Target Response:. William W. Johnstone
The arm was deep red from elbow to wrist. A paler red blush extended into the bicep area and the back of the hand, outriders of the crawler’s toxic contagion. Kilroy touched Raynor’s bare arm, careful to rest his fingertips well away from the bandaged area of the bite. The skin was hot to the touch.
Raynor’s glassy-orbed gaze met Kilroy’s clear-eyed appraisal without flinching. “It is what it is. Nothing to be done about it. It hasn’t reached my legs, so let’s keep moving. Cover as much ground as possible while it’s still daylight,” Raynor said.
Kilroy nodded. “You ready?”
“Lead on.”
Kilroy turned, resuming his forward progress. Now that his face was turned where Raynor couldn’t see it, his expression was worried. Not for himself but for Raynor.
Kilroy trudged onward, the other following. He caught himself listening for the sound of Raynor’s footfalls, to make sure he was keeping up behind him. Were they making progress?
Yes, of a sort, if progress was defined as putting some distance between them and the hunters. But their course was taking them not out of the swamp but ever deeper into it.
Kilroy glanced over his shoulder, back along the trail. “If you need a break, sing out,” he said.
“Don’t worry about me. I’ll walk your ass into the ground,” Raynor said. His face was sallow, strained. He did not so much walk as stagger.
The slog into the morass continued. The two men didn’t talk much. They needed to save their breath for the hike, and besides, when they opened their mouths to speak, gnats flew into them.
The air was so heavy, so humid, it was as moisture-laden as it was possible to be without actually raining. Kilroy longed for a rainfall. It would give them a chance to slake their thirst and refill the canteen with fresh rainwater.
Distant thunder rumbled, but no drop of rain fell. Tortuous miles grew as the day lengthened and the gloom deepened.
They came to a basin, a shallow hollow several football fields in length. The boggy ground was a maze of dozens of small ponds linked by twisty creeks and threaded by narrow lanes of solid ground. There had been a fire here once, possibly caused by a lightning strike during the dry season. The basin was studded with skeletal remains of dead trees killed by the blaze. Most stood upright but a number of them had fallen, forming impromptu walkways and bridges.
Kilroy halted. “What are you stopping for?” Raynor demanded.
“I’m going to climb a tree and take a look around,” Kilroy said.
“Oh—sorry. Thought you were stopping on my account…”
“Don’t think so hard.”
Raynor sat down on the trunk of a fallen tree. He looked like hell—filthy, haggard, and exhausted—but so would any man who’d spent a day and a half in the swamp.
Kilroy figured he looked the same. What worried him was the haunted, feverish look in Raynor’s eyes and the way the bones of his skull showed beneath taut, yellowish skin. His face was taking on the semblance of a death’s head. And his left arm—it wasn’t good. The swelling had reached his hand and the red flush was stealing up into his shoulder.
Kilroy unslung his rifle and set it butt down on the ground, leaning it against the fallen tree.
He crossed to a nearby tree that he’d picked to use for his vantage point. It showed a number of limbs that had broken off close to the trunk, forming ladderlike handholds. The green fought to reclaim its fire-blighted hulk, wrapping it with a mass of flowering lianas and dangling vines.
Kilroy reached for a low-hanging limb that looked sturdy enough to support him and tested his weight against it.
It held, so he pulled himself up, knees and thighs gripping the trunk as he reached for the next handhold. He wedged a booted foot in the crotch where a branch joined the trunk, affording him a steady platform. He groped for the next handhold and mounted higher.
In this fashion he scaled the tree. His ascent was not without incident. More than once, a branch that he tested snapped off under his hand and fell to the ground. That’s what testing is for. When it happened he was braced and ready with a solid perch beneath him. But it always came as an unpleasant discovery.
The noise was the worst part, for a dead tree limb breaks with a sharp, sudden crack like a rifle report, and it sounded dangerously loud in his ears. The first time it happened, it started a sudden flight of birds from a nearby tree. They took to the air as one, scattering in all directions. Kilroy worried that the sound or sight would draw the attention of nearby spotters.
He did not climb straight up the tree. The branches were not uniformly steady enough for that. He followed a spiraling course up and around the trunk. When he was fifty feet above the ground he stopped. That was high enough. None of the branches above him looked able to hold his weight.
In his treetop perch Kilroy took his bearings. Heat, haze, clouds, and the long shadows of falling day all conspired to obscure his vision and blur the view, hemming in the horizon.
Below, swampland extended in all directions out and away from him. No structures, no signs of human habitation showed as far as the eye could see. A pale sun disk hung about thirty degrees above the western horizon, floating amid towering gray clouds.
Nearer, a quarter mile west of the basin, a branch of the river wound and coiled its way down from the north, sluggishly flowing south. The water was so brown it was almost black, the color of coffee murky with coffee grounds.
Kilroy and Raynor had come down from the northwest, striking a roughly southeasterly course. Kilroy scanned the northwest quadrant, searching in vain for some sign of the derricks of the Vurukoo oil fields rising above the treeline. An unbroken vista of swampland unrolled toward the north.
East of the basin lay a vast tract of flooded forest, masses of gray-green foliage held in a web whose strands were channels of stagnant water.
South, the swamp extended to a low ridge that stretched east–west along the horizon. Beyond it, a tantalizing sliver of silver emptiness wavered at the limits of visibility. It glimmered like a mirage, winking in and out of sight.
That razor line of open space could be the Kondo, the big river into which all the water-courses of the swampland ultimately drained. An avenue of escape to the coast, the goal that he and Raynor sought.
That would make the water west of the basin the Rada River, which flowed southwest to meet the Kondo somewhere beyond the ridge.
Kilroy’s spirits lifted.
They received a swift check from a glimpse of motion on his right.
A boat rounded a bend of the Rada and came into view. A long, open bargelike boat with a stern-mounted motor. In it were about eight to ten men—soldiers armed with rifles.
The boat came downriver, creeping along at several miles per hour. There was something ominous in its slow, steady advance. It rippled the water’s surface with an arrow-shaped wake. Its stern was tailed by a thin, fan-shaped plume of blue-gray exhaust from the motor.
Now Kilroy could hear the engine’s stuttering putt-putt. He squirmed around on his perch, putting the tree trunk between him and the boat. The troops betrayed no sudden excitement or alarm, fired no shots. He guessed they hadn’t seen him.
On the far side of the river, a line of soldiers inched into view, marching south in single file on a path that ran along the top of the west bank. There was something about them suggestive of a column of ants.
Kilroy was unable to see the Rada’s east bank, hidden from him by an overhanging canopy of foliage. Was there a second column of soldiers prowling the river’s near side?
He didn’t intend to stick around and find out. He started his descent, covering behind the tree trunk as much as possible to screen himself from the hunters on and along the river.
He