by Jude Hardin
I went at it the same way as before, using the squirrel spear as a feeler. It was a little after two o’clock, less than four hours till sunrise. At sunrise, I would turn into a pumpkin. A dead one. The cameras would pick me up and Freeze would see I’d taken a long, unauthorized walk and it wouldn’t take more than a few minutes for his guys to chase me down and do their thing. If I was seen outside the playing field, they would know that I knew the defibrillators were bogus. I was a danger to them now, and they wouldn’t hesitate to execute me on the spot.
Under normal circumstances, I can easily walk a mile in thirty minutes. That’s at a leisurely pace. And if I jog, I can shave that by at least a third. But these weren’t normal circumstances. I was walking through fairly heavy brush, and I was doing it blind. I hadn’t slept enough or eaten enough in the past few days, and the altercation with Number Three had drained most of any energy reserves I might have had on tap. I was hurting. I was running on fumes. It was going to be the longest walk of my life, and I had no idea what to expect when I reached my destination. All I could hope for was that a little luck would finally come my way.
It was a still night, no breeze and unseasonably warm and humid. I was sweating profusely, and I hadn’t thought to bring any water along. Of all the things to forget. I was thirsty and feeling a little lightheaded, but I kept going. I soldiered on. I was very tired and on the verge of being dehydrated, but I knew if I stopped and sat down to rest I might never get up. If I never got up, Juliet would surely perish. I kept going. I did it for her. I did it for her and for Joe.
The woods seemed to go on forever. I checked the compass again and adjusted my course, and a few minutes later I came to a small clearing and saw the first branch of lightning streak across the sky. It lit the landscape bluely for a second, made it look like the set of a horror movie. Lightning flashed again and thunder crackled and I wished for the rain to come. I’d saved the empty peroxide bottle from the first-aid kit. If the rain came, I would be able to collect some drinking water. But it didn’t come. The lightning burned the sky and the thunder boomed like a cannon, but not a drop of rain fell.
I moved quickly through the clearing, in case the storm made me visible to the cameras. It seemed the entire universe was against me now, and I felt like shaking my fist skyward and asking it why. But the universe never answers. The universe is like Number Seven, the former Navy SEAL. The universe is a professional killer. It doesn’t usually say anything. It just kills you. The universe is one mean son of a bitch. I walked on.
And on.
I leaned against the gnarled trunk of a live oak, thinking this was it. My legs were like rubber. I couldn’t take another step. I slid to the ground and sat on the dry underbrush with my back against the tree. I flicked the lighter. My watch said 3:17. It had been well over an hour since I’d left Number Three’s house. I should have been to the road by now.
And I was.
Lightning blazed overhead, and through a stand of pine trees to my left I saw a narrow strip of blacktop about fifty feet from where I sat. Fat lengths of plastic tape had been threaded along the border of the woods, marking the boundary of the playing field. But the boundary didn’t matter to me anymore. I’d proven the defibrillators were fake, which rendered the boundaries meaningless.
Now that I had made it to the road, I wasn’t sure what to do. I sat there and thought about it. I looked at my compass. The strip of blacktop went north and south. One direction would lead to a bigger road and eventually to traffic and civilization. To people who could help me. To a telephone. To the police. The other direction would lead deeper into the swamp, no telling where. Either way I would be out of the playing area and therefore away from all the cameras mounted on posts and trees, but there was still the matter of the cameras embedded in the collar around my neck. The point-of-view cameras. I’d almost forgotten about them. If I went the wrong way and walked and walked until the sun came up, Freeze would see the images from the POV cameras around my neck. He would know I was far, far away from my house, from where I was supposed to be. He would know that I figured out the defibrillators were phony, and he would send his men to kill me. So I had to make a decision quickly. North or south. One direction led to potential salvation, the other to certain death.
