Wild Fiction

James appeared on deck with the boat’s portable VHF radio and a plastic tube stuffed with paper charts. Conrad had the masks and fins in a bag and Rebecca returned empty handed.
‘You found nothing of value to save?’ Conrad asked her his eyebrows raised.
‘My cabin is already knee deep in water and I wanted to take everything.’
‘Right, take these then,’ he said passing her a bag of snorkelling gear. He pulled the life sling off the back of the boat and untying it threw it in the water. ‘Okay get into the water and swim away from the boat. I don’t want anybody to be near it when it finally sinks. Let’s go.’
Only the top step on the transom was still above the water. Rebecca jumped in first, followed by the other two. She positioned herself in the life sling, opened the bag, and distributed the fins. Kicking on their backs, they made their way to a small and narrow stretch of sandy beach and watched despondently as their boat disappeared below the water. When it finally stopped sinking the top one third of the mast was still protruding above the water.
‘Looks like it was third time unlucky,’ James said. ‘At least things can’t get worse now.’
‘Don’t say that,’ Conrad said. ‘We’re stuck on a deserted island with no means of getting off, no clothes and no food.’
‘We have the radio, let’s use it to call for help.’ James turned the knob on the top of the radio and with a hiss the radio came on. He turned the squelch until the hissing stopped and the channel until the display read sixteen.
‘Wait,’ Conrad said. ‘If those blokes hear us calling for help they might come back and finish us off. I’m not so sure if they intend for us to survive.’
James looked up. ‘I suppose we’d better wait. Let’s just leave it tuned into sixteen and, if we hear any traffic, we can then talk to them - assuming of course it doesn’t sound like that cockney bastard.’
They watched the bubbles coming up around the mast and popping open as if from an underground volcano. The birds, which had been scared into silence by the machine gun fire, now started their twittering and squawking again.
‘Something’s burning,’ Rebecca said sniffing in the air.
‘I can’t smell anything,’ Conrad said.
‘No, she’s right, I can smell it too. It’s like rubber or plastic. A noxious smell,’ James said standing up and looking around.