Swamp Thing 1

by David Houston

  She picked out a path that seemed safe enough.

  Once, when she was halfway there, she risked exposing herself to see if the monster was still where she had seen him last. The crashing sounds had stopped.

  He was there, looking vaguely in her direction, but nothing indicated that he saw her.

  Jude was in the boat, waiting. He had readied the boat for a getaway.

  She jumped in.

  “You took your time!” he said accusingly. Then he read a peculiar change in her face. “What happened?”

  “Just go!” Cable said. She caught herself and lowered her voice. “We’re just going to do our job and get this notebook back to Washington.”

  “Oh. Is that our job?”

  “It is now.” She grabbed the pole from him and gave a hard shove against the bank that sent the skiff splashing into the water of the inlet. As she gave another, harder shove, she said to herself, “The rest isn’t my business!”

  The skiff skimmed toward the water of the lake.

  The creature stood in the doorway of the burned church watching her go. There was unmistakeable sadness on his monstrous face. His mouth opened slightly. A word tried to come out. It died as a rumble in his cavernous chest.

  He turned to go in again. Something caught his eye over where the ladders to the living quarters on the balcony were still bolted in place. The dining table was there. So was the orchid.

  While everything else that had been living had perished in the fire, the orchid that had burst out of its pot and sealed a bond with the table had not. The leaves and blossoms of the lower part had been destroyed, but a new shoot was now three times the height of the stem at the time of the fire. The upper portion was triumphant, virile green amid the black ashes, and it was in exquisite rambunctious bloom.

  He lowered his head and buried his nose in the largest flower. His eyes closed for a long moment.

  Suddenly he jerked upright. A sound . . . something out on the lake.

  He ran to the bridge and looked down the inlet.

  Out in the lake, cutting across the channel and the creature’s line of sight, a loud and fast airboat passed. It was perhaps a quarter of a mile away. There were two armed men riding in it.

  18

  Its great caged propeller howling, Ferret’s airboat plowed through sawgrass in shallow water at the speed of a racing auto. Ferret’s loose-fitting commando khaki flapped in the gale like a hurricane flag. Bruno’s boyish face was wide-eyed, excited by the speed. They stood gripping the pipe of a handrail with one hand, holding automatic rifles with the other, leaning into the wind.

  Their pilot sat at the wheel just in front of them; his cap suddenly flew from his almost bald head and stuck, like a scrap of paper on a fan, to the propeller cage.

  To the roar of the engine was added the fire-like crackle of reeds and water plants being ripped asunder by the boat that cut through them like a machete.

  They approached the peninsula. Ahead was a fragmented view of the church—around which still hung a gray haze of smoke—and the graveyard being reclaimed by the swamp.

  Bruno said something.

  “What?!” Ferret yelled.

  The strong man leaned toward Ferret’s ear and shouted, “Local folks say this place is full of ghosts.”

  Ferret grinned maliciously. “It may be now, thanks to us.” He added loudly, “Don’t talk, you moron. It was your fault we lost her before—you and your talk!”

  “When? When was it my fault? You could have drowned her—remember?”

  “Just pay attention to what you’re doing!”

  Bruno shrugged and returned his attention to the lake ahead. A minute later, he leaned over and said, “Arcane’s heat-sensor spotted them from the air, but if it was her and the kid, they must have taken one of the smaller channels. They should be on the lake by now.”

  “Who else could it have been?” Ferret asked, a shade uncertainly.

  “I don’t understand this plan anyway,” Bruno yelled against the noise of the boat.

  Ferret, not taking his eyes from the path ahead, said, “When’s the last time you did understand what Arcane was up to? That would be like the mouse understanding the lion.”

  Bruno pouted. “Well, do you understand him?”

  Ferret considered this and gave Bruno a serious answer, although he doubted Bruno would comprehend it. “I understand what he tells me but not what he’s dreaming about. It would take a genius like him to do that.” He added something he thought Bruno would relate to. “I like the women he brings to the estate, don’t you?”

