Suffer Not Evil: A Florida Action Adventure Novel

by Scott Cook

  Sarah Beth hated this stupid Florida wilderness. She loved the beach and going out on the inland waters around Saint Pete. She loved the hills and mountains of Wyoming. But she was not a fan of the Everglades or this mangrove jungle that lay at the edge of it.

  She was hot, sweating profusely and had at least a dozen mosquito bites already. Her tennis shoes were now soaked from jumping into the water and her soaked socks squelched with every step. As she plowed through the tangle of palmettos, slash pines, cypress and other denser foliage, she cursed the land, the situation and most especially, Jarvis.

  Although she consciously tried to tell herself that he’d been lying about Veronica, somewhere deep down in her psyche, she knew Jarvis hadn’t lied. Somewhere inside of her, a small voice seemed to keep repeating the same thing over and over again… you murdered your mother… you murdered your mother…

  It was driving her batty. And so what if she had? So fucking what? It wasn’t like Veronica knew about it. It wasn’t like it would’ve made any difference in their relationship. Sarah Beth and Veronica didn’t see eye to eye and only tolerated each other. There was no love there, so why cry over it.

  But maybe there could’ve been, the shitty little voice insisted.

  “Shut up…” she muttered to herself, trying to drown out the sound of her own conscience.

  Had Sarah Beth not been so distracted, she might have stopped and thought things through. She would’ve realized that chasing a fifteen-year-old girl on a remote island was pointless. She might have realized that she would be better off helping Brad re-float the boat before somebody else arrived. She would probably also have thought to frisk the brat when they’d first boarded the boat to make sure she wasn’t armed.

  That last item suddenly flared into her consciousness when two loud cracks seemed to split the hot silence of the island's interior. Even as Sarah screamed and threw herself sideways behind a big, gnarled cypress root, she swore she heard the passage of the rounds through the leaves above her head.

  The little bitch had shot at her!

  “I didn’t have to miss,” came a remarkably poised voice from no more than fifty feet away.

  Sarah peeked under the thigh-thick root. She’d been moving through a rough trail between the big cypress tree and a stand of short palmettos. The thick bright green fronds, no more than four feet high, were bordered by a row of slash pines beyond. That must be where the voice came from.

  “You’d better come back to the boat with me, kid!” Sarah called out, aiming her own pistol over the top of the root. “Lot of bad things out here!”

  There was a soft laugh, although Sarah couldn’t quite tell where it was coming from, “You have no idea… mommy killer.”

  That had done it. Sarah felt wild hot rage flare up inside her and she squeezed off half a dozen shots in the general direction of the voice as she shrieked in animal rage. A silence fell and then the laughter again.

  She’d missed! How the hell could she have missed?

  Although outwardly calm and collected, Shelby Delaney’s tummy was roiling. She wasn’t afraid of the bad things out in the wilderness. Not really. She knew about the Everglades and the Ten Thousand Islands, and knew what sorts of things lived there. What worried her more was the woman.

  Sarah Beth was obviously losing her grip. Shelby had fired in her direction hoping to scare her off, and had taunted her in hopes that the older woman would be afraid. Afraid because the younger woman wasn’t. Yet Sarah’s instability was growing, and she was clearly not thinking straight. That made her dangerous.

  Shelby was also afraid that she might actually have to shoot Sarah Beth. That bothered her most of all. She didn’t like the woman. In fact, what Scott had said had left Shelby with nothing but contempt for the hotheaded woman who, although seven years her senior, didn’t seem to have Shelby’s fortitude, brains or empathy. Shelby didn’t want to kill another person. Even a bad one… yet deep down she knew that if it came to Sarah Beth or herself… she might not have any choice.

  She also now got to truly put into practice all the stuff that her dad had taught her. Stuff about the wilderness and about dealing with bad guys. Always keep your head. Don’t let fear guide you. Also, most importantly, at that particular moment, never fire from the same place twice.

