The Hero of Varay

by Rick Shelley

  “Lesh, you think you can mind the store here for a day or so? Joy and I are going to Louisville. That ought to throw the dragon off.”

  “I’ll handle things here, Lord,” Lesh said.

  “We’ll take Harkane and Timon, I think. You want to come?” I asked them. Both nodded. Visits to the other world were still a treat for them.

  “Lesh, there anything you want us to bring back for you?”

  “I could use some of that beer in the big cans,” he said. “You know the kind I mean?”

  “The Australian stuff, Foster Lager, right?”

  “Aye, that’s it.”

  “Okay, Foster Lager it is,” I said.

  On one of our earlier visits to my world, Lesh and I had visited a fancy bar in Chicago that claimed to stock every brand of beer made in the United States or imported. The foreign beer list was alphabetized by country. Lesh and I started working our way straight down the menu. We were fresh out of Varay that evening, so we needed longer than usual to get stinking drunk—but we also needed another two nights of hard drinking to get all the way through the list. By the middle of our second session, the waitress hardly needed to ask for our order. She had a copy of the beer list. And on the third night, as we closed in on the end, we didn’t even have to pay. We had an audience, with different folks picking up the tab for each round. It was a fun time, even worth the hangovers and all the people who said, “I hope you’re not planning to drive.” I assured them all that we had come by cab and would leave by cab, and I smiled and nodded, all of that. A couple of jolly drunks. We bought a round for the house now and then, and everybody was happy. Nobody much noticed when Lesh and I slipped into Varayan to comment on one thing or another. Who pays attention to jolly drunks? Oh, the folks who knew that we had worked our way through more than a hundred brands of imported beer in three nights all wanted to know which we liked best, but you can’t make discriminating judgments when you’ve sampled most of the brands after you were already plotched. What Lesh liked so much about the Foster’s was that it came in quart cans.

  “A six-pack of that would really get you through supper” was the way he put it at the time.

  Harkane and Timon ran off to change clothes. Well, Harkane didn’t run. He would have considered that too undignified now that he was no longer a “kid.” But he hurried, just the same.

  “It’ll just be for tonight and tomorrow,” I told Joy. “The next morning, we’re back on the road again, going for the mate to this ruby.”

  “Isn’t one of those enough for whatever you have to do?” Joy asked.

  “I guess not. Nobody knows yet what we have to do. All the elf has said is that we have to bring both of them together.”

  “You going to change first?”

  “Yes, and I’m even going to take a quick bath to get some of the trail off me so I don’t clog the drain at Mother’s house. Why don’t you open a passage to Basil long enough for Harkane to pop through to tell Baron Kardeen where we’re going, and why. That way, someone can get in touch with us if necessary.”

  We set up Harkane and Timon in the guest room. That had double beds, its own bathroom, and a thirteen-inch television. TV fascinated both of them. If we hadn’t just returned from a long quest, they would likely have stayed up all night watching the tube. Almost everything on TV was still new to them, even Gilligan’s Island and I Love Lucy.

  Joy and I had my old room. It was still “my” room even though I hadn’t lived there since my first trip to Varay—actually, since I went away to college. I was only home for brief visits then, during school breaks and between semesters. I even took courses every summer.

  After Joy and I shared a long shower and started to catch up on the long weeks of missed sex, I had an idea.

  “You know, we could ease your mother’s mind about one thing.”

  “What’s that?” Joy asked drowsily.

  “We could drive down to Nashville in the morning and get married again. No blood test or waiting in Tennessee.”

  “Can we get there and back in one day?”

  “No problem. We’ll take Mother’s van. We can get copies of the license and certificate and mail them to your folks.”

  “You sure you don’t mind?”

  “Not at all, love. Besides, it gives us something to do. And it will be nice to look at some mountains I don’t have to climb.”

  “That’ll be nice,” Joy said. We made love again and then she went to sleep.

  But I couldn’t sleep. We had been back in the “real” world for three hours and I hadn’t checked the news yet.

