the Hydra on a lonely northbound stretch of Highway 23. Or actually, not run into. Sparks's Uncle Hubert had swerved his Ford Taurus off the road in order to avoid a head-on collision with the monster, and the car had ploughed nose-first down a steep bank into a gully.
Had Hubert, his wife and her mother died instantly in the crash, that would have been a mercy. But seatbelts and airbags preserved all three of them from fatal injury and reserved all three of them for a far worse fate. The Hydra descended the bank to the wrecked vehicle and proceeded to devour the dazed occupants more or less simultaneously, reaching in through the smashed-out windows with separate heads, hauling the family members out and tearing them apart. Louisiana PD had pieced the sequence of events together from the available evidence: skidmarks, Hydra spoor — oh, and the appalling bloody carnage of human remains that surrounded the Taurus for several yards in every direction.
Subsequently the Hydra had resumed its journey eastward and southward, passing down Florida's Gulf Coast to settle eventually in the Everglades, which were now a domain it had almost exclusively to itself. Since its arrival, most of the human residents in the southern portion of the state had moved out, leading to, among other things, a grievous property slump, with multimillion-dollar beachfront mansions now going for a song. Other victims of the Hydra's presence were the plethora of local theme parks — for all that they boasted newly erected 20-foot-tall steel security fences and watchtowers with manned machine-gun posts — and, indeed, the Florida tourism industry in general, those airboat rides and those tours of Hemingway's house looking increasingly unattractive to overseas visitors and Americans alike. Only the state's substantial population of retirees, because they were either too old or too ornery to care, were unwilling to be intimidated by having the Hydra on their doorsteps. They, therefore, had become the monster's principal quarry, its primary source of nutrition, a tastier and easier-to-catch morsel, softer in every sense, than its secondary source of nutrition, alligators. Every so often the Hydra would steal into the grounds of a rest home or gated community, using canals as its means of access, pluck some unwary Grey Panther or Silver Surfer from a sun lounger or wheelchair, and drag its screaming pension-age prey back into the water.
'It's quicker'n cancer,' commented one octogenarian Floridian, when asked by a TV reporter why she continued to live where she did after having watched two of her closest friends succumb to Hydra attack on separate occasions. 'You get to my age, you begin to think it's better to go fast, and while you've still got most of your inner organs and all of your marbles. Hydra wants to take me, like it did my gal pals Annie-May and Elvira? I say bring it on. Hope the damn thing chokes on my hip replacement.'
As for the Olympians, they appeared oblivious to the fact that the Hydra was at large, bringing impoverishment and euthanasia to the Sunshine State. Hermes could have come any time to retrieve it. He, along with Hera, who had power over the monsters, could have whisked the Hydra back to its pen on Mount Olympus, had Zeus instructed them to do so. Zeus, however, was not bothered, it would seem. Either he'd forgotten the Hydra was still out there, or else, perhaps, he simply had it in for America's Deep South.
The last confirmed sighting of the Hydra had been at a location just north of the Tamiami Canal, not far from the city of Copeland. That was just over a week ago, when an intrepid — some would say foolhardy — wildlife documentary film crew looking for footage of the creature had got exactly what they were after. Unfortunately their encounter with it had been a little more up-close and personal than they might have liked, and only one of them had emerged unscathed. The other two had been savaged to pieces and partially eaten, their deaths recorded for posterity on hi-def video by the surviving member, who was traumatised by the event but not so traumatised that he hadn't managed to auction the tape to the highest-bidding TV network for a seven-figure sum.
Landesman had made the Titans watch the gruesome video clip prior to embarking on the op.
'That is what you'll be facing,' he had said after they'd sat through it a harrowing three times. 'Be under no illusion: the Hydra is a hellish lethal beast. Hard to kill, too. It's capable of regenerating lost or damaged tissue almost instantly. No one's sure how. Some biologists have posited that it has huge quantities of self-organising blastema cells, which give it an exaggerated form of the ability of many reptiles and amphibians to re-grow lost legs or tails. Or it could, of course, be a magical creature of myth, and therefore has abilities that are beyond the powers of rational empiricism to account for.'
