Out for Blood

by Michael P. Spradlin

  A few yards farther into the woods, a gap opened in the trees. Beneath his feet, the ground grew softer. He sank up to his knees in swampy, muddy water, nearly shouting with joy.

  As quickly as he could, he covered his hair, face, and body in a thick coating of mud. He crawled to the edge of the small pit and lay on his back with just his face sticking above the surface. He tried to consciously slow his breathing. Pterogators could hear almost as well as they could see.

  The animals called to each other. They were closing in. A few moments later, they glided out of the trees and landed on the ground just yards away. They carefully sniffed the air, turning in quick circles, their heads leaning one way and then the other as they listened for any sound that might reveal his whereabouts.

  One of them put its nose to the ground, as if it were a bloodhound trying to follow his trail. The small marshy bog he lay in was probably fifteen feet across, and the creatures were sniffing the edge of it, understanding the thing they were chasing had been here but now its scent had mysteriously dissipated.

  Dr. Newton willed himself to stillness. His shoulders were burning with pain. It felt to him as if someone had poured gasoline on them and lit a match. He closed his eyes, afraid the Pterogators might recognize the two white dots in the mud and launch themselves at him.

  All he could do was listen to them grunt and growl as they circled ever closer. One of them huffed and clawed at the muddy bog. Dr. Newton squeezed his eyes shut, preparing for the sharp rake of claws to sever his flesh.

  He was unsure how many minutes passed, and whether it was shock or fatigue he couldn’t tell, but he suddenly realized that everything was quiet. The insects and frogs nearby began chirping again. Carefully opening one eye, then the other, he looked out to see the Pterogators were gone. Not taking any chances, he didn’t move for several more minutes. Then, slowly, and as quietly as possible, he lifted himself to his feet.

  The pain and loss of blood made him light-headed, but as he carefully crept through the trees and back to the road, he couldn’t help but smile. He had survived a Pterogator attack.

  No longer having the strength to run, he plodded along the road. The moon lit his way, riding high in the sky.

  Above him in the darkness, several hundred flying shapes crossed through the sky, temporarily blocking the moonlight. Dr. Newton did not look up. He did not see the colony flying along, and did not hear the screeching sound they made when they spotted a lone target stumbling along the road.

  They dived toward the ground.

  AS EMMET LIKED TO POINT OUT, CALVIN WAS QUIET even when he was being chatty. Calvin lay on the bed in his room, staring up at his ceiling in the darkness. Sometimes he wished he were more like Emmet, who was always so certain of his beliefs. And Emmet also took action, even though he pretended to be afraid and incompetent for a laugh. He had gone into the heart of the Everglades after his dad, and he’d rescued Apollo. And on another very important level, he understood what life was like for Calvin. After all, he’d lost his mom.

  Calvin’s mom tried to get him talking when they returned home from the police station. She had been trying to get him to open up to her ever since he’d come home from the rez in the summer. He loved his mother. She tried so hard, and was smart, and good, and cared about people. And she loved the Everglades almost as much as he did. She didn’t know that Calvin knew the park service had offered her promotion after promotion. They had given her the chance to run other parks, or even to move to Washington, D.C. and work there. When he was around the office, he heard other people talking. Calvin was so quiet, he often went unnoticed. But she turned them all down, because she knew Calvin couldn’t leave here. It would mean leaving his father behind.

  “Are you okay, hon?” she asked, peeking into the door of his bedroom.

  “Yeah. I’ll be okay. It was pretty hairy though,” he admitted.

  “I can only imagine. Calvin, I want you to know how proud I am of you. It takes someone very brave to keep a cool head like you do.”

  He shrugged. Calvin didn’t think about things like that. He looked at it more as a case of doing what the situation demanded.

  “I guess.”

  “Listen, son. I know this has been a hard few months and I’ve been —”

  “Mom, really. It’s all right. I don’t want you worrying about me or Emmet or anything else except finding Dr. Catalyst. I’m fine.”

  “Do you want to talk about the Green Corn ceremony?”

