The Island Ch. 03

"Oh, Jackpot!" Ray suddenly announced, pulling my attention back to the task at hand. He grinned happily as he pulled a box of condoms out of one of the cases. "These are going to be vital!"

"How many are in there?"

He opened the box and peered inside. "Oh... four."

"Excellent. At this rate, we are safe until lunchtime." I snorted.

"Fuck, little Rays running around the island, playing tag with all the little Dans." He shuddered visibly.

I cast a glance over to the crowd of women. "Would that be such a..." I stopped myself mid-sentence.

Would that be such a bad thing? What the fuck!... Ray either didn't hear me or had chosen to ignore such a ridiculous idea. I cleared my throat and made another attempt at saying something sensible. "Yeah, we should probably talk to them about that."

"Oh hey, I found a lighter!" Ray suddenly announced. "Condom guy is on a roll! What else does he have in here?" He started pulling armloads of clothes out of the case, rummaging around for more. "Holy shit! Hey Amy!" He called over to the group of women. "Would this be of any use to you?" He had pulled out a green first aid box and was waving it in the air.

"Oh my god! YES!" The Doc replied, instantly forgetting the game she was playing with the others and running over. She dropped onto the sand and took the kit excitedly, opening it up and checking the contents. "Phew." she breathed happily after a few minutes. "Okay, so this isn't going to do much if someone gets seriously hurt, but smaller things? I think we are covered."

"Does that mean we get to drink the alcohol?" Ray grinned back.

"Not unless you want this jammed into a very intimate area." Amy chuckled back, pulling out a pair of medical, needle-pointed scissors and waving them menacingly at him.

Ray and I both blinked, then groaned loudly.

"What?" Amy asked in confusion.

Ray slowly reached over and took the scissors out of her hand. "We needed something sharp to deal with dead dude."

"Who?" Amy frowned, the confused look staying firmly in place.

"Err... the guy in the life raft?" He said, a frown of his own pulling at his brow.

Amy turned around and looked over her shoulder at the raft. It hadn't moved from its spot further up the beach since we had pulled it ashore. "Oohhhhh. I'd forgotten about him." Amy shook her head and chuckled. "Well, okay, I'm going to put this somewhere safe," with that, she got up and skipped almost giddily toward the trees.

Ray and I just sat there for a few moments, the scissors still in Ray's hand. "That was weird, right?" he asked.

"The Doctor who was heartbroken about not being able to save a man's life, forgetting his body was still in the life raft?" I replied. "Yeah, just a little."

"Hmmm. We may have a bigger problem than we thought." He nodded.

"Yeah. Fuckin coconuts!"

"Fuckin coconuts." He agreed. "Okay, I need you to rip some of those useless clothes into face masks. Make sure they cover our noses and mouths. I need to find the blue case where Tom put all the perfumes."

********

A little while later, maybe an hour or so, we were ready. The still shirtless Ray had the remains of a little girl's bright pink t-shirt strapped over his face. A 'My Little Pony' displayed prominently on the front. I could try to tell you that this was a complete accident and a byproduct of the system I used to make it... But that would be a lie. My face mask was green. The women were all sitting around watching us, all of them giggling at how we looked. I'm pretty sure that Ray and I would have cast more than a few concerned looks at each other at their simple incomprehension of the task we were undertaking, but both of us were barely able to see through the tears in our eyes. The amount of cologne and perfume Ray had soaked into the facecloths was overpowering.

Whatever was happening to them wasn't turning them into mindless bimbos. Amy had proven that with her immediate professionalism over the first aid kit. It was more like they were forgetting about things a little too easily, and that only seemed to apply to things that would sour their mood. Amy and most of the others had only remembered the body of the man in the raft when they had been reminded of it and forced to confront it. Robyn and Louisa hadn't remembered him at all. It was not lost on either Ray or me that these were the two women who should be grieving the most.

The issue I had is that I never really knew any of them before our arrival on the Island, meaning I had no idea how much of the way they were acting was the real them and how much was an effect of whatever was happening to them. I would need to make a conscious effort to find out as much about them as I could. More than just getting to know them, but seeing if I could get some sort of history or backstory by which to measure their current demeanor.

They were more than a little amused by our appearance, but the reason for its necessity - the decomposition of the body and so on - seemed to be lost on all of them except Amy. They just shrugged it off as if it were nothing.

