Highfire

by Eoin Colfer

  Lie down in the swamp so his body wouldn’t ever be found.

  And once the notion had him, it wouldn’t let go. Where a fortnight ago he had been a dragon who was prepared to kill whoever it took in order to survive, today there he sat in his recliner, slugging vodka from the bottle, a creature who could not think of a single goddamn reason to live.

  “Dragon’s Bane,” Vern had said back in the day. “Sounds painful. Even rhymes with ‘pain.’”

  Wax had grinned, his rows of pointed teeth twinkling. “No, sir, no pain. You just get a little buzz, talk some shit maybe, then take a nap and don’t wake up. I don’t want no cramping dragon using his last remaining minutes to fry my old ass.”

  No pain, thought Vern now. Just take a nap.

  An appealing notion.

  A nap.

  What else was he going to do? Live in a goddamn swamp until some tourist got a photograph of him?

  No. Better to go out on his own terms.

  My own terms? Rotting away to nothing in the swamp mud, when we used to rule the skies?

  Not anymore.

  Not for a long time. Humans saw to that. Time to finally face facts. The dragon era was over, and it had been over for a long time. He was like the last guy in the world listening to an eight-track. That shit wasn’t ever coming back.

  The Dragon’s Bane sat on the arm of his chair now. Seemed like the wax paper was crinkling of its own accord, daring him to grow a pair and get this shit over with already.

  It’s been a while since I had the blues this bad, Vern realized. Guess I was due.

  And so Vern made a decision.

  I am gonna drink for the next day or so, and if this funk hasn’t lifted by then, I’m gonna eat that there Dragon’s Bane and take myself a final swim, somewhere nice and deep.

  And that is exactly what he proceeded to do. Apart from the final swim. That bit didn’t pan out as planned.

  SQUIB MOREAU, ALL unawares that Constable Hooke was on his tail, went about his unique business. Every day the same thing: Up at midmorning and shake off the sleep funk. Grab some breakfast at the Pearl, followed by his bottle-boy work behind the bar. Help Bodi set up for the lunch crowd, flirt a little with Shandra Boyce, who waited on the booths. Sometimes Shandra would split a cream soda with him in the lull, but usually not, because Shandra was after an upright boy and Squib hadn’t been in that bracket long enough to prove himself. He was like a junkie a couple of weeks off the gear: He needed a few more clean months under his belt.

  After lunch Squib was out on the water tending his nets and traps. Whatever haul he managed went back to the Pearl kitchen and was added to his weekly tote. There were usually a couple of items to be picked up for Vern in the general store. The staples were vodka, palm oil, and fresh meat, and there would always be a few extras. These would all have to be packed carefully in a cooler, and then Squib would take himself on a quick spin downriver, making damn sure to avoid any sort of human interaction lest he get himself followed and be forced to forgo his precious scale.

  After the drop-off, Squib would collect that day’s shopping list and suck on the dragon scale that weighed the list down. Then it was out back to collect the shit bucket and take himself over to old Waxman’s place for a spot of fertilization. Sometimes he talked to Waxman, told him how much of a pain in the ass Vern was being, how he had barely set eyes on the dragon these past ten days. And how he sure could use a little remuneration for all these hours he was putting in. Even gas money would be something.

  Squib felt like he’d been on tenterhooks forever, even though it had only been a couple of weeks. He felt like he couldn’t remember the sensation of being relaxed, though he could surely picture times when he must have been: smoking reefer out on the levee with Charles Jr., for example, or joining his momma for a viewing of Highlander, which was her favorite movie. Those were easy times, when he had surely felt his troubles lift off his shoulders for a couple of hours. But he couldn’t put his finger on that sensation right now. Seemed like those things had happened to another person in another life because this particular version of Squib Moreau was in thrall to a dragon.

  It was nightfall on the bayou, and a weekend to boot, so things were heating up in Petit Bateau. The Pearl had managed to somehow secure the services of Aaron Neville, who had history with Bodi Irwin. It was a secret gig, but as soon as the word got out that the king of New Orleans was burning up the Pearl’s little stage, half of Slidell piled into the diner and the other half filled up the dock and patio tables.

