The Dragon Star (Realms of Shadow and Grace: Volume 1)

by G. L. Breedon

  He hated dreams like that.

  He had them sometimes. Dreams that felt more real than reality. Dreams where he saw and did things that felt like he was really seeing and doing them. But he knew they were dreams. He always knew. Because of the feeling. The feeling it was more real than his waking life. And he always knew something else as well — whatever happened in the dream would happen when he woke up. Not right after he opened his eyes, not in the first hour maybe, possibly not for a day or two, or even a week, but eventually it would happen.

  So, Gabriel Salvador knew he was going to drown that day.

  The first time it happened, he was five and he had dreamed he was falling out of a tree. The next day he had fallen out of the willow tree in the backyard. When he told his father about the dream, his father had smiled and said it was what was known as a self-fulfilling prophecy. He dreamed he would fall out of the tree and then he had climbed the tree, remembered the dream, and was made so anxious by it that he had fallen. Gabriel didn’t tell his father he hadn’t remembered the dream until he saw the ground rushing up at him. He was lucky then. He only sprained his arm. But it happened again. And again. It couldn’t be avoided. What he dreamed was going to happen.

  Gabriel decided not to think about it. There was nothing he could do. If he stayed home from school, he might drown the next day. Or he might drown in the bathtub. Or it might rain for two days straight and he might drown in a flood. It didn’t matter. But it didn’t make him happy, either.

  He climbed out of bed and looked at himself in the mirror above his dresser. He was tall and skinny for thirteen, his hair slightly wavy like his Jewish father’s and dark black like his Guatemalan mother’s. He looked like his father’s child in the dim light of winter and his mother’s in the sunny days of summer. Even his eyes seemed like a blend between his parents: deep brown with flecks of green. He wished one of his parents had been a fish. That might help.

  He reached out to pluck his lucky pocket watch from the top of the dresser and paused. That was odd. Where was his lucky pocket watch? He had put it on the dresser the previous night before going out to practice catching fly balls with his dad in the back yard. Had it been there before he went to bed? He couldn’t remember. Could it have fallen on the floor? Gabriel searched around the dresser and the room with no success. Where could it have gone? It seemed like a bad omen, losing your lucky pocket watch on the day you thought you were likely to die.

  His father had given him the pocket watch on his thirteenth birthday, just as Gabriel’s grandfather had given it to him when he had turned thirteen. His grandfather had inherited the watch in a foxhole during a battle in World War II when his best friend had thrown himself on a mortar to save his buddies’ lives.

  But there was no lucky watch to be found that morning no matter where Gabriel looked for it. He filled his pockets with the usual things: coins, crumpled bills, a pack of gum, and a pocketknife and headed downstairs.

  At breakfast his mother could sense his mood immediately. “Why the Glum Gus routine this morning?”

  “Didn’t sleep well,” Gabriel said. He had learned long ago that telling his parents about his dreams never worked out. He didn’t need any more lectures about over-active imaginations and he especially didn’t need any more threats to see Dr. Wallace again. Gabriel didn’t need a psychiatrist, he needed a hot breakfast. And a life jacket.

  “Do I have to go today?” Gabriel asked. He knew the answer, but he figured he should try.

  “Are you not feeling well?” his father asked.

  “No, I’m fine.” It was too late to start faking an illness. If he were going to go that route, he should have come down the stairs coughing. Besides, it didn’t matter if he went or not. The dreams always came true.

  “Then you have to go,” his mother said.

  “Is that boy still bothering you?” his father asked.

  “No,” Gabriel answered. “Not usually.” Eddie Sloat was the neighborhood bully who had been pestering him for months.

  “You should walk to school with Emily Baskin,” his mother said. “You used to walk with her all the time.”

  “Emily hates me.”

  “That’s ridiculous,” his mother said. “Why would she possibly hate you?”

  “Do you honestly think I understand why girls do any of the things they do?”

  “Not to fear, Son,” his father said with a grin. “Once they become women, their actions are wholly and completely comprehensible in every way. Why, I understand your mother better than I understand myself.”

