Donna woke to the sound of the waves crashing and the wind rustling in the trees. She opened her eyes slowly, getting accustomed to the glaring sunlight. She could also feel the cold water as the waves lapped against the right side of her body. Still lying down, she moved her head so she could try and figure out where she was. She looked up and saw that the beach seemed to carry on, almost to the horizon. To her right, the sapphire-blue water glided slowly up and down the white-gold sand, while in the distance she could see the waves, terrifying with a white foamy head crashing down, before mellowing out as they got closer to land. She looked to her left and saw that there was a dense forest of impossibly tall palm trees. Donna squinted into the trees, but couldn't see beyond the first few trunks, such was the thickness of the foliage. She wiggled her fingers and toes, before slowly sitting up. She felt incredibly sore, the kind of sore you feel a day after completing your first workout in months. Her arms and legs ached and, as she looked down at her body, she saw that she was covered in small cuts and bruises.
"What the fuck happened?" She said, half to herself, and half to anyone that might have been around. When she received no answer (unsurprisingly) she gradually got to her feet, wincing as she did so. She looked down at herself again and saw that her outfit was in ruins. The strings of her bikini top were nearly all frayed, only one or two strands keeping everything in place. Further down, her sarong skirt had been turned into nothing more than a series of ribbons that hung around her waist, though thankfully the bikini bottoms she had on were still largely all there, meaning her modesty wasn't too ruined. She looked back up and across the sand. Now that she was standing up and more focussed on what was in front of her, she saw that what looked like a large amount of debris had washed up. She started walking towards it, unsteadily at first, but getting more confident with each step. She reached the first piece of debris and saw that it was just driftwood, clearly part of a bigger piece of wood that had been snapped completely. What had brought all this up? A storm? Donna looked out over the ocean. The waves on the horizon were still looking quite vicious, it was certainly possible that was the storm in question. She kept on walking, passing cupboards that had had their contents spilled out on the sand, furniture that could only now be used as firewood (and even then, with a thorough drying out) and more smashed pieces of wood until she saw one that looked vaguely intact. She walked over to it and knelt down next to it. The wood looked like it had been shaped properly and so she ran her hand over it, to clear off the sand and seaweed, so that she could read it. The sign simply said Amazon. All of a sudden, Donna's memories seem to come flooding back.
The Amazon had been the yacht that Donna had spent the past week sailing on. With the k**s at college, both her and her husband had decided to go to the Caribbean on a sailing vacation. Donna could remember her husband selling the idea to her all over again and she replayed the memories as she kept walking along the beach.
"Baby, two weeks in the sun, going wherever we want -- island hopping, cruising, or just sailing out to where no one else is around us and enjoying the sun. All you'd have to do is pack as many bikinis as you want, lie back on the deck and the crew can bring you as many cocktails as you want while you top up your tan and the sea breeze helps you drift off to sleep..." he'd said. Donna had never had an interest in sailing before, but he had made it sound quite nice. Of course, things were different when they had arrived in Barbados. Craig, her husband, hadn't booked a crew at the same time that he had chartered the yacht and the only crew available at such short notice was incredibly expensive. Of course, he didn't want to pay that much money and was confident that he could sail the yacht all by himself. Brushing Donna's protests aside ("yes, I'll do the sailing, the cooking, the cleaning, and I'll bring you the Mai Tais"), the two of them had boarded a yacht that was too big for two people to live on, never mind two people to crew it. Craig had done an okay job as the sole crewmember for the first week or so, mainly because the yacht never really got up to speed and rarely ventured far beyond the safety of the marina. And, of course, the one time that they decided to risk it and venture out to the next island, the storm came along, blew them off course, smashed up their yacht and left her stranded on an island in the middle of god-knows-where. 'Well', she thought, looking at the sign, 'looks like we won't be getting that deposit back any time soon'.
The moment she said that, she felt a pang of guilt. Her first thought had been about the money she had lost on the yacht, not about her husband. She had no idea where he was, and if he was still alive. A lump formed in her throat as she thought about it, but she blinked her eyes furiously and forced the lump back down. She wasn't going to sit here and cry about it. She was going to find him. No doubt he was doing the same -- eventually they would have to bump into each other, right?
