I managed to learn a few things from Billy. He didn’t want to tell me anything useful, but it is pretty hard to talk without eventually saying something useful. I have an idea about the direction of the city, and it is in that direction I set out, traveling through dense forest. Bucks usually sleep at night, so I can move without worrying too much about running into one or more of them.
This, it soon turns out, is my most successful escape yet. Probably because I don’t head back to my dome. Instead, I strike out in a new direction. I move as swiftly as I can, knowing Gruff will probably come after me if I cannot put enough distance between us and make myself completely untraceable.
Night turns into day, and the forest I am traveling through starts to get wet, and sparse. The types of trees change from dense, lush bushes and towering trunks to an entirely different kind of foliage. I have reached the boundary of a new biome.
These wetlands are expansive. I cannot see the end of them from where I stand. They are also, I discover after poking the ground with a very long stick that slides into the gluggy mud and then keeps going, clearly the sort of place where one can risk being stuck in a bog and then sucked down and forever.
It’s not exactly a nice place. It is brown and smelly, aside from some places where quite beautiful willow type trees send delicate fronds everywhere like an embarrassed housewife trying to tidy up at the last minute with some nice throws.
Fortunately, someone has taken the time to construct what seems like a very serviceable series of literal bridges that run between the tufts of what must be drier and more stable land. Day has begun to break, and I am able to see my path much more clearly. Looks like I’m going to be working my way over dozens of these bridges if I’m to have any hope at all of reaching the other side.
I start over them, glad for the fact that this is clearly an area where wild bucks are going to steer clear. They can’t come leaping out of the bog, anyway. They have to…
Suddenly, I hear the sound of heavy cloven hooves before I see the buck they belong to. One of the trees blocked our vision of one another until we both find ourselves at opposite ends of perhaps the largest bridge in the bog.
He is a tall white buck with curling horns that extend out to the side quite a ways. He is wearing a blue uniform of some kind, one that makes him look official. Either a postman or a soldier. Either way, he does not look pleased to see me.
“Pest!”
Yeah. That tells me all I need to know about the way he is perceiving me. He comes across the bridge not at a clip-clop, but at a clippety-clop, a veritable thunder of hooves trying to get me. I reach for my weapon, but the butt of it tangles in the strap of my pack, which I had hung to one side to get a snack from a few minutes ago. Fuck. These are the precious seconds that make the difference between life and death. Now I am fighting an inanimate object whose strapping suddenly feels like the vengeful tentacles of a monster who wants nothing more than to see me trampled and butted to death by an angry buck.
There is a sound. A sound between a roar and a glug. The sort of primeval sound that nobody has ever heard and yet everybody instantly recognizes as pure danger. The wood beneath my feet starts to vibrate and dance. I leap back just as the bridge splinters, and a beast rises from the waters of the bog. It is leviathan in size, it is green and scaly, and it has the most terrifying two golden slits of pure loathing in its yellowed eyes.
The caprine buck who was trying to kill me does not have the same chance to jump back. He was not at the end of the bridge. He was right in the middle, and then he was thrown up into the air with the force of the troll’s appearance, grabbed around the midsection by a single hand, and bitten in two. He doesn’t have a chance to make a sound as it dies. There’s no screaming or flailing. There’s just being, and then very suddenly, not being.
I run. I run with the speed reserves only someone fleeing for their life has at their disposal. The world turns into a blur of bridges and bog. I can hear the troll roaring behind me, and the sound spurs me on. It took me at least an hour or two to come this far into the bog, but I leave it in what feels like under fifteen minutes.
I burst out into the sunshine, solid ground, grass and….
Aw, fuck, it is still following me, and I can no longer keep running. I am exhausted and on the verge of physical collapse. I suppose I am going to have to come to terms with the fact that this is how my life ends. I am going to be eaten, and it is all my fault.
The troll stands at the edge of the bog, also panting and out of breath. I suppose trolls must be largely sedentary. The energy it must take to drag a body as large as that from the muddy grip of the water must be, well, I can understand why he eats bucks whole with those sharp fangs of his.
“Wait,” he says. “You dropped this.”
He hands me back my bag. It is covered in slime and goo, and I doubt the contents will ever be the same, but the gesture is more than kind.
“Thank you,” I say, astonished. “This is so nice of you.”
“I am nice,” the troll says. That statement would hold more weight if he didn’t currently have bits of buck spread down his front, fur and a trace of horn sticking out the corner of his lips as if he downed the beast as a snack. He sees me looking and wipes his mouth with the back of his massive, scaled hand, then grasps the horn which he proceeds to use as toothpick on some of the most devastatingly sharp and white teeth I’ve ever seen.
“You’re not a pest,” he says, conversationally. “You’re a human.”
“Yes!” I say, surprised. “I am a human. I didn’t know you knew humans.”
“Everybody knows humans,” he says. I guess everybody does actually seem to know what humans are. Nobody on this planet has seemed to be surprised by me at all.
“This area is not safe for you,” he says. “Where are you staying?”
I swallow. I don’t want to lie to a troll that I just saw eat a buck alive. But I also don’t want to take a troll back to Gruff’s house, in case he eats Gruff, and all his goats, including Strumpet.
“I…er…”
The troll takes a knee in front of me. This allows him to look at me more closely. Not quite eye to eye, but with fewer yards between our respective ocular sites. It is like seeing into the soul of a true beast. I don’t know what he truly is, or how he knows what I am. A creature that lives in a bog on a distant alien planet should not have any concept of humanity.
“How do you know what I am?”
“I’ve met humans before. Didn’t like them. Ate them.”