"Alright," Ray coughed. "We go in, we cut around the sides, we fold the bottom of the raft over the body, and then lift the rest of it away."

"Got it." I nodded.

He cast a look my way. Or at least I think he did, it was hard to tell through the blurred vision of my tearing eyes. Breathing through the fumes of the cologne was hard enough; seeing through it was almost impossible. "Take a deep breath." He said somberly. "This is going to suck!"

With a deep and held breath, he stepped forward, opened the flap, and started to step inside. Only a few seconds later, even before I could reach the flap, he came stumbling back out again. Coughing, spluttering, gagging, and wrenching. "Nope. Fuck that! The crabs have found him! Holy shit, that is not something I am going to forget any time soon." He shuddered almost violently, stooping down to rest his hands on his knees. I looked towards the flap again; we all know what they say about curiosity and cats. "Don't do it, man. Just... Don't. Trust me on this. That shit is..." He didn't get to finish his sentence as he deposited his last few meals onto the sand.

The girls had all stopped giggling and were now looking on with concern.

Zoe and Caroline had jumped to their feet and were running toward Ray; Amy wasn't far behind them. Ray waved them back, gesturing to keep away as he managed to straighten himself up. The opening of the flap had released some of the smell from inside, I could taste it even through the overpowering amounts of perfume. I could feel my stomach starting to turn. The girls, still a dozen or more feet away, all stopped, lifting their hands to cover their mouths and deciding that Ray may be onto something when telling them to keep their distance.

"Alright, new plan," Ray finally said after managing to compose himself. He stood back up straight and looked at the raft.

"I'm listening," I said after a suitable amount of silent minutes.

"Oh, I don't have one. I was just saying we need a new one."

"Ah."

We stared at the raft for a little while longer.

"Okay, how about this..." I started slowly, already wondering how much of this was a good idea with Steve still around. "...We lift up the sides and cut about half of the bottom away from beneath."

"Go on," Ray said after a pause.

"Then we push the whole raft into the water, as deep as we are able without pissing off our friendly neighborhood shark, and let the raft fill with water. The weight of the water should push the hole open, and Dead Dude should just... kinda float or sink out of it."

"Will that work? Won't he just sort of float around inside there?"

"It shouldn't matter," I said after a little thought. "If we lift the raft as we are pulling it back, it would lift the edges over him. Once part of him is out, we can just pull the raft over the rest of him. Plus, dragging it into the water with a hole in the bottom should scoop a fair bit of sand into it. That would weigh down the bottom and help him slide out."

"What about Steve?" Ray asked. Both of us looked out at the Ocean, the dark and dangerous-looking fin was nowhere to be seen. That didn't necessarily mean he was gone, he could have just been fully submerged in deeper water, and we had all seen how fast he could move if he thought there was a meal nearby... which he absolutely would do as soon as the bodily fluids around the dead dude leaked into the water.

"Yes, Steve would be a problem." I nodded. "Unless..." I stepped closer to the raft, kneeling down and studying the thin rope that was attached to its circumference. It had been what we had gripped onto to pull the raft when we had been swimming towards the Island. "Hand me the scissors."

A little while later, we were ready. The rope had been cut and attached to one of the fastening rings beneath the entrance flap, and the bottom section of the raft floor had been cut away on the opposite half of the circular-shaped craft. With a shove, we pushed it into the water and followed it in. The rope would let us stay out of the deeper, more dangerous Steve-infested water, but it wasn't long enough to let us stay on the beach. We were hoping that the dead body in the raft would keep him busy if he turned up.

We stopped before the water reached our knees, Ray on one side of the rope, me on the other, and we allowed the waves to wash the raft, and its cargo, further and further away from us. Finally, the rope was stretched out to its full length, and we held. "Now what?" Ray asked.

"Not a clue. This is as far ahead as I..."

The entire raft seemed to jump a few feet out of the water, and an enormous splash exploded from beneath it. The patch of crystal clear water around the craft slowly started to tinge with red. I sighed deeply. "Never mind, Steve is here."

"Hi, Steve."

"Did you want to say a few words or anything?"

Ray smirked at me.

"Don't do it, man."

Ray grinned a little wider before he started to sing. "We are sailing....."

********

A little while later, all of us - with the exception of Tom and Lousia - were sitting on the log at the top of the beach. The reality of the scene in front of them at the raft had snapped the girls out of their giggly distraction, and all of them were somberly discussing the next steps.

