Whale Song - Page 19
"Okaaay . . . so do you suddenly have a crazy plan, or have you just decided that we're all gonna die, and you want one last fling before that happens?” Diana asked in a carefully neutral tone. “Because to be perfectly honest, all this stress or something seems to have triggered my period a few days early, which has its time and place, but I doubt this is it.”
"Wrong!” I shouted with glee, in the process not doing myself any favors in the “not appearing crazy” department. “It's perfect! Not only can we use that, it'll draw that thing straight to you even faster!”
She looked at me askance. “So should I take to mean that you are now okay with me being a sacrifice?”
“No,” I answered as I dropped down into the mud and began rooting around for what I needed, ignoring how I was further hastening the ruin of my clothing. Next time I made a wilderness trek, maybe I would avoid wearing a white suit. “The sacrifice thing was your idea, not mine . . . aha!” I exclaimed as I found what I was looking for. “Bait,” I explained as I triumphantly raised the stick I had found. “You're going to be bait and trap, all in one delectable package!”
Unsurprisingly, Diana didn't look terribly enthusiastic with this idea, and continued to just stand there.
“Well hurry up and get naked!” I chastised. “These things never seem to ooze slowly when you want them to, so we don't have a lot time. I'll explain as best I can as we go, but if it makes you feel any better . . . ” I couldn't help but grin. “Getting you naked is going to be the least awkward part of this plan, so if you don't trust me yet, it's not going to get any easier from here.” My grin got a little bigger. “And you can trust me on that.”
*****
Sometimes the silliest things cross your mind in the time between setting up a desperate plan and the moment when you find out if it works or not. And as Diana stood naked in the rain waiting for a monster to claim her, all I could think of was how “old fairy tale” this setup had turned out to be after all, and how, provided we survived this, Diana was never going to let me live it down.
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