Serpentine (18 page)

He had just enough time to think this was really the case when the rear of the thing came sailing through the air. Joe saw it a little too late but in just enough time to prevent the thing from covering his entire head. Instead of wrapping its tentacle-like body around his face, it simply slapped him along the forehead. The weight of the thing was massive and Joe went to the floor of the boat again, his head aching tremendously.

He rolled over right away, realizing that he had lost the oar when he’d been blindsided. He saw Valerie sprawled out along the bottom of the canoe, shuddering and weeping. Meanwhile, the monster was slipping out of the boat, sliding out along the side.

And on its way out, its thick body had trapped Mac along the backside of the canoe. It slithered along her body as it escapes and, in doing so, instinctively started to coil around her.

“No,” Joe croaked.

He got to his feet, seeking out the shattered oar. He found it behind him, took its now slimy handle in his hands, and took a step forward. When he did, he slid in the vicious fluid of what served as the monster’s blood. He nearly fell again, dropping the oar into the water as he managed to keep his balance. He reached out to Mac and pulled her to him just as the monster had started to tighten around her. Joe felt the strength of it in the last moment, trying to claim her legs. They both fell, tripping over Valerie and falling in a heap.

The monster slipped completely out of the back of the canoe.

Or so it seemed.

It didn’t take Joe long to understand that the thing was still inside the canoe. It was so long that the back of its body was still in the front of the boat even through its front half had exited out of the back and was now underwater. At the front of the boat, the backside of the thing was making quick slithering motions. It was wrapping itself around the canoe in the same way it had wrapped itself around Valerie’s legs. Joe could hear the canoe creaking, the boat being squeezed beneath the thing’s weight and strength.

The canoe was tugged hard to the right as the creature moved deftly underwater. Joe recalled how quickly the thing had moved when it had come after him and Valerie that night in the field of fireflies. That, plus its strength, made Joe pretty sure that it would have no problem at all with either crushing the canoe completely or pulling them underwater.

“It’s going to crush the boat,” Joe said.

“Or try to pull us under,” Valerie said, echoing Joe’s other thought.

“We have to jump out,” Joe said.

“No,” Mac wailed. “No.”

“If we don’t it’ll kill us,” Joe said.

“But it can get us in the water, too.”

“Probably,” Joe said. “But at least we have a chance that way. Right?”

“Yeah,” Valerie said.

As they spoke, the head of the monster reappeared. It started slapping at the rear of the canoe, nestling itself around it in the same way the front was currently being claimed. Joe could feel the weight of the thing on the boat. The bottom buckled and cracked as the monster continued to squeeze.

“I can’t get in the water,” Mac said. “It’ll get us.”

The boat creaked again. Up front, the side cracked down the middle. Water started to trickle in. Two seconds later, that trickle was a steady stream.

“We don’t have a choice,” Joe told Mac. “Just hold my hand and we’ll be okay. We’ll swim back to the shack. And it’s right there…maybe fifteen feet away. We can do that. The thing is distracted with the boat.”

“But I can’t.”

“We’ll have a head start,” Valerie said, trying to help Joe convince her. “By the time it’s done with the boat, we’ll almost be there. Okay?”

Mac nodded, but let out a deep gasping pout. Joe hugged her to him as the boat made another cracking noise. Joe was pretty sure the entire body of the thing was wrapped around the boat. He counted three coils of it at the front of the canoe and one thicker one at the back. Meanwhile, they stood near the center as the boat was being crushed all around them.

Joe brought Mac to him and kissed her on the forehead. “I’ll get you over there,” he said, nodding to the pointing station. “But we have to go
now.
You ready?”

Yes,” she said, still crying.

“You?” Joe asked Valerie. She gave a nod in response.

“Now,”
he whispered.

And once again, Joe found himself jumping into the lake. Only now, he knew without a doubt that the monster was there. It was there and it was bigger than he had known it before. It was bigger, it was stronger and it was hungrier.

They hit the water and even before he came up with his sister’s hand in his own, he was swimming as hard as he could. He didn’t dare look back. But even still, he could hear the canoe. It was cracking, creaking, splintering.

