Half-Off Ragnarok

Sixteen

At a hidden gorgon community in the middle of the Ohio woods, emerging from the tree line, having not been eaten by a lindworm

WE WERE ONLY A short distance from the other side of the trees. If the dead lindworm’s mate was around, he didn’t attack us as we walked. The frickens started singing again after we had passed, their tiny, cheerful cries of “creep, creep, creep” signaling that the danger had passed. To them, we must have been as frightening as the lindworm, at least in the aftermath of our fight. Hopefully, they’d get over their fear of us. I didn’t want to walk through those woods again without an early warning system.

Then we stepped out of the trees, and I stopped thinking about the frickens. I was too busy staring.

When Frank and Dee called this area of the community “the fringe,” I naturally pictured the worst: ramshackle sheds, rusted-out trailers, and a few unkempt farmers with broken shovels in their hands, telling us to get off of their land. It was a terrible stereotype of something that had probably never been invented before—the redneck gorgon—and seeing the reality just made me feel worse about harboring those thoughts.

The main community was mostly mobile homes, designed to move at a moment’s notice. Here on the fringe, everything was built to last. A half dozen small brick houses were spaced around the edges of a wide green space, and more were half-hidden by the trees on the other side of the clearing. There was a grain silo, and three separate buildings that were either barns or stables of some sort. People worked in the field, bowed over their hoes and shovels. Like the gorgons back in the main community, they were bare-headed, allowing their snakes the freedom to taste the air. Unlike those gorgons, they were mostly bare-chested as well, exposing the scaled patches on their backs and shoulders. What clothing they did wear was plainly homemade, the sort of thing that could be stitched by hand.

If not for the snakes growing atop the head of every farmer and field hand we saw, this could have been taken for a human farming community, albeit one that should have existed a hundred years ago, or two hundred years ago, not in modern-day Ohio.

“Welcome to the fringe,” said Frank, not bothering to smother the disdain in his voice. “Come, this way.” He struck out across the field. Lacking any better plan, Shelby and I followed, with Dee bringing up the rear.

Shelby stepped close enough that she could drop her voice and murmur, “This isn’t what I was figuring on.”

“You’re not alone there,” I said, matching her tone. “They don’t look . . .”

“Friendly? No, they don’t, at that.” A few of the nearer farmhands had spotted us and stopped their work in favor of glaring. Shelby offered one of them a jaunty wave. He kept glaring. “But you notice, they’re pointing most of the unhappy at our guide? It’s like we’ve already been vetted to know that they exist, so they’re focusing their nasty on the other gorgons.”

“That makes sense.” A community this size would have to have human allies, even if they didn’t know that they were dealing with gorgons. Local farmers, garden supply stores, even feed stores, if they were serious about keeping livestock. They could pretend to be independent, but they were still connected to the greater world, just like the rest of us. “The fact that we made it this far means they know we’re not Covenant. That’s probably all that matters.”

“Low bar.”

“You work with what you have.”

“Guess that’s true.” Shelby’s tone changed, turning amused, as she asked, “So what was that about proposing marriage back there in the woods? You were talking to me and not the lindworm, right?”

My ears reddened. I pushed my glasses back up and said primly, “I don’t know what you’re talking about. You probably heard something wrong while we were trying not to be eaten.”

“You mean while you were trying not to be eaten. I was doing pretty okay. And my ears are fine.”

“Yes, about that. How did you know how to fight a lindworm?”

Shelby shrugged. “I didn’t. I just assumed that what would work on a crocodile would work on one of these big fellas, too.”

I stared at her. “You didn’t.”

“What are you complaining about? You’re alive, aren’t you?”

Try as I might, I couldn’t come up with a response to that.

As it turned out, I didn’t need to. A door opened in the nearest brick house and a man emerged. He was wearing a shirt and vest, but his head was bare, and the snakes growing there were long and healthy. Their scales were a pale silver that accentuated his dark tan. He was carrying a hoe. It seemed like a threat, rather than a farming tool. His size helped with that; he was almost a foot taller than Frank, with the solid build of a man who made his living from the land.

Frank stopped walking, motioning for the rest of us to do the same. “Walter,” he said coldly.

“Franklin,” Walter replied. He stopped several yards away, eyeing first me and then Shelby with open disdain. He didn’t look at Dee at all. His gaze lingered on Shelby’s hair, lip curling slightly, the way a human man’s might if he were looking at road kill or something else disgusting. “This is my land. Why are you here?”

