Carnivores

Chapter 1

Coiled against a tangle of red mangrove roots extending from the base of a hardwood hammock, the prolific hunter with a smooth cylindrical body, a pyramid-shaped head, and vertical pupils remained motionless. A chemosensory forked tongue flicked the air to transfer scent molecules to the Jacobson’s organ at the upper back part of the mouth, from where signals could be sent to the brain.

A native of Southeast Asia, the non-venomous reptile slowly unfurled to expand itself beyond the length of a stretch limousine inside the Everglades canopy forest. Hundreds of flexible ribs and vertebrae supported the two-hundred-pound mass sliding in a rectilinear progression along the elevated island’s subtropical topography. A canvas of brown blotches and streaks of black, the Burmese python’s disruptive coloration rendered the stealthy predator almost invisible, even to the well-trained observer.

One of over thirty-nine species in eight genera, the limbless vertebrate born blind to color or shape, and deaf to airborne sounds, used its lower jaw to detect ground vibrations. Facial heat receptors derived from thermosensitive membranes located warm-blooded animals. Multiple rows of needle-sharp, posteriorly recurved teeth immobilized prey while the powerful constrictor ensnarled its victim, compressing the lungs to starve blood flow to the brain. Articulated mandibles affixed to a ball and socket joint leveraged expandable connective tissue between the cranium and the lower jaw, allowing the reptilian mouth to swallow its quarry whole, ratcheting the kill down a muscular throat head-first to prevent protruding limbs from obstructing the lengthy digestive tract.

* * *

Herpetology professor Christina Flannagan watched her teaching assistant maintain a death-grip on the aluminum airboat’s backrest in front of him as the flat-bottom craft skimmed the shallow Everglades in the fading twilight. She wore ear protection to muffle the deafening sound from the rear-mounted engine and wooden propeller blasting air between dual parallel rudders. She sat forward and below the grizzled captain perched in the driver’s seat immediately ahead of the prop, his undulating mullet and sleeveless muscle shirt whipped by the turbulent airstream.

“Almost there!” she hollered at her assistant, barely able to hear her own voice through the insulated headpiece.

“I hope he knows the way back,” Kyle Daily replied to his Ph.D. advisor. He sat grimly in a hunched posture. Strands of brown hair sprouted from the earmuff padding pressed against the temples of his thick-rim glasses bridging his unibrow.

“That’s what GPS is for,” Professor Flannagan shouted over the interminable propeller noise.

Kyle felt the bow dig in as the captain steered through a narrow channel, scraping mangrove branches along the craft’s gunwales. His head tipped back when a sudden burst of throttle pushed the boat against floating mattocks and across the marsh in a brume of spray high enough to rain over nine-foot sedge.

An osprey soared overhead as a flock of white ibis fanned out against the burnt-orange sky, the scene revealing herons, egrets, and spoonbills wading through the shoals in search of fish and frogs. In the opposite direction, the knotted knees of cypress trees protruded above the watershed fed by a profusion of rivers, streams, and lakes stretching from the Kissimmee Chain of Lakes in Central Florida to Lake Okeechobee and the Florida peninsula’s southern tip.

Professor Flannagan turned sideways on her narrow bench seat and tapped the captain’s soiled jeans below the knee. She pointed to a cypress swamp partially obscuring a patch of pine scrubland, where a rutted sand trail appeared two feet above sea level.

The captain jerked the stick to flap the rudders side to side, causing the rear of the boat to skitter around a bank of spider-filled cattails before he throttled back to intercept the target landmark situated on a dry strip of land bedside a hardwood hammock. He reduced the engine speed to idle and drifted over rippling tangles of aquatic grass in gently flowing water shared by croaking frogs and buzzing insects.

“Throw the anchor,” he muttered to his passengers.

Seated high on his airboat rostrum overlooking the deck accumulating tiny spiders and frogs, he stopped the motor and removed his ear protection. He lit an unfiltered Pall Mall and blew smoke as he watched the Gilligan’s Island pair unlatch bulbous shock-resistant, watertight cases to reveal items of electronic gear.

“You hunting snakes or taking selfies?” he chided Kyle, who was powering on a camera resembling a police radar detector.

“This is a thermal imaging camera,” Kyle explained. “Not a cell phone.”

