Sometimes I wonder if it wouldn’t just make more sense to confront Jeremy and force him overboard. After all, it’s not like he has a chance of surviving this, and in the meantime he’s taking up resources that I might need.
Neither one of us says anything but we both know: if there was going to be a rescue, it’d have happened by now. There’ve been no planes, no coast guard or bright orange helicopters. Our little raft beacon chirps and blinks away merrily, sending little distress “rescue me” signals out into the world that either no one’s there to hear or they’re too busy ignoring us.
We know this. Just like we know that land can’t really be that far away-we’d been on a cruise after all. The whole point is to visit all the islands-they have to be out here somewhere.
But we can’t bring ourselves to lose sight of the ship to find out. Just in case.
I don’t realize what it is at first, the huge groaning noise like a whale’s swallowed us whole. There’s this massive, deep popping sound, a high-pitched whine and then the sound of the world sucking itself up with a straw.
The wave hits not too long after, tossing us around the boat. I grab the canopy trying to hold on and end up tearing part of it away from the sides.
“What the hell?” I ask, running my fingers over the raft to make sure nothing’s damaged.
Water knocks us around, up and down and up and down, and Jeremy’s at the flap, staring out in the night.
“No!” he shouts into the darkness and I suddenly realize just how dark it is. It’s nothing; pure absolute emptiness. The cruise ship’s gone, devoured by the ocean.
Jeremy jumps into the water and starts swimming as if he could somehow bring it back from the depths. I can’t even see him, he’s been swallowed up already, but I hear his splashing.
“It can’t go yet!” he screams. “I’m not ready. I’m not ready!”
I kneel in the boat, my arms over the side trying to feel for him as I listen to him beat at the waves and curse everything for taking away the ship once and for all.
When I finally get him back on board he shivers in my lap, his arms crossed tight over his chest. “I’m not ready,” he mutters, turning his face to my chest as tears burn hot against my skin.
I hold on to him, letting the raft rock us both, the silence of the sea settling around the sunken ship our only lullaby.
“Jenny Lyons,” I tell him and he cracks a small smile.
“Her?” he asks. “Really?”
I shrug. “It was eighth grade and computer class.”
“Didn’t she have braces then?”
“Oh yeah.”
He shakes his head.
“How about you?” I ask.
If possible, his cheeks pinken even more.
“Oh don’t tell me, sweet sixteen and never been kissed?” I mean it like a tease.
“More like eighteen,” he says staring at his lap.
I feel my smile tighten as I think about the bite on his ribs and suddenly it doesn’t seem so funny anymore.
It’s pitch-black dark when he finally comes clean. “Listen, I gotta tell you something,” he says. He must have known I was pretending to sleep because he doesn’t bother trying to wake me up first.
I shift a little, feeling the boat rock slowly under my movement. We haven’t seen anything else for days: no ship, land, rafts. Only so much nothing that it feels like we have to be the last people left.
As he explains I bite my teeth together as hard as possible, wondering if I can break them-break everything and be done with it.
“I’ll go overboard, if you want,” he says. In the darkness his voice has no body, no infection. It just is.
“But then you’ll turn into one of those things,” I tell him.
His breath shakes. “I’m going to turn into one of those things no matter what,” he says.
I push my fingers into my eyes, trying to poke them hard enough to bring tears because it’s the only way I can think of to unleash the searing pain inside. “Is that what you want?” I ask him.
“If I stay on this raft and turn, I’ll go after you,” he finally says. He pauses and in the emptiness our hearts keep beating. “I don’t want that,” he adds softly.
“So you think you can take me?” I ask him.
He doesn’t laugh, not really. It was a lame joke anyway, but I do hear him exhale a little harder as if he’d thought about laughing. “You have to promise me you’ll throw me over when it happens,” he finally says. “Promise me you’ll make me sink.”
I press my fingers harder against my eyes.
“Promise me.” His voice is urgent.
I shake my head. “I promise,” I mutter.
“I think Nancy had a little crush on you,” I tell him. It’s a thick soupy day, taunting us with rain and I’m organizing our water bottles to catch what I can. My mouth tries to salivate at the thought of it, cool and wet, sliding down my throat, filling every dry space inside me.
“I hope so, since she’s the one who bit me.” He’s leaning back in the shade of the canopy, shirt off now that I know his secret. I can’t look at him without glancing at the bite festering along his ribs. It’s like he’s proud of it, forcing us both to deal with it.
And then I realize what his words mean. “So you knew.” I don’t ask it as a question. I turn to face him. “If she’s the one who bit you, you knew about everyone else. Francis, Nancy and the others.”
“Why do you think I told you we shouldn’t wait for them?” he asks. Red streaks along his skin, marking every vein through his body with an infection whose heat sometimes radiates along the rubber of the raft.
“Then why did you keep asking to go back if you knew?”
He shrugs, stares at his hands. “I wanted to be wrong. Doesn’t matter now, I guess.”
And he’s right. We lost sight of the last raft two days ago.
His hands are hot as he grabs for me. He’s gasping for breath and at first I think he’s turned, gurgling on moans, but then I realize he’s trying to say my name. “Get up,” he says, shaking me, but his muscles are weak from so many days of disuse and I’m still much larger and stronger than he is.
“Get up,” he prods again.
He shoves something into my hand, the lanyards that lashed the flap of the canopy shut. “Tie me up,” he says. “It’s time. Tie me up, sink me.”
It’s been harder and harder for me to surface from sleep and I struggle to understand what Jeremy’s saying. He’s wheezing now as he takes my hands, wraps my fingers around the ropes, pulls them tight along his wrists and elbows.
His skin’s dry and cracked and I try to blink the salt from my eyes so I can focus on what’s going on. It’s dark in the little raft, pitch-black swallowing us everywhere with just the tiny hiccups of the alert beacon flashing.
– flash-
Jeremy knotting the ropes. Using his teeth to tighten them.
– flash-
Me winding them around his torso, tucking up his knees.
– flash-
Jeremy’s eyes glassy and bright. His chest barely moving.
– flash-
I don’t know what to say. What to do. What to tell him.
– flash-
I slip my fingers into his. “I’m sorry, Jeremy.”
– flash-
He’s nothing.
– flash-
Dead eyes. Still heart.
– flash-
Waves tilt and whirl as his body becomes a shell.
– flash-
I breathe in. Hold it.
– flash-
– flash-
– flash-
I exhale.
And before the light can flash again he explodes, straining and struggling.
I see the perfectly straight teeth, the gleaming white as he tries to lunge for me.
As he snaps at the air.
Screaming, I throw myself across the raft. Pushing and forcing myself back. Wishing the walls could absorb me. Keep me safe. His moans are like growls, guttural and wet. He’s insane with what looks like agony and rage and a desire so intense I can smell it.