Kenadee+M

= =  ** Marooned In Another World **

By: Kenadee Maxwell "To my right was another ocean, of green, as a drak, dense jungle of palm trees, vines, mosses and other plants sprawled out, claiming the interior of the island."

Chapter 1: The Lucky Four

The stir of the once serene plane jolted me awake from my spell-bound sleep; the feeling of an electric shock running through my body overtook my peaceful dreams. As I tried to make out the time on the face of my watch while my eyes adjusted to the light, I heard a loud “bing.” I looked up to see the seatbelt sign had clicked on, and as I felt around for the clasp of my belt the plane stirred again. We were only thirteen and a half hours into the eighteen hour flight from Vancouver to Sydney, Australia, and already the feeling of restlessness had overtaken me. Once again the plane stirred, but this time it shook in such a way that it was like a giant awakening from the passive slumber of a thousand years. “Must be turbulence,” I assured myself as I felt an eerie feeling slither its way over me.

As if in an answer to my thoughts, the pilot’s voice thundered through the plane: “We are experiencing some technical difficulties right now as we fly through this storm, and I would strongly recommend, just as a safety precaution, that all passengers re-familiarize themselves with the locations of emergency exits and life jackets.” He paused, catching his breath and tried to steady his voice, which anyone who could hear properly would be able to detect the hint of shakiness to it. “I’m going to do my best to make the next four hours and twenty-seven minutes as smooth as possible.”

Momentarily, the words of the pilot that had been ringing through my ears were replaced with my own thoughts. “I must have been asleep for a long time,” I pondered looking at the table tray in front of me, which held my complimentary water and cookies. As I leaned forward inspecting my water carefully, the surface began to ripple as though someone had touched it and disturbed the stillness. Suddenly, my body lurched forward as the plane plummeted down like a rollercoaster dropping down a steep decline and a deafening whir coated the air, as the engine burst into flames. In that moment all sense of thought left my body as I numbly felt under my seat for my life jacket; my plastic water glass fell to the floor, spilling the liquid from inside. * The impact against the water was so hard it felt like I had fallen onto concrete and the sudden struggle to breathe washed over me. Submersed in water, what was left of the plane began to fill up rapidly. My seatbelt now felt as if it were constricting my body and was dragging me down to the depths below. Un-clasping it with shaky hands, I turned to see the massive open space from where the window had once been and climbed my way over to it. As soon as I was free from the jaws of the monster that had once been my safety refuge, I inflated my life vest, lightly treading the water. The screams from inside the cavity of the plane from those who were being burned no longer filled the air. The area around the plane was motionless, and for a moment I wondered if I was the only escapee. The guilt and horror caused a lump in my throat as I listened to the voices of the fellow survivors die off. I kept my eyes plastered to the red and orange flames from the plane wreckage as it danced hypnotically, and I drifted off to sleep.

*

I shifted my head to the right, trying to escape the light lapping of water against my face that had woken me up, and I felt the hard, graininess of sand scratch my cheek. What felt like an eternity before my eyes sprung open, allowed my mind to process the events of the previous night. The details of the crash had slipped my mind, leaving black holes in my memory, but trying to reconstruct the event caused my brain to throb. The first thing I took notice of as I propped myself up on my elbows was the blue sky gleaming overhead and the brilliant, crystal clear ocean beside me. To my right was another ocean, of green, as a dark, dense jungle of palm trees, vines, mosses and other plants sprawled out, claiming the interior of the island. Sitting up fully, I inspected the damage the crash had caused to my body, taking note of any larger injuries that could hinder me in the future. Bruises covered almost all of the visible parts of my body, and a few cuts and gashes displayed themselves on my legs. From all I could see, none of my injuries were life threatening; however, for all I knew my internal injuries, if any, could cause me to collapse dead at any minute. Pushing the gruesome thoughts of my own death out of my head I struggled onto my feet, examining what looked like a monstrous reef surrounding the island, creating an isolated world from the rest of the ocean. The sound of footsteps coming up the beach caused me to turn my head so fast I got a throbbing head rush, but I pushed through the dizziness as I sprinted up the beach to the figure standing there.

*

Coming closer, I saw that the figure was a young man, of about twenty-three or so, with brown hair and deep brown eyes. In his hands he held a tangled rope and hooked to his belt was a large knife. A look of shock and pleasure that there was another survivor crossed over his face as he stepped closer to me. “I’m Amber,” I breathlessly explained, trying to take all the thoughts that swam through my head and turn them into questions. “Are we alone? How did you get here? Have you found any…?”

