Page 132 of Death is Familiar

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The forest stretched around us, awash with loblolly pine, tulip poplar, Virginia pine, scarlet oak, and river birch.

Which meant my initial guestimate was right. We were in Virginia or North Carolina.

That, or I wasn’t particularly good at plant geography. I knew what plants they were, yes, but I could have got the mix wrong for the states. For all we knew we could have been in Louisiana, which was a lot further from D.C. than I would have liked.

Did Virginia pine grow in Louisiana? I wasn’t sure. Damn it, we could have been anywhere. No, wait, basements weren’t common Louisiana, were they? And we’d most definitely been held two floors underground. That and⁠—

Stop.

There were more important things to worry about. I decided to choose to believe I was right until other facts presented themselves. Either way, we were headed north.

The underbrush was wet, the forest floor tacky. With our footprints imprinting at odd intervals in the muck, it must have rained recently. Bad news was this meant our trail would be a lot easier to follow. Worse news was that it was mid-October, so the damp would couple with the chill about to descend on us at night.

It wasn’t lost on me that we were two very noticeable half-naked women in hospital gowns in the middle of the forest. And time was running out before our pursuers latched onto our trail.

“How about some good news?” Three held up a branch for me as I ducked under, her question no doubt prompted because I’d been speaking my thoughts aloud.

“Good news, good news. Hm.” My foot slipped and I narrowly avoided tripping over a fallen log. “If the ground is making us slow, whoever they send after us will be slow too?” It wasn’t much but it was all I had.

Three blew a loose hair out of her eyeline. “Unless they have specialized gear.”

Her word choice was more sophisticated than I expected. “I thought you wanted good news?”

“I do.”

“Okay, fine, give me a minute.” There was a significant slice of swamp in front of us. It was large, nearly pitch black, and opaque. The shortest distance across was about twenty feet, and from our vantage point, I couldn’t see where it started, nor where it ended, so there was no walking around, only through. There were no plants dotted along the middle, the swamp was a clean cut through and through, which gave me no sense of the depth, or what may be lurking at the bottom. It was going to slow us down. But it had a mild current, so the obstacle may have also become an advantage. “Will they have dogs?”

“No.”

“You’re sure?”

“Pretty sure.”

Still, better to be prepared than to take our chances. I tested the swamp water with my toe. Yup, it was cold, and my skin returned coated in a muddy residue.

I hated this so much.

“Come on, then.” I hoisted the gown stuffed with our supplies a little higher, as I stepped into the swamp. Immediately, I was swallowed up to my knees.

“You can’t be serious.”

I didn’t grace Three with a response. Instead, I took another step forward. The water hit my thighs. The bottom encased my toes in a slippery silted slime. Ugh.

“Two!”

Ignoring Three, I kept walking, wading, until I was waist deep. I really hoped the water didn’t go any higher. If it did, the only way the granola bars came out of this dry was if I somehow stacked it on my head and swam across. I hoped it didn’t come to that.

Surveying the banks on either side trying to better gauge the depth, I noticed collected bundles of sticks, fallen branches, the occasional eroded tree trunk.

“Toss me a stick.”

“What?” She looked at me like I had two heads. “Why?”

“Just do it.” We’d only been in the wilderness for two hours, and already I didn’t have the energy to explain.

Three pointed at a mid-sized stick jutting out of the water. “This one?”