Survival Exercise

Talmage Powell is a native Southerner, born in 1920, who sold his first story to the pulp market in 1943 and who is now in his fifth decade as a professional writer. He has published more than five hundred short stories and sixteen novels, and also has ten visual media credits. His books, testimony to his versatility, include a fine suspense tale, The Smasher (1959); a series of five novels about a realistically and sympathetically drawn Tampa private detective named Ed Rivers (The Killer Is Mine, Start Screaming Murder, The Girl’s Number Doesn’t Answer, Corpus Delectable, and With a Madman Behind Me); an acclaimed offbeat Western, The Cage (1969); and a tale of the supernatural, The Thing in B-3 (1969), for young readers. When he isn’t traveling throughout the United States and elsewhere, he makes his home in North Carolina.

To: Capt. L. G. McCabe, Intelligence Officer

5th Bn., 22nd Marines, Parris Island, S.C.

Sir:

In the event that I can’t appear in person for debriefing re Survival Exercise to which I, Master Sergeant James C. Kelly, and Privates Rodney Gordon and Sidney Finklestein were assigned, I offer the following informal report.

This may be the only means of making known the events that began at Point E. I feel that my chances are good of returning to Point E, if only temporarily. If I must abandon the location or fail to survive, the report will be there, awaiting the helicopter scheduled to pick up the Survival Exercise team.

As you know, it was to be a routine exercise to provide experience in living off the land, as would a small unit isolated in enemy territory.

Enemy territory is hardly the phrase to describe the locale in which the team composed of Gordon, Finklestein, and I found ourselves. We stepped from the normal into a delirium in which survival became a mockery — and if you find this report beyond belief I would remind you, sir, that I have no reason for deceit and am testifying on my honor as a United States Marine.

Ferried in by helicopter, the team was in top form, even by Marine standards. Young, tough, battle-ready, Finklestein and Gordon regarded the week-long exerxise as an adventuresome break in base camp routine. They fully expected to be cracking an icy beer eight days from now and telling their buddies what it was like, going into a tropical wilderness without supplies, equipped only with trench knives at their waists and matches in their pockets.

In my own case, I had been on one previous Survival Exercise, in Alaska, and I felt the coming week would be something of a camp out. After all, Florida was my native state. Even though I had never set foot in the deep interior of the Everglades, I had fished the murmuring bayous and hunted the pine forests before they were overcome by condominiums, retirement cities, expressways, Disney Worlds, and Big Mac wrappers. As a rural boy I had rubbed shoulders with Seminoles. Later, during my two years at Florida State, a Seminole had been one of my closest friends. I knew the Indian legends and lore, the basics for living bare-handedly off the lush land. You would think. Captain McCabe, that I was going into a classroom with the quiz answers up my sleeve.

But as the helicopter whirred us deeper into the ’Glades, I was reminded that it wasn’t all going to be crabcakes and beer.

Beyond the horizon the familiar planet had vanished. The uninhabited reaches overwhelmed our senses as we stared down through the Plexiglas bubble. We looked out over the limitless sweep of a watery jungle unlike any other on earth, a sun-broiled morass that could swallow the state of Rhode Island almost four times over. It was a world of molten sun reflections from shallow water, of razor-sharp sawgrass and small, low islands — hummocks — scattered wherever vegetation had reared up and rotted for a million years. It was stands of cypress older than the Crusades, burdened with heavy gray curtains of Spanish moss, providing life for the enormous, parasitic, obscenely hued wild orchids strung along the tall trunks. It was a seething incubator where mists and vapors slithered and the nights crashed and roared in the eternal struggle for survival. It was alligator, and poisonous vipers, and puma on the prowl, and stalk-legged birds, and shifting clouds of insects unclassified by the taxonomist, and deer, muskrat, fang-toothed cousins of the piranha, and creatures born to twitch in fear and die.

