VERN HAD BODI IRWIN HELP HIM TO THE LANDING, WHICH BARELY qualified as a landing, overrun as it was with cypress knuckles, multicolored spores, and moss drapes. Vern had never fixed it up because he didn’t want any swamp folk getting ideas and tying off there. One of the dragon’s favorite tricks was to lie on his back in the shallow waters and punch dents in any hull that came too close, something he’d been doing for a hundred years. He called those punches “warning shots.”
Here be treacherous waters, boys: You ain’t getting onshore from here without perforations.
And so the tours knew to give Boar Island a wide berth on account of it wasn’t safe to land there. Too many submerged rocks and roots. And if the water predators didn’t get you, then the big cats and boars on the island would do the job. It was like the Bermuda Triangle for hillbillies: People went missing on Boar Island and the environs. And so the Honey Island monster legend grew.
Honey Island, which was fake news. Humans couldn’t even get the island right.
But the point was, there was hardly a soul who knew the way through.
Waxman had known the path, and now that secret had been passed on to young Squib.
Vern sighed.
Waxman.
Damn, that old bastard had been a good friend to him. In less than a hundred years Vern had grown closer to that mogwai than he’d ever been to his own kin. The dragon’s long experience of grieving told him that it would be decades before that pain dulled some, and it would never truly leave his system. Especially considering the way his buddy had checked out.
I been sadder for longer than any creature alive, thought Vern. Ain’t that a pain in the ass.
Vern blinked his inner lids half a dozen times to clear off the film of gunk which had been bothering him thanks to the ’70s chemical runoff from Exxon, which had permeated every molecule of water in the state and would take a million years to dissipate. His vision cleared, and he saw the Pearl motoring down the center of the river, Squib plowing up a wake like he didn’t care who saw.
“I keep telling him,” said Vern to Bodi, “low-profile. That’s the whole goddamn point.”
“Teenagers,” said Bodi, feeling Vern’s weight on his shoulder. “You give ’em access to an engine and all good sense goes out the window.”
“’Cause sound travels like a motherfucker over swamp water,” continued Vern. “Skips right along like a flat stone. I swear I can hear the music from your joint most nights.”
“You like it?” asked Bodi, hoping for an affirmative answer.
“A bit fiddle-heavy, if you ask me,” said Vern. “Ain’t you got any Linda Ronstadt on that jukebox?”
“I thought about it,” said Bodi. “A little on the nose, maybe?”
“Or maybe not,” said Vern.
“We’ll have her on there Monday,” promised Bodi. “‘Blue Bayou’ on repeat.”
Squib must’ve spotted his boss onshore because he made a great show of throttling back on approach.
“Look who just noticed us standing here,” said Vern, sniggering.
“James goddamn Bond himself,” said Bodi.
“Guess how many people he’s fooling with his Look at me, ain’t I careful act?”
“Not a one.”
“Goddamn right. I should dock his pay, I really should. But he is bringing in the goods. And trust me, Green Day, there’ll be a reckoning for that oil.”
Bodi wasn’t sure he liked the sound of that. “‘Reckoning’ has different connotations, Vern. You ain’t using the term in a negative sense, by any chance?”
Vern laughed and it felt good, but it also hurt his chest some. “Connotations? Well, fuck me, Bodi, ain’t you the linguist? Nah, it ain’t that kind of reckoning. I aim to fix up with you, is all.”
“Fix up” didn’t sound much better to Bodi, but he reckoned he’d let it go.
Vern watched Squib navigate the final stretch from the river proper into the barely visible tributary which ran into his little dock. The kid had skills, there was no doubt about that, tipping at the throttle with his left and adjusting the steering with the heel of his right, and right there Vern realized that something was missing—not from the world in general, but inside his own head, the psychological equivalent of rising hackles. Vern already knew that he liked the kid, but now he realized that he had faith in him.
This could work out, he thought. Kid’s young; we could do a half century.
“You make enough noise, kid?” he called when the boat nudged against the half-submerged planking. “Shit, you wakin’ up my ancestors.”
Squib grinned. “Hey, boss. I sure am glad to see you back on your feet. I thought you were toast—and I need this job.”
“He’s a cheeky little cuss, ain’t he?” Vern said to Bodi. “I’ll show him toast.”
And Vern wasted valuable energy spreading his wings. “Does this look like I’m toast, boy? I’ll outlive all you puny humans.”
And in that second, while he was all pumped up like that, Vern smelled something on the breeze: a scent he’d thought had been scorched from the earth.
Fucking Hooke, he thought. Come the nuclear holocaust, it’ll be just him and the cockroaches.
Then he heard a sound like an old lady coughing across the river and he had two holes in his wings the size of dinner plates. Or maybe the holes came first.
Bodi was saying something about something, but Vern couldn’t understand.
The old lady coughed some more, and Irwin was gone from under his arm, snatched away like he’d come to the end of his bungee.
Humans, thought Vern. The angry mob is here.
He looked to Squib, who was scrambling over the prow of the cruiser, desperate to help his master; then he, too, was snatched away, not by a bullet but by a hand on his ankle which yanked the boy backwards and sent him cartwheeling into the Pearl River. It might have been a lark, it looked so funny, but whatever was transpiring here, it wasn’t no comedy. In Squib’s place came the biggest human Vern had seen up close, swarming onto the landing like an angry bear. Vern had fought bears before and they weren’t no pushover, even when he was at the top of his game.
It’s fight-or-flight time, thought Vern, and I am plumb out of flight.
Which left fight.
On a good day it would have been an audacious creature indeed who would come at Wyvern, Lord Highfire, with nothing more than lead-shot-weighted sap gloves as weapons. But this was not a good day. Wyvern, Lord Highfire, was perforated, concussed, and out of juice, so no flame, no altitude, and very little balance. Whatever oomph he had, he sent to his armor plating so that he could at least roll with the punches.
And the punches were not long in coming. This human woman moved so fast that Vern wasn’t sure he could have tagged her a good one even if he had been tip-top. He made the effort, though, swinging open-clawed so if he did make contact he might clip an artery and that would be the end of the story as far as this assailant went. But the woman went low, and Vern only managed to rake one claw along her buzz-cut skull, opening a shallow gash that bled a little but was nowhere near fatal. And of course then Vern had missed his window and the human was inside his guard.
