“I’ve got it!” shouted Dee, just as the lindworm’s head flashed past my position, and my blood went cold.
Its eyes were granite-gray from side to side, with no pupil or sclera.
“You’re not going to be able to stun it!” I whirled, firing twice more into its side. The lindworm hissed horribly and whipped around again, jaws snapping shut on the place where I would have been standing if Frank hadn’t effortlessly yanked me out of the way. I fired at the lindworm again. Thanks could wait until we were no longer in immediate danger.
There was a whoop, and Shelby was abruptly sitting on the lindworm’s back, straddling it like a cowgirl riding a bucking bronco at the rodeo. She hooked the fingers of one hand under the broad scales at the back of its skull, drawing a gun from her waistband with the other hand. Her grin died as she glanced my way, meeting my eyes.
Clenching my jaw, I nodded.
Shelby nodded back before pressing the muzzle of her gun against the soft membrane that protected the lindworm’s inner ear. The lindworm bellowed, trying to shake her off. Shelby pulled the trigger.
It was a small report, mostly muffled by the lindworm’s skull. The two that followed it were only a little louder. The lindworm fell. It didn’t do it gracefully, and it didn’t do it all at once; that wasn’t possible for a creature of its size and bulk. Shelby leaped free before she could be pinned under the falling reptile, and I hurried away from Frank to help her catch her balance and pull her back from the lindworm’s death throes.
It thrashed madly in the underbrush for several minutes, each part of its body seeming to get the news about its death at a slightly different rate. When the tail had finished twitching, I finally let go of Shelby. She looked at me, wide-eyed.
“What in the world is going on?” asked Frank.
“Just give me a second, okay?” I moved away from the group and toward the lindworm, my gun still out and at the ready. It didn’t move. I prodded the side of its jaw with my foot. It didn’t move. Finally, cautiously, I crouched down and touched the stone surface of its left eye.
The petrifaction was advanced enough to have converted the lindworm’s entire eyeball. I peeled back the eyelid, feeling the inside edge, and found small, sandy protrusions marking the places where the conversion had begun in the soft interior tissues. It wasn’t as advanced there—if it had been, the eyelid would no longer have been capable of moving flexibly—but it was spreading.
“Alex?” said Shelby.
“It’s dead. I’m in no danger.” The fact that it was dead said a lot about how far the petrifaction had spread. A bullet to the brain shouldn’t have been enough to kill a lindworm.
I let go of the eyelid, pulling a knife from the lining of my sleeve, and began trying to pry up the edge of the lindworm’s eyeball. Normally, eyes are pretty easy to pop out of their sockets, once you have the proper leverage. They’re designed to move freely within their limited space, after all; an eye that can’t be budged isn’t going to be much use. Petrifaction had reduced the lindworm’s ability to move its useless eyeballs to practically zero, but “practically zero” wasn’t the same as nothing. I managed to wedge the tip of my knife under the eye in relatively short order, and pressed down, shifting the entire sphere up enough for me to get a good grip. I yanked. It came loose in my hand.
“Oh, my,” breathed Dee.
“You took the words right out of my mouth,” I said. Maybe with a little less swearing; what I’d been about to say would have been a good deal saltier.
You can’t catch petrifaction from skin contact, but I was still careful as I turned the eyeball, studying it. The ocular nerves dangling from the base of the eye were still flesh, red and raw and dripping. The spot where they joined up with the eyeball itself was white and squishy, if inflamed; the tissue looked infected, and when I pressed my knife against it, the vitreous humor that leaked out was gray, cloudy with silt.
“Look at this,” I said. “The vitreous humor has partially transformed. I’d need a hammer or a bone saw to tell how solid the interior of the eyeball is.”
“You know, it’s sort of nice to be surrounded by adults for a change,” said Dee, with a nervous giggle. “At work, you’d need to follow that statement up with ‘I mean the eye goo.’”
“Yeah, well, if I were dissecting a post-petrifaction lindworm at work, I’d have bigger problems than the vocabulary of today’s youth.” The inside of the lindworm’s eye socket was red and raw and angry, with only small patches of petrifaction.
