The natural habitat of the eastern coral snake is varied, from scrublands to woodlands to swamp verges, but the species is rarely found north of the thirty-fifth parallel: they don’t much care for cold. And this particular individual had been born and raised under the lights of the reptilarium: he or she had no yearning for the wide open spaces, not when there was food under the house.
The coral had never hunted before, but neither had it ever been hungry before. (The instinct was programmed, anyway-nature’s plan for reptiles didn’t involve Mommy or Daddy Snake spending a lot of quality time with the young’uns, teaching them how to fend.) The mice under Pender’s house were well fed (everything in Pender’s house but the ficus in the living room was well fed) and had never been hunted by anything as fast and deadly as a coral snake before. Mus musculus v. Micrurus fulvius fulvius wasn’t much of a contest.
Afterward, another programmed instinct kicked in, a thermal tropism: find warmth. The warmest place in the cold cellar was on the floor between the furnace and the water heater, but no sooner had the coral settled down than the thermostat on the furnace kicked in with a full-throated, percussive roar even a deaf snake could feel.
Once again, nurture affected nature’s plan. The coral had been raised, and more important, fed, by humans; it had no fear of them-quite the opposite. And the next warmest place in the cold cellar was across the room, next to the human. For all the snake knew, there might even be more food by the human, after the mouse had been digested. And perhaps there was also a conditioned reflex at work: this human smelled like coffee; coffee was the first thing the coral smelled every morning when the humans arrived to turn on the warm lights, and feed it, and clean its cage.
Or maybe it was just lonely. If snakes even get lonely-they are among the most difficult of creatures to anthropomorphize. It was true, though, that this one had never lived alone-never even been alone until the scarlet king had made good its escape. And even if the coral didn’t crave a companion, it certainly wasn’t averse to one that smelled like coffee and pumped out heat at a steady 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit.
Humans are not without instincts of their own. The coral didn’t make any noise, it didn’t give off any warmth, and it wasn’t actually touching her skin, only her wool bathrobe, but Linda sensed its presence. She wanted to crawl away, but it had taken her too long to achieve her current position, lying on her side, her knees drawn up in front of her as far as the rope permitted, with a jagged-edged chunk of brick behind her, wedged into place between the wall and her bound wrists.
But humans, as opposed to snakes, can talk themselves into going against their instincts. Linda told herself it was nothing-nothing! — and went back to sawing at the rope. It was hard work, with barely perceptible progress-she could saw for only a minute or so at a time, then had to rest her arms and shoulders for an equal period of time.
During one of these rest periods the nothing! squirmed more tightly against her, until it was an undeniable something. If Linda hadn’t just had an up-close-and-personal encounter with the coral, it would have taken her much longer to identify just what that something was, pressing against her so quietly and insistently. Instead, a concrete visual image came to her sight-starved mind almost immediately. The black snout, the flickering tongue, the round pupils, the muscular writhing beneath the shiny tricolored bands. She moaned into her fuzzy flannel gag-but only once, and softly, before her sense of humor, or at least irony, came into play. What’s next? she asked herself. What’s fucking next, the thuggees of Kali?
Linda had drawn back in spite of herself. The rope tautened against the brick; the coral wriggled closer. To her surprise, Linda found its presence at least tolerable.
She had been afraid of snakes her whole life, she really had-Gloria had been with her the day their anthro class came all the way up to the Bronx Zoo primarily to see the primates (the other primates, their instructor had emphasized), when Linda had passed out at the door of the reptile house-but she was afraid of them no longer. Must have worked through it when Childs was thrusting the coral into her face. She’d read about that happening, on phobia.com.
Flooding, they called it: the most extreme and successful form of counterphobic programming. And of course some good old-fashioned information hadn’t hurt: Childs said it hadn’t wanted to bite Gloria; and it certainly hadn’t bitten her even when she yanked it violently from Childs’s grasp.
But even if she wasn’t in any real danger from this serpent, Linda reminded herself, there was still the other snake, the human one, pacing the floor directly overhead. Quickly she went back to work. Freeing her hands might not help-she was still weaponless-but it sure wouldn’t hurt.
Then it struck her-she wasn’t weaponless. Or rather, she wouldn’t be, if only she could get her hands free before Childs returned for her, or before the coral slithered away, whichever came first.