Up Out of the Swamp
by Roy Dorman
Gwen Sutton took off out of the trailer on a dead run.
She left her dirtbag boyfriend, Gary, lying on his back, sleeping on the couch. He was drunk. He was almost always drunk recently, and he had earlier smacked her around for not jumping quickly enough for another beer.
Gwen had left the butcher knife from the kitchen drawer lying on his chest, and had taken his Glock and all of its clips from where he had left them on the coffee table near the couch.
She hoped he would get the message and not come after her.
The Glock hadn’t been out of Gary’s reach for weeks. In his drunken sleep, he often muttered apologies to his partner, Tony, about how he hadn’t had any other choice.
Gary had never muttered apologies to Gwen about anything, neither when awake nor in his sleep.
* * *
The path was squishy and overgrown. Gwen had walked it a couple of times when Gary had gone into the city to “work.” Gary’s work consisted of selling dope, stealing cars, and running errands for guys higher up on the food chain than he was.
He and Tony had been working together for about six months. Tony would come back to the trailer with Gary after they had collected enough money for beer and fast food to talk about their plans for getting rich.
Tony at least had been polite to Gwen, always a “please” and “thank you” for her, and this had grated on Gary. “You hittin’ on my woman again, Tony?” he’d ask, giving what he thought was a withering stare.
Tony would always look uncomfortable and change the subject back to how they were going to live high on the hog once they were rich. That always worked with Gary.
One night, Gary had come in later than usual with a lot of mud and blood on his clothes. Gwen knew better than to ask him what he’d been doing, and she put his clothes in a garbage bag as he told her to.
That was when the Glock had started to be always within arm’s length, and the drunken apologies became a broken record.
Tony had never come to the trailer again, and Gary no longer called him on his cell phone to iron out the details of an upcoming job.
Gwen was good at connecting dots.
* * *
As she jogged along the path, Gwen realized it was probably going to be dark before she reached the highway. When she had mentioned to the owners of the country store that was a few miles from the trailer that she had walked the path through the swamp, the old couple had shuddered and told her never to walk the path at night.
“Things are dead things in that swamp that oughta be alive and some things that seem alive should rightly be dead,” said Cletus Griffin.
“And seems it’s the nighttime that brings out the evil,” said his wife, Myrna, crossing herself.
The swamp was even noisier at twilight than it had been during the day. The sounds of insects and frogs more than made up for the absence of birdcalls.
About halfway through, she picked up the pace a bit. It was here that the path ran within a few feet of open water for a ways, and she had to step carefully to avoid a fall in the mud.
She glanced at the water from time to time when she heard a frog jump in or a turtle drop from a half-submerged log.
Then she saw the hand reaching out of the water ahead of her.
She stopped on the path when she had pulled up close to it, hoping it was a half-submerged tree branch, but it was clearly a human hand.
As she stared at it, the hand clenched into a fist and she saw the letters “T O N Y” tattooed on the lower part of the fingers that was just above the knuckles.
Gwen knew she had found where Gary had disposed of Tony’s body.
Tony’s face lay just below the surface, and in his new undead state he could see things out of the water that were close by.
The hand opened again and the arm seemed to reach for her. The hand now lay open to the sky. Very slowly it partially opened and closed a couple of times, back and forth, in a beckoning motion.
“I’m sorry if I was the cause of Gary killing you, Tony, but I’m not going to join you. I’m leaving this whole scene.”
Gwen thought she would make an anonymous call to the police when she got to the bus station; she had seen enough horror movies to know that letting that hand grab onto hers was a bad idea. Even if it belonged to Tony, who had always been nice to her, there was just so much she could bring herself to do, and touching a dead man was something she could not do.
She was about to resume her jog to the highway when she saw the hand make a side to side negative motion. The hand opened up into a “WAIT!” position and then the forefinger pointed to a tree branch close to the path.
Gwen picked up the branch and moved it toward the hand. It grasped the end, and Gwen was ready to drop her end if the hand tried to pull her in. The hand, Tony, just held onto his end and let Gwen exert some pressure. As she pulled, more of Tony came out of the water. His skin was grey and covered with mud and slime, but hadn’t started to deteriorate much yet.
When he was far enough that his head and one shoulder were visible, Gwen had to close her eyes tightly, but she continued to pull.
She slowly backpedaled as she pulled and knew when there was suddenly some slack that he was out. She dropped the branch and stood stock still, eyes still shut tightly, her hands stiffly at her sides.
She smelled Tony as he came up next to her face. He said something that sounded like “Thank you” or “Love you.” It was a liquidy, garbled message, and she knew she would scream if he touched her.
Gwen remained where she was until she heard Tony finally shuffle off. She knew where he was going and thought about offering him the Glock.
But if Tony could see well enough to find the trailer, he would probably be able to see the butcher knife on Gary’s chest.
Gwen started back down the path toward the highway, but walking this time; she felt she now had all the time she needed to catch a ride into the city and then a bus west.
Copyright © 2018 by Roy Dorman
