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
