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kittencuffs wrote a start to a fic. This isn't the first chapter, but the first idea she came up with.
It is a Monkees' fic with two original female characters. Mona and Nora are sisters. Mona is a concert cellist and Nora is a magician's assistant. I think this is a really good chapter, whatever number it ends up being. Also, for more info, Mona and Peter have been dating for about five months and Nora and Micky for roughly four.
I love adventurey type things. Monkees + desert island = AWESOME!
And please be specific on what you like! She's got some really fantastic ideas, but really needs a lot of ego stroking to go on... (Which is why this is going in my journal. Because my friends are better at replying to things, apparently...)
Ooh! Also, this is in multi-first person. It's pretty clear when it switches, so we're not going to worry about a list.
The plane crashed down at roughly five in the morning.
(We say “roughly,” because we now generalized time according to the sun's position and our own internal clocks. Mike had attempted to create a sundial early on, and insisted it was accurate, until we pointed out that, according to the time lines he'd scratched in the surrounding sand, it was almost seven in the evening while the sun was scorchingly hot directly overhead. He'd scowled and gone off to sulk privately over his failure, and later dismantled the sundial while no one was around. Since then, we've decided that precise time isn't terribly important anyway, and estimation is the best we can come up with. No one mentions the sundial.)
I had been sleeping when it came screaming out of the sky like the most massive heron, its motors spewing a stream of acrid black smoke. I woke up to a sound like a thousand boars roaring and before I'd even shaken off the fuzziness of sleep, I snatched up my spear and stumbled out on to the beach. (I have to admit, my first thought was that the boars of the island had convened to seek their revenge in a bloody battle to the death. I'm glad I was wrong.) The first thing I saw was the aluminum-sided airplane roaring toward us, it's deathsong drowning out the usual jungle cacophony. Immediately after registering the presence of the falling plane, I saw Micky rounding the corner from the jungle path, streaking toward the beach and shrieking my name.
“Davy!” he screamed, running at me. “A plane!” He pointed to it, as though I were either blind and deaf and hadn't noticed the massive thing roaring overhead, or completely thick and couldn't recognize this “iron bird” for what it really was. I tried to shout back a confirmation that I both saw and recognized it, but my throat was still dead from sleep and I couldn't strangle out a noise loud enough to be heard over the plane, so I just nodded and stared.
Peter and Mike had been scouting in the other side of the jungle, and now came racing along the other path toward us. Mona had been standing waist-deep in the lagoon, and Nora had been sitting near the fire; they both joined us as well, and the six of us watched together as the plane drew level overhead, then streaked by, losing altitude at an alarming rate.
I'd like to think that perhaps three or four months ago, such a sight would have elicited some kind of reaction other than casual interest. It was very clear that this airplane was about to crash to a fiery finish in a matter of seconds, and any passengers would likely be killed, and I feel a horrible kind of inhuman numbness to say that that knowledge didn't really affect me. In fact, it didn't seem to affect any of us as we anticipated the impact—I think we were all trying to quell the same hope, that the plane crash would create a smoke signal and might finally bring about a long-overdue rescue. (If that were the case, we were all to be sorely disappointed, we knew. We'd long ago come to the realization that we would probably end our lives on this very beach, and it was only a matter of how long it would take.) After months of training in taking the lives of other creatures, tragedy no longer existed. Someone's life was about to be ended on our island, but since they weren't a part of our tribe, we viewed it as no different than the life of the boar Mike and Micky had hunted and killed two nights ago. His death carried the promise of new parts to make island life more bearable, and it's not as though any of us had the power to stop the plane's ill-fated descent. Death was inevitable, and we no longer had to travel any emotional distance to accept that fact.
Proving my point, the plane had dropped low enough to skim the tops of the trees and continued to descend; limbs were ripped away, exposing the white virgin fiber beneath the bark. (My only thought was of all the softwood to be collected from their debris; we were running low on torches, after all.) Finally, with a sound that I will never forget, that sometimes still wakes me from my sleep, the plane met the ground. I don't think I can describe the sound exactly. There was a lot of rumbling, as the plane had hit an outcropping of the volcano and caused a small rock slide on to the path, which would take several days to clear. There was sloshing from the river, where the vibration of the crash caused the banks to spill over. And there was shrieking. Lots of shrieking. Metal shrieking as it was ripped away from braces, chimps and roosters and birds shrieking as they fled the area in abject terror... I try not to imagine there was human shrieking wrapped in the cacophony as well.
(I take extreme solace, however, in the fact that the two women of our small tribe were more affected than us men allowed ourselves to be—or at least allowed ourselves to display. Both of them turned away, Mona seeking refuge against Peter's shoulder, Nora finding comfort in Micky's embrace; each boy covered his girl's ears and shielded her eyes, as though it would be enough to protect her from the horrifying reality we knew we were about to plunder through. In those moments I always found myself wishing we'd found a couple of native girls somewhere on this rock for Mike and myself. I really missed those interactions. Perhaps we weren't becoming completely inhuman after all.)
There was a short moment of silence, out of a mixture of both shock and reverence, before Mike cleared his throat.
“We should go check it out,” he muttered, eyes locked on the rising smoke of the wreckage.
“Let's get the buckets,” Mona said to Nora, finally breaking contact with Peter's shoulder. They disappeared into the small shelter we'd erected to protect the few tools we were capable of creating, while us men suited up with our weaponry. (I always liked to think of it that way, though truthfully the most action my knife ever saw was ruthlessly slashing a coconut husk.) The girls emerged a few moments later with the yolks—pieces of sturdy driftwood with a wooden bucket attached to either end by a length of vine, dead useful for harvests even if the buckets were prone to breaking apart—and also two of our fishing nets. Mona helped Peter and I balance our yolks over our shoulders, while Nora helped Mike and Micky.
Nora chewed her lip thoughtfully for a moment, looking at the thin column of smoke. “Should I bring this?” she asked meekly, producing the boarskin pouch containing our few medical supplies, and looked to Mike for direction. We all turned to Mike as well. How were we going to handle it? Bringing the kit said that we would try to help if we found any survivors; leaving it meant we were going to loot, and nothing more. This was the first time we'd really had to choose between the morals of our previous lives and the reality of our new life.
When Mike opened his mouth, we all knew what he was going to say.
“Leave it.”
Nora stared at the pouch for a moment, almost unwilling to let it go. Micky quickly piped up. “What if someone survived, Mike?” The unspoken implication was clear: If someone had survived, would we help them, or kill them?
“No one could have survived that, Mick.”
“But what if someone did?”
Mike stared at the smoke column for a moment, quietly fingering the handle of the stone ax he'd claimed as his own and pursed his lips. Finally, his shoulders slumped and he sighed, “Never mind. Bring it.” Even Michael, our stone-faced leader, wasn't ready to become that.
Honestly, I really resented that they left the decision to me. I'm a better decision-maker than any of them, sure, but... that's not the kind of decision I want to be making. No one wants to have to choose between options like that. If there were survivors, we could help them, spend days trying to comfort them while we struggled to find cures for injuries we weren't skilled enough to handle, feed them with our already-limited rations, then watch them succumb to the pain, the infection, the degradation of it all in the end anyway. Or we could put an end to their suffering immediately and live with the guilt for the rest of our lives, outwardly justifying it with the old “law of the jungle” adage (which, I have to admit, is more than appropriate these days) while knowing that we lost a part of ourselves we'd never again restore.
I love all these guys, but I know none of them could handle something like that.
I lucked out, though. There were no survivors.
We took the familiar path into the jungle, following the wreckage to the site of impact. And what a sight it was, too. The plane had been shredded—first it lost the landing gear as it crashed through the treetops. Once it dropped below the tree line, it struck the side of the canyon with one wing, which was torn off, along with a part of the cabin wall. The impact shifted velocity and the plane twisted, scraping its nose along the canyon wall and leading with its one remaining wing. Finally, it took the end of the canyon to the hip, crushing the entire back end of the plane on the port side, and sending the second wing gouging deep into the canyon face.
The first thing we were confronted with was half the pilot. I thank god I saw it first.
“Stop!” I called out, and turned, holding my arms out to block everyone's view. (My yolk tumbled back when I did, and one of the buckets broke apart.) “Girls, turn around, don't look!” They did as I asked, but when I dropped my arms, Peter took one look at the partial carcass—two legs, still covered with nearly impeccable chinos and ended with wingtip shoes, attached to a pelvis where blood soaked thickly into the fabric and then an expanse of bare, blood-smeared abdominal flesh terminated gorily just over the navel with ropes of pink-white organs stretched out—and promptly hurled his mango-and-pompano-fish breakfast at Mona's feet.
“Oh god!” he gagged, and wretched again. Mona stepped back and knelt next to him, rubbing his back as he pressed the heel of his palms against his eyes and groaned. “Oh no, oh no, no, no...”
Davy had gone very pale, and turned away himself, masking his own revulsion by putting an arm across Nora's shoulders, presumably to keep her from turning to look as well.
Micky, who'd snapped countless roosters' necks and carried drawn-and-quartered boar carcasses through the jungle in the past few months, had a balled fist pressed to his lips, but otherwise looked alright as he stared at the severed body. He looked the least likely to faint, anyway.
“Mick, gimme a hand.”
Taking a deep breath, Micky straightened and came to my side. We each grabbed an ankle and began dragging the body away from the girls. It occurred to me how different the smell of fresh human blood was to the smell of animal blood. So much more coppery and foul. I think Micky was thinking the same thing, because he was gasping as though trying not to inhale the stench of the blood.
“Over here,” I directed, and we turned slightly, positioning the remains behind a fern. Micky gladly dropped his leg and took several steps back, breathing deeply, while I worked to move the fern's fronds over the body and block the view. I turned back and saw Micky frantically wiping his hands on the legs of his stained pants. “You okay?”
“Yeah,” he mumbled, not looking me in the eye. “Yeah, I'm fine.”
“You know we're going to have to find and move the rest of him, right?”
He winced, and I knew he hadn't realized that yet, but he nodded anyway. “Come on, let's get it over with.”
I nodded and stood; the body was covered well enough. We could think about what to actually do with it, and whoever else we may find, later. Micky followed me back to where Davy stood with Nora and Mona crouched with Peter, who'd stopped heaving and was just groaning. They turned as we approached, trusting that it was safe to look now.
“Okay, that one wasn't alive, obviously,” I started, and Nora gave a derisive snort. I ignored her. “Wait here while we check the rest and move... anything that needs moving.”
“We can handle bodies, Mike,” Nora said, even as Peter whimpered beside her.
