She limped through the open door through which the meat puppets had spilled earlier. In the back of the building, the walls that had originally separated the management offices had been knocked down, leaving a single, mammoth room almost as large as the warehouse out front. She found four more bodies slumped just past the door, not enough of them left for the Dragon to resurrect as meat puppets. Georgia stepped over the remains, trying not to look too closely.
Big, domed lamps hung from the ceiling on long chains. Iron-barred windows were set high in the walls. Below them backpacks, puffy eight-ball jackets, spent shells and discarded handguns lay scattered on the floor amid pools of blood. A series of tables had been set up around the perimeter of the room with digital scales, mounds of plastic baggies and stainless steel apothecary chests. She limped toward them, the cramps of dope sickness already starting to tie her insides into knots, and suddenly the floor reared up toward her. The tables, the windows, the whole room tilted away. Georgia’s feet were off the ground. At first she thought she was flying and figured she was dead after all, sailing off to that dark tunnel with the bright light, but then she realized she was in fact sliding backward down a slope of loose dirt. Her back hit something hard and seized painfully for a moment. She squeezed her eyes shut until the pain subsided, then opened them and saw dirt all around her, and the ceiling high above.
A hole. She’d fallen into a hole. Not a sinkhole like the kind that formed wherever the Dragon went, but something different. She climbed back up the slope to the top and saw that she had fallen into a deep trench that ran the length of the room. An excavation, as though something large had been dug out of the floor. The edges were ragged, not squared off the way they would be if shovels or heavy digging equipment had been used. The Dragon had done this, she realized. She’d seen the dirt on her claws. The Dragon had torn through the floor, ripped open the earth and removed . . . what? What had been down there?
A long crack ripped violently through in the ceiling, startling her, and plaster dust fell in gritty white curtains. The fracture spread quickly, spiderwebbing above her, and the lamps shivered on their chains. The building shook again. The whole warehouse was about to come down.
She turned away, back toward the door she’d come through. There was no time to search the stash. She limped as quickly as she could out of the back room, ignoring another cramp tightening in her stomach. She grabbed her shotgun off the floor — there was no time to collect the spent shells now — snatched up her purse and forced her aching legs to carry her out of the building. She managed to just reach her car when the warehouse fell in on itself. A huge cloud of dust blew outward from the collapse. She ducked down behind the car, her knee searing with pain again, and shielded herself until the cloud dissipated. When she stood up, there was nothing left of the Bristleman Corp. warehouse but a pile of rubble.
She expected to hear the sound of panicked voices, the rush of feet, but there was nothing. Not even sirens. The streets stayed quiet. Deserted.
She thought of going back to Egg Foo for more heroin, but she was out of cash. She had to think of something. If she didn’t get her hands on more soon, it would be over. The Dragon would win.
The pavement between her car and the collapsed warehouse shuddered and split open. The sinkhole was spreading. She got into her car, twisted the key in the ignition and took off. In the rearview mirror, she saw the spot where she’d parked buckle and plunge into the earth.
Navigating the streets of the warehouse district in the dimming light, she wondered how long she had left to live. The infection only seemed to spread at night, and night was coming fast. Without heroin to beat it back, she wouldn’t see the dawn. She could go after the Dragon, try to get it back, but she was too weak to fight her. The fastest way to get her hands on the drug now would be to steal it. The Shaolin Tong would be too heavily armed to risk trying to rob them. Where else? There were no other drug dealers in Buckshot Hill now that the Inkheads were dead, their stash buried under who knew how many tons of rubble.
Think, dammit!
A hospital. She could pull into an emergency room in her blood-soaked clothes and say, I hurt my head, I hurt my knee, and then when the doctors turned their backs she could sneak away, find the drug repository and nab some morphine. Would morphine work? But she didn’t know where the Buckshot Hill hospital was, or even if it had one, and she was so tired. The doctors would know right away. One look at her and they’d know she was a junkie and put armed guards around her so she didn’t steal any drugs, and while she was lying there waiting for them to return, the infection would keep spreading until she was dead. They would come back to find her corpse in the examination room, grey and black-veined and moving under the Dragon’s control, and god she was so tired she just wanted to sleep.
