(Love and respect to the awesome Stephen King - greatest of them all)
If there’d had been anyone or anything there to bear witness, they would have seen some crazy shit. First, there was nothing but water. Then there was something besides water. Sand appeared. Then coral. Then some rocks, more sand, some soil, seventeen trees, crabgrass and a hut made of logs. Surf and a reef. Then, apparently born from the thin air itself, a person. A person with a single purpose: to deliver, safely, the girl he was carrying. He found a spot, up from the beach but before the trees, and set her down. He looked around, then back down at the girl. He stayed like that for a few minutes. He was thinking about a book he’d once read.
When he finally looked up from the girl, he broke into action. He reached into a satchel that he had not been wearing. He took out these items in this order:
A Swiss Army knife
A bic lighter
A .45 caliber Sig automatic pistol
Eighty sticks of beef jerky
Seed packets for basil, tomatoes, grapefruit, and strawberries
Four cans of peach slices in syrup
A bottle of isopropyl alcohol
An aerosol can of antiseptic
A book called “House of Leaves”
A full role of Duct Tape
A kilo of pure brown heroin
He arranged the things on top of the satchel and placed the satchel next to the girls head. Then he disappeared. Then, just seconds later, he reappeared saying (to nobody, the girl was still asleep):
Can’t resist. Have fun Jenny. I’ll be watching. Count on it.
Then he bent down, and touched her belly under her shirt with both hands. After a few minutes he got up again, and disappeared again. This time he did not come back.
***
She was waking up. Sand in her face and her hair. She heard the surf and she heard the breeze coming on shore. She heard layers of rocks moving over one another as waves ebbed off the beach, becoming newer waves, and moving other rocks. The sounds were vast, and they claimed her for a time. It was a long while before she opened her eyes.
When she did, she saw the horizon. Blue meeting a deeper blue in the far distance. She didn’t have to turn around to know she was a long, long way from anything. She stayed still. Looked out. Rested.
***
The first weeks were the hardest, before she understood that she was pregnant, and before she started remembering bits and pieces of who she was and what had happened to her. It was the helplessness that really got to her. She had no ideas at all about anything, and so everything she attempted, from pissing in a hole on the beach to peeling a Slim Jim became a major hassle, and a time consuming hassle at that. At the same time, strange rumblings from her lower abdomen kept her awake days at a time. Like nothing she’d ever felt before. She still couldn’t remember the place crash, or the grey thing. There were fourteen Slim Jims left. She’d walked the length of her island two hundred times and marked each one into the bark of the biggest tree. 340 paces North/South. She still wasn’t sure what the heroin was, but she’d wrapped it in the satchel and buried it under a thicket in the trees. Something about the package made her feel better, like an emergency handle cased in glass.
***
No Slim Jims left. She’d eaten the last one a few days ago, in a celebration not only for her last stick of salty meat, but also because she was pregnant. She’d suspected as much when she’d felt the pangs of nausea upon waking that had started a few weeks back. She was sure now because, although she’d been subsisting for weeks on a less-than-meager diet of cured meat and the occasional peach slice, her belly had started to swell.
“That’s a fine how-do-ya-do! Yes sir!”
She intoned to the breezes and the sand, peeling the final Jerky wrapper and guzzling from the second-to-last peach can. Then she allowed herself the smallest, tiniest little day dream of having successfully birthed and fed a child on her very own island six million miles from nowhere. She’d feed him (it was a boy, she knew it was a boy) sand from the beach and he could drink salt water.
“Like a crab. Like my own little fiddler crab.”
She laughed a bit, but not much.
***
She’d been without food completely for twenty-six hours, having eaten the last syrupy peach in a ceremony of bitterness at the cook-fire. After that she’d made her way over to the “garden.” It was a pathetic attempt, she knew, but part of her had this weird idea that whatever she put into the ground would eventually find it’s way up to the light. After cutting small slits in two of the envelopes with the Swiss knife, she’d put 3-4 tiny grapefruit and strawberry seeds in ten holes she’d dug, again with the Swiss knife.
