No Man's Island

It was supposed to be the best week of Cheryl's young life: seven days cruising around the Caribbean with her best friends, their partners, and the love of her life. Brad had been dropping hints like crazy in the months leading up to it, too. Still, she wasn't a hundred percent sure until she found that receipt from Tiffany's crumpled up in the floorboards of his Pinto. This week was meant to be perfect.

How did everything go so horrifically wrong?

That's what she asked herself as she came to, swaddled in a blanket of wet sand and seawater. High tide washed her right up to the edge of dry land, soaking her balayage highlights one last time purely out of spite. She pried her face out of the beach with a low groan, coughing and gagging on the flavor of salt and grit clogging her spray-tanned throat. Everything hurt, especially her head. For a minute, she allowed herself to believe it was just a bad hangover. Honestly, that was partly true, which she blamed solely on last night's complementary Midnight Margarita bar. Then, her eye drifted back out to sea... where long trails of thick, sooty smoke stained the sunrise black.

It wasn't a dream. The Queen Calypso was gone. A glittering, brand-new ship with ten thousand souls aboard, reduced to scrap metal at the bottom of the ocean.

Cheryl's heart climbed higher into her throat, her Bambi brown eyes growing to the size of softballs in her head. The horizon was littered with tiny, bright yellow dots. Life boats; dozens of them. Without thinking, she hopped to her feet - ignoring how her legs wobbled like overcooked spaghetti - and stumbled back into the surf. Before she could start screaming and waving her arms like a maniac, she was grabbed from behind without warning.

"Cher! Thank God!"

Brad's full lips nearly suffocated her with a deep kiss, his brawny amber arms crushing her to his powerful chest. When he finally let go of her, his blue-grey eyes were full of tears.

"Are you okay?!" he asked, his hands shaking as they combed through her long, wet hair, "Are you hurt?! H-How many fingers am I holding up?!"

There were perks to dating an EMT, but Cheryl was too dazed and panicky to be aware of them right now. While his fretting hands kept pawing over her sandy skin for potential injuries, Cheryl's full attention was on the lifeboats. It had only been a minute since she'd noticed them, but they already seemed twice as far away.

"Th-The boats," she wheezed, "W-We have to get to the boats! C'mon!"

In a heartbeat, Brad's warm hands stopped, gripping Cheryl's shoulders tenderly. His face settled into a calm, placid frown, but the fear in his eyes was still plain as day.

"Cher... we can't," he said quietly, "They're too far out. I'm sorry."

Cheryl stepped back, almost tripping over her own feet. This couldn't be happening. She was too young to die shipwrecked on a deserted island. Automatically, her hands clawed at the back pocket of her shorts, digging her phone from its soggy depths. Although it was a miracle she still had it, it was way too waterlogged to even turn on. Before she had the chance to try anyway, Brad plucked it gently from her grip.

"I already tried that," he sighed, "Believe me, it won't work."

He hugged her again, kissing her neck for reassurance, before giving her Apple I-paperweight back. To her shock, he was smiling. Clearly, he was doing everything in his power to keep a cool head in the face of disaster.

"It's not all bad, though," Brad offered, fluffing his twists nervously, "Kim and Tina are already working on a signal fire further up the beach, and there's plenty of stuff to eat on this island, so... yeah."

Cheryl almost fainted from relief. "Th-They're okay?" she asked, clinging to Brad like a lifeline, "What about Zach?! A-And Connor?!"

"Both accounted for, and mostly in one piece," Brad insisted, "We're gonna be okay, Cher. I promise."

Although far from the week she'd planned, Cheryl reasoned there were worse places to be stranded than a gorgeous beach in the Caribbean. At least they wouldn't starve, and she had all her friends for support. Aside from a few bumps and bruises, no one was badly hurt either. Connor was the worst off of the bunch, having injured his ankle in the mad scramble to evacuate the sinking ship. Despite Connor's insistence that it was broken, however, Brad was confident it was just a bad sprain. Broken or not, Connor kept the drama to a minimum - for once - and did whatever he could to help the group survive.

