They barely made it. It was only with the help of the current, a lot of luck, and Tumble’s well-timed use of the pole to push the boat off that they managed at all.
Unfortunately, Tumble put so much muscle into the task that she lost her balance and fell into the bottom of the boat, dropping the pole into the water. By the time she sorted herself out, they were drifting away from the tree, and the pole was out of reach.
“Maybe we won’t need it again?” she said, trying to sound hopeful.
■ ■ ■
Soon, the creek narrowed in front of them, and Blue steered them carefully between the banks. The roots of the tall trees on either side were growing down toward the water like gnarled, grasping fingers.
Blue held his breath and concentrated, and then they were through, slipping between the tree roots and out of the creek entirely. The stream had taken them into a stiller body of water that opened up more and more until Tumble and Blue were gliding through an eerie landscape choked with lily pads.
Cypress trees bearded with Spanish moss surrounded them. The moonlight stained the pale trunks red.
“Blue . . . if we follow the moon . . .”
It only took a moment for him to realize what she meant. The moon shone down from over the treetops. They would run aground.
“Maybe we’re supposed to walk now,” Tumble suggested.
Blue rubbed at a bite on the back of his neck, thinking. “What if we need the boat later? We can’t carry it.”
“We have to listen to the moon, right? Or they wouldn’t have carved it into your attic.”
Blue guessed that made as much sense as anything else, but there was another problem. “I’m not sure how to park the boat.”
“Just drive it kind of slowly at land, I think. And don’t get the propeller stuck in the mud.”
“Okay,” Blue said, wondering if he could manage that. “Let me know when we’re getting really close to land.”
Tumble nodded. She directed Blue through the cypress trees, following the moon.
“Wait,” she said as a deeper darkness fell over them. “There’s a cloud blocking it.”
“The moon’s not going anywhere,” said Blue.
“I know that. But we need . . .” Tumble trailed off. Suddenly, she switched off the boat’s light.
She knelt at the front of the jon boat, staring hard at the red-tinged water off to their right.
“What?” Blue said. Nerves were zinging through him. His grip tightened on the tiller. “It’s not . . .”
He didn’t realize he was expecting a giant alligator to pop up at any moment until it didn’t happen.
“The water’s red,” Tumble said so quietly that Blue almost couldn’t make the words out over the sound of the motor.
“Yeah, I know. Everything’s kind of red.”
She was excited now. She pointed. “It’s a reflection of the moon!”
“So?”
“Blue,” she said, annoyed. “There’s a cloud over the moon, but not over the reflection.”
“That’s not . . .” Possible, he thought. But as he stared into the water himself, he realized Tumble was right.
“The carving! That’s why Almira was pointing down!” Tumble’s voice echoed through the swamp. “We’re not supposed to follow the moon. We’re supposed to follow its reflection!”
■ ■ ■
The reflection wasn’t perfectly clear against the water. It was more of a smear of gleaming red up ahead and to their right. As they pursued it, the lily pads parted in front of the boat’s bow.
Tumble kept her eyes trained on the light. She felt better, more confident, since she’d figured out the moon’s trick. It was a sign that they weren’t wrong to be out here. They weren’t crazy. They could make things better.
The glow led them steadily onward for a few minutes, before she noticed the change. “Are we going straight?” she asked.
“I’m trying!”
“No, I mean . . . I think it’s moving.”
They hadn’t changed directions, so the reflection of the moonlight against the water shouldn’t have shifted. But it had. To the left.
“That way is all weeds and trees,” Blue protested.
He wasn’t wrong. Tumble could see where a cypress had fallen. Its broken trunk speared up out of the water.
“We’ll get stuck,” he said.
The red light was drifting ever more to the left.
“We have to follow it,” Tumble said. “It’s like a test of faith or something.”
Blue took a deep breath, but he didn’t argue. He turned the boat again. They were going to run through a huge raft of lily pads.
“The propeller,” Blue said. “What if it gets tangled in those?”
Tumble didn’t know. “Speed up?” she suggested. “That way we’ll kind of mow through them?”
Blue had figured out how to go faster. The boat sped up.
“Faster than that!” said Tumble.
Suddenly they were zipping forward, toward the lily pads, then into them, the water behind them churning to a froth. They were doing it.
“Yeah!” Tumble shouted over the outboard’s purr. “We’re coming for you, Munch! Nothing can stop us!”
Something shrieked against the hull. The boat bucked under her feet.
And then it wasn’t under her feet at all.
Tumble was in the air.
She was falling.
Splash.
FORTY-THREE
SURVIVAL PRIORITIES
Move, she thought. Move fast. She kicked hard, trying to get out of the way of whatever was coming. Because there had to be something.
Whatever the swampish version of a curtain-eating dog or an exploding road flare was—it was bound to happen. She’d get tangled up in lily pads and drown. Or a snake would bite her on the ankle, and Blue would have to suck the venom out with his mouth, and then their friendship would never be the same because gross.
