I take another swig of wine, toss the now empty bottle over my shoulder, and creep to the top of the stairs. I’m expecting a war, but I find that the fortress appears empty.
Where is everyone else? I think, as I survey the lifeless den before me. This room alone is large enough to house fifty, and yet the straw beds lining the walls are all empty.
“Who else is here?” I demand. It’s probably not the smartest thing I’ve done, but I’m greeted with nothing but silence. Where the hell is everyone?
I branch out into a hallway, which is also bare, and then round a corner. The next room yields nothing. Nor does an armory on the other side of that, or the pantry past that. I’m just waiting for someone to jump out at me, but nothing happens. I’m clenching my axe so hard I feel like I might break the handle.
Finally, as I round the next corner, I hear the soft shuffle of footsteps, and I see the edge of a cape at the end of the hall. I burst out into a sprint, and so does whomever I’m chasing, because those soft footfalls pick up into loud, frantic stomps. The corner leads to a set of spiral stairs, and as I begin to catch up I see black boots pounding the steps just ahead of me. The armor this one wears is special. It’s almost entirely made of bone plating, even his helmet, which is adorned in feathers and a set of elk antlers.
He’s their leader.
He glances back over his shoulder, and through the thinnest slit in his helmet I can make out a look of apprehension. It fuels me, and I can feel myself gaining on him, right as he steps up onto the fortress’s stone rooftop. There is hay up here, and bones, and bloodstains, and it doesn’t make sense until he glances back a second time and I see that the apprehension is gone.
From just ahead of him an enormous rust-colored eye flops open, and a skinny, cat-like pupil focuses in on me. It’s pitch black out here, with only the smattering of stars and a paper-thin crescent moon radiating the faintest of light, but even in the darkness I can see the piercing blue of the scales that ruffle loudly, and the long, giraffe like neck that propels the enormous eye skyward.
It’s a dragon, armored from head to foot in sapphire colored scales, and it’s the size of a small houseboat, which is fitting, because as it stands on its hind legs it spreads a pair of leathery wings that look like an enormous, fleshy white pair of sails. Tendrils of smoke plume from its nostrils, and it huffs loudly. It knows I’m an intruder. And so, as the Rohkai commander climbs atop its back, it’s already set in motion toward me.
With a bit of fast but clumsy footing I throw myself forward as a set of talons the size of hunting knives carve the air above my head. I’ve never fought a dragon this big before, and the only thing I can think to do is run. In the darkness I’m slipping on still-moist blood and stomping over bones that were once used as toothpicks, but that’s irrelevant to the claws that are so close to carving my spine that I can now feel the breeze on my back where my leather armor was sheared.
“You can’t hope to run from me,” the Rohkai commander says, with much satisfaction in his voice.
Up ahead is a set of wooden chairs and a table, against the northern wall where archers assemble. But my goal is not to seek refuge. My goal is to seek height. And so with my axe clenched tightly in both hands I lift off my feet, first climbing the chair, then stomping up onto the table, and then launching myself at the wall with my foot extended. When it reaches the wall and makes contact, I kick as hard as I can off of it, turn my body, and bring my axe up over my head.
It’s the first time I’ve seen the dragon face to face, and right now it’s swinging both of its arms toward me, only it wasn’t expecting my jump, so the talons go directly underneath me and send the table and the chairs tumbling over the side of the building. Like a horse, the dragon has its eyes on each side of its slender head, so it turns its face to inspect me right as I’m soaring toward it. An enormous eye that was once the color of rust explodes like a crushed tomato as the axe makes contact.
The dragon’s shriek is so loud that it nearly ruptures my eardrums. Meanwhile its flailing has sent its rider crashing to the ground in a pile of discarded bones, and it’s swiping wildly in a blind rage. My ears are ringing, my ankles are throbbing from the fall, and my right arm is burning fiercely, but it’s not something I notice until after my axe has parted the dragon’s scales and knocked one of its ribs askew. Like Paul Bunyan felling a redwood, I take one more solid whack at its ribcage before the axe pierces its heart and sends its dying form crashing to the floor.
