“What?” Gianna said, not believing what she had just heard.
“My father is dead.”
“Oh my God, I am so sorry” Gianna said sympathetically.
Eryan was more like: “Oh my God we are fucked now” though she kept her silence.
There was some more movement from the prisoners. Elaine James came over to the trio, setting her arms down and around Jewel in a motherly fashion.
“Honey, I am so sorry to hear that” she consoled.
Jewel just went on crying.
Elaine hugged her, giving her room to move.
Eryan was not quite buying the sympathy thing just yet. Family death or not, this girl’s family was holding all of them captive and not only ruined their vacation that most spent months saving for and looking forward to, but also ruined their current lives.
With Elaine moving over to the girls, Hunter, Elaine’s husband awoke and overheard. He moved over to where Alan was sleeping and nudged him.
“Have some info for you. I know why the past twenty four was like it was…” he baited quietly.
Rubbing the sleep, salt and probably the sand out of his eyes, Alan remarked wearily “Oh?”
“Yeah…you may want to clear the sleep out of your head for this one…”
Still rubbing what was now feeling like glass shards from his eyes; Alan perked up a little and replied “Oh? Why’s that?”
“Why’s that?” Hunter repeated.
“Yeah…why’s that?” Alan again questioned.
“Bones is dead.”
Alan woke up completely and sat up.
“What?” he said loudly.
“Ssshhh” Hunter said. “Calm down. His daughter is here.”
“Huh? His daughter is here?” said a disbelieving Alan.
“Yeah.”
“Why?”
“I have no idea. But she is crying all over Gianna and Eryan. Elaine is over there now, too.”
“Wonder what happened” Alan said.
“Al, he’s dead. He died.”
“No shit, man. I got that. But I wonder how it all went down…” Alan replied as he got up from bed and motioned to and then moseyed with Hunter out of the building. “This changes things a bit…”
“I would imagine so…” Hunter agreed.
“Just not sure how though.”
“Exactly. We could be outta here fast, or it could get uglier in a hurry.”
“Yeah…we just need to figure this out” concluded Alan.
“But this explains a lot about what happened yesterday with all of the silence and then all of the commotion earlier tonight” added Hunter. “I think maybe, just maybe, he took some wrong turns and after a day of silence, the wife freaked and hustled him to the mainland or something. I could swear I heard motors during that commotion.”
“You could be right…” nodded Alan. “Just wish we could get in touch with Caleb and Dylan. I wonder what the hell is going on with them…”
•••
As Dylan and Caleb rested below the twinkling heavens, they also were considering their options. But for the overnight, they had agreed on sitting still close enough to their newfound mine to know where it was and yet far enough away that they wouldn’t do anything stupid…like accidentally setting off one of the sensors.
They also heard a good part of the commotion coming from the village and answered some of their own questions about whether the pirates were truly a modern day group with expensive toys or a hobnobbing group of traditional wannabes.
Both of them not only got to hear the sounds of some modern day motors loud and quite clear, but also saw the two of the toys as what appeared as an emergency on a mission was taking place. They couldn’t make out the entire hullabaloo, but they instinctually knew that something took top priority in a hurry.
They saw Rusty, and heard her barking instructions. They also witnessed someone else that commanded everyone’s attention, someone that was smaller in physical stature than Bones, yet had a much more intimidating way about him, if one could believe that. Neither Caleb nor Dylan could figure out this guy’s relationship to all the other pirates, but both assumed that he was the number two or three guy in the hierarchy. This guy was a much sharper presence than Briggs, whom everyone had thought was Bones’ number two guy.
Caleb could swear that his name was Katmandu. Dylan wasn’t as sure. But Rusty had barked out his name a couple of times as the ruckus evolved with urgency.
In what they had witnessed, there were several pirates moving objects, one of which appeared to be a body. Rusty accompanied them and this Katmandu character led the emergency voyage. The vessel that was used was a high powered speed boat that was pretty large in size. It took all of about three minutes to board and get settled before they all sped off and disappeared.
After they became a small blinking speck on the horizon in the dark, the village was still abuzz. Again, neither Caleb nor Dylan could make anything out.
An undetermined amount of time had passed with Caleb and Dylan just chilling under God’s lanterns. Since there were no discernible time pieces on the island, no one really knew the theory of time passage. So consider that it was hours later and still during the darkest part of the overnight.
The boat returned.
It wasn’t the same boat that had left hours before.
No doubt there was something missing.
Caleb and Dylan watched curiously, noting the huge drain of aura that had enveloped the traveling team at the onset. Once again, they figured something was going on, and realized that whatever it was it did not turn out for the best, but couldn’t determine exactly what that was.