  “That’s odd,” his mother said. “When boys turn to men they become completely obtuse. Your father surprises me every day with the things he says.”

  “I should go,” Gabriel said, standing up. “Wouldn’t want to be late.” He kissed his mom and hugged his dad and started for the door.

  “Walk with her.”

  “That’s how I won your mother over. Ignoring her when she told me to go away.”

  Gabriel waved at his parents. If he couldn’t figure out a way to let the dream happen without him drowning, it might be the last time he saw them.

  “I love you both,” he said as he closed the door.

  ***

  The first raindrop exploded gently on Gabriel’s face as he walked toward the school parking lot. He quickened his pace as a sheet of rain followed the lone raindrop. His best friends Tom and Harold laughed and rushed along with him and the rest of his class toward the waiting school bus. School was normally school, vastly boring daily drudgery, but today was a class field trip to the Museum of Natural History, so Gabriel was excited.

  History was Gabriel’s favorite subject. Baseball was the other. While Harold and Tom played other things, baseball was the only sport that had ever interested Gabriel. He suspected it was the history of the game that appealed to him — the way it had been woven into the character of the American psyche for over a century. Gabriel didn’t think there would ever be a football player who held the same sort of mythological wonder as Babe Ruth or Mickey Mantle.

  Stepping onto the bus, Gabriel wiped the rain from his face and looked around for a seat. Most of the seats were already taken. To his left he saw Emily Baskin. She looked up at him with a half-smile that quickly transformed into a scowl as he passed by her seat. Harold and Tom had already grabbed a seat, so Gabriel slipped into the seat across the aisle from them next to Larry, a sickly boy who was always sneezing. Something to do with allergies. Larry sneezed and wiped his nose on his jacket sleeve. How could you have allergies in a rainstorm? Gabriel wondered.

  He groaned silently to himself as Eddie Sloat slid into the seat behind him and the bus rumbled into motion. Eddie was on the wrestling team and was forever wrestling smaller kids to the ground who had never even seen a wrestling match, twisting their arms, pushing their faces in the mud, and generally enjoying himself at their discomfort. Gabriel was one of his favorite targets, although Eddie had so far confined himself to verbal taunts and the occasional shoulder shove in the hallways.

  Gabriel was skinny, but several inches taller than Eddie, so he had hoped to avoid any wrestling matches. Unfortunately, the thuggish red-headed boy bristled with animosity whenever Gabriel was around. Gabriel assumed it was because he was different. The only non-white kid in a small rural town. Although most of the kids accepted him for who he was, being different was enough for some people to hate you in a small town in 1980. It was certainly enough for Eddie.

  Gabriel knew it was coming. It took no clairvoyance to see what would happen next. It was like it was scripted and he was just playing his part. It started with the finger snap to the back of his head. Gabriel didn’t ignore it. His mother was always telling him never to start a fight, but to make sure he finished it if someone else did. His father was of the opinion that violence usually only led to more violence. Gabriel tried to walk a path somewhere between the two. Run when you could. Hit hard when you couldn’t. Which is probably why he’d been able to avoid a f
ight with Eddie so far.

  “Knock it off, Eddie,” Gabriel said, whipping around and looking the other boy in the eyes.

  “I didn’t do anything,” Eddie said with that gap-toothed grin of his.

  Gabriel turned back around, but it wasn’t long before the next finger snap came to the back of his head.

  “Seriously, knock it off.”

  “It must be your imagination.”

  “I must have imagined you had enough of a brain to realize how stupid you’re being.” Not a great retort, but the best he could think of on short notice.

  Then came the full-handed smack to the side of the head.

  “If you want to fight, why don’t you just fight?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “If you keep it up, Tom’s going to kick your ass.” That was Harold.

  “I don’t fight girls.” That was Tom.

  The fist came next. And then the pushing and the pulling and the yelling and the other fists. Some were Gabriel’s landing on Eddie’s face. Some were Eddie’s landing on his. The bus was over the Tillet River Bridge by then. Gabriel was busy trying to punch Eddie’s nose so he didn’t have time to notice if the bus driver, Mrs. Hopper, was distracted. He thought he heard her voice somewhere in the din of shouting that erupted with the fight, but he wasn’t sure. It didn’t pay to listen to voices of authority when someone was punching you in the face.

