The Island(43)

The heat was unbearable. They had no water. Horseflies and mosquitoes were landing on them and sucking their sweat and blood with impunity.

“Can we drink that water, Heather?” Olivia asked, pointing at the sea.

“No, it’s seawater. We can’t drink it unless there’s a river pouring into it,” Heather said. She took off her shoes, rolled up her jeans, waded into the sea, and cupped a little bit to her mouth. She drank and spit it out.

“It’s not good to drink, but I want you kids to bathe in the shallows and cool off a bit. I’ll keep watch,” Heather said, wading back to shore. She would watch for sharks. Tiger sharks, bull sharks, great whites—these waters were thick with predators.

It was not yet noon and it was well into the nineties. At least it was slightly cooler here than on the heathland because of a hint of a breeze blowing through the channel.

“Perhaps we could make a raft, like Olivia said?” Petra suggested.

“That might be a possibility,” Heather agreed. The children were panting in the heat. “Kids, please, I want you to cool off in the shallows. But no deeper than your ankles.”

The kids bathed, and while they dried off, Heather and Petra walked up and down the beach looking for suitable mangrove branches or driftwood, but the trees were stunted and the branches narrow and twisted. They were more mangrove bushes than actual trees. They broke off a branch and put it in the water, where it partially submerged.

“I don’t know why it’s doing that,” Heather said. “Wood should float better than that.”

“I don’t know either,” Petra said. “We would need hundreds of branches to make anything that could support even Olivia’s weight. And how would we tie them together?”

“We could cut our clothes into strips and use those,” Heather suggested, but she was skeptical—what they were thinking of would require days of work, perhaps a week. They were already exhausted just from this morning’s exertions, and none of them had had any water since before dawn.

Owen was excitedly digging in the sand.

“What are you doing there, Owen?” Heather asked.

“Either of you ever watch Bear Grylls? His early shows, not the new shit ones.”

Heather and Petra shook their heads.

“I found a couple of plastic bottles on the beach,” he said.

“With fresh water?” Heather asked excitedly.

“No, they’re empty, but look,” Owen said, becoming animated for the first time in days. “I think we can make some kind of…yeah, hold on.”

He took one bottle and half filled it with seawater, then he took an empty bottle and held it next to it. “What’s the idea?” Heather asked.

“We make a still. Water evaporates from the full bottle into the empty one, leaving the salt behind.”

“Will it be clean water in the other bottle?” Olivia asked.

“Completely.”

“We don’t really have time for this now, Owen,” Heather said.

Ignoring her, Owen took the seawater-filled bottle and placed it on the sand in the sun. He buried the empty bottle under the sand on a downward incline so it was cooler and the water wouldn’t leak out. He carefully placed the two bottlenecks together. “What’s supposed to happen is that the sun will evaporate the water from the hot bottle and it’ll condense into the cooler one,” Owen said.

“Wow, it’s actually really work—” Olivia began, but Heather put her hand up to silence her. She’d heard something. Was that a dog barking?

“Wait here,” she said.

She scrambled through the mangrove bushes and climbed a little rise so she could see out to the heathland.

The sight chilled her.

Twenty people from the farm had formed a line and were making their way methodically along the edge of the plain. They were standing about fifty feet apart so they could cover three hundred yards of territory easily. The line included women and children, and most of them were armed. Someone was driving an ATV at one end of the line and there was a motorcycle at the other. Matt was there in his checkered shirt carrying his rifle; she heard him call out, “Blue,” and his lame old dog came over and eagerly began limping beside him.

They were about two hundred yards away, but they were moving slowly and systematically in their direction.

Heather watched one boy with a gun climb through the mangrove bushes and presumably begin walking along the shore.

It was a replication of that thing Jacko had talked about, the black line. They were going to hunt the four of them down the way their antecedents had hunted down the original Dutch Islanders and the Tasman people.

Heather ran back to the others. “They’re coming for us! We have to go!”

“How far are they?” Petra asked.

“Too close! Get up, Owen.”

“The bottle’s working!” Owen said.

“I’m sorry! We have to go.”

“We’re dying of thirst here!” Owen protested.

Heather pulled him up and Petra got Olivia to her feet, and they began running along the shore with the O’Neills in close pursuit.





17



The jaunty Star Trek: Voyager theme music began as the end credits rolled. The music was an ironic commentary on the previous forty-two minutes. Somehow Carolyn had missed this episode when it originally aired and had caught it only now on her Netflix binge rewatch. She was crying. In fact, she was quietly devastated. The only person who would understand was Heather. It was dark out. It was tomorrow in Australia. Heather might be up.