by David Coy
It was high in the water. She rocked it with her foot; it rocked stiffly. She was going to make it.
She pronounced her handiwork, “Very seaworthy”, and patted it.
I hope.
* * *
It was almost mid-day. If she launched now, rather than waiting until the next morning, she would lessen the chances of making it across before nightfall. She thought about it. The idea that she might be able to spend the night in the clearing on the other side, rather than in the jungle helped her decide. She’d go now.
She wasn’t exactly overjoyed about having to slog through the mud and shallow water behind the raft to climb on board, but she didn’t have a choice. She moved back on the trunk, sat down and checked to make sure that her pants legs were sealed shut. She slid slowly off the log and into the goop.
Her feet sank into the mud up to her knees; and in a panic, she spun and threw her arms over the trunk.
“Aaaah! Shit!”
The mud continued to pull her down, then mercifully stopped as her grip on the trunk tightened. Grunting and pulling slowly, she worked her legs out of the suction and put one leg over the log, then the other.
She sat on the log and considered the problem. She’d have to put something over the mud to walk on. Either that or float the raft into deeper water, jump in behind it and climb on board.
The first option was nearly impossible; the mud was too soft to support anything she could find to put over it. She’d have to jump in the water and climb on.
She pulled the raft along the trunk until she thought the water under it was deep enough. The sun was up high now, and she could see the dark, soft, silty bottom. She looked ahead and could see the sharp, black place where the shore dropped into the channel. She didn’t know for sure, but she thought the water was probably too shallow for the big prick to come up after her where she was. But you never knew. The tracks of small swamp-bottom crawling somethings could be seen in the soft mud, crisscrossing in all directions. She tied the raft off and moved along the trunk back to the bank. She sat down and tried to think of another option, but there wasn’t one. She would have to submerge herself in that evil water if she were going to get on the raft.
In her mind, she practiced several times the movements it would take. Then she set her jaw, steeled her spine and slipped into the water, making a hook of her right arm and letting it fall over the rear cross-member as she went down. The water was coolish and went through her cotton clothing as if it weren't there. As fast as she could she oriented herself so she could flop up on the centerpiece. She hefted herself up and squirmed and kicked—and splashed loudly—as she went.
She hadn’t planned on making that much noise. As soon as she was squarely in position, she put her head on the pillow bundle and froze, barely breathing. She stayed that way for a full fifteen minutes, listening to the quiet lapping of water against the outriggers, hoping that if she had attracted the big fucker, it would lose interest over time and move away.
Finally, moving as slowly as possible, she sat up and covered the canopy’s rear opening. Then, adjusting each branch and vine to hang down and look as natural as she could make them, she tied off the camouflage for the raft’s underside.
She stretched out and flapped the vine off the branch that held the raft.
She was free.
She reached out the right side port and pushed gently away from the tree. The raft drifted slowly, silently away from the trunk, its slight rocking motion making waves that cast sparkling ripples through the dark water and onto the dark, spooky swamp bottom. Drifting high above the sunken, algae-covered logs and branches, she suddenly felt a flush of vertigo. She breathed and swallowed and the sense of dizzying height left her.
It was too deep to pole, so she sunk her arms slowly into the water on each side and with a single quiet thrust, stroked toward the patch of plant growth on the other side of the channel.
Things swam below; dark undulating things that glided up and over the fallen logs and darted along the bottom in spurts, then stopped. When the shadow of the raft passed over a patch of smooth swamp bottom, something big darted out of the mud, leaving a cloud of silt adrift like a swirling, silent storm. As she watched, a school of brown, fluttering somethings drifted by in a miasmic ball of twisting, vibrating activity. Her imagination couldn’t stretch far enough to imagine that the members of that wicked ball were anything but carnivorous.
The bottom fell away until it was barely visible, and she knew she was in the big bastard’s channel. The raft started to turn from its intended course, to drift sideways ever so gradually. If she didn’t correct it, she’d be turned all the way around in a few minutes. As she watched her goal drift aside, she began to realize that she could easily lose her sense of direction in the swamp, just as easily as in the jungle. If she lost her bearings, she could drift forever around in circles. To make navigation even worse, being low on the water restricted her view.
Panic began to build with each degree of rotation. Already, she was having difficulty distinguishing one plant or swamp tree from another. She could remember what the patch of plant stuff on the other side of the channel looked like, but as she got closer, changed angles, it might not be so easy. She began to wish she’d put up some marker, a flag of some kind on the trunk she’d launched from. At least that would have given her a point of reference if she'd needed it.
She was now forced to do what she dreaded: she’d have to put her arms into the water, in the deep channel, and thrust to change course.
She put her right arm silently down, feeling the cool pressure of the water as her arm went deeper and she began to stroke, slowly, gently caressing the water with her palm. The raft finally came around and she fixed her bearings on the ragged patch of plants in the shallows. A final stroke with both arms, and she drifted straight for it. She pulled her hands quietly up out of the water and rested them under her chin, trying not to drip.
