Hero's Curse

by Jack J. Lee

  Thank God, I’d studied and memorized the escape routes out of Salt Lake City when I’d first gotten here. “Drew, go by highway straight up Parley’s Canyon toward Park City. Mountain Dell golf course will be on your left, about ten miles from here. You should be able to get there in ten minutes. I’ll take city streets and go up Emigration Canyon—that’s a twenty-six mile route to the same place. When we get there, I’ll be coming from the east and you’ll be coming from the west. If things work out right, you’ll get there about fifteen minutes before me. Set up something nice for Puff.”

  Drew grinned, “It’s a change from tangos and drug runners.”

  I shot back at him. “You have to admit, when you hang with me, it’s never boring.”

  I called Harley into the kitchen and gunned it, opening the kitchen door by going straight through it. I must have been going forty when I sailed off the back porch and roared through yard directly at the cedar fence that separated my yard from my neighbor’s. Cedar is a relatively soft wood; it was easier going through the fence than the kitchen door. I barely felt the impact.

  I hated being bait again, but I had to make sure the dragon followed me. I exploded through the fence, skidded to a stop, and sprayed it with half a drum of fin stabilized slugs. I saw its scales ripple and I heard the slugs impact, but couldn’t tell if they penetrated. Puff roared, and jerked its Volkswagen-sized head in my direction.

  I jerked back on my throttle. My rear tire spun in place digging deep through the grass and into the soft dirt below. Something hot and gooey hit my back. The impact smacked my head into my handlebars. I was barely able to keep my bike upright.

  Getting hit had a silver lining; Harley got pushed forward and finally got traction. I was on asphalt going about thirty, weaving back and forth, when a ball of flame just missed me. I then realized that I was on fire; the dragon was spitting burning balls of mucous at me. Being the focus of murderous intent was nothing new—pretty much the story of my life. Having something try to kill me with a gigantic burning loogie—that pissed me off.

  Dragon flame was a lot like napalm. Flaming snot covered the back of my helmet, jacket, and left thigh. My left thigh began to hurt as the mithril strike plate heated up; the back of my head felt warm. My jacket protected me perfectly and Harley was fine. I checked my spell bar. I had twenty percent of my soul left. On the bright side, I didn’t feel drunk and I didn’t have a hangover.

  I sped through the deserted residential streets; I guessed it was around three or four in the morning. I was threading a fine line. I had to keep the dragon close enough to stay interested, but still stay out of range of its spit wads and claws. It takes a while to set up a M85. The more time I gave Drew the better.

  I was going about forty when I glanced in my rearview mirror. I saw the dragon take wing. It closed fast. I slammed on my brakes and went into a controlled skid; the dragon overshot me. It threw its wings open to air brake, over-corrected, stalled, and belly flopped on the pavement. Unfortunately, it didn’t look badly hurt—just surprised and a little stunned.

  Multiple tons of pissed off lizard was blocking my way, so I jumped the curb into somebody’s yard and cut through to the next street. I didn’t want to make it too obvious I was leading it somewhere, so I took an S-shaped route through the neighborhood so the dragon could take shortcuts over the houses.

  I was too busy not getting killed to come up with a Pig Latin spell to put out the flames. I didn’t want to waste a healing spell while I was still burning. The pain from my left thigh was getting hard to ignore.

  According to the fairy tales, dragons have human level intelligence. I hoped it was too dumb to realize what I was doing, or too cocky to care. Regardless of how smart he was, it had to have a predator’s basic instincts. In the heat of a chase, instincts are always stronger than logic. I mimicked the body language of a panicked prey animal; it wasn’t hard.

  I forced myself to take a meandering route through Sugar House. I made a wrong turn into a cul-de-sac. All of the houses in front of me had fenced in backyards. I aimed for a yard with a wood fence. I didn’t realize until I was committed that the back end of the yard had a chain link fence.

  I had just enough time to scream, “OH SHIT” and pulled Harley into a wheelie as I was about to smash into the fence. It took a few seconds for me to realize that my mount had smoothly ridden over the fence. I’d barely felt a bump. Magic motorcycles—there were a couple aspects of being a paladin that didn’t suck.

