Amber ran her hand carefully over the gravel, finding a considerable accumulation of smaller bits of wood and dry twigs in a ragged line parallel to the shore. She scraped them together in a small pile and put a fuzzball in the middle, then got out the sparker and began trying to light it. The sparks dazzled her eyes at first, and it took several tries before she could get a few to fall on the fuzzball. The soft outer layer went up in a flash that eliminated the remainder of her night vision. Then the wax caught, and in a few minutes she had enough of a fire to see the larger mass of driftwood.

It wasn’t a single dead tree, she saw with relief, but a row of branches a little higher up the shore than the light stuff she’d scraped together.

Tourist Trap is now available from Barnes and Noble and Amazon. Reviews on either would be much appreciated.

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