Lies

FOURTEEN

ON THE FIRST day of the disappearance-or, as Sanjit secretly thought of it, the deliverance-he and his brothers and sisters had searched the entire estate.

Not one single adult had been found. No nanny, no cook, no groundskeepers-which was a relief because one of the assistant groundskeepers seemed like kind of a perv-and no maids.

They stayed together as a group, Sanjit cracking jokes to keep everyone’s spirits up.

“Are we sure we want to find anyone?” he’d asked.

“We need grown-ups,” Virtue had argued in his pedantic way.

“For what, Choo?”

“For…” This had stumped Virtue.

“What if someone gets sick?” Peace had asked.

“You feel okay?” Sanjit asked her.

“I guess so.”

“See? We’re fine.”

Despite the undeniable creepiness of the situation, Sanjit had been more relieved than worried. He didn’t like having to respond to the name “Wisdom.” He didn’t like being told what to do just about every minute of the day. He didn’t like rules. And then, suddenly, no rules.

He’d had no answer to the repeated questions from the others as to what had happened. All that seemed clear was that all the adults were gone. And the radio and phones and satellite TV were dead.

Sanjit figured he could live with that.

But the little kids, Peace, Bowie and Pixie, had been scared from the beginning. Even Choo, whom Sanjit had never seen upset, had been creeped out.

The simple silence of the empty island was oppressive. The huge house, with some rooms the kids had never even seen, rooms no one had ever used, seemed as big and as dead as a museum. And searching through the butler’s home, through Nanny’s upstairs suite, through the bungalows and dorms, left them feeling like burglars.

But everyone’s mood had improved when they returned to the main house and opened the walk-in freezer in search of a long-overdue dinner that first evening.

“They do have ice cream!” Bowie accused. “They’ve had ice cream all along. They lied to us. They have tons of ice cream.”

There were twelve big five-gallon tubs of ice cream. Sixty gallons of ice cream.

Sanjit had patted Bowie on the shoulder. “Are you really surprised, little guy? Cook weighs three hundred pounds, and Annette isn’t far behind.” Annette was the maid who cleaned the children’s rooms.

“Can we have some?”

Sanjit was surprised to be asked for permission that first time. He was the oldest, but it had not really occurred to him that he was in charge.

“You’re asking me?”

Bowie shrugged. “I guess you’re the grown-up for now.”

Sanjit smiled. “Then, as temporary adult, I decree that we have ice cream for dinner. Grab one of those tubs and five spoons and we don’t stop till we hit the bottom.”

That had kept everyone happy for a while. But at last Peace raised her hand, like she was in school.

“You don’t have to raise your hand,” Sanjit said. “What’s up?”

“What’s going to happen?”

Sanjit had considered this for a few seconds. He was not normally a thoughtful person, he knew that. He was normally a joker. Not a clown, but not someone who took life too seriously. Taking life seriously was Virtue’s job.

Back in the days when he’d lived on the Bangkok streets and alleyways there were endless dangers: sweatshop bosses who would try to kidnap you and put you to work fourteen hours a day, cops who would beat you, shopkeepers who would chase you away from their fruit displays with bamboo sticks, and always the pimps who would turn you over to strange foreign men for their own purposes.

But Sanjit had always tried to laugh and not cry. No matter how hungry, how scared, how sick, he’d never given up like some of the kids he saw. He hadn’t become brutal, though he surely had survived by stealing. And as he aged on those wondrously exciting, terrifying, never-dull streets he’d nurtured a certain swagger, a certain attitude that made him stand out. He had learned to live each day, not to worry too much about the next. If he had food for the day, if he had a box to sleep in, if the rags on his back weren’t crawling with too many lice, he was happy.

“Well, we have plenty of food,” Sanjit said, as four faces looked to him for guidance. “So, I guess what we do is just kind of hang out. Right?”

