They kept going, and for a while they didn’t see anything of note again. That was, until a small town rose out of the nothingness. There was a sign for a marina on the other side of a bridge they were crossing, reading, “Jackson-Miller Marina” in faded letters next to a turn. Will drove across the bridge, and Lara saw boats in the marina.
“We need boats, right?” Lara said.
“We’re still too far from Song Island to launch here,” Will said. “We need to get closer.”
“What if we don’t find another marina farther down?”
“There has to be one. If not, we’ll come back.”
Lara never caught a sign that introduced the small town they were driving through, and soon they were making a huge left turn before turning right a little bit later. They were going south again, still traveling on Route 27. The town disappeared behind them, and Jackson-Miller Marina along with it.
They drove for another thirty minutes, passing marshlands and swamps on both sides of them. Nothingness became the order of the day once more. Trees became rare sights, shade from the harsh glare of the sun even rarer still. She wondered how long she would last out here, on the road without a car.
Probably ten minutes…best-case scenario.
After a while, the road started to curve right, and Will slowed down to twenty miles per hour.
He picked up the radio from the dashboard. “Danny.”
Danny answered from the other end: “What’s the word?”
“We’re almost there. Slow down.”
“Roger that.”
Will put the radio back on the dashboard. “Start looking for a marina.”
“Which side?” Lara asked.
“It’ll be on my side. Look for buildings, warehouses, parked trucks. Any signs of civilization.”
“I haven’t seen signs of civilization for the last hour, Will.”
“There should be something here.”
“What if—” She didn’t finish, because she saw the sun glinting off metal rooftops up ahead on Will’s side of the road. “Buildings,” she said, somehow managing to keep herself from shouting it out.
“I see it,” Will nodded.
There were two buildings — a big garage and what looked like a gazebo in the middle of nowhere. As they got closer, Lara saw a wooden sign pointing into an asphalt parking lot. She tried to read the sign, but it was so badly scarred by time that she could only make out the word “Marina.” There were numbers, which she guessed was a phone number, or possibly hours of operation.
Will turned left into the parking lot.
There were two white trucks parked next to the gazebo, and the garage was bigger up close, and longer. At least a four-car garage. There were a half-dozen vehicles, mostly trucks, parked near the shores in orderly fashion. She expected to see trailer hitches with boats in the back, but there weren’t any. She did see boat ramps to their right.
Where are all the boats?
They parked and Lara climbed out, stretching her legs, grateful to finally be moving again. The pain in her left shoulder had mostly disappeared overnight, and what remained had continued to fade during the long drive, thanks to a combination of rest, water, and painkillers. She could move the arm easily enough without the sling, though she still felt some throbbing every now and then and did her best to keep as much pressure off it as possible.
Walking closer to the edge of the parking lot, she could see where the launches fed boats into a small, man-made inlet that continued south, connecting to the main body of Beaufont Lake. Directly across from the inlet, farther up the road, was the first livable spread she had seen for miles. It was a white, two-story house surrounded by hurricane fencing. A green boathouse stood out to its left, and she could just barely make out two boats hanging from the rafters. The house had a big, wide-open parking lot, though no garages; and farther back, a big gray, plain-looking building that was too long to be another house. Storage, she assumed.
“I wouldn’t mind a place like that,” Gaby said, shielding her eyes from the sun as she looked across the inlet at the house.
“I guess we know where we’re staying if Song Island doesn’t pan out,” Lara said. “Speaking of which… Where is it?”
“Where’s what?”
“Song Island.”
“Oh. I guess it’d be out there…?” Gaby pointed toward the large expanse of calm water, blinking against the sun. “Shouldn’t it be out there somewhere? It is an island, right?”
“Should be…”
Gaby drifted back to where Josh was standing, gazing off into the distance, probably looking for the mythical Song Island, too.
So where the hell is it?
The suddenly very real possibility that they might have come all this way for nothing made her chest tighten a bit. It took the sight of Carly, walking toward her with a big grin on her face, to get Lara to push those downbeat thoughts away.
“We made it,” Carly said. “I can’t believe we actually made it.”
Lara smiled back at her. “Never doubted it.”
“Never?”
“Okay, maybe once or twice.”
“I knew it.”
Carly laughed and wrapped Lara up in a big hug, slipping her arms around Lara’s waist instead of over her arms. Lara laughed, too, because she knew exactly what Carly was feeling. The road from Harold Campbell’s facility had felt, at times, never ending, with one roadblock after another. Doubts had begun to creep into her thoughts even if she had refused to acknowledge them until now.
Lara heard a fake clicking sound next to them and looked over at Danny, miming taking a picture of them with his fingers. “This is going into the Rolodex for tonight.”
“Way to ruin a great moment, babe,” Carly said.
Lara saw Will nearby, peering through a pair of binoculars at something in the distance. She walked over to him, trying to see what he was looking at. The sun was in her eyes, and she couldn’t see much except calm, glistening water under an empty sky.
“Do you see it?” she asked, unable to keep back the anxiousness in her voice.
He lowered the binoculars and handed them over to her. “Have a look.”
“Is it out there, Will? Song Island?”
“Just look.”
She took the binoculars from him, her hand shaking a bit. Will stood next to her as she held them up to her eyes and looked across the lake. “Where am I looking?” she asked, frustrated. “I don’t see anything.”
“Here,” Will said. He stood behind her and guided her slightly to the left. “There. See it?”
She saw it — a big structure rising out from the lake itself. It was tall and looked a bit like a pencil, getting smaller the higher it went, though it was barely discernible in the distance and was surrounded by water. There was something else, like a ring of children’s glitter sparkling under the sun, encircling the structure.
“It’s a lighthouse,” Will said behind her. “Doesn’t look completely finished, but I’m pretty sure that’s a radio antenna sticking out of it. That’s where the FEMA broadcasts are coming from.”
Lara realized, breathlessly, that the lighthouse wasn’t rising out of the water on its own. It was jutting up from a patch of land in the middle of the lake, previously obscured by the rippling heat against the surface of the water. Now that she was staring at it, the land seemed to sprout before her eyes, rising and rising until it presented itself to her in all its glory.