She went to work like a surgeon, battering Vern’s midsection with a flurry of hooks and jabs, searching for weak spots. She found one or two, and Vern felt his armor plating groan under the pressure.
Come on, Highfire, he told himself. You ain’t no man-hands, right?
Maybe “man-hands” was the wrong derogative in this particular situation. This lady’s hands were breaking him down like an old chair. He felt his kidney plate collapse and his solar plexus wobble.
Too soon, he thought. Get it together, Vern.
The woman worked on the kidney area, and Vern felt a searing pain shoot from balls to throat.
“Mother—” he swore, and that’s when Vern got a momentary breather.
Maybe the woman hadn’t realized that it was Vern who had spoken earlier as she hid in the stern, or maybe Hooke hadn’t mentioned the dragon’s power of speech. Either way, Vern’s expletive froze the woman just for a second and she came into focus.
Vern completed the popular insult. “—fucker!” he said, driving his fist down on the woman’s head. It wasn’t much of a blow, but it bought him a few seconds to back up and draw his breath.
The woman went down on one knee and shook the stars from her eyes. “That’s it, Mister Vern? That’s all you got in the tank? Shit, I’m gonna mount your head on my wall.”
Vern clicked his jaws, trying to spark up, but there was nothing, not a single drop of fat. If only he could reach the oil barrels.
“What’s up with your face, Vern?” said the woman, balling her fists. “You having some kind of fit? In case you want to know, the name of the gal whupping your ass is Jewell Hardy. Don’t forget that name, will you, boy?”
“I ain’t whupped yet, Jewell Hardy,” said Vern, “so let’s you and me get to it.”
There was a blink of light from out on the river and then Vern got himself sledgehammered by a slug which pancaked on his chest. It was bad luck for the shooter, as the chest plate was close to impenetrable. Lack of penetration notwithstanding, Vern’s lungs still emptied in a whoof! and he was sent ass-over-tail into the brush.
“Go, Jiang,” said Jewell Hardy, whatever the hell that meant, and was all over Vern like a cheap cologne, which was as far as that analogy went because cheap cologne isn’t normally in the habit of beating the bejesus out of its wearers. Hardy gave him a couple in the side of the head first to rattle his marbles, then probed his torso with her fingers, looking for a way in.
Vern’s eyes rolled and he thought, I cannot believe this week.
The swamp mud squelched beneath him, and he felt the slick paste of Boar Island seep into his cargo pants.
New fucking pants, too. Well, newish.
“Ok-aay,” said Jewell Hardy, which was ominous.
The fist-fighter had found a gap in Vern’s ribs and jammed her fingers in, which tickled. But then she drew a knife from behind her back and tried to work it in the space.
This ain’t gonna tickle, thought Vern.
The tip went in—but the secondary effect of this penetration was not foreseen by either combatant. The first effect was a stab of white-hot pain, which was to be expected, but the second was an involuntary revving up of Vern’s neuromuscular system, which initiated a stretch of his muscles and woke up nerve receptors in his tendons, which kicked off an impulse transmission up his spinal cord, where it triggered a reaction to contract the muscle that was just stretched. Of course, Vern didn’t know the science of this; all he knew was his knee jackknifed with a force he would not have thought currently in him, which slammed Jewell Hardy in the back, sending her tumbling into the undergrowth with every last breath of air driven from her lungs.
“Shit,” gasped Vern. “Fucking beast of a human.”
He’d been lucky, but a woman like that wasn’t gonna lie down long because of a knee in the back; she wasn’t out of the fight yet—you could bet your last dollar on that. And unless she stabbed him in the same spot, he had nothing in the tank.
“Vern,” said a husky voice, and for a moment Vern thought his ancestors were talking to him from heaven where dragons were supposedly transformed into the seraphim.
“Is that the angels?”
“No, it ain’t no fucking angels, leastways, not yet.”
Vern looked sideways, and there was Bodi Irwin not three feet away, the blood on his shoulder glistening tar like some kid had dumped a bucket on him.
“Bodi,” said Vern.
Bodi tapped his chest weakly.
“I feel the same, buddy,” said Vern, reckoning it cost nothing to be gracious since the human was probably checking out.
“No, fuckwit. Shotgun.”
Ah, thought Vern. Yeah, that makes more sense.
Bodi had his shotgun strapped to his back.
Vern reached across, snicked the strap with one talon, then wiggled the weapon out from under Bodi.
“Goddamn,” swore Irwin. “Take it easy.”
“Sorry,” said Vern. “I saw on Lifetime how a bullet wound ranks about the same pain-wise as childbirth, so suck it up, Green Day.”
As Vern delivered this missal, he pumped a shell into the chamber, so that when two seconds later Jewell Hardy made a grab for the gun, he was able to blow one of her ears clean off the side of her head.
No more Beats by Dre for you, lady, thought Vern.
And he would have finished her off had Bodi’s cruiser not exploded.
SQUIB FELT LIKE he’d come out the sphincter end of a water slide all wrong. He hit the river so hard he was certain he would split like an overripe banana, but somehow his skin held on to its integrity, even when he crashed into the riverbed barely three feet below.
No: not the riverbed.
The swamp bed didn’t creak and buckle.
With remarkable presence of mind, Squib managed to assemble two rational thoughts:
One: I think my ass is broken.
And two: Goddamn, if I ain’t after landing on Hooke’s sunken boat.
It was good to know where the cruiser was, for future reference. If there was to be a future for him, which wasn’t looking very likely.
Squib found that he could stand on the cruiser’s keel, and once his lungs had been satisfied, he could take a peek at the situation, or situations, to be more accurate.
Seemed like there were two action zones.
Vern onshore wrestling with a WWE diva, looked like.
And a boat in the river, with someone taking potshots.
And wasn’t much he could do about either.
I brung them here, he thought. Those bastards, they done followed me.
Squib’s first instinct was to stay where he was, just bobbing here in the Pearl River, let this crisis wash over him. Vern could handle it—he’d surely handled worse. But that instinct faded fast, and he was ashamed of it.
Momma is on that island and all because of me.
So he made his choice based on desperation and a dollop of teenage stupidity.
