Escape (2 page)

Not me, that’sforsure !

One stubborn tail feather wouldn’t come out. JJ. yanked with both hands. As it jerked free, a splatter of blood hit him in the eye.

“Ow!”

Hard to believe — no,impossible — that barely a month ago, he’d been lounging around the pool with Gwyneth Paltrow and Julia Roberts. Then came the mistake. Okay, a few mistakes. Just a bunch of stuff to get his father’s attention: a case of champagne at the eighth-grade dance, a couple of CDs at the five-finger discount, a ride on Dad’s Harley through the front window of an art gallery on Rodeo Drive —

Yeah, he’d probably gone too far that time. It was what had earned him a ticket on Charting a New Course, a four-week boat trip for troubled youth. They had all done stupid things like that: Luke with the gun in his locker; Charla with her driven obsession to be a star athlete; Ian for being a TV-addicted couch potato; and Will and Lyssa for sibling warfare. Those were the offenses that had gotten them sent halfway around the world on a boat trip. Then — a few lousy breaks, and here they were.

A fewlousy breaks. Yeah, right

It was J.J.‘s opinion that there had been no disaster. The wreck of thePhoenix and everything that had happened since was, he felt, all carefully planned by Charting a New Course. A trick boat, designed to “sink” — it was probably part submarine. By now it had resurfaced to be fixed up for the next group of suckers. Luke and the others said it was impossible. But they’d never lived in Hollywood, where special-effects wizards created the impossible every day.

So gullible! Wasn’t it too much of a coincidence that two separate rafts had drifted to exactly the same tiny island? One that happened to be a rendezvous point for dangerous smugglers? It was a setup. The whole theme of CNC was learning teamwork and building character through adventure. JJ. was convinced the “smugglers” had been professional actors. The old military installation was fake too. Like the army would justforget an atomic bomb!

No one was in any danger. At the first sign of trouble, CNC would stop the simulation and send them all home. But the others insisted on playing Robinson Crusoe — living off the land, scrambling for coconuts and bananas. And now — gag! — a chicken.

JJ. could picture Captain Cascadden — whosupposedly drowned — and Mr. Radford — whosupposedly jumped ship and left them to die. For sure, the two men were watching the castaways on hidden cameras, high-fiving and laughing about how everything had unfolded exactly according to plan.

Well,almost according to plan. Will getting shot — that must have been a mistake. It was good news, really. At some point, Will needed to have that bullet removed from his leg. Which meant that any day now, CNC would stop this game and take the poor kid to a doctor. All the castaways had to do was wait it out.

Blood spattered on JJ.‘s shirt. He wheeled to face the jungle. That was where the hidden cameras probably were. “Hey, look!” he bellowed. “Jonathan Lane’s only son is plucking a chicken! He’s turning into a better person with every feather!”

The others were staring over at him, but nobody said a word. They thought he was nuts. JJ. knew better. Somewhere — in an office, or a plane, or a special surveillance boat — CNC was observing all this and making notes. He refused to give them the satisfaction of thinking that he couldn’t see through their charade!

He stood up. “Hey, Haggerty.”

When Luke looked over, JJ. tossed the plucked bird right to him in a chest pass.

“How do we cook it?” asked Lyssa.

Instantly, all eyes turned to Ian.

The younger boy backed up a step. “I don’t know anything about cooking!”

“You spent your whole life in front of the TV,” said JJ. “Didn’t you ever catch Chef Emeril?”

Luke dismantled one of the three stills the castaways used to boil the salt out of seawater to make it drinkable. Using two sticks, he held the fowl over the fire, turning it like a rotating spit on a barbecue.

“Nothing’s happening/’ Charla observed after a few breathless minutes.

So they tried cooking over the bonfire. This was a huge blaze — it was intended to alert passing planes and ships to their presence on the island. The sizzling sound was instant, along with a delicious smell of cooking meat. A split second later, half the bird was ablaze.

Lyssa beat at the fire with a plastic rain poncho, but that only fanned the flames, which spread to the sticks in Luke’s hands.

Luke looked around in alarm. “Quick! Grab the chicken!”

“Are you crazy?” exclaimed Charla. “It’s on fire!”

