“I don’t know what I would have done without him,” I heard Raine say quietly. I could feel her looking at me, but I didn’t turn towards her.
“He is a useful bastard, isn’t he?” John Paul said.
“Fuck you,” I repeated.
He just laughed and turned back around, looking out the front of the helicopter as we slowly lifted off the sand. As we lifted off the ground, I felt as if my chest were being torn into two pieces. Everything I ever wanted had been there, and now we were slowly moving away from it. I’d never have that again.
“Rescue One to base,” Nick said into the radio transmitter. A scratching voice acknowledged him. “Castaways are on board! ETA, ten forty-five.”
I watched paradise grow smaller and smaller as we headed west over the island. Everything was happening so fast. Thirty minutes ago, Raine was under me, screaming my name, and I was on top of the fucking world. All of a sudden, I felt like the world had been whisked out from under me, and except when she glanced warily over at me, Raine looked almost as happy as I had ever seen her.
“So where are we anyway?” I asked over the noise of the engine.
“About fifty miles east of Bonaire,” Nick said.
“That’s it?” I asked, a little surprised we hadn’t seen more boat traffic if we were that close.
“Where is that?” Raine asked quietly.
“Netherlands Antilles,” I told her. “Just north of Venezuela. I can’t believe no one else found us before now when we’re this close to that kind of population.”
“Yeah, but no one comes out in this direction by boat because of the reefs,” Nick said. He pointed out towards the water as we flew over the darkened shape below. The reef was huge and pretty much encompassed our small island. No wonder we hadn’t seen any other boats. “They’re up at the top of the water and can rip ships wide open. Some smaller boats can get through, and sometimes tourists go diving in the area, but it’s the off-season.”
“How did you know where to look for us?” I asked.
“We’ve been most everywhere,” John Paul said. “Given the currents, you just about had to have drifted south. We’ve been all over, from Aruba to Trinidad and Tobago.”
“I can’t believe you didn’t give up,” Raine chirped. “How long were we missing?”
“Sixty-eight days,” John Paul told her. “We stopped getting any help after thirty. They said you must have drowned or died of dehydration by then, but I told them you wouldn’t die that way.”
I snorted.
“You’re both on a list to be declared legally dead next month,” Nick told us.
“I didn’t really know if she would be with you,” John Paul smiled at Raine a little sheepishly. “We hoped so since we didn’t find a body, but we didn’t know.”
“Bastian saved my life.” Raine beamed at me.
“That’s a switch,” I heard John Paul say under his breath. When I glared up at him, he winked at me. I had no idea what this Nick knew, but I didn’t need John Paul running his mouth like that. It would have taken too much effort to un-strap myself from the harness just to move up front and smack him, so I ignored his stupid-ass comment instead.
“He saved me more than once,” Raine continued. “He caught fish, and collected rain water, and told me how much we could drink every day. We ate raw pelican, which was awful, but we only ate it because it had rained and we had water again.”
“What’s the plan?” I asked John Paul before Raine could recount all the shit that didn’t matter now. He nodded his head to Nick.
“I’ll fly us back to Bonaire,” Nick said. “From there, we get a small plane to take us to Maiquetía – the airport in Caracas. We’ve been staying in a house I have rented while we’ve been looking for you – it’s close to the airport. We can stay there tonight and then get the next flight booked back to the States. There are some places to get you guys some supplies, too – clothes, shoes, whatever you need. You can get cleaned up and go back home tomorrow.”
Home. Yeah, where the fuck was that now?
No one spoke much for the rest of the ride. We would have had to yell at each other over the noise anyway, so there wasn’t any point in talking. Raine kept looking over at me and trying to get my attention, but I ignored her. Part of me felt angry, and I could understand that part, but there was another part – one that went much deeper – and I didn’t know what it was trying to tell me. My gut was tight, and I was having a hard time taking deep breaths. I couldn’t look at either Nick or John Paul without wanting to punch the shit out of them, but when I stole a glance at Raine…well, that shit made my stomach cramp up more. I was losing everything. I was losing her.
Deep, deep inside of me, I wanted to fucking kill John Paul and Nick – and not in the figurative sense. I wished John Paul hadn’t made it when The Oblation sank. I wished Nick had given up like the rest of the would-be rescuers. I wished they had run into a freak crosswind and crashed the fucking helicopter rather than having found us. I knew how evil and callous that was even as a thought, but I couldn’t help it. John Paul was probably the only person in the world I could consider a friend, and I would happily wish him dead if it would take me back to an hour ago and just fucking leave me there for eternity. The farther away we were from my paradise, the more I wanted to curl up with a bottle and fucking forget everything.
Raine watched out the window as the island disappeared behind us, and the larger islands of the Netherlands Antilles appeared in front of us. It wasn’t too long of a flight, and soon we were landing at Flamingo Airport.
It was all going to be different now. I knew it would be.
* * * * *