Thunderbird Falls. C.E. Murphy
seen in the Dead Zone, a heaviness that seemed to bear down like the guilt and pain I’d experienced moments ago. There was no sense of being dead about the serpent. I wasn’t sure I’d ever seen anything so alive or so filled with purpose. It lived, and it lived to kill.
Its scales were black, fastened together like intricate armor, and gleamed so hard against the darkness of the Dead Zone they hurt to look at. It flared out a ruff, exposing gills that glittered and sparkled with hard edges. Tentacles, like Medusa gone mad, waved around its head. It had no legs, but the word snake fell pitifully short. Ridges crested its back, sharp and deadly. Even in the half-light, it looked as if the spires glistened with poison. It coiled higher, enough strength visible in its body to crush a ship. If this was the kind of thing that had inspired ancient mariners to their warnings of Here Be Dragons, I couldn’t blame them for wanting to avoid the unknown areas of the sea. It opened its mouth to hiss at me.
Its fangs were nearly as long as I was.
I wondered if I would stop feeling right away, or if I’d be alive a while inside the serpent’s maw, feeling the muscle of its throat crush me as it swallowed me down.
The smaller snakes began to drop off me, slithering down my arms and legs again and falling to the floor. I couldn’t blame them: I didn’t want to be facing their lord and master, either. One wriggled under my shirt and down my spine, then panicked, thrashing around, when it met the taut muscle of the snake around my ribs, blocking its passage. The snake around my ribs whipped its head around, pinning my arm against my body as it sank its teeth into the littler one under my shirt. The smaller reptile spasmed, flailing under my shirt in its death throes. Its cold terror seeped in through my skin, leaving me in an icy sweat. I stared up at the monster, feeling the snake die, little and boneless against the small of my back.
The rib-hugging viper began to unwind from me. Above me, the giant serpent swayed and moved closer, snakes below it squirming away from the weight of its huge body.
“Coyote,” I said once more, but this time I knew he wasn’t going to answer. The viper fell away from me. For the second time that morning, my hand reached out without consulting my mind. I caught the creature at the base of the neck, below its jaw, like I’d seen snake handlers do on the Discovery Channel. It hissed and spat and writhed, effectively neutered.
The thing above me went still.
“Oh good.” My voice cracked like a teenage boy’s. “You’re not a cannibal.”
It hissed. I wanted to look down to see if it had tiny impotent arms like a T Rex, waggling angrily at me, but I didn’t dare. Around me, the sea of snakes backed away, making a circle of blackness with the sea serpent at its head. Like their master, the ones closest to me reared up, and unlike the monster creature, swayed menacingly, as if to remind me I wasn’t the one in charge here.
I really didn’t need the reminder.
“So maybe now we make a bargain,” I said. It blinked at me, an action that in another creature might have read as surprise. In the giant serpent, it only served to make me aware that I could see my entire body reflected in the empty blackness. “You let us go,” I said hopefully, “and I’ll let it go.”
“Usssss.” The serpent’s voice was a river of sound, pounding behind my ears.
“Us,” I said again. “Me and Coyote.” Distance and space in the Dead Zone were malleable. I’d learned that the first time I’d visited, though I hadn’t been able to deliberately affect it. Now I swallowed against the tightness in my throat, clung to the idea of Coyote, and told the universe to change.
My feet went out from under me like I’d hit a patch of ice. My gut lurched with panic and I tightened my stranglehold on the snake in my fist. Space contracted into a needle point, then expanded again, snakes slithering down into that point like a sucking drain, and reappearing all around me. The dragon-thing slid with me, and so did the snake I held knotted in my fingers, but all the other snakes were new.
How I recognized one wriggling field of snakes from another, I didn’t know, but there it was.
The sea serpent flicked its tongue, long enough to wrap around me, and at my elbow, Coyote growled, “What,” and in an audible pause I heard him not saying “the hell” before he finished, “do you think you’re doing?”
“Rescuing us,” I said with all the confidence I could muster. My voice didn’t break again, so I counted that as good enough, and brandished my captive snake. “It for us,” I said to the waiting sea serpent. It flickered its tongue again, weaving back and forth to examine me from one side, then the other.
“There isss one of it,” it answered. “There are two of you.”
Crap. I’d been afraid it would notice that. “I don’t suppose you’ll give me time off for good behavior?”
It stared at me, unblinking.
Crap.
“Joanne,” Coyote said, a warning in his voice.
“Then let this one go,” I said, jerking my head at the red man beside me.
“Jo,” Coyote said again. “Don’t.”
The monster flattened its snout, tongue darting out, as if it were flaring its nostrils. “The sssacrifisse is ssweetesst when the victim isss willing.”
“I’m willing.” I waved the smaller snake at it. “This little guy for Coyote, and I’m all yours.”
“Done,” it said.
I released the little snake and shoved Coyote away from me with all my will, like the recoil from a car crash.
For an instant, Coyote resisted. He knew me; he knew that I work through the medium I know best, cars. In fact, he’d taught me to do that. So for a moment, the recoil of that car wreck was met by his own image, the steadfastness of a mountain, absorbing the energy I tried pushing him away with.
Then power surged through me, blood-red and deep and cool, a link from the serpent as it bent its will to the same ends I pursued. There was no metaphor to its desire, only the intent to remove that which it had promised to.
Coyote flickered like the serpent’s tongue, and disappeared.
The viper I’d dropped whipped around and hissed at me, striking forward so quickly I didn’t stand a chance.
The serpent spat, venom splashing over the smaller snake before it completed its attack. It shrieked, a high thin sound, and flipped onto its back, writhing and whining in pain.
“Yeah!” I spat at it, too, to much less effect. “I’m only a meal for the big guy!”
The serpent lifted its head and spread its hood, staring at me. It struck me that gloating was not a snakely trait. I cleared my throat. “Never mind. It’s just, you know, if you’ve got to go out, might as well get taken out by the…never mind.”
It reared up and doubled forward, jaws gaping. As I stared into its descending maw, my last thought was, isn’t there a Shel Silverstein poem appropriate to this situation?
CHAPTER FOUR
A meaty hand, warm and callused, clamped onto my shoulder. My eyes popped open and I looked blankly at the cream-colored tiles above the dead girl. This was not what I imagined the inside of a snake to look like.
“Walker?”
I twisted my head up. The warm hand on my shoulder was attached to the wrist, arm, shoulder, and ultimately, beefy body of my immediate supervisor, Captain Michael Morrison of the Seattle Police Department, North Precinct.
Morrison always made me think of a superhero starting to go to seed: late thirties, graying hair, sharp blue eyes, a bit too much weight on the bones. I’d never been so glad to see a seedy superhero in my life, and said the first grateful words that came to mind: “This isn’t your jurisdiction.”
“And that sure