by Perrin Briar
Funny she was so high, floating above the craggy rocks on a single vine rope. One slip and she would be dead. She would fall and that would be the end of her story. For the first time since she and Aaron had begun their descent, Cassie realized how reckless they had been. Who climbed into an abyss not knowing what was there?
Prepare, yes. But they had had time. They could have waited. And when they couldn’t wait any longer, when a large hungry mouth wanted to eat them, when the parent birds had gotten bored of them, or just wanted to kill them, for whatever reason, that was the time to jump headlong into the abyss. Not when they still had time.
From now on they would stay in the nest and come up with another way to escape, or else a way to get a message to their parents to inform them where they were. Cassie reached up and grabbed another vine.
She instantly regretted it.
It jerked, moving beneath her hand. It was cold and squirmed in her grip. She pulled her hand back immediately, wishing she could take back what she’d just done. But it was too late.
The snake would be coming back to confront her, from above. There would be no avoiding it. And she did the unthinkable. She reached up, gripped the snake, and pulled on it. It was already pushing itself down the vine toward her, and if it hadn’t been for this added momentum, Cassie would never have been able to dislodge the giant snake from its perch. But it was, and she did. The snake fell into the mist, sprawling end over end.
Cassie wouldn’t wait this time. She would rush. She seized the vine and pulled herself up. As she ascended, pulling herself up faster than she had ever moved before, she thought she made something out through the swirling mist.
Something hissed beside her head, but there was no way she was going to slow down now, not while she was making good time. She pushed on, forcing herself up one handhold at a time. She wouldn’t stop. Not for anything.
Before she knew it, the mist began to grow thin. The vine beneath her hands shivered and shook as the snake on her heels began to pick up speed, catching up to her. But she wouldn’t slow.
Cassie’s fingers brushed the pointed sticks of the nest. The vine was pulled taut. It was difficult to maintain a solid grip, unable to wrap her hands around it. Cassie checked each branch and protrusion to ensure it was strong enough to hold her weight before letting herself hang suspended.
She was going to make it!
She reached up to grip the nest’s side and pull herself up…
Except she couldn’t.
Something was wrapped about her ankle, tight like it meant to choke off her circulation.
“No!” Cassie said.
The snake was powerful and heavy. She kicked with her trapped foot and struck out with her free foot. Her hands were already beginning to slip, losing their grip.
“Cassie!” Aaron said, running over to her.
The relief was palpable in Aaron’s voice, even stronger in Cassie’s eyes. She didn’t want to be alone right then, not when she was so close to escaping to safety.
“A snake!” Cassie said. “It’s got me! It’s got my leg!”
Aaron grabbed Cassie’s arms and pulled on them. But the snake was too powerful and there was no way they were going to get it loose.
Cassie’s eyes widened at the sight behind Aaron. He turned, slowly, to peer behind himself. It was one of the Humungo birds. It looked at them, cocking its head inquisitively to one side.
Oh great, Cassie thought. Just what we need!
“Hold on!” Aaron said. “Hold on!”
“Don’t leave me!” Cassie said.
Aaron was already moving away, to the center of the nest where the vines were still attached. He bent down and untied the other end.
Cassie’s eyes widened.
“What are you doing?” she said. “You’re trying to kill me?”
Aaron didn’t say anything. He stood on the vine, pressing his weight onto it. Then he bent down and picked up the other end of the vine. He held it up, waving it at the bird and shouted, “Hey! Hey!”
The Humungo bird hopped from one foot to the other. It didn’t seem to know what to do. Aaron held up his hand with the vine, shut his eyes, and turned his head away. He didn’t want to see what was about to happen. The bird stopped shuffling from side to side and stared down at the flimsy end of the vine. At a certain angle it might have resembled a giant worm or even… A snake?
The snake attached to Cassie’s ankle seemed to grow heavier. Cassie was losing her grip. She couldn’t hold on much longer. She lost one hand, but threw it back up almost immediately. She was going to get pulled over the side any second if Aaron’s plan didn’t work out. Her fingertips bit deep into the sharp detritus of the nest’s building materials.