  Ferret laughed at Bruno’s offended expression.

  Bruno squinted and peered ahead. “There she is!” he shouted.

  “Pipe down. You want her to hear you?” Ferret said, just to have something to complain about.

  It was not until about that time that Cable and Jude heard the sound of the airboat. They were just leaving the mouth of the inlet and heading out into the lake.

  The airboat was still some distance away, but the two armed men standing in it were visible plainly enough.

  “Government men!” said Jude, alarmed. “I tol’ you this place was posted!”

  Cable shook her head. “Those aren’t government men, Jude.”

  “Well, thank goodness for that!”

  “They’re worse.”

  “Worse than the government? We gotta get outta here!”

  He reached to add his muscle to the pole Cable still operated.

  Suddenly there was a tremendous animal roar, and in the next instant the huge bulk of something crashed out of the undergrowth at a point halfway between them and the approaching airboat. It dived into the water and disappeared beneath a high-flying splash.

  Jude said dryly. “You see that?”

  Cable frowned. “Yes.”

  “Was that a gator—or what?” he quizzed accusingly.

  She didn’t answer.

  Ferret and Bruno saw the thing, too. So did their driver who let the boat drift to a glide.

  “You see that?” Ferret asked.

  “A moose or something?” Bruno said hopefully.

  “Moose! There’s no moose around here. It was that thing!”

  Bruno nodded. “Where’d it go?”

  “I don’t know,” said Ferret. “But we’ve got ’em both! Beauty and the—”

  The monster popped up twenty feet behind the drifting boat and let out a great screeching howl. Ferret jumped around as if stung by a bee. Bruno spun, let his hand slip off the railing and toppled out of the wildly pitching boat.

  Ferret saw the animated green heap only briefly; then it crashed under the water again.

  “Ferret!” Bruno screamed, wading shoulder-deep back toward the boat. “Help me! He’s gonna get me and pull me under!”

  “For Christ’s sake,” Ferret said, shaking his head admonishingly. “Move, then! Get out of the water!” The cadaverous man aimed his rifle roughly at Bruno. “I’m covering you. If I see him I’ll shoot.”

  “Shoot him!” Bruno stressed as he reached the boat and pressed himself up onto its side; the boat lurched and angled with his weight.

  Suddenly Ferret caught sight of the monster again. It had surfaced near a jut of land north of them—where another of the natural channels emptied into the lake. Ferret left Bruno to get in by himself and swooped onto the utility box beside the driver. He tore open the roof-shaped lid and grabbed a walkie-talkie.

  “Get him!” he yelled into the radio without preliminaries. “He’s coming right at you, heading for the channel.”

  The thing thrashed through the water, heading for the land. He stopped. There was another sound—not just the roar of Ferret’s boat revving up again—and it came from the channel. He waded to where he could look down the cavernous leaf-covered channel—the one Cable and Jude had traveled through on their way to the camp—and saw another airboat bank into view. Its flat hull sent a sheet of water off to the side as it turned. This was a newer, sleeker boa
t than the one on the lake. Three men stood in it; the foremost hunched over a huge 30-caliber machine gun mounted on the prow.

  Another airboat just like it careened into view. It, too, had a machine gun.

  The creature looked behind him. Ferret’s boat was making a wide turn, abandoning its attack on Cable for the moment and acting as backup for the armed fiberglass monsters thundering out of the channel. He was trapped.

  He looked again at the two coming at him down the channel. Gunners were ramming ammo belts into their weapons. He submerged and swam back toward Ferret, to deeper waters.

  Under water, the creature could hear the boats. He heard the vibrations of the propellers falling in pitch as the boats slowed, waiting for their target to surface.

  The water was a bright thick green. Sunlight probed it in wavering shafts that were filled with algae, dirt and motes of decay. Visibility extended only a few feet.

