Chasing The Dragon (10 page)

“No, I’m tired.” She pretended to yawn. In truth, she was wide awake and hungry for breakfast, but she didn’t want him to know that.

“Get up, Georgia.” He tickled her, and she laughed and kicked her legs under the blanket.

“Why should I?” she asked, trying to remain defiant.

“Because I said so. I’m your father and you have to do what I say. It’s the rules.”

She thought about that for a moment and said, “If I have to do what you say and get up, then you have to do what I say. Deal?”

He stroked his chin the way he always did when he was pretending to think really hard about something important.

“Deal. But just for a few minutes. Then I want you out of bed and at the breakfast table, missy.”

That was the day her favourite game, Do What Georgia Says, was invented. She looked up at her father and stroked her chin just like him.

“Clap your hands,” she said, and he did.

“Bark like a dog,” she said, and he did.

“Live forever,” she said.

“I need you to get up, Georgia,” her father said again as the warehouse came rushing back to her.

“I can’t,” she sobbed. Her body felt like a stone. Dead weight.

“Get up.”

She pushed her palms against the floor. Her elbows wobbled, gave out, and she fell. “I can’t!” The words came out in a scream.

Her father said, “You have to do what I say. It’s the rules.”

She pushed against the floor again.

“Get up, Georgia.”

Her elbows held this time, and she was able to slide her knees beneath her. The hurt one flared up for a moment, and she winced in pain. She forced herself to stand, one foot on the floor, then the other. She steadied herself. Her injured leg felt numb, her knee swollen. Her head hurt where she’d struck the wall.

“Now
you
have to do what
I
say,” she told him, but when she looked up her father and the blanket were gone. She took in the room around her and remembered where she was. Five meat puppets lay on the floor where she’d shot them. The three others were gone. They must have followed the Dragon out the door.

That was the second time the Dragon had nearly killed her, only to flee in pain before the final blow. Georgia still didn’t understand why.

She limped toward the open doorway, hoping her car was still outside. The morning brightness had dimmed to a murky twilight. She must have been unconscious for hours.

The Dragon could be anywhere by now, miles from Buckshot Hill, and Georgia would have to start the chase all over again. It was just as well. She was so tired she doubted she could do anything but flop onto the bed at the motel and sleep for days.

She accidentally kicked her purse, having forgotten it was there, and it slid a couple of inches along the floor. She bent down to retrieve it and noticed that the leather pack was gone. Then she remembered — the Dragon had still been holding the pack when she fled the warehouse. The heroin was gone. The needle she’d stuck in the Dragon’s foot was gone. Her addiction roared inside her, furious at being denied, and the image in her mind of dead grey skin spreading out from her hip caused fear to mushroom in her belly. She wanted to lose control, to kick the floor and punch the walls, but she didn’t have the energy. All she could do was stand there with a sinking heart. Without the heroin, she was as good as dead. The Dragon had killed her after all.

She pulled herself together, remembered where she was. The Inkheads’ stash house. The Inkheads sold drugs.

The floor suddenly swayed and shuddered beneath her. The cracks in the walls grew longer, sending chips of cement rattling to the floor. Entropy, the Dragon’s calling card. The warehouse could come down at any moment. She was lucky it hadn’t already, or the collapse would have buried her alive. If she was going to find more heroin, she’d have to be fast.

She limped through the open door through which the meat puppets had spilled earlier. In the back of the building, the walls that had originally separated the management offices had been knocked down, leaving a single, mammoth room almost as large as the warehouse out front. She found four more bodies slumped just past the door, not enough of them left for the Dragon to resurrect as meat puppets. Georgia stepped over the remains, trying not to look too closely.

