His heel found hard pavement. Civilization! Grateful for firm footing, he turned and strode toward his car.

And stopped.

He didn’t have a flashlight that worked, but he had matches. And cigarettes.

And he was sure he could find his way to Honey. She couldn’t have gone far in the thick foliage and mud that dragged at every step. And he couldn’t hear her splashing around. She wasn’t moving, he was sure. She probably thought she was hiding.

He glanced left and right into darkness. Surrounded by swamp country, no one would hear her screams. And if anyone did hear them, they’d assume the noise was being made by some animal, probably in the jaws of a gator.

If Honey did make it back to civilization, she wouldn’t get all that much sympathy. If he applied the cigarettes to the folds of her body, where they were barely visible, her scars wouldn’t look nearly as painful as they were. And there was no way she could prove he’d done anything to her.

He told himself that Honey would eventually be okay. She’d have a hard night, then she’d turn up somewhere, hysterical and cursing, and yammering a story that no one would believe. Not coming from such an “adventurous” girl.

A hard night in the swamp. He wondered what that would be like.

Well, it wasn’t his fault. He wasn’t the one who got stubborn and ran blindly away in the night. And he’d searched for her, hadn’t he? It wasn’t his fault that the flashlight went dead. Was he supposed to keep fresh batteries in the damned thing just in case some stupid cow did a dash into the swamp at night?

The swamp at night.

Now look what she was going to get for being such a nose-in-the-air bitch.

He shivered. Then he made sure there was nothing to indicate that Honey Carter had been in his car tonight. If she tried to implicate him in her panic and dumb dash, he’d simply deny it all, say she was lying. She’d gotten herself lost in the swamp and run into the wrong kind of people. Probably teased them, the way she liked to do. So they attacked her, had their fun with cigarettes and who knew what else. Now she was using him for a convenient scapegoat so she wouldn’t seem like such a boob. Maybe there’d be no real, serious harm done, anyway. Just another he said/she said thing. People would soon forget. And pretty soon there’d be more and different rumors about Honey, tease that she was.

Dwayne found her within half an hour, unconscious at the base of a tree. He used the sash of her dress to tie her arms behind her, then bound her ankles.

Then he began with the cigarettes, and she came awake fast, squirming and screaming. He didn’t bother to gag her, simply slapped her hard enough, often enough, and she suffered in silence. Well, she whimpered, actually.

Until she passed out.

He studied her for a while, knowing she was still alive. Then he removed the sash belt, and his own belt that he’d used on her ankles.

He walked away from her, wondering, if she lived through the night, what kind of story she would tell.

46

Pain dragged Honey up from sleep. Her eyes, her face, her lips, everything had been burned and stung like a thousand needles. She remembered last night, Dwayne bending over her with a glowing cigarette.

Through her pain, Honey became aware that there was a great weight on her. She attempted to lift whatever it was that was weighing her down, but she couldn’t. She squinted straight up through cypress branches at a bright morning sky and felt better, more confident. Last night was like a terrible dream. But the dream was over.

A bird gave something like a shrill warning cry, but she ignored it. After all, she’d made it through the night.

She attempted again to lift the weight from her chest, then woke all the way and felt its surprising heft and roundness, was aware of the difficulty she was having breathing. The thing was dry and smooth.

And moved!

She realized what it was, but not that this was actually happening to her.

Honey screamed, so terrified now that she lost awareness of even her painfully burned face.

Nothing happened. Her desperate shrill cry was lost in the swamp.

She screamed until she was out of breath, felt the python shift slightly and tighten its grip around her entire body. She thought about getting up and running, but it was only a thought. Her legs were pressed together with such force that her knees ached.

The huge snake tightened its grip again, and Honey heard a sound like steam escaping a valve under pressure. Her right arm was smashed tight against her ribs. She flailed with her left. Every move she made seemed to prompt a countermove and a slight increase of viselike pressure. She screamed again. Inhaled to follow with another scream, and found that she couldn’t draw in enough air to muster any sound. Her waving loose left arm—the only part of her that was free—found the damp mud of the swamp floor and she pressed her palm against it, futilely attempting to rise.

More pressure. There was a muffled cracking sound, and an agonizing pain in her right side. A rib breaking?

I’m going to die here! I’m going to die!

She was struggling mightily for precious oxygen now, making a series of gentle little puffs of exhalation. No more inhalations.

She managed to raise her head an inch. Two inches. And stared with wide eyes into eyes that were not human and held no hint of mercy.

She realized with horror that the head of the snake that returned her stare with its own implacable gaze was larger than her own head.

Her wail of utter horror emerged only as a faint puff of breath, and was another signal for the thing to tighten its grip.

47

Unemployed oil rig worker Bailey Conners, driving on Lagoon Road later that day, braked reflexively when he saw something glowing dully in the sunlight among the weeds. It was about a hundred feet off the side of the road, near some cypress trees, and he had no idea what the damned thing was.

Well, he didn’t have anything else to do other than to satisfy his curiosity.

Bailey steered his Dodge pickup onto the soggy shoulder, wondering if the truck’s oversized but worn tires would have the traction to get it going again in the mud. It was a risk he had to take. He understood that he had to find out for sure what he’d seen, and that his mind on some level had rejected.

He climbed down from the truck’s cab and rolled up the sleeves of his blue work shirt, knowing he was stalling to keep from approaching whatever was ahead of him in the tall grass. Nothing was visible now, without the advantage of seeing it from the truck’s raised cab.

The sun beat down on him, and he picked up the scent of his underarm odor from a shirt worn a day too long. There were crescents of perspiration beneath both arms of the shirt. He’d begun to sweat heavily.

He was considering returning to the truck when the grass stirred. His heartbeat picked up. He was aware of the copper taste of fear.

Grow some balls, Bailey!

He didn’t have any more sleeves to roll up, so he took a deep breath and moved forward.

Bailey didn’t see it at first, because it was almost the color of the swamp. Then there it was in recognizable form, like a trick of the light. Once he realized what it was, its configuration was obvious. How had he missed it at first? The coiled body of the snake was immense, thicker than a fire hose, colored a mottled tan and green that made it nearly invisible.

There had been a state-sponsored python hunting season recently, to try to keep the python population in check. Obviously, the hunt in this area hadn’t been successful.