“I’ve been through it all, and I’ll show you how to survive all that and worse in . . . Con Con the Survivin’ Man (pronounced ‘mahn,’ or so I keep reminding my producer). Tonight’s episode, Con Conlinson stupidly tells the crew to take their boat and separate, resulting in THE GIANT FUCKING MESS I find myself in this evening.”

Newly stranded, Animal World™’s Conwin Edmund Conlinson sighed and stared at the sky. The glorified rowboat rocked and swayed in this, a more or less unoccupied stretch of the Pacific Ocean.

And it hadn’t seemed like that much of a storm, either.

Con sighed again. When he stretched out, the boat was a foot longer than his head and his feet. The craft itself was little more than a couple of life jackets, a tarp, a first aid kit (which he hadn’t needed; he’d come through the storm without a scratch . . . or a crew), a knife, a flint, a notebook that he took to be some sort of log, and a box of blue Bics.

No food, of course. Or fishing gear.

Or land.

Just that silver coconut that had managed to keep a perfect distance between him and his boat for the last several hours, no matter where he drifted. He watched it bob, bored. He supposed he could start a diary. But he was a TV guy, not a journalist. TV guys weren’t known for their writing skills. But give ’em a teleprompter and they went to town! Yeah!

And what would he write about, anyway? How, in his arrogance, he’d wanted a smash-bang season opener of Con Con the Survivin’ Man (mahn), how he’d insisted on keeping distance between his little boat and the larger rig, the one with the camera crew, the producer, and the food.

How he’d ignored the storm, instead shouting survival tips to the camera over one shoulder while braving the squall. How he’d lost his balance and gone sprawling, how everything had gone starry and dark, and by the time he sat up, the crew boat was nowhere in sight. The storm had howled and nothing was in sight, and for a while he’d assumed he was in real trouble. And all this before sweeps week!

But just as suddenly as it had sprung up, the storm disappeared, leaving him stranded.

Yeah, he’d write all about that. He could see it now: The Memoirs of Captain Dumbass. Chapter One: I forget every single nautical rule of safety and survival.

No, he was in a mess of his own making, and writing about it wasn’t going to help. He and the silver coconut were on their own.

And where did that come from?

Well. It was the only thing to look at, for one thing; small wonder most of his attention was fixed on it. Wherever he looked he saw the endless ocean, the cruel unrelenting sea (hey, that was poetic, kinda, he should remember it for his triumphant comeback show), no islands, no greenery, no birds . . . just the silver coconut.

The survival expert flopped back into the bottom of the boat and realized that he had never seen a silver coconut. And the nearest tree was probably a zillion nautical miles from here. He studied the sky, which was an irritatingly cheerful blue. A “no dumbass got his bad self abandoned on my watch” kind of blue. The most annoying blue in the world, come to think of it. Arrggh.

He sat up, scowling. Better to look at the coconut. Which was quite a bit closer. Maybe the tides had changed? No, that didn’t make any sense. Maybe—

The coconut had a face. The coconut was a severed head!