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Something in her face tightens. But she nods and folds up the map.
“I would suggest that we go faster. There should be a toggle to control the speed to the right side of the tiller.”
Savannah is right. I turn the knob and the engine grows louder. The boat skips forward.
“Whoa!” Sav laughs, clinging to her hat with one hand and gripping the hand hold with the other.
“What do you know?” I mutter. I stare straight ahead, scanning the water frantically. An alligator slides through the water, eager to get out of the way of the boat.
That’s a bonus to going this fast, I guess.
Lightning flashes again. The first drops of rain splash the surface of the stream almost casually. The spray is icy, making my hands sting with cold.
The fine mist quickly grows into a rapid pitter-patter across the water’s surface. Sav scrunches up her face and turns her body so that she isn’t getting the full brunt of the water in her eyes.
“This sucks!” she yells.
“Sorry.” I point ahead to a dark shape that appears on the bank a little way ahead. “I think that’s the boat house.”
She turns to look and shades her eyes. “Yeah. We’ll be fine.” But she doesn’t sound too sure.
A gator appears much too close to the boat, its eyes and nostrils the only thing that I can see. Before I can tense up and maybe shout at it, Savannah dips her fingers into a pocket in her parka. She produces several marshmallows and throws them out over the water. The gator is distracted and our boat jets by. When I turn my head, I see one of the marshmallows has disappeared as if by magic.
“What the hell?” I shout.
She laughs at my expression. “I came prepared.”
I shake my head in disbelief, aiming the tiller toward the dock. At the last moment, I remember to turn the boat’s speed down by flicking the dial and then I nose the boat gently against the dock.
Sav hops off like she’s been working the docks for a thousand years. I cut the engine and turn to find her offering me a hand out of the boat.
The sky opens up just then. The wind whips rain at me horizontally and I yelp as it hits my face, driving into my skin like needles.
I grudgingly accept Savannah’s hand. She pulls me up, and I tie the boat down to the dock in two places. When I’m done, I see that Sav has already opened the rickety boat house’s door and is holding it open for me.
I grab my backpack and dash after her. Inside amounts to not much more than an ancient wood floor, four battered plywood walls, and a door that only keeps out part of the wind and rain pounding outside.
I wedge the door closed with a simple wooden latch.
Then it’s just Sav and me, in the gloom.
She rustles around in the darkness for a moment, then turns on a lightweight lantern. My eyes take a second to adjust, but when they do, I see that the little shed is only four feet by four feet. There is nothing else to see but a bunch of bent, rusted nails lying in one corner.
“Damn.” I wipe my face on my sleeve. “How the hell did we end up here?”
Sav takes off her sun hat and looks me up and down. “You are a mess.”
“Me? What about you?” I touch her hair, which hangs, limp and dripping, past her shoulders.
She grins and shrugs. “I’ll be okay. Plus….” She pulls a couple of those metallic emergency heating blankets from her backpack and spreads one on the floor. “I come bearing gifts.”
I’m surprised that Savannah had the foresight to bring the blankets. Where do you even get those things?
God, the fact that she is so much more multi-dimensional than I even realized rocks me back on my heels. Who is this girl?
She sits down on the blanket. I look at her, cocking my head.
“You’re content to just wait out the storm?”