I’m gonna swim ashore and give the boss some backup, at the very least come between that warrior woman and Momma.
So he made to push himself off the keel—then his foot snagged in something.
Goddamn gator’s got me, he thought. Spared by a dragon, only to be killed by a gator. That’s some cosmic bullshit there.
But it wasn’t a gator; it was a cord or strap or something, caught tight around his ankle.
Squib took a breath and ducked under. He kept his eyes closed because there wasn’t any point trying to see in a swamp at night, even on a clear night like this. He scrabbled at the strap looped around his ankle and wiggled his thumb in between the buckle and his skin, which was as much as he could do on the first breath. On the second, he widened the loop and slipped his foot out, then thought he might as well see if what’d snagged him could be of any use.
Turned out it could.
HOOKE FOUND HIMSELF watching a dragon getting beat up.
These are truly the best of times, Regence, he thought. Things ain’t never gonna be this good again.
And it was true: If snipers shooting at dragons in a swamp at the dead of night was your thing, then right now Boar Island was the sweet spot of the universe.
Hooke’s daddy had once told him, “You ain’t nothing special, boy. All these sinful antics that in your opinion make you different from the rest of the world? You ain’t different. There are a million other jerk-offs doing exactly the same thing you are.”
Hooke smiled again. Wrong again, Daddy.
He was watching the onshore shenanigans through his monocular. Jewell Hardy was going fine till Vern caught her with the shotgun blast.
“Holy shit,” he said to DuShane. “Now she’s gonna be pissed. Take us in a little.”
DuShane sat on the inflated gunwale. “Any closer and we’re gonna be scraping the bottom,” he said. His tone was weird, kinda hollow, like the pilot was in shock a little. Which could be the case.
Hooke didn’t care, so long as he didn’t lose control of the boat. “Fuck it if we scrape the bottom,” he said. “Ain’t my boat, son.”
“That’s what I thought,” said DuShane; then he said, “Heads up.”
Now ain’t that a strange thing to say? thought Hooke, wondering whose head Adebayo was referring to and why it should be up, but these questions were answered when DuShane plucked something from the sky and held it to his chest.
“I caught her,” he said, and proudly showed Hooke a grenade like it was a golden egg.
“Goddamn,” said Hooke.
Adebayo’s face collapsed like he’d been punched by an invisible fist as he realized what he was holding, and Hooke knew what was coming next. He’d seen it a hundred times. It wasn’t like in the movies when some square-jawed, in-it-for-the-“right”-reasons soldier caught a pineapple neat as a third baseman and pitched it toward the enemy, destroying a tank and saving the village. In the real world, if some fool is unlucky enough to find a grenade in his immediate vicinity, he immediately regresses to his pass-the-parcel days and targets the nearest comrade.
Not tonight, thought Hooke. He reached down to grab Adebayo’s ankle and with one heave he flipped the sailor out of the boat. He reckoned that he himself had maybe a thirty percent chance of survival.
As it turned out, Adebayo’s body shielded Hooke from most of the blast. The pilot managed a semi-revolution before the grenade exploded, making spaghetti of his Kevlar vest and churning his organs to mush. He was mashed against the keel before sliding down slowly into the murk like a sports sock down a wall.
He was dead before he hit the water. Hot lunch for the alligators.
Hooke took a slash on the forearm and would have tinnitus for the rest of his days, but otherwise he was hale and hearty. Jing Jiang was not accustomed to being within one thousand yards of the action. Her reaction to an explosion inside that comfort zone was a convoluted string of swear words, followed by a swift decision.
“I’m making that call, Hooke,” she called over her shoulder, and she swapped her .50-caliber for the rocket launcher, on which Hooke had written in Sharpie: “Last Rezort”—“Rezort” with a z, because soldiers surely loved that kind of rebellious misspelling.
The Russian MANPAD was a little clunkier around the midsection than the old drainpipe models, and the business end looked more like a paparazzi telephoto lens than a barrel, which made it difficult to aim precisely, and there was no time for digital sights, but Jiang probably figured it would obliterate most of her event horizon, so job done.
“Die, Gojira,” she said.
Hooke was pretty sure that “Gojira” was a Japanese reference and Jiang was Chinese, but they could discuss that cross-cultural reference later, and either way, the latest reboot was undeniably a hell of a movie.
And Jewell Hardy, thought Hooke, she will die, too. But his arm stung, and he had a ringing in his ears, so if Hardy had to go, so be it. It wasn’t as if she had two ears anymore, anyway.
“Do it,” he said.
“Like I need you to tell me,” said Jiang. The sniper boosted herself to her knees and with only the most cursory of aim-taking, pulled the trigger at precisely the same moment a cluster of gators thudded into the keel while fighting over the remains of DuShane Adebayo.
It wasn’t much of a thud—no one was falling out of the boat—but the prow dipped just enough to send Jing Jiang’s rocket squirreling off course underwater.
“Shit!” said the sniper, watching the blurred taillight fade into the murk. “I don’t even know if that’s gonna—”
AT WHICH POINT the Pearl cruiser leaped into the air like a volcano had just erupted underneath it, and the consequences were multifold:
A tiny species of hydrophytic buttercup, indigenous to the swamp, was blasted into extinction. No one ever saw it, and no one would ever miss it—apart from the bullfrogs that ate it for its hallucinogenic properties. Cue thousands of cold-turkey bullfrogs croaking their sacs off for what was left of the summer.
Two million gallons of swamp water were violently redistributed by the rocket’s release of energy, causing a six-foot wave to rise up from the depths like Poseidon’s fist and dozens of stunned alligators to float to the surface, where they bobbed like healthy turds.
Bodi Irwin’s cruiser flipped neater than a high school gymnast, landing square on top of Vern like he was in a Buster Keaton movie.
Squib tried to hold on to the keel of Hooke’s sunken boat, but the mini tsunami ripped both him and a section of the boat free, and the boy literally surfed thirty feet onto the deck of Hooke’s RIB.
Old Goatbeard, a legendary three-hundred-pound catfish who had been teasing fishermen for years, took a fin from the rocket in the brain.
NOISE.
Lotta coincidence and happenstance—but Wyvern the mythological dragon had brought that kind of thing with him from the early times.