And that was answer enough for that first day. They were all weirded out. But they had always pretty much taken care of one another, not relying too much on the indifferent adults around them. So they had brushed teeth and tucked each other into bed that first night; Sanjit the last to go to his room.

Pixie had come in and slept with him. Then Peace had come, holding a blanket to tearful eyes. And later Bowie, too.

When morning came they woke on schedule. They met for breakfast, which consisted largely of toast with lots of forbidden butter and forbidden jelly and thick slatherings of forbidden Nutella.

They went outside afterward, and that’s when they noticed the strange grinding noise.

They had rushed to the cliff’s edge. A hundred feet down they saw the yacht. The yacht-a huge, beautiful, sleek white boat so big, it had its own helicopter-had run aground. The knife-sharp prow was crumpled, wedged between huge boulders. Each slight swell lifted the ship and then let it grind slowly back down.

The yacht belonged to their parents. They hadn’t even known it was coming, hadn’t known their parents were nearby.

“What happened?” Peace asked in a tremulous voice.

Virtue answered, “It ran into the island. It must have been on its way…and then…then it just ran into the island.”

“Why didn’t Captain Rocky stop it?”

“Because he is gone,” Sanjit had said. “Just like all the other grown-ups.”

Somehow at that moment it had hit Sanjit. He’d never had much affection for the two actors who called themselves his mother and father, but seeing their yacht smashed heedlessly against the rocks had brought it home.

They were alone on the island. Maybe alone in the whole world.

“Someone will come for us,” Sanjit had said, not quite sure he believed it.

So they had waited. Days. And then weeks.

And then they had begun to ration food. There was still plenty of that left. The island was stocked for parties that sometimes included a hundred guests, all coming in by helicopter or private jet.

Sanjit had seen some of the parties. Lights strewn everywhere, all kinds of famous people in fancy clothes drinking and eating and laughing too loud while the kids were kept in their rooms, occasionally hauled out to say good evening and listen to people talk about how great it was that their parents had been so generous, rescuing “these kids.”

Sanjit had never considered himself rescued.

There was still a lot of food left. But the diesel fuel that ran the generator was running out despite all their efforts to conserve.

And now there was Bowie. Sanjit could usually manage to sidestep responsibility. But he couldn’t let Bowie die.

There were only two ways on or off the island. By small boat-and they had no boat. Or helicopter. And that they had. Sort of.

The time had come to seriously examine the most impossible option.

Sanjit and Virtue found rope in the groundskeeper’s shed. Sanjit anchored one end of the rope around the not-very-secure trunk of a sapling. He hurled the other end out into the void.

“Probably pull the tree down on our heads, huh?” He laughed.

Sanjit and Virtue went down. The rest were told to stay put, stay away from the cliff, and wait.

Twice Sanjit lost his footing and slid down on his butt till he managed to stop by digging his heel into a shrub or rock outcropping. The rope ended up being no use at all for the descent. It lay off to the right of the path, far out of reach.

The boat, the Fly Boy Two, was still there, battered, rusting, algae sliming around the waterline. It wallowed in the gentle swell, its bow seemingly hanging on for dear life to the rocks it had hit months earlier.

“How do we get onto the boat?” Virtue asked when they had reached the bottom.

“That’s a really good question, Choo.”

“I thought you were invincible, Sanjit.”

“Invincible, not fearless,” Sanjit said.

Virtue made his wry smile. “If we climb up on that rock, we can maybe grab the guardrail on the bow and pull ourselves up.”

From down here the boat was far larger. And the gentle motion that rocked the crumpled bow back and forth looked a lot more dangerous.

“Okay, little brother, I’m going to do this, okay?” Sanjit said.

“I’m a better climber than you are.”

Sanjit put his hand on his shoulder. “Choo, my brother, there aren’t going to be a lot of times when I’m brave and self-sacrificing. Enjoy this one. It may be the last you ever see.”

