Highfire

by Eoin Colfer

  “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 hi
m 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.