VERN WAS SUDDENLY in the dark, but leastways that crazy warrior woman was off his back for the moment.
The keel shuddered above him, roaring directly into his face like a giant shell channeling the ocean. Also, he was covered in gunk.
What is this shit? Vern wondered, but then his scales instinctively opened to absorb it and he knew.
Oil.
Finally, Lord Highfire gets a break. Now all I need is a minute to convert.
That much-needed minute was not forthcoming, however, as no sooner had the sonic vibration ceased than someone had hooked their fingers beneath the inverted gunwale and begun to heave.
Someone, thought Vern. Three guesses.
No normal human would be capable of lifting the boat, but Vern got the feeling that this woman would find the strength somewhere—like it was a tree trunk and he was her baby pinned underneath.
And the momma was hell-bent on killing the baby.
So not exactly your normal tree trunk–baby scenario.
Vern could feel the gunk sinking into his pipes.
Couple more seconds is all I need to be battle-ready.
Granted, it would be a very short battle—no aerial antics or anything showy, just a quick burst. But it appeared that even a few more seconds were not in the cards, because the boat lifted with the groaning reluctance of a mouth opening for the dentist. Swamp glow crept into the gap, and Vern could see the oil on his scales trickling through the grooves.
Come on, gunk. Do your job.
With a final heave and a childbearing shriek, Jewell Hardy pushed the cruiser past the point of no return, revealing a prostrate Vern slathered with the oil from Bodi’s busted barrels.
“Just a second,” said Vern. “I’ll be right with you.”
“Death don’t wait in line,” said Jewell Hardy, which had a nice ring to it.
And to be fair to the girl, with half her face hanging off and blood drenching her torso, she did seem like some class of a harbinger, and Vern was inclined to believe that this moment really was his last when Hardy was struck from behind with an oar and the blow caused her to momentarily hunch over.
“What now?” she said. “Just what the fuck now?”
And there was Elodie Moreau come from the shack, trying to help out, putting her own self in harm’s way for her son’s boss.
“You just leave that old dragon be,” she said. “Ain’t you got no respect for endangered species?”
Which handed Jewell Hardy her comeback on a plate. “Lady,” she said, shrugging off the blow, “you are something of an endangered species yourself.”
Elodie went for another blow with the oar, but Hardy caught it and knocked the blade against Elodie’s forehead. Squib’s momma crumpled to the grass beside Bodi, where they lay like spent lovers.
“Nighty night, sweethearts,” said Jewell. “Back in a sec.”
She turned to the dragon and said, “Sorry to keep you waiting, Mister Vern.”
“Ain’t no problem,” said Vern, and sparked up.
Jewell Hardy must have seen the spark because she endeavored to remove herself from the literal line of fire. Most of her made it, too, but not quite enough to save her life. Vern’s blast of howling flame charred her to cinders below the waist, and her heart had given up the ghost before she hit the mud.
I got enough juice for one more blast, thought Vern. And I know just the recipient.
SQUIB DROPPED THE grenade launcher and thought about his favorite book as he surfed on a keel plate that moonlit summer swamp night. The book was The Princess Bride, and the part was where one guy says to the other guy following a series of barely credible events how “inconceivable” might not mean what he thought it meant.
Yup, thought Squib, though mostly he was screaming.
The rocket-induced wave propelled him bodily toward the boat he’d just tried to sink and dumped him gasping like a fish on the deck. The boat took the shock, and the excess water sluiced out through bilge ports, but in spite of his name, Squib was too hefty to squeeze through one of them bilge ports and instead lay blinking the scum from his eyes.
“Pennies from heaven,” said a voice. “Inconceivable.”
Hooke is alive, and he can read my mind, thought Squib, and he wasn’t one whit surprised.
HOOKE LIKED TO believe himself godless, but when nature dumped the kid on his deck, he couldn’t help thinking that some dark force was working in his favor and therefore an opposite force must surely exist.
“Pennies from heaven,” he said. “Inconceivable.”
The kid was a sorry sight, all mud-slicked and bashed up by recent events, but that didn’t inspire any feelings of sympathy in Hooke. What he thought was, Enough of this screwing around. No more strategy. I’m just gonna kill my way to the end of this situation.
And so he grabbed at Squib. “C’mere, kid.”
The kid backpedaled along the deck, but there wasn’t really anywhere he could go besides into the water, and Hooke aimed to close down that option.
I’ll shoot him, he thought, but then, No, best not, not in an inflatable boat.
“Let’s go, boy,” he said. “I got things to do.” And he bent low with grabby hands and dug his strong fingers into Squib’s lapels.
No, not lapels. Some kind of crackly hide.
“Is this—?” said Hooke. “Are you wearing a dragon suit?”
The nine-fingered boy showed some dexterity and stuck a thumb in the middle of the granny knot securing the suit around his waist. With one jerk the knot unraveled, which surprised Hooke almost as much as the existence of the suit itself.
“Well, if that don’t beat all. David fucking Copperfield on a stick.”
Squib slid between his legs and was gone over the side so fast that all Hooke could do was chuckle.
“Gators will get him,” he said, but he didn’t give much weight to his own words. The darned kid had as many lives as fingers. Like a fucking roach.
Then again, I killed roaches before.
Jing Jiang climbed down off the prow. There were tears welling in her eyes. “I lost Timberlake,” she said weepily, and it took Hooke a second to catch on.
“Your weapon?”
“‘Weapon’?” said Jiang. “‘Weapon’? Timberlake was a friend of mine. Timberlake was a friend of the whole damn country.”
Over her shoulder, Hooke saw fire on the island and thought, Uh-oh. We awakened the beast.
And he draped the dragon skin over his shoulders.
“I lost Timberlake,” screamed Jing Jiang, “and you’re playing dress-up?”
Hooke pulled his Vern hood over his eyes, thinking, I must look like a big goddamn devil.
“Hail Satan,” he said. “I’m gonna kill Vern the old-fashioned way.”
And then he followed Squib overboard.
Hooke didn’t mean it—not about going overboard; that was on purpose.
And not about killing Vern; he absolutely meant that. That was an if it’s the last thing I ever do kinda statement.
About Satan. He didn’t mean it about “Hail Satan.”