Big, domed lamps hung from the ceiling on long chains. Iron-barred windows were set high in the walls. Below them backpacks, puffy eight-ball jackets, spent shells and discarded handguns lay scattered on the floor amid pools of blood. A series of tables had been set up around the perimeter of the room with digital scales, mounds of plastic baggies and stainless steel apothecary chests. She limped toward them, the cramps of dope sickness already starting to tie her insides into knots, and suddenly the floor reared up toward her. The tables, the windows, the whole room tilted away. Georgia’s feet were off the ground. At first she thought she was flying and figured she was dead after all, sailing off to that dark tunnel with the bright light, but then she realized she was in fact sliding backward down a slope of loose dirt. Her back hit something hard and seized painfully for a moment. She squeezed her eyes shut until the pain subsided, then opened them and saw dirt all around her, and the ceiling high above.

A hole. She’d fallen into a hole. Not a sinkhole like the kind that formed wherever the Dragon went, but something different. She climbed back up the slope to the top and saw that she had fallen into a deep trench that ran the length of the room. An excavation, as though something large had been dug out of the floor. The edges were ragged, not squared off the way they would be if shovels or heavy digging equipment had been used. The Dragon had done this, she realized. She’d seen the dirt on her claws. The Dragon had torn through the floor, ripped open the earth and removed . . . what? What had been down there?

A long crack ripped violently through in the ceiling, startling her, and plaster dust fell in gritty white curtains. The fracture spread quickly, spiderwebbing above her, and the lamps shivered on their chains. The building shook again. The whole warehouse was about to come down.

She turned away, back toward the door she’d come through. There was no time to search the stash. She limped as quickly as she could out of the back room, ignoring another cramp tightening in her stomach. She grabbed her shotgun off the floor — there was no time to collect the spent shells now — snatched up her purse and forced her aching legs to carry her out of the building. She managed to just reach her car when the warehouse fell in on itself. A huge cloud of dust blew outward from the collapse. She ducked down behind the car, her knee searing with pain again, and shielded herself until the cloud dissipated. When she stood up, there was nothing left of the Bristleman Corp. warehouse but a pile of rubble.

She expected to hear the sound of panicked voices, the rush of feet, but there was nothing. Not even sirens. The streets stayed quiet. Deserted.

She thought of going back to Egg Foo for more heroin, but she was out of cash. She had to think of something. If she didn’t get her hands on more soon, it would be over. The Dragon would win.

The pavement between her car and the collapsed warehouse shuddered and split open. The sinkhole was spreading. She got into her car, twisted the key in the ignition and took off. In the rearview mirror, she saw the spot where she’d parked buckle and plunge into the earth.

Navigating the streets of the warehouse district in the dimming light, she wondered how long she had left to live. The infection only seemed to spread at night, and night was coming fast. Without heroin to beat it back, she wouldn’t see the dawn. She could go after the Dragon, try to get it back, but she was too weak to fight her. The fastest way to get her hands on the drug now would be to steal it. The Shaolin Tong would be too heavily armed to risk trying to rob them. Where else? There were no other drug dealers in Buckshot Hill now that the Inkheads were dead, their stash buried under who knew how many tons of rubble.

Think, dammit!

A hospital. She could pull into an emergency room in her blood-soaked clothes and say,
I hurt my head, I hurt my knee
, and then when the doctors turned their backs she could sneak away, find the drug repository and nab some morphine. Would morphine work? But she didn’t know where the Buckshot Hill hospital was, or even if it had one, and she was so tired. The doctors would know right away. One look at her and they’d know she was a junkie and put armed guards around her so she didn’t steal any drugs, and while she was lying there waiting for them to return, the infection would keep spreading until she was dead. They would come back to find her corpse in the examination room, grey and black-veined and moving under the Dragon’s control, and god she was so tired she just wanted to sleep.

She forced her mind to keep sifting through her options, but she kept coming up empty. She didn’t have any heroin, and there was nothing she could do about it. It was high noon and she’d arrived at the showdown only to find her gun empty.

On the road back into town, the blacktop was as cracked as parched earth. Chunks of pavement dropped away all around her. She swerved to avoid the sinkholes as they appeared and willed her eyes to stay open just a little longer. She could rest soon, she told herself. Soon all the pain and grief and terror would be over.