  On another night Squib would hate to miss such a buzzy evening, but he was on the clock now and Waxman had been very clear that he shouldn’t ever be late. His duties for the evening were twofold: swap over shit buckets and deliver Vern’s groceries, which included Cocoa Puffs, Lucky Charms, Cheerios, and a gallon of soy milk. Apparently the dragon was a breakfast-for-dinner kind of guy.

  So far as I know. Could be he’s feeding Cheerios to the catfish. It ain’t like I ever lay eyes on him.

  So Squib was no less than dumbfounded to find the dragon actually present when he wheeled the cooler into the shack that evening. Vern was lolling in his easy chair, plates and scales glowing in the TV light, a bottle of vodka drooping from two clawed fingers of one hand and what looked like half a protein cookie in the other.

  The boy was further surprised when Vern said, “Looks like you ain’t the one dying after all, kid. Looks like it’s me.”

  The dragon was inebriated as all hell, judging by the slump of him, but Squib had heard a boatload of drunken declarations working Bodi’s bar, and he felt this one had a ring of truth to it.

  “Just one more bite of this here shit biscuit and off to sleep I go. Bye-bye, cruel world. Then you can blab to whoever you like, but no one will believe you.”

  This was confounding to Squib, as he didn’t know what action to take. Should he let the dragon go his merry way, if he even had a choice in the matter? Or should he do something to save him?

  “But I brung you cereal,” exclaimed the boy, which seemed a lame thing to mention given the situation. “And mineral water, too. From France.”

  The dragon cocked his head like this might change his mind. “Nope,” he said then, tossing the rest of the biscuit down his gullet. “Ain’t enough.”

  Vern washed the snack down with a slug of vodka; his teeth clunked against the bottle neck. “Off home now, boy. I don’t know exactly what side effects this Dragon Bane is gonna have. Could be I’ll go full Exorcist.”

  Squib had seen that movie mostly because his momma had absolutely forbidden him to watch it, and a dragon unleashing a fire-hose puke was not something he wanted to be in the path of.

  But still.

  A good puke might save him.

  Squib’s little voice had a problem with that.

  Save him? Why’n hell would you want to save him? Just let the big lizard go, and that’s fifty percent of your problems off the board.

  Yeah, but. Dragon, you know?

  Screw it. Fuck him. And to hell with extinction. Get your ass back in the boat, and keep the groceries while you’re at it.

  Even Waxman couldn’t blame him for Vern checking out like this.

  The dragon’s eyes were hazy. “I seen things, kid,” he said softly. “I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate.”

  That snapped Squib to a little. “That it, boss? All you gotta tell me is ripped off from Blade Runner? Tell me something real before you go.”

  Vern squinted and wagged a finger at Squib. “You got me there, kid. Blade Runner. I thought you probably wouldn’t have seen that one, young as you are.”

  “I seen it,” said Squib. “I seen all the old movies with Momma. She loves the Highlander.”

  “Shit!” said Vern. “There can be only one, right?”

  “There can be only one,” agreed Squib. “And you’re it. The one dragon. You wanna go out like this?”

  Vern blinked slowly like it was an effort. �
��I don’t wanna go out and I don’t wanna stay in. Know what I mean?”

  Actually, Squib kinda did know. He had some experience with people who didn’t care none for living.

  “I do get what you mean, Mister Vern. Times are tough. But we all got shit to take care of.”

  Vern burped. “Not me. I got nothing. You all saw to that. Not one of your kind ever did squat for me nor mine.”

  The dragon leaned forward, elbows on knees, drooling a little. “What’s the point?” he asked. “Maybe the sun will come out tomorrow, you know, but I’m sick of watching the sunrise alone.”

  Squib remembered something his momma had said one time when she came home real tired and found him in bed with the whooping cough and her new boyfriend was smoking reefer on the back porch and could not give a shit about her kid sick in bed. And as she was mopping his brow, Momma talked a little about his original daddy, which she rarely did.

  “If only I could have seen him through to sunrise,” she had said, a tear dripping from her nose. “But we weren’t enough, me and you.”

  So when Vern made that crack about sunrise, Squib felt himself getting angry. “Screw you, Vern,” he said. “You ain’t dying on me.”