  It was close to three in the morning, but Mother still kept the cable service paid up, so I got CNN and sat there to see what was going on in the world. There didn’t seem to be any major current crises, nothing to preempt everything else for. There was still a lot on about the Coral Lady disaster and some reprisal raids that had been made. Apparently, those had been in August. The references assumed that any viewers had been in touch with the story all along, so some of it was too oblique for me to be sure exactly what had been done. There had been a series of raids, not just the one attack that had been on the news before I headed into the Titans.

  There was no mention of the dragon that had been spotted over Chattanooga the last time I was in this world, no mention of a missing jet that might have strayed into the buffer zone. Maybe those dislocations had corrected themselves. I hoped so. Things were complicated enough.

  It was five o’clock before I went back up to bed. Joy didn’t wake. I set the alarm and crawled into bed. I still had time for a couple of hours of sleep. We planned to get up at seven to get ready for our trip south.

  The drive from Louisville to Nashville wasn’t bad, especially not since the speed limit on the interstate had been raised. We got on 1-65 out by the airport, headed south past Fort Knox and Mammoth Cave, and crossed the state line into Tennessee just after eleven. We stopped for lunch at McDonald’s just before we reached Nashville, ordered enough for twelve hungry people, and sat in the van to eat. When we went back inside to order seconds we drew stares from the kids working the counter.

  I needed a half hour to find the courthouse, and we stood in line for another thirty minutes to get the license. There was a preacher hanging around to marry couples who couldn’t wait or who didn’t have other plans, and the ceremony itself took less than five minutes. We had photocopies made of everything, then got a stamped envelope at the post office and sent the copies to Joy’s parents. Next we hit a big mall on the edge of town, found a jeweler who had rings in Joy’s size, and bought a set. We put more dents in my credit cards before we left the mall: clothes, books, playing cards, kerosene lanterns, and junk food. I planned to wait until we got back into Kentucky to buy the beer and some hard liquor.

  After another big meal, this one a little more balanced, we started back north, just after four o’clock. I didn’t push the van hard. We had plenty of time and I felt pleasantly full and contented. There was country music from a Nashville station and the day was beautiful, with some of the leaves just starting to turn to their autumn colors.

  Then a Willie Nelson song was interrupted for a news bulletin.

  “We have a report from Crossville on the Cumberland Plateau that Tessie has been spotted again, flying toward Nashville. An unidentified source at the FAA regional Air Traffic Control center confirms that the unidentified radar signatures match the August sightings there and in Chattanooga, and there have also been visual sightings this afternoon. We’ll keep you right up to the minute with this as always.”

  The special report ended and the disk jockey came back on with, “Well, folks, we got us another dragon doo-doo alert goin’ here. Ain’t nobody got a pooper scooper big enough for Tessie. An’ we’re still lookin’ for the first pile close enough for our crews to get to it. The reports we’ve had say Tessie can drop fifteen hundred pounds at a time.” He stopped and laughed. “I shore ain’t seen Tessie yet, an’ I’m not sure I want to. She
must not like country music.”

  “Tessie?” Joy asked.

  “It figures,” I said. “They call the Loch Ness monster Nessie, so Tennessee’s dragon becomes Tessie.” It was too transparent to be anything else.

  “But they’re treating it like a joke,” Joy complained.

  “What do you think they’re going to do? They have to either laugh at it or think they’re in the middle of a Japanese monster movie. It could be worse. After the Coral Lady, they could be shooting at clouds.” I looked in all three rearview mirrors, then craned my head out the window. “I guess we should be on the alert, though.”

  “You think this dragon will come after you like the others?” Harkane asked.

  “I’d almost bet on it,” I replied. Time for a sigh.

  “I’ll get your weapons ready, lord,” Harkane said. They were probably all at the bottom of the pile in the back of the van, beneath everything we’d bought in Nashville.

  “Tessie comes anywhere near Fort Knox, the Army is likely to blow him away,” I said. “I think that’s still restricted airspace, what with the gold depository and all.”

