Read Desperate Measures Online
Authors: Jeff Probst
Desperate Measures (10 page)
CHAPTER 18
T
he night didn't last long. Whatever time it had been when Mima set the fires, the sky soon lightened from black to something more like deep blue. Eventually, that gave way to an endless long line of yellow, then orange and red, as the sun peered up over the horizon.
For hours, there had been no need for paddling. The same current that brought them to Shadow Island's western shore seemed to be carrying them away from its eastern side.
As the day came on, though, the current gradually slowed to a standstill. By the time the sun was fully up, Shadow Island had long since disappeared behind
them, and the ocean stretched to a flat nothingness in every direction.
“Welcome to Benson-Diaz Island,” Jane said, breaking what had been an hour or more of silence.
Buzz managed a weak laugh. Jane wasn't wrong about that. The canoe itself was everything they had now, like their family's own tiny island. The only reason he wasn't panicking completely was because of the other three in the boat with him.
They had an unspoken pact now. A family deal. Nobody did anything to make this harder for anyone else. They'd made it this far together. They'd find their way home together, too.
Or they'd figure something else out.
All four of them, no matter what.
No words necessary.
Carter slept and woke in short bursts. Like the others, he kept himself covered with the fronds they'd brought, keeping at least partially out of the sun.
When his eyes opened this time, he looked straight up, scanning the blue cloudless sky. Mom and Dad were out there somewhere. That much was for sure. Their parents had searched nonstop while the kids were on Nowhere Island. And that meant they were searching nonstop right now.
Carter knew from the maps they'd had on Uncle Dexter's boat (was it really only three weeks ago?) that the stretch of ocean around them was as big as half the United States. It wasn't impossible to be spotted in a place like this, but unless they got very lucky, they were going to be in for a long wait.
Maybe a
very
long one.
“What do we do if we see land?” Jane asked.
“I say we go to it, at least just to look around,” Carter said.
“I agree,” Buzz said. “It's a chance to get more supplies, maybe even more water.”
“That's
if
we see land,” Vanessa said. Because they all knew that wasn't going to happen any time soon. From where Carter sat, looking around in every direction, there was nothing to see at all.
Much less anything to move toward.
Vanessa peeked out over the edge of the boat. The only way to know if they were moving was to look down at the water. Gauging their progress by the vast sky was impossible. But the position of the sun told her it was getting on toward late afternoon. They'd been drifting for at least twelve hours now. Maybe more.
At least the water was calm, she thought, and pulled the frond back over her head.
“Um . . .” Jane said from the other end of the boat. “You guys? What's that?”
Vanessa bolted up. Jane and Carter threw off their sunshades, too, and looked around.
Jane was pointing to the southwest.
“Is it a tree? Or a log?” Buzz said. “Or . . . something else?”
Vanessa squinted in that direction. She saw what he meant, but it took a minute before she could pick out any details. Then her heart jumped. The thing
was much farther off than she'd thought at firstâwhich meant it was way bigger than just a log.
“I think it's land!” she said.
“It's an island!” Jane said.
“Actually . . .” Carter came onto his knees, staring in the same direction. “It's more than one island. There's a whole chain of them.”
He'd barely said it before he was back down again, paddle in hand. Vanessa picked up the other one, and they bent to it, moving the canoe over the glassy water toward their new find. It was too early to say just how good this news might be. But it had already become clear that if they were going to be out here for a long time, they were going to need more supplies than they had in the boat.
“I hope there's water,” Vanessa said.
“What'll we carry it in?” Jane asked.
“We'll figure it out,” Buzz said. “First, we just need to . . .”
Vanessa dipped her paddle into the water, pulling as hard as she could. Carter paddled behind her in perfect sync. They were already picking up speed.
“We just need to what?” Jane asked Buzz. But he didn't answer. Instead, the boat rocked hard and nearly tipped as he repositioned himself behind Vanessa.
“Buzz, be careful!” Carter shouted. “And sit down! The last thing we need right now isâ”
“Turn around,” Buzz said.
“What?” Carter asked.
“Turn around,”
Buzz repeated. His voice was low, but urgent. Strangely urgent.
“What is it?” Vanessa asked. She twisted around to look at him, and he was staring in the opposite direction of the islands now. The far eastern sky had gone turquoise in the late-afternoon light. Other than that, Vanessa couldn't see anything.
“What are you looking at?” Jane asked.
“That!” Buzz said, pointing.
Vanessa looked again. She squinted. And then she saw the plane.
“Carter, stop paddling!” she said. “Look!”
It couldn't have been tinier. The plane was barely a speck on the horizon. It made no sound at allâor,
at least, didn't appear to. It was too far off for that. But it was headed in their direction.
“Is that them?” Jane asked. “Is it . . . I mean, could it be . . .”
Buzz finished the question for her. “Mom and Dad?” he asked.
And the answer wasâpossibly. Very, very possibly.
Either way, it was
someone.
This was incredible. Vanessa glanced back at the small island chain. She wasn't even sure why. Then she locked her eyes on the plane again. Carter, Jane, and Buzz were already waving and shouting.
“HEY! HEY!”
“OVER HERE!”
