Page 73 of The Nook for Brooks
“These aren’t boot tracks,” he said. “These are the footprints of someone wearing dress shoes. It’s difficult to tell where they go from here.”
I called out. “Brooks!”
I listened.
Our lights swept and settled on an area in the dark, swept and settled.
We slid around a muddy bend. The trail sloped left into leaf slime and rotting roots.
I was five paces behind when my boot got wedged in the fork of a fallen branch.
It tripped me up. I fell onto my knees, dropping my flashlight which scuttled ahead of me. I reached for it then shone it on the branch that had trapped my foot, when suddenly—
The trail to my left gave way.
Earth was no longer earth.
Solid ground was no longer solid ground.
It was a slide.
I gasped and toppled, skidding sideways as the earth beneath me liquefied into a rolling torrent of mud.
Mud surged under me, over me, into me. Cold grit slid beneath my collar, splattered across my teeth.
I tried to call for Harry and Dean, but all I could do was spit the mud out.
I grabbed at roots, branches, anything—but they snapped in my hands like wet spaghetti. My flashlight bounced ahead, beam cartwheeling through the dark before it hit a rock and winked out.
“Shit—fuck—shit!”
I half slid, half bounced, every impact jarring my ribs, every spin tangling me up in a battered heap, until I finally hit the bottom with a smack that knocked the “Fuck!” right out of me.
From the sucking sound I realized I was in a bog, my boots welded in by suction. The stink of rot slapped me in the face—old leaves, swamp water, and something dead enough to make me wanna dry retch… or at least, mud retch.
I fought my way onto my knees, gagging, dripping filth. The world around me was black. My flashlight was gone, so my hand went instinctively to the whistle at my neck. The cord was covered in sludge, the chamber of the whistle choked. I spat a glob of grit from my mouth and shoved the whistle between my lips. I blew hard, but all that came out was a wetthhbbbptsound like a deflating balloon.
“Come on,” I hissed. I yanked the lanyard from around my neck, fingers scrubbing the whistle in the bog water, shaking it, desperate to clear the muck.
That’s when I heard it.
A high-pitched sound.
Like a tremor in the air, thin and sharp at first, then swelling into a thick, furious hum.
Buzzing.
My stomach dropped. “Oh, that’s not good.”
The drone multiplied, circling, closing in.
Wasps.
The first one flicked past my ear. The second smacked my cheek. Then the sound of the swarm rose.
I dropped the whistle.
My legs tore free of the bog, and suddenly I was running—blind, stumbling, crashing through the trees like a maniac with no plan, no map, no light, no help.
