SWIM Book 1 (Complete three-hundred pages)

DAY 21

Saturday, December 9, 2017

T

ravis pulled me down the stairs to the fourth floor, where George was lounging on the couch, dangling upside down with his feet up and his head behind the coffee table as he hung a huge chunk of cooked salmon like a branch of grapes over his gaping mouth. When George saw Travis and me dashing across the room, he dropped the salmon and nearly choked.

Dropping his legs and flipping himself into upright position, he shouted, "Jesus you two scared me! Why are you running--" And in a split second his eyes caught that Travis was holding my hand as Travis pulled me to the next stairway, and George and I locked eyes while I could only imagine him thinking to himself—Damn, Zara, you really are one promiscuous girl when your life is in desperate turmoil.

George raised a devilish smile again, the same one he shot me when he suspected Brett and I were having an affair, and he surely assumed he had more power over me this time than even before. If you don't want me to tell Jack, George's eyes said, you'll have to give me tomorrow's food ration just like you gave me today's.

George sniggered at me and I rolled my eyes and shot him a furious glare before George dropped down behind the coffee table to pick his dropped salmon off the carpet, and Travis yanked me away through the threshold to the stairs where he led me down to the third floor, and then the second. Next thing I knew, he dragged me (as my tiredness caused me to nearly faint) across the second floor to the stairs that went down to the cellar. In the cellar, he let go of my hand, and that's when I wondered why we were even down here. Why was alcoholic relevant to make a rescue signal?

"What are we doing down here with the whiskey and scotch, Travis?" I leaned on the wall and carefully stepped over the inch of floodwater on the floor. I shielded my tired eyes as the soft gray rays of light beaded in through the thin window above the cellar's locked metal door that barred ten feet of water from rushing in. Through the slit of window, the sky's blue diamonds twinkled behind the stormy clouds. I looked to Travis. "How do you expect to make a flare gun down here?"

Travis grabbed the tallest bottle of whiskey he could find, then ran over to a rack on the wall where there lay a bottle opener. He popped the cork and it shot up at the ceiling and plummeted to the wet floor with a splash at my naked ankles. As I wiped my ankles and grumbled in annoyance, Travis snatched a dirty white towel off the same rack. He shoved the towel into the neck of the bottle so it hung out of the neck like a white flag. He held the bottle up so it glinted against the window's gray light. "Walla!"

I looked at it with a blank stare. I was not amused. "I don't get it."

Travis shot me a grumpy look. "What do you mean you don't get it?"

I pointed at the stupid contraption and said, "That doesn't look like a flare gun to me."

He sighed and said, "It's not a flare gun."

"Obviously. What is it?"

Travis held it up higher with a triumphant smile. "It's a Molotov cocktail. I'll light the towel with matches from upstairs. The alcohol is flammable enough so that when you throw the bottle it'll act as a bomb!"

I eyed him and shook my head. "First of all, you don't have the athleticism to throw it high enough for anyone to see it catch fire. Second of all, even if someone like Brett, with baseball pitcher abilities, threw it up at the height of ten giraffes standing on top of each other, no one across the horizon would see it."