by Edward Aubry
He had all of these thoughts in a minuscule fraction of a second, the lag time between when he started to understand what he was seeing and when his shock and horror responses kicked in. While he was trying to remember how to scream, he looked at the only other person he had yet met in an abandoned world as that person collapsed and died in slow motion. As the man fell, Harrison could see the hole in his chest. Black blood poured out of it and ran down the length of his McDonald's uniform. Simultaneously, globules of orange light leaked out of the same hole, rose upward, and dispersed. The beam of light remained poised in air, with a person-sized gap in it. The scream formed at last, and Harrison leapt out of his seat, knocking his tray on the floor, then he fell over, a part of him awestruck by the horrible beauty of the light. Then, as it hung there, the beam faded from orange to white and dissolved in a shower of sparks.
All at once, he recognized it. The raw, awful violence paled in the light of his recognition, of the fear that chased it. And then, there she was, hovering in front of him, her wings, purple and sparkly and beautiful, fluttering lightly.
The entire rest of her body was covered in gore.
This is it, he thought, and the utter, horrific betrayal broke his spirit. He had believed in her, literally, against his better judgment, and he had been wrong. She was not some harmless, child's fantasy after all, but an evil, murderous monster. Had she seen him as prey this whole time? He had been a fool. Now he would be a dead fool.
"Don't kill me. Don't kill me. Don't kill me." He repeated this mantra and wept.
She wiped blood away from her eyes and stared at him with unveiled rage and loathing. "Did you eat anything?" she asked.
He shook his head, sobbing. "Don't kill me," he begged.
She flew straight at his face, too fast for him to throw his arms up to guard himself. "DID YOU EAT ANYTHING?"
"Yes. I ate a chicken sandwich."
She turned and flew in a huge arc around the inside of the restaurant, and although she moved swiftly, Harrison's perception was prolonged and sickening. Here it comes, he thought. She picked up speed. The arc would end with him detonated against the front windows. He remembered a dog from his childhood, the best game of miniature golf he ever played, his first kiss. He remembered telling his father to go to hell when he was six years old. He remembered the regret over that incident he had felt at his father's funeral, eighteen years later. As Glimmer came around for the coup de grace, he could see her outstretched arms, her palms spread, no doubt to inflict maximum damage on her way through. He remembered his favorite book, a secret hiding place he hadn't thought of in years. His most embarrassing fart.
And then she hit him. It was the tiniest punch in the gut. He looked down, ready to see the hole, but he was intact, and she was still there, her hands laid flat against his belly. She glowed white, and where she touched him, a radiant stain spread to his whole torso. It made him feel warm and uncomfortable, but, to his surprise, not dead.
Then the nausea came. Glimmer flitted away and he pulled himself up to his knees, just in time to throw up. It hurt, and then he started to feel detached and dizzy. It reminded him of the regret that followed the one time he had gotten puking drunk. Between the illness and loss of control, that had been the most unpleasant experience in his life until now. Now was just a touch worse. He coughed, spat, and sat back down on the floor, scooting away from the vomit, as far as he could.
Then bloody Glimmer was back, holding a child-sized cup in both hands. "Drink this," she instructed.
"Oh, God," he moaned.
The rage came back. "DRINK IT!"
He drank it. It burned. Pure fear drove him to finish it. It scorched his throat, and right before he threw it up again, he identified it as warm cola. It splashed, foul and hot, on his pants.
"Oh, God." His throat felt like it had been scoured with a wire brush. He thought he could feel his teeth dissolving. "Oh, God," he rasped. "Oh, God. Oh, God. Oh, God."
"It will pass." Was she scolding him? No, not scolding. Reassuring? "We have to get you out of here." She pulled on his finger. "Harry? Come on, Harry, we're going." She flew into his face, and snapped her fingers. "Seriously, cupcake, time to go. Can you walk?"
He nodded in dull, hopeless confusion. "What just happened?"