“HELP!”
The plane was too far off to have spotted them yet. But Vanessa quickly joined in. There was no sitting still and keeping quiet now, even if she wanted to. From the direction the plane was headed, there would be no chance for it to miss them. One way or another, something huge was about to happen.
“THIS WAY! WE'RE HERE! WE'RE HERE!” she screamed. The sky blurred as her eyes filled with tearsâthe happiest tears of her life.
It was finally time to go home.
READ HOW THE ADVENTURE BEGAN IN
It was supposed to be a vacationâand a chance to get to know one another better. But when a massive storm sets in without warning, four kids are shipwrecked alone on a rocky jungle island in the middle of the South Pacific. No adults. No instructions. Nobody to rely on but themselves. Can they make it home alive?
A week ago, the biggest challenge Vanessa, Buzz, Carter, and Jane had was learning to live as a new blended family. Now the four siblings must find a way to work together if they're going to make it off the island. But first they've got to learn to survive one another.
CHAPTER 1
It
was day four at sea, and as far as eleven-year-old Carter Benson was concerned, life didn't get any better than this.
From where he hung, suspended fifty feet over the deck of the
Lucky Star
, all he could see was a planet's worth of blue water. The boat's huge white mainsail ballooned in front of him, filled with a stiff southerly wind that sent them scudding through the South Pacific faster than they'd sailed all week.
This was the best part of the best thing Carter had ever done, no question. It was like sailing and flying at the same time. The harness around his middle held him in place while his arms and legs hung free. The air itself seemed to carry him along, at speed with the boat.
“How you doin' up there, Carter?” Uncle Dexter shouted from the cockpit.
Carter flashed a thumbs-up and pumped his fist. “Faster!” he shouted back. Even with the wind whipping in his ears, Dex's huge belly laugh came back, loud and clear.
Meanwhile, Carter had a job to do. He wound the safety line from his harness in a figure eight around the cleat on the mast to secure himself. Then he reached over and unscrewed the navigation lamp he'd come up here to replace.
As soon as he'd pocketed the old lamp in his rain slicker, he pulled out the new one and fitted it into the fixture, making sure not to let go before he'd tightened it down. Carter had changed plenty of lightbulbs before, but never like this. If anything, it was all too easy and over too fast.
When he was done, he unwound his safety line and gave a hand signal to Dex's first mate, Joe Kahali, down below. Joe put both hands on the winch at the base of the mast and started cranking Carter back down to the deck.
“Good job, Carter,” Joe said, slapping him on the back as he got there. Carter swelled with pride and adrenaline. Normally, replacing the bulb would have been Joe's job, but Dex trusted him to take care of it.
Now Joe jerked a thumb over his shoulder. “Your uncle wants to talk to you,” he said.
Carter stepped out of the harness and stowed it in its locker, just like Dex and Joe had trained him to do. Once that was done, he clipped the D-ring on his life jacket to the safety cable that ran the length of the deck and headed toward the back.
It wasn't easy to keep his footing as the
Lucky Star
pitched and rolled over the waves, but even that was part of the fun. If he did fall, the safety cableâalso called a jacklineâwould keep him from going overboard. Everyone was required to stay clipped in when they were on deck, whether they were up there to work . . . or to puke, like Buzz was doing right now.
“Gross! Watch out, Buzz!” Carter said, pushing past him.
“
Uhhhhhnnnnh
,” was all Buzz said in return. He was leaning against the rail and looked both green and gray at the same time.
Carter kind of felt sorry for him. They were both eleven years old, but they didn't really have anything else in common. It was like they were having two different vacations out here.
“Gotta keep moving,” he said, and continued on toward the back, where Dex was waiting.
“Hey, buddy, it's getting a little choppier than I'd like,” Dex said as Carter stepped down into the cockpit. “I need you guys to get below.”
“I don't want to go below,” Carter said. “Dex, I can help. Let me steer!”
“No way,” Dex said. “Not in this wind. You've been great, Carter, but I promised your mom before we set sailâno kids on deck if these swells got over six feet. You see that?” He pointed to the front of the boat, where a cloud of sea spray had just broken over the bow. “
That's
what a six-foot swell looks like. We've got a storm on the wayâmaybe a big one. It's time for you to take a break.”
“Come on, please?” Carter said. “I thought we came out here to sail!”
Dex took him by the shoulders and looked him square in the eye.
“Remember what we talked about before we set out? My boat. My rules. Got it?”
Carter got it, all right. Arguing with Dex was like wrestling a bear. You could try, but you were never going to win.
“Now, grab your brother and get down there,” Dex told him.
“Okay, fine,” Carter said. “But he's not my brother, by the way. Just because my mom married his dad doesn't meanâ”
“Ask me tomorrow if I care,” Dexter said, and gave him a friendly but insistent shove. “Now go!”
*Â *Â *Â
Benjamin “Buzz” Diaz lifted his head from the rail and looked out into the distance. All he could see from here was an endless stretch of gray clouds over an endless stretch of choppy waves.
