But then a wave of torpor insinuated itself as a last vestige of the chemical washed across his forebrain, sinuous molecules urging sleep, a resumption of the comforting nothin ness that took away the fear of being cocooned like this.
No. Fight that. You know who did this. He has plans. He doesn’t want you. But he’ll use you to bring Sherman in.
You have to be ready when he comes back. Breathe. Exhale the poisons.
Reinvigorate the bloodstream with fresh oxygen.
After a few minutes, the deep breathing began to work, and he felt the insidious chemical recede. Then he tried the tape bonds on his arms and feet. Tight, unyielding. But he knew about tape. The secret to tape was steady pressure.
Tape was plastic fabric. Hard to break with brute force without first tearing it, but ultimately, it was stretchable. This was an exercise in isometrics. Put on steady pressure, then relax. It was difficult with his hands being back-to-back, but the sword exercises had built unusual strength in his forearms. Push out, like trying to do the breaststroke.
Relax. “Men do it again. Keep doing it. Push out. Relax. Get one hand free, then the other, and then get out of the bag. But first the tape.
Push. Breathe. Relax. Push.
Hiroshi drove them in Sherman’s car. It was fully dark by the time they reached and went past the entrance to Slade Hill Road. Sherman had Karen’s .45; she carried a Browning .380 semiautomatic, which Hiroshi had produced from the gun locker. She sat up front with Hiroshi, with the admiral perched on the edge of the backseat like a kid trying to see everything out the windows. “That’s the entrance to the road that goes up to the trailer,” she announced quietly as they drove past the familiar trash piles in the ditch. They had talked about how best to approach the trailer on the way over. They decided to go past the entrance, turn around, and get out somewhere above the Slade Hill Road entrance, on the premise that it would be easier to walk downhill to the trailer than climb up to it in the darkness. She had told Sherman about the POS tmaster’s snake stories. Hiroshi drove back up the hill until Karen signaled for him to stop abreast of what looked like an abandoned trailer pad. “We should be about a quarter mile above the entrance to Jack’s road,” she said.
“Okay, then it’s show time,” the admiral announced, hefting the big Colt. They each ‘ had a flashlight, whose lenses the admiral had darkened by using a red felt-tipped pen. Hiroshi’s instructions were to drive back down to the entrance to Slade Hill Road and park the car facing out on the road. Karen and the admiral got out, closing the car doors as quietly as they could. Hiroshi drove off, with one further instruction: to call Mcnair thirty minutes after he had parked to tell him that they were on the hill.
Karen waited to get her eyes adjusted to the darkness.
The sky was overcast, with a low scud blowing down toward the river. She realized they would be walking across the face of Slade Hill rather than down any slope. She suggested they bear left, partially up the hill, so that they would come down on the trailer and traverse the dirt road rather than have to climb, any part of it.
Sherman nodded in the darkness. He pushed the light on his watch.
“Nineteen-thirty,” he said. “We’d better go.”
They set out into the woods, where immediately they found themselves enveloped in a tangle of vines and thick vegetation. Sherman led the way, and they both soon picked up sticks to use to push the brambles out of their faces. She hoped they were going in a straight line across the hill, but there was really no way to tell in the darkness. The ground was soft and rocky, with patches of ankle-deep mud in places. Karen tripped and fell at one point, and then realized she had lost the .380.
They spent five minutes searching for the gun in the weeds, and this time she put it into a zippered pocket of the windbreaker. The admiral paused periodically to listen, but the woods were silent, with only some night insects and the occasional rustle of small game getting out of their way. The night air was heavy and humid as the front approached, compressing the atmosphere.
After twenty minutes, they could see a single dim light below. and to their right, which Karen assumed was the bikers’ trailer. Something snapped a stick up ahead of them in a grove of trees. They froze and listened for a few minutes, but there was no other sound. Finally, the admiral motioned that they should go on. Karen checked that she still had the gun, and she was about four paces to his left when the snake let go, an alarmingly loud buzz that sounded as if it was coming from just in-front of her. She froze..
Sherman turned around in the darkness. “Where is it?” he whispered.
“Can you tell?”
“To my right. Can’t tell how close.”
The snake buzzed again as Sherman stepped closer to where Karen had assumed her one-legged stance. He probed the bushes where the noise was coming from, then stopped when he realized he didn’t know how close the snake was to Karen.
“I’ll try to distract it,” he said, probing very carefully now with his stick. “If I feel it hit my stick, I’ll sing out, and you jump backward, okay?”
The snake stopped buzzing, and Sherman froze. “Now what?” she said, her throat dry. Neither one of them was properly dressed for rattlesnake country. Sherman swore and then began tapping his stick on the ground.
Nothing happened. Karen felt her first real surge of fear. As long as it was buzzing, she knew about where the damned thing was.
Now, she could only imagine it slithering between her feet, or gathering to strike.
Sherman stopped the tapping. “In theory, they’re as scared of us as we are of them. Supposedly, they’ll escape if allowed to.” In theory, huh?” she said. Her leg was getting tired, and she hated not being able to move. She put all her weight onto her left leg and moved her own stick to the right in the damp grass, probing for the dark patch where the buzzing sound had started. There was no response. Then she described a circle in the grass within two feet of where she was standing, still with no response.
“Hell with it,” she said, putting her foot down gingerly.
“I think it’s gone.”
Sherman beat the bushes between them more aggressively with his stick.
“I think you’re right,” he said, and turned around to proceed. He took one step, and a loud buzzing erupted right in front of him. It was his turn to freeze.
“Damn it,” he said. “Now it’s right in front of me.”
“How close?” Karen asked, trying to see around him without moving.
“Close enough,” he said, his voice tight as the snake buzzed again. “I’m even afraid to move my stick. Circle around! Come in from ahead of me and distract the damned thing!”
Karen went sideways, probing carefully ahead with her stick, moving uphill of where the admiral was frozen in place. She stepped very carefully, not placing a foot until she had swept the ground ahead and to the side. She had heard the old tale about rattlers traveling in pairs. That sounded like a big snake. She had just about made it halfway around him, at a distance of about six feet, when another snake let go, this time in front of her. As Sherman swore out loud, she froze again, focusing her senses, trying to detect the snake’s position. It’s a goddamned minefield, she thought. Then her heart gave a leap when the tip of her stick hit something that did not I feel like a tuft of grass.
The snake buzzed louder, and she realized she had stopped breathing in anticipation of a strike.
She pulled the stick back, but it caught momentarily and pulled something off the ground. She jumped back then, throwing the stick off, certain that the damned snake was on it. She stepped back and to the left, but to her horror, another snake started up to her left, about five or six feet away. She froze again, not sure of what the hell to do.
Sherman was calling to her as the buzzing stopped.
“Karen! Stand still ‘ We’ve disturbed a nest!”
“I am standing still! There’re three of the damned things out here. I don’t know which way to go!”
He had no answer for that, and they both stood there for a minute, immobilized, listening carefully. They could hear nothing but the wind.
“Karen,” he said.
“What?”
“Did you throw your stick?”
