The Dark Atoll Read online

  This was a little different though. This was unknown and possibly dangerous. For the past 18 years I had been studying. Pops and my dad made sure of it. They believed that if we were ever going to come out of the dark ages that we would have to lead. So, we studied. I was taught farming, physics, mathematics, tactics, mechanical design, basic chemistry, economics, leadership, psychology, martial arts, weapons, economics, negotiation and sales strategy, biology, first-aid, and anything else that might be useful. What I didn’t need was history. Not relatively recent history, anyway. I learned the history of civilization, wars, politics, and science but we didn’t feel a need for the names of presidents and the dates of various world events. I needed to know what important developments had taken place and in what order but actual time spans, not as much. Pops explained that something might have taken several thousand years the last time around but if we got the chance, this time it needed to take place in months or decades, not centuries.

  Of course, survival skills were at the top of the curriculum. I hadn’t been expecting to end up here though.

  The supposed worst-case scenario had been for us to be shipwrecked. Get it? Shipwrecked. Not castaway. Shipwrecked assumed the existence of a wrecked ship. One stocked with survival gear. Knives, my swords, animal traps, dehydrated food, a good water purification system; not the postage stamp worth of needle and thread stuffed inside my safety vest. I should have been wearing a real knife. No, I couldn’t have known. I might as well say that I should have been wearing a full set of body armor and surrounded by three “Norg”.

  Man, what I wouldn’t give for a Norg right now. Having one of the little non-organics, like Poppet or Muffin with me now would make things so much easier. But they couldn’t travel now. The ash was too thick, and they needed contact with the systems in the bunker to function. They would have protected me from being thrown off the boat in the first place but here they would have been able to hunt, build a shelter, and perhaps most importantly, kept me company. Yeah, I was a bit of a loner, but I didn’t want to spend the rest of my life actually alone. Maybe the thing making noise out there was a lion with a thorn in its paw and I could take it out and we’d be buddies for life.

  It was probably a wild pig, and a wild pig wasn’t going to follow me around like a golden retriever. I’d have to kill it. Oh wait, I can’t! I don’t have a weapon.

  This wasn’t a good direction. Frustration and futility weren’t going to help me right now. There was a time and place for everything. The time for complaining about what I didn’t have might come later but not right now.

  “Calm down,” I told myself. Take a breath. Take stock again. OK, my feet were drying. Nothing was attacking me. I could get water when I needed it. There was some kind of game animal here and I could eventually trap and kill one. What else? I was on the beach and the weather wasn’t bad at the moment. My head was bruised but I didn’t seem to have a concussion. I probably should have. I mean, I would have expected to, after the way that I had been hit. I was really glad that I didn’t. A concussion would have made it hard to think and even walk for a while. Good, no broken bones either. All in all, I was in pretty good shape. I’d be better when my boots were dry.

  CHAPTER Two - Moving Out

  I waited maybe an hour. We didn’t wear watches. We estimated time by the position of the sun. Well, by the position of the slightly lighter spot in the black overcast. By this time, my boots were dry. So were my socks. The synthetics dried fast.

  With my boots on, it was time to move out. The noise wasn’t going away, and I should deal with it. At least find out what it was. It was probably a pig. Or a goat. These islands didn’t have much in the way of land-based wildlife. Anything here was brought by settlers or traders sometime in the distant past. Or by people who owned and operated the abandoned tourist resorts more recently. The only things that made sense were pigs, goats, dogs, cats, and mice or rats that came on the supply ships at some point.

  What was my best move here? If it had been a person, I might have walked into the trees and tried to sneak up and see what was going on without giving away my location. With an animal, that wasn’t necessary. It would smell me long before it saw me. I would just walk up the beach and approach from the sand.

  I went back toward the water to put more distance between myself and the trees so that I would have more time to react if something rushed at me, and then started walking parallel to the trees in the direction of the noises. Listening closely and stopping occasionally, I approached. The sounds would stop for periods of time and then I’d hear something again. Just a creaking of a branch, maybe. Then a squeak or a grunt. When I thought that I was directly in front of the right place, I moved forward.

  I crouched slightly as I went, staying in a fighting stance with a good footing. When I got to the trees, I waited for another sound and tried to estimate the distance to my prey. I was a hunter, and I was stalking something.

  There was a small moaning sound and I figured that I must be no more than 30 feet from the thing. At this distance, I should be able to see it, except for the constant twilight that was even darker this time of the morning.

  I moved slowly, taking each footstep carefully, being as silent as I could manage. A few yards more and I could see a little movement. Something in the brush. But not a pig. It was taller. I crept closer, even more cautious than before. I came upon it from behind a tree where I could get a better look at it. I was about 10 feet from it when I finally got a good look. No, it wasn’t a pig.

  When I saw what it was, I stepped out into view quickly and held out my hands. My “prey” made a quick quiet hissing noise as it saw me, and its eyes pointed at the ground in front of itself as if looking at something that it wanted me to see. I examined the place in the shadows at its feet and saw that the ground was disturbed, and branches and leaves had been placed around the spot. It was a pit, covered over with plants.

