'Good. Be sure and snap the flap on your way out, will you?'
'You stay nice and dry, ma'am. I'll be careful.'
She had a brief glimpse of gray in motion. The thrumming of rain and wind was momentarily louder as their guide slipped out through the flap. She heard the flap-snap catch behind him, lay back down.
'What's going on?' It was Briscoe's blanket-muffled voice.
'Crossett. Gone to check out the boat. Shut up and go back to sleep.' b
She found herself able to return only halfway to the relaxing oblivion of sleep. The uneven ground seemed bother her more now than when she'd first lain down and she tossed and turned restlessly.
Suddenly she discovered herself sitting straight a wide awake in that occasionally unreal fashion that strikes without warning. She looked around. The tent was unchanged. Outside, rain continued to pummel the ear.
It sounded as though the wind had dropped slightly.
'Carey? Carey,' she whispered insistently, 'wake up, man.'
'Huh . . . wuzzat . . . somethin' wrong?'
'What time did Crossett go out?'
Briscoe was rubbing his eyes, yawned. 'How the hell should h know? He went out?'
'To check on the boat. Remember?'
'Oh, yeah. Yeah.' He glanced idly toward the third bedroll. It was empty. 'Not back yet, huh?' He looked vaguely puzzled.
'No.' She had a thought, fumbled through her bag and extricated her billfold. In the near blackness she had to feel for the bills and credit cards. Everything seemed to be there. She wasn't embarrassed either by the thought or by her action in following it up. After all, she was a child of the city, not the country.
'Maybe he's having trouble with the boat,' Briscoe suggested.
She shook her head impatiently. 'I'll bet it's been at least an hour.' Rolling over, she unlatched the tent flap, looking out into driving rain. Nothing. A flash of lightning revealed the outboard, securely beached and tied to a cypress stump. But no Crossett. The lightning faded, leaving blue patches on her retinas. Thunder skipped like a stone across her ears. She let the flap fall, didn't bother to secure it.
'Well?' Now awake, Briscoe was sitting up on his foam pad and staring at her.
She shook her head negatively, chewed her lower lip.
'Don't look so damn solemn,' he advised her. 'Probably he wandered off somewhere, maybe looking for a better place to tie the boat up. Want some coffee as long as we're awake?' He leaned on one side, began hunting in the darkness for the lantern.
'Huh uh; thanks. Crossett would've come back and told us if he was going to be gone this long.'
A glow filled the tent as Briscoe got the Coleman going. 'Not necessarily. Polite as he is, he might not want to wake us. It could be; though, that he hurt himself. Easy to slip out in that muck.' He sounded sympathetic and disgusted all at once.
'I don't relish going out looking for him. I agree that if he's not back in, say, fifteen minutes, we probably ought to get dressed and go hunt him up.' He stopped moving, one hand holding the tiny grasshopper stove, and the other a packet of coffee.
'What is it?'
'Shut up. There's something outside,' he whispered.
She froze. Several minutes went by during which they could hear only the steady percussion of the rain and the puffing wind.
'Nothing, I guess,' he said finally. He grinned. 'You know, I just had a thought. Maybe our good guide's using this opportunity to show us city slickers that out here in the swamp anybody can be deluded by a little bad weather and a rambling tall story.' He got the grasshopper going, set a pot of water on it.
'Okay, Crossett!' he abruptly shouted. 'Come on in and bet yourself warm. The coffee's boiling, and we're not.'
There was no response. Below, agitated water lapped at the meager shore. Briscoe shrugged. 'Let him get soaked, then. I swear, if he comes tumbling in here and drenches us-'
'. . . NURRRRR . . . '
It was thunder, but dull thunder, not sharp and clean like the kind that walked the treetops but a rich, rasping ululation that had nothing to do with electrical charges. It sounded again, on a rising inflection this time, and while it did not originate in the heavens, it came from a source almost as primal. A feral thunder.
Watkins found herself turning upside down as she rose into the air. The flaming grasshopper stove tumbled past her and shot out the open tent flap. Lockers, radio, food, charts, bedrolls, all fell in a surreal stream past her. Her head was bent to her chest, and her hands went out instinctively. Then she did a complete somersault, her hips falling past her head. Somewhere above her Briscoe was yelling about his legs, up at the other end of the tent. Aluminum tubing snapped like fresh popcorn around her.
So this is how a cat in a sack feels, she thought wildly. Then there was air and rain in her face. Seconds later there was pain, splitting her backside and racing up her spine, as she hit the ground.
Rolling over, she mumbled weakly. 'Carey?' A voice was alternately screaming and cursing in the hazy distance, legs and pain and guns all whipped up together in a verbal froth of anger and terror. Her mouth was full of mud. She started to lift up on her hands, collapsed as an unseen tormentor jabbed a long needle into her coccyx.
'Oh, God.' She lay on her side, her right arm under her. The screaming and demanding went on behind her.
Her gaze turned toward the noise. At the same time she became aware of a thick, rich stench like creosote. Lightning danced in a night sky of gray crepe.
Outlined in the light was the Thunderer. Occasionally it would let out a querulous bellow, a rumble like a simmering volcano. It shook her, mostly inside. She thought, a mite hysterically, of the reported sightings of such legends as the yeti and bigfoot, describing a hairy man or manlike ape eight or nine feet tall. How silly and foolish people are! she thought chidingly. Even the greatest of imaginary horrors fail when measured against the real thing.
What stood in the faded discharge of energy and light was at least seventeen feet high at the shoulder, and it stood in a hunched-over position. Long arms dragged the ground, ending in great burl knuckles that backed steamshovel-sized paws. Long white claws curved back into the palms. It was only remotely manlike, a grotesque hybrid of simian and gargoyle. It had ears like a bat's, vast black eyes, and a prognathous jaw from which protruded a pair of upcurving tusks like a warthog's.
She'd glimpsed a short, twitching tail, bald as a rat's. The entire slowly heaving mass was covered with short, bristly hairs, sparse but evenly distributed. Between the hairs the skin was composed of large scales like those of a tarpon.
It was holding the collapsed tent in one paw. She started to crawl away, not yet thinking of retreating to the boat but only of putting distance between herself and that transcendentally hideous form. She also worked to ignore the steady sobbing that was coming from within the smashed shape of the tent.
'UNNN . . . NURRRRR . . . . ' it bellowed. Another hand the size of their boat came off the ground, closed over its companion, and squeezed. There was a last, mercifully short shriek from within the tent. Then silence, save for rain and wind. The creature appeared to be exerting great strength. Watkins imagined she could detect s faint glow emanating from between those tightly pressed paws.
Thoughts of the size of those paws had reminded her of the boat. Thought of the boat reminded her of the guns lying within. As she painfully dragged herself through the muck, she considered poor Carey's modest .30-30, Crossett's ancient over-and-under. She struggled to her feet. One hand pressed tight over the fire in her lower back as though that would somehow ward off the agony. As she stood, another needle pierced her left ankle, and she nearly fell. Broken? She couldn't tell.
She might as well throw mud at the gigantus as use either of the guns. But there was something else: a tightly wrapped pack of gelignite charges for making soundings. If she could set a detonator in just one charge, place it where the monster might step nearby, it ought to discourage it. Perhaps even kill it.
She had no time to consider where the monster was, refused to consider what it might be doing with what remained of Caret'. All her energies, all her thoughts, were concentrated on reaching the boat. It appeared undisturbed, bobbing nervously in the fractured water. In the middle, beneath her seat, should be the small
