Sometimes I think things would be a lot easier to deal with if I didn’t think so damn much.
“Done,” announced Shelby, dropping the wrung-out shells of her onions to the ground. “Never seen a lindworm before. What color are they?”
“Greens and browns, mostly. Some of them have blue tails.” I dropped my own onions. “Dee? Frank? How are you two doing?”
“Ready,” said Dee.
“Great. Let’s go hope that whatever’s been attacking people in your woods is a lindworm.”
“And if it isn’t?” asked Frank.
“Well, then we’ve just seasoned ourselves nicely to be something’s dinner.”
The trees were silent as we moved from the open farmland and into their leafy shade. Nice as it was to have a brief respite from the sun, I still tensed. There should have been frickens singing in the trees. Given the number we’d found in a relatively accessible swamp, this stretch of protected, gorgon-occupied forest should have been the epicenter for a fricken population explosion. If they were missing—or worse, if they were silent—then something here was very wrong.
The only warning we had of the attack was a rustle in the bushes to the left. I turned toward it, one hand cheating toward the gun I had tucked into the waistband of my pants, and the lindworm’s tail caught me across the knees, whipping out from the right. I yelped and fell, the shouts of the others following me to the dirt.
The lindworm might have caught me off-guard, but that didn’t mean I was going to stay that way for long. I turned the fall into a roll and bounced back to my feet, pistol drawn and in my hand as I scanned the foliage for the lindworm’s head. “Back-to-back!” I shouted, hoping the others would get the point and move into a defensive position.
Shelby’s shoulders hit mine almost immediately, their warm, reassuring weight accompanied by the strong smell of onions. “I thought you said these things didn’t like onions!” she shouted.
“Lindworms won’t eat onions, and they don’t usually attack what they’re not planning to eat!” I said. “I don’t know what’s going on with this one!” I’d only been able to catch a glimpse of the tail that hit me, but it had looked more mossy green than electric blue; this was either a female or an immature male, and either way, it wasn’t the lindworm Dee and I had seen earlier. “Anyone have a line of sight on it?”
“No, and we’re looking,” said Dee tersely.
“Try to stun instead of killing if you can.” Neither gorgon was wearing any sort of eye covering. If they looked into the lindworm’s eyes, it was going to be sorry. And yet I couldn’t be, because it was going to kill us if we didn’t find a way to stop it.
The tail lashed out again, this time cracking in the air like a whip before it withdrew into the bushes. A few seconds passed in silence—and then, with no more warning than that, the lindworm charged.
Its body was long enough that the tail hits had been coming from almost directly behind the head; it had been curved in a vast C-shape, using the brush for cover. When it came at us, its open mouth was pointed almost directly at me. I fired twice, aiming for the back of its throat. At least one of my shots struck home; the lindworm coughed, mouth slamming shut, and began to slither off to the left, either trying to flank or flee. It was impossible for me to tell which it was.
“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.’”