She kicked toward the boat.
“Blue!” she shouted. “Blue, are you all right?”
Blue had been thrown forward by the impact, but he recovered quickly. “Don’t come this way!” he shouted. “We’re stuck on a tree or something.”
Tumble stopped swimming a few feet from the boat. Blue was right. The water under the boat was probably full of sharp broken limbs. The last thing they needed was for her to be shish-kebabed in the middle of the swamp with no way to call an ambulance.
“But . . . can you turn the motor back on? Can you reverse?”
“Ummmm.” Blue was staring down at Goat’s boat.
“Blue?”
“I don’t think I should try,” he said at last.
“Well, you’ve got to! We’ve got an alligator to find!”
“Tumble, the boat . . .”
A mounting suspicion made Tumble’s words come out high and nervous. “What’s wrong?”
“The boat is kind of—just a little bit—broken.” Blue was using what Maximal Star would have called an Unalarming Voice.
Tumble was alarmed anyway. “Blue, is there a hole in the boat?!”
“Kind of.”
“Kind of!”
“Yes,” said Blue. “Yes, there’s a hole in the boat.”
“Are we sinking?”
“We’re sinking.”
“Blue!”
“But really slowly,” he said.
They stared at each other for a long moment.
We’re going to have to spend the night treading water in a swamp, thought Tumble.
We’re going to die in a swamp trying to find a magic alligator, thought Blue.
The moon had reappeared overhead. It grinned bloodily down at them.
Tumble saw Blue pick up her backpack and put it on the bench in fr
ont of him to keep it dry.
“My phone’s in there,” she realized. She was still bobbing just out of reach. Her fingers were getting pruney. “Try to call someone.”
They would be in so much trouble, but anything was better than floating here all night.
“You know we’re not going to have a signal.”
“So you’re not even going to try? We’re stuck in a swamp with a sinking boat!”
“Okay.” Blue sighed. “But there’s not going to be a signal.”
He found Tumble’s phone in the front pouch of the backpack. She saw the blue-white glow of the screen light up his face. Work, she thought. Please work.
“No reception,” Blue said.
“Okay.” Tumble tried to breathe deeply. “Okay . . . so what are we going to do?”
“I guess we have to swim,” Blue said. “And then we walk back to the creek?”
Tumble was sure they could make it to land. They were surrounded by it, and it would be easy enough with the life jacket. But she wasn’t certain about getting all the way back to the creek. And once they got there, how far would they have to walk to get back to Goat’s?
“That sounds like a great plan,” she said in the most upbeat tone she could manage.
■ ■ ■
Blue tried to keep his fingers from shaking as he rummaged through Tumble’s backpack.
He found a bottle of water, a pocketknife, and a package of trail mix. His new flashlight was supposed to be waterproof, so he tied its strap around one of his belt loops and hoped for the best. He zipped the remaining supplies back into the pack and put it in the driest part of the boat he could find.
Getting into the water was tricky. He dropped the knife while he was easing himself out of the boat, and he only managed to hold on to the trail mix because he was clenching the bag between his teeth. But he had bigger problems to worry about. There were sharp limbs in the water, and Blue didn’t want them to scratch his legs. Blood might attract alligators, and even if it didn’t, he’d probably get some kind of swamp infection.
When he finally made it into the water, which was cool but not cold, all he could think about was the fact that he had not come prepared for swimming. His running shoes were weirdly buoyant on his feet, and the flashlight pulled at his shorts under the water. He paddled cautiously toward Tumble, one arm wrapped around the supplies.
She was fighting her way out of the life jacket.
“Don’t do that!” Blue said. He ended up with a mouthful of water.
“We need to share it,” said Tumble.
“No we don’t!” he sputtered.
“You can’t even keep your head above water!”
Blue had been planning on letting her carry the supplies since she had the jacket, but by the time he reached her, she had flattened it out on the water in front of her like a float.
“This isn’t how you’re supposed to use them,” said Blue, reaching for the jacket.
Tumble snorted. “You’re also not supposed to steal people’s boats. Or drown in swamps. I think we’re just going to have to ignore a few more rules tonight.”
She tied one of the jacket’s straps around the water bottle, but they ended up throwing the trail mix away.
“It’s not like one package is going to do us any good if we’re stuck out here,” she pointed out. “Survival is about priorities.”
They each kept a hand on half of the jacket to help them stay afloat as they kicked back the way they had come.
Tumble kept looking over her shoulder. Blue knew that the moon’s reflection was still there, glistening red on the water.
“What if we were really close?” she said.
Blue, who had been thinking that reptiles probably loved hiding under lily pads, didn’t know what she meant at first. Then, he caught the longing in her voice.
“No,” he said. “No way.”
