by Jon Sharpe
Bayou Trackdown
( The Trailsman - 329 )
Jon Sharpe
The trailsman meets a murderous monster...
In the marshy wilderness of Louisiana’s Atchafalaya Swamp, people are being killed by a monster that strikes without mercy, leaving behind little more than mangled flesh, blood, and bones.
Now, Fargo finds himself hunting a creature straight out of a bad dream. And once he finds his quarry, the Trailsman is determined to put the nightmare to sleep once and for all…
OUT OF THE DARKNESS
The thing had decided to end the game of cat and mouse and was making a beeline for them. They must reach the trees or they were doomed.
Suddenly the hummock appeared, a low mound bisected by the trail. The trees were not many, but some had thick trunks and might resist being uprooted. Emmeline raced to one, hooked her hands under Halette’s arms, and practically heaved her at the lowest limbs, shouting, “Grab hold and climb!”
“What about you?”
Emmeline whirled. The massive monster was almost on top of them. She jerked her rifle to her shoulder and took aim. But even as she fired, and her daughter screamed, Emmeline knew these were her last moments on earth. Her rifle boomed but it had no effect, and then the thing was on her. Emmeline tried to be brave—she tried not to scream—but God, the pain, the searing, awful ripping and rending.
It seemed to go on forever.
The Trailsman
Beginnings . . . they bend the tree and they mark the man. Skye Fargo was born when he was eighteen. Terror was his midwife, vengeance his first cry. Killing spawned Skye Fargo, ruthless, cold-blooded murder. Out of the acrid smoke of gunpowder still hanging in the air, he rose, cried out a promise never forgotten.
The Trailsman they began to call him all across the West: searcher, scout, hunter, the man who could see where others only looked, his skills for hire but not his soul, the man who lived each day to the fullest, yet trailed each tomorrow. Skye Fargo, the Trailsman, the seeker who could take the wildness of a land and the wanting of a woman and make them his own.
The Louisiana swamp, 1861—where death came
in many guises and many sizes.
1
The night was moonless but the mother wasn’t worried.
Emmeline had been born and bred in the Atchafalaya Swamp. She knew the bayous and cypress haunts as city women knew streets and alleys. She was at home here.
So it was that on a hot, muggy summer night, Emmeline and her youngest, Halette, started out from the settlement for their cabin. The trails were as familiar to her as garden paths to a Southern belle. Emmeline thought nothing of the fact that the swamp crawled with snakes and alligators. She had her rifle and she was a good shot.
But as they were leaving her best friend’s shack, Simone took her aside. “Maybe you should stay the night, oui? Start back in the morning fresh and rested.”
“Non,” Emmeline said. “We can be home in a couple of hours if we don’t stop to rest too often.”
“Your daughter is only eight. You expect too much of her,” Simone criticized.
“No more than I expected of myself at her age.” Emmeline kissed Simone on the cheek. “Don’t worry. We’ll be fine. I’ve have done this countless times, have I not?”
“Even so,” Simone said, and, glancing at Halette, she lowered her voice. “There have been stories.”
“Oh, please.”
“You’ve heard them. About the people who have gone missing. About a creature that is never seen but only heard. About the blood and the bones.” Simone shuddered. “I tell you, they terrify me.”
“Oh, please,” Emmeline said again. “Am I a child to be made timid by horror tales?”
Emmeline and little Halette had been hiking under the stars for over an hour now. They were deep in the swamp, well past the last of the isolated cabins that dotted the watery domain of the cottonmouth, save one—their own cabin. And they still had a long way to go.
“I’m tired, Mère,” Halette remarked. She had her mother’s oval face and fair complexion and her beautiful auburn hair.
“There is a spot ahead. It’s not far. I suppose we can rest there for a few minutes.”
“Merci.”
The spot Emmeline was thinking of was a grassy hummock. The trail, after many twists and turns, often with water lapping at both sides, presently brought them there, and Halette, with a sigh of relief, sank down, curling her legs under her.
