Dr. Franklin's Island Read Online Free Page A

pictures of the bobbing heads in the dark water, the jagged rocks, me and Miranda and Arnie swimming the other way from everyone else, that huge explosion. The faces of the teenagers in the departure lounge in Miami started running through my head. I remembered how I’d wandered around, envying the lucky ones in their chattering groups. . . . A few meters farther on we found a fleet of airline meals, still wrapped in their foil, sealed in plastic bags that had blown up like balloons. We hooked out as many as we could reach and left them stacked on the rock. Then we found a life jacket, with the straps torn. A
Planet Savers
baseball cap. Two floating shoes, but not a pair. Neither of them was anything like big enough for Arnie, so we threw them back. Another rucksack (which we salvaged, like the first). A seat cover. A plastic drinking glass. By this time even I could see the silvery shape of the wrecked plane, crumpled on the rocks like a broken toy. It was still a long way off.
    The lagoon, which had looked flat as a boating lake from the shore, was heaving with slow, foamless billows that kept hiding the wreck and the outer reef from view. Arnie started to make a joke about the Swiss Family Robinson, the castaways in a classic desert island story. They manage to rescue a whole department store of supplies from their wreck; we were doing pathetically badly in comparison—
    Then he stopped dead—he was in front—and said quietly, “Oh God.”
    There was a body bumping against our causeway. No life jacket. The jacket must have been ripped away by whatever had made the hideous jagged wound that almost cut the torso in two. It was Neil Cannon, the
Planet
Savers
TV presenter. His hair wasn’t spiky anymore, it drifted like seaweed. His healthy outdoors tan had turned pale and bloodless. He only had one leg.
    “I don’t think I’ll go swimming in this lagoon,” muttered Arnie.
    “Can we bury him?” I whispered. “Can we please, please get him out and bury him?”
    It seemed
awful
to leave him there.
    “Look!”
breathed Miranda.
    Farther out, the billows had lifted into view something I saw as a big, bobbing yellow blur. It was a life raft! We ran toward it, yelling.
    When we were level with it, we saw that the raft was floating upside down. We shouted, in the faint hope that there were people alive, trapped underneath; but got no answer. Then as we watched, it was heaved up by the waves; and lazily turned over. As it rolled, we saw the long wide gash in the bottom, before it slowly sank. “It wasn’t a shark that did that,” whispered Miranda.
    “No,” said Arnie. “It must have been the explosion. Remember, there was an explosion.”
    “I don’t think we’re going to reach the wreck,” said Miranda. “It’s too far.”
    We stood there, surrounded by the empty sea and the empty sky.
    “I think we’d better head back,” I said at last. “I’m sure the tide’s started to turn.”
    We returned to the beach in silence, collecting our salvaged goods on the way. I had to close my eyes while we were passing the body. The tide was coming in quickly. We were wading knee-deep before we reached the shore, which was very scary.
    As night fell, we sat under our rock ledge again, eating more coconut meat and sipping on thin, refreshing young coconut milk. None of us felt like tackling the airline food. In fact, none of us felt hungry. We ate because we knew we ought to. We talked about ways of getting out to the plane. We talked about needing a decent knife, and about making a signal fire. One of the things Miranda had moved from her bag into her pockets, on the plane, had been a box of matches wrapped in plastic; but they were lost. The pocket they had been in had been torn off in the water. We hoped there’d be something we could use to make a fire in one of the rucksacks. But we didn’t feel like looking now, and anyway, we had no light to see by. There’d been thirty-seven teenagers, ten
Planet