To forestall further argument Sanjit climbed up onto the rock spur and made his way carefully, cautiously, to the end, sneakers slipping on rock coated with algae and salt spray. He leaned with one hand against the white hull. He was at eye level with the deck.

He grabbed the frail-looking stainless-steel rail with both hands and pulled himself up until his elbows were at ninety-degree angles. The danger zone was just below him and if he let go, he’d be lucky to survive with just a crushed foot.

His scramble aboard the boat wasn’t pretty, but he made it with only a scraped elbow and a bruised thigh. He lay panting, facedown on the teak deck for a few seconds.

“Do you see anything?” Virtue called up.

“I saw my life flashing before my eyes, does that count?”

Sanjit stood up, bending his knees to roll with the boat. No sound of human activity. No sign of anyone. Not exactly a surprise, but in some dark corner of his mind, Sanjit had almost expected to see bodies.

He placed his hands on the rails, looked down at Virtue’s anxious face, and said, “Ahoy there, matey.”

“Go look around,” Virtue said.

“That’s ‘Go look around, Captain,’ to you.”

Sanjit strolled with false nonchalance to the first door he found. He’d been on the yacht twice before, back when Todd and Jennifer were still around, so he knew the layout.

It was the same eerie feeling he’d had that first day of the big disappearance: he was going into places he didn’t belong, and there was no one to stop him.

Silence. Except for the groan of the hull.

Creepy. A ghost ship. Like something out of Pirates of the Caribbean. But very posh. Very nice crystal glasses. Little statues stuck in alcoves. Framed movie posters. Photos of Todd and Jennifer with some kind of famous old actor.

“Hello?” he called, and instantly felt like an idiot.

He went back to the bow. “No one home, Choo.”

“It’s been months,” Virtue said. “What did you think? They were all down here playing cards and eating potato chips?”

Sanjit found a ladder and hung it over the side. “Come aboard,” he said.

Virtue climbed up carefully and instantly Sanjit felt a little better. Shielding his eyes he could see Peace up at the top of the cliff, looking down anxiously. He waved to show everything was okay.

“So, I don’t suppose you’ve found a manual for the helicopter lying around?”

“Helicopters for Dummies?” Sanjit joked. “No. Not exactly.”

“We should look.”

“Yeah. That would be great,” Sanjit said, momentarily losing his jaunty sense of humor as he looked up at Peace on the cliff. “Because just between you and me, Choo, the idea of trying to fly a helicopter up out of here scares the pee out of me.”

Six rowboats set out from the marina under bright stars. Three kids in each boat. Two pulling oars, one at the tiller. The oars stirred phosphorescence with each stroke.

Quinn’s fleet. Quinn’s armada. The Mighty Quinn Navy.

Quinn didn’t have to take a turn at the oars; after all, he was the boss of the whole fishing operation, but he found he kind of liked it.

They used to just motor out and drop their lines and trail their nets. But gasoline, like everything else in the FAYZ, was in short supply. They had a few hundred gallons of marine fuel left at the marina. That would have to be saved for emergencies, not for daily work like fishing.

So it was oars and sore backs. A long, long day that started long before dawn. It took an hour to get everything ready in the morning, the nets stowed after they’d been dried, the bait, hooks, lines, poles, the boats themselves, the day’s food supply, water, life jackets. Then it took another hour of working the oars to get out far enough.

Six boats, three armed with poles and lines, and three dragging nets. They took turns because everyone hated the nets. It was more rowing, dragging the nets back and forth slowly across the water. Then hauling the nets up into the boat and picking fish and crabs and assorted debris out of the cords. Hard work.

Later, in the afternoon, a second batch of boats would go out to fish mostly for the blue water bats. The water bats were a mutated species that lived in caves during the night and flew out into the water during daylight. The only use for the bats was to feed the zekes, the killer worms that lived in the vegetable fields. The bats were the tribute kids paid the zekes. The economy of Perdido Beach was doubly dependent on Quinn’s efforts.

