Stranded Read online

  “Jane? What are you doing down there?” Vanessa called out from the deck. She’d just come outside, still looking sleepy, but her dark hair was pulled neatly off her face in a short ponytail, and she’d put on clean shorts and a T-shirt. She looked ready for business.

  For some reason, Jane felt embarrassed. “I was just working on my report,” she said.

  Vanessa gave her a look, the same one adults did sometimes. It was a confused sort of smile, like maybe Jane was too smart for her own good.

  “You can work on that later,” she said. “Come on up. I want to have a family meeting.”

  “About what?” Jane asked.

  Vanessa shrugged, like it should be obvious.

  “Everything,” she said.

  * * *

  In the cockpit of the Lucky Star, Vanessa set out the last can of fruit cocktail, half a bag of marshmallows, and four spoons. There was still a full jar of peanut butter and some canned chili and beef stew they could eat, but for now it seemed like a good idea to stay away from anything that might make them even thirstier.

  “Why do we have to have a family meeting?” Carter wanted to know right away.

  “Because we have to figure out what to do today, and who’s going to do it,” Vanessa said.

  “We don’t need a meeting for that. We can talk while we’re looking for water. That’s, like, the world’s biggest duh to me.”

  You’re a big duh, Vanessa thought. But she held her tongue. There had been enough fighting the night before. Carter hadn’t said a word when he came back to the boat, but he’d obviously been crying.

  Now she couldn’t help thinking about what her dad would say about all this. Work it out. Every time there was a disagreement in the new house—about computer time or who got which bedroom or whether someone had taken something that wasn’t theirs—it was always the same: You don’t have to love everything about one another, but you do have to figure out how to get along. We’re one family now, not two.

  So work it out.

  “We definitely need water,” Vanessa agreed. “But I’ve been thinking about that solar panel, too.” She pointed over to where the broken panel was sitting facedown on the deck. “If we can get the satellite phone charged up again, we could make another call.”

  Carter looked at her like she was speaking Russian. “Are you serious? When was the last time you hooked up a solar panel?”

  “Never,” she told him. “But I’m good with stuff like that.”

  “It’s true,” Buzz said. “She is.”

  It wasn’t like she knew for a fact that she could do it, but it was worth a shot. The back of the panel had only a few wires sticking out of it. Maybe it wouldn’t be that hard.

  “Uh, hello? Is anyone besides me really thirsty?” Carter asked.

  “We don’t need four people to look for water,” Vanessa pointed out. “We can get more done if we split up.”

  “I think we should stick together,” Jane said.

  “I think we should stop talking about everything and start doing it,” Carter said.

  “Hey, and where are we supposed to go number two, anyway?” Buzz asked. Vanessa felt like she was ready to scream. This meeting was going downhill fast.

  “Come on, you guys,” she said. “We have to make some decisions. Let’s just take a vote, okay?”

  But Carter was already on his feet. “I vote I’m going to look for water so we don’t all die of dehydration. Jane, you can come with me if you want.”

  Jane looked at Vanessa.

  “Fine,” Vanessa said. In fact, she realized, they both wanted the same things, anyway: water, rescue, and a little time apart from one another.

  So much for their family meeting.

  “Let’s just get to work,” she said.

  CHAPTER 11

  Carter pulled the straps of his backpack a little tighter. Jane had one, too. Both of them were filled with as many jars and bottles as they’d been able to find on the boat. With any luck, all those containers would be full by the time they got back.

  “Remember, stick to the beach,” Vanessa called after them. “That way, you can’t get lost.”

  She was just trying to help, Carter knew, but sometimes Vanessa sounded more like a mom than his mom did.

  In fact, it had been Jane’s idea to walk around the outside of the ring-shaped island. If there was fresh water here, it would flow downhill toward the ocean. With any luck, they’d cross paths with it along the way.

  They headed off in the same direction as the day before, away from the crash site.

  For the first long stretch of beach, Jane seemed fine. She’d even brought her camera and made some of her little videos while they walked. But then the land started to curve off to the right, and they quickly lost sight of the Lucky Star behind them. That’s when Jane started getting nervous.

  “I still think we should have stuck together,” she said, looking back.

  “Don’t worry about it,” Carter said. “Vanessa’s right. We don’t need four people to do this. But don’t tell her I said that.”

  It was supposed to be a joke, though Jane didn’t even smile. Instead, she started asking questions. That’s what his sister did when she was anxious—she gathered information.

  “How big do you think the island is?” she said.

  “I don’t know. Maybe five miles around,” Carter told her.

  “How long does it take to go a mile?”

  “It depends. The world record is under four minutes, but that’s on a track.”

  “Carter? What if we don’t find any water?”

  “We will,” he said.

  “How do you know?” Jane said.

  Carter stopped walking. “Look around,” he told her. “Half this island is green. There has to be water somewhere.”

  That seemed to satisfy her. Carter even felt a little proud of himself for thinking of it so fast.

