Chasing the Dragon

by Nicholas Kaufmann

  “You don’t have anything I could possibly want,” Georgia said.

  “Are you so certain? Consider your mythology. The Garden of Eden. What am I if not a serpent?” One claw disappeared into its billowing cloak sleeve, then reappeared a moment later clutching the brown leather pack she’d taken from Georgia’s purse. “What is this if not your apple?”

  Georgia stared at the pack.

  “It sates a hunger in you even I do not understand,” the Dragon said. “What, I wonder, will you do to taste it again?”

  Georgia’s body trembled. Her gut knotted. Her veins felt empty, yearning, as the addiction howled inside her. She fought to control herself, to resist the temptation, but the jones was strong, and more than that, she could feel the infection moving through her system. She didn’t have much time before she succumbed and became just another meat puppet.

  She could stop it. Just a taste would do. It would curb the infection, quiet the jonesing . . .

  She reached for it, but the Dragon moved it out of her reach. “Kill me and you will never have it.”

  Georgia leaned on the switchblade again. “Give it to me.”

  Grunting with effort, the Dragon hurled the leather pack over Georgia’s head. Georgia watched it sail across the parking lot. It landed beside the burning frame of the patrol car, so close that the pack’s edge instantly started to smoke and char.

  “No!”

  “Fetch,” the Dragon said.

  Georgia leapt to her feet and ran after it, the Dragon’s mocking laughter hanging in the air behind her. She bent to pull the pack away from the fire. Heat seared her arm, curling the downy hairs there. The leather was hot in her hands, but as she backed away with it from the burning car, she saw little damage had been done. She unrolled the pack quickly. Everything was there: the bag of heroin she’d bought from Egg Foo, even the needle she’d jammed into the Dragon’s foot. The Dragon had kept it all. An ace up her sleeve.

  There was no time to prepare an injection. She’d have to find another way. She lifted the small plastic baggie out of the pack. Should she snort it? Rub it on her wounds? Would that even work?

  A laboured grunt made Georgia glance up. The Dragon was back on her feet. She pulled the switchblade from her body and let it drop to the ground. Wheezing, she took a step toward the gigantic skeleton, stumbled, then quickly righted herself. She latched her claws onto the ribcage again.

  The dark smoke inside the skeleton continued to spread, resolving itself into muscle and tissue. Organs inflated out of nothing. A wide network of veins and arteries roped out from the massive heart, and then the innards disappeared as a thick, dark red hide spread over the bones, so dark it nearly disappeared against the night sky as it travelled up the immense neck. The sight froze Georgia in place.

  Egg Foo appeared suddenly, grabbing for her. She jumped backward, away from it and onto the motel porch. The leather pack slipped from her hand. The meat puppet kept coming, stepping on it. She heard something snap under its weight. The hypodermic. She turned and ran, clutching the bag of heroin tight in her fist.

  She glanced over and saw the Dragon slump before the titanic beast, now almost fully formed. The Dragon’s claws slid out of its hide. Then her body collapsed into dust, leaving the empty brown cloak pooled on the asphalt in front of one enormous, taloned toe.

  Georgia skidded to a halt, not sure what had just happened. Was the Dragon dead?

  The enormous toe moved. At first only a twitch. Then the whole foot lifted from the ground and came down on top of the cloak. The porch shook with the impact.

  Georgia gawked up at the creature. The Dragon’s new body. Tiamat reborn. Her mammoth wings unfurled and blocked out the stars. Her immense jaws opened in a roar that tore the air. The roar shook the ground, shattered windows. Georgia put her hands over her ears until it died away.

  The head craned down toward her on its long, serpentine neck until Georgia was staring into two yellow eyes the size of boulders, vertical irises narrowing as they focused on her.

  “I can feel it,” the Dragon said, and her hot breath washed over Georgia like heat from electric coils. “The whole of the cosmos inside me. Such immense power. To destroy as I see fit. It sets me among the gods.” She reared back, lifting her head to the sky again. “I am a god!”

  A cold hand fell on Georgia’s shoulder. The meat puppet had caught up to her. It spun her around, tried to grab her by the wrists.