“Watch out for snakes,” Emmeline cautioned.
“I’m too tired to care.”
The breeze was strong. It brought with it the night sounds of the great swamp: the croak of frogs, the bellow of gators, the scream of a panther, and the shrieks of prey. These were sounds Emmeline was used to. She had heard them every night of her life. She gave them no more thought than a city woman would give the clatter of wagon wheels.
Emmeline sat down next to Halette, and her daughter leaned against her, saying quietly, “It’s pretty out here.”
“Oui. I have always loved the swamp. Many people are afraid of it, but to us who live in it, it is part of us. It is in our blood and in our breath, and we can never be afraid.”
“I am now and then. When I am in our cabin alone at night and I hear noises.”
Emmeline squeezed Halette’s shoulder. “That’s normal, little one. When I was young as you, I would get scared, too. I imagined all sorts of things that were not real. Eventually you outgrow such silliness.”
“I will try not to be afraid, for you.”
Mother and daughter shared smiles, and the mother hugged the daughter, and it was then, from out of the benighted fastness of water and cypress and reeds, that there came a sound that caused the mother to stiffen and the daughter to gasp. It was a low rumbling, neither roar nor grunt yet a little of both, which rose to a piercing squeal and then abruptly stopped.
“What was that?” Halette exclaimed.
“I don’t know,” Emmeline admitted. “A gator, maybe.”
“I never heard a gator do that. No bear, either. Yet it had to be something big. Really big.”
“Whatever it was, it was far away.”
“Was it? Père says that sometimes our ears play tricks on us. That what we think is far is close, and what we think is close is far.”
Emmeline grinned and ruffled Halette’s hair. “You worry too much. That is your problem.” She rose. “Come. We should keep going. I do not want to take all night getting home.”
They walked on, the mother holding the girl’s hand, and if the girl walked so close that their hips brushed, the mother didn’t say anything. They had gone several hundred feet and were in a belt of rank vegetation with solid ground all around when the strange sound was repeated. They both stopped.
“It’s closer,” Halette said.
“But still a ways off.” Emmeline walked faster and was comforted by the old Sharps in the crook of her elbow. It held only one shot but it was powerful enough to bring down anything in the swamp. And she could hit a knothole in a tree at thirty paces.
“Wouldn’t it be nice to sing?” Halette asked. “I like it when we sing.”
So they sang, a new ditty popular with children called “The Pig Song” by a man named Burnand.
“There was a fiddler and he wore a wig. Wiggy, wiggy, wiggy, wiggy, weedle, weedle, weedle. He saved up his money and he bought a pig. Tweedle, tweedle, tweedle, tweedle, tweedle, tweedle, tweedle.”
They were about to begin the second stanza when a rumbling grunt from out of the thick undergrowth brought them to a stop. Halette’s fingernails dug so deep into Emmeline’s palm they almost drew blood.
“It’s really close, Mère.”
“Don’t wo
rry. I have my rifle.” But Emmeline was worried herself. She thought it might be a black bear, and if so, it had to be a big one and the big ones were hard to kill. A single shot to the brain or the heart was not always enough. She walked faster.
Somewhere off in the darkness a twig snapped.
“I don’t like this,” Halette said.
“Be brave. I’m right here.” But inside Emmeline, a swarm of butterflies was loose in her stomach. Or was it moths, since it was nighttime? She smiled at her humor, and then lost the smile when something crunched off in the trees.
“Did you hear that?”
“Stay calm. It might be a deer.”
“No deer made that sound we heard,” Halette insisted. “Whatever it is, it’s following us.”
“That’s preposterous.” But Emmeline had the same suspicion. She shifted her rifle so the muzzle was pointed at the side of the trails the thing was on.
“Should we climb a tree? Père says that’s the best thing to do when a bear is after you.”
“Only if it’s a large bear,” Emmeline amended. “Small bears can climb as well as we can.”
