Georgia took a deep breath, wondering how many more she had left. She turned off the light, lay back and closed her eyes. What point was there in fighting it? She couldn’t think of a reason
not
to let the infection take her. She was a failure. She’d failed in her relationships. She’d failed her parents. She’d failed to kill the Dragon. She’d failed to have children and ensure the lineage of dragonslayers continued after her. She might as well do everyone a favour and die.
She will devour the world
. That’s what the Book of Ascalon had said about the Dragon. Well, it was all hers now. She could choke on it.
A loud bang woke her. She hadn’t realized she’d fallen asleep. She was drenched in sweat. It was still dark outside. She shifted on the bed, rolled over. She just wanted to sleep. The bang came again. Loud. The motel room door. She switched on the light and, with her stiff knee complaining, swung her heavy legs over the side of the bed. The grey patch on her skin had grown, the veins turning black beneath it. She poked at it sleepily. It was numb. Dead skin. Dead Georgia.
Another bang, and the door broke off its hinges and crashed to the floor. Startled, she fell off the bed. Staying crouched, she peeked over the mattress to see what was happening.
A tall figure walked into the room, shrouded in a dark brown cloak. The opening in the large, drooping hood was deeply shadowed, obscuring the face within. The hands that reached up to pull back the hood were scaly and ended not with fingers but with long, curved claws like ancient, yellowing ivory. “Found you, child,” the Dragon said.
The window beside the door shattered, and dozens of dead, grey arms reached through.
Curled up on the couch next to her father, Georgia looked at the painting in the Book of Ascalon. There was Saint George in his black armour, his horse rearing as his lance plunged into the Dragon’s chest, and in the background, the woman who sat on the tall rocks.
“So, Daddy, who’s that woman if she’s not a princess?”
“The artist, Gustave Moreau, was commissioned to paint this by our family, back in the 1800s when they lived in Paris,” he said. “They told him exactly what to paint, down to the last detail. But none of what you see here is actually what happened in Cyrene.”
Thinking she finally understood, she looked up at him. “There was no princess, was there?”
He ruffled her hair. “Smart kid. No, there was no princess.”
“Then who is she? Why did they want her in the picture?”
“It’s a secret code. A warning. Remember those illustrations we saw, how the Dragon didn’t look the same in all of them? She’s different each time she comes back. She . . . evolves.” He handed her the book. “Look closely at Saint George’s eyes. What is he looking at?”
She brought the book close to her face and discovered that though Saint George’s head was tipped toward the creature on the ground, his eyes were looking elsewhere. She followed his gaze in a straight line, all the way to the woman.
“That’s her, Georgia,” her father said. “That’s the Dragon.”
The thing standing in the doorway of Georgia’s motel room was a mockery of a human being. The Dragon’s face still had the flat nose and wide, lipless mouth of a reptile, despite her strangely human eyes and the few limp strands of auburn hair that sprouted from her otherwise bald cranium. She didn’t have ears, just holes on the sides of her skull. The cloak bulged out in front of her where her huge stomach sagged to her knees, full of the meat and gristle of those she’d slaughtered.
The Dragon had grown decrepit in her advanced age. Her scaled skin was tinged a sickly green, no longer the leathery armour it must have been back in the Fourth Century. Now it looked as thin and brittle as tissue paper. Her talons had grown so long and heavy over the centuries that they weighed her hands down from her wrists.
Georgia had seen a lot of terrible things, but nothing so awful as the toothsome, triumphant grin on the Dragon’s face.
Meat puppets crawled in through the broken window and lumbered through the doorway. Georgia grabbed the stock of the shotgun at the foot of the bed and slid it toward her. The box of shells sat on the floor next to her suitcase, across the room. She glanced quickly at the meat puppets spilling past where the Dragon stood. They were slow, but that wouldn’t buy her much time in the small room. She broke open the shotgun, sprang for the ammo box and fumbled with the shells. They spilled out at her feet. She reached for one and gasped to see black veins marbling her legs, the skin already paling to grey. She scooped up the shells and started loading them into the shotgun, trying not to shake.
“Can you feel me growing inside you, child?” the Dragon asked. “I can. I can taste the fear in your thoughts.”