The captain leaned forward for a closer view. An alligator tooth dangled from his leather necklace. “How much did that getcha?”

“I have no idea.”

“Looks like a toy to me,” the captain spoke through thin lips, revealing extensive tooth decay. Burn scar tissue extended from his neck to the top of his left cheek, his right side deeply furrowed from a lifetime of excessive sun exposure.

“This toy is special,” Kyle informed the hired help, his light complexion and boyish charm more akin to a high school freshman than a twenty-five-year-old Ph.D. candidate. “The camera uses near-infrared light to capture a dark image against a bright background but then reverses the image to make it glow white against a black background.”

The captain smoked his cigarette while he noodled on the boy’s explanation. “They teach you that in school?”

Kyle glanced at the fuel tank mounted below the airboat’s engine tower. “Among other things. Like not to smoke on a floating gas can.”

“You’re a cocky little bastard, ain’t ya?”

“I’m just here to help.”

The captain gave a roguish grin and blew smoke through his nostrils. “Watch your back. These glades are full of shit that can kill you. Bobcat. Alligator. Panther. Cottonmouth. Diamondback. Coral snake.”

Professor Flannagan wedged herself between the quibbling duo to retrieve a duffle bag. A consummate scientist, she held a doctorate in veterinary medicine and two post-doctoral degrees in molecular biology and biochemistry. Her fair skin, hazel eyes, and sharp, angular facial features accentuated her Irish profile, with her ginger hair in a ponytail. “We’re all professionals here. Let’s try to act like it.”

She gave Kyle a bottle of bug spray. “Put this on before you add mosquitoes to the list of things that can kill you.”

Kyle applied a liberal amount and sneezed. “You think we’ll find him tonight?” he asked Professor Flannagan before he inspected the radio tracking equipment.

“Depends on if he wants to be found.”

Kyle cabled a yogi antenna to the radio receiver. “When did you tag him?”

“I first caught Henry when he was a ten-foot juvenile. Part of a grant-funded research study to investigate methods for disrupting the python reproduction cycle. I’ve been using Henry as one of many scouts to help us track female pythons, but I have to replace his transmitter with a new one before the battery in his old one runs out.”

“How do you know for sure he’s still here?”

Professor Flannagan opened the canvas duffle bag to retrieve her hunting vest and a pair of holstered machetes. “Radio telemetry from a recent flight caught his signal near this location.”

The captain blew smoke rings. He stared at Flannagan with a skeptical eye as she pulled her vest on and secured both machetes with straps. He flicked his cigarette stub at the water. Sweat drizzled along the contours of his burlap face, his sun-scorched skin dark enough to trade ethnicities. “You’re a regular Indiana Jones. I figured you were more of a pencil-pusher.”

“You figured wrong,” Professor Flannagan answered tersely, slipping a small headlamp on.

The captain reclaimed his seat. “I get paid to drive the boat.” He lit a fresh cigarette and scratched his chin as he stared across the inhospitable environment inundated with hungry alligators, lurking below the water, its surface teeming with aquatic grass and sage. “Pythons don’t eat from a trough. They hunt. They breed. And they spread like disease.”

Professor Flannagan loaded a pneumatic tranquilizer pistol with a xylazine dart and slid the hardware in her hip holster. Next, she inserted a fresh CO₂ gas cartridge inside the industrial bolt gun she carried with a six-inch ice pick, a defensive weapon of last resort. “Stay on the boat,” she told the captain before she disembarked with Kyle to struggle over wet terrain shrouded in bramble and thickets. She glanced at a small compass. “This way.”

“I’ll follow you,” Kyle responded with lukewarm enthusiasm. He stopped to untangle a length of coax cable snagged at one end of his antenna. Sweat beaded on his forehead in the humid air flush with mosquitoes, no-see-ums, and horseflies buzzing like large caliber bullets with wings. The forest floor was draped in sticky spider webs.

“You look nervous,” Professor Flannagan opined.

“This seemed easier on paper.”

“You’ll be fine. I’ll carry the camera. You carry the radio. We’ll nab Henry and bring him back to the boat for transport to the lab. I’ll swap his transceiver for a new one, and we’ll re-release him to the wild.”

“You make it sound like swapping tires on a car. I’m a research scientist, not a Lara Croft disciple.”

“Follow my lead, and look before you step.”