The question seemed directed at all of us. I cleared my throat. “My name is Alexander—”

“I know who you are, human.” He spat the word between us. “I knew as soon as you set your filthy feet in this state. You have no business here, and yet here you stand. Why are you here?” His gaze flicked to Frank, then finally to Dee. “Unless you’ve brought me a breeding pair as a peace offering . . . ?”

“Don’t be disgusting,” said Dee. She was lisping slightly. I glanced to the side, unsurprised to see that her fangs had dropped. “These people are our allies.”

“You’re seeking allies among the apes now? You’ve fallen even farther into disgrace than I feared.”

Frank shook his head. “There is no talking to you, is there? There never has been, and there never will be.”

“Yet here you stand, like there’s some purpose in trying,” said Walter. “Which of us is the fool?”

“Sounds to me like you are, but I’m just a monkey, so what do I know?” All of us turned to look at Shelby. She shrugged broadly. “It’s a little silly not to listen to someone who’s come all the way here to see you, don’t you think? Oh, and fought the dragon-worm-thing that was living in your woods, mustn’t forget that. It was big, too. You should be quite impressed and happy to talk to us.”

Walter blinked, the snakes atop his head stirring and beginning to taste the air. “You saw the lindworms and lived?” he asked. “How is that possible?”

“Onions will usually keep lindworms from attacking, but in this case, we saw the lindworm—singular, it was the female—and lived mostly because it had already been blinded,” I said. “It was half petrified. That made it easy to kill, and that’s why we’re here. There’s a cockatrice running around Columbus, and there’s a gorgon helping it turn people into stone. Deanna brought me, and my associate, to talk to you and see if there was anything you might know about this.”

“To accuse us, you mean,” said Walter flatly.

“Easy to kill?” said Shelby.

“Sir, I’m a Price. Do you really think I would risk everything my family has built solely for the chance to accuse you of something we both know you didn’t do?”

Walter blinked again. Then his eyes narrowed. “Come again, son?”

“No, I’m back on ‘easy,’” said Shelby. “You think that was easy to kill?”

I tried to ignore her, focusing on Walter. “You’re too tall to have come into the city without being noticed. Maybe—maybe—you could have driven the cockatrice to the city limits and dropped it off, but you’d have had no way of catching it again, and you wouldn’t have been able to bite the second man we found. We’re here because we need help, and because I heard you’ve been trying to work with gorgon-safe livestock. I wanted to talk to you about that.”

Walter eyed me for a few moments more before he turned to Frank and Dee. “Is he telling the truth?”

“Alexander Price is one of the worst liars I’ve ever met,” said Dee. “Mostly he just tries not to say anything that might get him questioned.”

“I’ve been dating him for months, and I can back up everything she just said,” said Shelby, raising her hand. “I thought he was shy at first. Then I thought he was being controlled by a telepathic murder-bitch. It’s much better now that I know he’s just a terrible liar.”

“Yes, that’s much better,” I mumbled, and turned back to Walter. “Have you ever kept cockatrice here?”

“Yes,” he said, without hesitation. “They can meet our eyes without harm. That’s more than you can do.”

“That’s absolutely true,” I said. “Can you show me where they were kept?”

His chuckle was slow and deep, like rocks shaking beneath the surface of the earth. “I can do more than that,” he said. “I can show you where they are.”

Following a Pliny’s gorgon I barely knew into a cockatrice coop could probably be moved straight to the top of my list of The Dumbest Things I Have Ever Voluntarily Done. It helped that I was armed, but it only helped a little; gorgons and cockatrice are armed by definition. They wouldn’t even need to draw their weapons.

Shelby stuck close to my side as we entered the darkened building. It smelled like a combination of reptile house and pigeon roost, the hot, dry stink of too many reptiles jammed into an enclosed space mingling with feathers, dust, and the unavoidable oceans of bird shit. The ceiling was high enough for both Walter and Frank to stand upright. Light filtered in through cracks between the boards, turned smoky by the dust that hung suspended in the air.

The walls were lined with roosting boxes, and black lumps filled them, occasionally making sleepy clucking noises. I couldn’t get an accurate population count in the darkness. I tried, reached “many” as a final number three times, and gave it up as a bad plan. “Many” was terrifying enough.

“You may want to stay back,” said Walter, and picked up his pace, using his longer legs to get to the middle of the coop while the rest of us were still hanging back by the door. He grabbed the rope that dangled from the ceiling and gave it a solid yank. A trapdoor swung open, hinges creaking, and revealed the chicken wire dome that we had passed through on our way to the building. I had to give the fringe gorgons this much: they were being careful with their cockatrice (although being really careful would have meant not keeping cockatrice at all). The coop, and a decent amount of the area around it, was completely surrounded by chicken wire, reinforced and double thick. Nothing was getting out of here accidentally.