I had a fifty-fifty chance of picking the right direction. If I could get up and walk. I thought I could probably make one last push, but what if I chose wrong? That would be it, for me and for my wife. Life and death came down to the toss of a coin. North or south? Left or right? I had no idea, but I knew I had to choose. Staying put and doing nothing was not an option. Staying put and doing nothing would amount to a zero percent chance of survival. Five more minutes, I thought. Five more minutes of rest, and I would decide.
The minutes rolled by, and I decided to head north on the road. There was no reason behind my decision. It was a random choice. One-to-one odds weren’t good enough to be betting mine and Juliet’s lives on, but there was no alternative. I stood up and shook off the dizziness and put one foot in front of the other.
I’d taken several steps toward the road when a pair of headlight beams rounded the corner. It was a small four-door sedan, a Camry or a Sentra or maybe one of the Korean brands. Too dark to tell for sure. It had come from the south, but that didn’t tell me much of anything. It could have come from the main highway, where I wanted to go, or it could have come from somewhere else in the swamp. The Okefenokee contained a land mass of almost half a million acres. The car could have come from anywhere.
The driver pulled to the side of the road and opened the door and got out. He left the headlights on and the engine running. I could see his silhouette. It appeared to be one of the guys wearing blue coveralls and a red ball cap. One of the maintenance guys. He switched on a flashlight and walked a few feet beyond the shoulder to a post topped with a rectangular steel box. He pulled out a ring of keys and opened the door to the hollow metal housing. It was about the size of a shoebox. I figured maybe it was some sort of junction for the cameras. He made a lot of noise jingling his keys and fiddling with getting the door open. He wasn’t trying to be quiet. He thought he was alone. I was cloaked by the woods, and he had no idea I was standing there spying on him.
I wanted his car. I needed it, and I needed for him to tell me the way back to civilization.
I pulled out my nunchucks and crept toward him, treading as lightly as I could. He had a walkie-talkie on his belt, but otherwise appeared to be weaponless. He was concentrating on the junction box. He never heard me coming. I used the chain from the nunchucks like a garrote, choking him tightly enough to keep him from talking but not enough to completely occlude his airway. I didn’t want to kill him yet. I needed him to give me directions.
He fell to his knees. Made some little mewling sounds. I stayed upright behind him, holding the handles to the nunchucks the way you would hold a pair of post-hole diggers. I loosened the tension slightly and whispered for him to be quiet. I told him to shut the fuck up or I was going to break his windpipe. He nodded in agreement. We had a deal. I loosened the grip some more, but not enough for him to wriggle out of it.
“Which way to the highway?” I said.
“You think I’m stupid? If I tell you, you won’t need me anymore. You’ll kill me.”
“Maybe, maybe not. But I’m sure as shit going to kill you if you don’t tell me.”
He was wheezing from the pressure on his trachea. He knew he was going to die if he didn’t say something. “You have to go south a couple of miles, and then veer left at the fork. Another ten miles and you’ll see some lights, and then you’ll see the signs to the interstate.”
“I’m going to take you with me,” I said. “I’m going to stuff your ass into the trunk and take you with me. If you’re lying, I’m going to tie you to the bumper of the car and drag you all the way back here. Then the buzzards can have whatever’s left of your corpse.”
“I swear. You have to go south and then southwest. Left at the
fork.”
“Stand up,” I said.
He stood. I pulled the chain a little tighter against his throat and started walking backward toward the idling sedan. I walked him to the driver’s side and told him to open the door. He did.
“Reach in there and cut the engine,” I said.
He reached in and cut the engine. I still had the nunchuck chain tight against his windpipe.
“Now take the keys out of the ignition.”
He took the keys out of the ignition. I was going to make him open the trunk, and then I was going to slam the lid and imprison him once he was inside. If he’d told me wrong on the directions, I planned to make good on my promise to drag his worthless carcass back to our current position. If he’d told me correctly, I planned to hand him over to the cops. Either way, he was going to lose. Everyone involved in this fucked-up world Freeze had created was going to lose. I planned to make sure of it.
