Sand scuffed upward as Laila began to run toward the tower, only to find she ran alone and, frankly, she didn't exactly like the idea of rushing through this strange jungle without someone else beside her that could distract any wild animals from attacking her. The pilot looked the type to put up a fight, which suited Laila perfectly, but not if the pilot wasn't there to do the actual fighting. She stopped at the edge of the jungle and turned to see if it was only because she was a faster runner.
She wasn't. Or, at least, she couldn't tell, because the pilot hadn't moved away from the car which, to Laila, was the least interesting of the two things they had found. Instead, the pilot stood beside the car, hands on her hips, looking around at everything but the tower. And the car, it seemed. That woman had to get her priorities straight! By the time she returned to the pilot, the woman had taken one of the precious bottles of water from her backpack and just stood there, sipping the water.
"What are you doing? That ..." She threw out her arm toward the tower. "... is a radio tower! Look at it! Big dish. Pointing upward? You know what that means? It means a radio!"
She extended the syllables of 'radio' to emphasise the word. Any normal person would have made that connection, but not the pilot, who Laila had started to think wasn't all that smart and probably should never have been allowed to pilot a plane. She'd have a whole lot of things to say about that when they got back and had the inquiry, and probably a trial for the pilot for gross negligence. Or something.
"It's a radio telescope tower. It's not that kind of radio. Besides, it's for looking into space, not down here." With the hand holding the bottle, middle finger poking out to point, the pilot indicated all around them. "Notice anything?"
Laila frowned. Of course she had noticed something! An enormous tower with a dish at the top! She looked around anyway to see that they had found themselves in a cove, or an inlet of some kind. The beach swept around, forming a bubble of ocean before curling back outward and then curving away toward the horizon. Perhaps the island wasn't that small, after all and maybe it wasn't an island, only part of a larger coast of the mainland, though Laila wasn't certain there were many jungles on the west coast of the US.
The pilot, however, seemed to think there was something significant about where she pointed, so Laila took off her elaborate sunglasses and squinted, trying to see if the pilot was pointing at nothing. She was. There was nothing there but beach, surf, more beach, more surf, a whole lot of jungle and the car. That little car that proved they weren't all that far from civilisation after all. After another sweep of her eyes, she replaced the sunglasses on her head and threw up her hands in surrender.
"Sand. I notice sand." She made several, very determined steps back up the beach, toward the tower, and stopped again when the pilot stubbornly refused to follow her lead. "What? What is so important?"
"Where'd the car come from?" The pilot straightened out the fingers of one hand, then the arm, pointing directly behind the car and looking down her arm with one eye closed, as though measuring by sight. "Do you see a road? Or a path? Even a big enough space between the trees?"
"What?" Of course there was a path! Laila rolled her eyes at the woman's stupidity and pointed to ... nothing. Only jungle. She turned around and looked the other way.
There was nothing like a jetty for the car to come off a boat. No moorings for boats, even. Only a flat, peaceful sea where waves rolled inward as though racing to shore, only to collapse before they got there and let momentum carry them the rest of the way. She looked back again, but the pilot had it right. No road. No path. Only thick, practically impenetrable jungle, with trees so close together that even Laila, as thin as she was, might struggle to pass through.
Not to mention the undergrowth. Plants that Laila couldn't even name if she had a book in front of her. They created a bedding beneath the canopy of trees that would prove difficult to get through and Laila hoped the pilot had a machete in that backpack of hers. Or a really long knife. Come to think of it, she couldn't see any way the car had got here. But it had. The evidence sat right there, in front of them.
"It probably drove around the beach." That had to be the answer. "If we keep going, or go back far enough the other way, we'll find the path it came along. Or the road. I'd prefer a road because my feet are killing me."
She hadn't only that moment noticed that, but she had kept it to herself, not one to complain. At least not about too much. Not much that wasn't important, that is. In hindsight, she should have hopped into the plane to find the rest of her luggage herself and found a decent pair of sandals that she didn't mind ruining. As it was, at least she wasn't wearing platform shoes. The pilot, of course, didn't care in the slightest about her discomfort.
In fact, the pilot ignored her discomfort entirely, circling the car with a look on her face as though she concentrated. Poor thing. Probably didn't do much thinking usually. When the pilot crouched down at the front, brushing her hand against something, Laila knew they weren't going to the tower any time soon. At least the tower wasn't going anywhere. Their way off this island was only ... she tried to calculate the distance and failed ... over there. Not too far. Probably.
"How old would you say this car was?" The pilot looked up, raising one of those perfect eyebrows above those beautiful dark eyes and Laila almost choked, coughing and turning away. "Roughly."
"I don't know. Cars are things other people drive me around in." For the first time, she took a good look at the car and curled her nose in distaste. "Old? Quite old? Look, I don't know. It has rust and things on it."
It looked pitted and a bit of a mess, in fact. The tyres had gone flat and the rims looked as though rust had decided to eat away the entire slab of metal. The bodywork had cracks in it, the paint chipped and peeling in places. The windows looked as though someone had tried to wash them with a metal brush and, as she leaned in, trying not to get too close, she could see the material of the seats had become moth-eaten and shabby. Probably abandoned after getting stuck in the sand.
