Thank God, that bit is finally done. It needs major spackling, but it’s on the paper, as it were.
I had gotten Oft halfway up the ramp when the not-cow ripped through the trees. It was one of the smaller ones, so no more than fifteen feet high. That was bad news, by the way. The bigger not-cows get, the slower they move. This one was moving at a pretty good clip, although you shouldn’t take my word for it. Right then, I would have said that even a crawl was too damn fast.
Worse, it looked sick. There were boils and weeping sores spreading across the front of its headless torso, raw and green-black. Some of the not-cows legs looked like they had snapped in two and left to fester, instead of cleanly popping off; and the tekelilis it made sounded all wrong, full of phlegm or something even more foul. Absolutely worst of all was the way I could see the infection, or contamination, visibly strengthen as it moved.
No, wait. That’s wrong. The absolute worst thing of all was that none of this was stopping the not-cow from closing the distance. Whatever this horrible disease or whatever was, it wasn’t slowing down the creature any.
That would have to be my job.