Half-Off Ragnarok

Fifteen

At a hidden gorgon community in the middle of the Ohio woods, where no one is going to hear the cries for help

“THIS IS BAD,” said Dee.

“It’s certainly not good,” agreed Frank. “Does anyone know you brought them here?”

“My grandparents,” I said. “Which means that the rest of my family will know in short order if I don’t come home.”

“Nobody knows I’m here but Alex and his folks,” said Shelby cheerfully. I blinked at her. She shrugged. “No point in lying about it. I figure if I’m going to be eaten, I’ll get avenged when your people come riding in with their guns blazing. Although speaking of guns, this feels like a good time to point out that anybody trying to eat me had better be prepared for a face full of bullets. It’s not a very friendly thing to do, but neither is eating your company.”

“No one’s eating anyone,” said Dee firmly. “We don’t eat humans. Pliny’s gorgons are . . . well, we’re not vegetarians, but we’re not people-eaters either.”

“But Hannah’s not a Pliny’s gorgon, is she?” I asked slowly. Dee and Frank both turned to look at me. I shook my head. “Not entirely, I mean. She’s too tall. Female Pliny’s gorgons don’t get that tall. And her snakes . . . something about the shape of their heads is wrong.”

“Her mother was a Pliny’s gorgon,” said Frank. “Her father was of Medusa’s breed.”

I gaped at him. “Pliny’s gorgons are cross-fertile with greater gorgons?” I realized how insensitive the question was as soon as it was out. I winced. “Sorry. That was rude of me. I just didn’t realize . . . anyway. There’s nothing in the books to indicate that’s possible.”

“Then you haven’t read your great-grandfather Jonathan’s notes very carefully. Hannah speaks very highly of him. He spoke in favor of the marriage of her parents, when it became clear that they were going through with their union.”

“I may have missed a few things,” I said. It was a little white lie: whatever I’d missed wasn’t in the house to be read. There are big holes in the information we got from Great-Grandpa Healy’s notes, and they can almost certainly be blamed on his daughter—my maternal grandmother—who burned a lot of his things after he died. In her defense, she had good reason. That doesn’t justify losing whatever knowledge she’d destroyed.

“Hannah’s status as a crossbreed has been debated many times, and is actually viewed as an asset, now,” said Dee. “She’s a bit more . . . potent . . . than the rest of us, and she does a very good job of guarding the community.”

“And as she has no children of her own, she looks after all the children of the community with the fierceness of a mother defending her own clutch,” said Frank. There was something weary in his tone, which I thought was better left uninvestigated—at least for now. “She has been a good leader. You are fortunate to have the opportunity to dine with her.”

Most crossbreeds are infertile. That probably explained why Hannah was so happy to take care of the children of the community. I had the presence of mind not to say that out loud. Instead, I nodded and said, “It’ll be good to learn more. In the meantime . . . does this mean we have to stay here until dinner is served, or are we allowed to look around?”

“You are not prisoners,” said Frank. “It would be a great insult if you were to attempt to leave, but apart from that, you are free to move throughout the community. Within reason. I would not recommend going out alone, and it would be rude to enter a private dwelling without permission.”

“Oh, neither of those things is going to be an issue, I assure you.” I turned to Dee. “Remember those fringe groups you told me about? The ones who may be trying to work with dangerous animals in the name of self-sufficiency?”

“Yes,” said Dee, looking uneasy. She clearly knew where this was going.

There had never been any real question. “This seems like a good time for you to take us there.”

Shelby completely failed to suppress her expression of delight.

We left the medical trailer in a group, Dee at the front, me and Shelby in the middle, and Frank at the rear. Attempts to tell him that he didn’t need to come had been met with a dangerously blank stare. We were taking his wife into what he clearly viewed as unsavory territory. He was coming along.

Privately, I was glad of the extra muscle. It’s hard to make diplomatic inroads after you’ve shot someone. Having Frank with us might help to avoid that. If the farmers got violent, he at least stood a chance of subduing them in a non-fatal manner.

A crowd had formed outside the trailer while we were talking to Frank and Hannah, and while most of them didn’t follow us as we walked away, they weren’t subtle about their staring. I counted at least two dozen adults, plus the children. They were the ones who did follow us, running behind the trailers and peeking out at us as we passed. Shelby stuck her tongue out at the little girl with the bows on her snakes. The girl squealed with glee. Shelby smirked.

“Kids are kids,” she said. “All the rest is just details.”

“Remind me to introduce you properly to Chandi after all this is over,” I said. “Dee? Do we need to move the car?”

“No. You’re parked in front of our house, and that’s perfectly fine. We have two parking spaces allotted to us.”

