Chapter 9 the sky of the broken glass
Jack stood at the mouth of the Black Cave, his arms crossed over his chest, which was now crisscrossed with the fading silver scars of the tiger’s claws. He looked at his handiwork. He had iron tools, silver wiring, and a home that was the envy of the wilderness. He felt like a god. He felt untouchable.
But the Pacific Ocean has a way of humbling those who think they have conquered it.The afternoon of Day 42 didn't begin with a roar; it began with a terrifying, unnatural silence. The birds, usually a riot of color and noise in the canopy, had vanished. Even the insects had stopped their rhythmic clicking. The air felt thick, like he was breathing through a wet cloth, and the temperature had dropped ten degrees in minutes.Jack looked toward the horizon. The sky wasn't blue, and it wasn't gray. It was a bruised, sickly shade of yellow-green."Something is wrong," Jack whispered.He ran to the beach. The tide had pulled back further than he had ever seen, leaving fish flopping in the mud and exposing jagged reefs that usually stayed hidden. Then, he heard it. It wasn't the sound of wind. It was the sound of a thousand freight trains screaming across the water.A massive, spinning pillar of black cloud descended from the sky, touching the ocean and turning the water into a white mist. It was a tornado—a monster of wind and salt.As the roar grew louder, Jack’s mind flashed back to the night of the shipwreck. He saw the Sovereign of the Seas tilting. He heard the metallic scream of the hull snapping. He felt the same cold, paralyzing terror he had felt when the yacht went down. He remembered the feeling of being small—of being a tiny, insignificant speck in a world that wanted to swallow him."Not again," Jack cried out, his voice lost in the wind. "I built this! I worked for this!"He didn't have time to save his inventions. He barely had time to save himself.The tornado hit the coastline like a bomb. Jack watched in horror as his beautiful house—the one he had spent weeks building with his own two hands—was simply erased. The palm-thatch roof was ripped away in a second. The wooden beams, joined by his clever plastic-bottle technology, snapped like dry toothpicks.His forge was scattered. His gold and silver wiring, the pride of his scientific mind, was caught in the wind and spun away into the jungle like tinsel. The iron anvil he had labored over was tossed through the air like a pebble.Jack scrambled toward the Black Cave, his fingers clawing at the dirt. The wind was so strong it began to lift his legs off the ground. He grabbed a heavy root and held on, his muscles screaming. He watched as the tornado moved over his camp, grinding everything he owned into splinters and dust.Everything was gone. The "King of the Island" was back to having nothing but the dirt under his fingernails.
When the storm finally passed, the silence that returned was even more haunting than the roar. Jack crawled out from the crevice he had squeezed into, his body covered in mud and scratches.He walked toward where his house had stood. There was nothing left but a patch of cleared dirt. Not a single piece of wood remained. His "Advanced Technology"—the batteries, the telegraph, the lights—were gone, buried under a mountain of debris or blown out to sea.Jack stood in the center of the ruins. He looked at his hands. They were shaking.He found the "Calendar Tree." It had been snapped in half. The marks he had made—the record of his forty-two days of survival—were gone. He felt a sob rise in his throat, a raw, jagged sound that tore through the quiet air."I have nothing," Jack groaned, falling to his knees. "I am right back where I started."The destruction made him remember the yacht more clearly than ever. He remembered the feeling of the water hitting his lungs. He remembered the butlers rowing away in the lifeboats, leaving him behind.For the first time since the shipwreck, Jack felt like a victim again. He felt like the weak, soft boy who had boarded the ship in San Francisco. He looked at the wreckage of his forge and felt the weight of total failure.He sat in the mud for hours, the rain—now a gentle, mocking drizzle—falling on his head. He didn't want to build. He didn't want to hunt. He just wanted to disappear.As the sun began to set behind the ravaged jungle, Jack’s eyes caught a glint of something in the mud. He reached down and pulled out a small, twisted piece of silver wire. It was thin, but it hadn't broken.He looked at the Black Cave. The tornado had destroyed his house, but it couldn't destroy the mountain. The minerals were still there. The gold was still there. The water spring was still there.Jack stood up slowly. His legs were weak, and his heart was heavy, but he wasn't the same boy from the yacht. The boy from the yacht would have waited for someone to save him. The Jack of the Island knew that no one was coming."The tornado took my house," Jack said, his voice gaining strength. "But it didn't take my mind. It didn't take my hands. I'm still alive. You tried to drown me with the yacht, and you tried to blow me away with the storm. But I'm still here."
