I dreamed of swimming in the depths, of promises both forgotten and kept.


    For the second time that day I woke lying in the sand. I was dry this time, up on the foredune. A glorious sunset coloured the sky beyond the western headland and coloured the bay between me and it. The sea to the south was an open spread of black, beautiful and secret.


    At the bottom of the dune, maybe ten meters from me, a little campfire burned. In the circle of its light sat the other six, Chloe with her leg outstretched. They seemed to be talking happily among themselves and when the breeze blew the smoke my way it brought with it the smell of roasting fish.


    I pushed myself up, hungry despite the weird essence saturating my flesh. Trembling just a little bit I staggered down into the light. Andy must have heard me first.


    “He lives!”


    It was met with a general cheer.


    “Hero of the hour,” Ryan declared, leaning back and patting the spot between him and Andy.


    I ducked my head and sat where he indicated, feeling awkward and out of place.


    “We were worried for you dear,” Jan said from across the flames. “Those spines must have had something in them. You slept most of the afternoon.”


    My right hand and left forearm had been wrapped in strips of cloth. They throbbed so the fish-lizard thing must have spiked me pretty deep, but I don’t think it was poison that took me down.


    “You gotta take more care man!” said Andy. “You can’t just jump on the first creature we see!”


    Chloe leaned over from Andy’s other side, “Thank you,” she said.


    They were the first words she’d spoken to me. I rubbed my neck and ducked my head. Her leg was wrapped up in the same material as my arm. Strips, I realised, torn remains of Ryan’s coat.


    “No problem,” I muttered. “Any of us would have done it. Ryan’s the one who killed it.”


    Vanessa leaned across Ryan holding out a cupped bit of palm leaf piled with pieces of smoking hot fish.


    “You’re the one who pinned it,” she said. “You must have been a fighter yes? You were really trying to batter it to death.”


    The others all grinned happily but I thought that her smile looked forced. Her eyes looked at me uneasily as if I might be a threat.


    “I guess so?” I tried, even more embarrassed. “I can’t really remember to be honest.”


    “Yeah well... We all know that feeling,” laughed Andy. Even by firelight he looked horribly sunburnt. I thought for sure that he''d be blistered by the morning.


    He pointed at Jan, “Retail Manager.”


    At Eric, “Truckie.”


    At Chloe, “Student.” He made a face at her, “Arts.”


    At himself, “Sales!”


    He skipped me and went to Ryan, “A Banker!” There was some envy in his voice.


    Lastly he pointed at Vanessa, “Real Estate Law.”


    Then he looked at me, “What about you?”


    I dredged through my mind. “Student?”


    Andy laughed. “Eric had money on you being a dole bludger!”


    Across the fire Eric had the grace to look embarrassed. He was sunburnt as well, although it was harder to tell against his normal colouring.


    “High school or uni?” Chloe asked, her tone more lively than before.


    “Uni!” I said, a bit offended. “Postgrad. I think I’m older than you!”


    “So what did you study?” she challenged.


    It stumped me for a bit.


    “History?” I ventured.


    “Ha!” Andy laughed again. “That’s fucked!”


    I looked at him quizzically until he expanded.


    “Think about it. History’s nothing but names and places and countries. They’ve taken all of that!”


    He sounded a bit wild in the last bit, a little bit distressed. It resonated with how violated I''d felt earlier when I’d tried to work out how much I’d forgotten, or been made to forget.


    All of us went quiet. For a little while it was just the sound of the fire, the wavelets on the shore, the breeze across the sand and among the palm leaves further in. Sunset faded to stars overhead. Eric said something to Jan. Ryan joined in. I picked at my fish and found that it was fucking delicious. The most flaky, savoury, wholesome flesh I’d ever eaten. There was essence in it, like a shot of caffeine, if you can imagine that being good with meat. But I couldn’t be worried about potential effects when it tasted so... good!


    It was hard to believe they’d just cooked it on the fire. It tasted like what you''d dream of getting from a five star chef.


    I ate with increasing quickness until there was nothing left on the bit of green palm leaf that I’d been given. My belly felt stretched but I could have eaten the same again. A hunger was on me and filling it was deeply satisfying. I looked up hopefully to Vanessa but she shook her head and handed me a crinkled plastic bottle half full of water instead.


    Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.


    “We’ve decided to ration the rest,” she said, giving me a much more genuine smile, one that made me think that they must have all enjoyed the food too. “It was hard, but we’ll all want to eat again tomorrow.”


    She pointed to the spot between her and Jan where picked remains of the roast lizard-fish lay wrapped in more green leaves. There were a few half woven fronds beside it and on one of them Vanessa’s handbag as well as a pile of phones and keys, our wallets, a lipstick, and a single muesli bar, wrapped in plastic.


    I took a swig from the bottle. The water tasted of sand and grit but it was very welcome. Andy jogged my elbow and nodded at the bottle so I passed it to him. He took a swig for himself and grinned, passing it on to Chloe.


    “Bet you’re glad we dug that well now,” he said.


    I started to scoff and then thought about how it would feel to splash down to the water’s edge for a drink in the dark with monsters in the depths.


    “Yeah,” I said. “That, ah, turned out to be a good idea.”


    He laughed.


    “What’s with the stuff?” I asked, pointing at the little pile.


    “Oh yeah,” said Andy. “Forgot to tell you. We went through your pockets while you were out of it.”


    I didn’t know how I felt about that. “Anything useful?”


    “Nah,” Andy shook his head. “Only good thing is Eric’s lighter. He’s got half a pack of cigarettes and my vape doesn’t even work. All the phones are useless. They’re fake, just solid pieces of plastic. Even the writing on the cards is gibberish. It’s like they duplicated what we were carrying without knowing what it was for.”