  “Can we drive through the base?” Joy asked. “Wouldn’t it be simpler if they took care of the dragon and you didn’t have to?”

  I couldn’t deny it. “If we get that far. But we’ll have to hide the weapons again and hope they don’t stop us for a random check. The Army gets touchy about armed visitors.”

  I hadn’t been to Fort Knox in years. We used to drive out to look at the bullion depository every year or two, go through the George S. Patton Museum, and look at soldiers. Mostly, somebody in the family got the idea to go out there every time Goldfinger was on television. I knew that we had to get off the interstate quite a bit south to go through the base and depository area, but I had never gone in from that side, so Joy had to check the map to find out that we needed to turn off on US 31W at Elizabethtown.

  Tessie didn’t cooperate, though. We were just south of the exit for Abraham Lincoln’s birthplace when Timon spotted the dragon coming up from the southeast, a little off to the right and behind us. We weren’t going to outrun Tessie. I was already doing sixty and it was overtaking us easily.

  “I have your sword and gun, lord,” Harkane yelled right in my ear.

  “Rest area coming up,” Joy said. She was watching the signs.

  “It’s either the rest area or we fight out here on the road,” I said. I floored the gas pedal and the van shuddered a little at the sudden acceleration. “Make sure that there’s a shell in the chamber and that the safety is off,” I told Harkane. I had taught him the basics of handling firearms, enough to get the weapon ready for me. I hadn’t known that the rifle was in the car until Harkane mentioned it. That must have been his idea.

  “There’s the exit,” Joy said.

  I kept my foot on the gas until the last possible instant, then braked hard and pulled onto the ramp. There weren’t many vehicles in the rest area—a couple of tractor-trailer rigs, one camper, and two cars. We went past all of them to the far end of the lot. I turned the wheel hard and stood on the brake, and we skidded to a stop.

  I swung my door open and Harkane handed me the rifle, another .458 magnum like the one I had at Cayenne. The van was between me and the other vehicles. At the moment, there were no other people out in the open. I hoped that any witnesses would be too busy watching, or running from, the dragon to notice when I started shooting. I figured that the odds were pretty good.

  “There’s a box of shells in the glove compartment,” Harkane said. Joy got the box out and open. I didn’t know if I would have time to empty the magazine, let alone reload, but …

  But there was no more time to plan. The dragon was on a steep glide, its wings tucked back, aiming straight for me. There wasn’t going to be any hovering and circling for this joker. Of course, this dragon had been out of the buffer zone since before the rest of the nonsense started.

  I wrapped the leather sling around my left arm and steadied the barrel on the roof of the van. The only thing missing was a telescopic sight, and that was hardly essential. I lined up on the dragon’s left eye and worked to keep the pupil lined up in the notch of the sights while I waited.

  I waited until the dragon was within a hundred yards before I started shooting—after I heard the first scream in the parking lot. I squeezed off all five shots, as fast as I could aim and shoot accurately.

  I hit the dragon, every time. It jerked to the side, flipped over, then righted itself and came down hard, but not hard enough. It was still alive. It got up on all four legs and started toward me again. I moved out from behind the van, and Timon passed me Dragon’s Death while Harkane reloaded the rifle. Harkane had never fired a weapon that powerful, and I hoped he wouldn’t pick this time to start. He’d be as like to hit me as the dragon, even though the reptile was twice the size of the riverboat Belle of Louisville.

  I moved out toward the dragon, but slowly, content to let it do most of the traveling. There were sirens blowing in the distance, coming our way, so someone had called the cops. A lot of good a state trooper was going to do, even if he had a shotgun or one of those briefcase submachine guns. Anyway, the sirens sounded too far off to reach the rest area in time to do anything but pick up the pieces.

  The dragon stumbled and went down on its front knees—or whatever the proper terminology is for a dragon. It got up, and fell again. Its head slammed against the pavement, hard enough to crack it—the pavement, not the head. Lower teeth pierced its upper lip. Black blood oozed out.

