some men in the swamps on the south side of the base the year before and they didn’t want that happening again. Now Torelli wondered if it had been just the swamp that had swallowed those men up.
The sun burned down on Torelli’s head, baking his jet-black hair. He rubbed his hand over his close-shaven scalp. Damn. He hadn’t even realized he’d lost his helmet. He pulled his gun tight to his bosom. That he still had, and he didn’t plan on losing it. He wasn’t going to panic like the others. When they came at him, he was going to fire steady, cold. He reached down with his left hand and made sure his spare clips were handy. They’d eat his rounds before he’d let them kill him.
Mosquitoes hummed at his ears, and gnats made their maddening song at the corners of his eyes. Florida was for shit, he decided. If he could just get out of here, he wasn’t ever coming back. He’d put in for a transfer to Alaska, by God. He’d go anywhere but bug-infested, hotbox, Florida.
And who would have bet on monsters? He had to stifle a laugh. He was cracking up. He had to be strong.
Torelli tried to remember where he was. He looked up, and figured he’d come about a mile west of the point where the company had come apart. If that was true, he was close to Aiken Creek, which emptied into Aiken Lake, which usually had half a dozen off-duty soldiers fishing out there or just lying around dozing with no sergeant to bother them. If he was careful, he could follow the creek down to the lake and yell for help, or commandeer a jeep if someone was there. He’d swim, if he had to, even though they’d all been briefed on the alligators that lived in the water on the base. The base was one of the few places left where you could see a gator; they’d been hunted out everywhere else.
He wondered who knew about these things. Someone had to know. Maybe they’d been sent out to test them, see how a couple of fire teams could stand up to them. If so, the things had passed with an almost perfect score: eleven men dead to none for them, unless Jenkins had killed a baby one. But he was still there. Anthony Torelli’s boy was still kicking, and he was damned if some animal was going to take him down without a fight.
Well, he’d rested enough. It was time to move out. Aiken Creek couldn’t be but a quarter mile or so away. That wasn’t far. He could do that, easy. All he had to do was look and listen, and watch where he stepped. That was all. Piece of cake.
Slowly, Torelli stood.
He was in the middle of a grassy plain. The young man, born and raised in a Philadelphia row house neighborhood, didn’t know that he was standing in the last upland longleaf savanna in Florida; all the rest of it had been cut down and plowed under and either planted in slash pines or had been paved over. This was the last, and it was a very strange thing to look at: primal. On a purely instinctive level, in something that tickled at some dim and faded racial memory, Torelli knew there was danger lurking out there, out in the tall grass.
Carefully, he took a step. Looked behind. Was intensely aware of what he picked up in his peripheral vision. He breathed slowly. Fear was in him, like a smoldering fire that threatened to flare into panic. He controlled it. Torelli took another step. From his right, he heard something. He tensed, bringing his gun up. Saw a gently sliding movement on the ground, in the grass. He breathed out a sigh as a long, brown water snake moved swiftly by like a living band of liquid. If the snake felt safe enough to move, maybe Torelli was safe.
He took another step.
But that snake had certainly been in a hurry. Torelli froze. He pivoted slowly, looking. The wind blew the tops of the grass so that it made patterns like breaking waves in the acres and acres around him. He was not alone. He felt it. If he was going to live, if he was ever going to make it to the lake, to the barracks, to a day when he would see his mom and dad and that Philadelphia neighborhood again, he was going