Epilogue Episode 1.6: The Sister

Epilogue is a series of short stories following the final moments of different people in a singular location at the end of the world. Season one follows the passengers on a plane travelling from Brisbane to Hobart.

The Season One finale follows Ava as she struggles to swim through the wreckage in search of her sister. She reflects on her childhood and how her sister has been the most important person in her life since she was a kid.

The chopping of waves and the smell of smoke in the air took Ava back to the barbeque on the beach. It was a happy memory from a dark time in her life. It had been her birthday, the day she had turned twelve. Her parents hadn’t prepared any sort of celebration and she hadn’t been allowed to go out with friends. But her sister, seven years her senior, wasn't having any of that. Ivy had arranged for her then boyfriend to pick them up and marched Ava out to the car before their parents could raise much of a fuss. They set up a barbeque and she had spent the evening eating charred sausages, splashing in the waves and watching the stars through the telescope the pair of them had splurged on to provide for her. Ava had always loved the stars. She had always loved Ivy too. That day had started rough but now, fifteen years later, it was one of her fondest memories. No bruises. No booze. Just the sound of sizzling meat, joyous laughter and the sloshing of the sea overseen by the warm reds and oranges of the sunset.

Once more, Ava was floating in the sea under a red sky. She grinned giddily up at the sky, lost in the memory and not aware of the delusional fog clouding her thoughts. As far as Ava was concerned, she was that young girl again; waiting for her sister to brave the waves with her.

“Ivy?” she called out. But her sister didn’t answer her. Ava wondered if she’d run off somewhere with that boyfriend of hers - whatever his name was - for a moment. But of course Ivy wouldn’t do that. “Ivy?!”

Again Ivy didn’t come to join her. Ava’s anger flared as red as the atmosphere above, her muscles clenching. She tried to shout for Ivy again but her throat was agonising and raw. The shout came up as more of a croak and she found herself coughing, almost choking on an acrid taste as oily saltwater filled her mouth. 

Why was her throat so strained? Why did the water taste so wrong? Why did everything hurt? The questions came one after another and with them so did fragmentary pieces of memory.

Ava kicked her legs, gasping for air as she broke the surface of the sea. Ignoring how much it hurt, she lunged for the nearest object she could and ended up slumping over a thin piece of jagged metal.

Her life jacket wasn’t inflated. She couldn’t remember if it had been to start with or not. All she could piece together was that nearly drowning had shocked her out of her unwilling trip down memory lane.

All around Ava were debris and corpses, a gruesome kind of flotsam. Her plane had crashed, she realised. The piece of jagged metal she was clinging to had been a part of the fuselage. All the detritus she could see had once been a part of the plane just like it. The water had tasted oily and wrong because it was laced with jet fuel. The bodies - sagging over strewn about luggage or similar chunks of broken-off aircraft to her had been passengers just like she had. 

Ava had been sitting next to Ivy en route to a trip to Tasmania to see its famous scenery and do some stargazing away from the light pollution of the mainland. Then there had been rattling and shaking. The plane had started dropping, tilting hard to the left. The next thing Ava knew, there was the red sky above and delirious dreams.

Not everything had faded away as she returned to reality though. The sky was still a threatening, ominous shade of red. Ivy was still not at Ava’s side.

“Ivy?!” she called again, ignoring how much it burned her throat to yell.

Yet again, Ivy didn’t respond to her.

It occurred to Ava that it was eerily silent. She would have expected groans, other people shouting for their loved ones or even screams of pain and terror. But it was quiet other than the sloshing of the waves.

The terrifying thought that she might be the only survivor slithered into Ava’s mind. Certainly she wasn’t seeing any evidence to the contrary. The silence spoke volumes. Ivy was not calling for her. 

The icy realisation that Ivy might already be dead washed over Ava. A world without Ivy in it was scarcely conceivable. She didn’t know how to exist without her sister. Ivy was her anchor. She had been since Ava was a child. 

Suddenly, the world under the nefarious red sky felt so much bigger and scarier to Ava. She didn’t feel like a grown woman anymore. She felt like the scared kid she used to be, hiding from the adults in her life that would harm her and praying that Ivy would walk in the door at any moment and take her away.

But if Ivy was gone, Ava was alone. She would face whatever nightmare this was on her own, with only a carpet of the dead floating along on the waves for company.

“IVY!!” she called again, once more ignoring the war it seared and tore at her throat to yell. In her desperation, she started kicking. Ava clinged to the sharp metal that used to be a part of the plane like a floatation device and started paddling through the ocean of the dead. She didn’t have a plan or a destination in mind, she just had to find Ivy.

