As he advanced, Ryan swung the panga, twice feeling the satisfying jar run up his arm as it struck solidly home on flesh and gristle.
His left hand touched the gator on the foreleg, enabling him to work out precisely where the beast was lying. He threw himself on it, one arm clamping around the murderous jaws, holding them shut. Despite the straining efforts of the reptile to open its jaws and savage him, Ryan held fast.
It was a piece of lore that he’d learned from Trader. Even the biggest of saurians was helpless once you closed its jaws and held them shut. They were incredibly powerful when it came to their snapping shut on anyone, but surprisingly feeble when it came to trying to open them.
Trader had told Ryan that at least a dozen years ago, and he’d remembered it.
And it was true.
Pinning the beast down, Ryan was free to use the panga against its throat and underbelly, where the scales were much thinner. He used all of his strength, gasping out with the effort of each stabbing blow.
“Die fucker die fuckin’ die.”
The gator wriggled harder, its legs kicking out great chunks of the muddy walls of its lair. It bounced Ryan against the ceiling, almost crushing him. But he held his grip and continued to hack at the creature. It felt like it was going to try to dive out under the water to the open bayou, but seemed to change its mind at the last moment.
The mutie’s movements seemed to be getting slower and less violent.
Ryan continued to stab, thrust and hack away with the razored panga, digging deeper and deeper at the gator’s innards, up beyond the wrist with each savage blow, feeling the soft twists and loops of intestines spilling into the water and coiling around him, aware of the most vile smell, deafened by the muffled roaring of the beast.
He became aware that he was using the blade on a corpse. The gator had become still, its muscles relaxed, fouling the water in its passing, floating at his side like a great sodden tree trunk.
Ryan leaned away from it, fighting for breath in the noxious air, struggling to hold off the sudden onset of panic at being trapped in this cramped underwater den with the body of the mutie saurian for company.
He fumbled for the sheath at his hip and put away the panga, avoiding cutting his fingers on it, feeling automatically to check that the SIG-Sauer P-226 was still safely bolstered on the opposite side.
As he leaned back against the sloping wall of the den, as far away from the swaying corpse of the gator as he could get, Ryan felt a growing wave of claustrophobia sweeping over his mind. He had an awareness that he was buried somewhere deep beneath the earth, in a pit that was three parts filled with the brackish swamp water, with no way of knowing how to get outand no way at all of letting Krystyif she was still aliveknow where he was. As far as she knew, the gator had taken him and he was gone forever, to be trapped, blind and alone.
“Fireblast,” Ryan whispered, voice gentle and controlled. “Fucking fireblast.” He could hardly hear himself. The only sound, apart from the soft whispering of the water, was the pounding blood in his skull.
He rubbed mud from his head, fingers inches from his eye. “Can’t even see the hand in front of my face,” he said, almost managing something like a laugh.
Almost.
It was totally black and silent.
Silent as the grave.
Chapter Twenty
Krysty had finally stopped the futile crying. Tears streaked her cheeks, and deep marks marred her palms where she’d dug in her nails.
Her shoulders slumped, and she stared vacantly out across the gray-brown expanse of the bayou. She ached all over from the violent battering she’d endured from the powerful jaws of the giant mutie gator, and her chest hurt when she took in a deep breath. But Krysty figured that there was nothing too serious done to her. No broken ribs.
She’d actually watched Ryan readying himself for his blind dive to the rescue, and had done what she could to stop him. But she might as well have tried to stop a maddened charging buffalo with a spitball.
A part of her brimmed with pride at the way her lover had come to her aid, though he had to have been aware how bitterly the dice were loaded against him.
And a larger part of her was filled with a hopeless bleakness at the certainty that he had offered his life in exchange for hers, and that she would never see him again.
“Never.”
“ACTION WITHOUT THOUGHT can be time totally wasted. If you got the time to think, then do it.”
The saying came into Ryan’s mind as he leaned against the pile of wet twigs and gnawed bones, trying to regain full control of his body and his nerves.
“Yeah, thanks a lot, Trader,” he said. “Ace on the line, as usual.”
There had been a way into the creature’s hidden lair, which meant that there was also a way out of it.
Ryan could remember the mad race along the narrow twisting tunnel, between the roots of the mangroves, hauled by the wounded gator. Then they’d exploded into the underground nest, hollowed from the living mud.
There was an exit from the hole, somewhere below the level of the swamp water. All he had to do was take a good deep breath and dive down to find it, then swim along until he was able to break free to the surface.
It couldn’t be more than forty or fifty feet to swim under water.
Maybe eight feet?
“Hundred,” Ryan offered. “Any advance on a hundred? Do I hear one-fifty?” The movement of the water had ceased and it was utterly silent. “No advance? Hey, are you speaking to me? Guess you must be. I’m the only one here.”
He smiled.
If there had been light down there and anyone to see, they would have been appalled at the rictus of shock and horror on Ryan’s face.
“Waiting won’t make it any easier. Time to go exploring, Ryan. Find the way out is all. Deep breath and let’s have a feel around under the water.” He laughed, a harsh, abrupt sound. “Least being blind doesn’t make much difference to this one.”
He drew what he could of the foul air into his lungs and dived down out of sight.
KRYSTY HAD TWO CHOICES.
She could go back into Bramton and enlist help to try to find Ryanor his bodythough she wasn’t sure if she could ever locate the place again. Trees, drooping with the white fronds of Spanish moss, were all around the edges of the dark, scummy water. One lagoon and causeway looked much like another.
The starting point of the old tourist motel and the time-frozen marina was a couple hundred yards away. Krysty knew that much. But she wasn’t sure how far the gator had dragged her. Or in what direction.
The alternative was to try to follow the way the beast had taken Ryan. She’d been able to crawl out of the swamp in time to see the foaming turbulence that had man and reptile at its bubbling center. But that had disappeared behind a large group of drooping mangroves, a good hundred paces to the east.
Krysty glanced at the sky.
Light was already beginning to fade, the dull shadows lengthening, making the place even more dark and gloomy. There was certainly no hope of returning with rescuers from the ville before full dark, which meant the two options were really only one.
She began to pick her way cautiously around the edge of the bayou, stopping suddenly and carefully reloading her blaster, her fingers only trembling a little.
THE FIRST TWO DIVES were fruitless. All he found were hollows and pockets in the mud, none of which went more than a few feet in any direction before closing off in dead ends, which meant a difficult retreat, wriggling backward, fighting all the time to overcome the rising waves of terror at being helplessly trapped in the filthy hole.
“Third time lucky,” Ryan panted.
As he filled his lungs, it seemed that the pocket of air in the den was much diminished in quality.
Maybe he wouldn’t drown after all.
Just suffocate.
Ryan dived once more under the dark surface, hands reaching for the tunnel out.
IT WAS HOPELESS. Krysty knew that the big carnivores had their nests, dens or lairs some way beneath the surface of the water, hollowed out from mud, where they would take their prey. They often used the dark holes as larders, sometimes allowing their victims to stay alive for several days.
But there was no way of identifying them from outside, on the banks above.