“Blue—”
“Absolutely not,” said Blue. “I’m tired. My bug spray is washing off, and I’ve inhaled at least three mosquitoes. We have one bottle of water and no food. And we’ve got no way to get back home before people realize we’ve been gone, unless we’re extremely lucky.”
He paused.
“And, Tumble, we’re never lucky.”
“I know that,” said Tumble. “But maybe that means we don’t have anything left to lose.”
“Except our lives!”
“Now you’re just being melodramatic. We’ll be okay. I know how to build a campfire and everything.”
Blue glared at her.
“Fine,” she grumbled. “We’ll keep going.”
They kicked away from the moonlight. Toward home. And all of the things that were wrong there.
“But, Blue,” Tumble said, “what if we were really, really close?”
“Tumble, no. We are not turning this life jacket around.”
FORTY-FOUR
UPSIDE DOWN
Tumble snorted. She was too breathless to laugh outright, but Blue heard her anyway.
“I don’t think you should be allowed to giggle when you’re swimming toward your death.”
Tumble snorted again. “I’m laughing in the face of danger.”
“Has that ever gone well for you?”
She decided not to answer that.
They had agreed not to swim so far that they couldn’t see the boat anymore. At first, it had been difficult to keep their pace the same, and the life jacket had jerked to and fro as they swam, but they were finally falling into a rhythm.
Tumble was a little worried about how tired her legs were getting. It wasn’t like swimming in a pool, where you spent half the time standing up in the shallow end.
They swam past a cypress tree, and the moon’s reflection shifted farther to the left.
Blue was glancing back over his shoulder again. Tumble knew the dark outline of the boat must be almost invisible.
“We won’t go much farther,” she panted. “I promise. But we’ll never forgive ourselves if we don’t do everything we can.”
They swam on.
■ ■ ■
Later, when they tried to describe what had happened, Tumble and Blue would never be able to recapture the strangeness of the moment.
They were swimming toward the moon’s reflection. Something—she hoped it was only a lily pad stem—was wrapped around Tumble’s leg, and she was kicking extra hard with that foot to knock it off. Blue was trying to hold the life jacket steady. Neither of them was paying as much attention as they should have been when the world turned upside down.
It happened all at once.
Suddenly, they were underwater.
Their hands were still gripping the life jacket, which was somehow below them in the water, and their feet were still kicking, but above them. They were swimming down.
Before Tumble could panic, before Blue could yell, the world flipped again, and they were jetting in the other direction. Up, up.
In an instant, Tumble’s head and the life jacket broke the surface with a splash.
Blue came up beside her, sputtering and reaching for one of the jacket’s straps.
“What happened?!” Tumble shouted.
“How did we get pulled under?!” Blue shouted back.
They clung to the life jacket together, their hearts pounding, their lungs demanding reassuring gulps of air.
Then they looked around.
They were still in the swamp but nowhere near where they had been.
Tumble and Blue were floating in a lake, bordered all around with tall grasses. The water was deeper here. Even Blue’s long legs couldn’t reach the bottom before his head went under. And in front of them, a hundred or so yards away, was an island.
It was a small hummock of land rising above the still water, covered with tall pines and tupe
los that stood out like inky columns in the darkness. A strip of muck and weeds ran along the side facing Tumble and Blue, and that narrow bank was covered in a writhing mass of scales.
Alligators—dozens of them.
They were lying there, row upon row, so that their dark prehistoric hides obscured most of the ground. In their midst, bigger than any of the others, was an alligator whose armor shone a burnished gold, even in the red moon’s dim light.
FORTY-FIVE
UNDERWATER
Blue wasn’t going to move. Or speak. Or think loud thoughts.
They held on to their life jacket, staring hard at Munch. He looked like a giant statue more than anything. No real alligator could be that big. It was difficult to make out the finer details in the darkness, but Blue thought his eyes were closed. They had to be closed.
Munch was sleeping, he told himself, and he was going to keep sleeping, and they were not going to be gator bait.
The moon was smiling right over the alligator’s gleaming head, closer and bigger than it should have been, as if it wanted to remind them that this was what they had been looking for. This was their answer.
Blue hadn’t expected the answer to appear so deadly. He stared into Tumble’s eyes, trying to communicate silently.
I don’t know what to do, said her eyes.
We’ve made a terrible mistake, said his.
And she didn’t disagree.
Each of them was waiting for the other’s decision.
A sudden tremendous splash shattered the silence, and twenty yards away, between them and the island, a silver canoe rose out of the water. It was upside down, water sheeting from its sides, and someone was clinging to it with one arm.
The stranger struggled for a moment before he managed to flip the canoe. Then he brought his other arm up out of the water. He was holding a paddle. He tossed it into the canoe, and it hit the metal seat with a BONNNG so loud Blue could feel it in the water around him.
Tumble & Blue Page 18