Regence Hooke worshipped no one but his own self.
VERN MANAGED A three-second blast.
His aim was a little erratic, shearing the Irish moss right off a row of cypress over on Honey Island, but at least one final second of dragon flame landed on Hooke’s boat, melting it and anybody on it to a memory. One second might not sound like much, but it’s a long time to be on fire, as Jing Jiang might have testified to if she hadn’t been so incinerated. In fact, in the name of honesty, truer to say that Jiang wasn’t incinerated as such, because Vern’s final second was a bit breathy, as the last second often is, so the temperature dipped considerably, meaning that Jing Jiang was actually asphyxiated by melted plastic rather than burned outright, which was not really any comfort to the sniper.
Dragon flame was clean. Being cocooned in liquefied plastic? Not so much.
Vern kept on pumping till his molars sparked like an empty Zippo; then he keeled over into the mud and thrashed a little like he was making a swamp angel.
Bodi Irwin, trying to attend to Elodie, had something to say about the thrashings. “Vern, come on, dude. I been shot here, and Elodie’s out cold. Quit spasming. You’re tail-lashing me.”
“Show some gratitude, Green Day,” said Vern, though he did calm down with the tail. “I saved your hippie ass. And you ain’t dying, in case you was wondering. If you was dying, you would be gone already. Plus you’re talking up a storm.”
“It ain’t hardly a storm, stringing a few sentences together,” argued Bodi. “And you ain’t exactly keeping mum your own self.”
Vern snorted. “You was afraid of me a minute ago. I miss those days.”
“Yeah, well, a ruptured torso puts things in perspective.”
Vern patted his stomach, which was now concave. “Perspective, Green Day? From which perspective ain’t a dragon scary?”
“I’m still scared, Vern, but I’m more anxious.”
Vern sniggered. “About Elodie?”
Bodi elbowed the dragon. “Screw you.”
“She’s a hell of a woman, if you like that species.”
Bodi picked the hair from Elodie’s forehead, taking a peek underneath. “This ain’t the time, Vern. I been shot. You’re close to a skeleton, and Elodie’s knocked senseless.”
“Check on her then,” said Vern. “Lemme take a second here, then I’ll retrieve our boy.”
Bodi had a barman’s experience with checking on casualties, so was soon satisfied that at least one of them wasn’t going to die anytime soon, though Squib’s momma would have a bruise the size of a lily pad and could probably do with a couple of staples to the bridge of her nose.
“You see what happened to Squib?” he asked the dragon.
Vern hiked himself up on his elbows, thinking there was probably more oil underneath the Pearl cruiser or in the swamp pools hereabouts, and if he could just swallow a few quarts . . .
“He went in the water. After that I was busy getting beat on.”
“Maybe you should take a look-see now?”
“Yeah. I surely would, if you could stop detaining me with conversation.”
Bodi did not rejoin, preferring to lie back beside Elodie and put pressure on his own wound. The Lord knew he had thought about them lying parallel like this, but without the bullet hole and lily pad bruise.
“Guess I’ll take a look-see then,” said Vern, rolling onto his stomach. “Might have to drag this old carcass.”
But he never had to drag the old carcass because Squib came lurching out of the water by the splintered remains of the landing.
“Momma?” he called. “Momma? Vern?”
“Heh,” said Vern. “You ain’t even in the circle of trust, Green Day.”
Then he raised an arm weakly. “Yeah. Everyone’s alive, Squib. I done saved ’em all. You shoulda seen me.”
“The alligators look like sleeping turds,” said Squib, sniffling.
It was plain that the boy was close to all-out bawling.
“I wanna hug my momma in just a second,” he said.
“Just a second”? wondered Vern. Why the delay?
Squib squatted down, elbows on knees with the loose joints of childhood, which was pretty graceful, and then ruined the effect by throwing up a quart of swamp water onto the keel of Bodi’s inverted cruiser. It was one of those effortless pukes, no painful retches: just open mouth and unleash the torrent.
“Shit, boy,” said Vern. “You musta gone in with both ends wide-open.”
“I been thrown in twice,” said Squib. “My insides ain’t nothing but swamp.”
Vern had to laugh. Nothing funnier than watching a youngster throw up. It was a shame Squib hadn’t been drinking, as then the dragon could’ve delivered a lecture, too. But puking would have to do.
“Get it out, son.”
Squib wiped his mouth. “Nah, I’m done.”
“You sure? Sometimes there’s a round two.”
But Squib did not oblige, and instead, Vern was forced to deal with the uncomfortable truth that he was lying exposed out in the open in the aftermath of an epic shit storm with the Feds one county south keeping their eyes peeled for exactly this class of a blip on the thermals.
Highfire, son, he thought to himself, you don’t wanna stop being mythical and start being real.
This was surely true, as being real was only one step away from being extinct. Lying prostrate in the mud with holes in his wings and a head wound bubbling on his forehead, Vern had to admit that the one step between him and extinction was feeling like a baby step this fine morning as the sun threatened to push through over the gulf.
“Momma,” said Squib. “Momma—your face . . .”
“That looks bad,” said Vern, “but it’s cosmetic—”
And then things got balls-nasty one more time because it looked like the Swamp Thing was coming out of the river. But it wasn’t the Swamp Thing; it was Regence Hooke wearing Vern’s skin like a cloak, limbs all blackened where they poked out.
Vern’s response to this apparition was to unleash his junk and take an arcing piss.
The Swamp Thing sloughed off the algae and weed fronds to become, of course, Regence Hooke, blackened and blistered, but infuriatingly, undeniably alive.
HOOKE HAD FELT the heat of Vern’s dragon fire moments earlier as he leaped from the RIB, but not as severely as he might have without Vern’s own skin to protect him. Even so, his pants were frizzled away, and his hands scorched black.
Coulda been a whole lot worse, Regence, he told himself. A dragon suit? Fuck me.
Hooke wasn’t the greatest of swimmers, but he plugged away, dragging himself through the murk-of-dawn swamp, trying to ignore the logjam of dazed alligators off his port side.
That’s one for the Discovery Channel, he thought. Shit, maybe I should board one of those brutes and paddle ashore.