The lumps in the roosting boxes began to stir as the light hit them. They didn’t make the usual broody noises of suddenly-wakened chickens; these sounds were more like the small screeches of angry parrots, combined with an unnerving amount of hissing. Shelby’s hand found mine, grabbing hold and squeezing tightly. I squeezed back, trying to be reassuring.

Then the first cockatrice jumped from its brooding box to the floor of the coop, ruffling its feathers as it bobbed its head in a distinctly avian way. It turned to look at us, first with one eye, then with the other, before opening its mouth and hissing. It was a sound more suited to a dinosaur than anything that should have been walking the earth in this day and age.

I stared, caught between horror and awe. “It’s beautiful.”

The cockatrice was about the size of a wild turkey, with a pointed, reptilian head that shared more attributes with a small predatory dinosaur than it did with a modern bird. Its teeth were a jagged sea of points and tearing surfaces, and its only concession to a beak was the hardened “egg tooth”-like scale on the very tip of its snout. It would use that egg tooth-like protrusion to chip away petrifaction inside the bodies of its victims. The feathers started about halfway down its neck, brown and green with hints of yellow, and continued all the way down its birdlike body to the long whip of its serpentine tail. The feathers on its tail-tip were shockingly red. It opened its wings and flapped them in a threat display, revealing more red feathers. Only its leathery wings were completely devoid of plumage. It didn’t advance, and none of the other cockatrice came down to join it.

With the trapdoor in the ceiling open, I could finally get an accurate count. There were fifteen cockatrice in the room. That was fifteen cockatrice too many.

“We’re not missing any, if that was going to be your next question,” said Walter, reaching down and picking up the cockatrice that was currently trying to intimidate us. It hissed and struck at his arm. He responded by wrapping one big hand around its muzzle, effectively removing the threat of its teeth. It locked eyes with him, continuing to stare as it waited for him to turn to stone. Cockatrice aren’t very bright.

“This is . . . a lot of cockatrice,” I said, trying to mask my discomfort. It wasn’t working.

“We’d have more if we could get them to breed,” said Walter. “Cockatrice meat can be quite tasty, and their eggs work well in anything that you’d use chicken eggs for.”

“Pass,” said Shelby instantly.

Walter snorted, sounding more amused than annoyed. “Can’t get them to breed, though, no matter how much we try. I’m starting to think it’s a matter of space—they want more territory before they’re willing to reproduce. As it stands, we have to buy new pullets every time we eat one.”

“How much do they taste like chicken?” It was an odd question, on the surface of things. It was also a serious one. People say that everything tastes like chicken, but they’re quite wrong. Rattlesnake, for example, is spicy even if prepared with no seasonings at all, and goat tastes more like venison than anything else that people regularly farm.

“I don’t know,” said Walter. “What does chicken taste like?”

That was the answer I was afraid of. “I’m sorry to have to be the one to tell you this,” I said, “but someone’s been stealing your cockatrice.”

Silence reigned . . . but only for a moment. Shelby put up her hand while the gorgons were still staring at me and asked, in a small voice, “Could we maybe have the earth-shaking revelations somewhere that isn’t in the coop filled with demon chickens? Because I come from the deadliest place on the planet, and these things are giving me the heebie-jeebies.”

Walter blinked at her. Then, ruefully, he laughed.

“All right,” he said. “Let’s take this inside.”

Walter’s home was quite nice, and would have fit right into most Amish farmsteads, as long as they were willing to overlook the terrified cage of fancy mice in his pantry, next to the potatoes. He saw me looking and closed the pantry door.

“Every man’s allowed his little vices,” he said, in a challenging tone. “I trade for them with the community.”

“White mice taste better,” said Dee. She smiled at me, a slightly frayed air behind her apparent cheerfulness. She didn’t like being here, on the fringe, in the home of a man who represented an ideology she didn’t believe in. But she was trying, and I respected that.

“I’ll take your word for that,” I said, and turned back to Walter. “When did you begin keeping cockatrice?”

“Three years ago,” he said. “We get them from a family of Bigfoot who live upstate. They trap cockatrice for us, we give them organic produce. They’re very fond of ‘organic.’ I didn’t know most people grew inorganic tomatoes.”

Lecturing this man on the local and organic food movement seemed like a bad idea. Instead, I nodded, and asked, “When did you start trying to breed them?”

“Right from the beginning. It hasn’t worked yet, but we keep trying.” He shot a poisonous glare at Frank, the snakes on his head stirring themselves to hiss. “It might go faster if we could get some books on animal husbandry to reference.”

