It was while Erica was showing the huge, ugly man how to operate the weapon that she discovered him to be one of those rarities—a natural marksman. From his first shots until the day he died, she never saw him miss any stationary object on which he leveled his piece, usually firing one-handed, from the hip or waist, working the bolt left-handed for rapid fire. Not even the hellish recoil of the heavy-caliber arm seemed to bother him. He easily kept the rifle barrel level and steady.
When they arrived at the area that Erica figured to have been just beyond the tail of the train, she and her three lieutenants set the lower-ranking bullies to work higher up on the slide. This, of course, called for the shifting of far more stone and other debris before reaching whatever lay or did not lie beneath. It was backbreaking, frequently frustrating labor, and only the physical fear of Bowley, Horseface and Counter Trimain and the respect in which all held Erica kept them at it through three more days.
Then the horror began, violently.
Because more than a score of hardworking men required a goodly amount of food, the better hunters were out each day, and luck a’nd skill had both been good to them for as long as they had been in this area, which apparently had not been hunted since parts of it were burned over last spring. On this particular day, Horseface had taken the hunters out, leaving Merle Bowley, Counter Trimain and Erica to supervise the groups of sweating, grimy, loudly cursing Ganiks at work up on the scree.
Erica was closest when it began, and what she saw that day haunted her nightmares for months. A party of five men with a few yards of rope and a couple of pry poles—which poor, inadequate equipment was all that they had been able to make up from existing materials—plus much groaning, cursing and cracking of muscles, had shifted enough stone to get down to what had been ground level before the landslide. There they discovered the shattered leg bones of a mule.
The woman had known the bones to be those of a mule, for they were too long and thick to be those of a pony. Therefore, she had set the crew to work again, clearing the area just east of the space already cleared. As she watched the labors of the near-naked men, she had to rub her forearms hard to lay the gooseflesh, for as she recalled the transceiver had been packed on a big mule.
The workers had already sent some half ton of rock into the area they had earlier cleared when it became crystal-clear that they could do no more in this area. Indeed, not even the near-score of men nearby could have budged the irregularly shaped hunk of rock which immediately overlay the remains of that mule—over two meters long, almost that in width and more than a meter in thickness, Erica reckoned sadly.
It was cruelly frustrating to be so near and yet never know whether the precious transceiver really lay beneath that massive, unmovable chunk of rock or not. And therefore, she quickly agreed when one of the Ganiks—a short, wiry man, with Ahrmehnee features and skintone, called Big-nose Sheldon—opined that he thought he could squeeze his body into the space under the huge rock, where it partially rested on some smaller stones.
Slowly, first pushing out troublesome rocks, then shoving them far enough back to be kicked out, Big-nose inched his way under the monstrous slab of stone, perforce feeling his way into the inky blackness. Suddenly, the watchers heard a muffled shriek, so another of the men flopped onto his belly and managed to get himself far enough into the low space to grasp an ankle of Big-nose’s now-thrashing legs, but pull as hard as he might, he could not seem to budge the still-screaming little man. So he shouted back and the other three Ganiks laid hands to his own legs and heaved.
Gradually, by dint of much effort, the three drew the larger man—still clamping the ankle of the smaller in his crushing grip—from beneath the slab, then all four took the legs of Big-nose and heaved again. Once, twice, and his buttocks came into view. Three, four more pulls and whatever force was obstructing his removal was overcome and they were able to draw him out into the daylight.
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.