Page 19
The side of the shack blew apart. Bits of timber flew across the swamp, and a man tumbled onto the deck beside Victor and Zee. He groaned, then blinked, shaking the shock from his head, and when he saw us his eyes widened. “Help me!”
He reached a hand toward us.
A thick pink ropelike tendril flew out of the shack, looped around the man’s reaching arm, and snatched him off the deck.
I’d never seen anything like it. Like a giant pink scaleless snake thing.
“Yoink,” Zee said.
I moved the few steps across the deck to where the side of the shack had been smashed open, and saw a humanoid creature as tall as me use its long, flashy pink tongue to haul the man into the air. The man screamed, and I would have too if I were peering down into the open mouth and throat of a frog . . . And it was definitely a frog.
The frog—huge, and wrapped in clothes that looked a lot like the bib overalls Hooper had been wearing—threw its large head back and used its tongue to dangle the man over its open mouth. Then that muscular tongue shoved the man straight into the frog’s gullet . . . whole. Stuffed him right in there. Arms and legs poked at the stretching membrane around the frog’s mouth. The frog opened up again, and using its weird, fleshy, toelike fingers, maneuvered the man around in its mouth. Then, with the help of its protruding eyes, it blinked one then the other, and forced the man-snack down its throat.
“Well . . .” Victor said beside me. “That is indeed a large frog.”
The shack was in disarray, but the big frog wasn’t the only frog here. As the dust settled, more frogs emerged from the back room. Not as big as the man-eating one, but big enough to make me feel small. And outnumbered.
The man-eater slapped its thin lips together, its mouth fixed in a smug frog smile.
We’d made a mistake coming back.
These frogs did not need our help.
They’d been just fine without us. As was made clear by the unconscious—or maybe dead—guys strewn around us, their guns kicked out of reach. They were definitely the guys from the truck.
“Uhm . . . hi again? So . . . we thought you maybe needed help, but it looks like you have everything under control.”
“Ribbit,” the man-eater said.
Zee gulped loud enough for me to hear. “Kitten, you speak frog, right?” he whispered. Although in the quiet of the shack, everyone heard him.
“Uh, no, I don’t think so.”
“You speak fuckin’ alligator. It’s the same.”
“Frogs are amphibians, not reptiles,” Victor clarified.
“I don’t wanna hear any frog facts outtah your face when you were wrong this whole time, Fancy Fangs, an’ I was right.”
Victor blinked slowly, and with a stiff nod, said, “Understood.”
The man-eater stepped forward. His huge belly jiggled, full of . . . person. It rolled its broad shoulders, and the exposed green flesh of its arms and legs began to change color, gradually shifting to a more typical human skin tone, baked by endless hours under the sun. The big frog eyes shrank back into human eye sockets, and the enormous mouth reduced down to just human lips. Hooper adjusted his belt and coughed the croak from his throat. “Sorry you had to see that.”
“Are you gonna murder us too?” Zee asked, a twitch away from launching himself through the roof.
“Only if you mean us harm.” Hooper’s deep voice bubbled, as though wet. “Like these guys.”
The others gradually shifted back to human forms too, but still squat and round, with big eyes and no necks, which made more sense now I knew they were actually frog people and not human people. They collected the dead guys and dragged them out through the new hole in the side of the shack.
“Gators will take care of the cleanup,” Hooper said.
Zee shared a quick glance with me and Victor without Hooper seeing, and gestured for us to run.
“They keep comin’ round, an’ we keep dealing with ’em, but it’s gettin’ worse. Ever since we refused to sell . . .” Hooper was saying as he began to set right the broken make-do furniture.
Zee gestured wildly for us to leave.
I picked up a fallen barrel and rolled it back to where it had roughly been before. “Who are they?”
