Cave-in Read online

  CONTENTS

  TITLE PAGE

  PART ONE: TREMORS

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  PART TWO: A TONGUE OF STONE

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  PART THREE: MAROONED

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  PART FOUR: SEAWEED

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14

  PREVIEW

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  COPYRIGHT

  SURVIVAL TIP #1

  * * *

  If you are inside a building when an earthquake occurs, stay inside. Move to the center of the room or take a position underneath the frame of a doorway. Do not run outside. If you are outside, remain where you are. If you are driving a car, stop the car and stay inside the vehicle until the tremors cease. When the shaking stops, assess your status. Check to make sure electric fixtures have not loosened or become dangerous from the shaking. Remember that trees and walls, even entire buildings, might be damaged by tremors. Use extreme caution when moving about after an earthquake.

  Lobsterman Bertie Smith put the nose of the Laurie Hall on the rise of land at the center of Hog Island Ledge, Casco Bay, Maine, and set a course straight for her. Nothing to it. A bit of wind had come up from the east, turning the water milky, but it was an easy run to the island. He had done it before, plenty of times, in fact, but never with such a crew as the one he had on board today. When he looked back from the wheel, pretending to check behind him, he saw six kids stretched out, half of them already green around the gills with seasickness.

  “Water is a little choppy,” the teacher-boy said from his position beside the wheel.

  “Guess so.”

  “We’re supposed to have pretty good weather. That was the last report.”

  “It’s November,” Bertie said, stating the obvious. “Be cold out on that island.”

  “We’re prepared for it,” said the teacher with confidence.

  “That so?”

  The trip was a stupid idea, as anyone on Earth would know except the teacher-boy, Bertie reflected. You did not camp on Hog Island at the tail end of November if you had half an ounce of intelligence to begin with. It was just a long weekend, true, but pretty soon the bay would be thick as chowder and you could get a wind running over your back out there that you wouldn’t soon forget. No, sir. The island sat exposed to every wind and curl of water. Seals used it more than people did. It held a working fort sometime around the Civil War, but that day had long since passed. That fort had been ancient when Bertie was a boy.

  “Hey,” the teacher-boy shouted back to the students, his voice hardly making it above the diesel chunk of the engine. “You all ready? You ready to camp? We’re going to see some amazing birds. Puffins!”

  The kids, some of them anyway, nodded. One made a little whoo-hooooo sound, but Bertie knew the kid was being a brat. Mostly they watched one of the boys fly a jury-rigged kite behind the boat. The boy had folded a piece of paper into a plane and put a string through its nose. Now it fluttered behind the boat, rising and falling on the air currents.

  “Is that it?” the teacher-girl asked, coming into the cuddy and pointing toward the island. “Is that the island?”

  Bertie nodded. The girl was a student teacher, he knew, working at the school beside the teacher-boy. He had talked to them both to arrange the transport. They made quite a pair, Bertie thought. At least the teacher-girl had the good sense to wear a wool hat for the crossing. The teacher-boy didn’t even have that much sense.

  “Do many boats come out this way?” the teacher-girl asked.

  “In the summer, some do,” Bertie said. “Not many this time of year. You’ve got the ferry line out to Peaks Island.”

  “How about tankers and such?” the teacher-boy asked.

  “They’d be farther out to sea. And the fishing trade shuts down this time of year, ’cepting for the lobster boys, and they stick closer to shore. Oh, you’ll have the island to yourselves, you can count on that.”

  The teacher-girl smiled at receiving that information. The teacher-boy looked out the front windshield and went up on his toes to see the island over the curve of the sea. The island looked like an eyebrow, Bertie reflected, always had, always would.

  Sam Harding watched the paper airplane flutter behind the boat. It was pretty cool. It rode the air currents and floated up and down, jerking and soaring in rhythms you couldn’t predict. His mom was big on kite making. She had even opened a small business for a while out of their basement, designing homemade kites and huge origami swans, and just about anything else that could be made from paper. She named the business Folds, which was not a good name for a business, because pretty soon it did fold, and people couldn’t resist making jokes about it.

