Chapter 15: Peter's Fever
1501 Words
By mid-morning, Peter was burning.
Heat rolled from him in waves. His skin shone wet in the shade, and his lips moved around words that made no sense. Sometimes he called for his mother. Sometimes he begged someone not to open a door. Once, he gripped Maya's wrist so hard her knuckles whitened, then released her as if ashamed in his sleep.
Maya sat beside him.
She had tied her red hair back with a strip torn from her ruined overshirt, but loose strands clung to her cheeks. Her eyes were gritty with lack of sleep. There was blood on one knee, sand on both arms and the fierce stillness of a woman refusing to let exhaustion take the only thing she could still control.
Idris brought her cooled boiled water in the dented flask.
"Drink," he said.
"Peter first."
"Peter had some. Drink."
She looked up at him. "That sounded dangerously close to an order."
"It was a medical recommendation from an unqualified man."
"Worse."
But she drank.
Only a small mouthful. Still, she drank.
The camp had settled into tasks because Idris gave them no room to do otherwise. Rosa kept the supply list beneath the palm, the pages pinned with stones. Owen sorted torn fabric into piles with his good hand. Clara watched Lily and tore cloth into strips. Tom kept the fire fed and tried to dry more wood in the sun. Gareth hovered at the edge of every task, helping just enough not to be accused of doing nothing and commenting often enough to remind people he was there.
The dead remained the hardest question.
They could not carry them far without tools. The sand near the upper beach was dry and loose, terrible for digging. The jungle soil might be better, but the jungle held teeth.
"We burn them," Gareth said after the third time flies lifted from the covered bodies.
Clara looked horrified. "No."
"Then bury them with what? Our fingernails?"
"We do not speak of them like rubbish," Clara said.
Gareth's face tightened. "I am speaking of keeping the living alive."
Idris stepped between them before grief became something sharper.
"We move them farther from the camp after we strengthen the fire. We use driftwood to mark the place. Tonight we keep flame between them and the trees. When we have tools, we bury them properly."
"When we have tools," Gareth repeated. "When we have medicine. When we have rescue. You build lovely castles out of later."
"Later is all we have if we do not ruin now."
Gareth stared at him, then turned away.
Maya called Idris back before the argument could grow.
"His pulse is fast," she said quietly. "Too fast. He needs fluids, and I need to check the wound again."
Idris crouched. "Tell me."
She peeled back the outer cloth.
The smell reached him first.
Metallic blood. Wet fabric. Beneath it, something sour beginning.
Maya's jaw tightened.
"Infection?" Idris asked.
"Too soon to know. But the wound is filthy. Seawater, sand, metal, cloth that was not sterile. Everything we have done has bought him time, not safety."
Peter groaned, eyes rolling beneath his lids.
"Can we clean it properly?"
"Properly? No. Better? Maybe. I need boiled water cooled, the last wipes, cleanest cloth and someone to hold him when he wakes up screaming."
Idris nodded.
"Not Gareth," she added.
Despite everything, he almost smiled. "I was not going to suggest him."
Tom helped.
The red-haired man had been quiet since the jungle. He did not talk bravery into being. He simply crouched where Maya told him, put both hands on Peter's shoulders and went pale but steady.
Idris held Peter's leg above the wound.
Maya loosened the binding.
Peter woke halfway through the cleaning.
His scream tore across the beach.
Lily began crying. Clara turned her face away but did not run. Owen dropped a strip of cloth and stared. Rosa whispered, "Oh no, oh no," until Gareth snapped at her to stop.
Maya kept working.
"Peter, listen to me," she said, voice sharp enough to cut through his pain. "You are on the beach. Your leg is hurt. I am cleaning it. You can hate me later. Right now you breathe."
Peter thrashed.
Tom held.
Idris pressed down harder and hated himself for it.
"Please," Peter gasped. "Please, stop."
Maya's eyes glistened, but her hands did not slow.
"I cannot."
Those three words changed something in Idris.