“That poor sweet baby,” said Shelby. “It must have been hurting so bad. No wonder it attacked us.”
“Marry me,” I said distractedly, turning the eye over in my hand to study the front again.
“What was that?”
“Nothing. This lindworm is a female. Probably the mate of the one Dee and I tagged earlier. You should still be careful in this stretch of wood—the male is likely to come looking for her.” I put the eye down next to the lindworm’s head and stood. The knife went back into my sleeve. I wiped my hands against my pants, trying to get rid of the faintly sticky, gritty feeling the lindworm’s vitreous humor had left behind. “All right. Can a cockatrice petrify something this size?”
“No.”
The answer was very soft. It took me a moment to realize that it had come from Frank. I turned to face him.
The snakes atop his head had coiled themselves, tucking their heads under their bodies and going still. From my work with Dee, I knew that this was the gorgon equivalent of looking ashamed. “When you showed that picture I thought you were surely lying. That you had come to make trouble, and that there was no way one of us could be involved in any way. But this . . .” He indicated the lindworm. “A cockatrice is a fearsome predator. It can do a great deal of damage without any assistance from anyone, or anything, else. A human is nothing to a cockatrice. It will lock eyes and move on, never caring about the damage it has done.”
“A lindworm is different.”
Frank nodded. “Lindworms are larger, more solid . . . and not mammalian. Not even as much as a gorgon can be said to be mammalian. To petrify a lindworm takes something more powerful than the gaze of a cockatrice.”
“I’m guessing from the look on your face right now that the venom of a Pliny’s gorgon would be enough to do the job.”
Expression grim, Frank nodded. “Yes. It would be enough to assist the process, if nothing else.”
Shelby cleared her throat. “All right, this is all very fascinating, in that ‘we’re finally solving the murder mystery, aren’t we clever’ sort of way, but we’re standing in the middle of a forest where a giant lizard just tried to eat us. Worse, we had to kill the poor thing to make it stop. So in the interest of not being eaten, and not killing anything else that doesn’t absolutely have to be killed, how about we move on to where we were going in the first place, hmm?”
I stiffened at the reminder of how exposed we really were. The frickens were still silent; they still sensed danger in the trees. They could have been reacting to our presence.
They could have been reacting to something else.
“How much farther?” I asked Frank.
“This way,” he said, and waved for us to follow as he turned and led us out of the woods. The body of the lindworm remained behind, a gruesome reminder that not all the deaths in this conflict were going to be human—and not all the victims were going to go down without a fight.
Sixteen
“Rules only matter if everyone understands them, agrees to them, and can be trusted not to break them. Bearing those irrefutable facts in mind, rules never matter at all.”
—Thomas Price
At a hidden gorgon community in the middle of the Ohio woods, emerging from the tree line, having not been eaten by a lindworm
WE WERE ONLY A short distance from the other side of the trees. If the dead lindw
orm’s mate was around, he didn’t attack us as we walked. The frickens started singing again after we had passed, their tiny, cheerful cries of “creep, creep, creep” signaling that the danger had passed. To them, we must have been as frightening as the lindworm, at least in the aftermath of our fight. Hopefully, they’d get over their fear of us. I didn’t want to walk through those woods again without an early warning system.
Then we stepped out of the trees, and I stopped thinking about the frickens. I was too busy staring.
When Frank and Dee called this area of the community “the fringe,” I naturally pictured the worst: ramshackle sheds, rusted-out trailers, and a few unkempt farmers with broken shovels in their hands, telling us to get off of their land. It was a terrible stereotype of something that had probably never been invented before—the redneck gorgon—and seeing the reality just made me feel worse about harboring those thoughts.
