The Python Breaks

Prologue

            Louis “Heck” Metz stood staring  at the red glow of cooling lava through the  skylight of a la      va tube.  “Skylight” being the term volcanologists use to describe the hole created in the top of a lava tube when the roof partially collapses.

            Hebe Gittings stepped up to where his friend stood, stripped his pack off, withdrew a canteen, took a pull.

            “What ‘chu lookin’ at?” he asked, wiping his mouth off.

            “’At’s damn hot down there, “ Heck said, tossing a pebble through the skylight.

            “You think there’s any damn diamonds out here?” Hebe asked, waving his canteen at the smoking lava flows.

            Heck withdrew a canteen from its holster at his side.  He hitched up the army surplus web belt over his gut. “Well sir, mah second cousin Emmylou works at th’ hospital, an’ the word was when they brung th’ Indian—Two Feathers—in, somebody’d bored a hole in his skull an’ nen covered it with a sheet  a’ diamond. Swore was it was a tribe ah prehistoric Indians did th’ drilling, an’ they had piles an’ piles ah diamonds. Emmylou herself saw th’ plate—looked like a sheet ah clear glass, she said, like somebody’d installed a winder in his haid.”

            “Mebbeso,” Hebe said, “even if all ‘at’s true, I don’t know how th’ hell we’ll find anything under all iss lava.”

            “Me neither,” Heck said, sitting cross-legged on a sheet of fresh basalt, properly called pahoehoe lava.

            “Where’s Doobie?” Hebe asked. He sat down next to Heck.

             “I dunno,”  Heck said. “Last I seen him, he dropped on in ‘at gulley right over there.  Said he’d circle around an’ meet us yonder by ‘at cone.” He nodded at a small ocher cinder cone about a hundred yards away.  The lava field  where they sat was congested with blocks of lava, called  “floating blocks,” that sailed on top of the moving lava flow.  Some of them were big as pick-up trucks.

            From where they sat, they could look in any direction five or ten miles and see nothing but black, basaltic flow, a’a rubble, or a mixture of the two, with the huge floating blocks.  The a’a rubble was the worst, for it produced a field of broken, clinker-like shards, difficult to walk on and sharp as broken beer bottles.  An occasional gulley threaded its way through the flow, where the lava, for some reason, had forked.  Such a gulley lay twenty yards to their right and was presumably being inspected by their friend, Clyde “Doobie” Jackson.

            Hebe extracted a can of Skoal from his hip pocket, thumped the can, opened it, pinched a goodly wad which he wedged under his lip. He passed the can to Heck, who did the same.

            Then the screaming began.  Shrill, high-pitched animal screaming pierced the great silence of the lava flows.  Soon, Doobie appeared at the lip of the gully, dragging a small boy by the arm.  The child, about six years old, dressed in furry animal skins, screeched,  resisting the man with the huge gut who dragged him.

            “Lookit at what I found!” Doobie hollered.

            Heck and Hebe both stood up, dusted their breeches off. “What in th’ hell you suppose ‘at is,” Heck muttered.

            “Lookit at what I found,” Doobie beamed, proudly showing the two other men his trophy.

            “It’s a goddamned prehistoric kid,” Hebe said.

            “Shut up yer yowlin’!”  Doobie barked and smacked the kid up side the head.  The kid dropped, mewling.

            “What th’ hell you gonna do with it?” Heck asked.

            “Why, shit.  This here’s  good as diamonds,” Doobie said.  “I figure we kin sell it, er something.’”
            “Yeah. An’ jest who would want—.” And then Heck stopped talking, surprised, puzzled at the feathered shaft sticking from his breast bone.  In quick succession, similar five foot shafts skewered Doobie through the right lung, Hebe through the neck.  Hebe died instantly of a severed spinal cord; Heck moments later with a bled-out heart.

            Doobie lay on his side, blowing scarlet bubbles, wondering at his shortness of breath, and sudden weakness.  He heard a crunching, and looked up to see a muscular, black-haired man with glittering black eyes bend over him.

            Doobie coughed a gush of crimson blood.  “We wasn’t gonna hurt him,” he said.

            Then the Paleolithic Indian with the glittering black eyes grasped the shaft and yanked it savagely from Doobie’s chest.  Doobie watched as the man, and two others like him, gathered up the child and melted back into the rocks.  Doobie exhaled a long sigh.