Taur stands in a shallow pool where the water reaches his knees. He clangs his iron bat against the stone to draw the marsupial tigers, which are thin, and lanky, with pointed snouts and pronounced canines. The tigers run splashing into the water, where the horned man has the advantage. The tigers are slowed by the water, while he can still swing his bat just as fast and as powerfully. The bat connects with the skull of one tiger that tries to turn, but is slowed by the water. With a clank the bat lands on its neck, and it convulses, twitches, and drifts off with the current.

One of the women soldiers screams in protest, but it is too late, and Taur has one less marsupial opponent. With a shriek, the soldier leans back, loading up her spear to hurl it, but I am falling from above. I won't reach her spear before she can throw it, so I launch my tongue from my open snout, latching onto her fist holding the spear. She tries to throw the spear, but it's as if it's tied, anchored to one of the pine trees. She looks behind her to find what is snagging her spear, but is slow to look up.

I pounce on her skull with both feet and use her as a springboard to push off, connecting with a soldier in a fox mask, complete with a bushy tail, and striking him (her?) solidly in the chin. There is the gratifying crunch of metal breaking bone, and Mr. Fox goes down. When I land I swing my tail, which is shorter and still hasn't fully grown out, so it strikes more like a weighted blackjack than a whip, smashing a kneecap. With a shriek, a soldier in a raccoon mask falls and rolls. He gets whacked in the face when his spear bounces off of a rock.

They've got numbers, so I make a tactical retreat toward the pool, which sounds braver than running for my life. Another heavy woman, this one with short green hair, chases me into the pool, followed by several others. In the clearing they have the advantage with their spears, but once in the water, they will be slower. Perhaps sensing this disadvantage, they throw their spears, which bounce off the rock and slice through the water. I spring and make an awful belly flop on the pool. It doesn't hurt, because jumping geckos land on our stomachs all the time, but it doesn't look impressive. Geckos are fine swimmers, but poor divers. I go down deep as hurled lances pierce the water around me.

But this is where the albino's gift of foresight comes into play. She has hidden at the edge of the pool, and dropped underwater just as the soldiers reached the water's edge, so that she remained unseen. As the first hefty woman closes in on me, Liana approaches from behind, and sinks her dagger into the soldier's kidney. As the woman spins she aids Liana's cut, which opens the wound and unleashes a cloud of blood in the water.

There is another splash in water, reminding me of being a kid at summer camp and doing a cannonball into the swimming pool to create a thunderous splash. This obese soldier is relying more on her weight than the finesse of her technique to create a splash and a wave. I swim down deep, hugging the stone floor of the pool like an alligator and curve upward, latching onto the soldier's femoral artery and rolling. I come out of the roll and thrust my foot forward. It is a slow kick because I'm underwater, but the venomous spur lands high in the chest of another soldier.

I spit out the chunk of flesh in my jaws, which unleashes a torrent of blood underwater. The red tendrils partially obscure a mouth that pours out a stream of bubbles, which would constitute a scream if we weren't submerged. Liana moves to the side, anticipating a thrust with a double-edged sword, which she easily evades, countering with a thrust of her dagger, which is parried, but the thrust of the second dagger sinks home.

Taur dives into the pool, catching Liana with an arm spread wide and towing her for a short distance underwater before surfacing. The current is gently pushing us toward the end of the first pool, where there's a lip and a shallow waterfall descending to the next level.

I pop up to the surface. “Get across to the other side!”

Taur nods in the affirmative, so I spin on a dime—okay, so there are no dimes on this planet, but it's a figure of speech, because I've got a spine like taffy. I shoot up the face of the rock slope, where I spray a fine, wide mist of acid, which becomes a boiling cloud mimicking those rising up from the base of the waterfall. The acid mist serves like a pepper spray, irritating the eyes of the freaks posing as soldiers. It seems that everybody with a bushy tail, a leather mask, a fur costume, or a pair of horns didn't want to get his costume wet, because in this army looking neat in your costume and playing out some kind of weird fetish is more important than soldiering. Unfortunately, soldiering is an arena where people get killed.

I kick with the poison spur, then spring as I land, catching a head in my jaws, throw the body when I finish the cartwheel, and spin, whipping out my tail. Another kick with the shackle on the right foot, followed by a kick with the poison spur, one-two, to two different opponents, as my tongue shoots out, striking the wolf-masked face of some freak just as he raises a short sword. The impact of what Bruce Lee would call a jeet, from Jeet Kun Do, means that the hurtling bulbous end of my tongue blasts him, blowing him up just as he starts his attack, and the whole thing crumbles. I reel in my tongue but only succeed in stripping the wolf mask off of his face. Spitting out the mask, which has the horrid taste of sweaty leather, I spring into a headbutt, putting my whole body behind the strike with the blunt end of my snout, and cave in his forehead.

