“Where do you want me?” Carmen asked, but no one answered.
She went next to Ellis and tried to help him pull the tail in the reverse direction the coils had taken around Kuru.
“Hurry,” Ellis said.
Carmen pulled until her neck hurt. She pulled after that, too, but she could not get the image of Kuru’s expression out of her mind. Done. Kuru was done.
Moments before, Kuru watched the snake dip into the water. He looked, she thought, almost as if he wanted a drink. But then the rest of the body followed the head into the surface film, and instead of going under, accepting the liquidity of water, the snake simply stretched out. His body undulated and the last of his huge coils came off the stairs. Then she had concentrated on the wake. Yes, the snake caused a wake when he passed through the water, a triangle of motion breaking away from the head.
She backed away. She looked around furiously for something with which to fend the snake away. They had promised her that the snake had no interest in them. They were too big, too many, and the snake could not eat them anyway. What would he gain by attacking? That was her thought. Even as the snake shivered closer she wondered what he was doing.
“Look out!” Day yelled.
“Stay together,” Ellis said.
As if that were a magical incantation, Kuru thought. As if that made any difference to the snake. If they just stayed together, he seemed to think, the snake would go on his way.
“He’s coming this way!” Kuru yelled.
The next thing that happened seemed inevitable. It seemed as though she had been waiting for it to happen her entire life. The snake did not turn right or left, did not even hesitate. He swam directly at her and then submerged. A peculiar silence entered the room, an instantaneous waiting, and then the snake hit her.
It nearly knocked her down. He bit into the meaty part of her thigh, jammed into it, and forced her to take a step backward. She screamed. It was no big scream, because although it hurt to be bitten, it was not unendurable. She felt the snake’s mouth on her leg, but that didn’t mean it was the end of the world. She had suffered injuries in sports, had the usual assortment of breaks and sprains, so she was not a sissy when it came to physical pain.
But then the snake began to froth.
That was the right word for it: frothing. The snake began to pull itself forward from his purchase on her leg. His body curled and tossed, seeking a hold, and at last he looped up and grabbed around her waist. Even that, even that, did not seem horrible. She still had a sense that they could pull Big Monte off her, unwind him as they had unwound the snake that had bitten Zebby. Yes, the snake was enormous. She felt his weight being slowly transferred from the water onto her body, but it felt, at least in those first moments, as if she had been given something terribly heavy to carry. The weight was not in her arms, or supported by her hands, but clung to her entire body. The snake felt like the world’s heaviest backpack. She staggered a little as he conquered more of her body.
And that’s when it became terrifying.
What had started as a dreadfully fascinating encounter suddenly became genuinely perilous. The snake curled and rolled and without really understanding how he had performed his lock so easily, suddenly she knew she was trapped. The snake had his long body around her, strand by strand, and she felt his presence. Felt his attachment to her. A constrictor, she knew, did not simply begin squeezing. When its victim exhaled, the snake simply tightened, making each breath shorter, shallower, less and less satisfactory. Eventually, the prey could no longer expand its lungs to take in oxygen. Kuru understood that intellectually, but her body resisted by pumping more blood and demanding greater gulps of air.
She slipped and fell. She went under the water and that would have finished her, she knew, but Alice suddenly helped her to her feet. That made three people to pull the snake off her. What had Ellis said? How many people per how many feet of snake? She couldn’t remember. But they were full-grown adults, probably, not young kids. The equation had too many variables.
Kuru wondered if she was about to die.
She tried to resist such a morbid thought, but it tightened on her just as the snake’s coils constricted on her. This is how I end, she thought. For a moment she spotted Carmen standing on the steps, slowly descending to help, and she wondered if Carmen could pull hard enough, if her neck would allow her to do so. That was a funny notion to have, she knew. With a snake squeezing her slowly, her mind went to Carmen’s neck condition. Funny. The entire world was funny, when you thought about it, and she decided she did not hate the snake. Did not hate Big Monte. He was only trying to survive, just as they had, just as they had scurried up to the second-floor apartment, so why shouldn’t the snake do his best to keep on living? It was only fair.
She fell again. And when she rose once more she felt the arms of a man around her.
Several men, actually. The men wore uniforms and they spoke rapidly, but not in panic, and a moment later the snake began to unwind. She heard a radio squawk and she heard someone say, a man’s voice, that they should get the head free. Then she heard Ellis saying, Big Monte, his name is Big Monte, and that probably made no sense to anyone. A team, she realized. A team of rescuers had found them at last, and she couldn’t say where they had come from, or how they knew what to do with the snake, but her breath started to pass more freely to her lungs. The snake stopped frothing and became a ribbon of muscle, a mottled length of heavy cordage. She fell when the snake’s weight finally left her. Someone lifted her quickly and put her back on her feet.
“You okay?” a man in a uniform asked. “You all right?”
She nodded. She was. She was okay.
Ellis sat in the boat and listened to the radios buzz back and forth. That was the sound that filled every corner for a while. Radios clicking on and off, static, the burr of an electric connection just before voices came through. People talked quickly into the radios at their shoulders. They asked a lot of questions about the snakes. Clearly, they didn’t like the idea of snakes roaming around. At the same time, Ellis knew they found the situation kind of interesting. It wasn’t every day you ran into pythons or boas set loose in a flood. It was one thing to get people out of buildings, but quite another to release someone from a constrictor. Ellis saw it pumped up the rescue folks. It was a touch of drama.