  I decided I’d given Drew enough time and headed straight for Emigration Canyon. By Harley’s speedometer, Puff’s maximum airspeed on the straightaway was fifty-two miles per hour. I stayed about two hundred feet ahead of him until I got two-thirds of the way up the canyon. There were a couple switchback turns near the top. If I didn’t have enough of a lead, the dragon would get in front of me.

  I made the decision to trust my magic mount, and went as fast as Harley could go. Her speedometer only went to 125, but I had to have been going at least 150 when I entered the first turn. My scream was mixture of pain, fear, and exhilaration; Harley and I took the turn like we were on rails. The G-force was so great I started to gray out.

  As I expected, Puff flew straight over the top of the mountain, but I still had to follow the road. He got within fifty feet of me. I prepared myself for another blast of flaming dragon snot, but it didn’t happen. It appeared he’d run out of fuel. That was good, because the back of my head was really getting hot; the dragon flames must have almost burned completely through my helmet. I sent it back to storage. Hopefully, Aidan didn’t keep a lot of important flammable things in the same space. I considered sending my pants back too, but I saw that the dragon snot had eaten completely through my leathers on my left thigh and adhered to the strike plate. The titanium plate cooked through the leather underneath and fused to my thigh.

  I put my left hand straight up in the air and gave him a backwards finger. I knew it was an unnecessary risk but I didn’t care. From his cry of outrage, he knew what it meant. For almost thirty seconds he sped up to fifty-five miles an hour. I kept a close eye on him in my rear view mirrors and kept just barely out of reach.

  I started laughing when Puff screamed in frustration and started to slow down. There’s nothing like kicking an asshole when he’s down. I slowed down with him, staying about thirty feet ahead of him—close enough that he could almost taste me. Again, it was an unnecessary; risk. If he’d been pretending to be tired, he could have had me—but he wasn’t pretending.

  I was only going twenty-eight miles an hour when we got to Mountain Dell. I saw the flash as the two LAW rockets fired; I hoped the shooters were Tim and Aidan. The rockets sounded like they were coming straight at me. I screamed and gunned it. I heard the tremendous ‘BOOM—BOOM’ as the rockets smashed into Puff. I watched in the rearview mirrors as Puff hit the pavement hard.

  When I heard the M85 open up, I knew Tim and Aidan were alive. The dragon’s head thrashed like a spastic snake as Drew expertly fired all five hundred rounds of mixed armor-piercing and tracer into the base of the dragon’s neck. He had linked the belts and laid them out perfectly; the gun never missed a lick.

  The LAW warheads must have burned through Puff’s armor because the fifty caliber slugs almost took his head off. When Drew cleared and safed the M85, it was all over but the twitching. Puff’s corpse jerked and flopped like a twenty ton decapitated chicken.

  I coasted up to Drew and stopped, putting all of the weight on my right foot. I didn’t get off my bike. I was barely able to shift gears with my left foot. There was no way I’d be able to stand. He came up grinning like a madman, slapped me on the shoulder, and said, “I call dibs on the head. I’m going to stuff it and hang it on a wall even if I have to custom build a room big enough to hold it.” His grin fell away as he noticed the charred strikeplate that had melted itself into my left thigh. He sucked his breath in between his teeth and gritted, “Shit, I thought I smelled barbequed pork, but it’s you! T
hat has got to hurt like a motherfucker! Hang on; I’ve got morphine syrettes in my first aid kit.”

  Drew retrieved the morphine, and jabbed me with two of the syrettes. He had a third one standing by. I felt the morphine take hold, and the pain receded.

  Aidan and Tim got closer. They looked crap. They didn’t look injured, but their faces had no color; they moved slowly and carefully, like old men.

  I called out to them, “I hope you guys feel better than you look. What happened?”

  They staggered the last few steps up to me and Drew. Tim gave me a tired smile. “Neither Master Aidan nor I have ever fired a LAW before.” He threw a weak wave at Drew. “Mr. MacDonald informed us that it takes considerable practice to be accurate with them. A dragon’s scales have close to the same strength and resilience as the side armor of a modern main battle tank. We had to pierce the armor so the .50 BMG rounds could penetrate. Because we had to do it quick and dirty, Master Aidan and I pretty much used up everything we had to cast guidance spells on the rockets.