Lyssa held up the pot of freshwater from the dismantled still. Luke deposited the bird inside and dropped the burning sticks to the sand. A plop and a hiss, and Will’s birthday dinner was extinguished.

Luke blew on his hands. “Thanks,” he told Lyssa.

“Hey, why don’t we just boil it?” suggested Charla. “You can boil anything, right?”

Lyssa hung the pot by its half-hoop handle over the fire. Since the water had just been boiling, it began to churn and bubble almost right away.

“How long do we cook it for?” asked Will.

“Better make it a while,” put in Charla. “Nothing is grosser than raw chicken.”

Leaving the birthday dinner to boil, they went about their business, lan’s mission: find taro, a potatolike root vegetable that would make a good side dish. Luke went into the jungle with him, to collect firewood. Since large logs were rare, and smaller twigs and branches burned quickly, keeping the voracious bonfire going was a full-time job. Charla went along to help.

JJ. opted for a swim to wash away the blood, sweat, and feathers of his plucking experience. Only Lyssa stuck around to keep Will company. But there was work to do there too. She had to tend the bonfire and also the smaller fires on the two working stills. From these, she collected the bowls of freshwater and poured them into their keg. It, like most of their conveniences, came from the Phoenix’s rubber lifeboat. Lyssa and JJ. had drifted to the island on this inflatable craft. Seven days lost at sea. The memory of it still brought her chills. But it had been a luxury cruise compared with what the other four had suffered — bobbing around on a tiny piece of the destroyedPhoenix , big enough only for three, while the fourth hung over the side. It was amazing any of them had survived — especially her brother, who was a suburban kid and kind of soft.

Sharply, she reminded herself that Will wasn’t out of the woods yet. None of them were if they couldn’t find a way off this island.

Now the covered lifeboat sat just inside the trees, where it served as the castaways’ sleeping quarters.

Lyssa recorked the water keg and plucked three large snails from the sun canopy. These would go into the boiling pot as soon as the chicken was done.

The chicken. The position of the sun told her that more than an hour had passed. Surely the birthday dinner was ready by now.

She ran over and checked the pot. “Oh, no!” she gasped.

Will sat bolt upright on the raft. “Don’t tell me you’ve burned my chicken!”

“No,” she managed. “Not burned.” How would you describe it? Pieces of meat and skin floated everywhere. Down in the bottom of the pot rested a small pile of bare bones. They had cooked the living daylights out of that poor little hen.

Painstakingly, she began spooning pieces of meat onto a plate. “They’re going to kill me,” she told Will.

“I’m going to kill you/’ Will retorted. “Is it ruined?”

“Not exactly. But it’s not good either.”

She was about to pour out the water when Will suddenly sniffed the air. “Lyss, I may be delirious, but — I think I smell Grandma’s matzoh ball soup!”

Lyssa took a whiff, and then a taste of the water she had been about to dump. “Itis soup!” she exclaimed in amazement. “We made chicken soup!”

Bouncing on his bottom, Will managed to “sit” his way over to the fire. He accepted a taste from his sister.

“Unbelievable!” he exclaimed. “We don’t even have toilet paper, but we managed to cook homemade chicken soup! The others are going to drop dead!”

As Lyssa took another taste, she caught sight of her reflection in the aluminum pot.

The girl who thought she would never smile again was already smiling.

Day 17, 2:15 p.m.

Will ran a fever the very next day.

JJ. was the first to notice the flush in his face. “Dude, it looks like you’re wearing old-lady makeup. Your cheeks are bright red.”

For most of the afternoon, Will had been asking if the weather was getting colder. This close to the equator, the weather never got any colder, and the humidity stayed permanently at sweat-bath level.

“Chills,” was lan’s diagnosis.

The thermometer in the first-aid kit confirmed that, yes, the patient was running a temperature of 99.8 degrees.

Will tried to treat it lightly. “Impossible,” he wisecracked. “A person can’t get sick after eating Grandma’s chicken soup.”

Lyssa took Luke and Ian aside. ‘That’s not a high fever. It’s okay, right?”

If she was looking to them for reassurance, she didn’t get it.

“He’s only been off the antibiotic for a day,” Ian said nervously. “If there’s an infection already, it could spread very fast.”