  So, maybe she was distracted. Maybe she turned the wheel when she was looking into the giant rearview mirror. Maybe she didn’t see a car stop in front of her. Gabriel never knew. All he knew was the sudden fishtailing motion of the bus and then the squeal of metal against metal as the bus scraped along the guardrail of the bridge. And the screams. After the screams, it was hard to hear anything else. His own scream was particularly hard to hear over.

  And then the bus was tumbling. Over the guardrail. Spinning as it fell. He could see the other students falling and twisting through the air, bouncing against seats and windows and the ceiling and the floor. He saw Tom’s head hit a window. He saw Harold clutching at the leg of the seat. He saw Eddie, terror in his eyes and his mouth wide in mid-scream, slam his shoulder into the ceiling.

  And he saw the water. The bus plunging toward it. Forty feet from bridge to river in long, panic-filled moments. Enough time to notice anything. A small eternity. And he had seen it all before.

  The bus struck the water sideways and the motion within came to a jarring halt, bodies falling into the windows on the bottom. Some of the windows had been open. Others broke. The water began pouring in faster than Gabriel would have imagined possible. He was wedged under a body. Tom’s body. Not moving. The blow to Tom’s head must have knocked him unconscious. Gabriel could see Harold. Screaming. Everyone was still screaming.

  “The door!” Gabriel screamed. He struggled up above the side of the seat and saw that the front door of the bus had been pushed open by the impact and water was rushing in. The entire bus would be flooded in seconds. He couldn’t see Mrs. Hopper. Straining to push Tom’s unconscious body off himself, he saw two kids struggling near the emergency door at the rear of the bus. It took a moment before he realized it was Emily Baskin and Eddie. Emily was struggling to get near the exit door and Eddie was trying to stop her.

  “We have to get it open,” Emily screamed.

  “The water will come in,” Eddie screamed back.

  He probably can’t swim, Gabriel thought. Gabriel hadn’t been able to swim either until last spring. He hadn’t wanted to learn, but his parents had insisted. It had been a mortifying experience. The only thirteen-year-old learning to swim with a class of seven and eight-year-olds. Apparently Gabriel had a higher tolerance level for mortification than most boys his age. He was glad he did. Otherwise, he might have been like poor Eddie; so afraid of drowning that he would try to stop the one person who could save him.

  The water continued to flow into the interior of the bus from the windows and the front door. Emily continued to fight with Eddie near the emergency door at the rear. The water was up to their waists. People continued to scream. And Gabriel continued to struggle to get from underneath Tom.

  He saw Eddie punch Emily in the face. Emily’s head snapped back, but her legs never moved. She may have been a slender, geeky girl, but she knew how to take a punch. And she knew how to deliver one. Emily had six older brothers. Eddie saw the left hook, but he never noticed the right-handed haymaker that clocked him in the temple. Eddie collapsed with a splash into the ever-deepening water. Gabriel had just enough time to think that if it was going to be the last thing he saw, seeing Eddie Sloat being knocked out by Emily Baskin wasn’t half bad.

  Of course it didn’t matter, Gabriel thought in a wave of despair. The rear emergency door only opened out. It would never budge until the water had already filled the interior of the bus. However, Emily didn’t move to open the door. Instead, she reached down behind the rear seat and pulled free the large red fire extinguisher. Why didn’t I think of that? Gabriel wondered as he continued to struggle with Tom’s unconscious form.

  Emily slammed the base of the fire extinguisher into the window of the exit door with all her strength. The window cracked. That was all. Too bad, Gabriel thought. Emily struck the window again. Nothing. She shouted in frustration and raised the fire extinguisher to strike again when the window suddenly imploded, a wall of water throwing her back into the bus. Gabriel barely had time to suck in a lung full of air before the water was over his head and the bus filled to capacity, sinking even faster than before.

