Chasing The Dragon (14 page)

As luck would have it, the prolonged investigation kept Edith from demolishing the wrecked motel and removing the rubble from the parking lot. Every night after Edith turned in early, exhausted from her meetings with lawyers, insurance agents and the police, Georgia and Wilbur would sneak back to the motel, duck under the yellow police tape that surrounded the property, and collect as many fragments of Tiamat’s shattered bones as they could. They brought them back to the house and stored them in a series of large trunks in the basement. If the fragments were too big to fit, they took great pleasure in smashing them with a sledgehammer.

Georgia stopped again to rest. The air was getting thinner as she approached the summit, and she felt hot in her thick parka. When she’d caught her breath, she started again.

It turned out the friends that Edith Dalton had been visiting in Santa Fe worked for an international airline company. When Georgia was fully recovered, they generously arranged a job for her as flight attendant. The uniform she had to wear was ridiculous, and it didn’t take long for her to develop a hatred for the passengers, but the job took her all over the world. Took her to distant countries where she found deep gorges, tar pits, swamps and caverns that suited her purposes.

When Georgia reached the peak of Mount Redoubt, the thin air grew tinged with a heavy sulphuric odour. She pulled her scarf over her nose and mouth, and strapped on plastic goggles to protect her eyes from the steam that belched out of the wide crater before her.

Redoubt hadn’t erupted since 1989, and its gases weren’t at a toxic level, but she felt nervous standing so close to the crater of an active volcano. She didn’t want to be there any longer than necessary. She reached into the pocket of her parka.

The Dragon would come again, she knew. The earth would spit her out again as surely as it spat out the oil in the field below. The Dragon would be reborn in another age, another civilization with its own dragonslayer. And if that dragonslayer should fail, if the Dragon should live long enough to remember once more who she was, if she should go looking . . . well, Georgia wasn’t going to make it easy for her.

From her pocket she pulled a bone fragment smaller than her palm, chipped around the edges and brown on one end from the fire. She didn’t know which part of the skeleton it had belonged to. She’d long ago stopped trying to remember what each bone was.

Georgia tossed it as hard as she could. It flew in a long arc above the crater and then disappeared into the steam.

It was dark by the time she reached the base again, where her rental car was waiting. It drove smoother than her father’s, but she missed the old Impala anyway. It had been the last thing of her parents’ she’d owned, but it had taken too much damage to repair.

She started the car. It would take her several hours to get back to the airport hotel in Anchorage, and that was only if she got lucky and there were no snowstorms. Driving through the streets of the oil workers’ village to get back to the main road, she saw houses and barracks painted bright gaudy colours so they could be spotted in a blizzard. After the houses came the bars, big wooden shacks with neon signs in the windows advertising different kinds of beer. The sidewalks outside were packed with bearded men in rough parkas and, sauntering among them, women wearing much too little for such cold weather.

Prostitutes. The oil companies turned a blind eye to it, knowing how far the oil field was from civilization and how lonely the workers, almost entirely male, would get. She’d heard rumours that sometimes the companies themselves surreptitiously flew in prostitutes to keep everyone happy and in line.

Prostitution wasn’t the only thing the companies pretended not to notice. Georgia saw shifty men mixing with the workers, taking money from them and handing them bags of weed.

The traffic light at the corner turned red. Georgia stopped and watched the drug dealers until one of them noticed her. A smile cracked his heavily bearded face, and he walked toward her car.

“Hey there, sweetheart,” he called through the window. “Always nice to see a new face, ’specially one as pretty as yours. Whaddaya need? Weed, meth, crank, coke, horse?” He tapped the window. “I got a real sweet Mexican black tar, just in from south of the border. I can set you up cheap.”

The light turned green.

This time, Georgia drove on.

Nicholas Kaufmann is the Bram Stoker Award-nominated author of
General Slocum’s Gold
,
Hunt at World’s End
, and the short story collection
Walk in Shadows
. His fiction has appeared in
Cemetery Dance
,
The Mammoth Book of Best New Erotica 3
,
City Slab
,
The Best American Erotica 2007
,
Playboy
,
Shivers V
, and others. In addition to writing the monthly “Dead Air” column for
The Internet Review of Science Fiction
, his non-fiction has appeared in the Writers Digest book
On Writing Horror
,
Dark Scribe Magazine
,
Annabelle Magazine
,
Fantastic Metropolis
,
Fear Zone
, and others. He has served on the Board of Trustees for the Horror Writers Association and is a member of the International Thriller Writers. He lives in Brooklyn, NY.

Visit him on the Web at www.nicholaskaufmann.com.