Chapter 11
Blair
By the time the sun was high in the sky, I had already put enough distance between the town and me that I finally felt comfortable enough to slow down.
Unfortunately, the pretty pink forest that surrounded his town had bled into a marshy ravine.
And I didn’t exactly have access to a grappling hook or an elevator to get over it.
The ravine was like a deep, winding gash cut through the earth, the stone walls eroded smooth from centuries of water.
From the patchwork of shallow pools and thick black mud that covered the banks, this place probably flooded pretty often.
It had rained pretty hard last night, and judging from dark ominous clouds in the sky, the rain wasn’t done.
I shuddered, remembering my last stint with a flash flood back when I lived in Utah.
Porsha and I had decided to go biking in Canyonlands and chose the wrong place to stop for a rest. It was like the scene from The Lion King where Simba ran from that stampede.
Except instead of wildebeests and a man refusing to accept the fact that he was just mid, it was Porsha and me hauling our Black asses up the side of a riverbed.
Never did find where the water carried my bike.
I’d had quite enough swimming for my life on this little sabbatical already.
The last thing I needed was to get caught up in a marsh during high tide.
It would’ve been different if I had been smart enough to steal that damn map before I left.
Then I could at the very least judge how far into the ravine I’d have to go.
Or if I was even headed in the direction of a place I wanted to go.
When I snuck out of the fort, the road came to a fork.
We came from the left yesterday, and I did not want to go back to that battlefield with all them severed heads just lying around being nasty. So I went right.
Adventurer extraordinaire I was not.
Sun dappled through the trees and cast rays of light onto a moss-covered boulder. Butterflies flitted through the sunlight; when they dipped lower to flit among the flowers, their wings stirred the gentle mist around them.
My feet ached something fierce, and I took a moment to climb the rock to sit and rest.
As soon as my ass hit moss, the hair on the back of my neck stood on end. Raw, primal fear, the kind that allowed no reason or logic, clawed at my insides until I felt like I’d vomit.
I swallowed hard and turned my head.
At first, all I saw was muck and algae. A patch of green goop shifted in the water in a way that just felt off.
My mind scrambled to make sense of it. And then the algae shifted, a slow, gliding motion rose in the water behind it, and I followed the movement until it rose along the bank and coiled on the wall of the ravine.
“Ohhhhh it’s a snake! A giant, motherfucking snake!
” A tear fell out of my eye. “Ohh what the fuck,” I sang.
My voice echoed off the walls of the gorge, and for a moment I was back on stage, basking in a crowd of cheering fans instead of serenading a giant snake before it slurped me down like a milkshake.
If I was gonna go, I was gonna go with a song in my heart.
“My milkshake brings all the snakes to the abyss.”
The snake moved a little closer, dark-yellow eyes never leaving me.
I blinked away more tears, and my voice wobbled as I continued to sing. “And I…I’m like…you wanna eat this.”
The snake froze as soon as I did, and I realized that getting up to run would only cause it to strike. If I moved, I was dead, and if I stayed frozen singing like an idiot, I’d probably still die too. Great.
An odd sense of peace washed over me. What was I even trying to stay alive for?
I’d been dropped on some weird-ass planet with no food, no water, and the only people I’d met kept trying to kill one another.
My Black ass was never gonna survive more than two days, max.
I wasn’t a damn survivalist and this ain’t Naked and Afraid.
Well. I was afraid, but at least I wasn’t caught with my drawers down.
“You know what?” I asked the snake, carrying out question until the melody echoed.
“Fuck it! Eat me, but I’m about to give you the worst indigestion of your goddamn life!
” I reached into my pocket and pulled out my sin tin.
Moving the remaining joint to the side, I grabbed a pinch of the brightly colored squares and popped them in my mouth.
Then I popped a few more, because I imagine a snake big enough to swallow me whole would have a much higher tolerance for LSD than me.
Tucking the tin pack in my pocket, I threw up two middle fingers and belted out, “Get wrecked, you scaly biiiiiii—”
Thick coils wrapped around me before I could even finish the word.
The snake squeezed until it felt like the remaining air in my chest would pop me open like bubble wrap.
Crushing pain made my eyes water; I tried to exhale, but even that movement was somehow robbed from me.
Blood rushed to my head until I could feel the veins bulging in my neck.
All sound faded, save for a ringing in my ears.
Then a thumping sound, like the blood in my head slapped against my brain in a dizzying wave.
Then louder and louder, like that terrible wave turned to a tide ready and willing to drag me under into the arms of a reaper with my name already engraved on his scythe.
And then came a second thumping, just as loud and awful as the last. And then came more still.
None following the cadence of the other.
As if a horde of reapers had come to claim my soul at once.
The Titanoboa’s head appeared in my darkening vision; its long red tongue flicked out to taste the air. Gasping, I choked out the final syllable, “…itch.”
A giant skewer came crashing down like the mighty hand of some wrathful god and impaled the snake clean through its skull.
The crushing weight loosened in an instant, and my body slid down the snake’s coils until my feet touched stone.
I sucked in a breath, unable to keep from gasping.
My hands came over my mouth as I shrank down a little farther and tried to quiet my breath.
The owner of that skewer was still on the other side of this wall of meat, and whatever bravado shit I was on before had died off into shaking knees and a desperate need to live.
Then there was a scream, raw and almost feminine, but warped and mangled. Almost like it was run through old school analog hardware with overloaded amps. The scream split into a blast deeper than a tuba that was worn and neglected, its valves clacking like bones.
I shuddered, sinking deeper against the bottom coil of the snake.
The scales at my back shoved me forward until I slammed against the other side.
The snake was jerked again, and I fell on my hands and knees.
White-hot pain shot up my leg when my knee landed on a rock.
I gasped, rolling to my back, tears spilling as I plucked the pebble from my knee and threw it to the side.
Suddenly the snake was lifted away from me, jerking and tearing as two giant monsters tore at its flesh. I realized then that the thumping I heard wasn’t the stomp of giants. It was wings.
A long black beak pierced down into the carcass and jerked, causing a mound of flesh to peel away from the bone. The monster reared its head back and gulped it down a muscle-laden neck with a patch of red spanning the throat. Attached to it was a pterodactyl-looking thing the size of a giraffe.
A shadow loomed over my head just before another one ran from behind me.
Its strange feet nearly crushed my leg as it launched itself at the shared meal.
I lay there frozen as a flock of…stabadactyls screeched and fought over the meat.
When two of the larger beasts jerked at the snake, the one with the red neck lost its hold, stumbling as it let out a hiss at its stolen kill.
High-pitched screeching drew my attention to the thieves, and when I looked back, Red Throat was looking at me too.
In three long strides, it was above me. So close I could see the individual fuzzy hairs covering its body.
White stripes adorned the back of its neck, breaking up its black coloring, and repeating into an array of stripes and spots down its torso.
The ends of its wings were folded tightly against its wrists, shooting up toward the sky.
Orange eyes stared down that long skewer of a beak at me.
The feeling was hard to describe, but some dark animal part of me snapped, and the gun was in my hand before I could think.
BANG.
I shot it right in its eye. Its head snapped back before the creature fell to the ground dead.
The other roided-out stabadactyls bolted, galloping away on their strange legs before launching themselves into the air, one after another.
One made the mistake of looking back before taking off and clipped the wing of its flock mate, who went crashing against a dam of debris.
The impact knocked several of the logs loose.
Water sprayed out of the new openings and into the mud.
Then came the screaming, mine this time.
“THAT’S RIGHT,” I roared, jumping to my feet. “THAT’S WHAT YOU FUCKING GET!”