  “Give me the rifle,” I called. Harkane was there in a second. I returned the sword and took the rifle. I went to within six feet of Tessie’s snout and put five more rounds through the eye. Before long, I was going to be the Dirty Harry of the dragon-slaying business.

  “Okay, let’s get out of here before the cops arrive,” I said, hurrying back to the van.

  We got inside and I started the engine. “Bury the rifle and sword back there,” I said as I put the transmission in drive and goosed the gas pedal.

  “You’re just going to leave that thing lying there?” Joy asked.

  “Damn right. This isn’t the time to get messed up in red tape.”

  “But what are they going to think?”

  “Maybe they’ll think that dragons are for real,” I said. I didn’t really care. “Check the map. Find us a back road into Louisville.”

  17

  The Mist

  By the time we got back to my mother’s house, the story was already breaking. The telephones and CB radios must have been busy. Most of the Louisville television and radio stations had crews on the way, and two TV stations with news helicopters were already on the scene. There were live shots of the dead dragon on TV when I switched the set in the living room on. There was no chance that anyone would be able to suppress this story—assuming that any military or governmental types might have tried out of conditioned reflex. The carcass appeared on the evening news of all three networks as well. I had the distinct feeling that Tessie would be much more than a nine-day wonder. Before the late news came on, dragon sightings had been reported in every state but Hawaii … and there had been two “sea serpent” sightings there.

  “You think any of those are for real?” Joy asked.

  “No. they would be swarming all over us by now if there were more.” Maybe that was just my pessimism.

  I switched over to CNN. The Air Force had finally admitted that a fighter plane had been missing for two weeks, lost while attempting to intercept a Tessie radar return over the Great Smoky Mountain National Park. A small coastal freighter was missing without a trace in the Adriatic. There had been no storms or reports of trouble from the ship before its disappearance. No wreckage had been found. An attempt to hijack a SAC B-l bomber had been foiled by Air Police and the FBI. The Soviet Union was making “almost an accusation” that American forces had either sunk or sabotaged a new frigate in the Indian Ocean near Diego Garcia. Despite the imp
roved relations of the last few years, the rhetoric was fairly heated. Radio and television signals had been mysteriously jammed, off and on, for nearly two hours throughout Iberia. The Tokyo Stock Exchange had suspended trading for three days after the Nissei Index doubled in five days. Duluth, Minnesota, had recorded its first significant September summer snowfall—nine inches and counting. A few hundred miles away, Milwaukee and Chicago were breaking record high temperatures, not just for September, for any month.

  I would have liked to listen to more news, maybe even spend the night in civilization, but I had to get back to Varay. I got Joy, the others, and all of our loot through to Cayenne, stopped to talk to Lesh for a few minutes, then went right over to Basil while Joy organized a late supper at Cayenne.

  Supper was just ending at Basil, but there was still food on the table, so I grabbed a snack, then went looking for Kardeen. He was in his office, still working.

  “Sorry I’m late,” I told him. “I keep attracting dragons.” I pulled the ruby out from under my shirt. I hadn’t taken the jewel off since I got it. Varay isn’t big on safe deposit boxes. “They seem to be drawn by this. Even in the other world.” I told him about Tessie.

  Kardeen nodded, and gestured me into a chair without saying anything. He looked overworked and tired. He was always overworked, but he usually kept it off his face.

  “I’m going to need Parthet along on the boat or we’ll never get to the other shrine,” I said when I finished talking about Tessie. “He has a spell to hide people from dragons. He used it when we rode to Thyme that first time. If the spell will work around this ruby.”

  Kardeen sent a runner for Parthet and Xayber’s son, then filled in the time by telling me about our boat and the strange things that had been happening around Varay the last few weeks. A lot of little things had been reported. It sounded vaguely like the weird reports back home. In one case, they merged quite clearly. Fishermen had reported seeing a gray steel ship drifting without power in the Mist.