But he didn’t want to risk waking the big lizards. It would be a shame to be eaten by a gator on the way to beat up a dragon.
Anyways, it wasn’t more’n two pulls before his boots touched down and all Hooke had to do then was negotiate the submerged tree knuckles and dips of the swamp bed on his way to shore. He kept himself low, just peeking out enough to breathe. His sopping attire killed any buoyancy he might have had, so it was easy to keep himself mostly hidden. He saw Squib, that little pain in his ass, crawl ashore and throw his guts up. He saw the first rays of slanting morning sun catch Vern on the snout. That boy was tuckered the hell out and couldn’t even manage a hug for his little familiar. And there was Bodi Irwin, all shot to hell. He might make it or he might not, but either way he wasn’t up for fisticuffs right at the moment.
This is your chance, Regence, he told himself. This right here is the golden opportunity people are always talking about.
Sure, his Delta Force plan had gone completely ass-ways, but here was a shot at redemption.
Hooke counted to five, then waded ashore.
Squib never heard Hooke coming up behind him, being too busy boo-hooing over his precious momma. But Hooke knew the little seven-toed bastard would be like a gnat if he wasn’t swatted, so he improvised a move, one of those maneuvers that he just knew was gonna work out before he even set himself in motion.
He could visualize it.
This is gonna be cool, he thought, and reached one of his massive hands beneath the gunwale of Bodi’s boat. Making sure to lift with his knees, he hauled the craft maybe three feet up on one side, then whistled. “Hey, kid.”
Squib left off his bawling for long enough to check out the whistle, at which point Hooke palmed him under the boat and dropped it on him like a coffin lid: the second time in as many minutes the cruiser had been used as a prison.
“Oh-ho,” he crowed, “sa-weet. Whaddya say, Vern?”
The dragon’s response to this was to take an epic piss.
“What the hell you doing, Vern?” asked Hooke. This wasn’t no way for his nemesis to go out, pissing on his friends.
“You make me nervous, Constable Hooke,” replied the dragon, “and when I’m nervous, I pee.”
“Uh-uh,” said Hooke, not really buying it, suspecting something. “You pee.”
He peered around, looking for the blindside move, but everything seemed clear. The boy was banging on the hull, yelling about his momma and doing damage to his own eardrums. Bodi Irwin was bleeding out, and pretty Elodie Moreau sure wasn’t pretty no more. As for the mighty Vern, he was on his ass, pissing on Bodi and Elodie.
“You squirt away, lizard. Either you let it out now, or I’m surely gonna beat it outta you.”
Bodi, finding a smidge of gumption somewhere, started pawing at the shotgun by his side.
“No, sir,” said Hooke, snatching the weapon away and checking the load. Empty. “I am done with inconveniences. You just lie still, and I promise to kill you quick.”
“Ain’t you got no soul, Regence?” Bodi rasped, his face cherry-red with indignation. “This here is the last of his kind. You wanna be the man who robbed the world of magic?”
Hooke spat in the mud. “Magic? Magic, old man? Your ‘magic’ is ass-deep in swamp mud pissing on your flank. I think the world can survive just fine without that kind of enchantment.”
This was a good point, and as much as Bodi blustered and rasped, he came up short regarding an answer.
“That’s what I thought,” said Hooke. He cast around, looking for something in the blossoming light of a summer morning, the sun bleeding into the sky from out on the gulf and mosquitoes calling it a night.
“Aha,” he said, like a movie psycho who’s just come upon the biggest knife in the kitchen. But it wasn’t a knife he’d discovered but the top half of Jewell Hardy, which was bled pale in the scrub.
“Shit, Vern,” he said, peeling off her weighted gloves. “You done a number on this girl. I liked her, too, so that’s coming out of your ass.”
“Sure, Hooke,” said Vern, whose tank was apparently empty. “You’re gonna be the one. After all these years, it’s gonna be Regence Hooke. Dream on, Constable.”
Hooke tugged the gloves on as far as they would go on his massive hands. “A little O. J., right? I know. But still, it should be enough to do you in, Vern. You ain’t got nothing left. No fire, no flight. Shit, you don’t even got no piss anymore.”
Vern grinned weakly, and blood bubbled behind his teeth. “I got one thing, shitface.”
Hooke set himself up, planting his feet on Vern’s wings, squatting low and snapping off a right hook to Vern’s jaw.
“What’s that, lizard? What’s the one thing? You ain’t gonna say ‘friends,’ are you?” Hooke laughed. “Because I’d say your friends are just about as fucked as you. Five seconds after I beat your head off, I’m gonna take care of them, and what’s more, it’s gonna look like you was responsible. I’ll be a goddamn hero, sheriff of whatever goddamn ward I choose. Shit, I might even run for mayor.”
Hooke set about Vern’s head with a flurry of jabs, snapping the dragon’s head from side to side, drawing blood with each blow. Soon the dragon’s face was a lattice of blood lines.
Vern’s eyes rolled back, and it sounded like he was trying to speak, but all he could manage was a reptilian throat rattle.
Hooke was delighted. “Your buddy is reverting, Bodi. I beat him all the way back to the Jurassic age.”
Bodi couldn’t talk much; all his energy was going into anger, which was just pumping the blood out of him faster. “You . . .” he said. “You . . .”
“Yep,” said Hooke, happier than he had ever been in his life. “Me . . . Me.”
Vern rattled some more, and coughed at the end of it.
“What you saying there, Vern?” asked Hooke, stomping on the dragon’s jaw. “You calling for your dragon momma?”
Vern spat blood and one of his tusks, which Hooke picked up and wiped on his pants.
“Naw,” gasped Vern, “I’m calling for the one thing I got.”
Hooke had too much adrenaline rushing through his veins to catch the tone. “I’ll tell you what you got. You got a hope in hell, that’s what you got, Wyvern.”
Vern rattled his throat one more time, then said, “No, Regence. What I got is subjects.”
“‘Subjects’?” said Hooke, then laughed. “Goddamn subjects. You’re a one, Vern. Damned if you ain’t, Your Majesty.”
This relentless ragging must’ve got Vern’s goat a little because he withdrew his junk with a defiant clanking. “And you’re a dick, Regence. But not for long.”
