Robert Adams - Bili the Axe

Erica had assumed that the rocks within had shifted and injured the volunteer, but when the twitching body was out and turned onto its back, it was obvious that something else, something living and fearsome, had been the cause of the little man’s injuries and his resultant cries of fear and agony.

The big nose of Big-nose had been torn off completely; so too had his lips and portions of both cheeks. The remaining flesh of his face and forehead was in tatters, with white bone winking through the blood-dripping mess. One eye had been torn fully out and the other punctured; the lids were as shredded as what remained of the face.

Chunks of flesh and muscle were missing from shoulders and arms, and the hands and lower arms were coated with a slimy substance that looked to Erica like a thin mucus. But while all eyes were staring at the dying body of the mutilated Ganik, the real horror emerged to reclaim the meal so rudely torn from its jaws.

The other working parties of Ganiks, drawn by the disturbance and making their way over the uneven footing of the scree, saw the emerging monster before the preoccupied Erica and her reduced group.

‘ ‘ Snake! Big oi snake, Ehrkah!” were the alarmed shouts that first drew her gaze to what had come from under the rock.

It was certainly no snake, she was certain of that, even as she stared in horrified fascination. For one thing, she knew that nowhere in these latitudes of the North American continent were there any snakes of this size—her trained mind said a length of about three meters and an almost uniform circumference of nearly forty centimeters. Nor had the agent in all her hundreds of years of life ever seen or read or even heard tales of a large, dirty-yellowish white snake that was annulated like a worm and left a slime trail like a snail or a slug. Nor did the creature’s dentition look at all snakelike.

The four Ganiks who had drawn out Big-nose’s body were backing in helpless horror from the arcane beast, having left all of their weapons along with most of their clothes in the camp. Erica, tired of carrying the heavy thing in the late-summer heat, had leaned her rifle against a rock some little distance down the slope of the scree, but the big pistol was tucked in her belt. She drew it, charged it and, after taking careful aim at the still-advancing creature, fired until she could be certain that she had hit the spine—if the monster had one—at least once.

Upon the first report of the pistol, Merle Bowley came running from the direction of the camp with rifle, sword and dirk. But even after two explosive rounds from the rifle, the successive impacts of the stones and small boulders flung by the assembled Ganiks and deep stabs in supposedly vital places by the blade of Bowley’s longsword, the beast kept up its silent writhing and snapping at anything that came within proximity to its tooth-studded jaws, all the while exuding quantities of the thin mucuslike secretion from all parts of its elongated body.

“Dammitawl, Ehrkah!” Bowley finally snapped in clear exasperation. “What the hell kinda critter is thishere, enyhow?”

She shook her head. “How should I know? I thought you Ganiks were supposed to know every plant and animal in these mountains.”

“Wai, I ain’t never seed nuthin lak thisun, Ehrkah. Big ol* shitpile worm ‘r snake ‘r whutevuh, I jest wants to know how to kill it!” Bowley snapped back.

But at length, as they all watched, the serpentine thing’s twitchings became more reflexive, weaker. Although the wicked jaws still snapped when the body was prodded with pry poles, they snapped at empty air, for the neckless head did not move. Nonetheless, when Horseface and his party of hunters rode back in with their day’s bag some hour or more later, the long body still could be seen to ripple convulsively, the shudders running from end to end.

With closer examination now possible, Erica found the creature to possess a double row of sharp teeth in its upper jaw, though but a single row in the lower. After a moment, she took the magazine out of a rifle and was easily able to fit some of the teeth in the slack jaws exactly into the set of scratches in the metal.

Well, at least now she knew what creature had so easily gotten about under the rockslide to devour the corpses of both men and animals. But, big as the wormlike beast was, there had been a good fifty men and a third again as many pack animals, plus the ones the men had been riding, in the trapped and killed group, so how many of these wormlike horrors had it taken to consume all of that flesh? How many more of them were coiled under those rocks right now? Were they all this size? Bigger, maybe?

“Good God,” she thought in horror. “Even with rifles and the pistol, twenty-seven—no, twenty-six, now—of us would be hard pressed to defend ourselves from one of these things, if it was larger, hard as they seem to be to kill. It might be best to move our camp a good bit farther out into the burned-over area. It’s still fairly open out there, so we might at least be able to see the hellish thing coming.”

But when she broached the idea, Bowley demurred. “Look, Ehrkah, iffen them thangs ‘uz gonna come outen the rocks aftuh us in camp, they’d of done ‘er by now. I reckon they lives in them rocks and don’t come out lessen they’s riled up.

“But tell y’ what, we’ll build us a big ol’ watchfire come dark, an’ me an’ Horseface an’ you an’ Counter, we c’n take turns a-watchin’ with the firesti—uh, rye-fulls, heahnh?”

After a subdued dinner of game and wild plants, the Ganiks flopped down around the cookfire, and soon most were snoring. Erica took first watch, being relieved by Bowley, he by Counter, and the last watch being that of Horseface. But there were no disturbances of any sort throughout the short summer night.

The next morning, however, all witnessed clear evidence that the loathy monsters had indeed been at work. Big-nose and the dead monster had been left where they had died. But the rising sun shone down upon only their well-picked bones, with several Broad trails of slimy mucus issuing from rocky crevices and crisscrossing the new boneyard.

Accurately gauging the temper of the lesser bullies, Merle Bowley took Erica a little apart and said, “Looky here, Ehrkah, them mens, they ain’ gonna work today, noway— lessen we kills two, three of ‘em, they ain’t. Sides, did you git you a good look at whatawl Horseface brought in yestiddy? Not one dang critter biggern a coon. We done jest ‘bout hunted thesehere parts clean. I thanks it’s time we moved awn. Mebbe nawth an’ wes’; it’s still some Ganiks up there.”

Erica knew better than to protest the decision of her lover and principal supporter. For one thing, she could see the clear sense in what he was recommending. For another, she was not herself especially anxious to confront another of those crawling, wormlike, abundantly toothed horrors and so could easily empathize with the lesser bullies on that score. Lastly, she was becoming discouraged about ever finding the transceiver now entombed under tons upon tons of rock in who knew what area of the quarter-mile-long expanse of tumbled scree.

So she simply nodded agreement. “Allright, Merle, let’s pack up and move on. I confess I’ll feel much better about sleeping if we can put a few miles between us and this place before dark. We have between the four of us over five hundred rounds for the rifles, so we should be well enough off for a long while.”

But Erica knew full well how very valuable the contents of the buried pack train were to the Center and so was dead certain that Sternheimer would eventually mount and dispatch an expedition to uncover and retrieve as much as still might be usable of the loot stripped from what had been the Hold of the Moon Maidens. Therefore, her last act before joining Merle Bowley to lead their followers away from the abode of the horrendous worms was to write a brief message with a stub of indelible pencil, enclose the missive in the flat case in which she had once carried her slender cigars and hang the case in an easily visible spot on the charred trunk of a dead tree near the former campsite. Not having found the transceiver, it was all she now could do.