As they rested digesting what had happened, there were noises that broached their area of silence. Those noises weren’t the tropical breezes blowing lazily through the trees. Oh, no. They weren’t noises associated with a passing shower that hit those same trees creating a set of sounds that were different some hours earlier just after sundown. But they were noises that caught the attention of military trained Caleb.
He stood up at attention and scoped the darkened area. What little juice was left in the flashlights were shone around the area, but yielded no answers.
The noises stopped.
Then there were noises from behind the duo.
Both about snapped their necks in looking behind. But again, they saw nothing but jungle. Their ‘frightened meters’ skyrocketed with the sporadic noises of movements that were emanating from all around them. The ironic thing was that these types of noises were now echoing around them because the constant buzz from the village had died down. Lord only knows how long those creepy little sounds were clicking off. Caleb was handling them best with his former training of Special Forces. Dylan was quickly becoming a nervous wreck. After more than twenty four hours on this expedition at heightened awareness, he was beginning to crack.
The noises left and reappeared several more times in a fifteen minute span that took over two hours of their lives to live. The guys didn’t think it was an animal, and shrugged off an insect theory. Originally thought as a wandering pirate search team, even that theory was eventually shot down because the noises weren’t consistent enough to give credence to.
And then, as if this person just fell out of a tree, there the person was.
“Holy shit!” exclaimed Dylan.
Dylan jumped so high it looked as though he actually came out of his skin.
“My God, where the hell did you come from?” Caleb pronounced more calmly.
“EEEEEEEEEEEKK!”
At first, neither Dylan nor Caleb recognized the person next to them. It was a darkened diminutive silhouette. They assumed it was female since the physical stature appeared smaller than both of them.
It was.
She was just as shocked as the two men, letting out quite a scream when she almost literally walked into them.
“SSHHH” Caleb demanded as he tried to put his hand over her mouth.
The darkness kept him from success.
She recognized the voice of Caleb immediately.
“Caleb!”
“Yeah…who are you? Identify yourself…”
She answered instinctually without thinking.
“Caleb…it’s me…”
“Me? Me who?”
“Caleb…it’s me…Dyane” she reassured.
“Dyane? Dyane who?”
Her voice did not register with Caleb.
“Dyane Stowe.,..Jesus, Caleb” she deadpanned. “I’m missing for how long and this is the greeting I get?”
Dylan was busy trying to fit himself back into his skin.
“Dyane, where have you been? God, we thought you were dead days ago…”
“Well thanks, Caleb. But I can assure you that I am here standing next to you two and not a figment of your imagination. Where have I been? Got an hour for a story?”
“Realistically probably not” he said dryly in his usual tone and pace. “But I don’t think we’re moving anywhere anytime soon.”
“No? Why not? I have been moving all night” she quipped.
“Two reasons…one, we have no juice left in our flashlights. Two, we are standing about ten feet from a mine.”
“A mine?” she questioned.
“Yeah, a mine…” he repeated.
“No shit. Like a bomb kind of mine?” she asked in disbelief.
“Yeah, a real mine.”
“Boy this whole vacation just gets better by the minute…” she commented sarcastically.
“Trust me, you don’t know the half of it” said Caleb.
“The half of it?? I don’t know ANY of it!” she confessed openly. “I have no idea what’s going on, where I am and why I am here…”
“I can understand.”
“So, not to sound like a smart ass” she said in the dark “but can you possibly shed some light on what the hell is going on?”
“What do you know as of now?” asked Caleb.
“Assume nothing, because I have no idea about anything since we left Paradise Key.”
“Seriously?”
“Yeah…seriously.”
“Okay…better sit down…”
Dyane sat on the ground right where she was. She was totally uncomfortable and stood right back up.
The guys understood. In what little light was available, the threesome shared what was going on from each other’s perspective. Well, two of them did. Dyane instantly started crying. Dylan stayed conspicuously quiet. Caleb tried to keep her as calm as possible so she wouldn’t give away their position in the area. In doing so, he sheltered her from much of what happened.
That didn’t slow her tears. It just diverted her focus away from her husband, who was still clinging to some specs of life, to the twenty friends who were also involved in the takeover and kidnapping. She had no idea the real extent of what had happened.
Her thoughts became rapid fire spoken thoughts and questions from herself. Her breathing became rapid as well, and the intensity of her body language and her spoken thoughts made Caleb reach out and grab hold of her.
It surprised her.
But it snapped her non stop behavior patterns.
She then felt a strange wicked feeling come up from her lower bowels that took off through her body, shaking her spastically for a good five or six seconds. The look on her face could be barely made out, but it was evident to Caleb that through her woman’s intuition, she was needed somewhere else and in a hurry.
“Where’s the village?” she asked on a mission.
“The village? Shit, we don’t remember. We’ve been out her over a day…”
She changed her look from urgency to fire.