That had been weeks ago. She allowed herself to forget the garden, and then remember it every few days, skipping back to it in a paroxysms of expectancy and hope. So far, nothing had found it’s way up. The baby son in her belly was fully moving around in there, kicking the walls, doing splits and somersaults. Perhaps - she mused - wondering about what was to become of him. She started marking days on another tree, to keep track of what was going on with her son.
When she finally did stumble on the spring, she had to scold herself. The thing was big. At least eight feet long and three or four feet deep. It was hidden slightly, partly obscured under same thicket she’d buried the narcotics in, but on the opposite end, hidden under thicker brush in a natural rock cistern. She’d gone there to use her last few drops of energy to dig up the package and try to make heads or tails. The baby would die soon, she thought. He’d shrivel up like a neglected prune in her seething belly. Or maybe she’d die first. Either way, she’d a notion that whatever intoxicant it was that was buried in the brush could only ease her way. She’d just unearthed the heroin when she spied the edge of the spring.
Not ready for the process of making decisions and expending energy, the girl stalled a little, gazing into the pool, fingering the cellophane bags wrapping the drugs. Finally though, she sorted out a plan. Spooning a few handfuls of the fresh, warm water to her chapped lips, she felt revitalized in a way her own brain had reluctantly ruled out just a few hours before. Energy raced down her limbs and across her mid section. Her loins ached. The baby, also startled and shot-through with energy from the sparkling water, started to move and kick. More…More…More.
***
She used the Swiss knife to cut a tidy slash across the top part of the package, which was close in color and size to a normal red brick. As she peeled back the layers of plastic she found her mind dancing towards other, less compelling assumptions:
It’s clay. Or perhaps red sand of some sort. It’s nothing…
But the deeper, instinctual part of her was over-yelling the doubts. She knew, just as she knew she’d been pregnant, what was in the package. Although she’d never taken hard drugs of any kind, she found herself flashing to a conversation she’d had in college, many years ago, with a wacky roommate about the demon cocaine:
Why not Jenny?
Cause, like, you can die? I’m all for having a good time, but a massive coronary doesn’t sound to me like a party. Keep it. How do you even do that? Sniffing something? Aughh! Gross.
First of all…
The girl had said:
You’re not going to die. That’s just Nancy Reagan talking. And as for sniffing…It’s easy! You don’t have to take a lot. Just dip the front of a key in the bag, aim it at your nose, and when you can’t see it anymore, sniff. Hard.
The wacky roommate had even acted it out for her, thus sealing Jenny’s life-long aversion to anything snorted. Now, cradling the brown/red brick in her hand, she imitated the roommate’s act, replacing the key with her trusted Swiss knife, she dug it down into the brick. As the knife probed into the thing, she saw it was delicate, turning to a fine powder almost on contact with the small steel blade. She scooped out a little mound on the tip, and aimed for her nose. When she could no longer see brown dust piled on the knife-tip, she sniffed.
She lay back in the brush, facing up at the dusky sky. The heavy dose of opiates flooded her neural pathways, and then she was falling. Falling and flipping surfing on the updrafts and thermals in a sky as big as the heavens. A tiny place, secret, and deep in the center of her mind, began to pulse and tingle like the best idea she ever had. Just before she slipped into the warm, healing, wholly unbelievable spring, she made sure the package of drugs was safe, wrapping the plastic back around the powder-brick and stashing the satchel deep in the same hole as before. She cut out a smaller bundle, maybe four times the size of the amount she’d snorted, and wrapped it up in an old peach can label.
Then it was just her and the water and the night. She lay there: perfectly still with just her face poking from the water, her entire being enwrapped in a fine, dull, glow. She thought then, that she might name the child Ben. The next morning she woke revitalized, and made her way to her garden, knowing full well what she’d find there. She was right, of course. As she’d hoped, three grapefruits that looked ripe, or at least almost ripe, sat there tangled in the vines. She saw a few strawberries in there that looked about right as well. Ben squirmed and tumbled in her belly.
