Spiral

worked. Only I hadn’t seen a building or a light since leaving the paved state route about half a mile back.
    Tranh’d told me over the phone to watch for a neon-orange surveyor’s tape on the left, because a driveway into the Colonel’s tract had been punched through a little beyond it. Another quarter-mile, and I spotted the tape knotted around a stout trunk, fresh tire tracks curving into the hammock.
    Which is when I turned off my headlights and engine.
    I waited until my eyes adjusted to the dark and my ears to the silence. After a minute, I could make out both the shapes of trees against the cloud-streaked night sky and the sounds of frogs singing in them. After another minute, the shades of gray became relatively distinct, and I was hearing sounds of creatures I couldn’t recognize. High-pitched barking, low-pitched chuffing, even a roar that belonged in Jurassic Park.
    I opened the driver’s side door and stepped out onto mushy grass, my shoes squelching in the quiet around me. I didn’t know how far sound would travel, but I’d guessed that anybody for a mile around could have heard the car engine, so I didn’t sweat closing my door.
    Ten steps up the driveway—really just a cleared and packed trail—the mosquitoes found me. I waved at them, but didn’t slap any, figuring that noise could be identified as obviously human by somebody close by. And though Tranh had said the driveway went on for nearly half a mile into the hammock, he wasn’t sure how many side-paths might have been blazed, so I wasn’t sure how close that somebody might be.
    I moved down the center of the driveway, since I hadn’t known him to use any distance weapons, and I wanted the open space of the cleared brush around me to buy reaction time.
    Thanks to moonlight trickling through the canopy of tree crowns above, I could make out a narrower path cut to the right. The surrounding trees, ferns, and vines—some thick enough for Kyle Cascadden to swing from—were so dense, I didn’t think anyone would use anything else to move along, so I followed the path to a dead-end about fifty feet farther down. On the way back out, I listened carefully. I’d learned in Vietnam that a human being could remain silent in the bush by standing stock still, but almost every motion in dense foliage gives off some sound. I was fairly certain no one was moving on either side of me.
    I still trod very slowly, though, swinging my head left to right in a slow arc and then back again, letting what images there were come in at an angle to my retinas, my ears like radar dishes for any noise, any movement. The Skipper had commented a couple of times about the old days, and that sense of walking on a razor’s edge came close to what I was feeling now.
    Back on the driveway, I moved farther along, the peek-a-boo moon giving me glimpses of continuing tire tracks. I passed three more side-paths, one on the left and two on the right, but even though leaving them unexplored and to my rear bothered me, I thought following the tracks might bring me somewhere faster.
    Especially since I seemed to be getting closer to the creature making the low, chuffing noises.
    Another hundred meters by my stride count, and three more side-paths, all on the left this time. Passing them was even more troubling, but the chuffing was getting louder.
    Fifty meters farther, and I could see the driveway curving for the first time, to the right. I stopped and listened as carefully as I ever had in my life. Nothing I could call human, but the chuffing sound was now less than a baseball toss away.
    Just around the curve, in fact.
    I stayed on the inside of the driveway arc, moving two steps, then stopping, then one and stopping, then three and the same. Enough times to pick up sound, but hopefully without any kind of predictable pattern for someone to spring an ambush or—
    I saw her first.
    I’d already stopped for a listen. If I hadn’t, I’m not sure the change in the shape of this particular tree would have been apparent until I was a lot closer.
    Not that it made any difference to Malinda Dujong.
    This time, the cloying smell of decaying flesh hit me ten feet later, the process no doubt accelerated by the heat of a Florida day. And by some creatures in the hammock as well, from the strips of flesh ripped from her body.
    Up close, the eyes and earlobes were gone, peck-marks on her cheeks. The lips had been saved by black electrician’s tape over them. Her dress was torn