Chapter 19: The Lagoon
Frederick stopped, certain he heard the faint, whispering hush of falling water. He held his breath in, straining to pick out the phantom sound. Nothing. He turned his head slightly and this time heard it again. Even so, he couldn’t tell how far. But as he stumbled through the undergrowth another hundred paces, the noise grew, became unmistakable. A waterfall most likely, and from the growing susurrations, a substantial one. He didn’t remember seeing one on his map, but knew that didn’t mean a whole lot. Jungle rains created and destroyed countless lesser streams, run-offs, and transitory ponds daily. He’d found out through experience that mapped topography and actual topography had a tendency to vary widely.
He didn’t even bother pulling out the compass to check his heading. His arms were tired from pulling and pushing at the ponderous vines and other foliage that lined every step of the goddamn way. Down here at the floor of the jungle it was suffocating; the very air seemed to be in conspiracy against him as he trudged ahead. But there was water ahead and water meant life. Again he slashed out with the short-bladed machete, and inched slowly forward. Only a slight variation in sound convinced him he was moving in the right direction, but it was still uncertain, puzzling how the sound remained almost constant, unchanging. He reasoned that the tightly-packed jungle itself was behind this theft of sound. Perhaps the whole goddamn thing was a mirage. There was a great heaviness pressing him down, wrapping him slowly in a strangling death-grip.
Twice he had to stop, furiously seeking out the lost sound amid the huge omnipotence surrounding him. It seemed he hacked through several more miles of jungle before the sound of falling water again became unmistakable. No phantom now, but real. Even while swinging the blade. He forgot his initial disquiet. He began to imagine himself stumbling out onto some sandy glade, emerging from this green, dripping Hell into a startling Eden. He tried to bite back on it.
He saw a brightness ahead, a clearing surely. It worked at pulling apart the shadows itself as he heaved forward, hacking harder and faster now. In fact, he was moving so fast and carelessly that a downward arc finally broke him through the borderland, spilling him out into what was actually a skinny ring of muddy beach. He pulled himself to his knees, flung the machete off a few yards. Sunlight danced against his closed eyelids. For several, thankful, lost moments he remained just so, on his knees, his hands useless at his side. Only when the euphoria began to wane did he dare open his eyes.
The lagoon was as irregular as anything truly natural is likely to be. It formed a thin, pronounced ribbon ten yards deep, reaching out to skirt a slight, patched attempt at an island, until finally widening out into a bowl practically a quarter-mile away. From his vantage point, he could just make out a waterfall on the far side. The lagoon formed a recessed cup at the base of a ridge of ragged slopes. They were surely no more than 800-1,000 feet above sea level but their overbearing presence immediately caused a tickling feather of discomfort in the back of Frederick’s throat. Perfection could be cruel, could lie. He would be a fool now to ignore history and other ominous legends from the past. But let’s face it, what other plan did he have? Stagger back into the fucking jungle? No. The sun made nightmares dim and featureless.
He rocked back onto the sand, his elbows digging in. He looked around and began to smile, shaking his head at the things he’d endured on the way to this place. He struggled out of his backpack and left it on the beach beside him. He couldn’t remember ever being so glad to see the sunshine. Even fucking ‘Nam didn’t come close. That’s right, he told himself. Enjoy, but don’t get too fucking carried away. Don’t forget what’s happened. Even if you do get out the real fun will just be starting. He nodded at this, too, but the smile refused to go.
“Where to?” he said aloud. His voice sounded foreign, vulnerable out here in the open, and he cast his head nervously about. Some of the magic had escaped with that one utterance, and he did feel the cool, trailing needle that left a reminder of where he was at his spine. Only a few days back in the bush, and he was already starting to lose civilization. Just like in ‘Nam, the vestiges of that animal even now rearing its head again. There was no comfortable distance between the violence and death that crouched on the edge of the Real World. Civilization had its trappings and rituals; here there was no ritual save living and dying. One thing was sure enough though, inaction led to a swift death.
This thought pushed away the others as he lay there on the bank, his elbows dug into the sand, his mind drifting to places it hadn’t been in a long while. He sat up and tried to stretch the fatigue from his body.
He looked around again, paying attention to every detail of the lagoon. A beautiful place in different circumstances, a potential liability to him now. He needed to get away from the water, up to a vantage point where he’d hopefully be safe for the night. A place he could dig his back into and fight like a demon if need be. A place where he’d have an advantage.
That ridge. He would pitch there tonight. He felt sure it was a dominant enough feature as to be recorded on his map. It surely circled around the lagoon with enough authority. He had to be close to that fucking highway. Even going on low numbers, he felt sure he’d covered enough ground. Christ, it’d been four days now!
