The woman shrugged. “They’re gone.” She spread her fingers to emulate a cloud of smoke. “Poof. Just like that. Some pothead came by this morning, said he used to buy from them but had to come to us instead. He said there was blood everywhere.”
Georgia chewed her lip. So the Dragon hadn’t left Buckshot Hill after all. But why go after the Inkheads? The Dragon’s hunger was insatiable; she would eat everything in her path, given the opportunity. But she’d managed to control herself before, normally moving on for hundreds of miles before feeding again. What had kept her in Buckshot Hill? What could possibly be of interest to her here?
“Did you see anything else? What did the shapes look like?”
The woman shrugged and said, “Do you like my fish?” Her eyes followed the fish swimming laps around the glowing blue tank.
“This is important,” Georgia said. “What did you see?”
The blonde woman pouted. “Nothing, all right? Nothing. I’m no snitch.” She brushed by Georgia to put her Slurpee on the table. Up close, she smelled of bitter smoke, sweat and cheap shampoo. “I heard you with Egg Foo outside,” the woman said. “You’re chasing the dragon.”
Georgia’s heart pushed into her throat. “What did you say?”
“Isn’t that what they call it? Heroin?” She picked up the crack pipe and fished a lighter out of her pocket. “You want a hit?”
“No, what I want is for you to tell me what you saw. Which way did the shapes go?”
The woman laughed. “Whatever. Suit yourself. I can’t keep away from this stuff. You know what it’s like. Sometimes you chase the dragon, and sometimes the dragon chases you, right?” She lit the pipe and took a long drag. A cloud of smoke seeped from her mouth, and then her face slackened and her eyes glazed over as the drug took hold.
“Which way did they go?” Georgia pressed.
The woman looked up at the coloured lights playing along the ceiling. “Sometimes I think I can see heaven up there.”
Frustrated, Georgia turned away. In the quiet of the woman’s room, she felt how hard she’d crashed — harder than she thought. Her headache was still there, buzzing just under the surface. She felt itchy again and only then realized she’d been scratching her arm without knowing it. Her stomach was twisted in knots. Somehow, watching the fish swim back and forth helped. It was calming. Serene. Another fix would help too. Just a small one, enough to get her in fighting shape to go after the Dragon. She could go right back to the motel and have a little taste.
No, there was no time for that. She couldn’t let the Dragon slip away again. She wished Egg Foo would hurry up.
“I could watch them all day,” the blonde woman whispered next to her. “They don’t care that they’re not getting anywhere. They just keep swimming.”
Georgia watched the fish glide in the deep blue light.
Stainless
, she thought, and she tried to put it from her mind but the rest kept coming,
Stainless Steel Stanley’s
and
“Found you, child,”
and she fought against it but the fish were swimming back and forth like a hypnotist’s watch, and then the memory broke through and she couldn’t stop it from unspooling . . .
In the empty parking lot behind a closed convenience store, Georgia sank down in a nest of candy wrappers and crushed soda cans, her back against the wall and her pockets filled with the change she’d begged off people on the rich side of town. She thought of Zack out scoring somewhere. She was supposed to meet him soon, back at the old, decrepit hunting cabin they’d been sleeping in, but she couldn’t keep her eyes open. She tried to focus on the billboard that rose high over the woods behind the parking lot. STAINLESS STEEL STANLEY’S, it said, RESTAURANT SUPPLY, EXIT 9. There was a big picture of a fish laid out on a wide steel spatula, sliced open down the middle and stuffed with lemons, its head still attached, its beady black eyes staring back at her. Disgusting. She closed her eyes so she wouldn’t have to look at it. Nodded off.
When she opened her eyes again, it was getting dark and a man was standing over her, his sickly grey skin marbled with black veins. Half his face had been shorn from his skull. In his hand was a blood-edged straight razor. “Found you, child,” the meat puppet said.
Behind it, twigs and branches snapped as a dark shape moved through the woods toward her. The Dragon.
Georgia struggled groggily to her feet, turned to run, but the meat puppet grabbed her. It slammed her face-first against the wall and held her there.
The hand pressing her face to the wall pulled away and was immediately replaced by another. Scaly and hard. Long ivory claws closed over the top of her head.
