Melette and Odelie broke camp silently, brushed down the area and hid all sign they’d been there, then flitted through the woods, heading for the wooded knoll on the White Oak Trail. A hundred yards from where the trail diverged from the main road, Odelie froze, one foot in the air, her hand up to silence Melette. Both girls listened intently, then Odelie made a circling gesture with her raised hand, pointing first left then right,
Melette understood immediately; the men on the knoll were on the move, moving in closer to the house, so she would circle around to the left in front of them and Odelie would do likewise to the right, and jump them before they reached the house. Both girls set off, Odelie with her Remington cocked and the safety off, and Melette with an arrow nocked ready.
Odelie made contact first; about two hundred yards from the house she spotted a city thug sneaking through the woods, the reek of tobacco and overpowering cologne confirming it was one of the men from the knoll, so she circled ahead of him, clambered up into a huge old Live Oak on the trail he’d have to use, and waited for him to come blundering by.
When he showed up, she could see he was alert for trouble, constantly scanning the terrain around him. He should have looked up. As he walked under the big branch she was crouched on, Odelie dropped square on him, her knee between his shoulder-blades sending him flying, while his own rifle flew off somewhere into the underbrush. Odelie clubbed him on the back of the head with her rifle-butt as he went down, and shoved her rifle muzzle up under his chin when he rolled over on his back to see who had jumped him.
“Don’t you-all move less’n y’all want a big hole in yo’ favorite head, boy!” she grinned. “This my daddy’s old Remington and she got a real sensitive trigger, so you be smart, or you be dead, you hear me, boy?”
So saying, she gave the distinctive triple ‘Kee-weet, Kee-weet, Kee-weet’ call of the yellow-bellied flycatcher, repeating it twice.
Meanwhile, Melette had caught up with his partner, a young man no older than herself, with what looked like an expensive, high-end, high-tech sniper rifle. She watched him cast around for a place to rest the rifle bipod for a clear shot, but finding nowhere suitable, instead took a length of rope from his pack and tied it around a tree at about shoulder-height. Melette frowned, unable to work out just what the hell he was doing, but when he pushed the muzzle of the rifle through a loop twisted in the rope, she suddenly understood what he was up to; he was giving himself a stable rest to take his shot.
As far as Melette was concerned, it had already gone too far; this creep was setting up a kill-shot. She realized she could clearly see Johnny and Justine on the porch, about four hundred yards away, so that meant that paid killer could as well; it was time to act.
As the man started to line up his shot, she put a razor sharp, broad-head hunting arrow through his trigger-hand, pinning it to the tree he was leaning against. The killer screamed, and as he tried to yank the deeply embedded arrow out of the tree, she shot him again, this time in the buttock. The man gave another howl as he dropped to his knees, and squealed once more as the arrow through his hand kept him hanging against the tree.
Melette grinned and stood up; scratch one killer. The sniper’s eyes bugged when he saw it was a pretty little blonde girl who’d shot him and tried to grab his rifle with his uninjured free hand. Before he could reach it, Melette was standing in front of him. He froze when she pushed the razor-sharp tip of an arrow into his nostril just far enough for him to feel how sharp it was.
“I wouldn’t boy; now just you lemme see what we got here…”
Without taking her eyes off him, Melette unhooked his rifle and looked it up and down, and worked the bolt to eject the round in the breech.
“This look real expensive; that right, boy?” she murmured, and when he nodded, she smiled brightly at him.
“Bet it shoots real accurate too; looks like you c’n hit purty much what you wants from a ways out, ‘m I right or am I right?”
The thug nodded fearfully, wondering where she was going with all this.
“That’s just too bad, hun; I ‘spose I could give this to one of the boys, but it ain’t no use to them. See, they hunters, they kill to put food on the table, an’ when they kill, they thank th’ Lord for his bounty in providin’ for their family; they don’ murder from concealment. This thing here made for murderin’ folks, an’ that’s all it was made for; there ain’t no other reason for it to be; none the boys gonna want nuthin’ to do with it; it’s dirty, an’ it’s evil, an’ we don’ need stuff like this down here, sooo… ”
With that, and before he could blink, she’d swung the rifle by the barrel and smashed it against the tree with all her might. ABS shattered and splintered as she repeatedly slammed the sinister-looking rifle against the tree until it was just a mass of plastic shards and bent metal components.