  I had wondered what my slugs had done when I shot the dragon. Now I knew the answer; I’d tickled it. I had more questions. “That scaly son-of-a-bitch tore through our protections like they didn’t exist. Why would a dragon attack us?”

  Aidan smiled as he replied, “Ah, my boy. It makes more sense if you know it was a she and not a he.

  I stared again at the twitching corpse. “How do you know it’s female?”

  Tim answered with a straight face, “She doesn’t have a penis.”

  Drew thought this was funny. He actually dropped to the ground laughing. Aidan started to chuckle and then Tim did too. Soon all three were whooping at the top of their lungs. I understood why they were laughing; there’s a high that comes from surviving a deadly fight. But Mina was dead and I had a titanium plate melted into my thigh. I wasn’t in the mood to join them.

  When Tim was able to talk again, he explained, “What I meant to say is dragons, like most reptiles have two penises and usually keep their penises inside their tails until they need it. During reproduction the pair of hemipenes pop out of their anal opening. Males have a bulge over their retracted penises. Also, they usually have a V-shaped line in front of their anal opening called a sulcus. The dragon we killed didn’t have a bulge or a sulcus.” Tim looked contemplative. “All living creatures have auras. Shapechangers have very distinct auras and it’s sometimes possible to see their original species. From the aura, I’d guess that dragon was originally a Jotunn.”

  “Wait a minute; you’re saying we killed Signe?”

  Aidan nodded, “Victor, it makes sense if she stole Andvaranaut.”

  Tim gasped with excitement. “Master, that’s got to be the answer!”

  I glanced at Drew. He had no idea what they were talking about either. Then I heard B imitating Elmer Fudd singing, “Kill the Dwaagon, Kill the Dwaagon, Kill the Dwaagon!” When we all turned to face him, he smiled. “I can tell you guys have no idea where the theme music from that Bugs Bunny cartoon came from.” He gave a sad shake of his head at our lack of culture. “Boys, that’s ‘The Ride of The Valkyries’ from Richard Wagner’s greatest work, Der Ring des Nibelungen. It’s based on Norse history. Andvaranaut is a golden ring that creates a duplicate ring once a day. If you wear it long enough, it turns you into a dragon. It’s clear that our dragon lady wore it long enough.”

  I asked myself if I had been given enough time, would I have ever researched German operas? I shook my head—not a chance. “So by right of conquest, the ring’s mine?”

  B gave me a politician’s smile. “I’ll tell you what, Vic.” He walked over to me and clasped my shoulder. I felt a wave of energy enter my body from his hand. As it spread through me, I felt rejuvenated. “How about I heal you and we’ll call it even. If it was a routine, run-of-the-mill magic doo-dad, it’d be yours. But it’s against policy to let dragons enter our universe; it’s one of the few heavenly regulations that make any sense. It’s based on the unwritten commandment, ‘There shalt be no God but Jehovah on this Earth.’ The longer a dragon lives, the larger and more powerful it becomes. There’s a dragon—Jormungand—that’s as powerful as any Norse god.

  Then he grabbed my right hand and gave me a two-handed hand shake. This time his smile looked real. “Congrats Dude, you kicked some truly major ass. Even a day old dragon is a powerful enough entity that I probably could have gotten away with nailing it for you. But that would have made you look like a whiny little sissy-pants, and I know how you hate that. I took a gamble and decided to have faith in you—if you’d gone tits up, I’d be up the proverbial fecal estuary with inadequate means of propulsion. But, it paid off. Keep it up and I might be able to get off The Great Gazoo’s shit list.” With that he disappeared.

  I looked down at my left thigh. My leather pants looked brand new and my thigh didn’t hurt.

  Drew snickered, “Yeah, Mister Big Hero Man. Glad you kicked dragon ass all by your lonesome.” He then cocked his head toward the M85 and then his van. “How about giving your old pal a hand?” Even though his back was healed, he still had the instincts of a guy with a bad back; he didn’t want to risk hurting it again. I got off my bike, picked up the seventy pounds of fifty caliber machine gun, and packed it into the van. I realized why Drew brought the M85 instead of an M-2. The M-2 was the better weapon, but with the tripod it weighed a hundred and thirty pounds. He’d made an old man’s choice and hadn’t wanted to admit it.

