Burn(6)

“Three.”

Malcolm sat all the way up.

“Four.”

He pushed himself to his feet. He could see Godwin now, a stout man altogether different than Malcolm had expected.

“Five.”

“Quit staring at me and get a move on,” Godwin said.

“Six.”

“I’m sorry for this,” Malcolm said.

“Seven.”

“Sorry for what?” Godwin said, and exploded in a wash of fire and blood that Malcolm stepped back behind the tree to avoid, not incidentally stepping out of the line of sight of the first man’s gun. He still caught a wave of blood across the side of his face, Godwin’s mixing with his own and spattering Malcolm’s bag. Flames clawed at the tree trunk, scorching it but not catching.

The bag, of course, was fireproof.

“What the hell was that?” the first man shouted. “You said you’d surrender.”

“I am surrendering.” Malcolm pressed himself back into the tree trunk for what he knew was coming. “I can, however, be overruled.”

The screaming began a second later and ended two seconds after that, so at least the man did not suffer long. Malcolm waited until the roaring stopped, until the great lunging of wings quieted in the sky and all that was left was the tick of cooling metal and the pop of boiling rubber.

“Thank you,” he breathed, in unfeigned amazement. “Thank you.”

He gathered his bag, Godwin’s blood already drying. He didn’t look at the blackened circle of forest where Godwin had died, just headed quickly for the road.

The Oldsmobile was now a philosophical question all on its own: Was it still a car if most of it had ceased to exist and what was left fit into a shallow puddle? Was there a spirit to the Oldsmobile that could be said to still live if Malcolm remembered it?

He crossed the road ten meters down from it lest the heat in the tarmac melt his shoes. He entered the trees that led to the riverside, hoisted his bag onto his back, and continued his walk, not looking back.

He would rest later.

For now, there were a good hundred and eighty miles to go to the American border.





Three


“WHERE DID YOUR father find a blue?” Jason Inagawa asked Sarah as they walked the dirt road back from school.

“From the broker your father recommended,” Sarah replied, surprised.

The sun was out, but it was still near freezing. They kept their steps quick to stay warm; the school bus never seemed to make it out to the farms of the school’s only mixed-race girl and one of its very few Asians. Funny that.

“Yeah, but he never mentioned a blue,” Jason said. “I’ve never even heard of a blue around here before.”

“Me neither. But my dad said he was going to give your father a piece of his mind after what the dragon did.”

The dragon had not killed them. Of course. Dragons never did anymore. No one quite knew how long dragons lived—the rumors of immortality were surely just that—but a dragon valued its life enough not to break treaties hundreds of years old with a species that had proven especially adept at weapons of mass destruction. The periodic and costly dragon/human wars across the millennia had finally ended in the 1700s. Dragons had moved to their various Wastes around the world at more or less their own request, and a peace had endured long enough for humans to turn their aggression against themselves. World Wars I and II—from which the dragons had completely abstained—were the two most obvious examples, among countless smaller ones. Even just this week, the Soviet Union had captured an American pilot spying on them. Eisenhower had threatened retaliation if the spy wasn’t returned, but retaliation these days meant bombs big enough to vaporize entire cities. Sarah knew kids at school who prayed every night that they’d wake up in the morning. Truly, despite their ability to squash, swallow, or melt any human with barely an effort, dragons were quite far down the list of human worries these days.

This hadn’t made Sarah and her father’s flight home in their truck any less harrowing.

“If you ever pull a stunt like that again!” he had shouted, after the dragon had safely dropped them in their drive.

“You will do what?” the dragon rumbled. “Pay me even less?” It sounded amused and certainly didn’t look at all troubled by Gareth Dewhurst’s ranting.

“I mean it, claw,” her father said. “The authorities around here don’t take kindly to dragons.”

“The authorities cannot fly,” the dragon said, taking off, leaving her father mid-sentence and circling to the first field where it already knew it would work. Sarah watched it curl up at the edge of the trees. She had no way of knowing for sure, but some part of her felt certain that it had fallen promptly to sleep.

“I’m going to give Hisao Inagawa a piece of my mind,” her father had said, stomping into the house.

“People are always giving my father a piece of their mind,” Jason Inagawa said now. “You ever notice that?”

“They did to my mom, too,” Sarah said, feeling the usual quickening in her chest at speaking about her mother. “Especially when she caught Mr. Hainault cheating her at Frome Grocery.”

Jason left a respectful silence after this, as he had since she became motherless like him, a rarity in a time when it had mostly been fathers lost to war. It had brought them closer, but they’d been friends (and sometimes more than friends) since they were little kids who noticed they looked different from everybody else. They were only three weeks apart in age, both had even been born on their farms, though Jason’s first memories were all from “Camp Harmony,” the name given to the internment camp over at the Fairgrounds in Puyallup where all the Japanese families from Washington and Alaska had been forced to move. Even that had only been temporary: not-even-yet-walking Jason Inagawa and his mother and father—both born in Tacoma, both U.S. citizens, both viewed as potential “enemy collaborators” by the government for no other reason than their heritage—had been sent on to a permanent camp in Minidoka, Idaho, where, two years into their three-year forced stay, Jason’s mother had died of pneumonia.