The giant bird’s head snapped forward, striking the flimsy vine. Aaron cried out, snatching back his own hand. Cassie was no longer holding the vine, but felt it slide beneath her as the bird pulled on it.
“Grab it!” Aaron shouted.
The plan made sense to Cassie the moment he shouted those words. She took up the vine, clutching it between her two hands.
The bird stepped back and pulled Cassie up over the side of the nest. Cassie crashed onto the nest’s floor. There was a red lash mark, a deep scratch where the snake’s tail had clung to Cassie in its fierce embrace. But now the snake lay beside her.
The bird, having seemingly mistaken the vine for a snake, now spied the snake and snatched it up before it could awaken from its dazed state.
Aaron staggered to Cassie, falling to his knees beside her. Cassie looked him over. He was white as a sheet, clutching his arm close to his chest.
“Aaron, are you okay?” Cassie said.
“I’ll be fine,” Aaron said. “The bird wrenched it, that’s all. It’ll be fine in a few hours.”
Cassie hugged him.
“Thank you,” she said. “I don’t know what I’d have done if you hadn’t come.”
Aaron shrugged.
“It’s no more or less than you would have done,” he said.
Sleep found them easily. They lay back on the nest, and though it was actually thorny and sharp like nettles, it felt soft as a cloud to their weary backs. They snored, their aching muscles sore and pained, their bodies settling down to begin healing themselves.
They were much too tired to notice as Aaron’s vine, still staked to the nest, began to twitch.
10.
NIGHT DESCENDED over the world and the stars came out to play. They were a sporadic mishmash, clumped together in small groups in one area, and stretching across vast empty expanses to another. Constellations unlike anything seen on the face of the surface’s night sky.
Bryan and Zoe nursed the blisters on the soles of their feet, wrapping bandages of thin leaves around them to staunch the blood, pus and pain. They had persevered through the pain at Zoe’s behest and her imposed pace. She seemed intent on setting some kind of record in crossing this world.
“You always said I ought to get in shape,” Bryan said, sliding his sodden socks back on with care.
“But it took coming all the way down here before you listened to me,” Zoe said.
“Better late than never,” Bryan said.
Zoe didn’t reply.
“Or so they say,” Bryan grumbled to himself.
Zoe wouldn’t slow down for Bryan, and that had made him angry. He had done his best to keep up with her. He hadn’t said anything, and instead buried it deep inside himself, focusing his discontent into driving his legs forward.
He thought he’d done rather well, but Zoe hadn’t uttered a single word of encouragement. Any pace he could go was not fast enough in her eyes, and each time she began to pull away from him she had to slow down so he could catch up.
“You know, getting to Aaron and Cassie earlier by a few hours isn’t likely to make that much difference,” Bryan said.
“Every minute matters,” Zoe said. “We need to get to them as quickly as possible. What if we get there just after they get ea
ten, or something else we could have prevented?”
“Then we would always be late before something happens,” Bryan said.
“That’s why we should never be late,” Zoe said.
Bryan picked up a pair of dead rats he’d skewered on sticks.
“Are you sure you don’t want one of these?” he said.
“You’re not seriously going to eat them?” Zoe said.
“Sure I am,” Bryan said. “You don’t give up quality roadkill like this.”
“I thought you were joking!” Zoe said.
“I never joke about food,” Bryan said.
“Unless it’s good for you,” Zoe said. “I notice you don’t mind joking about it then. And then not eat it.”
“You’re just jealous,” Bryan said.
“Of what?” Zoe said.
“Of my constitution,” Bryan said.
Zoe threw her head back and barked a laugh.
“That’ll be the day,” she said. “How are you going to cook them, anyway? We don’t have anything to start a fire with.”
Bryan shook his head.
“You poor uninspired simpleton,” he said.
