Banshee Worm King: Book Five of the Oz Chronicles (33 page)

“What do you know?” Gordy said.
 
“Those monkeys are smarter than us.”

“Apes, you idiot,” I said sitting on the platform.
 
“Give me some of your Myrmidon meat.”

He reached in his pants pocket and pulled out a chunk of
blood red flesh.
 
I rubbed it on my shoes
and started climbing down the tree.

“So, it’s safe now?” Gordy asked.

I looked up at the faces staring down at me.
 
“I hope so.” They all proceeded to rub their
shoes with Myrmidon meat.
 
By the time we
were all standing on the ground, I figured Ariabod and Ajax were near the other
side.
 
I wasn’t sure what was there
waiting for them, and I hoped to God they hadn’t dropped the egg, but I was
fairly confident they were waiting for us.

We all took a few tentative steps in the direction of the
treehouse.
 
The ground was soft and
mossy.
 
As we walked, we scanned the
ground for worm activity.
 

The fog that we had zipped through in the past stretched
all the way down to the forest floor.
 
It
was as thick as pea soup. And, maybe because we were walking through it rather
slowly, we all noticed a distinct odor for the first time.
 
It was pungent, like rotting cheese.
 

I stepped down and my foot slipped on something white and
long.
 
Looking closer, I saw that the
ground was littered with some kind of white debris.
 

Tyrone was the only one brave enough to reach down and pick
up the nearest white object.
 
He held it
close to his face to get a good look.
 
Then, his head jerked back, and he dropped it.

“What’s wrong?” I asked.

“It’s a bone.
 
They’re all bones.”

“What?” Gordy grabbed my arm and squeezed.
 
“Bones?
 
C’mon, don’t say that.
 
They can’t
be bones. There are too many of them.”

Wes reached down and picked one up.
 
“They’re bones,” he said showing us what he
was holding.
 
It was the skeletal remains
of a human hand.

“So what, this is like their puke place?” Gordy asked
looking as if he might puke himself.

“Don’t know and don’t wanna know,” Wes said. “Just keep moving.”

We broke through the fog and saw the burned treehouse for
the first time.
 
The front wall was still
standing, but it was a much darker color than it had been before.
 
Black char marks lined the edges of the
house. Burned and smoldering lumber was jammed into the crook of the tree.
 
And a few planks of the flooring hung down
and swung in the breeze.
 
The tree itself
was partially burned, but it remained standing.
 

“Whoa,” Gordy said.

“You really did a number on this place, Oz.”

I didn’t reply to him.
 
“Where are Ajax and Ariabod?”

As if they’d heard my question, they leaned out from behind
the tree trunk just below the house, and flashed their teeth in exaggerated
grins.

“Where’s the egg?”

Ajax produced it from between his legs.

I breathed a little easier.
 
Although I wasn’t sure why. After all I was going to use the egg to draw
in a man-eating worm.
 
That sort of thing
shouldn’t have made me feel relaxed.

The ground in front of the tree was crawling with dozens of
worms.
 
They were twisting and turning on
top of the ground, fighting to bury themselves, but also feeling the urge to
get to the egg.

“What now?” Lou asked.
 

“We have to get to the other side of the tree.”

“Why?” Tyrone asked.

“Because the worm with the half moon scar has surfaced
twice over there.
 
That’s its spot.”

“I still ain’t clear on how we’re going to kill this
thing?
 
Two arrows ain’t going to do
nothing but piss it off.”

“Good,” I said.
 
“If
it’s pissed, it will make a mistake.”

“That’s your plan?” Wes asked.
 
“You hope that it gets mad when we try to
kill it so we can kill it?”

I shrugged.
 
“More or
less.”
 
I yelled up to Ajax and
Ariabod.
 
“Keep moving.
 
Three more trees down.”

They resumed their climb-and-catch routine and signaled
with hoots when they’d reached their destination.

I looked into the forest canopy and saw a dozen or so
climbers jumping from tree to tree.
 

“We’ve got to move fast,” I said.

The worms had disappeared from the front of the tree, so we
ran around it and stood on the spot where the worm had taken Kimball.

The back deck to the treehouse had collapsed. There were
charred splintered chunks of wood all over the place.
 
I picked up a good-sized spike.
 
Everyone but Lou did the same.

I held the spike like a sword and turned to the
others.
 
“We’re doing this for Kimball.”

They all nodded.

“I’m going to get it to come up here, so you all stand on
either side of me.
 
Lou, you’re next to
me.
 
Fire as soon as it surfaces.
 
Only use the second arrow if you have
to.
 
Things are going to get crazy, so
you could hit any one of us by accident.”

“Right,” she said.

I was about to signal to Ajax and Ariabod, but Lou stopped
me.

“Wait, I want to say something first.”
 
If I didn’t know better, I would have said
she was about to cry.
 
Was she scared?
“You guys are my family, and I want you to know that.
 
I’d do anything for you.
 
If something ever happens... Well, I just
want to thank you and let you know you made me feel like I belong.”