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With a glance I see that Taur and Liana are successfully across the pool. A horn blows, and I figure that's the sound of reinforcements, or the second force in a prong maneuver. I spin and run full speed across the smooth rock, while a volley of spears is launched—I can see their shadows sail over the stone slope. I hit the water, running upright, running across the surface of the pool like a bearded dragon or the gecko of God. The feeling of running on water, flitting over the surface like Hermes on his winged sandals is one of the most exhilarating feelings in the world—right up until I catch a spear in the thigh.

I'm really glad there's no video of this, because I tumble, flop forward and roll, skittering over the surface of the pool as both ends of the spear alternately dig into the water and steer me, turning me as if I'm paddling, so I end up in a wobbly, rolling tumble over the water until I hit the stone slope on the opposite bank with enough force to snap the spear. The pressure of the pole straining against the flesh in my thigh is excruciating, and I feel an agonizing wave of pain until the spear snaps and I continue the roll over the sandstone and up into the dirt strewn with pine needles. All along the way it hasn't been a clean roll, but one in which the short ends of the broken spear keep thumping into the stone, knocking me upward or digging into the turn, making me spin.

I stand on one leg, unable to put weight on the other. I lean against a tree, watching the hooting freaks in the animal costumes gesture at us with their weapons. The horn blows again, sounding like a conch, or perhaps a ram's horn.

Liana and Taur race to my side.

“Oh my Lord, Vic, that looks bad!” the albino girl exclaims when she sees the spear piercing my thigh.

“Have you ever seen a spear wound that looks good?” I retort. “Looks like it's close to the femoral artery.”

“Oh, no,” she bends down to look more closely, but sees something else. “Taur! You've been bitten!”

The albino girl throws her long white hair over her shoulder and turns to inspect the horned man's wound, which looks like a couple of tooth marks. I may have a severed artery, but no big deal, you just go right ahead and see after Taur's dog bite. A severed artery's hardly ever fatal, right?

So the pretty girl has chosen the muscular bad guy with scars and horns over a large gecko. Only an idiot would be surprised, but I have to admit I'm disappointed.

I lean up against the tree, and my foot starts to slip because I'm standing on a pile of dry pine needles. I know I'm not supposed to pull out an embedded object. There is the story, perhaps apocryphal, of a biker who is in the hospital with a knife lodged in his head. The best brain surgeons in the region are trying to figure out a way to remove the knife without causing massive internal bleeding in the guy's cranium. At this point one of his fellow bikers comes into the operating room and asks what the problem is. When the doctors explain that they're trying to figure out how to remove the knife from his companion's skull, the biker, says, “No problem.” He yanks out the knife and his friend drops dead. I hope that story was intended as a joke.

Never remove an embedded object, like a spear skewering your thigh, that hopefully has missed the femoral artery. On the other hand, there are no hospitals on this planet. Leaning against the tree trunk I suck in my breath and hold it. I reach down to grab the end of the spear but my arms are too short, so I'm forced to hunch over, at which point my foot slips and I land with my butt/tail on the needle-strewn dirt beneath the tree.

“I just got nipped, I think,” Taur tells Liana, referring to his dog bite.

“Well, let me get some water on that to clean it out.” Liana's voice oozes concern. “No telling what kind of germs those tigers are carrying.”

Honestly, they looked like undernourished dogs to me, but you just go right ahead and take care of Taur's dog bite. With a grimace I heave outward with a shout, but geckos can't shout, so it comes out like a croak, something like a frog with a hernia would make. Blood comes streaming out of my thigh, and if I'm not mistaken, those are arterial spurts. Any chance that's a vein?

Looking across the pool, even though Taur and Liana are blocking my view, she's so concerned for the big guy's wound and he's so caught up in her soft eyes that they're completely oblivious to me as I bleed out. The second force of F Troop ('F' as in “Freak”) has met up with the first, and they're starting to cross the river at the lip of the first pool. In no time they'll be right on top of us, with the advantage of overwhelming numbers.

I'm feeling light headed. Blood loss, that's a killer, I tell you. I don't know how many times I have to say it. It's okay, you two, don't let my death interrupt any romantic moments. I'll just lie here under this tree and fade to black.

There's a guy in a pig mask, who stands out even in a whole company of freaks. He's saying in a voice that sounds like Porky the Pig, “Bde debe behde, that's all folks!”

Max loves that cartoon. Right, Max?