Sarah had the grace to look chagrined. "Sorry. What I meant to say is that we need to clean it really good and do what we can to get the infection out." She nodded her head to add some affirmation to her words.

"Oh, s.h.i.t, I don't feel so good," moaned Kevin, holding his stomach. He sat up and vomited over the edge of the boat.

He heaved over and over again, making Jonathan only slightly worried that Kevin's guts were going to come out and float away. He'd never seen anyone so violently ill.

Candi leaned forward and patted him on the back, clearly at a loss.

"Kevin, what's going on?" asked Jonathan. This wasn't normal for a hand wound as far as he knew.

"I don't know," gasped Kevin. "I think I ate something bad on the ship at dinner." He gulped uncomfortably. "Did anyone else eat those ... G.o.d, I don't even want to say the words ... raw oysters?"

Everyone looked at each other, shaking their heads. Jonathan answered for all of them. "Nope."

Kevin wiped his mouth off with his hand and dipped it into the water. Then he fell back into the boat, landing on his back, moaning. "f.u.c.k me. I've been poisoned."

Candi's eyes bulged out of her head. This was not good.

"Kevin, you need to drink some water. You're going to get dehydrated quickly if you do have food poisoning and keep vomiting like that." Jonathan turned his attention to Candi. "Candi, get the water bottle and get at least four ounces of water in him over the next thirty minutes."

Candi nodded her head, moving to follow his instructions.

Sarah just sat there numbly, looking worried, nodding her head at nothing in particular. Then she stopped nodding and started squinting at Candi, examining her, as if seeing her for the first time.

"What?" said Candi.

"What do you mean 'what'?"

"I mean, why are you staring at me?"

Sarah shrugged. "No reason. I was just thinking that you look like total c.r.a.p."

Candi got immediately offended. "Well, thank you very much, Miss Thinks She's Perfect, and may I say that you don't look so hot yourself!"

Sarah reached up to touch her chapped and salty lips. Her fingers glided over the skin of her face, which pulled tight every time her mouth moved. It had a layer of salt coating it that Jonathan knew from his own face, felt like a fine, dry crust. She shrugged. "I probably do look less than my best, but at least my hair doesn't look like there's a family of rats living in it."

Candi laughed bitterly. "I wouldn't be so sure about that, if I were you."

Sarah frowned and then reached up to touch her hair. She pulled some of it forward and stared at it, obviously surprised to see that a light salty coating had come to rest all over it, making it go from blond to nearly gray. She reached up with both hands to feel her entire head of hair. "Oh. My. G.o.d. It feels like teased cotton candy. What the h.e.l.l ... ?"

Jonathan wasn't paying any mind to what they were saying. Something he saw off in the distance was grabbing his attention.

"I think I see land!" yelled Jonathan, suddenly.

"What?! Where?" said Candi, twisting around as far as she could, to see where Jonathan was looking.

"There!" answered Jonathan, pointing off in the distance. "It has to be. Otherwise there wouldn't be flies."

"I thought it was seagulls that flew around land," said Sarah sarcastically.

"Yeah, but flies too," said Jonathan, ignoring her att.i.tude.

Kevin sat up with obvious effort.

"Land. Cool." He laid back down and closed his eyes.

Jonathan began rustling through one of the boat's storage bins behind him.

"What are you looking for?" asked Candi.

"I think we have my small telescope here, don't we?"

"I don't think you need one it's definitely land, I can see it from here. We're getting closer."

Sure enough, the current seemed to be driving them towards the land at a rapid pace.

"Sweet," said Jonathan, a smile breaking out across his face as he confirmed Candi's a.s.sessment. "I guess we can just sit here then and wait until we wash up on the sh.o.r.e."

"What sh.o.r.e is it, though?" asked Sarah, trepidation in her voice. "I mean, where in the h.e.l.l are we?"

"I have absolutely no idea," said Jonathan, "but we're about to find out. Do you have any idea how lucky we are right now? To have run into an island like this?" He couldn't stop himself grinning from ear to ear.

"Are there any, like, wild cannibal tribes out here that eat people and shrink heads and stuff like that?"

Jonathan frowned at her. "Don't be silly. We're in the Caribbean. You'd have more trouble with pirates and drug runners than cannibals out here."

"Ha! Pirates! That's a good one," said Sarah, looking out at the island with a smile. "Johnny Depp can come after my treasure any day of the week. I'll barely even put up a fight, I promise."

