The Weight of a Dying Man

Tom pressed his forehead to the sand and said it. Said the word: swear. Felt the wrongness of it in his teeth, like biting iron. But Marrow's hand was on his collar and the fowling-piece was nearly charged behind the dune and the drums — God, the drums — had moved closer without him noticing until just now.

He got his hands under the captain's arms. Marrow made no sound, which was worse than screaming. The splinter had shifted. Tom could feel the wrongness of it when he pulled, the way the old man's whole body stiffened and went rigid as a plank, and still Marrow made no sound. Just fixed Tom with those pale eyes and nodded once.

They moved in inches.

The sea-grass cut Tom's forearms to ribbons. The sand beneath gave way to root-bound earth, softer and darker, and the light changed as the canopy reached out overhead. Salt air turned to something green and wet and thick with rot. Good rot, Tom told himself. Living rot. The kind that hid things.

Behind them: a crunch of boot on shell-scatter.

The tall man had cleared the dune.

Tom froze. He could hear the man's breathing — slow, deliberate, a hunter's patience. The drums answered from somewhere left and deeper. Closer now by fifty yards, maybe less. Two parties and Tom between them with a dying man and a cutlass he barely knew how to hold and a packet sewn against his ribs that someone on Saint-Pierre was willing to kill over.

Marrow's lips moved. No sound came out. Tom read them anyway.

Don't trust the smoke.

Then the jungle exhaled — a breath of gray mist, low and clinging, rolling out from between the roots like something alive.