Lost Cipher by Michael Oechsle

Author:Michael Oechsle
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Albert Whitman & Company
Published: 2016-05-12T17:37:41+00:00

CHAPTER 19

Lucas started to withdraw his hand, as slow as possible, but the snake was already poised to strike. It tried to slither backward but had no room to escape. It kept its head pointed straight at the fingers that had invaded its mossy bed.

Lucas gasped. He pressed his face against the rock, thinking that hiding part of himself from the snake would calm it down. With his head turned downstream, he began to slowly ease his hand of the ledge, imaging the snake’s fangs sinking into his fingers at any moment. From behind him, Lucas heard George whisper frantically, “Alex! No!”

Lucas turned just in time to see Alex swinging a flat rock down on the snake.

Alex aimed for the snake’s wide head, but his blow hit mostly rock and sent a tiny splinter of stone bouncing off Lucas’s forehead.

The stunned snake flattened itself against the ledge, a drop of blood on its neck. It pulsed with anger and frantically wriggled the tip of its tail like a rattler, a sure sign it would strike. But Alex was already raising the rock for another blow.

“No! Leave it!” Lucas yelled, but it was too late.

Alex brought the rock down again, and the snake struck his hand.

Jerking away, Alex lost his balance. He tilted back from the boulder, grabbing for it, but kept falling. With one foot, he pushed away from the rock, trying to make a clean jump, but there was no safe place to land in the jumble of jagged boulders and shallow water below. Lucas heard a sickening snap when Alex landed.

“Aaaagh! ” Alex toppled over onto a rock and grabbed at his ankle. He looked frantically up at the others on the ledge. “Where’d the snake go?” he yelled, his face twisted into a mask of pain.

“It’s up here still, right next to my foot!” hissed George. Lucas looked down. The snake had dropped to the ledge between them and coiled up again. Its eyes were angry yellow slits, and its black tongue flicked in and out rapidly, probing the air for the predator it had just bitten. Its head was bloodied.

George started to scurry backward, muttering a string of curse words.

“Just freeze!” hollered Lucas. “Don’t move! It’s a copperhead. Let it calm down and it’ll leave.”

George stopped moving, but Lucas could hear his breath coming in gasps.

Finally, after what seemed like forever, the snake slowly uncoiled. It wriggled off the ledge and disappeared beneath the boulders, leaving spots of blood on the rock. Lucas figured it would be dead before long.

He started working his way down the rock to his injured friend. “It’s gone,” he told Alex. “How bad are you hurt?”

Alex was sitting on a rock, sucking hard on the side of his hand and spitting. He stopped and used his good hand to cradle the one with the bite. When he looked up at the other boys, his face had gone pale, and his eyes had a lost look that made him seem very small.

“I think it got me,” he said.

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