Page 35 of Cooper

Seeing a dark gravel driveway, she took it, praying for it to be the right direction.

“No. No,” she whispered. She stared at the long gravel road in front of her, in the distance there was a yellow, iron drop gate. “Someone must live there.”

She jumped over the short gate, obviously meant to stop cars, not pedestrians and then ran across an old wooden bridge. On the other side was another yellow gate and she jumped it as well, racing off into the darkness.

She fell once, twice, and then a third time in a mud puddle, her body screaming in agony. Her chest her so badly from breathing heavily, she couldn’t keep going. That’s when she heard two things.

The first, in the distance, was the sound of Pablo screaming her name. But the second, the second was something much more familiar and yet, still dangerous.

It was the distinct hissing rumble of an alligator. The eyes appeared in front of her, slowly creeping toward her. They were red, with yellow and black. It seem almost unnatural. Then she knew.

“Alvin, help me.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

“Someone crossed the bridge to the island animal sanctuary,” yelled Hiro running toward the men.

“She knew where it was,” said Cooper. “I took her out there a few days ago and introduced her to the animals. It’s her.”

“Go! Everyone, go!” yelled Ham. “If Pablo finds the animals out there, he’ll kill them all.”

The animal island sanctuary…

Night had not fallen over Belle Fleur so much as risen from it, seeping out of the black water and the knotted roots until the island seemed afloat inside a single enormous shadow.

Beneath the cypress canopy, Spanish moss moved without wind, and every pale strand leaned toward the unconscious girl being carried deeper into the sanctuary.

Bianca hung limp between two white-tailed deer, her arms looped over their narrow backs while a procession of raccoons steadied her dragging feet, a skunk in the lead.

Her face was bloodless in the moonlight. A barred owl glided above them, silent as a passing thought, choosing the path before the others reached it.

All around them, the island sanctuary for the animals at Belle Fleur rearranged itself. Ferns uncurled across the trail they had used. Cypress knees thrust higher from the mud like the teeth of a buried jaw. Vines descended in slow green ropes, erasing every gap through which a man might follow.

“Bianca!” Pablo’s voice tore through the distance.

It came once from the ruined dock, then again from the palmetto grove, furious and frightened, each cry smaller than the last beneath the immensity of the trees.

The animals answered him in borrowed voices. A flock of herons exploded from the western marsh, making the reeds thrash as though a body fled through them. Far to the east, foxes yipped in Bianca’s cadence, turning her name into a broken plea.

Pablo swung toward each sound. His flashlight slashed across trunks, eyes, water, and mist, never resting long enough to understand what it saw. Behind him, his driver muttered that they should return to the car, but the island swallowed the words before they traveled three feet.

“Boss, we should go back to the car. There’s something unnatural here.”

A broad-backed alligator slid across the trail ahead, its hide lacquered silver by the moon. Pablo fired near it, and the muzzle flash showed dozens of smaller shapes watching from the brush. When darkness closed again, the alligator was gone, but the trail had become water.

The driver stepped backward and felt something cold settle around his ankle. He looked down too late. One of the great boas lay braided through the buttonbush, its patterned body indistinguishable from leaf rot and moon-flecked mud.

The coil tightened and the man vanished from the path with a single choked cry. Branches snapped low to the ground. His hands clawed twin furrows through the muck while the boa drew him toward the bayou with patient, muscular certainty.

Pablo wheeled and fired into the darkness. Three shots punched the night apart. One tore bark from a cypress, one scattered ibis from a dead tree, and one struck the water where the driver’s pale hand had been.

Then there was only the bayou closing over itself. Rings widened between the lilies. A loosened shoe floated up, slowly turned its empty mouth toward Pablo, and drifted beneath a curtain of duckweed.

“Bianca!” Pablo screamed again. “I will kill you, you little bitch!”

The island returned the name from six directions, some echoes deep, some shrill, one whispered directly behind his ear. He spun so violently that he nearly fell.

He did not know the shots had carried beyond the island. Across the channels, the search team stopped as one beneath the hammering rotors of insects and turned toward the brief orange wounds in the trees. Radios crackled. Boots entered the shallows.