The Flock (3 page)

“Holcomb's place. Vance Holcomb.”

“Ah. I'd heard about the…
situation
with Holcomb.”

“You'd think a man with a few billion dollars could find something better to do than sit out here and cause problems for this company. Pointless problems, too, I might add. Salutations USA is as concerned with protecting the environment as any other American organization. We've done our utmost to minimize the impact of modern living on the natural world around us.” Tatum moved behind the big desk that sat facing away from the view. He indicated a padded leather chair for Riggs.

Both seated, Tatum continued.

“You know the drill,” Tatum said, this time with a bit of coldness in his voice. “We've had several more dogs vanish. Mainly in Phase Three, eh,” he turned and shrugged toward the houses that bled into the forest to the north, “over there.”

“Has anyone seen anything?” Riggs stood and went to the window to look out at that neighborhood. Most of the forest was that same pine-oak mix. But there was that savanna area beyond it and past that he could see some truly impressive cypress trees rising up in wetlands beyond.

“Nothing. No one has even heard a dog struggling with anything. No yelps or barks. Dog there one minute, gone the next.”

“I doubt it's a gator,” Riggs said.

“Why do you say that?” Still seated, Tatum was looking in the same direction as Riggs.

“That area is too high and dry. No streams, no swampy area there. And you said some of the dogs vanished from fenced yards. Gators can dig like nobody's business, but you'd see the sign, of course. And that neighborhood's elevated, too. I'd almost call it a hill. What passes for a hill in this area. An alligator would have to be terribly hungry to go up there, and from what I can tell from looking around, and from the environmental impact statements I've read, there's plenty of food in the gator habitat to keep a sizable population well fed and in place. I think we can rule out alligators. So no need to call in one of our licensed trappers, just yet.”

“Well, that's a relief. I'd hate to see Dodd take that one to town. Can you imagine what he'd write? And the last thing I'd want to see is a photo of some trapper hauling off another one of those big alligators in the bed of his truck. Christ. That last one was a fifteen-footer. Damned dinosaur was what it was. Ate
two
dogs, that one.” He sighed, pinched the bridge of his nose. “What else, then?”

“Well. I won't know for sure until I check. One of the impact statements I read mentioned a panther track.”

“Panther?”

“Florida panther.
Felis concolor floridanus
. Mountain lion. Cougar.”

“Oh, Jesus.”

“But I don't think so.”

“Why not?”

“We're too far north, for one thing. There aren't but fifty or so of them left, and most of them live in or near the Everglades. Every once in a while one strays north, especially since the Department began seeding the area with transplanted panthers from Texas, to beef up the bloodlines because of inbreeding. But I don't think it's a panther. They're very afraid of dogs. More likely to run from one than eat one. Still, they do weigh over a hundred pounds, and killing a dog wouldn't be that difficult for a healthy panther.

“But, no. I think someone would have heard something. At least one of the dogs in the neighborhood would have caught wind of a panther. And there's been no sign of struggle or of blood. I can't see a panther operating like that. Nope. Doubt it's a panther.”

“Then what?”

“Could be bear, I guess. But I'd rule that out for many of the same reasons, although I
know
these woods have a healthy bear population. A bear coming in to eat a dog would just make more of a fuss, I think.” Ron gazed off into those woods, peering even beyond the longleaf savanna.

“Then there's coyotes. They've been known to lure dogs out into the bush and then ambush them and eat them. But I haven't seen any credible evidence that there are any coyotes in this part of the state.

“So…barring the dogs just wandering off into that wilderness and getting lost…”

“Yes?”

“I'd have to say a snake.”

Tatum stood and took a few steps away from his desk. “A
snake?
You mean, like Dodd is writing about? A giant snake? Are you crazy?”

“Well, look at it this way. The dogs don't even raise an alarm. They're in the yard one hour, gone the next. No one sees anything or hears anything. No blood. No tracks. In the past, people here in Florida have either lost large pet snakes, or released them when they got too big to handle. Pythons, usually, but there are a couple of Anacondas on record as having been recaptured around the state. One near Big Springs State Park was a twenty-footer. It had been chowing down on the local dogs when it couldn't find enough raccoons to eat.”