Hooke was bored now. Incredible, that a person could tire of beating up a dragon, but now the race was run, more or less, and he wanted to keep on keeping on. This situation needed tidying up before the Federales arrived with their tents and stuff to cross. He had all the t’s, dot the i’s, and drown the witnesses.
“Anyways, Vern,” he said, “I reckon there’s one thing that will surely slice through to a dragon’s heart, if you’re finished pissing on your friends, that is.” He wrapped his fingers around Vern’s own tusk, testing its underhand grip.
It was possible that Vern was slightly more pale than usual.
Everything looked red in this light, but he continued talking back to his last breath. “Ain’t you never watched nature shows, Hooke? Ain’t you never had a goddamned dog? I wasn’t pissing on my friends. I was marking them.”
Vern gave one more rattle, which gave Hooke a moment to consider the “marking them” comment.
“Bullshit” was his verdict on that. “Bullshit, Vern. Piss ain’t no more effective than Rosary beads. Piss can’t protect nobody from me.”
Vern barely opened his mouth to answer. “Not from you, moron. You ain’t nothing.”
Okeydokey, thought Hooke. Cab for one delirious dragon. He made a few experimental thrusts with the tusk.
Nice heft, he thought. I’m gonna have this tooled up. Put a handle on her. Kill everything with a dragon’s tooth from this day forth.
Constable Regence Hooke took a moment to appreciate his surroundings. Live in the moment, wasn’t that what they said? All them gurus and so forth.
“There ain’t never going to be another moment like this one, Regence,” he told himself. All the elements were present for a unique-style memory:
1. The dragon dying on his ass.
2. The woman with her face all beat up.
3. The son trapped under an inverted boat.
It was almost demeaning to that bunch of details to include a bleeding-out hippie, but Bodi was part of it, so Hooke acknowledged him with a wink.
Ain’t you never had a dog? What the hell was that about? Deathbed bullshit.
But the fact was that Regence Hooke never did have a dog as a boy, his daddy being dead set against them. But he had read up on them, back in the day, and he did know that dogs pissed on things to mark their territory. To warn off other dogs.
But there ain’t no other dogs, that is to say, dragons.
Then Regence felt a clamping on his ankle, and now he understood.
Fuck.
Vern did have subjects after all.
Hooke looked down to see a big-ass alligator with what looked like a scorched head chomping on his boot. The creature’s teeth hadn’t penetrated the padded leather yet, but it was only a matter of time, so he nailed it right between the eyes with Vern’s tusk, and it sank in like a spike through crusty bread, that is to say, a little initial resistance, then through to the sponge beneath. Trouble was, it didn’t come out so easy, and there were a ton more gators slithering across the slick swamp grass.
“You prick, Vern,” said Hooke. “You goddamn prick.”
The first gator didn’t relax its grip, even in death. In fact, its jaws ratcheted tighter and Hooke felt a bone snap in his ankle.
No talking now. No threats.
Hooke knew that he would need every joule of energy to extricate himself from this gator crisis, for they were coming in a sinewy wave over the verge, hides glistening red, some still half stunned by the explosion, turret eyes rolling, jaws wide like Satan’s hedge clippers.
Hooke gave the tusk a couple more tugs, then abandoned it.
Better maybe, Regence, to abandon this entire conflict for now.
But first he needed to retrieve his foot. He stomped on the gator that had latched onto his ankle, stomping with his heavy boot until the animal’s snout was only so much crazy paving, and twisted his foot out of the tooth trap. The broken bone hurt like hellfire, but he tucked that pain in his back pocket for now. He could take it out on someone or other later, when everything on this godforsaken island was dead excepting him.
He tried to run, but after three hobbling steps he knew that two more would see him collapse into the mud, so he turned to fight.
Weapons?
He had lost pretty much everything in the swamp, but he still had his faithful gut hook, and so he armed himself sharpish as the sinewy sea of alligators swept toward him with a synchronicity about them that he had never seen in gators before, and he reckoned that was going to be all she wrote for his ass.
Still, a fella has to go down swinging, so the constable gamely sliced into the first alligator, hoping that the herd would be scattered by the death of their leader. It was only when the gators ignored the body of their comrade, clambering over it to get to him, that Hooke realized, I’m going for the wrong creature. Vern is their leader.
But he had no time to deal with that before the glistening mass of nubs and teeth was upon him, tearing him apart with all the eagerness of demons welcoming newcomers to Hades. Hooke watched as one arm was torn from his body and the blood spurted like oil from a nozzle; then he saw a gator take a chunk out of his stomach the size of a basketball and his own insides plop onto his lap.
Ripped right through my vest, he thought, like it wasn’t even there.
Then he was lying on his ass and trying to punch his attackers with a hand he didn’t have anymore, and he had to laugh at that, which was a mistake because a gator aimed its lower jaw directly into Hooke’s open mouth hole and speared him right through the brain, which was an unusual move for that species, but it was effective as all hell because when the gator closed its mouth, Hooke’s head cracked like a watermelon under the hammer.
VERN HAD EXPECTED to feel some kind of grim satisfaction. You watch your sworn enemy getting torn apart, and it’s meant to feel good, right?
Hell yeah! That’s supposed to be your reaction.
But Vern was surprised to find he didn’t feel anything even close to exhilaration. It was too brutal a death, even for a cosmic-level asshole like Constable Regence Hooke.
Still.
Hooke was definitely dead this time, so there was that.
Vern watched as Hooke was completely submerged in a sea of alligators, then gave a rattle from his throat, followed by two brief whistles.
The gators retreated like they were on bungee cords, leaving Hooke’s mangled corpse in an unnatural heap on the trampled reeds, looking like a butcher just poured him out of a sack. Buttons’s corpse was lying maybe six feet away. Vern knew his buddies would come back for him when the ripples had settled.
Maybe just as well Buttons got plugged, thought Vern. He mighta taken another shot at the king, and this time the crown woulda been his.
But Vern didn’t buy his own rationalization. He’d gotten Buttons killed, was the long and short of it.
He took a shaky breath, and even that hurt. He realized that it was quite possible Hooke would still manage to be the death of him unless Squib got his ass in gear and did his job.
“Bodi,” he said. “You there, man?”
The response was slow coming. “More or less, Vern. Not for long, I’m thinking.”
