by C Sharp
“I’m guessing that didn’t work out so well,” Chloe muttered.
“No. Your dad had started to get pretty heavily into religion around that same time. You remember the way he used to talk in the kitchen?”
Chloe nodded.
“He didn’t think too highly of some of the Group’s experimentations and policies regarding bioengineering and stuff like that, and he became increasingly contentious the more he learned about what was going on over there…until they finally accused him of leaking some of the classified documents he’d been hired to whitewash to the Washington Post. They could never prove it was him, but he was fired for breach of his nondisclosure agreement and threatened with some pretty serious legal repercussions if he kept at it. I always suspected that Richard Roberts might have had something to do with his leaving.”
The car rounded the bend toward home and pulled into the driveway beside the barn with the familiar crunch of gravel beneath the tires. The headlights caught the shine of Shipwreck’s eyes, watching from the bushes, before Audrey switched off the engine and returned the yard to the dark of a cool autumn night.
“Did he do it?” Chloe asked.
“I don’t know, probably,” Audrey answered.
“Was he right?”
Audrey sighed as if measuring an answer to a question she had long pondered. “You know I’m no fan of what that company is doing to this community for a profit, and despite all of his failures as a husband and a father, your dad was nothing if not passionate about what he believed in. I always respected him for that; it’s a big part of why I fell in love with him in the first place. But you were still pretty young then and may not remember it so well. He got pretty out there by the end—talking all the time about Judgment Day and how the Daedalus Group was going to accidentally destroy the world and all kinds of mumbo jumbo like that,” she admitted painfully.
Despite the calm quiet of the car, Chloe’s heart was thundering in her chest. She had never heard that story before, and she wasn’t sure what to think about it. What if he was right? What if it’s happening now? “You think Dad was crazy?”
“I don’t know, honey. He was a good man, underneath it all, but I think he’d have to be pretty nuts to leave you. And it seems to me that the world is getting on just fine here without him,” she said as she opened her door and flooded the cab with the light from the overhead. “But I do know that it’s time for dinner.”
Chloe forced herself to smile, though her stomach was doing somersaults. It didn’t help that when she stepped from the car, she was immediately hit by a nauseating waft of rotten death from the barn. Audrey’s hand went to her nose, and Chloe winced and coughed.
“Good God, Shipwreck has outdone himself this time! That’s awful!” Audrey proclaimed with a nasally twang.
They started running toward the house in an attempt to escape the reek, and it quickly turned into a race as they jostled to be the first to get through the door amid a flurry of laughs and squeals. Shipwreck darted in behind them and disappeared upstairs before they slammed the door. Chloe knew what was coming. Audrey ruffled through one of the shopping bags and removed a brand-new box of thirty-gallon trash bags.
“I’m gonna need you to clean that out tomorrow morning before I get home.” She handed the box to Chloe with a cross between a grimace and a smile.
“Mom!” Chloe whined.
“Sorry, honey, he’s your cat.” She headed toward the kitchen with a little chuckle. “Consider it part of your grounding.”
• • •
Chloe rummaged through the cabinet beneath the sink and came away with a pair of yellow rubber dishwashing gloves and the bulk jug of industrial cleaner her mom had swiped from the restaurant. A year later and the jug was still half-full; it smelled like someone had crossbred a lemon tree with a Douglas fir and then sent the whole thing through a wood chipper.
The unopened box of trash bags still waited for her on the counter where she’d left it the night before. Audrey had added a Post-it that said, “Do a good job cleaning the barn and I’ll see about getting you a new phone this afternoon. GOOD LUCK!”
Chloe unceremoniously shoved a piece of wadded-up tissue into each nostril before tying a red bandanna over her nose. She pulled on the rubber gloves like a surgeon preparing to operate. The bags and cleaner went into the bucket at her feet. She snatched its rusted handle and walked toward the back door while trying to concentrate on breathing through her mouth. Shipwreck eyed her warily from the top of the stairs as she came to the door and peered back at him.
“Thanks a lot, buddy!” she yelled just as he took off down the hallway.
She eyed the dilapidated structure of the barn through the storm door. The once beautiful, fireman-red building had been reduced to two stories of junk-filled storage in a rotten paint-chipped shell.
Chloe exhaled deeply and shouldered the back door open to a beautiful fall morning. Even from the porch she could catch the acrid stench of death in the air, and she wondered again why they hadn’t bulldozed the barn a long time ago. She and Audrey didn’t need the reminder of what the barn had become in that final year before Ray McClellan had left—hours spent within, pacing, tinkering, and ranting to himself.
She stepped from the porch and walked the length of the unkempt hedges behind the house. A large spool of garden hose sat dormant at the corner with four lengths of connected hose and a high-powered spray-gun head. She pushed aside the hedge and leaned over to turn the valve with a hiss and a rattle as the hose swelled with expectation.
Chloe grabbed the spray gun with her free hand and started walking the fifty paces to the barn as the hose wheel unspooled behind her with a reoccurring squeak. For half the length of the yard, she pretended that she was a gunslinger heading to a duel, but then it was too hard to imagine anything past the stink.
