A man’s voice near the still-smoking church said something that contained the words “careful” and “hot”; and Cable wanted to hear more and to see what they were doing. Cautiously she moved closer.
The back of the church had been reduced to rubble, and tall marsh shrubs hid her passage to the very back of the ruin. Bruno was in there talking to one of Ferret’s mercenaries.
“Ferret says we don’t get out of here till we find that missing guard—Darkow.”
“I thought they found his boat,” said the mercenary.
“Yeah, but he wasn’t in it,” Bruno grumbled.
“What’re you looking for? It’s dangerous in here!”
“Bodies,” said Bruno. “Just making sure.”
The mercenary stepped high over black shapes that smoked and occasionally flared into flame as he headed out of the ruin. “Nobody made it through this,” he said.
“Guess not,” said Bruno, who continued to poke and kick aside charred timbers and furnishings.
Another man wandered by. Chains and things were dangling from his hands. He said, “I vote we get back and have breakfast. All the bodies are at the bottom of the swamp, and besides, I got all I can carry.”
Bruno looked pensive and somehow affected by the tragedy. Half-heartedly he asked, “What you got there?”
The man grinned. “I found some money, rings, watches, a couple of—”
“No,” said Bruno, “that.” He reached out and took the chain which dangled below the rest of the man’s loot. The chain was gold, with a trinket attached.
“Oh, that,” the man said with a shrug. “Took it off the lady scientist.” He looked at Bruno and seemed to see something dangerous in the big man’s childish face. “You want it? You can have it, Bruno. Ain’t worth nothing compared to the watches. One of these has a real computer—”
“Yeah, I want it,” said Bruno.
“Okay,” said the man, who was shorter by a foot and lighter by a hundred pounds. He turned nonchalantly and made his way out of the church. As he left, he said back over his shoulder. “Wasn’t that something the way Alec Holland burned himself to a crisp? Damndest thing I ever saw!”
Cable recalled a dim memory of a light flashing by, and heat, and a man’s tortured scream. She drew in a quick sobbing breath.
Bruno heard her.
She ducked as he looked down the length of the remains of the lab to the smoking rubble of the back wall.
A timber from above fell and shattered into a cloud of soot, sparks and a tongue of fire. Bruno looked up to make sure there would be no more surprises and then made his way to the back wall.
Cable drew back to the nearest cypress trunk and slid behind it. She was well hidden but no more than ten feet from Bruno when he peered out. She heard Bruno cock his pistol. She found that she could see him, or fragments of him, through a tight clump of leaves at the base of the tree. He grabbed the hot rubble as he bent out to look around, and blew on his hands when he leaned back in again. “Ferret!” he called. There was no answer.
Cable slipped the notebook out of her blouse and stashed it in a deep cleft in the treetrunk.
As Bruno ambled back the way he had come—shoving aside hot timbers as if they were toothpicks—he held up the chain and opened the locket on it.
Cable leaned against the tree with a silent sigh of relief.
Next moment, Ferret yanked her to her feet with an awful laughing shout: “Gotcha!” His long bony fingers dug into the flesh of her arms as he dragged her toward where the bodies had been weighted and sunk.
She saw Bruno staring sadly, sympathetically, and she called to him, “Help me, Goddamn it!”
The big brute turned his head away.
“He’s sentimental as a grandmother,” Ferret chuckled; “but down deep he’s a realist.”
Three men came running up from the water’s edge, where one of the blue boats was tied to a cypress, to give Ferret a hand. They rushed Cable to the boat and threw her in bodily. Two got in and held her down while the lanky, gray Ferret jumped in and instantly started the engine.
Alec had driven this boat last time she had ridden in it; Bill Darkow had driven it on her first ride. Ferret gassed the boat fast into the lake.
Bruno stood on the path, watching from the shore.