"We need some shelter," Liz stated simply. "We have food, we have water, but eventually the weather is going to turn, and if we don't have any...."

"We are at risk of succumbing to exposure," Amy finished for her.

"The raft is going to need a few days, minimum, to be aired out before it can be used for anything," Ray added.

"And we are going to need tools to actually build something, something sturdy enough to be useful, anyway. The raft will do in a pinch, but a strong gust of wind, and it's gonna be useless." I chipped in. "We need to think of it as a glorified sunshade. Not as a shelter. Real shelter is going to need to be built from scratch... That is going to take tools... and time."

"And there is nothing useful in the cases?" Hayley asked, leaning into the side of me.

"Not yet," My arm wrapped comfortably around her waist, and my fingers were tenderly and familiarly stroking over the skin of her hip. "But I don't think we have checked more than a third of the cases. We may still get lucky."

There were a series of nods. "Okay, I'm going to say it," Robyn spoke up. "What if we aren't lucky?"

"We don't have to worry about that," Lousia said, beaming as she and Tom approached the rest of the group. Tom stepped forward and, while maintaining perfect eye contact, handed something to me.

It took me a few moments to realize what I was looking at. "Holy fucking Shit, Tom! You made this?" Tom nodded as I held it up for the rest of the group to see. In my hand was a fairly thick but almost perfectly straight branch. The branch didn't look like it came from any of the trees close to the beach, so he had clearly gone hunting for it while the rest of us had been busy. But what was truly remarkable about the stick, was that it had what looked like a stone age style ax-head attached to one end of the stick. The stone had been smashed and shaped in a way that made one side of it into a perfect ax shape, while the other had been tapered off into almost a point, which had been worked through the branch. The whole thing had been tied off by what looked like the fibrous skins on the palm trees.

Tom, from banging stones together for god knew how many hours, and even more hours before that, literally peeling trees, had fashioned a crude but apparently effective ax.

"Called it." Ray laughed.

I looked down, my jaw opened in disbelief, before I managed to pull my eyes back up to Tom. "You... Jesus, I don't know what to say... You may have just saved everyone's life... Thank you."

Tom beamed proudly, his eye contact faltering at the praise. "Mmmmm, you are welcome."

"Well, okay. Thanks to Tom here, I get to be a lumberjack for the rest of the day. Who wants to help?" Hayley, Hannah, Katie, and Robyn all threw their hands into the air as I ran my thumb over the surprisingly sharp edge of the blade. It wasn't sharp enough to draw blood, but it was more than enough to fell trees.

"That looks about fair." Amy nodded with a smile. "The rest of us can go through as many cases as we can to see what else is there."

"Sounds like a plan to me," Ray said, clapping Tom on the arm.

With a few more words of goodbyes and good luck, we parted into our work groups and went our separate ways. Hayley hooked her arm onto one side of me, Robyn on the other.

"You do realize something," Robyn purred into my ear as we headed into the trees and towards the waterfall. "You're not gonna be allowed to leave this forest until you have fucked my brains out too."

I just laughed. Hayley, who had heard the whole thing, giggled too. "I wouldn't dream of it."

********

Thank you all for reading Chapter 3 of the Island.

After reading the comments, I have noticed that a lot of you seem to be having the same hang-ups on the same issues. Especially things like the waste of alcohol and buttons, etc. These are not oversights; these are put in intentionally and will become important later in the story when the source of the control over them... or the source of their loss of control... is revealed. A lot of thought is put into foreshadowing and dropping subtle hints about the nature of the control, but it is done over time. This is written to a slow-burn story, the major themes will not be unveiled for some time yet, and a lot of that includes the realization - by the main character and others - that they have made mistakes despite their obviousness. The whole "what the hell was I thinking?" and "Why the hell did I do that?" are going to be ongoing questions until they are answered. I will always appreciate constructive criticism, but I can assure you that this is a point that has already been considered.

The same applies to the understandable desire for the women in the story to be more fleshed out. I have no desire to write a story about bimbos or mindless sex slaves. Each character, male and female, is going to be as complete and thoroughly considered as I am able to make them. I promise you that it is coming.

The next chapter will be released on Monday, and the newest NewU chapter will be submitted on Thursday.

I will see you all soon, stay awesome.

Nova