She forced her mind to keep sifting through her options, but she kept coming up empty. She didn’t have any heroin, and there was nothing she could do about it. It was high noon and she’d arrived at the showdown only to find her gun empty.
On the road back into town, the blacktop was as cracked as parched earth. Chunks of pavement dropped away all around her. She swerved to avoid the sinkholes as they appeared and willed her eyes to stay open just a little longer. She could rest soon, she told herself. Soon all the pain and grief and terror would be over.
A dark grey fog rolled in from nowhere and enveloped the car, suddenly limiting her visibility to only a few feet. She slowed, her stiff knee protesting as she worked the brake. A sharp odour seeped in around the closed windows, and she realized it wasn’t fog. It was smoke. In the distance, she saw muffled lights crackling like lightning. A fire somewhere.
A big, dark silhouette moved through the smoke toward her car. She watched the shape approach, gripping the steering wheel until her knuckles turned white. Then the smoke parted and a chestnut brown horse cantered through, the white stripe along its nose reflecting her headlights. It clip-clopped past the car like a phantom, not even looking in her direction, and disappeared into the smoke beyond.
Georgia drove on, maintaining a slow speed through the almost impenetrable smoke. As the lights grew closer, she realized she was looking at a house on fire. The land all around it was cracked and sunken. Beside the house was a flaming structure that looked like it had once been a stable, and next to it she saw a sinkhole and what looked like the exploded remains of several propane canisters. At least the horse had gotten out. She hoped the family had too.
A crowd had gathered on the opposite side of the road to watch the firefighters tackle the blaze. A black and white highway patrol car was parked in front of them, its siren lights spinning red and blue in the haze and making the number 113 painted on its side glow like a digital clock. Two State Troopers stood next to the car in their navy and grey uniforms. One was speaking into the radio handset. The other turned to watch Georgia’s car, kept watching as she passed. He had a moustache and tired eyes. She glanced in the rearview mirror and saw him vanish in the smoke.
Georgia caught a glimpse of herself in the rearview. She was covered in blood — her face, her hair, her clothes. One of her cheeks sported a dark bruise. Had the Trooper seen her? Was that why he’d stared at her when she drove by? She felt a moment of panic, thought of the shotgun shells in the warehouse rubble near the bodies, how easily the authorities could trace everything back to her, and then let it go. The State Troopers had their hands full tonight, and by morning it wouldn’t matter if they came looking for her.
Downtown Buckshot Hill was deserted. The smoke had begun to dissipate, turning into a grey mist that rolled over the sidewalks and across the storefronts. A long crack climbed up the side of a women’s boutique, etching thin fissures into the glass of the front window. A varsity jacket lay discarded on the sidewalk. Two of the tables in front of the ice cream parlour were overturned onto their sides. She’d never seen the devastation spread this far before.
Georgia thought of the enormous hole dug into the floor of the warehouse. She�
��d always assumed the Dragon’s movements were random, that she went wherever she could hide safely and feed in secret. Her ancestors had chased the Dragon through Africa, Asia and Europe, and finally to America. She’d believed all along that the Dragon was simply running from them, but what if the Dragon’s travels weren’t arbitrary? What if she was looking for something?
There was no more smoke by the time Georgia pulled into the Buckshot Motor Inn’s parking lot, but the smell of burning wood was still in the air. No one stood on the porch outside the rooms. Marcus Townsend’s car was back in its spot, a child-sized trucker hat printed with the words RIO ARRIBA FAIRBOARD RANCH RODEO sitting in the back seat, but the windows of his room were dark. The slam of her car door sounded thunderously loud in the quiet of the parking lot. Nothing moved. No lights came on.