  Towering above, the Dragon opened her mouth wide. A column of fire spat out from between her jaws. Georgia kicked the meat puppet away and ran. The blazing column struck the porch where she’d stood, and the front of the motel went up in a raging fire.

  Georgia stopped, looked back to see the meat puppet lurching aimlessly like a drunk, its body engulfed in flame. A moment later it collapsed into a fiery heap.

  The Dragon snaked her head in Georgia’s direction. She turned to run.

  And suddenly she couldn’t move. Her legs were locked in place. She looked down and saw both of them had turned completely grey. She couldn’t feel them anymore. Her legs were dead. The infection had taken them. The Dragon had control.

  Her left leg took a step toward the Dragon, then her right. Something resembling a twisted grin played along the Dragon’s jaws. Georgia struggled, tried to stop walking, but she was powerless against it. She still had feeling from the waist up, could still move her arms, but for how much longer? She already felt the infection spreading like ice water from the cuts on her back and shoulders.

  “Come to me,” the Dragon said.

  Her legs carried her relentlessly forward.

  The Dragon’s head swooped down, her mouth opening.

  In the flickering light of the motel fire, Georgia saw countless teeth arranged in sharp rows all the way back to her throat.

  Georgia took a deep breath, steeling herself. There would be no flinching this time. No crying or begging for mercy. She wouldn’t even give the Dragon the pleasure of hearing her scream.

  The visions came, as they always did when the Dragon was about to feed. In her mind, she was looking down from the Dragon’s vantage at herself. She looked so small. She saw her own terrified face. She saw slate grey skin. She saw something glisten in her fist.

  The bag of heroin. Inside, the brown powder looked as sweet as cocoa mix. It looked so tiny in her palm, too insignificant to have created such a vast need inside her. And yet, how much of her life had she devoted to it? How much time had she wasted in the needle’s embrace?

  The Dragon’s eyes rolled back in her head as she prepared to snap her jaws.

  She wished she had Saint George’s lance. She’d shove it right down the Dragon’s throat.

  Her legs carried her another step closer.

  She imagined herself in Saint George’s place, the King of Cyrene handing her the lance with which to kill the Dragon. No, it wasn’t just a simple lance, she remembered. It had been coated with the oil of a local flower. The only thing in the entire kingdom the Dragon wouldn’t devour. A flower whose name was lost to time.

  She thought back to the Inkheads’ warehouse. Stabbing the Dragon’s foot with the needle — her own version of the lance. It shouldn’t have done anything to the Dragon beyond a moment of pain and shock, yet it had caused her excruciating agony. So much that the Dragon had fled screaming.

  Another step.

  Georgia thought back to the roadside diner outside Buckshot Hill and something the Dragon said there: “When I tore you open, your blood stung me. It burned.”

  Another step.

  She looked at the bag in her hand. She’d had heroin in her blood when the Dragon mauled her hip. Heroin had kept the ensuing infection in check. Heroin had still been in the tip of the needle when she’d stabbed the Dragon with it.

  She realized then what the King of Cyrene’s mysterious flower had been. They’d spread poppy oil on Saint George’s lance to kill the Dragon.

  Opium.

  She looked into the Dragon�
��s gargantuan mouth and got the sudden sense that she wasn’t alone. Scores of men stood just behind her. Saint George in his black armour. Generations of her ancestors. Her father. They were all there with her. Watching.

  Her legs took one last step forward. Right up to the Dragon’s chin. Hot breath singed her skin, the tang of burning rock thick in her nostrils.

  She opened the plastic bag and threw it into the Dragon’s mouth. The heroin spilled out onto her leathery black tongue like confectioner’s sugar.

  Georgia yanked her hand back as the Dragon’s jaws snapped closed. The enormous yellow eyes opened and fixed Georgia with a confused, angry look.

  The Dragon bucked suddenly, and her immense wings twitched. Brown foam spurted from the corners of her mouth, seeped from between her teeth, from her nostrils and the corners of her eyes. She squirmed and shook, her tail knocking down trees and telephone poles along the road. Her eyes went wide. The Dragon looked frightened, something Georgia had never seen before.