Today Quinn was with a net boat. He’d let himself go for a long time, getting more and more out of shape in the first months after FAYZ fall. Now he was kind of enjoying the fact that his legs and arms, shoulders, and back were getting stronger. It helped, of course, that he had a better supply of protein than most people.

Quinn worked a long morning, him and Big Goof and Katrina, the three of them having a pretty good day of it. They hauled up a number of small fish and one huge one.

“I thought for sure that was the net being snagged,” Big Goof said. He stared happily at the almost-five-foot-long fish in the bottom of the boat. “I believe that’s the biggest fish we ever landed.”

“I think it’s a tuna,” Katrina opined.

None of them really knew what some of the fish were. They were either edible or not, either had a lot of bones or didn’t. This fish, slowly gasping his last, looked very edible.

“Maybe so,” Quinn said mildly. “Big, anyway.”

“Took all three of us to haul him aboard,” Katrina said, laughing happily at the memory of the three of them slipping, sliding, and cursing.

“Good morning’s work,” Quinn said. “So, guys. You think it’s about time for brunch?” It was an old joke by now. By mid-morning everyone was starving. They’d come to call it brunch.

Quinn dug out the silver coach’s whistle he used to communicate across his scattered fleet. He blew three long blasts.

The other boats all dug in their oars and began heading toward Quinn’s boat. Everyone found new energy when it was time to assemble for brunch.

There were no waves, no storms, even here, a mile offshore; it was like lolling in the middle of a placid mountain lake. From this far out it was possible to believe that Perdido Beach looked normal. From this far out it was a lovely little beach town sparkling in the sun.

They broke out the hibachi and the wood they’d kept dry, and Katrina, who had amazing skill with these things, started a fire going. One of the girls in another boat cut off the tail section of the tuna, scaled it, and sliced it into purple-pink steaks.

In addition to the fish they had three cabbages and some cold, boiled artichokes. The smell of the fish cooking was like a drug. No one could really think of anything else until it had been eaten.

Then they sat back, with the boats loosely roped together, and talked, taking a break before they spent another hour fishing and then faced the long row back into town.

“I bet that was tuna,” a boy said.

“I don’t know what it was, but it was good. I wouldn’t mind eating another few slices of that.”

“Hey, we have plenty of octopus,” someone joked. Octopi weren’t something you had to catch; they sort of caught themselves, a lot of the time. And no one liked them very much. But everyone had eaten them on more than one occasion.

“Octopus this,” someone said, accompanying it with a rude gesture.

Quinn found himself staring off to the north. Perdido Beach was at the extreme southern end of the FAYZ, snugged right up against the barrier. Quinn had been with Sam when in the first days of the FAYZ they’d fled Perdido Beach and headed up the coast looking for a way out.

Sam’s plan had originally been to follow the barrier all the way. Foot by foot, over water and land, looking for an escape hatch.

That had not quite happened. Other events had intervened.

“You know what we should have done?” Quinn said, barely realizing that he was speaking out loud. “We should have explored all that area up there. Back when we still had plenty of gas.”

Big Goof said, “Explore what? You mean, looking for fish?”

Quinn shrugged. “It’s not like we’ve exactly run out of fish down here. We almost always seem to catch some. But don’t you ever kind of wonder if there’s better fishing farther north?”

Big Goof considered it carefully. He was not the sharpest pencil in the box; strong and sweet, but not very curious. “That’s a long row.”

“Yeah, it would be,” Quinn acknowledged. “But I’m saying, if we still had gas.”

He pulled the visor of his floppy hat low and considered taking just a brief snooze. But no, that wouldn’t do. He was in charge. For the first time in his life, Quinn had responsibility. He wasn’t going to screw that up.

“There are islands up there,” Katrina said.

“Yep.” Quinn yawned. “I wish we’d checked all that out. But Goof is right: it’s a long, long row.”