Killer of Enemies by Joseph Bruchac

Author:Joseph Bruchac [Bruchac, Joseph]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-62014-144-1
Publisher: Lee & Low Books
Published: 2013-08-22T22:47:00+00:00

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

A Simple Plan

As I walk along the wall, never taking my eyes off the ruined panorama of the thousand acre serpentarium below me, I’m wondering if my idea is going to work.

“Sometimes the simplest plan is the best.” That is what Dad told me.

But is my plan so simple that it is just plain stupid? How could something that big move that fast? I hadn’t expected that. Somehow, in my mind, I’d pictured the giant gemod anaconda as being slow, ponderous. But the creature I’ve just seen and narrowly escaped is far different from that. Rather than bloated and fat, its huge body is rippled with muscle and it moved as sudden and deadly as the snap of a steel trap. And then there is the intelligence that I read in its cat-like eye as it studied me through the doorway.

A shiver goes down my back again at the thought of that measuring gaze. That last look it gave me before it suddenly whipped its head out of sight. It was not an angry or frustrated look. I could feel that. Instead it was a look that seemed almost amused, a knowing, self-confident, arrogant stare.

And the thought came to me then, just as it returns to me now, that even though I have a plan to kill it, the giant snake has a plan of its own that ends with me down its gullet.

But what could the snake’s plan be? Although the great snake is even bigger than I had expected—the result, I suppose, of consuming uncounted tons of other cold-blooded main courses, as well as the unfortunate populations of nearby towns—it still is not large enough to reach up to the top of this wall. Its weight is so immense that even with its great strength, lifting more than a third of its two-hundred-foot body shouldn’t be possible. And the inner side of the ring wall around Big Ranch is still as concave and glassy smooth as it was when it was first made. The only ways up to the top of the wall are almost certainly no wider than the staircase I just took—relatively narrow entrances, tunnels, and stairways.

Does that means I’m safe up here? Maybe. But I am also still trapped. And I have only enough water in my canteens to last me for a few days at most. I could go back down that stairway and try to make a run for it. But that may be what Super Snake is expecting as it lies in wait.

Not only that, I would be leaving a trail for it to follow. Right back to Haven, whose walls are far from impregnable to something that big. I can only guess at why it didn’t follow the survivors of the Dreamer’s last expedition—perhaps it was sated enough with their friends that the trail went cold before it attempted to do so. Much as I hate to admit it, selfish as the Dreamer’s primary motive may have been for sending

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