Vines had grown thick up one wall and spilled over onto the roof, where they ran in every direction. They had grown around pipes, metal grating, poles, anything and everything had been consumed by the creeping foliage. He avoided the vines. There might be snakes or any number of other small but deadly critters living in the tangle. His earlier run-in with the snake had successfully filled his snake-sighting quota for the rest of his life as far as he was concerned.
After making two complete circuits of the roof, he walked toward the vine jungle living on the roof. Taking a handful of vines at random, he pulled on them, leaning his weight into it. A few broke, but most held. Most of the breakage happened near the runners at the end of the vines.
He found that he was a lot less afraid of snakes hiding in the mesh of vines than he’d first thought. Dehydration, fear, exhaustion, and a burning need to exact revenge made a man’s priorities shift a bit.
At the edge of the roof, he grabbed another handful of vines and tested their strength. They were surprisingly sturdy. He peered over the edge. The trick would be to bear hug enough of the vines to support his whole weight as he dangled twenty-plus feet above the ground. Below, the fall would be softened only by thick foliage. If there was pavement, or even a large rock or chunk of concrete under that blanket of green, a fall could still be deadly from that height.
Bending to get on his knees, he noticed the top of a small pipe hidden among the leaves of the creeper. He put his foot against it and pushed. It didn’t move. Clearing away the leaves and stalks revealed the pipe was attached to the building. The diameter was just large enough to fit comfortably in his hand.
“Yes!” He looked up to the clouds and said, “Thank you!”
Positioning himself carefully, he eased his legs over the side of the building and gripped the pipe with both hands. It supported his weight and didn’t even groan. Thinking that just maybe there was a God up there looking out for him after all, he began descending. The thicket of vines gave enough support to help him but not enough to hinder progress.
Descending about eight feet, he started having difficulty gripping the pipe. The vines had spiraled around it in thick twists that crushed under his grip and made the pipe slick with moisture. Struggling another three or four feet down, his feet and legs tangled in the mess. He paused to untangle his leg and started descending again, keeping his eyes on his footing. Every muscle in his body burned with the strain, and his hands cramped. Ten feet above the ground, he moved his hand down to get his next grip, and there was no pipe.
With his top hand slipping, he grabbed with his free hand, but it was too late, he was falling. Pawing at the vines as he fell away from the wall at an angle that landed him on his back, his legs still caught in the creeper and sticking up in the air.
The irony of it wasn’t lost on him. Just as he had started to think someone was up there looking out for him, a higher, benevolent power, he had fallen. He chuckled dryly. Remaining on his back, he used the axe to cut and pull the vines from around his legs.
“At least I’m out of there.” He stood and moved out of the tangle and onto a vestige of concrete sidewalk.
He circled the building but couldn’t find the plain block room he’d been in to start with. He tried to remember which way the sun had set when his car had left him stranded. That gave him only a broad idea, very broad actually, of which way to walk. He decided another round of the grounds was in order before going off into the swampy woods without knowing his heading for sure.
He moved outside the fence, which was as simple as walking through a large hole somebody had put in it long ago. A small tree had sprouted and grown through part of the cut away wire, holding it in place.
The place had a feral, outlaw feel to it, unlike the woods and mountains where his father used to take him on hunting trips. Those places had always exuded a peaceful, getting-in-touch-with-nature feeling. They were tranquil and always put him at ease. His father’s presence had been the only thing that had ever given off bad vibes in those woods.
But this was far different. It felt dangerous, lethal. The feeling put him on his guard and made him edgy as he began walking around the property in the band that had been cleared. Things moved beyond the tree line. The shadows within prevented him from seeing very far. He could imagine big, slavering cats stalking his movement with glowing green eyes and deadly intentions.
He stopped fifty feet from the swampy area. The air smelled hot and stale; he eyed the stagnant water in front of him with longing. His thirst overruled logic and he headed for the slight embankment. Keeping a keen eye out for movement, he knelt and scooped up a double handful of the rank water, bringing it to his parched lips without even looking at it.
The first drink had no taste; it was wet and slightly cooler than his mouth. He scooped more and poured it down his throat, tilting his head back to get every drop. There was an unpleasant dead aftertaste that was terrible when he exhaled. Holding his breath, he drank again. Swamp water wasn’t anyone’s first choice as drinking water, but he was beyond all that. If he didn’t have some hydration, he would never make it back to the road, let alone the gas station, and eventually to his family.
Leaning forward to scoop more water, he froze. A set of alligator eyes rode atop the sludgy water toward him. They were moving fast. He stood and backed up the muddy slope but lost his footing. The snotty ground acted like a greased slide determined to deposit him in the water. His foot disappeared beneath the water before he came to a stop.
The eyes advanced, unblinking. Eyes of a non-repentant serial killer, he thought, scrambling up the little bank and onto flat land again.
The gator paused in the water, its eyes tracking his movement. He didn’t dare turn his back and run. After several tense seconds, the gator moved slowly forward again, its horrible snout emerging a little at a time.
