Half-Off Ragnarok
Page 59
“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.”
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.”