The commander, having spilled over with enough force to crack his helmet, is pulling himself away from me on his back. I draw closer with my bloodied axe ready to strike.
“With your death ends the reign of the Rohkai,” I say, raising my axe for the final blow. A thick trail of blood falls down my forearm and into the crevice of my elbow.
“The end?” asks the commander, uttering a laugh. “It’s only begun. I’m nothing. I’m but a peon. The great leaders are only beginning to emerge.”
My axe falls so hard it cleaves a dent into the floor, and the commander’s head—along with the cracked bone helmet atop it—rolls off the side of the fortress wall. Only now do I notice that my forearm is split open in a nasty gash, and only now do I notice that it stings so badly I’ve locked my jaw.
I start to reach for my bag of healing herbs when below me, the rooftop begins to tremor. I’m expecting the dragon to lift up and bathe me in flames, but instead I hear the fortress’s doors burst off the hinges. A dragon takes flight off into the night, with a Rohkai saddled firmly on its back, and then another. Then another. A wave of dragons are spewing from the fortress’s mouth, each with its own rider, each bigger and nastier and more dangerous than the last.
The final dragon that flies out, a charcoal gray beast coated in spikes, does not hold a Rohkai. It holds a woman. She’s bound by her hands, she has curly brown hair that falls away from her face, and she has tears in her eyes as they meet mine.
It’s Mary.
I’m screaming for her, and I’m trying to run after her but my legs feel like rubber. One of them is throbbing, like I’m being kicked. I feel thumps against my shin. Each gets progressively harder. Suddenly I snap awake on the garage apartment floor, wild eyed and clutching my axe. A boot is nudging my leg.
Officer Brody wrinkles his brow and offers a hand. “Jesus, nod off on the job, huh?”
I say nothing as I take his hand and climb to my feet. My ankles are still sore—from the fall—but Brody’s strong, and I lift up easily. Only then do I ask myself why my ankles are hurting.
“You’ve been drinking, haven’t you?” Brody smiles as he says it. “You reek of wine.”
How could he possibly smell that if this is just my imagination? However, it’s not something I have time to ponder, and I answer quickly.
“I had a tall glass with dinner. I’m housesitting. I don’t need to drive anywhere, and Mr. Howard says it’s fine.” Finally, my wits gather about me. “What are you doing in here?”
“I was just in the neighborhood,” he says—which we both know is a lie—“and I heard a loud bang up here.” Another lie. “Thought I’d just make sure no one was breaking in.”
“Just dropped my axe,” I reply, feeling its full weight in my hand. The only difference between an axe murderer and a gardener is employment, I think. To anyone else this might look like a threat, but as a guy who chops firewood on a weekly basis, clutching an axe doesn’t faze Officer Brody.
“Are you okay?” he asks, and I can feel his eyes scanning me from behind those windshield-sized glasses of his. “Looks like you cut yourself pretty bad.”
Only now do I realize my right arm is still burning, and the cut, which has stopped bleeding, has left a thick crust of clotted blood across my forearm.
“Occupational hazard,” I say, which is not a lie. “I just wasn’t as careful today.”
Brody smirks. “The cut. The wine. Laying down on the floor like a damn dog. I know exactly what this means.”
> I dread the answer, but I ask calmly, “What does it mean?”
“It means you’re worked to the bone. You need to get plastered, buddy.”
*
I don’t know how he’s done it, but I’m with Officer Brody at the pub across town, the only patrons in a dark shithole where the barmaid—I mean bartender—is an older woman who’s afraid to cut off the police officer that keeps ordering drinks like he owns the place.
In the past three hours, all I’ve been able to think about is Mary, and the Rohkai, and the gash that can’t possibly be from a dragon because that creature existed only in my imagination. Still, I’ve learned a few things about Officer Brody. First, I’ve learned that he’s a very lonely man, and very paranoid as well. He’s convinced the Howard family might be a part of the occult, and he’s trying as hard as he can to squeeze me for information and ‘rid the town of this evil.’ He also apparently thinks we’re friends, because he’s confiding in me. Something about how he threw around a football fifteen years ago in high school, so we have to stick together. I don’t mention that I’ve never even held a football, that I spent my teenage years with playing cards that casted spells and summoned monsters. It’s irrelevant, though, and it’s not the kind of thing a man absorbs when he’s five beers in and thinks he’s found his new best friend.
