“Damn,” said Oakley. He slammed to a stop in the emergency lane. “Good-bye, Taurus.”
They sprinted down a weedy embankment and vaulted a three-strand barbwire fence. Beyond the fence, they were quickly swallowed by the dense ground cover of a pine savanna. Branches whipping their faces, wiregrass snagging their feet, they crashed through. The highway, pulsing with blue light and echoing the squawk of a radio, faded behind. Saw palmetto spines stabbed through their jeans. Overhead, the slash pines cast bottlebrush silhouettes against a pumpkin moon.
Simultaneously, they tripped over a fallen log.
“What place is this?” Oakley puffed.
“Topsail Hill Park. It’s a nature preserve,” said Sparrow. “If we can get through it, we’ll come out on deserted beach.”
“How do you know?”
“I reroofed the park office and the pavilions in April. I read their brochures at lunchtime. The wind is blowing in off the Gulf. All’s we gotta do is keep the breeze in our faces.”
The sandy soil turned mucky, and suddenly they were chest high in cattails, and next, in water up to their waists. They backed out, lily pads clinging to them like greasy bandages.
“What now?” Oakley wanted to know.
“We stumbled into Morris Lake. If we work our way to the left, we’ll run into a tidal marsh that drains it into the Gulf. We can follow it to the beach.”
Twenty minutes later, they found Morris Lake’s outfall; they felt their way along its edge, aided by lightning flashes from a storm percolating out over the Gulf.
“Yow! Shit!” Oakley yelped. “Something bit my leg.”
“You see what was it?”
“Too dark. Them brochures mention snakes?”
“Yeah, got cottonmouth and rattlers, but a bunch of nonpoisonous ones too.”
They could hear the surf now. A few minutes later, the scrub broke onto a twenty-five-foot sand dune crested by sea oats. The outfall creek, brimming with tannin-blackened water, cut through the dune and became an estuary flowing through the beach and into the Gulf. They clambered up the dune. Cloud-to-cloud lightning and intermittent moonlight delivered the blessed sight of the beach below them. A constant, storm-driven sea breeze drove the waves onto the shore with the intensity of a cymbal roll; salt spray stung their faces. Oakley tried to roll up the leg of his jeans to inspect his wound, but his calf was too swollen. “Pretty sure it was a snake,” he said. “My leg’s gettin’ stiff on me.”
Sparrow said, “We gotta walk two miles of this beach to Sandestin. We get there, we’ll get you into the emergency room at Sacred Heart.”
Mushing through the soft sand atop the dune, it quickly became apparent that their best time would be made on the more compact surface of the beach. They slid down the face of the dune. They could taste the storm’s ozonic breath. An in-rushing cloudbank canceled the moonlight.
They walked along the base of the dunes, pushing west toward the lights of Sandestin’s high-rise condos. The wind sheared their faces like a belt sander, and, more rapidly now, lightning fluxed cloud-to-cloud and into the water at the horizon.
“I thought you said this beach was deserted,” Oakley said, pointing toward the water’s edge.
The next lightning flash revealed two figures in copulation — a man was taking a woman from behind. They were facing the sea. The lightning bleached their skin a cadaverous white.
“Haw,” said Oakley. “It’s the doggy-style remake of Burt Lancaster and Deborah whatsherface on the beach in From Here to Eternity.”
It went dark.
Came another long flicker.
“Something ain’t right about this frame,” Sparrow said.
“True that. Let us file for discovery.”
They strode closer, their approach masked by the roar of the elements. The man had something twisted around the woman’s neck — a rope or belt — and her arms flopped like those of a rag doll with each thrust. In a voice loud enough to be heard above the combers, Oakley said, “Well, well, if it ain’t Chester the Molester. In the slam, we got a cure for you rape-o motherfuckers: it’s called sticking my pecker up your comic-opera rectum.”
He was skinny and basketball tall and he leapt away from the girl like he’d stepped on a third rail. The girl collapsed face forward onto the sand. Sparrow noted that her back was cut to shreds.
The guy got his pants up and lunged toward something metallic — a bowie knife — that was sticking out of the sand.
“He’s got a banger!” Sparrow yelled as the man swept the foot-long blade in a wide arc toward Oakley’s face.
Like an exercise-yard assassination, they split to either side of him. Sparrow heard Oakley’s Spyderco snap into locked position. The man feinted at Oakley a second time. Oakley tripped backwards into the sand; the man moved in on him, bowie knife poised to plunge. Sparrow snagged the man’s elbow, clutching it just long enough to keep him from stabbing Oakley. The man rounded on Sparrow. Sparrow threw a fistful of sand in his face.
The man made a noise in his throat and reeled backwards, clawing at his eyes. Oakley was on his feet again. “Eat this, Chester,” he said as he jabbed his blade into the guy’s midsection and then ducked beneath the reflexive chop of the big knife. Taking advantage of his opponent’s blindness, Oakley cut the man repeatedly with his own blade, slashing and pinking, a quick gash across the forearm, one that missed the groin to strike the man’s upper thigh. Sparrow thrust-kicked at the man’s knees, trying to take him off of his feet, but either missed or landed glancing blows.
Oakley’s hit count mounted, but three-inch wounds to the torso of a man whose bloodstream is blazing with adrenaline are hardly felt, much less immediately fatal.
At the water’s edge, they spun in a death dance played out in total darkness punctuated by the blinding strobe of the lightning. Finally, Oakley managed to sink the full length of his pocketknife’s blade into the man’s lower rib cage; the man gasped. Sparrow tripped him, but as he fell, his blind thrashing with the heavy-bladed hunting knife caught Oakley across the belly as he was rushing in. While the man was trying to get back up, Sparrow kicked him in the temple and then again at the base of his ear. The man’s grip on his knife went slack. Sparrow wrenched it free from his grasp and, with his left forearm pinning the man’s throat, plunged the blade in and up through the man’s solar plexus. Blood geysered into Sparrow’s face. The man convulsed orgasmically for five seconds and lapsed into shock. Twenty seconds later he was dead.
Oakley was lying on his back in the sand, the front of his shirt soaked with blood. Sparrow bent over him and said, “Hey, bro. You okay?”
Oakley’s eyeballs were rolled up. “Between the river and the steep came... serpents,” he mumbled.
Sparrow shook him. “What? What’s that mean?” He tried blowing into Oakley’s mouth, but Oakley remained incoherent. Sparrow went over to the naked girl and rolled her over. She was limper than a boned capon. He splashed seawater on her; she made a noise. She was alive — for now.
Far down the beach, he saw headlights coming toward him. Sparrow rubbed a handful of sand on the handle of the bowie knife sticking out of the man’s chest. To wash out his tracks, he sprinted along the edge of the surf; back to the natural ditch that Morris Lake’s outfall made in the beach and waded up its dark waters until he was safely back among the pines.
Soon, the airspace above the shoreline lit up with beams and flashes of light — red, yellow, blue, and blue-white. Sparrow heard the helicopter and then saw the probe and sweep of its searchlight, the angry finger of society’s god. He crawled beneath a gallberry bush. It was starting to rain.
Sparrow spent Friday night in the preserve. The rainfall varied from blinding sheets to drizzle. During the drizzle, he worked his way west through the brush until his terror of stepping upon an alligator or a snake in the darkness finally made him stay put in a thicket of swamp sweetbells.