Half-Off Ragnarok
Page 62

I stared, caught between horror and awe. “It’s beautiful.”
The cockatrice was about the size of a wild turkey, with a pointed, reptilian head that shared more attributes with a small predatory dinosaur than it did with a modern bird. Its teeth were a jagged sea of points and tearing surfaces, and its only concession to a beak was the hardened “egg tooth”-like scale on the very tip of its snout. It would use that egg tooth-like protrusion to chip away petrifaction inside the bodies of its victims. The feathers started about halfway down its neck, brown and green with hints of yellow, and continued all the way down its birdlike body to the long whip of its serpentine tail. The feathers on its tail-tip were shockingly red. It opened its wings and flapped them in a threat display, revealing more red feathers. Only its leathery wings were completely devoid of plumage. It didn’t advance, and none of the other cockatrice came down to join it.
With the trapdoor in the ceiling open, I could finally get an accurate count. There were fifteen cockatrice in the room. That was fifteen cockatrice too many.
“We’re not missing any, if that was going to be your next question,” said Walter, reaching down and picking up the cockatrice that was currently trying to intimidate us. It hissed and struck at his arm. He responded by wrapping one big hand around its muzzle, effectively removing the threat of its teeth. It locked eyes with him, continuing to stare as it waited for him to turn to stone. Cockatrice aren’t very bright.
“This is . . . a lot of cockatrice,” I said, trying to mask my discomfort. It wasn’t working.
“We’d have more if we could get them to breed,” said Walter. “Cockatrice meat can be quite tasty, and their eggs work well in anything that you’d use chicken eggs for.”
“Pass,” said Shelby instantly.
Walter snorted, sounding more amused than annoyed. “Can’t get them to breed, though, no matter how much we try. I’m starting to think it’s a matter of space—they want more territory before they’re willing to reproduce. As it stands, we have to buy new pullets every time we eat one.”
“How much do they taste like chicken?” It was an odd question, on the surface of things. It was also a serious one. People say that everything tastes like chicken, but they’re quite wrong. Rattlesnake, for example, is spicy even if prepared with no seasonings at all, and goat tastes more like venison than anything else that people regularly farm.
“I don’t know,” said Walter. “What does chicken taste like?”
That was the answer I was afraid of. “I’m sorry to have to be the one to tell you this,” I said, “but someone’s been stealing your cockatrice.”
Silence reigned . . . but only for a moment. Shelby put up her hand while the gorgons were still staring at me and asked, in a small voice, “Could we maybe have the earth-shaking revelations somewhere that isn’t in the coop filled with demon chickens? Because I come from the deadliest place on the planet, and these things are giving me the heebie-jeebies.”
Walter blinked at her. Then, ruefully, he laughed.
“All right,” he said. “Let’s take this inside.”
Walter’s home was quite nice, and would have fit right into most Amish farmsteads, as long as they were willing to overlook the terrified cage of fancy mice in his pantry, next to the potatoes. He saw me looking and closed the pantry door.
“Every man’s allowed his little vices,” he said, in a challenging tone. “I trade for them with the community.”
“White mice taste better,” said Dee. She smiled at me, a slightly frayed air behind her apparent cheerfulness. She didn’t like being here, on the fringe, in the home of a man who represented an ideology she didn’t believe in. But she was trying, and I respected that.
“I’ll take your word for that,” I said, and turned back to Walter. “When did you begin keeping cockatrice?”
“Three years ago,” he said. “We get them from a family of Bigfoot who live upstate. They trap cockatrice for us, we give them organic produce. They’re very fond of ‘organic.’ I didn’t know most people grew inorganic tomatoes.”
Lecturing this man on the local and organic food movement seemed like a bad idea. Instead, I nodded, and asked, “When did you start trying to breed them?”
“Right from the beginning. It hasn’t worked yet, but we keep trying.” He shot a poisonous glare at Frank, the snakes on his head stirring themselves to hiss. “It might go faster if we could get some books on animal husbandry to reference.”
“Buy them yourselves,” snapped Frank. “Or get on the Internet and order them like normal people.”
“You’re allowing human culture to corrupt you,” Walter snapped back.
“You want human books. How is that any different?”
“We don’t need them!” Now the snakes atop both men’s heads were standing erect, hissing loudly and showing their fangs.
“You may not need human things, but you’re both doing an excellent job of embarrassing yourselves in front of the humans,” said Dee quietly. The men turned to look at her. “This isn’t their fight. Perhaps we should stop providing them with a free demonstration of why it’s ours.”
“Ah.” Walter leaned back in his seat, composing his expression. His snakes kept hissing, but otherwise stood down. “My apologies to our guests.”
“But not to your brother-in-law?” asked Frank.
“No, Franklin. Never to you.” Walter looked to me. “Why do you think we are so incompetent as to have lost a cockatrice?”
“I don’t think you were incompetent,” I said, trying not to react to the revelation that Dee was Walter’s sister. “I think you were tricked. If you don’t know what chicken tastes like . . . the bones are similar. It would be easy to purchase a chicken or small turkey at a grocery store, make soup, and claim that it was cockatrice. With enough wild garlic and onion, the flavor would be even more confused. You’d never know. The count in your aviary would remain accurate, and whoever hatched the plan would be free to do what they liked with the cockatrice.”
“None of my people would enter your city, or attack in such a vulgar way.”
“No. But they might be willing to trade a cockatrice for something they wanted and couldn’t otherwise have.”