Lyssa swore them both to secrecy. “I don’t want Will worrying about this. He’s such a wimp that he could make himself even sicker.”

Luke looked thoughtful. “Maybe he was like that in his old life. But your brother’s been through a lot in these last few weeks. He’s not a pushover anymore.”

But she was adamant. “Let’s not play with his head — at least not until we know we’ve got trouble.”

If they were fooling Will, they certainly weren’t fooling Charla. “We should go back to the army base,” she urged quietly. “They had alcohol and bandages. Maybe they’ve got some pills or something.”

It was decided that Luke and Charla would go over to the other side of the island and raid the dispensary.

This was a trip the castaways didn’t make very often, although it was less than two miles. The foliage was so dense, the vines and underbrush so tangled, the insects so relentless, that it wasn’t a very pleasant walk. Even under the best of circumstances it took an hour and a half, but it could easily be double that. Since there was no trail, every journey was different, climbing over new-fallen logs, squeezing through new stands of ferns, ducking under new low-growing branches.

Luke hated these island crossings, and it wasn’t just because of the mosquito bites. If the smugglers returned to their meeting place at the old base, there couldn’t be any clue that there were others on the island. The slightest sign — a misplaced footprint, a fallen button — could alert these dangerous criminals to the castaways’ presence. Luke had already seen them execute one of their own men without mercy. They would not hesitate to kill six kids to protect their illegal operation.

There was such a sameness to the rain forest that Luke and Charla clung to the few landmarks they knew. First came the crumbling concrete. It had once been the air base’s runway, but now it was overgrown with jungle. From there, they became more careful because they knew the bomb pit was near. Luke had always assumed that nuclear devices were stored in high-tech containers. But back in World War Two, the atomic bombs had been kept right out in the open, in shallow pits just like this one. They had it on the authority of Ian and the Discovery Channel that this was true of Fat Man and Little Boy, the weapons that had actually been used. Junior, the third bomb, had been so top secret that the history books said it had never been built. But it made perfect sense that Junior would be housed the same way.

Luke and Charla grew quiet as they drew close. Of course, you couldn’t set off an atomic bomb by talking too loud. But they still felt a certain fearful respect for the awesome power of the device and the terrible destruction and death that had been brought about by its two brothers.

They exchanged a knowing glance as they passed a little notch on the trunk of a palm tree. Luke himself had made that mark. It told them that the pit was here, hidden in what looked like an unbroken expanse of jungle floor. He’d been unwilling to risk more obvious marking. There could be no greater disaster than having the smugglers find Junior. These men made money from the blood of endangered animals. They would not think twice about selling an atomic bomb to the highest bidder.

Charla put it on a more basic level. “This place gives me the creeps.”

“Amen,” Luke agreed.

At this point, the jungle was so dense that progress came closer to wading than walking. They pushed through ferns and twining vines. It still amazed Luke that the building remained invisible until he was practically close enough to touch it. The foliage was so thick and overgrown that there was a leaf here, a frond there, to obscure every inch of a hundred-foot Quonset hut.

Feeling their way along the corrugated metal, they headed for the rear, where two smaller huts were located. One of these showed a faded sign: DISPENSARY.

The door was off its hinges. Luke shoved it open and they stepped inside.

Day 17, 4:35 p.m.

Mangosteens.

Will Greenfield sat up on his raft, working with a knife to cut open a mountain of the plum-sized fruit.

Mangosteens! In the world of naming foods, who had come up with that one? It sounded like a partner in his father’s law firm: Berkowitz, Greenfield, and Mangosteen.

They were good, though. Actually, they were delicious. But that was beside the point. Six lives were in danger. Important work had to be done for their very survival. And what was Will’s job? A mangosteen fruit salad.

Just because he’d had the bad luck to get shot. And now this fever. 99.8 degrees, and everyone was treating him like he was on his deathbed.

He’d run higher fevers from a bad cold.

For an instant, a sense of foreboding replaced his irritation. His thigh didn’t hurt exactly, and the numbness was gone now, so that was a good sign, wasn’t it? But still it felt somehow — wrong. There was a strange rhythmic throbbing, almost like a second heartbeat down there. One minute the leg would seem strong enough for him to get up and dance. The next, it would be so weak he wasn’t sure it would even support him.