The meat puppets kept coming. She couldn’t tell how many there were. Ten? Fifteen? The shotgun only held six shells at a time. It wouldn’t be enough. But if this was her last stand, she’d go down swinging.
Georgia snapped the shotgun closed and rolled back behind the bed, clumsy from her stiff knee. She pumped the first shell into the chamber and took aim at the closest meat puppet. It had been an Inkhead, the black bandana tied tight above the loose, shredded skin of its face.
If you can really taste my thoughts, taste this one!
She pulled the trigger, blasting the meat puppet’s head into a chunky smear on the wallpaper behind it. The others moved forward to take its place as it slumped to the floor, and she pivoted quickly to sight down the barrel at the next one.
Oh no, not him . . .
It was a black man, or had been once, before its skin had turned a pallid grey. Blood from the open wound on its throat smeared across the writing on its t-shirt: RIO ARRIBA FAIRBOARD RANCH RODEO. Marcus Townsend, her car-loving neighbour from the room next door.
He’d been nice to her. He’d talked with her outside and given her a brief but welcome taste of normality in her nightmarish excuse for a life. It shamed her, thinking how she’d jonesed in front of him and ran out in the middle of their conversation, and now she’d never have a chance to apologize to him, to make things right.
It lurched toward her, its dead fingers groping.
Georgia took a deep breath to steel herself and pulled the trigger. The face that had once belonged to Marcus Townsend exploded, and the headless corpse toppled backward to the floor.
Behind where it had stood was another, a small boy of nine or ten. It wore a t-shirt with a cowboy riding a bucking bronco. Both its arms were gone. Bloody stumps filled the t-shirt’s sleeves. Its face was as blank and terrible as its father’s had been.
Instinctively, she took her finger off from the trigger. A child. Just a child . . .
“I brought my boy with me this time ’round. He’s old enough now that I thought I’d make a vacation out of it, show him some of the country so he doesn’t think it’s all high rises and housing projects, you know?”
She shook Marcus’s voice out of her head and let her training take over.
Don’t hesitate. If you hesitate, it’ll kill you.
Georgia swallowed hard and replaced her finger on the trigger.
It’s not really him. He’s dead. He’s an empty shell, not a boy. Not Marcus’s son.
She swallowed again. Her trigger finger twitched. She couldn’t do it. Not a child. The tiny meat puppet stumbled closer, off balance without its arms. Her heart felt like it was going to shatter into pieces.
Just close your fucking eyes and shoot!
She did, and after the loud bang of the shotgun she heard him fall. When she opened her eyes, she saw the boy had fallen at his father’s feet. She felt like crying.
Another had circled around the bed. A fat blonde woman in a tight tube top. Georgia recognized her right away, despite her mutilated face. The garish red lipstick she’d worn while showing Georgia her room in the Shaolin Tong warehouse was replaced by a glistening smear of blood. Her bottom jaw hung loose, her tongue lolling out.
First Marcus and now her. The Dragon must have retraced Georgia’s steps while she’d lain unconscious in the Inkheads’ warehouse, the visions of their deaths swallowed up by the blackness. The Dragon had killed them for no other reason than that Georgia knew them, had purposely surrounded herself with an army of familiar corpses to keep Georgia off her guard. It was monstrous.
Georgia raised the shotgun toward the blonde meat puppet. It knocked the barrel aside and grabbed for her. Georgia leapt up onto the bed, intending to jump down on the other side, but her stiff knee slowed her. The meat puppet grabbed her by the hair and pulled Georgia toward it. She hit it in the chest with the butt of the shotgun and slipped free, falling backward onto the bed. She jammed the barrel into the ragged gash of its mouth.
Georgia pulled the trigger. Cold, thick blood spattered across her face. The shock and disgust kept her momentarily frozen in place. She thought of fish swimming like silhouettes in a deep blue light.
Move! Move, dammit!
Wiping the blood out of her eyes, she rolled off the bed.
