Zombie Raccoons & Killer Bunnies (15 page)

A pigeon landed on his shoulder, just like at St. Mark’s in Venice. It picked at the fabric of his coat with its claws. Like it was trying to keep Paul from leaving. Like it didn’t want him to go. He hesitated; it was just a bird. But what was it saying? He could almost hear it pleading.

But that was crazy, so he kept climbing. Then, the pigeon
nipped his ear. Crying out, Paul batted it away, and it flew. But then another came, pecking at his hand. It hurt, but Paul couldn’t let go.

The pigeons were everywhere.

A dozen of them flew at him, dove at him, wings flapping, beating at him. Individually, they were rats with wings, easily defeated, but together, like this, a swarm of them, all thrashing at him—it was too much. Paul screamed, crouched to try to escape, put up his arms to protect his face—and lost his grip.

He fell.
Then,
he hit bottom.

THE THINGS THAT CRAWL

“M
rs. Porter is hysterical,” the dispatcher said, “and not making a lot of sense. But apparently somebody named Molly collapsed.”

“Shouldn’t you send EMTs?” I asked. Like most cops, I’d once learned CPR. But I hadn’t practiced in a long time, and anyway, what if CPR wouldn’t do the job?

“I tried, but there’s a tree down between them and Chiles Road. They’ll have to go the long way around. You’re close. I’m hoping you can get there faster.”

“I’m on my way,” I said.

I pulled my patrol car out of the Circle K parking lot
and headed down a flooded two-lane road only barely distinguishable from the overflowing drainage ditches on either side. The tires threw up dirty water. Broken branches littered the roadway or dangled above me. A telephone pole leaned to the side.

That was because it was September, 2004, and just hours ago, Hurricane Frances had hammered the little central Florida town where I was trying to make a new start. If you compared the damage to what Katrina did later to New Orleans and Mississippi, you might say we got off easy. But I’d never gone through any sort of hurricane before, and I was pretty damn impressed.

Despite the miserable driving conditions, it only took a couple minutes to reach Chiles Road, and Mrs. Porter had white numbers painted on her green plastic mailbox to point me to the proper dirt-and-gravel driveway. It dipped down, so the standing water was even deeper there than it was on the highway. Worried that the car was going to stall or get stuck, I made the turn anyway, managed to keep rolling past the live oaks growing on either side, and ended up in the yard—except that currently, it was more like a pond—in front of a doublewide trailer.

A woman knelt over a motionless body lying on its side and held the head up out of the water. I assumed I was looking at Mrs. Porter and Molly. Mrs. Porter was obese, fifty-something, and wearing a pink housecoat. Molly was a Labrador retriever.

For a second, I was annoyed. You don’t call 911 because a pet is sick, especially in the aftermath of a natural disaster. But when Mrs. Porter looked up at me, I could read the fear and pain in her round, red, blotchy face even from yards away, and then I just felt bad for
her. I climbed out of the cruiser and sloshed toward her through brown water and the sucking mud beneath.

“I don’t drive!” Mrs. Porter wheezed. “You’ve got to take her to the vet!”

I suspected it might be too late for that. Molly didn’t look like she was breathing. Still, I asked, “What vet does she go to?”

“Dr. LaSalle,” she answered, and then I glimpsed a rippling curl of motion in the water on the far side of her.

I grew up in the city, so I don’t know why I was instantly sure I’d spotted something dangerous. Maybe because of the Lab. Anyway, I pointed and yelled, “Watch out!”

Mrs. Porter looked around, and her reaction proved my instincts were on target. She yelped and tried to flounder in my direction. But one swollen, slipper-clad foot slipped out from under her, and she splashed back down into the water.

I lunged forward—as much as you can lunge, when you’re wading—grabbed her by one doughy forearm, and heaved. Somehow, heavy though she was, I managed to spin her around behind me. Which gave me my first good look at the animal that was swimming after her.

