Deadly Pursuit

39

Dead end.

Kirstie had retreated at least thirty yards into the swamp before realizing that the creek had narrowed to the width of a sidewalk. Ahead, it vanished entirely in a drift of close-packed turtle grass bordered by a wall of trees.

She turned, hoping to double back. No chance. Jack’s flashlight beam crept out of the gloom fifty feet away.

He hadn’t seen her yet. The channel was crooked, overhung with gnarled branches; a bend in the creek blocked her from his view.

Instinct moved her faster than conscious thought. Turning toward the nearest mangrove thicket, she grabbed hold of the dense skein of prop roots and hoisted herself out of the water.

The roots gave way to a confusion of intertwined branches, closely stitched. Thick leaves with the texture of leather and the gloss of wax hung in dense array, layers of green tapestry barring her path. Frantically her hands probed the branches in search of an opening wide enough to wriggle through. There was none. No space between the trees, either; not only their roots and branches but even their trunks were interlaced in a lunatic jumble.

No way through. The words beat like fists in her brain. No way through.

She glanced behind her. Jack was rounding the bend, the flashlight’s beam slowly swinging in her direction.

No way through.

All right, then. She wouldn’t go through. She would go over. Over the top.

The closest tree wasn’t tall, no more than fifteen feet high. She climbed it, feet and hands moving from branch to branch with desperate speed, dislodging dozens of long tubular seedlings. They dropped into the water, their soft splashes sure to draw Jack’s attention at any moment.

Faster. Faster.

She reached the crown and started down on the opposite side. Handhold, foothold, handhold, foothold. Like climbing on the monkey bars, she thought irrelevantly. In some strange way she had become a child again, playing in the summer night.

Jack must feel the tug of similar memories. She remembered his jeering call: Ollee ollee oxen free.

Kids at play-was that all this was?

She half clambered, half slid down the mangrove’s mossy roots, into the black water, and found herself in a new creek running parallel to the one she had left.

Jack’s flashlight still searched the other channel. He didn’t know where she had gone.

With gentle strokes she swam along the waterway. The flashlight’s glow receded. She advanced into a deepening darkness.

Black mangrove trees began to appear along the channel, encroaching on territory colonized by red mangroves years before. Steve had explained it all to her: how the red mangroves built soil out of shells, sand, and mud captured by their roots, blending it with the compost of their own rotted leaves. When the new land was firmly established, the black mangrove moved in and slowly wrested possession of it from the red.

All very interesting, and yesterday she would have expressed the appropriate wonderment at the adaptability of nature in the appropriate respectful tone, the kind of sentiment her colleagues at the PBS affiliate would understand.

Now she hated the swamp. She saw nothing in it worth preserving. The swamp was evil-smelling black water and hunched, spidery trees and pools of sucking mud. The swamp was mosquitoes and sand flies and unseen slippery things that brushed past her in the murk, briefly nuzzling her bare legs. The swamp was everything hostile to human life, and human life-her own life-was all she cared about right now; and as for what her coworkers might say about that particular observation while they sipped their mineral water and sliced their Brie and tuned in MacNeil-Lehrer — well, she simply didn’t give a shit.

Drain it, she thought with a kind of savage hysteria. Just drain the goddamn thing and pour concrete and put up condos. Condos and a shopping center, and to hell with the ecosystem She realized she was losing control. Not terribly surprising; she was neck-deep in slime, hemmed in by contorted caricatures of trees, pursued by a killer, and lost. Yes, lost. The maze of zigzag channels had left her hopelessly disoriented. She no longer had any clue where the boardwalk was or how to find dry land.

Well, maybe Jack was lost, too. Maybe she could find her way out of here and leave him wandering in the swamp till the mosquitoes sucked him dry.

Gazing over her shoulder, she saw no hint of the flashlight. No sign of movement There.

Spreading ripples in the water. A low, dark form perhaps a hundred feet away, moving toward her.

An alligator? Steve had said there were none on the island. But suppose he’d been wrong.

