Banshee Worm King: Book Five of the Oz Chronicles (24 page)

My hand slipped inside the mound.
 
The opening.
 
Something slid across my head.
 
I
pulled myself inside the mound and scrambled to find the air pocket Max told me
would be there.
 
Please, don’t let him be
wrong, I begged.
 
My hand broke the
surface, and I rushed to get my head above water, spitting and coughing as I
did.
 
My lungs burned as I breathed in
and out deeply.
 

I wiped my eyes and saw little points of light, what my
grandpa would have called seeing stars.
 
I found my footing and to my surprise discovered that I was walking up
an incline.
 
When I got knee high in the
water, I fell to my hands and knees and crawled until I could fall on my back
with my head out of the water.
 
I blinked
and tried to adjust my eyes to the darkness.
 
After several seconds, I could make out the curve of the mound.
 
It was as if I was inside a dome looking up
at the ceiling.
 
A few more seconds
passed and I sat up.
 
Over my shoulder, I
saw a pile of rocks the size of baseballs.
 
They were perfectly round.
 
The
eggs.
 
They had to be.
 
Fresh lays.
 
I wiggled out of my backpack.
 

They were slimy and soft.
 
It felt almost as if they would break apart in my hand, but they were
amazingly durable at the same time. Shivering from the intense cold, I placed
eight eggs in the pack.
 
Once I zipped it
shut, I heard a clicking sound.
 
The worm
was coming from overhead.

I looked up and stared through the darkness.
 
I saw it.
 
Something was crawling on the ceiling.
 
It had a long skinny body and a white head. A climber.
 
I saw more movement.
 
A dozen climbers over my head.

I scrambled down the ramp and submerged into the water,
holding on tightly to my backpack.
 
I
didn’t take a good enough breath.
 
There
was no way I could make it to the surface.
 
I held my head high out of the water and was in the process of working
up a deep breath when one of the climbers jumped into the water.
 
I quickly went under and swam towards the
opening.
 
The climber grabbed onto my leg
and scratched me.
 
I kicked frantically
and swam out of the opening to the mound.
 

The Banshee bumped me and nearly knocked the backpack out
of my hand.
 
I stopped swimming and
floated slowly up.
 
The worm bumped me
again. As long as I didn’t respond, it didn’t seem to know where I was.

Several seconds passed and it appeared the Banshee had
moved out of the area.
 
I had no idea
where the climbers were or if they could alert the guarder that I was in the
area, but I didn’t plan on sticking around to find out.
 
I swam to the surface and managed to break
through the chop without running into the worm again.

“There he is,” Max said.
 
“Got the eggs?”

I held the pack out of the water.

“Good.
 
Got both your
arms?”

I held my free hand out of the water.

“Good.
 
We’ll take
stock of the rest of you when get on shore.”

I worked my arms through the straps of the backpack and
started my slow swim to the shore.

A small white mass broke through the surface, followed by
another and another.
 
The climbers.
 
They formed a circle around me, and I readied
myself for an attack on all sides.
 
They
didn’t move.
 
I fooled myself into
thinking they were going to let me pass, that they had just developed their
bodies and they were venturing out into the world for the first time, but I was
wrong.
 

They all started slapping the surface of the water with the
palms of their new hands.
 
They slapped
harder with each whack of the water.
 
They were letting the guarder know where I was.
 
I couldn’t afford to take it slow.
 
I pushed myself forward and swam like there
was no tomorrow.
 
Water was kicking up
behind me.
 
It looked like the wake of a
small prop engine.
 

I felt the water rising behind me.
 
A quick peek over my shoulder revealed the
worm swimming towards me like an alligator on top of the water.
 
It was on the other side of the lake, but
once it snaked its entire body behind it, I was done for.

“You best swim,” Max said.
 

I wanted to scream out what do you think I’m doing, you
idiot, but I couldn’t afford to take the time or energy to do so.
 
As it was, the backpack was slowing me
down.
 
I wasn’t a great swimmer, but I
could hold my own.
 
I was certain that if
I didn’t have the backpack full of eggs I would have been on the shore by now.

What was going to happen when or if I got on shore was
another matter.
 
I had eight Banshee eggs
with a giant Banshee worm chasing me.
 
Plus there was a group of climbers that probably weren’t going to just
let us walk off with the eggs.
 
Getting
on land more than likely wouldn’t end my problems.

I pushed those questions out of my mind and concentrated
all my efforts on swimming.
 
My arms felt
like lead weights, and my thighs burned.
 

“He done went under,” Max said.
 

I hated the play-by-play.
 
I wanted him to just shut up.
 
My
fingers scraped the bottom of the lake.
 
Shallow water.
 
I somehow
increased my speed and eventually placed a foot on the lake bottom and stumbled
out of the water.
 

The worm exploded straight up out of the water a good
twenty feet.
 
It let out an ear piercing
bellow and then fell backwards back into the lake.
 

“How many did you get?” Max asked.

“Eight,” I said almost completely out of breath.
 
I turned and twisted desperately working my
arms free from the backpack.

Max grabbed it and opened it.
 

I started to get dressed.

“Ain’t no time for that,” Max said.
 
“The guarder just ratted you out.”

“What?”

“He let every Banshee from here to Knoxville know that you
stole their babies.”
 

