Chapter 15

“LOOK, I THINKwe need to organize ourselves.”

It was Conor who spoke. We were sitting around the cabana in the early morning cool, listening to the chatter of the birds and the screech of the parrots, and finishing off a breakfast scrounged from the broken boxes down at the staff quarters. We’d had to throw the sandwiches away, but there were croissants, tinned fruit salad, and brioche. I was getting incredibly tired of brioche, and it had only been two days.

“What do you mean?” Dan looked up from his bowl, where he was scooping up the last of the fruit salad with a chunk of muffin. “Organize ourselves for what? Local elections?”

Bayer laughed, but Conor ignored him.

“We need to know what we’re up against. We don’t know how long we’ll be here—” He raised his hand as a protest erupted, voices exclaiming that it couldn’t possibly be that long. “I know, I know, but look, we’re already on day three since the boat left. I think we have to hope for the best, plan for the worst. And the worst-case scenario is, we’re stuck here for a while. So that’s what we have to plan for, even if we hope it doesn’t happen. We need to know how much water we’ve got, how much food, whether we’ve got any means of contacting the mainland. Maybe someone’s left a mobile phone in one of the shacks.”

I raised my hand, and then felt annoyed with my own subservience, put it down, and spoke.

“There’s a radio.”

Conor raised an eyebrow.

“Does it work?”

“It seems to. Though who knows how long the battery will last. But I already tried to broadcast on it; no one came in.”

“Okay, well, let’s finish up here and then head over to the staff quarters and see what’s what. You can show us how the radio works, and then afterwards we can make a proper inventory, see what we’re dealing with. Bayer, are you okay to help?”

Bayer nodded. His arm was black with bruising under the tattoos, but he was moving it all right.

“Santana, you’d better stay here, keep an eye on things.”

“Are you sure?” Santana looked a mixture of relieved and disappointed. “I can walk, you know.”

“I know, but the last thing we need is you opening up that wound. Lyla did a pretty amazing job, all things considered, but let’s not push our luck.”

Further nods. I stood up, feeling the aching muscles in my back and arms stretch. I had been more tense than I knew, clenching my fists against some unspoken dread.

Hope for the best… plan for the worst.The question was… how bad could it get? And the answer, I was beginning to fear, might be pretty bad.

WHAT WE WEREdealing with, it turned out, was a lot and also… not a lot. We had bottled water, a couple of hundred liters at a rough count, though we’d already drunk a good twenty or thirty liters—a worrying amount in just two days. There was also toilet paper and some basic cleaning supplies. And we had some food, though not a great deal. Everything perishable had gone off in the sultry heat—the sandwiches curling into ant-infested mounds, the cheese and cold cuts so rancid that Angel gagged when she opened the refrigerator door and swung it quickly shut again.

What we were left with was dry goods and tins. Which meant chips and pretzels, cookies, and a stack of boxes full of the everlasting pastries and long-life brioche. There was precious little in the way of anything fresh, aside from the tinned fruit salad. We also had a small amount of beer and wine—though not much; evidently, Baz hadn’t trusted us enough to leave most of the alcohol on the island—and the radio.

On the minus side, there were no first aid supplies beyond what we’d each brought with us, and the island’s infrastructure looked damaged beyond what any of us could possibly repair. Down near the waterline Conor had discovered a smashed-up hut filled with tanks and equipment that looked worryingly like the remains of a desalination plant, and the power was still out. We had no idea how electricity to the island had been supplied before the storm—if there had been solar panels, we couldn’t see them now, and an underwater cable seemed unlikely, given how far we were from the nearest big island. Regardless, there was a strong smell of diesel wafting across the staff quarters, and down by the wrecked desalination plant you could see a small lake of iridescent oil spreading over the surface of the waves. If the desalination shed had housed the backup generator, it was no longer much of a backup.

The animals had already started to pick over the broken boxes, so under Conor’s instruction, we packed up the remainder of the food and carted it to the cabana.

“Who died and made him fucking king,” Bayer grumbled as he and I started our second trek through the forest, holding armfuls of plastic-wrapped food—chips and cakes and the kind of additive-laden cookies I’d never been allowed as a child. I said nothing. I couldn’t blame Conor for taking charge—somebody had to, and everything he’d suggested was sensible. We did need to make an inventory of food and get it away from being pecked at by birds or nibbled by rats. But I also couldn’t blame Bayer for being angry. We were all exhausted. It was swelteringly hot, I could feel my back burning through the thin cotton of my shirt and the sweat trickling down between my breasts, and I knew Bayer’s arm must be killing him. And more than that—Conor was making us face up to something that none of us wanted to admit: the possibility that the Over Easy wasn’t coming to rescue us any time soon.

It was Angel who forced the issue, with a tantrum down at the ruins of the staff quarters when Conor ordered a third trip up to the cabana.

“Why are we doing this?” she shouted. “The boat has to come back eventually, and then personally je fous le camp aussi vite que possible.”

“And what if it doesn’t?” Conor asked pleasantly.

