“Then where are we going? Do you have a plan?”
He doesn’t answer as he suddenly puts on a burst of speed. Somewhere, I find the strength to match it.
We break through the foliage. The rough rocks turn into smooth pebbles, which angle downward into a small lake.
On the opposite side of the lake, a rise—a small cliff—extends over black water. It’s a good ten-foot drop into fathomless water housing goddess-knows-what horrors.
“It—can’t—swim,” Soren says around heavy breaths. I want to ask him how he knows this, if he’ll stake his life on this information—
But the gunda breaks onto the shore with us. So close. Too close.
“Axes out. Now!” Soren stops running and turns to face the threat, but his gaze isn’t focused on those eyes up top. No, his attention is directed much lower. Toward the base, where the rough skin has started to move.
Tendons strain and muscles flex as a flap of skin rises directly at the front of the gunda, until it is parallel with the ground, just below all those eyes. Something falls to the ground from the interior—a tangle of white and red—
At first, I can’t make sense of what lies beneath. Some sort of fleshy pink skin, coiled like a snake and held tight against its side.
But then that pink skin lashes forward, like a frog’s tongue, and I realize that’s exactly what it is, a tongue, ready to strike and catch its prey.
Soren dodges that forked tongue, rolling off to the side. When the tongue meets the ground instead, rocks stick to it, and they’re drawn back into the gunda’s body. That flap of skin lowers back down, trapping it all in place.
And that’s when true horror washes over me. There were no teeth around that tongue, no mouth or throat. Just wet, sticky skin. If that thing catches me, it’ll enclose me in darkness, hold me tight to its body, and slowly I will decompose, absorbed through the gunda’s skin. I’ll likely die from the lack of air first, but the thought of being unable to move, encased in wet, sticky darkness—it has me backtracking, nearly tripping over my own feet.
My eyes lower to the white-and-red heap on the ground in front of the beast, and I realize now what it is.
A carcass—the remains of its last meal.
The gunda quickly realizes it’s captured nothing edible. The rocks and dirt clods tumble to the ground as that flap of skin rises once more.
I send a prayer up to the goddess. And when that tongue flings outward again, toward me this time, I throw myself out of the way.
Pain burrows into my side and clears my head as I strike the rough ground.
I’ve been cast out and rejected by my village. I’ve been sleeping on the ground in the wild. I have a ridiculous boy following me everywhere I go.
But I am a warrior!
I am Rasmira Bendrauggo, and I’m going to kill this beast.
I’ve made this decision, when someone else comes bounding through the trees.
Iric.
He already has his ax in hand.
“No,” Soren whispers from beside me, and I take a moment to wonder why he would protest more help, before Iric speaks.
“What have you gotten yourself into?” Iric demands, and I’m certain he’s talking to Soren. “Ziken wasn’t your preferred method of dying? You’d prefer the gunda?”
“What are you doing here, Iric?” Soren shouts back.
“I couldn’t focus on anything when I knew you’d gone after the girl again. You’re lucky I spotted you cutting into the wild with the gunda on your heels.”
“Get out of here!” Soren demands.
“Don’t tell me what to do!”
After the gunda drops its newest mouthful of dirt clods, it turns in Iric’s direction.
Soren reaches between his feet to grab a sizable rock and hurls it at the gunda. It strikes the creature solidly in the back, but it doesn’t budge. Doesn’t turn to see what disturbed it, provided it felt the impact at all.
So Soren charges it, ax held high. He only gets a couple of steps before I join him.
Opposite us, Iric dodges a tongue lash and attempts to bring his ax down on the thick muscle, but the pink flesh returns to its resting place much too quickly. The skin flap starts to lower as Soren and I make contact.
It’s like striking rock. Only, rock crumbles eventually. But this, the skin of the gunda, it doesn’t even dent.
I rear back my ax, taking a heavier swing, but all it does is send pain ricocheting up my arms. The skin is impenetrable.
We need to carry on with Soren’s plan: drowning it.
“We need to get it up that ridge,” I say. “To push it into the water.”
“We need to get it away from Iric,” Soren says. He darts around the beast, trying to get it to focus on him instead of his friend. I’m all for saving friends and family, but Soren’s single-minded determination is a bit extreme.
The two of us are exhausted. But Iric? He must be fresher than we are, especially if he only walked the distance from the tree house to the lake.
“Iric!” I shout. “Run up the ridge over the water! Get it to follow you. We need to drown it.”
Iric takes off running, heeding my command, and the gunda follows. Soren tries to hurry after the pair, but he’s so spent. We scramble after the two figures curving around the lake.
The lake that’s now rippling, I note. Deep green skin skims the top of the water. Nothing distinct for me to make out the shape, just enough for me to know that whatever lives in the water is enormous.
I hope it likes to eat gunda and not people.
Soren and I are practically crawling by the time we get to the base of the ridge overhanging the water. Iric is dodging the gunda’s strikes as best he can. The gunda’s tongue lands at the edges of the cliff, pulling rocks up and sending more tumbling into the water. I can imagine whatever lives in there circling in place, just waiting for something living to fall into the lake.
“Iric, get away from the edge!” I say as I force my legs up the incline.
“No problem!” Iric says sarcastically.
He runs in as much of an arc around the beast as he can, but the ridge isn’t wider than fifteen feet. He just barely gets around the gunda before that tongue strikes, curling around Iric’s foot.
Iric loses his ax, his fingers clawing against the ground as the tongue starts to drag him backward, slower than its previous retractions, due to Iric’s weight.
I leap forward, ax raised high above my head, but Soren gets there first. He brings his own weapon down across that tongue, severing the tip from the rest of it. It frees Iric, who hurriedly pulls the wet flesh from his ankle.
“I’m going to be sick,” Iric says. Then he unloads his stomach’s contents onto the ground. Soren reaches Iric’s side a second later, and Iric manages to kick the severed tongue over the cliff.
Meanwhile, the gunda is wriggling. It has no voice with which to scream, but it’s clearly in pain. Flap open wide, tongue swishing aimlessly on the ground, blood trailing after the severed end.
I rush straight at it.
“What is she doing?” Iric asks, but I don’t spare either boy a glance. I put my focus on the gunda. On that open flap and exposed skin. That soft skin.
Let’s see if that’s impervious.
I let the spike come free of my ax and ram it into the gunda at a full sprint. Flesh gives way, spike and ax points embedding deeply, and brown blood spurts right into my face. Blinking rapidly, I pull my ax free and swing again, this time from the side, letting one of the ax blades sink in even deeper.
That does it.
The gunda is swaying side to side on its two legs, ambling around like a bird with its head cut off. I leap over the flopping tongue.
The gunda backs up toward the cliff edge.
I ram it again with the point of my ax, pushing it the rest of the way.
The body falls first, the impossibly long tongue sliding after it along the ground.
A yell.
I turn.
Soren and Iric must have been coming to help me, because they’re both much closer than I realized.
And the gunda’s wriggling tongue end had found another target while it was sinking.