Island Jumper 3

  Island Jumper 3

  An Archipelago Series

  M H Ryan

  Island Jumper

  Book 3

  By MH Ryan

  Copyright 2019

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  About the Author

  Chapter 1

  A hand touched my face and then more hands on my legs and chest. They unbuttoned my shirt and were speaking words I couldn’t quite hear. I reached out, trying to orient myself by feel. They had to be close enough to touch me, but their voices were a muffled echo in my head. Hands went under me, lifting me as I opened my eyes.

  The forest canopy moved by my view. I blinked hard, trying to clear my vision. The green leaves above me stopped, and a gentle, concerned face appeared over me. Then another and another. Some looked scared, and I knew those beautiful faces. Their mix of blonde, brown, and black hair caught the sunlight and scattered over me like perfect portraits of beauty.

  “Jack?” one of them asked.

  Yes. Jack. That was my name. What happened? I sat up, letting my legs dangle off the edge of the platform they had placed me on. The girls crowded around me, keeping hands on me to keep me from falling.

  “I’m okay,” I said, and winced, feeling my headache.

  “We found you on the beach unconscious,” Benji said, but her voice sounded distant, as if she was talking at the far end of a tunnel.

  “Benji?” I asked, her face becoming clearer.

  She had tears in her eyes and looked close to breaking down into sobs. I reached to her, touching her soft, flushed cheek. Why was she so sad? She took my hand in hers and held it against her chest. Her yellow bikini did little to hide her incredible body. She was my archer and good humor companion, and I hated seeing her upset.

  “What happened?” Sherri asked, getting closer to Benji and grabbing my attention.

  Sherri, the busty wonder, with a red, white and blue bikini and blonde hair spilling over her track star body. She loved it out here, and her enthusiasm brought us all to a better place.

  “I don’t know,” I said, but then it started flooding back to me. “They…they were here.”

  “Who?” Aubrey asked.

  Aubrey, the sexiest person alive, with her perfectly proportioned body and tanned skin. Her brown hair framed her pretty face. She was a balance to the enthusiasm, fierce wit, and I loved that she was in the group.

  “The watchers,” I said. “I felt them coming here, many of them.”

  “The watchers?” Kara asked, getting close to me and wrapping her arms around me. “You scared us. If anything had happened to you…”

  “Hey,” I said, looking at Kara. “I’m okay. I’m not leaving any of you.”

  Kara had tears in her eyes as she looked up at me. I got lost in those big blues—my ocean eyes, as I’d come to call them. We found Kara on a terrible island, but she found a new home of happiness on this island and with the group. I ran my hand over her pale skin and the bottom of her straight black hair. She had many tattoos scattered over her body and the contrast of black tats over her milky skin made an alluring contrast. She wore a black bikini that had strings running over her midsection, down to her bottoms. I’d seen her fast and furious wild side and wanted to bring that back out of her.

  “You better not leave us,” Kara said, releasing me.

  “So, the watchers did this to you?” Eliza asked.

  Eliza stood behind the girls, but they shifted to allow her to move closer. Eliza, the daughter of Captain Rebecca Brown and a child of these islands. Pretty and petite, with the powerful body of a gymnast and long, wavy brown hair that most like would break an unbreakable comb. Eliza had an innocence I’d never seen in a nineteen-year-old. The girls played with her naivetes in a good-natured way and Eliza had quickly become a strong member of the team.

  I thought on her question. The watchers…the memories were coming in a rush. I jerked my head up and pain shot behind my eyes.

  “They didn’t hurt me. I hurt them,” I said, holding my head. “They were coming out of the ocean. They had bluish, grey faces, with big eyes and—”

  “What do you mean, you hurt them?” Benji asked.

  “I…” I tried to think of a way to explain it. “I concentrated on making them leave. Like really hard.”

  “Like I did with the geyser?” Benji asked.

  “Yeah, and Sherri with the boiling aftermath,” I said. “I stopped them with my mind. They were compelled to leave, and I felt their pain, as if my command hurt them all.”

  “What the fuck’s a watcher?” Cass asked, standing behind the girls with her hands on her hips.

  “Something that’s been watching us for the last week,” I said. “I’m not sure what they are, but I think they can live on land or water. They have slick looking skin, the colors of the ocean, with human-like face, arms and body, but not human entirely.” I touched my head. God it hurt.

  Cass laughed and tossed up her arms. She walked to the supply area and picked up a bag of water.

  “Cass, it’s not time to drink,” Sherri said.

  Cass tossed the water bag back down and grunted in annoyance.

  “We should get back to work,” I said, trying to hide my pain. “I got rid of the watchers, and I don’t think they’ll be back anytime soon.”