“The boat has to come back,” Angel repeated, stubbornly. “But I am not carrying one more package of fucking food. And you are not the boss of this island to tell me!”

“If you want to eat it, you’ll carry it,” Conor said. His tone was flat, and on the surface his voice sounded fairly matter-of-fact, but there was a menace underneath that made the group fall into silence. Bayer stepped forward.

“Don’t talk to my woman like that,” he growled. Conor turned to him and smiled, but it was a completely mirthless smile, one that didn’t reach his extraordinary pale eyes.

“So she should benefit from everyone else’s hard work while she does nothing?”

“Santana is,” Bayer said. He was squaring up to Conor, the muscles in his shoulders and neck standing out.

“Santana’s got a six-inch gash in her leg, you moron,” I snapped. As soon as the words left my mouth I regretted them. They were true, and there was no reason why Angel couldn’t pull her weight like the rest of us, but I knew that deep down, that wasn’t why she was refusing—it wasn’t laziness, it was a terror at what this level of preparation meant, a refusal to look that possibility in the eye.

Bayer wasn’t interested in psychoanalysis though.

“What did you call me?” he snarled.

“Hey!” It was Joel who stepped forward, hands outstretched. “Mate, calm down. Look”—he glanced at Conor—“maybe we should have a break, get some food into everyone, and then finish up in the afternoon when it’s less hot?”

Conor looked up at the sky, as if calculating the time, and then shrugged and nodded.

“Okay. That’s not a bad idea.”

“And before we go, shall we try to figure out this radio?” Joel said. Conor nodded again.

“Where did you say it was, Lyla?”

“In that shack over there.” I pointed, and we moved across, a little ragged group, hot and bad-tempered, to take another look.

Inside the hut it was dark, and almost cool after the blaze of the sun outside. The radio was still sitting there, the LED still glowing green, and when I picked up the receiver, the display lit up just like before. This time I noticed there were wires coming out the back, leading to something that looked a lot like a car battery.

“Has anyone used one of these before?” I asked. Heads were shaken all round, and I felt my heart sink a little. “Me neither. I basically guessed before. But look, this”—I twisted the knob that made the static flare and reduce—“seems to be some kind of volume control, and you press this button here on the receiver to transmit. But this”—I pointed to another knob—“I think is to change the channel. The problem is, I’ve got no idea what channel we should be using. I left it on the preset one because I thought that was the one the Over Easy would be monitoring, but if they’re not in the area, maybe we should be using a Mayday channel.”

“Which is?” Angel asked a little snippily. I raised my shoulders a little defensively.

“I have no idea. That’s the problem.”

There was a long pause.

“Look,” Joel said at last, “I think the only thing we can do is just try as many as possible. Flick through the channels and repeat the message each time with as much information as we can. Do you agree?”

“I mean… yes,” I said reluctantly, “except that it’s battery-powered and we have no idea how much charge is left.” I pointed at the chunky orange battery sitting under the table, the wires from the radio coiled around the terminals. “So we’re going to have to strike a balance between broadcasting as widely as possible now, and saving some charge in case…”

In case we needed it in the days and weeks to come, was the unspoken message, but I didn’t want to say it. If the storm had been a bad one, maybe even still circulating along the coast of Indonesia, it was perfectly possible that all the boats and fishing vessels were tied up in port, safely waiting it out. We might have a better chance of passing traffic in a few days. But if we’d used up all the battery before that, we’d have shot ourselves in the foot.

“You’re both right,” Conor said at last, decisively. “Joel, you stay here and broadcast a Mayday call on half a dozen different frequencies, see if you can get any response. If you can, write down what the frequencies were. And then if that doesn’t work, we turn off the radio to conserve power and try again tomorrow. Lyla, did you scroll through to see if you could hear anything?”

“Um… no,” I said, a little shamefacedly. As soon as Conor had said the words, it seemed like such an obvious step. Of course, if there were a channel people were already using, it made sense to put a call out on that one. “No, I didn’t think of that.”

“Well, it’s probably a good idea to do that first, see if we can pick anything up. If we can’t, just pick some frequencies you can remember, Joel, and we’ll try different ones tomorrow.”

“Okay,” Joel said. He picked up the receiver and began turning the dial, listening intently as the static ebbed and rose.

“The rest of us will take one more set of supplies up to the cabana, and then we’ll break for lunch.”

Joel nodded. He had run through the full spectrum of the dial now, and as we walked away from the hut to pick up a last set of supplies, I could hear him beginning to broadcast.

“Hello, my name is Joel Richards, this is… God, I’m not sure. Maybe our third Mayday call? Please, if you can hear us, send urgent help. We’re stranded on an island about twenty hours southwest of Indonesia. Twenty hours by boat that is—we came here by boat.”

His voice was getting fainter as I picked up a box of tinned tuna salad and added some vacuum-packed croissants on top.

“There are people here with serious injuries….” I heard, as I walked away from the clearing, up the path to the cabana. “If anyone can hear me, please respond or send help. We don’t know how long they will last.”