Fever Dream - Douglas Preston [146]
A clang sounded as a round struck the engine, and a gout of flame erupted. Clang! Clang! The shots were coming from the darkness to her right.
“Get a weapon,” Pendergast whispered in her ear.
She grasped the gunwale and, waiting for a lull in the shooting, hoisted herself up, grabbed the closest gun—a heavy rifle—and slid back down. Another fusillade of shots tore into the boat, several striking the engine. A trickle of flame ran down the bottom of the boat: the gas line had been hit.
“Don’t return fire!” Pendergast whispered, giving her a push. “Get to the other side of the boat, head for the far side of the channel, and take cover.”
She half swam, half waded through the water, keeping her head as low as possible. The burning boat erupted into flames behind them, casting a yellow glow over the water. There was a muffled crump! and she felt the pressure-wave of the explosion wash over her, a ball of fire rising orange and black into the night. A series of smaller explosions crackled from the burning pile of firearms.
Suddenly shots were striking all around, sending up gouts of water.
“We’re spotted,” Pendergast said urgently. “Immerse and swim!”
Hayward took a deep breath, ducked below the water, and, rifle awkwardly gripped in one hand, began to propel herself forward in the watery darkness. As her feet sank into the muck, she could feel hard—and sometimes not-so-hard—objects and the occasional slimy wriggle of a fish. She tried not to think about the water moccasins, or about the nutrias and eight-inch leeches and everything else that infested the swamp. She could hear the zip zip of bullets entering the water around her. With her lungs almost bursting she rose, gasped in another breath, and submerged again.
The water seemed to be alive with the buzzing sound of bullets. She had no idea where Pendergast was but she kept going, rising every minute or so to gulp air. The mud under her feet began to rise. Soon she was crawling in ever-shallower water, the trees on the far side of the canal looming up. The shooter was still firing to her right, the bullets striking the tree trunks above her. The shots were more intermittent now. He had evidently lost her and was simply shooting into her general vicinity.
She dragged herself onto the slippery bank, rolling onto her back amid the hyacinths and fighting to catch her breath. She was completely covered with mud. It had happened so fast she hadn’t had time to think—but now she thought. Furiously. It wasn’t the swampers this time, she was sure of that. It appeared to be a lone shooter. Someone who knew they were coming and had time to prepare.
She ventured a look around but saw no sign of Pendergast. Cradling the rifle with one hand, she half crawled, half swam up a shallow rivulet into the cover of the trees. She grasped an old, rotting cypress stump and settled herself behind it. As she did so, she heard a faint splashing sound. She almost called out, thinking it was Pendergast, when a spotlight abruptly went on in the channel, illuminating the swamp to her left.
She ducked down, trying to make herself as small as possible behind the stump. Slowly, with great deliberation, she shifted the rifle in front of her. It was covered with mud. Immersing it in the water of the rivulet, she agitated it slightly, letting the mud dissolve away, then brought the weapon up and felt along its length, trying to figure out what it was. Lever-action, heavy, octagon barrel, big caliber. It seemed to be a .45-70, a modern replica of an Old West rifle, maybe a Winchester reproduction of an old Browning—which meant it would probably still fire despite the immersion. The magazine would hold between four and nine rounds.
The spotlight lanced through the trees, scanning the swamp. The shooting had stopped, but the light was moving closer.
She should shoot out the light. That was, in fact, her only target, as everything else was invisible in the