“Why?” I asked, before I thought better of it. “I mean—”

“You’re pretty good about hiding the fact that you want to study me most of the time, Alex, and I appreciate that, but that doesn’t mean I don’t know,” said Dee, sounding wearily amused. She kept walking as she continued, “Megan is away at school right now, but when she’s home, she needs a place to keep her car. After she graduates and becomes a full adult, she’ll either get a home of her own, or find a husband in another community and move away from us. I admit I’m kind of hoping she’ll choose to stay. Even with the Internet and the changes in rapid transit, each community is fairly isolated.”

“I can’t imagine never seeing my parents,” I said. “It seems like it must be really hard.”

“It is, but it is the only way,” said Frank. His tone was sharp, accompanied by a warning glance at Dee. “If no one can betray anyone else, then there need be no fear of betrayal. We keep communication to a minimum when not bartering or making marriage arrangements.”

“Still. It sounds lonely.”

“It is.” Frank increased his stride, outpacing the rest of us. Now it was Dee following him, and our back was entirely unguarded. That didn’t worry me as much as it might have; we were almost to the edge of the spiraling mobile homes, striking out across the green farmland.

“He knows where we’re going?” asked Shelby.

Dee nodded. “Everyone knows where the fringe is.”

“From the way you talked about them before, I was expecting them to be the only farming around here,” I said, and gestured to the left, where a large patch of ground had been dug into furrows and planted with what looked like some sort of melon. “What’s all the rest of this?”

“We do as much of our own agriculture as possible. It can be hard to buy enough produce, and we appreciate the self-sufficiency, even if it isn’t absolute. The issue is livestock.” Dee shook her head. She should have looked incongruous; a woman in business casual clothes with snakes growing from her head, walking into what was basically an amateur farm. She looked like the most natural thing in the world. “There are very few creatures that can share space with a petrifactor without being in danger. None of them are what I’d call ‘friendly.’”

“My basilisks are okay,” I said, feeling oddly defensive toward the little feathered bowling balls.

“Basilisk eggs are toxic, or they’d be a viable candidate. As it stands, we could eat them, but we’d have to devote a lot more time and money to raising them than we spend just buying bulk raw chicken at Costco.”

“That’s a problem.”

“It is.”

We stopped talking for a while after that, and just walked. The patches of farmed ground gave way to fields with people in them, weeding and hoeing as they worked the land. They straightened as we passed, watching us go. Most were bareheaded, but a few were wearing straw hats with the tops cut out, providing them with a small measure of shade while also allowing their “hair” to move freely. I saw one man thrust his head suddenly into the corn, and come out with the back half of a mouse squirming in the jaws of one of his larger snakes.

Shelby followed my gaze. “Bet that’s a mouse that’s not going to be singing any hosannas any time soon.”

“This is why the Aeslin mice stay home,” I said.

“Quiet,” said Frank, looking back over his shoulder. “This is where we are quiet, and stealthy, and hope that we are not attacked. Yes?”

We were approaching the woods. I frowned. “Your own people would attack us?”

“I’d like to think not, but Frank’s right,” said Dee. “Strange things have been happening in this stretch of wood. The fringe farmers swear it isn’t them, and yet . . .”

“Strange things like what?”

“Men being bitten in two,” said Frank. “Is that strange enough for you?”

“Maybe.” I looked to Dee. “You couldn’t bite a man in two—”

“I appreciate the vote of confidence.”

“—but that lindworm we saw earlier could, and we’re only about five miles from where we tagged it. That’s well within a lindworm’s normal territory. Do you have any wild onions growing around here?”

Dee blinked. “Yes. We passed a patch a little ways back.”

“Can we get some? I think six bulbs or so would be sufficient.”

“And that will keep the lindworm from attacking us?”

“If it’s the lindworm, yes. If it’s something else, we can at least make it cry as it eats us.” I shrugged. “If we have to go through this patch of trees regardless, we may as well try for the solution that doesn’t end with us being digested slowly in the stomach of a giant lizard.”

“I appreciate non-digestive solutions,” said Frank. “Deanna, you wait here. I’m faster.” With that, he turned and trotted back toward the promised onions.

I shook my head. “If it’s not one thing, it’s something else.”

Minutes ticked by while Frank gathered onions in the distance. The sun was high enough to make me wish that I’d thought to bring sunscreen. Portland isn’t really sunburn country. I slapped at a fly that had landed on my arm, and said, “Hey, Dee? While we’re waiting, you want to fill us in on what we’re walking into?”

“Sure,” said Dee. “It’s not like I’m going to convince you to turn around now.”

“Pretty sure that ship has sailed,” said Shelby, who was eyeing the nearby foliage with trepidation, as if she expected it to attack at any moment. Then again, she came from Australia: she probably did expect some sort of vegetable ambush.

(Australia. The only continent designed with a difficulty rating of “ha ha fuck you no.”)