“Whoa,” he chuckled, “slow down! Let’s just get through the introductions first. I’m Sam. But to answer your first question no, we’re not alone. There are two other survivors here. Right now they’re out looking for any supplies from the wreckage that we can use to our advantage.”

“Is that them now?” I questioned, as two figures, a petite looking girl around my age and a tall, older man came strolling up, carrying what looked like a tarp in their arms. Sam nodded.

“You found another survivor!” shouted the girl coming up to greet me. “I’m Ginger, and that’s Henry.” She pointed to the other man. He nodded a quick hello and dropped his head down.

“Since there was no one else, I guess this means we’re the lucky four…” he concluded, raising his head a little.

“I guess so,” I replied.

"The sound of footsteps coming up the beach caused me to turn my head so fast I got a throbbing head rush, but I pushed through the dizziness as I sprinted up the beach to the figure standing there."

Chapter 2: The Calm Before The Storm

Four and a half months had gone by since the first time I had laid eyes on the figure standing up the beach and discovered I was not alone. This meant I was now four and a half months away from everything I once knew, four and a half months away from the grasp of real civilization and four and a half months away from the day I should have died.

* “So Amber, tell us about yourself,” Ginger stated in her overly friendly manner, which was already starting to get to me after only a couple of hours of being around her. I felt the eyes of Sam, the 24 year-old, engineer bore into the side of my head as he constructed our shelter. Casting him a sideways glance I found myself completely awestruck with his creation. Despite the shortage of construction supplies he had a real talent of taking thirty stalks of bamboo, palm leaves, a severed, but still strung together rope and what was left of a tarp and making it look like a five-star hotel. His smirk caught my eye as I realized the shock I felt was written all over my face like a billboard sign. Trying to redeem myself, I turned back to Ginger.

“Well…” I started, “I live inSan Diego, I’m a lawyer and I’m twenty-six.”

“No husband or kids?” Ginger politely questioned.

“No kids, and my husband and I are recently separated,” I self-consciously confirmed. “We’re still very good friends, and I was actually flying to meet him inSydneybecause his grandmother passed away.”

Ginger nodded sympathetically before turning to Henry to see how the fire was coming along. I quietly excused myself from the group and walked along the beach till I found a breezy spot, shaded from the scorching topical sun. As I lay down in a patch of jungle leaves, I peacefully drifted off to sleep reaching the point where dreams suddenly over-take your body and nothing else in the world can touch you. It was the same slumber I had reached on the plane before I had awoken to find my worst nightmare.

*

After more than four months on the island, myself, Ginger, Sam and even Henry, who was quite socially awkward, had formed our own little family. We had accepted that this was our life now; although, the hope of rescue never strayed too far from our minds. We took care of each other, and we were united like a tribe. Then one morning, I awoke to find my new world had been turned 180 degrees and lay upside down. “How could you lose the knife?” raged Sam. “That was the only thing we had to obtain the little food we are actually able to get!”

“I, I, I never lost the knife!” Henry quietly stammered.

“So, it just grew legs and walked away?” Sam sneered. “Come on, Henry, get real.”

“Can you both please just be quiet?” I shouted. “Now, it’s neither one person’s job nor responsibility to watch the supplies. So that means it’s not one person’s fault if they go missing,” I reasoned.

Henry was about to open his mouth when Sam cut him off. “I can’t do this right now.” He turned around and took off down the beach. As I watched Sam sprint away from everything the four of us had become I felt a pang of guilt for not chasing after him or trying to stop him. Once again I found myself thinking back to the first day I had arrived on the island. * Waking up in the cool, serene shaded spot I had fallen asleep in I took note of something shining on the rocks. Crawling like a wild beast towards the glint I discovered a slightly cracked but still in seemingly good shape, compass. Picking it up, I strolled around the island for a little while making a mental map for myself of all the trees with fruit and the little spring located just beyond a large rolling hill that separated the jungle from the rocky ledge of a small cliff. I closed my eyes and listened to the cries of wild birds, taking in the sweet smell of tropical flowers and fruit. “This really would be paradise,” I thought, “if we had not crash landed in.” I laughed silently to myself at the twisted joke I had made. * A storm had been brewing since Sam had sprinted away in anger early that morning. It was almost like the weather had a way of mimicking the mood between the four of us. As the wind picked up to such high speeds and volumes I made a decision that I had to go looking for him. “I have to find him!” I shouted above the wind tearing through our shelter, “He could be laying somewhere in the middle of the jungle, dead!” As the last words spilled from my lips they seemed to echo all around us in the atmosphere. I gave Ginger a pleading look.

