Behind her, imitating her movements, were six tiny piglets.
“Wow,” yelled one of the boys. “Look at that! Wild pigs!”
Instantly the sow’s ears pricked, her head came up, and she faced the boat. A second later she was gone, her offspring disappearing even faster than she did. “Nice going, Terry,” another of the boys groaned. “Can’t you ever shut up?”
As the boys began to squabble, Michael restarted the engine and headed back toward tour headquarters. If he didn’t make any more side trips, he should make it right on time. Glancing back at his charges, he found himself grinning as the mothers tried to mediate the argument between the two kids. “What do you think?” he asked Kelly, switching off the mike for a moment. “How am I doing?”
“This is neat,” Kelly told him. “You’re really good at it.”
Then he heard a voice from the rear of the boat: “Is it true that people actually live in the swamp?”
The question came from a woman in the stern, who was holding a small boy, no more than three years old, on her lap, and had another one, even younger, lying in a carrier that sat on the seat next to her. Michael nodded and began telling them about the swamp rats and how they lived. One of the older boys waved his hand and began speaking even before Michael had acknowledged him.
“What about the zombies?” the boy asked.
Michael frowned uncertainly. “Zombies?” he asked. “I’m not sure what you mean.”
The little boy gazed steadily at him. “My cousin says there’s zombies in this swamp. Dead people. Except they’re not really dead.” As some of the little girls squealed nervously, the boy warmed to his own words. “My cousin says there’s kids out here. Dead kids that go around lookin’ for people to kill. He says they’re like vampires, an’ if they get you, they suck the blood right out of you!”
“Bobby!” the boy’s mother said. “What a terrible story. I can’t believe Jody told you anything like that!”
“Well, he did,” Bobby insisted, his eyes fixed on Michael. “Is it true?”
Michael felt Kelly’s eyes on him. He glanced over at her and saw that her face was pale. For the first time that morning he had no idea what to say. When he tried to speak, his mouth had gone dry.
Say something, he told himself. Say anything. Tell them it’s just a story.
But it wasn’t a story, not really. It wasn’t quite the way Bobby was putting it, but—
And then, as the boat drifted slowly through the narrow channel, barely wide enough here to let it pass, one of the women let out a startled gasp.
A moment later there was another gasp, and then some of the children started screaming and pointing forward.
Michael turned.
Standing on the shore only a few yards away, a man was watching the boat.
An old man.
A man whose eyes, sunk deep into their sockets, were barely visible, but from which an evil glow seemed to emanate.
Kelly, who had turned at the same time as Michael, grasped his arm. He could see recognition on her ashen face. Yet he hadn’t needed to look at Kelly to know who the man was, for he, too, had recognized him the instant he’d seen him.
The awful sunken greedy eyes.
Evil eyes, eyes he’d seen before.
Eyes he’d seen in the face in the mirror.
The boat was passing the vile figure now, and Michael remained frozen, unable either to speak or to move in the face of the nightmare image that had suddenly become reality.
In the boat the women and children closest to Carl Anderson shrank away from him, as if they, too, felt the horror that was overcoming Michael.
And then, as the boat was about to move away from him, Carl reached out, his gnarled fingers curling like? the talons of a carnivorous bird, and snatched up the baby that lay in its carrier on the stern seat.
It happened so quickly that for a moment Michael wasn’t sure it had happened at all.
The old man was gone, disappearing into the dense junglelike foliage as if it had swallowed him up. For one happy second Michael thought that perhaps the vile apparition hadn’t existed at all, that once more it was only his mind playing tricks on him.
But the screams of the child’s mother told him he was wrong.
She was standing in the stern of the boat, ready to go after the man who had stolen her child; only the hands of the women around her held her back.
“My baby,” the woman screamed. “He took my baby!”
Michael reacted almost without thinking. “Stay in the boat!” he shouted at the woman. He cut the engine and spoke quickly to Kelly. “Keep them in the boat. Whatever you do, don’t let them get out, or they’ll all get lost.”
Without waiting for Kelly to reply, he leaped over the gunwale and dropped into the shallow water, then scrambled ashore.
“Michael!” Kelly shouted. “Michael, don’t!”
But it was too late.
Michael, too, had disappeared into the swamp.
• • •
Carl Anderson felt a sharp pain in his chest, and came to a stop, his breath coming in ragged gasps. His legs felt weak, and he let himself sink to the ground, leaning back against the trunk of a pine tree. Thick shrubbery surrounded the tree, so he would have a respite now, concealed from anyone who might be pursuing him.
He clutched the baby to his chest and waited for the pain to subside, waited for his breathing to return to some semblance of normality.
Exhaustion was spreading through him, draining away the last of his energy. He wasn’t certain how much longer he could go on.
But he had to go on. If he didn’t, he would die.
It was the shot — the shot that should have made him feel young again. But it wasn’t working this time; it hadn’t been strong enough. For a while, early this morning, he had felt better, confident that by this afternoon his strength would have returned to him. But as he’d worked his way deeper into the swamp, determined to lose himself until the shot’s restorative powers had rejuvenated him completely, he’d slowly begun to feel the weakness of age creeping up on him once more.
He’d panicked, knowing that he had to find a child.
Today.
Now.
A child whose youth Phillips could tap into and transfer to his own aging body.
By tomorrow it would be too late.
But where could he find a child?
If Ted hadn’t taken his pickup keys, he could simply have driven up toward Orlando and found a shopping mall.
There would be children everywhere, children with inattentive mothers.
Children disappeared from shopping malls every day, and by the time the child was missed, he could have been halfway back to Villejeune.
Villejeune, and Warren Phillips.
Warren Phillips, and the eternal youth most men only dreamed of.
But Ted had found him, and only the gun had bought Carl any time at all.
The gun that was still in the belt of his pants, lending him courage despite the failing strength of his body.
It was stupid to have taken the child from the tour boat, but when he’d stumbled upon it, and seen the children who filled it — plump babies with their smooth skin and supple muscles — he’d felt a surge of cold fury.
Why should they be young when he was not?
Why should they have a whole life to look forward to, while he had nothing but memories to succor his painfully failing body?
After all, it wasn’t as if Phillips killed the children.
Phillips had told him that long ago, when he’d first offered the treatment, and Carl’s own granddaughter was the proof.
“It doesn’t hurt them. All I need is the secretion from their thymus glands,” Phillips had assured him. “After I’m done with them, they grow up perfectly normally.”
Still, he should have waited, should have kept hunting through the marshlands until he found one of the swamp rats’ children, a child no one cared about, a child who had no future anyway.