Didn’t look like a gator, though. It looked…

Human.

A man’s head and upper body. Ripples radiating from his arms as they cut the water in quick scissor-like strokes.

Was it Jack, his flashlight off? Or Steve?

She didn’t know or care. What mattered was only to get away, lose her pursuer down some side channel.

She swam faster, each jerk of her arms tearing a new ache out of muscles still sore from her ordeal in the radio room.

Ahead, the channel forked into two narrower passageways. Both routes receded into blackness. She went to her right.

A backward glance eased her tension slightly. Her pursuer was no longer visible. For the moment she had outpaced him, and he would have no way to know which route she’d taken at the point where the channel divided.

The creek led her past stands of dead mangroves, the ravaged victims of some recent fire perhaps sparked by a lightning strike. Their jungles of roots remained intact, forming the banks of the waterway, but their trunks were rotting, the branches leafless and splintered.

She swam on. The creek widened, deepening. Her toes tried to touch bottom, couldn’t.

Around her, more dead trees. Fire had gutted this entire pocket of the swamp. Even here, though, there was life. Orb weavers had webbed the sagging branches in gossamer; hermit crabs scuttled busily among the roots. In the water, tiny mangrove seedlings already had sprouted, promising renewal.

Though she had no love of spiders, crabs, or mangroves, life’s refusal to accept defeat heartened her. If the smallest living things went on fighting for survival against every obstacle, she could do no less.

A noble thought, rich with inspiration, but she had no time to savor it.

The creek had dead-ended.

A breath of angry sibilance: “Shit.”

She’d blundered down another blind alley. The wide, deep pool was hemmed in on almost every side by withered and toppled mangroves, the only opening the narrow passageway she’d taken a minute earlier.

Double back? Or wait here and hope her pursuer had gone the wrong way?

Neither.

He was coming.

She saw the glitter of ripples that announced his approach.

No way to get past him. And no time to climb through the trees and escape as she had before.

Motionless in the water, she was less easy to spot than he was. But he would see her soon enough.

She sank lower, the waterline rising to her chin.

From the far end of the pool, a whisper: “Kirstie?”

She breathed through gritted teeth.

“It’s me, Steve. I want to help you.”

Christ, the same line he used before. Did he think she was enough of an idiot to fall for it twice?

“If you’re here, answer me. Please.”

Fat chance, you son of a bitch.

She prayed for him to turn and leave, continue his search in the other channel.

“Kirstie…?”

He swam closer. Hell, he would be right on top of her in a minute. Couldn’t help but see her then.

Unless…

She drew a deep, slow breath, filling her lungs, then closed her eyes and gradually lowered her head beneath the surface.

Submerged, she was invisible. The turgid water, the color of dark tea, would conceal her as completely as a bath of ink.

The only question was how long she could stay under.

She waited, eyes squeezed shut, fighting the incipient panic prompted by the cutoff of breathing. Bubbles of air escaped her pursed lips and rose past her face to pucker the surface of the swamp. She could only hope Steve wouldn’t notice.

Seconds ticked past. She counted heartbeats, gave up after fifty.

There was no way to know if he was still nearby. She simply had to stay down as long as possible, then pray he would be gone when she finally surfaced.

Faintly she was conscious of a burning sensation in her chest. Her lungs were beginning to cry out for oxygen.

She ignored the warning, concentrated on staying calm. It was easier than she had expected. The warm salt water was the amniotic fluid of a second womb; suspended in it, she was an unborn child again.

An unborn child… with no umbilical cord.

The distress signals broadcast by her body became more urgent. Her extremities tingled. Her head pounded. She pictured her face turning blue, eyes bulging behind closed lids.

Better surface. But what if he was still here?

She could hold out a little longer. She was sure of it.

Arms folded, she hugged herself. No more air bubbles dribbled from her mouth. Her lungs were empty.