That’s right, four days, the voice reminded him. Only four. Once in ‘Nam he’d been pursued through the jungle for the better part of two weeks. You made it then and you can damn sure make it now, he tried to remind himseslf. Hell, this time you’re not even being chas--
This thought stuck in his mind like a dry bone in a dog’s throat. No, no, no. No more of that shit. Not here, not now. Of course, he’d been scared; he’d been off balance. His mind had played tricks on him. It wasn’t that hard to explain: he’d hallucinated. Plain and simple. But now it was time to leave all that behind. Now it was time to keep on living or get on with dying.
He closed his eyes and meditated for a moment. When he opened them again he felt steady. The ridge would take him no more than thirty minutes, an hour tops. Even from here he could make out the way. Okay, next. There were still several hours until nightfall and it would do no good to hang around here. But my God, he was filthy! Better to wash the grime off and start fresh.
And the water did look beautiful. He wouldn’t be in long, just enough time to leech the rest of the ache out of his bones. The last couple of days had worn him thin. He scanned the tree line for a large rock or fallen tree he could hang his clothes and backpack on. There, a rotted, sinewy length of withered tree bowing out of the competition along the border of the lagoon thirty feet to his left. The jungle had crept up far enough there that the beach was gone, but Frederick could tell from the shadows on the water that it wasn’t very deep. It would suffice as a hat rack in a pinch.
He made his way over and discovered he was right, the water was no higher than his ankles, and he hung his backpack on what looked to be a fairly stout branch. His boots and socks he took from around his neck and hung them likewise. As he leaned against the tree, he took off his pants, only getting them minimally wet in the process. The 9 was safe in a leg pocket, disengaged from his body for the first time since beginning this fucked-up odyssey. He hung his shirt from the same branch and was suddenly comfortably naked for the first time in what seemed like months. This was indeed a day of firsts.
Oddly enough, he did not feel vulnerable. The sun was too high, the water too cool. The perfection of the moment could not be denied.
He moved farther into the water until it ringed his waist and stood there scarcely breathing. The tension he’d carried with him since the initial meeting with the brothers ran off in steady waves. Even the nagging thought of piranhas held little fear. He fanned out his arms, appreciating the clear, mirror-like surface. His feet undulated beneath him.
He puffed out his chest and dropped to his knees on the soft, muddy bottom. Nice. He reclined with his legs thrown out in front while he rested his bouncing ass in the depressions his knees had left. The rigorous
days began to drift away. Hell, maybe there would still turn out to be a way out of this hellish mess. All he had to do was make it out of the jungle, turn a deal in some rat-fuck hole of a town off the highway (wherever that happened to be), and make it back to the now almost mythical land of Thibodaux, Louisiana. That was it, simple. And then fuck the Franklins. This was no time to turn pussy. He bobbed there for a while and thought good thoughts with a grim smile on his face.
Not long after he heard the twig snap.
He snorted water into his nose as he started up, momentarily thrown off balance. Bent over, he coughed several times before he got control, and then hunkered down, his mind racing. He scanned the tree-shrouded bank but could find no source for the noise.
Then, closer still, another snap. And as his eyes hurried to mark the spot, he thought he caught a glimpse of clothing lurching among a swaying bush set back from the bank. Off to the left, thankfully, away from the place where his clothes and backpack swayed gently from the branch. He crouched forward, closing ground on the leaning tree while panning the bank with his eyes.
There it was again, farther left still. Frederick caught himself breathing loudly and cursed under his breath. Should have taken the goddamn gun! The image came instantaneously: a man popping out of the jungle darkness, one of the Colombians or even an Indian, smiling with murderous intent as he got to the tree first, rummaging around in the backpack until finding the gun and then unloading until Frederick floated naked, bleeding and dead, face-down in this forgotten lagoon, slowly taking on water until he sunk to the bottom.
His hands began to shake. Another sound, louder; a crash this time as Frederick strained to make out the form making its way through the underbrush.
When it came it was as if the jungle had vomited the form from itself. The decomposing body spilled out to the bank with nightmarish violence, twisting and swinging madly as it tumbled toward the water line. And then it almost went down, but didn’t. There was no doubt; hallucination or not, there was no doubt now.
“Oh my God,” Frederick whispered when the apparition turned its single-eyed gaze on him.
Impossibly, the remains of Samuel Franklin stood on the bank. Its clothes hung in tatters and were fouled beyond all recognition, bulging at the seams from the swollen flesh rising from within the tears in the torn fabric. Frederick caught the rancid smell rolling off the body and gagged. Went down to one knee in the water.
The body took a few lurching steps in his direction, seemingly in more control now that its target was fixed. Frederick rubbed a dripping forearm across his eyes to clear what had to be a trick of the light, a weird case of sunstroke. But it was still there, its feet even now making contact with the water as it came on. Frederick rolled instinctively to the right, attempting a circle flank toward the handgun, amazed at himself for actually believing he was falling for this continuing bizarre hallucination.