“Do you promise to come back?” she asked as tears filled her eyes.

I nodded as the sting of tears burned my own eyes and my throat became a thick knot. “I promise that I will come back, no matter what.”

* The rain fell in sideways sheets obstructing my view as I tore through the jungle. Even the familiar path I had strolled down every morning with Ginger to get water from the spring seemed alien to me. “Where could he possibly be?” my thoughts screamed inside my head. My mind was going a mile a minute filled with questions and fears and all at once I was back on the plane again crashing into the ocean beneath me. Through my blurred vision I could narrowly see the path ahead of me as my feet carried me wherever they wanted to go. I ran through the unknown for as long as my lungs would allow before I collapsed in a panting heap inside a small cavern created between the base of the hill and the jungle. All at once I felt the struggle to breathe encase my body as an unbearable force pressed down on me. A yelp escaped from my lips as I heard someone whisper, “Amber! I’m so sorry!” I turned my head slightly as the weight retracted itself from off my body and I saw Sam. Before I even had the chance to collect my thoughts, I felt myself breathe a sigh of relief.

“You’re alive!” I gasped.

“Yeah, but just barely,” he stated, slowly positioning his leg in such a way that I could see something had attacked him. The wound looked like a bite mark and from the looks of the swollen, pussing infection surrounding it, it was something poisonous. “Snake,” he confirmed.

“I won’t be able to get you back to the shelter,” I said. “I’ll have to get help.”

The rain had let up a little by the time I left the cavern and sprinted down the same path I had just come from not more than an hour before. About ten yards away from the shelter I stopped and screamed to Ginger and Henry. “Bring the first aid kit and hurry!” They caught up to me, as my tired legs and lungs had made me slow right down. Between gasps for air I told them about Sam and how his condition had rapidly been declining from the moment I had found him to the time I left. As we sprinted towards the cavern a rumbling moan sounded from inside. “No! We can’t be too late! We just can’t be.” A thousand thoughts thundered through my brain as another moan sounded again.



"The wound looked like a bite mark and from the looks of the swollen, pussing infection surrounding it, it was something poisonous. “Snake,” he confirmed."

Chapter 3: Words Left Unspoken I jolted awake from the recurring nightmare that plagued me. Upon arriving on the island, I was haunted each night by dreams of the plane crash, reliving the horror over and over. Like a playlist on an iPod, this dream played on in a continuous loop, and each time I closed my eyes it was as though I had pressed play. However, since the night that Sam had almost perished from the snakebite, I found myself being terrorized by these new nightmares. The end of these dreams never finished the way they had in real life, with us rushing into the cave, just in time to grab onto the thread of Sam’s life that had been cut by fate and was in mid-fall. Instead, the conclusion was always rearranged and fragmented, but the ending always resulted in the death of Sam. Only after I awoke sobbing, and had mustered the courage to look over and see him sleeping, did I know it was just another nightmare.

Insomnia haunted me like a tragic experience, for most of my childhood, and I had long ago found a loophole that had allowed me to enter into the mystical world of sleep for longer than any average insomniac. As time wore on upon the island, the nightmares continued to fill the loophole I had discovered, and I gradually allowed myself to slip back into the dark world of sleeplessness.

Grabbing hold of only a few nightmare-filled hours of sleep each night, I felt my state of mind begin to crumble. No longer could I think about one thing for too long before my mind went blank, and I found deep gashes in my memory, forgetting even the simplest of things. I often worried that if we did not get off the island soon, I would lose all sense of who I ever was.

* After nearly six months of isolation from the rest of the world, my body had become accustomed to the infinitesimal-sized portions of coconuts, papayas and fish that had become the muse of every meal. Throughout the first week on the island, I was frequently struck with pain in my stomach as it began shrinking to match the portion sizes of food we were able to obtain. As each moment, of the roughly two hundred days we had been living in this new world passed, our food supply had rapidly dwindled. The island was only vast enough that each day, another undiscovered territory became explored, until the point where the four of us knew every crack on every rock and every shortcut to our camp.