  “Do I … uh … well. Okay. I was thinking, if it’s all right with you, I would ask Uncle Yaha to stand with me. I’d really like it if it could be you, Mom. But the tradition of the tribe …”

  She tried to keep the disappointment from her face, and failed. Yaha was his grandmother’s brother and a tribal elder. A good man, but most of his father’s family had been cool to his mother from the beginning of their relationship. It was complicated.

  “I think Yaha would be happy to. He’s a fine choice.” She smiled weakly at him, then closed the door, leaving Calvin alone in his room.

  Calvin’s grandmother was still alive, but his grandfather had disappeared in the swamp years ago. He’d gone out to hunt and never came back. It happened a lot. The Everglades could be a dangerous place. It had taken his grandfather and his father. His mom told him she always thought the disappearance of Calvin’s grandfather was why his father had lived out there. Like he was always looking.

  For a kid, losing a parent before it’s time is something you never really got over. This summer, while he spent time with his family up at the rez, his father’s absence was like an itch he couldn’t scratch. Calvin glanced over at the wall, at a photo of him and his dad hanging above his desk. They were with a group of airboat pilots buzzing along out on the River of Grass. Someone had snapped the shot of the two of them, his father at the tiller and Calvin strapped into the passenger seat. His dad had his shoulder-length hair loose, and the wind pulled it behind him like a miniature cape. Calvin still remembered that day. He remembered that exact moment. He didn’t think he’d ever been happier.

  Emmet popped into his head again. He thought about how much alike and yet how different they were. Calvin admired Emmet and all that he had done. Losing his mom, being jerked all the way from Montana to Florida and plopped down into the middle of all this, he marveled at how well his friend had adapted.

  He would never be able to do anything like that. Calvin needed rules. Order. Emmet seemed to thrive in chaos.

  And now? Now Calvin didn’t know what to do.

  Because he’d never told his mom about the photo.

  There was a photo in his dad’s journal that he’d found in the bottom of the toolbox. His father had tucked it carefully away in the garage. It was a battered old notebook full of his father’s observations about the Everglades. There were notes about tides and creeks and compass headings to hidden fishing spots. Jottings about the behavior of birds and animals, and a lifetime of knowledge gained from living out in the River of Grass, the one place Lucas Geaux loved more than any other.

  It had drawings and sketches of plants and animals — apparently his father had a talent for art.

  And there were some mementoes in the journal as well. A clipping from the tribal newspaper about his grandfather’s disappearance, a folded-up copy of his father’s high-school diploma, and a photograph.

  In the picture, his father was maybe Calvin’s age. There was another boy and four men with them, all of them at a camp in the Everglades. Gator skins, freshly caught fish, and even a deer hide stretching on a frame were all laid out in the background. Calvin had studied the photo for many hours. He recognized one of the men as his great-uncle Yaha, but he didn’t know the three others, and had never seen any of them on the reservation.

  The thing is, he’d never told anyone about the photo. He’d wanted to, but if he did, then he would have to tell someone where he found it. There was no way he could lie. It just wasn’t in him. He didn’t have Emmet’s
ability to make up a whopper on the spot.

  But the notebook was something between just him and his father. He felt connected to him when he looked through it. And he didn’t want anyone to know about it.

  At every reservation event, every family gathering he went to, all the picnics and festivals and ceremonies, he had looked for those men. But he never saw them. Not anywhere.

  Until tonight.

  When Officer Tracy Mackey had finished her Identi-Kit sketch and turned around the computer screen to show them, Calvin recognized him.

  He was one of the men in the photo from his father’s journal. Calvin had wanted to speak up, he truly did. But he couldn’t. If he did, he would have to tell where he’d found the picture. It would mean the only thing of his father’s that was truly his, wouldn’t be his anymore.

  He picked up the photo and looked at it. The man was younger in the picture, obviously, but there was no doubt in Calvin’s mind it was the same guy. But who was he? Calvin needed to know.

  Quietly, he slipped the snapshot inside his backpack and climbed out his bedroom window. He was going to catch the bus to Everglades National Park HQ, get THE DRAGONFLY I, and go find some answers. Calvin left a note on his desk for his mom: “Don’t worry. I’m okay. I’ll be back.” Calvin smiled; if only Emmet were here. He would say, “Dude! That note is so totally you.”

