Chasing the Dragon

by Nicholas Kaufmann

  CHASING

  THE

  DRAGON

  NICHOLAS KAUFMANN

  ChiZine Publications

  Copyright

  Chasing the Dragon © 2009 by Nicholas Kaufmann

  Cover artwork © 2009 by Erik Mohr

  All rights reserved.

  Published by ChiZine Publications

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either a product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  EPub Edition APRIL 2012 ISBN: 978-1-92685-180-8

  All rights reserved under all applicable International Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen.

  No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

  No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in reviews.

  CHIZINE PUBLICATIONS

  Toronto, Canada

  www.chizinepub.com

  info@chizinepub.com

  Edited by Brett Alexander Savory

  Copyedited and proofread by Sandra Kasturi

  We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts, which last year invested $20.1 million in writing and publishing throughout Canada.

  Published with the generous assistance of the Ontario Arts Council.

  For Lee Thomas and Stefan Petrucha, dear friends in absentia.

  Special thanks to the Who Wants Cake team for all their help with this novella: Daniel Braum, M.M. De Voe, Rhodi Hawk, Sarah Langan, Victor LaValle, K.Z. Perry and David Wellington.

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  COVER

  TITLE PAGE

  COPYRIGHT

  DEDICATION

  1. SHE SPEAKS THROUGH THE DEAD

  2. SHE TAKES EVERYTHING YOU LOVE

  3. SHE BREATHES PESTILENCE

  4. SHE HIDES IN PLAIN SIGHT

  5. SHE IS RULED BY HER APPETITE

  6. THE EARTH CRUMBLES WHERE SHE TREADS

  7. SHE WILL DEVOUR THE WORLD

  EPILOGUE

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  1.

  SHE SPEAKS THROUGH THE DEAD

  It would be a massacre. It always was. Georgia Quincey had seen it enough times, had witnessed more butchery and blood at the age of twenty-five than most people saw in a lifetime. Pulling her car into the parking lot of the roadside diner, she already knew what kind of slaughter she would find inside. The visions had shown her.

  She’d been driving west all day, trying to pick up the Dragon’s trail, and somewhere on the dusty plains between Santa Rosa and Albuquerque the visions had come. Terrifying flashes of carnage, so strong she’d had to pull to the side of the road; screaming faces and geysers of blood, the wet rip of shredding flesh, the snapping of bone, and she knew. The Dragon had killed again.

  The diner, or what was left of it, stood like the last defiant outpost of civilization in the middle of a vast, arid flatland peppered with Emory oaks and Apache pines. She opened the car door and stepped out into the stifling air. Waves of heat rose off the blacktop and shimmered like spirits. The diner’s windows were cracked and painted in red, messy arcs where the blood had hit. The screen door hung off its hinges, banging against the wall in the hot New Mexico breeze. A long fissure cut the pavement like a lightning bolt between the building and the base of a tall metal signpost beside the parking lot, which now tilted toward the ground at an almost forty-five degree angle, half the letters of its flickering neon sign shattered: BET Y’S ROADS DE DINER A G EAT PLACE FO BURG S YOU BETCHA! Half a dozen empty cars waited in the parking lot, their engines ticking in the heat, but there were no people. No survivors. There never were. No one who’d been inside when the Dragon came calling had stood a chance.

  Please, she thought, don’t let any of them still be moving. Dead bodies were something she didn’t think she’d ever get used to, especially after the Dragon had feasted on them, but the ones that still walked, those were the ones that really wigged her out. Those were the ones she had to be careful of.

  Georgia stretched, cracked her back, and pulled the pump-action shotgun from the backseat.