Now, looking over at each one of us, it was evident that we were slowly but surely dying from the inside out. Bones protruded from every visible part of our bodies and I often found my elbows getting hooked onto trees as I trudged past, as a result of their exposure to the world. Stretched over the bones, our skin, which had turned from a fleshy, peach colour to a dull, grey, translucence, was so thin that even the slightest fall could cause a large tear in it. I often drifted into my thoughts, as I recalled my high school social studies classes and the lessons we had learned about World War II. Staring at the appearances of Henry, Sam and Ginger seemed almost as though I was looking at the live versions of the pictures that had been photographed in our textbooks of the starving Jewish people.

Physical change had come quite quickly; however, the alteration that struck me the most wasn’t my overexposed bones or pale skin. Instead, it was something that I had always loved the most about myself, and generally it was the one thing someone would be drawn to notice upon first meeting me.

“My eyes!” I gasped, as I peered into the crystal clear water of the spring that posed as our water source. It was the sweetest water any one human could taste and made bottled water from back home taste utterly nauseating.

“What about them?” Ginger asked. I could detect the slight twinge of panic that her tone held, and I just shook my head in response.

“They used to be so vivacious, but now they’re just so, so, so dull,” I concluded. Never before had I seen my eyes look so lifeless and dreary. The brilliant, cerulean blue sparkle was gone; in its place was a washed-out grey. From that point on, the changes in our appearances continued to became more evident.

* Early one morning, I awoke around dawn to the sound of rain softly pattering against the leaves of the surrounding palm trees. Drops of water crawled down my neck, making their way down my spine, bit by bit. “Wait a minute,” I contemplated, “why is there water dripping down my neck?” My head shot up as I stared at our patchwork, palm leaf, roof. Sure enough droplets of water were weaving themselves through the cracks, as they continued their descent towards the earth. A cool, ill-feeling shiver ran through my body like the electric shock I had felt course through my veins, when our plane was struck by lightning. Glancing over at the dimly lit fire I knew that before long, the single ember would be put out and the fight for survival would really be on.

* I had lost track of the days, as they all seemed to blur together in one continuous era of rain. As I had predicted the fire had only lasted us for a few more hours, after I had woken up, and we were incapable of re-lighting it again. We had eaten all the fruit from the island, scouring every inch of it for more, only to come up with nothing. Fishing had become nearly impossible too, as all the fish had gone away, sensing something that would remain a secret to us humans, until the moment it occurred.

Each day we sat in our crumbling shelter, starving and weakening every minute. Our skeleton bodies stopped retaining heat after the first day of rain. Our skin was water-logged; soaked straight to the bone. When we huddled together the rattle of our bones against one another seemed to overtake all the other noise. All I could think about was how far we had come just to be cruelly forced into the jaws of death. Based on their tired, surrendering expressions, it was evident that Ginger, Henry and Sam were all thinking the same thing. Giving into the cruel world of death didn’t seem like the right answer, but it didn’t seem like the wrong one either. * Dragging my tired, lifeless body down the path towards the spring, I clutched the water basket Ginger and I had weaved during our first few days here. I smiled, thinking back to the laughs we shared as we talked about our lives back home and our futures, like the plans we had made for them were still securely intact. Reaching the spring I sidled up next to it, cautiously filling the basket, taking such care so as not to spill a single drop of water. The rain had briefly stopped, and based on the clearing sky it looked like the days of showers would finally be coming to an end. The jungle, once again seemed to have come alive with the noises of birds, and the smell of the rejuvenated earth rose in thick clouds. As the sun slipped through the break in the trees surrounding the spring, I let it warm my face, until the point where I could feel the heat toasting my pale skin.

Setting the basket on the ground as I struggled to stand up, I noticed a slight ripple on the surface of the water I had collected. Leaning closer to inspect it, I had a sudden flashback to the horrid last few moments on the plane. Then, like something had clicked inside of me, I turned my head to face the sky and took off running back down the path, towards the beach. * Peering off far into the distance, I watched the helicopter gradually descend the staircase of clouds that engulfed it. The sight was comparable to that of a king addressing his kingdom; just exposed enough that being in the presence caused a feeling of awe to slowly overtake my frail body.

Silence coated the atmosphere as the others came to join me at the water’s edge, and a million words were left unspoken between Henry, Ginger, Sam and I. Time seemed to have stopped and as the moments escaped us, the silence dragged on. All these words were there, just within reach, yet for some reason they were left locked up inside each one of us, never to be vocalized, but still were understood just as clearly as if they had been.



"Never before had I seen my eyes look so lifeless and dreary. The brilliant, cerulean blue sparkle was gone; in its place was a washed-out grey."