Treasure

“You’re kidding.”

“I... it’s good news, really. There’s a ferry from the other side of the island to Ponce, we just have to walk there...”

“What, all of us just walk out of the jungle?”

Josh shrugged. He’d gone from “we’re all going to die in a plane crash” through “we’re all going to drown” and “we’re trapped on a desert island” to “we have to walk to the ferry” and was pretty pleased with that progress, on the whole. Explaining how they’d gotten onto the island seemed like a detail, a minor problem, and not really to be compared with “how do we avoid being eaten by sharks.”

“I don’t think...” He looked around. “We swam,” he said. “We’re part of a race, or a rally or something, and we swam out here as part of...”

Carlos looked around at the soaking wet crew of computer security experts standing, sitting and lying on the beach. 

“Swam,” he said. “We. Swam here. In cargo shorts and...” He waved his hand in the general direction of other people. “Jason is actually wearing a pocket protector.”

Josh shrugged. “It doesn’t matter,” he said. “Nobody’s going to ask. We’ll be dry by the time we get to the ferry, nobody is going to ask. It’s a tourist ferry, we’re on a nature preserve. It’s not like there’s customs.”

Carlos crossed his arms. “Fine,” he said. “What about that?”

He pointed to where Dave was sitting on top of an extra large duffle bag. It was the only piece of luggage they’d salvaged from the plane.

Obviously, they hadn’t swum here with it.

“How...” Josh paused. “Okay,” he said, “Everybody puts as much as they can in their pockets, and we stash the rest of it somewhere.”

“Stash it.”

“Preferably somewhere close to the damned road.”

“There’s a road?”

Josh looked down at the map he’d had in his pocket. It was wet, on the verge of becoming mush.

“It’s that way,” he said, pointing generally west.

“So,” said Carlos, “You’re proposing that we bury a bag of money on a Caribbean island, draw a map of where we buried it, and come back for it later.”

“Basically.”

“I expect there will be a big X where we buried it.”

Josh grinned. “I expect there will be,” he said.

Carlos sighed. He looked out to sea, and then at the group on the beach. The fact that they weren’t all about to die was finally catching up with him.

“Okay,” he said. “Let’s get everybody gathered up and start walking.”