  The reason that my “prey” hadn’t fallen in was that my “prey” was a girl tied by her wrists and hanging from a rope attached to a tree branch above her head. Apparently, she was bait. I didn’t know what she was bait for. Maybe it was me.

  I dropped to a deep crouch and scanned the area as best I could. If this was a trap, and it certainly was, then whoever set the trap might be nearby, watching.

  The girl, a woman actually, hissed quietly and shook her head, and I had the impression that she was saying that there wasn’t anyone watching. I couldn’t be sure that she was telling the truth, but she had warned me about the pit, so maybe I could trust her. If she had been a willing participant in trapping me, she would have acted differently, maybe doing what she could to lure me into the ambush.

  I held up my hand in a gesture that I hoped would convey reassurance of my willingness to help her and I turned my attention to the tree above her head. The rope held her just an inch off the ground, and the branch was just two feet above where her wrists were tied. The branch was about nine or ten feet off the ground.

  The girl grunted to get my attention and gave me a wild look as if to tell me to hurry, and she nodded toward the jungle. She could have meant, “Quick, run away,” or “Quick, get me out of here.” I opted for getting her out of her predicament.

  I ran to the tree that she was tied to, avoiding the edge of the pit, and climbed easily to the first branch. I could steady myself with a grip on the branches above and I walked out to the spot where the rope was tied. It was looped loosely over the branch in a way that would make it easy to remove if the girl hadn’t been hanging from it. But I didn’t intend to get her down until she wasn’t hanging over a pit.

  Bending down, I grabbed the rope with one hand and used my legs to pull upward. I lifted the weight of the girl a few inches and worked my way back toward the trunk of the tree. I was able to move her to where she was about two feet outside what I thought was the pit. I hoped that it was enough.

  Climbing down to the ground I whispered, “If I lift you, can you undo the ropes fro
m your wrists?”

  She nodded but seemed a little unsure. I stepped to where I could put my arms around her legs to lift her but stopped suddenly. I had thought that I would put my arms around her knees and hoist her up but now, as I stepped close to her, I saw for the first time that she was naked. Apparently, I had been too busy evaluating the danger of our situation to notice what the girl was wearing, or even what she looked like. She wasn’t wearing clothes and that meant that no matter how I stood, if I grabbed her legs, my face would be very close to her, probably pressed against her skin; either her crotch, her buttocks, or her hip.

  I’d barely seen a naked woman before. Actually, I’d only seen them in drawings in anatomy books. Pops and my dad had told me that before the cataclysm that it was common for the family to be naked a lot, but I’d never seen it. I moved to the bunker almost three years before the dark times and by then everyone was pretty scared and the place was very business-like, and everyone wore clothes and acted pretty modest around each other…at least when I was around. Maybe because I was an eleven-year-old-boy at the time. After things went to hell, it was cold and dark and dangerous. Because of the way things were, I never had a girlfriend.

  There was the fifth sister, but she was way too young still. I was almost twenty years older than she was. That wouldn’t be a problem when she was an adult; our life spans were long, and twenty years wasn’t that much but that would have been at least another ten years from now. It just seemed best not to think much about sex and stuff like that. Pops and Dad had talked to me about maybe having one of the Norg, but I never thought I needed to pursue it. It wasn’t that I didn’t like girls, I probably did but my life had been so much about training and studying and surviving that I didn’t think about it much. Yeah, I’d masturbate sometimes but even that wasn’t very often. The cataclysm messed us up in lots of ways. I even knew about sexual anatomy and response and lovemaking positions and arousal, but it was academic. Yeah, someday I’d maybe have a wife, when she was old enough, as long as she wanted me that is, and I was prepared with information, but I was prepared for lots of things that I had never had the chance to act upon.

  My issue right now was not at all academic. This was a real naked woman and I had to get close and touch her and be pretty intimate in order to do what had to be done; and I had to do it quickly, apparently.

  I stooped down and put my hands together under her feet, instead of grabbing her legs, and I put my head back and to the side as I closed my eyes and lifted her up several feet into the air. I could feel her awkwardly struggling with the ropes at her hands while her thigh pressed against my shoulder, and after a minute she was free. She put her hands on my shoulders to steady herself and I felt the side of her hip press against my cheek. I lowered her quickly to the ground and caught her as she stumbled, her legs temporarily giving way beneath her because of the effects of having been hanging there for who knew how long.

  As soon as she regained her feet, I started to back away and wondered about offering her my jumpsuit, or at least my T-shirt but I didn’t get the chance. The girl grabbed my wrist and pulled me quickly away from the spot, back toward the beach. It was only a few strides away and we reached it in seconds. No longer concerned about being quiet, we ran as fast as we could, straight for the water.

  The girl splashed into the surf and I followed her. When we were waist deep, she dove farther into the ocean and started swimming. My boots and my jumpsuit hindered me a bit, but I was able to do an adequate breaststroke and we kept swimming until we were outside the surf line where the waves started breaking; then she stopped.

  My companion ducked low so that only her eyes and nose were above the water and motioned me to do the same. She scanned the beach, presumably for signs of pursuers but we didn’t see any. We only paused for five seconds or so and then she put her hand to her lips to tell me to be as quiet as we could be, and she started swimming again.