  Gabriel floated up to the opposite side of windows near the surface of the river as the bus swiftly sank to the bottom some fifteen feet below. The engine of the bus sank first, the rear falling more slowly. The bus rotated as it hit bottom, the ceiling becoming the floor. It was all Gabriel could do to keep his head straight and know which way was which. Where was the door?

  He dragged Tom through the water, pulling him past the row of seats above their heads, struggling past kids panicking and drowning, past kids trying to swim for the exit door. Gabriel pushed people with one hand, pulling Tom with the other, using his feet to kick against anything he could use to reach the exit.

  Someone before him had managed to open the door. Gabriel groped his way through the opening and looked around, seeing cloudy sky above the water fifteen feet over his head. He swam. He swam harder than he ever had before, the weight of Tom pulling him down, the small mouthful of air in his lungs burning to get out, stinging like acid in his chest. He could feel the weight of his clothes and shoes, his jacket making it harder to move his arms. He was getting closer. The water above his head was lighter. Brighter. Nearer.

  He gasped for air, spitting water and wheezing. I’m not going to drown today, he thought as the rain beat down on his face. He grinned as he put his arm around Tom and began to swim for the shore. It wasn’t far. Only thirty feet or so. He looked around as he swam and saw that he was not the only one swimming for the riverbank. Twenty or so of his fellow classmates paddled to safety. He could see Harold flailing his arms, trying to remember the strokes he must have learned when he was six like everyone else.

  “Help me!” Gabriel shouted as he came to the shallow edge of the river. Harold struggled to reach them. Gabriel didn’t even wait to get Tom all the way to the riverbank before turning him over, wrapping his arms around Tom’s middle, and pulling repeatedly to empty the water from his stomach and lungs. Swinging Tom onto his back, Gabriel continued to push on his stomach to clear the water from his airway. Tom spit in Gabriel’s face, his eyes fluttering open. Harold had reached them by then.

  “Gabe,” Tom said.

  “You’re okay now,” Gabriel said.

  “You saved me,” Tom said with a weak laugh. “Just like Aquaman.”

  “There are still kids down there,” Harold said, looking back at the river. The shimmering yellow form of the bus was easily visible beneath the gently flowing water.

  �
��Stay here with Tom,” Gabriel said as he looked into Harold’s eyes. Harold could swim well enough to reach the shore once, but he would never make it twice.

  “You can’t go back down there!” Harold said, fear making his voice jump an octave.

  “I’ll be fine,” Gabriel said, shrugging out of his jacket and kicking off his shoes. “My parents paid a lot of money so I’d be able to do stupid things like swim back down to sunken buses.” He doubted that was what his mother had been thinking when she had insisted on the swimming classes.

  He gave Tom a quick wave and then jumped back into the water, his legs kicking hard, his oddly long arms making for smooth, strong strokes that brought him to the middle of the river in hardly any time at all. His fellow students screamed, cried, shouted, and tried to swim for the shore. Gabriel looked down at the bus. He didn’t see any motion, but he could see what looked like shadowy shapes that might be people. He sucked air in fast, let it out, and sucked it in again, filling his lungs. Then he dived.

  He fought his body’s natural inclination to float as he dove, his arms striking through the water in unison. It took a few seconds to reach the bottom of the river and the bus. A few seconds that allowed him to think. What the hell am I doing? He’d only learned to swim six months ago. Why was he the only one going back down? He’d been on the shore. The dream hadn’t come true. Why tempt fate? And then he reached the bus and saw the two faces floating near the rear windows. That was why. Because you couldn’t just let people die when you might be able to do something about it.

  He edged around the emergency door and swam into the bus. There were more bodies than the two he had seen. They might be dead. Or maybe not. Five in all, he could see. He grabbed the one closest to the door. Emily. He thought she had gotten out. The fire extinguisher must have hit her when the window broke. Her open eyes stared right through him. He didn’t look back for long. He grabbed her arm and hauled her toward the door, pushing her through and giving her a shove toward the surface. She moved upward. Not as fast as he had wanted. He hoped it was fast enough. He hoped someone above would get to her in time.