Highfire

by Eoin Colfer

  Hooke set about Vern’s head with a flurry of jabs, snapping the dragon’s head from side to side, drawing blood with each blow. Soon the dragon’s face was a lattice of blood lines.

  Vern’s eyes rolled back, and it sounded like he was trying to speak, but all he could manage was a reptilian throat rattle.

  Hooke was delighted. “Your buddy is reverting, Bodi. I beat him all the way back to the Jurassic age.”

  Bodi couldn’t talk much; all his energy was going into anger, which was just pumping the blood out of him faster. “You . . .” he said. “You . . .”

  “Yep,” said Hooke, happier than he had ever been in his life. “Me . . . Me.”

  Vern rattled some more, and coughed at the end of it.

  “What you saying there, Vern?” asked Hooke, stomping on the dragon’s jaw. “You calling for your dragon momma?”

  Vern spat blood and one of his tusks, which Hooke picked up and wiped on his pants.

  “Naw,” gasped Vern, “I’m calling for the one thing I got.”

  Hooke had too much adrenaline rushing through his veins to catch the tone. “I’ll tell you what you got. You got a hope in hell, that’s what you got, Wyvern.”

  Vern rattled his throat one more time, then said, “No, Regence. What I got is subjects.”

  “‘Subjects’?” said Hooke, then laughed. “Goddamn subjects. You’re a one, Vern. Damned if you ain’t, Your Majesty.”

  This relentless ragging must’ve got Vern’s goat a little because he withdrew his junk with a defiant clanking. “And you’re a dick, Regence. But not for long.”

  Hooke was bored now. Incredible, that a person could tire of beating up a dragon, but now the race was run, more or less, and he wanted to keep on keeping on. This situation needed tidying up before the Federales arrived with their tents and stuff to cross. He had all the t’s, dot the i’s, and drown the witnesses.

  “Anyways, Vern,” he said, “I reckon there’s one thing that will surely slice through to a dragon’s heart, if you’re finished pissing on your friends, that is.” He wrapped his fingers around Vern’s own tusk, testing its underhand grip.

  It was possible that Vern was slightly more pale than usual.

  Everything looked red in this light, but he continued talking back to his last breath. “Ain’t you never watched nature shows, Hooke? Ain’t you never had a goddamned dog? I wasn’t pissing on my friends. I was marking them.”

  Vern gave one more rattle, which gave Hooke a moment to consider the “marking them” comment.

  “Bullshit” was his verdict on that. “Bullshit, Vern. Piss ain’t no more effective than Rosary beads. Piss can’t protect nobody from me.”

  Vern barely opened his mouth to answer. “Not from you, moron. You ain’t nothing.”

  Okeydokey, thought Hooke. Cab for one delirious dragon. He made a few experimental thrusts with the tusk.

  Nice heft, he thought. I’m gonna have this tooled up. Put a handle on her. Kill everything with a dragon’s tooth from this day forth.

  Constable Regence Hooke took a moment to appreciate his surroundings. Live in the moment, wasn’t that what they said? All them gurus and so forth.

  “There ain’t never going to be another moment like this one, Regence,” he told himself. All the elements were present for a unique-style memory:

  1. The dragon dying on his ass.

  2. The woman with her face all beat up.

  3. The son trapped under an inverted boat.

  It was almost demeaning to that bunch of details to include a bleeding-out hippie, but Bodi was part of it, so Hooke acknowledged him with a wink.

  Ain’t you never had a dog? What the hell was that about? Deathbed bullshit.

  But the fact was that Regence Hooke never did have a dog as a boy, his daddy being dead set against them. But he had read up on them, back in the day, and he did know that dogs pissed on things to mark their territory. To warn off other dogs.

  But there ain’t no other dogs, that is to say, dragons.

  Then Regence felt a clamping on his ankle, and now he understood.

  Fuck.

  Vern did have subjects after all.

  Hooke looked down to see a big-ass alligator with what looked like a scorched head chomping on his boot. The creature’s teeth hadn’t penetrated the padded leather yet, but it was only a matter of time, so he nailed it right between the eyes with Vern’s tusk, and it sank in like a spike through crusty bread, that is to say, a little initial resistance, then through to the sponge beneath. Trouble was, it didn’t come out so easy, and there were a ton more gators slithering across the slick swamp grass.