She liked to challenge me, always did, but I wasn't backing down on this one. “Wait. Here.”
Nora huffed angrily, but reached down and grabbed the remains of the bucket I broke, then stalked off, away from the wreck and presumably looking for vine to repair it with while she waited. Victory, me.
I gestured to Micky to follow me, and we left the others at the top of the path, following the carnage to the wreck. It had settled at the far end of the canyon, tilted with it's crushed back-end toward the ground and the end where the nose used to be tipped more skyward. The canyon was going to smell pretty damn funky after a while, I knew, when the carpet and foam padding inside the plane began to mildew and rot. Maybe we'd be able to pull some of that stuff out and get rid of it properly...
The one remaining wing was still smoking, oil burning dirty while the grime-coated propeller fought to spin. I started to pick up a branch to shove into the blades to stop their spinning when it gave up the ghost on its own and sputtered out. Micky clambered up into the elevated belly of the plane to shovel sand onto a small electrical fire in what remained of the instrument panel; it died quickly with a feeble hiss, and sent out wisps of the blue smoke unique to dying electronic equipment. (All us boys were familiar with this phenomenon, from the day Peter spilled his milk all down the front of my best amp.) Micky turned back to me with a small grin, and I knew he was remembering the spilled milk, too. I smiled back, despite the sudden pang I felt—I'd never play another guitar for the rest of my life...
But I reminded myself there was a job to be done, and pushed that thought away. I stepped forward to hoist myself up alongside Micky, but lurched backward when I recognized the other half of the pilot perched right at the edge of the plane's new mouth. Micky saw it at the same time, and took a hasty step backward. The pilot's upper torso was dripping over the edge of the cabin head, his bloody shirttail hanging a couple feet over the jungle floor. The shirt covered most of the gore, but I could still make out something dangling from within. I think it was his stomach.
“I think I found the rest, Mike,” Micky deadpanned.
I'd jumped right over him to get to the fire, and never even recognized him for what he was. I guess the complete absurdity of the scene—a trashed private plane crumpled in the middle of a jungle—threw me off. Half a body didn't really seem so out of place when nothing was really in place.
But it still feels wrong.
“Any other bodies in there?” Mike asked.
Wrong feeling again; it hadn't occurred to me to look until he mentioned it. I glanced around the interior—it was a very small plane, nothing more than a charter plane, really. The “cabin” consisted of a bench seat and maybe ten feet of cargo space behind it; when it was whole, the pilot's chair made the whole thing fifteen feet or so on the inside.
“Two more,” I answered. I cautiously peered around the seat, and felt myself release a breath I didn't mean to be holding. “Both in one piece.”
“Good. Help me get this guy back with his other half, and we'll clear out those two and get started,” he instructed.
I gotta be honest, I didn't want to touch him. Sure, I'd lugged dead boars for about a hundred miles by now, but this just wasn't the same. The boars were food. This was a man who'd been ripped in half. And his eyes were still open. And he was looking at me.
He looked very surprised.
“Micky?”
Mike must've sensed my hesitancy, because he let out one of his famous long-suffering sighs and, before I could move forward to help, he stepped up to the wet end of the torso, seized it around the chest and dragged him out of the plane and onto the ground. The head lolled oddly as it slid over the edge.
“Are you gonna get it together and help me, or do I need to send you over with the girls while I do the dirty work?” I wasn't sure if he was intentionally lumping Davy and Peter in with “the girls,” but I didn't want to join them. I was sort of a second-in-command in these fucked up tribal ranks. Davy and Pete couldn't do death and killing. I could.
“Yeah, I'm good.” I knelt at the opening, braced my hand on the ripped edge and hopped down. I'd accidentally set my hand right down in a pool of slimy blood, but I sure wasn't gonna let Mike see me freak out about it again. I wiped it on the pilot's shoulder, a dark red streak against his regulation blue dress shirt. I didn't think he'd really mind anymore.
Mike bent over and grabbed the pilot's wrists; for a second, I though he was implying that I take the other end—the end that was leaking organs more than I'd like it to be—but then he handed one of his wrists to me. I took it, and we carried him across to the brush fern, holding his hands like we were leading a four-year-old child across the street. (Boy, I wished that thought hadn't come to mind. Not that I expected to be leading any four-year-old children across a street ever again...)
“Mike,” I said (honestly, I kind of whimpered; I hoped Mike didn't hear that), “it feels like he's gripping me back.”
“He'd dead, Mick. He won't be gripping anything for a while.”
“I know, but it really feels like he's hanging on to me as much I'm hanging on to him, man.”
“It's just rigor mortis. He's dead. Believe me, no one could be alive after being torn in half like that. No god would allow that.”
I was more than a little surprised to hear Mike say that. None of us had had much to say on the subject of faith lately. I wasn't too sure that any of us still had much faith. Except Pete and the girls, of course. They really ate this “at one with nature” stuff right up. (Hey, it kept them upbeat. And them being upbeat kept the rest of us upbeat. So I didn't complain when they did rain dances or whatever it was around the camp fire.)
We dropped the rest of the pilot off behind the fern, and I tried to maneuver his top half around to fit against his bottom half again. Something like that really shouldn't be parted for too long, it can't be healthy.
Mike was full of surprises today; he dropped to one knee and started fishing through the guy's pockets.
“What the hell are you doing?!” I hissed at him. Really, it was one thing to take what we could use from the cargo, but to pick a dead man's pockets was just too much.
“Cover him up,” Mike ordered, standing up again. “I got his wallet. I want to know what name to carve on his grave marker.”
Oh. That was okay. I pushed the fronds over him again, obscuring him from view of the others, then we headed back to where Mike had told them to wait. Peter was still seated on the ground; he'd stopped groaning, but his head was between his knees.
“The pilot's taken care of. There were two others on the plane; they're both dead, too, but Mick says they're in one piece. Since dead bodies don't bother you none, we can get started with this.”
Nora yolked him again, the repaired bucket a sort of peace offering toward their last head-butt, and helped me saddle mine on again, too. Davy struggled with his on his own while Mona helped Pete. I hung back with them; Pete didn't look so good.
“Hey, man, you okay?”
“I'll be fine—whoa!”
I grabbed his arm, keeping him upright as his yolk dipped to one side and he staggered. “Are you sure? You don't look so good...”
“I'll be fine,” he sighed. “I don't get to see exposed organs all the time like you do. I wasn't expecting to see a man torn in half, is all.”
He didn't sound all that fine to me, but Pete hated when we fawned over him like he wasn't able to take care of himself, so I let it go. He and Mona and I hurried to catch up to the others, who were already halfway down the path. The peace offering bucket hadn't lasted long, Nora and Mike were arguing again already. I stopped alongside Davy, matching his stride and listening to them duke it out a step ahead of us.
“I know you've got that Texas chivalry thing going for you, and it's usually really cute, but you're starting to get on my nerves, man!”
I love her, but man, she's as stubborn as... well, me.
“Look, I just don't think it's something you need to be doing! I'm not saying it's because you're a woman and women are weak and irrational and not suited for a job like this, I just don't think you're as prepared for it as you want to sound.”
Gotta hand it to him, when he's of a mind to, Mike really knows the right things to say to diffuse a situation. Need to get him to teach me that.
“Just what do you mean by that?”
“I mean, would you be as eager to go take a peek if I hadn't said you couldn't?”
No.
“Yes!”
Liar.
“That's kinda sick, Nora. The man was torn in half, you dig? Ripped in two pieces, right here.” He cut a line across his abdomen with his hand, indicating where the pilot now required a hinge. “Intestines hanging out both ends. It's not like the boars, baby. It's different. It's... just different.”
I was really glad to hear Mike say that. It had affected him, it wasn't just me being a wimp.
“Not if you learn to adopt the right frame of mind. A body is a body, be it human or animal. Whether it's all bundled up in a nice, neat little package or strewn around like a ticker-tape parade, it's the same damn thing.”
Well... yeah, I guess that was one way to look at it. Mike paused, thinking it over, too.
“You don't want that frame of mind. I... don't want you to have that frame of mind. It changes you, a lot more than you might think.” He paused again, then added, “I don't want you to change like that.”
I'd expected her to kick up a rage again, but she didn't. It looked like she appreciated Mike's sentiment. I suddenly felt the need to show my girl that Mike wasn't the only one who cared about her wellbeing. (Hey, call me jealous if you want, but the only other girl on this rock was Nora's sister, who spent her time keeping Peter's bedroll warm. I wanted to stay in her good graces as often as possible, you know?) I doubled my step and gently nudged Mike aside (he took the hint and fell back into step with Davy), and put my arm across her shoulders—no small feat when balancing a yolk, let me tell you!
“He's right, baby,” I said, trying my best to mimic Mike's sensitivity. “Besides, we need you scouring the cargo. We can't leave something like that to Pete and Dav—ow!” I felt a jab between my shoulder blades as Davy pretended to stumble and nailed me with the end of his yolk.
“Oh, sorry Mick,” he apologized cheekily. “Damn uneven ground, you know!” I'd get him back for that later.
“Anyway, there's a transistor in there. It might be a little damaged, but if you can get it out of there, we might be able to fix it up, and maybe get some kind of signal or something. Maybe even send an SOS!”
“And that's my department, right?”
We came up in front of the wreckage then, and all us guys set down our yolks. While Mike and Davy moved past us, I put my hands on her waist and turned her to face me. She rested her arms on my shoulders and raised an eyebrow, smirking.
“No one has your touch, baby.”
He was being sarcastic, of course. I might be a good candidate for removing the transistor without damaging it (you'd be surprised how two years as a magician's assistant can hone an unusually delicate touch), but I was horrible with complicated electronics, and everyone knew it.
But I kissed him anyway. Hey, I may not know how to rebuild a radio, but I'm no fool.
Mike cleared his throat, and we all turned to him. “I guess we need to start with the bodies,” he surmised. “Gimme a hand, guys.” He hoisted himself up easily, and Micky and Peter followed him.
Davy, however, stopped short. Literally. His shoulders barely cleared the ledge.
“Need a step stool, Davy-boy?” Micky grinned.
“I can do it myself!” Davy braced his arms on the ledge and tried to scramble up alongside the other guys, but he couldn't find the leverage to lift himself up far enough to get a leg-up. He dropped down again, and sighed hotly. “A little help, please?” he grumbled, looking toward Mona and I.
We came up beside him and laced our fingers together, making a stirrup. Davy hiked one foot up into it, and we hoisted him up while Mike and Peter grabbed for his arms and pulled him into the cabin. He straightened up, dusting himself off (the front of his shirt bore a new hole from being snagged on a bit of jagged metal, and there was a streak of the pilot's blood on his ribs, but I'm not sure he noticed that part, and I certainly wasn't going to point it out), and scowled around at us. Micky had a hand pressed to his mouth to keep from laughing, Peter and Mona and I were biting back giggles, and even Mike was smirking at the ground.