“You hid yourself well, child,” the Dragon said. “But you must have known you could not hide forever. You knew I would come eventually. It is our nature to be bound together. But I give you credit. You were not where I thought to find you. Someone else was. A clever ruse. One that shall be properly punished with agony.”
“I don’t know what you mean,” Georgia sobbed. “What ruse? I didn’t do anything!”
A second claw appeared from behind her, sliding around to her belly. The long talons scratched lightly through her shirt — not hard enough to draw blood, just enough to let her know they were there. “I wonder what you will taste like.” The Dragon sniffed her. “Dirt, perhaps. Desperation and filth and need. Very different from your father.”
Tears spilled down Georgia’s face. Panic kept her from catching her breath. “You don’t have to do this. It’s over. The whole thing is over. I don’t care anymore. That’s why I stopped coming after you. We can just leave each other alone now. You can go do whatever you want. I don’t care. We never have to see each other again. Just go!”
Hot breath hit the back of Georgia’s head. The Dragon was laughing. “And never taste your flesh? Never experience the joy of watching you die? No, I think not, child.”
The Dragon’s claw tightened against her belly. Georgia thought of herself on a giant spatula, her stomach slit open, filled with lemons. Dead black eyes. “I have looked far and wide for you, child. I have earned my reward.”
Georgia spasmed in fear, her body twisted, and instead of slashing open her stomach, the claw tore through her jeans and the flesh beneath, practically down to the bone of her hip. Georgia watched her own blood spill out of her body like juice from a carton, saw shreds of her own skin stuck in the fibres of her torn jeans, and she started hyperventilating.
The world buckled and darkened at the edges.
As unconsciousness enveloped her, she thought she heard a piercing, inhuman scream. Thought she saw the Dragon run back into the woods and the meat puppet stumble aimlessly like a marionette with cut strings. Then the world went away.
Later, she woke up in the pitch black night. Bleeding and weak, Georgia crawled through the woods toward the hunting cabin. Crawled home to Zack. She found him curled on the floor in a pool of blood. He had cuts all over his hands, defensive wounds, and one big cut across his throat. The kind a straight razor might make. The Dragon had come to the cabin looking for her, Georgia realized, and found Zack instead.
The rolled-up leather pack was still where he left it on the bed. Inside was the full bag of heroin he’d scored. The skin around her wound was already turning grey from the Dragon’s infection. She didn’t have much time. Sobbing, she curled up next to Zack’s body. Too weak to reach her toes or even break the skin, she injected the drug directly into the open, bleeding wound in her hip. One final high as the Dragon’s infection unfolded inside her. She wondered if it would hurt to die, and if being high would make it hurt less. She wondered if the Dragon would turn her into a meat puppet, and if she’d know, if she’d be trapped and helpless in the shell of her corpse. Then the heroin knocked her out and threw her into a black void from which she knew she would never return.
But she did. Hours later, she woke up clutching Zack’s cold, stiff hand, very much surprised to be alive. The wound had stopped bleeding. The grey, infected skin was gone.
Somehow the heroin had kept the infection at bay. She didn’t know why, and frankly she didn’t care as long it kept working.
The infection tried to spread again the next night, and the night after that, and each time she fought it back with the heroin. The infection never cleared up; it lived inside her where the Dragon had mauled her, but the drug dammed its flow through her system, stopped it from killing her and giving the Dragon control of her body.
Somehow, with an irony so absurd it felt like a bad joke, her worst, most self-destructive habit had become the only thing keeping her alive.
She buried Zack in a shallow grave in the woods and holed up in the cabin for months, leaving only to beg for change to score more heroin and, occasionally, to eat.
Finally, when she was strong enough, when the wound was healing well and she had a handle on the infection, she loaded up the car. Then she brought a wildflower to Zack’s grave.
“I’m going now,” she told the dirt. “I’m going after her. It’s what I should have been doing all this time. If I’d done what I was supposed to . . .” Her chin quivered. She bit her lip. “None of this would have happened. It’s all my fault. I’m going to find her.” She dropped the flower on his grave. “I’m going to make her pay.”
“Hey!” The angry shout ripped Georgia out of her memories. Egg Foo stood in the doorway of the blonde woman’s room. He stalked inside and slapped the woman upside the head. Georgia winced at the sharp sound, but the woman didn’t even seem to notice. “The fuck is she doing in here? Huh? The fuck’s the matter with you, you fucking cow? No one comes inside! You got that? No one!”