"Everything is fine, sweetheart, we just need to get you up and out." He stood up, his legs shaking. His whole body shaking. "Attaboy. Come on." She flew as he walked, slowly, leading him to the door. As they passed the second or third table, he paused and looked back. "DON'T STOP. Harry! Eyes forward," she said. But she was too late. The blood everywhere looked just like he thought it looked. For a moment it renewed his terror of the pixie. Then he saw his own vomit, which did not look at all like he thought it should. It steamed and bubbled. Boiled? Hard to tell. What he could tell, despite his attempts not to notice it, was that it was moving slowly toward him. More than moving, it writhed and flopped.
"Okay," he croaked, "let's go."
As they reached the front door, she blocked him "We need the pack, honey," she reminded him, "and I can't carry it." He bent down to pick it up, and was startled to remember that it weighed almost nothing. He was stable enough to get it on, but only just.
Once they were outside, he saw that the drawbridge had been raised. It was held up by two ropes. Glimmer flew through them and snapped them both. The drawbridge crashed down, but did not break. She led him across, and as soon as they were on dry land, she ordered him to sit down. He did. She flew back to the drawbridge, then flew across it, back and forth, with more and more speed. Her trail of sparks covered the bridge in denser zigzags, until the wood began to smolder. It burst into flames.
She landed on the grass next to him. "Are you feeling coherent?" she asked. He thought about this, then nodded. "Good," she said. "I need you to focus for a minute. I have to get this stuff off me. Right now. I want you to get a bottle of water out of your pack and pour it on me."
"Pour it on you," he repeated.
"That's right. I need a shower, and it has to be right away."
"Moat?" he suggested.
She shook her head. "No," she said. "That water's no good."
"Shower," he said. "Got it." He opened the pack and rooted for a few seconds, before producing one of the plastic water bottles. He stared at it, not sure if she wanted him to use the pop-up nozzle.
"Just unscrew the cap and dump," she said. He did so. The water glugged out, and she held out her arms and turned under the flow. He expected the blood to be water soluble, and rinse off, but it reacted to the water by hissing and sizzling against her flesh. If it hurt, she gave no indication of it. He was afraid to pour it over her wings, as he assumed they might be flimsy and easy to damage, but the water had no visible effect on them. They did not bend under its weight and stayed dry. After a few seconds, the hissing stopped. The blood was gone. She was just getting wet. At that point, he discovered something he hadn't noticed before. She was naked.
In spite of everything, he found himself staring. She was not what he expected. Somehow, he had always imagined fairies to be lithe and svelte creatures, and her Barbie wardrobe had cemented that impression. Now he could see that without her clothes she was more curvy than he would have guessed, of a softer build. That she did not conform to the American cultural standard of idealized perfection made her more believable, somehow, and far more appealing. Her nipples stood at attention from the cold shower, and the tiny patch of shimmery, iridescent silver hair punctuated the image. She was, as she had pointed out to him when they first met, quite lovely. After what they had just endured, she was a tonic to his eyes. Looking at her calmed and centered him.
It took his brain a couple seconds to catch up with the fact that he had run out of water. Glimmer looked up at him. She saw the expression on his face. She grinned, curtsied. "Ta-dah!"
He was mortified. For a moment, he considered the possibility of vomiting again, this time out of abject shame. He would have blushed deep red, but in
his current state all his face could do was become a little less pasty. He covered his eyes, and tried to say, "Sorry," but his ravaged throat choked on the word. She heard it anyway.
"Don't be. I enjoy the attention," she said without artifice. "Towel." He lifted his hand from his eyes. She held her hand out. He reached into the pack and produced a washcloth. She wrapped it around her body. Her wings emerged through the cloth.
Harrison dropped down onto his back and lay still with his eyes closed for several minutes. When he felt the adrenaline start to recede, he opened his eyes, and rocked his head back and forth, looking for the pixie. She stood a couple feet away from his head, still wearing the washcloth. Her expression was tender and concerned.
"Hi," she said. "How are you feeling?"
He coughed. "Not so good," he whispered. "What did you do?"
"You needed a purge," she said. It sounded clinical.
