Deadly Pursuit

41

Kirstie had almost given up hope of escaping from the swamp. The maze of waterways was bewildering, incomprehensible. She might be swimming in circles for all she knew. The boardwalk had vanished; perhaps it had never existed. Perhaps all this was a dream, a fever dream; or perhaps she was dead already-killed by Steve on the beach or by Jack in the swamp-dead and sentenced to an endless prison term in hell.

She swam on, aimlessly, hopelessly, limbs flailing in ragged, uncoordinated strokes that churned up a foamy wake.

God, there had to be a way out of this place. The swamp wasn’t even big; swimming in a straight-line path, she could traverse it in a few minutes. But there were no straight lines here. Every channel was insanely contorted, bent and folded and turned back on itself, impossible to navigate.

I’ll die here, she thought. I’ll die, and no one will ever find my body. And the mangroves will build new root systems over my bones.

She could picture it-a skeleton woven into the web of roots-a skeleton with her face.

Don’t.

With a shudder she rejected the image. No point in thinking like that. Defeatism was wrong-perversely ungrateful, in fact-after the inexplicable miracle that had saved her life only a short time ago.

She kept going. The water seemed thicker now, heavily clouded with silt. Beating her way through it was like swimming in mud.

Her right arm curved forward in another breaststroke, and her fingers sank into something soft and oozy. A bank of wet clay.

Another dead end? No. Not this time.

She let out a sound midway between a sigh and a chuckle, a sound expressive of all the relief she had ever felt.

She’d made it. She’d reached the shallows at the border of the swamp. Dry land ahead.

“Oh, thank God,” she mumbled in a blurred sleepwalker’s voice. “Thank God, thank God, thank God.”

Struggling through the thick, viscid mire, she half staggered, half crawled out of the water.

Around her, a few buttonwood trees formed a transitional zone between the red and black mangroves and the live oaks and mahoganies that grew in drier soil.

She shambled a dozen yards from the swamp, hoping to escape the worst of the mosquitoes, then collapsed, exhausted, at the base of a mahogany. She lay there, coughing weakly, her head in her arms.

Rest, she thought vaguely. Just for a little while.

Her whole body hurt. She had more aches than muscles.

If she lived through this, she was going to get fat and lazy. She never would work out again.

The thought made her smile.

Then slowly the smile faded as she became aware of a new kind of pain, throbbing throughout her right side.

The bite wounds in her arm, shoulder, and chest burned like splashes of acid.

Shaking herself alert, she examined the twin punctures in her forearm. The site was swelling noticeably, the surrounding flesh turning an ugly purple.

An infection? No, this was something different. Something worse.

White mouth.

The thought startled her, words from nowhere.

The snake had a white mouth.

And it swam with its head out of the water.

Those details held some significance her dazed mind could not quite grasp. She struggled to make herself see.

White mouth…

Cottonmouth.

The cottonmouth swims like that.

“Oh no,” she whispered. “No.”

The snake was a cottonmouth, a water moccasin, and it had bitten her. Bitten her three times, with each bite burying its fangs deep.

Its hollow, venom-injecting fangs.

Poisoned. She had been poisoned.

And even while she struggled so desperately to live, she was slowly dying inside.