And because of that, the drunken wisdom keeps coming.
“Look, Robb,” he says, placing a hand on my shoulder. “You really need to get laid.”
As I sit hostage in a bar with a drunken police officer, a frightened bartender, and a blood-crusted dragon wound, I feel like a lack of sex is the least of my problems. But more than that, guys like Brody don’t understand everlasting love. They can barely comprehend wanting one woman until the end of the week, much less having one until the end of time. I know this because he’s made me explain it to him. Again.
“She’s the only one I ever wanted,” I say, elbows pinned to the counter, staring into my lukewarm beer. “I pledged my love to her and her alone, and even in death my love is only for her. If people choose to remarry when their spouse dies, fine. I don’t care. But that’s not for me. My wife was not a dog—one dies, you just buy another. I will wait for her, and I will be with her again.”
“Wow,” Brody says, voice low and for the first time tonight quiet. Perhaps I’ve finally gotten him to understand me. “You… are such a vagina.”
I guess not.
“I’m telling you, man,” Brody slurs, as he stands up from the barstool with enough drunken force to almost knock it—and himself—over. “Sometimes you just gotta move on. That’s what life is all about, man. Moving on. Otherwise, all you do is stay in the same place.”
I smirk, think of saying something in protest, and then simply say, “Maybe you’re right.” He’s not, but I just want to get back to the Howards’ house.
“Come on, let’s jet,” Brody says, as he starts walking to the door. He hasn’t paid the bartender, something he made clear earlier in the night, because he feels like the town owes him for his civic duty.
I slip her one of Will Howard’s twenties just before I catch up to Brody staggering to his car.
“Now, I’m too drunk to drive all the way home,” he says five minutes later, as he veers his car down the next street and narrowly avoids hopping the curb, “cuz I live on the west side of town, so I’m just gonna crash with you tonight, if that’s okay?”
As with everything else that’s happened tonight, what is presented as a choice is really not, and soon Officer Brody is snoring on the Howards’ couch. I’m laying restlessly in the recliner beside him, thinking of the dragons, thinking of Fairhaven, thinking of Mary and how much I wish I could see her again if it wasn’t for the drunken oaf splayed out next to me.
A bang resonates from the other room, from one of the mysterious doors of this magical house, but Brody is too blacked out to notice. If he had, he might be bursting into the Howards’ own personal adventure right now and breaking up their ‘occult,’ rather than drooling onto their good throw pillows.
Four hours later, he quietly collects himself and shows himself out, but not before recommending the same e-dating site he slurred on and on about last night. Not before reminding me I’m a ‘good guy’ and I just need to move on.
After Brody leaves, I, though exhausted, wander out to the garage apartment to resume my adventure. To see the look on Voss’s face when I march into Fairhaven, having leveled his fortress to the ground. To set out to whatever Rohkai encampment awaits me next, and to slay the next dragon, no matter how big it may be. To take back my Mary and resume our own adventures without aggressive chemotherapy and rest breaks and beeping machines. But when I lay down on the carpet clutching my axe, all that finds me is a rocky, disjointed sleep.
*
By the time I’ve awoke, the family has already returned from ‘the bus station’ as Will Howard insists. Here I stand, suspicious of where he’s just come, while he eyeballs me, having just walked out of the garage apartment rubbing sleep from my eyes. We both lie to each other, accept one another’s word as truth, and go about our day. I gather some firewood to chop, even though the existing pile is plenty high, because it’s either that or go home to my empty apartment.