A dark grey fog rolled in from nowhere and enveloped the car, suddenly limiting her visibility to only a few feet. She slowed, her stiff knee protesting as she worked the brake. A sharp odour seeped in around the closed windows, and she realized it wasn’t fog. It was smoke. In the distance, she saw muffled lights crackling like lightning. A fire somewhere.

A big, dark silhouette moved through the smoke toward her car. She watched the shape approach, gripping the steering wheel until her knuckles turned white. Then the smoke parted and a chestnut brown horse cantered through, the white stripe along its nose reflecting her headlights. It clip-clopped past the car like a phantom, not even looking in her direction, and disappeared into the smoke beyond.

Georgia drove on, maintaining a slow speed through the almost impenetrable smoke. As the lights grew closer, she realized she was looking at a house on fire. The land all around it was cracked and sunken. Beside the house was a flaming structure that looked like it had once been a stable, and next to it she saw a sinkhole and what looked like the exploded remains of several propane canisters. At least the horse had gotten out. She hoped the family had too.

A crowd had gathered on the opposite side of the road to watch the firefighters tackle the blaze. A black and white highway patrol car was parked in front of them, its siren lights spinning red and blue in the haze and making the number 113 painted on its side glow like a digital clock. Two State Troopers stood next to the car in their navy and grey uniforms. One was speaking into the radio handset. The other turned to watch Georgia’s car, kept watching as she passed. He had a moustache and tired eyes. She glanced in the rearview mirror and saw him vanish in the smoke.

Georgia caught a glimpse of herself in the rearview. She was covered in blood — her face, her hair, her clothes. One of her cheeks sported a dark bruise. Had the Trooper seen her? Was that why he’d stared at her when she drove by? She felt a moment of panic, thought of the shotgun shells in the warehouse rubble near the bodies, how easily the authorities could trace everything back to her, and then let it go. The State Troopers had their hands full tonight, and by morning it wouldn’t matter if they came looking for her.

Downtown Buckshot Hill was deserted. The smoke had begun to dissipate, turning into a grey mist that rolled over the sidewalks and across the storefronts. A long crack climbed up the side of a women’s boutique, etching thin fissures into the glass of the front window. A varsity jacket lay discarded on the sidewalk. Two of the tables in front of the ice cream parlour were overturned onto their sides. She’d never seen the devastation spread this far before.

Georgia thought of the enormous hole dug into the floor of the warehouse. She’d always assumed the Dragon’s movements were random, that she went wherever she could hide safely and feed in secret. Her ancestors had chased the Dragon through Africa, Asia and Europe, and finally to America. She’d believed all along that the Dragon was simply running from them, but what if the Dragon’s travels weren’t arbitrary? What if she was looking for something?

There was no more smoke by the time Georgia pulled into the Buckshot Motor Inn’s parking lot, but the smell of burning wood was still in the air. No one stood on the porch outside the rooms. Marcus Townsend’s car was back in its spot, a child-sized trucker hat printed with the words RIO ARRIBA FAIRBOARD RANCH RODEO sitting in the back seat, but the windows of his room were dark. The slam of her car door sounded thunderously loud in the quiet of the parking lot. Nothing moved. No lights came on.

She took her purse and the shotgun and let herself into her room. There, she dropped everything at the foot of the bed, peeled off her bloodstained clothes and stood under the hottest shower she could stand. Her muscles ached. Her sore knee looked twice as big as the other and had turned shades of yellow and purple. A red line crossed her deltoid muscle where the bullet had grazed her, and the cut on her forehead was tender to the touch. Standing in front of the bathroom mirror, towelling herself off and wincing with each sore movement, the dope sickness hit her again, twisting her gut. She knelt over the toilet and dry-heaved until her ribs hurt. She’d never felt more defeated. More alone.

Finally, she collapsed on the bed in her sweat shorts and t-shirt. She rolled down the waistband and saw her scarred hip had started to turn grey again. Soon the infection would travel outward, down her leg, across her torso, until it filled her completely. She found herself trembling, but she didn’t know if it was from fear or from jonesing.