    That... gave me a lot to think about.


    “Bizarre,” I said. “You vape? What will you do?”


    “Dunno,” Andy replied. He shrugged, sounding stressed. “Quit I guess. I’m not gonna start sucking on Eric’s death sticks even if he’d let me.”


    I nodded without really paying attention. Even if the writing was gibberish I still knew what writing was. I could picture the alphabet in my head. I was confident that it wasn’t one of the things I’d forgotten. Why would they replace our phones with duds? We had to be out of service. Who could even make licenses and bank cards without being able to write on them?


    “Where’d you get the tat?” Andy asked.


    I looked at him blankly, “What? What tat?”


    Then some kind of residual echo of memory struck me. I should have tattoos. I was working on a sleeve. I looked down at my arm and found only blank brown skin.


    “Not your right arm,” said Andy. “Your left! That blue scale pattern all up your inner forearm. I saw it when we were wrapping you up.”


    I stared at him in the fire light and then at my left. With a feeling a bit like going down the basement stairs I began to unwrap the makeshift bandages. There was a puckered little row of sore and clotted holes, but other than that just brown skin. I looked up at Andy, expecting to find that he’d been having me on, but he was looking at me in confusion.


    “They were there!” he insisted. “Silvery blue scales all up your inner arm. Like this really deep marine blue. You’re the only one of us who has a tat. Even Eric doesn’t have any. You’d think he’d be covered in them.”


    From across the fire Eric gave Andy the figure and turned back to his conversation. He had fat arms, truckie’s arms, wrinkled, hairy, and muscular, but Andy was right. There wasn’t a tattoo anywhere on them.


    Ryan fed the fire a couple more sticks. They must have been into the forest and fetched a few more loads. He and other older folk were talking about how big the Island could be and what we might expect. The water bottle was empty by the time it got back to Vanessa. She rose, still in her business dress, and went to fill it up. We were only a few meters from the well but she came back quicker than I expected.


    “There’s a glowing light!” she said. “There’s some kind of light across the water!”


    We all got up in a rush of hope and noise, Andy helping Chloe with her leg. Vanessa led us across the sand into darkness and pointed with outstretched hand. Sure enough, once my eyes adjusted, I could make out the shadow of the headland to our west, and at its end a diffuse orange-red glow like a bonfire shielded from sight.


    “What is that?” asked Jan.


    “Dunno,” replied Eric.


    “It’s gotta be people!” Said Andy. “Right?”


    Then we were all talking at once, excitement rising. In turning I saw that there were more lights on the shore.


    “More! More!” I shouted. “They’re coming around the bay!”


    The new lights were a small constellation of three, flickering yellow, like they might have been burning touches. They were a long way off but coming towards us, following the beach around the water.


    We were all talking together again.


    “It’s a rescue!”


    “We’re saved!”


    “They’re coming right towards us!”


    I felt swept up in giddiness. You’ve got to understand I’d given up on rescue. I knew we weren’t on Earth, and for some reason that had made think there were no other people. The idea that others were out there, that they were doing better than we were, came as quite a shock.


    A good shock. Maybe not as amazing as discovering how that fish tasted, but it changed my whole outlook. If we weren’t alone in being stranded here then everything was different. A lot more things were possible! Other people might even know what was going on.


    Ryan ran to to fire and grabbed up a burning stick to wave it overhead. The first of those distant lights waved back and we all cheered and shouted.


    Andy and Eric and I rushed to get more sticks while Vanessa collected up our stuff. She left the remains of the fish. We wouldn’t need to pick the bones if these other folk had tucker.


    Without really talking about it we all headed down the beach, into the dark, towards the oncoming torches. We soon discovered that our sticks weren’t very good as light sources. Ryan led the way with his but mine went out and Andy handed his to Jan in favour of helping Chloe. Even the one’s that stayed alight weren’t very bright. All we really succeeded in doing was blinding ourselves with smoke and waving around orange coals.


    The sand was soft however and the beach was fairly level. We stumbled along through the dark without too much trouble, tired and sore but relieved. It became obvious from things some of the others said that they still expected a return to civilisation. The coast guard were mentioned, and the police. I’m not sure if all of them thought we were still on Earth but it was definitely more than just one or two.


    Those oncoming torches were really quite steady, yellow flames held high. I’d seen a couple of flickering drips which made me think they might be soaked in pitch or a fuel of some kind. They were approaching us much faster than we were moving and as they did so I saw outlined the bearers’ arms and torsos.


    “Are they riding something?” Vanessa asked, suddenly sounding uneasy.


    They were. At first I thought that the three people coming toward us were each riding an oxen. Their mounts had the same swept back horns and stood about as tall but their skin was scale and their faces lizard-like. Their necks and bodies and tails were longer. They were riding giant lizards, like the biggest komodo dragons you can imagine if komodo dragons held their bodies up higher.


    “Fuuuuuuck!” Breathed Eric.


    “Run!” screamed Andy and turned to do so, tangling with Chloe.


    I turned too, stumbling in the soft sand. Before I could make a dozen steps however two of the riders had spurred their monsters forward and around our group, flanking either side. The creature’s legs churned like a lizard at full pace, hideously fast over such a short sprint. Something fell over my arm and shoulder and jerked me backward so hard that I fell onto my side. The others were screaming. I’d been lassoed! The rope tangled and tightened and I struggled against it while all around me the others were brought to bay, surrounded by the trio of monsters and their riders.


    The leader dismounted, torch in one hand and reins in the other, he approached out group.


    “Hey now! Hey now,” he said calmingly. “Don’t be running away. There’s wild monsters in the jungle.”


    His accent was lilting and with shock I recognised it.


    “We aren’t be after hurting you,” he continued. “We’re here to be your rescue!”


    This fucking dude was Irish!