Flesh Wounds, page 27
She was going to die.
As he untied her legs and forced them apart, she started praying that it would be soon.
“Know what this is, Sweetpiece?” At some point (she’d been fading in and out ever since he’d kicked her in the head hours ago) he’d acquired a five gallon metal bucket. When he nudged it with his foot, liquid sloshed within.
“Course you don’t, you stupid cunt.” He caught her by the hair and forced her to look at him. “You never heard of Lindow man ‘cause you probably can’t even fuckin’ read. Sumbitch died in a peat bog in England two thousand years ago. Couple a’ fellas stumbled across him in 1984. He looked like he’d died yesterday, Sweetpiece.” He started working off the lid of the bucket. “No oxygen. Acidity in the peat. A body will last a long time under the right conditions.”
A lucid fragment of her cudgeled intellect noted that his hick accent was slipping. As he continued, she was reminded of a patient college professor caught up with the sound of his own voice and the facile conviction that someone actually gave a shit what he had to say.
“A good dry desert will work too. The hot sand sucks all the moisture out of the body and defeats decay. Best example’s a Predynastic man buried at Gebelain around 3200 B.C.” The lid came off, slopping out a dark fluid that ran thick and slow down the side of the bucket. He looked at her and she saw him realize all at once that he’d been lecturing. “No desert for you, Sweetpiece.” The backwoods drawl had returned. “Who’d wanna come back for sand-dried pussy?”
“You can’t do this,” she croaked. But her voice lacked all conviction.
“Can. And will. ’Course, what we got ’round here is your everyday Louisiana bayou. Spanish moss out your asshole, but no peat for a thousan’ mile. Still,” he added with the sly grin of a clever schoolboy, “I can be real resourceful when I wanna be. And there ain’t nothing—nothing, mind you—that money can’t buy.” He reached into the bucket and brought up a handful of dripping black humus. “Loretta, meet peat.”
The stuff tasted of cold sewage. Rotten fruit from a gardener’s compost. Rancid black spinach. Crude oil. And the grave.
When you’re young, thought Dylan as he studied the steam billowing out from under the camaro’s hood,you dream of growing up so you can do two things: beat the shit out of your father and sleep with your mother.
Of course, by the time you’re old enough to do either, you’ve changed. You realize the old man isn’t worth the effort. The muscle you’ve put on is equal to the sum of what he’s lost and the spare tire around his middle. The six inches you’ve gained on him is not so much a factor of your height as it is his bowed back and stooped shoulders. You let that fantasy go and try not to think about a time when you’ll look just like him.
As for sleeping with your mother... well, it’s not that you don’t still want to, but society has made it pretty clear to you by this point that sex with your mother isn’t exactly kosher; besides which, while you’ve been working yourself up to puberty, Mom’s lost a considerable measure of sex appeal. So you opt for the next best thing and go out and find someone who reminds you of Mom. Years, months, perhaps only weeks later, you realize what a horrible fucking mistake you’ve made.
Your new bride isn’t Mom when you want her to be. And she is when you don’t. The short of it being that you’ve got a wife who is lousy in bed, nags the shit out of you over petty things not much more important than picking up your room ever was, certainly can’t cook the way Mom did, and doesn’t understand the first thing about auto maintenance.
Like Shelley. The damn radiator hadn’t been so much as pissed in since he’d bought the car for her in ‘85. Six years! Six years and seventy some fucking thousand miles with no antifreeze, no water, nothing!
Dylan studied the moss-draped branches of the trees that clawed the roadside. Beneath them, starlight glinted on sable pools that may or may not be bottomed with quicksand. The sound of a million summer insects crawled up his spine, their voices only slightly less terrifying than the unidentifiable grunts and splashes from the swamp.
The middle of nowhere. B.F.E. to the extreme. Nothing but swamp and a single desolate strip of blacktop vanishing into the night from either end of the hissing camaro.
“Dammit, Shelley. This is all your fault.”
The insects laughed.