  The lights were out in the neighboring houses and the street was quiet. When he was certain no one was around, he scurried to the sidewalk and hurried up the street to the intersection and the bus stop.

  What he was doing was dangerous. He knew that. But he also understood something no one else did. If he got into trouble — if he didn’t make it back — Emmet would find him.

  “DR. GEAUX, HONEST, IF I KNEW WHERE CALVIN WENT, I would tell you. I swear. But I don’t.”

  She had knocked on their door, pounded really, at six o’clock in the A.M., which was seven minutes ago. Emmet was still trying to come fully awake when she’d started interrogating him about Calvin’s whereabouts. Thus far, his sleep-addled brain could only determine that his friend was missing, and he’d left a note.

  “Was it … him?” Emmet asked.

  “Him who?” Dr. Geaux asked.

  “Do you think Dr. Catalyst …” Emmet let the words hang because it was too frightening to even consider.

  “No,” she said. “Dr. Catalyst didn’t kidnap him. He left a note. It’s Calvin’s handwriting.” Dr. Geaux ran nervous hands through her hair and stalked across their living room.

  “Rosalita,” Emmet’s dad said, “I know this is hard. But do you think Dr. Catalyst could have forced him to write the note? To cover his tracks?”

  She stopped pacing and let out a big sigh of frustration.

  “No! I don’t think so. Calvin was acting a little strange when we got home from the police station. Almost like he was on the verge of telling me something. I should have pressed him on it, but I’ve … I’m just so tired.”

  Dr. Doyle stood and put his arms around her. She slumped against him and tears rolled down her cheeks. Which really scared Emmet. Dr. Geaux was the most fearless woman he’d ever met. She went after Pterogators! If it wasn’t Dr. Catalyst, Emmet couldn’t imagine why Calvin would do something like this.

  “Why would Calvin run off?” Emmet muttered.

  “Did you alert the task force?” Dr. Doyle asked.

  “Yes,” she said. “They’re coordinating a search right now. Honestly, Emmet, please don’t take offense, but I came straight here. Calvin isn’t — he doesn’t — he’s not as daring as you are and I thought maybe …”

  “You thought we were off on another one of my harebrained schemes?” Emmet asked.

  Dr. Geaux laughed in spite of herself. “Yes. Forgive me. But yes.”

  “It’s okay, Dr. Geaux. If I were you, I would have suspected the same thing. Did you try tracking his cell phone?”

  “First thing I would have done, if it hadn’t been sitting on his desk right next to the note,” she said. She started pacing again.

  Emmet threw himself backward on the couch and looked up at the ceiling. “We need to think like Calvin.”

  Emmet lay there, the ceiling fan turning slowly. Something had changed. Calvin wouldn’t usually do this. Not to his mom. He wouldn’t have just taken off without a reason in the middle of a crisis. In Emmet’s mind, that meant it was connected to Dr. Catalyst somehow. It was the only thing that made sense.

  And what had changed regarding their efforts to capture Dr. Catalyst? The Blood Jackets, but that was nothing new. To Emmet, it felt like Dr. Catalyst was releasing at least one souped-up critter a week. And take last night. While Emmet was busy freaking out in the school, Calvin was his normal, cool-as-the-other-side-of-the-pillow self. Seeing a problem, confronting it, solving it, surviving.

  He closed his eyes. In his mind, he went back to the police station. The suspect. In coming up with a sketch, they’d all contributed thoughts and comments: Riley, Raeburn, and Emmet. Not Calvin. But Calvin never said much anyway, so that didn’t necessarily point to anything.

  Concentrating like Officer Mackey had shown him, he saw Calvin sitting at the conference table, so quiet and still, and remaining there even after everyone else had left the room. The sketch.

  “Did you check the Dragonfly One?” Emmet asked Dr. Geaux.

  “No? Why would he go there?” she asked.

  “Can you call? Have someone check? Please?”

