Instead, he held his hand out to her. “Quick, get out before you stir something up. And keep your gun out of the water.”
She grasped his hand and let him pull her out.
“I’m sorry. It just looked so good.”
“That’s an illusion. There’re all kinds of alligators and snakes in there that’ll ruin your day, not to mention the turtles. If they get a hold of you with those beaks, they’re leaving with a pound of your flesh.”
Dominic caught up to them and knelt at the water’s edge, pushing fallen leaves around. He got excited and jumped up. “Look! There’s blood on this one. We must be right behind them.”
Rooster plucked the leaf from his hand and brought it up to his nose. He recoiled from the smell. “Yep, that’s from them all right. Looks like we’re all headed the same way.”
Finding Angelo was the least of Rooster’s concerns, but he had to play the game to keep everyone with him. Knowing that some crazed Bigfoot or whatever it could be was out there changed the game. Rooster needed numbers, especially when they all had guns. Getting out of this mess alive meant depending on the group.
“Mick, come up here!” Rooster hollered.
The pilot was deathly pale. Blood had mixed with his sweat so he looked like an extra from a horror movie.
“I need a second pair of eyes. You see anything between here and that spot?” He pointed to the horseshoe-shaped landmass slightly to their right.
Mick squinted, taking his time, while Rooster gave another sweep of their immediate area, which was where most of the bad shit would lie in wait.
“It looks clear to me, but you know there could be anything under the surface.”
“Yeah, I know, but we’ll have to take our chances.” He turned to the group. “We’re heading for that island over there. Odds are the water will be pretty shallow, so hopefully we can walk across. But you may have to swim in parts. Keep your gun over your head. If it gets wet, it’s about as useful as a rock. I’ll take the lead, and Mick here will stay in the middle. Liz, you seem like you can handle yourself. You opposed to taking the rear?”
The girl quietly shook her head.
Mick added, “And watch out for gator holes. When the water’s low, they dig these big old holes looking for food. Now that the water’s high, you can’t see them until you drop in one. Just be ready to tread water if your foot comes across empty space.”
That seemed to rattle a few cages. Mick noticed and added, “The gators aren’t
in
the holes now. Just be aware that you may come across some deep pits.”
“No sense lugging this around,” Rooster said. He dropped the bag of guns, which only had five more, and hung it on a branch. “If I’m lucky, I can come back for this later.”
“What about that small one?” Maddie asked, nodding toward the tool bag of money.
He just smiled and left it at that.
“Good. Let’s get wet.”
Rooster eased into the water and had to admit that Maddie was right. Despite the ball-shriveling fear that something in the murk was moments from biting or eating him, the cool water did wonders for chasing the heat stroke away.
He heard Dominic say, “Angelo’s probably over there too, right?”
When Rooster turned, he saw John and Carol put a hand on each of his shoulders. “I’m sure he is,” Carol said.
Dominic jumped in like a kid at a public pool, anxious to find his friend. Next was Mick. He filled his cap with water and let it rain down over his head, washing the blood off his face. Jack came in tentatively after him, his eyes wide and searching for imminent death.
Maddie and Rooster had gone about twenty yards and the water was still chest high, at least for him. They hopped on the balls of their feet, moving ahead steadily. A breeze had picked up and was at their backs. It felt good.
But it also carried something with it.
“Oh shit!”
Rooster spun around and shouted, “Get in the water, now!”
Liz, John and Carol were still on land, tying one of the supply bags to John’s back. They must have smelled it, too, because each of them stopped and stiffened.
Instantly, the mangrove trees came alive with unearthly wailing that would freeze a man’s piss midstream.
What came bursting out of them would haunt Rooster until the day he died.
Chapter Twelve
John felt the hammer blow to his back before he had a chance to turn around. It sounded like a herd of stampeding wildebeests.
He hit the shallow water face-first and got a mouth full of gunk from the bottom. When he exploded to the surface, he couldn’t help but scream.
Four hairy monsters, the smallest at just about seven feet, the largest over eight, stood side by side on the shore, bellowing with murderous intent. All had broad, muscular chests, and one sported a pair of drooping, furred breasts. The hair on their heads was long, like an 80s glam band gone rogue. Their immense, talon-like hands hung low, almost to their knees. A small amount of bronze flesh was visible on their faces, but the rest of them just looked like bipedal woolly mammoths. And their eyes! Eight flaming eyes bored out from under all that hair and filth.
“Carol!”
Liz was nowhere to be seen, but three of the skunk apes had hold of his wife. Tears ran down her face and she wailed, “John! Please, help me!”
He whipped around to see Rooster take a careful shot at the one that held Carol’s left arm. A jet of blood sprouted from its shoulder, but it didn’t let go.
Instead, it tightened its grip, bringing out a scream from Carol that didn’t seem humanly possible.
“It’s breaking my arm!” she shouted.
John fought the mire that tried to hold him in place. He was weeping and shouting and out of his mind with helpless anger and fear.
“Just hold on, baby!”
He was inches from shore when the beasts bent at the knees in a concerted effort and tugged. Carol came apart in three shredded hunks as easily as a cheap piñata. One of them held a portion that contained her right leg, part of her torso, neck, and worst of all, still-screaming head.
“Nooooooo!”
John meant to empty every bullet he had in his gun, but it had been lost in the water.