That was when he saw the headlights. They were coming fast, moving along the twisting road with a familiarity bordering on recklessness. Afraid the approaching vehicle would hit him before he could flag it down, Dylan was walking around the camaro to switch on his own headlights when the lights turned off the main road. For a minute they were visible, flickering through tree and brush, rolling and bouncing on what was obviously not a paved road. Then, abruptly, they vanished. The night swept back and reclaimed its own.
Thunder rumbled and sheet lightning camera-flashed in the distance, lighting the clouds up like distant nebulae. But it had been doing that all evening; there was little chance it would rain in this heat.
Dylan’s options were few. He spoke them to the night because the sound of his voice was something of a comfort and, if nothing else, it silenced some of the insects.
“One. I can wait till someone happens by.” He thought a moment, then shook his head. “Doubtful. I’m a long way off the beaten path. I’m surprised I even saw that one other vehicle.
“Two. I can scrounge around in the car, find something that’ll hold water, and try to fill the radiator.” The thought of venturing off the road wasn’t very appealing. Quicksand. Alligators. Cottonmouths. Louisiana swamps are no place for a midnight stroll.
“Three. I can wait till morning.” But that blew his whole purpose in coming out here. He’d have to come back out tomorrow night.
“Four. I can walk up the road and see where that car went. There’s got to be a house up there. No other reason for anyone to be out here at this time of night.” The thought of confronting a cajun eccentric enough to live out here frightened him, but not nearly as much as waiting out the night or venturing into the swamp. The walk up the road would be safe and, no matter how rough it might be, the driveway the mystery vehicle had taken was bound to be safer than the swamp.
Dylan found it virtually impossible to tell where the vehicle had turned off the road. He was about to give up when movement on the shoulder caught his eye. He leaned close in the dark, then jumped back.
Water moccasin. Someone had run over it, crushing the lower half of the snake’s body into the warm asphalt. That left the venomous snake with a foot and half of movement with which it was struggling valiantly. Indefatigable the moccasin might be, but the crushed length remained stamped to the blacktop. Its eyes gleamed like fireflies in the starlight. Mad with pain, it snapped insanely at empty air, desiring more than anything to feel its enemy caught in that sabered vice: the tremulous struggle of life as the fangs hooked deep, the pumping of venom, the gasping quivers while poison raced red highways through doomed flesh.
Giving the snake a wide berth, Dylan left the road and found what looked like a fire trail. Fresh tire tracks, running puddles, and bubbling mud confirmed it as the spot where the vehicle had left the road. Less than fifty feet into the swamp waited a Toyota four by four. Mud was still dripping from the little truck’s running boards and flaps. The engine hissed and clicked. The doors were locked, the truck was empty, and the driver was nowhere in sight.
The swamp pressed in all around him. He could feel the touch of a thousand eyes on his back. Malevolent voices whispered just below the clarity threshold, like plotting relatives in another room. In every direction, the swamp looked the same, a black ambiguity both fetid and feral. Barren, twisted limbs stretched overhead, straining to reclaim the forestry department’s trail. Beneath these weeping boughs lay murky wells of intangible nothing from which occasionally there winked the red of sinister eyes and the ebony glint of deadly water. If it weren’t for the pickup’s tailgate pointing the way back to the road, Dylan wasn’t so sure he could find it.
He hesitated to call out. There was obviously no house or trailer within miles. No campsite. Nothing to bring a man out here in the night. With a shudder, he realized that knowing what brought the Toyota’s owner out here could lead to a situation far worse than his present one.
A light winked in the swamp.
He told himself to go back to the road and wait for morning. Someone was bound to come by and give him a lift.
Curiosity was a woman’s failing, an inability to keep one’s nose out of other people’s business. Mrs. Cravats at her window spying on Samantha Stevens. Aunt Bee and Jessica Fletcher snooping about town. Shelley had been bad about it. Always checking up on him. Initially he thought she was afraid he was having an affair. Later he learned it was just the way she was, always having to be “in the know” as she put it.
He wasn’t the type who couldn’t turn away without knowing the ins and outs of something. Never had been. But something about that light winking among the trees and cypress stumps—a flashlight; he was certain of it now—intrigued him. Perhaps, he told the whispering dark, I can use this to my advantage.
