they had gone full bore for about five or six minutes. At twenty one knots that worked out to a circle about two miles wide, and from there things got more arcane still. Before they had set off following the gulls in a vague northerly direction they had drifted for almost half and hour. Sarah was of the opinion that the current probably hadn't had enough time to make the circle of uncertainty grow much more. Finally they had to account for two hours of rowing. Knowing the general direction of this final leg of the journey only served to transform their potential position from a relatively neat ring a couple miles wide into a bizarre amoeba with hash marks scoring the protective plastic coating the charts.
Nowhere in the area of their potential position was an island. "So now we know for sure," Chuck said. "We're on a deserted, uncharted island. I guess I'd better get started on my circuit diagrams."
Sarah shook her head. "They'll take you what, an hour?"
"More like ninety minutes."
She pointed out a cloud bank off to seaward. "Storm will wipe those out. Better to wait and look for better shelter until then. Or a freshwater supply."
"We could let the zodiac fill up with rainwater, couldn't we? That will give us a couple days water supply, yeah?"
"Be kind of nasty, but drinkable," Sarah said. "It's a good back up plan. We'll need to find something to plug up the scuppers though."
Sarah reloaded the shotgun and slung it over her shoulder. She and Chuck split up the supplies into their backpacks and worked together to wrestle the zodiac into position at the bottom of the cliff a little way off from the underhang where they had spent the night. Rain and runoff from the cliff would combine to give them a couple liters of hopefully drinkable water when the storm broke. Trusting their water supply solely to the rain didn't strike either Chuck or Sarah as a good idea, even though showers were shaping up to be an everyday occurence so far.
"So..." Chuck said when they were satisfied with their rain collector. They scanned the area more closely than they had managed the night before.
Their black sand beach was cut off at the near side by the steep crooked cliff-face where they had taken refuge. It protruded a good fifty feet into the water, and there was no guarantee they would find more beach close by if they got around the point.
At the far end of the beach, the cliff was shorter, only ten yards, and a slope bearing a tumble of boulders rather than a solid cliff face. Sarah shouldered her spear-gun and led the way in that direction, in search of their first and most pressing need, for fresh water.
"If we find some trees maybe we can make a bed or something. It'd almost have to be softer than the rock in that under-hang last night."
Chuck nodded and didn't say anything as they trudged up the slope. Neither of them had mentioned what had happened last night after the wind had tipped the zodiac over on them, shutting them off into their own little world.
She sighed and stopped in her tracks. "I'm sorry I didn't remember the thermal blanket until this morning. We'd have been a lot warmer."
"Well, we were both... under a lot of... stress," Chuck said.
Sarah laughed. "Is that what we're calling it now?" She blushed faintly, and conversation lapsed. Neither of them was ready to address that particular elephant in the room just yet.
Any hope that making it to the top of the cliff would give them a better picture of the layout of the island was crushed when they got up the first bit of slope. The cliff-line had been hiding a second taller cliff. At least there were a number of trees atop the shorter beach-side line of cliffs. The trees themselves were scrawny things, bereft of leaves or needles, or whatever; Chuck couldnt make an immediate guess as to whether they were supposed to be conifers or deciduous, so stunted and wind wracked were they. The trees had sunk tendrils into bare stone somehow. By unspoken agreement, Chuck and Sarah left the poor disheveled trees unmolested and they headed up along the cliff overlooking their landing beach. The other direction merely showed another narrow stretch of beach with an imposing set of cliffs above. Judging from the little Chuck and Sarah had seen of the island's coastline, they had been lucky to both to find a way up the cliffs, and to have found an actual beach to put in at.
They made good time up to the point of their beach-overlooking cliff but the storm that had been threatening hit while they were nearing the top. Chuck and Sarah only got a quick glimpse of a long expanse of beach fifty or sixty feet straight down, before the wind picked up and they had to huddle under the thermal blanket and think like rocks so they didn't get buffeted off the cliff by the wind. Chuck's arm curled around her waist easily and Sarah found once again that her head fit perfectly into the little niche formed by his neck and shoulder.
The storm, if it could be called that, only lasted a few minutes, and probably only gave them half an inch or less of rain. Chuck did the math with the remembered dimensions of the zodiac and predicted maybe a liter worth of collected freshwater. If they stretched the water currently in their canteens they might turn it into another days' worth of water. The math on that one was worrisome. Three days withough water, or three weeks without food was pretty much a death sentence. They had food covered. 12 energy bars each was maybe a weeks' worth of backup food supply if they found the island barren. Each of the canteens however, only held a liter, barely enough to stave off dehydration for a day, if they didn't lose a lot of moisture to sweat. The shower had cut the temperature back, but the mercury had already been rising by then.
