“What will?” she asked immediately.
“Nothing.”
She swallowed down a scream and barely refrained from stomping her feet in frustration.
Then Fred spoke up from behind her in his monotone voice. “Wolf, it would be wise to move at an increased pace. The slower we go, the longer we’re in the swamp. The longer we are in the swamp without access to clean water, food, or adequate shelter, our odds of survival decrease. By walking slow, we are prolonging our time in the swamp and increasing our risk of falling ill, being injured, or even dying.”
Regan bit back a laugh at the professor’s scientific approach to prodding Wolf along. Maybe it would work better than her thinly veiled hostility.
“Speed gets you killed,” Wolf replied, nonplussed by the constant complaining from behind him. “If we go tearing through here, we’re likely to encounter a deadly snake, a venomous spider, or trip and fall. We have to pay attention. We can’t do that if we’re racing. Patience is your friend.”
“I thought it was a virtue,” Geno grumbled from the back of the line.
“This is a snail’s pace. I’m talking about moving a little faster,” Regan complained.
Wolf ignored her, and so she went back to shooting invisible daggers into his back. She considered poking him with a stick to make him move faster through the mud. The slow pace was frustrating her and making her wish she had stayed by herself. She could have been much farther along by now, had she not sat around at the set and then set out at a pace a toddler could outrun.
If Wolf got her killed because he was moving too slowly, she vowed to haunt him for the rest of his miserable life. In her opinion, their pace made them more susceptible to an attack. They were easy targets for even the smallest, weakest predators.
Fred cleared his throat. Regan smiled, knowing he was about to spew more statistics and valid reasons for moving faster. He didn’t get the chance, however. Wolf stopped walking and turned to look at him.
“No.” He’d uttered the single word without waiting to hear whatever it was Fred meant to say, and then turned around and begun moving again before anything more could be said.
Regan glanced back at Fred, who looked stunned. It was funny. She smiled at the professor, though he didn’t look the least bit amused.
“You tried,” she offered by way of placating his wounded ego.
He nodded once and fell back into the same slow and steady pace they’d been moving at for the past hour.
Regan’s frustration level grew with every step. She could practically feel it radiating off her. The humidity was cranking up as the day stretched on, too, making her even more cranky. Sweat was dripping down her back.
Out of the blue, Wolf held up a hand, bringing their slow procession to a dead stop. Regan waited to be scolded again, even though she hadn’t purposely sighed, and no one had said a word that she’d heard.
“Now what?” she asked.
“We wait.”
“Wait for what?” she practically shouted.
She moved to stand beside him in the very small clearing they had come to with a narrow river ahead of them. She assumed he wanted to refill their water bottles, which meant they were either going to start a fire or use their purification tablets. She waited, looking around at the relatively serene scene. If there hadn’t been such a risk of an alligator popping its head up, it would have been an idyllic setting. They had been walking under a canopy of foliage for so long, she had almost forgotten what it felt like to have the sun on her face. She took a minute to appreciate the way it felt on her skin. Hot as it was beating down, maybe it would at least scare some bugs away and dry a bit of the sweat soaking all of their clothing.
“What are we looking at?” she asked, scanning the area again and seeing nothing that demanded they stop moving.
“We can’t cross that river for another hour or two,” Wolf said as if his reasoning were obvious.
“Does it disappear in the afternoon?” she quipped.
His sigh of frustration told her she was on the verge of pushing him too far. The man had shown extreme patience thus far, she knew, but she had a way of grating on people’s nerves. Or so she’d been told. It was her sarcasm, dry humor, and lack of a filter. She called it like she saw it. Tact was something she was trying to work on, but it was a struggle—especially when her own patience was long since gone.
“I guess you can go ahead and wade in. There may or may not be an alligator waiting for you,” he said in the same dry tone.
“Oh.” She stared at the water. “The bridge?”
“Wrong direction,” he replied.
“Oh.”
She remembered the warnings in the stack of paperwork. The animals that called the swamp home were most active in the morning hours. When it was hot, they tended to take their afternoon naps. Important details like that were why she was with the group, she reminded herself. She probably would have waded right in and been eaten.
“Everyone sit down, hydrate, and we’ll move once the sun is a little higher in the sky,” Wolf called out.
Tabitha and Geno immediately faded into the dense foliage so that Tabitha could relieve herself with Geno standing guard.
“I’m going to scout down the riverbank and see if I can find anything useful,” Regan announced.
“Be careful. You’re likely to encounter a gator,” Wolf warned her.
“Gator, croc, I get it. They’ll eat me if they see me,” she mumbled, heading toward the riverbank. Still, she stayed a good ten feet from the river.
She had no idea what she was looking for, but anything she found could prove useful in one way or another. The walk was also a good excuse to get away from the others. She needed a brief break or she’d lose her cool.
Something caught her eye about forty feet farther ahead, right along the bank. She paused, stared, and tried to focus on what she was seeing. It wasn’t an alligator. In fact, it looked like a person.
She picked up her pace, anxious to see if what was very clearly a woman lying in the mud needed help.
“Oh no,” she gasped when she got close enough to view the carnage—there was a massive chunk of flesh missing from the woman’s torso, along with part of her arm.