"The food," he sputtered. "Poisoned?" His head was still fuzzy. He struggled to assemble the puzzle. "I thought you were going to kill me."
"Kill you? I like you!" she said, her eyes wide with shock.
"You killed that man," he reminded her.
"Yes, I did," she admitted, "and, no, you weren't poisoned. But you had a stomach full of facer larvae." She walked closer to him and sat down. "That man wasn't a man, Harry. It was a kind of demon, and it was feeding you its young. They would have eaten you alive. From the inside out."
He closed his eyes. He didn't want there to be demons. It made sense, though. There were pixies, so there would be demons. The good came with the bad. And the ugly. He wanted to beg her to make all the evil go away. He wanted to beg her to be that powerful. All he managed to say, though, was, "They tasted like chicken."
"I've heard that," she said. There was no mockery in her voice.
"How did you know?" he asked. "He looked human to me. He acted human." As he said that last part, though, he realized that wasn't true. His impression of the man was that he was some sort of schizophrenic. He had not reacted to Harrison at all, which didn't make sense. His behavior was downright abnormal, but Harrison had been so damn eager to forgive it.
"It was a facer," she said. "A facing demon, they're called. They can make themselves look like humans, or trolls, or whatever they're trying to fool. They can't sustain it, though. But they usually don't have to for very long."
"How do you tell when you see one?" he asked, desperate and afraid.
"Their magic smells like skunk," she said. "I detected this one from over two miles away." She paused. "The way you can tell one is that you stick with me."
He nodded in obedience. "Why the Coke?"
"Caffeine is a magic detergent. It's not strong, but mixed with carbon dioxide, it helps flush evil toxins. That, and the sugar, which is a demonicide. I had to make sure the larvae were all out. Coke is a great magical ipecac for certain ailments." She offered a sympathetic face. "Sorry it was warm. I got it from a bottle in your pack. The soda fountain probably wouldn't have had any sugar in it."
He felt as though he were under the care of a competent doctor. This calmed him down. "Thank you."
She smiled. "All in a day's work."
Harrison sat up. He pulled another bottle of water out of his pack and, after rinsing and spitting twice, gulped it down. The cool water felt marvelous on his scratchy throat, and he could feel his voice take a first step on the long road to recovery. "I'm sorry I doubted you in there," he said, still hoarse, but with a little more volume.
"Oh," she said. "Don't. I understand."
He shook his head. "That was," he paused, looking for the right word, "alarming. You did that thing … that thing where you made yourself a bullet. I didn't know you could be so …" Fierce? Ruthless? Savage? How could he say it without scaring himself all over again? "Aggressive," he finished. "That first day or two after you found me, you seemed so fragile."
"What? Fragile? That's how you see me?" Her eyes huge, welling with tears.
"No, no, no!" he backpedaled, and the words sent him into new coughs. "No, not fragile. Wrong word. Ah …" he sorted through his brain. "Sensitive. That's all. Nice. Sweet. Not the sort of pixie who would use violence."
"Oh," she sniffed. "Well, I am. Mostly."
"Mostly," he repeated, incredulous.
"Listen," she said, "I want you to sit still for a minute. Then come with me. I have something to show you that might cheer you up."
"I think I could use some cheer right now." He got up, wobbled a bit.
She took him back to the highway and further west. Whatever she wanted to show him was not very close, and Harrison had to stop several times for rest and water. Finally, she took him off the side of the road, where they walked up a small hill. The top of the hill overlooked a meadow, and what Harrison saw in the meadow just about crushed his fragile psyche.
On the grass, its back to him, lay the body of a dinosaur, just like the one he had seen the day he first heard Claudia. Apart from the detail that it was about twice as big.
"Okay," he said. "I'm cheered up. Can we go now?"
"Shh. Keep watching."
He kept watching, insofar as he could watch a dinosaur corpse. He was about to say, "Why? Is it going to do a trick?" but between forming the joke and speaking it, something happened.
"There!" said Glimmer. "See?"