“Any of you guys say one word and I'm gonna deck you!” Davy declared, waving a fist. “I swear it!”
Peter clapped him on the back, and they all got down to work. Mona and I waited outside; the cabin wasn't exactly tiny, but with four living men trying to maneuver two dead men, we wanted to stay out of the way.
“What are we gonna do with them?” Davy asked.
“I dunno yet,” was the only answer Mike had.
“Aw, man!” That was Peter, and wasn't in response to Mike and Davy's conversation. He turned away from the dead bodies, looking pale again.
“Baby, what's wrong?” Mona asked. I stood on tiptoe to try to get a better look, but it didn't really help. Both bodies had been thrown behind the bench seat, and all I could see were a couple limbs peeking out from the sides.
Peter didn't answer, only pressed his fingers to his eyes. I think he was trying to suppress tears.
“One of them is a chick,” Micky answered for him. Pete nodded vigorously, indicating that yes, that was what was wrong. Micky came up alongside him and squeezed his shoulder. “Me and Davy'll take care of her. You and Mike can move the guy, okay?” Peter nodded, taking his hands away from his face and breathing deeply, and turned back again.
We watched as they orchestrated the moving process, Davy taking the woman under the shoulders and Micky taking her feet, then setting her down at the edge of the cabin while Davy clambered down to the ground again. They pushed and pulled her over the edge, Micky hanging on until Davy had a good enough grip to keep from dropping her, then Micky hopped down himself.
She was older than any of us, but not quite as old as our mothers. Mid-thirties, maybe? She had been dressed conservatively, in a style that reminded me of Mona's rehearsal clothes, all cream-colored woolen suit and silk blouse. Her shoes (well, her shoe, one of them was missing) had been dyed to match. And she would be very pretty if she hadn't lost half her forehead, and if her neck didn't slump at a perfect right-angle to her spine.
Then something occurred to me.
“Wait!” I cried, as Micky and Davy balanced her out between them again. They paused, as did Mike and Peter, who were trying to work out the physics of carrying the man. “Should we take what we can use from them, too?”
Beside me, Mona snapped her fingers, already figuring out what I was getting at. (That's one of the best things about having a twin; half-formed ideas are as easily shared as full concepts are with everyone else.)
“Their clothes, their personal stuff... I mean, we might not be able to use the clothes as they are, but there's a severe lack of fabric around here.”
All the boys looked a bit doubtful, but Mona backed me up immediately. (Did I mention how great it is having a twin?)
“Yeah, we could take the cloth and cut it down into other things. Use it for bandages, or make a blanket, or—yeah, or we can use it for tying the joints on the huts!”
The boys looked at one another, then down at the bodies. Micky reached down and fingered the woman's blouse collar.
“I think this is silk,” he determined, looking back at Mike. “Silk is really strong stuff.”
Davy took up the cause, too. “If we ever get home again, it might be appreciated by their families if we could give them their personals. Jewelry and watches and things. And I'd say this crash has increased the odds a bit in our favor! Surely someone will be looking for them!”
Davy's last words hung heavily for a moment, and he realized what he'd said.
“I mean... someone's looking for us, too. Of course they are! But these guys were in a plane! With a radio! I bet they sent out transmissions to Tower or whatever it is they do, and Tower will know where they were when they sent the last one and will have some idea of where to be looking for them!” We all exchanged glances around him, which frustrated him, I think. “All we had was a little tugboat with a radio that didn't work! We could be anywhere as far as anyone else is concerned, but these guys had direct communication with someone! Come on, you know what I meant!”
We did know what he'd meant, of course, but somehow, we just couldn't work up his optimism. It sounded good—really good, in fact—but... nothing like having your hopes raised to make the crushing that much worse, you know? But we weren't going to shoot him out of the sky like that; he was really having the hardest time of all of us, adjusting to our new life.
“Yeah, Davy,” Mike placated, “that's a real good point. You're right.”
“Hang on a second,” Peter started, and for just a second, I was afraid he was about to shoot Davy's theory out of the sky. But Peter had moved back to the matter immediately at hand. “What are we talking about, just stripping them down right here? I... I just don't think that's... right, you know?” He was looking pointedly at the woman balanced in Davy's and Micky's arms.
“We could leave them for now,” Micky suggested, “clean out the plane, and strip them before we bury them.”
“Yeah,” Mona agreed. “You guys can do the men, and we can take care of her. And we can wrap them up in leaves or something, so they won't be, you know, stark naked out there in front of God and everybody.”
We all looked to Mike, who looked to Peter for approval. Peter looked away from the woman and gave a little half-shrug, only meeting Mike's eye for a moment before turning back to the dead man at their feet. “Yeah, that sounds okay, I guess.”
“That's what we'll do, then, but we're going to have to work fast. I don't want the bodies lying around any longer than they have to. They're gonna start to go off, especially the pilot, and it's gonna attract a lot of things that'll make our job a lot harder. You girls start stripping the plane for parts, and us guys will take shifts doing that and taking care of them. Let's get a move on.”
They all set to work again, while Mona and I took a step back, to make sure we were out of their way. Davy and Micky hiked the woman's body up again and carried her off to the fern bed Micky and Mike had hidden the pilot's remains in earlier, and deposited her just in front of it. Peter and Mike were right behind them, lugging the male passenger.
As Mike and I approached them, Davy pulled a frond off the fern beside them and placed it over the dead woman's face, I guess for me.
I'm not as big a wimp as I seem, really I'm not. It's just... when I was a kid, my parents would invite the neighboring couple over for bridge and canasta every Tuesday night. The wife—I called her Mrs. Bellamy, but Mom and Dad called her Margo—was really pretty, and really nice, and... okay, I guess I had a little bit of a crush on her. She knitted me a sweater for Christmas one year, and gave me a peach once, when I told Mom I was tired of having bananas in my lunch.
The dead lady looked just like her.
“Where are we going to bury them?” Micky asked, looking to Mike.
Mike didn't answer immediately, instead staring off into the distance with his lips pursed tightly. I knew that look, it meant he was thinking very hard. I tried to copy it once, but nothing happened. Micky saw me trying it and thought I was about to pass out.
After a moment, he slowly responded, “I don't think we should bury them.”
I was confused, and for once, I wasn't the only one.
“What are you saying, we should just leave them here?” Davy asked incredulously.
“I hope you're not thinking about bait for the tiger pit,” Micky said, and he sounded a little bit angry, too.
“No, no, nothing like that,” Mike defended, holding up his hands. “I don't think burial is a practical solution. It's gonna take a while to dig three graves, and it gets pretty damn hot out here when you're digging holes six feet deep with a clam shell, take it from me.”
He raised his eyebrows pointedly, and I knew we were all remembering the day Mike had dug the tiger pit. He'd done it all on his own; it had taken him all day, and between the sun and his thirst, he'd come closer to dying than anyone cared to say.
“So... what should we do?” I asked. “Burial at sea?” I was hoping that's not what he was thinking of. Mrs. Bellamy didn't swim.
“We can't do that,” Micky said. “You gotta wrap the body up and weigh it down so it doesn't float back to shore—” (I had the horrible thought of waking up in the morning to find Mrs. Bellamy's body washed up alongside the seashells and driftwood.) “—then take it a long way out into the ocean so it sinks down far enough. We don't have anything to wrap them with, and if we had a boat to get out to the deep water, we wouldn't be here in the first place.”
“I know, I'm not thinking about that. How about a funeral pyre?”
“Like the Vikings!” Davy said, snapping his fingers. “Yeah, that could work, couldn't it?”
“I think so, yeah, and it'd be a hell of a lot easier than grave-digging, man.”
It sounded pretty good to me. Graves were really big, and we'd have to dig three of them. A pyre might be easier. And it was kind of a more respectful way, wasn't it? Pyres were for heroes, weren't they?
“Okay, so, where should we build it?” I asked.
Mike got that look again, and turned to look down the path we'd taken to get here from home. He pivoted slightly to the right, and held his hands out in front of him, moving them this way and that way, using them to mark locations as he thought.
“I think...” he started slowly, “if we put them at the end of our beach, away from the river, that would be best. The wind will keep the fire hot, and the smoke will blow away from us. There's not too much on that end that's useful, and we can see it from home if there's a problem. We're going to have to take shifts in watching the fire, though, until it's done.”
“Okay! Let's get started!” Davy seemed so excited to do this, it was a little disturbing to remember what exactly we were discussing: torching dead people.
I looked back to the dessicated plane, and saw Mona and Nora working furiously inside the cabin. They'd probably made a bet on who could get the most stuff. “Should we tell the girls what we're doing?”
“Yeah, I'll go tell them,” Micky said, already moving toward them. “You guys go on, I'll catch up!”
We watched Micky bounding off across the canyon toward the wrecked plane for a moment, then turned and headed back up the path.
“How do you know so much about building a pyre?” Davy asked Mike.
“In Texas, I had a job every day after school as a farm hand on a cattle ranch. We used pyres all the time to dispose of dead animals and parts we couldn't use.”
Mike didn't talk about Texas too often; we always assumed it was a sore subject, so we never brought it up and he didn't volunteer information too freely. So Davy and I didn't ask anything more, and we all lapsed into silence. After a minute, Mike started up again.
“The biggest problem is it's probably going to take all of our wood to get this thing going. Rocks will help, they hold heat really well and don't burn down to nothing. Micky might be able to drain some oil out of the boat's engine for an accelerant, if there's anything left...”
“Micky might what?” Micky asked breathlessly, jogging up alongside us. He was peeling the skin off a mango, probably from the tree at the mouth of the canyon, and handed a second one to me. I was glad; I was starting to feel really hungry, since I lost my breakfast a while ago.
“Think you can drain the oil out of the boat engine, Mick?” Mike asked him.
Micky made a face, and not because the mango wasn't ripe enough. “I dunno, man, I don't think there's much in there. It was grinding pretty hard during the storm. And it's been sitting for a while, it might be sludgy with engine burn-off.” He took another bite, slurping juice loudly. “But I can try. Why?”
“Accelerant for the fire.”
“Oh. If I can't, coconut meat might work. There's a lot of oil in there. Or—” (He took another noisy bite.) “—boar fat, if we've got any left.”
“We do.” I'd dipped into our fat supply just last night, to treat some wood for new fishing spears, and hung up what was left myself. As long as we hadn't been raided by a leopard again, we still had plenty.