The undergrowth rustled and crackled. They stopped, peered hard to try to spot the cause, and the crackling stopped. When they moved on, the crackling began again.
“What is it, Mère?” Halette asked in stark fear.
“Stay calm,” Emmeline said again. But deep inside she was just as scared. Whatever the thing was, it wasn’t afraid of them. It was indeed stalking them and it didn’t care if they knew it. Her palms grew slick with sweat and her mouth became dry.
For minutes that seemed like hours the taut tableau continued. Mother and daughter were glued to each other. Now and then the creature in the undergrowth grunted or snorted and the mother felt her youngest quake.
“I wish Père was here,” the girl said, not once but several times.
The mother thought of their cabin, so near and yet so far, and her husband, and she felt a burning sensation in the pit of her stomach that brought bitter bile to her mouth. She swallowed the bile back down.
Simone had been right to take the tales seriously, and Emmeline had been wrong. Those people who vanished—they hadn’t become lost or fallen to the Mad Indian or run into Remy Cuvier’s cutthroats. Not that Remy would ever harm her, or any other Cajun, for that matter. The thing in the woods was to blame. She knew that as surely as she knew anything.
Then the growth thinned and ahead lay a stretch of swamp where the trail was no wider than a broad man’s shoulders. Water lapped the edges. Here and there hummocks of land choked with growth broke the surface.
Emmeline’s heart leaped in fragile hope. The thing could not get at them now without her seeing it. She would be able to get off a shot, and must make the shot count. Emboldened, she said for her daughter’s benefit, “Let that animal show itself now and I will put a hole in its head.”
Halette laughed a short, nervous laugh.
They redoubled their speed. A city girl using that serpentine trail in the dark of night would inch along like a turtle, but Emmeline and Halette were bayou born and bred, and to them a trail three feet wide was as good as a road. They covered a hundred yards, and there was no sign of the creature. Two hundred yards, and the only sounds were those of the insects, frogs and gators, a familiar chorus that soothed their troubled hearts.
“I guess it was nothing,” Halette broke their silence, and laughed again.
No sooner were the words out of her young mouth than a loud splash warned them that something large was in the water.
“A gator,” Emmeline said.
“Sure,” Halette agreed.
But then the thing that made the splash grunted, and icy cold fear rippled down their spines.
“It’s still following us!” Halette gasped.
“Perhaps it is something harmless.” But Emmeline didn’t believe that. Her fright was heightened by the thought that whatever that thing was, it must know about guns. How else to explain why it moved away from them when they came to the open water, yet still shadowed them?
“If only our cabin wasn’t so far.”
“We’ll make it,” Emmeline said, and patted Halette on the head. “I won’t ever let anything happen to you.”
“Frogs eat bugs and snakes eat frogs and gators eat snakes and frogs and people, too,” Halette said softly.
It was a family saying. It stemmed from when their oldest, Clovis, was younger than Halette, and they were trying to make him understand that while the bayous and swamps were places of great beauty, they were also places of great danger. To a five-year-old boy, the world was a friend. It took some doing for Emmeline and Namo to convince Clovis that he must be wary of the many creatures that could do him harm. To that end, Emmeline came up with a rhyme to remind him. Silly, but it helped, and Clovis came to see that while the world was his friend, some of the creatures he shared the world with weren’t friendly.
“Listen!” Halette exclaimed.
The thing was grunting and snorting in a frenzy, and the splashing had grown so loud, the very swamp seemed to be in upheaval.
“It’s fighting something!”
Emmeline thought so, too. A gator, perhaps. Or one of the huge snakes, rare but spotted from time to time by the human denizens of the great swamp. Town and city dwellers scoffed at the notion, saying snakes never grew to thirty meters or more and were never as thick around as large trees. But the swamp dwellers saw with their own eyes, and knew the truth.