“This snake is more afraid of me than I’m afraid of it,” Kyle told himself out loud.

“Don’t bet on it,” Professor Flannagan said as they stepped onto a muddy path and made their way along a trail marked with bobcat, fox, and other animal tracks.

“Note to self,” Kyle mumbled as he trailed behind his thesis advisor prone to doing everything her way. “You should teach motivational speaking,” he suggested in a sarcastic tone. “You have a penchant for comforting people.”

When they turned from the path, Professor Flannagan used a machete to hack at thick scrub brush impeding her forward progress. Frogs croaked in fields of cabbage palms submerged in shin-deep water. “Python derives from Pytho, a chthonic dragon of Greek myth, slain by Apollo in its lair. Some mythologists believed python was a giant serpent daughter of Gaia, the goddess of Earth.”

“I’m not a fan of Greek mythology.”

Professor Flannagan surveyed the vegetation in front of her, her gaze snapping from side to side in an effort to distinguish natural foliage from a python’s cryptic camouflage. “Are you hearing anything?”

Kyle adjusted the receiver sensitivity and held the yogi antenna over his head. The radio speaker emitted a weak beeping sound. “If he’s in range, we should find him unless his transmitter battery died. The radio won’t detect a signal it can’t hear.” He repositioned the antenna and measured no discernable difference in received signal strength. “What’s with the captain?”

“He came recommended.”

“So did John Wayne Gacy the clown.”

Professor Flannagan gave a subtle smirk as she hacked her way into a narrow opening and sheathed her machete. She turned her headlamp on and glanced around. Nothing. Killing the light, she peered through the infrared camera lens to scour the sawgrass marsh and mangrove forest populating the subtropical wetlands layered with thick roots and leaves. “Why a doctorate in biochemistry?” she asked absently.

Kyle trained the antenna at a clump of palm fronds. Sweat leached from his pores. The torrid humidity coated his polarized lenses. “I’m not sure, exactly. I think biochemistry chose me. Why do you study herpetology?”

“I like snakes.”

Kyle scratched his shoulder and spotted a golden orb spider on a king-size web. The inch-long body affixed to legs as long as his hand loomed uncomfortably close. “Makes sense,” he said, sidestepping the Herculean arachnid to follow Professor Flannagan. “Who doesn’t love snakes?” he continued with his snide commentary. “Why did you hire me for this?”

“You applied.”

“I meant besides that.”

“I wanted an extra pair of hands, and you could use the field experience.”

“I’ve seen your graduate enrollments. You must have a dozen students more qualified than me for this type of work.”

“They don’t need the extra fieldwork. You do.”

“Sure… Who doesn’t enjoy a romp through the swamp, searching for a man-eating reptile.”

“Henry eats a lot of animals. Homo sapiens aren’t one of them.” Professor Flannagan reached for her machete to swipe at a tangle of hanging vines obstructing her view. Cumulus clouds drifted in the starless sky, exposing flocks of nervous birds scattered across a mosaic of multiple ecosystems. “You could be standing on top of him and not know it.”

Kyle repositioned the antenna. “I’m getting a stronger signal,” he said over the radio’s persistent beep, asynchronous to the chirp and hum of aquatic fauna. He took a second step and ducked as frenzied birds scattered from the sound of a charging boar wide as an oak bourbon barrel, snorting and grunting, with gnarled tusks jutting out like bone bayonets.

Kyle’s pulse quickened from the close call collision. “This place is a death trap!”

Professor Flannagan brushed aside taller grass with her machete and proceeded deeper into the canopied forest.“How close are we?”

Kyle checked the signal strength indicator. “Hard to know for sure. Fifty meters, give or take. You see anything on the camera?”

“Not yet.”

“How much snake do we have to carry out of here?”

“Given an average growth cycle, twelve or thirteen feet at most.”

Kyle stopped to adjust the antenna position. “Wait up.”

Professor Flannagan pressed her eye to the infrared viewfinder. “I don’t see any movement.”

Kyle kicked his foot to free himself from straggly weeds entangled around his shoe. He pointed to Flannagan’s holstered tranquilizer gun and asked, “What if the dart doesn’t work?”

“It will.”

“But what if you miss or you only graze him and piss him off?”

Professor Flannagan’s radio receiver beep louder. She scanned the marshy clearing with the camera. “We’re here to catch him. Not kill him.”