Wes put his arm around her and said, “Sweetie, you do
belong, and ain’t nobody going nowhere.”

“You okay?” I asked her.

She nodded.

I gave her a smile and then turned to Ajax, “On the count
of three, throw me the egg.”

He grinned and nodded his massive head.

To the others, “There’s no going back when I count to
three.
 
They’re all going to come for
us.
 
Our worm will be first out of the
ground.
 
Once Lou shoots it, the rest of
us will each stab it twice as quickly as we can.
 
In, out, in, out, and then find high
ground.
 
Got it?”

“Not really,” Gordy said.

“What’s the problem?”

“How do you know our worm will be the first one out of the
ground?”

I thought about his question and then said, “Because it has
to be.”

I counted to three.

Ajax tossed me the egg.

I extended my arm in front of me straight and squeezed the
egg until it start screaming.

The ground shook.

A worm surfaced, and I almost jumped for joy when I saw the
half moon scar.

Lou fired her shot and hit the worm in its open mouth.
 

The rest of us lunged forward.
 
Stab. Stab.

Tyrone leapt up and grabbed a branch above him.

Gordy turned, took three steps, and jumped up in the lowest
crook of the tree that held the charred treehouse.

Wes joined him.

I kept stabbing.
 
I
wasn’t going to take the chance that the worm that killed my dog would survive.
I stabbed and I stabbed and I stabbed until the ground beneath me swirled. Then
I tossed the screaming egg as far away as I could.

We stood silently for a few brief seconds and let the
bedlam die down.
 
The worm was dead.
 
There was no question.

“We did it!” Gordy said.
 
“We killed it!
 
And we’re not
dead!”

The gorillas started whooping.
 
Tyrone swung off his branch and actually
laughed when he touched down on the ground.
 

“Lordy, Lordy, Lordy,” Wes said.

I turned to celebrate with Lou but she wasn’t there.
 
“Lou?”

The others settled down when they heard me call her name.

“Lou?”

“Where’d she go?” Wes asked.

Her crossbow and last arrow were lying on the ground where
I had seen her standing last.
 

“Lou?”

***

We looked for Lou until morning.
 
We had enough Myrmidon meat between us to
keep the worms away. But I would have looked for her even if we’d had to climb
through the trees all night.

I never took the time to dry off from my swim in the lake,
so I was cold as hell, but it didn’t matter to me.

It felt like we’d walked 100 square miles looking for her.
No one suggested we give up, not even Gordy.
 
I think he knew I would have beat him within an inch of his life if he
did.

We descended a hill and prepared to climb a steeper, bigger
hill on the other side of a small ravine, when the presence of three people at
the top of the hill caught us off guard.
 

“Oz Griffin?”

I recognized the voice.
 
The leader of the Ratty-Bobs.
 
“Yeah.”

“You the one killed all those Myrmidons?”

“Well, I helped it along.”

“And Bostic?”

“Had a hand in it, yeah.”

“Well, the Ratty-Bobs thank you.
 
We have enough jubilee meat for a year, and
we ain’t gotta go through Bostic for it. That’s a fine thing for us.”

“You want to pay me back,” I said.

There was a pause.
 
“If the price ain’t too steep.”

“I just need your help finding someone...”

“A girl?”

My heart skipped a beat.
 
“Yes, a girl.
 
Her name’s
Lou.
 
Have you seen her?”

“We have.
 
That’s why
we come to find you.”

I looked at the others.
 
We were all smiles.
 
“Is she all
right?
 
Where is she?”

“Gone.”

“Gone?
 
What do you mean
gone?”

“She moved on is what I mean. Says I’m to give you a
message.”

Our smiles were replaced with slack-jawed expressions.
 
“What message?”

“Go home.”

Eight

The snow drifted down softly at first.
 
It felt almost peaceful.
 
The cold air eventually turned damp and
bitter.
  
And then the snow fell in
sheets of stinging icy flakes.
 
We found
a small plot of land surrounded by mountain peaks that shielded us from the
raging three-day storm.

None of us knew where we were, and I didn’t particularly
care.
 
It had been a week since Lou
left.
 
I missed her, and hated her, and
understood why she left all at once.
  
If
I were in her shoes, I would have done the same thing.
 

But I wasn’t in her shoes.
 
I was in mine, and I wasn’t going to lose her. She was real.
 
I knew it.
 
I could see it as plain as day.
 
I
was going to find her and make her see what I saw.
 
That she had to be real.
 
I couldn’t feel this way about somebody who
wasn’t.
 

I sat on a fallen tree under a natural shelter of tangled
tree limbs that helped me stay relatively dry.
 
Tyrone and Wes were in the woods behind me rounding up wood for a
fire.
 
Thankfully, Wes had a couple of
lighters in his pocket.
 
They were about
the only supplies we had besides our one arrow and the crossbow.
 
Everything else was lost in the fire.
 
That meant we were all hungry.

Gordy sat next to me on the tree.
 
He was shivering and his teeth were
chattering up a storm.
 
“Cold.”