  I reached out to the ocean with a moment of hesitation, like dipping your toe into the hot tub. The static of the ocean greeted me like a warm blanket. No watchers. Something large lurked in the water nearby, though. I looked in its direction. It felt like a shark, with determination for finding its next meal.

  Moshe jumped up on the platform and walked over to me, meowing. She brushed up against me and I felt the concern in her.

  “Aw, Moshe, come here girl. It’s going to be okay.” I picked her up and she climbed onto my shoulder, licked my head once and jumped off my back.

  “You sure you’re okay?” Benji asked, touching my shoulder.

  “Yeah, slight headache, but I’ll be fine. It will be nice to think about our shelter, anyway. I dealt with the watchers, okay? So let’s just get back to work.”

  “You heard him, ladies,” Sherri said, snapping her fingers. “Let’s get back to work.”

  “Oh please,” Aubrey said, rolling her eyes at Sherri as she walked up to me. “You sure you’re okay?” Aubrey held onto the sides of my face and studied me.

  “I don’t have a concussion. I think I just exerted myself.” I broke from her, hopped off the platform, trying to show her my fitness while hiding that throbbing headache.

  “You look good,” Aubrey said, eyeing me in a different way.

  “Well, thank you. Now can I get back to building this shelter, please?”

  She leaned in, kissed my cheek, and said, “Think you can get the shelter built for us tonight?” She licked my ear lobe and then gave it a soft
bite.

  “Um, I think it will take a couple days,” I said. “It’s a pretty big project.”

  “Don’t hold it back from me for too long,” Aubrey said and patted my ass before walking away with Sherri. “Keep an eye on him, Eliza.”

  “I will,” Eliza said and gave Aubrey a small wave.

  Kara and Benji both hugged me at the same time. I embraced both of them and they each whispered about me being careful and to take it easy before turning to Eliza and giving her instructions to my care. They both head back to the stream and their ax-making station.

  That left Eliza, Cass, and me for laying out the new shelter. With most of the girls gone, I took a few breaths, trying to not only clear my head but damn, those women took my breath away.

  “You can have me do the work,” Eliza said. “If you’re not feeling up to it.”

  “Nonsense,” I said, brushing off my shirt. “I’m feeling better already.”

  I stood before our broken platform. Our geyser had somehow become clogged and when Benji let loose the cork, it sent a near boulder-sized right rock through our beloved platform, shattering much of it into a broken pile of timber.

  “We can salvage most of it,” I said.

  “Yeah, the girls were already dismantling it earlier,” Eliza said.

  Eliza stood next to me, and I glanced over to Cass who stood near the shoreline and watched the ocean, detached from our conversation. Aubrey had done that as well, early on. For the new girls, there was this assumption that at any moment a rescue would happen. After a week, we had given up on planning for outside help, which led me to focus more on long-term solutions to our issues. First was going to be this shelter, and then the raft.

  I planned on leaning on Eliza for this. She had built her shelter on her island, and in fact, we had many of the pieces of it with us now. We had stripped her place and brought back as much as our modest raft could carry.

  I walked around the platform. Four trees, maybe ten feet apart, formed the posts we used to set the platform on. I wanted to make it twice as big, at least. We had more women to rescue, and I didn’t want to have to keep building shelters.

  The damage had broken many of the wood logs in the center of the platform, but the main beams attached to the trees were still intact. The girls had already taken apart some of the shelter and stacked the lumber at the far end of it.

  “What do you think?” I asked Eliza. “I want to make it at least twice as big as this one.”

  “Well, these trees are the confining element here. If we moved into the forest a little bit, we could use those three trees over there,” Eliza said, pointing into the forest.

  We walked around the three trees. They weren’t more than twenty feet away from the other trees. We would still be close to the beach and the fire pit. The geyser blast would still be nothing more than a warm mist at this location. This seemed like a good spot.

  I stepped out the distance between the three trees, stomping on a few ferns in the process. Sorry, nature. The three trees made a twenty-foot triangle. I stood at the far end of them and shoved a stick into the ground.

  “If we set a post right here, we’ll have a fourth place to attach the main logs to,” I said.

  “Oh yeah, and then we can make the same length cuts each time,” Eliza said and touched my arm.

  She pulled back immediately and went red in the face.

  “Sorry,” she said. “I didn’t mean to touch you.”

  “It’s okay,” I said, trying to make her comfortable. “You can touch me. In these close quarters, we’re all kind of touchy.”

  Eliza took a deep breath. “Okay, so we can be touchy?”

  “You okay?”

  “Um, sure,” Eliza said, taking a sudden interest in the stick I set in the ground. “I should measure these distances and let Sherri and Aubrey know. They’ll be the ones cutting the new beams.”

  Eliza walked, heel to toe, between my stick and one of the trees. It looked as if she was taking a sobriety test and had me smiling. She also had a sexy ass, which didn’t hurt.