  This time we swam both farther out and toward the north side of the island, away from the spot where I had landed up on the sand earlier. Off in the distance, maybe a half a mile away, was an end to one of the dry islands and an inlet to the atoll. The place where I had washed up wasn’t actually an island; it was an atoll. It was roughly round, with a series of land strips surrounding a body of water in the center. That inlet seemed to be where we were headed.

  We went slowly, keeping our heads down. When we did come to the inlet, we kept going, past the next small bit of land, and turned inward to the east after we had passed the north side. She continued to scan the coastline warily, but we still didn’t see signs of pursuit. I didn’t expect that we would be spotted now. It was fairly dark, and the ocean was the same color as the sky. As long as we didn’t yell to attract attention, we’d be fine.

  The girl was obviously in good physical shape and looked like she could keep swimming indefinitely. I wouldn’t be able to go as long as she did, but I had my vest to keep me afloat and I didn’t have to expend as much energy as my companion. I guess we weren’t companions but we were traveling together, at least for the moment.

  Once we were inside the atoll, we turned north again. It was easier on the interior of the little islands; the ocean was rougher on the outside. We had been swimming slowly for perhaps three miles when she turned us toward a beach at the south end of a larger islet. None of the bits of land were very big, some just a dozen yards across but this was a bigger one. We climbed out of the water and ran for the trees. When we were concealed, we slowed down again.

  Neither of us had spoken since I had first seen her. No, that wasn’t exactly true: I had asked her one question, but she hadn’t spoken a single word, just hissed at me twice without saying anything. And now, moving through the little jungle, we continued to stay silent. Once we were hidden in the trees and bushes, we would be able to stop and reconnoiter. At least I hoped so. I was just following someone who seemed to have a plan.

  Sure enough, when we were well out of sight, my guide stopped and had us sit down. And we took a breath. And we rested, emotionally and physically. It was about noon. She was the first to speak.

  She said quietly, “Stay here for more darker again,” and that was all.

  I said, “My name is Florin.”

  She looked at my face now and said, “Florin? Others say Lana at me.”

  I was surprised that she didn’t ask me where I was from or who I was or anything about me. She didn’t really volunteer any information herself, either.

  I said, “What’s happening? Who are you? Why were you tied up like that?”

  She looked at me like I might be stupid and said, “They wanted you to fall in the pit.”

  I didn’t say anything, and she explained, “So you could die.”

  I waited some more, and she added, “So they tied me.”

  She was offering more information as long as I didn’t say anything, so I kept waiting. Her speech was strange, but I understood well enough.

  Lana said, “You fell on the beach before dawn. They came and told the others. The others said go kill you. They were afraid, in case you woke up. They didn’t know if you are a boy or a girl. If you are a boy, they would tie you up. If you are a girl, they would leave you alone unless you make trouble.”

  I asked, “But how did you get involved? Why did they put you over the pit?”

  She said simply, “You are strange. They don’t like me. I’m a girl. I don’t like them. They tried to catch you. You might die. Where are you from. I know everyone. All the others and them. Who are you?”

  I decided to keep it simple. I decided to trust her to some extent.

  I said, “I’m Florin. I was on a boat. I fell off. I came here.”

  She looked puzzled and said, “You have a boat? To go away?”

  I said, “No. I was on a boat. I fell off. I don’t have anything.”

  She said, “You have clothes.”

  With that statement I remembered something important. Something that I hadn’t been paying att
ention to. She was right, I did have clothes. That wasn’t the important thing. The thing that I suddenly remembered was that she didn’t.

  I said quickly, “Do you want my shirt?”

  She frowned and looked at me harshly, and said, “Why? You don’t owe me. I told you not to fall and die. You got me down. I went away. You followed me and here we are. Do you want me to do sex with you? I won’t.”

  I exclaimed, “No! I mean, what?”

  She said, “Sex. I won’t. I am not yours. I don’t want you. I won’t take anything from you.”

  I sighed and thought.

  Then I said, “Lana, I just got here. I don’t know you. I don’t know how you live. You said that I have clothes. I thought that you might want to put on my shirt because they left you naked. Why is that offensive? I thought that you wanted to put something on. That’s all.”

  Lana stared at me and said, “You wanted to help me? Because I don’t have clothes like you do? Like the old days? Before.”

  I said, “You could put it like that. I was trying to be kind. And you did help me. If I can help you, I will.”

  Lana continued to stare at me, and I looked back at her. I could figure this out if I tried. What was going on? What did I know?

  First of all, who was Lana? She wasn’t a native of this island. This place should have been uninhabited. But according to her, there were other people here. Let’s see. There were both men and women. Enough of them to be considered a tribe. Some of them lived, or at least sometimes stayed, on the islet that I had washed up on. I could assume that she had no way to leave here because she had asked if I had a boat and if I could leave, as if she couldn’t.

  I knew that the people here weren’t all friendly and that they weren’t all friendly to Lana either. She had indicated that they would have killed me. Um, or if I was a boy, they would tie me up, and if I was a girl, ignore me if I didn’t cause any trouble.