If that was true, they all needed to run. Everyone in the village. If the soldier boys wanted you, they took you, and Mahlia had never heard of anyone coming back after they got recruited.

“So what’s that thing out there?” Mouse asked.

Mahlia followed his gaze to the huge alien mass, floating in the swamp. “Hell if I know. Looks like a gator.”

“Not with fur.”

Mahlia didn’t want to stick around anymore. The jungle was making her skin crawl. “We got to get back to the doc, tell him about the soldiers. Let people know there’s military around.”

“In a minute.”

“Mouse…”

But the licebiter was already wading in, headstrong and crazy.

“Mouse!” Mahlia whispered. “Get back here!”

Mouse ignored her, wading deeper, pushing aside cattails. He prodded the floating mass with the machete. Flies lifted off the dead thing, buzzing and humming. Matted hair and grime, clots of blackened blood, leathery hard skin.

In the light of day, crawdads were in it, and beetles feeding on ragged putrid wounds. Mahlia saw a centipede-like thing come out of a gash and drop into the water, slither-swimming through the water like a cottonmouth.

Mouse leaned against the thing with his blade.

“Damn,” he grunted. “It’s big.”

Huge, more like. Meters and meters of meat, fur, and rough armored skin. It rocked sullenly, so big that it barely moved, even when Mouse leaned hard. Green mossy scum water rippled around it. Rafts of tiny lilies bobbed up and down. Water skippers fled.

“I do believe we’ve found dinner,” Mouse announced.

“Don’t be gross.”

“It ain’t spoiled. And there’s enough here for us to smoke. Better than scraping for crawdads and trying to snare lizards and rabbits. Plenty to give to Amaya and her new baby.”

“No way the doctor will eat something like that.”

“Just because he don’t eat pig, don’t mean he won’t eat this.” Mouse spat into the water, irritated. “Anyway, we don’t have to tell him what it is.”

“We don’t know what it is.”

“So we just feed it to him. We can call it goat, or something. Or make up some of his Latin talk for it. Deadus pondus, right? Mahfouz’d eat that right up. He loves those big words.”

Mahlia laughed. “You try that, he’ll definitely know you’re up to something.”

“Come on, Mahlia. If we don’t carve it up, coywolv will.”

Something about the dead thing made her uneasy. She scanned the swampy pools, the jungle all around. Nothing but trees, green leaves, and kudzu draping over everything. Deep mossy pools. And then in the middle of it, this bloody leaking thing.

Mouse was smirking at her.

Grind it. She couldn’t be paranoid forever. Mahlia waded in, feeling stupid for her fear. The warm waters of the swamp eased up around her thighs, hot as blood.

“You’ll eat anything,” she said.