  But then she asked, “How long do you think this is going to take?”

  That one was trickier. There was no way of knowing, but that seemed like the wrong thing to say.

  “Not too long,” he told her as casually as he could, then continued on up the beach.

  It would be several hours before either of them realized just how wrong Carter had been. But by then, it was going to be too late to do anything about it.

  * * *

  Vanessa stood on the deck, looking at the solar panel like some kind of giant puzzle. The glass surface was in a million pieces, but the inside still looked intact.

  Maybe Carter was right. Maybe she was crazy to think she could ever do this. But she had to try.

  “Help me lift this,” she told Buzz. The panel wasn’t heavy, but it was big and awkward. They each took a side and slid it up onto the cabin roof. Then they climbed up next to it and propped the whole thing against the metal bracket where it had lived before the crash.

  Hopefully, this first part wasn’t going to be super complicated. The back of the panel had one white wire and one black wire sticking out of it. Likewise, the electrical box on the mounting bracket had one white wire and one black wire, all of them with exposed copper ends where they’d torn free.

  Vanessa looked across at Buzz. “White to white and black to black, right? That makes sense.”

  “I guess,” he said. “Like that lamp Dad fixed a few weeks ago.”

  “Right.” She remembered now. Anytime she’d seen their father do anything like this, the colors always matched up.

  As she bent down to take a closer look, Buzz spoke up again, quietly this time.

  “What do you think Dad’s doing right now?” he asked her.

  Vanessa didn’t have to think about that one. “Looking for us,” she said. “I’ll bet he and Beth are on some Coa
st Guard plane right now, flying around up there.”

  When she looked at the sky, the clouds had started to roll in overhead. That was bad news. Even if they did get this panel hooked up correctly, they’d have to wait for the sun to come back before they could test it.

  “Vanessa?”

  “Yeah?”

  “What happens if they can’t find us?”

  “I don’t know, Buzz,” Vanessa told him honestly. “We’ve still got the boat. There’s still a bunch of food. Hopefully, Jane and Carter are going to find water. We’ll just—”

  “Just what?” Buzz was looking her right in the eye now. He didn’t just want to know, she could tell. He needed to know.

  “We’ll work it out,” she said. “Okay?”

  That actually made him smile. “That’s what Dad would say.” She smiled, too.

  “Now come on, let’s do this,” she said, and knelt down next to the panel.

  There wasn’t any electricity running on the boat, so there didn’t seem to be any danger of getting electrocuted. Still, Vanessa was careful. She used a pair of rubber-handled pliers from the cockpit to twist the two white wires together, nice and tight. After that, Buzz had to lift the panel up so she could slide underneath it, like a car mechanic, and do the same thing with the black wires.

  As soon as it was done, they both ran down to the main cabin. The batteries in the engine compartment looked like they were hooked up, but there was no way of knowing for sure. The console at the nav station still looked just as dead and blank as ever.

  That was no real surprise. Until the sun came back, they wouldn’t know if they’d made any progress here. Even then, they were going to need the satellite phone charger to work. And even then, they’d have to try and figure out where in the world they were so they’d have something to say if they finally got to make another call.

  That was a lot of ifs and a lot of maybes, Vanessa knew. A total long shot. But an hour ago, they’d had no chance of reaching the outside world at all. Now they did.

  And a long shot was way better than no shot at all.

  CHAPTER 12

  “YES!”

  Jane looked up from tying her sneaker. Carter was walking in a small circle now, and he spiked an imaginary football over his shoulder.

  “What is it?” Jane said.

  “Over there! See?”

  They’d been hiking for hours, with no luck, and the land around them had started to thin out. As the wall of the jungle dropped away behind them, they’d gotten their first look at the island’s huge inner lagoon from ground level. Jane had seen the lagoon from above, on Lookout Point, but not the cliffs that faced it on this side.

  The cliff walls themselves were dotted all over with dozens of black holes—more caves, Jane realized. Some were just small openings, but others were at least as big as the one they’d found in the woods on the opposite side of the island.

  “Do you see it?” Carter said.

  “See what?” Jane said.

  “Give me your camera.”

  He took it and zoomed in on the cliff wall, directly across the lagoon from where they were standing. As the image came clear, Jane swallowed hard—or, at least, she tried to. Her throat was sore and as dry as paper.

  But right there on the camera’s view screen was a small waterfall. It spilled out of one of the caves from a height of about ten feet. The water cascaded over a rock formation into a pool down below, then continued on toward the lagoon.

  Carter grinned. “I told you we’d find it. Come on!”

  Jane didn’t need any coaxing. She was exhausted from the hike, but the sight of the falls got her moving again. It was too far to swim all the way across the lagoon, so they continued around it, in the same clockwise direction they’d been going.

  Soon, they were at the very narrowest part of the island. The ground was just sand and beach grass here, with several small streams cutting across their path as they went. It was like a chain of tiny, sandy islands, one after the other.

