Uncharted(45)

Unfaltering caretaker.

In cheerleading, there’s no greater trust than that between a flyer and her base. You can’t reach the top of the pyramid without a solid foundation beneath your feet. Beck may not have phrased it as eloquently as my cheer coach, but the concept still applies. What he’s saying — what he’s offering — is clear as day.

I’ll be your support system.

Always.

When we eventually fall asleep, we don’t move to opposite sides of the fire, as we have for the past week. We lie side by side, not quite touching, but close enough that I could reach out and grab his hand with a simple flick of my wrist. There’s a warm glow inside my chest I cannot seem to suppress, even after my eyes have closed and Beck’s breaths have slowed to the steady rhythms of sleep.

It’s been a good night.

A great night.

I never would’ve predicted I’d find myself saying that again, so long as we remain on this island.

Basking in the warmth of the fire, I slip unconscious with a smile on my face… in my lingering joy, completely forgetting that I never got around to checking Ian’s leg bandages.

Later, I’d look back at that moment of bliss and wonder if it was possible to hate myself more.





Chapter Thirteen





B R E A K





It’s amazing how much can happen in eight hours.

A speeding car can cross New England in its entirety. A person can work a full day shift, or catch a total night’s sleep. A space satellite can complete an orbit. A single cell can replicate exponentially until one unit of bacteria becomes a hundred, a thousand, a million.

Until it spreads enough to do irreversible damage.

As soon as my eyes open, I know something’s wrong. Ian isn’t propped up on his pallet, drawing inappropriate things in the margins of the children’s coloring book with our stock of crayons to keep himself entertained. He’s huddled low, shivering like it’s eight below zero rather than eighty and rising. I spare a single glance at Beck, sleeping soundly at my side, as I sit up and make my way to Ian.

“Hey,” I murmur, pulling his foil blankets down so I can see his face. “Are you—”

My mouth goes dry. My eyes widen as they trace over his skin. The fever is back, that’s immediately obvious. There’s a clammy sheen to his face that wasn’t there last night.

Or, maybe it was… and you were so focused on enjoying yourself, you simply didn’t see it.

Selfish, selfish, selfish.

I press my hand to his forehead and wince when the heat of his skin nearly scalds me. He’s burning up.

“Ian? Can you hear me?”

“What’s up, doc?” he murmurs, eyelids fluttering as a grin tugs at his lips. It quickly morphs into a grimace. An insuppressible groan of pain hits my ears. “Christ, it hurts.”

“What hurts?”

“My leg.”

All traces of humor are gone from his voice. This is no pun. I don’t wait for a punchline or a lighthearted twist. With trembling fingers, I reach for the fabric wrappings around his stump and slowly unwind them. My heart pounds a sharp staccato inside my chest.

The smell hits me first. Decay and death. I breathe through my mouth as I pull away the final piece of bandage, nearly fainting when I take in what’s become of his leg in the short time since I last saw it. Patches of black, necrotic tissue are no match for the angry red streaks of infection. Beginning at the seared burn site, they stretch toward his groin, disappearing beneath the edge of his boxer shorts. Creeping toward his heart.

“Oh, Ian,” I breathe, horror overtaking me when see the extent of the blood poisoning. “Ian…”

There’s no reply. He’s unconscious. Delirious. Lost in the throes of fever dreams as his skin trembles with cold.

Why didn’t you tell me? I want to wail, shaking him for answers. Why didn’t you say anything?

He must’ve known. This did not happen over the course of a few hours. To spread this far, he must’ve been feeling the effects for days.

My mind whirls as I consider our options. They are grim indeed, from where I sit. With no medicine and precious little remaining alcohol, we can hardly sanitize our hands of germs, let alone kill an aggressive bacterial infection. I’ve begun to study the trees around our camp, but I don’t know nearly enough to start blindly shoving them down Ian’s throat — not without testing their effects on myself first. Picking the wrong plant could kill him even faster than this infection.

My desperate eyes sweep the camp, snagging on the smoldering fire. It’s hard to believe mere hours ago we were all laughing together around a magnificent blaze. Hard to believe things could change so swiftly from fun to fear. Discarded coconut shells litter the ground like party favors.

Coconuts! The thought clangs loudly inside my skull, inspiration striking like a blow. Coconuts have medicinal properties!

I used to tease some of my more health-conscious friends about their obsession with the thick white oil. They’d put it in food, on their skin, in their hair. Over the past few years it’s become such a fitness fad, I’ve heard claims about curative benefits ranging from fat burning to wrinkle reduction to hormone balance to blood pressure. It’s been linked to treatments for everything from Alzheimer’s to cancer to heart disease.