'It can be killed, though,' Sparks had said.
'Oh yes,' Landesman had replied. 'I believe it can.'
A few hours since venturing into the Everglades, the four Titans had seen a couple of alligators but nothing larger or more alarming than that. The 'gators had slithered away at their approach, seeking refuge in underbrush or deep water, and Barrington had remarked disparagingly about how small they were 'compared to the crocs back home.' Their snaggletooth grins were unnerving, though, and Sam was glad to be kitted out in armour that they hadn't a hope of biting through. She was gladder still of the substantial firepower that she and her cohorts were carrying.
Near midday, she called a rest stop. The Titans clambered out of the swamp onto the shady, dry elevation of a tree island, and broke out energy bars and bottled water. Removing her helmet, Sam felt the stagnant, damp Everglades air close in around her head, unbearably clammy, like being swaddled in a hot wet towel.
'Now I really appreciate these suits' microclimates,' she said. 'We'd be roasting alive otherwise.'
Barrington concurred. 'I'm as chilly as a brew in an eski.'
'If you'll excuse me,' said Sparks, standing, 'I need a comfort break. This may take some time.'
'Five minutes, no more,' Sam said.
'I'll need that long just to get my drawers down. These darn suits, they ain't toilet-friendly, you knowum saying?'
'Ten minutes, then. We need to get moving again soon.'
Sparks disappeared into a dense thicket of saw palmetto.
The time ticked by. Hamel occupied herself by checking her weapon, a lightweight, self-contained flamethrower fuelled by capsules of liquid hydrazine. Sam did likewise with her recoilless submachine gun. Not long ago Landesman had enthused to her about the beauty of the gun's design. It was constructed so as to direct the force of the recoil downwards, rather than into your shoulder. Where a. 45-calibre weapon typically had a kick like a mule, and you had muzzle climb to contend with, this one fired straight and true with scarcely a twitch in your hands, while still spitting out the rounds at a rate of over 4,000 per minute on full-auto. To Sam it looked like a gun that had been stripped down to its bare essentials, flensed, inelegant. She couldn't deny, though, that it was a joy to fire. There was something almost obscene in the way it could rip apart paper targets and yet, to the wielder, it might as well have been a water pistol for all the handling trouble it gave.
'Sam?' said Barrington. 'Base is calling in. They want a sitrep.'
'Not Sam. Tethys,' Sam said as she slid her helmet back on. She was reminding herself about her callsign as much as Barrington. 'Base, this is Tethys. We're just taking a breather.'
'I know,' said Landesman, five time zones and several thousand miles away. 'I can see. But why has Theia gone offline?'
'Theia's answering the call of nature. I imagine she wants some privacy.'
'I don't like being incommunicado with a Titan in the field.'
'Her ten minutes are nearly up. I'll go and see what's keeping her.'
Sam pushed her way into the palmetto thicket, shoving aside the long spiky leaves. There was no sign of Sparks — Theia. She forged further in. How deep into the thicket had Theia gone? How much privacy did a girl need? There was shy and then there was ridiculously bashful.
An unsettling feeling came over Sam. How still everything suddenly seemed. Not just still. Silent. The birdcalls were absent. Minutes earlier there had been a cacophony of cuckoo hoots and stork squawks and the up- down trills of mockingbirds. Now nothing. Even the incessant insect hum sounded subdued.
She knew then, without knowing quite how she knew, that the Hydra was nearby.
She lowered her gun from port-arms to ready.
Had it got Theia? Snatched her from the thicket?
There was no sign of a struggle, as far as she could see. The palmetto leaves and the ground underfoot appeared undisturbed, unbroken. But the Hydra was a cunning creature. It hunted alligators, after all, and they were no easy prey. Elderly humans were one thing, but it took stealth and guile to stalk and catch an alligator. The monster might well have sneaked up on Theia and grabbed her without a sound, too quickly for her to put up a fight.
Sam reached the outer edge of the thicket, where it gave onto open ground — a narrow mud beach that sloped down into the swamp water.
