CHAPTER TWENTY SIX

Paulo and Amber slipped into the water and set out for the boat, concerned more with speed than subtly this trip around. Amber powered ahead, a strong swimmer and as home in the water as she was on it, Paulo trailing behind; water related activities were not quite as common for him, hailing from an Argentinean cattle ranch, and especially trying to keep up with Amber he felt like he was floundering. She reached the boat when Paulo was barely halfway, and hauled herself out of the water onto the back deck. Water dripping off her, Amber froze in a crouch and cocked her head, listening for any sounds coming from the boat, giving herself a chance to sense if anything was off. Feeling as confident as she could, give the circumstances, she slowly unfolded her body and stood up, taking several cautious steps towards the cabin, body tense for flight if she should need it.

The boat remained still and quiet- until, that is, Paulo arrived, and he hauled himself out with a grunt. The boat dipped slightly, and Amber paused at the doorway to the cabin, waiting for him to join her.

"You are a fish," he said with admiration, shaking water from his curly brown hair, sending it flying in all directions.

"A fish?" Amber feigned indignation. "What about something a bit more fancy, like a dolphin?"

"A mermaid?"

"That works too." She pointed to the stairs that led up into the cockpit. "Let's check if our friends are compliant with maritime regulations, shall we?"

Up in the cockpit, Amber quickly scanned over the dials and screens on display. There was an electronic GPS system that seemed in working order, but not any charts that Amber could see easily; given the men had been stationary for a bit, though, especially if they weren't planning on going anywhere, they may have stowed them away somewhere. They would look for them shortly, the immediate concern regarding the radio. Amber consulted the GPS and got their position coordinates, keeping the unit in eyeball range for when she tried the radio.

"Handheld radio only," Amber said, her tone clearly disapproving. "But it's here. Let's see what else they lied about that, and if it actually does work."

Holding her breath, Amber turned the handset on. The breath came out in a gust of relief as the unit flickered to life. Wasting no time, Amber ensured it was tuned to channel 16, the emergency channel and the one that all vessels were obligated to monitor when not using the radio on another channel.

"Mayday, mayday, mayday," Amber said into the radio. "This is Sandpiper, Sandpiper, Sandpiper." She had chosen to go with the original boat they had been on because, if anyone picked up the transmission who was aware that six teenagers had been missing on that boat, it would help them know they were still alive. "Mayday. Sandpiper."

Amber paused for a moment and released the button on the side of the radio. Her and Paulo stood in silence, waiting and hoping that someone would have heard them, and that the radio was actually transmitting, before she continued with the rest of the call. They waited five seconds, ten seconds, fifteen, and then just as Amber raised the radio again, ready to try the start of the mayday call for a second time, a voice crackled in over the radio.

"Mayday. Sandpiper, Sandpiper, Sandpiper. This is Sea-battical, Sea-battical, Sea-battical. Received mayday. State your location and nature of emergency. Over."

Amber could have wept with relief. Her free hand grabbed for Paulo's arm and she squeezed tightly. They were going to be okay. Someone was there, someone was in range of their radio call, the radio worked. They were going to be okay. But the relieved squeeze on Paulo's arm turned into a grip of frustration as Amber pressed the button down to respond to the other boat and received… nothing. The screen of the unit was dead, the battery gone, and being a hand held unit they had no other source of power.

"A battery. A spare battery." Amber dumped the radio onto the bench and started to frantically search the cockpit. "They have to have a spare battery. No one would be dumb enough to travel with a handset radio without a spare battery."

Paulo joined the search, once he had got Amber to pause for just long enough to describe, more or less, what he was looking for, and they tore the place apart searching. But there was nothing, and Amber felt the hope that had been flaring in her fade and die, and with it her energy. She sunk down, sliding her back down the cupboards, until she sat in a defeated heap on the floor.

"Do not be upset," Paulo said gently, crouching beside her and putting a gentle hand on her knee. "Someone heard us. They would be close, yes?"

"Within five nautical miles, given the size of the aerial on this boat. Or they wouldn't have heard us." Amber's response was delivered flatly, almost on autopilot.