“Oh, hey, guess what the girls found!”
“What?”
“Okay, well, they've found a lot of stuff. Nora thinks the woman might've been an English teacher somewhere, because there were a bunch of books in her luggage—she's absolutely through the roof about that. And the man was carrying a shaving kit, with a razor blade and foam and everything!”
All of us, myself included (and I almost choked on my mango to do it, too!), shouted “I call first!” at once. Davy started to stamp up an argument for the shaving kit, but Micky popped a piece of mango into his open mouth to cut him off. He chewed sulkily as Micky continued.
“But the big find,” he said, pausing to roll his tongue and mime a drum roll. “They found the plane's emergency kits intact!”
Mike slammed to a halt and spun around. “What was in it?!” he demanded.
“Some tools—a hammer and nails, a couple screwdrivers, a ratchet set—and a good first aid kit with bandages and acetaminophen tabs and alcohol pads... and a flare gun.”
No one moved for several long seconds. Micky grinned like a gargoyle at us while we soaked this in. The tools and first aid kit were good things, they'd make life a little easier—but the flare gun... The flare gun meant hope. We might find a way home. To our real home, I mean. The pad on North Beechwood, with the cracked plaster and leaky faucet and toilet that never quite stopped running, wasn't much, but I don't think any of us ever truly appreciated it properly.
Slowly, we came back to life and resumed walking, but no one broke the silence yet, all lost in thought. I wondered what had happened to our stuff after we'd defaulted on our lease. If we were really lucky, maybe Mr. Babbitt put it all in storage—more likely, he sold it to cover the remains of our broken lease, but I can dream, can't I? I wondered if our apartment had been rented out yet. If not, maybe we could get back in, and get our stuff back, and everything could be exactly the way it was before...
But then I found myself wondering what had happened to Mona's and Nora's things, and whether they'd be able to get their apartment back. We'd all been living in such close quarters the past few months, it was hard to imagine life without them immediately at hand. Maybe... maybe we could all find a place together? Our pad wouldn't be big enough for the six of us, unless us four guys shared one room, and the girls took the other. But... maybe it could work...
We were all thinking the same things, I think.
We'd made a bet on who could salvage the most useful things from the wreckage. Nora had been winning, thanks to the shaving kit she'd unearthed in the man's duffel, but when I uncovered the flare gun, she immediately declared me the winner by default. Unless we discovered a second, non-wrecked, gassed-up plane that we could use to fly the hell out of here somewhere in this carnage, the flare gun trumped all.
While we were staring at the flare gun, Micky had trotted up to share the new plans for laying the victims to rest; he stopped dead in his tracks when he recognized the flare gun for what it was, then let out a whoop of delight and snatched Nora up, planting an embarrassingly huge kiss on her. (I turned away; it would have been awkward for them if I'd watched—if either of them had any morals, that is.)
He set her down again and hurried off to pass along the news to the other boys (putting in a request as he went that Nora collect as many electrical components from the instrument panels as she could wrangle out; I asked him to stop and pick a mango for Peter on the way, since he'd gotten sick and they had a long day's work ahead of them), and Nora and I got back to work.
We worked in silence—she was prying the fronts off the electrical panels while I was trying to unbolt the bench seat from the floor of the plane, both jobs made infinitely easier by the screwdrivers and ratchets we'd found—completely lost in our own thoughts. The flare gun was an unbelievably fortunate discovery, but I refused to get my hopes up too high. It was only worth anything if we saw someone to signal, and that's assuming the thing worked in the first place. There was only one flare in the case, so we couldn't check it, and we had to pray our signal was seen with that one shot. We weren't rescued yet...
But oh, it was hard fighting my hopes. My thoughts kept drifting to being rescued, and finally seeing civilization again. The very first thing I would do, I decided, was take a long, scorching hot bath—a bubble bath, with real soap and shampoo!—and catch up on my back issues of Vogue and Harper's Bazaar. (Oh, I hoped the fashion scene hadn't taken another of its sporadic leaps forward and left me in the dust with last season's cast-offs!) Then it was straight to the salon; this ocean environment had completely ruined my hair, turning it coarse and brassy, and I was dying for a hot oil treatment. Then Peter and I would go to the movie house for a date that didn't involve sharing a papaya, and then back to the apartment to make sweet, passionate love. Finally. (Oh, I'd need to fit a quick stop at the druggist's in there somewhere, to reinstate my prescription, wouldn't I? On the way to the salon, then.)
Nora and I would need to find a new apartment; I'm sure Mrs. Meeker had terminated our lease, given that our last rent payment was fourteen weeks overdue now. The old place was nice, but kind of... busy. The food co-op had neighbors popping in at any given moment, bringing us shares of food in exchange for cooking it or cleaning it or preserving it or anything else you can do to food. It would be nice to have a quieter place, where your neighbors knew their boundaries. Maybe the six of us could all—
No. I would not start planning a new living situation. I would not start pinning all my expectations on being rescued shortly. My current objective was to get this last damn bolt out of this bench seat and shove it out of here, and I would put all my focus on that. I would harvest every available piece that we could potentially use, and I would do my fair share to make island life livable. I would—
“Would you be interested in sharing a pad with the guys?”
I would have to talk to my sister about reading my thoughts.
“What do you mean?” I was trying to play dumb to shake her off, but she wasn't buying it. She'd set her screwdriver down and had turned to face me completely.
“Come on, I know you were thinking it as well as I was. What do you think about all of us getting an apartment together? The six of us; you and Pete, Mick and me, and Davy, and Mike?”
I sighed and set down my ratchet, rocking back on my heels. It was Discussion Time, no getting out of it.
“I don't know,” I floundered, and I really didn't. Sure I'd thought about it—truth be told, I had entertained the notion briefly before any of this happened, when we were all planted firmly on solid ground. As a possibility way in the future, of course; I don't think any of us were ready for a step like that in our relationships. Peter and I had only been together for four months at that point, Nora and Micky less than that. Six people in one apartment... that was quite a bit more than I thought of as comfortable. Sure, we were basically living that way here, but it was different somehow. We weren't all packed in next to each other in a tiny pad with spit-and-toilet-paper walls that tried for the illusion of privacy; we knew there was no such thing as privacy here. During the day, there was the entire island to roam, and we all had our own little shelters and bedrolls at night. “Six people in one apartment—,” I started.
“It's not like we'd all be crammed in together every second of every day,” Nora quickly reminded me, with an accuracy that was downright eerie, even for us. “We'll have jobs, and errands, and places to go that don't require everyone's attendance. We can dole out the chores—it'll be just like here but in a different setting!”
She'd been thinking this for a while, I could tell, long before the flare gun appeared; I wondered if she'd considered it as long ago as I had.
“I don't know,” I repeated. “If we can come up with enough money to get a pad that's big enough for all six of us, without us tripping over each other all the time, it might not be so bad.”
She turned her head a little, trying to hide her smile.
“But don't forget,” I added quickly, “all our belongings are probably long gone. I might have to get a new cello before I could return to the symphony—if there's still a place for me. Mumford may have gotten himself a new assistant. The boys might not have any of their instruments anymore. We'll be lucky if we can get an apartment at all now that our old jobs are history.”
Nora's face fell, and I knew I'd just dashed her hopes pretty harshly. “Yeah, I guess you're right,” she muttered, and turned back to the task of disemboweling the instrument panels. “It was a stupid idea.”
“It wasn't a stupid idea—”
“Yes, it was.”
That meant she wasn't in the mood to talk anymore, so I returned to the rusty bolt. She could get so bent out of shape if everyone in the room didn't immediately bow jump on her ideas sometimes... I gave the ratchet a mighty twist, and the bolt finally squeaked loose with a rusty protest.
“Oh, thank god!” I sighed with relief, and pushed myself back up to my feet. “Give me a hand with this?”
Together, we each seized an end and wrestled the thing out of the mouth of the plane and onto the ground, where Nora set it upright in the dirt and flopped onto it with a contented sigh.
“You know, this is pretty damn comfy,” she declared, shifting deeper into the noisy leatherette padding. She patted the space next to her, and I happily joined her; she was right, it was fairly comfortable. More comfortable than what we'd become accustomed to, anyway. We rested there for a moment; afternoon was coming on and it was getting very warm inside the shell of the plane. The light breeze rolling through the canyon felt so good now.
“You know,” I offered after a moment, “if we can't afford a three-bedroom apartment right away, maybe we can swing apartments in the same building. We'd be neighbors, all right there and living side-by-side, we could see each other any time we wanted, and we wouldn't be so close that there was no escaping each other.”
She smiled again, and I knew I was forgiven. “Yeah, that might work out... You know, if they're interested, too.”
“Yeah.” There were a few beats of silence, then I added, “Plus, you know, separate apartments means more privacy.”
Her smile quickly shifted in one of her wicked grins, and—
“Oh my goodness, is that a blush? Is my sister, Nora, Queen of the Harlots, actually showing a hint of embarrassment?!”
At my crowing, her blush deepened (which was my intent exactly); she bit her lip against her grin and turned away, a hand over her face. Even the tips of her ears were reddening, and not from the heat, either.
“Okay, out with it, what's going on?”
She pressed her fingers to her cheeks, as though trying to force them to release their hold on her smile and let her compose herself. After a moment of my expectant silence, she knew she had my attention and I wasn't going to back off this. Hell, the longer she held out, the more interested I was. What on earth could get her this worked up—
“Oh my god, you're pregnant!” I squeaked, horrified. In a flash, she sat up and clapped a hand over my mouth, looking toward the head of the path nervously.
“Jesus Christ!” she hissed at me. “No, I'm not pregnant and if any of them heard you say that I'm going to throw your ass in the tiger pit!”
I used one hand to pry her hand from my face, holding the other up in submission. “Okay, okay,” I relented, giggling with relief, “I'm sorry. Got a little carried away. Not pregnant, gotcha. Thank god. So what is it?”
She leaned back in the seat again, letting her head flop back over the backrest, and I got the distinct impression that she was avoiding looking me in the eye.
“The, uh, means for more privacy...” she started, trailing off.
“Yes? Separate apartments, more privacy, we covered that part.” God, she could be so infuriating when she had something she was reluctant to share!
“It... might come in more handy than you realize,” she said cryptically, then added, like I was clueless, “the privacy, I mean.”
“And why is that, oh dearest sister of mine?” I clipped sarcastically.
She chewed her lip for a minute, then cracked her knuckles slowly, then stretched her legs out in front of her; I was this close to grabbing her by the hair and shaking her when she finally blurted it out.