  The monster surfaced, breeched like a whale, and tried to take in the positions of his adversaries before he sank again. His enormous lungs expanded with air—but in the oxygen-rich atmosphere of the swamp, there was not sufficient carbon dioxide to sustain his needs for long. He suspected that if he had to, he might stay submerged almost indefinitely, but his instincts told him that he would have to be perfectly inactive for his body to accommodate such an experiment. If he lay still and hid from them, they would get Cable.

  There was an island out in the lake . . . maybe if he could reach it . . . but where was it? He was turned around, blind in the thick jade water. He pulled himself along the shallow bottom tugging on water plants, trying not to disturb the surface and reveal his whereabouts.

  The water seemed to be getting clearer, shallower. Soon he would be out whether he wanted to be or not.

  He had not approached the island—though it was not far—but was on a minor upcropping of land. It supported vegetation despite the fact that its surface remained inches under water. The creature scrambled up onto it, breathing in fierce roaring breaths.

  One of the boats strained its engine, the deafening sound a rising jet-like whine, and slashed by the swamp thing in a dive-bomber’s scream with a rattling of its machine gun.

  The monster howled in rage and pain as the searing bullets slammed through his body, knocking him backwards into the foliage.

  He got to his feet, roaring back at the roaring boats.

  Ferret’s airboat—Ferret and Bruno holding on for dear life—came out of nowhere and struck the submerged land mass. As the airboat sideswiped the creature and sent it tumbling, the slimy land served as a ramp that sent the plane-like boat into the air.

  Bruno screamed.

  Ferret’s boat smashed back into the water; its pilot managed to keep it on an even keel as he shifted gears and made as swift a turn as possible, returning for the kill.

  Ferret and his pilot laughed heartily, like rowdies on a fox hunt. But as they returned to the sunken hummock, the creature was gone.

  One of the other boats pulled alongside Ferret’s slowing vessel. “Did we kill it?” asked the commando at the machine gun.

  Ferret shook his head. “Better not have.”

  Bruno said pathetically, superstitiously, “We’ll never kill it. It can’t die.”

  The swamp was eerily quiet with the three airboat engines idling. The third was drifting toward the large island in the lake; the hummock where the creature had been was between it and the other boats.

  The swamp creatures were still, frightened. Birds had long since fled the loud scene of battle.

  “Damn thing is sure slippery,” the commando said to Ferret. “What the hell is it, anyway?”

  “That’s what Arcane wants to know. We have to catch it to find out.”

  A large bubble burst on the water’s surface. The machine-gunner swiftly aimed at it and fired a short round. Nothing emerged. There were no more bubbles.

  Bruno said, “Maybe we better go back for the girl.”

  Ferret and Bruno twisted around to look back at the inlet where the snail-slow boat had last been seen. It wasn’t there.

  “Goddamn it,” Ferret muttered. He turned to the commando in the faster boat. “Maybe you’d better break off and go pick up—”

  Suddenly the boat dipped backwards as the heavy propeller cage was pulled down. The boat turned completely over and both Ferret and Bruno pitched headlong into the swampy lake.

  A few seconds later, the creature breeched an incredible distance away and lumbered his way onto the main island.

  Bruno and the pilot righted the odd-shaped boat with difficulty. Ferret did not offer to help. He stood in the shallow pea soup staring after the beast, fuming, raging with frustration. He yelled to the other boat: “Go get that frog-faced bastard! Stop him!”

  The sleek airboat’s props whipped the air as its engine made that rising-turbine noise, and it streaked off toward the island.

  The creature was already on the opposite side of the land mass, which was deceptively narrow. It was shaped like a boomerang.

  He burst through the low, thick palmettos into view of the third boat—which was there waiting for him.

  The boat’s engine roared; the creature roared back at it, tauntingly.

  As the boat turned to position itself for firing, the quarry ran along the water’s edge, angling around the boat dong the bent-crescent shape of the island.

  The fusillade began. One shell struck the creature’s arm, but he ignored the pain and the flying green matter of his flesh and swerved into the underbrush. Swiftly, out of sight, he made his way down the center of the narrow island and broke into the light on the opposite side. The other powerful boat was there waiting; it revved its engine and followed the creature.

