The Flock by James Robert Smith Read Free Book Online Page A

the pesky mosquitoes he’d encountered around the area. Those buggers defied almost all of his attempts to crush them, and they chose hard-to-reach places on which they stopped to feast. The town was okay, Dodd figured, but all of this wilderness crap was for the birds.
    The constant chirp of a hundred thousand cicadas whirred and was really getting on his nerves. If he didn’t find Riggs soon, or spot where the man might be moving, he was just going to turn around and head back. How far had he gone, anyway? Tim Dodd was also not good at judging such matters. Maybe on an Atlanta street, but not out here in the woods. He might be half a mile from his car, or five. He didn’t know.
    In fact, the reporter was two miles down the trail. But unlike Riggs, who had stayed on the straightway, following the main path the local deer had carved through the bush, Dodd had veered off to the left, ending up on a secondary trail. He hadn’t even realized he had missed the main artery. Soon he was climbing what amounted to a low ridge of bedrock, what geologists have termed oolitic limestone. The rise was so gradual, he had not acknowledged it, and hadn’t even really noted that the local flora had changed as he walked, going from bottomland trees to a kind of field and slash pine environment. Looking ahead, the trail all but ended in tufts of hardy grasses and clumps of palmettos, and suddenly there was exposed rock making for rough walking. Sharp edges gouged into his shoes and he almost stumbled a time or two, catching his balance with the vinyl hiking staff he had bought in a store in Salutations. This wasn’t like anywhere he had ever seen in Florida. Where was the sand? Where were the palms?
    He stopped next to a big slash pine that had toppled in a recent thunderstorm. The roots, locked tight in the limestone, had held fast to clumps of the rock, and the base of the fallen tree was like a big, rough tombstone standing pale and hot in the afternoon sun. Dodd put his hand on the rock and leaned there, panting. His ever-present camera dangled around his neck, chafing the skin where the strap was digging in. Gad, he was thirsty . And he’d thought to bring a two-quart water bottle on a nifty strap that attached to his belt. He snapped it loose and undid the cap, taking a long slug. Half the contents vanished in a couple of gulps before he recapped it.
    He looked around.
    And that was when he realized that he was no longer on the trail. In fact, he couldn’t even see where the trail had been. It had just petered out in the low shrubs and grasses here on this long, low ridge. Everywhere he looked all he could see were pines interspersed by thickets that seemed poised to claw at him with spikes of broken limbs and an array of thorns. Something croaked nearby; his heart leaped painfully in his chest.
    Dodd gasped and stumbled back as a black form shot out of a nearby clump of vegetation. A bird . He sighed in relief. It croaked again as it vanished low against the horizon. What kind of bird was that ? It had looked like a crow. The reporter walked over to the fallen trunk and leaned against it, in a half-sitting posture. A corn snake slithered away from his left foot, sliding over his right one before vanishing into the shadows, out of the hot sunlight. Tim Dodd yelled, his voice echoing through the pines as he danced away from the dead tree, finally stumbling and falling to the stony ground, where he gouged a healthy chunk of skin off the heels of both hands as he braced to keep from hitting his head.
    There was blood, and his hands were singing a song of complaint. “Ow. Goddamit,” he muttered. And then, “Damn,” much louder.
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    Off at the far end of the low ridge, where the oolitic limestone dipped down to the low country again, the Scarlet paused as it heard the sound of the man’s pain. And it breathed in, scenting for something in the warm air.
    In a moment, carried on a slow, hot