Shipwreck hadn’t killed anything bigger than a squirrel in a couple years, but Chloe was still traumatized by the unfortunate family of possum carcasses that the cat had left in the upper floor of the barn three summers back. Audrey had only found them after they’d ripened for more than a week of ninety-plus degree days. It was a mother and three young: ambushed and murdered in their den. That was the day that Audrey had decreed that she would never go into the barn again. Chloe shuddered when she thought about it.
The cooler weather was working in her favor this time, but the advance assault on her nose spoke of another potentially soul-scarring discovery. She kept walking with the rhythmic squeak of the uncurling hose behind her, unable to believe that this was how she was spending her Sunday morning.
She dropped the hose and bucket at the door to pull out a couple of the heavy plastic bags from the fresh box. Reluctantly she raised her shiny yellow fingers to the iron latch, and as the creaking door swung open, a blast of warm, fetid air punched her in the gut. She had to stop herself from the impulse to drop everything and sprint back to the house.
It took a moment for her eyes to adjust to the darkness beyond the pool of sunlight that burned through the open door. Most of the windows were greased over with neglect or blocked by piles of her father’s discarded crap. One wall was stacked to Chloe’s head with buckets of dried-up red and white paint, left behind from her dad’s half-finished plans to renovate ten years prior.
The opposite wall was lined with a collection of farm equipment that, to Chloe’s memory, her father had never once put to use. There was a tractor, an old VW Bug that hadn’t run since before Chloe was born, and a refrigerator that Audrey had inherited when she was still in high school herself…but nothing to indicate how a smell this awful could also be housed within.
Chloe reached around the lip of the door and felt along the wall for the flashlight long kept on a hook for the rare occasions when one of the McClellan women ventured into the cavernous and creepy space beyond. Chloe remembered this approach as a confused eight year old girl—wanting desperately to be with the warm, patient, and inspiring father of her youth, but also a litt
le scared of the volatile and distant stranger who had begun to take his place.
She hoped that the light wouldn’t be there—or maybe the batteries will be dead—anything to justify putting off the task, even if only for the time it took to return inside to find fresh AAs.
Instead, her rubber fingers found the weatherproof plastic cylinder, and she clicked the red button to find a dull but steady beam of light at her feet. Crap!
Chloe pointed the light into the barn, but the weak orange glow only showed her fifteen feet of old, trampled hay and the still-functioning push mower that she occasionally used to cut the grass. She saw no animal parts and still hadn’t heard the buzzing flies normally present at such occasions, but the stink seemed to increase with every step.
She cupped her hand over her face and took a deep inhale through her mouth before holding her breath. Let’s see how long these cross-country lungs can hold out. She clenched the trash bags tightly and stepped on.
The barn was big, nasty, and beyond hope. The air was unpleasantly humid compared to the crisp breeze outside, and most every surface was covered with old bat poop and cobwebs. The front hood of the Volkswagen had so many little black dots scattered across it that, on a first look, it almost seemed that the car might have originally been painted grey rather than white.
No bugs, birds, or beasts so much as stirred throughout the gloom as Chloe scrutinized every lump and surface she could reach with the light. She continued moving toward the open and less used space at the far end, passing by stacks of her Dad’s now-browned and warped National Geographic magazines. She stepped around a wood-paneled, antenna TV with its screen smashed in, and then navigated an unintended obstacle course of a large collection of rakes, hoes, and shovels.
Even with her breath held, the stink of death seeped into her pores and kept her on the cusp of a gag. There’s no way that Shipwreck could have done this.
The flashlight caught something ahead, glistening and red, and Chloe stopped advancing. She held the beam on it as the reality of what she was seeing sunk in. She gasped.
There was a large brown cow lying on its side with its stomach ripped out and half its guts on display. Chloe might have screamed if she hadn’t been too stunned to react. The increasingly shaky beam of light scanned to another lump beside it, this one comprised of a half-eaten bull that had been left to rot for weeks. Nearby she spotted a pinkish mound of what may have been pigs and another large pile of discarded bones, hooves, and horns, almost entirely stripped of meat.
A giant shadow in the corner of the barn began to uncoil and take shape. Its form filled the entirety of the space that had once been used to winter sheep; as it shifted, Chloe could see a silvery sheen within the gloom. Without thinking, she swung the flashlight toward it and caught the horned head of the dragon in her sickly orange light.
Steaming drool fell from Uktena’s long crocodile jaws, and his blue eyes flared with electricity as he slithered closer. Chloe tried to bolt, but as before, she found her body locked in place by his will. She fought to break free as a surprisingly feral noise emerged from her belly and the tingle of electricity gathered in her extremities.
Uktena’s head swayed slightly and seemed to tremble as more sizzling drool fell to the hay. His previously shining scales had taken on a waxy, clouded cast, and his muzzle and neck were splattered unceremoniously with layers of dried gore. The electric current in his eyes began to fade and then dimmed completely, just as his head visibly drooped… Chloe found that she was able to move again.