The chopper hovered. The pilot, a husky, weathered, gray-templed veteran, gave the team a badgering squint. “Welcome to a week in hell’s furnace, you gyrenes. I’ll go have a beer.”

He had chosen and zeroed Point Exercise, a finger-shaped hummock about a mile in length. A relative clearing, grown in waist-high grass on its eastern end, beckoned as a landing pad.

The pilot carefully rechecked readings on the electronic dials before him and clicked a switch, programming the coordinates into the mini-computer for a return to this precise spot one week from today.

He brought the chopper down feather-light, and Gordon, Finklestein, and I spilled out — three men in fatigues hunched in the flicking shadow of the idling overhead rotor.

The pilot grinned and yelled a parting, “Have fun.” And the helicopter was quickly up and away, leaving a small, empty moment.

“Home sweet home,” Finklestein said, looking around. He was twenty years old, wiry and agile.

“Bring on the girls,” Gordon added. A rawboned, slightly gawky, sandy-haired farm boy from Iowa, he listened to his words die in a muggy silence accented by the soft insect hum.

I’d spotted a probable campsite while the chopper had hovered, a shadowed glen about three hundred yards west of where we stood. “Let’s see what the Everglades Hilton has to offer.”

We strung out and walked, the grass slashing our calves. I was at point, senior in rank, age, experience — and size. I have not always been comfortable about my size. I stand six feet, seven inches, weigh in at two-forty. Gordon and Finklestein were by no means shorties, but I towered above them, and at the moment they seemed a bit grateful for my shadow.

A dozen yards, and the cloying heat swathed us in oily sweat. It was only a foretaste. Knives, matches, brains, and hands — tools for survival. Two concessions only had been made. In my hip pocket was the notebook in which I would keep a daily log — and which is now receiving this report. And Finklestein carried a portable short-wave transmitter, rigged with shoulder straps. It was insurance against the most desperate emergency.

Still, I thought of what we’d look like a week from today when we stepped aboard the helicopter. Baked out. Cheeks and noses peeling. Lumpy from insect bites. But I hadn’t the slightest doubt we’d be wearing the cocksure grin of Marines at the end of maneuvers.

The glade looked even better than it had from the air. It was sheltered by twisted pines and cabbage palms, carpeted with a soft sponge of pine needles. Two stunted trees would anchor the southern corners of a tchiki, the open-sided shelter favored by the Seminoles of old.

By sunset, we were pioneering in style. Our campfire was a friendly flicker in a muggy twilight, our bodies were tired, and the details of a busy day ran together in our minds. Or at least in mine. We’d cut pole framing and fronds for the tchiki roof. Plaited cordage from slender vines. Split bamboo for fish spears and crab traps. Gordon had turned up a fifty-pound turtle and we had him staked out alive as larder of future fresh meat. Finklestein had trapped an enormous king snake. I’d robbed a quail’s nest and climbed a cabbage palm to cut out the bud. Now we were belching pleasant echoes of a dinner of roast snake, baked eggs, and crisp, juicy palm fruit.

Under a bright moon we talked in the desultory way of men whose friendship needs little conversation. Gordon volunteered for first watch. I left him and Finklestein talking and sacked out under the tchiki. Another too-short bunk; the soles of my combat boots stuck out from the shadow of the thatch roof.

I lay there for a little while, liquidly tired, listening to sounds already ancient before man dressed out his first skin. Skirlings… rustlings… basso frogs (frog legs for breakfast?)… snarlings… thrashings… screams, sometimes cut short…

I’m not sure just what awakened me. Maybe it was the impact of the club as it crushed Gordon’s skull, or Finklestein’s movements as he stirred from sleep during the final second of his life when the crude club rose and fell once more.

The first thing I consciously heard was an absolute silence. The writhing violence of the ’Glades had come to a total halt, and the silence, so sudden, was a ringing in my ears.

And while the silence deafened, the darkness became a gagging odor like something out of a slimy pit that had formed when the earth was young. It was the steam from the excretion of dinosaurs, the musk of a female creature long dead, the fetid effluvia of some unspeakable thing.