She took her purse and the shotgun and let herself into her room. There, she dropped everything at the foot of the bed, peeled off her bloodstained clothes and stood under the hottest shower she could stand. Her muscles ached. Her sore knee looked twice as big as the other and had turned shades of yellow and purple. A red line crossed her deltoid muscle where the bullet had grazed her, and the cut on her forehead was tender to the touch. Standing in front of the bathroom mirror, towelling herself off and wincing with each sore movement, the dope sickness hit her again, twisting her gut. She knelt over the toilet and dry-heaved until her ribs hurt. She’d never felt more defeated. More alone.
Finally, she collapsed on the bed in her sweat shorts and t-shirt. She rolled down the waistband and saw her scarred hip had started to turn grey again. Soon the infection would travel outward, down her leg, across her torso, until it filled her completely. She found herself trembling, but she didn’t know if it was from fear or from jonesing.
Georgia took a deep breath, wondering how many more she had left. She turned off the light, lay back and closed her eyes. What point was there in fighting it? She couldn’t think of a reason not to let the infection take her. She was a failure. She’d failed in her relationships. She’d failed her parents. She’d failed to kill the Dragon. She’d failed to have children and ensure the lineage of dragonslayers continued after her. She might as well do everyone a favour and die.
She will devour the world. That’s what the Book of Ascalon had said about the Dragon. Well, it was all hers now. She could choke on it.
A loud bang woke her. She hadn’t realized she’d fallen asleep. She was drenched in sweat. It was still dark outside. She shifted on the bed, rolled over. She just wanted to sleep. The bang came again. Loud. The motel room door. She switched on the light and, with her stiff knee complaining, swung her heavy legs over the side of the bed. The grey patch on her skin had grown, the veins turning black beneath it. She poked at it sleepily. It was numb. Dead skin. Dead Georgia.
Another bang, and the door broke off its hinges and crashed to the floor. Startled, she fell off the bed. Staying crouched, she peeked over the mattress to see what was happening.
A tall figure walked into the room, shrouded in a dark brown cloak. The opening in the large, drooping hood was deeply shadowed, obscuring the face within. The hands that reached up to pull back the hood were scaly and ended not with fingers but with long, curved claws like ancient, yellowing ivory. “Found you, child,” the Dragon said.
The window beside the door shattered, and dozens of dead, grey arms reached through.
7.
SHE WILL DEVOUR THE WORLD
Curled up on the couch next to her father, Georgia looked at the painting in the Book of Ascalon. There was Saint George in his black armour, his horse rearing as his lance plunged into the Dragon’s chest, and in the background, the woman who sat on the tall rocks.
“So, Daddy, who’s that woman if she’s not a princess?”
“The artist, Gustave Moreau, was commissioned to paint this by our family, back in the 1800s when they lived in Paris,” he said. “They told him exactly what to paint, down to the last detail. But none of what you see here is actually what happened in Cyrene.”
Thinking she finally understood, she looked up at him. “There was no princess, was there?”
He ruffled her hair. “Smart kid. No, there was no princess.”
“Then who is she? Why did they want her in the picture?”
“It’s a secret code. A warning. Remember those illustrations we saw, how the Dragon didn’t look the same in all of them? She’s different each time she comes back. She . . . evolves.” He handed her the book. “Look closely at Saint George’s eyes. What is he looking at?”
She brought the book close to her face and discovered that though Saint George’s head was tipped toward the creature on the ground, his eyes were looking elsewhere. She followed his gaze in a straight line, all the way to the woman.
“That’s her, Georgia,” her father said. “That’s the Dragon.”
The thing standing in the doorway of Georgia’s motel room was a mockery of a human being. The Dragon’s face still had the flat nose and wide, lipless mouth of a reptile, despite her strangely human eyes and the few limp strands of auburn hair that sprouted from her otherwise bald cranium. She didn’t have ears, just holes on the sides of her skull. The cloak bulged out in front of her where her huge stomach sagged to her knees, full of the meat and gristle of those she’d slaughtered.
The Dragon had grown decrepit in her advanced age. Her scaled skin was tinged a sickly green, no longer the leathery armour it must have been back in the Fourth Century. Now it looked as thin and brittle as tissue paper. Her talons had grown so long and heavy over the centuries that they weighed her hands down from her wrists.