Kyle eyed the freshwater marsh. Poked by stubs of broken branches, he wiped his brow with his free hand and looked down to straddle a thick log. When he looked up, he glimpsed the tranquilizer gun aimed in his direction.

“Don’t move!” Professor Flannagan whispered, unable to discern the forest floor from the scaly brown blotches gliding over twigs and pine needles blanketing the ground.

Kyle gripped the antenna and felt the log begin to move between his legs as the camouflaged python inched itself along an indigenous backdrop of auburn hues through a trail of dense underbrush, its iridescent scales almost invisible in the waning twilight. A squirt of urine trickled in his pants while the radio beeped incessantly.

Professor Flannagan watched the twenty-foot serpent slither past thickets of ferns and grass along a circuitous route toward the water. “That’s not Henry.”

“The radio would beg to differ.”

“He didn’t grow ten feet in three months.”

“Maybe he got eaten?” Kyle stammered half-jokingly.

“It happens…”

Kyle squinted at the natural contours of the rolling watershed with its tenebrous basins and mini forests of tropical trees. “I was kidding.”

Professor Flannagan clipped the camera to her hunting vest and swapped the tranquilizer gun for her machete. “Stay still…”

“I think I shit myself.”

“Stop talking.”

Kyle kept his feet planted as Professor Flannagan approached him with the machete raised high. He flinched when she swung the blade in a downward horizontal track, slicing the head from an eight-foot python suspended by a cypress branch. “Holy cow!”

Professor Flannagan inspected her immediate surroundings, her visual observations and intellectual thought process overshadowed by a foreboding of insuperable danger she couldn’t reconcile. “We should get back to the boat.”

“I was hoping you would say that,” Kyle blurted. He hooked the antenna to his belt and followed Professor Flannagan, who’d turned her headlamp back on and started hacking a trail through palmetto palms with short, efficient swings from the Katana-sharp blade. “Are you sure this is the way we came?”

“I’m taking a shortcut,” Professor Flannagan replied, pausing to rest the machete handle against her leg before continuing along the scrubland trail.

Kyle noticed the flashing LED lights on the tracking indicator and adjusted the speaker volume to hear the loud radio beep. “Something’s wrong. The signal should be getting weaker, not stronger.”

Professor Flannagan grabbed the infrared camera on her vest and viewed the surrounding foliage. “You must have picked up a different signal by mistake.”

“The receiver’s locked to Henry’s frequency.”

“Keep moving.”

“How fast can pythons travel over land?”

“About one mile per hour.”

Kyle contemplated the vista of anemic wilderness and swamp. “What about in the water?”

Professor Flannagan ignored him and swapped the camera for her captive bolt gun. “Stay close to me,” she cautioned, chopping through dense vegetation with the machete in her strong hand. When she finally arrived at the rutted sand trail, she followed the twisty path to the airboat.

Kyle stared at the empty boat, his neck and arms peppered in superficial cuts from pointy branches and prickly palm fronds. “Where’s the captain?”

Professor Flannagan scanned the soft soil for human tracks and followed the footpath to find a partially submerged rubber boot in thick mud near a broken leather necklace with an alligator tooth attached. “Get on the boat.”

“Where’s the captain?”

“Start the boat!”

“I don’t know how to drive it.”

Professor Flannagan glanced around, then stood, transfixed in horror. “Turn the key until the big fan spins!”

Kyle followed the professor’s headlamp beam to discover a massive python partially obscured behind a mangrove tree at the water’s edge, its twisted coils enveloping the dead captain whose lifeless eyes bulged out of his head, his face bloody and swollen from a devastating bite.

Professor Flannagan holstered the bolt gun and grabbed Kyle’s arm to pull him back, her instincts telling her to avoid confrontation with the malign animal exuding an almost malevolent aura. She dislodged the mushroom anchor and heaved it on deck. “Get on the boat!”

Kyle scrambled awkwardly over the gunwale to secure himself on board. “Wh-what about the captain?” He was shaking uncontrollably.

Professor Flannagan commandeered the pilot’s seat and started the engine with an explosion of exhaust smoke. “He’s gone,” she yelled over the noise from the spinning propeller and stomped the gas pedal to launch the flat-bottom craft away from shore.

© , Jason Melby. All Rights Reserved.