She felt it before she saw it. As the creature passed underneath her, the raft rocked slightly on its swell. Its massive back was so close to the raft, she could have reached down and touched it. She froze and watched as the humped shape passed silently beneath her. Dark brown scales, the color of the swamp, as big as dinner plates, covered the surface in an overlapping pattern. A thick undulating tail followed behind, moving slowly like a huge fan. She estimated its length at over twenty meters. It was gone, but she somehow sensed, somehow knew, it was turning for another look, and a moment later, it passed under again. The creature cruised by without a sound, leaving no wake or trace of its passing.
She held her breath and resisted the urge to draw up her feet and tuck herself into a tight little ball. To do that, she would have to move and that was out of the question. The raft, which had seemed so sturdy a moment before, now seemed flimsy, invisible and useless against the thing’s submerged strength and mass.
She finally breathed. She was drifting off course again, but couldn’t bring herself to put her arms in the water. She had to wait. She had to know it was gone and its interest firmly held by some other prey before she could put any part of herself in the water.
Turning her head slowly to the side, she watched for it, praying it had lost interest and moved on. Then, like a shadow, the creature’s head drifted into view from behind and stopped just a half-meter from the raft. One of its eyes, round with a vertical pupil, looked right at her, fixed and unmoving. Whether it saw her as food, or as merely drifting flotsam she didn’t know. She could only hope that the canopy was making it difficult for it to make out her shape. She wanted to look away but was afraid to move, even to blink. With no sign of propulsion, the head moved closer until the frowning, upturned mouth passed under her at midpoint, easily spanning the width from outrigger to outrigger. Then the mouth opened, revealing a gray and yellowish cavern lined with spiny teeth. The water poured into it over the edges in a smooth roll like a waterfall then splashed over those teeth and filled the pit with a sound like an enormous bu
cket filling. She thought she’d fall in and felt the raft bump and rock against the rim of the thing’s huge mouth as the water fell out from under it.
Oh, God . . .
The mouth snapped closed abruptly, sending a wide gush of water up over her and lifting the raft on its massive swell like a toy.
Christ!
Again the mouth opened, filled then gushed water. If it wasn’t for the teeth she could have imagined the thing was playing with the raft, but she knew it was more likely it was just trying to flush something edible out of the hollow husk afloat in its territory.
It gushed again, sending water boiling up over her, lifting the raft up and dropping it hard. She clung tight, trying to keep from being washed away.
Again it gushed and the water erupted up in a flood and covered her.
“Stop . . . ” she whispered.
As if on command, it did.
She watched the beast’s head sink straight down, fade, then vanish in the dark water. She stiffened and waited for the rush from below that would send the raft flying and tumbling through the air.
It never came.
When she worked up the courage to move, she looked around and took inventory. Only a few of the canopy’s leaves had been lost and her larder was still intact. There didn’t seem to be any damage to the structure itself.
She looked out the front and now had no idea which way she was pointed. The idea of putting her arms into the water after seeing the maw that wanted to chomp them off was more than she could stand. She gave another look down, peering into the dark, shimmering water, trying to make out the thing’s shape.
Nothing. She breathed deep. It was gone. She waited anyway.
Minutes later, she slipped her arms slowly into the water and paddled lightly around, trying to get her bearings. She turned and studied the scenery drifting by. She was relieved when she saw the clump of target foliage, some twenty meters closer than it had been before. She stroked gently, quietly, toward it. As she got closer and the water got shallower, she could begin to see the swamp bottom again. This told her she was out of the deep channel. That was a relief. When she was close enough, she reached out the front window with the hook and grabbed onto a sturdy stalk to anchor herself.
She fixed the holes in the canopy, tightened the net around the food and got her bearings. The way ahead was bushy with lots of broad floating leaves, but the water was probably more shallow, and hopefully too shallow for the thing she’d left behind.
Using the hook, she could pull her way along for quite a distance from this point. She fixed her sights on a tall tree straight ahead, memorized its shape, then reached out with the pole and grabbed a stalk with it. She pulled, lurched ahead, jammed up against the stalk and stopped cold.
This would take some doing. She pushed off and tried again, this time grabbing at a mass of floating leaves with viney stems. She pulled, then cut loose at just the right moment. That worked, and she grazed the stalk and drifted over the floating vegetation for a full five meters before bumping into another clump. She sat up, tried it, and found she got much better control that way.
Sitting cross-legged, she pulled her way along, all the way to the tree she’d aimed for. The reaching, grabbing and pulling with the pole made her arms ache, and she decided to tie off to the tree and rest.
The water around the base of the tree was deeper than she liked. She looked down into the submerged tangle of thick, dull roots and just knew something horrible was down among them, staring up, panting water, waiting for her.
She cut short her rest and pushed gently away from the tree. She felt she had no choice but to get out of the swamp before night.