Beside him, swimming as well as she could (which wasn’t very good at all), Mac continued to cry. Valerie came up beside them and they worked together to keep Mac afloat.

The shore was now about twelve feet ahead of them. Then ten…then eight. Joe kept his eyes focused on the old shack and hoped it would serve as some sort of safety.

Behind them, there was a chilling crashing noise. Joe couldn’t help it—he looked over his shoulder and saw the boat being snapped in half. It broke into three pieces, one of which flew a few feet into the air. Splinters and dust formed a small cloud that settled over the water. Then the monster was slithering over the remains of the boat and quickly darting under water.

Joe let out a moan. The shore was now six feet away. He took another stroke forward and felt instant relief when his feet touched the bottom. He pushed himself forward, hauling the two girls with him as he splashed out of the water and towards the shack.

He looked back again and saw nothing—only the lake and shattered remains of the canoe. But somewhere between their bodies and those flecks of wood, he knew their deaths were speeding towards them somewhere in that murky lake water.

TWENTY-SEVEN

The cabin was starting to reek. There was a thick mingling of Chinese food leftovers, garbage that needed to be taken out, and the overall smell a place tends to take on when the inhabitant is being unproductive. Only, Scott didn’t
feel
like he was being unproductive. Starting at these damned screens for the better part of a week was causing some of the worst headaches he’d ever had. He was tired, he was listless, and he was frustrated.

And truth be known, he wasn’t quite sure when he had last taken a shower.

Still, there were a few positives to the situation. For instance, there had been no reports of violent deaths around the lake. The only death in the last four days had come from a drunk driving incident on the outskirts of Clarkton. No deaths meant no extra guilt from not having found the creature. Of course, it also meant that the next attack could be right around the corner.

He was starting to wonder if the old man on the fishing boat had mortally wounded the thing. Susan had told him that the man—Wayne Crosby, if he remembered correctly—claimed to have shot the creature with a Ruger .22. Being that the creature seemed to have not been active in the last few days, it was worth considering.

The other positive was that Roger Lowry seemed to have accepted that his “clean-up man” was holed up in a cabin in the remote lakeside community of Clarkton, Virginia. Roger understood the waiting game and knew that this slow surveillance process was essentially the only way to find the creature. The only alternative was to send a specialist of some sort that had a background in marine biology, or maybe even a whole FBI team with a diving background. But that meant spending more bureau dollars on a case that, when all was said and done, would be buried under so much paperwork that no one in their right mind would ever dig deep enough to find out what had happened. It was also a case that less than a dozen people were aware of, so there was also the level of secrecy to be considered.

As long as Scott sent in his reports twice a day (at lunch and just before he went to sleep), Roger seemed happy. Scott assumed that after another week or two, there would be talk of relieving him with another agent, but if that week ended up being as long as this one, Roger wasn’t even going to waste his time with such hopes.

He was looking around the cabin, wondering if he should maybe take an hour to clean the place up, when he saw a small wooden boat go wafting out into the water on one of the screens set up in the living room. At first glance, he thought nothing of it and turned his attention to the overflowing garbage can in the kitchen. But just as he turned his head, he saw that there was only a single passenger in the boat and it looked to be a little girl. Closer inspection revealed that the boat was a small canoe.

He went to the laptop the screen was being displayed on and maximized it, temporarily blocking out the other feeds on the screen. He then switched it to the television screen, giving him a forty inch view of the scene.

The camera he was viewing was the one that had been set up several feet within a tree along one of the banks not too far away from his cabin. The little girl was a good distance away from the bank, having crept onto the screen from the left. Scott could see the tree line on the opposite side of the water, assuming the girl had come from the bank on the opposite side of the cove. There seemed to be no activity along the tree line, making the sight of this young girl all alone in a boat a little alarming. She looked to be no older than ten, but it was hard to be certain given the angle of the camera and the distance between the girl and where the camera was perched. She was a good seventy feet away and was little more than a detailed speck on the screen.