He was with Cheryl an hour later, helping her forage for breakfast in the jungle a half mile or so inland from the beach. Brad's first impression turned out to be right on the money. Everywhere Cheryl turned, she bumped into another fruit tree; branches bent to the breaking point with mangoes, coconuts, star fruits, etc. The hard part was reaching the ones that were ripe, which were almost always near the top. Seeing as Connor was in no shape to climb, Cheryl wound up playing monkey and tossed her spoils down to him once they'd been successfully picked.

When she'd just about finished harvesting a bushel of guavas, something in the distance caught her eye. A little tin shack, nestled in the heart of the jungle. Normally, her instincts would have told her to avoid creepy abandoned buildings in the woods like the plague. And normally, she would've listened. This creepy little shack, however, had a great big antenna sticking out of its rusty roof. Where there was an antenna, there had to be a radio to go with it.

"Earth to Cheryl!" Connor snapped, bringing Cheryl immediately down to earth. "What is taking so long?! Hurry it up already before we get eaten by a tiger or something!"

Cheryl tried not to roll her eyes as she shinnied down the trunk. "Pretty sure tigers don't live around here. C'mon; follow me."

Connor limped in her footsteps for a few paces then stopped, his sunburnt face wrinkling up in a frown. "Uh, the beach is that way," he said, pointing behind them with his makeshift crutch.

"I know that, Genius," she snapped, "...but I think I just found us a way home! Are you with me, or not?!"

Connor shook his sweaty red curls out of his face, pushing his cracked glasses back up on his nose with a huff. "Fine; lead the way. Just go slow. My ankle is killing me!"

Ten minutes later, Cheryl and Connor had successfully karate-chopped their way to the shack. It was even creepier up close; the whole clearing stank like death and old fish guts, and it wasn't hard to figure out why. All along the edge of the shack's roof dangled hand-made wind chimes made from the bones of small animals. Their half-rotted pelts weren't far, flapping in the wind on a clothesline next to a few pairs of heavily stained, equally rank tighty-whities. As unsettling as it all was, Cheryl was confident that the shack was abandoned. And, based on the layers of mildew coating those crusty briefs, it had been for some time.

Despite Connor's loud squeaks of protest, Cheryl went right up to the door. The hinges were rusty and the dirt floor uneven, requiring a lot of force to open it. Inside, the shack was fairly bare bones: nothing but a dusty cot, a table, and a single chair hanging out with all the cobwebs within. Before she lost her nerve, Cheryl made a beeline for the radio and switched it on. To her relief, it worked.

"Mayday! Mayday!" she cried into the mic, "Hello?! Can anybody hear me?!"

"Girl, have you never seen a horror movie before?!" Connor hissed, "We seriously gotta go!"

Cheryl flat out ignored Connor, focusing all her attention on the radio. The only thing she got back was static no matter how loud she screamed, though. She would've kept trying all day, but a noise outside made her frantic cries die in her throat.

Something was moving just beyond the tree line. Something big. And it was getting closer.

Without thinking, Cheryl snatched up the whole radio, wires, mic, and all, and hoofed it out of the shack. It was heavier than she'd expected, but she still managed to outrun Connor. Not that that was any great accomplishment. With his bad ankle, a toddler with rickets could lap him right now. She didn't realize just how far ahead of him she was, though, until she skidded to a stop in a small clearing to catch her breath. As she struggled to refill her burning lungs, it finally hit her that she was alone.

"Connor?" she wheezed, craning her neck to see through the dense foliage behind her. "Connor, where are you?!"

Cheryl set down the heavy radio - planning to turn back and find him - but she didn't have time to take another step. A shrill, guttural scream froze her solid a second later, echoing from deep in the jungle. At first, she tried to convince herself that it was just an animal. Deep down, though, she couldn't deny the truth. That was the sound of a person - one of her very best friends - shrieking in pure terror.

Of course she wanted to go back for Connor. There was no question about that. They'd known each other since the third grade; she was the first person he'd come out to. As badly as she wanted to run to his rescue, though, her body refused to budge an inch. Paralyzed from the brain down. Then, just as suddenly as it started, Connor's screaming stopped. Part of Cheryl hoped that was a good sign. The rest of her knew it wasn't.