It was a dark, mottled snake about two feet long, with indentations between the nostrils and the places where the eyes must be, though I couldn’t actually see them while looking down from above. It darted at me, I kicked it, and it bit my foot.

Fortunately, the fangs didn’t pierce my shoe leather. I kicked a second time, shook the snake loose, and flung it several feet away. It immediately swam at me again, and two others followed right after it.

I really wanted to run. But even if I could have made
it back to the cruiser ahead of the snakes, I couldn’t have managed it while dragging Mrs. Porter along. So there was nothing to do but draw my Browning and shoot.

Even at short range, it’s not easy to hit a target with a handgun, not when it’s small and moving and you don’t have time to aim. I emptied the whole magazine, and by the time I killed the last snake, it was right at my feet. Scared as I was, I was lucky I didn’t blow my toes off.

Standing in a haze of smoke and the smell of cord ite, I looked around for more snakes and didn’t see any. Hands trembling, I reloaded anyway, then turned to Mrs. Porter, who was still on her hands and knees where I’d tossed her. “Are you all right?” I asked.

“I think so,” she said, her breathy voice shaky like my hands. “Did the cottonmouths bite Molly?”

“I don’t know,” I said. But I figured they probably had, and hours later, when the vet examined the Lab’s body, it turned out I was right.

But at first, I didn’t think much more about it, and neither did anybody else. One poor snake-bitten dog didn’t count for much when we had a whole town to put back together. City and county government focused on getting the power back on, the roads open, and the debris cleared. I worked a lot of overtime, craved a drink, and settled for attending early morning and late night meetings instead.

Meanwhile, water moccasins killed one person and diamondback rattlesnakes, another. I didn’t see either of those deaths. But when a guy named Kropp called from Michigan to report that his mother had stopped answering the phone, I was the patrolman who went out to check on her.

Like many in the area, the house was a sort of ramshackle bungalow with a tin roof. Overall, it looked as if
had been built decades ago, although the roll-up plastic storm shutters—which currently were up—had to be a recent improvement.

A dozen bright green lizards clung to the brick fa çade. Their black eyes stared as I picked my way over ground that was no longer underwater but still soft and sticky nonetheless.

The mere presence of the lizards wasn’t odd. They lived all over the area, anyplace there were plants and bugs. I saw one or two whenever I went out of my duplex apartment during the day. But they generally skittered for cover whenever a human being approached, so it did seem strange that this bunch was staying put. Strange and, after my previous confrontation with local wildlife, maybe even a little bit creepy. But unlike the cottonmouths, the lizards were tiny and completely harmless, so I managed to find the raw courage to step up on the concrete stoop and ring the doorbell anyway.

Nobody answered. I knocked and shouted, and no one responded to that, either. The lizards kept on staring.

I decided to walk around the house and see what I could see. I headed right, took a few steps, then glimpsed motion from the corner of my eye. I pivoted.

The lizards I’d been walking toward had held their positions. But the ones I’d started walking away from had darted along the wall and followed me. They stopped moving when I did, but it took them a second. Just time enough for me to see what they were doing.

But had I
really
seen it? It seemed more likely that my eyes were playing tricks on me. I headed left.

Now the lizards on the right scurried after me. The ones on the left stayed put until I passed them, then joined the parade. And whenever I stopped, the reptiles did, too.

Okay, this really did seem weird, but I reminded myself I knew nothing about lizards. If I did, maybe I’d understand that what they were doing was normal.

In any case, it couldn’t have anything to do with Mrs. Kropp, and she was the reason I was here. I took a breath and went back to checking the house. The lizards continued to supervise.

The air conditioner was a stumpy metal box with rounded corners sitting on the ground next to the east side of the building. It wasn’t running, which came as no surprise, considering that Mrs. Kropp had left a number of windows open. The one above the AC unit had a hole poked through the bottom of the screen. A small hole. I couldn’t have stuck my hand through without tearing it bigger.

But a snake could slide through.

Not that there was a bit of evidence that a snake actually had. But once the thought occurred to me, it stuck in my head.