  Ferret and Bruno waited and watched from their command ship. They saw the huge mossy brute running in and out of sight, leading a pursuit boat toward the tip of the island. The boat glided a little beyond the tip and then turned, waiting.

  The other boat careened around the opposite tip of the island, but because of the bend in the land mass it was not in sight of its companion.

  “That’s dumb,” said Bruno, “the thing’s bound to be on the other side by now. Why are both boats on this side?”

  Suddenly, the creature burst from the underbrush and headed out into the lake—exactly at the apex of the island. Each boat could see the creature, but not the other boat.

  Ferret’s hair stood on end as he realized what was about to happen. “No!” he screamed; but his voice was drowned out by the rising roars of the two boats. He grabbed for the walkie-talkie, pressed its button and yelled, “Watch out!”

  But his warning was too vague and too late.

  The boats plunged ahead gathering speed like dive-bombing banshees. The creature vanished under water and the boats collided head-on at a combined speed of well over a hundred miles an hour!

  The crash sounded like a train wreck as the powerful engines and prop cages met in mid-air and the gas tanks exploded. Bodies flew into the air like human cannonballs, and twisted metal and splintered fiberglass rained into the lake and onto the island. One of the propellers, still spinning at terrific speed, buzzed high into the air and sailed like a Frisbee toward Ferret’s boat.

  He did not flinch as it whizzed past and splashed into the water.

  Bruno stared at the wreckage in horror.

  “My God,” Ferret gasped, “what is that thing?”

  The lake was on fire where spilled fuel burned. A man struggled in the blaze, screaming, swimming jerkily. Other men swam or waded toward the island. Two facedown bodies were about to sink.

  The swamp thing left the water, unnoticed, and walked back onto the peninsula. His breath came out as hot exhausted steam in the humid, cool morning air. The sun was still low.

  The sounds of the swamp began again, timidly.

  The creature sank to his knees and lay, grimacing over his myriad wounds, in a soft bed of yielding star moss.

  Cable and Jude had found anoth
er inlet to hide in. It was a cul-de-sac—they would have to retreat the way they came—but for the time being it seemed to provide safety.

  They could not see the battle, but they heard it—the racing boat engines, explosive splashes, terrifying outbursts of machine-gun fire. The great crash that ended in absolute quiet sent them a glimmer of an image in the form of a cloud of fire that shimmered through the trees and reflected from the calm water.

  Jude said, “Sounds like World War Three just started.”

  “Maybe it just ended,” Cable said softly, her ears alert.

  They heard indistinct shouts, and the sound of a boat engine starting again. It purred this time, at slow speed. The sound seemed to be coming nearer. Cable poled the boat deeper into the underbrush.

  From their hiding place, they saw Ferret’s airboat. It was almost submerged with the weight of too many men, some of whom were covered with blood.

  “One hand grenade would do it,” Cable whispered, observing the single boatload of the retreating army.

  Jude said, “You that mad? Killin’ mad?”

  She thought it over. Her answer surprised her. “As a matter of fact, I am. Mad enough to plan killing them.” She shook her head in amazement. “That’s something I never expected to understand—how that happens in a person’s mind.”

  “That’s really somethin’,” Jude said with dead seriousness and no trace of condemnation.

  Cable looked down at the notebook that rested on top of Jude’s old wooden tool box. She looked at Jude, frowning.

  “What you up to?” he asked expressionlessly.

  She said slowly, “I have to leave you, Jude.”

  “What you mean?”

  “I—I’ve got to go back and try to help.”

  “Help? Help who?”

  The sound of Ferret’s departing boat was now almost impossible to separate from the faint sounds of the swamp.

  Cable said tenderly, “I’m not sure.”

  Jude was completely perplexed. He was about to challenge her.

  “Jude, I’ve got to go,” she insisted. “And you have to get his book to safety. Hide it well, and I’ll come back for it.”