Irrelevant images began popping on and off in her mind like flashcubes. A birthday party, the children’s laughing mouths smeared with cake frosting. A clumsy kiss in a grade-school stairwell. Bleeding knees, scraped in a rough fall on a gravel path. The green campus of Amherst College. A golden retriever named Lancelot plunging into a field of summer dandelions. Steve, stiff in his tuxedo, guiding his bride’s hand as she cut the wedding cake.

Random memories, fragments of her life. She wondered why she so often visualized herself as viewed from a distance in those scenes, as if she had not lived her life at all, but had merely observed a story unfolding.

Lungs bursting now. Fire in her throat. Hands and feet numb. Freight-train roaring in her ears.

Oddly she no longer felt the desperate need to relieve these symptoms. Though her body was starving for oxygen, her mind seemed curiously detached, her thoughts drifting, drifting…

No. Snap out of it. And get oxygen-now.

She surfaced. Instantly her unreal calm was shredded as breath flooded her lungs. Shaking all over, fighting waves of light-headedness, she swallowed great gulps of air. The fire in her chest died down to embers, then to ashes. Her fingers and toes returned to life.

Only when she’d filled her lungs for the third time did she remember Steve. Dizzily she scanned the area.

He was gone.

She’d outlasted him. And nearly outlasted herself.

Jack paused, listening.

From a parallel channel, soft noises had risen a moment earlier: a muffled splash, an almost inaudible whisper. Sounds so faint he was hardly sure he’d heard them at all.

It made no sense anyway. Why would Kirstie whisper? She was alone.

Unless Steve was with her, had found her somehow.

Impossible. Steve was unconscious. He had to be.

Well, perhaps there had been no whisper. Perhaps he’d misinterpreted the sigh of the wind or the buzz of an insect.

One way or the other, he would find out.

He turned back, hunting for a passageway to the parallel creek. Yards of muddy water glided past, lined with misshapen trees. Somewhere a barred owl released a feline screech, its harsh cry scraping the night, fingernails on a blackboard.

Jack supposed most people would hate the swamp, would recoil from this place as if from a stinking carcass. Rot and mire, shadows and mist-nothing beautiful here.

But he felt a peculiar kinship with the swamp. Its comforting darkness concealed secretive, predatory things, hungry things that fed on weakness, things not unlike himself.

The swamp’s natural predators had eyes that saw in the dark. He had a flashlight. They had fangs. He had a knife, a gun.

How many rounds left now? Six, he calculated.

It would take only one shot to stop Kirstie’s heart.

Only one.

Kirstie pedaled water, catching her breath and clearing her thoughts.

Having failed to find her here, Steve must be retracing the route he’d taken, intending to explore the other branch of the channel. But at any moment he might return. She had to move on.

Still, returning the way she had come was too risky. Suppose she ran into him in the dark.

There was another option. The dead mangroves were largely stripped of branches; she could muscle her way between the trunks easily enough.

Briskly she swam for the nearest thicket of trees. Their roots, grayish-white and slimed with algae, broke the waterline in a jumble of knots and creases, like the folded gray matter of the brain. Topping the mound, a copse of fire-blasted trees sketched a tracery of coal-black lines against the sky.

At the skirt of roots she paused, catching her breath. She heard no sound to signal Steve’s reappearance. No sound at all except the ambient croak and hiss that formed the swamp’s perpetual background noise.

It occurred to her, for no particular reason, that this was one hell of a way to spend her summer vacation.

The thought made her smile. The upward curl of her lips felt shockingly strange, an unnatural action.

There were so many things she’d taken for granted. Smiles. Laughter. Clean clothes. Shelter and food. Physical safety-even with all the craziness in the news, she had rarely felt endangered.

Now all of that was gone, and she was no more than an animal, hunted in the wild, struggling for survival.

She shook free of those thoughts. Later she would muse on what she’d lost and what she’d learned. Later.

Grunting with strain, she grabbed hold of a thick root, hauled herself partway up, then found a foothold and reached higher. Her right hand closed over another, larger root…

It came alive in her grasp.

Her next split second of awareness was a blur of fragmentary images: the shuddering, convulsive movement of something long and black and grotesquely twisted; a smear of pinkish-white describing a looping trajectory toward her right arm.