***
The heroin was half gone. She’d stayed away after the first time. For two weeks she didn’t touch the stuff, wondering, for the first time in her life, about things she’d only heard about in books and movies. Dope sickness. Cold Turkey. “Of course,” she told herself, “that won’t be a factor here. I’ve got what must be a lifetime supply, and nobody to share it with.” Instead of digging up the package, she soaked in the spring for hours every day, watching her belly and breasts swell, and thinking about what she’d be eating during the next few hours. Though, she always suspected, that if she had to, she and Ben would be just fine consuming only the water from the warm spring. It was slightly salty, always refreshing, and almost certainly mineral-rich. Before she’d started spear fishing in the small cove on the northern side of the island, she’d gone for days just taking gulps of the water every few hours. It was like a miracle. She’d marked off twenty-three weeks of baby growing though, snorting like a fiend every day. If she checked up, even a little bit, she could save what she needed for giving birth and then wean down before she ran out.
But then she’d discovered the fish, and the great thrill that came from hunting them. One day she’d noticed the narrow blade would be easily duct taped to a hefty stick from the wooded inland. She’d wade into the tidal pool, only short lived every day between tides in the afternoon. She’d wait for the thing to fill, and watch for the biggest of the twenty or so fish that inevitably found their way to her lair. The stillness, that was the key, and that’s also what - in the end - had fucked her up. It didn’t take long to learn that the success of the fishing was in the wait. As long as you were patient, and didn’t make a try for the big fish as they entered the pool, she could guarantee a catch. Sometimes the pool would just close itself off with the tides, and catch her fish for her. But waiting wasn’t easy. The sun and the salt combined with the breeze to form a quiet, but relentless degradation engine. An hour in the noon sun standing still would leave peeled skin on all exposed flesh, it would burn in the legs and sting the eyes. An afternoons hunt would sometimes leave her incapacitated for days.
So she started cushioning. A little bump in the morning with her A.M. soak, and then one more before the fishing proper. If she caught something, she’d leave it, spend the afternoon feasting and soaking. But if not, she’d sneak a few more bumps during the long afternoon lurk. After a while her tolerance shot through the roof from raw, unchecked consumption. Soon she was taking whole weeks off fishing at all. Not good for the baby, she knew, but looking at the mini-dune of heroin in her waterproof satchel, it was hard to conceive of a habit big enough to make even a dent. Then one day, at about the end of the tides filling push into the her pool, she’d noticed a massive fish swamping in with the last wavelets. It was huge. And fat. Her belly tumbled and yearned at it, and the baby started in too, somehow sensing the potential feast.
Jenny didn’t go right for the prize however. Her angling skills had been forged to a fine edge by this time and she knew the beast would probably drown itself soon enough, too heavy to flip out with the next tide. That’s when she’d move. She bounded out of the tidal pool ready to celebrate with a huge, mid afternoon rip of the H. She was jacked when she dug up the satchel though, and she ended up making the mistake that most junkies only make once. She moved to fast trying to prepare the goods, and - in process - ending up spilling a lot. It was the Swiss knife that fucked her. She’d not taken the time to unstuck it from the fish spear, and the over-leverage forced a hole in the kilo, Before she’d even noticed she was spilling, most of the red dust had been blown into the sea on the afternoon shore-breeze. When she finally saw her mistake and stopped, she had only ten grams, maybe less. She sat by the waterside for the next five hours, just trying to somehow un-think her terrible misfortune.
It didn’t take long to understand she was in a major fuck-hole. She felt as if she’d been snarfing at least as much heroin as she now had left every fucking day for the last month. The baby didn’t have long, maybe twelve weeks, maybe less. She had expected to have 100 times the narcotics by then. Dread crawled into her life and her belly and stayed there.
It took her three days to finish every grain she had left. The baby came early, arrived three weeks after that. When he crawled from her bleeding guts the withdrawal had sapped even the strength to hold it to her breast. The two lay on the dirt above the beach and stared at the stars. The baby, Ben she’d wanted to call him, cried at some point in the night, but by morning he’d fallen silent.
***
She’d bled and bled, but somehow did not die. Her fluids had spread out around her, seeping down into the sand and stinking in the midday heat. After a while it rained on them lying there in the blood. Mother and child still connected by a useless, graying umbilicus.
