I punched at the top row of buttons, numbered for a combination. No response, though without power I wasn't expecting it. I examined the door more closely, then gave it a shoulder. Nothing. I put some weight behind the next one. Thing was solid. I knocked at the flat surface with the butt end of my flashlight. The sound was distinctly metal, and then I banged on it a few more times at an angle. By scraping off some paint I could see that someone had taken pains to paint a faux wood design on what was a substantial metal door. My only thought was that something valuable was inside. You don't build an extra-heavy-duty safe room without something to keep safe inside of it. But the guesses were endless out here: Food? Hunting weapons? I swept the flashlight through the room again. Not a clue. This side of the place was sparse. Too sparse, in fact.
"Hell with it," I said out loud and the sound of my own voice went dead in the thick air. I snatched up a water bottle, left the front door open, and stepped out onto the porch and checked my handheld GPS. I figured to go through the brush again and then row the canoe around. I could pull Sherry out next to the deck and then get her inside on the bed. Maybe I'd overlooked some blankets, something to keep her covered. I'd tackle the locked room later. Maybe it was the sugar hitting the back of my head, maybe the sharper image now of Sherry's leg, still propped and bound in the bow of the canoe without me there to watch her. But suddenly I wanted her inside, somewhere safe. The light was seeping out of the late afternoon sky now and even though the coming darkness would be no more intense than any other time out here, I did not want to be exposed again.
When I had climbed and slogged and ducked through the beaten hammock to the canoe and spotted Sherry's head through branches in the distance, I called out her name but the dark blondness of her hair did not move, and it scared me.
"Sherry!"
No answer. No movement. I started crashing through some downed poisonwood.
"Sherry!"
Her hand came up, palm facing away from me, fingers straight up and stiff, not a sign but a signal and I stopped. I tried to see beyond her, into the bush and the twig mass that I'd dragged the canoe through to its resting spot. I kept my vision low, water height, and then tried to move slowly.
Ten yards closer and I spotted the nostrils, like moss- covered walnuts resting on an equally dark log. But these were too symmetrical and behind them, maybe a foot, two hooded black marbles shone. It was hard to tell how big he was from where I stood, or whether he was on a solid mass of vegetation or still floating. I have seen gators get up on all fours and charge with amazing speed. But under most circumstances they like to lay quiet, like a spring trap, and snap their prey with a speed and strength that seemingly comes from nowhere. This one might have been stalking Sherry, or her scent, moving at incremental inches until it was at striking distance. My rustlings in the hammock seemed not to have distracted it in the least. Usually, man-made noise, a passing airboat or even shouting and the whacking of boat paddles, caused the animals to whiplash their tails and dive down and away into any nearby water. Usually. What the passing hurricane had done to the flow of nature was unpredictable and I was not going to guess the mood of this monster. Last year a woman jogger who had simply stopped along the edge of the lake in a Broward County park to dip her feet in the water was snatched by a fourteen-footer, pulled into the lake, and dismembered. With gators there was no such thing as predictable.
I was thinking strategies and to go along with them I picked up a good sturdy limb that had been sheared from an old-growth mahogany above. I set down my supplies and pulled my knife from its scabbard and started hacking strips off one end of the limb, half a dozen downward strokes, the blade so sharp it slid through the two-inch diameter stake like it was putty, and left a glistening, bone-colored point. You could poke 'em. I'd seen the wildlife resource officers for the state maneuver even the nasty ones by poking them with long-handled nooses and then roping them. But I had no such interest. Just a poke in the snout if the thing came forward. Maybe a jab in the throat if he opened that mouth of his. I took hold of the stick like a foolish caveman and moved toward Sherry. When I got next to her she cut her eyes to me and whispered in a raspy voice: "Jesus, Max. What the hell are you going to do with that?"
Adrenaline had perked her up. She was fully conscious.
"Hell if I know," I answered as truthfully as I could and handed her my knife.
"And what the hell am I going to do with this?"
The gator snuffled, I swear, and let out a whoof of air that rippled the water in front of him but he did not move.
My insane reaction was to yell at the top of my lungs and then lunge out at the animal, bringing the broom-length staff of mahogany down with a sharp swat on the surface of the water. The spray erupted in front of the beast's face and in response it snapped out with amazing quickness and bit the end of the stick and pulled it from my grasp.
"Shit," I said, and reached back into the canoe, fingers searching, and found the long metal staff of Big Bertha that I'd tossed in the boat at the cabin. I whipped the headless golf club out and it whistled past the gator's nose, and he seemed momentarily awed by the sound. He froze but I did not. I reloaded for a second shot and this time I lunged and stabbed at the thing's face, jabbing at the nose but missing and unintentionally sticking the end of the metal shaft a good three inches into its eye socket.
The gator did not roar, did not make any sound at all but spun his huge body away and the slew of his huge tail sent a wave at us, catching me up in the chest as if a ski boat had just peeled by, and when I shook the water from my vision I saw the ass-end of the gator slipping through the greenness headed in the opposite direction.
We were frozen in silence for a few beats, listening to the rustle in the brush echo away, listening to me breathe in gradually slowing gulps, listening, each of us, to our own heartbeats trip down.