“No, man, no,” he whispered again. This was no hallucination. Whatever hellish thing this was, it was indeed no hallucination. The time was over for fooling himself. “This is what you saw the other night,” he said almost conversationally. The how and why of it didn’t mean anything anymore. Only one thing mattered: the rotten body of his drug-dealing connection was slowly entering the water.
Coming after him.
The stench increased as the breeze changed direction, and Frederick found it impossible to look away from the shambling form. Now it was no more than thirty feet away, rotting-thigh deep, cutting an oily swath in the placid water with a slow fecundity of movement that was painful to watch.
The nose had completely sloughed away, and in the black hollow that remained something, some animal maybe, had appeared to take up residence; the wound looked chewed and raw. The dead eye hung out on a shriveled stalk, swinging back and forth like a crumpled golf ball at the end of a string of cat gut. The rest of the face was a study in contrasts, contorted by wet and dried patches that alternately sagged and stretched. The mouth a swollen hole that gaped wide and leaked putrescence. The tongue had split in several places and lolled out now long and thin. What was left of the body (or what little he could make of it through its shell of rotted clothing) had swelled grotesquely and peeled away from the bone in a few places. There was no blood but Frederick could make out a gray loop of intestine playing out from the recesses of the distended and blown stomach, leaving a greasy trail behind it in the water. A ribbon of muscle vibrated madly at the thing’s left arm, causing the fingers there to beat an insane staccato on the lagoon’s surface.
But even with these horrible wounds it moved much faster than Frederick expected. The horror movies from his childhood had always depicted such monstrosities as slow and ponderous, but this was different. Frederick was not curled up on a sofa, listening to people talk in the background as he casually watched the hero or heroine stumble to their doom. This time he was actually backing away from something that had no right to exist. There was no channel-changer, no comfortable bed in which to escape. He suddenly believed in Hell then, with a conviction that had never entered his mind before. Not even in ‘Nam.
“I’ve gotta be out of my fucking mind,” he said, not worrying about whispering now. If he’d gone around the bend there was no use in whispering. But he continued rounding away to the bank, angling for the leaning tree. He slipped on the bottom and his head dipped below the surface for a second, his eyes wide in the now disturbed, murky water. His mind’s eye pictured the thing speeding up, hurrying to get its rotting hands around his—
He flung himself up, slinging his head this way and that to clear the water. Through his blurred vision he found the monster, now in almost to its putrid chest, checking its course to find him out. The slack face was devoid of emotion, but the one fiery, baleful eye pushed far back in the doughy flesh sought out its prey with a feverish intensity.
Frederick stumbled again on a sudden incline, but regained his balance just as fast, lunging forward, almost going under again, only maintaining his balance with a sheer act of will. The fetid stench was now almost unbearable, the reek of graves. Madness loomed only scant seconds away.
The crash had not been the end of it. Somehow, in the midst of this extraordinary cluster fuck, the whole nightmarish scenario continued to get worse. He coughed out a mouthful of water and hurried ahead, paddling with his arms, trying to get back to his pack, his gun.
A loud, gurgling belch punched the air behind him. Frederick leapt ahead, high-stepping into the now knee-deep water, churning and digging with both hands and feet as he made his way into the shallows. Once there he stood with the water still lapping about his ankles (the tree only feet away) and paused to gape at the thing coming up from behind. Although still submerged to its stinking chest, what was left of the Franklin brother slowly turned toward him.
“The fucking Twilight Zone,” Frederick muttered, whispering again. Now, for unknown reasons, he didn’t want his voice to carry in the nightmare he found himself a part of. Coherency and logic were long gone.
He splashed up to the tree where he’d left the pack and clothes. His pants were easy enough to get into and he soaked them through in the process. Then he thrust his hand inside the pack and pulled out the 9mm. It had one in the chamber and eight more in the handle.
He spun around, pistol up and ready.
What was left of Samuel looked a bit heavy in the water. It was thrashing around madly again, the one livid eye glaring out of the rotten face. No time for the boots now, just grab the pack and go!
But it was still coming, fetid and stinking of the grave that had not yet claimed it to rest.
Frederick fired and the phantom’s ragged shirt puffed out in a spray of red and black. The dead thing spun back a foot or so, but turned back. Its jaw worked as if chewing.
“Motherfucker, you’re going down,” he snarled, closing his right eye to get better aim. He’d always been good with a pistol and he thought the next several moments just might save his soul. Three more shots rang out
in rapid succession, one splashing in the water to the left of the monster. 9 millimeter handguns were notoriously inaccurate at a distance, much more effective in close-in fighting. A wild thought entered his head. You don’t miss in nightmares, do you? But he had and what did that say?
He pulled the trigger again until the gun was empty.
