Marshland, long stretches of mudflat and barren reeds set asway by the hot breezes, a body here and there, festering in the muck and lit upon by carrion birds. A meatskin, finding himself stuck, unable to move, up to his neck in the mud, arms floating out crosswise as though he were treading water, motionless, nothing even to jaw at in this place of swamp and brittle grass. They come to a small rutted road leading off to the right. She supposes thats the Levee Road the man told her about, but its in bad repair, a small shack toppled over into it she can see it in the distance.

I reckon we can make it through whatever they made it through, she says and continues west down the swamp road.

Soon the road rises up on concrete pylons and the swamp becomes a lake of thick brackish water beneath them, green slime shifting in slow eddies across the surface. The road ends halfway across the bridge, the tarmac surface ripped away from itself and collapsed into the muck. She stops the car and looks across the gap where the bridge continues a hundred yards away, the ragged end of the concrete bent like an aluminum antenna. So she turns the car around and drives back and takes a side road that looks like it might circle the lake to the south. The road follows a narrow brown river, weeds and wildflowers overgrowing the verge, styrofoam cups and other ancient garbage caught up in the thorny limbs of bushes.

Around a bend she sees the thing in the distance. At first it looks like a man in the road, or a slug, but as she gets closer she realizes the thing is too big. Its man-shaped, but it must be seven or eight feet tall. It lumbers along, its arms swinging like heavy chains on a revenant. When it hears the car behind it, it turns its head and she can see the face human but disfigured, part of the skull exposed, one eye crazy-wide and the other sleepy-lidded, a pallor the colour of moss or rot. But its not a slug, because when it sees the car it retreats into the trees with a weird sideways loping gait.

Now what in holy hell was that? Temple says.

She gets to the place in the road where the thing disappeared and pulls the car over. She leans out the window and scans the treeline, but theres nothing to be seen.

Hey! she calls into the dense brush. Hey, bigfoot! You can come out, I aint gonna hurt you.

Next to her, in the passenger seat, Maury begins to moan, a long low wail absent of meaning.

Hush up, she says. Well get movin again. I just gotta know what that giant was. Miraclesre sometimes hidden by unpleasing looks.