  “You prick, Vern,” said Hooke. “You goddamn prick.”

  The first gator didn’t relax its grip, even in death. In fact, its jaws ratcheted tighter and Hooke felt a bone snap in his ankle.

  No talking now. No threats.

  Hooke knew that he would need every joule of energy to extricate himself from this gator crisis, for they were coming in a sinewy wave over the verge, hides glistening red, some still half stunned by the explosion, turret eyes rolling, jaws wide like Satan’s hedge clippers.

  Hooke gave the tusk a couple more tugs, then abandoned it.

  Better maybe, Regence, to abandon this entire conflict for now.

  But first he needed to retrieve his foot. He stomped on the gator that had latched onto his ankle, stomping with his heavy boot until the animal’s snout was only so much crazy paving, and twisted his foot out of the tooth trap. The broken bone hurt like hellfire, but he tucked that pain in his back pocket for now. He could take it out on someone or other later, when everything on this godforsaken island was dead excepting him.

  He tried to run, but after three hobbling steps he knew that two more would see him collapse into the mud, so he turned to fight.

  Weapons?

  He had lost pretty much everything in the swamp, but he still had his faithful gut hook, and so he armed himself sharpish as the sinewy sea of alligators swept toward him with a synchronicity about them that he had never seen in gators before, and he reckoned that was going to be all she wrote for his ass.

  Still, a fella has to go down swinging, so the constable gamely sliced into the first alligator, hoping that the herd would be scattered by the death of their leader. It was only when the gators ignored the body of their comrade, clambering over it to get to him, that Hooke realized, I’m going for the wrong creature. Vern is their leader.

  But he had no time to deal with that before the glistening mass of nubs and teeth was upon him, tearing him apart with all the eagerness of demons welcoming newcomers to Hades. Hooke watched as one arm was torn from his body and the blood spurted like oil from a nozzle; then he saw a gator take a chunk out of his stomach the size of a basketball and his own insides plop onto his lap.

  Ripped right through my vest, he thought, like it wasn’t even there.

  Then he was lying on his ass and trying to punch his attackers with a hand he didn’t have anymore, and he had to laugh at that, which was a mistake because a gator aimed its lower jaw directly into Hooke’s open mouth hole and speared him right through the brain, which was an unusual move for that species, but it was effective as all hell because when the gator closed its mouth, Hooke’s head cracked like a watermelon under the hammer.

  VERN HAD EXPECTED to feel some kind of grim satisfaction. You watch your sworn enemy getting torn apart, and it’s meant to feel good, right?

  Hell yeah! That’s supposed to be your reaction.

  But Vern was surprised to find he didn’t feel anything even close to exhilaration. It was too brutal a death, even for a cosmic-level asshole like Constable Regence Hooke.

  Still.

  Hooke was definitely dead this time, so there was that.

  Vern watched as Hooke was completely submerged in a sea of alligators, then gave a rattle from his throat, followed by two brief whistles.

  The gators retreated like they were on bungee cords, leaving Hooke’
s mangled corpse in an unnatural heap on the trampled reeds, looking like a butcher just poured him out of a sack. Buttons’s corpse was lying maybe six feet away. Vern knew his buddies would come back for him when the ripples had settled.

  Maybe just as well Buttons got plugged, thought Vern. He mighta taken another shot at the king, and this time the crown woulda been his.

  But Vern didn’t buy his own rationalization. He’d gotten Buttons killed, was the long and short of it.

  He took a shaky breath, and even that hurt. He realized that it was quite possible Hooke would still manage to be the death of him unless Squib got his ass in gear and did his job.

  “Bodi,” he said. “You there, man?”

  The response was slow coming. “More or less, Vern. Not for long, I’m thinking.”

  “How about Elodie?”

  “I can hear her snoring. Nose must be broke.”

  “She’s still beautiful inside, so don’t you be forgetting that.”

  “Screw you, lizard,” said Bodi, probably figuring he was dying anyway.

  “Oh-ho,” said Vern. “Green Day grew some balls.”

  And he closed his eyes.

  SQUIB KNEW WHAT was going on outside his prison boat. He’d heard an alligator swarm in Vern’s shack; he doubted that he would ever forget that noise. If he had to do a comparison, like for a school essay or something, he would say alligators swarming sounded a little like a billion punctured tires all leaking air at the same time—not normal tires, mind, but big tires, like the ones on them monster trucks.