“Twenty feet? You're serious?”

“Yes, I am. I've read the reports about that one. They found it under a lady's house when her poodle started barking at something under there. A snake that big could eat a child, you know.”

“Jesus.” Tatum strode back to the desk and picked up the phone, then put it back down. “I guess we leave this up to you guys, then? Endangered or threatened species, right?”

“Actually, if it's an escaped large constrictor, we don't want it roaming free. It's a non-native species and not officially welcome here. But, yes, I'd like to take a look around, and we can recommend a specialist to trap it if we decide that's what the problem is.”

“Well, that's a relief.” The smile returned to Tatum's face. “So. When can you get started?”

Walks Backward laid his head in the cool shadows, sighed. The Scarlet had gone rogue and the rest of the Flock was in danger because of it.

Nearby, Egg Mother and Egg Father murmured to the young brood, telling the great stories of their ancestors. He raised his head a small distance and peered toward them. They were so well concealed that even he could not spot them. Quickly, though, he looked back the way they had come, the direction in which he lay, the way he always did, as was his task.

It was also his task to worry. For years he had worried about the Scarlet. It was not good that its coat was so different from the others. They lived in concealment and in safety because they could blend so well with the land in which they roamed. But not the Scarlet. His coloring did not allow him to vanish so completely as the rest of the Flock. But he had been born directly of the Egg Mother, and so it was not the place of Walks Backward to eliminate the threat by eating the Scarlet while he was still a hatchling. Not his place to act, only to worry.

But now the Scarlet was grown. And
how
he had grown. The Scarlet was much larger than any other member of the Flock. Larger even than Egg Father, heavier even than Walks Backward himself, who was heavier than all the others. Until now.

The Scarlet was not right, did not do things as they were to be done. In times past, this one should have made his move to take his place as foremost of the Flock. He should have learned to lead and to hide and to hunt, and to take a mate and be a father. But he did none of these things.

Instead, he had left the Flock, coming back only from time to time to stand and watch them from a distance. Walks Backward had spotted him a number of times, so easy to see, that ridiculous red mark revealed against the forest and field. Walks Backward suspected that the rogue was plotting to try to cull some of the females from the Flock, to form a new group. This would not do. There was not room here for two Flocks: they all, each of them, knew this fact.

The Man had left them this one place to live. Whether by design or by accident, none among them knew. But it was theirs, almost untouched for the life spans of two pairs of Egg Fathers. The humans sometimes had ventured in, and once, when Walks Backward had been a hatchling, the Flock had killed and eaten humans. But that was the only time they had met, Flock and Man. Man was everywhere beyond this place; in packs too numerous to comprehend. The Flock could not make a practice of competing with Man. This was common knowledge taught to the youngest hatchling. Everyone obeyed this rule and so the Flock bedded down in the Sun, hid well; only at night did they emerge to run and to hunt. This was the way things were supposed to be.

Except for the Scarlet. The rogue among them. He no longer acknowledged the first rules that had meant life for the Flock when so many in their stories became only that: stories. The rogue among them endangered all, and they were at a loss for a solution.

Walks Backward knew what should be done. The Scarlet should be hunted down, at night, and killed. It was the only way, but it was not his place to decide such. The Egg Father and Egg Mother only could decide an act of that magnitude. He sighed again and raised his head from the ground and peered, seeing with a perfect sight still strong after so much time. He was older than any other member of the Flock. He could recall things that were now only stories memorized in the songs of the others. But he had lived them. He had been so small when the men had attacked the nests, when the Flock had been forced to defend itself by tracking the men and killing them all. The Flock had had a most wise leader, then. One who had never made an error in judgment such as that made by this Egg Father. He trilled a note of discontent, and the hatchlings' lesson was interrupted. Without checking, he knew that Egg Father and Mother were looking his way, although he doubted they could find him.