  “The first hit is always the best,” she said.

  Georgia’s arms reached up suddenly, and her fingers wrapped around her own throat. Squeezed. She looked with horror at her arms, saw only black veins running under grey skin. The Dragon had taken control. Georgia tried to suck air into her lungs, but her fingers were squeezing her trachea too tightly. Her vision turned black and fuzzy around the edges. She felt her strength ebbing away, leaking from her like blood from a wound. She fell to her knees, then down on her side. Her fingers kept squeezing, squeezing . . .

  The Dragon tried to roar, or maybe she was laughing at Georgia, though what came out was only a laboured wheeze. More brown foam spat from her mouth.

  Georgia rolled onto her back as her brain started to shut down, starved for oxygen. Above, the stars were hidden behind massive red wings that shuddered spastically. The leathery skin of the wings tore suddenly from the bones, snapping like ruptured sails.

  Then the Dragon did roar, a miserable, pain-wracked scream, loud and terrible enough to split the world in two, and as Georgia struggled for breath, she saw the Dragon wither. Her hide, her organs, they crumbled away into the dust from which they had come, and as Georgia’s eyes closed and the scream faded away, she heard the lifeless bones of the Dragon come down. They fell all around her, smashing the cars in the parking lot, demolishing the burning motel porch, and then something fell on Georgia’s chest and she didn’t hear anything more.

  She felt herself falling through the ground and into the earth. Kept falling through darkness.

  “Miss?” The voice came out of the black void that surrounded her.

  “Miss, can you hear me?” She felt hands around her wrists, felt herself being dragged out from under the debris. A blur of light and colour. Billowing smoke came into focus above her, a half-destroyed neon sign with lights that said only VACANCY for a moment, then flickered out altogether, and she realized she’d opened her eyes. Someone was pulling her by the arms. She felt the heat of a fire nearby, tasted ash in the back of her throat, coughed smoke out of her lungs. She was breathing.

  Whoever it was pulled her far away from the burning porch and the still smouldering wreckage of the patrol car, far away from the epicentre of the field of broken, shattered bones, all the way to the end of the building. In the lot outside the motel office, she felt her wrists released. Her arms dropped to the ground, and someone leaned over her, a teenaged boy with acne on his face and braces on his teeth. He looked terrified and confused.

  “Wilbur?” she breathed.

  “You can hear me?” His face exploded in a big grin of relief. “You can hear me!”

  “I can hear you,” she said.

  “Oh God . . . oh God . . . I thought you were dead.” He knelt beside her, helped her sit up. “I called 911. They’re sending an ambulance. I . . . I didn’t know what else to do.”

  Georgia coughed again. Her ribs hurt where the bones had fallen on her. Why was she still alive? If nothing else, the infection should have killed her by now.

  “Things got so crazy,” Wilbur continued, his voice high with panic. “There were so many people, but they weren’t people, they were all fucked up, and I hid in the back room of the office. I . . . I saw what happened to my dad . . . That thing . . .” His eyes welled with tears. “It killed my dad . . .”

  Georgia nodded. “Mine too.”

  She looked down at herself and saw pink skin on her arms and legs. Bruised, bloody, but pink. She pulled at her waistband and saw the grey was gone even around the wound on her hip.

  The infection was gone. As a living part of the Dragon, it had died with her.

  It sank in then that she’d done it. She’d actually done something none of her ancestors had, not even Saint George himself. She’d killed the Dragon.

  No, she’d done two things they hadn’t.

  She’d also survived.

  She felt Wilbur’s body hitch and knew he was trying not to cry in front of her. They leaned against each other and sat on the pavement for a long, quiet moment, watching the motel burn. She heard the pop-pop-pop of the last of her shotgun shells exploding in the room. Somewhere in the conflagration was her broken hypodermic needle. So easy to fix with duct tape, but the fire would have taken it by now. She tensed up. She still wanted the drug. She didn’t need it anymore now that the infection was gone, but the ache for it was still there. Just one hit, she thought. To take the edge off. Dull the pain.