My first impression of the source of the smell was of two hairy, columnar legs standing beside the open-sided tchiki. As I reared up, spun, drew the trench knife, enormous hands grabbed the front roof and ripped it away.

I rolled through the open side, bounced to my feet away from the monstrous thing. I glimpsed Gordon and Finklestein sprawled in the open glade, their heads shattered. The thing had dropped its tree limb club to smash the tchiki and get to me. Its shadow engulfed me. I had an impression of a hairy black humanoid shape, about nine feet tall. Then I was enveloped by massive arms, and the smell of the thing shot down my throat, through my guts.

Maybe I screamed in a very un-Marinelike way. I’m not sure. I had the nightmarish certainty that I was going to be crushed and carried to some time-forgotten lair as dinner for a couple of hungry cubs.

The creature mewled, gibbered, and resisted my thrashings by crushing me against its sickening mass. I felt the tip of my knife bite into a yielding surface, and the thing barked in querulous anger and pain. For a second the embrace was uncertain, and I managed to break away.

I plunged through a thicket and ran. Heard my feet splash water and felt the slash of sawgrass. I looked over my shoulder at the shifting of shadows on the hummock, trying to separate the gigantic creature from the background blackness. It spotted me and called out, a bark-bark-barking note, high in pitch. The weird sound struck me as a pronouncement, a promise. I was the invader. I had hurt something that ruled here, and I must pay a price for that.

As I churned on through the sawgrass, my Marine training took hold of me again and my thoughts began to order themselves. Objective: survive the night; don’t get lost; return to the campsite and the short-wave transmitter. Obstacle: I could hear the slashing of sawgrass as the thing narrowed the distance in long strides. I had no hope of outrunning it. And no chance if I faced it squarely, even as large and strong as I was by everyday measurements.

The shallow water thinned out and was gone. Moist black sand became firmer under my pounding feet. Dense jungle shadows closed about me. The next hummock was a couple of hundred yards south of the campsite.

I veered in that direction, ducked behind a giant banyan tree and stood sucking for breath. The night was silent for a moment. The thing, I knew, had reached the edge of the hummock, its night vision searching for me. It bark-barked a note of angry frustration, as if demanding that I stop this foolishness and give myself up to it.

I heard the thud of heavy footsteps and knew the banyan was poor cover. I broke away, going deeper into the hummock, burrowing through a dry thicket. Never mind the sounds, the dry rattlings that revealed the direction of my flight; I had matches in my hand now.

Scratch. Pouf. Wink of fire. I dropped one after another in the brush as I ran. If the first one didn’t catch, I prayed the second or third would.

I burst out of the underbrush into a small clearing, changed directions, dropped belly flat, and wriggled into a maze of twisted pine trees. As I looked back, tongues of fire were lapping in the thicket. More than one of the matches had caught and touched off the dry grass.

There was a hesitant crackling, then a soft roar as more of the tinder-dry brush flamed. I saw the humanoid silhouette towering at the further edge of the thicket. It barked again, looking this way and that, still searching for me. Then it reeled back as the flames swept toward it.

I wormed down to the water’s edge. This time. I didn’t run. I stayed low, on all fours below the level of the sawgrass. Several yards out, I took my bearings. The Big Dipper, the North Star — I wanted to keep Polaris directly behind me and move due south. A subsequent trip due north, when I had the chance, would return me to the campsite and short-wave transmitter.

Half an hour later I crawled onto another hummock, sprawling, taking painful breaths. Looking back. I could see the dark image of the monster towering above the sawgrass. Quarter of a mile behind me now. Slogging back and forth uncertainly, mewling and whining in the same angry frustration as before.

I lay, hands knotted, silently begging the creature to turn east, west, north — any direction but south. The fire had made it lose sight of me and it seemed to be searching haphazardly. I was beginning to hope that the odds now were several dozen compass points in my favor.