  “Hey, Sam, why don’t you tie this on the plane?” Harry Cameron asked.

  Sam looked down at Harry. Harry had his fingers held in a circle below his knee. Sam had made the mistake of looking, and he watched Harry give a satisfied smile and begin climbing toward him over the luggage. By looking at the finger circle, Sam had given Harry the right to punch him in the shoulder. It was the oldest game going, and it had circulated around their school like a virus the last few weeks.

  Sam closed his eyes and leaned forward to accept his punishment.

  Harry punched him hard on the shoulder, but not ridiculously hard, as some people did. After the punch Sam felt a dull ache begin in his deltoid, the muscle that covered his shoulder.

  “This is sick,” Harry said, pushing down onto the deck of the boat beside Sam. “It’s going to be cold as anything out there.”

  Harry’s breath smelled like peanut butter, Sam realized. Harry’s breath usually smelled like peanut butter.

  “You seasick at all?” Sam asked, mostly because he felt a little seasick and wouldn’t have minded hearing someone else say he felt funny.

  “Naw, I’m okay.”

  “Sandy looks like she’s going to yak,” Sam said, pushing his chin a little at Sandy Bellow, the most annoying girl in the world.

  “Sandy’s not exactly outdoorsy.”

  “I don’t even know why she’s on this trip.”

  “Neither does she, I bet.”

  Sam pulled the line tighter on the paper airplane. It looked pretty cool the way it navigated the air currents. Harry stood up quickly and looked in the direction the boat was heading. Then he sat back down. Sam kept his eyes on the airplane.

  “We’re getting there,” Harry said. “Shouldn’t be long now.”

  “Five days on an island.”

  “It’ll be cool.”

  “You think so? I guess,” Sam said.

  Sam let out the last of his string. The plane went higher, but it also swooped lower, threatening to dive into the backwash behind the boat. He looked around at the other kids. Bob Worm watched the plane, but Sandy sat with her hoodie up over her head, her hands stuffed in the front pouch pocket; Mary and Azzy played some sort of card game down low, but the cards blew around and scattered whenever the wind could pry them up. The two teachers, Mr. O’Connell and Ms. Carpenter, stood up by the captain of the boat. The wind sometimes brought their voices over the sound of the engine.

  The boat quartered a little and the wind changed. Sam’s plane dipped down and the string ran against Sandy’s head. In one quick motion she reached up and knocked the string away and the plane snapped free. It sputtered for a moment, almost surprised, Sam thought, to find itself no longer attached to the string, then it rose up and backward for an instant before finally plunging into the sea.

  “Way to go, Sand
y,” Harry said.

  “Keep it out of my face,” she said, not looking up.

  Then the engine sound softened and Sam heard the gulls begin calling like crazy.

  Eamon O’Connell, seventh-grade advisor and social-science teacher, went to the stern of the boat and tried to gauge the rock of the sea. It was choppy, that was for sure. Choppier than he had anticipated. When Bertie had said he would have to off-load on the lee side, wherever that happened to be, Eamon had simply taken it for granted that there would be a lee side. A calm side. But now, with the wind up and the sea churning, Eamon saw he had underestimated the very first element of the camping trip.

  “Looks like we’re going to get wet,” Ursula, his student teacher, observed. “What’s your plan?”

  He wanted to say, Plan? What plan?

  But he knew that wouldn’t inspire confidence.

  “You need to make a move,” Bertie said, shouting over the engine noises. “I can’t hold her here for long.”

  “It’s not deep,” Eamon said, reassuring himself as much as anything else.

  “It’s cold, though,” Ursula said. “They’ll be cold by the time we make it to land if they have to wade in.”