I guided him to the rear of the car. “Open the trunk,” I said.
But he didn’t. He reared back and launched the keys to the other side of the road and at the same time came down hard on the instep of my left foot. The shock of the sudden crunching pain shot up my spinal cord and briefly paralyzed my fingers on that side. There had been some nerve damage in my left hand after the trauma in Tennessee anyway, and the strength in my ring finger and pinky had never returned a hundred percent. The paralysis only lasted a second, but it was enough time for him to wriggle free and take off running.
If he had been thinking straight, he could have started screaming and shouting and whooping and hollering. He could have started making a lot of noise, and the cameras would have picked up the ruckus and alerted whoever was monitoring them that something was terribly wrong. Then whoever was monitoring the cameras could have cranked on some lights, which would have immediately revealed good old Number Eight Nicholas Colt standing there with his ass flapping in the nonexistent breeze.
But the guy wasn’t thinking straight. He didn’t start screaming and shouting and whooping and hollering. He just ran. My left hand was a little numb, and the top of my foot felt like someone had taken a sledgehammer to it. My right hand hurt. It was skinned and bruised from hitting Number Three in the teeth.
But it still worked OK.
I pulled my knife from its sheath and whizzed it at him overhand like a tomahawk. It thudded deeply into his back, just below his right rib cage. He fell to the pavement. Curled into a fetal position. Started moaning and writhing. I hobbled to where he lay and kicked the knife around a few times with the toe of my boot. I wanted to make sure he was good and sliced up inside. I kicked it around a few times and then yanked it out and watched him bleed. Stupid motherfucker. He should have just cooperated. I didn’t have time for this shit.
I took his flashlight and walked back to the car. I crossed the road and descended an embankment and looked around for the keys. I followed a line to where I thought they might be. I got lucky. I spotted them in the mud twenty feet or so from the road.
I spotted them, but there was a problem.
Below the keys, where the embankment ended and the water began, from the stagnant black cypress stump soup people ordinarily associate with the word swamp, a pair of bloodred eyes stared hungrily back at me.
Gators. Of course. What else?
I swept the area with the flashlight. There were four of them. Four sentinels armed with jaws powerful enough to rip a grown man’s arm clean off with a single snap. Four slimy smelly ugly sons of bitches from darkest prehistoric hell.
Their tails and hind legs were submerged, with their front halves resting happily on the mucky bank. They all looked up at me. They all wore that shit-eating alligator grin, as if they were daring me to come on down. As if they were daring me to cross an imaginary line.
“Run along, fellas,” I whispered. “I won’t hurt you if you don’t hurt me.”
They stood their ground. Kept grinning. I took that as a “Fuck you, bubba. You want these keys, you’re going to have to go through us to get them.”
I wanted those keys. I needed them. Those keys represented victory for me and defeat for Freeze. All I had to do was start the car and find the interstate and pull off at the first exit. Stop at a filling station and phone the police. Game over. Freeze goes to prison, Juliet and I live happily ever after.
With the car, I had plenty of time to do what I needed to do before daylight. Without the car, I wasn’t going to make it. I didn’t have the time or the energy to walk twelve miles. Even if I could have somehow mustered the strength, the sun would have risen on me somewhere between my current position and the interstate. The sun would rise and the cameras in my collar would give me away, and that would be that. Game over. Freeze keeps kidnapping people and hosting his demented sport every year, and Juliet and I get buried somewhere in the Okefenokee Swamp.
I needed those keys, but I couldn’t very well wrestle four alligators to get them. Four gators that I could see, and there might be more lurking nearby. There might be a dozen of them for all I knew. One slip and they would all converge and tear me apart. It was an impossible situation. If I went for the keys, the gators would kill me. If I didn’t go for the keys, Freeze would kill me. My only choice seemed to be which way I wanted to die.
Then I got an idea.
I climbed up the hill and walked north on the road a hundred feet or so and then climbed back down. I switched on the flashlight and looked around.