“There, now it’s clean…” she murmured, tossing the wreckage far out into the bayou. “Nex’ thing is, I gotta deal with you, so…”
She pulled out her huge, custom-made Randall Bowie knife, the ‘Confederate’ model, with its eleven-inch, razor-sharp clip-pointed blade and brass knuckle-bow, one of a pair that Johnny had given the girls for their 18th birthday, intending to cut the arrow-shaft out of his hand, but he took one look at the huge blade and fainted dead away.
“What in Sam Hill…?” she muttered, but then shrugged; if he was out cold he wasn’t going to be all squirming and crying and telling her how much it hurt, so she set to. When he came around, he found she’d zip-cuffed him securely, with his hands behind his back, taken the rope he was going to use as a stable base for his shot and tied it around his neck, then around the tree, immobilizing him, strapped his ankles together with his own belt, dressed the arrow-wounds in his hand and backside, and thrown his pants, boots and socks away.
As he focused on her, they both heard a repeated squittering bird call, and, after a pause, the sound of a rifle-shot, and Melette smiled.
“Who are you?” he asked, terrified. “I saw ‘Southern Comfort’, I know what you people are like, please don’t let your clan have me, I’ll do anything you want…”
Melette frowned and prodded him with the alloy shaft of the arrow she’d taken out of his hand.
“You lucky I’m the shy, retirin’ type, or I might take offense at that! That there birdsong an’ shot mean yo’ friend face down in the swamp, or he wish he wus. Now you tell me sumthin’; jes’ whut kinda stupid city-boy idjit are you anyway? You an’ yo’ fancy guns come slitherin’ around here bein’ all sly an’ thinkin’ you all that, but these here swamplands is dangerous enough for you an’ yore kind without you-all lookin’ to go fussin’ with my folks. You lucky I got you first, ain’t no tellin’ what else is a-trailin’ you, or even sittin’ right next to you this deep in, jes’ waitin’ for you to do somethin’ all-fired stupid; look here…”
She whirled and raised her bow, with an arrow already nocked, and in one quick release shot another of her razor-sharp, broad-head arrows right through the huge mottled snake lying coiled up in the mound of leaf litter a few feet away from him. The arrow pinned the huge snake to the tree it was lying under, entering its neck just behind the head, a perfect shot. He shrieked as the snake thrashed around violently, unable to wrench itself free from the deeply embedded hunting arrow.
Melette grinned at her shot, winked at the helpless killer, then, carefully approaching the coiling, thrashing monster, calmly drew her huge Bowie knife and, with a two handed grip, rammed the fearsome clip-point right through the snake’s skull, killing the huge creature instantly.
“What the fuck was that!?” he shrieked, and she grinned at him.
“That there’s a Ree-tic-ulated python; them idjits up New Orleans way keep them as pets; why they do that only the good Lord knows, ’tain’t like we don’ got enough dangerous shit roamin’ aroun’ out here already, where they ‘spose to be, but no, they got to bring in even more, an’ worse than that, too. Then Katrina come along, these damned things get loose, now they breedin’ faster’n hogs in a canebrake; ain’t nothing to stop ’em, even daddy ‘gators shy away from them, so they grow real big. This’n ain’t but a young’un, only ten, mebbe twelve feet; I seen ones near-on twice as long an’ thicker’n Fat Arno’s leg. I hear tell they’s even spotted some Nile crocodiles North and East o’ here, too, more escapees after Katrina; I dunno ’bout that, but you lucky you never meet one o’ them, they huge, an’ they don’t hide none, they just rear right up ‘n’ bite you clean in half; I read somewhere that a Nile croc bites with the same force as a truck fallin’ off of a cliff; be grateful there ain’t none of them down this way… not yet, anyway.”
She nudged the still thrashing and shuddering dead snake with her trail boot and grinned at him, making him quail even further.
“You still lucky I got you afore that snake did, yes sir. See, he ain’t gon’ eat you, but mebbe he don’ like you comin’ too close, so he snap out an’ bite you real deep; you get bit by one o’ them, you be real sick afore long.”
She hunkered down and tapped the twitching dead snake with the flat of her huge knife.
“Thing is, they ain’t poisonous, not like cottonmouths , but they got real dirty mouths, and there ain’t no-one out here for to clean you up, no ant-i-biotics, so you get bit, you gon’ get sick, then real sick, mebbe lose your mind a little, go wanderin’ ’round, an’ this a real bad place to go wandering if you ain’t in your right mind; you go fallin’ in the swamp, then a big ole daddy ‘gator gon’ come along an’ take you fo’ a li’l swim, stick you under some log deep-down only he know ’bout, an’ wait for you to go all sof’ an’ sweet an’ ready to eat.”