Fernando trudged back through the stiffening, sucking muck. Depleted, he sat down on the steps of the ruined porch. He felt useless to do anything else because there was nothing else. Nothing to salvage, nothing spared. What little the storm hadn’t leveled he would have to see leveled himself. But not today. Today there was nothing to be done except to watch the blaze devour the spoiled fruits of his labors.

Through raw, red-rimmed eyes, he watched the fire rage. He watched the flames spread to the felled ceiba, to the fencing. He wondered idly if it would spread to the brush and the surrounding trees. It could consume the whole damn jungle for all he cared—part of him even half-hoped that it would. But in the damp no stray spark caught. In the stale air no breath of wind rose to answer his dark prayers.

His stomach growled against the encroaching night. Fernando was surprised he had an appetite at all, given the unsavory circumstances. But now that he’d registered his hunger pangs, he couldn’t dismiss them. He’d always eaten like a starved dog, even when he was a child. Often back then he was truly starved, combing vainly through the dregs of empty cabinets and pantries which his mother had neglected to stock with little else besides liquor, condoms and cigarettes. More times than he cared to remember, he’d had to beg food from the neighbors or scrounge from the trash. He’d even had to steal on occasion, though he’d loathed doing so. He would make surreptitious repayments by stealing from his mother’s purse in turn—counter-thefts that were justified in his mind.

At a precarious tilt in the mud, the busted chicken coop still stood. Thinking that there might yet be some eggs left in it, or even a cowering bird, Fernando made his way over to it. In the waning twilight, he ducked inside and flicked on the flashlight. With a curse, he drew back at what its beam revealed. The back of his head smacked against the skewed threshold.

In the moldering straw of the nest box lay a huge black snake, two meters long at least. Its loose-coiled scales glimmered with dull dark malice in the glare, its flickering tongue a ribbon of insidious shadow. The ropy length of its still black body bulged at unmistakable, elliptical intervals, like something obscene. Something to pleasure a monster. Preceding these ovoid shapes was a much larger bulge still yet more profane—a lump Fernando took to be the mother who’d refused to abandon her clutch, unto death.

This sinister discovery was the final straw. Ignited by the gnashing in his empty stomach, the stabbing pains in his stricken skull, the rancor that had been smoldering in Fernando exploded from him in a riot of unfettered rage. The light of the dropped flashlight scattered wildly. He saw only red as he turned, ripping one of the roosting perches off the wall in a screech of warped nails and splintered wood.

The gluttonous snake tried to flee from the fallen box. But sluggish and engorged as it was, it was far too slow to escape him in his fury. The wooden beam came crashing down like a lightning strike of white-hot wrath—again and again, as Fernando bludgeoned the snake from tail to snout, pulverizing it into such a gory, mutilated mash of scale, feather, shell and bone that the pulped flesh of the killer was indistinguishable from that of its swallowed victims.

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La Gorgona © CS Dark Fantasy