  Tim and Drew walked along with me and we all got into the van together. Drew called out to Aidan who was still staring longingly at the spot where the dragon had been. B had taken the carcass with him when he disappeared. “Aidan, we should move it, man. We made enough noise that the cops are going to get here anytime.”

  The leprechaun took one last look and ran to the van. As he climbed in he moaned, “Lads, what a waste. Do you know that bathing in fresh dragon’s blood makes you virtually invulnerable? The skin, teeth, talons, bones, and heart are almost as valuable.”

  I turned to Drew, “Let’s go back to the house and see how much is left.” As we got on the highway, I thought about what B had said about not taking care of Signe for me. I decided I was glad he hadn’t. I hadn’t killed her with my own hands but as much as anyone, I was responsible for her death. It wouldn’t have been the same if B had eliminated her for us.

  I owed B for telling me as soon as he knew that Mina was dead. Did that make him my friend? I decided not. The asshole had ‘let’ me take care of Signe for his benefit, not mine. If it was to his advantage, I was almost certain he’d betray me without hesitation.

  When we got to the house, it looked like it had never been attacked. Even the back fence was repaired. A hand written note from B was jammed in the kitchen door frame. ‘It’s the least I could do.’ He’d signed it with a smiley face with horns and a spiked tail.

  The note confirmed my suspicions about B. Yeah, his note was ‘true’ but it was truth meant to deceive. I should know, it’s what I had been doing with ‘truth’ since I’d become a paladin. The asshole was playing me. Once you understood that Jehovah’s power was fueled by faith, and that faith by definition required uncertainty, you could predict what the heavenly bureaucracy would do. They absolutely had to cover up any event that gave proof to ordinary mortals that magic, monsters, and gods do in fact, exist.

  Earlier in the night, I’d been too busy trying to survive to worry about my neighbors. Now that I had time to think, there had to be some reason why none of them had called 911 when a monster was eating my house. Yeah, it was the least that B could do to remove all traces of Signe, but he didn’t do it for us as a reward for good work. He was just doing his job.

  We were all exhausted. I went into my newly restored apartment and fell asleep as soon as I hit the bed.

  I woke up around noon. For once, I was the last one up. I heard the others talking about magic and guns in kitchen. As soon as I got down there, Tim jumped up. “Vic! The Jotunn attacked Boise. It was
a slaughter!”

  “What!”

  Tim said it again, “The Jotunn attacked Boise. It was a slaughter!”

  I pulled a chair out and sat down.

  Aidan explained further, “I received word from the armorer in Boise this morning. Twelve Jotunn attacked them last night right around the time Signe attacked us.”

  The previous time the Jotunn had attacked Boise, Samson and the Oath Brotherhood had only been able to kill two of the warband at the cost of twelve Oath Brothers. This time around they didn’t have a paladin; the Boise Brotherhood had probably taken massive losses. I asked, “How many Brothers did they lose?”

  Aidan shook his head in wonder, “None.”

  I frowned. “How is that a slaughter?”

  Tim looked like he was about to burst. Aidan took pity on him and waved at Tim to answer my question. “It was the Jotunn that got slaughtered, and it’s because of you! The Boise Oath Brothers saw what modern firearms could do when you had your trial by combat with Paladin Samson. When a paladin dies, the minions move in and the Oath Brothers usually die like flies. That prospect helped convince Father Mallory try something new. Two days ago, the Boise armorer called and asked us for advice. Master Aidan told him to get semi-automatic assault rifles and tracer rounds.

  “When the Jotunn attacked the Boise Brotherhood Sanctuary this morning, they were armed with the usual swords, axes, and spears. They met twenty Brotherhood guards armed with AKMs. They cut the Jotunn to pieces. The news is traveling like wildfire through the Oath Brother grapevine. If you hadn’t come up with the idea of using modern firearms first, none of this would have ever happened. You’ve been a paladin for just seven days and you’ve changed everything. Everyone is talking about you.”

  I didn’t know how to respond. I got up and went to the coffee maker on the counter and poured myself a cup. I took a sip. I decided I didn’t give a crap if I’d changed everything and if everyone was talking about me. I just hoped that word of where I was didn’t get back to my old enemies. It wasn’t like I couldn’t handle them, but I didn’t need the extra hassle. I shrugged.