  Shelby had shot and had immediately moved twenty feet to her left. She’d spoken to the woman and then laughed and moved again. When Sarah fired back, wasting almost half of her bullets, she’d fired a good fifty feet from where Shelby actually crouched between two pine trunks and behind a stand of dense palmettos.

  As she moved again, headed for the interior of the island, Shelby clung to the hope that somebody from the fishing cabin would arrive soon to deal with Brad and Sarah. She had no doubt that Scott and her dad would figure a way out of their situation and would come for them.

  At the moment, though, Shelby was on her own. She moved slowly but quietly inland. The island wasn’t super large, but it was probably a dozen acres or more in size. It also rose toward its center, and this was high ground and Shelby wanted to get to the high ground.

  “You can’t run forever, bitch!” Sarah Beth called out from her cypress tree. “And I don’t think you’ll shoot me… but I’ll shoot you!”

  Unfortunately, Sarah Beth was right. That was Sarah’s biggest advantage. Shelby wouldn’t shoot her unless absolutely, no-foolin’ necessary. That also meant that Sarah was now plunging through the woods at a much faster pace. She didn’t care if Shelby knew where she was.

  “Well, then that’s your mistake, lady,” Shelby whispered to herself and crept further into the island.

  33

  The actual, no-foolin’, last chapter… for reals

  It had been nearly fifteen minutes of pushing and shoving to no avail when Brad heard the eight shots. First two and then a minute later, six. It suddenly dawned on him that the kid might have been concealing a weapon under her shirt. Neither he nor Sarah Beth had thought of that.

  He didn’t worry much about it. The odds that the fifteen-year-old would shoot either one of them were small. He inwardly hoped that she’d simply evade Sarah long enough for him to get the boat re-floated and then he and Sarah could just leave. They’d leave her on the island, and she’d have to fend for herself. Somehow, in his mind, that was better than simply shooting her outright. Leaving a kid out in the wilderness with no food and water all alone was somehow more humane.

  “They’ll find her,” he grumbled. “That spaghetti track led me here, and I’ll bet that old Indian knows exactly where this island is… which means we gotta get the hell outta here.”

  He only needed to move the skiff a boat length astern to get her back in water deep enough to lower the outboard again. The problem was that they’d run hard up on the bar and the sand was acting like a suction cup. What he needed was a lever.

  The island was pretty large, and Brad could see a variety of trees from his location. There might even be some hardwoods in there. A thick, six-foot mahogany branch would do nicely. Had to be plenty of deadfalls. All he’d need to do is wedge a heavy branch under the bow and lift. If he really had to, he could probably find something to use as a fulcrum. If he could lift the bow and break the suction, he could shove the boat backward far enough. It only weighed a thousand pounds boat and motor all told. Not that heavy, especially since the stern was still in six or eight inches of water.

  Being a Florida native, Brad had a pretty good understanding of the Everglades environment. He had enough situational awareness to know what was around him and how to use it. Unfortunately, he didn’t have enough situational awareness to realize that even as he stood in ankle-deep water and pushed on the bow, he was being stalked.

  He didn’t see the swiftly moving wake of a creature far larger than himself moving in a lazy zig-zag toward him. He didn’t see the reptilian eyes that peered just above the surface as they studied him. Nor the forked tongue as it flicked in and out, tasting the air and the chemical
scents of his mammalian body. He didn’t, and wouldn’t have been able, to see the huge body that trailed behind those cold, hungry eyes.

  All that saved him, at least for the moment, was his decision to walk onto the island and look for his stick. His feet had only just touched the little beach when a primordial force reached his boat and began to explore.

  The only real advantage that Sarah Beth Bradford had over Shelby Delaney was that she was mostly immune to attack. That is to say, she didn’t fear that the younger woman would shoot her. Sarah knew that if she threatened the girl, she might pull the trigger. The kid seemed remarkably poised and confident for a teenager.

