it is Tony does. Rick got even more famous. And I’m here, on this beautiful island, doing what I love. We all lived happily ever after.
Except that they hadn’t lived happily ever after. She knew this, deep down inside. None of them had escaped unscathed.
Richard had been happy for a couple months. Then, one night, his wife and their adopted daughter were killed by a drunken driver. The accident had happened only a mile away from the new home they’d just moved into. The other driver rear-ended them at sixty miles per hour, slamming their car into a bridge abutment. The airbags didn’t deploy. Richard’s wife was ejected from the car and died instantly. Their daughter passed away while en route to the hospital. Two weeks after the funeral, Richard had checked himself into a hospital. He hadn’t come out since.
Jennifer had no idea what had happened to Tony. He’d vanished. That, in and of itself, didn’t bode well. She could imagine several different scenarios accounting for his disappearance, each one more sinister than the last.
Rick’s press junket continued—but probably not in a way that he would have preferred. Within a year, he’d begun a very public and very grim slide. His fall from grace—the angry outburst during his Rolling Stone interview, his arrest for drunken driving, his subsequent arrest for cocaine possession, the fist fight with some paparazzi, a second fist fight with some people at a horror convention where Rick was Guest of Honor, and the public accusations from his publisher regarding missed deadlines and breach of contract had all been plastered across the tabloids and gossip websites.
And then there was Livingston. He’d become President of the United States of America. How bad could that be? Well, as it had turned out, very bad indeed. The Republican National Committee had swayed public opinion enough that Congress officially investigated allegations that the Livingston Administration had engaged in a conspiracy to cover up the real reason behind President Tyler’s death. That storm passed, with no wrongdoing found and no credibility to the accusations and internet rumors. But then it was discovered that Livingston had signed an executive order to detain the remaining key members of Tyler’s administration, on charges of perjury, obstruction of justice, fraud, and embezzlement. Former Advisor to President Tyler, Donald Barker, was taken into custody and imprisoned at an undisclosed location. The ensuing uproar had dominated the headlines for most of the last year. The stress showed on Livingston’s face. He hadn’t been a spring chicken when he accepted the nomination. Now, he looked positively ancient. Jennifer doubted he’d last the rest of his term, let alone long enough to run for reelection.
As for herself, well, she was just fine, wasn’t she? She’d come through the whole ordeal unscathed, unless you counted post-traumatic stress disorder, chronic depression, an increased reliance on alcohol and prescription medication, no social life, general malaise, and an extreme aversion to marine life—the latter of which made her occupation quite interesting.
The birds shrieked louder, disrupting her ruminations. Jennifer opened one eye, and was surprised to see that it was now dark. She sat up, frowned at the fourth and fifth crabs scuttling past, and then brushed sand from her hair and arms and the back of her neck. She’d have to get back soon. The others would be worried about her.
Jennifer had come to the island not only to escape the past and reinvent herself, but because it was the first scientific find in a long time that actually excited her. When the word first broke that remnants of an ancient primitive people had been discovered on the South Pacific island of Naranu, Jennifer hadn’t paid attention to the story. Paleontologists found the artifacts at the bottom of a cliff located deep within the island’s jungle—faces similar to the famous figures on Easter Island—carved out of stone, with eyes, nose, mouth and teeth all detailed. But mixed in with them were other carvings. Some bore a striking resemblance to the Dark Ones. Another depicted a hideous, hulking creature with the body of a man and the face of a squid. Carbon dating placed the artifacts at forty to eighty thousand years old. Further study of the island had unveiled over three dozen marine and tropical species that had previously been thought extinct—everything from frogs to worms to fish. As a journalist for National Geographic had referred to it, Naranu was like “the Garden of Eden.”
The scientific community had converged on the island. In addition to Jennifer’s team from the National Aquarium, scholars, scientists and researchers from universities and research centers across the globe had joined the rush. Jennifer had made friends with several of them—Dr. Edward Steinhardt, director of Paleovertebrates at UCLA, and doctors Susan Ehart and Wade Collins, leading researchers in human prehistory from the University of Michigan.