Prologue - Only Dangerous In The Breeding Season

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...?