“There’s a wonderful channel right about here, Cable,” said Ferret. “Full of catfish, they tell me, and other kinds of scavengers. Water rats. It’s like a river running along the bottom of a lake. Crayfish. Mosquito larvae. Alec Holland, they tell me, probably loves it down there. Water moccasins. Alligators.”
Ferret flipped the motor suddenly into neutral. The boat coasted to a stop.
Without another word, Ferret pulled Cable off the floor of the boat and tossed her overboard.
She swam up to the surface, choking and struggling, and Ferret spread his spidery hand over her head and shoved it back under with a growl that was more an expression of pleasure than of anger.
There was a surge of bubbles, but she did not resurface. A moment later she came up with a gasp on the other side of the boat.
Ferret shouted with delight. The game was on! She began to swim away. Instead of pursuing her with the boat, Ferret took an oar and reached out with it, pushing her down again, slapping the water beside her head.
She came back up and lunged for the oar. He swatted at her with it again, and this time she gripped it and yanked it from his hands. He almost toppled into the water.
“Bravo!” he croaked. “Touché!”
The mist was turning to rain under a darkening sky. There was a rumble of distant thunder.
Cable flung the oar as far as she could and struck out for shore.
One of the men reached for the motor controls.
“No!” Ferret whooped. “Row, man! You have one oar left! Are you going to let her make it to shore? Row, man, row!
The man tried to maneuver the wide motorboat as one would a canoe; it zigzagged as it chased Cable.
Her strength was waning; the boat caught up with her.
With a shout, Ferret shoved her under again. This time he held tight to her hair. He felt her hands clawing at his wrist under water, but she did not come up. Bubbles burst around his arm. After a stillness, more bubbles broke the surface. Then nothing.
Ferret felt her hands relax and fall away from his wrist. He released her hair.
With a frantic struggle she surfaced again gasping, coughing. Her eyes were wide and her arms struggled aimlessly.
Ferret smiled. He took the remaining oar and, with great ease, pushed her down again. Bubbles burst. She sank as he pushed gently on the oar. Out of his perverse sense of order, he pushed all the way down until his hands were in the water. Rain drops made myriad circles on the still water.
Suddenly something huge and green and powerful reared out of the lake and seized Ferret’s arm. A giant hand! It pulled him headlong into the water.
In the next second a gigantic shape loomed up with such a startling burst of energy that the boat flipped on end and sent its crew sailing through the air. They yelled as they splashed into the lake.
10
The boat floated upside down. The lake was quiet except for the sound of Ferret and his men treading water and raindrops striking its surface.
Then Bruno yelled from the shore, “Feeerrreeett!
And the men all looked and saw the same thing. Mountainous heap of a creature—glistening with slime, draped with rotting weeds, roughly the shape of a giant man—rose out of the swamp carrying the limp body of Cable. It kicked through hard cypress roots, snapping them like twigs, and lumbered onto muddy land.
“Don’t just stand there!” Ferret yelled at Bruno. “Shoot it! Kill it! And kill her!”
The men in the water swam to the boat and righted it. They heard shots from Bruno’s gun. When they looked again, Bruno was firing into the thicket at the shore, but the creature was not in sight. Other men ran to Bruno and followed him into the brush. Their pis
tols and rifles exploded like a chain of Chinese firecrackers.
“Ten to one,” Ferret said to one of his men, “they’re shooting at bushes.”
Ferret was right. The men had immediately lost sight of the thing that blended so perfectly with the colors and shapes of the swamp. They were firing at where they thought it might have gone.
The gunshots ceased. Their last echoes blended with a thunderclap, and then the swamp was unnaturally silent. There was only the hiss of falling rain.
Ferret reached the shore and joined Bruno and the others who had backed out of the thicket, their guns still drawn but not knowing how to proceed. Ferret shook himself like a wet dog and snarled: “Go in there. Circle the area. The girl must not escape!”
The men were not quick to follow orders. Bruno said it for all of them: “What was that?”
Ferret said, in the manner of a sarcastic kindergarten teacher, “We’ll never find out standing here guessing, will we?”