Then I saw it come to a standstill. Its processes were working, crystallizing. As if with sudden decision, it began to move toward the hummock where I lay. I backed off, the sick emptiness working again in my belly. I wondered if the thing could smell me as I smelled it, and if my own odor was equally repulsive.

Always south… keeping the invisible, tenuous lifeline of direction between me and the transmitter. Every furlong, every hellish mile increased the risk of losing my fix on the campsite and transmitter forever. From a distance each hummock looked like all the others. How many hummocks? Ten thousand? If I did lose direction, the transmitter would become the proverbial needle in a haystack.

The night became a nightmare of fatigue, sawgrass and water, lattices of iron-hard mangrove in impenetrable tangles. Forever due south, Polaris winking behind me whenever I could see the sky.

Finally I collapsed under a great live oak, too exhausted to get up, too frightened to feel safe where I was. I lay there, my cheek against rotting humus that a week ago had been avid green vegetation, listening. Waiting for the echoes of giant footsteps.

But they didn’t come, and I realized that my cars were trying to tell me something. Yes… once more the swamp shimmered with its normal predawn sounds; it no longer crouched in silence because the thing was there. The creature must have lost my trail…

My spry old grandmother was at my bedside, her face filled with concern in its soft cloud of fine gray hair. I was ten years old and my temperature had been a hundred and three, and my grandmother was smiling and touching my forehead with a cool cloth. “Hi there, Mr. James C. Kelly! I do declare, the delirious boy who had a franzy is back with us, the nasty old fever all gone. What are we having for breakfast, Jimmy the Rugged?”…

Then my senses struggled up out of the dream, and there was merciless sun-glare, dappled through gnarled pines and shaggy wild palms. There was timeless emptiness and the hiss of insects. I wasn’t ten; and the “franzy” had been for real. A hint of the creature’s smell from the moment of close contact still clung to me, nauseatingly.

I sat up, took hold of a knotty sapling, and pulled to my feet. The sun was still low in the east, but the morning was already a shroud of heat.

Working against muscle stiffness, I walked across the narrow island, keeping the sun on my right. I looked north — and a small, bright jolt went through me. I was anything but lost. In the distance a thin feather of pale gray smoke high in the sky marked the location of the hummock I had set on fire. I had picked up a spin-off dividend. The masses of green stuff on the hummock would smolder and smoke for perhaps days — a beacon two hundred yards south of Point E, the campsite.

I wanted food, a bath. My own stink was overlaid by the creature’s effluvium. My belly rumbled emptily. I imagined dining on roast portions from Gordon’s fifty-pound turtle tethered at the campsite while I transmitted an endless Mayday on the radio. But the thought was a crutch; it didn’t ease my heavy sorrow. I was alive, on a day that Gordon and Finklestein would not see. They would be my first objective at Point E.

I laid the mutilated bodies side by side, expressed a prayer over them, and. burial being out of the question, covered them with a makeshift shield of palm fronds. Then I crossed the clearing to where the radio was—

A tearing sensation went through me. And I squatted slowly and fingered the wreckage of the short-wave transmitter. A heavy foot had come down on it in passing, crushing it under what must have been at least five hundred pounds of weight.

I could only hunker there, suspended in the prehistoric immensity of this place. I felt eyes watching me, felt the swamp humming a baleful promise all around me. Bamboo clicked softly, like the rattle of clods on my coffin.

Drawing a breath, I fought down the spooky feeling. “The hell with you!” I muttered at the swamp, and pushed to my feet. I wasn’t dead yet. This was still a Survival Exercise.

My first task was to kill and roast the turtle — rations for a trip north. Somewhere in that direction lay the only mark of civilization I had a hope of reaching, the old Tamiami Trail which crosses the ’Glades from Naples on the Gulf to Miami on the Atlantic.