He grabbed the woman’s arm and shook her, but she only giggled. She looked at Georgia with her cloudy, doped eyes and said, “She’s glowing. See? So pretty. Glowing like an angel.”
Egg Foo pushed her back. “Bitch is fucked up. You,” he said to Georgia, “let’s go.” He led her out of the room and back toward the front door. He stuck a small zip-locked baggie in her hand.
“Thanks.”
He didn’t answer. He opened the door and they both walked out onto the sidewalk.
“Is it true about the Inkheads?” she asked. “They’re all dead? No survivors at all?”
“Yo, fuck ’em,” Egg Foo said. “They got what they deserved, trash-talkin’ motherfuckers. Their shit wasn’t no good, neither. That’s why they kept trying to steal ours. Probably a pissed off customer that took ’em out. People died smoking the Inkheads’ rock, and that shit’s bad for business, you feel me? But whoever wasted ’em last night did us a big favour. Now we
own
this backass town.”
“Where did the Inkheads hang out?”
“The fuck you care, bitch? You got your horse, now ride it the fuck outta here.” He sucked his teeth at her, then went back inside and slammed the door. It stayed closed this time.
Walking the long stretch of sidewalk back to her car, Georgia unrolled the leather pack, dropped the baggie inside, and put it all back in her purse. She opened the car door, the sun-heated handle stinging her fingers, and lowered herself into the steaming heat of the vehicle. She drove off slowly, checking the buildings as she passed.
She found what she was looking for on the other side of the warehouse district: a corroded, run-down box of a building with a big name painted across the front windows: BRISTLEMAN CORP.
She parked across the street, grabbed the shotgun out of the back seat and walked carefully toward the building. No yellow tape criss-crossed the doorway, no officers guarded the crime scene — Egg Foo hadn’t lied about the police not caring what happened in Buckshot Hill. The front door was unlocked. She nudged it open with the shotgun and stepped through. It was dark inside, and unlike the Shaolin Tong’s air-conditioned warehouse, the air here was stifling. Her purse, still slung over her shoulder, banged against her side. Cursing, she dropped it to the floor. She should have left it in the car. Stupid of her.
Get it together, girl,
she thought.
She took another step, and her shoe landed in something slick. Blood. The floor was drenched with it, pooling around the overturned metal tables, the chairs scattered across the room, the dusty wooden crates piled in the corners. Red arcs spattered the walls, half-obliterating the word
Inkhedz
spray-painted across one of them. Playing cards were stuck in the puddles of blood. The Inkheads must have been surprised in the middle of a game. She peeled a card off the bottom of her shoe — King of Hearts, the suicide king, with his sword up against his head. His face was smeared with blood like he was bleeding from his own self-inflicted wound. She let it fall to the floor.
She didn’t see any bodies. Blood, an ocean of it, but no bodies, not even any bones or meat left behind. If the Dragon hadn’t eaten them, what had she done with them?
A door at the far end of the warehouse burst open, startling her. Shapes lumbered out of the shadows. The shafts of light from the front windows fell first on the black bandanas on their heads, then on their grey, black-veined skin, their blood-soaked sleeveless t-shirts and baggy shorts.
She pumped a shell into the shotgun chamber, one of the three remaining shells still in the tube running under the barrel, and realized then that she’d forgotten to reload after the fight at the diner. Her father had trained her better than that. She’d gotten sloppy.
Only three shots. She scanned the dead Inkheads lurching toward her and counted eight of them. Her stomach filled with ice.
“She will kill you! Do you get that, Georgia? She will
kill
you!”
In her mind, she saw the box of shotgun shells sitting uselessly by her suitcase in the motel room.
Georgia backed toward the warehouse exit, but one look at the dead hands groping for her from the shadows told her she wouldn’t make it. The meat puppets had moved too close. Even with their slow, clumsy movements, she knew they’d trap her in the narrow doorway before she could escape. She didn’t have a choice — she stepped to the side, trying to circle around them, and trying to keep enough distance from the wall behind her so she wouldn’t get pinned. The meat puppets turned in unison, following her with their lifeless eyes.