Marooned: The Crossing

MAROONED: The Crossing

Carl Lakeland

The engine dies without warning.
No smoke. No drama. Just silence — and an endless, freezing sea.

Ricky Gabriel, his brother Jason, and a pregnant woman named Chloe drift with no fuel, no destination, and dwindling supplies. The ice is behind them. The ocean is everywhere else. Hunger turns from discomfort into calculation, and survival becomes a series of choices no one should ever have to make.

Jason believes in rules. Rations. Math. Hard decisions made early so fewer people die later. Ricky believes in mercy — in love, in hope, in the belief that survival without humanity isn't survival at all. Caught between them is Chloe, growing weaker by the hour, carrying a child the world no longer has room for.

As the days stretch into something uncountable, the sea begins to watch them back. Orcas move beneath the lifeboat with deliberate purpose, lifting, guiding, disappearing without explanation. Help, when it comes, feels less like rescue and more like judgment.

When a ship finally rises from the horizon — impossibly old, impossibly intact — the survivors are faced with a truth far more unsettling than death at sea. They have not been saved. They have been chosen.

MAROONED: The Crossing is a brutal, atmospheric sequel about survival after survival — about the cost of staying human when the world has already ended. A story of hunger, love, brotherhood, and the thin, dangerous line between necessity and cruelty.

This is not a story about escape.
It's about what comes after.