She forgot that she’d meant to scream as the dragon’s head fell to the ground with a barn-rattling thump. Chloe stumbled back and tripped on a rake, winding up on her butt in the hay with her back against a stack of tractor tires. Her body surged with panic, but everything began to slow again as the dragon emitted a long, wheezing sigh and closed his eyes, almost as if he were ashamed to have her see him this way. They stayed motionless for a few seconds—silent, save for the pounding of Chloe’s heart and the rasp of the dragon’s labored breaths.
In that moment, the threat of the Daedalus Group and the warnings of the Tipping Point Prophecy became immaterial. “You’re sick,” she said with a quivering voice. “Maybe I can help?”
His unnaturally blue gaze snapped open again, and the black slits in the center thinned to focus on her as the spiny ridge down his neck bristled. “I am the Fifth Claw of Typhon’s talon, the Lord of Lightning and Great Worm of the West—I need no help from humans!” he growled.
His deep, gravelly voice echoed through Chloe’s mind with the power of an avalanche, but his eyes were red-rimmed and sunken, and his focus could not maintain the ferocity for long. In some spots along his neck, the scales had begun to look translucent, and the diamond shape across his brow held no trace of the internal light that had been there before. The spines along his back dropped back down as he huffed out another labored breath that devolved into a series of hacking coughs. Uktena winced with obvious pain.
Chloe could hear the fluid rattling in his lungs as still more of the steaming bile dribbled from between his teeth to singe the hay below. She yanked the bandanna from her face and sat up. With all the adrenaline coursing through her blood, she’d somehow forgotten about the stink. I nursed Shipwreck back from the brink of death. How different can this be?
“It’s the pond, isn’t it?” Chloe suggested. “You woke too soon, and now you can’t go back there since the Daedalus Group took it.”
Uktena studied her closely as his body rose and fell with the ponderous work of his lungs. Finally he answered, “Those men meddle with forces beyond their comprehension. Now they plague my rest and poison my den with their presence.”
“Have you been here since the night you destroyed the tower?” she asked, awed that a hundred-foot-long monster could have been living in her backyard for almost a month without her noticing.
Uktena did not answer as he began to lick his blood-caked claws with a long, purplish serpentine tongue. He averted his eyes and seemed in that moment to be self-conscious of his messy appearance.
“Is that why you’re so weak?” she asked. “Because you can’t sleep?”
The dragon looked as if he might protest, only to find that he lacked the strength to do so. His eyes glanced to the freshly killed cow nearby. “I have awoken with a great hunger to fill, but I cannot eat,” he admitted. “Something is wrong with the meat. It is unclean like the water and air, corrupted by toxins—unnatural like all that you humans touch.”
He said the word humans with such vitriol that Chloe began to shake as she pressed painfully into the tires at her back. But she swallowed through a dry mouth and rebelled against every fiber in her body that told her to run, forcing herself instead to shuffle forward toward the bloody mess of a cow. She swung the beam to the cow’s haunches and illuminated the angel wing Daedalus Group insignia branded there.
“These cows have been pumped full of hormones and steroids to make them bigger and more valuable,” Chloe said, remembering her mother’s many rants on the evils of the Daedalus Group’s industrial food production. “You’re sick because you’ve been eating the wrong cows.”
“And you would know where I could find clean meat?” The dragon hissed and leveled his gaze on Chloe, and for an instant, the electricity flashed within his eyes again.
She felt the probe of his will through her mind for an instant, and then it was gone as his jaws slumped back to the ground. She was close enough to feel the hot, stale air of his breath against her face, but she held fast. He looked too weak to leave the barn, let alone snatch a four-hundred-pound steer from the wing.
“If this smell doesn’t go away by tonight, my mom is going to come looking in this barn, and neither one of us wants that to happen,” she said, thinking while she spoke. “If you can somehow clean up this mess, I’ll promise to bring you clean meat until you get your strength back… How did you get in here anyway?”
Uktena motioned with his eyes toward the up
per story, where the fifteen-foot-tall sliding door for loading and unloading hay was cracked open with a bright slash of light burning through.
“Right,” she nodded, trying to play it off like all this was business as usual. “Do we have a deal?” she asked.
“Why would you help me?” he asked, seeming in that moment more like a tired old man than an ancient monster.
“You saved my life twice; it’s the least I can do,” she stated, not knowing how to voice the deeper connection she’d felt to him since the lightning dream. “Plus, we seem to have a common enemy,” she said with a nod back to the Daedalus Group’s poison cow. “And I’ll tell you what,” she added with the hint of a mischievous smile, “when you can fly again, I’ll show you where to find some of the finest meat you’ve ever tasted.”
Chapter 21
The Cow Thieves
Perhaps the only thing that could have taken Chloe’s attention away from pining over Kirin the following week was attempting to secretly nurse a dragon back to health. She came to understand rather quickly that dragons ate a tremendous amount, and her grand declaration that she would provide for one of their god-kings in her mother’s barn had already proven to be a bit rash by Sunday night.
Luckily Audrey, in her wonderfully thrifty way, had gotten into the habit of flash freezing large amounts of locally raised, grass-fed organic beef a few times a year. She’d just made her usual winter meat purchase the week before when the beef supplier for Positive Pete’s had showed up with some discount overstocked cuts and a fondness for flirting. Audrey knew how to capitalize on a good thing.