The kids are playing in the yard. Talking about wizards and swords and the troll they killed with magic. I have a feeling they aren’t just talking about a very imaginative playtime, but what do I know? I’m standing here chopping wood with a dragon wound on my arm. I find myself wondering if I’m allergic to such creatures. If this stupid wound, having only been treated with a wet washcloth and a gauze bandage from the medicine cabinet, will be the death of me. If my quest ends because the Rohkai are somehow getting too strong for me. Or if my quest is in vain, for this very same reason.
This is frustrating me, something I notice as I heave my axe and chop a log with enough force to send a stray chunk flying toward the children. It plops into the grass beside them, some fifteen feet away, and all shouting stops as they turn their eyes up toward me.
“Sorry,” I say, as I collect the wood chunk and toss is back into the pile I’ve collected.
“Hi, Robb,” Ruth chirps, not one to back away from a conversation—even one that hasn’t been started yet. “You know, my mommy says she’s kinda scared of you.”
“Shut up!” Tom shouts, and tries to pull her away by the arm. She refuses to move.
“And why,” I ask, as I plunge my axe into the next log and split it in half with a thunderous crack, “would she be scared of me?”
Ruth doesn’t want to answer. Instead, she giggles and eyes the blade of my axe.
“Because you always have that axe with you,” Sam breathes. “We never see you without it. It’s like… I don’t know, your teddy bear or something.”
I laugh, and the children, who did not so much as flinch when I split a log in half, jump at having heard me laugh for the first time. I guess it unsettles them. “You think I come home and cuddle with this at night, huh?” I pull it into my arms and rock it like a baby. “Yes, good boy, sleep tight…”
The children giggle, and from the back porch, I see Claire’s face pop into view. She’s wearing an expression of confusion.
“Hey, your name is Robb,” Ruth blurts out. “So are you going to rob us?”
“Ruth!” one brother shouts.
“Shut up!” calls the other brother.
“Well, that’s what mom said.”
“It was a joke,” Tom says, through gritted teeth. “That mom told us in secret, you dummy.”
I smile. “Actually, it’s Robb, with two b’s. Not like the verb.”
“Is it short for something?” Tom asks.
“Yeah,” Ruth giggles. “Robbert? Robbin? Robberta?”
I smirk. “Just Robb.”
Ruth glances down at my arm. “How did you hurt yourself?”
“Probably cutting trees, dummy,” Tom snaps.
“Or cutting hedges,” Sam adds. “Tho
se big shears are sharp.”
I don’t know why I say it, or why I’m even talking to them for longer than half a second, but I smile at the three and narrow my eyes. “Or maybe I was slaying dragons.”
Ruth’s mouth is agape, clearly in awe. I guess in her adventures, she hasn’t yet encountered a dragon. Her brothers, meanwhile, roll their eyes.
“God, Ruth,” Tom says with a sigh. “You are so gullible. He’s just pulling your leg.”
“Is it true?” Ruth asks, as she traces along my forearm with her finger. “A dragon did that to you?”
I grin. “You should see the dragon.”
*
The night has come and gone, with me sulking over a can of beans in my apartment, tossing endlessly in my sleep, and then slamming another pot of coffee before slugging off down Line Avenue for my morning walk to work. Brody’s perched on the side of the road in his police cruiser, stationed outside of the school, and he waves. I don’t wave back. This doesn’t seem to matter to him, though, because he’s still grinning at me.
I talk to Will Howard, I say I’m ‘fine’ when he asks how I am, and then I march into the backyard to rake up the pecans. An hour drips by, and then I see Will Howard’s car pull out of the driveway to take him to work. I run back to the garage apartment and fumble open the door with shaky hands.
Moments later, I’m thrust into Fairhaven, only it doesn’t feel like Fairhaven because the people are gone. The cottages are in ruins, and the market stands, which are now ash, smolder with lazy plumes of smoke that are still fresh.
I’m still anticipating the look on Voss’s face as I step into the Jarl’s longhouse, and I find that it looks a lot like my own expression. I am bewildered. Enric is gone. The Jarl is gone. The soldiers are all wearing armor made of bone, and Voss is sitting at the head of the table, wearing the Jarl’s ruby red cloak.
The Graveyard Shift Page 6
