Torched: A Thriller by Daniel Powell

nothing to offer the
patient gators.
    “Lord, let this
work,” she prayed. She was down to her last few throws, and her shoulder and
elbow ached.
    The tell-tale
skittering echoed again from the other side. She took a deep breath, released
it, stepped into the sunlight and fired a shot. It clipped the iguana—a fatty,
maybe seven or eight pounds!—on the haunches and the creature fell over on its
side.
    She’d broken its
leg, but the animal was far from dead. It pawed at the dirt, struggling
mightily to escape.
    Vivian charged
it with the irrigation key. It stopped moving after three good whacks. Vivian
looked at it, horrified by the quantity of bright red blood it shed, and
vomited.
    How long had it
been since she’d eaten anything? There wasn’t anything there but bile and
water, and her abdominal muscles cramped.
    She kicked sand
over the vomit, collected the iguana corpse by the tail and disappeared behind
the wall.
    It wasn’t
enough. She had to have more.
    She hunkered
down to wait, but it didn’t take long. Maybe attracted by the blood, maybe by
her vomit—a bevy of lizards ventured out of the brush.
    This time,
Vivian had options. She plunked another fatty, thankful that it stayed down.
The others scattered, but now she had two.
    Would it work?
    It had to.
    She studied the
canal’s surface, counting a total of eight gators in the water, and two more
sunning themselves on the far shore.
    She located the
best place to cross, estimating a forty-yard swim. She’d been decent as a
child, but she hadn’t trotted out her competitive stroke in decades.
    “No movement,
and it’s been almost an hour,” Terri said. “You coming, girl?”
    Vivian collected
the iPad, peering into the screen. “How’s this for movement?” she said. She
hefted the device, working her wrist like a hinge before chucking it like a
frisbee. It sailed true, gliding across the canal and landing, seemingly none
the worse for wear, in a puff of dust on the far banks.
    “It takes a
licking and keeps on ticking,” she muttered to herself as she tore long gashes
in the iguanas with the sod knife.
    She threw the
irrigation key across the canal, careful to land it far from the iPad. She
removed her shoes and socks and tossed them across. The sand was scorching
beneath her feet.
    She took the
first carcass as near to the shore of the canal as she dared. Alligators were
ambush hunters. If there were eight on the surface, there were probably that
many on the canal bed as well.
    “Come and get
it!” she shouted, heaving the lizard out into the water. The iguana landed with
a hearty splash and the water boiled, a flurry of green and gray scales
writhing in a contest for the tiny scrap of food. A few of the gators blocking
her route moved closer to the feeding frenzy, and she lured them even closer by
tossing the second carcass.
    As another
battle erupted there, she sprinted for the canal. She leaped, bounding out into
the water. One step, a second, and then she tucked into a shallow dive,
skimming through the murky water, repulsed by its stagnant warmth and the
threat of unseen monsters.
    She surfaced,
churning the water with arms and legs, and swam as hard as she could for the
far banks.
    Something big
knocked against her calf. Something attempted to grip her upper arm, and she
wrenched it free and kept flailing forward.
    Her mind went
blank, instincts taking over. She felt the water thrashing all around her,
sensed the presence of reptiles beneath her and at her side.
    And still she
flailed.
    The canal was
deep and then, just as quickly, it was shallow. She’d covered the distance in a
blur; she felt silt beneath her feet, and then she was stumbling forward,
scrambling to free herself of the water.
    She stood on
shaking legs and stumbled, half lurching and half running, up the gradual bank.
She fell hard on her ass and scuttled backward, hands slipping in the loose
sand, screaming as a reptile the size of a log pushed across the canal.
    A