17
"You can start with the tap water. Take some samples and culture them in agar and blood. There’s some old blood in the back of the clinic you can use. Nobody’ll mind. You probably won’t find anything. The shelter’s water filters are pretty good, but look anyway. Then take some samples from any standing water in contact with the ground—puddles, footprints filled with water—that kind of thing. Anything with fecal material near it especially. Runoff from the shelters’ roofs might be worth a look, too, if you can find any. Keep track of where every sample comes from.”
“Then do the soil and any standing water outside,” Rachel said. “See what you can find.”
“Okay,” Joe said too confidently. He made a note on his pad, his brow tight and knowing.
Rachel glanced at him and sniffed. He didn’t have a clue how to start, but she didn’t have the heart or the motivation right then to call him on it.
“Okay.”
“You won’t have any problem with preparing the cultures will you? Boiling the agar, that kind of thing?”
“Nah.”
“Good.”
“Not a problem.”
“If you get anything that looks like bacteria, try to type it. You probably won’t be able to, but it might be useful to try. Just get the charge at least, if you can. You can use my kits, I think I brought enough stain.”
“Okay.”
“Take some samples of the soil in the clearing and in the jungle, but don’t go in too far. Make a map showing where you got each sample. Put the samples under a scope and photograph anything that moves or has bilateral symmetry. Jar up whatever you find, then culture the soil. We can do the WM's for them in the next few days. Label everything.”
“Uh, WM's?”
“Standard Bio-hazard Weight Matrices. You know, like at school.”
“Oh, yeah. Got it.”
I’m sure you do.
It was grunt work, but it would keep him busy and there was always the chance he would find something important. She doubted it, but you never knew.
“I’ll start on the arthropod-likes. Those are gonna keep us busy for a while.”
“Yea..Yeah,” Joe chuckled.
“Ummm . . . okay. Get on it. Let me know if I can help you out.”
“Sure will.”
She stood there for a moment with her hands on her hips and watched him think, waiting for the questions that should have come but didn’t. Finally, she turned away and thought about what she herself had to do. If he hit a snag, he could call her, or not. It didn’t matter.
She went in the back and found the containers that her equipment had come in and looking at the contents, was pleased with the anal part of her personality for the very first time in her life. She’d packed more than she had originally thought to bring, but now it didn’t seem like so much at all. She took out her empty field pack, unfolded it and opened the top. She’d brought hundreds of half-liter, accordion-style sample bottles with wide necks. Exactly what she wanted. She dumped several packages of them in the bag. She took a pair of rubber gloves, a small spade and two sizes of tongs with her, too. Of course her medium-sized net had to go. Then she added her camera and her favorite field scope. She thought about taking some Stunzem but figured the tough plastic bottles would hold anything she might find today and skipped it.
She picked up her pad and checked the batteries before she put that in the pack, too. She added to her list of equipment a simple, large cotton sack with a draw string closure she’d found in the back room.
“Well, good luck Mr. Devonshire,” she said as she walked out.
“Yeah, thanks. You, too.”
The sun was halfway to overhead, bathing the terrain in dull wet heat. She started to sweat and wished she could have worn shorts and a ventilated, sleeveless top. There was no possibility of wearing such a skin-exposing item on this planet. It would be quite stupid.
She wanted to work the jungle’s edge, the area where clearing met foliage just now.
As she approached, she marveled at the variety and number of flowering plants. The rich sweet scent filled her head and washed away the odor of all the bullshit she’d experienced since yesterday.
There was a fallen log about the size of her thigh just where the foliage met clearing. It was rotten and covered with brown fungi—a go
od place to start. She moved to one end and lifted it out of the ground. It came away with a sound like tearing rot and she slowly swung it out of the way. As she sat it down, she saw that the depression under the log was honeycombed with neat channels running in all directions like veins.
Nice.
She squatted down and found several large black and shiny beetles running like mice in the groves. She jabbed at one once, twice with the tongs and caught it. When she picked it up, its legs waved and clawed at the air. It was the biggest she’d ever seen. She turned it over and took a look at its glossy brown abdomen. Nothing spooky there. The head and mouth parts were always a give away. This one’s small head and minute mouth proclaimed it an eater of debris and the jungle’s dead and rotten. It probably wasn’t much of a threat. It would have to be ground and cultured anyway. Innocuous vectors transmitted some very nasty things. She unfolded a bottle, dropped the bug into it with a plunk and capped the bottle off. Its legs scratched noisily at the slippery plastic. She put the bottle in the bag.
What she wanted were the larvae if she could find them. If she could find one here in the soil or close by, she could probably rule out that stage of its life cycle as being dangerous as well. She probed around with the spade, taking a scoop of moist soil and shaking if off a little at time, flicking the last of it off the spade with a finger. On the third try, she unearthed a black pupa, about the size of the adult form. Its immature legs were visible and folded tight to its body. She dropped it in the same bottle with the adult.
Bugs are so predictable.
She made a note on the jar’s label.
She scratched around at the dirt some more and found a few other pupae that she ignored. Then she stripped some of the rotten bark from the tree and found some interesting maggots and smaller beetles. She took a few of those.