The main community was mostly mobile homes, designed to move at a moment’s notice. Here on the fringe, everything was built to last. A half dozen small brick houses were spaced around the edges of a wide green space, and more were half-hidden by the trees on the other side of the clearing. There was a grain silo, and three separate buildings that were either barns or stables of some sort. People worked in the field, bowed over their hoes and shovels. Like the gorgons back in the main community, they were bare-headed, allowing their snakes the freedom to taste the air. Unlike those gorgons, they were mostly bare-chested as well, exposing the scaled patches on their backs and shoulders. What clothing they did wear was plainly homemade, the sort of thing that could be stitched by hand.
If not for the snakes growing atop the head of every farmer and field hand we saw, this could have been taken for a human farming community, albeit one that should have existed a hundred years ago, or two hundred years ago, not in modern-day Ohio.
“Welcome to the fringe,” said Frank, not bothering to smother the disdain in his voice. “Come, this way.” He struck out across the field. Lacking any better plan, Shelby and I followed, with Dee bringing up the rear.
Shelby stepped close enough that she could drop her voice and murmur, “This isn’t what I was figuring on.”
“You’re not alone there,” I said, matching her tone. “They don’t look . . .”
“Friendly? No, they don’t, at that.” A few of the nearer farmhands had spotted us and stopped their work in favor of glaring. Shelby offered one of them a jaunty wave. He kept glaring. “But you notice, they’re pointing most of the unhappy at our guide? It’s like we’ve already been vetted to know that they exist, so they’re focusing their nasty on the other gorgons.”
“That makes sense.” A community this size would have to have human allies, even if they didn’t know that they were dealing with gorgons. Local farmers, garden supply stores, even feed stores, if they were serious about keeping livestock. They could pretend to be independent, but they were still connected to the greater world, just like the rest of us. “The fact that we made it this far means they know we’re not Covenant. That’s probably all that matters.”
“Low bar.”
“You work with what you have.”
“Guess that’s true.” Shelby’s tone changed, turning amused, as she asked, “So what was that about proposing marriage back there in the woods? You were talking to me and not the lindworm, right?”
My ears reddened. I pushed my glasses back up and said primly, “I don’t know what you’re talking about. You probably heard something wrong while we were trying not to be eaten.”
“You mean while you were trying not to be eaten. I was doing pretty okay. And my ears are fine.”
“Yes, about that. How did you know how to fight a lindworm?”
Shelby shrugged. “I didn’t. I just assumed that what would work on a crocodile would work on one of these big fellas, too.”
I stared at her. “You didn’t.”
“What are you complaining about? You’re alive, aren’t you?”
Try as I might, I couldn’t come up with a response to that.
As it turned out, I didn’t need to. A door opened in the nearest brick house and a man emerged. He was wearing a shirt and vest, but his head was bare, and the snakes growing there were long and healthy. Their scales were a pale silver that accentuated his dark tan. He was carrying a hoe. It seemed like a threat, rather than a farming tool. His size helped with that; he was almost a foot taller than Frank, with the solid build of a man who made his living from the land.
Frank stopped walking, motioning for the rest of us to do the same. “Walter,” he said coldly.
“Franklin,” Walter replied. He stopped several yards away, eyeing first me and then Shelby with open disdain. He didn’t look at Dee at all. His gaze lingered on Shelby’s hair, lip curling slightly, the way a human man’s might if he were looking at road kill or something else disgusting. “This is my land. Why are you here?”
The question seemed directed at all of us. I cleared my throat. “My name is Alexander—”
“I know who you are, human.” He spat the word between us. “I knew as soon as you set your filthy feet in this state. You have no business here, and yet here you stand. Why are you here?” His gaze flicked to Frank, then finally to Dee. “Unless you’ve brought me a breeding pair as a peace offering . . . ?”
“Don’t be disgusting,” said Dee. She was lisping slightly. I glanced to the side, unsurprised to see that her fangs had dropped. “These people are our allies.”
“You’re seeking allies among the apes now? You’ve fallen even farther into disgrace than I feared.”
Frank shook his head. “There is no talking to you, is there? There never has been, and there never will be.”
“Yet here you stand, like there’s some purpose in trying,” said Walter. “Which of us is the fool?”