He sighed again and peered out at the forest that had sustained them. Somewhere in the trees or at the lake or perhaps even in the open grasses, the Scarlet was moving, ignoring the ancient rules that had preserved the Flock for so long. Or maybe the mad one was even scouting at the edge of the forest where Man had built its crazy home, where numbers of them had invaded and taken a prime hunting area from the Flock. He hoped not. He hoped that even the stupid rogue would not make such an error.

But he had learned that to hope did no good at all.

Being an official with Fish & Wildlife, Riggs had the right to cross almost any boundary, public or private. But when Tatum put out the word that Riggs had the run of the town, it made things a bit easier. He didn't have to worry about some pesky security man with a private badge asking him what he was doing poking around a pump house or a sub-station.

He had spent that first day just driving around Salutations, getting the lay of the land. He had a knack for remembering something the first time he saw it, recalling locations and making the transition from map to the real thing, and back. In college he had almost always won the orienteering competitions he'd entered.
Ronny-on-the-spot,
they had called him.

Before getting the nod at the office for this assignment, Ron hadn't given this area much thought. He'd read the newspaper concerning the legal battle being waged between competing camps, each armed with their own lawyers trying to fight off the other. But now that he'd had a chance to look at the place, he could fully understand why so many people were willing to go to the mat for this land.

Except for the road leading in to what had been the Edmunds Military Base, the 400,000 acres here was one of the largest roadless areas in the state. It was probably only second to the Everglades National Park in that respect. As military bases went, the construction had been minimal. Most of the area had been used as a bombing range, and even since the 60s, most of the bombing had been done either with dummy ordnance or had merely been bombing runs with no real armaments used. The U.S. Armed Forces had inadvertently created a vast wilderness area.

Of course the wilderness aspect of the former base was now what was in contention among the varied parties. When it had been decommissioned and evacuated, the land had gone on the public auction block. The Berg Brothers group had stepped in and had snapped up the area that had been housing and ops for the base. Since it had already been inhabited, there was no need for environmental impact statements, and they had begun almost immediately with construction of Salutations, to quite a bit of fanfare. Ron had to admit that they had done a wonderful job in building their ideal fantasy town. There were already over five hundred families living there, and more houses were under construction.

The studio boys had even managed to lock down first refusal rights on an additional 50,000 acres, pending environmental impact statements. And that was when the proverbial shit had hit the fan.

It had taken only a few weeks before several environmental groups had taken to the courts and filed suits that were serving as staying actions on any further development beyond the couple of thousand or so acres the studio had bought outright. But they were not well funded, being environmental groups, and the big company was having no major problems in outflanking those suits.

The true monkey wrenches had come from two unexpected sources.

First and foremost, one Vance Holcomb was found to have legal right to a one hundred-acre tract of land abutting that of the Salutations town limits. Concurrent with the groundbreaking of the town, he had begun construction of what the billionaire was calling a “research park,” to be the nexus of a school for the study of the pristine environment of the land. With all of those dollars in assets to back him up, Holcomb was proving to be a greater bother than almost any other group vying for the status of the acreage.

The second cog breaker had been the appearance in court of Colonel Winston Grisham, U.S. Marines, retired. He was best known as a right wing extremist with widely publicized racist views, what amounted to a private army, and friends in the Florida legislature. He also owned a one thousand acre farm, which also lay cheek by jowl with projected expansion for Salutations. While a wealthy man, he was not in Vance Holcomb's money class, and his legal strengths had so far lay in the good ol' boys he chummed with in the state government. He'd become something of a thorn in the side of plans to expand Salutations. But he was also a thorn in the side of those who wanted to preserve the acreage as wilderness.

And that was the extent of Ron's knowledge of the current legal status of the almost half a million acres of roadless wilderness he now stood beside and peered into.

The sun was up and startlingly yellow in a clear blue sky about as dark and cloudless as any. Florida skies were the equal of any he'd seen, from the East Coast to Alaska. They rivaled those of the Big Sky country where he'd spent a year as an intern with the Park Service when he was just out of college. Rainy days scoured the air and the prevailing winds from the Atlantic or the Gulf brought in clean breezes. He enjoyed the skies here, most definitely.

