The light from the airboat had gone, and Deb couldn’t see the snake, only feel it twisting next to her, a slab of dry muscle thick as a grown man’s calf, curving up her side as the baby snakes swarmed her body.

They were crawling all over her now—she didn’t know how many. Burrowing into her hair, sliding up her shirt, between her breasts. And the mother now, pressed against her. All of them touching her, pressing her, tickling her, twisting on her, as if she were being caressed by the fingers of a dozen insane men, men who’d kill her if she made the slightest movement.

The big snake pulled back; Deb felt its coils gathering, imagined the head rising.

Then she heard a small splash from the river; something was coming toward them.

The slow rattle began, then got louder.

A weak light shone into the buttonwoods from the water; there was a sharp intake of breath, and the snake rose up in front of her face, its rattle, lifted above the coils, shrilling quickly now. The narrow, deadly head, eyes hard and black as carbon, swayed as the snake prepared to strike.

She mustn’t move. Whatever she did she mustn’t move.

The light grew brighter, and Deb closed her eyes. She anticipated the attack, the snake’s body shooting straight at her, recoiling in a fraction of a second leaving blood and venom and death in its wake.

The light flared through her eyelids, and she saw orange and she heard the rattle reach a crescendo, a high buzzing as dry as a cicada on a hot summer’s day. Something hard nudged her leg.

She opened her eyes and saw the shotgun blast, the snake’s head explode into a cloud of blood, the headless body thrashing and knotting, rolling over her hip to smear blood across her stomach. And when her ears could hear again, the first thing Deb heard was the shimmering rattle, still shaking as the snake’s headless body writhed and twisted.

A small man, a shadow behind the glare of a flashlight, was leaning into the bushes, the shotgun now pointing at the ground by her leg. The light shifted as he reached in to grab her wrist, and she saw the lower part of his face was covered by a bandanna, bandit-style.