By midday I figured I’d made five or six miles. My surroundings didn’t show it. From any vantage point the ’Glades were the same, an expanding universe of sawgrass and water dotted with hummocks like minor galaxies without number.

In the late afternoon I finally stopped to rest. I stripped off and bathed in a waist-deep lagoon off the perimeter of a hummock. Scrubbed myself with sand. But some of the smell of the monster lingered, whether in my pores or in my imagination. I no longer knew which.

I thought of a legend an old Seminole had once told me. It was the story of Stuestaw Enawchee. Literally translated, the words come out to mean “too much body.” In the old legendary application, the Stuestaw Enawchee were the gigantic beings from some netherworld that had inhabited the Rivers of Grass since the time of creation. They had come out of the great swamp to war on the first Seminoles a thousand generations before the white man appeared. The People, so went the legend, had a shaman who was sent down from heaven with a magic herb with which he anointed his body as he went into the swamp to confront the creatures. The herb killed off so many of the Stuestaw Enawchee that they began to fear the People and retreated into the great swamp, and the People were able to live in peace.

Trekking on northward, I thought about the Stuestaw Enawchee. From what I had seen I was certain that this legend was, like many others, grounded in fact. Troy and Ur were legends until archeologists went after them with their picks and shovels. The African legends of a man-thing were legends no more after Leakey turned up his first fossilized find. In the present case, Captain McCabe, it is imperative that you not dismiss the Stuestaw Enawchee — the SE — as a figment of a Marine’s heat-blasted mind. At the dawn of man, there must have been many such descendants of something that came crawling out of primordial slime, isolated and indigenous to this tropical wilderness a mapmaker would ultimately label the Everglades. The aboriginal ancestors of the Seminoles had discovered a poison, a magic herb, a bait that would kill off the SEs, beat them back, until it seemed that the hideous beings had vanished forever,

But forever is a long, long time…

As the gray fur of twilight spread over the reaches, I slogged onto a hummock and was content to sprawl belly flat for a while. I guessed that I’d covered about fifteen miles. Not much of a hike for a six-foot-seven-inch Marine? Sir. I hope you never have to try it through sawgrass.

I half-dozed, not letting myself think of where I was. After a little, I roused myself, ate a piece of roast turtle, and then curled in for the night in a tiny alcove inside a clump of wild palms. It was not much of a bivouac, but I slept anyway.

And then, when the night was old and strained in a hush, a mist came seeping out of a cauldron from a time when dinosaurs were dying… a body dew… a musk… a nauseating essence coiling over my flesh…

My eyes snapped open. I admit to choking back a scream. My heart felt as if it would burst through my chest. The palms rustled as the SE parted the fronds. The slow steps thudded, heavy beats measuring off the remnants of my life. The great hairy head blocked off the light of a dying moon.

I twisted around and got out through a break between the palms. Into the water once more. Running, fighting aside the sawgrass.

Behind me the SE barked churlishly.

I floundered onto a hummock. Wrong direction, headed south away from the old trail. But I had no choice. The thing was herding me back toward the depths of the Glades.

I could hear the splashing of the huge feet. Nocturnal creatures… quiescent by day, but by night imbued with powers of which I had no knowledge. I felt the sick certainty that the thing had antennae, a sense unknown to human beings — a guidance system like the sonar of a bat, the instinct of a Capistrano swallow, the built-in controls of an SAM missile. A tool evolved a thousand millenia ago to compensate for the bulk that made it hard for an SE to slip up undetected on its prey. No need to crouch and spring when the creature could dog its quarry to exhaustion.

Why had I been given a day’s reprieve? Because the SE’s unique function was impaired by solar radiation, the way sunspots interfere with our own sub-light-level transmissions? Because the thing saw better at night in the infrared range? It didn’t matter now; I was already scrambling onto another hummock, hearing the creature coming through sawgrass and underbrush, forcing me southward.

I turned right and went off the end of the hummock. Calmer now. Again staying low, taking the cover of the sawgrass.