Georgia had seen a lot of terrible things, but nothing so awful as the toothsome, triumphant grin on the Dragon’s face.
Meat puppets crawled in through the broken window and lumbered through the doorway. Georgia grabbed the stock of the shotgun at the foot of the bed and slid it toward her. The box of shells sat on the floor next to her suitcase, across the room. She glanced quickly at the meat puppets spilling past where the Dragon stood. They were slow, but that wouldn’t buy her much time in the small room. She broke open the shotgun, sprang for the ammo box and fumbled with the shells. They spilled out at her feet. She reached for one and gasped to see black veins marbling her legs, the skin already paling to grey. She scooped up the shells and started loading them into the shotgun, trying not to shake.
“Can you feel me growing inside you, child?” the Dragon asked. “I can. I can taste the fear in your thoughts.”
The meat puppets kept coming. She couldn’t tell how many there were. Ten? Fifteen? The shotgun only held six shells at a time. It wouldn’t be enough. But if this was her last stand, she’d go down swinging.
Georgia snapped the shotgun closed and rolled back behind the bed, clumsy from her stiff knee. She pumped the first shell into the chamber and took aim at the closest meat puppet. It had been an Inkhead, the black bandana tied tight above the loose, shredded skin of its face.
If you can really taste my thoughts, taste this one! She pulled the trigger, blasting the meat puppet’s head into a chunky smear on the wallpaper behind it. The others moved forward to take its place as it slumped to the floor, and she pivoted quickly to sight down the barrel at the next one.
Oh no, not him . . .
It was a black man, or had been once, before its skin had turned a pallid grey. Blood from the open wound on its throat smeared across the writing on its t-shirt: RIO ARRIBA FAIRBOARD RANCH RODEO. Marcus Townsend, her car-loving neighbour from the room next door.
He’d been nice to her. He’d talked with her outside and given her a brief but welcome taste of normality in her nightmarish excuse for a life. It shamed her, thinking how she’d jonesed in front of him and ran out in the middle of their conversation, and now she’d never have a chance to apologize to him, to make things right.
It lurched toward her, its dead fingers groping.
Georgia took a deep breath to steel herself and pulled the tri
gger. The face that had once belonged to Marcus Townsend exploded, and the headless corpse toppled backward to the floor.
Behind where it had stood was another, a small boy of nine or ten. It wore a t-shirt with a cowboy riding a bucking bronco. Both its arms were gone. Bloody stumps filled the t-shirt’s sleeves. Its face was as blank and terrible as its father’s had been.
Instinctively, she took her finger off from the trigger. A child. Just a child . . .
“I brought my boy with me this time ’round. He’s old enough now that I thought I’d make a vacation out of it, show him some of the country so he doesn’t think it’s all high rises and housing projects, you know?”
She shook Marcus’s voice out of her head and let her training take over. Don’t hesitate. If you hesitate, it’ll kill you. Georgia swallowed hard and replaced her finger on the trigger. It’s not really him. He’s dead. He’s an empty shell, not a boy. Not Marcus’s son. She swallowed again. Her trigger finger twitched. She couldn’t do it. Not a child. The tiny meat puppet stumbled closer, off balance without its arms. Her heart felt like it was going to shatter into pieces. Just close your fucking eyes and shoot!
She did, and after the loud bang of the shotgun she heard him fall. When she opened her eyes, she saw the boy had fallen at his father’s feet. She felt like crying.
Another had circled around the bed. A fat blonde woman in a tight tube top. Georgia recognized her right away, despite her mutilated face. The garish red lipstick she’d worn while showing Georgia her room in the Shaolin Tong warehouse was replaced by a glistening smear of blood. Her bottom jaw hung loose, her tongue lolling out.
First Marcus and now her. The Dragon must have retraced Georgia’s steps while she’d lain unconscious in the Inkheads’ warehouse, the visions of their deaths swallowed up by the blackness. The Dragon had killed them for no other reason than that Georgia knew them, had purposely surrounded herself with an army of familiar corpses to keep Georgia off her guard. It was monstrous.
Chasing the Dragon Page 8