“Micky asked me to marry him.”
kittencuffs wrote a start to a fic. This isn't the first chapter, but the first idea she came up with.It is a Monkees' fic with two original female characters. Mona and Nora are sisters. Mona is a concert cellist and Nora is a magician's assistant. I think this is a really good chapter, whatever number it ends up being. Also, for more info, Mona and Peter have been dating for about five months and Nora and Micky for roughly four.
I love adventurey type things. Monkees + desert island = AWESOME!
And please be specific on what you like! She's got some really fantastic ideas, but really needs a lot of ego stroking to go on... (Which is why this is going in my journal. Because my friends are better at replying to things, apparently...)
Ooh! Also, this is in multi-first person. It's pretty clear when it switches, so we're not going to worry about a list.
The plane crashed down at roughly five in the morning.
(We say “roughly,” because we now generalized time according to the sun's position and our own internal clocks. Mike had attempted to create a sundial early on, and insisted it was accurate, until we pointed out that, according to the time lines he'd scratched in the surrounding sand, it was almost seven in the evening while the sun was scorchingly hot directly overhead. He'd scowled and gone off to sulk privately over his failure, and later dismantled the sundial while no one was around. Since then, we've decided that precise time isn't terribly important anyway, and estimation is the best we can come up with. No one mentions the sundial.)
I had been sleeping when it came screaming out of the sky like the most massive heron, its motors spewing a stream of acrid black smoke. I woke up to a sound like a thousand boars roaring and before I'd even shaken off the fuzziness of sleep, I snatched up my spear and stumbled out on to the beach. (I have to admit, my first thought was that the boars of the island had convened to seek their revenge in a bloody battle to the death. I'm glad I was wrong.) The first thing I saw was the aluminum-sided airplane roaring toward us, it's deathsong drowning out the usual jungle cacophony. Immediately after registering the presence of the falling plane, I saw Micky rounding the corner from the jungle path, streaking toward the beach and shrieking my name.
“Davy!” he screamed, running at me. “A plane!” He pointed to it, as though I were either blind and deaf and hadn't noticed the massive thing roaring overhead, or completely thick and couldn't recognize this “iron bird” for what it really was. I tried to shout back a confirmation that I both saw and recognized it, but my throat was still dead from sleep and I couldn't strangle out a noise loud enough to be heard over the plane, so I just nodded and stared.
Peter and Mike had been scouting in the other side of the jungle, and now came racing along the other path toward us. Mona had been standing waist-deep in the lagoon, and Nora had been sitting near the fire; they both joined us as well, and the six of us watched together as the plane drew level overhead, then streaked by, losing altitude at an alarming rate.
I'd like to think that perhaps three or four months ago, such a sight would have elicited some kind of reaction other than casual interest. It was very clear that this airplane was about to crash to a fiery finish in a matter of seconds, and any passengers would likely be killed, and I feel a horrible kind of inhuman numbness to say that that knowledge didn't really affect me. In fact, it didn't seem to affect any of us as we anticipated the impact—I think we were all trying to quell the same hope, that the plane crash would create a smoke signal and might finally bring about a long-overdue rescue. (If that were the case, we were all to be sorely disappointed, we knew. We'd long ago come to the realization that we would probably end our lives on this very beach, and it was only a matter of how long it would take.) After months of training in taking the lives of other creatures, tragedy no longer existed. Someone's life was about to be ended on our island, but since they weren't a part of our tribe, we viewed it as no different than the life of the boar Mike and Micky had hunted and killed two nights ago. His death carried the promise of new parts to make island life more bearable, and it's not as though any of us had the power to stop the plane's ill-fated descent. Death was inevitable, and we no longer had to travel any emotional distance to accept that fact.
Proving my point, the plane had dropped low enough to skim the tops of the trees and continued to descend; limbs were ripped away, exposing the white virgin fiber beneath the bark. (My only thought was of all the softwood to be collected from their debris; we were running low on torches, after all.) Finally, with a sound that I will never forget, that sometimes still wakes me from my sleep, the plane met the ground. I don't think I can describe the sound exactly. There was a lot of rumbling, as the plane had hit an outcropping of the volcano and caused a small rock slide on to the path, which would take several days to clear. There was sloshing from the river, where the vibration of the crash caused the banks to spill over. And there was shrieking. Lots of shrieking. Metal shrieking as it was ripped away from braces, chimps and roosters and birds shrieking as they fled the area in abject terror... I try not to imagine there was human shrieking wrapped in the cacophony as well.
(I take extreme solace, however, in the fact that the two women of our small tribe were more affected than us men allowed ourselves to be—or at least allowed ourselves to display. Both of them turned away, Mona seeking refuge against Peter's shoulder, Nora finding comfort in Micky's embrace; each boy covered his girl's ears and shielded her eyes, as though it would be enough to protect her from the horrifying reality we knew we were about to plunder through. In those moments I always found myself wishing we'd found a couple of native girls somewhere on this rock for Mike and myself. I really missed those interactions. Perhaps we weren't becoming completely inhuman after all.)
There was a short moment of silence, out of a mixture of both shock and reverence, before Mike cleared his throat.
“We should go check it out,” he muttered, eyes locked on the rising smoke of the wreckage.
“Let's get the buckets,” Mona said to Nora, finally breaking contact with Peter's shoulder. They disappeared into the small shelter we'd erected to protect the few tools we were capable of creating, while us men suited up with our weaponry. (I always liked to think of it that way, though truthfully the most action my knife ever saw was ruthlessly slashing a coconut husk.) The girls emerged a few moments later with the yolks—pieces of sturdy driftwood with a wooden bucket attached to either end by a length of vine, dead useful for harvests even if the buckets were prone to breaking apart—and also two of our fishing nets. Mona helped Peter and I balance our yolks over our shoulders, while Nora helped Mike and Micky.
Nora chewed her lip thoughtfully for a moment, looking at the thin column of smoke. “Should I bring this?” she asked meekly, producing the boarskin pouch containing our few medical supplies, and looked to Mike for direction. We all turned to Mike as well. How were we going to handle it? Bringing the kit said that we would try to help if we found any survivors; leaving it meant we were going to loot, and nothing more. This was the first time we'd really had to choose between the morals of our previous lives and the reality of our new life.
When Mike opened his mouth, we all knew what he was going to say.
“Leave it.”
Nora stared at the pouch for a moment, almost unwilling to let it go. Micky quickly piped up. “What if someone survived, Mike?” The unspoken implication was clear: If someone had survived, would we help them, or kill them?
“No one could have survived that, Mick.”
“But what if someone did?”
Mike stared at the smoke column for a moment, quietly fingering the handle of the stone ax he'd claimed as his own and pursed his lips. Finally, his shoulders slumped and he sighed, “Never mind. Bring it.” Even Michael, our stone-faced leader, wasn't ready to become that.
Honestly, I really resented that they left the decision to me. I'm a better decision-maker than any of them, sure, but... that's not the kind of decision I want to be making. No one wants to have to choose between options like that. If there were survivors, we could help them, spend days trying to comfort them while we struggled to find cures for injuries we weren't skilled enough to handle, feed them with our already-limited rations, then watch them succumb to the pain, the infection, the degradation of it all in the end anyway. Or we could put an end to their suffering immediately and live with the guilt for the rest of our lives, outwardly justifying it with the old “law of the jungle” adage (which, I have to admit, is more than appropriate these days) while knowing that we lost a part of ourselves we'd never again restore.
I love all these guys, but I know none of them could handle something like that.
I lucked out, though. There were no survivors.
We took the familiar path into the jungle, following the wreckage to the site of impact. And what a sight it was, too. The plane had been shredded—first it lost the landing gear as it crashed through the treetops. Once it dropped below the tree line, it struck the side of the canyon with one wing, which was torn off, along with a part of the cabin wall. The impact shifted velocity and the plane twisted, scraping its nose along the canyon wall and leading with its one remaining wing. Finally, it took the end of the canyon to the hip, crushing the entire back end of the plane on the port side, and sending the second wing gouging deep into the canyon face.
The first thing we were confronted with was half the pilot. I thank god I saw it first.
“Stop!” I called out, and turned, holding my arms out to block everyone's view. (My yolk tumbled back when I did, and one of the buckets broke apart.) “Girls, turn around, don't look!” They did as I asked, but when I dropped my arms, Peter took one look at the partial carcass—two legs, still covered with nearly impeccable chinos and ended with wingtip shoes, attached to a pelvis where blood soaked thickly into the fabric and then an expanse of bare, blood-smeared abdominal flesh terminated gorily just over the navel with ropes of pink-white organs stretched out—and promptly hurled his mango-and-pompano-fish breakfast at Mona's feet.
“Oh god!” he gagged, and wretched again. Mona stepped back and knelt next to him, rubbing his back as he pressed the heel of his palms against his eyes and groaned. “Oh no, oh no, no, no...”
Davy had gone very pale, and turned away himself, masking his own revulsion by putting an arm across Nora's shoulders, presumably to keep her from turning to look as well.
Micky, who'd snapped countless roosters' necks and carried drawn-and-quartered boar carcasses through the jungle in the past few months, had a balled fist pressed to his lips, but otherwise looked alright as he stared at the severed body. He looked the least likely to faint, anyway.
“Mick, gimme a hand.”
Taking a deep breath, Micky straightened and came to my side. We each grabbed an ankle and began dragging the body away from the girls. It occurred to me how different the smell of fresh human blood was to the smell of animal blood. So much more coppery and foul. I think Micky was thinking the same thing, because he was gasping as though trying not to inhale the stench of the blood.
“Over here,” I directed, and we turned slightly, positioning the remains behind a fern. Micky gladly dropped his leg and took several steps back, breathing deeply, while I worked to move the fern's fronds over the body and block the view. I turned back and saw Micky frantically wiping his hands on the legs of his stained pants. “You okay?”
“Yeah,” he mumbled, not looking me in the eye. “Yeah, I'm fine.”
“You know we're going to have to find and move the rest of him, right?”
He winced, and I knew he hadn't realized that yet, but he nodded anyway. “Come on, let's get it over with.”
I nodded and stood; the body was covered well enough. We could think about what to actually do with it, and whoever else we may find, later. Micky followed me back to where Davy stood with Nora and Mona crouched with Peter, who'd stopped heaving and was just groaning. They turned as we approached, trusting that it was safe to look now.
“Okay, that one wasn't alive, obviously,” I started, and Nora gave a derisive snort. I ignored her. “Wait here while we check the rest and move... anything that needs moving.”
“We can handle bodies, Mike,” Nora said, even as Peter whimpered beside her.
