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.
Some century and more before, when the ancestors of the folk of New Kuhmbuhluhn had first ridden down from the northeast, the vast stretch of mountains, glens and valleys had been the sole preserve of scattered families of Ganiks and a single extended family of the hybrid Kleesahks. The newcome northerners had, however, proved to be most acquisitive and incredibly land-hungry, nor had they been at all tolerant of the customs and ancient religion of the Ganiks. Moreover, all of the male Kuhmbuhluhners were well armed and most were well versed in the use of said arms, and so their intolerance most often took the unpleasant form of armed harassment or open aggression.
Not that any of this was new or novel to the Ganik farmers, for almost from the beginning, their singular ways and outre” practices had brought down upon the heads of their ancestors the scorn and downright enmity of all the neighbors they had ever had, wherever they had lived. So most of them—those who chose to continue to cleave to their ages-old behavior and values—had emulated all of their progenitors and moved on into still-untenanted lands to the south and west.
Some few dozen families, however, in the northeast of what had by then become New Kuhmbuhluhn, chose to forsake many aspects of both ingrained religion and traditional customs, becoming more akin to the Kuhmbuhluhners with every succeeding generation. But not all of these turncoat Ganiks had adapted as fully or as fast as had others to the new, sinful, sacrilegious siren song of the pagan northerners. Even down to the present day, there still were a few families of Ganiks of this northern group who were—or so Merle Bowley and the other surviviors were convinced—secret adherents to the old-time religion and therefore covert enemies of the Crown and the alien folk of Kuhmbuhluhn. Perhaps they would prove hospitable and willing to help these few remaining members of the main bunch of the once large and powerful force of Ganik outlaw-raiders.
If such atavistic Ganiks really existed in the northwest quadrant of the Kingdom of New Kuhmbuhluhn—and Bowley and the rest maintained to the very death that they did—they were exceedingly well hidden, for the small band of survivors never managed to locate a single one of them; the only way that they ever secured any food, supplies or the like from these northerly descendants of Ganiks was to take it either by stealth or by raw force. And immediately on the heels of their one and only raid, it seemed to the harried group that the entire countryside arose and mounted and rode against them under arms.
Relentlessly pursued by the vengeful farmers, tracked like wild game by packs of vicious hunting dogs, Erica and Bowley and the rest fled far and fast and by the easiest route available, which was how they had come to winter in a low-ceilinged cave in the side of a hill above a brook which, when it was not frozen, rushed down to join the large river some miles to the north. Erica thought that the river was ” probably the Ohio.
Hard as the winter had been, with the rifles and the uncanny marksmanship of Horseface Charley there had been precious few occasions when any of them had gone to bed hungry. And although the bodily filth and accompanying infestation of parasitic vermin still was distressing to Erica, she had learned to almost ignore the gagging stenches of the uncured hides and pelts, for at least they helped to alleviate the cold on the long nights in the cave.
She knew not what the spring would bring, only that there was patently no safety for her group here, in the north; she surmised that only the onset of the long, hard winter had prevented stronger forces from Kuhmbuhluhn hunting this last tiny bunch of outlaw Ganiks to death, an oversight that would most likely be rectified with the oncoming warmer weather.