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Stranded: A Novel

By Don Prichard, Stephanie Prichard

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Prologue

The heavens faded from black to dusky blue, arching like an inverted bowl over the inky waters below. Sprawled across a fragment of boat, Jake Chalmers scanned the horizon. Darkness cloaked the expanse to the west, but in the east the circle of the earth etched a line of gold between ocean and sky. Pushing himself chest high, arms shaking, he studied the line for movement. Nothing. Nothing but the rising sun.
He rolled to his back and threw an arm over his eyes. Seawater dripped off his sleeve, stinging the cracks in his lips. He winced and pressed them together. A scum of brine coated the inside of his mouth, numbing his tongue and the back of his throat. Swallowing to generate saliva blazed a trail of salt down his esophagus. His stomach heaved, but there was nothing to expel, not even bile.
So thirsty. The craving ground like fine sandpaper against every cell in his body. Forty-two years old and he’d never experienced misery like this, not even in Nam. He raised his arm and flexed his fingers, blinked until the crinkled skin on the back of his hand came into focus. Were the wrinkles a symptom of dehydration? Or the result of floating five nights in the ocean?
He shifted back onto his stomach and hooked his left arm over the edge of the fragment to keep his balance. The flat-bottomed vessel, split in half lengthwise by the explosion and flipped into an upside-down V, barely accommodated the stretch of his six-foot-two frame. The submerged air compartments that had doubled as tourist passenger seats kept the damaged craft afloat, but the V tipped precariously with each swash of a wave.
He’d count, clear the haze from his mind. Count the days since he’d boarded the cruise ship. The days alone on the ocean after the explosion. The hours, the minutes, every second of the rest of his life he’d spend hunting down Captain Emilio.
He sat up, catapulted by the heat of rage. The boat fragment jerked, and he fell on his back and slid, grasping with outflung arms at the wet surface. The ocean swallowed his feet, his chest. The bucking craft smacked his head as he slipped off. Blood filled his mouth, stinging his tongue where his teeth slashed it. He caught the edge of the vessel, pulled up, and spat. Crimson dots spattered the craft’s white paint.
Ginny. The ache for her pressed against his chest. Where was she? Floating like him in the ocean? Or had she slipped under the waves to a briny grave? He closed his eyes. Tired. So tired. Wanting to save her. Failing. His throat tightened.
He repositioned his grip and willed himself not to let go. Willed himself to fill his lungs and release the air in a slow exhale. Willed himself to crawl back onto the broken sea vessel. He lay on his stomach and stretched his limbs into a sprawl.
God and man may have abandoned him, but he wouldn’t yield body and soul easily. The ocean would have to wait.
He dozed in snatches until the change came. Awareness of it crawled into his dreams and elbowed him awake. He opened his eyes. Rain? He raised his head, body trembling, to scan the heavens. Empty. Only the sun glaring from its own ocean of blue sky.
No, beneath him. Motion, tugging him—a surge forward, then a stop. Surge forward, stop. He shook his head, lifted himself off his stomach. At the next swell he glimpsed the horizon. A green smear creased its edge.
Land.
LAND!
His heart slammed into high gear, and he struggled to his knees. The water dipped and the land disappeared. The boat fragment slid forward. Stopped. Rose on the slow elevator of another swell. He held his breath.
An island slipped onto the horizon. High on one end, sloping to sea level at the other.
He sucked in air and hurled it out in a cry that reverberated across the waves.
As if startled, the boat fragment jumped, and he fell on his stomach. He grabbed the vessel’s edge. It rotated in a half circle and lurched forward on a new path. A path headed back to sea.
An ocean current—it must have caught the longer part of the fragment submerged in the water. He studied the distance to the island. The current might veer back and sidle up to the island, or, just as likely, it might tow his broken sea vessel farther away.
Didn’t matter. He didn’t need the boat. Just the island.
He slipped into the water and set his strokes on autopilot.

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