Her mind had time to form one word: snake.

Then-pain.

A shock wave of glassy, wrenching pain in her forearm just below the elbow.

Her fingers splayed. She let go of the snake and slid a foot lower on the mass of roots. Somewhere a siren started wailing, its cry high and ululant, ripping the night air.

Thrashing wildly, the snake whipsawed its head and bit again, fangs drilling into the meat of her right shoulder.

The siren climbed in pitch, whooping breathlessly.

Another roiling twist of its body, and the snake clamped down on the tender skin above her left breast.

She threw back her head, dazzled by pain. The siren, oddly, had taken on the quality of a human voice, or nearly human, a voice shrilling with the outraged, plaintive terror of a child.

“Get it off me, get it off me, get it off!”

Its fangs were twin syringes sinking deep. She beat at the long writhing body with her fists. The snake lashed backward, and in a frozen instant she saw it clearly: the broad, flat head, the lidless eyes bisected by vertical pupils, the mouth stretched wide to expose shining fangs and surreal pinkish-white lips.

White mouth. The thought floated like a bubble just at the level of consciousness. It has a white mouth.

Then the bubble popped, the idea was lost, as the snake lunged again.

She dodged it. Her sudden sideways movement sent her tumbling backward into the water with a splash.

It showed its fangs once more, challenging her, then slowly unpacked itself from the jungle of roots where it had lain in ambush. Coil by coil its ponderous, impossibly long body unkinked, while its head nosed languidly toward the water.

She watched, numb with trauma, wondering blankly if it meant to come after her and finish the job.

Finally the snake’s full extension was presented to her like an unrolled carpet. How long was the goddamned thing? Five feet? Six? Thick, too-not ropelike-an undulating cylinder of muscle, nearly as large in diameter as her lower leg.

The snake slipped into the water, lung inflated, head and neck lifted above the surface. For an eerie moment it seemed to regard her out of one cool, unwinking eye.

Then it glided off into the murk. She followed it with her gaze until it had merged with black water and vaporous air, like some evil spirit of the swamp that had briefly materialized out of mud and rot and miasma, only to surrender its form and return, ghostlike, to its essence.

In the near distance, violent splashing.

Turning, she saw a faint yellowish glow.

Jack’s flashlight.

She remembered the siren’s wail that had split the night.

No siren, of course. Screams. Her own voice raised in cries of blind panic. She’d given away her position, and now Jack was coming for her. Coming fast.

He was swimming like a maniac, chopping the water with wild, vigorous strokes. Already his flashlight’s beam tickled the branches of dead mangroves at the other end of the channel.

She clawed at the roots, trying again to find a handhold, but her fingers wouldn’t work right-they were spastic and uncoordinated, her muscles still fluttering with the aftereffects of trauma-the roots kept slipping from her grasp.

Light dazzled her.

Turning her head, she looked blinking into a yellow glare.

“Evening, Mrs. Gardner!” Jack called cheerfully. “Funny meeting you here.”

He was wading in the shallower part of the creek, flashlight in one hand, gun in the other. Black water retreated from him in lazy ripples as he took a final step toward her.

Slowly he lifted the gun, taking aim.

Kirstie waited, breath stopped. No way out for her, not now. She wondered how the bullet would feel as it chewed through muscle and bone.

“Count of three, sweetheart!” He was laughing. “One! Two!”

The flashlight jerked sideways.

A splash-Jack facedown in the water-a muffled crack as the gun discharged into the muddy bottom, launching a geyser of sediment.

In the moment before he’d meant to shoot her, he’d lost his balance somehow. Slipped on the wet mud, maybe. Or had the snake gotten him, too?

She didn’t know, couldn’t guess. Some kind of miracle had taken place, and she was in no position to argue with it.

This time her hands found purchase in the roots. She hauled herself out of the water.

Ducking under the mangroves’ leafless branches, she kicked a deadfall of rotted timber out of her way and plunged blindly into the night.