Lamb: the Gospel According to Biff, Christ's Childhood Pal

“Just kidding,” he said. “I’m not kilt.” And he plucked the spear from his chest with less effort than it might take to brush away a fly.
    I threw my own lance, but didn’t wait to see where it hit. I grabbed Joy and ran.
    “Where?” she said.
    “Far,” I said.
    “No,” she said, grabbing my tunic and jerking me around a corner, causing me to nearly coldcock myself on the wall. “To the cliff passage.” We were in total darkness now, neither one of us having thought to grab a lamp, and I was trusting my life to Joy’s memory of these stone halls.
    As we ran we could hear the demon’s scales scraping the walls and the occasional curse in Hebrew as he found a low ceiling. Perhaps he could see in the dark somewhat, but not a lot better than we could.
    “Duck,” Joy said, pushing my head down as we entered the narrow passage that led to the cliff above. I crouched in this passage the way the monster had to crouch to move in the normal-sized halls and I suddenly realized the brilliance of Joy’s choice in taking this route. We were just seeing the moonlight breaking in through the opening in the cliff’s face when I heard the monster hit the bottleneck of the passage.
    “Fuck! Ouch! You weasels! I’m going to crunch your little heads between my teeth like candied dates.”
    “What’d he say?” asked Joy.
    “He says that you are a sweet of uncommon delicacy.”
    “He did not say that.”
    “Believe me, my translation is as close as you want to the truth.”
    I heard a horrible scraping noise from inside the passage as we climbed out on the ledge and up the rope ladder to the top of the plateau. Joy helped me up, then pulled the ladder up behind us. We ran to the stable where the camel saddles and other supplies were normally kept. There were only the three camels that Joshua and Balthasar had taken, and no horses, so I couldn’t figure out why we were taking the time to stop until I saw Joy filling two water skins at the cistern behind the stable.
    “We’ll never make it to Kabul without water,” Joy said.
    “And what happens when we make it to Kabul? Can anyone there help? What in the hell is that thing?”
    “If I knew, would I have opened that door?” She was remarkably calm for someone who had just lost her friends to a hideous beast.
    “I guess not. But I didn’t see it come out of there. I felt something, but nothing that size.”
    “Act, Biff, don’t think. Act.”
    She handed me a water skin and I held it in the cistern, trying to listen for the sound of the monster over the bubbles as it filled. All I could hear was the occasional bleating of the goats and the sound of my own pulse in my ears. Joy corked her water skin, then went about opening the pig and goat pens, shooing the animals out onto the plateau.
    “Let’s go!” she shouted to me. She took off down the path toward the hidden road. I pulled the water skin from the cistern and followed as quickly as I could. There was enough moonlight to make traveling fairly easy, but since I hadn’t even seen the road in daylight, I didn’t want to try to negotiate its deadly cutbacks at night without a guide. We had almost made the first leg of the road when we heard a hideous wailing and something heavy landed in the dust in front of us. When I could get my breath again I stepped up to find the bloodied carcass of a goat.
    “There,” Joy said, pointing down the mountainside to something moving among the rocks. Then it looked up at us and there was no mistaking the glowing yellow eyes.
    “Back,” Joy said, pulling me back from the road.
    “Is that the only way down?”
    “That or diving off the edge. It’s a fortress, remember—it’s not supposed to be easy to get in and out of.”
    We made our way back to the rope ladder, tossed it over the side, and started down. As Joy made it to the ledge and ducked into the cave something heavy hit me on the right shoulder. My arm went numb with the impact and I let go of the ladder. Mercifully, my feet had tangled in the rungs as I fell, and I found myself hanging upside down looking into the cave entrance where Joy stood. I could hear the terrified goat that had hit me screaming as it fell into the abyss, then there was a distant thump and the screaming stopped.
    “Hey, kid, you’re a Jew, aren’t you?” said the monster from above.
    “None of your business,” I said. Joy grabbed the ladder and pulled me inside the cave, ladder and all, just as another goat came