Trial by Fire (2 page)

T
he rain stopped sometime just before dawn.

Buzz was the first to notice. It was the sound that changed. The wind died down first, and then the steady drumbeat of the rain itself. Finally, the darkness lifted, and the shape of the cave's mouth started to show in the very earliest morning light.

Carter, Vanessa, and Jane were sitting with their heads drooped, half awake. None of them had slept, not really, but they didn't seem ready to get up and move yet, either.

Still, nature called. Buzz had been holding on for what felt like hours. After the run-in with the boars, who knew what else might be waiting out there?

But the rocks dug into his back no matter how he sat, and his damp clothes had kept him shivering through the night. It was crazy how cold it got here after dark, considering how hot it was during the day. He'd never been this cold in his life, not even during the worst Chicago winters back home.

Finally, he got up, stretched his aching body, and stepped outside.

The ground around the cave's entrance was littered with the things they'd brought from the boat. They'd dropped most of it in the confusion, including the two blankets Buzz had grabbed. Those were both filthy now, and trampled into the mud, with dozens of small hoofprints all around.

As he headed downhill to look for a private spot, Buzz found a few more of their things. There was a coil of rope that Carter had been carrying. A crumpled-up sea chart under a bush. A single shoe stuck in the mud.

And then, just before he reached the beach, he spotted Jane's bright yellow waterproof camera. It sat under the palm tree where they'd stopped to regroup.

Jane was going to be thrilled. She'd brought the camera to the South Pacific to make a video report for her fifth-grade class, all about the trip they were meant to take.

That is, until everything went so wrong.

It was supposed to be a week of open-ocean sailing with their uncle Dexter and his first mate, Joe Kahali, while their parents honeymooned in Hawaii. Two months earlier, Buzz and Vanessa's father had married Carter and Jane's mother. The whole idea of the sailing adventure was to give their parents some alone time while the kids got to know one another better as brothers and sisters.

Now Dex and Joe were out there on a life raft somewhere, hopefully still alive. Their parents were a thousand miles away in Hawaii. And Vanessa, Buzz, Jane, and Carter had been forced to fend for themselves here on Nowhere Island. That was Jane's name for it—Nowhere Island—because as far as they knew, this place wasn't on anyone's map. The only communication they'd managed was a quick conversation with the Coast Guard in Hawaii, and even that had been cut short when their satellite phone had died. Whether or not the authorities would be able to find this uncharted island in the middle of nowhere, Buzz had no idea.

Coming out of the woods and onto the beach, he scanned the horizon. As usual, all he saw was an endless stretch of sea and sky. No boats, no planes, nothing.

From the beach, Buzz climbed up onto the black volcanic rocks they'd scrambled off of the night before. They called this spot Dead Man's Shelf. It was where the
Lucky Star
had crashed. Now the only signs that their boat had been there at all were the few stray pieces of junk left behind—a jagged piece of teakwood lodged between two boulders; a pile of shattered glass in a tidal pool; a section of stainless steel railing that looked as if it had been bent into a crazy pretzel.

Oh, man,
Buzz thought.
Pretzels. Burgers. Pizza.
He couldn't help himself. Only yesterday, they'd had cans of beef stew and ravioli, and one last jar of peanut butter on the boat. Now it was all on the bottom of the ocean somewhere. His belly ached in that way he'd started to recognize here on the island. It was called starving, and not the kind where you missed lunch at school. This felt more like his stomach was eating away at its own empty self, with a sharp, constant pain that left him feeling a little bit dizzy all the time.

Then another unwanted thought pushed its way in.
I don't want to die here.

He wasn't made for this kind of thing. Not like Carter, or Vanessa, or even Jane. They had their football, and gymnastics, and swimming back home. Jane and Carter had even been camping a bunch of times with their mom.

Not Buzz. He was made for the kind of adventure you enjoyed from the safety of your own couch, with a game controller in one hand and a snack in the other.

Now, if the four of them were going to eat at all, they were going to have to go out and find the food for themselves. Buzz tried to think of every movie he'd ever seen about this kind of thing, every TV show where some guy volunteered to get dropped off in the middle of nowhere. What did those people eat?

Crabs? Fish? Bugs?

Coconuts!

Of course
, Buzz thought.
Duh—coconuts.
It occurred to him just as he spotted several of them washing up and down the beach. They'd probably been knocked loose from the trees by the storm. More importantly, coconuts were something they didn't have to catch, kill, or cook if they wanted to eat them.

Maybe they weren't beef stew, but right now, coconuts were the next best thing.

Island canned goods!

Jane knelt on the floor of the cave, digging through the backpack she'd saved from the boat. There wasn't much inside—they'd had only a minute to grab whatever they could before the boat had been lost.

At the bottom of the pack, she found what she was looking for—Uncle Dexter's journal. It was filled with notes and diary entries for every day he'd ever spent at sea on the
Lucky Star
.

She opened the book to a blank page at the back, picked up one of the two pens she'd managed to save, and began to write.

July 2. Day 8 since we left Hawaii. Day 4 on Nowhere Island.

