He thought about submerging himself and swimming as far as he could underwater, but just as he prepared to fill his lungs for the underwater dash, a bullet clipped the tree trunk and he was spattered by blood.
Before he could even wonder where he had been hit, he heard a loud splash.
I don’t think I’m shot, he told himself, so what’s with all the blood?
Patting himself down as he searched for a bullet wound, MacCready turned reflexively toward the splashing noises and caught a flash of cyclopean movement.
The two Germans had been wading less than ninety feet away, between a pair of ancient and rotting tree trunks—but the dead wood had somehow come to life.
The tree trunks are moving, MacCready’s brain registered. And they’ve got eyes!
Corporal Kessler, who had apparently been using one of the “trees” to pull himself along, was now giving MacCready a puzzled, pleading expression; even in his fevered condition, the American knew that the expression had something to do with the fact that the corporal’s right arm had been removed at the shoulder. Arterial blood pumped in a pulsating flow that mimicked Kessler’s racing heart.
MacCready required several more seconds to wrap his mind around the fact that these tree trunks weren’t tree trunks at all. They were the superbly camouflaged heads and necks of a pair of turtles—enormous turtles. And although their shells remained hidden below the water, he calculated that they must be ten feet across.
An instant later, Kessler’s body jerked downward and disappeared under the black-green surface of the swamp. Except for a swirl of red foam, it was as if he had never existed.
The other man shared none of Kessler’s luck. His “tree trunk” had struck him in the abdomen, and he screamed and flailed against the knotty armor with his fists.
The astonishingly bizarre turtle seemed to draw back from the blows and as it did, something pink and wet trailed away from the screaming man. The German tried desperately to reclaim his intestines—to put them back inside.
A third tree trunk mimic, this one an arm’s length away from where MacCready stood, opened its golden eyes and began to move. Its watermelon-size head turned toward him and a pair of nostrils, as wide as silver dollars, flared and sniffed. Then, inexplicably, the bullet-wounded turtle turned and glided away, leaving little noticeable wake but a trail of its own blood as it steered directly toward the stricken German. Veering away from the food at the last moment, the newcomer rammed its body against the man’s attacker.
The turtles sideswiped each other with their necks. Like sparring male giraffes, Mac thought. And as the creatures vied for possession of the soldier, they hissed and snapped at each other. MacCready suddenly recalled the strange battle cries of the Tyrannosaurus rex in King Kong.
As Mac watched the distracted giants, the dying man took the opportunity to reel in another length of his intestines. For a moment, just for a moment, it appeared as if he might win the struggle to reviscerate himself. But as the soldier staggered away from the behemoths, the sparring session ended abruptly and the creatures turned their full attention toward him.
In the end, the turtles divided and shared their meal. And when they had finished, they drifted slowly apart—then froze. In little more than an instant, they transformed themselves back into tree trunks again.
MacCready, who hadn’t moved since the attack began, stared at the swamp ahead. He could see scores of dead trunks, maybe hundreds. Without thinking, he reached into his shirt and withdrew Yanni’s bottle. This time with no grimacing, and with little wasted motion, he spread the oil over his arms, head, and torso—much more liberally, now.
“‘It’ll keep ya from getting bitten,’ she says. Fuckin’ A!”
MacCready sniffed at the empty bottle and tossed it into the brush.
Too bad this shit doesn’t repel insects like it does giant turtles.
As his first hours out of the swamp became a day and then two days, the constant assault by flies and biting midges of unlimited variety rendered him more and more feverish.
By the third day, his body was losing water faster than he could replenish it by chewing on moisture-filled stems and roots. As for the bites, medicinal tree bark helped to stabilize his fever but failed to bring it down.
On the fourth day, paranoia had begun to set in. Someone was following him.
But even paranoids are sometimes right, he told himself. Through fever and self-doubt, he knew this was one of those times.
Years of field experience had taught him to pay attention to subconscious warning signals—a few molecules of smoke or a minute change in the pattern of birdcalls, never sensed consciously. There was no ignoring the warning bell from within, so he zigged and zagged his route, traveling by night and navigating by stars whenever breaks in the clouds allowed it.
By the fifth day, he needed protein, and he needed it badly.