The Scrolls of Gideon by Sonya Bateman

Author:Sonya Bateman [Bateman, Sonya]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2018-03-27T22:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 24

“Nasty overgrown fish!” Dom shouted as he sighted his gun on the mermaid and fired. Its head exploded in a burst of black ichor, and the rest of it thumped and writhed on the ground for a minute before it finally stilled.

As the rolling echo of the shot bounced along the canyon, faint sounds washed up from behind us. Someone screaming, an answering shout, an abrupt crack.

Before I could figure out what those noises were, a more immediate problem presented itself. Quick scuffling sounds from the derelict ships around us, and more of those keening shrieks like I’d heard from the mermaid I electrocuted. Except those cries weren’t pain — they were anger.

There were more of them down here. A lot more than one.

“Damn these things!” Mr. Wilt said as three of them burst through the rotting side of a simple wood boat to the left of us. He started firing, and Dom unslung the scope rifle he’d been carrying across his back, aiming at movement that was a good hundred yards ahead. A single shot from the rifle stopped whatever it was cold.

The bastard was a damned good shot.

I shuffled back toward the rotting trawler as the two of them played whack-a-mermaid, hoping to find something I could use for a makeshift club or a knife. If any of those creatures came at me, I had nothing to stop them with.

After a minute or so of frantic searching, I spotted a big, thick wooden oar that had cracked just below the blade. I grabbed it, rested the edge of the blade on the ground at an angle, and stomped on the crack. The flat end broke off and the oar snapped partway down the handle, leaving me with basically a six-foot wooden stake.

More screams and shouts echoed faintly down the corridor from the direction where we’d left the rest of them. Damn it, something was wrong back there. It killed me that I couldn’t do a damned thing about it. But I fully intended to, once we weren’t being attacked by mermaids.

I staggered back a few steps from the trawler, trying to regain my bearings. Before I could reorient myself and head back toward the assholes who’d kill my friends if they thought I was escaping, something grabbed my leg. And sharp teeth bit into my thigh.

I screamed and reacted instinctively by driving a fist into the mermaid’s face.

The blow loosened its bite, and it bubbled something that almost sounded like words. I raised the broken oar over my head with both hands and drove it into the mermaid’s chest with a sickening wet crunch, pinning it to the ground.

The mermaid screamed piercingly, a sound that dwindled to nothing as black blood gushed from its chest and left it frozen in death.

I tried to catch my breath for a minute and get a look at my leg. My pants were shredded where the damned thing bit me, and blood had soaked through the material all the way down to my ankle.

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