The Time of the Titans

Chapter 11: Loneliness

I returned to the campsite and started studying the ground for any footprints, any tracks or marks. I soon discovered there were too many of them – after all, we had been twelve people on our feet, and one wounded. Nothing seemed to indicate struggle, however – neither with red demons, nor with pirates or anything else. Yet they were all gone.

Had we been once more betrayed by Nurse Ellis? Was that it? I blamed myself for trusting her. I had needed her for Benson's sake. But even if she betrayed us, why on earth would they leave me and Benson behind? Why had Mary not woken me up? Why had none of the girls cried and grabbed my arm?

Had they gone back to the lifeboat and sailed away with it? Or had someone come here to take them away? But it didn't seem from the tracks that they had been taken with force. There were no signs of a major struggle here, and I had not woken up. Surely, I'd have awoken if someone came and took them by force. And if someone came and called them – a rescue mission, that is – then they'd have woken me up, for sure.

Then another thought came to my mind. The titans – they had found the lifeboat. There must have been a tracker inside, which we had missed when we tried to get rid of all their smart technology. The lifeboat might even have had a secret mechanism to return back to the base, activated by some trigger. A timer? Had they been on the lifeboat when such a signal trapped them there and took them back to Atlantis? But if that's what had happened, if they could call the lifeboat back, then why had the Laputans destroyed the Nautilus?

Yet another group of titans – a third party we didn't know about? Maybe there were red ones, in addition to the grey and blue ones we had seen so far. Maybe someone had convinced Nurse Ellis to cooperate. Or even Mary. In good faith, she might do that, to save the girls. But why would she leave me behind? That wasn't like her.

An exhaustive amount of alternative explanations circulated through my mind, and none of them seemed verifiable or even convincing. Desperate, I sat down on a rock. My eyes wandered around the crags, the crevices, scanning for all the possible hides, finding nothing but more nesting seabirds.

*   *   *

The first morning in a new world – and I hadn't just slept late but lost my companions. I had hardly started thinking of Mary as my future, as my new beginning, when I had already lost her. Now I was stuck here, in a strange world with a headache and a badly wounded man whom I could hardly hope to rescue.

The thought sent me back to Benson. I tried to communicate with him but he kept whispering "silence" and something about demons. I started investigating his wounds and the medical kit to see if there was anything I could do. That would be something Mary would think of. Leaving this medical kit for me when she had to go somewhere. But where? And why not wake me up? I changed the wraps of Benson's wounds, used disinfection and gave him what Nurse Ellis had called morphine.

"I will be back soon", I said then, seeing to it that Benson lay in a safe place, and set up climbing to a higher altitude, hoping to reach the top of the rocks in order to see further around. Maybe I would be able to make the figure of the lifeboat somewhere in the horizon. Send signals to them, perhaps. Or even swim to them.

They must have left with the boat, somehow. Perhaps by accident. Perhaps trapped by a mechanism we had been unaware of. Perhaps thinking they were only going somewhere nearby. They should have woken me up.

While I climbed, I noticed tracks of something climbing there before me. They looked like marks of hooves, not shoeprints. Some kind of animals lived here, I tried to convince myself, pushing away the ominous whispers of red demons.

Climbing exhausted me physically, but I kept going – I had to see what would be up there. And when I finally reached the top, there was indeed a new world, wide open in front of my eyes.