She liked to challenge me, always did, but I wasn't backing down on this one. “Wait. Here.”
Nora huffed angrily, but reached down and grabbed the remains of the bucket I broke, then stalked off, away from the wreck and presumably looking for vine to repair it with while she waited. Victory, me.
I gestured to Micky to follow me, and we left the others at the top of the path, following the carnage to the wreck. It had settled at the far end of the canyon, tilted with it's crushed back-end toward the ground and the end where the nose used to be tipped more skyward. The canyon was going to smell pretty damn funky after a while, I knew, when the carpet and foam padding inside the plane began to mildew and rot. Maybe we'd be able to pull some of that stuff out and get rid of it properly...
The one remaining wing was still smoking, oil burning dirty while the grime-coated propeller fought to spin. I started to pick up a branch to shove into the blades to stop their spinning when it gave up the ghost on its own and sputtered out. Micky clambered up into the elevated belly of the plane to shovel sand onto a small electrical fire in what remained of the instrument panel; it died quickly with a feeble hiss, and sent out wisps of the blue smoke unique to dying electronic equipment. (All us boys were familiar with this phenomenon, from the day Peter spilled his milk all down the front of my best amp.) Micky turned back to me with a small grin, and I knew he was remembering the spilled milk, too. I smiled back, despite the sudden pang I felt—I'd never play another guitar for the rest of my life...
But I reminded myself there was a job to be done, and pushed that thought away. I stepped forward to hoist myself up alongside Micky, but lurched backward when I recognized the other half of the pilot perched right at the edge of the plane's new mouth. Micky saw it at the same time, and took a hasty step backward. The pilot's upper torso was dripping over the edge of the cabin head, his bloody shirttail hanging a couple feet over the jungle floor. The shirt covered most of the gore, but I could still make out something dangling from within. I think it was his stomach.
“I think I found the rest, Mike,” Micky deadpanned.
I'd jumped right over him to get to the fire, and never even recognized him for what he was. I guess the complete absurdity of the scene—a trashed private plane crumpled in the middle of a jungle—threw me off. Half a body didn't really seem so out of place when nothing was really in place.
But it still feels wrong.
“Any other bodies in there?” Mike asked.
Wrong feeling again; it hadn't occurred to me to look until he mentioned it. I glanced around the interior—it was a very small plane, nothing more than a charter plane, really. The “cabin” consisted of a bench seat and maybe ten feet of cargo space behind it; when it was whole, the pilot's chair made the whole thing fifteen feet or so on the inside.
“Two more,” I answered. I cautiously peered around the seat, and felt myself release a breath I didn't mean to be holding. “Both in one piece.”
“Good. Help me get this guy back with his other half, and we'll clear out those two and get started,” he instructed.
I gotta be honest, I didn't want to touch him. Sure, I'd lugged dead boars for about a hundred miles by now, but this just wasn't the same. The boars were food. This was a man who'd been ripped in half. And his eyes were still open. And he was looking at me.
He looked very surprised.
“Micky?”
Mike must've sensed my hesitancy, because he let out one of his famous long-suffering sighs and, before I could move forward to help, he stepped up to the wet end of the torso, seized it around the chest and dragged him out of the plane and onto the ground. The head lolled oddly as it slid over the edge.
“Are you gonna get it together and help me, or do I need to send you over with the girls while I do the dirty work?” I wasn't sure if he was intentionally lumping Davy and Peter in with “the girls,” but I didn't want to join them. I was sort of a second-in-command in these fucked up tribal ranks. Davy and Pete couldn't do death and killing. I could.
“Yeah, I'm good.” I knelt at the opening, braced my hand on the ripped edge and hopped down. I'd accidentally set my hand right down in a pool of slimy blood, but I sure wasn't gonna let Mike see me freak out about it again. I wiped it on the pilot's shoulder, a dark red streak against his regulation blue dress shirt. I didn't think he'd really mind anymore.
Mike bent over and grabbed the pilot's wrists; for a second, I though he was implying that I take the other end—the end that was leaking organs more than I'd like it to be—but then he handed one of his wrists to me. I took it, and we carried him across to the brush fern, holding his hands like we were leading a four-year-old child across the street. (Boy, I wished that thought hadn't come to mind. Not that I expected to be leading any four-year-old children across a street ever again...)
“Mike,” I said (honestly, I kind of whimpered; I hoped Mike didn't hear that), “it feels like he's gripping me back.”
“He'd dead, Mick. He won't be gripping anything for a while.”
“I know, but it really feels like he's hanging on to me as much I'm hanging on to him, man.”
“It's just rigor mortis. He's dead. Believe me, no one could be alive after being torn in half like that. No god would allow that.”
I was more than a little surprised to hear Mike say that. None of us had had much to say on the subject of faith lately. I wasn't too sure that any of us still had much faith. Except Pete and the girls, of course. They really ate this “at one with nature” stuff right up. (Hey, it kept them upbeat. And them being upbeat kept the rest of us upbeat. So I didn't complain when they did rain dances or whatever it was around the camp fire.)
We dropped the rest of the pilot off behind the fern, and I tried to maneuver his top half around to fit against his bottom half again. Something like that really shouldn't be parted for too long, it can't be healthy.
Mike was full of surprises today; he dropped to one knee and started fishing through the guy's pockets.
“What the hell are you doing?!” I hissed at him. Really, it was one thing to take what we could use from the cargo, but to pick a dead man's pockets was just too much.
“Cover him up,” Mike ordered, standing up again. “I got his wallet. I want to know what name to carve on his grave marker.”
Oh. That was okay. I pushed the fronds over him again, obscuring him from view of the others, then we headed back to where Mike had told them to wait. Peter was still seated on the ground; he'd stopped groaning, but his head was between his knees.
“The pilot's taken care of. There were two others on the plane; they're both dead, too, but Mick says they're in one piece. Since dead bodies don't bother you none, we can get started with this.”
Nora yolked him again, the repaired bucket a sort of peace offering toward their last head-butt, and helped me saddle mine on again, too. Davy struggled with his on his own while Mona helped Pete. I hung back with them; Pete didn't look so good.
“Hey, man, you okay?”
“I'll be fine—whoa!”
I grabbed his arm, keeping him upright as his yolk dipped to one side and he staggered. “Are you sure? You don't look so good...”
“I'll be fine,” he sighed. “I don't get to see exposed organs all the time like you do. I wasn't expecting to see a man torn in half, is all.”
He didn't sound all that fine to me, but Pete hated when we fawned over him like he wasn't able to take care of himself, so I let it go. He and Mona and I hurried to catch up to the others, who were already halfway down the path. The peace offering bucket hadn't lasted long, Nora and Mike were arguing again already. I stopped alongside Davy, matching his stride and listening to them duke it out a step ahead of us.
“I know you've got that Texas chivalry thing going for you, and it's usually really cute, but you're starting to get on my nerves, man!”
I love her, but man, she's as stubborn as... well, me.
“Look, I just don't think it's something you need to be doing! I'm not saying it's because you're a woman and women are weak and irrational and not suited for a job like this, I just don't think you're as prepared for it as you want to sound.”
Gotta hand it to him, when he's of a mind to, Mike really knows the right things to say to diffuse a situation. Need to get him to teach me that.
“Just what do you mean by that?”
“I mean, would you be as eager to go take a peek if I hadn't said you couldn't?”
No.
“Yes!”
Liar.
“That's kinda sick, Nora. The man was torn in half, you dig? Ripped in two pieces, right here.” He cut a line across his abdomen with his hand, indicating where the pilot now required a hinge. “Intestines hanging out both ends. It's not like the boars, baby. It's different. It's... just different.”
I was really glad to hear Mike say that. It had affected him, it wasn't just me being a wimp.
“Not if you learn to adopt the right frame of mind. A body is a body, be it human or animal. Whether it's all bundled up in a nice, neat little package or strewn around like a ticker-tape parade, it's the same damn thing.”
Well... yeah, I guess that was one way to look at it. Mike paused, thinking it over, too.
“You don't want that frame of mind. I... don't want you to have that frame of mind. It changes you, a lot more than you might think.” He paused again, then added, “I don't want you to change like that.”
I'd expected her to kick up a rage again, but she didn't. It looked like she appreciated Mike's sentiment. I suddenly felt the need to show my girl that Mike wasn't the only one who cared about her wellbeing. (Hey, call me jealous if you want, but the only other girl on this rock was Nora's sister, who spent her time keeping Peter's bedroll warm. I wanted to stay in her good graces as often as possible, you know?) I doubled my step and gently nudged Mike aside (he took the hint and fell back into step with Davy), and put my arm across her shoulders—no small feat when balancing a yolk, let me tell you!
“He's right, baby,” I said, trying my best to mimic Mike's sensitivity. “Besides, we need you scouring the cargo. We can't leave something like that to Pete and Dav—ow!” I felt a jab between my shoulder blades as Davy pretended to stumble and nailed me with the end of his yolk.
“Oh, sorry Mick,” he apologized cheekily. “Damn uneven ground, you know!” I'd get him back for that later.
“Anyway, there's a transistor in there. It might be a little damaged, but if you can get it out of there, we might be able to fix it up, and maybe get some kind of signal or something. Maybe even send an SOS!”
“And that's my department, right?”
We came up in front of the wreckage then, and all us guys set down our yolks. While Mike and Davy moved past us, I put my hands on her waist and turned her to face me. She rested her arms on my shoulders and raised an eyebrow, smirking.
“No one has your touch, baby.”
He was being sarcastic, of course. I might be a good candidate for removing the transistor without damaging it (you'd be surprised how two years as a magician's assistant can hone an unusually delicate touch), but I was horrible with complicated electronics, and everyone knew it.
But I kissed him anyway. Hey, I may not know how to rebuild a radio, but I'm no fool.
Mike cleared his throat, and we all turned to him. “I guess we need to start with the bodies,” he surmised. “Gimme a hand, guys.” He hoisted himself up easily, and Micky and Peter followed him.
Davy, however, stopped short. Literally. His shoulders barely cleared the ledge.
“Need a step stool, Davy-boy?” Micky grinned.
“I can do it myself!” Davy braced his arms on the ledge and tried to scramble up alongside the other guys, but he couldn't find the leverage to lift himself up far enough to get a leg-up. He dropped down again, and sighed hotly. “A little help, please?” he grumbled, looking toward Mona and I.
We came up beside him and laced our fingers together, making a stirrup. Davy hiked one foot up into it, and we hoisted him up while Mike and Peter grabbed for his arms and pulled him into the cabin. He straightened up, dusting himself off (the front of his shirt bore a new hole from being snagged on a bit of jagged metal, and there was a streak of the pilot's blood on his ribs, but I'm not sure he noticed that part, and I certainly wasn't going to point it out), and scowled around at us. Micky had a hand pressed to his mouth to keep from laughing, Peter and Mona and I were biting back giggles, and even Mike was smirking at the ground.
