Shipwreck (10 page)

A bird?

No, that couldn’t be right. Luke’s eyes were playing tricks on him again. There were no birds out here in the open ocean. They had to stay within flying range of land.

He’d been having a lot of hallucinations. Like a couple of hours ago — days ago? — when he’d had a very clear memory of Reese stashing that gun in his locker. Crazy! How could he remember what he hadn’t seen? Of course, heknew it had been Reese, even though the jerk denied it. So Luke’s hazy mind had put together what must have happened and constructed a fake memory out of it.

It was not very different from lan’s whale — the beginning of the end.

It was a terrible end, Luke decided, because your last thought is the one where you realize you’re losing your mind.

What was this? His body wriggled with revulsion as a long slimy shape attacked and wrapped itself around his neck. He let go of the raft and tore at it, ripping it to pieces. An eel? The tentacle of a giant squid? Through the fog of his confusion, he struggled to focus on what was in his hands.

Seaweed. Another hallucination. There was no seaweed in the open ocean either.

Splashing wildly, he managed to regain his grip on the raft. He had no idea why he was struggling so hard to preserve his doomed life a few extra minutes. What was the point? They were all dead, courtesy of Ratface.

Ratface — what a waste of a thought when there weren’t many thoughts left.

Luke forced the mate’s picture out of his brain. But its replacement image was too painful — a fleeting glimpse of his parents, who would mourn him. He closed his eyes tightly, but they were still there.

Make this stop! he tried to exclaim.

And when he opened his eyes again, he saw the fin.

Another hallucination?

Maybe, but this one struck him right in the ribs.

Shark! He tried to sound the warning, but the technical difficulties between his brain and his mouth still existed.

The raft bobbed away from the fin. Luke held his breath. The long shape in the water followed.

Another bump! Luke braced himself for the ripping, tearing bite that was to come next. But when he looked down, he saw the bottle-nosed snout of a dolphin.

This time it nudged the raft, and Luke was pulled along. He remembered somewhere in lan’s rambling lecture stories of dolphins pushing drowning sailors to safety. Surely this was the final hallucination, the last desperate brain impulses of a dying mind. He was amazed at how vivid it was — the white water roaring around him, the pounding of surf, the sudden thump of his dangling feet onto shallow sandy bottom.

Instinct took over — instinct and a frantic desire to die on dry land. Luke pushed the raft with every ounce of strength that remained in his exhausted body — kept on pushing, even when the cabin top dug into the beach and would move no more.

Sunday, July 23, 1555 hours

It was a drenching rain, a downpour, a deluge. As Luke slept, he dreamed that hundreds of tiny jackhammers were working on his face. The water quickly puddled up in his eye sockets and in the hollows on both sides of his nose. The trickle found his lips.

Water. Real water. Drinking water.

He sat bolt upright and stared around him in confusion. Palm trees. Jungle. A sandy beach.

He leaped up too fast, toppling over and landing in the surf. As he lay there in the shallows, an amazing sight met his eyes. The cabin top was jammed into the heavy sand just above the tide line. Will, Charla, and Ian lay upon it, still unconscious. Between Ian and Charla sat the rain hat, propped up by their bodies and full to overflowing with freshwater.

Luke crawled through the surf, bent over the raft, and stuck his head into the hat, drinking greedily. Nothing had ever tasted better. He could have happily remained there, draining the hat dry. It took a gigantic effort to pull himself away.

Carefully, like he was handling nitro, he picked up the hat and held it to Will’s cracked lips.

Luke watched the precious water roll down Will’s chin. Finally, a tiny amount managed to find its way into his mouth. It dribbled down the back of his throat; he choked suddenly. Poor Will still couldn’t keep anything down.

He moved on to Charla. He propped her up on the sand and began by wetting her lips with water from his finger. The girl opened her eyes and her mouth at the same time.

“Where — ?”

“Drink,” Luke interrupted.

And she did, gulping so deeply that she ended up choking too, although not a drop was wasted.

The two attended to Ian. The younger boy smacked his lips at the first taste. Then he swallowed and kept on swallowing. He sat up, grabbed the hat, and chug-a-lugged.

In the spot where he had been lying, the raft still said NIX.

“Save some for Will,” ordered Luke.

Charla looked worried, still disoriented. “I don’t know,” she said nervously. “Will’s really messed up. He hasn’t moved in days.”

Luke spilled water on Will’s upturned face and forced some past the parched lips. The boy choked again, but this time the water stayed down. Luke dropped to his knees and gently slapped Will’s cheeks. “Come on, Will. Join the party.”

No response.

All three hunkered down and tried everything they could think of to rouse their friend. No amount of shaking, pinching, chafing, and massaging had any effect.

“He’s definitely alive,” concluded Ian, “but there’s no telling when he’ll snap out of it. It could be five minutes from now; it could be never.” He flushed at Luke’s angry look and explained, “I saw it on the Learning Channel.”

Charla looked around. “Whatis this place?”

“Who cares?” Luke replied. “Itisn’t the raft. It’s land, and that’s all that matters.”

“It must be an island,” mused Ian. “There’s no way we could have drifted far enough to reach continental land. This is a miracle! To hit an island in this part of the Pacific is as unlikely as two bullets striking each other head-on. We lucked out.”

“Luck had nothing to do with it,” said Luke. “It was that dolphin.”

They stared at him. “Dolphin?” repeated Charla.

“You must have seen it,” Luke insisted. “It pushed us in to the island. Just like you told us, Ian. Dolphins try to help people. This one saved our lives.”

“You must have been hallucinating,” Ian said kindly. “There wasn’t any dolphin. A big wind blew us here. Don’t you remember? One minute we were drifting, and the next we were being carried along by a hot wind. It felt sort of like the dryer in a car wash.”

“You’re both crazy!” exclaimed Charla. “Nothing brought us here. We swam in. We lined up along the raft and kicked like crazy. When I close my eyes, I can still see us doing it.”

They stared at one another, bewildered, as the rain beat down.

Ian seemed to choose his words very carefully. “I think maybe we’reall right — inside our minds.”

By that time, the rubber hat was full again. Charla drank some more and passed it around.

Luke raised it like a champagne glass. “To us, man! I can’t believe we made it!” His face fell suddenly. “And to those who didn’t make it.”

It was a painful thought, one that packed the wallop of a sledgehammer. But the castaways had more pressing problems — the need for food, the need for shelter, the need to help their unconscious friend. So they set aside their grieving and made plans to explore the island that had risen from the sea to save their lives.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

GORDON KORMAN is the author of more than thirty-five books for children and young adults, including most recentlyThe Chicken Doesn’t Skate , the Slapshots series, andLiar, Liar, Pants on Fire . He lives in Long Island with his wife and son. Although he has never been stranded on a desert island, he did a lot of research to write this, his first adventure novel.

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