Drawn Into Darkness by Nancy Springer Page B

darkness, pulling Justin with me.
    We ducked just as the van’s headlights blazed on, blindingly bright for an instant before our heads hit the water.
    Had Stoat seen us? Would he see us now? Desperately hoping not, I held my breath and did a pretty good imitation of a log just by keeping still. Clutching my arm and taking his cue from me, Justin did the same. Meanwhile, the river current swirled us around and took charge of us, so by the time I had to raise my head and gasp for air, we were nicely downstream, away from the area where the van’s headlights still shone across the surface of the water.
    But not quite far enough downstream to suit me, because the van’s lights also shone on the all-too-familiar figure of a quick, slim man near the flooded river’s edge.
    â€œUncle Steve!” gasped Justin, bobbing alongside me.
    â€œStop calling him your uncle! He’s a kidnapper and a pedophile and a rapist and he deserves—” I managed to cease firing from a sawed-off shotgun of rage I hadn’t even realized I had in me. Words badly aimed, scattering, good for nothing. “Sorry, Justin. Are you okay?” I tried to reach for his hand, which had slipped out of mine, but I didn’t find it.
    â€œHe knows where we went,” Justin said in the dead voice of someone who has already given up.
    Actually, bent over and pacing back and forth at the edge of the water, Stoat seemed to be hunting upstream and down like an old hound dog. And the river carried us farther away from him every moment.
    â€œI don’t think so,” I told Justin. “Our tracks are rained out. He doesn’t even know what he’s looking for.”
    But he did. He found it, reached down to seize it, and turned it on.
    The flashlight.
    Justin gulped air and disappeared underwater at the same time I did. Holding my breath and hurrying myself along with the rushing river, I fired some angry mental bullets at myself. Damn flashlight, I didn’t even remember dropping it. Stupid, clueless, what was I thinking, why hadn’t I thrown it into the drink like the gun?
    Really, rationally, I did not think it likely that Stoat had seen us when he had turned on the flashlight, but at the same time, I felt an irrational fear that he had, and I knew Justin would be feeling it a hundred times worse, would be absolutely sure his “uncle” knew exactly where he was and would come after him.
    A burning feeling started in my lungs. I thrust myself to the surface and gasped for air while trying to clear my eyes of bleary water so I could see.
    But there was nothing to see. Complete darkness. Either the river had taken us around a bend that hid everything from our view, or Stoat and his flashlight and his van were gone.
    I asked the darkness, “Justin?”
    No answer.
    â€œJustin!”
    Nothing. And it was high time to get out of this flooding river. At any moment it might conk me with a floating log or smash me against a fallen tree. Which, with my luck, would have snakes on it.
    â€œJustin!” I called, uselessly, before I kicked, managing to lie more or less on top of the water, and by swimming across the river current, I aimed, I hoped, toward shore. The opposite shore from the one we had left Stoat on.
    I was just getting into the rhythm of a pretty good Australian crawl—stroke, up and over, stroke—when my extended hand touched something that felt like a big tree. But when I tried to grab on to it, it lashed like a giant whip, threw me aside as if I were made of cork, and took off.
    â€œSorry, alligator,” I said politely, treading water. Having never before in my life been in a situation like this, I found it impossible to predict my own reactions or even explain them. I reached out again, could not find the alligator, and promptly panicked because now it could be behind me, underneath me, anywhere.
    â€œJustin!”
Why not yell? Between the swoosh of the water and the