rolled.
He grabbed the flashlight, switched it on, swung it wildly about the clearing. His eyes took in too much, too many awful images for his brain to sort: the liquid spilling from his lacerated arm, the wreckage of the campsite, the rent and mangled corpse in the sand. His eyes fixed idiotically on the dark-soaked remnants of a double sleeping bag—the blood appeared crimson only in the bright center of the beam.
The throb of the crickets. Everywhere. The throb of blood rushing in his ears. Deafening. The mistiness was not his vision—thin fog curled through the clearing. He realized someone had been shrieking the same thing over and over, but he couldn’t make out the words. There was movement. “Jenny, where are you?” Swinging the tiny arc of light, he stumbled bleeding into the pines, and they closed around him. Crickets rose to a dense pitch. He could hear running. Cries came from all around him. But, near fainting with shock and pain, he could see no one, the flashlight providing only fleeting, distorted glimpses.
Now he heard something else, a growling, a thrashing. The child’s white face, blank with fear, flashed at him, then vanished, lost in the blackness.
“Amelia!” Sickened with dread, he held the flashlight out in front of him. The beam thrust forward, the shaft of light striking…
…a visage out of a nightmare.
All thought of fighting, of trying to help the others fled his mind. Casey screamed once, an ugly chopped-off sound; then he dropped the flashlight and plunged into the night.
They all ran, scattered, screaming. They blundered onto trails and off again, losing them where the pines grew thickest. “Alan, where are you?” They ran in winding circles. “Help me! Please, Alan! It’s near me, oh God!”
Casey wore only jockey shorts, and branches whipped his legs. Long grasses stung hotly. Behind him, Sandy’s screams became gurgles. As his mind whirled in nausea and panic, the pines sped past him, sometimes striking him hard. His heart thundered, and blood pumped from the ruptured flesh of his arm.
He crashed into a tree, and front teeth broke with a sharp crunch. Pain hammered in his brain, and he staggered back, whimpering, then stumbled heavily onward. Darkness came in denser waves, shadows more solid than the night, black pulsations he suspected were internal. He knew he had to get farther away before he lost consciousness, and he clutched at his arm, tried to squeeze off the bleeding, feeling the thick, slow warmth ooze over his fingers.
He sucked burning gouts of air into his lungs. The pines spun, and they made noise, but the noises lay behind him, and he plowed through bushes that clawed the flesh of his chest and legs. Where they fell on dried leaves, beads of blood made a rapid pattering, but when they dropped on parched sand or pine needles, they were silent as soft rain. Mists spiraled across the face of the moon. In the pale light, invisible birds skittered from tree to tree.
Behind him, the haze broke, and from the deep shadows something glowed, cold and green with phosphorescence. The flashlight? Had he run in a circle?
As the ground dropped away beneath him, he shouted wordlessly, clawing at air.
Moonlight glinted off the black surface of the water.
Splashing, choking, he thrashed in panic, then found the soft bottom. The water was chest deep, and he plowed through it, mouth filled. Dead reeds snapped under his clutching hands as he fell across a submerged sandbar.
In a swirl of fog, he fought his way, gasping, through mats of water plants, thoughts of poisonous snakes slithering through his mind. Gases bubbled up around him, and mosquitoes clouded in a suffocating swarm—they covered his bare chest and back. Sinking, he tried to run, but his legs barely moved through the mire, pushing through rushes. Blood clouded the water behind him, coiling and swirling.
Something rose ahead, where whitish vapor tangled through long reeds, something black as the withered pines surrounding it. Dark and squat. A shed of some sort. Shelter. Nearing the end of the marsh, he staggered through deep foulness. All around him, talons of stunted trees clawed into the slippery ground. He fell on his face, plowing a furrow in the fetid muck with his chin. Struggling to his feet, he fell again, knees sinking. As he yanked himself loose, something clicked agonizingly in his ankle. He slid, crawled, slithered. When he tried to listen for the sounds of pursuit, he could hear only the sucking mire and his choking breath.
The hut stood windowless and abandoned in the moonlight. At last, stumbling across hardened mud, he cried out and beat at the walls with black-caked arms. Limping painfully, he pressed between the crowding pines and groped along the walls for the door.
It stuck. Weak and dizzy, he put his shoulder to it, heaved, and the door gave slightly with a moldering crunch. With a grinding, the door, ancient hinges rusted through, tottered, showering him with dirt. It struck him on the head—dull agony—and he tasted fresh blood once more, as the door lodged, leaning against the bending pines, revealing an angled opening of less than a foot in width, a passage into absolute darkness.
With his shoulder and chest halfway through the crack, he nearly recoiled—a sour stench emanated from the hot interior. Pulling himself in, he scraped his legs on the doorframe. With a squelch, his foot went through something on the floor, and instantly the smell rose. He gagged on vomit. Rankness choked the air from his lungs. Dark forms swelled in his brain. Beyond knowing or caring what he shared the hut with, he clung, sobbing, to the walls, their roughness slick with mold.
The moon sank into the pines.
Waves of blackness swept over him, but he didn’t fall: he was back in his sleeping bag, and then he was home in bed, but there was something, something squishing, and why did his arm hurt so much? Foulness. Squishing?
A wet slithering moved along the outside wall.
He opened his eyes.
He was peering through the door opening when it came under the wall behind him. Powerful arms went around him, gripping.
Hot and dripping at his back, it drooled on his cheek, pressing him. His own screams seemed to draw inward and penetrate his guts as his ears were torn away, and the smooth flesh at the back of his neck was assaulted by sharp teeth and rough tongue.
“We should keep the lights like this all the time.” Raising his voice above the siren shriek, Larry fumbled about in the half-light. “It seems to have a real good calming effect.”
“On you, maybe,” Athena said as she gazed down at a blood-streaked face. The child had finally stopped gulping and sobbing, had lapsed into a terrible, staring quiet. She checked the pulse. Very faint. When she let go of the wrist, a film of liquid remained on her fingertips. Slowly, she resumed helping Larry to bind the seeping redness.
Outside, the light failed, and inside the rig, one of the fluorescent tubes flickered.
“Did you see those tracks?” He wound bandages around the girl’s arm. “Boy, there must’ve been maybe eight, nine dogs, at least. You see the way her dog’s body was tore up? What probably happened was the wild ones went after her mutt, and the kid tried to save it and got in the middle. Was that about what happened, sweetheart?” The girl just stared up at him, and by the time her mouth began to move, he had already turned away. “You think that sounds right, ’Thena?”
She shrugged, dropping a roll of bandages.
Everything she did today was off the beat, he noticed, watching her grope around on the floor. He supposed it had something to do with the injured child, though he sure wouldn’t have figured her for that type.
She stood up, looking pale and sweaty. “The wounds aren’t too bad,” she muttered. “She’ll need stitches.” One arm was chewed, though not deeply, but the torn flap of the cheek would probably leave a scar. She found