“Dammit,” Wolf muttered from behind her.
Regan spun around breathlessly. She’d thought she was alone. The man was always right there, it seemed.
“Is that Bonnie?” Regan asked while still facing him, afraid to look at the face.
“Yes.”
“Oh, man. Is this an alligator attack?” Regan asked, suddenly very wary of standing so close to the water.
Wolf nodded. “It is.”
Regan swallowed down nausea. “Do you think there are more bodies?”
Wolf met her eyes and shook his head. “I don’t know. Maybe she set out on her own. I didn’t see them leave and assumed they all went together. She was probably attempting to cross or maybe get water when she was attacked. I’m surprised the body is on the bank and not in the water,” he said flatly. Looking around. “I don’t see her pack, so either whoever she was with took it or she’d set it down away from the water. Do you see it? There might be supplies we could use.”
Regan closed her eyes, wishing she could unsee the sight behind her before taking a quick scan of the surrounding area to look for the pack. Not seeing it, she asked him, “What do we do?”
He shrugged. “Nothing we can do.”
“We have to tell the others,” Regan said, surprising herself with her need to share the news.
“Let’s get back.”
They started walking back and were greeted by the rest of the group.
“You were stopped and looking at something. What was it?” Geno asked, gesturing to where the body lay.
Regan and Wolf exchanged a look before Wolf took the lead. “It’s Bonnie.”
Tabitha immediately went into paramedic mode. “I’ll get a first aid kit,” she said, turning to run back to the supplies. “
Get her away from the water!” she ordered.
“No,” Wolf stopped her. “You can’t help her.”
“What do you mean?” Geno asked.
Tabitha froze and turned back around, looking beyond Regan and Wolf. Regan saw the second she realized what had happened. Her shoulders slumped, and she looked defeated.
Fred was nodding his head as if he had already assessed the situation. “Alligator.”
Wolf took a deep breath. “Yes, looks like.”
“She’s dead?” Geno asked, his face contorted into a horrified expression.
“Yeah,” Regan confirmed.
“Oh no,” Tabitha said, covering her mouth with a dainty hand. “How terrible. Was she alone?”
Wolf shrugged. “I don’t know. Possibly. We didn’t look around for anyone else.”
“We need to check. They may need help,” Geno said, walking around Wolf and Regan and making his way toward the body.
The rest of them followed, forming a semi-circle around the mangled body once they got there.
“Wow,” Geno muttered, standing over the woman who had been savaged. “We need to bury her.”
“No. We shouldn’t expend the energy—it wouldn’t do any good,” Wolf told him, putting a hand on one of Geno’s massive shoulders to pause him before he ran off.
“We can’t leave her here!” he said, his cheeks reddening with anger.
“It’s a swamp,” Fred stated gently. “We could dig for hours and only find more water. She would only float back to the top.”
Regan had gotten used to his matter-of-fact approach to everything and realized it was his way. It was nothing personal.
Wolf nodded in agreement. “Nature will take its course. This isn’t a safe place for us to be. There’s at least one alligator around here. It’s mating season, and I don’t want to get in the way.”
Regan looked around, feeling as though a violent, hungry alligator would burst from the trees and attack. In that particular situation, she decided being in a group was definitely better than being alone. If nothing else, the odds were good that the alligator would go after only one of them, giving her a chance to escape. It wasn’t the most generous or kind thought she had ever had, but it was the truth.
“Let’s go,” Regan muttered, not waiting around for anyone to join her.
She walked back to the area where they’d dropped their packs, staying a safe distance from the water. She stared out over the smooth, glass-like surface once she took a seat by her pack. It was hard to imagine that something so serene could be so deadly. Everyone was quiet as they made their way back to their original stopping point. Regan was surprised to notice that even Geno was silent. That was a rarity.
Each of them was lost in their own thoughts, and Regan had the very sudden realization that their situation was serious. When she’d thought about striking out on her own before, getting out of the swamp had seemed like a formality. Step one in surviving. She’d been wrong to think that for even a moment. Death was a real possibility. When they had landed in the swamp that first day, death had never been a risk. Sure, the show played it up, but in reality, there was a team of medical people on hand and a crew of camera men and others who would jump in and save them, should something truly threaten their lives. There’d been EpiPens for allergies and Wolf’s cell for anything serious enough to require a hospital.
The safety net was gone now. They were well and truly on their own.
Wolf came to stand by her as she stared out at the water. She was no longer looking at the beauty of it, but scanning for bubbles or ripples in the river to indicate that something was moving below the surface. If an alligator came on shore, she was running for the trees.
“We’ll be okay,” Wolf said softly. “Bonnie didn’t recognize the danger. If she was out here early this morning, she would have walked right into the alligator. It was a risk she didn’t think about.”
“It doesn’t make it any less horrible,” Regan replied.
“No, but I think it was a wake-up call for the rest of us. Even I can get complacent at times.”
She nodded in understanding. It made her feel a little better to know she hadn’t been the only one shocked by the scene.
“We stick together, keep our eyes open, and don’t take anything for granted,” he said.
