Rain Flower’s arm hung limply, sandwiched between two of the thickest coils. The fingers were no longer moving.
Jak wriggled a little, gripping the python as if he were riding a starfishing bronco, giving himself leverage with his left arm. The short-bladed knife was in his right hand.
“The eyes!” Ryan shouted.
But the boy didn’t need to be told.
The little blade pecked the sight from the right eye of the snake, darting instantly at the other side of the flat skull, pricking out the left eye.
Jak pressed the point home as hard as he could, clear liquid, tinted pink, running over his hand and down his arm.
The mutie serpent reared, fifteen, twenty feet from the floor of the forest, its head shaking to and fro with a dreadful violence, trying to dislodge the thing that had brought bright pain and a cloaking darkness.
“Let go and jump, kid!” the Armorer called.
But Jak wasn’t finished.
Merely blinding the reptile wasn’t going to be good enough. He wanted it dead.
Jak worked the sharp point deeper and deeper into the ruined eye, until he was wrist deep in the armored socket, driving the knife back through the optic nerve into the primitive brain of the great snake.
“Get ready to try and snatch the girl if it lets her go,” Ryan yelled.
The lines were going down, the snake losing control of its own enormous fifty-foot-long body. Its tail thrashed from side to side uprooting a sturdy live oak as though it were matchwood.
“Loosening, I do believe,” shouted Doc, who’d bravely moved closer to the part of the serpent that was holding the unconscious young native woman.
“Gaia!” Krysty screamed to Jak. “Let go of it and save yourself!”
The snake’s death throes were stupendous, making the floor of the forest tremble. Its tail lashed out, demolishing the remnants of the guardhouse, snapping the red-and-white pole into shards of rusted metal.
As it fought against the coming of endless night, the python’s coils relaxed, leaving the unconscious body of Rain Flower to tumble to the dirt. She lay limp and still, blood trickling from nose, mouth and ears. Doc was fastest, stooping beneath the thrashing scaled loops, whipping the native girl up into his arms and scampering with surprising speed away from the scene of death, toward the others.
“Well done,” Ryan yelled. “Carry her well out the way. God knows how long it’s going to take for this mutie bastard to buy the farm.”
The writhing creature twice reared up to a phenomenal height, way above the lower branches of the taller trees. But still Jak clung, both arms and legs wrapped around the part of the body just below the blinded head.
Rain Flower blinked open her eyes, staring around in bewilderment. She whispered something in her own tongue, eyes widening, seeing the white-haired teenager riding the sky lanes with the dying monster.
“No!” she screamed, and passed out again.
The end came with a startling abruptness. Jak’s knife finally probed through to the forepart of the mutie snake’s brain and killed it.
One moment it had been reared up high, hissing, jaws working, frothing green spittle seeping over its bright scales. Then it fell like a tumbling redwood, shaking the earth again, flinging the albino from his hold, sending him rolling over and over into a stand of white lilies.
Doc stayed with Rain Flower, while the others ran toward Jak.
The teenager was standing up, examining a deep bruise on his right elbow, rubbing at it.
“You all right?” asked Ryan, the first one to reach him.
Jak half smiled back at him, blinking. “Eyes don’t work too good. Shaken around. Big son of a double bitch, wasn’t it? How’s girl?”
“Fine. Passed out when she saw you riding the back of the beast,” Mildred said. “You sure you’re all right, Jak? No bites at all?”
“I was too low and behind it for that. Couldn’t reach. Tried. Failed.”
Dean picked bits of grass and leaves from Jak’s back and hair. “That was the hottest pipe I ever saw,” he said breathlessly. “Thought you was done.”
“I thought same,” Jak replied, ruffling the boy’s dark curly hair. “Like riding tree in flume. No control. Had to hang on. Follow. No other way.”