"The license plate says it's from 2029." Now Laila knew the pilot was insane.
"Don't be ridiculous! That's four years away." Curious now, Laila moved around to the front to see the plate. It didn't even look like a real one. "It's a joke! Obviously. That's not a licence plate, it's a barcode."
"California have been considering moving to barcode licence plates for years. Best guess when it will pass into law? 2028." The pilot moved around the car. "It's electric. No design of car I've ever seen. On the road or in concept. Notice anything else when you looked inside. Probably not. Where's the steering wheel?"
Laila could only gape at the pilot. Of course she'd noticed! But, for good measure, using the sunglasses to hide it, she looked inside the car to make sure. It had no steering wheel. Not on the correct side, or on the wrong side. Whichever side the correct side and wrong side were. So, that meant this car was, what, remote controlled? Like using a console joypad or something? Steered by thought? All ridiculous! Which made it all the more obvious that this was someone's idea of a joke and best that they leave it alone and ...
"What? Why? Don't touch it! Why are you touching it? Don't open it!" She shrieked the last sentence, hand reaching to her throat as though that would save it from the abuse she had laid upon it over the last few hours. "It might be ... booby-trapped!"
"Didn't know you had it in you to care." The pilot grinned and that wasn't fair. Muscles aside, she was good looking and Laila had no-one better to find attractive. The pilot's fingers drummed against the roof, her other hand on the door handle. "It's not going to be booby-trapped."
"Well, I don't. Care. But I could get caught in the blast." She stepped back several feet. "And if you die, who'll fight the jungle creatures for me."
"Other jungle creatures? Don't worry, it's perfectly ..." A loud noise sent birds erupting from the branches of the trees and rush to the skies, urgent calls of distress breaking the otherwise silent island. And the pilot laughed as Laila dived to the sand. "Sorry. Had to do that."
With sand drifting down from her hair, that would now probably need shaving off entirely and precipitate wearing wigs or starting a whole new trend of bald women, Laila lifted her eyes to realise what the pilot had done. She had deliberately slapped the roof of the car as she opened it and Laila could swear that could, at a push, be considered attempted murder. If Laila had heart problems, which she didn't, but the pilot didn't know that.
The pilot now had her head and half her body inside the car, rummaging around, and Laila pushed herself from the sand, cursing Genna for contracting the flight to this insane woman. Then she felt bad, considering that Genna had died, then she remembered that it was Genna's job to do that sort of thing, so kind of deserved the curse. But Laila still felt bad about it. She retook the steps forward that she had taken backward and eased closer to the car, trying to see what the pilot was doing.
Calls and whistles from the birds had started to settle as they came back in lazy circles, all swooping around in an almost perfectly choreographed dance until they returned to their perches in the branches of the trees, silence falling once again over the area and Laila felt a little mischief coming on. Getting closer, she moved to the hood of the car, waited until the pilot ducked further down and then hammered several times on the car.
"Ha! See how you like it!" She hammered more times, hair flopping about in front of her eyes, birds taking to the skies again. "Not so clever now, are you, pilot?"
"Maria. Mah-ree-ahh. It isn't hard to say." Unaffected by the noise, the pilot emerged from the car and now wore what looked like expensive sunglasses. Better than those Laila wore, which were mostly for the act. She gaped again at the woman. "Lookit. I found some papers."
Slipping the sunglasses atop her head, the pilot moved to the front of the car, her hip bumping against Laila's, and began to flatten the papers out on the hood. Her finger traced over them, looking for something specific because Laila doubted the pilot could read that fast. Not that she thought it a sign of stupidity, though Laila had ideas about that, or because the pilot couldn't read, because she obviously had to to become a pilot, but because she scanned the papers too fast.
Laila leaned over, taking her time to look at the papers but it all looked far too boring. Memos. Laila despised memos and had almost fired Toby years ago when he started sending her memos instead of texts or emails. She soon broke him out of that stupidness, but it had tainted their working relationship and she had wanted to get someone new ever since. She wondered if he was still alive, somewhere, on this island. She hoped so. She still had to fire him.
"Every date." The pilot broke in to Laila's thoughts, stabbing a finger at the memos. "All of them are past 2025. If this is a joke, it's an elaborate one. Now we can try to reach that tower. I think more answers can be found there."
"Wait, what does this even mean?" Laila shook her head, trying to understand, but it wasn't possible. "What are you saying."
"I'm not saying anything. You could be right. It could be a joke, but I don't think it is. But the alternative conjecture is ... a little crazy." The pilot caught Laila's look of confusion. The pilot mirrored it. "I don't want to say until I find more evidence."
Whatever it was that the pilot thought she needed evidence for, it seemed clear that it worried her and, after everything the pilot had said, everything that had happened so far, to hear the pilot say her thought was 'a little crazy' didn't engender any sense of comfort for Laila.
How crazy could this 'conjecture' be?