What the hell had happened here?
No time to think about it. In the trees, a yellowish flicker.
Robbed of his glasses, he saw it only as a tremulous blur, a blob of color shivering like a raindrop on a windowpane. He identified it anyway. Jack’s flashlight.
The bastard was hunting her in the black swamp water, looking for a clean shot.
With the Beretta, the flash, and the knife. Jack enjoyed a triple advantage over either of his adversaries. Steve could think of only one possible point in his own favor.
He doesn’t know I’m here.
A small consolation, but it was all he had.
Soundlessly he swung down off the boardwalk, into the inky water, and joined in the chase.
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.
