‘How long was I out?’
Abbey took his face in her hands. ‘Couple of hours. What did I tell you? No one can fight currents like that, you’re lucky Sebastian came along when he did.’
James glanced up at the smoking man. ‘You pulled me out of there?’
‘I was in the area, chief,’ Sebastian replied, the hint of a smile creeping onto his face.
Shakily, James climbed to his feet and ran his fingers through his hair. It was knotted, sandy. Stepping to Sebastian, he held out his hand. The smoking man shook it.
‘Thanks,’ he muttered.
‘Yeah,’ said Sebastian, heavy traces of South African in his accent.
‘He rescued Teri too,’ Abbey threw in. ‘Dragged you both right out of the wreckage in one go.’
Finishing his cigarette, Sebastian flicked it into the nearest dying fire. ‘I was a coastguard in a former life,’ he revealed. ‘It’s no big deal. Besides, I literally was passing. I was swimming to shore from further out when I came across you guys. What was I supposed to do, let you drown?’
‘How about you, Teri?’ asked James.
‘How about me?’
‘You okay? You hurt?’
‘I’m alive, aren’t I?’ she murmured. ‘No thanks to you.’
Abbey reeled. ‘You ungrateful bitch! James risked his life for you last night, so the words you’re looking for are thank you.’
‘Chill down, Oprah,’ Teri said. ‘Before you go getting all righteous on me, perhaps you’d like to ask yourself the question, did she want to be saved? Did this girl who, judging by her appearance is severely damaged, wish to be rescued by the knight in slightly off-white armour and carried away into the sunset?’
‘You ungrateful bitch!’
‘You did that one.’
‘You sure as hell sounded like you wanted to be rescued,’ James threw in. ‘We could hear you screaming from here.’
‘Instinct, cowboy,’ Teri countered.
Done with the argument, Teri backed away and headed for the tree line, the back of her t-shirt shredded revealing more ugly black patterns on her skin. ‘When the search party turns up, I’ll be over here smoking a cigarette.’
‘Let her go,’ James advised. ‘She’s not going anywhere.’
‘Who does she think she is?’ Abbey fumed. ‘Wish I’d known her attitude stank last night, I would’ve gone out there myself and held her under.’
‘Does it matter?’ said Sebastian.
‘Teri’s not the problem,’ James agreed. ‘But she's right about something, we should sit tight until help arrives.’
‘How do you know it will?’
‘Because it’s twenty-eleven, and when planes disappear, people notice.’ James smiled reassuringly. ‘Okay, here’s what we do. We check every human body, try and find pulses. We need to gather all survivors for when the cavalry arrives, and we count heads. The last thing we need is folk wandering into the jungle if a boat turns up.’
‘Why do we all need to stick together, chief?’ Sebastian asked.
‘We don’t need to do anything,’ he said. ‘But there is safety in numbers.’
‘Tell that to six million Jews. Besides, we’ve checked the handful around us, there aren’t any more.’
‘They were on the plane, Sebastian, so they're here somewhere. Two hundred-plus people don’t just evaporate.’
‘This two hundred-plus people do.’
At the tree line, Teri had planted her behind on the sand and was toking on a cigarette. Like the Australian, they would have to abandon her and catch up with her later.
Already James could tell the day was going to be a firetrap, the rising sun beginning to get serious.
‘What do you suppose that is?’ Sebastian piped up finally.
In the adjacent bay a huge towering chimney of smoke funnelled into the sky.
‘Looks to me like a fire’s just gone out,’ Abbey suggested.
James agreed. ‘Looks to me like a good place to start.’
14
With the fires blown out and most of the charred debris cooling, it was easy to cross the beach. Single-file, Abbey led the group. Behind her was the girl who seemed to have taken a shine to her. She wondered why the young girl hadn’t requested they search for her family members. Instead she’d merely followed the pack as though in a trance.
Nearing the end of the inlet, a thin gulley of water streamed from the jungle and flowed into the sea. It wasn’t wide enough to give them any problems. Directly beyond the separating outcrop, the stack of smoke dispersed into the bluing sky.
‘Want me to go first?’ James called from the back of the line.
‘No, I got it.' Hauling herself up onto the first boulder, Abbey glanced down at the trio watching her from the sand. ‘Piece of cake,’ she grinned.
Her confidence grew as she bounded from one rock to another, Sebastian behind her, then the girl, and finally James. Her eyes lingered too long on James as he climbed, and she glanced away coyly.
One by one the others reached the top of the divide, their eyes settling on the source of the smoke. Buried in the white sand halfway along the next beach was the first hundred feet of the plane, part of one wing still attached. Its jet engine, still attempting to rotate, coughed out the pale grey smoke. The nose cone had ploughed into the sand and created a furrow right up to, and beyond, the tree line: an object and a location sharing no common ground. The remainder of the beach was largely untouched.
‘Wow,’ James muttered at last. ‘Does anybody else feel kind of…’
‘Yeah,’ Sebastian agreed.
‘But also kind of…’
‘Yeah.’
‘You know what it’s going to be like in there, right?’
Abbey began making her way down the rocks and across the sand. At the wreckage