“Maybe the girl’s already dead, drowned,” said one of the men who came ashore with Ferret.
Ferret repeated, in precisely the same voice, like a stuck record: “We’ll never find out standing here guessing, will we?”
The men reloaded their disarray of firearms and thrashed forward through the tangle of bushes, vines and dripping Spanish moss.
Deeper in the thicket, Cable lay hidden in a patch of marsh grass. Its sharp blades were tall and as thick as snakes. She coughed and spit muddy water from her mouth. Still struggling for awareness, she felt someone gently move wet hair off her face; and she thought she heard massive footsteps.
A burst of gunshots wakened her completely. She looked around and saw no one. She coughed again and tried to stifle the sound. She heard Ferret’s rasping voice: “How can a thing that big hide? It’s got to be here!” And instinctively she drew in around herself to make herself smaller. She heard rustle of bushes as the men passed; she saw no one.
But something moved low in the marsh grass nearby. Her eyes widened, and her skin crawled as if covered with gnats. A large alligator was ambling, lumbering from side to side, toward her. The blades of the tall grass bowed and snapped under its reptilian feet. Her face flushed; she hoped it would not react adversely to the scent of human fear. She remembered Alec’s indignation, his defense of the alligator in the accident that she thought had killed her predecessor: “Well, the guy stepped right on the gator’s head!”
Right now, she thought confidently, Alec would not be afraid. Heaven knows what he would do, but he wouldn’t panic or try to harm the gator. The thought calmed her a bit.
The gator came very close before it noticed her at all. It stopped and regarded her expressionlessly, except for a twitch of its wide-set eyes.
Its mouth opened, and Cable felt fear in every nerve end. A guttural gurgle emerged from between its spikelike teeth, and then the mouth closed. It had yawned. Bored with whatever the sight of Cable meant to it, it waddled off toward the water.
Cable came close to laughing aloud. She began to wonder how she had gotten here, how she had escaped from Ferret.
Ferret. She listened, tuned her ear acutely to distant sounds, and did not hear her pursuer.
Though water had stopped falling, it still sounded as if it were raining. Leaves and blades of grass crackled as they shed the weight of moisture and sprang back into place.
Cable pushed herself onto her elbows. Every muscle felt strained; she was extremely weak. Just as well, she thought, for she doubted that it was safe yet for her to stand up.
The majority of Ferret’s men had trudged in the mire farther inland, but one had fallen back, had taken a different path. His name was Willie, and he prided himself on being as stealthy as a Seminole in the wilds of the swamp. He had always longed to catch birds with his bare hands, but he wasn’t quite that good. The others hurried. Willie took his time. The others blundered through the bush. Willie climbed a short way up a tree and studied what he saw around him.
The sky was still completely overcast, but it was brighter now that the rain had passed . . . bright enough to make him curious about the smudge of blue he saw among the greens and browns. There was not much blue on the ground of the swamp—scattered violets and vibrant flecks of blue in a few species of birds—nothing like this smudge of manufactured color that looked very like the gray-blue jacket Cable had been wearing.
Willie knew that if the quarry had indeed been found, the others were too far away to take the credit away from him. He was in no hurry. He wondered if she was alive.
He was watching when the alligator looked her over, and also when she raised up on her elbows. Then he saw her head of wet brown hair and knew he had her.
He climbed down from the tree and quietly—muffling the clicks with his hand—pulled back the pins of his shotgun.
His feet did not break a single twig, nor did he lower a foot flat enough to make a squishing sound in the wet moss.
He got close enough for his weapon to be totally effective and sighted her along the double-barrel—which he braced in the fork of a tree.
He mouthed, silently, “So long, baby.”
Before he could pull the trigger, Willie heard a deep wheezing sound, like the breath of some titanic beast, coming from directly behind him. A huge forearm—wet, moss-green, large as a leg, with vines like blood vessels snaked tight around it—came down in front of Willie’s eyes and pressed into his throat. Willie’s last scream was strangled. His neck snapped. The gun he dropped struck the ground and fired both barrels.