  Vern drooled some more. “That is correct, son. I ain’t dying on you. I’m dying on myself.”

  “The hell you are,” said Squib, and sprang into action. Or, more accurately, ran around in a tight circle while he considered what action to spring into. He remembered when his friend Charles Jr. had accidentally taken a swig out of a bleach bottle, with the reasoning that the container was similar in dimensions to his daddy’s rye whiskey bottle. Miss Ingram had taken Charles by the neck like he was a turkey and jammed three fingers down his throat till he puked all down her forearm. Took the color right out of her blouse.

  Miss Ingram had admitted later that this technique was homegrown and frowned upon by the medical profession, but hell Charles was alive, wasn’t he?

  And even if he did try the Ingram method, it could be that dragons didn’t puke in the same manner as humans, but Vern had referenced The Exorcist, so Squib reckoned he might as well give it a try.

  Still, he thought, those teeth look mighty sharp.

  Squib widened the radius of his run and snagged one of a dozen T-shirts hanging from a peg. He wrapped it around his forearm, then said a quick prayer. “Jesus God, help me now.”

  “I met Jesus,” mumbled Vern, his head coming up. “He weren’t even a good carpenter.”

  No more revelations were forthcoming as Squib stuffed as much of his fist as he could down the dragon’s windpipe. He really put his weight behind it, grunting with effort, and flashed on a time, years before, when he and Charles Jr. had punched into a bucket of drying concrete to see how far in they could go, except this was tighter and ridged with muscles and teeth. Squib met Vern’s eyes, and it seemed like the dragon was outraged, for he stood suddenly upright and took Squib bodily with him—and still not a sign of a puke, so Squib wiggled his fingers in there good, like he was running a finger race, and then planted his feet on Vern’s barrel chest and yanked himself free.

  Maybe a pint of gel-like substance came with him, and Vern hawked and said, “The goddamn nerve!”

  Then he puked up whatever he’d been keeping down in a multicolored, multitextured heave which washed across the planking like so much bilge.

  “Ah,” said Vern. “I see what you done.”

  Squib wasn’t concerned so much about saving the dragon’s life no more as he had moved on to the next stage of his evening, that being panic, for the gel-like substance which preceded the vomit had already eaten through the T-shirt, leaving nothing but strands of crisped cotton.

  “Oh Godawmighty,” said Squib as the gel marched on, going to work on his arm hairs, crisping them like a thousand tiny fuses, and then sinking into the pores, raising tiny funnels of smoke from each one. He yelped in pain and slapped at his arm like he could smother dragon flame.

  “Urgh,” said Vern, then, “Fugg.”

  The dragon hawked and spat a lump of gel which burned a neat circle in the floor.

  “Okay,” he said, “you ain’t gonna like this, kid, but it’s better than losing an arm.”

  Then Vern dropped his cargo pants, magicked his dragon tackle out of somewhere, and pissed all over Squib’s arm.

  Mostly his arm.

  A HALF HOUR later, dragon and boy were seated on the deck watching the gator eyes pop up and down on the river’s surface.

  “Like Whac-A-Mole, every goddamn night,” said Vern. “Like I’m gonna do something unusual after a hundred years.”

  “You pissed on a kid,” said Squib, “so that’s unusual, I guess.”

  His arm was smooth and a little raw-looking but no worse than the time he’d tried one of Momma’s wax strips out of boredom. Sometimes when a guy’s momma works nights, he gets into things.

  Vern shrugged. “Technically, I marked you. You’s lucky I did, kid. Dragon piss got all sorts of properties, including some kind of healing chemical in there. They reckon mogwai are made mostly from that chemical, which accounts for their healing abilities.”

  Squib wasn’t in the mood for a science lesson. From his teenage perspective, getting pissed on was worse than being burned. Having said that, he did mentally add dragon piss to the list of things which might grant him superpowers.

  Dragon-Boy. Not bad.

  “The way to think of it,” continued Vern, “is like it’s aloe vera times a million.”

  Aloe vera did not sound like something an X-Man might have a use for, so Squib went back to being annoyed.

  “Aloe vera? Why’ncha write me a book about that and I’ll read it when I’m old and can’t do nuthin’ fun no more.”