He lay beside a thin stream of bubbling magma. He extended the rats and let them hang lazily over it. The rising heat sizzled the flesh, the fat dribbling. Bryan smiled at Zoe with a triumphant grin. Zoe rolled her eyes. She sat up and hugged her knees close to herself.
“I’ve seen Aaron almost every day since his birth, and now, to be away from him…” she said, shaking her head. “I don’t think I’ve ever been away from him for so long.”
They looked up at the stars. The constellations were still strange to them both, like cultures of bacteria, bunched together in some areas, and wide spaces between them to the next colony.
“We’ll find him again,” Bryan said. “Both of them. You’ll see.”
The meat cooked and smelled good. Bryan brought them to his mouth. He blew to cool them, opened his mouth to bite on a hind leg, saliva already flowing.
“The rats down here probably have something wrong with them,” Zoe said. “The plague. Or some other illness. Why else would they be lying dead on the side of the road the way they were?”
Bryan paused.
“Yeah, right,” he said.
“Stands to reason, don’t you think?” Zoe said.
Bryan eyed the rats. Now he couldn’t look at them without thinking of deadly bacteria. He shook his head, sighed, and tossed them into the magma stream.
“You really know how to take the fun out of life, you know that?” he said.
“I’ve got more than enough salad to go round, if you want some,” Zoe said.
Bryan sighed.
“Endless exercise and rabbit food,” he said. “We really are in hell.”
11.
CASSIE’S DREAMS were filled with slithering ugly beasts with split lips and missing forked tongues. The world was consumed with them. One snake wrapping around each of her limbs, and then a final black one with glowing yellow eyes slid into her mouth and down her throat. She choked, clutching and tearing at her neck.
Cassie was awoken by a grunting, rasping sound, something nudging her from Aaron’s side. She nudged him back with her elbow and rolled away from him. He poked her again, in the small of her back. Cassie opened her eyes, turned to face him, and opened her mouth to berate him.
Her mouth dropped open. Her nightmare had come true. She was lost for words. Speechless.
She rolled to one side, onto her hands and feet. She crabbed backward. She had never seen anything so horrific her whole life. It shocked her.
One of the giant snakes had gotten into the nest. It lay where Aaron was, where he was sleeping.
It was in the process of consuming him.
There was an Aaron-shaped figure inside the snake’s skin. He had managed to get one of his arms up over his mouth and nose, creating a small space to breathe. How he had managed to do that when the snake was busy consuming him, Cassie couldn’t say. But here was the evidence. She supposed it didn’t really matter how it had happened, only that it had.
The snake flexed its wide gaping mouth, extending over Aaron’s hips by another inch. Aaron kicked, flailing. That was what disturbed Cassie the most. A living creature—a human—fighting for its life. It was this struggling that had awoken her.
The snake had somehow managed to take Aaron from the top of the head. How had Aaron not woken up? How had he gotten himself in this situation? But he was still alive.
He spoke, his words muffled. Cassie couldn’t understand a word he was saying, but he was clearly trying to communicate with her. She approached the Aaron-shaped lump and put her hand to the arm on his head. She spoke in comforting tones, knowing he likely couldn’t understand what she was saying. The tone itself would be the message.
She was asking him to stay calm, that she was going to get him free. He needed to conserve what little oxygen reserves he had left. Aaron relaxed and stopped kicking his legs. Evidently he had understood what she was saying.
Cassie approached the snake’s head. Its eyes were rolled back into its head, the protective layers of its eyelids in place. It was not the same scarred snake that had first attacked Cassie in the mist, but another, slightly smaller one.
Cassie beat on the snake’s head, pummeling it with her fist. The snake’s eyes slitted open. It attempted to roll over to protect itself, but Aaron was too large and heavy to allow the movement. Cassie didn’t let up, and continued to belt the creature. The snake slid its protective eyelids shut and gulped faster.