Cable’s heart raced at the sound of the close gunshots. She whirled in the direction of the sound but saw nothing.
Ferret’s voice boomed out from the opposite direction:
“Willie? Did you get her?”
Footsteps and the tearing of underbrush came from the direction of Ferret’s voice—toward Cable. They would surely see her!
She crawled, imitating the alligator, pulling her body flat along the ground, toward the muddy slush the gator had slid into. The reeds were taller and thicker there. She passed a cluster of green-brown orchid blossoms whose stems were tangled in, at one with, the dead stump of a tree—and she thought of Alec. The orchid he picked . . . what it grew into . . . splendid . . . how tragic that Alec had died in flames.
The alligator was there, lying still in inch-deep water. Mustn’t step on its head, she thought inanely, on the verge of hysteria as she realized that death came at her from so many directions that she was safest lying here with a sleeping alligator.
She heard crushing sounds; something of great weight was moving slowly through the swamp. And she heard what sounded like the rumbling breath of a giant. She lay still, wanting the alligator to shield her.
Ferret gathered his men in a semblance of a clearing. “Willie?” he called again, this time more softly.
Ferret also heard the breathing and footfalls of a giant. They dwindled and stopped.
“Willie?” No answer. Ferret told his men: “Spread out.”
Two men—the two who had been with him in the boat—flanked Ferret with their weapons ready. They moved into the thicket away from the clearing.
“Wait,” Ferret whispered. “Listen.”
They heard only the sounds made by the other men who were clumsily slashing through the underbrush.
“Such talent,” Ferret muttered derisively. His two men caught his meaning and laughed, but nervously.
Something moved up ahead.
Without investigating, one of the two panicked and opened fire. His automatic blasted five times.
A man screamed, and there were shouts.
“Cease firing, you imbecile!” Ferret ordered.
Two of Ferret’s men had been shot. One was dead. The survivor sat on the ground clutching his arm, whining, cursing. “Who did this?!” he demanded to know.
Ferret’s eyes pointed out the guilty party—who stared down, speechless, holding a smoking gun. “You can kill him, for all I care,” Ferret told the wo
unded man. “Later.”
Others had arrived. Ferret told them: “Bury this body with all the others.”
The wounded man got to his feet, pulling himself up with the help of a bending branch. Ferret asked him: “Can you walk?”
If the wounded man had said no, he might have ended up among the bodies at the bottom of the lake. “Sure,” he said.
Ferret nodded. “They’ll take care of you at the estate. Beat it. Wait for us at the pickup point.” He told the others, “Spread out; we’re not finished here.”
A minute later, a man yelled, “Hey! Here’s Willie’s gun . . . and—” Suddenly he screamed; his shout became a gag, and then there was a crashing sound in the bush.
Ferret’s men were frozen.
“Come on, for Christ’s sake,” Ferret grumbled; “there are three of us. Just don’t shoot each other this time.”
Bruno took the lead and echoed his leader’s accusation, “Yeah, don’t shoot each other.” They started out. Then Bruno stopped suddenly and bent down.
He had found two bodies—Willie’s and the other man’s. Their necks had been crushed and were bent back as if no bones remained in the upper spine.
Something bestial roared not far away, and from the same direction branches rustled and snapped.
Bruno said, “Ferret . . . don’t you think maybe we should—”
“I think we should get the hell out of here,” Ferret agreed. No discussion was required; the men raced, scrambled and stumbled back the way they had come.
Cable had heard shots and shouts and movement in the swamp that seemed to be getting farther and farther away. She lay on her back beside the sleeping alligator and gathered strength as she watched the clouds above thin and patches of blue appear.
The alligator grunted and waddled away, apparently unaware that it had had company.
The swamp sounded empty of humanity.
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