The dog man spat out a wad of tobacco. “Turned their prey is my guess. Got ‘em on the run and he's so turned ‘round he don't know which way's up. If we just wait long ‘nough, your criminal's going to come runnin’ right into your arms."
"Too easy,” Dean said. “Not this weasel."
The dog man returned in a moment with word from the captain, Staubb's superior, a man named Todd Daniels. “Captain says it's time we go to meet up with the dogs. Told ‘em we should give ‘em bit more time, but he's got ants in his pants."
"Don't we all,” said Dean.
The group was some thirteen armed men now, counting Dean and Sid. The first sign of the sun filtered in through the thick brush and palmetto, scrub oak and palms. The forest was so dense here that Dean expected to see monkeys in the palm trees, but all he saw were curious squirrels and a flaming-red cardinal. Somewhere at the other end of the human chain they formed, Dean heard somebody shout a warning about a cottonmouth. No shots were fired and the line moved onward, forming a wide net, toward the sound of the dogs, which were now closing in.
Sid had not exaggerated the wilderness aspect of the tropical flatlands. Grass was up to Dean's armpits wherever there was a break in the trees. No rocks, no stones, no bumps in the land here, only miles of exotic vegetation, some plants Dean had never known existed, strange and beehive-like in their crusty coverings, plants that did battle with a sun that by 10 a.m. set the place aflame. The entire effect was that of a foreign and wild place.
"Damn sure wish I was back at the lab,” complained Sid, sweat glistening from every pore.
"Damn sure I wish I was back in Chicago."
Sid managed a half-smile. “You've proven to be a good friend, my friend.” Sid's last word ended in a groan.
"Leg hurt?"
"Both legs hurt like hell ... real bad,” he admitted.
Dean had looked at the scald marks and one of the officers who'd come on had thought to bring a first-aid kit. The burns were wrapped now, but the pain and the throbbing, if anything like Dean's arm, must be difficult to put pressure on.
"Why not hold up here, Sid, until we can come back for you?” Dean suggested when they came to a clearing with a little shade.
"Not on your life, Dean ... been nearly killed twice by that ... that thing. I'll be damned if I'll risk it a third time."
"But if—"
"No, no!” he was adamant and, Dean realized, scared. “Keep moving."
"Downriver!” shouted the captain, taking a cue from the dogs’ baying and the dog man, who suddenly bolted and raced in that direction, shouting, “I think they done got him, boys!"
He fell.
He got up.
He ran.
It had been an endless repetition all night long.
Fall, get up, run.
Sometimes he'd lie there long enough to try to think, but they gave him no time.
The dog sounds frightened him. He imagined the dogs tearing him to pieces. He sensed this was going to be his end, and neither Ian nor the dark powers would stop it. Ian was gone ... they were gone. Now it was Van, alone again, facing certain death—or capture. Neither ending particularly appealed to him.
Death meant the end of all the many years of hard work to get as far as he and Ian had come. Death by gnarling, angry dogs meant destruction of all that he had toiled for, an end to the satanic power growing within him. For his failure, too, the death would be not only a painful one, but made everlasting and endless by the very powers he had served so long, the dark ones who'd nurtured him in his infancy and childhood.
He remembered the black woman well.
He even remembered the black man who, from time to time, came in the company of the black woman.
Then they stopped coming. All he ever saw afterward was the dish, like a dog plate shoved onto the top stair of the basement. But he never forgot the dark ones who'd come and nurtured him, kept him alive during those crucial early years.
He would fight back as he'd always fought back. He wouldn't just lie here and wait for the dogs to pounce upon him and rip him limb from limb. He must think like Ian, develop a workable plan.
He snatched off his oxblood-colored vest and attached it to a limb. Taking a piece of brush, he dusted his trail as he backed from the vest down toward the river again, which he'd crossed once before, nearly drowning in the process. He didn't want to return to the water, but an animal fear drove him toward it.
He backed down now into the water, which enveloped his hairy form. He got deep down, feeling the muck tug at his knees, there on the bank, hiding among the reeds, waterlillies, and branches where a slender green snake slept so soundlessly on a limb he at first believed it part of the branch.
He knew he, too, must become part of the land, to disappear before the eye of any unsuspecting person or animal that happened by. In the water he had a chance. It would erase his scent. It would erase him.
Then he heard the voices of men on the other side of the river, heard them noisily sloshing through the shallows. He darted into a small alcove covered thick with algae, the surface a green mush he parted as he went.
The dogs were bringing the men, and he realized for the first time that he'd gotten turned around in the unfamiliar landscape. He silently cursed a man named Dean Grant.
He did not see the slow, deliberate movement at his back, and when, out of the corner of one eye, he did spot it, he took it for an aged, water-blackened log moving with the current. But he felt no current in the little cove. Another glance, closer this time, and he saw the two enormous eyes at the snout of the log, realizing it was alive. The gator moved at Van with ease, grace, and the certainty of a meal.
A chilling scream, like that of a banshee, froze Dean and the other men in place where they stood almost shoulder-deep in the river, holding their weapons overhead. The scream sounded to the dog man like that of a Georgia bobcat. The dogs, too, had been startled by the cry, like that of a woman in terrible distress, Dean thought, but his senses told him it was the dwarf. “It came from that way, opposite the dogs,” shouted the captain, leading the column of men.
They fought with the river to get to the other side where it narrowed, the dogs rushing by them, when Dean saw that one of the dogs up ahead had a little vest in his mouth which appeared to have been dredged from the water—it was soaking wet. All the dogs stood in a semicircle about an algae-infested alcove off the river. There before them was an enormous monster of an alligator, rolling about in the water, tearing one dog to pieces as the other animals yelped and barked and snarled, still keeping a safe distance.
Putrid water, algae, and the tussling animals could not hide the welter of blood discoloring the surface of the water.
"My dog! It's ... it's Queenie! Damn it, Captain, do something! Do something!"
"Look!” shouted Sid, seeing a piece of ripped clothing floating among the algae. Dean swiped at it with a stick, dredging it toward them. Even with the algae clinging to it, the clothing was easily that of a child ... or a dwarf.
"Think the alligator got the bastard?” asked Sid.
"A fitting Florida end to the man,” said Dean, satisfied even more by the blood he found on the little cloak. “But we've got to be sure, Sid."
Dean stepped to where the captain stared over the feeding gator. The dog man was still shouting in the other man's ear about his dog. “We've got to kill the alligator, Captain."
"What the hell for? The dog's done for."
"We've got to know for sure if the dwarf went before the dog."
"Hell, you heard the scream!"
"That's not enough, not with a killer like this!"
The captain relented when the dog man said, “Shoot the ugly bastard. He killed Queenie,"
The gun was raised, a powerful hunting rifle, and the large-caliber bullet went right between the animal's eyes. Its body kicked and shivered with the impact. There was a moment's thrashing, and it lay still at last. “Snatch him outa there,” ordered the captain, and two of his men took it by the tail. It took a third to get the giant beast onto shore.