Keeping an eye on the horizon was supposed to help with the seasickness, but so far, all it had done was remind him that he was in the middle of the biggest stretch of nowhere he'd ever seen. His stomach felt like it had been turned upside down and inside out. His legs were like rubber bands, and his head swam with a thick, fuzzy feeling, while the boat rocked and rocked and rocked.
It didn't look like this weather was going to be changing anytime soon, either. At least, not for the better.
Buzz tried to think about something elseâanything elseâto take his mind off how miserable he felt. He thought about his room back home. He thought about how much he couldn't wait to get there, where he could just close his door and hang out all day if he wanted, playing City of Doom and eating pepperoni pizzâ
Wait,
Buzz thought.
No. Not that.
He tried to unthink anything to do with food, but it was too late. Already, he was leaning over the rail again and hurling the last of his breakfast into the ocean.
“Still feeding the fish, huh?” Suddenly, Carter was back. He put a hand on Buzz's arm. “Come on,” he said. “Dex told me we have to get below.”
Buzz clutched his belly. “Are you kidding?” he said. “Can't it wait?”
“No. Come on.”
All week long, Carter had been running around the deck of the
Lucky Star
like he owned it or something. Still, Carter was the least of Buzz's worries right now.
It was only day four at sea, and if things kept going like this, he was going to be lucky to make it to day five.
*Â *Â *Â
Vanessa Diaz sat at the
Lucky Star
's navigation station belowdecks and stared at the laptop screen in front of her. She'd only just started to learn about this stuff a few days earlier, but as far as she could tell, all that orange and red on the weather radar was a bad sign. Not to mention the scroll across the bottom of the screen, saying something about “gale-force winds and deteriorating conditions.”
The first three days of their trip had been nothing but clear blue skies and warm breezes. Now, nine hundred miles off the coast of Hawaii, all of that had changed. Dexter kept saying they had to adjust their course to outrun the weather, but so far, it seemed like the weather was outrunning them. They'd changed direction at least three times, and things only seemed to be getting worse.
The question wasâhow
much
worse?
A chill ran down Vanessa's spine as the hatch over the galley stairs opened, and Buzz and Carter came clattering down the steps.
“How are you feeling, Buzzy?” she asked, but he didn't stop to talk. Instead, he went straight for the little bathroomâthe “head,” Dexter called itâand slammed the door behind him.
Her little brother was getting the worst of these bad seas, by far. Carter, on the other hand, seemed unfazed.
Sometimes Vanessa called them “the twins,” as a joke, because they were both eleven but nothing alike. Carter kept his sandy hair cut short and was even kind of muscley for a kid his age. Buzz, on the other hand, had shaggy jet-black curls like their father's and was what adults liked to call husky. The kids at school just called him fat.
Vanessa didn't think her brother was fatânot exactlyâbut you could definitely tell he spent a lot of time in front of the TV.
“It's starting to rain,” Carter said, looking up at the sky.
“Then close the hatch,” Vanessa said.
“Don't tell me what to do.”
Vanessa rolled her eyes. “Okay, fine. Get wet. See if I care.”
He would, too, she thought. He'd just stand there and get rained on, only because she told him not to. Carter was one part bulldog and one part mule.
Jane was there now, too. She'd just come out of the tiny sleeping cabin the two girls shared.
Jane was like the opposite of Carter. She could slip in and out of a room without anyone ever noticing. With Carter, you always knew he was there.
“What are you looking at, Nessa?” Jane asked.
“Nothing.” Vanessa flipped the laptop closed. “I was just checking the weather,” she said.
There was no reason to scare Jane about all that. She was only nine, and tiny for her age. Vanessa was the oldest, at thirteen, and even though nobody told her to look out for Jane on this trip, she did anyway.
“Dex said there's a storm coming,” Carter blurted out. “He said it's going to be major.”
“Carter!” Vanessa looked over at him and rolled her eyes in Jane's direction.
But he just shrugged. “What?” he said. “You think she's not going to find out?”
“You don't have to worry about me,” Jane said. She crawled up onto Vanessa's lap and opened the computer to have a look. “Show me.”
“See?” Carter said. “I know my sister.”
Vanessa took a deep breath. If the idea of this trip was to make them one big happy family, it wasn't exactly working.
Technically, the whole sailing adventure was a wedding gift from her new uncle, Dexter. It had been two months since Vanessa and Buzz's father had married Carter and Jane's mother, but they'd waited until the end of the school year to take a honeymoon. Now, while their parents were hiking Volcanoes National Park and enjoying the beaches on Hawaii's Big Island, the four kids were spending the week at sea and supposedly getting to know one another better.
So far, the sailing had been amazing, but the sister-brother bonding thing? Not so much, Vanessa thought. The weather wasn't helping, either. It looked like they were going to be cooped up together for the rest of the day.
“Is that the storm?” Jane said. She pointed at the large red mass on the laptop screen.
“That's it,” Vanessa answered. On the computer, it seemed as if the oncoming front had gotten even bigger in the last few minutes. She started braiding Jane's long blond hair to distract her.
“It's just rain, right?” Jane said. “If this was something really bad, we'd already know about it. Wouldn't we, Nessa?”
Vanessa tried to smile. “Sure,” she said. But the truth was, she had no idea how bad it was going to get.
None of them did.