Going Dark(17)

Though he didn’t believe he had anything to fear. Surely the snake had been dining well enough on the shorebirds and small game living on Prince Key and would have no interest in anything as large and unfriendly as Thorn.

He saw its sinuous length gliding just below the surface, heading to the ripples, which put the big snake about as far from Thorn as Thorn was from shore.

He took hold of the pry bar.

Leaning forward, he drew a quick breath and dove. He swam as smoothly as his body allowed. Slicing and pulling himself forward with his arms, but not kicking. Even though he knew this attempt at stealth was silly, for surely the python had registered his entry into the basin, knew instantly that this alien chunk of protein was out of its element.

He was well aware of the creature’s method of attack. He’d encountered one earlier that summer warming its cold blood on his dock. Because it was an invading species, decimating native wildlife, Thorn had no qualms about murdering the thing. A single machete blow had decapitated the six-footer, and he’d stored its chunky head on ice until Sugar’s daughters came down for their next scheduled visit.

That weekend he presented the trophy to fourteen-year-old Janey Sugarman, a devoted naturalist. And just as he’d thought, Janey was thrilled at the chance to dissect the python’s head and study its structure. They’d spent the afternoon at Thorn’s fish-cleaning bench, using one of his fillet knives to dismember the creature’s skull and examine its strange, hingeless jaw that allowed the python to swallow prey five times the diameter of its head. Its incisor teeth were about a half inch long and curved inward, not meant for chewing, but only to lock on to the flesh of its prey, hold it in place while the supple trunk wrapped around its quarry and crushed the life from it.

Halfway across the basin, swimming smoothly, he felt a brush against his ankle. He accelerated, began to flutter-kick in earnest, and lifted his head to check his progress. He was a few seconds offshore when he crashed against the submerged branch. It thumped so hard into his ribs it felt like a short left hook from a pissed-off welterweight. A serious, breathtaking hurt.

Gasping for a breath, he halted his stroke, let his legs drop.

A mistake.

As his feet sank into the mucky sediment, he saw a shadow sneaking toward his right hip and jabbed at it with the pry bar, making glancing contact with its slippery flesh, then he staggered backward toward the bank. Twenty feet of squashy muck to cross through waist-high water.

Up to his thighs in the quicksand, he was struggling toward the soggy bank when he saw the shadow making another approach.

He waited till it was at arm’s length, then waited a moment more before he slashed, missed, and slashed again. Water splattered, but he struck nothing solid. He felt the silky mass slide against his thigh, heavy and thick and undulating, its slippery flesh coiling around his hips in a loose embrace.

Gripping the pry bar two-handed, he aimed its sharp end at the golden-brown shine, searching for the head, the vulnerable eyes. But seeing only the endless tail. As far as he could tell, this monster was all tail, all heavy, dark meat, a being whose length had not yet fully arrived.

He picked a spot and hacked at the trunk looping his waist, the massive, rubbery bulk with its butterscotch markings, its slow, encircling clinch. Still not seeing the eyes, the head, the face, the mouth. Its small brain controlling the instinctive swirl of its body. This creature only knew how to do one thing. A simpleton with a single strategy. To squash the breath from what it desired. And right now it hankered for Thorn.

Before he knew it was happening, he was locked firmly. Until that moment he’d thought he was still moving freely. He’d believed he was working his way backward up the last eight or ten feet of the slushy bank, but when he looked back at the land, it had moved away. He was not just immobilized, he was being towed out to deeper water, coaxed without knowing it.

This idiot creature hadn’t even bothered to bite and take hold, but just enveloped him slowly without a fight. Seducing with its slow embrace.

Then he spotted the wedged head moving past and slashed the crowbar’s talon with enough force to splinter its skull and liquefy its brains. But his aim was off by an inch and all he got was another splatter of water.

His mind seemed to be clouding. He was now chest high in water and firmly in the grasp of the python, a pressuring hug that was relentless, yet so languorous that he was feeling a dreamy calm, a sense that there was nothing to worry about, a drifting away from the consequences of drifting away.

But some dim, bullheaded region of Thorn’s brain was still active enough to absorb his predicament. If he didn’t strike a decisive blow soon, his ribs would begin to crack one by one.