to be done.
“Do it, goddammit!” he told himself.
Grimacing, he wedged his fingers into the corners of the snake’s mouth. A moment later he cried out and yanked his hands back. Teeth he hadn’t seen had pricked his fingers. He thought about bashing the serpent’s head with his fists or elbows, but that would injure Austin as well.
Then, with a pelican-like gulp, the snake’s grinning mouth jerked over Austin’s eyes and nose, so only his mouth and chin remained visible.
“No!”
Jeff stuck his fingers in the snake’s mouth again, one hand gripping the upper jaw, one the lower. He pulled with all his strength but still couldn’t pry them apart. As if to prove it was undaunted by his effort to steal its prey, the snake’s coiled body undulated and its mouth moved farther down over Austin’s face, all the way to his neck.
With a moan, Jeff rolled away from the demonic thing, unwilling to watch it devour the rest of his friend. He closed his eyes, gripped his hair with his hands, and touched his forehead to the floor.
He wasn’t aware of the second green anaconda slithering silently through the darkness toward him.
CHAPTER 19
“Something came out of the fog.”
The Fog (1980)
According to Mandy’s gold wristwatch—a gift from Jeff—she had been wandering through the ghostly forest for a little over an hour, though it seemed much longer than that. She had started away from the small butte in what she’d thought had been the direction of the highway, but she’d never arrived at it, and now she had to admit she was completely lost. She wasn’t surprised. The forest would have been difficult enough to navigate correctly in the daytime. The thick, soupy shadows and coalescing fog made it near impossible. It seemed every five or ten feet she had to circumvent another tree, ducking beneath the low sprouting branches, each time veering more and more off course. To make matters worse, it had started to rain twenty minutes ago. This had cleared some of the mist, improving her visibility, but it had also soaked through her silly Cheetara costume, making the Spandex cling uncomfortably to her cold and clammy skin.
Nevertheless, despite all this, Mandy had to remind herself she was lucky. She had escaped Cleavon and his brothers. God knows what the others were going through right then. She could still hear Cherry’s screams in her head. What had Cleavon or his brothers done to her? And why? Moreover, why had they attacked Mandy and the others in the first place? What was their motivation? Were they a bunch of sick, depraved rednecks that ran some sort of torture operation back at the “ol’ McGrady place?” Or were they simply psychopaths, who killed for the sake of killing?
She tried to convince herself that Steve and Noah had returned to the scene of the accident with the police and paramedics in time to rescue Cherry and Austin and Jeff. But something told her they would return to find nobody there. They would think Austin and Mandy and Cherry had carried Jeff off in the hopes of finding help. They would organize some sort of search party, but they wouldn’t find them. And this was why Mandy felt so frustrated she hadn’t reached the road. She wouldn’t be able to tell the police about Cleavon and his brothers—and by the time she made her way out of the forest and contacted them, it would likely be too late.
A branch clawed Mandy’s face. She cried out at the burning sensation in her right cheek. She touched the cut and felt warm blood.
Suddenly tears welled in her eyes and threatened to spill down her cheeks in great torrents. This wasn’t fair. This shouldn’t be happening. This was supposed to have been a fun weekend, a chance for she and Jeff to rekindle what had been lost in their relationship. She shouldn’t be wandering around wet and lost and…hunted…in some god-awful national park. She should be in the cozy hotel room in town that Jeff had rented for them, warm, the TV on, snuggling with him under the bed covers.
It’s all your fault, Jeff, she thought with a hot-blooded surge of anger. If you hadn’t felt the need to play chicken with that hearse, we wouldn’t have crashed. We wouldn’t have run into Cleavon and his brothers. Everything would have been as we’d planned it—
Mandy stopped on the spot. Ahead of her, visible between the crosshatch of branches, illuminated in the cold light of the autumn