The Lost War, Karl Gallagher [recommended reading txt] 📗

foot length of intestine and squeezed it empty with her gloved hands. Nothing. She tossed the empty sausage casing into the new basin and chose another.

The fourth one had a worm in it. That she squeezed into the small box, along with some blood. The worms turned to feasting on the deer blood.

Some of the parasites were smart enough to hide under the tubes instead of inside them. They’d have to wait until last.

“Oh, ewww!” squealed one of the hunters.

Lady Burnout turned to her sample box. Two of the parasites were eating the third, one biting just behind the head, the other working on the tail.

“Interesting. Obligate sibliphagy,” she said.

“What?”

“They eat each other until only one is left. That’s why Belladonna only had one in her. It was the survivor.”

“Ewww,” said the hunter again.

“There’s stuff just as nasty on our planet.” Lady Burnout tossed another worm into the small plastic arena. “Do you find any partially eaten deer carcasses?”

“Yeah. Well, how partial? There are ones with enough bits on the bones you can tell they’re freshly dead.”

“Any with just the belly eaten out?” asked Burnout.

“That part’s always gone. It’s softest. But there’s always more than that eaten.”

“Of course. The surviving offspring feeds on the host for as long as it can.”

The hunter looked puzzled. “Didn’t Belladonna’s . . . parasite run off right away?”

“Yes, because there were strange creatures acting in a threatening manner. Which means these things are born smart enough to make threat assessments as well as fast enough to escape.”

“That’s scary.”

***

Butchering a deer was a straightforward process for the hunters. They’d had enough practice to efficiently separate out the edible portions. The definition of edible was stretched to the limit to provide all the food they could.

Lady Burnout’s current project was less elegant. Her subject lay on a board between two tree stumps, shaded by the edge of the forest. Instead of extracting the parasites from the latest “wormy” deer she was trying to follow the trail of damage they’d left in the intestines. Figuring out their behavior should let her devise new treatments for Strongarm. So far, she’d just wound up wondering why the poor son of a bitch wasn’t dead of peritonitis.

“My lady, we found something that might interest you.”

Burnout looked up from the carcass she was dissecting. Leadsmith had a tense look on his face. She followed him to the butchering station.

“This one doesn’t have a worm, it’s some big critter inside it. I hit it by sheer luck.”

The deer carcass was suspended by the neck. Leadsmith pivoted it to face the interesting part toward Lady Burnout. An arrow stood in the beast’s belly. A handspan away something poked out of a tear in the hide.

“That’s certainly a parasite,” she said. “Thank you.”

Before trying to extract the creature she wiggled the arrow to check for reaction. Nope, it was as dead as it looked.

“Hold on to the arrow as I cut,” she told Leadsmith. “I don’t want it falling out.”

The watching hunters held the deer steady as Burnout opened the hide with a scalpel. This parasite was at least ten times thicker than the ones she’d found before. The maw held sharp triangular teeth. Where she wiped blood or other fluids off, the skin exposed was green.

“Damn, I wish I’d saved some gloves for later,” she muttered.

Cutting open intestines was messy. She stepped back to wait for the dripping to stop. Then she resumed cutting, exposing the rest of the parasite. Two arms were folded against the torso. The lower torso tapered into a tail. The arrow was stuck in the ribcage.

Lady Burnout nudged Leadsmith aside. Some leverage on the arrow let her slide the parasite out of the deer.

“Ugly,” muttered a hunter. The others agreed.

She had to agree. In full sunlight it was hideous. The small eyes sat over a mouth fixed in a dead snarl. The head reminded her of . . .

“I need to check something. Don’t dispose of the carcass. I want to examine the extent of damage to it. Move it to my dissection table if you need to.”

“Yes, milady,” said Leadsmith.

The chirurgeon was already marching across the field of stumps between the woods and the camp. Two guards stood at the gate, hands resting on the hilts of their rapiers.

They were flanked by a pair of wooden stakes with orc heads impaled on them. Lady Burnout held her specimen up to one for comparison.

Triangular teeth, check.

The skin was different shades of green.

The orc’s eyes were protected by a bony ridge. Burnout had to press her fingertips to the creature’s face to find its equivalent.

The ears were in similar spots on the side of the skull.

Orcs, of course, were bipedal. Burnout palpated the parasite’s tail. The hips were easy to find. The lower tail held two sets of bones in parallel.

Lady Burnout stepped back to pull her thoughts in order. The big parasite was clearly a transitional form between the little worms and whatever the thing was that burst out of Belladonna’s body.

She winced at a memory of a black claw cutting from the inside. Then she checked the hands of the parasite. Pressing on the fingertips found a needle-sharp point on each one.

Which made Belladonna’s thing a transitional form to . . . Burnout looked at the severed head. No. She needed more data before leaping to that conclusion.

The guards were watching Burnout as a distraction from the boredom of their long shift. When she snapped her gaze to them they braced to attention.

“I have a message for Count Dirk. I need orc bodies to dissect. At least four.”

“Yes, my lady!” blurted a guard. He ran through the gate.

***

“Hey, Newman, catch,” said Deadeye.

Newman was almost at his