Following the light wasn’t easy. Mud sucked at Dylan’s loafers and weighted the legs of his slacks. The cold, oily swamp water stank of bile and roadkill. Twisted branches clawed at his arms and face, caressing him with grey moss probably loaded with ticks. Leeches, spiders, and snakes seemed to swarm about his ankles. He was terrified, imagining gator mouths poised in the dark like great bear traps. With every step he was certain that his next would plunge him to the eyeballs in quicksand.
The light finally came to a halt. Though he couldn’t have been but a few hundred yards deeper into the swamp, Dylan had no idea in what direction lay the truck or the road. He was lost now, with no choice but to play out whatever scenario presented itself.
Dylan worked his way to within twenty feet of where the flashlight’s pallor cast a man’s shadow among the holocaustic foliage. Stealth was a minor concern; the deeper into the swamp he had gone, the louder the voices of the insects, frogs, and night creatures became. Combine that cacophony with the bone-like rattling of the wind in the trees and the flatulent muttering of the swamp, and the sounds he made were minuscule.
Concealed behind an ancient mushroom-shaped stump, Dylan watched as the flashlight revealed a stocky man in somber clothing. For a moment he appeared to be hauling on something, a rope perhaps, then he knelt, splashing water from a milk jug on a long, mud-caked object stretched across the ground. He was talking. Dylan could just barely make out some of the words.
“...couple months, but I wanted... so bad... Loretta... just couldn’t wait.” The water sloshed from the jug. Where the mud washed clear, the object gleamed white in the light. “...clean you up and...”
As the mud washed away to reveal long pale legs, Dylan realized the stranger was kneeling over a naked woman. Because she made no attempt to cover herself and hadn’t moved or spoken a word, he guessed she was unconscious. Had the stranger drugged and kidnapped her? Surely no woman would willingly accompany him out into the swamps, remove her clothing, and—
Shit! The stranger had dropped his trousers down around his knees, spread the silent woman’s legs, and gone down on her.
“Hey!” The single syllable was out of Dylan’s mouth and he had risen from behind the stump before he thought about what he was doing.
The stranger struggled to his knees, clawing at pants and flashlight. The flashlight rolled away, its beam playing briefly across the woman’s (Loretta?) flaccid face. It came to rest pointing off into the swamps, a single shaft of incandescence slicing the gloom. He let the flashlight go and surged to his feet, hauling his pants up. “Who’s there?”
“Get away from her,” Dylan ordered.
“Who the fuck are you?”
The man’s face was all shadow, lost against the hungry dark. Dylan knew he was likewise hidden, perhaps more so because he was further from the light.
Something glinted silver in the stranger’s hand. Something small, but sharp, gleaming with the moonless black of the night sky.
“I ain’t gonna ask you again, asshole.” The stranger’s voice shifted at that moment, as if he’d suddenly swapped one persona for another.
“Just leave the woman and go,” Dylan told him.
“Humph! You ain’t no cop,” the man snickered. Starlight played briefly off white teeth. “Come on over here, boy. May be that I lets you have some when I’s done.” He took several short steps in Dylan’s direction, but the way he swung his head from side to side said that he wasn’t even real sure where Dylan was.
There was a dead limb leaning against the stump. It was about four feet long, thick as Dylan’s thigh at one end, tapered at the opposite end like a baseball bat. Dylan took hold of the slender end and pulled the club out of the mud.
“I’m gonna cut you bad, you don’ answer me, muthafucker.”
Dylan leaped over the stump, leaving one loafer in the mud behind him. Startled, the stranger let out one yelp before the stout cypress club caught him in the side of the head. He went down with a splash, tried to get back up, but Dylan brought the club down across the back of his head.
Breathing heavy, Dylan stood over the man for a full minute, watching for the slightest movement. The man groaned once, but made no move to get up. Dylan dropped the club and went to the woman.
She was cold. Way too cold. He was drenched in sweat and she was cold as ice. She needed help. Fast.