It was only mid-morning; by noon the cooling of the brief shower would be obliterated, and Chuck and Sarah would begin to sweat to death if more water wasnt forthcoming. From the point of the cliff that poked out into the water, they got a better view of the larger beach, and Chuck grinned. There was a rocky outcropping a couple hundred yards down the beach, another outflung arm of the cliff-face they were following, with a rather imposing stone building near the waterline.
"Civilization!" he crowed. "Is that a dock?"
Sarah took a pair of binoculars from her pack and held her breath as she investigated. Those hadnt been in the inventory. She must have been holding out. Chuck decided not to mention it when she snarled a curse.
"Looks abandoned. The dock's just a handful of stone pilings. Must have been a big stone dock at some point. Building looks half collapsed up close. Worth a look though if we can get down there."
"Maybe an old Spanish fort. They had a bunch of little bases out here, back in the old days, didn't they?"
"Let's hope its a little more recent than that, okay? I doubt anything useful would have lasted two hundred years or more, you know."
"Buzz-kill," Chuck grumbled. "I seem to remember you already found your chest of Spanish doubloons."
Sarah rolled her eyes. "Pretty sure they'd have taken all that with them when they abandoned the place."
"This only lends credence to my Buzz-kill accusation, Ms. Walker."
Sarah shrugged and pressed her lips together, conceding the point. Finding a way down to the ruins on the second beach was a little more complicated than it seemed. The path that appeared to be heading that direction turned back on itself, and it was slick from the rainwater washing down it to boot.
"We probably should have gone back and just swum around the point," Chuck said after the second time he had nearly lost his footing.
"No argument here," Sarah said, and cocked her head to one side.
"What's up?"
"Shut up," she hissed. "Do you hear that?"
Chuck grimaced at the illogic of those two thoughts expressed so close together, and strained his ears listening. "Sounds like a stream or something."
"Or something," Sarah smirked. "Jackpot, Chuck, c'mon!"
The path began winding back and forth, the sides deepening until it became an obvious gully; if there had been much more rain, it might have been a stream at least briefly. The sides deepened further, and after one last hairpin turn, the gully entered a small cave.
There was about an inch and a half of standing water, in a large puddle, cool in the shade of the cave entrance. Chuck breathed a sigh of relief and took a long drink from his canteen. He refilled it while Sarah got out her canteen and followed his lead. The sound of rushing water echoed from further inside the cave.
"What do you think?" Chuck said, "Underground river?"
She just shrugged. "One way to find out."
Just a handful of yards into the cave, the ceiling was noticeably lower; Chuck nearly clocked his head, but Sarah warned him in time. He fished his flashlight out of his pack, and shook it briefly, to let the weight inside generate a little extra charge before he flicked it on.
The passage narrowed up ahead until it was barely a few inches wider than Chuck's shoulders, and only three feet or so tall.
Chuck played the light against the wall, crouching and crab-walking forward.
"You see something?"
He nodded. "These look like tool-marks; might have been the Spanish from that ruin on the beach we spotted."
"What would they have been doing up here?" Sarah wondered aloud.
"Beats me," Chuck shrugged. "Maybe they found this same cave and had to widen it for some reason."
"Assuming that's true then, you think it'll take us down to the beach?"
He grinned. "One way to find out."
Sarah stuck out her tongue at him.
Thankfully, the passage didn't narrow much further. Tool-marks became more common as they went, and after a while, Sarah had Chuck turn off the flashlight. "See," she said. "There's light coming through from somewhere."
Another twenty yards of slow crawling down the tunnel and it opened up into an octagonal chamber open to the sky. There were half a dozen tiny waterfalls coming down at the edges of the ten foot wide hole in the ceiling and filling a huge stone basin. Designs carved into the edges of the basin confirmed the old Spanish origins of the place.
"It's the cistern," Sarah said as recognition took hold. "They must have been using this island as a resupply station. I know first hand. Things can get pretty sketchy aboard ship when the fresh water runs out. They probably had a fruit orchard someplace on the island as well to help fight scurvy for the crews. Well,the captains anyway."
"I'm just glad its here," Chuck said. He took another quick drink from his canteen and stooped to fill it back up. "Looks like that's our water problem solved."
"Yeah, looks like," she said. Something in her voice gave Chuck a moment's warning. He turned and caught the mischief in her eyes before she nudged him in the back with her foot, just hard enough to send him headfirst into the cistern.
Chuck came up, sputtering. The water came up nearly to his shoulders. "Hey, dammit, it's cold in here!"
Sarah set down her pack and weaponry at the edge before joining him in the water. She gasped and shivered. "You weren't kidding," she said softly as she padded over close to him. "I'd better help you warm up."
Chuck shivered, but not from the cold, as her arms went around his neck. One thing led to another. Again.