He did. "It's moving." He was dumbfounded. "Please," he managed, "let's go now."
"Not yet." She was still whispering.
Then he saw it for real. The movement came from behind the dinosaur. Something was down there, something probably chewing its guts out. Just when Harrison was about to ask what it was, and why he would want to see it, a head emerged.
At first he thought it was another dinosaur. The head was reptilian enough, but it was also long and toothy, more like an alligator than a lizard. It was either red or green or both. It was hard to tell because it sparkled when it moved. It reminded Harrison of a Christmas tree. He could see its breath, which was odd, because it was still warm out.
Then it looked right at him.
He panicked. Froze. Remembered what he had learned from watching Jurassic Park. If they didn't move, maybe it wouldn't see them. He inched his head toward Glimmer to tell her the plan.
She waved at it.
More than that, she zipped up and down, back and forth, cycling through the color spectrum. Harrison stared in stupefied disbelief.
"What are you doing?" he whispered, furious.
"Oh, don't be a big baby," she said, pointing to the beast. "Look!"
He looked. It was still watching them, but now it was waving a huge, brown flag back and forth. No, thought Harrison. Not a flag.
A wing?
It was waving back.
"I thought I saw him fly by early this morning," Glimmer said. "I spent most of the day tracking him. His name's Gustav. I wanted you to meet him."
"Gustav," Harrison said slowly, "is a dragon?"
"Duh," said Glimmer. "Let's go down!"
"Wait. Can you … uhhh, can you tell him I've had a really bad day? That maybe we could take a rain check?"
Glimmer put her little hands on his cheekbones and looked into his tired, frightened eyes. "Do you trust me?"
He thought back over the time since she had introduced herself, giving special attention to this last day. He thought about how it had felt to fear her, not to trust her, and he thought about whether she had given him a reason, any reason at all, to distrust her. He thought back on her habit of avoiding questions and misdirecting him, and he wondered if any of that mattered. He saw her as suspicious. But maybe it was time to see her as mischievous, and only sometimes at that. She certainly hadn't treated him with mischief when his life was at stake.
He touched her hands with his fingers. She did not move them.
"Yes."
"Then come and meet my friend."
Chapter Seven
Gustav
As he approached the dragon, the most striking sensat
ion Harrison experienced was the smell. It was somewhere between the tangy sweetness of barbeque and the vile sweetness of rotten meat. It made him uncomfortable, and fearful, and more than once he fought back the urge to ask Glimmer to convey his apologies. He wanted to run away. While they were still at least a hundred yards away, he saw a spray of light and smoke pour out of the back of the dead dinosaur, followed by a hissing, roaring sound. It reminded him of a fire hose, but in a very different sense of the term than the usual one.
That's when he realized that the smell wasn't the dragon. It was the dragon's lunch. Gustav was roasting the carcass as he went along. The rotten smell made Harrison consider a new possibility. If the dinosaur were carrion, and not a fresh kill, that might mean that dragons were scavengers, not predators. Harrison took an odd comfort in that. At this point, he was eager to take comfort wherever he could find it.
Harrison heard a loud, wet snap. Gustav spat out a huge bone.
"Come on," Glimmer whispered.
Harrison realized that he had stopped walking, but he couldn't remember how long he had been standing still. Gustav's visage evoked a deep, primal response in him. He could make out the dragon's form now. It looked like a large reptile, not quite a lizard, not quite an alligator. Something else. It rested on enormous, bulky hind legs and had slimmer, but not shorter, forelegs, not the stubby "arms" of a tyrannosaurus. These were full-fledge arms that ended in distinct hands complete with opposable thumbs. The fingers were tipped with severe claws, which Gustav used to grasp and tear. His wings were folded across his back, though they unfurled and collapsed as he ate in a manner that looked unconscious rather than deliberate. They must have spanned at least fifty feet. The dragon's design fascinated Harrison. No earthly vertebrate was built like this. Birds, bats, even pterosaurs had wings that were homologous to front limbs, yet on Gustav wings and arms were distinct. He had the best of both worlds.