“Sounds to me like you are, but I’m just a monkey, so what do I know?” All of us turned to look at Shelby. She shrugged broadly. “It’s a little silly not to listen to someone who’s come all the way here to see you, don’t you think? Oh, and fought the dragon-worm-thing that was living in your woods, mustn’t forget that. It was big, too. You should be quite impressed and happy to talk to us.”
Walter blinked, the snakes atop his head stirring and beginning to taste the air. “You saw the lindworms and lived?” he asked. “How is that possible?”
“Onions will usually keep lindworms from attacking, but in this case, we saw the lindworm—singular, it was the female—and lived mostly because it had already been blinded,” I said. “It was half petrified. That made it easy to kill, and that’s why we’re here. There’s a cockatrice running around Columbus, and there’s a gorgon helping it turn people into stone. Deanna brought me, and my associate, to talk to you and see if there was anything you might know about this.”
“To accuse us, you mean,” said Walter flatly.
“Easy to kill?” said Shelby.
“Sir, I’m a Price. Do you really think I would risk everything my family has built solely for the chance to accuse you of something we both know you didn’t do?”
Walter blinked again. Then his eyes narrowed. “Come again, son?”
“No, I’m back on ‘easy,’” said Shelby. “You think that was easy to kill?”
I tried to ignore her, focusing on Walter. “You’re too tall to have come into the city without being noticed. Maybe—maybe—you could have driven the cockatrice to the city limits and dropped it off, but you’d have had no way of catching it again, and you wouldn’t have been able to bite the second man we found. We’re here because we need help, and because I heard you’ve been trying to work with gorgon-safe livestock. I wanted to talk to you about that.”
Walter eyed me for a few moments more before he turned to Frank and Dee. “Is he telling the truth?”
“Alexander Price is one of the worst liars I’ve ever
met,” said Dee. “Mostly he just tries not to say anything that might get him questioned.”
“I’ve been dating him for months, and I can back up everything she just said,” said Shelby, raising her hand. “I thought he was shy at first. Then I thought he was being controlled by a telepathic murder-bitch. It’s much better now that I know he’s just a terrible liar.”
“Yes, that’s much better,” I mumbled, and turned back to Walter. “Have you ever kept cockatrice here?”
“Yes,” he said, without hesitation. “They can meet our eyes without harm. That’s more than you can do.”
“That’s absolutely true,” I said. “Can you show me where they were kept?”
His chuckle was slow and deep, like rocks shaking beneath the surface of the earth. “I can do more than that,” he said. “I can show you where they are.”
Following a Pliny’s gorgon I barely knew into a cockatrice coop could probably be moved straight to the top of my list of The Dumbest Things I Have Ever Voluntarily Done. It helped that I was armed, but it only helped a little; gorgons and cockatrice are armed by definition. They wouldn’t even need to draw their weapons.
Shelby stuck close to my side as we entered the darkened building. It smelled like a combination of reptile house and pigeon roost, the hot, dry stink of too many reptiles jammed into an enclosed space mingling with feathers, dust, and the unavoidable oceans of bird shit. The ceiling was high enough for both Walter and Frank to stand upright. Light filtered in through cracks between the boards, turned smoky by the dust that hung suspended in the air.
The walls were lined with roosting boxes, and black lumps filled them, occasionally making sleepy clucking noises. I couldn’t get an accurate population count in the darkness. I tried, reached “many” as a final number three times, and gave it up as a bad plan. “Many” was terrifying enough.
“You may want to stay back,” said Walter, and picked up his pace, using his longer legs to get to the middle of the coop while the rest of us were still hanging back by the door. He grabbed the rope that dangled from the ceiling and gave it a solid yank. A trapdoor swung open, hinges creaking, and revealed the chicken wire dome that we had passed through on our way to the building. I had to give the fringe gorgons this much: they were being careful with their cockatrice (although being really careful would have meant not keeping cockatrice at all). The coop, and a decent amount of the area around it, was completely surrounded by chicken wire, reinforced and double thick. Nothing was getting out of here accidentally.
Half-Off Ragnarok: Book Three of InCryptid Page 22