“I get it,” Regan answered quietly. “This is my lesson. This is why you warned me about setting off on my own. You don’t have to keep telling me about the dangers.”
“Yes and no. I would never wish this on anyone, but yes, I am glad you can see firsthand what kind of dangers are out here. Anywhere, really. Being alone leaves you vulnerable. You can’t see behind you.”
She shook her head, swallowing down emotion. “I know there’s danger. Sometimes, when you are alone, you can sneak by the danger. You don’t always have to be a hero. Minding your own business and staying out of people’s way is my preference. I’ve discovered the people watching your back tend to be the ones stabbing a knife into it.”
There was a pause, and for a minute she thought Wolf was going to put his hand on her shoulder in some misguided attempt at comfort, but instead he crouched down in front of her and met her eyes. “I’m sorry you had to learn that,” he said, “but that is not always the case. I’m not going to stab you in the back. Ever.”
“Fine,” she murmured, suddenly uncomfortable with the intimate feel of the conversation.
Wolf nodded and sat down on the ground beside her, letting himself thump to the dirt with a grunt. After another minute of silence, he shifted beside her. “I have to tell her family,” he blurted out.
Regan turned to look at him. Despite his apparent effort to seem unaffected by Bonnie’s death, she could tell he was. The man was difficult to read, but she could see the strain in the tiny wrinkles around his eyes and the set of his mouth. He was stressed.
“How will you find them, or even know how to contact them?” she asked.
He shrugged. “The network has files on everyone.”
“On a computer?”
“The application she filled out will be filed away. I have to at least try, at some point. They deserve to know what happened. I don’t want them holding out hope, waiting for her to come home.”
The death was terrible, and reminded Regan of how things could change so quickly. One minute, you were having the time of your life, and the next you were dying. She hoped it had been quick for Bonnie. Maybe someone had been with her and tried to help, or at least been there as she’d drawn her last breath. Being alone wasn’t always so great. Regan couldn’t imagine the terror Bonnie had felt in those last seconds.
“I can’t imagine their pain,” she lied, to have something to say. She of course knew exactly what kind of pain Bonnie’s family would be feeling, at some point. When her own mother had been killed and she’d been notified, she’d felt that pain and overwhelming grief. She didn’t envy them.
After a moment, she felt Wolf looking at her. “Can’t you?” he asked.
She didn’t answer his question, and could have kicked herself for making that comment to him of all people. Obviously, he knew she’d been orphaned at a young age but she wasn’t going to get into the sordid details. It wasn’t something she liked to think about, and definitely not something she wanted to chat about when she was facing her own mortality in the depths of a Florida swamp. Let him think what he wanted to about her.
“We can’t dwell on it,” she said, hoping to make him feel a little better and get him off the death thing in general. “You told us all about the dangers. You tried to stop them from leaving. We all make our own decisions and we all have to live with the consequences.”
His mouth relaxed a bit and a small smile appeared. “You’re right. I hope you can take your own advice.”
She smiled. “I doubt it.”
He rolled his eyes. “You are going to give me gray hair before this is over.”
“You already have some grays in there. They really sta
nd out against the black,” she offered, allowing herself to grin with the jibe.
That made him smile. She felt a little better with the sight of it, and a bit more hopeful for their trek out of the swamp. Wolf was much easier to get along with when he wasn’t focused on the actual act of surviving. She imagined he’d be cool to hang with once everything was back to normal.
“You okay with moving slow?” Wolf asked as they moved to sit down with the rest of the group in the shade and rest a few more minutes before it was time to cross the river.
She smirked. “Move as slow as you want. I do not want to wrestle an alligator.”
That made him laugh. “I think Geno has the best odds. If we come up on one, let’s send him to the front of the pack.”
Geno was shaking his head. “They have teeth, so no thanks.”
“I think, out of all of us, Regan can run the fastest. I’ll be keeping up with her while you guys play with the alligator,” Tabitha joked.
“The alligator isn’t going to want to eat the women anyway,” Geno groaned. “They’re too skinny. They’ll go after one of us first.”
“Tabitha is a bite-size meal,” Fred added, joining in the jesting. The guy tended to be focused on facts and didn’t often join in casual conversations but when he did, he’d often have the group groaning over his version of humor.
“Moving slow isn’t about giving us time to see the animals, you know,” Wolf explained. “It gives the animals time to move away from us. We don’t want to surprise them and catch them off-guard. They’ll immediately go into defense mode.”
“Got it,” Regan replied. “I’ll quit complaining about the slow progress.”
She heard Wolf mumble something under his breath and raised an eyebrow, questioning him. He smiled instead of telling her what it was he’d said.
He might as well have said what was on his mind. She was sure it had been something along the lines of him being right and her being wrong. Everyone got to be right at least once in their life, she silently mused.
8
Waiting sucked. Patience was not a virtue Regan had. Chalk that up to one of her many character flaws. Doing nothing always made her feel as if she was an easy target. She always kept on the move, rarely staying in one place for more than a few months. Sitting in the shade of a tree should have been relaxing, but for her, it made her anxious.
Surviving the Swamp (Survivalist Reality Show Book 1) Page 7