  The first water crossings were easy. They barely slowed down as they splashed right through. But then they came to a much deeper channel.

  “Keep going,” Carter said. “Hold my hand.”

  As they started to cross, it only took a few steps before the water was up to Jane’s chin. The current was stronger than she’d thought, and her feet left the ground a few times before Carter pulled her back close. By the time they’d reached the next patch of dry sand, both of them were soaked and out of breath. Jane’s wet pack felt twice as heavy as before.

  “I hope that was it,” she said.

  But it wasn’t. They’d barely scaled the next dune before Jane realized their luck was running out. What stretched in front of them now was something like a fast-flowing river, from the ocean to the lagoon.

  “I think we have to go back,” Jane said.

  “I don’t think we can,” Carter told her. For the first time, he looked truly worried.

  When Jane turned around, she saw why. The last channel they’d managed to cross was now just as high as the one in front of them. The tide was rushing in and their tiny island was shrinking by the minute.

  “We’re going to have to swim across,” Carter said.

  “It’s too fast!” she said.

  Jane was a good swimmer; she’d been doing it all her life. But that was in pools and in Lake Michigan back home. Here, there was nothing to stop her from getting carried off like a piece of driftwood.

  “I’ll check it out first,” Carter said. “Then I’ll come back for you.”

  “No, don’t!” Jane said.

  The only thing worse than being stuck here together would be if they got separated. She grabbed for Carter’s arm, but it was like trying to stop a bulldozer.

  He walked straight into the channel up to his waist, then dove away.

  * * *

  Carter was shocked at how quickly the current took him. The moment his feet left the ground, he felt himself swept sideways, away from the direction he wanted to go.

  “Carter!” he heard Jane yelling, but there was nothing he could do now.

  Immediately, he knew he’d made a mistake. He turned over in the water, trying to stroke his way back to shore. But it was too late for that. Before he could take another gulp of air, he felt himself tumbled back underwater by the current.

  His pack wasn’t helping, either. The straps bound him up as he tried to swim. The more he struggled, the more he felt wrapped up like a mummy, unable to move his arms at all. He had to get free of it or he’d drown.

  Carter bucked and jerked with everything he had, struggling to ditch the pack. His lungs burned, desperate for oxygen that wasn’t there. What he got instead was a giant gulp of salt water.

  Finally, with a last desperate twist, he pulled one arm loose, and then the other. There was no thought of trying to keep the pack anymore. All his mind could perceive was the need to breathe, and he kicked toward the light at the surface of the water.

  Just when it seemed as if his lungs were going to pop in his chest, Carter broke through, hacking up water and sucking down air practically at the same time.

  “Carter!” Jane yelled somewhere behind him.

  He spun around in the water toward her voice. That’s when he realized just how far from the sandbar he’d been carried. Jane was a good hundred yards away. She’d dropped her pack but was standing in the channel up to her knees now.

  “Jane!” he croaked out. His throat burned from the salt water. “Stay right there!”

  She seemed to hear his voice but not what he was saying. Instead of staying put, Jane took another cautious step forward—and that was all it took. Carter saw his sister go down as the water swept her right off her feet.

  After that, he couldn’t see her at all.
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  CHAPTER 13

  Buzz stood on the deck of the Lucky Star, scanning the beach with a pair of cracked binoculars. Carter and Jane had been gone all morning and now a good part of the afternoon as well. So far, there was no sign of them.

  No water, either. The inside of his mouth felt like paste on paste.

  “Hey, Vanessa?” he called down. “Don’t you think they should have been back by now?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “This is Carter we’re talking about. He won’t be able to show his face unless he finds water.”

  It was true, Buzz thought. Carter was stubborn that way.

  Still, it was hard not to worry. Once you’d gotten shipwrecked in the middle of nowhere, it was pretty easy to imagine other bad things happening, too.

  “Maybe we should go look,” he said. “Just walk up the beach or something?”

  “If they’re not back in an hour, we’ll start looking,” Vanessa said as she came up the galley steps. “But come here. Check this out.”

  She was carrying a spiral-bound book of maps in her hand, and she laid it open on the deck to show him. Buzz crouched down to have a look.

  The map in front of him was a two-page spread with the title “Islands of Oceania” across the top. It showed the west coast of the United States in one corner, Australia in the other, and a wide expanse of Pacific Ocean in between.

  “So, we set sail from here, six days ago,” she said, putting her finger down over the big island of Hawaii. On the map, it was about the size of a Skittle. “And when we left, I’m pretty sure we sailed south and west.”

  She drew a diagonal line with her finger, past something called Johnston Atoll, then out into the biggest empty space of ocean on the page.

  “This is about nine hundred miles from Hawaii,” she said. “That’s how far we were supposed to come. I don’t know how much farther that storm blew us, or which way Dexter changed course, but I think we’re somewhere around here.”