"Would we be on their radar?"

Amber shrugged. She didn't feel like trouble shooting or looking on the positive side right at that moment. "I should have said our location. I should have just done the whole mayday call. I shouldn't have waited to see if the radio was working. I should have-"

"No more should have," Paulo said firmly. "If you had done that, we would not have had the battery to hear them respond. So the same thing would have happened."

"But they would know where we are."

Paulo shrugged, like it was just semantics. "It is done," he said. "So let us look at the engine, and see if they have a battery for the radio somewhere. Come on." He stood up and held out a hand for her, a hand that Amber reluctantly took.

She allowed him to pull her to her feet, and did her best to shake off what had just happened as she followed Paulo back down to the main deck. He was right. It was done, it was what it was, and they had to move on to the next part of their plan.

The trees were starting to thin out, and the ground had been sloping gradually downwards rather than upwards for the last thirty minutes or so. Their destination now close, Alex picked up the pace, Li mirroring it at the back, forcing Stella to match. Stella was stumbling a lot, Li had noticed, but there wasn't time to stop or slow down. Their progress had been slower than they had thought or hoped, and they were pushing it to get down to the water in time to be picked up.

All going to plan.

The subtle trail had been abandoned again now in favour of speed, and they crashed through the rainforest, making a beeline for the shore that they knew lay not too far away, and then suddenly, through the trees, they could see it. Grey and muted by the moonlight, the beach was a small, loose horseshoe, the tide up, the waves calm and gently breaking on the shore. Alex pulled to a stop before they got any closer.

"I can't see the tender," he said softly as Stella and Li clustered around him. "It's really exposed out there, no cover. We're better hanging back." He checked his watch again. "We've got a little more time before our lift is meant to arrive, let's just wait back here."

They were moving over to a denser patch of vegetation when, out of nowhere, they could hear sounds of crashing through the undergrowth. Something was coming- and it was coming fast.

Stella's face went deathly pale, and before she totally froze to the spot and became an immovable object, Alex seized her arm and dragged her back several metres. He had spotted a potential hiding spot, a nice large fig tree with an impressive set of buttress roots; Hex had told him how he and Amber had been missed by the man pursuing them by tucking down into the roots, and that seemed the most viable option. Stella was like a dead weight, both Alex and Li having to drag her behind them. They shoved her down into the root structure and followed closely. It was a tight squeeze, and the three of them huddled together as the crashing reached a crescendo and then-

"Oh." Li breathed and gave a soft chuckle as the source of the crashing came into view half a dozen metres ahead. "It's just a pig."

No sooner were the words out of her mouth, no sooner had Alex and Stella also spotted the pig, and there was a sharp crack; the pig dropped where it had been standing.

The sudden silence that followed seemed suffocating. Li clapped a hand over Stella's mouth, as she saw the other girl's eyes widen and her lips open to scream. She pulled Stella into her, half hugging and half shielding her, and her eyes found Alex's. Li went to mouth something to Alex, but stopped with her mouth open as the sharp sound of twigs breaking underfoot shattered the silence.

The snaps came slowly, deliberately, someone treading carefully along the path, taking their time to put each foot down but not to keep their movements quiet. They were searching, listening, looking.

Hunting.

"Here pig pig pig…" The voice floated out of the rainforest. "Here pig pig pig…"

Under her hand, Li felt Stella's low moan of fear and she gripped the other girl tighter. Li's natural inclination was to err on the side of fight, rather than flee or freeze, but they were fresh out of the ability to make choices. They had to just sit as quietly as possible and… Li's brain raced, trying to find a way out of the situation that didn't end up with at least one of them becoming like the shot feral pig lying just half a dozen metres away. How quickly the man had reached them… He must have been closer than they thought for the last leg of their journey, and the prospect made Li shiver; he had been following them, probably close enough to take them out, but he had waited until they were down at the beach, hemmed in and trapped.

Stella was murmuring something, her breath coming in short sharp gasps, and Li worried she was smothering the girl a bit. Carefully, she took her hand away from Stella's mouth.

"Snake," Stella whispered, a shaking hand pointing not more than a metre away from them where a thick tail was just disappearing underneath some leaves.

