shots. He squeezed the trigger. The rifle barked.
The trooper fell backward, dead. The space that he’d been occupying opened up, affording a view of several more soldiers positioned in single file along a trail reaching back through the brush.
Kilroy shot the next man in line. The others jumped to the sides, taking cover.
Angry shouts and shots erupted along the trail. A racketing clamor of autofire erupted. The soldiers weren’t aiming at anything they could see—they were just shooting into the glade in the direction from which the gunfire had come.
Other shouts sounded in the near distance, coming from the right and left of the trail, the voices of other hunting bands calling out to their comrades under fire.
Hot rounds zipped through the air, smacking tree limbs and cutting down branches. They all fell wide of the mark, but once the troopers got their bearings and augmented their numbers with reinforcements, they’d zero in on their targets.
Kilroy’s expression was rueful. If he only had a tenth of the ammunition they were so prodigally expending, he could clean house. But he didn’t, so—
It was time to move out.
“Here we go again,” he said sourly.
Crouching low, he and Raynor scrambled into the brush on the near side of the glade, disappearing behind a tangle of green.
The chase was on again.
By midafternoon they seemed to have lost their pursuers. One thing that couldn’t be outrun, though, was the poison in Bill Raynor’s system. Raynor had been favoring his left arm, the limb that had been bitten by the black centipede, holding it close to his side, using it as little as possible.
He and Kilroy were making their way through a patch of dense scrub brush. Kilroy was a few paces ahead, blazing the trail. The ground was spongy underfoot, the tangled foliage bunched up close.
Raynor stumbled, bumping into a low, shrub-like tree with his left side. He gasped, trying to regain his balance. He grabbed a tree branch with his right hand, steadying himself.
Kilroy looked back. Raynor stood frozen, eyes squeezed shut, face a mask of agony. Kilroy caught a glimpse of Raynor’s left arm. The forearm was swollen to twice its normal size.
Raynor opened his eyes; it took several beats before they came into focus. Kilroy went to him. “Let me see that arm,” he said.
“It’s nothing,” Raynor said.
“What affects you affects me. So let’s see.”
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