  However, Shelby had a number of advantages over her adversary. For one thing, she was dressed for the situation. Shelby had worn a long-sleeved shirt, jeans and hiking boots. She’d even tucked the jeans into the boots, thus ensuring that when she’d jumped into the shallow water, her feet had remained dry. The tucked cuffs also meant she was safe from scratches and bites. The long sleeves protected her as well. The loose hem of the shirt had also allowed Shelby to conceal her weapon.

  On the other hand, Sarah Beth was wearing jeans, sneakers and a short-sleeved blouse with a low V neckline. Her arms and chest were somewhat exposed and already peppered with bug bites. Her long blonde hair was matted with sweat and tangled. Shelby’s own hair was tucked neatly up into her ball cap.

  Also, Shelby knew something about wilderness activity. She’d been to the Everglades before and had a knowledge of the plant and animal life. She was also a little smaller and could move better and stealthier.

  Shelby had also been holding a full bottle of water when she’d run. She stopped and took a big sip from the now warm bottle but didn’t gulp it. She knew that water might have to last her a while and she needed to conserve it.

  She capped the bottle and moved upward, climbing a slope that was growing less and less dense with foliage. The palmettos and cypress trees were giving way to more pines and heavier trees. She thought she could see a big old banyan near the top, too.

  Off to her right and maybe a hundred yards away, Shelby heard Sarah Beth crashing through the brush, grunting and swearing and making it very easy to keep tabs on her.

  Shelby suddenly stopped and looked around. Something caught her eye, but she couldn’t quite understand what it was. Movement? She went silent, brandished her pistol and waited.

  From a dense patch of yucca, a dark and hairy form suddenly burst out, snorting and making an ungodly sound. Shelby bit her lip to keep quiet and only just managed not to fire her gun. The two-hundred-pound wild hog oinked in alarm, pawed the ground and then trotted away, snuffling and giving the distinct impression of displeasure at being disturbed.

  Shelby almost laughed then; the sight of the fat hog being irritated was oddly comic in this wild setting. When Shelby moved a few more feet upward and close to the banyan tree, however, she saw the hog’s tracks and where they’d come from. The big tree, whose branches must be sixty or seventy feet across and whose feeder roots made a fort-like structure, was rooted on the side of a somewhat steep slope. At the base of the tree on the lower end of the slope was what looked like a pit.

  It wasn’t deep, maybe a foot or two. It was more like a ring of mud and sticks that had been formed into a roughly eight-foot-wide circle. Evidently, the hog had disturbed the ring, and Shelby could now see why.

  It wasn’t a pit at all, but some kind of a nest. In the center were about twenty large eggs, maybe the size of grapefruits. There were a lot of shell fragments in there, too. Probably had been a lot more eggs before the hog or whatever else found the nest came along.

  Shelby wondered what kind of nest it was. She knew alligators made mud nests, but they didn’t lay that many eggs and they usually built their nests in wetlands. She didn’t know of any birds that laid that many eggs either. It was also strange that the mother whatever wasn’t around watching the nest… or was she?

  The eggs were large, which meant something large had laid them. Shelby suddenly felt a little shiver of fear and moved away from the nest, up the steep slope and to the protection and cover of the many vertical branches of the banyan tree.

  Scott slowly steered the Maverick along the spaghetti track that was laid out on the plotter. Rick had been right, this one was clearly not the way out. If anything, it actually led deeper into the Ten G’s. He couldn’t be sure, but Scott thought that they were now closer to the actual Everglades than the Gulf. They were easily a half hour or more behind Brad and the two women and neither he nor Clay was having a great deal of success at being patient.

  “What’s that!” Clay shouted from the casting deck. He pointed the AK-47 at a large island around which they were idling.

  Scott put the boat in neutral and let them coast. As they slowly drifted, something white and artificial began to appear, starkly contrasting with so much green. It only took a few seconds for them to recognize another flats skiff.

  Rick’s flat skiff.

  “That’s it!” Clay exclaimed. “Get us in closer, Scott.”

  “Hold on a sec, dude…” Scott said, still letting the boat drift. “Let’s scope this for a minute just to be sure… what the hell’s that?”

  “What?” Jackie spoke up from beside him.

