“Shit.” She kept her balance and leaped to the next, even larger one that had to be 10 feet around. This one had a slight upward curve and she landed easily, going into a crouch. But again, within seconds of her touching down, the entire rock moved.
“What the fuck? Hey, stop that.” On one side, something lifted from the water. It was about two feet wide, and then the thing swiveled.
“Jesus.” It was a head, a goddamn big head, with a long downward-curving beak. It glared and made a hoarse rattling noise deep in its throat. She remembered there was one more thing to look out for — giant freshwater turtles.
“Oops, sorry, buddy.” She stood, arms out like a surfer, and then ran up its back to leap off, and land on another smaller one that also sunk—probably its young, she thought. But this time she kept going, clearing a few more and landing on the bank.
She turned. The eyes of the turtles glowed like headlights, and she could imagine what they were thinking—what a rude little creature, they undoubtedly thought.
Emma grinned and saluted them. “Thanks, guys.” She then turned back to her path and saw that the water was shallowing into puddles here, with a few remaining boggy areas.
She began to jog to the jungle edge. Her feet sloshed, first to the ankles, and then to her calves. Then, her feet sunk, deep, and she fell forward. Her hands struck the oily slickness, like porridge, and nothing to grab onto. It was all around her, and in the seconds it took her to realize where she was, she had already sunk to her waist.
It hadn’t been a puddle at all. But just a thin veneer of water over quicksand, she thought with horror.
She remembered what she needed to do: relax, try to lay flat, and float. However, her legs wouldn’t come up as the glutinous mass was low on water and high on silt, and the layer on top was brackish swamp-slime, and below that a sucking bog. It was more quickmud than quicksand.
In seconds more, she was in it to her chest.
“No, no… ”
Emma grimaced, and turned one way then the other. This is where I yell for help, she thought insanely.
She looked for something, anything, she could use. She spotted a tapering log, just at one end of the pool she was in, and she reached out for it. Her fingers fell a foot short, and she stretched again, with little forward motion.
She needed to be closer or she needed longer arms. As she wasn’t able to move back or forth, so, longer arms it was.
She sunk a little more—now or never, she thought and reached down to undo her nylon clasp belt and pull it out of her belt loops.
She wrapped one end around her hand and concentrated — the log had a skinny end and was hard to see clearly in the darkness.
Emma pulled her smallest blade from her belt and stuck it right through the nylon webbing until it reached its hilt. She held up the miniature grappling hook and began to swing it back and forth a few times before launching it.
“Shit.” She missed.
And the motion caused her to sink another few inches. She grinned at the lunatic thought that popped into her head; she remembered the mysterious print from the museum with the weird indentations they thought might have been a human footprint.
If they thought that was a mystery, then what would they make of a human skeleton dug out of some prehistoric petrified bog in 100 million years time? she wondered. I’ll be a sensation, she answered herself.
She reeled her belt in, and once again swung it back and forth a few times, and then this time gave it more slack. The belt and its blade hook slapped down on the log end, hooking it.
The log was immediately whipped away with an angry hiss like a steam train. Emma froze.
Then the diamond-shaped head emerged from between the fern fronds about 30 feet away.
“Oh, for fuck’s sake.”
The snake was big by modern standards, but smaller than the monsters she had seen on the plateau. The head was a foot across, and she bet its body was as thick as her waist, and given where the head just appeared, would have been 30 feet long if it was an inch. Small, she knew, but easily big enough to make a meal out of her.
Emma stuck a hand down into the mud and fumbled for her SIG Sauer handgun. She lifted it free from the glutinous mess she was stuck in, aimed, and pulled the trigger — there was a grinding sensation, but nothing happened. She pulled again and again with the same result.
The guns were extremely reliable, but she guessed they drew the line at being gummed up with gritty silt.
She dropped the gun, and instead grabbed at her longest blade, drew it, and held it up. The 10-inch metal tooth was a feeble defense against something this size, but it was all she had.
She knew the snake would have hundreds of backward-curving teeth in two rows that were used for gripping. If it got hold of her, she’d never get herself free from the mouth.
She knew what to expect — it would rear up and then lunge, using its muscled body to strike out, hit her hard, and bite down, embedding its teeth in her flesh. Her knife would probably never even penetrate the armored scales. The one chance she had was to stick her knife into the softer palate — inside its open mouth.
Emma could have wept; the odds of her pulling that off were about zero.
Stay focused and stay alive. She tried to think through its attack, how it would come, and what she would do.
She bared her teeth. One thing’s for sure — she’d die fighting. Emma raised the knife. She knew how to use it.
The snake glided forward, but instead of coiling itself back, loading its muscles for the impact strike as she expected, when it got to the edge of her scum-covered pool, it simply slid in below the surface.
“Oh, no, no, no.”
It was going to come at her from below.
Emma became frantic and swiveled one way then the other. Her screwing back and forth forced her lower into the slimy water.
The snake entered the pool and for all she knew was right below her now. No, she bet it’d do one thing first… and it did. The huge head rose a few inches from the water, sighting her, before easing back down.
Fuck it, she thought.
“Help!”
She tried to swim backward but was stuck in place.
“He-eeelp!”
She lowered her head and shoulder into the water and sliced the knife back and forth. Emma couldn’t resist the urge to open her eyes, but the gritty blackness did nothing but fill her eyes with slime and grit. Coming back up, she screamed again.
“Goddamn it!” Frustration boiled over.
“Emma!”
She spun, her stinging eyes held wide.
“Help me… snake… in water.” She sputtered a little. “Stay back… quicksand.”
Drake edged forward, with Andy holding onto him from behind by his belt. The soldier had his rifle pulled back tight into his shoulder. He fired several rounds into the water — spraying one side, then the next.
Andy let Drake go and quickly ripped a length of rope free from his pack and tossed the loop to her. She grabbed it, feeling her groin tingle at the thought of the snake still being down there.
As the pair of men began to haul her out, Emma felt something touch her thigh and she kicked at it, feeling the scaled resistance of its muscular body. She jerked her leg away and in another second, she was sliding backward in the mud.