I eeled my way across to the next island as dawn came, hot and angry red out of the east. Tearing through a wall of vines, I squished up onto firmer ground. A clearing spread before me. My footsteps wavered. In the middle of the glen was a low mound about ten feet long. And in the gray light I realized it was not a natural mound at all. I jarred to a halt, staring. The SE lay before me, stretched on its back as if asleep. How had it circled and got here? Why didn’t it move?

By then I had the knife in my hand. Then the scent came, that permeating muskiness, seeping through the dawn… from behind me. I heard crashings in the underbrush in (he direction from which I’d come.

In a crouch I circled the clearing, eased into the shallow-water, took cover in the saw-grass. So there were two of them. A living SE with the single thought of pursuit in its primeval brain. And one dead thing in the clearing. Not like any animal, either of them. Nor like any human. A gigantic blending of the two.

Looking back through the spiny green, I saw the living SE arrive at the side of the dead one. The living one stopped, and for a brief moment I seemed to be forgotten as it knelt beside the dead creature, took one of the enormous dead hands and pressed it to a broad, hairy cheek. The living one’s head lifted and the shrill bark-bark became a lament of pain and heartbreak.

I understood, then. The living SE was a female, and her mate had fallen ill and died.

I was held by the depths of the SE’s — Essie’s — grief as she hunkered beside her mate. I wondered if this had been part of her purpose, to bring me here for a sharing of her bereavement and suffering. If so, it was a ritual beyond my comprehension.

I faded back quietly, working my way through the saw-grass and canebreaks as the sun rose higher. I knew when she returned to my trail. Through the brightening heat came her high-pitched mewling, the note of loneliness and despair that had so often told me her position. The cries, became less strident as the sun neared its zenith. Finally, there was only the insect hum and the sound of my own exhausted breathing.

At midday I looked out through a screen of brush on the island where I’d finally come to roost. I saw no sign of Essie, but I knew she was out there, waiting for nightfall again.

I took a bearing. Far to the southeast a thin sliver of smoke hung in the brazen sky, marking the approximate location of Point E. If I survived, I would meet the helicopter there as scheduled. If not, I would leave this report beside the bodies of my two comrades.

Meanwhile, my body machinery demanded attention. I dug out some coontie root with the knife and munched the starchy provender of the old-time Seminoles. It was flat, tasteless, but Ailing and nourishing. Then I rolled into the water, clothed, to cool off. A mess of a Marine, face hamburgered from insect bites, each hair a painful quill in the tenderness of my sun-burned scalp…

Afterward I crawled into the palmetto shadows and slept.

Now, Captain McCabe, I have regained enough strength to move out again. My destination is Point E, and I would like to complete this report insofar as possible in case I am not there to file a verbal report when the helicopter returns for the pickup of the survival team.

If I’m missing, when you view the bodies of good men such as Gordon and Finklestein you must give all due thought to my explanation. There are things unknown in the recesses of the ’Glades, Captain McCabe. You must accept that.

Just as I am accepting the clarity of certain factors.

I know why Essie didn’t club me to death in the first attack on the campsite. She had seen that I was the biggest of the three strange SE-oid creatures that had invaded her domain. She had a reason to spare the largest.

I know the meaning of her mewlings and whimperings, her high-pitched barking notes of entreaty.

I can begin to understand, to imagine, how the big, dead male must have felt when he in vigorous life smelled that primeval odor, the exudation of musk, that perfume of hers. Now he is dead, and the laws of her nature can’t be set aside, any more than we could stop a female deer from exuding her mating scent when she is in heat.

Essie is a passion-heavy female in full season, on the prowl for a mate.

I can’t help feeling for her innocence, her helplessness in her hormonal situation. But even though I feel compassion for her, I have my knife out and ready. If I am denied sanctuary at Point E, one of us will die.

She is out there now in the lengthening shadows, mewling and whimpering and bark-barking her impatience. She is out there, sir, singing her hellish song of love…