Okay, then.“Wecan’tuse the flare gun now,” I say. “Either of you guys from Florida?”
They both shake their heads.
“Either of you have a working knowledge of water rescues?”
They shake their heads.
“Do youseeany fucking boats, orhearany fucking aircraft?”
They shake their heads.
“Then why thehelldo you want towasteour flares?” My shrill voice echoes off the inside of the raft. “Wait until you hear aircraft. Hell, wait until aircraft canseeus.” I point up. “We have a low ceiling right now. No damn vis.”
Everyone looks up and finally seems to note the cloud cover. I might not be much of a boater, but I’ve observed marine SAR ops, both practice and for real, in the course of my official duties.
We’re a state mostly surrounded by water, duh. We have Coast Guard stations. They have photo ops, and we usually have idiots who go out ahead of storms in boats that can’t handle the seas and need to be plucked to safety.
I’d kill to see one of those mechanical orange and white birds in the sky right now.
“Can’t they track us by satellite?” Flare Shooter Wannabe asks.
“Unless you smuggled an EPIRB up your ass, buddy, that’d be a hard no.”
Tennessee guy laughs. His sad, blue-eyed smirk reminds me a little of Carter’s amused expression.
Well, shoot. Guess I’m probably going to get labeled the Florida Bitch. I belatedly realize I’m channeling Carter.
Sure, a near-panicked, much snarkier Carter, but if I make it through this, I’m sure he’d be proud of me for telling him that later. “Because I don’t see a rescue beacon anywhere, unless one’s hidden in one of those packs,” I add.
Motherfucking charter company better prepare for one fuckinghellof a nasty one-star Yelp review from my ass.
The others finally seem to note the packs and start to search them for anything that might be helpful.
Tennessee guy tries to get up on his knees and look over the side of the raft, but we’re still bouncing around in pretty rough swells.
“It’s ten-to-twelve foot seas out there, easy,” I wearily say, another round of nausea trying to make me dry-heave. “Or more. You won’t see anything until it’s lighter. Stay down and don’t risk falling out or swamping us.”
He slumps down again. “You’re from Florida?”
I nod. “Susa.”
“George. Tennessee.”
I look at the other guy who challenged FSW and took the flare kit away from him. “Allen. North Carolina.” Sounds like it, too, that nasally, round kind of soft twang.
FSW looks even more disgruntled than the rest of us. “Pat. Georgia.” But he doesn’t “sound Georgia,” so I bet he’s a transplant from somewhere else.
Collin from Arkansas rounds out the male contingent. Sarah was, in fact, from South Carolina.
Yay, me.
I’ll take Regional Southern Accents for two hundred, Alex.
Lisa is from Alabama, although I can tell that as soon as she opens her mouth. And Ivy is from Virginia. At thirty-nine, I am by far the youngest person in the raft. George is probably the second-youngest, maybe his mid to late forties.
We’re intermittently pelted by spats of rain, but it’s not the hard, driving rain of yesterday. It’s still windy, gusty, the water choppy, but I think the seas are starting to calm a little. We definitely aren’t getting thrown around as much as we were before.
It’s enough the taller men can take turns trying to spot any signs of land, or a boat. We can hear the wind and the water against the sides of the raft, but no man-made sounds that don’t originate from one of us.