Alex shook his head, put his finger to his lips. Stella's eyes darted; if anything the prospect of a snake slithering around near them seemed to terrify her more than the ever increasing footsteps of the man with the gun. He mimed the snake slithering and pointed away from them. It's going he mouthed to her, and she hesitated then gave a shaking nod.

The footsteps were growing louder. Crunching on the leaves and twigs, heading in their direction. Over the top of Stella's head, Alex looked at Li and saw her eyes had hardened. She wasn't about to sit and hide and wait to be shot. There would be one opportunity to get the upper hand, use the element of surprise, and Alex could see that Li was going to take it. He hesitated, then nodded at her, and Li started to shift her position, getting more crouched and free of Stella. Getting ready.

Another crack, another crunch, and then-

A scream.

Not from Stella, for a change. Not from any of them.

There was the sound of something being dropped, and something even heavier hitting the ground a second later. A string of cursing filtered to the teens' hiding place and, cautiously, Alex poked his head up and around to see what was happening.

The flash of the snake, on the move again but far quicker this time, caught his eye and then, not far past, was Ty. Ty was on the ground, one hand pressed to a spot on his leg not far above his ankle. He writhed and thrashed, all the while swearing, and seemed to not have noticed the blonde head sticking up from between the buttress roots. Alex took in the scene, then ducked back out of sight.

"I think he's been bitten," Alex said in a low voice to Li and Stella.
"By that snake?" Stella sounded terrified, eyes darting around.

"It's okay," Alex said, "it's moved on. He probably stood on it, gave it a fright."

"Gave it a fright?" Stella sounded incredulous, her voice rising above what Alex would have considered an acceptable volume, given they were still hiding.

He frowned at her and put a finger to his lips again. "He still has a gun," he warned her, and that shut Stella right up. Turning to Li, he tilted his head and shrugged, hoping she would understand what he meant.

"Not a python, by the pattern and colour," Li said quietly, catching on to what he was asking. "Impossible to tell what it was though. Only saw the back end."

"But venomous?"

"Likely. It's Australia."

Alex cautiously poked his head up again; Ty was still squirming about on the ground, but it wasn't him that Alex was wanting to look for this time. There, on the ground, barely a few metres away, was the gun. Without giving himself time to think too much and second guess the situation, given that it was still very much in reach of Ty, Alex launched up out of the roots and flung himself onto the gun, wrenching it back and towards himself, scooting into reverse as soon as his hands touched the weapon, getting himself out of range of Ty.

The man barely seemed to register what had happened, and it wasn't until Li and Stella joined Alex that Ty seemed to tune back in to reality.

"Help me," he barked.

Li scoffed. "Help yourself," she shot back. "You should stop moving around so much. First aid for a snake bite dictates you pressure bandage the affected limb, and don't move." She folded her arms and shot Ty a look. "I trust you are carrying a snakebite kit, given our surroundings? We certainly don't have one, given we were abandoned on this island with nothing in the way of supplies."

Ty snarled, or rather tried to, but his face instead contorted into a painful grimace. Sweat was starting to bead on his forehead, and his face had taken on a clammy sheen that seemed to glow in the moonlight. "You can't just leave me here," he said.

Alex laughed. "You were hunting us!" He gestured with the gun he was holding, carefully, in his hands. "You were going to shoot us, like you shot that pig."

"It was just a game," Ty said. "No one was gonna get hurt."

"Pull the other one," Alex snapped. "You brought us here, and dumped us here, so you could hunt us down."

Li was studying Ty's face, in particular his pupils. "Is that the snake venom playing with your body," she asked, "or are you siphoning off your goods? Not sure what sort of combo venom and illicit drugs make in the body, but I would suggest you are going to find out very shortly."

Alex had had enough of the banter; he checked his watch. "Hex will be here any moment," he said to the girls, "let's go."

"Best of luck, Ty," Li said over her shoulder as they walked off towards the beach. "We'd call for help, but again- abandoned on a deserted island." She felt a twinge of guilt, but quickly shoved it away as they broke the tree line and emerged onto the sand.