Jonathan broke into her daydream with his serious response. "I'm not joking. There are modern day pirates out here that hijack and steal from unwary boaters and do all kinds of other things that we probably don't want to know about."

Sarah was instantly p.i.s.sed again. "Are you serious? Because that's just great, Jonathan. Great. Pirates! And I thought sharks were our biggest problem."

"Sharks are definitely a problem; but there are also poisonous jelly fish, barracudas, venomous snakes ... "

Sarah's face grew more and more alarmed with every word that came out of Jonathan's mouth.

"Okay, Jonathan! That's enough, we get it now!" said Candi.

"Did you hear that, Kevin? We're getting out of the frying pan and heading right into the fire," said Sarah, bitterness lacing her voice.

"Mmmph, fire ... " was all they heard in reply. Then Kevin started singing, very out of tune, " 'Come on baby light my fiiiirrre, try to set the night on fiiirrre ... ' " He petered out at the end and went quiet again.

"Kevin?" asked Candi, tentatively. He sounded so out of it.

Jonathan reached over and put his hand on Kevin's forehead. "He has a fever. I don't know if it's that hand or the food or what, but he's burning up. Seems kind of soon after the injury to have an infection that bad. We need to get him to that land over there and cleaned up and hydrated. Let's put the tarp up over his part of the boat to give him some shade. Sarah, you see if you can get him to drink some more water."

Candi began securing the tarp over Kevin to give him some shade.

Sarah wasn't registering Jonathan's orders. "Are my eyes fooling me, or are we moving away from the land now?" asked Sarah.

Jonathan looked up at the horizon and saw that she was not mistaken. "Oh c.r.a.p, the current is moving us parallel to the sh.o.r.e. If this keeps up, we're going to miss the sh.o.r.e completely!"

He got up and shook off his backpack. "Come on, we have to start rowing!" There was no mistaking the panic in his voice.

The girls scrambled to help him lock the oars in place and put them out over the water. "I'll get this one; you two get the other and row together," ordered Jonathan.

This was one of those live or die moments. They were going to have to row their a.s.ses off and not waste any time arguing.

They got the oars locked in quickly and sat in position, side by side, preparing to pull back on it.

"Go!" yelled Jonathan, heaving back on his oar.

The girls rowed in tandem with him, meeting him stroke for stroke. Jonathan was able to take quick looks back every minute or so to check their progress.

"I'm going to need ... some serious paraffin treatments ... after this," grunted out Sarah.

"It's working! Keep it up! Don't stop!" Jonathan gasped out. They had cut the distance in half with twenty minutes of steady rowing. They could have been closer but they were forced to row diagonally to their goal to fight the push of the current. All of them were wishing Kevin were in shape so he could help, since it would undoubtedly have been a much easier ch.o.r.e with his strong back and arms; but he was out of commission for sure.

Kevin tried to sit up, but his head b.u.mped up against the tarp that Candi had secured over him. "Lemme help, guys, you can't do it all by yourselves."

"Just save your strength, Kevin, you have a fever."

"Don't be silly, I don' hava feeve ... " The next thing they heard was Kevin slumping back down into the bottom of the boat.

"That's not good. We have to get him to land, guys, row harder!"

Sarah and Candi put their backs into it. Candi moved her hands to a different spot on the oar, and said, "Try to switch your hand position so you don't pop any blisters!"

Jonathan followed her orders. All they needed was more infections. He wasn't convinced this land they were seeing was inhabited. All he had seen was green, green and more green when he glanced back over his shoulder at the sh.o.r.eline.

Finally, after thirty more minutes of rowing, they were within forty yards of the sh.o.r.e. Jonathan told them to stop and locked the oars in place. Sweat was pouring off his body and running into his eyes, stinging them and making them burn.

"Untie the rope, quick."

The girls did as he asked without question.

He jumped into the water, yelling to the girls, "Tie the rope to the front of the boat and hand me the other end with a loop in it!"

Candi rushed to do what he ordered. She threw the loop out to him so he could start pulling the boat in.

Sarah was staring out to sea with a look of heavy concentration on her face. Jonathan wrestled with the loop trying to get it around his body as Candi looked at her and asked what she was doing.

"Watching for sharks."

"Oh, good."

"Jonathan, if I see a shark, I'll yell 'Shark!' and then Candi will haul you back into the boat by the rope."

"Fine!" he yelled, turning to swim for sh.o.r.e.

Candi smiled, a little bit relieved to have a plan. "Good idea, Sarah. Okay. Cool." She felt a tug as Jonathan began dragging the boat behind him.

