Marooned!

The story so far… January 2006

We were all enjoying a pleasure cruise around Australia’s Great Barrier Reef aboard the cruise ship Calamity Jane when the boat suddenly caught fire. We all grabbed as much as we could and swam to an island nearby, helping the injured to get to shore. On the island, there was… nothing. We realized with growing horror that we were marooned.

We looked for a place to sleep. It was getting late. Everyone got what they needed for the night and we all split up.

In the morning, we started to talk about what had happened. We introduced ourselves to each other, some of us nodding at familiar names and faces, others quiet with shock. There was Kim, an actress; Inaam, the distraught captain of the Calamity Jane; the police officer, Brian; Andrew, a carpenter; Shannon, a singer; and me, a nurse. Then we shared our experiences, some of which were heart breaking. Shannon sobbed as she told us that she had lost her husband Julian, a PE teacher. Andrew suggested we compile a list of people we knew were missing, and look for the dead or other survivors.

As we searched in those first few days, we found some things from the boat. With some matches that turned up on the beach, the women got to work building a fire while we men looked for bodies to give them a decent burial. Inaam had collected herself and was appointed our leader, organizing everything. No-one complained. Andrew and I looked around the island trying to find something to build a shelter out of.

Back on the beach, Shannon was very upset over what had happened to her husband. Kim was talking to her. They had just met over the past few days but the tragedy over what had happened had pushed the two together into a friendship. Brandon was quiet, and as he didn’t want to be near the rest of us, he moved away to the other side of the island. Inaam tried to stop him from doing so, but he had gotten angry. We had to let him go. It was no big deal anyway.

Andrew had had his tool kit with him when the boat sank, so when we had collected enough supplies he was able to construct a small shelter for all of us (bar Brandon) to live in. I helped him. It took us a few hours, but everyone was grateful when it was finished. Days on end in the sun makes you grateful of a little shade. We built a small fire inside, so we could see at night. Inaam got the blankets from the shore and dragged them inside.

Once inside, we started talking once again about our families and our hometowns. After that, we went to sleep, our first night with a shelter.

At three in the morning we heard a loud noise that woke us all up. I picked up a crudely made torch we had made for night-times and lit it. Those of us who were brave enough went outside to discover Brandon, laying dead clutching a note in one hand and a gun in the other. Hearing gasps and cries behind me, I reached down and pulled the note out of his hand. I read it aloud to the others:

"I was here for a week and already I cannot stand the thoughts in my head. I don’t know how long it will take the rest of you to get off this island but I couldn’t take another day. Don’t despair, I am with my darling Melinda now…"

Shannon piped up from behind me: “On the ship, he was talking about Melinda. His daughter. She was killed in a car accident. That was why he was o this cruise, he was escaping the memories of her.”

Kim and I volunteered to carry the body as the others collected his things from his small campsite. We buried him, and decided it was time to have a general ‘funeral’ for all those we had not found yet. Brian took the gun from Brandon’s hand. He looked at the rest of us in surprise. It had been his own gun, police issued. It had 5 shots left in it.

The night afterwards, we looked through Brandon’s wallet for an address, we would tell his family of his fate if we ever got off this damn island. I was the first to notice it: a picture of a young girl, his daughter Melinda. I snuck it into my pocket and went outside to place it on his grave.

One week later, we were fast running out of food. We had been eating from cans that washed up on the beach, but there were hardly any left now. In Andrew’s tool belt he had a small hatchet, so he started to use that to cut a tree down, after we noticed the bananas growing from it. The tree started falling, and suddenly, before any of us knew what was happening, it was pinning Andrew to the ground. It was instantly obvious that he had broken his back. We slowly hoisted the tree up off of him, but it was too late. There was nothing we could do but bury him when he died, two days after the accident.

Kim and I were talking about a month later about her acting career. She had been at it for three years, and I came to realize I knew her work; she had been in a film I was a big fan of. She had been due to start filming the sequel only two weeks after the cruise, but as she put it “No chance now of that happening.”