“How about Elodie?”
“I can hear her snoring. Nose must be broke.”
“She’s still beautiful inside, so don’t you be forgetting that.”
“Screw you, lizard,” said Bodi, probably figuring he was dying anyway.
“Oh-ho,” said Vern. “Green Day grew some balls.”
And he closed his eyes.
SQUIB KNEW WHAT was going on outside his prison boat. He’d heard an alligator swarm in Vern’s shack; he doubted that he would ever forget that noise. If he had to do a comparison, like for a school essay or something, he would say alligators swarming sounded a little like a billion punctured tires all leaking air at the same time—not normal tires, mind, but big tires, like the ones on them monster trucks.
Boss man’s called in the cavalry, he realized. Those gators will tear Hooke to bloody strips.
His mom, too, most likely. And Mister Irwin.
It was the thought of them gators crawling all over his mother that gave Squib strength. Even though he was tuckered out beyond belief, what with all the swamp shenanigans, he threw himself at the cruiser’s gunwale and heaved with every ounce of his newfound supernatural reserves. He managed to move it maybe half an inch.
Think, Everett Moreau, he told himself. Think.
He wiped his hands on his legs, which didn’t dry them any, and ripped open the Velcro seal on his vest’s phone pocket. His phone wouldn’t be any use as a communication device, not out here in the dead zone, but at least he would have some light, presuming recent traumas hadn’t done a number on his electronics. His luck was in, and soon the boat cave was awash in a spooky glow.
Outside, the alligator charge was continuing. Squib could hear the bastards scrambling over the boat to get at someone.
“Momma!” he called, his voice ragged with fear. “I’m coming!” For all the good the mighty Squib’s intervention would do. But he had to try.
He wasn’t shifting the boat, that much was clear, but there had to be a way out. He ran his torch around the gunwale again, but the craft was sealed pretty tight, sunk right down into the mud in some places. He could probably dig himself out if he had an hour to spare and a handy shovel, but neither of those things were presenting themselves. There was a patch of morning light shafting in through the engine port, but there was barely enough room for a baby rat to squeak through.
Unless I can get the engine off, he thought suddenly. The fifty-horsepower outboard was secured by two large butterfly clamps, and Squib attacked the first with gusto. Luckily, Bodi was a man who took care of his equipment and the nut barely put up a fight, spinning off in his fingers. Squib’s luck held some more when the second clamp couldn’t bear the weight of the skewed engine and was dragged off without him having to so much as say Boo to it. Now he had an escape hatch about the size of a cereal box. For once, being the runt of his generation was about to pay off.
“Pay off,” he thought. Well, if getting chewed up and swallowed by swamp gators was the kind of payment a boy was after.
Nevertheless, and to his credit, Squib did not hesitate but dived into that hatch like there was a fantasy land on the other side where the folks were just waiting to dub him a prince. It was a tight fit. The mud insinuated itself into his every crevice, and Squib felt like he would never be clean again, but that didn’t matter much, seeing as how he’d most likely be dead in a couple of seconds anyway.
They can bury me in mud, and no one will know the difference.
His hands scrabbled for the outside world. When he felt the air playing across them, he worried that some sharp-eyed gator would mistake his fingers for worms and chomp them right off his hands, but no such amputations occurred, and soon Squib Moreau was on his feet and blinking in the morning haze.
He was looking for his momma, his boss, and his other boss, and he found them laid out side by side by side. It was quite a peaceful tableau, if Squib ignored the wounds and bruises and blood, which he couldn’t. He dropped to his knees in the squelch of swamp and waved his hands over his momma’s head like an expert in one of those nontouching healing massage methods.
“Momma?” he said. “Are you dead?”
Elodie declined to answer, having been recently paddled by a bear-woman, but at least she continued to breathe, which was something, though her swollen nose made a whistling labor of the process.
“Nose, Momma,” said Squib, pointing at the nose. “Your nose.”
“Boy’s some kind of genius,” said Vern.
“Goddamn prodigy,” agreed Bodi, who reckoned he was so deep in shock that he might as well converse like none of this was happening.
Squib wiped a tear from his nose. “What do I do, boss? Everyone’s dying or plumb dead already. This situation is DEFCON 1 fucked.”
Vern was okay for smart-assholery, but actual decisions were beyond his oil-starved brain. “Uh,” he said. “Erm. Lemme sleep on that.”
And he did, collapsing into catatonia.
“Balls,” said Squib, crawling across to Bodi, who seemed to be chuckling at an invisible joke while blood bubbled on his chest. “Come on, Mister Irwin, I can’t plan stuff. I done proved that over and over.”
“Sorry, boy,” said Bodi, “I can barely manage to stay alive. If you tell me something, I might remember it.”
Squib suddenly felt as though the mud coating him was alive with critters and they were chewing ruminatively on his flesh. There were lives on the line and corpses to be explained. Everyone was dying and he had to fix it somehow—and all without a phone signal.
“Everyone is dying, Mister Irwin,” he said desperately.
And then Bodi found a spark in his brain to say something intelligent. “Ain’t nobody dying, Squib, ’cept maybe me. And by the sound of it, help is on the way.”
Squib thought on this. Nobody was dying. Only Bodi Irwin was in need of urgent help, and the sound of sirens on the water confirmed that the cavalry was surging upriver. After the hoo-ha in New Orleans, there was probably a whole flotilla of lawmakers strapping on their Kevlar right now.
“Okay,” he said. “Okay, I think I got something. It’s crazy, but not as crazy as the truth.”
And he told Bodi his plan.
“Yup,” said Bodi. “That’s just about the biggest heap of . . .”
Then Bodi joined the other two in unconsciousness, and Squib could only hope he had been about to say, That’s just about the biggest heap of genius I ever heard.
Which was a well-known phrase, wasn’t it?
Even if it wasn’t, Squib had no choice, no help, and no better ideas, so it was either get busy trying or get busy waiting for the cops to arrive.
What would Vern do? he asked himself.
That was easy. Vern would cuss a little, scratch his behind, then get busy.
Well, all right then.
“Fuck a duck,” said Squib, scratching the sopping ass of his jeans, then took his momma under the arms and dragged her toward the pirogue.