Dee took a deep breath, appearing to gather her thoughts, and said, “Most Pliny’s gorgons live in communities like this one, close enough to mid-sized human cities to be able to blend in, but far enough away to have some autonomy. We tend to move on when the cities get too large, since the alternative is discovery, and that never ends well for anyone.”

“I can see that, what with the,” Shelby made a snaky gesture in the air above her head, “and all.”

“Yes, that,” said Dee, clearly not sure whether or not she should be offended. “This particular community was founded by Hannah and some of her cousins from her mother’s side, about fifty years ago. I won’t tell you where they came from originally, although you can probably figure it out if you read those notes of your great-grandfather’s.”

“Er. Yes.” Somehow, I didn’t think that telling her the notes had been destroyed was going to help. “Was it a matter of relocating an older community, or . . . ?”

“Hannah had issues fitting in with her original community,” said Dee delicately.

“Because she’s gigantic?” asked Shelby.

“Something like that. Pliny’s gorgons and greater gorgons don’t historically have the best relationship, and when it became clear that she needed to move if she wanted to keep the peace in her family, she took some of the younger, more flexible cousins along with her. This,” Dee waved a hand, “was intended to be the first of a new breed of community. A permanent one.”

“Hence all the illusions and distractions on the way in,” I said.

Dee nodded. “We pay every year to have them renewed. The idea is that the cities can grow up around us until we’re just one of those strange little patches of forest that seem to exist in every major metropolitan area. Then we’ll always have a refuge. Not all our children can stay, of course—the limited footprint of the settlement means that we have population caps—but we know they’re safe as long as they’re with us.”

“So what about the fringe?” I asked. “How did that start?”

“The farming aspect was always a part of the community ideal,” said Dee. “Originally, there were some who wanted to see this turned into a multi-cryptid settlement. Plant vegetable lambs and bring in some manticore for protection, start growing bird-fruit and get a few tailypo to come and hang around doing whatever it is that tailypo do . . . but it didn’t work out. No one really liked needing to wear eye protection every time they left their trailers, and non-gorgons could never quite relax around us, knowing that all it would take was one slip for them to be at risk. We settled into being a normal gorgon community.”

I frowned, eyeing her, and waited. There had to be more to the story.

Sure enough, after a few seconds of silence, Dee sighed and continued, “Some members of the community, though, felt like the leadership had rejected them by even implying that cohabitation was possible. They said we would never be free until we were able to exist entirely independent of human culture and human resources. They moved to the edge of our protected land and started their current farming projects.”

“Which eventually expanded to include things like ‘happy fun time with cockatrice,’” I said. “Okay, I’m starting to understand the situation. How much do they mingle with the rest of you?”

“More than we’d like, not as much as would probably be good for them,” said Dee. “I think—” She cut herself off mid-sentence. I turned to see Frank trotting back toward us, his hands now full of small purple onions.

“This is enough?” he asked.

“That’s more than enough,” I said, and produced a knife from inside my pocket. “Pass them over.” He handed me the onions. “Shelby, give me your hands.”

“Righto.” She stuck her hands obligingly out toward me, cupping them to make a rough bowl shape.

I started trimming the green tops off the onions before cutting the onions themselves into quarters. The leafy parts I dropped to the ground, while the onions went into Shelby’s hands. “Everyone take a few chunks of onion and rub them all over your skin. I know it’s not the world’s most pleasant perfume, but as much as it bothers you, it’ll be ten times worse for the lindworm.”

“My eyes are already burning,” said Shelby.

“I have more eyes than you do,” countered Dee, and took a piece of onion.

“Regardless, if we’re covered in onion, we won’t smell like food. If we don’t smell like food, the lindworm won’t eat us. Since I’m opposed to being eaten, I’m okay with being a little onion-y.” I finished cutting the last onion, and wiped my knife on my sleeve before tucking it back into my pocket. “Be sure to get the back of your neck, ears, and anything else that isn’t covered by your clothes.”

“You really do know how to party,” said Shelby, dumping half the onions back into my hands before she started scrubbing herself down with the remainder.

“Ain’t no party like a Price party,” I said. Dee and Frank were covering each other in onion, moving with a careful efficiency that spoke to long years together. I glanced over at Shelby as I rubbed onion on my cheeks and neck. She didn’t look like she needed any help. I still wanted to offer it.

This was exactly the wrong place to be wondering about the state of my relationship, which didn’t do anything to make me stop doing it. Shelby and I had both been lying to each other, even if only through omission, and while that wasn’t the most comfortable thing in the world, it was the level of commitment I’d been both comfortable with and ready for. Now that I knew she wasn’t as much of an outsider in my world as I’d assumed, where did that leave us? She’d said that things were “different” between us now, but was that good or bad?

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.’”

“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.