Prologue - Only Dangerous In The Breeding Season
A
night so black.
Running,
scrambling, along a sodden swamp pathway hemmed on both sides by swaying
vegetation I could barely see.
Somewhere
in the dark behind me, I could hear voices, barking to each other in garbled
syllables, the whistling sound of flails, flattening reeds and thrashing among
the underbrush. Under the staccato human yelps, the constant quaking rhythm of
the swamp at night...frogs, beetles, crickets, grackles, possums, alligators,
nameless slithering things, all clicking, buzzing, hissing, creaking,
whistling, croaking out there, somewhere in the limitless black.
I
scrambled on across the damp, yielding soil. Out here, the pinewoods only a
memory, the trail was bolt-straight and fringed with bulrushes, tangled soaking
weeds and arching palmettos that reached out to flick the face. I had a clear path,
but it ran only in one inescapable line – beyond the straggly mat of vegetation
lay the water, still, viscous and so endlessly dark. The voices were still a
distance away, but the overgrown dykes that split the swamp into parallel-edged
rectangles guided them inescapably closer, even in the blackness, to their
quarry.
Me.
I
breathed in, controlled as I could, strangling any loud gasp that could draw
them forward even quicker. They had no flashlights, no narrow beams lancing the
dark, my one comfort in the doomed task of escaping them on the swamp railroad
that let me, and the pursuers, travel only in straight lines. Now, they
couldn’t be sure where I had gone, but eventually...they couldn’t miss on this unbending
path. Suddenly, I had half-stumbled into a clammy thicket of reeds blocking my
progress...reeds slapping me in the face meant I’d hit a T-junction in the path.
Left? Right? Left!
I
skidded left and the path continued at 90 degrees, clear enough for me to
manage a half-jog but still with towering foliage close on both sides,
rank-scented vegetation I could more sense than see. Wait...the voices were
receding, or, better yet, no longer following. Maybe they were no happier in
the dark than me? I stopped to listen.
I
bent over and used the breathing space...literally, to breathe harder and quell
the dull pounding in my chest. Voices, further away now, merging with the
natural squeaks, groans and trills of the night swamp, pulsing cadences
unceasing. A shout...no, more a guffaw.
Why? I strained in the dark to identify shadows, to delineate earth from sky,
movement from stillness. Then I saw it – a tracer of light lacing through the
swamp undergrowth where none had been before. They hadn’t abandoned the chase,
just waited for somebody to arrive who could send the piercing flashlight beam
arcing along the pathways, animating the dark stage. I drew a deep breath and
stumbled onward along the one path, the true path, the only path I could, my
straight line through the swamp.
There
were more voices now – four, five? Too many, far too many, and they were armed.
To defend myself, I had the wet clothes I stood up in and a sharp tongue.
I
lose.
They
hadn’t made the turn into my left branch of the path yet – maybe they’d go
right at the junction. Was there a
right? I didn’t truly know but they’d see quickly enough. In the thin glow of dead
cloud under muted stars, I could see another bank of dense foliage dead ahead –
another junction in the network. I turned left – an interlocking tangle. To the right, then – the same. The path
had come to a full stop and the maze was at an end. There was no other way to
turn. Behind me, closing as they must, the hunters.
Fatal.
There
was only one way to go – straight ahead...beyond the path and through the vegetation, to the swamp
itself, plunging into the terminal uncertainty of what lay beyond. I peeled
apart two toppling bulrushes and inserted myself into the knotted jumble of
plant-life, sharp-edged reeds nicking at my face and hands. One step inside the
tangle, my feet sank into ooze. Forward, thrashing my way into the foliage, no
longer caring about the noise, one fragment of my brain saying ‘it’s okay, they’re shouting themselves, they’ll
never hear this above their own noise’...other fragments too scared to form
thoughts at all. Four more steps and I was through the band of marginal
vegetation and I was treading out into deeper water of the swamp, sinking
slowly into the blank, shapeless, formless dark. Two feet deep, three feet, further
yet...my feet touched bottom, water sluggishly ebbing around my chest now, feet
half-sunk into a morass of muck. Here, I would be invisible from the path, no
doubt.
Beneath
me, around me, things moved and swirled in the black water.
Things.
My
head rang with a piece of information somebody had told me once,
half-remembered, half-digested.
Alligators,
it went, are only dangerous in the breeding season.
When
was that, exactly, the alligator
breeding season...?
