Page 124 of Lord Have Mercy Part Four: Big Son

A branch finally did snap, and the line went slack, and the gator attached to it – a solid five-footer – fell down amongst the men in the boat, who started screaming bloody murder.

“Fuck me,” Toly breathed. “It worked.” He hustled forward, keeping low, rifle held in one hand, and cut the switches.

The winches stopped.

The gator who’d struck the side made a low, deep growling nose and thrashed its head side-to-side, fighting the line.

The others were in the boat, and one started rolling; another sent a man overboard with a swipe of its tail.

A gunshot cracked out, and Toly ducked, but none of the men in the boat had seen him.

“You shot the boat!” a man shouted, and he heard the engine rev back to life.

A moment later, it was gone, foamy white wake lapping at the shore.

Two of the gators had tumbled back into the water, dancing at the ends of their lines. Toly reversed the winches andlet the cords play out again; the gators used the slack to dive once more, still hooked, but now even angrier.

One, though, was still onboard the boat, and he shook his head in wonderment.

Mercy’s words from earlier returned to him: “I don’t expect anyone to get seriously hurt, but these are thugs and killers and not swamp men. This here” – he’d gestured to the winch and cord setup – “is gonna scare the everloving shit out of them. And a scared man is a man who makes mistakes.”

“Diabolical,” Toly had assured, and Mercy had grinned, teeth flashing in the gloom of evening as he tested the give of the lines.

“I should hope so.”

~*~

Pain was just weakness leaving the body. Wasn’t that what the Marine Corps said? Mercy had heard it somewhere, and it came to him now, though it didn’t really matter: he didn’t know if there was weakness leaving his body, only a lot of blood, and the pain was secondary. There were bandages and alcohol in his pack. He cleaned up best he could, wrapped his arm, slapped gauze and tape over his shoulder, shrugged into the pack, and set off through the swamp, boots squishing pleasantly on the soft ground. The pain was a steady drumbeat, throbbing in time with his pulse, but nothing was dislocated or broken, and he could move. There’d been Gatorade and a few granola bars in his pack, one of the latter he crammed down against a wave of nausea, and the former he carried in one hand, sipping regularly as he walked.

He'd come so close to killing Boyle on the boat – but he would have his chance again. He was more confident now than he’d been in days, because now, Boyle was on foot, and, inept as he was in the wild, he was leaving a trail for Mercy to follow.

Better yet: though he didn’t know it, Boyle was cutting a path cross-country straight for the rookery, and, as Mercy had hoped all along, it was there that Boyle would be trapped.

I’m coming, baby, he thought in Remy’s direction, and lengthened his stride, the pain pulsing sharp and electrifying through him.

~*~

Ava didn’t know the swamp the way that Mercy did, and she wasn’t going to delude herself into believing that a mother’s love and intuition could overcome the gaps in her knowledge and experience.

But what she did know was that Mercy had set his trap for Boyle west of here, at a lake island where the birds congregated after dark: the rookery. And she knew that this canal would lead her there eventually. So, with her rifle, and her radio, and a backpack of ammo and essentials, she struck off on her own.

She’d listened to the radio long enough to know that Boyle, Remy, and Mercy were missing, and knew that Mercy would be hunting Boyle.

She intended to join them, stepping carefully in the dark, brushing aside curtains of moss, boots squish-squishing in the mud.

Hold on, baby, she thought, to both her boys, and lengthened her stride.

~*~

They heard a gunshot. Singular. One loud, booming crack that echoed through the forest, and which sounded too close to have come from the wild scene at the dock.

Boyle froze, hand closing punishingly on Remy’s shoulder, and he swore under his breath.

Remy wanted to twist away from him, but he knew that if he did, Boyle would snatch the back of his shirt, and maybe strike him in the head to daze him; maybe even throw him over his shoulder like he did that first day in the school, and as bad as this was, Remy didn’t want to be carried. Walking on his own was better than being completely captive.

“That was too close,” Boyle muttered, and shoved him without letting go, righting him roughly when he tripped on a hidden tree root. “Fuck them. Fuck your fucking family,” he fumed, and Remy figured that didn’t warrant an answer.

They’d been walking for some time. When they started out, Remy had been able to see the three-quarter moon overhead, but it had dipped out of sight now. He’d been shivering when he first came out of the water, but now his sodden clothes dragged at him like weights, and sweat slicked his skin beneath them. He didn’t dare try to take his sweatshirt off, though. Boyle probably wouldn’t allow it, for one, and two, they were slapped and scraped from all sides by low branches. Boyle’s arms, he noted when he reached to impatiently swat at a screen of Spanish moss, were criss-crossed with red welts and scratches.

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