“Any of you guys say one word and I'm gonna deck you!” Davy declared, waving a fist. “I swear it!”
Peter clapped him on the back, and they all got down to work. Mona and I waited outside; the cabin wasn't exactly tiny, but with four living men trying to maneuver two dead men, we wanted to stay out of the way.
“What are we gonna do with them?” Davy asked.
“I dunno yet,” was the only answer Mike had.
“Aw, man!” That was Peter, and wasn't in response to Mike and Davy's conversation. He turned away from the dead bodies, looking pale again.
“Baby, what's wrong?” Mona asked. I stood on tiptoe to try to get a better look, but it didn't really help. Both bodies had been thrown behind the bench seat, and all I could see were a couple limbs peeking out from the sides.
Peter didn't answer, only pressed his fingers to his eyes. I think he was trying to suppress tears.
“One of them is a chick,” Micky answered for him. Pete nodded vigorously, indicating that yes, that was what was wrong. Micky came up alongside him and squeezed his shoulder. “Me and Davy'll take care of her. You and Mike can move the guy, okay?” Peter nodded, taking his hands away from his face and breathing deeply, and turned back again.
We watched as they orchestrated the moving process, Davy taking the woman under the shoulders and Micky taking her feet, then setting her down at the edge of the cabin while Davy clambered down to the ground again. They pushed and pulled her over the edge, Micky hanging on until Davy had a good enough grip to keep from dropping her, then Micky hopped down himself.
She was older than any of us, but not quite as old as our mothers. Mid-thirties, maybe? She had been dressed conservatively, in a style that reminded me of Mona's rehearsal clothes, all cream-colored woolen suit and silk blouse. Her shoes (well, her shoe, one of them was missing) had been dyed to match. And she would be very pretty if she hadn't lost half her forehead, and if her neck didn't slump at a perfect right-angle to her spine.
Then something occurred to me.
“Wait!” I cried, as Micky and Davy balanced her out between them again. They paused, as did Mike and Peter, who were trying to work out the physics of carrying the man. “Should we take what we can use from them, too?”
Beside me, Mona snapped her fingers, already figuring out what I was getting at. (That's one of the best things about having a twin; half-formed ideas are as easily shared as full concepts are with everyone else.)
“Their clothes, their personal stuff... I mean, we might not be able to use the clothes as they are, but there's a severe lack of fabric around here.”
All the boys looked a bit doubtful, but Mona backed me up immediately. (Did I mention how great it is having a twin?)
“Yeah, we could take the cloth and cut it down into other things. Use it for bandages, or make a blanket, or—yeah, or we can use it for tying the joints on the huts!”
The boys looked at one another, then down at the bodies. Micky reached down and fingered the woman's blouse collar.
“I think this is silk,” he determined, looking back at Mike. “Silk is really strong stuff.”
Davy took up the cause, too. “If we ever get home again, it might be appreciated by their families if we could give them their personals. Jewelry and watches and things. And I'd say this crash has increased the odds a bit in our favor! Surely someone will be looking for them!”
Davy's last words hung heavily for a moment, and he realized what he'd said.
“I mean... someone's looking for us, too. Of course they are! But these guys were in a plane! With a radio! I bet they sent out transmissions to Tower or whatever it is they do, and Tower will know where they were when they sent the last one and will have some idea of where to be looking for them!” We all exchanged glances around him, which frustrated him, I think. “All we had was a little tugboat with a radio that didn't work! We could be anywhere as far as anyone else is concerned, but these guys had direct communication with someone! Come on, you know what I meant!”
We did know what he'd meant, of course, but somehow, we just couldn't work up his optimism. It sounded good—really good, in fact—but... nothing like having your hopes raised to make the crushing that much worse, you know? But we weren't going to shoot him out of the sky like that; he was really having the hardest time of all of us, adjusting to our new life.
“Yeah, Davy,” Mike placated, “that's a real good point. You're right.”
“Hang on a second,” Peter started, and for just a second, I was afraid he was about to shoot Davy's theory out of the sky. But Peter had moved back to the matter immediately at hand. “What are we talking about, just stripping them down right here? I... I just don't think that's... right, you know?” He was looking pointedly at the woman balanced in Davy's and Micky's arms.
“We could leave them for now,” Micky suggested, “clean out the plane, and strip them before we bury them.”
“Yeah,” Mona agreed. “You guys can do the men, and we can take care of her. And we can wrap them up in leaves or something, so they won't be, you know, stark naked out there in front of God and everybody.”
We all looked to Mike, who looked to Peter for approval. Peter looked away from the woman and gave a little half-shrug, only meeting Mike's eye for a moment before turning back to the dead man at their feet. “Yeah, that sounds okay, I guess.”
“That's what we'll do, then, but we're going to have to work fast. I don't want the bodies lying around any longer than they have to. They're gonna start to go off, especially the pilot, and it's gonna attract a lot of things that'll make our job a lot harder. You girls start stripping the plane for parts, and us guys will take shifts doing that and taking care of them. Let's get a move on.”
They all set to work again, while Mona and I took a step back, to make sure we were out of their way. Davy and Micky hiked the woman's body up again and carried her off to the fern bed Micky and Mike had hidden the pilot's remains in earlier, and deposited her just in front of it. Peter and Mike were right behind them, lugging the male passenger.
As Mike and I approached them, Davy pulled a frond off the fern beside them and placed it over the dead woman's face, I guess for me.
I'm not as big a wimp as I seem, really I'm not. It's just... when I was a kid, my parents would invite the neighboring couple over for bridge and canasta every Tuesday night. The wife—I called her Mrs. Bellamy, but Mom and Dad called her Margo—was really pretty, and really nice, and... okay, I guess I had a little bit of a crush on her. She knitted me a sweater for Christmas one year, and gave me a peach once, when I told Mom I was tired of having bananas in my lunch.
The dead lady looked just like her.
“Where are we going to bury them?” Micky asked, looking to Mike.
Mike didn't answer immediately, instead staring off into the distance with his lips pursed tightly. I knew that look, it meant he was thinking very hard. I tried to copy it once, but nothing happened. Micky saw me trying it and thought I was about to pass out.
After a moment, he slowly responded, “I don't think we should bury them.”
I was confused, and for once, I wasn't the only one.
“What are you saying, we should just leave them here?” Davy asked incredulously.
“I hope you're not thinking about bait for the tiger pit,” Micky said, and he sounded a little bit angry, too.
“No, no, nothing like that,” Mike defended, holding up his hands. “I don't think burial is a practical solution. It's gonna take a while to dig three graves, and it gets pretty damn hot out here when you're digging holes six feet deep with a clam shell, take it from me.”
He raised his eyebrows pointedly, and I knew we were all remembering the day Mike had dug the tiger pit. He'd done it all on his own; it had taken him all day, and between the sun and his thirst, he'd come closer to dying than anyone cared to say.
“So... what should we do?” I asked. “Burial at sea?” I was hoping that's not what he was thinking of. Mrs. Bellamy didn't swim.
“We can't do that,” Micky said. “You gotta wrap the body up and weigh it down so it doesn't float back to shore—” (I had the horrible thought of waking up in the morning to find Mrs. Bellamy's body washed up alongside the seashells and driftwood.) “—then take it a long way out into the ocean so it sinks down far enough. We don't have anything to wrap them with, and if we had a boat to get out to the deep water, we wouldn't be here in the first place.”
“I know, I'm not thinking about that. How about a funeral pyre?”
“Like the Vikings!” Davy said, snapping his fingers. “Yeah, that could work, couldn't it?”
“I think so, yeah, and it'd be a hell of a lot easier than grave-digging, man.”
It sounded pretty good to me. Graves were really big, and we'd have to dig three of them. A pyre might be easier. And it was kind of a more respectful way, wasn't it? Pyres were for heroes, weren't they?
“Okay, so, where should we build it?” I asked.
Mike got that look again, and turned to look down the path we'd taken to get here from home. He pivoted slightly to the right, and held his hands out in front of him, moving them this way and that way, using them to mark locations as he thought.
“I think...” he started slowly, “if we put them at the end of our beach, away from the river, that would be best. The wind will keep the fire hot, and the smoke will blow away from us. There's not too much on that end that's useful, and we can see it from home if there's a problem. We're going to have to take shifts in watching the fire, though, until it's done.”
“Okay! Let's get started!” Davy seemed so excited to do this, it was a little disturbing to remember what exactly we were discussing: torching dead people.
I looked back to the dessicated plane, and saw Mona and Nora working furiously inside the cabin. They'd probably made a bet on who could get the most stuff. “Should we tell the girls what we're doing?”
“Yeah, I'll go tell them,” Micky said, already moving toward them. “You guys go on, I'll catch up!”
We watched Micky bounding off across the canyon toward the wrecked plane for a moment, then turned and headed back up the path.
“How do you know so much about building a pyre?” Davy asked Mike.
“In Texas, I had a job every day after school as a farm hand on a cattle ranch. We used pyres all the time to dispose of dead animals and parts we couldn't use.”
Mike didn't talk about Texas too often; we always assumed it was a sore subject, so we never brought it up and he didn't volunteer information too freely. So Davy and I didn't ask anything more, and we all lapsed into silence. After a minute, Mike started up again.
“The biggest problem is it's probably going to take all of our wood to get this thing going. Rocks will help, they hold heat really well and don't burn down to nothing. Micky might be able to drain some oil out of the boat's engine for an accelerant, if there's anything left...”
“Micky might what?” Micky asked breathlessly, jogging up alongside us. He was peeling the skin off a mango, probably from the tree at the mouth of the canyon, and handed a second one to me. I was glad; I was starting to feel really hungry, since I lost my breakfast a while ago.
“Think you can drain the oil out of the boat engine, Mick?” Mike asked him.
Micky made a face, and not because the mango wasn't ripe enough. “I dunno, man, I don't think there's much in there. It was grinding pretty hard during the storm. And it's been sitting for a while, it might be sludgy with engine burn-off.” He took another bite, slurping juice loudly. “But I can try. Why?”
“Accelerant for the fire.”
“Oh. If I can't, coconut meat might work. There's a lot of oil in there. Or—” (He took another noisy bite.) “—boar fat, if we've got any left.”
“We do.” I'd dipped into our fat supply just last night, to treat some wood for new fishing spears, and hung up what was left myself. As long as we hadn't been raided by a leopard again, we still had plenty.
