Austin Aslan - The Islands at the End of the World

We tumble over another waterfall. This one is a longer drop, the water below shallower, but we both land on our backs, packs cushioning us from the rocks beneath the water.

Dad coughs and grunts. I take a deep breath. My eyes are everywhere at once, focused and keen. No dogs. No hunters.

“Up the far bank.” Dad pulls me along. We trudge through the water as if running in a nightmare, going more slowly the harder we try. The dog that swam after us surfaces before me and I stifle a cry. But the dog is dead. One of us may have landed on top of it. I push the limp carcass away.

I see a space behind a patch of hanging brambles. “Dad, in here. Quick!”

His eyes light up as he spies the hole. It’s our best bet; we can’t outrun the dogs, and I don’t know how many waterfalls we can survive.

Dad snatches the red collar of the dead dog and drags it behind him. We press through the narrow opening between a boulder and a ledge and duck beneath the vine. We’re suddenly huddled in a tiny alcove carved into the rock: me, Dad, a couple of backpacks, and Fido. In water up to our chests. One big happy family.

I eye Dad. He whispers, “If they find the dog, they’ll expect to find us. If none of us are around, they may continue downstream, or figure we were sucked into a rock tube.”

I bite my lip. My lungs are burning, my thigh is on fire, and my bruised arms feel as if I’ve used them to shatter bricks. The horror settles in, and I hold Dad tightly. This is insane. They attacked us!

“Shhh. Stay quiet. They’ll miss us. We just need to wait it out.”

“Are you hit? Are you hurt?” I whisper.

“No. Are you?”

“Bad dog bite on my leg, I think.”

“Jesus,” Dad mutters.

“What the hell, Dad? Why are they doing this?”

“Shhh, honey.”

It makes no sense . I can only close my eyes and clench my jaw.

“Lei, your bag’s open! You’re losing stuff!”

I turn to secure my pack, and my stomach sinks. A shirt and a blister pack of iodide tablets rush away from our hiding spot on the strong current. “No!”

“Stay here.” Dad pulls me back. “Too late.”

“I know, but … if they find it, they’ll know what we have.” Dad shakes his head. “Too late. Shhh.”

The voices approach and then drift away. We are as silent and still as the rocks for several minutes. Then the voices sound nearer. Dad and I shrink against the back wall of our hollow.

A gunshot.

Barking.

The voices grow agitated—and more distant.

Machine-gun fire. Screams.

What’s happening?

Far away, a car horn honks. A motor fires up; then the sound is lost below the rushing water.

“Dad, should we go?”

“No. Could be a trick. Just wait. It’ll be dark soon.”

We wait. And we wait. Tiny fish nibble occasionally on my thigh, and I cage the wound with cupped fingers to keep them away. The mosquitoes don’t have any trouble finding us, and my face soon feels like a pizza. We wait until nightfall before we wade across the river, shivering and starving, stumbling once again into the jungle, this time without even a blade to clear our way. The pain in my leg is exquisite, but more than that, I am tortured by every twig snap, terrorized by the thought that it will trigger another onslaught of dogs and murderous foes. But we must take that step. And the next. One after another into the endless swarms of bloodsuckers, through the night and beyond the dawn.

It is our only way home.

The zombie apocalypse is upon us. Dad and I trudge all day through the dark underbrush like the undead, me dragging a hurting thigh and plucking stitches from my forehead, Dad hunched over with exhaustion. We’re covered from head to toe in mosquito bites. We’d make a great outdoor-outfitter ad: sporting our baggy, tattered, dripping-wet quick-dry shorts and button-up shirts, smeared with soils of every color and matted with fern fur. A snapped arrow shaft juts out from my ragged pack.

In the afternoon we stumble into a clearing in the jungle. A dirt road with a wide shoulder on a steep slope cleaves the forest into halves. We have a grand, uninterrupted view of the Pacific Ocean to the north or northeast.

We see a long train of naval ships. Dozens upon dozens of craft—from smaller red-and-white Coast Guard boats all the way up to battleships—are clustered in a great flock ten miles off the shore, travelling away from Maui at a slight angle.

Dad says, “That’s the entire Hawaiian fleet out there.”

“Wow,” I mutter. “Maybe … they’re deploying some defense.”

“What if we’re at war?” Dad thinks aloud. But he concludes, “No. They wouldn’t be taking Coast Guard tugboats into battle. This doesn’t make any sense.”

I remember what Aukina said to me at the Marine Corps Base the afternoon before we escaped: “We’re out of gas. Unnecessary flights have already stopped. We need what’s left for something big. Our orders are to …”

But he had trailed off. And finished by saying, “I’d take you and your dad with us if I could.”

I’d take you with us.… Something big … “Dad,” I say. “These are the orders Aukina was hinting at. They’ve been ordered to leave. They’re just … leaving.”

Is Aukina on one of those ships? Did he take his family with him? I hope he’s safe .

“Lei, the US military’s not going to leave Hawai`i. The generals wouldn’t ditch this state. The reason these islands were occupied to begin with is their strategic significance in the Pacific. They’re going to clamp down on supply lines and farmlands and snuff out all the bickering. People don’t abdicate power for no reason.”

“Dad. That was all before. Everything’s changed.”

We sit down and watch in silence as the distant battleships grow smaller.

As I see all that power and might drift away on the open sea, I’m reminded, absurdly, of how I felt the first time my parents left me alone to babysit Kai. I watched their car pull out of the driveway feeling scared and excited. I was on my own.

There’s no excitement now. The United States has ditched us. The barbarians who hunted us yesterday might cheer. But what if an enemy shows up on these shores?

“We’re no longer part of America,” I whisper.

Dad’s eyes widen.

I cough. Tiny droplets of blood spatter my fist. I wipe the evidence away. “Where are they going? San Diego? What are they going to find?”

“Klingons.”

“I’m serious, Dad.”

“We may never know.” Dad scratches his beard. “We may never find out what the hell has happened to the world. Who’s going to flee to Hawai`i?”

I shrug. “The Chinese?”

Dad soaks up my comment for a moment. “Can you imagine?”

“Hysteresis,” I say.

Dad gives me an approving wink. “You’re right.”

Hysteresis is another ecology word I’ve heard at home. It describes when things are harder to fix than they were to break in the first place. Like a rubber band: they stretch a lot, but when you pull too hard, they snap, and there’s no going back to the way it used to be.

No doubt now: Hawai`i has snapped.

We can only march forward. Dad and I press on.

We break through the trees as dusk begins to fall and find ourselves standing along the edge of a one-acre clearing planted with pakalōlō . Rows upon rows of marijuana plants. Dad tosses his bag to the ground, falls to his knees, and declares, “We are done for the day.”

“We can’t stop here! This belongs to someone. What if they come along and find us?”

“Then we’ll all get baked together.” He grins. He’s serious. “Lei, we have to stop. I can’t keep going. We have to clean out your dog bite. We both need medical attention. I can’t think of a finer apothecary on all the islands.”