There were other tales, too. Of things only talked about behind locked doors in the flickering glow of candles. Of goblins and ghosts and three-toed skunk apes. But Emmeline never believed in any of that. Her Namo did. He was as superstitious as a person could be, but he was a good provider and a good husband, so she put up with his charms and bones and rabbit’s feet.
The splashing and grunting ended in a high-pitched squeal that climbed to an ear-piercing shriek.
Halette said, “Something is dying.”
Emmeline went rigid with shock. She almost told her daughter that no, that wasn’t it. The squeal wasn’t the death cry of the loser; it was the cry of triumph of the victor. At last she realized what it was, and fear filled every fiber of her being. “Run,” she said.
And they ran.
A hundred feet more would bring them to a hummock, and trees. Those trees, Emmeline hoped, would prove their salvation. She held her daughter’s hand firmly and the two of them fairly flew. She could go faster, but Halette was at her limit.
“Mère!”
Emmeline had heard. The splashing was coming toward them. The thing had decided to end the game of cat and mouse and was making a beeline for them. They must reach the trees or they were doomed.
Suddenly the hummock appeared, a low mound bisected by the trail. The trees were not many, but some had thick trunks and might resist being uprooted. Emmeline raced to one, hooked her hands under Halette’s arms, and practically heaved her at the lowest limbs, shouting, “Grab hold and climb!”
“What about you?”
Emmeline whirled. The massive monster was almost on top of them. She jerked her rifle to her shoulder and took aim. But even as she fired, and her daughter screamed, Emmeline knew these were her last moments on earth. Her rifle boomed but it had no effect, and then the thing was on her. Emmeline tried to be brave—she tried not to scream—but God, the pain, the searing, awful ripping and rending.
It seemed to go on forever.
2
Skye Fargo was a long way from the mountains and prairies he loved to roam. A big man, broad at the shoulder and slim at the hips, he sat a saddle as if born to it. He wore buckskins and a hat that was white when he bought it but now was a dusty shade of brown, and a red bandana. On his hip was a Colt. In his boot in an ankle sheath nestled a twin-edged Arkansas toothpick.
Fargo was close to Arkansas now, or as close as he had been in many a month. He was in Louisiana, in the backwater bayou country, winding along what the loca
ls called a road but anyone else would call a path. It was pockmarked with hoofprints and rutted by more than a few wagon wheels.
So far the directions in the letter had been easy to follow. But then, finding something the size of the Atchafalaya Swamp was easy for a man who had an unerring instinct for finding his way anywhere. The Trailsman, folks called him, not because he followed known trails but because he broke new ones.
Skye Fargo had been where no whites ever set foot. He had explored vast tracts of untamed country overrun with hostile men and savage beasts. That he was still breathing said a lot about his ability to handle himself.
The trail was leading Fargo ever deeper into the swamp. As he rode he studied the riot of plant growth. Many were plants seldom if ever seen west of the Mississippi. Take magnolia trees, which Louisiana had plenty of. Oak trees and cypress were also common, the latter especially so in the swamp, where Spanish moss hung from many a limb. Flowers grew in profusion—lilies, orchids, jasmine and azaleas.
Honeysuckle was abundant. Fargo liked the sweet taste. It reminded him of many idle hours spent as a boy plucking and sucking.
Where there was a rich variety of plant life, there was invariably a rich variety of animal life. Louisiana was rife with deer and bear. Wildcats thrived. Musk-rats plied the waterways. Raccoons and opossums and polecats were all over. Then there were the cougars, the alligators, and the snakes.
Fargo could do without the snakes. It was bad enough having to deal with rattlers. But here there were also cottonmouths and copperheads and a few coral snakes, or so he had been told.
Birds were as numerous as everything else. Warblers, robins, wrens. Sparrows, finches, woodpeckers. It went without saying that ducks and geese found all the water to their liking. As did brown pelicans.
Fargo breathed deep of the muggy, dank air. It didn’t suit him. Give him the rarified heights of the Rocky Mountains any day. There was practically no humidity that high up.
The Ovaro nickered.