  She approached the diner slowly, careful to step around the enormous crack in the pavement. Concrete crumbled at the edges of the fissure, and smaller cracks were already starting to form, branching out into the parking lot. It wouldn’t be long before the whole structure collapsed. The sound of her boots crunching over the gravel put her in mind of High Noon, her father’s favourite movie. Something about the image of the lone protector, the hero no one would — or could — help, had resonated strongly with him, and he’d shown it to her dozens of times. She imagined herself for a moment as Gary Cooper headed alone to the showdown with Ian McDonald. All she was missing were jangling spurs on her heels.

  She forced the thought from her mind. The truth wasn’t glamourous like a movie. The truth was bald and ugly. Forgetting that would get her killed.

  She watched the diner’s windows and listened for sounds of movement, but there was only the low moan of the desert wind blowing across the flatlands. The screen door banging.

  She gripped the shotgun tight and stepped inside. She noticed the coppery smell of spilled blood the moment she stepped over the threshold. The heat released from the eviscerated bodies made the air humid despite the rattling air conditioner over the door. A bank of booths ran along the wall on her right, all the way to the swinging doors of the kitchen. Blood dripped from the windows, ran along the tabletops and trickled off the edges like spilled cola. The floors, the seats were littered with bones and chunks of bloody meat — pieces of the Dragon’s victims. Georgia saw the stump of a stockinged leg, a high-heeled shoe still on the foot, and turned away to keep her gorge from rising. At the counter, six stools were bolted to the floor, each spattered with blood and grue. An array of cracked plates and smashed coffee mugs cluttered the countertop, and at the far end, half a human torso sat like an order of steak waiting to be brought to a table, its one remaining arm still inside the sleeve of a shredded blue Oxford. Beyond it, the dessert rack creaked on rusty gears, the pies and cakes spinning in lazy, indifferent circles.

  The building shuddered around her. Cracks split the black and white linoleum floor. There wasn’t much time.

  She stepped deeper inside and wondered if the Dragon was still there, hiding, waiting for Georgia to let her guard down. It had taken her half an hour to find the diner after the vision hit. The Dragon could already be long gone. But she had to be sure.

  The floor buckled and leaned. A severed arm rolled against her foot. The hand landed on her ankle, the fingers brushing her skin. She bit back a yelp and kicked it away.

  The heavy clang of a pan falling in the kitchen made Georgia jump. She lifted the shotgun to her shoulder and turned to the swinging doors.

  The doors banged open and a hulking form stumbled out — fat, moustached, wearing a grease-stained apron. A fry cook, or it had been once. Both the apron and the shirt beneath had been torn open, revealing deep gashes in its chest and stomach. Blood oozed over grey skin, thick black veins. It came toward her with jerking, awkward steps, its dead muscles lacking the coordination to walk properly.

  It fixed her with milky whi
te eyes, opened its cracked black lips and said, “I was wondering when you would come.”

  Its voice was deep, dusty and undeniably female. The Dragon’s voice.

  Georgia grit her teeth and tried to keep the heebie-jeebies under control. The talking corpses made her skin crawl every time. She had to remind herself the thing in front of her wasn’t human, wasn’t even alive in any sense of the word. The Dragon was controlling its movements, speaking through its mouth.

  The dead made a perfect and lethal army, unwavering, unquestioning, unstoppable so long as the brain remained intact to operate the motor functions. Georgia’s father had called them ghouls, but she had her own name for them. Something she thought was more fitting.

  Meat puppets.

  Instead of attacking her, the meat puppet tilted its head in puzzled amusement, and the Dragon said through it, “You should be dead, child. You should have died when I tore you open. Yet here we are. Together again.”

  Georgia pumped a shell into the shotgun’s firing chamber. “You must he disappointed.”

  The corpse laughed, a horrible sound. “Disappointed? No, child, I am intrigued. For centuries I have triumphed over the warriors who stood against me. Tore them open like ragdolls. Devoured them while the life drained from their eyes. But you, child. You are different. When I opened you, your blood stung me. It burned. When I opened you, you lived. I find this remarkable. It has been such a long time since I have had a challenge.”

