My Brother’s Keeper
My Brother’s Keeper is an award-winning, psychological thriller encompassing a battle between two brothers as they strive for supremacy and at the same time as they battle nature to survive. The setting is a uninhabited island in the Java Sea that has become home to six castaways in the early days of WW2. They escape Singapore prior to the Japanese invasion, but never reach their destination. The protagonists, two brothers, battle for supremacy at the same time as they battle nature to survive.
Fast paced and shocking; you will not want the story to end.
A brief peek inside of My Brother’s Keeper
Sometimes a sacrifice is required.
…Anders Cartwright
We are falling. There are bumps, some large, some small, along the way down, but these are only futile attempts by our small airplane to save itself. The noise is deafening; the engines groan and wail as they struggle for life. Our fuselage is under attack by the rain, each drop a bullet that hammers into the steel and aluminum on the way downward. The plane shudders under the vibration of the wings as they cut through the wind. And then…
There is no warning, just an ear-deafening bang and Ess’ body slams into my left side with excruciating force, sending me crushing to the right into the first mate’s shoulder. He is sitting against the bulkhead; there is nowhere for him to go as his head smashes hard into the wood and steel frame. It hits not with a dull thud but with a sound more akin to the crack of a baseball bat striking a homerun. There is a final and terrible sound of fracturing and tearing metal as the nose of the plane slaps downward. At that moment, the brave Douglas DC-3 moaned and died a quick and merciful death.
It is too dark to see. We are blind in the blackness. I blink my eyes trying to get a sense as to what has just happened. The dark is disconcerting. There is no movement in the plane and I have no idea how long it has been since the plane came to rest. Can I be the only survivor? How cruel would God be? It would not be fair to be alone. I shiver with cold and my body hurts. The banging water bullets have quieted and the straining of the propellers is gone. Now, the only noise is the whistling breeze and the gentle patter of rain as it sheds over the outside hull of our downed aircraft. Where the metal skin has torn from its rivets, water streams into the cabin poring over me. I am drenched.
I close my eyes again, trying to calm myself to the pain, but it doesn’t help. I am damaged. I don’t know how badly. I fear I am lost and alone.
Chapter 1 – Why?
I am Anders, Andy to everybody except my brother and the accountants who write my paycheck every two weeks. To them I will always be Anders.
I am not alone. I have been thrown into this world with five others. Only two, Shelly and Simon, did I know before our flight started. The other three are strangers to me. We are joined together by the common need to escape our bizarre lives in Singapore, lives that had until recently been fun and unreal. For me and Shelly, life before our flight was one of endless press meetings and interviews as we competed to make up fantastic stories for our respective news agencies. I say “make up” because nobody wants to read the boring stuff of reality, so we embellished… everything. The nights were a time of drunken parties and formal evening clothes as we rubbed shoulders with the beautiful and the powerful. Everything was British prim and proper on the surface, but once you got behind the façade everything was decadent, indulgent, and, in private, xenophobic. My brother, Simon, did not fit in with the ethereal life Ess and I had fallen into, but I will touch on that later. For the three others that have been thrown onto this small island with us, Singapore had meant economic freedom, power, and yes, parties, perhaps not of the British, high-brow nature, but every bit as intoxicating. I use the past tense because our lives that had been centered around the wonders and opportunities in Singapore are now nothing more than a memory.
Now we are part of the six human beings thrown together alone on this island. We were seven, but one life was lost last night as the plane hit the ground. Even with the brevity of our association, we know we are now family. We have come from completely different lives, but we have a common bond, stronger than that of blood; we have the relation of dependence. I don’t know that I even like these people, yet I will be forced to rely on them and them on me.
