"What's that?" Brother Mark asked, pointing behind them.
Valentine put the oar across his thighs and looked over his shoulder. Something like a turtle's back was cutting through the current. Valentine saw a face come up for air.
"That," Valentine said, "is a Reaper head."
It wasn't swimming hard to intercept them; it was just following.
Valentine put his oar in the water and took six vigorous strokes while he thought. Then he set the oar in the bottom of the canoe and carefully turned around.
He took up one of the Ordnance hand grenades. It was the more powerful of the two used by their military, designed to be thrown from cover at an advancing enemy. Javelin had captured plenty from the Moondaggers, who used them to clear buildings.
"Hold up for a moment," Valentine said.
After a quick read of the yellow letters on the side to double-check the instructions, Valentine stripped off the red safety tape and pulled the fuse pin. The grenade whispered like a snake.
He knew better than to stand up in a canoe, so, kneeling and bracing as best as he could, he hurled the grenade at the following head.
It was a poor throw. It plopped short and detonated in a fountain of water with a rumbling roar that sounded like an oversized toilet flushing.
"Well done, my man," Brother Mark said.
"We'll see," Valentine said.
The last of the water fell and the head was still there, though it had halted and drifted with the current. It took a cautious stroke or two toward them again, letting the current put more distance between them.
"Not easily discouraged," Brother Mark said.
"Row hard," Valentine said.
Paddling hard enough to froth the river, with Valentine steering and Brother Mark puffing with the effort of providing power, they beached the canoe on the little brush-overgrown spit that they'd used to cautiously launch it a few hours before.
The Reaper scuttled up and out of the water sideways, like the crabs Valentine had seen on the Gulf Coast.
"Lord, oh lord, the thing's stalking us," Brother Mark said.
It had killed before but not fed. Valentine saw the yellow eyes, bright with something that was probably hunger in this cold, fixed on the slower-moving Brother Mark.
Valentine no longer felt sorry for the creature. The easy sympathy that came when he pictured it wandering the woods, confused and hungry, had been replaced by pale-skinned, black-fanged reality.
"Anything in your bag of tricks that lets you suggest something to a Reaper? Like going back across the river and trying the hunting in Indiana?"
Brother Mark closed his eyes, opened them, and then closed them again, this time firmly. "No, Major, nothing, I'm afraid. I get no sense of a mind there, not even a human one."
Valentine put his sights on it and it froze. It retained enough knowledge, then, to know what a pointed gun meant.
That made it more dangerous.
It slipped behind a tree with a swift step that cut the air like the sound of an arrow in flight.
"Shit," Valentine said.
He had one hope left.
A predator has a stronger survival instinct than most people credit it with. To the hunting cat or the pursuing wolf, serious injury is synonymous with death. If not defending young or scrapping with a challenger for territory, a predator will usually shy away from an aggressive display, especially if you can overawe it in size and noise.
Of course this isn't the case with all meat eaters. A wolverine or a bear will often welcome a fight.
He handed his remaining grenade to Brother Mark. "If it gets its tongue in me, toss this. They get lost in the act of feeding. You could run up and hang it off its back."