GUN SALAD

 At first, Beretta had tried to walk at her father’s side, but the combination of their cramped surroundings and the constant, ear-splitting sound of gunfire quickly encouraged her to reconsider. 

Slowly but surely, Beretta fell behind. She knew that his task of clearing a path through the underbrush was important, but did Voidthrower have to be so loud? It was scaring away all the animals! Not that she’d be able to actually see them anyway, considering the dense greenery all around them. The path he’d carved so far resembled a long, green tunnel–a tunnel that only got darker and more foreboding as the group strayed further from the beach. 

The girl shivered in spite of herself. She had expected to find her first foray into the jungle enchanting, but instead she felt increasingly afraid. Only Mimi, of all people, seemed to be having any fun at all.

“Ahh, pulvinatus stereum! I’d hoped to see one of these before I left the continent,” she gushed, directing everyone’s attention toward a big, bulgy mushroom that had slumped over into their path. “It would’ve been even more impressive if Voidthrower hadn’t bisected it just now, but still!”

Beretta wrinkled her nose. “It looks gross.”

“True,” Mimi agreed, “but just look how purple it is! And, according to my botanical handbook, it’s one of the most poisonous mushrooms in southwestern Truvelo–so no touching, Berry!”

“Ugh! I would never.”

“I didn’t know you were so interested in plants, Mimi,” Roulette added. “Wouldn’t expect that kind of thing to come up much in your line of work.”

“Yes, well, one of the burdens of being sharp-minded is my insatiable appetite for knowledge,” Mimi said with a sigh. “It’s a curse, really. But it can come in handy in situations like these.”

Morgan snickered at that. “Right. Like if we were lookin’ to poison ourselves to escape your jawin’.”

Beretta giggled, but Mimi seemed unamused. They all walked in silence for awhile, the repeated discharge of Father’s gun filling the empty air around them, until finally something exciting happened:

Voidthrower carved through the last few feet of the thicket ahead of them, revealing a vast, sunlit clearing.

It took every ounce of Beretta’s self-control to avoid barreling past her father to see what she could see. Already, she could hear birdsong and the sound of rushing water. A blast of air, slightly cooler than the humidity that had set in since they’d left the beach, rushed into the narrow channel they occupied, lifting everyone’s spirits in an instant. Indeed, as they stepped out into the spacious heart of the jungle, with its colorful flowers and impossibly tall trees, she was thrilled to see that each member of the group wore a smile as big as her own.

“Now, ain’t that a sight worth waitin’ for…” Morgan marveled, spinning slowly to regard the clearing from every angle as he went. “Never seen so many trees in my life. I can see why it would’ve been a chore to walk through a hundred miles of this.”

Father smiled back at him, shouldering Voidthrower with obvious relief. “Beautiful, is it not? I have always wanted to visit, but as you say, navigating the Great Jungle is… Not something I would ever have done by choice,” he admitted. “In this way, I am thankful to you, Roulette–without you, Beretta and I might never have had the chance to see this for ourselves.”

“Yes! Thank you, Roulette!” she chirped in agreement. Roulette smiled back at her, but there was a certain sadness behind her eyes. Beretta couldn’t imagine why, though; how could anyone be sad in such a beautiful place?

“We’ll want to keep to the south as much as we can,” Mimi advised, squinting into the crowd of thick trunks standing to their right. “Maybe find and follow the coastline if possible. It will be hard to gauge how far we are from Turu’s base if we drift too far inland.”

Roulette nodded. “Good thinkin’. We’d better hurry, too–we’ve got nothin’ in the way of provisions,” she said. “In fact, none of us have eaten since Sebastopol. So if you see anything edible…”

“I’ll be sure to point it out,” Mimi finished. “Now let’s get going, shall we?”

Father led the way again. Voidthrower wasn’t needed to make their way anymore, but he was an easy man to spot no matter how dark the jungle got–a landmark unto himself. Everyone else trailed along behind him as he followed a murky stream southward, leaving Beretta free to peer around at the local wildlife. Now that the gunfire had died down, plenty of animals were coming out of hiding: birds, lizards, and even a few lanky, monkey-like creatures with big eyes and enormous ears!

