Castle of Water - Dane Huckelbridge

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contacts, taking a few tentative blinks to adjust to the light.

      “Second of all, your French is terrible. And third of all, I need your help with the raft. I think we should move it over here.”

      Sophie (yes, that was her name!) was standing resolutely before him, torso cocked slightly so as to see into his frond tent. She was wearing his dress shirt, sleeves rolled up and knotted at the waist, and her short-cropped brown hair was cleaned and slicked back. Her eyes were rheumy and red, he suspected from crying, but also clear and focused—no sign of her stupor remained.

      Barry crawled out of the shelter and rose to his feet, brushing the sand from his legs and arms as he did so. “How are you feeling? Is everything okay?”

      Sophie expelled an exasperated, Gallic puff of air. Pfff. “That’s a stupid question, isn’t it?”

      “Did anyone else . . .” Barry trailed off, not sure how to ask the question. “Did you see anybody else after the crash?”

      Sophie shook her head and bit her lip. “Non,” she said in French, wincing visibly. “Il n’y avait personne.”

      “God, I’m sorry.”

      “Well, I’m sorry for you, too. We’re both in the same position at the moment, in case you haven’t noticed.”

      It was clear she didn’t want to discuss whatever had happened to her husband.

      Barry made an attempt at clearing his throat. “Are you thirsty? Hungry? There’s water and bananas deeper in the island.”

      “I know. I found them. Unlike you, I didn’t spend the whole day sleeping.”

      No, you only spent the whole previous day practically comatose, Barry thought to himself, but he didn’t dare say it. “Well, have you seen any boats or planes? Someone must be looking for us.”

      She shook her head again. “No, I don’t think so.”

      “Shit.” Barry shoved his hands in his sand-gritty pockets. How many days had it been? Two and a half? Three? Surely the pilot radioed back some sign of distress. Naturally alarms must have been raised when the plane failed to arrive. Unquestionably there were rescue craft out trolling the seas, checking coordinates on maps, and monitoring little electric pings on some form of GPS device. After all, it was the twenty-first goddamn century.

      “Come on, let’s go get the raft.” Sophie tightened the shirt knot and smoothed her hair back behind her ears. “There are some supplies in it, too.”

      “Supplies?”

      “Like a little survival kit. It’s attached to the inside.”

      Barry perked up. A survival kit? After having to make do with disposable Bics and unripe bananas, a shot at some viable gear offered considerable promise. Who knew what treasures such a kit might contain? Clean changes of unisex clothing? Gallons of freshwater? Freeze-dried gourmet dinners? Astronaut ice cream? Wasting no time, Barry and Sophie hurried to the other side of the island to fetch it—he, in great excitement, humming “Frère Jacques,” and she, in great annoyance, kindly asking him to never sing that stupid song again, putain de merde.

      There is, of course, one pressing question that deserves to be answered: Why wasn’t anyone searching for survivors? The answer is that they were. Barry was correct—alarms had been sounded when their plane failed to arrive, and rescue craft were indeed out trolling the seas. Unfortunately, they were looking in the wrong place. This was the direct consequence of an unfortunate addiction on the part of their pilot and of the fact that their smallish Cessna had been downed by a colossal bolt of lightning—one that deep-fried every radio circuit on board.

      As for the pilot—a fifty-year-old Filipino divorcé of Spanish Principalía ancestry by the name of Marco “Ding Dong” Mercado—both his skills and his privileged social status were sharply negated on more than one occasion by his great thirst for a Manila rum known as Tanduay. In fact, it was a bottle of Tanduay White that had cost him his captain’s title five years before at Philippine Airlines, a bottle of Tanduay Dark that had severed his ties with a down-market Malaysian airline two years after that, and an entire case of Tanduay Añejo, consumed over the course of a single weekend, that had convinced his wife to leave him forever, just one year prior to his fatal crash. Which was how he came to service a scruffy, no-name airport in Tahiti, shuttling tourists twice a week to the Marquesas. The eight-hundred-mile flight was a breeze, and given the intervals between each leg, he generally had the freedom to enjoy as much Tanduay as he liked, so long as he could slog through his hangover, throw on a pair of mirrored sunglasses to hide his bloodshot eyes, and make his way woozily down to the hangar.

      Naturally, such a boozy existence gave rise to a fair amount of unadvisable liberties. Airport regulations demanded that Marco leave a detailed manifest before each trip, but he seldom complied. Control tower etiquette mandated that he keep in regular contact throughout the course of the flight, but he almost never did. Indeed, Marco wasn’t even above dozing off behind the stick when his hangovers called for it. The compass beeped if he went off course, and the altimeter buzzed when he got too low—what could possibly go wrong?

      Well, as it turned out, much to the detriment of those on board that fateful morning, quite a bit could go wrong. Marco’s hangover from the night before was otherworldly. It had been his and his ex-wife’s anniversary, and he had spent it alone at a dingy bar in Papeete, downing shot after shot of clear, unaged Tanduay, doing precisely that which had convinced her to leave him in the first place. And when his clock radio prodded him awake at eight o’clock the next morning, he was still reekingly, staggeringly drunk. But it wasn’t the first time he had walked the half mile to the airstrip loaded, nor did he think—although he was sorely mistaken—that it would be his last. Shielded behind his mirrored aviators, he trudged into the hangar, waving at the mechanics as he yanked his keys off the upturned gutter nail from which they were hung. Marco glanced quickly at a clipboarded manifest, reading off the names of his passengers: two French and one American. Perfecto. He choked back five ibuprofen tablets from his locker, downed them with a swig of Tanduay from a half-pint he kept there for just such an occasion, and climbed into the cockpit of his trusty Cessna 208. The mechanic gave him a thumbs-up, and Marco, donning his earphones and adjusting his mouthpiece, gave him a healthy dose of thumb in return. Time to pick up the passengers, who, if able to distinguish between the Tanduay and the gas fumes that filled the airplane, said nothing.

      The first half of the four-hour flight had gone seamlessly as planned. The American stared out the window in amazed bewilderment, the French couple was all smiles and hand squeezes, and the skies were clear and . . .

      Well, not that clear. Snoring awake from one of his infamous micronaps, Marco took note of something ahead: A bank of clouds, dark and foreboding, loomed before them. It wasn’t unusual at that time of year to encounter a stormy patch, and Marco’s usual strategy was simply to fly around it. It could add twenty or thirty minutes to the trip, but it was better than turning back and wasting the entire day, as traffic control generally suggested. Which was precisely why he seldom informed them of his little detours.

      By the time Marco executed his slow, droning roll, raindrops were already flecking the windshield, squirming their way across the glass. He considered turning on his radio and asking for some information on the storm’s size, but with his head a-throb and guts a-churn, he was in no mood to have some pissy traffic controller demand he turn the craft around. No, Marco would continue on his way, skirting the storm’s dark margins, waiting patiently for the skies to clear.

      Only they didn’t. Because the small patch of storm clouds Marco was intent upon circumventing was nothing of the sort—a fact he did not know, because he had been too hung over to bother checking the morning’s weather report. Its black curtain hung for miles, hiving from within with flares of orange-and-purple lightning. And more pressing than that, after spending two hours trying to flank it, his weak-winged little craft was running dangerously low on fuel. Gulping back down

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