  “Do you see that?” Scott asked, going forward to stand next to Clay. “In the boat there?”

  Jackie appeared next to the men, and they all looked. It was hardly visible at all, but it looked like a stick or something was lying in the boat.

  “A log?” Jackie asked.

  “No… I don’t think so,” Scott said. “It’s curved… too perfectly curved… maybe a leg?”

  “Go closer,” Clay suggested.

  That’s when Brad Raker stepped out of the island’s dense foliage carrying an actual log. He moved to the bow of the boat and began to push the log under the bow. Somehow, he hadn’t seen the other boat nor heard the sound of the admittedly quiet four-stroke outboard.

  Something saw Brad, though.

  The thing that might have been a log or a leg vanished and was instead replaced by a natural horror almost too large to be believed. What at first looked like a Brontosaurus head rose up from behind the helm console. It rose impossibly high, as high as a standing man. Then a coil appeared over the transom and the head and the rest of the largest snake any of them had ever seen began to move slowly toward Brad.

  “Jesus Christ!” Jackie shouted. “Look out!”

  Scott leapt back and put the boat in gear, moving them toward the other vessel at a fast idle.

  Clay shouldered the weapon and fired off several bursts in the direction of the monstrous reptile. There was a blur of movement, a blood-curdling scream and then something that seemed to flow like brown-black water rippled across the intervening space between the skiff and the mangroves.

  Brad Raker was hot, tired and burnt out. After expending far too much energy trying to shove the skiff off, he grabbed a bottle of water and had headed off into the island. It had been some time since the shots he’d heard, but had yet to hear anything more.

  The island was wild, and it took him nearly twenty minutes to locate a bit of wood that he felt would be sufficiently hard enough to help to lever the small boat off the mud bank. As he trudged back to the beach area, swatting flies and cursing, Brad briefly pondered a quick dip in the water.

  Of course, with the thoughts of alligators and who knew what else, he quickly disposed of that idea.

  “Let’s just get the damned boat floated and get the hell out of here,” Brad grumbled to himself as he caught sight of the little beach. “I’ll just keep pushing west. Eventually we’ll get to the Gulf and can run up to Marco or some shit.”

  Brad slogged out onto the sandbar and shoved the fat end of the seven-foot log under the flat bow of the skiff and began to press down. It seemed to be working because the bow definitely rose. Although as it did, it strangely grew heavy again and thumped back down.

  “God dammit!
” Brad cursed and looked up.

  So many things happened at once that it took his mind a full four or five-seconds to process it all. First, maybe a hundred feet behind his boat was another similar skiff with three people standing in front. One of them was aiming a big, nasty-looking rifle at him.

  The next thing he noticed was that a dinosaur was raising its head and neck up from behind the helm. Even more than the rifle, this drove any sane thoughts from Brad’s mind. Could there really be a dinosaur alive out here…?

  It was the rifle shots that got both the creature and its potential prey moving. The dinosaur… no, it couldn’t be… the snake lunged forward toward him, its hideous toothed jaws open to an impossible aperture and a primeval and chilling hiss carrying the acrid scent of decay to Brad’s nostrils.

  Six bullets whizzed by over Brad’s head, close to the monstrous thing but not hitting it. Brad screamed and fell back, his mind unwilling to comprehend the scene before him. For the second time, fortune saved Brad from an unpleasant situation. The huge snake, startled by the vibrations of the big gun, altered its trajectory and instead of lunging for Brad, it slithered over the bow and toward the island. All Brad saw as he hit the water on his back was something long and as thick as his waist vanishing into the underbrush.

  In the direction Sarah Beth had gone…

  By the time Brad came to the realization that he was not, in fact, being constricted as a preamble to becoming a monster’s next meal, the other boat had pulled up on the sandbar and somebody was dragging him to his feet by the front of his Eagle Feather Eco Tours T-shirt.

  “Where’s Shelby!” a man Brad’s over-stressed mind didn’t immediately recognize was shouting into his face. “Where’s my daughter you mother fucker!”