Aaron must have been running out of oxygen now. Cassie needed to figure out a way to destroy this snake before it swallowed Aaron whole or suffocated him. But Cassie wouldn’t—couldn’t—let that happen.
She reached into the elastic of her pants and extracted her knife. She slipped the blade into the corner of the snake’s mouth and pulled back, and just like that, the snake wore a Chelsea Smile. Cassie took hold of the snake’s upper and lower jaws and pulled, splitting it down the middle, peeling it back like a banana skin.
The snake’s slimy inner juices covered Aaron head to foot. Aaron still had his arm over his face. He gasped a deep lungful of fresh air. He didn’t stop till he filled his lungs. Then he rolled away from the snake and its entrails.
“Thank you,” Aaron said between breaths.
“You’re welcome,” Cassie said. “Now all we have to worry about is whether these things are venomous. Otherwise you’re doomed.”
“It’s not venomous,” Aaron said.
“How do you know that?” Cassie said.
“Because I’m still conscious,” Aaron said. “There’s no way I would still be breathing if something that large had a venomous bite. It’s a constrictor. It crushes its food to death before consuming them.”
“Then why didn’t it crush you first?” Cassie said.
“It must have taken me for dead when it started consuming me,” Aaron said.
“Wonderful,” Cassie said.
Hissssssssss.
Cassie and Aaron spun around to face the noise. A sliver of shadow slithered underneath the giant eggs.
Cassie bent down and reached for sticks that poked up from the nest floor. She checked where she was putting her hand to ensure she wasn’t reaching down the throat of a snake. She returned her gaze straight ahead and focused on the peripheries of her vision.
“You think there’s another one here?” Aaron said.
“I know there is,” Cassie said. “So do you. Come on.”
They edged toward the eggs. There was no giant bird to help them this time.
“What do you want to do?” Aaron said. “What’s the game plan?”
“We wait for the birds to return,” Cassie said. “Then we’ll scare the snake out for the birds to take care of, like last time.”
“Sounds good to me,” Aaron said. “The less contact we have with them, the better.”
He brushed his hands over his hair to
dislodge the slime.
Aaron and Cassie moved to the far side of the nest and sat on the edge, watching the eggs. Aaron moved to the vine that hung over the side, the vine he had used to climb up the previous day. He took out his knife and began hacking at it, cutting through each strand until he had worked his way through. The rope fell over the side and disappeared into the mist below.
A silver tongue, cast in moonlight, flapped from between two eggs, and a pair of large slitted eyes blinked into the light.
Aaron and Cassie squared off against the snake. Cassie recognized it by its scarred chin and large bulbous yellow eyes immediately. His damaged forked tongue flickered between his thick lips. It lowered its head and darted toward Cassie, who swung her stick and struck the side of the snake’s head. The snake was strong, prepared for the blow.
It was only by Cassie’s quick feet that she wasn’t impaled by the snake’s enormous fangs. The snake struck the floor of the nest. Cassie rolled up onto her feet. Aaron was ready with his own stick, and swung at the snake too, catching it below the jaw. The snake shook its head and repositioned its jaws.
The snake turned to face the two young fighters. Cassie waved her stick side to side at the snake. But it was ready, and caught the stick in its mouth, eyes unblinking and focused on the kids. It tensed its jaws, snapping the stick in half, and spat the two sticks out.
They were playing for time. If they could just keep the snake here, and stay alive, long enough for the birds to turn up, they would deal with the snake for them. But that was not going to be an easy task. The snake drew itself up on its powerful muscles to its full height, staring them down.
The snake hissed and rushed forward again, sensing victory. Cassie had no weapon in her hands. The snake’s grin was wide. Aaron moved to protect Cassie, but the snake lashed out and tore his stick away from him too. They were defenseless.
The snake fell upon Cassie, knocking her to the ground. The harsh splinters of the nest dug into her back and neck. She tried to roll aside, to push the snake away, but its coils were too heavy. She couldn’t do it. She shuffled backward, but the snake pressed harder on her chest, pinning her down.