  Georgia smirked. If there was one thing she knew about the Dragon, it was that she loved the sound of her own voice. “If you’re so confident, why don’t you face me yourself? Why hide and make this thing do your dirty work?”

  The meat puppet stepped toward her. She sighted down the barrel at its head, but her hands shook. Come on, girl, get it together, she thought. You’ve done this plenty of times.

  “We are not dissimilar, you and I,” it said. “It seems neither of us dies easily. Devouring you will be all the sweeter for it.”

  “Where are you?” Georgia demanded. “You want to kill me so badly? Tell me where to go. Tell me where to find you.”

  “I am everywhere, child. I am all around you.” Grey, rigid arms wrapped suddenly around her from behind, one snaking across her stomach, the other hooking around her neck. Another meat puppet had sneaked up on her while she’d been distracted. Georgia cursed her own incompetence. The arms pulled her back, and she tripped, banging her head against the floor. The shotgun accidentally discharged, shattering one of the windows, and the recoil knocked the weapon out of her grasp.

  The meat puppet fell on top of her, a middle-aged woman with thick red viscera poking wetly out of a torn flowered dress. It scrambled for a hold, pinning her legs and one of her arms. With her free arm, Georgia reached for the shotgun, her fingers barely grazing the recoil pad at the end of the stock. The meat puppet reached for her neck. Georgia struggled for the shotgun again. This time she was able to grab hold of the stock and pull it toward her. As the meat puppet’s hand wrapped around her throat, Georgia swung the shotgun up and shoved the barrel under its chin. She squeezed the trigger.

  Nothing happened.

  Dammit! She hadn’t ejected the first shell. The next one wasn’t even in the firing chamber yet. With one arm pinned, she couldn’t work the pump. Panicking, struggling for air as dead hands tightened on her throat, her gaze fell on the table in the booth next to her, its metal legs bolted into the floor. Georgia jammed the fore-end of the shotgun pump against one leg and pushed with all her might. Everything grew dim. In another minute, she would lose consciousness. In two, she’d be dead. She gave one last push, and the fore-end finally slid back against the counterpressure of the table leg. The spent shell tumbled out of the ejection port, and a second clicked into place in the firing chamber.

  Another tremor rocked the building. Plaster dust rained down from a crack that appeared in the ceiling. The meat puppet fell off of her. Gasping to pull air into her lungs, Georgia rolled away, came up on her knees, and levelled the shotgun at its head.

  It didn’t bother getting up off the floor. It turned its filmy eyes to her and snarled, “Like a ragdoll.”

  Georgia pulled the trigger. With a loud bang that rang in her ears, the shotgun jerked against her shoulder and the corpse’s head turned into a wet red stain on the floor.

  She spun around. The other meat puppet, the fry cook, stood by the counter. It pulled a steak knife out from beneath the broken plates and turned to her. Georgia pumped the shotgun, sending the hot shell clattering to the floor.

  The meat puppet paused. It was outmatched, too far away for the knife to be of any use. “You want to know where I am?” it said. “I am closer than you think.”

  “Whatever,” Georgia said, lifting the shotgun. “I’ll find you. I always do.” A crooked smile creased the dead man’s face. “Or perhaps, child,” the Dragon said, “I will find you.” Georgia pulled the trigger. The meat puppet’s head exploded in a shower of blood and bone that spattered against the glass of the rotating dessert rack.

  The building trembled again and the floor started to sink. She needed to get out of there before the whole place came down on top of her. She quickly scooped up the shotgun shells from the floor and put them in her pocket, just as her father had taught her. Then, stepping over body parts and pools of blood, she walked to where the cash register sat on the counter by the door. She scanned the buttons until she found the No Sale. She hit it, the register dinged and the drawer slid open. She scooped up the bills inside and did a quick count: two hundred and forty dollars. She fished her wallet out of her pocket, opened it.

