Free Dead Simple by Jon Land Page B

waist deep, with islands of footing recognizable as slight splotches that reflected the sun differently. Blaine’s plan was to dance from one to the other, never even stir a gator if he planned things right.
    A twelve-footer slithered by with its mouth opened as Blaine leaped atop the first land pod. For a time his leaps from one land pod to the next became a frantic game of connect the dots. Initially he hit the soft patches too hard, drawing the death jaws of several gators uncomfortably close. Once, a grayish one had him dead to rights, when another gator’s sudden leap knocked it aside. Then Blaine began to soften his landings, gliding through the air rather than lunging.
    The problem was nature had not cooperated with his plan, putting increasing distance between the land patches the closer he got to the opposite shore. Blaine never once turned back toward Buck; this wasn’t about Buck. This was about him. This was about fear and conquering it. Not of the gators; they were just an exercise tool. The fear of real danger, as opposed to pain.
    With a third of the distance left to cover, he ran out of land; only water
separated him now from the opposite shore. Blaine slid off the final land patch into knee-deep black water that quickly rose to his waist, alert for the sudden shifts in current indicating a gator had him in its sights and was coming fast. He got used to the feel of the water lapping around him, and when it lapped wrong he lunged to one side, a few times narrowly avoiding eager jaws, which snapped closed on nothing.
    Suddenly he realized he could feel the presence of the gators even when the water did nothing to betray their location. He began to move more subtly, mixing with the currents instead of disturbing them. His first thought had been to grab a branch, a rock—some sort of weapon. But thought gave way to instinct before he had a chance to think again.
    He learned to blend with the gators’ movements, drift into the wakes left by their quick spurts through the water. Eventually they came to regard Blaine indifferently, or perhaps not regard him at all, even though they had him surrounded.
    Blaine remembered other swamps, other jungles, in which the odds were the same and only the enemy was different, realizing then why Buck had waited until today to bring him here. Surviving required a mental edge as well as a physical one. This was Buck’s way of saying the latter had been regained and it was time to check on the former. Give him back not just his muscle but also his mind-set.
    Dead Simple …
    That was how walking through the gators had felt. That was how thriving in another jungle had been.
    Reaching the other shore, where Buck Torrey was now waiting, Blaine could have sworn a few of the gators lifted their snouts out of the water to give him a last look. They seemed confused, glad the stranger in their midst had gone before the day grew hot and they slipped back into the waters for a nap.
    “Wanna come back for dinner tonight?” Torrey asked him with a wink.
     
    “ I ’m gonna be gone for a time,” Buck announced when Blaine got back from his distance swim that afternoon. “Some things I gotta attend to.”
    His voice held a somber tone Blaine didn’t recognize from all the years they’d known each other. Torrey’s eyes drooped, wide with worry.
    “What’s wrong?”
    “Personal.”
    “So was me coming down here.”
    “This ain’t your concern.”
    “You saying there’s nothing I can do to help?”
    “Nope. You can stay here and keep putting yourself back together so when I get home I can finally get rid of you once and for all.” Torrey tried to force a smile, couldn’t manage it.

    “Why don’t I come along?”
    “Like I said—”
    “I know: it’s personal. Nothing’s personal among old dogs like us. Sound familiar?”
    “You’re out of order, Private.”
    “I went out a captain, Sergeant Major.”
    “You went out an asshole who didn’t know when to leave things