“Ooh, ooh! Mimi, what is that?” Beretta asked, tugging on her sleeve and pointing out the strange mammals.

“No idea,” she answered with a shrug. “I didn’t research much about the jungle beyond plants and dangerous creatures. Didn’t seem practical.”

“Does that mean I can name them?”

“I mean, they probably already have…” Mimi began to answer, but, upon meeting her eyes, she seemed to think better of it. “You know what, sure. You can name them.”

“Okay! Then I will call them ‘Morgonkeys’!” she declared.

Morgan perked up at the sound of his name. “You’re namin’ ‘em after me?”

“Yes! They seem nice. I think they would treat you better than the monkeys you fought in the arena.”

“I like it,” Mimi decided. “They look kind of like him, too.”

“What? My ears are nowhere near that big!”

Everyone laughed, which spooked the morgonkeys so much that they swung away through the trees. Beretta was sad to see them go, but it wasn’t long before something else captured her attention: a strange whistling sound issuing from somewhere up ahead. It was unlike anything she’d heard before.

“Before you ask, yes, I know what that sound is,” Mimi said. “Timpan trees.”

“Timpan trees?” Beretta echoed. She didn’t exactly doubt Mimi, but it was hard to believe that a tree could make a noise like the one she was hearing. Soon enough, though, they arrived at the source of the whistling–a grove of long, skinny trees with ash-gray trunks. They stood at the edge of a tall cliff overlooking the sea, granting Beretta and company a much-anticipated look beyond the jungle’s boundaries.

“Timpan trees are interesting. They can grow to be tall and beautiful, but they almost always die before reaching maturity, just as these ones have,” Mimi explained. “There’s a certain species of jungle bird that loves timpan sap–they’ll peck through the trunks to get at it. The problem is that timpan sap has a unique property: after being exposed to oxygen, it slowly becomes corrosive, even to the tree itself. Once its trunk is breached, a timpan tree will die slowly from the inside, hollowed out by its own sap.

“The combination of a dead timpan’s hollowed-out interior and the holes pecked into its trunk allows air to flow through freely. So, whenever the wind picks up, you can hear the trees ‘whistling’ just like this.”

Mimi’s explanation inspired each of them to stop in place for a time, immersing themselves in the timpan grove’s song. It sounded sad to Beretta–almost like the trees were crying out over the life they’d lost–but it was beautiful. The varied placement of each trunk’s holes caused the timpans to whistle at different volumes and pitches, creating a many-layered piece of natural music that stirred her very soul.

After a long, meditative rest among the trees, it was Father who got everyone moving again. “We had better move on,” he said, looking out across the water toward the darkening sky. “Night will fall soon. I would guess that the jungle will lose much of its charm, then.”

He took the lead again and moved deeper into the grove. Beretta watched him go and prepared to follow, eager to see whatever else awaited them on their trek through the jungle.

Sadly, what happened next ensured that she wouldn’t get the chance.

Father howled as something seized around his foot and pulled him rapidly into the air, turning the big man upside-down so violently that his guns clattered to the ground. Her eyes widened at the sight, but before she could so much as cry out, she heard a series of odd noises coming from somewhere up above.

She looked up frantically toward the treetops, but whatever had made them moved faster than her eyes could track. By the time her gaze returned to ground level, chaos had ensued; tiny projectiles were whizzing past them from every angle, dispensed from the hole-pocked trunks of the timpans all around them! She looked around to find that one was already jutting from Morgan’s neck–a tiny dart, it looked like. His eyes looked wild and unfocused, and Mimi had already thrown herself to the ground behind him.

“BERETTA!” she screamed, “GET DOWN!”

She wanted to obey, but she found that she couldn’t move a muscle. Everything had happened so fast; it was too overwhelming! The girl heard a sound coming from the hole nearest her, and she knew in her heart that a dart was about to pass through it. There was no time to react–it was going to hit her!

She was going to die…!

But right then, at the very last moment, something got in the way–a blur of pink and black that threw itself between Beretta and her impending fate without hesitation:

Roulette.