  A small photo in one of the plastic sleeves greeted her. A man with short dark hair and a strawberry-blonde woman, arms around each other’s shoulders and smiling in front of a house. A brown spot intersected the edge of the man’s forehead where a drop of blood had dried long ago. George and Tanya Quincey, her parents. She stuffed the wad of bills into her wallet, pocketed it, and slid the register drawer closed again.

  It shamed her, stealing from the dead like that, but she didn’t have a choice. She had no home anymore, no job, but she still needed money for food, for gas and shells and a bed for the night. She hoped the dead understood.

  When she left the diner, the sun was a hazy orange ball hovering at the horizon and the desert heat was starting to dissipate. She stopped in the middle of the parking lot and closed her eyes, letting the cool air wash over her. She almost couldn’t feel the weight of the shotgun in her hand anymore. There was only silence and a sweet breeze off the flatlands. A moment of calm, of stillness, to let her tense nerves and muscles unwind, that was all she wanted. Blanket peace, she called it. A feeling she remembered from when she was a little girl wrapped in her favourite blanket, the worn, powder blue one with Snoopy peeling off his stitchwork. The same feeling she’d had when her father would pick her up and carry her, her nose nuzzled against his neck with the scent of tobacco and aftershave wrapping around her.

  A loud groaning sound broke through the calm. She opened her eyes.

  Behind her, wood snapped, metal girders creaked, and the diner’s roof sagged inward. The building shifted, part of it sinking halfway into the earth as more deep cracks broke the asphalt of the parking lot. The leaning signpost finally completed its fall, dropping into the trees beyond the lot with a loud crash. Sighing, she walked to her car.

  The driver’s side door hung open. Georgia was sure she’d closed it. She gripped the shotgun with both hands, looked around for movement, but there was nothing. Inside the car, someone had rummaged through her belongings. Another meat puppet, no doubt, or maybe the same one that had sneaked up behind her in the diner. But why would the Dragon bother with her car? What was she looking for? In the backseat, Georgia’s suitcase was open and her clothes were scattered. Her purse had fallen out of the car, its spilled contents fanned out on the pavement. Georgia’s heart sped with a sudden panic. She scanned the ground, searching desperately. She knelt a
nd scooped up objects as quickly as she could. A makeup compact, a tampon, a half-empty pack of gum, she shovelled everything back into her purse, but the one thing she needed wasn’t there.

  “Shit, shit, shit!” She couldn’t lose it. She couldn’t.

  And then she spotted it, hidden where it fell behind the front wheel — a brown leather pack, rolled up tight and bound with a leather strap. She snatched it up and sighed with relief.

  Georgia climbed into the driver’s seat and closed the door, shutting out the world, if only for a moment. She hugged the leather pack to her chest and leaned her head against the steering wheel. It took a moment to fight off the sobs building in her chest, and then she started the car.

  2.

  SHE TAKES EVERYTHING YOU LOVE

  Georgia kept her car on the same road that led from the diner, heading west. All around her, there was nothing but flatland as far as the eye could see. Brown earth stubbled with dry desert shrubs. In the distance, the southern tip of the Rockies jutted up against the seemingly endless sky. The setting sun nestled red and hazy behind the peaks, and as it sank away the sky dimmed to a dark purple. It was only when daylight faded to dusk and she switched on the headlights that she realized hers was the only car on the road. An unexpected loneliness rose inside her. She felt like the last woman on Earth, and suddenly she wanted — no, she needed — to see people. Needed to touch another living human being to wipe the memory of dead meat puppet skin from her fingers.

  Fifteen miles from the diner, she finally saw signs of civilization, and her vice-like grip on the steering wheel eased. She hadn’t realized she’d been squeezing so hard, and now, feeling foolish, she shook the tension out of her hands and slowed the car. The road took her past what appeared to be an abandoned industrial area comprised of boarded-up warehouses and empty lofts. The streets and sidewalks were empty, but she knew whatever dusty little New Mexico town claimed the warehouses as its own couldn’t be much farther.