My Heart Is a Chainsaw (The Lake Witch Trilogy #1)(110)

No way is she announcing him to Letha, so she can use her final girl determination to wrench the jaws of that bear trap open. This is a Let-Nature-Take-Its-Course situation if there ever was one.

“You okay?” Letha asks, meeting Jade halfway to crutch her along again, some part of Theo evidently cueing in that Jade’s close, so he should groan again, louder, longer.

“Are you?” Jade says back, then has to stop when Letha does.

“Hear that?” she asks.

“Mountain alligator,” Jade tells her, doing her eyebrows to show how much she doesn’t mean this. “I scared it, I think.”

But challenging Letha to call her on it, too.

Letha considers this, listens harder, and when the groan doesn’t come again, they move forward, Letha going from garage to garage to garage along the shore, coming out of each shaking her head no: all the boats they never even use are trashed. Not the engines, but the hulls. The boats are taking on water, foundering, the only thing holding them up their mooring lines or the straps looped under them.

“He wants us to have to walk it,” Jade says.

“You can’t,” Letha says back.

“You could swim it,” Jade says.

Letha nods, already knew that.

“The yacht,” she says finally. Again.

“No motors on the water for the Fourth,” Jade recites.

“I think this would be an exception.”

“Except I’m not going on that boat again.”

“Yacht.”

“Whatever.”

“Where’s that… the Umiak, right?”

“Hunh,” Letha says, looking around for it just the same.

“He already sunk it, didn’t he?” Jade says.

“There,” Letha says, and she’s right. The Umiak is drifting out between Terra Nova and Camp Blood. Not sitting quite level anymore, either. It’s the Orca now, after the shark’s been chewing on it.

Letha shakes her head in frustration.

“They’ll have hot dogs and stuff over there,” Jade says, about Proofrock.

“I don’t want to go through that… that old camp, cool?”

Letha says.

Jade nods, doesn’t explain that they’ll just be looking down on Camp Blood from the bluff.

“We’re gonna miss the movie if we don’t—” she says instead, but Letha’s silence and stillness stop her.

Jade follows what Letha’s staring at.

It’s… a head bobbing in the tall grass? An ostrich?

“You,” Letha says to the ostrich head, pulling Jade ahead with it. “Pedals only,” she narrates, “no motor.”

Jade tries to force this into a statement that makes sense.

But then all at once it does: the swan boat, the one Deacon Samuels was playing on in that memorial slideshow. They have to wade out to it, then Letha has to push and pull to get it unmired, but it’s whole. The only boat over here that is.

Jade looks around to Letha to confirm that they’re doing this, but Letha’s gone. Jade spins around, about to panic, which is when Letha bursts up from the water, still trying to wash her face.

Jade follows suit, lowering herself under the surface in what she hopes is a more menacing fashion, swishing left to right, coming up to breathe, then doing it again, and again, until she feels halfway clean. Clean enough for a massacre.

Letha’s already up in the boat’s fiberglass couple’s seat. She holds her hand down, hauls Jade’s wet heavy self up as easy as anything, the swan boat tilting and rocking, but there’s no hull for water to slosh over, really, no bottom to have to bail out.

Just a footspace for water to wash across, run down. Jade clomps her heavy boots down into that slurry, watches the lake run red around her feet, then clear.

“You should—” Letha says, about Jade’s boots. “If we end up having to swim, I mean.”

Jade looks down at her combat boots, the ones she pulled on for battle each morning of the war called “high school.” But Letha’s right. She should have kicked them off last night, really. That’s why Letha was able to swim so much faster than her. Well, that’s one reason.

She unlaces them, works them off, sets them gently down into the lake. It takes them as it takes everything it’s offered.

“The—” Letha says then, pulling at the nonexistent zipper over her chest, which is her way of saying maybe Jade should leave her coveralls behind as well?

Jade shakes her head no. Letha might look more killer with each article of clothing she loses, but Jade needs these, at the very least. She gathers her hand over the collars, pulling them together like fighting to keep them on.

“I feel like we’re going to get noticed in this,” she says about the swan boat.

“Good,” Letha says, and starts churning them through the water.

Jade tries to figure out how to place her feet on the spinning pedals, pitch in.

There’s a steering wheel of sorts—a joystick with a big white fiberglass egg for a handle, that must be connected to a rudder under the sweeping-back tail.

“Not exactly how I envisioned my return,” Jade mumbles.

“Black swan fit you better?” Letha says, not quite with a smile—this isn’t a time for that—but it shows she’s waking up a little anyway.