  Which was quite a turnaround in attitude for the Cajun boy so far as Vern was concerned.

  “Hey,” said the dragon, “watch your mouth, kid. I’m still an apex predator, hear?”

  Squib rubbed his arm. “I ain’t minding my mouth. You’s gonna murder me anyhow.”

  “How d’you figure?” asked Vern, who was actually considering the opposite, if not murdering was the opposite of murdering.

  “I gotta chew on a fresh-dropped scale, don’t I? You were set on dumping yourself in the swamp. So I reckon my life don’t even figure on your list of priorities.”

  “That’s true,” admitted Vern, “but I ain’t so set on killing you no more, not since you punched my windpipe from the inside. Even if you only did it for your scale.”

  “I only thought of that scale this second,” muttered Squib, snapping off a dozen crisped hairs from his forearm.

  It sounded so like the truth that Vern was visibly taken aback. A dragon being visibly taken aback took the form of his twin eyelids flickering some and his snout wrinkling so the nubs knocked up against each other.

  “Bullshit,” he said. “That ain’t the human way.”

  Squib screwed his courage to the sticking place, glared at Vern, and said with no little accusation, “You ever think that maybe Waxman was right? Maybe we’re all souls?”

  “Wax don’t know humanity like I do,” Vern countered. “That boy is only a few hundred years old. Anyway, the whole scale thing was a crock. Dragon’s breath might dumb you down a little, but it won’t kill you.”

  Instead of relief, all Squib felt was more anger. “Goddamn you, Mister Vern! Messing with me left, right, and center! Ever since I bumped into you, I been living on my nerves. Ain’t you seen the movies? Meeting a dragon is supposed to be cool.”

  Squib ran out of steam somewhat at this juncture and reckoned that maybe shouting “Goddamn you” at a dragon was the new number one on his dumb-moves chart.

  For his part, Vern took a moment to let the developments of the past few minutes sink in. After all, these were minutes he hadn’t been counting on living to see.

  “Cool, huh?”

  Squib was staring at his forearm like it used to be invisible but now he could see it. “You know the pr
oblem with you people?” he asked.

  Vern was surprised. “‘People’? I got people now?”

  “Dragons. Humans. Anyone who’s planning on taking their own life.”

  “No,” said Vern, a touch irritated. “Why don’t you tell me, kid? After all, you been around for all of ten seconds.”

  “The problem is, you don’t give a shit for the folks that get left behind.”

  “I don’t got nobody left behind,” Vern pointed out. “Wax is gone down. And anyways, maybe I’ve been here long enough. Most people don’t believe in me, and those that do want to make me into a nice pair of boots. You ain’t got no idea what it’s like to not be believed in.”

  “That’s maybe true, Mister Vern,” said Squib, “but I do know what it’s like to be left behind. I know how it feels to carry it around in your gut like a lump of gristle that won’t pass. I seen what it does to a fella’s momma. All my momma does is cure folks, but she couldn’t cure my daddy ’cause what he had was invisible. Weren’t no reason for it but chemicals.”

  “Your daddy, huh?” said Vern, seeing the light regarding why Squib chose to save his life. A fella didn’t have to be a genius.

  “Yeah,” said Squib. “He bought himself a version of your shit biscuit.”

  Vern didn’t have it in him to sympathize with a human just yet, so he kept his own counsel and listened to the worms popping out of the swamp mud.

  Finally, the dragon grinned a little. “So I ain’t cool enough for you, boy?”

  “I don’t know,” said Squib. “I can’t tell. Too busy crapping my pants, burying my friend in shit, and running vodka downriver.”

  Vern was surprised to realize that his own black dog was loping off. The kid’s funk was pulling him out of his, and damned if he didn’t wanna cheer up the little swamp rat a little. “You brung vodka?”

  Squib scowled. “Yeah, I brung an extra quart, just in case. Lucky I did, huh? Now you can get your drunk on and chew on another shit biscuit.”

  “You brung the mineral water, too?”

  “I told you that already, boss, but you was all Tannhäuser Gate and stuff.”

  Vern dipped his scaled feet in the water and flexed his webbed toes, thinking. “Okay, Squib Moreau. New deal, if you’re up for it.”