  “My mom’s coming home,” Wilbur said. His voice cracked with a sob. “She . . . she was in Santa Fe. I told her what happened. I told her about Dad. How everyone’s dead.” He shook his head. “I don’t know how you survived. I thought for sure you were dead, but I couldn’t just leave you there. You’re one lucky girl.”

  “My family,” she said. “We’re built strong that way.”

  Exhausted, she asked if she could lie down. Wilbur crossed his legs, and she leaned back until her head rested in the crook of his shins like a pillow.

  “When I called my mom, she cried,” Wilbur said. “I never heard her cry before. She said she was just glad I was okay. She kept saying it over and over. Over and over. And the weird thing is, I didn’t want her to stop.”

  Georgia looked up at the roiling smoke in the sky. Wilbur was lucky. She wished she could call her parents too and let them know she was okay. She hoped wherever they were, they knew.

  Above her, a breeze parted the smoke and she could see the stars again.

  EPILOGUE

  Georgia’s breath clouded before her in the cold Alaskan air. She stopped hiking to catch her breath. She looked at the snow-capped peak of Mount Redoubt looming above her, then turned to see how far she’d come. Below, she saw an oil field with tall metal derricks straddling the wells and drilling rigs moving along the earth like tiny ants between the pipelines and the bobbing arms of the pump jacks. Halfway up, give or take, she thought. It wouldn’t be too much longer. Redoubt wasn’t particularly steep, but it was massive, nearly ten thousand feet tall over a span of five miles. She took a deep breath, rubbed her gloved hands together and started her ascent again.

  Redoubt. It was a fitting name. A stronghold. A secret and protected place.

  Wilbur and his mother, Edith, had been waiting for her when she left the hospital the day after the battle at the motel. They took her in, letting her stay in the guest room of their small house in Buckshot Hill while she recovered. It took nearly a month. In that time, she and Wilbur never told Edith about the Dragon. As far as Edith knew, neither of them had seen anything in the chaos. It was the same story they told the police, and since the fire had erased her prints from the shotgun, they had no reason to doubt their story, choosing instead to focus their investigation on a possible gang war between the Inkheads and the Shaolin Tong.

  The lie was a silent agreement between Georgia and Wilbur. They knew no one would understand or believe them. But in Wilbur Georgia had someone with whom she could finally share the burden of truth, and that felt as good as she
always thought it would.

  As luck would have it, the prolonged investigation kept Edith from demolishing the wrecked motel and removing the rubble from the parking lot. Every night after Edith turned in early, exhausted from her meetings with lawyers, insurance agents and the police, Georgia and Wilbur would sneak back to the motel, duck under the yellow police tape that surrounded the property, and collect as many fragments of Tiamat’s shattered bones as they could. They brought them back to the house and stored them in a series of large trunks in the basement. If the fragments were too big to fit, they took great pleasure in smashing them with a sledgehammer.

  Georgia stopped again to rest. The air was getting thinner as she approached the summit, and she felt hot in her thick parka. When she’d caught her breath, she started again.

  It turned out the friends that Edith Dalton had been visiting in Santa Fe worked for an international airline company. When Georgia was fully recovered, they generously arranged a job for her as flight attendant. The uniform she had to wear was ridiculous, and it didn’t take long for her to develop a hatred for the passengers, but the job took her all over the world. Took her to distant countries where she found deep gorges, tar pits, swamps and caverns that suited her purposes.

  When Georgia reached the peak of Mount Redoubt, the thin air grew tinged with a heavy sulphuric odour. She pulled her scarf over her nose and mouth, and strapped on plastic goggles to protect her eyes from the steam that belched out of the wide crater before her.

  Redoubt hadn’t erupted since 1989, and its gases weren’t at a toxic level, but she felt nervous standing so close to the crater of an active volcano. She didn’t want to be there any longer than necessary. She reached into the pocket of her parka.

  The Dragon would come again, she knew. The earth would spit her out again as surely as it spat out the oil in the field below. The Dragon would be reborn in another age, another civilization with its own dragonslayer. And if that dragonslayer should fail, if the Dragon should live long enough to remember once more who she was, if she should go looking . . . well, Georgia wasn’t going to make it easy for her.