Another shot rang out, biting off the trunk of a tree.
He heard someone shout, “John, get back!”
Carol’s eyes settled on his, and her shouting, and her pain, stopped. A final tear snaked down her cheek, and she was silent.
The skunk apes tossed her pieces into the water, beating at the ground with their massive hands and screeching, baring jagged, yellow teeth.
A hand grabbed John’s shoulder and pulled him away. It was Jack. Dazed, John went limp and allowed himself to be trailed along like a floatable pool toy. His stomach heaved and he threw up.
Carol.
He couldn’t save her.
Please forgive me! I failed you when you needed me most!
He blocked out the impossible horror on the shore. He could only see the final, pleading moment in Carol’s eyes.
Jack, pulling John, passed Dominic, who had squared his legs and shoulders and was deciding which skunk ape to shoot.
“You motherfuckers!”
He pulled the trigger and the pistol jerked up, missing high and wide.
“Save your bullets!” Rooster shouted. He had come back and was right behind him. “They’re too far for you.”
He was right. Dominic needed to go to
them.
“Are you crazy?” Rooster hollered. He felt the big man’s fingers swipe at his neck and shoulder but shrugged them off.
Dominic advanced to the shore. His heart thundered in his chest. These amped-up gorillas had taken Angelo and killed that lady. He wasn’t going to run away. They had to pay.
The skunk apes stopped their ungodly howling and trained their attention on him. They mustn’t have been used to having prey come
to
them. Odds were, they were the king shits out here. But alligators and bears and panthers didn’t have guns, and they weren’t from the Bronx.
“You think you’re tough shit?” Dominic cried out. He smiled when he saw the river of blood running down one of their arms. “You sure as hell aren’t bulletproof.”
He picked the huge one with the chest that looked like it was made of two beer kegs, aimed at its heart and shot.
The skunk ape darted to the side with the dexterity of a gazelle, and the bullet impotently sailed into the trees.
“How…how did it do that?”
“We’ll figure it out later, kid,” Rooster hissed, yanking him away and into deeper water.
And that’s when the fourth skunk ape, relegated to the shadows, came sprinting out from behind a twisted mangrove tree, holding a headless body high above its head.
Oh no! Angelo!
It launched Angelo’s body at them, slamming into Dominic and Rooster like the world’s heaviest medicine ball. They both went under from the impact. When Dominic struggled to get air, his hand errantly reached into the open cavity of Angelo’s neck, dipping his fingers deep into his best friend’s frayed innards. The last of his air burst from his lungs, and he kicked and pumped his arms until he was free.
He came up just in time to hear three quick shots. The skunk apes turned to their right and skittered away.
Liz had popped up from behind the roots of a mangrove, her pistol blazing.
The skunk apes shrieked, but it sounded more like fear than fury. They ran in a pack in the opposite direction and took to the water, splashing and making more noise than an old outboard motor. Liz followed them to the shoreline, emptying her last bullet into the white froth that the monsters had kicked up.
As suddenly as the madness had started, it was over. The skunk apes went under water and didn’t come back up. There weren’t even bubbles on the surface to betray the direction they had gone.
Angelo’s body bobbed against Dominic.
He looked down at what was left of his friend, and felt all of his defenses crumble. For the first time since he was a little kid, he wept.
Chapter Thirteen
They made it to the next island without any further surprises. Rooster figured the good Lord had had enough amusement with them, at least for the moment.
A royal palm tree made a good leaning post and offered shade from the relentless sun. Everyone was winded, soaked to their taints and scared. Rolling to his side, Rooster rummaged around one of the bags of supplies and opened a bottle of water.
“You all take a sip and pass it around. Leave enough to go around.” He took the first pull and had to stop himself from chugging it down. His body cried out for more, his stomach cramping. Instead, he wiped the top and passed it to Jack.
He looked over at John, who sat with his forearms over his knees, staring at the ground like he was looking into the center of a black hole. Poor bastard had checked out. Rooster couldn’t blame him. He’d seen a lot of bad shit go down in his life, but what had happened to Carol beat them all to hell. The way they ripped her apart, it was like watching a couple of little kids tearing a sheet of paper, except with blood spraying in every direction and internal organs slopping to the ground in a piping pile.
Dominic, on the other hand, looked like a penned-in bull waiting to enter the ring. He didn’t cry long, and Rooster had to physically restrain him from dragging Angelo’s body along with them. The way he saw it, that body would distract all the predators in the area, keep them away from those who still had heads.
“Anyone see which way they went?” Mick asked.
Liz answered, “It looked like they went for that other island over there, I’d say two hundred yards east of us. At least that’s the direction they started in.”
“It’s like they were fish,” Jack said. “Skunk apes are land mammals. How could they swim that great a distance without coming up for air?”
“You ever study a skunk ape to see how it swims?” Maddie asked.
Jack’s eyebrow rose. “That’s crazy. No one has.”
“Exactly, so no one knows what those things are capable of,” she shot back. She stabbed a stick repeatedly into the ground between her feet.
Jack was quiet for a moment, then said, “It would make sense that something that large would have considerably sized lungs. Maybe they’ve adapted to living in the Everglades so they can hold air longer, seeing as there’s so much water in the environment and being under the water is safer than above. It keeps them in a predatory position.”