So you can imagine how eager I was to go inside the house. But the son had given permission, and it seemed that someone should.

Mrs. Kropp had left the back door unlocked, so I didn’t have to break in. I resisted the urge to enter with gun in hand. I didn’t want to scare her to death if it turned out she was simply hard of hearing.

First, I smelled the rotten stink. Then I heard the buzzing flies.

Mrs. Kropp had been slimmer and nicer-looking than Mrs. Porter, but I judged she was about the same age. She lay on her bedroom floor with multiple wounds—paired punctures—on her face, neck, hands, and arms, and legs. Maybe on the rest of her body, too, but her yellow pull-over and baggy tan walking shorts made it hard to tell.

It was scary to realize that the snake or snakes that had bitten her might still be in the house. But the lizards crawling on the walls spooked me just about as badly.

I told myself they couldn’t be the same animals that had followed me around outside. They hadn’t really come through the hole in the screen, then raced through the house to watch my reaction when I discovered the corpse. No, obviously these were different lizards, camped out here to eat the insects that came to eat the body.

I exited the house even more cautiously than I’d entered, then called in the death. Along with the usual ambulance and investigators, Animal Control showed up to look for the snakes. They didn’t find them. The reptiles had killed their victim and escaped back into the great outdoors.

I caught the Animal Control officers when they were tossing their snake-catching equipment—poles with hooks on the ends and sturdy canvas bags that looked like mail sacks—into the back of their van. “I think I know how the snakes got in and out,” I said. “Want to see?”

The shorter of the pair, a redheaded, freckled guy who smelled of cigarette smoke, shrugged and said, “Okay.”

I led them around to the side of the house. No lizards followed us. Maybe the activity centered on the corpse was more interesting.

“The way I see it,” I said, “a snake could probably climb up on top of the air-conditioning unit, then move from there onto the windowsill. It could press its nose against the screen until it broke, then crawl on in. There’s a chair on the other side of the window, so when it was ready, it could climb back up and out.”

The freckled guy frowned. “I guess a snake could do all that. But I don’t think it would.”

“Me neither,” said his partner. He was missing the last joint of his ring finger, and I wondered if an animal had bitten it off. “A snake will come into a house if it happens to find a way. But climbing, then
forcing
a way in? I just don’t see it. I don’t know, maybe if the hole was already there. The hurricane could have ripped the screen.”

“Probably not,” I said. “It didn’t tear any of the others, and she would have had her new storm shutters down. But if my idea’s wrong, how do you think the snakes got in and out?”

“There’s a hole at ground level,” said the freckled man, pulling a pack of Marlboros and a disposable lighter from his pocket. “We didn’t find it, but it’s there somewhere.”

And that was that. Since they didn’t even like my snake theory, I didn’t see much point in telling them my crazy lizard story.

Snakes killed someone else the very next day, and that was when the local TV stations and newspapers decided to make a big deal out of the story. They had a point. Florida averaged five deaths by snakebite per year. Our little piece of the state had racked up almost that many in a week.

Herpetologists explained that it was simply a fluke. Snakes didn’t ordinarily hunt in packs, nor did they hunt humans. If we left them alone, they’d leave us alone and help us out by killing rats and other pests.

I imagine some of the local residents found the experts’ line reassuring. Others went hunting, to get the snakes before the snakes got them.

Whether or not that was an overreaction, it was largely an exercise in futility. The town was on the I-4 corridor and close enough to Tampa for commuters to drive back
and forth, so the developers had us in their sights. But the area was still pretty rural—
very
rural, compared to what I was used to—with plenty of strawberry fields, pastures, barns, thick stands of palmetto, and creek beds. All perfect places for a copperhead or diamondback to live and, if need be, hide.

Since the damn snakes had nearly bitten me, and I’d been the first officer at the scene of Mrs. Kropp’s death, I got interested enough to find out the details of each incident. And after the fifth death, I reluctantly decided I ought to talk to my boss.