  “Not sure what else we can do. I thought we could land on the beach, but Bertie says no,” Eamon said. “I’ll go first.”

  It wasn’t a good plan. Eamon saw that right away. But he was in charge, it was his program to run, so he slipped out of his backpack and got ready to climb over the edge. Once he was over the edge and secured his footing, then he could help the others. At the same time he worried that the boat, bobbing and chucking on the sea, could back up and smash him against the rocks. He wondered what he had been thinking, taking six students to a deserted island on Thanksgiving weekend.

  He felt the students gathered at the stern to watch him. Sam and Harry stood side by side, and the girls, Azzy, Mary, and Sandy, huddled together against the wind. Bob Worm stood at the rear of the grouping, taller and wider than any of the others.

  Eamon decided to put a bold face on a bad situation.

  “Okay, I’m hopping in,” he said. “It’s only about knee deep. We can make a chain and hand the bags up. Ursula, if you don’t mind, you can be the last one off. You can make sure everyone gets off okay.”

  “Get a move on!” Bertie shouted.

  Eamon slid over the stern, dangled for a second on the gunwale, then pushed back and dropped onto his feet. The cold took his breath away. The water lapped against him and nearly knocked him off his pins, but then he braced himself for balance and smiled up at the students.

  “Nothing to it,” he said. “Who’s next?”

  Bob Worm knew what they would ask even before they asked it.

  People always asked. Just because he was big, sort of gigantic, really, for his grade, people always expected more from him. No, he reflected, that wasn’t true. They expected more from him physically, absolutely, but they thought of him, by and large, as a big, solid dullard.

  People held a prejudice against big kids and didn’t even know it.

  Right now, for instance, he stood in the water, freezing his tail off, while kids handed out their bags to him. Then he turned and handed the bags to Mr. O’Connell, who in turn handed the bags to Azzy, who in turn handed them to a revolving parade of people on the rocky shoreline. No one else had to stand in the water, no student anyway, unless you counted Azzy, who only stood in water up to her ankles. The big jobs, the big lifts, always fell on his shoulders, and Bob Worm hated it.

  “Make sure you get everything,” Mr. O’Connell called up to the boat.

  Then he turned to the shoreline and yelled at the class.

  “People, people, make sure your bag has been off-loaded. Make sure you have your gear. Check carefully. We don’t want to leave anything behind.”

  Bob Worm knew the kids wouldn’t check. That’s just the way it went.

  “Almost there,” Ms. Carpenter, the student teacher, said from the boat. “You okay, Bob?”

  “Getting cold,” Bob Worm said.

  “Hold on just a little longer.”

  She looked around the deck of the boat. Then she handed out a small camera bag. Bob Worm passed it back toward shore.

  “Check your bags!” Ms. Carpenter yelled at the kids on the shoreline. “Make sure you have everything!”

  Bob Worm watched a couple kids glance at the pile of backpacks and junk piled on the shoreline. They didn’t do anything close to a thorough search.

  “Okay, thanks, Mr. Smith,” Ms. Carpenter yelled to the lobster guy. “That’s it.”

  “See you Tuesday,” Bertie Smith said. “Right around noon. If the weather turns ugly, it may be earlier or later. Be ready.”

  “Okay.”

  Ms. Carpenter climbed over the tail of the boat. The stern, Bob Worm reminded himself. Bow, stern, port, starboard.

  She plunked into the water up to her waist and let out a little yelp. Bob Worm held out his hand, and she grabbed it and clambered toward shore. He followed her. The lobster boat pulled out of the cove bit by bit. Bob Worm tasted the diesel exhaust on his tongue as he climbed onto Hog Island.

  You didn’t think the wind could blow as hard as it did, Harry Cameron thought, but then it did anyway. And it didn’t stop. He felt the wind shoving at him, curling over the island top and shoving at him, as if it had decided it didn’t want them to camp there.

  “Whoaaaaa,” he said to no one in particular at one huge gust.