He pulled out an egg.
 
“Where’s your knife?”

I pointed to the backpack.
 
“Side pocket.”

He opened the pocket and found the knife.
 

The climbers had made it to shallow waters.

“You and the hairy fella remember your way back to the
Myrmidon camp?”

I was shaking almost uncontrollably as I picked up my
belongings. “Yeah.”

“Well get going then.”

“What about you?”

“There’s only one thing that’s going to get them worms and
climbers off your behind.”
 
He held up an
egg and poked it with the knife.

The egg let out a squeal like a piglet.

“A screaming egg.”

The climbers shifted their direction toward him.
 

Max took off running.
 
“Get moving, boys.
 
When this
thing dies out I can’t give you no more cover.”
 
He stuck the egg again and it let out another scream.

***

We heard the high-pitched scream of the Banshee egg for 30
minutes.
 
The sound of it carried for
miles.
 
Ajax and I ran to the top of the
hill overlooking the lake before I begged him to stop so I could get
dressed.
 
I was so cold I felt like my
insides were frozen solid.
 
Unfortunately, putting on my clothes didn’t provide much relief.
 

I gathered up my crossbow and arrows, and assured Ajax I
was ready to go even though my legs were stiff.
 
He picked up the backpack and looped one of his massive arms through the
strap. I thought of insisting that he let me carry it, but I couldn’t bring
myself to do it.
 
I was just too weak and
tired.
 

We started down a game trail when I noticed something was
missing.
 
“The jubilee meat is gone.”

The Banshee egg let out another scream.

“What do you know?
 
That Ratty-Bob stole our meat.”
 
Another scream.
 
“Guess he earned
it. I just hope the screaming egg keeps the Banshees away.”

We trekked through the mountains for the next hour and a
half.
 
My legs had gone from stiff to
numb.
 
If I hadn’t seen them attached to
my body, I wouldn’t even have known I had legs.
 
I fell more than I can remember.
 
Each time, Ajax helped me up with his huge hands.
 

I fell one more time and said, “I can’t go any farther,
Ajax.
 
Not without resting.”
 

He dragged me to the nearest large tree and propped me up
against it.
 

I was shivering more violently than before.
 
The wind had picked up and blew the cold
right through me.
 
“Wonder how Max is
doing?”

We heard a cracking sound from the bottom of the
mountain.
 
It put us on edge, but no
other sounds followed it so we decided it was just the wind breaking a dead
branch.

“Speaking of sounds,” I said, “and I really hate to bring
this up, but we haven’t heard that egg scream in almost twenty minutes.”
 

Ajax grunted and moved in closer to me to keep me
warm.
 

I felt myself starting to shut down.
 
The more I tried to control my shaking, the
worse I shook.
 
I couldn’t stop my teeth
from chattering.
 
The light of the
afternoon seemed to be pulsating from bright to dim.
 

Ajax moved in even closer.
 
He reached out and pulled me into his chest, wrapping his arms around
me.
 
It was a bear hug from a gorilla.

“I can’t do it, Ajax.”
 
I was talking without knowing what I was really saying.

He rubbed my back.

“I can’t protect everyone.
 
I only want to protect her.”

I didn’t know it at the time, but there were more noises
coming from the valley below us.
 
Ajax
became increasingly nervous with each crack, whack, and rumble.

“I know that’s wrong.
 
I know I’m supposed to fix what I’ve done, but I can’t do that if fixing
it means she goes away.”

A tree fell a few hundred yards away and Ajax turned
quickly to face the woods.
 
Something was
coming and he knew it.
 
He grabbed me by
my arm and dragged me up to the lowest limb on the tree.
 
After retrieving an egg, he passed the
backpack up to me, and motioned for me to climb higher.
 

I shimmied up to the next limb with a great deal of
difficulty and rested in the crook of the tree.
 
“I can’t go any higher, Ajax.”
 
He
roared, urging me to keep climbing, but I just couldn’t do it.

The tree started to shake from the bottom up.
 
I nearly fell off the limb, but grabbed onto
the trunk while desperately holding onto the backpack.
 

A worm surfaced thirty feet away and slithered along the
trunk of a tree.
 
Ajax banged the egg on
the ground and it squealed.
 
The worm
immediately took notice.
 
It shifted its
body in Ajax’s direction and dove underneath the ground.
 

Ajax bounded back down the mountain with the worm chasing
him.
 
I knew what was going on, but I
couldn’t make sense of why it was going on.
 
I thought Ajax had gone crazy.
 
It
didn’t hit me until some minutes later that he was leading the worm away from
me.
 
He was doing what Max had done.
 
I dropped down off the tree and felt a
stabbing pain in my injured knee.
 
In
addition, my numbness had turned into millions of imaginary needles pricking my
entire lower body.
 
I was a hot mess of
agony, but Ajax was risking his life so I could continue on to the Myrmidon
camp.
 
I wasn’t about to let anything
keep me from making it.
 
I’d make it even
if it meant losing my arm to do it.
 
She
was depending on me.
 
I wasn’t going to
lose her.
 
Not to the Myrmidons, and not
by finding a way back home.
 
This was my
life now. Running from and fighting horrible monsters.
 
I’d happily put up with it if it meant I got
to keep her in my life.