Inaam and Shannon had been talking as this went on, and suddenly the former screamed. I looked around to see Shannon vomiting violently into a nearby bush. We got her into the shelter, and I checked her over. I looked up at her and realized her problem: She was pregnant. After I told her, she went into a state of shock. We worked out that the baby had been conceived the day of the boat sinking. All of us agreed that the baby was a sign for us to keep on living, as it obviously had such a strong survival instinct from the womb. It was also decided that since I had medical knowledge that I would act as midwife if we were still on the island when it arrived.

The day after the discovery, Inaam instructed us to make a sign: “S.O.S.” I thought it was a stupid idea, so I took no part in it, but Kim and Shannon helped make it while Brian and I wandered into the forest to look for animals to cook as meat. We had been surviving on small fish after Andrew’s accident; we had no desire to cut down anymore trees. There didn’t seem to be any other animals on the island, which everyone found strange. We walked around for a while then went back to the campsite. The women had almost finished the sign; they were exhausted from the effort. I went out to find some water bottles; they had begun to wash up on the shore a week beforehand.

I found a couple of bottles about a kilometer up the beach. Sitting on top of them was my greatest fear: a spider. It was huge. I threw a stick at it and it scrambled off. I picked the bottles up and ran away, back to where the women were waiting. That night, I told them all about the spider; it was the most interesting thing of the day.

Kim and Shannon went to their usual sleeping spot, and Brian huddled close to them. He and Kim had struck up a sort of friendship, so they slept near each other at night. Inaam and I slept propped up next to the entrance of the shelter.

In the middle of the night, we woke to a startling scream. Kim was hysterical. She kept pointing at Brian and Shannon. Brian was laying perfectly still, with his eyes open and dried blood staining his skin around his mouth and nose. Shannon, however, seemed to be having some kind of fit, she was shaking violently and vomit mixed with blood was trailing down from her mouth. Resting on her chest was the spider I had seen earlier. As with Andrew, there was nothing we could do but wait for her to die and buried the two bodies in the morning. It hit us hard, our sign of hope was gone.

A few days passed and none of our supplies were left. No water bottles, no matches, nothing. To keep our spirits up, we half-heartedly joked about turning to cannibalism. Inaam told me to look for more food, and gave me the almost-forgotten gun, still with 5 shots left in it. She and Kim were going to make baskets to put fruit and other plants into, for us to eat. I came back half an hour later, excited. I grabbed one of the baskets and set off again. I had found a huge grove of fruit – bananas, apples, passion fruit, even a small watermelon! I came back with enough fruit to last us a week, if we rationed it.

One morning, two weeks later, after almost all the fruit was gone, we heard a strange buzzing sound. We looked up, into the skies, and saw the best thing we had laid eyes on in a couple of months: a helicopter! It landed on our beach as we danced around singing a quickly made-up song: “We’re saved! We’re saved!” (As you can tell, we weren’t very creative in our moment of salvation) The pilot jumped out and informed us that he could only take two of us, but there was a town nearby that he could take us to before rescuing the last one. It was agreed that Inaam would be that final person.

As the helicopter took off, we breathed a sigh of relief. It was over, we were going home! I looked down at the island; it looked like a question mark so I decided I would call it “Question Island”. Then the helicopter started sputtering. The engine was giving out.
Back on the island, Inaam watched in horror as the helicopter dove into a cliff, exploding into a huge fireball. She knew then that we were dead. She sat on the beach and sobbed. She decided that day to wait for the next helicopter. Surely there would be one, wouldn’t there?

Six years later, she was still waiting. She had survived winter, the spiders, everything, but she couldn’t escape her mind telling her there was no hope. Finally, she took the gun, held it to her head, and took her own life. The last thing she heard before that bullet went into her skull was a strange buzzing sound…