And smacked right into another one. It wore a yellow bandana on its head and had the Shaolin Tong symbol tattooed on its arm. It was missing a great deal of skin from the right side of its face, leaving one round white eye like a ping-pong ball staring out at her from the blood and tissue. There was so much blood on its clothing she almost didn’t notice the gashes where his chest had been ripped open. It pinned her arms to her side with strong, vise-like hands and lifted her off the ground. Unable to raise the shotgun to line up a shot, she kicked it in the groin, in the stomach, but it didn’t do any good. The dead felt no pain. She swung her legs back until she felt her toes touch the bed. She placed her feet flat on the mattress, bent her one good knee and pushed off, sending the meat puppet tumbling backward with its arms still around her. It landed on its back, and the force of the impact knocked its eye loose and sent it rolling down its cheek to the carpet. Georgia landed on top of the meat puppet and squirmed out of its grasp. It started to get back up, groping blindly for her, but she put the barrel to its forehead and blew its head apart.
There was only one shell left in the shotgun. There was no way she’d have time to reload before they overpowered her. She had to make the last shot count. She looked at the seemingly endless army of meat puppets shambling toward her, and behind them, the Dragon, watching Georgia with her too-human eyes. She looked almost amused.
How many had the Dragon killed? Not over the centuries, she thought, just tonight. Just for this final ambush. Just to have an army between her and Georgia.
Her jaw tightened, and she took a step toward the Dragon. She’d fight her way through a hundred meat puppets if she had to. A thousand. It didn’t matter if she only had one shell left. She was going to take that cold-blooded bitch down.
A small hand grabbed the shotgun’s barrel. Egg Foo. The oversized Lobos jersey had been shredded open, revealing frayed skin underneath. The gold chain around its neck was caked with dried blood. The sunglasses sat lopsided on its face.
Another hand, a fist this time, came out of nowhere, connecting with her jaw. She reeled back, stunned, and Egg Foo yanked the shotgun out of her hand, tossed it aside. Then it grabbed one of her arms, and whoever had punched her grabbed the other. Together they pulled her upright, and she saw the second meat puppet was Roy Dalton. The motel owner’s torso had been torn open, and as it yanked her forward, Georgia felt the wet red things hanging out of its belly touch her. She fought back a gag.
The two meat puppets pulled her toward the doorway, where the Dragon waited. Georgia dug her feet into the carpet and tried to resist, but the meat puppets were stronger. The dead didn’t weaken, didn’t tire. The others moved aside, forming a corridor with the Dragon at its end.
“At last,” the Dragon said. A long red tongue, forked like a snake’s, dipped out of her mouth.
Egg Foo and Roy Dalton shoved Georgia to the floor, holding her arms behind her painfully. It felt like her shoulders were going to snap out of their sockets. Above her, Georgia saw the Dragon raise her heavy talons.
A loud, electronic squawk startled Georgia, and she glanced past the Dragon out the door. A black and white highway patrol car had pulled into the motel parking lot, the number 113 painted on its side. The same car she’d seen at the burning house, when the moustached State Trooper had watched her drive by covered in blood. With a rush of relief, she realized he’d come looking for her after all.
The Trooper and his partner exited the patrol car. She saw them point and say something to each other, but she couldn’t hear what. Their hands dropped tentatively to their sidearms, but they stood where they were. Her heart sank. They didn’t know what was happening. They were trying to take it all in, figure out the situation, but she didn’t have time, she needed them
now
.
“Help!” she shouted. “Help me!”
The Dragon hissed and drew back a claw to strike her, but it was too late. The Troopers pulled their guns, and the one with the moustache shouted, “Hey!”
The meat puppets turned and marched out the doorway toward them. Only Egg Foo and Roy Dalton remained, holding Georgia in place. She tried to wriggle loose, but their grip was too strong. The Dragon leaned forward with that awful, toothsome smile again. Her tongue flicked out and hit Georgia’s neck like wet sandpaper. Georgia squirmed.
“Just a taste before the meal,” the Dragon said.
Through the doorway, Georgia saw the meat puppets advance on the patrol car. The Troopers ordered them not to come any closer and fired warning shots into the air. The walking corpses didn’t stop. When the Troopers finally saw what they were, the colour drained from their faces. They fired into the crowd. Two meat puppets fell from lucky shots to the head, but the Troopers were still outnumbered. They reached the first Trooper and swarmed over him in a wave of grey flesh. Georgia heard him screaming. The moustached Trooper fired off a few panicked shots, hitting nothing, and ran around to the other side of the car.