He had parked his truck on the south end of Salutations, near an unobtrusive electrical substation that was surrounded by a red brick wall eight feet tall capped with a cast iron row of ornamental spikes. The station had been built on a bed of crushed river rock, he'd noted, hauled in from out of state. That was a very expensive setup for a small substation. But the place reeked of money. He supposed the average price of a home here was about $400,000.

Riggs looked back, down the street, as someone in a Mercedes sedan drove by. A kid in the back seat waved at him, and he waved a return greeting. He walked around the side of the substation and followed a small path through the grass that led off into the tall pines. There were sedges growing here and there, brown in all of that greenery, and the path took him through a field of a type of grass he couldn't identify. But botany wasn't his strong suit. He bent and tugged on a tuft and put the stuff in a plastic baggy he drew out of his pocket. He'd let one of the guys back in town have a look at it. Might be endangered or threatened. Wouldn't hurt to check.

Stuffing the sealed bag back into his pocket, he continued down the path. It was possible humans made the path, but he suspected it was more likely a deer trail. Apparently some of the deer were coming into the new neighborhoods and eating the shrubbery and whatever garden vegetables some of the housewives and retirees were planting. Tatum had admitted that a couple of the residents had shot at deer, once successfully. Ron told him that he wouldn't call the game warden, but asked that Tatum inform the shooter that the act was illegal.

The sun was tilting up toward its high point in the sky. He looked back through the grasses and through the trees. There was no sign of anything not put down by Mother Nature. Just trees and palmettos. He calculated he'd hoofed half a mile, maybe a shade more. The vegetation and the breezes swallowed up even the sounds of any passing cars. Some quail called off to his right. He smiled.

Ron supposed that a big snake might follow a path such as this one. He had touched up his knowledge concerning big constrictors and knew that they would cruise game trails looking for a place to waylay their victims. Deer were a bit out of their league, but other animals could use a deer trail, too. He suspected that raccoons and opossum were probably the main prey of any introduced python or anaconda. But considering the size of some snakes, there weren't many animals out of the question for their menu.

Soon he was two miles out from where he'd parked the truck. He'd seen a Pileated Woodpecker on a tall, dead pine ten yards to the left of the deer trail. Ron knew that bird watchers sometimes made the mistake of identifying the Pileated as one of the extinct Ivory-Bills. Hopeful thinking on the part of novice bird lovers, he suspected. Every so often he heard tales that there might still be a pocket of Ivory-Billed Woodpeckers living here or there, but he knew it was just hopes and wishes. He was convinced they were all gone. It was a good thing that the dead snags and dying trees here were left to stand and fall on their own. Some birds preferred to feed on the insects that lived in such trees, refusing to dine on the trunk if it was on the ground. If ever there was a place to find a lost Ivory-Bill, he supposed this was it.

The trail had branched a couple of times, but Ron had kept to the main one, which led southward. A dog might use such a trail to snoop around, checking out the nearby forests. Dogs would be quite edible where a big snake was concerned. Alligators loved them, and that was for certain. Ron had lost count of the number of dogs that were taken by gators every year; it was a common occurrence, and he knew that a resident construction worker had lost at least a pair of dogs to a gator before the place had opened to the public. Apparently, that had pretty much started Dodd's Jurassic Park articles. Ron hadn't seen the reporter since that brief meeting on the steps of the administrative building, and he wondered if the man had gone back to home base.

He was about two and a half miles out when he came to the longleaf savanna he'd spotted from Tatum's office. There was a line of mixed oaks and pines, and suddenly he was out on a wide plain interspersed with longleaf pines, a species mostly gone from Florida, pushed out by the planting of slash pines and other more commercial types. He'd read about such environments, but had never seen one this large. This one was almost a mile square and he was tempted to hike across, just to see what it was like. The trail led out a ways, and just vanished in all of the low grasses and Spanish bayonet. This was a type of forest and grassland that had once dominated vast areas of the Gulf and low country of the East Coast. But now it was reduced to small pockets here and there.

