The animals looked up without much fear; then they moved off at a leisurely pace, down a path that made a low tunnel through the mangroves. Debbi tucked away the loose end of her scarf, took Arty's hand, and went to follow. Arty, reluctant, resisted the tug for a fraction of a second, then gave in.
They crouched low, held mangrove branches away from their faces, stepped gingerly around the raised and grabbing roots. Mosquitoes hummed around them; spiders swung on half-completed webs. The path wound away from the water; after a dozen steps, scrub pines began to mix in with the mangroves, and under the denser canopy it was dark enough so that colors disappeared and only shapes existed. Fallen pine needles mingled on the ground with limestone pebbles. Up ahead, the deer made the softest rustlings as they ambled.
Debbi paused a second, looked back at Arty, grinned. In that moment of stillness he thought he heard sounds coming from behind them. A jolt of adrenaline put a milky feeling in his legs. Debbi, trusting and excited, pulled him onward.
They came to a small break in the woods. Two miniature bucks were there, their antlers like winter-bare azaleas. Three more does were nibbling at the spiky bushes. Debbi and Arty stood very close together; he felt a warmth like that of fresh-baked bread pulse off her. But he couldn't savor the feeling and he didn't watch the deer; he was listening. There were sounds that were foreign to the woods and he knew now they were footsteps. He tried without success to keep the panic out of his voice. "Someone's following us," he said.
Debbi looked at him in the dimness. Her smile seemed to float free of her face, then shattered like a breaking window; in a heartbeat she had caught the infection of his fear. Mosquitoes swarmed; the metallic groans of toads grew maddening. The two of them stood paralyzed a moment, then bolted across the clearing, scattering the deer, groping with the instincts of the desperate for a path on the far side.
Arty dove through a gap in the twisted pines, Debbi scrambling behind. Low branches lashed their faces; cobwebs wrapped them in appalling gossamer. Their breath came harder in their flight, the sound of it slammed back against their ears. They moved randomly, wherever the woods would let them go. At some point they understood that they were looping back toward water: the pines thinned, the mangroves thickened, a sick salt smell like spoiled oysters weighted the air. Now and again they stepped in slick shallow puddles simmering with rot. Arty wrestled vines, bushwhacked with torn and bleeding elbows.
Then he fell. A mangrove root had grabbed his foot, twisted it as he tried to step. He toppled onto his side; warm muck slapped against his flank, his cheek. He groaned, then tugged his leg like a bear caught in a trap. It came free but his ankle didn't feel right.
Debbi was crouching over him. Her face was close, mosquitoes swarmed between them. "Go," he said. "Don't wait."
She didn't answer. She didn't go. She put her arms in Arty's armpits and helped him up. For a second he stood on one foot, and in that instant they heard the rustlings behind them, the sharp recoilings of swatted foliage. She threw Arty's arm across her shoulder and they trundled on together.
The ground was getting softer underfoot; there were fewer dry places between the slimy puddles. The mangroves got lower, snakier; flashes of sky broke through here and there, and by the most gradual of increments the woods became a swamp. The puddles merged into an unbroken shallow ooze. The ground beneath melted to an infernal batter, a dense sucking slop like loose cement. Arty's hurt ankle screamed with every step; Debbi's knees ached as she pumped them to lift her sinking feet.
Their progress now was inches at a time. Against the muted splashes of their dire steps, they heard the ever-closer sounds of their pursuers. They heard mumbled curses, gruff breathing fearsome as the wheeze of dragons.
The foul water got deeper, the muck became all-possessing. Debbi sank down past her calves; she struggled to lift herself and tumbled with an awful slowness to a half-sitting posture against a crotch of branches. Arty didn't so much fall with her as reach a certain point of leaning from which he could not deviate. He held a mangrove with both hands, strained every muscle and felt nothing but a stalemate, registered a helplessness more galling than any failure he could ever have imagined.
"Debbi," he whispered, "I'm sorry."
She said nothing. Her eyes were wide, the lashes almost vertical. Tiny lines of blood traced out the scratches on her face.
A flash of blinding light knifed across the swamp. Behind it, two forward-leaning silhouettes could just barely be distinguished. Shoes sucked through the warm morass. One pursuer slowed; the other trudged on with the grim momentum of a dray horse. The beacon panned crazily across the mangroves as the man holding it inexorably approached. Arty's pulse pounded in his neck, he heard blood rushing in his ears. He thought of screaming but went as mute as some toothless thing going down before a lion.