No gators in sight.
I turned the light off and crept southward toward where I’d been before, back toward the ruthless predators standing guard over the keys. I was hoping they might have gotten bored and moved on, but they were still there. Still half in the water, half out. The original four were still there, and now a fifth had joined them. A smaller one. A youngster.
I got as close as I dared, and then I pulled out the stun baton. My plan was to shock all the gators by shocking the water. I figured the voltage might paralyze them long enough for me to snatch the car keys and make a run for it. Or it might do nothing. I didn’t know.
It was a risk, because discharging the stun baton would then render it useless. That would mean one less weapon in my arsenal. Also, my boots were in the mud now and I wondered if I would get shocked myself. The boots had rubber soles, so I didn’t think so. I decided to give it a shot. If it didn’t work, I would have to think of something else. I had to have those car keys no matter what.
I bent down, put my finger on the trigger, and fired the baton into the water. I expected to see some fireworks. I expected blue arcs of electrical current to explode into the bog and light up the night. But nothing happened. Nothing happened, and the gators didn’t move.
I picked up a large rock and hurled it toward the pack of monsters and switched on the flashlight. They still didn’t move. I wondered if they were dead.
I trudged along the muddy bank toward them, keeping the light aimed at the keys. One of them opened its mouth in what looked like a yawn, but it didn’t stir from its position. The stun baton had temporarily paralyzed those ghastly fucking creatures from the black lagoon, just as I had predicted.
I walked to within three feet of them, bent over, and reached for the keys.
I was inches from wrapping my fingers around surefire salvation when the baby of the bunch darted from nowhere and snapped at my hand. I got out of the way in time, but the scummy little bastard scooped the shiny ring into its mouth and raised its head in a thrashing motion and swallowed the keys in a single gulp.
“Motherfucker,” I said.
I pulled my knife and went after him. He was only about three feet long. I figured I could handle him. I figured I could stab him in the brain and then slit his belly open and retrieve the keys. He made a hissing sound, and our eyes locked and I was about to come down overhand and plant the blade into his skull when one of the larger animals started edging its way out of the mire. First one, and then another. And another. And another. They were all waking up f
rom the stun gun shock. It was no longer just me against the runt. It was back to one against five.
I took a step backward, and they all came after me. I turned and ran as fast as I could, climbing the embankment at an angle. I didn’t look back until I got to the car.
Fortunately, the gators gave up somewhere along the way.
Unfortunately, I still didn’t have the keys. I didn’t have them, and I wasn’t going to get them.
I looked at my watch. 4:21. I had wasted over an hour trying to get the car, first from the guy in blue coveralls and a red ball cap, and then from the alligators. And I had failed. Now it was less than two hours till daybreak. Now I was screwed.
I should have killed the maintenance man in the first place. I never should have spoken to him. I should have just crept up from behind and severed one of the arteries in his neck. He would have bled out and died in under a minute, and I would have had the keys. I hadn’t known which way to go, north or south, but I could have tried both ways. I had had time to try both ways. I could have skipped the coercion. That’s the way it should have gone down. If it had, maybe I would be in a nice soft bed by now with a hot meal in front of me.
But then hindsight’s always twenty-twenty. I needed to forget about what could have happened, what should have happened. I needed to forget about it and move on. My chances of surviving now were slim to none, but I needed to accept that and move on to Plan B.
Plan B wasn’t much of a plan at all. If what the maintenance man had said was true, the interstate was about twelve miles south of my current position. It was way too late to even think about walking that far now, so my only other real choice was to travel north. I had no idea what waited in that direction. The maintenance man hadn’t said, and I hadn’t thought to ask. I was too busy basking in the glow of victory at the time, sure I was going to momentarily be speeding along the blacktop, the metaphorical yellow brick road to home. Rule #23 in Nicholas Colt’s Philosophy of Life: Don’t count your chickens before they hatch. It’s a cliché, but a good one. I felt like a fool for celebrating too soon.
