Gator's Arc

Chapter 2 of 2

Gator followed the tracks inland, nose low to the wet stone. The scent was faint but real. Then the wind changed. It came off the sea now, heavy and cold. Far out over the water, clouds stacked into a black wall. Gator smelled it before he saw it. Rain. If the rain hit, it would wash the trail from the ground. He had one chance to reach her before the storm swallowed her scent. He ran. The tracks climbed away from the rocks and into scrub grass. He kept his nose down and his legs moving. Thunder rolled behind him. The first drops struck his back, fat and slow. The scent thinned under the water. Gator pushed harder. He knew he was losing it. Each stride, the trail grew weaker, until the ground gave him almost nothing. Then he caught something new. Not oil. Not rust. Blood, and under it, her. Fresh. Close. He drove toward it as the rain came down in sheets. He found her at the edge of a treeline. A girl sat against a trunk, one leg stretched out wrong. Blonde hair stuck to her face. Red streaks ran under it. Cuts marked her cheek. She was not his master. But the strap in the wreck had carried her plane, and her blood now marked the last of the trail. She had crawled from the same crash. She had walked this ground. Gator stopped a few feet off. He lowered his head and watched her with steady eyes. The girl looked up. Her blue eyes found him. She did not flinch. "You're wet," she said. "So am I." Gator did not move. He sniffed the air between them, hunting for his master under the blood and rain. It was not there. This girl had been in the plane. His master had been in the plane. But their trails had split somewhere he had not seen. "There was a woman," the girl said, as if she read his search. She winced and pressed a hand to her leg. "She pulled me out. Then she went that way." She lifted her chin toward the trees, inland, away from the sea. Gator turned his head where she pointed. The rain hammered the grass flat. The trail he had run was gone now, drowned. But the girl had given him a direction the water could not take. He stepped closer and pushed his nose against her hand once. Then he faced the trees. "Go," the girl said. "Find her." Gator ran into the storm. The scent under his feet was dead. But he was no longer following the ground. He was following where his master had gone, and now he knew the way.