A sliver of smoke trailed out of the barrel, and where the form had been only a wide ripple played out. But he could still see one monstrously bloated hand, floating black and limp on the surface. The water was far too muddy now to see anything below it. And then a swollen lump of intestines rolled to the surface and bobbed silently next to the hand.
Frederick squinted at the spot. Nothing moved, but again, it was impossible to know what was going on beneath the water. What could have been a clump of hair made a darker mark just below the surface like a shadow. Only then did he realize his pants were down around his ankles, soaking wet. He quickly pulled them up and buckled them. He breathed out heavily, lost in a sense of revelry that was still greatly hallucinogenic. He was completely detached, like nothing he’d ever experienced in ‘Nam.
Like nothing he’d experienced anywhere.
He peeled his shirt from the branch and pulled it on quickly. Everything was intact; wet pants but he could deal with that. There were plenty of other things that he was having a much harder time dealing with at present.
He’d just turned to slosh toward the bank when he heard another splash behind him. He didn’t find the courage to turn around until he was on the bank. Where the hand and intestines had been there was now a thick, bubbling clot of oily liquid spreading out, and the smell made him groan. He had just the time to clap a hand over his mouth before vomiting through his fingers. He back-pedaled, lost his balance, and came down hard on his ass on the bank. His stomach did loops as he sought the remaining four magazines he knew were in the backpack. He puked again and went double. He scrabbled at the wet sand, pushed himself farther toward dry ground. The lagoon now held the stench of a sewer. Finally, he was out to the tree line. He slung the pack to the ground and went down on one knee to hunt down those goddamn magazines. Done. He thumbed out the spent magazine and jammed the next one home.
The noise was back, even though the stench was less where he stood. He closed his eyes and spun around to greet whatever was left to emerge from the water.
It was still coming. The monster weaved slightly from side to side, the wet rags not doing enough now to convince what they’d covered was human. The pulpy head was bent to the left shoulder, and the slivered tongue shimmered blackly in the light. The hair had peeled away from the forehead in a massed furrow laying far back from that goddamn eye.
Frederick steadied the weapon again. He squeezed the trigger.
The thing’s head jerked back and for a glorious second Frederick was sure it was going down. A chunk of hair flew away from the clotted mess of its head, but it remained upright. The head, which was lying almost perpendicular to the shoulder now, slowly rotated around. Frederick could see the perfect circle punched in the white, skinless cranium no more than an inch from that fucking eye. Puss oozed from the hole.
He fired again, watching in a new slow-motion time as the drift of shirt knotted around the huge, purple forearm shredded. The arm jerked out and around. Frederick emptied the rest of the new magazine into the monster.
A black thatch of hairy meat flew away from the thing’s side, far down near the hip. Skin slid and fell away, slabbing off into the water like left-over food dumped into a disposal. As if each shot hit secret levers that released great masses of flesh. The smell grew unbearable, and when Frederick retched again there was nothing more to come up. But he collapsed to his knees, his trigger finger still clicking on dead cylinders.
The moment took him unaware, gave him distance from his predicament. Gave him time to think. The jungle had never shown him this underbelly. Of course he’d seen atrocities in ‘Nam, but never something not of man’s own making. Yes, he’d stood in the middle of a burning village; he’d smelled the sweet, cloying scent as children boiled in the conflagration. But nothing like this. What about the little girl, a voice in his mind asked? He shook his head, trying to dispel the thing he’d fought back so many years. But it refused to go.
Not now.
“No,” he whispered. “Definitely not fucking now.” Perhaps this creeping horror had been after him ever since, biding its time. Because the devil always got his due. And goddammit, he was getting his now, like it or not.
So this is how the mouse feels when the snake locks those black eyes on it, he thought. He ripped through the pack again, extracting another magazine from the very bottom. He stumbled to his feet.
The motherfucker was back. The thing that had been Samuel Franklin was up again and moving through water that barely lapped at its gangrened, flayed ankles. What had been left of the pants had slogged away, and the awful reminder of what had made this thing male was long and hard, set deeply between the rotting thighs, blackened like a horse dick and oozing nastiness from the tip.
It wouldn’t stop. And in the back of his mind, hadn’t he always known it wouldn’t?
Bullets were not going to stop it. Hell itself would probably not be able to stop it. He almost laughed then, finding it amazing how much religion he’d managed to stuff into the last few minutes. No, the only thing he could do now was put as much distance between them as possible. And plenty of it.
A loud, gaseous fart rolled out of the approaching monstrosity, and it was this final disgust that got him moving. He hunched down, near panic, and broke left around a large, wet rock near the border area of the trees and lagoon. Then he began crashing pell-mell into the scraggy brush behind it. And his screams sounded more animal than human, and above all, lost.
The thing, relentless, was soon to the break Frederick had torn along the bank, leaving bits of itself hanging from the undergrowth. And as it disappeared into the jungle the sun played curious tricks of light with the slick of grease it left behind on the once again silent lagoon.