Robert gripped the axe and backed away slowly only glancing behind every few seconds to look for obstacles or other gators. For all he knew, they might hunt in packs down in the swamps. It wouldn’t have surprised him after everything he had seen lately.
The gator paused again at the edge of the water, its head tilted up the bank, eyes still on Robert. It happened so quickly that Robert was shocked. One second, its body was still submerged in dark water, the next, the gator was charging him, making a low rumbling noise.
He ran for the chain link fence and jumped, grabbing and climbing at the same time. He climbed to the top before he looked down. The alligator paced below, its snout turned up and partially open to reveal all those bone breaking, tissue slicing teeth.
Robert slid his arm under the barbed wire and laced his fingers through the fence from the other side. The bar in the crook of his elbow supported him. Realizing he was hanging on the fence, face-to-face with the barbed wire he had thought was unnecessary, he grinned and rested his cheek on his arm.
“Well, I figured out why someone might try to climb the fence, eh?” He spat at the gator below.
Thankful the alligator apparently had a short attention span, Robert watched as it walked nonchalantly back toward the swamp. He remained on the fence until the six-foot monstrosity had disappeared from his view and then he leaped off the fence.
He knew which way not to walk this time. Thinking only of avoiding the swamp completely, he crossed the overgrown parking lot that lay opposite the swamp and continued into the woods beyond.
Soon, though, the fetid smell filled the air again. It was farther away. He reached a drop off and was amazed to see an abandoned guard shack, a squat, building, and the remnants of a gravel road cutting through part of the forest. He hiked down the hill knowing he had found the building at last.
The little gate that had once served to stop vehicles at the guard’s shack had been broken from its post and thrown into a thicket of briars. It was a very odd place to have a gate and a guard shack considering the high bank would have pr
evented anyone from driving close to the facility from there. Not to mention, there was no road the way he had come. It had all been forest. Shaking his head, he decided that nothing out there had made sense.
He turned to look for the trail the men had used and saw that a large, manmade tunnel opening was set into the bank he had descended. It was one of the vehicle access tunnels he had traveled, no doubt. A wall of blocks had been put up to seal the passage, but some of them had fallen away to reveal the iron bars of a security gate like the one that sealed the parking garage he had seen inside.
The facility could not be seen from the guard shack, and he knew it wouldn’t be visible on the remains of the little gravel road. It was too far away. There were possibly miles of underground tunnels. He turned from the building, and turned his thoughts away, too. He scoured the land in front of the building and found the path.
The lowering sun meant he only had a few hours at most to get to the road. If the sun set before he could get out of the woods, he wouldn’t be able to find his way out.
The path wended into the thicker part of the forest and then took a sudden, sharp right. Ten steps later, it went left and opened up into a semi-clearing. There were three paths leading out of the clearing.
He ruled out one path quickly as it was too narrow for the men to drag him through. It was probably an animal trail. The other two, though, led in different directions and both widened out a few yards in. Plenty of room on either one to drag a partially unconscious man.
Choosing the path that looked as if it led away from the swampy area, he started walking. As he went, he searched the ground for signs of footprints or drag marks, anything that would let him know he was definitely on the right track. But there was none of that. A few game tracks and lots of grass, weeds, vines, and bugs was all he could see.
The forest looked exactly the same in all directions. Trees. Huge trees, small trees, twisted, sinister looking trees. Nothing stuck out that jogged his memory. Nothing made him say, ‘Aha! I remember that.’
The shadows grew steadily longer and darker. From experience, he knew darkness fell inside a forest faster than outside it. He thought he probably had a ninety minutes to two hours, tops.
“I don’t have time for this to be the wrong path.” He walked with more confidence and determination.
No matter what happened, he had to get out of the woods by nightfall. Along the way, he found several places where the trail branched off and meandered deeper into the shadowy trees, but each time, he was sure the trails were too narrow, and he kept to the main one.
The temperature dropped a few degrees, but the humidity still rode high enough to make the air feel damp as he trudged through it. After walking for what he considered too long, he caught the distinct odor of swampy water again. He had smelled that when the men had first dragged him into the woods. Thinking he was getting close to the spot where they had parked the truck, he moved along faster, with a sense of relief building.
As it often does out in the Louisiana thick woods, the swamp sneaked up on him. One moment, he was looking ahead, side to side, and saw only solid ground; the next, he was seeing the sunlight reflecting off patches of exposed water.
“Shit!” He kicked at the dirt and stood still. The swamp extended as far as he could see in both directions.
Trees grew up right out of the water, which was so still it looked like glass. The foliage reflected in its surface, serving as a type of camouflage. What had looked like merely patches of water turned out to be completely connected to each other, forming a wending ribbon of dirty water that was too wide to walk through.
If he hadn’t been afraid of the alligators, he could have waded in and been on the other side in maybe two minutes. But there were gators there and he was afraid of them. Any sane person would be afraid to slip into that murky water knowing there were gators all around.