Candi kept an anxious eye on him, while simultaneously watching the sh.o.r.e come closer and scanning the water's surface for the gray triangles of death. As her eyes pa.s.sed over her brother's swimming form, she wondered how he could possibly have the energy to do this. He'd had hardly any water or food, and was as exhausted as she was. She decided the first thing she was going to do when they reached sh.o.r.e was give him the biggest hug of her life.

"Shark!!" yelled Sarah from the back of the boat.

The fear raced up into Candi's throat and threatened to choke her. "No!" she gasped, as she leaned over to take the rope that was connected to her brother.

"Yes, look!" yelled Sarah, pointing off to the side of the boat.

Candi's hand was on the rope, ready to use the adrenaline coursing through her veins to haul her brother back into the boat like Superwoman.

She hesitated a moment. She looked to where Sarah was pointing. "Wait, that's not a shark ... " She peered through squinted eyes at the movement of the gray body under the water.

"It's another dolphin!"

She had noticed it swimming in an up and down motion and not the side-to-side, zigzag motion of the sharks from the day before; plus the fin was rounder or more curved. She took a split second to silently thank Mother Nature for including this telltale difference so right now she didn't have to be overwhelmed with visions of her brother being eaten while she tried to rescue him using strength she didn't have any more.

The dolphin chose that moment to leap out of the water and flash them a trademark dolphin grin.

Sarah let out a whoop and shot her fist in the air. "Yes! That is a friggin' DOLPHIN, ladies and gentlemen!" She turned and shot Candi a huge grin and put her hand up for a high-five.

Candi smiled and slapped her palm. Things were looking up. She checked on Jonathan and saw that he was no longer swimming, but was standing in the water on some sort of sand bar, walking the boat closer to sh.o.r.e. The shallow spot went pretty far out into the water that was now a beautiful bluish green and clear enough to see all the way to the bottom. Candi looked back to see the dolphin again, but it had disappeared.

Now that the sh.o.r.e was so close, the girls could see it in detail for the first time. There was a vast expanse of white sand that ringed what looked like an island about the size of two football fields. The beach was about fifteen yards wide, met at its far edge by a line of palms and other kinds of trees with medium sized, roundish leaves. They were growing together so closely and were so thick with foliage, it was impossible to see too far into them. The left side of the island, which was probably the south side, if Candi's navigation wasn't completely off, had some rocks she could see above the treetops. She saw no signs of houses or hotels or anything she was used to seeing on beaches.

Candi felt a little bit sick to her stomach. She looked down at Kevin, wondering how they were going to help him if there wasn't anyone there with medicine. He was sleeping; she could see his chest rising and falling as he breathed. His lips were crusty and cracked with dried blood on them. His face was coated in fine, white salt. She could see the skin underneath was burned pretty badly from the sun. There were little tiny pieces of sh.e.l.l and sand all through his hair, and she could see it in one of his ears too. It must have been churned up by the terrible storms and put on their bodies with all the sea spray. She felt her own face to see if she felt the same things there. Sure enough. She tried to brush it all away, but it hurt the sunburn that she just realized was also there.

A small piece of her was jealous of Kevin's unconsciousness. She wished she could be sleeping through this day like he was and then be able to wake up when it was all over.

But that was stupid she knew Kevin felt terrible and was in very real danger without medicine or enough water. Be careful what you wish for. Look where it's gotten you so far. You wanted to be better acquainted with Sarah and Kevin Peterson; you dreamed of someday having some alone time with Kevin. Well, here you go. That was a very sobering thought. Wishing was dangerous business.

"Man, am I glad to get back to civilization. I'm going to go have the longest, most relaxing shower I've ever had in my entire life," exclaimed Sarah.

"Uh, Sarah ... "

"Shush!" yelled Sarah, holding up a finger at Candi, not bothering to open her eyes. "Don't mess with the fantasy, okay, Sugar Lump? I'm five seconds away from a cool cuc.u.mber facial and a hot oil ma.s.sage given to me by a man-boy named Juan."

"Okaaaayyy ... "

Sarah heard Candi jump in the water and sighed, opening her eyes. She watched as Candi walked in slow motion through the small waves until she reached Jonathan, grabbing the rope that was still around his chest.

"Let me take it now; you can rest. I think you're overdoing it, Jonathan."

Sarah strained her eyes to see Jonathan's face, wondering at the concern she heard in Candi's voice.