Free The Swamp Warden by Unknown Page B

to tip? Still bigger than most.”
    “Usually five to six is what I see,” one of the fishermen said. He scratched his ear. “That looks like the fella that hit us last week. Don’t get ‘em this far up, and so big either.”
    “And they don’t attack men,” said Mart. “Strange all around.”
    “What’s this?” Rhyn fingered an old scar on the gator’s cream-colored underside. “Almost a pattern.” The scar reminded him of the runes on the fetish hanging from the tree, and the skin on his back crinkled in gooseflesh.
    “No idea,” Mart said.
    Rhyn lined the knife up on the gator’s belly. Gators could and would eat just about anything, and it was always worth checking their stomachs. The gator’s fleshy belly was thick, but not tough like the rest of its hide. The gathered women shooed the children off and headed back to their homes. The fishermen who remained gathered close around to watch. Rhyn slid the knife in and worked it back toward the tail, letting the oily blood drip down through the boards of the pier.
    It was the work of a few minutes to find the stomach and slice it open. Rhyn reached in cautiously with gloved hand. He wrinkled his nose at the acrid stench of bile and groped through the mush of the gator’s insides.
    Almost instantly he felt it: a tangle of firm but yielding objects, like a mass of twigs. He grabbed one and pulled. With a wet squish, he withdrew his arm and displayed a human hand, flesh dripping off the bones, green with slime and severed at the wrist.
    The fishermen recoiled with a collective groan. Rhyn dropped the hand and it splatted on the pier. “Guess he had himself a meal not long ago,” Mart said.
    “Guess so.” Rhyn gingerly slid his hand back into the stomach, breathing shallowly through his mouth. The stink of rotting flesh, heavy and thick as marsh gas, hovered around him. He grabbed at the tangle again and pulled.
    A second hand slopped onto the boards to lay beside the first. The fishermen muttered and shook their heads. Rhyn stared at the hands, brow furrowed. Soft bones, half-eaten by the gator’s stomach juices, shone wetly through the strips of flesh. Mart came to squat next to him.
    “Poor soul,” he muttered. “Strange how they look almost cut, isn’t it? Suppose there’s more of him in there?”
    “Don’t know,” Rhyn said. He took one of the severed hands between thumb and finger and flipped it over. “They do look cut. Mart, tell me something.”
    “Yep?”
    “These both look like right hands to you?”
    Everyone stared at the hands for a good long minute.
    “Fear the scaled ones,” Rhyn whispered.
     
    ∗ ∗ ∗
     
    He pulled five right hands from the gator’s stomach and nothing else. Within an hour he had cleaned and sharpened his knife and restocked the skiff. Mart stood on the pier and watched the preparations.
    “Why you gotta go right now?”
    Rhyn paused in the act of coiling a rope. “I saw something right before the gator surfaced. Some kind of charm hanging from the trees.”
    “You think maybe a lizard put it up there?”
    “Maybe. I don’t know. But the gator sure as hell didn’t tie it to the branch, and it didn’t bite off five people’s hands just for fun. Someone’s behind this, and once they realize their pet is dead, they’ll haul off. Find a new hole to squat in.”
    “But Rhyn…” Mart rubbed his chin. “You’ll be out there at night.”
    “Got no choice. I’m the one who keeps you all safe. Can’t always wait for the right time to do that.” Rhyn tossed the rope into the skiff and set his longsword on top of it.
    “You got plenty of choice. You took up this job on your own and we were happy to let you, ‘cause you’re good at it. But you can stop whenever you want. You’ve paid your debts and then some.” He paused. “It wasn’t your fault.”
    Rhyn stared out into the black of the swamp. “I’m gonna head out. I’ll come back when it’s safe.”
    Mart shook his head but said no