“Everything’s going to be alright now, lady—uh, Loretta.”
The stout man groaned again. One of his legs twitched in the mud. Dylan rolled him over. A quick search turned up the keys to the pickup and the man’s wallet. A driver’s license identified him as one Andrew J. Higginbotham from Thibodaux. A Nicholls State University I.D. indicated he was an archaeology professor there.
“Well, Professor Higginbotham, I can guarantee you won’t be teaching there much longer.”
Higginbotham groaned and his eyelids fluttered.
Dylan pocketed the keys and returned to the woman. A plan was coming to him. He could take care of his business and drive the pickup into Chacahoula. Chacahoula was a little town whose one (contested) claim to fame was being the home of Louisiana’s largest alligator farm, but it had a local Sheriff. Dylan would tell the Sheriff that he’d followed Higginbotham into the swamps, scuffled with him, saved Loretta, and escaped in his pickup. The Sheriff would probably have to call in the State Police or some feds out of Houma, but they’d get out to the swamps soon enough, where they’d find Higginbotham and...
Yeah. It’d work.
He slipped his arms under Loretta’s cold body and cradled her in his arms. He was getting to his feet when pain exploded in his left thigh.
“Cocksucker!” Higginbotham’s knife flashed again and another shock lanced through Dylan’s leg. The professor was on his hands and knees, blood and mud dripping from his maniacal face. In his hand was a small pocketknife, the blade red with Dylan’s blood.
Clutching Loretta to his chest, Dylan spun away and ran. He’d taken four or five strides when she was suddenly jerked from his arms with enough force to spin him off balance. He slammed into a tree trunk and sprawled into deep inky water. He came up terrified, imagining cavernous jaws slamming shut on his leg, being pulled deep beneath the water, and that final death roll. Near screaming, he scrambled for dry ground, made it as far as the shallows.
Higginbotham met him with the knife, driving the little blade between Dylan’s ribs.
Dylan bellowed in pain and shoved the shorter man away. Higginbotham slipped in the mud and went down. When Dylan clutched at the searing pain in his side, he found the handle of the knife there. He tried pulling it free, but the blade was wedged tight in his ribs. He tugged again with all his might. The blade scraped bone, twisted, then snapped in two. Warmth gushed down his side.
The professor came up with Dylan’s club, swinging it in a vicious arc. Dylan scrambled back, lost his footing, and went down in the water. He lost his other loafer and the useless knife handle. As he tried to regain his footing, Higginbotham raised the cypress club like a enormous spike. Dylan barely managed to roll to one side as the jagged wooden tip sliced the water and sank deep in the mud. Higginbotham jerked the makeshift weapon free, slinging great gobs of muck into the air. He raised it for another blow, but Dylan dove under the limb, tackling the professor about the knees. Both men went down. The club spun free and splashed off to one side.
Higginbotham howled as Dylan punched him in the balls. Dylan rolled away. He tried to find the club, but it had been swallowed by the swamp. He cast about for another weapon, but nothing stood out in the dark. And it was dark. In their struggle, one of them had stepped on the flashlight. Only the faintest glow revealed where it lay buried in the mud. Dylan pulled it free. He was trying to wipe the goop from the lens when Higginbotham jumped him.
The two men plunged into cold water, Higginbotham’s hands clamped about Dylan’s throat. Dylan pounded the other man in the face with the flashlight. The lens broke. The light went out.
As Higginbotham’s hands clenched tighter about his throat, a deeper darkness probed the periphery of Dylan’s vision. There was suddenly a swarm of bees in his head and bright lights where the professor’s face ought to be. Dylan dropped the shattered light, got one thumb over Higginbotham’s left eye and dug in. There was a soft pop and tepid fluid gushed out over the back of Dylan’s hand. The madman’s hands left his throat.
Dylan rolled free, gasping for air, gagging on the corrupt water that he’d swallowed. Higginbotham was thrashing about in the water, screaming like an unattended tea kettle. When he could breathe again, Dylan caught the madman by the hair and shoved his head under the muddy water. When Higginbotham struggled, Dylan sat on him.