  “Hey,” I said. “We can use some fishing line as a measure.” I looked at Cass, who was near the camp. “Cass, can you grab me the fishing line out of the red bag?”

  Cass took her attention off the ocean. “Fine,” she said, seeming agitated.

  She rummaged the bag and then brought me the line.

  “You doing okay?” I asked.

  “No, Jack, I’m not,” Cass said, putting her hands on her hips. “We’re stuck on this island, and everything you guys tell me is a nightmare out there.” She had her hand up in a halting gesture as I opened my mouth in response. “And don’t even get me started on the snake tale. I don’t even want to think about that.”

  We had found Cass in a den of snakes. Fortunately for her, she remembered nothing of the time we carried her unconscious body around the islands.

  “We’re out here together, Cass. I understand what you’ve been through, so I can give you some slack,” I said. “But at some point, we’ll need you to contribute.”

  I felt bad for Cass, but I also didn’t need dead weight in our group. Up until she joined us, everyone new contributed right away. I guess Cass needed more time until she found her place in the group. Being the largest girl here, she could help physically, and from what I understood from the others, she had an equally strong personality. Both could be significant assets to the group. Plus, I liked her, in a way. She was this sleepy beauty that we took care of. I felt responsible for her life and she would never fully understand the lengths we went to save her.

  Cass sighed. “This place is just going to take some getting used to.” With that, she walked back to the shore.

  I guess she wasn’t helping with the shelter. That was fine. Eliza and I could handle the layout.

  Eliza and I used a piece of the fishing line and strung it between the stick and the tree. Holding onto that same piece, we ran it between the two trees. The two distances were within inches of each other.

  “Not bad for eyeballing it, eh?” I said.

  “Pretty good,” Eliza said. “I’ll go tell Aubrey and Sherri.”

  Eliza walked into the forest with the fishing string.

  I kneeled down to where I set the stick and started clearing the ground around it. We’d have to dig a hole a few feet deep to have a stable post set in place. I pulled away the layer of leaves and dug down to the white sands. I starting taking scoops of sand out when I heard a rustling of leaves.

  Benji came running up to me, looking flushed and terrified.

  “What is it?” I said, jumping to my feet and putting my hand on my knife.

  “The stone. The pure evil. I found it on our island. I know where it is.”

  Chapter 2

  Benji, Kara, and I stood at the big-ass tree. Its trunk had to be several feet around, and it ran high up into the canopy. Massive branches spread out, casting a large shadow over us. It felt warmer here, though, as if the tree radiated heat.

  “This is it,” Benji said, holding her hand over her chest.

  The tree had a crack, a few inches wide, running up the middle of the trunk. I reached for the split when Benji grabbed my hand.

  “What is with you?” Benji said. “You can’t touch this stuff. It’s pure evil, remember?”

  “Dude, it’s bad mojo for sure,” Kara said, holding a newly made ax. “I’ve been feeling it on this island since we landed.”

  “I take it you two were looking for this on your own?” I asked.

  “Yeah, we are sort of the ones with the skills to find it,” Benji said. “We knew it was somewhere on this island.”

  “You think it’s in this tree?” I asked, leaning closer and reaching out again.

  “Stop it!” Benji said. “I know it is and so do you. Even if you won’t admit it. It’s already pulling for you.”

  I snapped my hand back and whatever question I had about what was in the tree disappeared. She was right, I knew it was in
there just as she did and it wanted me to touch it. It wouldn’t have been the first time it drew me in, either. I shamefully took a stone from the ship in secrecy. Thankfully, it had fallen out of my possession when we jumped into the ocean. I hated that even for that short time, I had hidden something from Benji.

  “There’s something I need to tell you,” I said.

  “What?”

  “When I went back into the boat, I took the stone we had looked at.” I rushed over her protest with more words. “I wanted to keep it so we could study it. So we could figure out what it is and how to stop it. These are like a plague across these islands. We’ve already seen two islands destroyed by these stones.”

  “Yeah, but Mario is gone,” Kara said. “And the rest of the stones burned up in that ship fire.”

  Benji stayed quiet and swayed, covering her mouth with her hand.

  “I think Mario was just the latest version of a shadow man. I bet there will be another. I don’t know when, maybe there are more out there now, but eventually, we’ll have to deal with this.”

  Benji took a deep breath and said, “I took the stone from you, Jack.”

  “What?” I asked, shocked. I guess we both had secrets.

  “When you were trying to get into the raft, I felt it in your pocket and pickpocketed you. Then I dropped it into the ocean before you noticed.”

  I stood there, stunned.

  “I knew you weren’t thinking rationally about the stones,” Benji said, looking upset. “For some reason, you are drawn to them, or they pull you in. Either way, it’s bad news and I won’t have them messing with you.”