Free Kid vs. Squid by Greg van Eekhout

hull was a bit rusty—”
    â€œHold on,” I said. “Before you finish this inspiring anecdote, let me ask you one thing: Where’s the
Mad Guppy
now?”
    â€œWell, she’s on the bottom of the Bering Sea, but that’s not my point—”
    â€œIt’s ten minutes to midnight,” Trudy said. “We were hoping to beat the Atlanteans back to the palace. We’ve got to get moving.”
    But we wouldn’t be going in the car. We’d either have to wait for a tow truck or find another way.
    Trudy unfolded a map. “How far is it to walk?”
    â€œThat depends,” Griswald said. “It’s not the same distance every time. Depends on the tides, the moon,and the stars. And you can put that map away, missy. Nothing concerning the Atlanteans is down on any map. True things never are.”
    Trudy shot him a suspicious look. She still didn’t trust him any more than I did. “Then how were you planning to get there?”
    He didn’t answer right away, chewing his gum as though he was trying to come to a decision. With his fish leg, there was no way he’d be able to hike far, and I figured he’d try to talk Trudy and me out of going on our own. But he just sighed and pointed down the road.
    â€œSet a course that way and go until you can go no farther,” he said. “I’ll get this tire fixed somehow, and if you beat me to the palace, I’ll at least pick you up to take you home.”
    Trudy cinched up her backpack, and I cinched up my pants. Cinching just seemed like the kind of thing you do before heading off into unknown territory. We set off without another word, but after a few yards I stopped and looked back at Griswald. He was leaning on his crutch and fiddling with the rope from the trunk. Only a day before I’d have been happy for any excuse to get away from him. Now, even though I still wasn’t sure about him, I felt bad about leaving him behind.
    â€œDon’t you worry about me,” Griswald said. “It’sbeen a long time since I’ve had allies, and allies can give even an old hardtack biscuit like me some freshness. I’ll be fine. You just look after yourselves. You’re each other’s lifeboat. Never forget that.”
    We left Griswald alone in the fog.
    The road beneath our feet grew more and more crumbled, and the air before us thickened into a wet wall that swallowed Trudy’s flashlight beam. We passed a junkyard where a Doberman rushed the fence and growled, jolting us into a run until we figured out it was just a dog, and then we kept going, our hearts kicking in our chests. There was a welding yard, and a burned-out building that might have once been a bar, and then we left the town behind us. A lone, mournful truck horn faded in the distance, but we saw no traffic.
    The road ended at a wall of tangled brush. We pushed our way through, into a field of dry scrub. In the still air, I could hear waves crashing ashore. Somewhere a seal barked.
    Rusty contraptions like the remains of squashed steel spiders punctuated the field: roller-coaster tracks and whirly rides abandoned in place when the amusement park was wrecked almost a hundred years ago. I felt like we were walking through the graveyard of a lost civilization. And then I remembered that, in a sense, we were.
    We kept walking until Trudy’s light landed on a monster. Or at least a plaster sculpture of one. A shark the size of Griswald’s car was entwined by ivy, its gaping maw a nest of windblown straw and spider webs. Even in its decrepit state, I recognized it from the book back at Trudy’s.
    Trudy roved her flashlight across the shadows and revealed a great, towering mass of plant growth, in which were trapped mermaid figures and a Spanish galleon. We’d come to the right place.
    We waded through the weeds and found a pair of doors, thick with grime and powdery dust. “Should we knock?” Trudy