Slither - Edward Lee [67]
"We can show it to her tomorrow," she said, emphasizing the pronoun "we."
They moved through moonlight back to the beach; Trent placed the object in his bag. "Well, you're bored, so I guess that means you want to get back to the camp," he presumed, and reached for his pants.
"Not that bored."
"Oh, okay. Let's lie out here a while longer," he said. He got back down on his towel.
What a moron. "I'm not done yet," she said bluntly.
"Not done with what?"
She stepped over him, looking down. "With you," she said, and sat on his face.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
(I)
When Slydes awoke, he felt akin to a reanimated corpse rising from a lime pit. Mooooooooother- FUCKER! he thought. Had someone hit him in the head last night? Had he fallen down? But when he awoke, he remained in the captain's chair behind the wheel, where he usually took his downtime on the boat.
Ruth's tousled head emerged from belowdecks. She looked cross-eyed and dehydrated-about the same way Slydes felt just now. "When are we leaving?" her shrill voice inquired. "Isn't it high tide yet?"
Bonehead, Slydes thought. "We missed it by ten hours," he gruffed. His watch told him it was seven in the morning. We fucked up again . . . "What the fuck is wrong with us!"
"I don't feel good, Slydes!"
Them bugs, he remembered. They MUST have bit me. "We all must have got some jungle fever or some thing. We keep passin' out." He tried to roust himself. "I'm gonna try to get us out of here in low tide. Shag Jonas's ass and get him up here."
"Jonas ain't down there!" she railed. "You said he went looking for me last night!"
Ruth's whining voice was killing him. "He never came back? That goddamn pain in the ass!"
"Where do you think he went?"
"You know damn well where he went! Probably went back for more dope, the shithead! We never should have come out here in the first place. This is his fault." The solution was simple; they needed to bring him back so they could leave. But he was still out in the woods, and the woods were where they'd picked up those gross-ass yellow bugs.
Slydes eyed up Ruth. "Go to the head shack and bring him back."
Ruth's face screwed up at the suggestion. "Fuuuuuu- uuck you, motherfucker! I ain't going back in those woods by myself! I told you! There's a zombie out there that pulled my pants off and tried to rape me! And he tried to feed me to those giant pink snakes!"
Here she goes with the zombie again. There's nothing like a drug burnout to make a fucked-up situation MORE fucked up. He took the keys out of the boat's ignition. Did he trust Ruth?
Hell no.
"I'll go find him, you stay here," he ordered.
"I don't want to stay on this creepy boat by myself!"
"Quit whining! You sound like a fuckin' dog toy. Nighttime's one thing, but this is broad daylight. You and I both can't be thrashing around in the woods, not with them photographers up and about."
Ruth crossed her arms. 'If you go, I go."
"Yeah?"
'Yeah."
Slydes punched her right in the forehead. She fell to the bottom of the short steps, out cold. Best way to win an argument with a gal, he thought.
Slydes stepped off the deck ladder into the water, and waded toward the island.
(II)
Nora thought back to her old lit classes as she meandered through the woods at just past dawn, Henry David Thoreau and all that. Being alone amid this plush wilderness-just as the new day began to arrive-put one in a sedate frame of mind. The beauty shimmered around her; it seemed to invite her to venture deeper, that and her curious solitude.
It feels damn good to be away from everyone else for a little while, she admitted, and she knew it was more than just escaping the envious angst that Annabelle incited. It let her free her mind, and now, for these cherished moments, she delighted in the luxury of thinking about nothing at all.
She roved deeper, down trails she hadn't been aware of. The pink light of the sunrise