For the longest time, the jungle was eerily quiet. No birds; no small animals rustling in the underbrush; not even the smallest gust of wind. All Cheryl could hear was her own heart, thundering in her ears. As life slowly crept back into her limbs, allowing her feet to inch forward, a hand landed swiftly on her shoulder without any warning. She screamed - loud - and spun on her heel, fists already flying in a flurry of panic. When her would-be attacker yanked her into a hug, however, she froze again.

"Cher, it's me!" Brad huffed, kissing and stroking her hair, "Are you okay?! We could hear screaming all the way up the beach! What happened?!"

Cheryl blinked the tears out of her eyes, quaking where she stood in Brad's arms. Kim and Tina were right behind him, and Zach brought up the rear. While Cheryl was still struggling to form a coherent sentence, Kim tore her out of Brad's embrace. With the aggressive love only a Latina could possess, Kim squashed Cheryl to her large, soft chest.

"Don't ever scare us like that again!" Kim snapped, "You were supposed to be back with the food ages ago! Look at me; are you hurt?"

"Hey, a radio," Tina interjected, kneeling over the set Cheryl had dropped, "...and it works! Cher, you are a rock star! With this, we can-"

"Where's Connor?"

The smile melted right off Tina's pretty mahogany face, her head turning immediately to Zach. Cheryl and the others followed suit. She was so wrapped up in her own terror, she hadn't noticed that Zach was half a shade paler than usual. He shook like a leaf, tears brimming in his black, almond-shaped eyes.

"Cher," he said, his quiet voice a little stronger than before, "Where is Connor?!"

Cheryl couldn't speak. She was too shaken up and guilt-ridden to even make a sound. All she could do was point in the direction she'd come from, and try to remember to keep breathing. Zach took off like a shot, with Tina hot on his heels for support. Brad and Kim, meanwhile, led Cheryl back to the beach. By the time they had her resting in the shade and sipping water from a coconut, Zach and Tina returned.

Zach was a complete wreck, clinging to Tina and sobbing like a baby. Clutched in his fist were Connor's glasses, the lenses splattered with mud and tiny, bright red flecks. Tina kept her head high and her back straight, but her dark face had gone ashen. The corner of her full lips was crusted in greenish yellow residue, her throat constantly spasming with endless, dry swallows.

"Teen," Brad murmured, "What happened? Is Connor-"

"Connor's dead."

Tina's words hung in the air like an icy shroud, smothering all the life out of the small circle of friends. No one dared to speak or even breathe for a long while, letting Zach's wheezy cries fill the silence among them. Eventually, Brad was the first to break it.

"Are... A-Are you sure?" he asked, getting to his feet suddenly, "Take me to him. There might still be time to-"

"There's not," Tina said flatly, settling into the sand beside Zach, "Trust me, Dude."

Kim shuddered next to Cheryl, her thick black ponytail brushing her shoulders as she shook her head in disbelief. "Poor Connor. W-Was it a bear, or... O-Or did he just... fall off a cliff and-"

"There aren't any cliffs here," Brad pointed out, "or bears. It's more likely he was bitten by a snake, or got hit in the head by a falling coconut."

"No," Zach snuffled, clutching Connor's glasses to his chest, "No, no, no! Oh, Connie...! Cheryl, th-this is all your fault!!"

"Zee, that's not fair," Tina insisted, "She couldn't have known."

"Known what?" Cheryl murmured, "Tina... how did Connor die?"

Tina swallowed hard again, looking like she was trying very hard not to throw up. "I don't know," she admitted, "...but he... H-He was all... c-cut up when we found him."

"Cut up?" Brad parroted, his brows furrowing in confusion, "Like, from running through brambles and stuff? So, it was an accident then?"

Tina shook her head, her afro puffs fluffing in the salty breeze. "I don't think so," she said, "It was more like... L-Like he was attacked, with a knife... o-or an axe or something. I-I dunno."

She paused for a long while, helping herself to one of the coconuts sitting in the sand next to Kim. Within a minute, she'd punched its eyes out with her Swiss army knife and raised it to her lips, gulping the water from it greedily. When she offered the half-empty coconut to Zach, the fear in her honey brown eyes was palpable.

"We're not alone on this island."