“Oh, hey, guess what the girls found!”
“What?”
“Okay, well, they've found a lot of stuff. Nora thinks the woman might've been an English teacher somewhere, because there were a bunch of books in her luggage—she's absolutely through the roof about that. And the man was carrying a shaving kit, with a razor blade and foam and everything!”
All of us, myself included (and I almost choked on my mango to do it, too!), shouted “I call first!” at once. Davy started to stamp up an argument for the shaving kit, but Micky popped a piece of mango into his open mouth to cut him off. He chewed sulkily as Micky continued.
“But the big find,” he said, pausing to roll his tongue and mime a drum roll. “They found the plane's emergency kits intact!”
Mike slammed to a halt and spun around. “What was in it?!” he demanded.
“Some tools—a hammer and nails, a couple screwdrivers, a ratchet set—and a good first aid kit with bandages and acetaminophen tabs and alcohol pads... and a flare gun.”
No one moved for several long seconds. Micky grinned like a gargoyle at us while we soaked this in. The tools and first aid kit were good things, they'd make life a little easier—but the flare gun... The flare gun meant hope. We might find a way home. To our real home, I mean. The pad on North Beechwood, with the cracked plaster and leaky faucet and toilet that never quite stopped running, wasn't much, but I don't think any of us ever truly appreciated it properly.
Slowly, we came back to life and resumed walking, but no one broke the silence yet, all lost in thought. I wondered what had happened to our stuff after we'd defaulted on our lease. If we were really lucky, maybe Mr. Babbitt put it all in storage—more likely, he sold it to cover the remains of our broken lease, but I can dream, can't I? I wondered if our apartment had been rented out yet. If not, maybe we could get back in, and get our stuff back, and everything could be exactly the way it was before...
But then I found myself wondering what had happened to Mona's and Nora's things, and whether they'd be able to get their apartment back. We'd all been living in such close quarters the past few months, it was hard to imagine life without them immediately at hand. Maybe... maybe we could all find a place together? Our pad wouldn't be big enough for the six of us, unless us four guys shared one room, and the girls took the other. But... maybe it could work...
We were all thinking the same things, I think.
We'd made a bet on who could salvage the most useful things from the wreckage. Nora had been winning, thanks to the shaving kit she'd unearthed in the man's duffel, but when I uncovered the flare gun, she immediately declared me the winner by default. Unless we discovered a second, non-wrecked, gassed-up plane that we could use to fly the hell out of here somewhere in this carnage, the flare gun trumped all.
While we were staring at the flare gun, Micky had trotted up to share the new plans for laying the victims to rest; he stopped dead in his tracks when he recognized the flare gun for what it was, then let out a whoop of delight and snatched Nora up, planting an embarrassingly huge kiss on her. (I turned away; it would have been awkward for them if I'd watched—if either of them had any morals, that is.)
He set her down again and hurried off to pass along the news to the other boys (putting in a request as he went that Nora collect as many electrical components from the instrument panels as she could wrangle out; I asked him to stop and pick a mango for Peter on the way, since he'd gotten sick and they had a long day's work ahead of them), and Nora and I got back to work.
We worked in silence—she was prying the fronts off the electrical panels while I was trying to unbolt the bench seat from the floor of the plane, both jobs made infinitely easier by the screwdrivers and ratchets we'd found—completely lost in our own thoughts. The flare gun was an unbelievably fortunate discovery, but I refused to get my hopes up too high. It was only worth anything if we saw someone to signal, and that's assuming the thing worked in the first place. There was only one flare in the case, so we couldn't check it, and we had to pray our signal was seen with that one shot. We weren't rescued yet...
But oh, it was hard fighting my hopes. My thoughts kept drifting to being rescued, and finally seeing civilization again. The very first thing I would do, I decided, was take a long, scorching hot bath—a bubble bath, with real soap and shampoo!—and catch up on my back issues of Vogue and Harper's Bazaar. (Oh, I hoped the fashion scene hadn't taken another of its sporadic leaps forward and left me in the dust with last season's cast-offs!) Then it was straight to the salon; this ocean environment had completely ruined my hair, turning it coarse and brassy, and I was dying for a hot oil treatment. Then Peter and I would go to the movie house for a date that didn't involve sharing a papaya, and then back to the apartment to make sweet, passionate love. Finally. (Oh, I'd need to fit a quick stop at the druggist's in there somewhere, to reinstate my prescription, wouldn't I? On the way to the salon, then.)
Nora and I would need to find a new apartment; I'm sure Mrs. Meeker had terminated our lease, given that our last rent payment was fourteen weeks overdue now. The old place was nice, but kind of... busy. The food co-op had neighbors popping in at any given moment, bringing us shares of food in exchange for cooking it or cleaning it or preserving it or anything else you can do to food. It would be nice to have a quieter place, where your neighbors knew their boundaries. Maybe the six of us could all—
No. I would not start planning a new living situation. I would not start pinning all my expectations on being rescued shortly. My current objective was to get this last damn bolt out of this bench seat and shove it out of here, and I would put all my focus on that. I would harvest every available piece that we could potentially use, and I would do my fair share to make island life livable. I would—
“Would you be interested in sharing a pad with the guys?”
I would have to talk to my sister about reading my thoughts.
“What do you mean?” I was trying to play dumb to shake her off, but she wasn't buying it. She'd set her screwdriver down and had turned to face me completely.
“Come on, I know you were thinking it as well as I was. What do you think about all of us getting an apartment together? The six of us; you and Pete, Mick and me, and Davy, and Mike?”
I sighed and set down my ratchet, rocking back on my heels. It was Discussion Time, no getting out of it.
“I don't know,” I floundered, and I really didn't. Sure I'd thought about it—truth be told, I had entertained the notion briefly before any of this happened, when we were all planted firmly on solid ground. As a possibility way in the future, of course; I don't think any of us were ready for a step like that in our relationships. Peter and I had only been together for four months at that point, Nora and Micky less than that. Six people in one apartment... that was quite a bit more than I thought of as comfortable. Sure, we were basically living that way here, but it was different somehow. We weren't all packed in next to each other in a tiny pad with spit-and-toilet-paper walls that tried for the illusion of privacy; we knew there was no such thing as privacy here. During the day, there was the entire island to roam, and we all had our own little shelters and bedrolls at night. “Six people in one apartment—,” I started.
“It's not like we'd all be crammed in together every second of every day,” Nora quickly reminded me, with an accuracy that was downright eerie, even for us. “We'll have jobs, and errands, and places to go that don't require everyone's attendance. We can dole out the chores—it'll be just like here but in a different setting!”
She'd been thinking this for a while, I could tell, long before the flare gun appeared; I wondered if she'd considered it as long ago as I had.
“I don't know,” I repeated. “If we can come up with enough money to get a pad that's big enough for all six of us, without us tripping over each other all the time, it might not be so bad.”
She turned her head a little, trying to hide her smile.
“But don't forget,” I added quickly, “all our belongings are probably long gone. I might have to get a new cello before I could return to the symphony—if there's still a place for me. Mumford may have gotten himself a new assistant. The boys might not have any of their instruments anymore. We'll be lucky if we can get an apartment at all now that our old jobs are history.”
Nora's face fell, and I knew I'd just dashed her hopes pretty harshly. “Yeah, I guess you're right,” she muttered, and turned back to the task of disemboweling the instrument panels. “It was a stupid idea.”
“It wasn't a stupid idea—”
“Yes, it was.”
That meant she wasn't in the mood to talk anymore, so I returned to the rusty bolt. She could get so bent out of shape if everyone in the room didn't immediately bow jump on her ideas sometimes... I gave the ratchet a mighty twist, and the bolt finally squeaked loose with a rusty protest.
“Oh, thank god!” I sighed with relief, and pushed myself back up to my feet. “Give me a hand with this?”
Together, we each seized an end and wrestled the thing out of the mouth of the plane and onto the ground, where Nora set it upright in the dirt and flopped onto it with a contented sigh.
“You know, this is pretty damn comfy,” she declared, shifting deeper into the noisy leatherette padding. She patted the space next to her, and I happily joined her; she was right, it was fairly comfortable. More comfortable than what we'd become accustomed to, anyway. We rested there for a moment; afternoon was coming on and it was getting very warm inside the shell of the plane. The light breeze rolling through the canyon felt so good now.
“You know,” I offered after a moment, “if we can't afford a three-bedroom apartment right away, maybe we can swing apartments in the same building. We'd be neighbors, all right there and living side-by-side, we could see each other any time we wanted, and we wouldn't be so close that there was no escaping each other.”
She smiled again, and I knew I was forgiven. “Yeah, that might work out... You know, if they're interested, too.”
“Yeah.” There were a few beats of silence, then I added, “Plus, you know, separate apartments means more privacy.”
Her smile quickly shifted in one of her wicked grins, and—
“Oh my goodness, is that a blush? Is my sister, Nora, Queen of the Harlots, actually showing a hint of embarrassment?!”
At my crowing, her blush deepened (which was my intent exactly); she bit her lip against her grin and turned away, a hand over her face. Even the tips of her ears were reddening, and not from the heat, either.
“Okay, out with it, what's going on?”
She pressed her fingers to her cheeks, as though trying to force them to release their hold on her smile and let her compose herself. After a moment of my expectant silence, she knew she had my attention and I wasn't going to back off this. Hell, the longer she held out, the more interested I was. What on earth could get her this worked up—
“Oh my god, you're pregnant!” I squeaked, horrified. In a flash, she sat up and clapped a hand over my mouth, looking toward the head of the path nervously.
“Jesus Christ!” she hissed at me. “No, I'm not pregnant and if any of them heard you say that I'm going to throw your ass in the tiger pit!”
I used one hand to pry her hand from my face, holding the other up in submission. “Okay, okay,” I relented, giggling with relief, “I'm sorry. Got a little carried away. Not pregnant, gotcha. Thank god. So what is it?”
She leaned back in the seat again, letting her head flop back over the backrest, and I got the distinct impression that she was avoiding looking me in the eye.
“The, uh, means for more privacy...” she started, trailing off.
“Yes? Separate apartments, more privacy, we covered that part.” God, she could be so infuriating when she had something she was reluctant to share!
“It... might come in more handy than you realize,” she said cryptically, then added, like I was clueless, “the privacy, I mean.”
“And why is that, oh dearest sister of mine?” I clipped sarcastically.
She chewed her lip for a minute, then cracked her knuckles slowly, then stretched her legs out in front of her; I was this close to grabbing her by the hair and shaking her when she finally blurted it out.
“Micky asked me to marry him.”