  Dr. Geaux called a number on her phone and spoke into it. A few minutes later her phone rang.

  “Yes,” she said. “It’s gone?” She stood up. “Patch me through to Manny in Park Ops.” She put the phone on speaker, so Emmet and his dad could hear.

  “Manny here, Doc. What’s up?”

  “Manny, did you happen to hear from Calvin this morning? Did he file a float plan with you?”

  “No, ma’am. Haven’t heard from Little Papi in a while.” Emmet remembered Calvin talking to Manny the first time they went out on the airboat. Manny was always cheerful.

  “The Dragonfly One is gone from the dock; can you pull up the GPS locator?”

  “Sure thing, hold on.” They could hear the sound of computer keys clicking over the phone. Then again. And again.

  “Manny?” Dr. Geaux prodded him.

  “I’m checking … I … Did you say it’s gone from the dock?” he asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Well, I’m gonna have to run a system diagnostic because according to the GPS readings it’s still right there where it should be,” he said. Manny’s voice was genuinely puzzled.

  “Don’t bother with the diagnostic, Manny. I know you keep that system in top-notch condition. I think Calvin removed the GPS unit and set it on one of the other boats.”

  “What?” Manny asked. “Why would Little Papi do something like that? Did that Catalyst bozo take him? Because if he did, I’ll track down that son of a —”

  “No. I don’t think it was Dr. Catalyst, Manny,” Dr. Geaux interrupted. “But can you alert staff at all stations to be on the lookout for him? And get ready to coordinate a grid search; I’m going to be sending out all hands.”

  “Copy that, Doc. I’m on it.” Manny disconnected.

  Dr. Geaux looked at Emmet and his dad, and her tears started again.

  Emmet almost said something but needed to think more first. The worst thing to do would be sending everyone off on a wild-goose chase. It would take time and it would require him to think like Calvin.

  “Calvin,” he muttered to himself, “what have you done?”

  DR. CATALYST KNELT ON THE GROUND, EXAMINING THE remains of a shattered plaster cast. For the first time since he put the idiot Newton in his cell, he felt nervous. How had an imbecile like that managed to escape?

  There were signs of a struggle in the nearby grass and bushes. What happened here? Where was his prisoner?

  He wasn’t worried when he first discovered Newton’s escape. The compound where
he was holding the teacher was well off the beaten path, a great distance from anything that would offer him either shelter or assistance. Besides, travel on foot through the swamp was full of dangers, not the least of which were his own Pterogators. In fact, it appeared the crafty Dr. Newton may have been too smart for his own good, and perhaps had encountered one of his creations. At the very least, he had met up with a very large predator — an alligator, if not a hybrid.

  But while the ground and grasses were crushed and flattened, and the branches on nearby bushes were cracked and broken, and blood was splattered all along the ground, there was no body. Or body parts.

  This gnawed at Dr. Catalyst.

  Upon first capturing Newton, he had placed a tracking device inside his cast. It was unlikely to be discovered there. And he followed the signal here, to this marshy area near a service road, which was an impressive ten miles from where Newton was kept prisoner. Somehow he managed to make it this far, but the cast was smashed to pieces and he found the tracker buried in the grass.

  Dr. Catalyst walked in an ever-widening circle around the spot. His eyes studied the ground, looking for any sign that Dr. Newton might have miraculously gotten up and walked away from this encounter.

  A few yards away, he found the traces of someone who’d recently staggered through the undergrowth and followed the trail.

  As he walked, he found more blood spattered along the ground. The footprints were erratic, and the person making them had obviously been injured or delirious. Slowly he developed a new measure of respect for Newton. To have survived for this long was no small feat.

  Dr. Catalyst had spent so much time in the swamp that he was completely at home there. Newton was a puffy-haired pseudo-intellectual and should have perished by now. Every minute Dr. Catalyst spent in pursuit of this imbecile kept him from more important work.

  Up ahead he came upon a stand of mangrove trees. Dr. Catalyst realized the surrounding swamp had gone quiet and he stopped. The insects and the birds were not just silent, there were none visible. Not anywhere. Strange.