“They were down in the basement,” Ellis said to the man who piloted the boat. He had asked where they had been housed. The man relayed the information to someone somewhere else. Ellis wondered if Teddy eventually would get into trouble. He might. It was probably against the law to run a snake breeding business in the basement of an apartment building.
“Your parents have been crazy with worry,” the man said. “We had to prevent them from trying to wade in here to rescue you. If they had known about the snakes, there’s no way we could have stopped them.”
The boat Ellis sat in was not large. It was an aluminum skiff, maybe fourteen feet long. The man who asked the questions had his body half turned around to manage the engine throttle. His name was Dave. His partner, at the bow, was named Lucille. They were National Guard members. They were going around evacuating people.
“How many snakes?” Dave asked.
“Around a dozen,” Ellis said. “I think a dozen.”
“A dozen,” Dave said into the radio at his shoulder. Ellis heard someone reply, but he couldn’t make out the words. He wondered what they would do about the snakes. Hunt them, he imagined. They had also said the buildings along his street were undermined. One had already collapsed about a quarter of a mile away. That was a danger in floods, Dave said, buildings going down. He said Jenson’s Market would likely collapse, although the owner, Mr. Jenson, refused any offer of rescue. Eventually, they would have to condemn some of the buildings. That was for later, Dave said, once the water had withdrawn.
The boat eased slowly through the flood. They could not use the engine freely, Dave had already explained. Too many objects in the water,
too much debris. They didn’t want to bust off the propeller. They headed south, directly away from the Illinois River. Dave had told them all a rescue center had been set up in a high school gym. Ellis didn’t recall the name of the high school, but he didn’t really care. He was hungry and tired and cold.
“How much does a snake sell for, anyway?” Dave asked.
“Depends, I guess. A couple hundred. Sometimes a thousand if it’s a really good specimen.”
“Who knew?” Dave said, obviously surprised.
“They’re good pets most of the time,” Ellis said, feeling the need to defend them. “This was just a strange situation.”
“Someone once told me they put a fetal monitor on a pregnant python’s belly and the babies’ hearts made a whirring sound. Not a beat, like a mammal’s, but a whirring sound, like an engine revving up. Or like wind.”
“I don’t know about that,” Ellis said. “It could be.”
“Well, that’s what I heard. Makes you wonder, doesn’t it?”
“I guess.”
“Not far now,” Dave said, aiming the boat between two car roofs.
It was strange to float down roads and past buildings. But as they went, Ellis could tell the water became shallower. The water would draw back to the river, finally, and that water would go to the Mississippi River. The Mississippi would empty into the ocean somewhere in Louisiana, and Ellis wondered if a snake could travel that entire distance, eating along the way, picking off pets and rats and squirrels and traveling at night. Big Monte, he thought, could make it. He had once read about a bull shark that had traveled up the Mississippi to the Ohio River all the way to Cincinnati. It had raided a fishing weir, and when they had finally caught it, they couldn’t believe a shark had traveled through freshwater for hundreds of miles. If a shark could come up the river, he reflected, a python could probably go down the same watercourse.
For a while he dozed. He felt tremendously sleepy now. The boat rocked him and he held a green army blanket around him. When he woke now and then, coming up out of dreams to rejoin the world, he saw G-Mom and Kuru in a second boat. Carmen and the baby, too. He was in the boat with his brother, Day, and with Alice and Zebby. They puttered along, the water no longer a real obstacle. Rain still fell. Lucille said it was supposed to stop by the end of the day. Good weather, she said, was on its way.
Before the plane crashed, before it became more than the sound of a mosquito up in the sky, a moose, a great northern Alaskan moose, stepped into the bright body of water called Long Lake. The moose appeared coated in copper; he had been rolling in dirt and mud to rid his ears and body of the mosquitoes that peppered him all day. He weighed thirteen hundred pounds and stood over seven feet high at the shoulder. He possessed a forty-inch-long leg and measured ten feet from tail to nose. As distant relatives, he counted the wapiti or North American elk, the caribou, the mule deer, and the whitetail in his family. He was a deer, the largest in the world, and on this summer evening, his pedicels — two small knots of soft tissue just forward of the ears — had pushed out into what became, over the long summer season, the trademark symbol of moose: palmate antlers.
He was the first animal to notice the plane.
JOSEPH MONNINGER lives in New Hampshire. He is the author of the young adult novels Baby, Hippie Chick, Wish, and Finding Somewhere.
Copyright © 2014 by Joseph Monninger
All rights reserved. Published by Scholastic Inc., Publishers since 1920. SCHOLASTIC and associated logos are trademarks and/or registered trademarks of Scholastic Inc.
First Printing, October 2014
Cover art by Dave Seeley
Front cover design by Natalie C. Sousa
e-ISBN 978-0-545-56361-1
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this publication may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher. For information regarding permission, write to Scholastic Inc., Attention: Permissions Department, 557 Broadway, New York, NY 10012.
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