Free Nil Unlocked by Lynne Matson

cracked, like my lips. Like my tongue.
    That’s when I saw his spear. He turned, his expression fierce. I stopped. He hopped down from the rocks as agile as a monkey.
    I stood as still as the rock arches, ready to run. For all I knew he was a cannibal.
    Turned out he was a German.
    “Hello,” he said. He’d stopped about five feet away. “I’m Karl. Vat is your name?”
    “Scott.”
    He nodded. “How long haf you been here, Scott?”
    “Six days. I think.”
    He nodded again. Sharp brown eyes flicked over me a second time. He pointed his spear at my waist. “Vere did you get zee clothes?” He sounded suspicious.
    “A girl. She brought them to me.”
    He raised an eyebrow. “A girl.” He paused. “Vat vas her name?”
    “She didn’t tell me. She brought me clothes, and a gourd of water. She wore white clothes and had flowers in her hair.” I almost added she looked like an angel, but the last brain cell I had left told me to shut the hell up. “I never saw her again,” I added. Karl listened thoughtfully as I spoke. A second of awkward silence ticked by. Then I offered, “But I did see a giraffe. Twice. And I just saw a walrus fall out of the air.”
    Karl shook his head and sighed, his spear dropping. “Zis place. So shtrange.” He looked directly at me, his features relaxing into a smile. He spread his arms wide. “Scott,” he said grandly. “Velcome to zee island of Nil.”
    My name is Scott Bracken, and this is the truth.
    And there it was.
    Nil.
    Why Nil? I wondered. And why a walrus? Strange wasn’t the half of it. Of course I kept reading. People magazine had nothing on Uncle Scott’s journal.
    Entry #10
    I guess by Giraffe Land standards, I got lucky. Karl was a good guy. Smart, honest, and island-savvy. It turns out that he was the Leader of the City. And by City I mean a rock hut village, populated by a ragtag band of misfits, a global version of The Breakfast Club stuck on an island. You had the jocks, the intellectuals, the crybabies, the slackers, you name it. But after a few weeks I learned that people are more similar than you’d ever think. Most are good, especially when working toward a common goal of survival.
    Most.
    I kept waiting for the Professor and Mary Ann to show up with a coconut-crafted radio to get us the hell off the island or tell us we were all on a new, twisted version of Candid Camera, but it didn’t happen. No Professor, no Mary Ann. No adults. Only teenagers got tapped to join the island party, so the over-nineteen crowd was missing. Same for the elementary school set. We were one step above the Lord of the Flies crew.
    Barely.
    Because in this setting it didn’t take long for people’s true natures to show.
    But like I said, most were good.
    Everybody worked together to fish, hunt, and look out for each other, a classic division of labor. We worked in smooth teams to string nets, harvest pineapple, and keep the firepit going; we gave each other privacy at the Cove and collected wood on the way back; we made splints when Dustin broke his arm and we patrolled the City at night. A few days here and you’d see the City was an impressive cohesive unit of kids helping each other and surviving against the odds.
    That is, until noon.
    Noon was a free-for-all, a get-the-hell-out-of-my-way race for the finish. Because noon is when the gates come. Noon is when you can leave.
    And everyone wanted to leave.
    Karl delivered the bad news on my Day 6. I had 359 more days to catch a gate or my goose was cooked. Or in his words, “You haf 365 days to catch a gate or you vill die.” He accompanied that bomb with a very descriptive slicing motion across his throat. And when I asked for more details, Karl shrugged. His answer? “Zee island vill take you.” All I could think about was that scene in the Indiana Jones movie when the Germans opened the chest and all who looked at it were burned to a skeletal crisp. Maybe the island would do the same to me.
    I didn’t want to