Spotting a clump of pines that might do, she took a few steps toward it. One foot sank deep in muck, and the ground oozed. Her foot made a squishy suck coming out, and she almost lost the sandal. “I don’t believe this.” Fouled with slime to the ankle, she began picking her way back across the marshy ground.
There came a hideous stench. Behind her, something moved heavily in the underbrush.
Her legs and arms ached with the sudden pressure of blood, and her bladder voided as, with agonizing slowness, she turned.
The darkness moved.
Unaware of the sudden hot tears on her face, she groped her way backward toward the road.
A shape lurched toward her from the shadows.
Branches slashed at her plump bare thighs as she ran. Something exploded out of the thicket behind her. Propelled by terror, she ran faster than she’d ever thought she could, her brain screaming too loudly to register sights or sounds. Only her bones felt the pounding that gained on the road behind her.
Lights! A car ahead—she cried out, but the sandals, plowing through soft dirt, slowed her so that…
Slammed into from behind, she was spun around with incredible force.
Distantly, strangely dislocated from herself, from this body whirling through the dark, she wondered if she’d been hit by a car after all. Had the old man come back? It was her last coherent thought.
She lay, pain humming through her in the night, then felt herself being lifted.
A large bat scurried across the sky as a car flashed past the side road, red taillights retreating. The thrashing in the thicket gradually diminished, and soon there remained only the droning of insects.
“You can slow down now, Jack. I told you, there’s no hurry—this one’s DOA. I’d rather we didn’t all wind up that way, if you don’t mind.”
“Are you saying my driving ain’t all it should be, Doris?”
“You mean to tell me you didn’t finish filling that out yet?” Ignoring him, she sat down next to the woman in back. “What’s taking so long, kid?”
The narrow stretcher creaked. Perched on one of the cushioned seats of worn orange vinyl, Athena looked up. “The first one got a little messed up,” she responded, trying to keep dark arterial blood from getting on the report.
“Big surprise. Darn, would you look at my jeans? I throw away more clothes! You should’ve seen it coming out of my hair last night in the shower.” Doris Compson was a short, solid woman. Steel gray hair, steel gray eyes. The patch on her sleeve read captain. Originally from the Tampa Bay area, she’d been living in these woods for almost twenty-five years but still spoke with a slight Southern twang. She’d once avowed, “Jersey’s the crookedest state in the Union—Mafia runs the whole damn place, like Mexico,” but she’d said it with pride, swearing in the next breath that she’d never want to live anywhere else: it was the local style.
With a loud rattle, the ambulance shuddered, spattered ceiling lights faltering. Tires shrieked, leaving twin streaks of acrid rubber on the road.
“What in hell was that?” yelled Doris, jumping to her feet.
The ambulance regained speed.
“I hit a dog.” Shirtsleeves rolled on his muscular arms, Jack Buzby wrestled the wheel, steering the rig around a series of sharp turns.
“You what?”
“You heard me, Doris,” he said, glancing over his shoulder. The thick glasses he pushed back on his nose gave him an incongruously studious air. He was twenty years old, good-looking and normally easygoing, though just now trying hard not to look upset. “It ran outta the woods in front of me. That headlight’s so outta whack, I didn’t even see it till too late.”
“Kill it?”
“Prob’ly.”
“You think it might’ve been one of those wild dogs, kid? The ones Barry and Steve were talking about?”
Athena glanced up. She felt light-headed, nauseated by the heat.
“We had that happen around here once before, couple years back,” Doris went on. “Remember, Jack? A gang of dogs got to running wild in the woods, raiding farms and the like. Hmm, dog days,” she muttered, wiping her face. “That’s what they call it when it’s thick like this. Damn air feels like a dog’s breath.”
“Feral dogs.” Athena stared at the small puddle of blood sloshing around her shoes. The disposable blankets they’d used to sop up some of the liquid lay wadded and soaking.
“You say something, honey?” Doris peered at her.
“Feral dogs, they’re called.” Absently, she massaged her leg. “Like feral children.”
“Leg bothering you again, hon?”
“No.” Scowling, she tried to ignore the ache in her knee while she completed the accident report.
The corpse that sprawled across the stretcher was immensely fat and mangled. The accident had taken place barely a mile from the ambulance hall, and blood had still been spouting from him when they’d arrived. Despite his wife’s protests, the drunken idiot had gone up a rickety ladder to prune a tree at night. He’d landed beer belly—first on the chainsaw.
Athena shook her head, writing up the particulars. Her faded work shirt was drenched and sticky, her hair pulled back in a tight bun.
“Hey, Athena, why don’t you come up here and keep the driver company?”
“Just ignore him, honey. What’s the matter, stud? Need some help with your stick shift?” Doris waved at the air around her face; in truth, it was an old, familiar odor. Before an early retirement, she’d been the local coroner. The appointment had been political, and her professional survival through a succession of graft-ridden administrations had been no accident. She was tough, an expert at cronyism. The fact that Mullica Emergency Rescue, with its small volunteer crew, kept operating at all was due entirely to her fund-raising activities, the shambling wreck of an ambulance itself having been donated by a neighboring township at her instigation. “Christ, this job is a bitch during the summer,” she muttered, resisting the impulse to hold her nose.
The bald head of the dead man was splattered and darkening, and he stank of booze and other things, his abdomen a shredded pile that slopped through lacy layers of fat. When the ambulance rattled through a series of rapid lurches, the ruined organs quivered, slipping farther down, and fleshy tendrils vibrated toward the floor. Doris mumbled something about the damn road, and Jack replied with something about a tune-up and new shocks.
Athena tossed a blanket over the body. They were still a good twenty miles away from the nearest hospital.
…and Mary Bradley knelt in black water. The marsh was a darkly flooded vision of hell, and the nightmare landscape revolved, rushing with the blood that streamed down her left side.
“No! Please!”
Circling, the thing lunged. It tore at her, ripped her soft breasts, and the force of the attack sent her rolling in the morass. Now glimpsed in scattered moonlight, now invisible in shadow, the thing backed off, moving through dark water with incredible speed, again circling.
“Stay away from—!” A mouthful of warm, stagnant water stopped her screams as something spurted from beneath her rent T-shirt. She staggered to her feet, slipped in slimy muck and went down in a sitting position. Half submerged, she watched the red spot on her shirt spread, watched the water around her darken. “Don’t hurt me.”
It surged toward her. She was jerked upright. Struggling, she beat wildly, beads of blood flying as it lashed at her. She was thrown against a dead sapling, and the pine toppled, easily uprooted in the muck.
She came down on one knee in shallow water. Splashing, slapping noises surrounded her in the dark. She slid backward, falling across a mound of hard earth. If she could only rise…