“Caleb, don’t fuck with me. Where’s the village?”
Caleb felt the heat.
“I think it’s that way, but…” he said, pointing behind Dylan.
She took off into the darkness suddenly, darting from the position she had standing next to Caleb and Dylan.
“But…that’s the village! We’re in the camp over in that direction” he half yelled in the empty air that once possessed her nearby, pointing in the opposite direction.
Of course she didn’t hear him. She was already gone. She had no light or anything to protect her, and that worried the two men. The jungle was pretty thick with no real paths carved into it.
But she took off like a jack rabbit. She really had no clues just how bad her husband’s condition was in the prisoner’s camp. Again, call it a woman’s intuition. Those feelings that she had emanated from lower than the pit of her stomach and shook her like a firm moist Arctic breeze caught her stark and raw right to the bone.
She raced.
It was in her mind that she had little time to see Jim again.
She hauled ass.
And through at least the beginning part of the journey for her, someone up above was watching…and watching closely. Any time that she was close to decapitating herself with a tree branch or tripping over a shrubbery and brush, those obstacles seemed to magically disappear.
Dyane left Caleb and Dylan standing there not knowing what to do. Do they leave the mine that they had found and follow her? What if the mine disappears? What if they all get lost? What if they get captured? What if…what if?
“Screw all the what ifs…” Dylan said. “Are we going after her in the dark or are we staying here until light?”
“Hate to let her leave like that, but she’s gone. We will never find her in the dark…” replied Caleb.
“Shit, we should have never let her go…”
“Dude, we didn’t let her go. She darted like a bat out of hell…totally possessed. She was gone before it registered in my mind” admitted Caleb.
“Great. Now what?” asked Dylan.
“I don’t know, man. I’d rather stay here and be safe. First, she could run into a mine and blow herself up. Two, she could run right into a tree and kill herself. Three, she could run right into pirates. You don’t think they’d like that, do you?”
“I see what you mean” Dylan said shaking his head. “I can’t believe she just took off.”
“Yeah, me too…and in the wrong direction.”
The two of them settled down again, close to the mine they found and under the heavenly stars. They did wait until dawn to make a move.
Meanwhile, with her sense of urgency beating harder and stronger with each passing minute, Dyane continued to bolt through the jungle. Her luck began to run out as she drew nearer the village.
She was felled by a hidden piece of tree sticking out. It wasn’t really a branch, but a thick trunk of growth with dozens of branches expanding its shape.
WHUMP!
Down she went seeing more stars than the ones that were lighting her way through the darkness. Of course, the direct hit caught her by surprise.
But being the trooper on a mission, she scrambled up to her feet and ambitiously shook out some of the venom from that sting. Her head hurt, but her insides were hurting much more with each second going by without Jim by her side.
Three steps after gaining her feet, she tripped over a hard thick root.
“Damn…did that hurt!” she snapped at herself.
That trip down to earth ripped both of her knees open when they hit flush against the staunchly, petrified soil.
She regained her feet, with both knees bleeding warmly down her legs. She continued to scamper as best as she could and within a short time she came across some signs of life and the pirate village.
There were only a couple of pirates standing guard at the village, but there still was some buzz in the heavy overnight air that made dark its darkest just prior to dawn.
Dyane slowed her pace to a caution. She was hurting physically from the run and falls, but the desires mentally of her husband kept her in motion.
“Gotta find him” she kept saying to herself over and over.
“Gotta find him…”
“Gotta find him…”
She stayed along the outside boundaries of the pirate town. She couldn’t tell if she was in the right place or not, or even if she was any closer to her ailing husband.
While slowly scoping out the area and investigating the sights and sounds that she came across, she witnessed a couple of people returning on a motorized speedboat. The aura that surrounded them was somber, yet volatile. Within a few seconds of the docking there were yells and screams from the pirate Rusty could be heard calling Katmandu.
Those screams were not screams of joy by any means.
Katmandu wanted revenge for the death of his brother, Blackeye Bones, the Captain of this Pirate population. While Dyane couldn’t make out all of the thoughts that were being screamed, she could tell that it was one of her group’s personnel that dealt Bones his dying blow.
That whole incident frightened her to no end. Someone was going to pay for the Captain’s passing and she found herself saying numerous prayers that he wasn’t screaming about Jim.
That fed her desires to get to him even stronger. So she kept moving. She wasn’t sure the direction of where Jim was, but she held tight to the line of direction she was on to begin with.
She bought herself a little time as Rusty had persuaded and escorted Katmandu into her house. From there the voices could still be heard, echoing over the breezes coming off of the Caribbean Sea that rustled countless trees. She couldn’t make out anything that they were saying, but she wasn’t going to hang around and attempt to decipher their words when they became clearer. She wanted Jim, so she kept moving…and moving…and moving…