The scene was more alarming still when the girl got to her feet and starting to yell. There was no sound, as the cameras had no audio capabilities, so her little screams were totally silent as he watched. She was looking slightly to her left, peering somewhere off the screen. And as she continued to shout, her little canoe continued to drift slowly closer towards the trail cam.

The more responsible part of him thought about calling the local PD to go out and check on things. But he also knew that this could be some sort of elaborate play between the girl and one of her friends. If this was the case, the only thing worth looking into were the irresponsible parents.

He held off for a while, although he found that he was already holding his cellphone in his hand. Scott was not one that typically relied on gut instincts but he felt something instinctual slipping in behind the control as he watched the girl and her little wooden canoe drift closer to the camera. As she got closer, Scott saw that she seemed to be settling down into the canoe again but was still looking to someone or something off camera. He could also see her more clearly now and he was certain that this little girl was no more than ten years of age—probably younger than that.

After another minute or so, Scott saw another boat come into view, coming from the same direction as the little girl. Again, the distance made it hard to tell, but he thought this boat was a basic aluminum fishing boat. It was old but it came across the water quickly. There were two people in it and when Scott squinted at the screen, he felt pretty confident that they were kids, too. These looked a little older. There was one boy and one girl; the girl was rowing and making pretty good speed. Scott wondered if this was a bullying situation or some sort of rescue attempt. He looked back to the little girl and saw that she looked a little more relaxed. He began to get irritated with the screen, wishing he were there in person to watch it play out. It was so hard to judge correctly when his subjects were no larger than three inches on the television screen.

As he continued to watch, something went wrong. The two kids in the aluminum boat had stopped rowing. The boy was standing up and looking out towards the younger girl. The older girl in the canoe was trying to row but didn’t seem to be going anywhere.

Scott started to almost absently pull his contacts up on his cellphone as the boy took the oar from the girl and tried rowing closer to the canoe. By the time the two older kids in the canoe had decided to leap out of their boat, Scott had figured that it was sinking. He watched the older kids amble into the canoe with the younger girl and his gut reaction was stronger than ever. Sure, the older kids had come to the little girl’s rescue; that much was clear now. But seeing the older two jump into the water…well, something didn’t seem right about it. They were moving with a sort of urgency that spoke of fear and survival. Maybe he was jumping to conclusions as he watched the tiny people play out their scene on the TV in front of him, but he was pretty sure the older two were scared of something.

Figuring it was better to be safe than sorry, Scott pulled up Susan Lessing’s phone number and tapped it. As it rang in his ear, he watched the older two kids get situated in the boat with the younger one. The boy started working to turn the canoe around in the direction the canoe had drifted from. A few feet away, the aluminum boat continued to sink, now almost entirely submerged.

“Yeah?” Susan said in his ear.

“Susan, I’ve got a potentially dangerous situation out on Kerr Lane…on the opposite side of the lake from where the trail cam in the tree is situated. There are three kids—a younger girl and what looks to be two teens. I’m not sure yet but…well, maybe head over this way.”

“Sure. I’m in the car now. I’m maybe five minutes away from your cabin, actually.”

“Great. It might be nothing, but these kids, they…”

“They what?”

Scott saw two humps break in the water. It looked exactly like a snake rippling through the water, only the size was off. This would have been a
big
snake.

“Shit. Susan, I think we’ve got a sighting. I’m watching it right now.”

“The monster?”

“I think so. It—”

And then he saw it rise up out of the water and attack the canoe. Even in a tiny form on the laptop screen, it was terrifying.

“Kerr Lane,” Scott barked. “Now!”

“Oh God,” Susan said. “Okay. Give me about five minutes.”

With his cellphone still by his ear, he grabbed up his gun from the coffee table. Just feeling the Sig Sauer in his hands made him feel like he was finally doing something productive.

Scott was already figuring the time it would take him to get there. He figured he was a little less than a mile away from the place where the kids had gotten into the water. Hauling ass in the car down Kerr Lane, he could probably get there in a minute and a half.

Seems quick,
he thought.
But I’m pretty sure those kids will be dead by then…

With that thought haunting, Scott ran to his car.

In the seconds between opening and closing his door, he heard screams coming from somewhere off the lake.