Ivy shouldn’t have been that far away, they had been right next to each other when the plane crashed. 

Images of her sister being thrown flying across the water, skipping like a stone as her bones broke and organs ruptured conjured themselves into existence in Ava’s mind’s eye. She pushed them aside only to see Ivy being pulled beneath the surface by ravenous sharks and torn apart instead.

Tears clouded Ava’s vision, a meagre contribution to the salinity of the water she was desperately kicking through. Each movement of her legs wracked her body with indescribable agony, but nothing could hurt Ava more than losing Ivy. That just couldn’t happen.

Ava kept paddling.

She didn’t even realise that she was bleeding profusely. She didn’t notice the holes in her body or the shattered bones. It hurt. It hurt a lot. But in her panicked, adrenaline-fueled delirium, such things were trifling. All that mattered was Ivy. She had to find Ivy. If she could find her sister, they could sever her legs from her body and carve out pieces of her and she would still be whole.

So she paddled onwards, clinging to her scrap of fuselage.

She was so focused on her frantic search, she almost missed the tiny, whimpering voice. 

“Help. Help me. Someone help me.”

The voice was small, fragile. The voice of a child who was alone and frightened. Ava knew it well. She had heard it come from between her own lips enough times growing up.

A not insignificant part of Ava wanted to ignore the parched, raspy cries for help. Ivy could be out there somewhere, needing her. But the voice of the despairing child had returned some of her sense of reality. Ava was not a helpless kid who could not survive without the protection of her big sister any more. She was an adult who had long since moved away from the people who hurt her. Now she was the one in a position to offer some meagre comfort to a child in need.

With a pang for her missing sister, Ava changed the direction she was paddling to look for the source of the pitiable voice. With her frenzy subsiding and clarity coming back to her thoughts, it didn’t take her very long.

The kid looked to be a young boy, maybe seven or eight. It was hard to tell for sure through Ava’s hazy vision. What she could tell though, was that he was thoroughly drenched and clinging to a water-logged carry-on that looked like it could sink at any moment for dear life.

She kicked her aching legs and made her way over to him. 

“Hey there,” she croaked out. “I have room for one more.”

Ava hesitantly reached out to the boy and found herself surprised at how little he resisted her touch. She half-dragged, half-guided him on top of the fuselage chunk that had been serving as her paddle board and was pleased to find it didn’t dip overly much into the water with the added weight.

“Thank you,” the boy mumbled, straining out the words.

“Try not to talk too much,” Ava said. “Your throat sounds sore and we don’t have anything to drink.”

The boy nodded, but spoke anyway a moment later. “Have you seen my mum?”

Ava forced herself not to wince or frown. “I don’t think so. But I’m sure she can’t be too far. I need to give my legs a rest, but we can look for her after I’ve had a bit of a break. Maybe we’ll find my sister too.”

Truthfully, while she did need to rest her aching legs, Ava was just hoping to stall until rescue found them. She didn’t think the boy’s mother was alive even if they could find her. She had given up on finding Ivy too. She just wished that the excuse of needing a rest would let the kid cling to the belief he would still be able to find his mum long enough for someone to save them.

They waited a very long time with no sign of any rescue being imminent. Ava found her vision was getting darker and cloudier - a tunnel of hazy red ringed by blackness. Her thoughts were getting sluggish. Her body still screamed at her in agony. She thought that the pain might have been the only thing keeping her conscious, the sharp sensation shaking her awake any time she started to slip.

The boy on their chunk of scrap had gotten quiet and still, Ava realised. She wasn’t sure how long he had been slumped there without movement or whimpers.

“Are you awake?” Ava said, barely recognising her own voice as weak as it now was.

“Yes,” the boy said. His voice was slurred. He sounded so tired.

“I forgot to ask before, what’s your name?”

“Theo,” the boy drawled.

“That’s a good name,” Ava said.

Theo didn’t say anything back to that. Ava was just glad that he was still alive. So long as he kept breathing, there was a chance for him to be saved. She wasn’t so sure she would be able to be, but that wasn’t the priority now.

“What’s your name?” Theo eventually asked, so much later that Ava had almost forgotten she had asked for his.

With her groggy, faded thoughts, it took Ava a while to form a response.

“Ivy,” she said. 

“Pretty name,” Theo said.

“Yeah,” Ava replied. “It is.”

She found herself smiling. She wasn’t going to make it. She was sure of that. But she could keep Theo company. She could help keep him alive. She could leave that one last parting gift for the sister who had given her everything: another child saved by Ivy Gil. This time, everyone would know that Ava’s sister was a hero.

She had no way of knowing that rescuers would never come to save Theo and learn her sister’s name.