Afterward, they sat side by side on the edge of the water basin, feet dangling in. Chuck frowned. "Something wrong?" Sarah said while she finished redoing the ties on her bikini.
"Just..." Chuck shrugged awkwardly. "In hindsight, we probably shouldn't have done that in our water supply."
Sarah's laugh ended in a snort that nearly became a coughing fit. Chuck slapped her on the back and she recovered quickly. "Yeah," she said. "Sorry. Didn't think that one out very well, did I?"
"Not a complaint, don't think-" Chuck cut himself off.
"Gotcha." The silence became awkward again. "You think we should bother heading back to the zodiac? We left our swim-fins and snorkels and stuff, but I'm thinking we should move camp over to this beach instead. We could just swim around the point; wouldn't have to crawl through the tunnel again that way."
"I'm all for moving closer to the freshwater," Chuck said, "but first let's follow the trail down to the beach. It might not be easy to spot from the other direction, so we should mark the path."
The tunnel in the far side of the chamber was taller, though Chuck still had to stoop so he wouldn't knock himself out on the ceiling. It wound back and forth, still descending, until they came out into thick jungle.
Chuck had to chop through some vines growing across the entrance to the cistern-cave with his survival knife. Once the was done, Sarah confiscated his orange para-cord bracelet and cut it into foot-long pieces with her diving knife. The green of her matching accessory might blend in too well. They followed the sound of the surf, and Sarah tied little orange para-cord bows around tree branches to mark the path out to the beach.
Sand crunched under their feet, and Chuck led the way to the ruined Spanish fort. It wasn't much to look at; Sarah's assessment from the cliffs above had been accurate enough. On the inside it was little better. There were cracks in one of the walls, but the roof was still mostly on, which was pretty impressive after four or five hundred years of storms and erosion.
The ruin was divided into two chambers. One had obviously been the main storage area, with broken, empty water and supply barrels still littering the floor. On closer inspection, there was a small stone desk set out of the way near the door, bearing a heavy wood-bound logbook. Sarah blew the dust off and opened the cover very carefully. The pages were dry and brittle, a testament to the quality of the ruin's roof if nothing else.
"You read Spanish?" Chuck asked.
"No, you?"
Chuck just shook his head.
"I guess we can use it for kindling. Same with the barrels."
"But this is probably an archeologically important site," Chuck protested.
Sarah rolled her eyes. "I'd rather we were alive to tell somebody about it, instead of becoming a part of it, yeah?"
Chuck frowned. "Okay, point taken. If we find something to write with, I could use the scratch paper. Any blank pages at the back?"
Sarah flipped the logbook over, riffling pages. "Like fifty or so," she said, closed the book and thrust it at him. "Here, you carry it."
Chuck grinned. "Carrying your books, does this mean we're going steady?"
Sarah blinked at him. "You really want to have that talk now?"
His eyes widened, realizing he'd unintentionally mentioned the 300 pound gorilla in the room. "Um, sorry. Let's just go back to awkwardly not talking about it."
"Okay," Sarah said airily, leading the way into the other chamber.
"That was sarcasm," Chuck grumbled under his breath.
The other chamber was larger, and must have been a combination barracks-kitchen. There was a large fire-pit with centuries-old ashes and charcoal remnants. Chuck stooped and pulled out a bit. He flipped the logbook open and tried it on a used page. "Nice," Chuck said, "No more worrying about a storm messing up sand-diagrams."
"Cool, you want to get started, I'll see about getting us some lunch?" Sarah patted her spear-gun.
It was closer to dinner, when Sarah actually caught something. Chuck helped clean the pair of large tropical fish she had caught, while Sarah started the fire with driftwood and kindling torn from the used pages of the logbook.
They ate in companionable silence. "So," Chuck said when they had both eaten. "I think I'm ready for a trial run, on my cellphone."
"Need me to do anything?"
"Hold the flashlight? Sunset's not too far off, and I'm losing the light."
"No problem."
It took Chuck longer than he thought to wire his phone into the leads from the first shake-powered flashlight, but just before sunset, he was finished.
"Moment of truth," Chuck said, and flipped on the power switch to his phone. After the usual start-up noises, his phone chirped again. "What the hell?"
Chuck stared incredulously at the glowing screen.
"What?" Sarah asked, "Did it work or not? Chuck, are you alright?"
"I don't... I don't understand," Chuck stammered.
"What is it, Chuck, what's wrong?"
He showed her the screen. "I... have wi-fi..."
Sarah's eyebrows attempted to climb off her face. They weren't alone on the island.
TO BE CONTINUED...
A/N: Now there's a cliffhanger! Only a few more chapters to go before the end, so keep those reviews coming and I'll try to get my time between chapters back under a week.