He had thought strength was doing what fear told you not to do. Maya showed him another kind. Doing what kindness hated because mercy sometimes had blood under its fingernails.
When it was over, Peter collapsed into a shaking half-sleep. The wound looked cleaner, which was not the same as clean. Maya wrapped it again and sat back, breathing hard.
Tom stood and walked three steps away before bending over with his hands on his knees.
"I am fine," he said immediately.
"No one asked," Owen said.
"Good."
The small exchange loosened the camp by a fraction.
Maya wiped her forehead with the back of her wrist. "He needs antibiotics."
"We do not have any."
"I know. I said needs, not has."
Idris looked at the wreckage line, the jungle and the endless indifferent sea.
Somewhere, perhaps, more luggage had washed ashore. Some medicine. A travel kit. Painkillers. Anything.
"We search the beach properly," he said. "One group stays with the fire. One gathers wreckage along the high line. No one goes near the reef yet."
Gareth turned. "The reef might have trapped supplies."
"It might also trap feet, cut legs and pull people under when waves break."
"Everything might do something terrible according to you."
"Yes," Maya said. "That is why he is useful."
Gareth looked at her. His mouth closed.
They searched.
The sun climbed, ruthless and white. Idris walked the high tide line with Tom and Rosa. They found wet shoes that fitted no one, a child's plastic hair clip, foil wrappers, a cracked cosmetic case, another dead phone and half a packet of biscuits sealed inside plastic but crushed to powder.
Rosa held them up like treasure.
"Food," she said.
"Food," Idris agreed.
They divided the biscuit dust later by pinches. It turned to paste on the tongue and made thirst worse, but people closed their eyes as they swallowed it.
Near a cluster of rocks, Tom found a small washbag wedged under driftwood.
Inside were a toothbrush, shaving razor, painkillers in a blister pack and three sachets of rehydration salts.
For a moment, nobody spoke.
Then Rosa laughed.
Not because it was funny.
Because it was something.
Maya's face changed when Idris brought them back. She took the rehydration salts as if they were jewels.
"These are for Peter," she said.
Gareth opened his mouth.
She looked at him.
He closed it again.
By afternoon, Peter had taken a little salted water. His fever did not break. His breathing remained shallow. But he swallowed.
On that island, swallowing counted as victory.
As the sun lowered, Idris caught Maya staring at him.
"What?"
"You look ordinary," she said.
The comment caught him so off guard he almost laughed. "Thank you?"
"I mean it. Average man. Short hair. Not built like some rescue hero. And yet everyone keeps waiting to see what you will do."
"That sounds like a complaint."
"It is an observation."
"And?"
Her gaze moved to Peter, then to the fire, then to Gareth standing apart with arms folded.
"Do not make them think you can save everyone."
The warning landed softly.
It still hurt.
"I do not think I can."
"Good," she said. "Remember that before they forget."
Night approached again.
The rehydration salts helped Peter enough to make Maya hope and frightened her enough to punish that hope immediately. Idris saw the argument pass across her face. She wanted improvement to mean promise. She knew better.
He did not speak. He only sat beside her for a few minutes while Peter slept, close enough that she was not alone, far enough that she did not have to thank him.
From the jungle came no growl this time.
Only silence.
Somehow, that was worse.
The others pretended not to listen when Peter spoke, but Idris saw how their faces changed. A father waiting for surgery made Peter more than a wound taking water. It made every ration given to him heavier, harder to resent openly and easier to resent in silence. That was another kind of danger, quieter than Gareth and more patient.
Maya gave the painkillers to Peter in careful halves, spacing them with the seriousness of a woman guarding a kingdom. Idris saw her count the remaining tablets three times. Each count made her face harder. Scarcity did not only empty hands. It changed the shape of mercy.
When Idris carried the empty sachet wrappers to Rosa, she flattened them and stored them inside the ledger. Proof, she said, of what had been used. Proof also of what they no longer had.
- Writer