He didn’t have time to go back to the clearing and take the other path. The sun would be down before he got there. He followed the water to the right, searching for a narrowing. A gator floated just under the water, tracking him. It was far enough away that he was confident he could avoid it if it came after him, but the prospect of merely being in its sight was unnerving. The last one proved unpredictable and he thought that was probably representative of the entire species. On the other bank, blending in with the tentacle-like roots of some of the trees, smaller alligators sunned themselves. The gap between the banks got wider in that directions. He counted a total of seven alligators in the water or on the other bank. The bank at his feet was slowly slipping into shadow as the sun lowered.
He turned around and walked the other way, counting the alligators as he went. Seven. None had slipped onto the strip of land to lay in wait for him. The one in the water tracked his progress from the center of the water, turning, keeping only its eyes above the water line. He hated those cold, unblinking, reptilian eyes on him. He hated worse that he could feel intimidated by them. Passing a shallow spot, he noted the gator didn’t follow him. That was good and worrisome. If the gators didn’t follow him to the shallows, what was in them? Something worse than alligators? He could only think of snakes, but gators wouldn’t be afraid of snakes; they wouldn’t be afraid of anything.
He found two possible spots to cross. The water looked shallower in the narrow places. Shallow and narrow did not mean it was free of dangers—it just meant he stood a better chance of crossing quickly and surviving.
On the other side of the narrow strip, he saw a strip of land that ran a twisting path through the marshy land on the other side. It looked solid enough from his perspective, and even though it wasn’t the route by which he had entered the forest, it would have to serve as his route out. Getting to the road was paramount.
To his right, about sixty feet away, the gator remained watching him. Robert moved to the narrow spot about thirty feet farther from the gator and felt more comfortable with that choice. Looking to the left, he saw nothing in the water. No movement rippled the perfectly still surface.
Okay, this is it. Once you’re in, there’s no turning back, he thought.
At the edge of the water, he peered down, hoping the slope underneath its grimy surface was a gentle one, and that the appearance of shallowness was a truth instead of a cruel illusion. He had never been a strong swimmer, and he rarely liked being in water deeper than three feet. He wasn’t afraid of water, he simply preferred to be on dry land.
Balancing the axe on his shoulder, his wrist through the loop and his hand gripping the handle, he stuck his foot into the water. It was warm. The ripples traveled outward in concentric circles and reached the other side, some twenty-five or thirty feet away. He scanned the water in all directions. Nothing moved and a heavy silence fell over the land.
He stepped completely into the water. It rose to just above his knees. The ground underneath was snotty, and his feet slipped and slid as he tried to walk. A cypress sprouted from the water nearby. Spanish moss hung like curtains from every limb, dangling only a few feet above the surface of the water. The buttresses at the bottom of the trunk were stained in dark horizontal lines from the rising and lowering of the waterline over the years. It occurred to him that under different circumstances, the place might be beautiful.
The cypress trees crowded the banks and their roots vied for water, growing in twists and tangles like the gnarled arthritic fingers of giant witches reaching toward the swamp. Loons cried in the distance, a sound he could have done without. It was a haunting, lonely cry that made him think of a woman being stabbed to death and that cry was her last sound on earth.
Unable to see around the tree, he edged to the right a few feet and leaned forward, straining. In the swamp, there was no telling what might be hiding behind such a large, convoluted tree trunk.
Keeping his eyes on the tree, he moved forward slowly, carefully placing each foot and shifting his weight gently. His progress
was silent but not unnoticed. The gator in the water moved to the shallow Robert had passed. It stood watching him. The water reached barely past its belly. It looked to be about six feet long.
Apparently, its progress had been silent, too. Robert moved a little faster. The other bank was drawing closer. Fifteen feet. Ten. Eight. And, finally, he could step out of the algae-scrim and filth. Bugs, mostly mosquitoes, buzzed loudly, attracted to his sweat, blood, and new coating of nasty. He swatted them away, but they did their share of damage, landing on his back where he couldn’t reach, leaving itchy, burning welts in their wake.
The gator in the water moved swiftly to the shallow Robert had exited and stared at him from the water, its snout open a few inches. Robert backed away, wondering if the damn thing was going to charge after him as the other one had. He counted ten steps and turned, meaning to run at least a short distance, but he was faced with water. More dirty, stinking water with a thick coat of algae instead of a scrim.
The water was bad, but what was in the water was worse. Seven sets of eyes floated just above the water and all of them faced him. He wondered if they belonged to the seven smaller alligators that had been sunning farther up the way. Sneaky bastards, he thought.
They were widely spread out to either side; none were extremely close to him or the shallow place in front of him. He looked back. The big gator had moved closer to the bank and stood on the shallow like a damn sentinel. ‘Nope. You’re not coming back this way,’ its stance said. And he believed it.
Any direction he could move, there was water within a few feet that he would have to wade through. And those gators could access every possible escape route. The shallow waters in front of him looked to be only several inches deep. He thought he might be able to run across faster than the gators could get to him. But they could also follow him out of the water.
S79 The Horror in the Swamp Page 15