Free Brechalon by Wesley Allison Page B

‘chicken-lizard’ and
‘turkey lizard’ you’d soon run out of names. Face it. That’s really
what they look like.”
    A much louder squawk than those heard before
announced to all the soldiers that something larger and more
frightening than the skittish buitreraptors had arrived. A monster
burst out of the brush and ran toward the tiny creatures. It was a
bird lizard too, covered with feathers ranging from a deep
turquoise on the head to a light green around the legs, but it
didn’t fit Augie’s earlier nomenclature, if for no other reason
than size. Its body was as large as the biggest horse, its head
bobbing back and forth about seven feet above the ground, but it’s
long, feathered tail stretched straight out behind it to make it
more than twenty feet long. Though the puny wings would have made
any attempt to fly laughable, the clawed fingers and the huge
sickle-shaped clawed toes prevented any such jocularity.
    The monster apparently had been stalking its
tiny cousins through the woods, but now that it saw the human
beings, it abruptly changed its targets. Why chase after a tiny
morsel when a much juicier and slower prey could be had? It needed
only to shift its weight and maintain the same stride to put it on
its new trajectory. With a leap into the air that amazed everyone
watching, the beast flew more than forty feet to land on top of
Private Holloway, clawing him and bending down to give him a
killing bite before anyone could react. A second later the beast
was peppered with more than twenty shots fired from all over the
clearing.
    “ Kafira damn-it!” Augie shouted.
“Color Sergeant!
    “ Sir.” Color Sergeant Bourne ran
toward him and came to attention.
    “ Set up a perimeter watch. Make
sure all the men have chambered rounds. And prepare a burial
detail.” The Color Sergeant hurried off to his duties. Augie turned
to McTeague. “Come on.”
    The two lieutenants stepped over to the giant
bird and Private Holloway. It was only too obvious that he was
beyond hope. His head had been bitten half through.
    “ Nothing to be done,” said
McTeague.
    “ Not for Holloway,” Augie
agreed.
    * * * * *
    It was a large spider crawling across his face
that woke Nils Chapman up. It tickled his right nostril and then
continued on its way down his right cheek and over his right ear.
He turned his head and watched it as it went over the edge of the
mattress. He didn’t want to get up. He wanted to count—one thousand
nine hundred seventy nine… No! No, he wasn’t going to do that. He
felt sick to his stomach. He had felt sick to his stomach ever
since he had seen the impossible undulating movement of the wall in
prisoner eighty nine’s cell. He hadn’t gone back to the cell since,
but the uneasiness, the slowly creeping nausea did not go
away.
    He turned over and looked toward Karl Drury’s
bunk. The sadistic guard was not there. On the one hand, this made
Chapman happy, because he found that he was increasingly happy
whenever Drury was not around. On the other hand, if he wasn’t here
and he wasn’t on duty, he was probably in eighty nine’s cell,
abusing her. Chapman shuddered. He had become increasingly sickened
by Drury’s treatment of women in general and this one in
particular, but now he felt even more ill at the thought of the
cell itself, and the wall, and the strange writing, and the
undulating movement… he shuddered.
    He sat up and rolled out of bed. Taney was the
only other guard in the bunkroom.
    “ Where’s Drury?” he
asked.
    “ The filthy bastard’s got duty at
the loading dock,” came the reply. “I wouldn’t want to be one of
the boys working down there.”
    “ Somebody should stop
him.”
    “ Go ahead,” said Taney, “if you
want a knife between your ribs.”
    Chapman didn’t want a knife between his ribs,
but he didn’t know what else to do, so he went down the ancient
spiral stone steps to the docks. Six boys were unloading a skiff,
but Chapman didn’t see any