Watching from 150 feet up, as Lu was now and had been since setting things in motion seven months ago, it looked like mother and child were lying in a circle painted dark red in the sand. He saw them down there, just at the top of the beach where the sand became soil. The baby wasn’t moving at all, and mother only once in a great while. He’d seen her crawl over to her spring a few times, hanging her head in the water to drink. He found it strange though, she never submerged herself in the cistern, which would have eased her withdrawal symptoms somewhat. Instead she kept crawling back to her newborn. “Why,” he wondered, “doesn’t she know he’s dead?”
***
She did, somewhere in her roiling brain, understand that her baby was dead. It was, however, a small sapling fact in a deep, painful forest of more immediate horrors. Leaving her body almost as suddenly as it had joined, the drug was exacting a steep cost for having stayed so long. Every cell of her body and mind - it seemed - was under a constant, insidious siege. She sweat like a wrung-sponge through the burning afternoons, but shivered from cold the whole time. Her body was covered in the filmy remains of everything she’d been through, and the smell was so pervasive it had become a taste as well. Her joints and skin, her head, her mind, all burning and freezing. A haywire effect ripping through her causing massive pain even just lying still. She hadn’t eaten a fish in nine days. A new odor, this one sour and astringent, voiced her body’s demand for more than just spring water. She was burning through muscle tissue now, and it wouldn’t be long till there wasn’t any left. The child, uncovered and roasting under the beaming noon sun, began to steam. Her body revolted, reeling and twitching at the awful scent. Her mind though, was having other ideas.
Smells like Chinese restaurants I’ve loved. Smells like Wo-Hop, the candy chicken, the pot-stickers. Used to have’em at three in the morning after drinking all night in the clubs. Smelled like street food. Like drunken good times. Like being alive…
That night, four days before a meteor called Mord would bowl the entire planet into the next life, she crawled her tortured body over to the supplies she hadn’t tended in the better part of a month. She had precious little energy left in her wasted, depleted body so she knew she had to work quickly. She rummaged a bit before grabbing the thing she’d been seeking. Drawing a few heavy breaths in preparation, she low-crawled in the sand like a crab…
Like a fucking crab baby. I’m a fucking crab with the other crabs here in the sea. Just goin’ after anything I find, cause crabs ain’t discernin’. Crabs eat what crabs got. Leaves, fish, sand, and - in a pinch - other crabs. Crabs! We eat and eat, cause we gotta keep goin’…
She dressed her dinner without further comment, mental or otherwise. The first few bites, even raw as they were, triggered life-responses that had died unannounced in her days on the island without meat. She felt the drug taking a final leave then, replaced with the taste of blood, of meat, of life. She scurried over to her gear and found the lighter. That night she ate till she was full and slept well. She did not dream.
***
She woke late the next day, having finally attained somewhat of a normal slumber. Even after she was technically awake she lay on her side staring out on her little corner of the planet. It took her eighteen whole minutes to realize the seagull she was watching was the first one she’d seen in all her days on the island. It took another six minutes to understand that the filthy off-white tern was perched atop the skull of her still-born son, and eating his indifferent eye out of his skull like an oyster from a shell. She wretched then, blowing all the sustaining nutrients her dilapidated stomach hadn’t yet digested into a vile puddle in the dirt. The bird did not move, or even pause it’s meal.
Her head began to swim then, and she dove for the warm sand before she passed out. When she woke next, she was in the cargo hold of a 65-foot Hatteras Sportfisher called “Gumption,” wrapped from head to toe in clean linen and having been thoroughly scrubbed and showered. Her senses struggled to catch up with events, but it was no use. She remembered nothing.
But when a familiar looking man wearing a red t-shirt and a silly white glob of protectant on his nose ducked into the cabin, she felt deja-vu wash over her like a tide. The man was smiling a mischief-smile. He said:
Ah, Vu Ja De, no? I love that. One of my better turns of invention I think, don’t you? How rude though of me not to have introduced myself: The name’s Lu. I think I just rescued you. Before you get all emotional though I must admit: It was me put you down there to begin with...
She felt her legs turn to butter. A blackness obscuring her vision. Lu said:
Sorry about that. Sorry you hadda eat the kid…I swear though, I won’t tell anybody. Not a lot pf people anyway…
But she heard not a word.
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