"And when I find him," Donna said, quickening her pace up the beach, "he's going to wish he was dead." Her feet kicked up the sand as she walked, almost ran, up and over sand dune after sand dune. Each time she got to the top of one, she stopped and looked out over the land, trying to find her husband, or more debris that might lead her to him. But nothing came up, beyond the usual mess of wood and metal. Finally she climbed up the highest sand dune out of all of them and looked down at the scene of carnage below her.
Both halves of Amazon lay on the beach. She had been snapped right down the middle and been washed up, with about thirty yards between her halves. Her two propellers were half-dug in the sand and the engines lay next to them, water still pouring out of the turbines. How recently had this washed up? Something this big and loud was surely going to get her attention, she had thought. Suddenly she could see movement at the base of Amazon. Could it be Craig? She ran down the dune, getting closer to the person who was now climbing around the wreck of the yacht. Twice she almost fell, but she kept going until she reached the bottom of the dune and was no more than sixty yards from the wreck. Then she stopped, frozen. The figure (from this distance Donna could see that it was a man) had climbed down from the wreck back onto the beach, and was joined by two more men who had also emerged from the yacht. None of these men were her husband. They were all quite tall and lithely built, with very little body fat but also not a lot of muscle -- they looked like the long-distance runners Donna had seen at the Olympics. She started to back away slowly, when one of them noticed her. He pointed at her and shouted. Donna stopped where she was and tried to reason with the men.
"Can you help me?" She shouted, "this was my yacht! I am looking for my husband!" The three men looked at each other and seemed to be speaking to each other in a language Donna couldn't understand. It didn't sound like a European language, so maybe it was something more native? Donna had no idea, but the optimism that these men might be able to help her had rapidly disappeared. Especially when the three men looked at her and broke into a run at her. Donna screamed and turned round, running back up the dune, but she had no chance of getting away from three men who were built for running, especially when she was still sore from the storm. They bridged the distance between them and her easily and one of them tackled her into the sand. Donna screamed again and tried to get away, but the men wouldn't let her go. They turned her round so she was on her back. Donna looked up at them, terrified of what was going to happen next. One of the men reached for what looked like a set of vines on a belt round his waist and he pulled her wrists together, tying them together. He then did the same to her ankles, before saying something to the other two men. Between them, they picked her up and carried her off into the jungle. All the while, Donna tried to reason with them -- "please don't do this", "I just need your help", "please let me go -- I need to find my husband." All the cries and protests fell on deaf ears, however. Eventually all four of them walked -- or were carried -- in a tense silence. Donna took this as a chance to study her captors further. They all looked to be very young, perhaps barely nineteen, and they all had long black hair that went down past their shoulders. It also hadn't escaped Donna's attention that they were all black -- their skin was incredibly dark, much darker than Donna had seen anyone else's before. Donna stared at the men as they jogged through the jungle, each taking it in turns to carry her, until Donna could suddenly start hearing different noises. Voices, laughter, the sounds of a****ls -- were they getting near a village? Someone there must speak English!
Suddenly they broke through the dense jungle and came out into a clearing. Donna looked round (as much as she could while being slung over the shoulder of one of the men) and saw maybe twenty or thirty small wooden huts dotted around the clearing, with small fires between them. c***dren ran between the huts, playing chase and other games and women knelt, tending the fires, washing clothes and otherwise managing the camp. Both the women and the c***dren stopped what they were doing when Donna walked past, eyeing her with suspicion. At one end was a clearer space, where a series of large wooden tables sat in front of a huge stone throne. In one corner of the clearing there were about half a dozen cages, each of them sitting on the ground, but connected by a chain to a series of beams at the same height as the tree canopy, so they could be lifted up. Donna swallowed nervously as the men carried her over to the cages, but breathed a sigh of relief when they diverted at the last minute, instead throwing her inside one of the small huts. It was wooden, but looked to be crudely reinforced with metal. Donna guessed this was some sort of prison. She landed on the ground and turned round in time to see them shut the door in her face, before they walked off.
"Assholes," Donna spat at their backs, not daring to do it to their faces. She jumped when she heard a voice in the corner of the room.