"Are we really just going to leave him there?" Stella asked in a small voice.

Alex shrugged. "Not much we can do for him," he said, matter-of-factly. "If he's lucky, it's something not too dangerous and he can ride it out with a bit of vomiting. Or it's something super dangerous, and he dies quickly."

Stella looked horrified, and while Li didn't really want to get the other girl back into the panic and frozen state, she felt compelled to gently remind her, "He was going to kill us, Stella," which wiped the expression right off Stella's face.

Alex was carefully attending to the gun, flicking the safety on, mindful that they were about to be boarding a small boat being driven by Hex, who Alex suspected had never attempted to do such a task before in his life. "And we didn't cause him to get bitten," Alex added, hoping it would make her feel a bit better- if such a word could be used- about the situation. "He did. And Li was right- we don't have anything that could help him, not really. He would have to get to a hospital for anti venom and supportive care. We don't have that as an option right now. And," he added firmly, "we are our first priority. And there's still Francis out there. Somewhere."

Stella shivered, and Li frowned in concern, casting a wary glance back towards the tree line. In all of the chaos, Francis had completely slipped from their minds. He would have heard his friend, if he was close, which put into question whether the other man had doubled back and headed to the lagoon instead. It was good for the three of them, right then, waiting out on the fringe of the beach- but what it meant for the others, back in the lagoon, remained to be seen.

Frowning, Ricky returned his radio to its cradle. He had tried a further three times to raise the ship back on the radio, the one who had started the mayday call, without success. The call hadn't given a location, however it was unlikely that the boat was too far away; his small trawler didn't have the antenna to pick up radio calls from any sort of major distance. He was still frowning over it when Pat poked her head into the cabin.

"What's wrong?" she said, clocking the expression on her captain's face.

"Mayday call," he replied. "But I can't raise them again."

Pat instantly became serious; a ship in trouble was never anything to take lightly. "Location?"

"Didn't say."

Now it was Pat's turn to frown. "Kids playing with a radio?" she asked. It had happened more than once, not generally with families who were familiar with the ocean and how there were no games, no room for messing about, out here, but kids would still be kids and parents would still sometimes leave them unattended near important seafaring equipment.

Ricky considered it, but then shook his head. "Apart from not giving a location, it was done correctly," he said. "I wouldn't think that would be a kid messing about." He didn't mention that the voice over the radio had sounded young; age aside, she had sounded calm and in control, exactly how you should be when making a mayday call.

"So someone's in trouble- and maybe didn't get to finish the call."

"That's what I was worried about."

"Anyone else pick it up?"

Ricky shook his head. "Didn't seem to be, and I've asked on 16 and not got anything back. I don't think anyone else is about."

Pat made her way across to the radar, watching the screen carefully. "Nothing's there," she said. "We're not picking up anyone. Could be out of range, but…" She shot Ricky a look. "Maybe it went down already. Did they say what the problem was?"

Another head shake. "And I haven't seen anything on there," he added, nodding at the radar Pat was studying, "for ages. So I don't really know."

Pat left the radar and poured over the charts Ricky always had out; the trawler was by no means a new boat, but they had all the necessary modern upgrades, GPS and radar, hard wired in radio, even a satellite phone, but Ricky always said there was nothing more reliable than a good old fashioned chart and a compass. Like most of the Bright Island residents, he had grown up there and been out on the water from before he could walk.

"There's a number of little islands out here," Pat said. "A small boat could be tucked in behind one, that's why we can't pick them on the radar. Which is good, at least," she continued after a moment's thought. "If they were taking on water, or had engine trouble, they would be near land."

"Mmm."

"Doesn't help them if it's hostiles, though." Pat frowned. "Shocking, isn't it. Wouldn't have considered it, not in a million years, but after what happened with Allison's boat-"

Ricky stopped listening, it hitting him in a rush. That was what had sounded so familiar. The boat, in the mayday call. His expression mirrored his shock and horror, as Pat stared at him.

"What?" she said. "What's wrong?"

"The mayday. They said they were from The Sandpiper."

Pat's eyes went wide. "The kids. The kids might still be alive."