Huge storm last night. No more boat. No more food. This is everything we have left:

1 backpack

1 journal

2 pens (1 blue, 1 red)

2 blankets

1 pillowcase

1 axe

1 pot

1 big sharp knife

1 regular knife

2 forks

4 spoons

1 plastic bottle (with cap)

6 sea charts

1 rope

1 satellite phone (dead, no charger)

1 laptop (dead)

1 flashlight (broken, but with 2 good batteries)

2 life jackets

“Is that everything?” Jane asked.

Carter and Vanessa were stacking whatever they could find inside the mouth of the cave, where the ground was dry. Almost all of it was covered in mud. The laptop was broken into two pieces now, as if maybe one of the boars had stomped it.

The memory of that stampede, and those crazy screams in the dark, sent a shudder right through her. What if it had been one of them stomped like that? Something like a broken bone out here was almost unthinkable, because what could they do about it? Not much. Not with the nearest hospital a thousand miles away.

“Hey, you guys!”

Jane looked across the clearing to see Buzz coming out of the woods. He had a coil of rope on one shoulder, a shoe sticking out of his pocket, and a plastic soda bottle in his hand. He also had a big green coconut under each arm. She quickly crossed out the number 1s next to “plastic bottle” and “rope” on her list, and changed them both to 2s.

“I got breakfast,” Buzz said proudly, dropping it all just inside the cave. “And that's not all.”

He reached into another pocket on his cargo shorts and pulled out Jane's camera. Her heart leaped when she saw it. The camera was muddy like everything else, but still in one piece.

“Thank you, thank you, thank you!” She jumped up and threw her arms around Buzz before he could squirm away.

Vanessa was there now, too. She held her hand out for the camera. “Jane, we need to keep that with everything else,” she said. “You can't use it for videos anymore.”

“What?”
Jane asked. “Why not?”

“It's the closest thing we have to a flashlight,” Vanessa told her. Her voice softened. “I'm sorry.”

Jane wanted to protest. She'd been using the camera to keep careful track of everything they did, before
and
after the shipwreck. If they ever got home again, people were going to want to know about this. It was important. She was dying to turn it on now and make sure her videos were all still there. But Vanessa was right. They couldn't afford to waste the battery.

At home, nobody could have told Jane what to do with her own camera. It was
hers,
after all. Or at least, it had been once. But being on Nowhere Island changed everything. Now that camera didn't belong to her any more than those two coconuts on the ground belonged to Buzz.

The rules were different here.

Carter walked over and picked up one of the coconuts Buzz had brought from the beach. It looked more like a green rugby ball than the brown hairy things he thought of as coconuts back home.

When he shook it next to his ear, a sloshing sound came from inside. That was good news. It meant food
and
drink, all in one. They hadn't had a thing to eat or drink in over twenty-four hours.

“I'll get the axe,” he said.

“You want me to do it?” Vanessa asked him.

“I got it.”

The axe was his thing. In the first days on the island, it had felt awkward in his hands. But he'd taught himself to choke up for a better swing, just like batting in T-ball when he was a little kid. Soon enough, he'd gotten halfway decent at cutting down palm fronds and tree branches. Hopefully, coconuts would be even easier.

He put his foot up on the first one to steady it and raised the axe blade to his shoulder.

“Careful,” Vanessa said.

“I said I've got it,” Carter told her.

When he brought the axe down, it split the green hull cleanly down the middle with one satisfying chop. Soon, he was using his fingers to pull the dry, stringy outer husk away from the familiar brown nut inside.

“Save that stuff,” Buzz said. “We can use it for making fires.”

Carter didn't question it. Jane may have been the bookworm, but Buzz knew more about survival in the wild than any of them. It was kind of funny, since he hardly ever went outside at home.

In a way, Carter felt sorry for Buzz. Everything he knew came from TV and video games, and most of his so-called friends were online geeks just like him. The kid was going to get eaten alive in middle school.

That is, assuming they ever made it off this stupid island.

He set the coconut down again and took another hard swing. But instead of cracking, the exposed brown shell shattered into half a dozen pieces. Before they could even think about saving the liquid inside, it had all spilled into the dirt.

“Carter!” Vanessa said.

“Give me a break,” he said. “I've never done this before. I'll get it on the next one.”

At least there was still the bright white coconut meat itself. Buzz used a kitchen knife to pry it away from the shell and handed it out piece by piece. The flesh was slimy when Carter tried it, and it didn't taste like much. Still, just to chew and swallow
something
felt amazing.

On the second try, he went more carefully. Once the husk was off, he palmed the coconut and pounded it against the edge of the axe just hard enough to put a crack in the side. It made for sloppy drinking but nobody cared about that. They all sucked down a share of the slightly sweet liquid as fast as they could get it.

“Are there a lot of these on the beach?” Carter asked.

“Some,” Buzz said. “Most of them are up in the trees.”

“'Cause I'm still starving,” Carter said.

Everyone seemed to be thinking the same thing. As much help as the first two coconuts had been, it was a lot of work for just a few mouthfuls.

They were going to have to do better than this.