Standing in it, viewing the wide, open country, the pines tall and strong amidst the fields, he understood why groups would vie to own or protect it all. Despite the fact that he was supposed to remain officially neutral about these things, he found himself hoping that no one would be allowed to harm this area in any way.

He smiled. At one time, this kind of country would have been prime hunting area for a large constrictor. This would be perfect habitat for such an animal. Which threw his thoughts back to the job he was there to do.

The only thing that was bothering Ron about the possibility of a python being the culprit of the missing dogs was the time between the disappearances. In the past ten days, four dogs had vanished. Having spoken to owners of the missing dogs, he was aware that only one of the pets had weighed less than twenty pounds. One had been a full-grown Airedale terrier. That dog alone would be enough food mass for even a big snake to sleep off for several weeks.

So why would it take four dogs? The probability that there were more than two large snakes here wasn't even worth considering. Of course, he supposed, stranger things had happened.

Taking his small daypack off, he laid it at the base of a big pine tree and sat down, his back against the tall trunk. He looked up, watched the needles undulating in the breeze. Despite the warmth of the day, he felt comfortable out there, and the wind had chased away whatever biting bugs were about. The thought of taking out the camera and snapping a few shots occurred to him, but he decided it would be better to eat a sandwich and get back to Salutations to start scouting around. After all, if there really were a snake, he'd be better off looking under someone's house than off in the wilderness. He reached into the pack and began to rummage for the roast beef on sourdough he had prepared. The thought of tangy deli mustard had him salivating.

Almost, he didn't catch the rustle of moving grass over the small noises his hand was making in the recesses of his little backpack. Ron froze.

Holding his breath, he looked around. Overhead, a Snail Kite streaked across the sky. Even alert as he was, he made a mental note to mention that one to the boys back at home base. Snail Kites were definitely an endangered species. He stared across the savanna, trying to pinpoint the location of the sound. There was only wind whispering through pine needles.

And then it came again.

Whatever it was, it was out in the savanna, maybe a hundred feet away, and it seemed to be coming toward him. He stared, squinting, and finally saw a movement out in the sedges. A tall figure was moving his way, almost a beeline right toward him. He held silent until he could identify it.

It stopped. All he could see was something light colored standing behind a tuft of bear grass. And then it was moving toward him again. Suddenly, it appeared from out of the tall grasses.

“Hello,” she called in a husky voice.

Ron breathed out, relieved and wondering why he had been so tense. There really wasn't anything out there likely to be a danger to him. He felt relatively certain he could outrun a big snake. He laughed nervously, low in his chest, before he stood.

“Hey,” he replied. The girl was moving his way quickly. She, too, had a small daypack on her back. She was wearing khaki cotton pants and a long-sleeved shirt of similar color, a kerchief of muted green around her neck. She had short brown hair, and she was very tall.

And she was quite pretty, he noticed as she walked up to greet him, her own hand outstretched to take his. Her grip was strong, stronger than he had expected. He had to look up to meet her eyes: she was six feet tall, at least.

“So. You're with Fish and Wildlife.” Her gaze was on the patch on his right shoulder.

“Yes,” he needlessly replied. “Out here scouting around today.”

“You guys thinking of updating those preliminary impact reports you did? Those really sucked, you know. I almost thought you fellows were working for the studio.” She was shedding her own pack, revealing a great dark stain down her back. Ron realized she had been out on the savanna for some time, and he wondered how she had spotted him.

“No. I'm not here for anything like that. That's not my gig. They have other boys at the office for that type of thing. I'm more of a Jack-of-all-trades with the department. PR, informational talks, that kind of thing.” He indicated his tree. “Have a seat. Plenty of room. Name's Ron, by the way. Ron Riggs.”

“Sure. I think I will have a seat. Lunchtime, anyway. Thanks.” She tossed her pack next to his and sat, her long legs extending out before her, back against the tree much as Ron had been sitting before she'd arrived. “My name's Kate Kwitney. I was hoping your bunch'd do another impact statement. As I said…”