  He watched Ms. Carpenter clump onto the island. Then Bob Worm. Mr. O’Connell had already climbed up the hill toward the center of the island to scout. That’s what he said. He was heading off scouting. That left everyone else standing in a circle around their bags, all of them facing away from the wind.

  “Whoooaaaaaaaa,” Harry said again as the wind hit his back.

  “I’m freeezinnnnngggggggggg,” Sandy Bellow said, her hat tucked down over her head and her hoodie up over her hat.

  “We’ll get out of the wind in a minute,” Ms. Carpenter said in a teacher voice. “Just hold on. Let’s all work together.”

  Harry flipped the hood of his hoodie up over his head.

  He was freezing, too.

  His pant legs were wet, for one thing. For another thing, the wind came across the island like a snarling wildebeest. If you cocked your head one way or the other, all you could hear was a high, desperate keening sound.

  And birds.

  Millions and millions of birds.

  Well, okay, maybe not millions of birds, but certainly thousands. Mostly gulls. They glided back and forth above them, banking on the wind, calling, shouting, making all sorts of weird, haunted noises that sounded, in certain registers, like babies crying. It gave the whole scene a strange, haunted feeling.

  He put his hand in his pocket and felt the harmonica resting there. He wanted to play it, but he thought it might look pretty corny to pull it out and start playing it right away. Still, he wondered what the gulls would think of harmonica music coming at them over the wind. He thought it might sound pretty cool.

  He didn’t have long to think, though, because Mr. O’Connell came charging down the hillside at that moment and yelled for everyone to come closer. Harry walked over toward the pile of bags, but found the bottoms of his pants had frozen into two tubes of ice. He punched his hand on his pant legs and shattered the ice.

  “The old fort is right up there,” Mr. O’Connell said, pointing up the hill. “We can find a place to be out of the wind. We can set up next to the fort wall. If we all work together, we can have a camp set up in an hour maybe.”

  “I’m freeezzzzzzing,” Sandy said.

  “I know, I know, sorry,” Mr. O’Connell said. “It wasn’t the ideal way to get off the boat, but we had to do what we did. Hope you all understand. Remember, no exploring the fort until everything is set up. Is that clear?”

  Yes, that is clear, Harry thought.

  “Okay, grab your own bag and as much of the other stuf
f as you can. We’re almost there. Everyone pitch in. Aren’t these birds amazing?”

  Harry looked around the circle of students. What they thought was amazing, he knew, was that they were standing on an island off the coast of Maine on the day after Thanksgiving with the wind howling like an Irish demon and the birds calling for their blood.

  Azzy, Mary, Sam, Harry, Sandy, Bob. Check. Ursula Carpenter, student teacher, mentally checked off the student roll, then dumped her backpack beside the wall of Fort Gorges and lifted her fleece away from her belly. She had not wanted to sweat given the force of the wind and the chill from the water, but the climb up the hill had been a pain. The kids had whined and wheedled and tried to get out of carrying anything, and she had taken up the slack by making three trips.

  Gung-Ho Gussie. That’s what her dad called her. That’s how he teased her.

  She was always a little too ready to jump into the fray. As a result, she had grabbed more than her share, way more than her share, and had lugged things up the incline to the foot of the fort. Now she dumped her backpack and other junk and looked around.

  It was good to be out of the wind. The wind could make you a little crazy, she thought, a little testy. Eamon didn’t seem to mind, though. He jumped around and kept everyone’s spirits up, laughing and joking and trying to get people to see the fun of the situation. The kids looked leery and doubtful, as if they couldn’t quite believe what they had gotten involved in. They hadn’t really approached their usual level of goofiness since the boat had left the dock on the mainland. They all looked a little stunned by their surroundings.

  “Tents up,” Eamon called. “Get your tents up and your sleeping bags inside. Remember to weight the tents and peg them down. The wind is going to try to take them out to sea.”