“Buy them yourselves,” snapped Frank. “Or get on the Internet and order them like normal people.”

“You’re allowing human culture to corrupt you,” Walter snapped back.

“You want human books. How is that any different?”

“We don’t need them!” Now the snakes atop both men’s heads were standing erect, hissing loudly and showing their fangs.

“You may not need human things, but you’re both doing an excellent job of embarrassing yourselves in front of the humans,” said Dee quietly. The men turned to look at her. “This isn’t their fight. Perhaps we should stop providing them with a free demonstration of why it’s ours.”

“Ah.” Walter leaned back in his seat, composing his expression. His snakes kept hissing, but otherwise stood down. “My apologies to our guests.”

“But not to your brother-in-law?” asked Frank.

“No, Franklin. Never to you.” Walter looked to me. “Why do you think we are so incompetent as to have lost a cockatrice?”

“I don’t think you were incompetent,” I said, trying not to react to the revelation that Dee was Walter’s sister. “I think you were tricked. If you don’t know what chicken tastes like . . . the bones are similar. It would be easy to purchase a chicken or small turkey at a grocery store, make soup, and claim that it was cockatrice. With enough wild garlic and onion, the flavor would be even more confused. You’d never know. The count in your aviary would remain accurate, and whoever hatched the plan would be free to do what they liked with the cockatrice.”

“None of my people would enter your city, or attack in such a vulgar way.”

“No. But they might be willing to trade a cockatrice for something they wanted and couldn’t otherwise have.”

Walter stood abruptly, his chair legs scraping against the wooden floor. “Come with me,” he commanded, and strode toward the door. He didn’t look back. Shelby and I exchanged a glance, and then we followed after him.

There was a brass bell outside Walter’s door, old and battered and streaked with verdigris. When he rang it, it sounded like it should have been audible all the way into the next county. The echoes were still fading when the fringe gorgons came, walking in from the fields, from the houses, and from the various outbuildings. They were all dressed like the ones we’d already seen, in home-stitched clothes and plain, simple colors. The impression that we’d wandered into the world’s strangest Amish farmstead kept growing, even though I knew it was wrong.

“These people,” said Walter, in a booming voice, “have come from the community, with news of the human cities. One of our cockatrice is loose. So I ask: who has given a cockatrice to an outsider? Do not lie to me. I will know.” He scanned the crowd, focusing his attention on a group of teenagers who stood slightly apart from the others. One of them was staring at the ground, the snakes atop her head virtually braiding themselves as they twisted together.

Walter stepped away from the porch, walking over to her. “Marian,” he said softly. “What is it that you want to tell me?”

“I . . .” She raised her head, biting her lip before she said, “I’m sorry, sir, I’m so very sorry, I didn’t know he was going to keep it, and he offered . . .”

“Marian.” The gorgon girl stopped talking. Walter crouched down so that his eyes were level with hers. “What did you do?”

She took a deep breath. “A man came through the forest, past the lindworm. He said the community had sent him. Said they needed a cockatrice, but that they were ashamed to ask it of you. He brought payment. A dead bird in a bag for the stew, and sweets for the children, and good yarn for the knitters. All he asked was one of the young males, and we had too many . . .”

“And you gave it to him?”

Marian’s voice seemed to desert her. She bit her lip again, and nodded.

“I see.” Walter’s hand lashed out almost too fast to follow, grabbing a fistful of her snakes and yanking. The rest hissed madly, but didn’t try to bite him. I guess even snakes can be smart, under the right circumstances. He turned back to the rest of us. “You should go now. You have done enough damage.”

“Walter . . .” began Dee.

“You are as much of an outsider here as these apes that you sully yourself by traveling with,” spat Walter. “Our father would be ashamed to see what you’ve grown into. Go.”

I took Shelby’s hand, sparing one last glance for the girl, Marian, who was weeping as she hung limply in her captor’s hand. If he’d been human, I would have tried to do something—but it’s not my place to criticize the culture of the cryptids we work with. Gritting my teeth to keep from saying something I would regret, I turned, and let Frank lead us away from the fringe, back across the fields to the woods.

The lindworm’s body was still sprawled where we had left it. It was still too fresh to have attracted any large predators, and its partially-petrified state was probably confusing the bugs. I stopped to pick up the eye I’d pried loose earlier, shoving it into my jacket pocket. Maybe I could learn more about the petrifaction process by studying it. It was worth the effort.

We’d been gone long enough for the frickens to forget what had happened earlier. Their small, piping voices escorted us back through the woods, and no more lindworms came to kill us. After what we’d been through so far today, that was enough for me.