Eden Rising Read Free

wake the rest of the island.
    Robert glanced over his shoulder. Estella, one of the resort guests, had walked up quietly behind him, a timid smile on her face. “Morning,” he said.
    He thought she was from Spain, but couldn’t remember for sure. What he did recall was that she’d been on the island for only a day before everything went haywire, and was supposed to have been joined by a couple friends on Christmas Eve. They, of course, had never shown up.
    She moved next to him, and looked out at the sea. “It’s beautiful.”
    “Yeah,” he said, though the truth was he was having a hard time seeing beauty in anything anymore.
    “I guess this is why we all came here, yes?” She finished with a laugh, nervous, almost forced.
    He smiled politely and nodded, but said nothing.
    As she brushed a strand of hair off her face, Robert noticed her hand was shaking.
    “Are you okay?” he asked.
    “Yes. Of course. I am fine.”
    He smiled as if to say he was glad to hear it, but he knew none of them were fine. How could they be?
    Estella looked out at the water again. “Have you been able to reach anyone yet?” He could tell she was trying to sound casual, but she wasn’t pulling it off.
    “Not yet,” he said.
    “But the message,” she said. “I thought we would have reached them by now.”
    “We’re still trying. I’m sure we’ll get through to someone soon.”
    The message was from the UN and had been playing in a loop on TV for four days now. A day earlier, a list of several ways in which the organization could be contacted had been added at the end of the secretary general’s speech. Robert had immediately used the resort’s satellite phone to try calling the provided phone number. That’s when he discovered that while the phone seemed to be working fine, it no longer had a signal. He then tried the two-way radio. Unfortunately, the resort’s owners had invested in a transmitter only powerful enough to reach the Costa Rican mainland. Either Robert or Renee kept at it every few hours, but so far no one had answered them.
    “Do you think…I mean, how many people?” Estella said.
    “I don’t know, but it didn’t look—”
    He stopped himself. There was an object in the sky just north of the newly risen sun. A dot. Probably a bird, he thought, but…
    Estella followed his gaze. “What is it?”
    “I’m not sure.”
    He narrowed his eyes to a squint to cut down on the sun’s glare. The dot was growing larger.
    It’s gotta be a bird .
    But even as the thought passed through his mind, he knew he was wrong. There was no flapping of wings, no subtle dips and rises of a bird riding the wind. The object was moving in a straight line, its speed constant.
    Estella was the first to voice what they’d both realized. “A plane. It is a plane!”
    The dot was no longer a dot, but a central tube with what could only be fixed wings sticking out on either side.
    “It is a plane!” she said. “It is!” She started jumping up and down, waving her arms, and yelling as if her voice could reach across the sea to those aboard the aircraft.
    It was her shouts that finally snapped Robert out of his trance. He turned from the water and ran toward the resort. If Estella knew he was gone, she made no indication. He could hear her continued attempts to get the plane’s attention as he left the beach.
    A few of the early risers were in the open-air bar as he crested the steps and jogged onto the deck.
    “Is something wrong?” a man named Jussi from Finland asked.
    “Is that someone yelling?” Monica, an American from the Midwest, asked.
    Ignoring the questions and stares, Robert raced around the back of the bar to the room where the radio was. He found Renee inside. She had been the resort’s assistant manager under Dominic, but had been more than happy to allow Robert to take charge after Dominic was gone.
    “Are they transmitting?” he asked.
    She looked over, confused. “Is who transmitting?”
    “The