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“Holy shit!” Rodrigo suddenly shouted as he went up on his knees, hanging over his side of the raft.
“What is it?” Jack peered over the water, the darkness suddenly gripping him by his throat. He’d been too busy surviving the storm last night to actually notice this eerie darkness at sea. Not tonight, though. That he couldn’t actually see his surroundings made him uneasy.
Jack could make out in the bit of moonlight that Rodrigo pointed at something in the distance. “Y’all don’t see it? It’s right there!”
Dominic wormed himself in between Rodrigo and Zane and followed Rodrigo’s directions.
“There! Right in front of us! That’s a light, right?”
Dominic laughed unbelievingly. “That’s a fuckin’ fire, man! Someone’s having a barbecue on a damn beach and forgot to invite us!”
“No way!” Jack peered over the water and his heart almost leaped out of his chest when he indeed spotted the small glow in the dark he knew so well. Finding a fire had never felt this good.
“Are we moving closer or further away?” Gabriel asked.
Dominic and Rodrigo shouted, “Closer!”
“I can’t believe it! Fire means that there are people, right?” Reed said while he punched Jack’s shoulder in his enthusiasm.
Jack nodded. “It may be a forest fire, but either way, it means land.”
Gabriel shook his head. “I can’t believe it…”
“We’ll have to paddle in case there’s a stream up ahead that takes us in another direction. I’ll start paddling with Rod,” Dominic said.
Rodrigo got to work and said, “Let’s do this.”
With every few minutes that passed, the tiny orange glow in the dark became a little bit more visible. He had a hard time making out anything else in the dark, but when the clouds parted, the moonlight revealed an island in front of them.
He knew his friends all saw the same thing he did when a hush fell over the life raft. Jack was in awe of the enormous island before them. They were heading straight for the fire on the beach. After about forty hours drifting at sea while trapped in their life raft, they were almost free.
Jack smiled at Zane before hugging his best friend tight. This was it. Things would only get better from here on out. He was sure of it.
CHAPTER FIVE
Adela fellto her knees and scooped up a pile of sand with both hands. She threw the sand into the flames, hoping it would put at least half of the raging fire out. A sudden gust of wind swept up the flames even higher, disheartening Adela.
After their swim in the lake, Camilla and Adela walked for an hour through the jungle before reaching the beach. They had found dry wood for a fire while walking on their last legs.
It had taken them two hours of rubbing two sticks together without any success, before Adela finally remembered Raven’s reading glasses in the drawstring bag.
After fifteen minutes of pointing the lens of the glasses to the part of the dry leaves facing the sun, the first sign of smoke had made them ecstatic. On this windy beach, however, their fire lit up in a way they both hadn’t foreseen. Their mood quickly derailed from euphoric to despair when the flames suddenly towered over Adela’s five foot five.
“This fire is way out of control!” Camilla shouted.
Adela chucked another pile of sand into the fire. “I’m trying to put this side out, but it’s not working!”
Instead of helping her with throwing sand into the massive fire, Camilla kept pacing behind her, driving Adela absolute bonkers.
“Stop pacing!”
“Stop shouting at me! What if we burn down the island?”
Adela would have rolled her eyes if she hadn’t been so caught up in her efforts of actually controlling the fire.
Tired to the bone, their emotions finally got the better of the two friends. Adela hated how they argued and stepped backwards, right into Camilla’s path and away from the fire.
“I’m sorry, Cami. I didn’t mean to snap at you.”
