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“But one man of her crew alive,” sang the axe man. “What put to sea with seventy-five . . .”
The song faded into a giggle, high-pitched.
“Does he know we’re here?” demanded Phil. “In the tree? And he’s just . . . hanging around? Is he making fun of us?”
“I don’t know,” said Brian grimly. He lit his first pine cone and handed it to Phil to throw.
It fizzled up with flames, but when Phil hurled it down, the thing just bounced off of the creature’s head, the fire already out, and the snake didn’t even twitch. Brian caught the shine of its filmy, baleful eye still turned up to them, but its mouth wasn’t open, and it wasn’t mad. It was just . . . waiting. He thought a string of very bad words.
“Well,” said Coco, “I think we need the firewood. I can see where you dropped them from here.” Brian heard the quiver of breathless fear in her voice.
Phil said, “Coco, come on, the snake is right there! Look at what happened to Mr. Adler. Look at what happened to my uncle!”
Coco was scanning the ground below the tree. Her voice turned cold. “The same thing that is going to happen to my mom,” she said, “if she comes into the forest looking for me. I am not sitting up here safe waiting for my mom to turn into a decoy for that thing. So, yes, I’ll take my chances. Besides,” she added, “now you can distract the snake.”
“Bud, she’s not wrong,” said Brian reluctantly. He knew better than Phil how quick Coco could be, and how brave. “Be careful, Tiny,” he told her.
Tiny was the nickname he first gave her months ago. She’d hated it then, because she hated being small. But now Coco knew she wasn’t small, not in the ways that counted, and Brian knew she knew. She rolled her eyes and flashed Brian a shaky grin.
Phil looked from Brian to Coco, opened his mouth, closed it again, and finally just nodded. “Be careful,” he said to Coco.
“Yup,” she said. “Be distracting.”
It took a lot of flaming pine cones and shouting to keep the snake from noticing Coco as she crept down the other side of the tree. Brian just hoped Coco’s mom couldn’t hear the racket, all the way on the beach. The snake was so big the pine cones mostly just bounced off without disturbing it. An ordinary snake would have just crawled away.
But finally the snake locked onto them, staring. And when the twentieth or so flaming pine cone bounced off its head, it hissed. Phil had fantastic aim.
Coco dropped from branch to branch. Brian dropped lower too, if not quite so low.
“Hey!” he shouted at the snake. “Hey, you! Fangy! Look up here! Here!”
Its eyes were fixed on him, narrow and calculating. Brian wondered, staring into those weird eyes, if Phil was right and he had caught the thing’s baby, fishing. If this was personal. But that would be weird. Snakes hatched from eggs, and they didn’t parent. Then again, snakes didn’t sink sailboats either.
Coco was creeping towards the bundle of logs. At the same moment, the snake lunged up the tree. Brian discovered, fortunately, that his branch was just out of range.
Phil threw more pine cones. It was going well. It was going well right up until Coco had the bundle of wood slung across her shoulders, looking small under its weight. She began to creep back to the tree.
And a stick cracked, loudly, under her shoe.
The snake’s head whipped around, mouth open, teeth glistening with black venom. It darted at her head, and Coco dodged, looking tiny and terrified.
And Phil yelled, something pretty close to a scream, grabbed the last flaming pine cone, and pitched it down with a lot of force and accuracy right onto the thing’s eye. The monster left Coco and lunged upward for them, coming up just short.
By then, Coco had darted into the tree and was hustling upward. Brian and Phil were bellowing the worst things they could think of at the snake.
Coco rejoined them. She was pale and panting, and she had the bundle of logs on her back. “Phil, you saved my life,” she said.
Phil looked startled. “I did? I guess I did,” he said, looking both puzzled and pleased with himself. “Gotta make last year up to you somehow.”
She smiled at him. “I think you did.”
Brian was already busy jabbing as many fishhooks into the dry wood as he could, trying to make a proper missile.
“Okay,” he said, “here,” and handed Phil the first log, spiky with fishhooks.
Phil hefted it like it was the first pitch of the playoffs. He took a deep breath and threw. It shot straight down and smashed the snake right in the face. The snake recoiled, its massive mouth open, hissing.
“That’s for my uncle!” bellowed Phil triumphantly.