  Boss man’s called in the cavalry, he realized. Those gators will tear Hooke to bloody strips.

  His mom, too, most likely. And Mister Irwin.

  It was the thought of them gators crawling all over his mother that gave Squib strength. Even though he was tuckered out beyond belief, what with all the swamp shenanigans, he threw himself at the cruiser’s gunwale and heaved with every ounce of his newfound supernatural reserves. He managed to move it maybe half an inch.

  Think, Everett Moreau, he told himself. Think.

  He wiped his hands on his legs, which didn’t dry them any, and ripped open the Velcro seal on his vest’s phone pocket. His phone wouldn’t be any use as a communication device, not out here in the dead zone, but at least he would have some light, presuming recent traumas hadn’t done a number on his electronics. His luck was in, and soon the boat cave was awash in a spooky glow.

  Outside, the alligator charge was continuing. Squib could hear the bastards scrambling over the boat to get at someone.

  “Momma!” he called, his voice ragged with fear. “I’m coming!” For all the good the mighty Squib’s intervention would do. But he had to try.

  He wasn’t shifting the boat, that much was clear, but there had to be a way out. He ran his torch around the gunwale again, but the craft was sealed pretty tight, sunk right down into the mud in some places. He could probably dig himself out if he had an hour to spare and a handy shovel, but neither of those things were presenting themselves. There was a patch of morning light shafting in through the engine port, but there was barely enough room for a baby rat to squeak through.

  Unless I can get the engine off, he thought suddenly. The fifty-horsepower outboard was secured by two large butterfly clamps, and Squib attacked the first with gusto. Luckily, Bodi was a man who took care of his equipment and the nut barely put up a fight, spinning off in his fingers. Squib’s luck held some more when the second clamp couldn’t bear the weight of the skewed engine and was dragged off without him having to so much as say Boo to it. Now he had an escape hatch about the size of a cereal box. For once, being the runt of his generation was about to pay off.

  “Pay off,” he thought. Well, if getting chewed up and swallowed by swamp gators was the kind of payment a boy was after.

  Nevertheless, and to his credit, Squib did not hesitate but dived into that hatch like there was a fantasy land on the other side where the folks were just waiting to dub him a prince. It was a tight fit. The mud insinuated itself into his every crevice, and Squib felt like he would never be clean again, but that didn’t matter much, seeing as how he’d most likely be dead in a couple of seconds anyway.

  They can bury me in mud, and no one will know the difference.

  His hands scrabbled for the outside world. When he felt the air playing across them, he worried that some sharp-eyed gator would mistake his fingers for worms and chomp them right off his hands, but no such amputations occurred, and soon Squib Moreau was on his feet and blinking in the morning haze.

  He was looking for his momma, his boss, and his other boss, and he found them laid out side by side by side. It was quite a peaceful tableau, if Squib ignored the wounds and bruises and blood, which he couldn’t. He dropped to his knees in the squelch of swamp and waved his hands over his momma’s head like an expert in one of those nontouching healing massage methods.

  “Momma?” he said. “Are you dead?”

  Elodie declined to answer, having been recently paddled by a bear-woman, but at least she continued to breathe, which was something, though her swollen nose made a whistling labor of the process.

  “Nose, Momma,” said Squib, pointing at the nose. “Your nose.”

  “Boy’s some kind of genius,” said Vern.

  “Goddamn prodigy,” agreed Bodi, who reckoned he was so deep in shock that he might as well converse like none of this was happening.

  Squib wiped a tear from his nose. “What do I do, boss? Everyone’s dying or plumb dead already. This situation is DEFCON 1 fucked.”

  Vern was okay for smart-assholery, but actual decisions were beyond his oil-starved brain. “Uh,” he said. “Erm. Lemme sleep on that.”

  And he did, collapsing into catatonia.

  “Balls,” said Squib, crawling across to Bodi, who seemed to be chuckling at an invisible joke while blood bubbled on his chest. “Come on, Mister Irwin, I can’t plan stuff. I done proved that over and over.”

  “Sorry, boy,” said Bodi, “I can barely manage to stay alive. If you tell me something, I might remember it.”

  Squib suddenly felt as though the mud coating him was alive with critters and they were chewing ruminatively on his flesh. There were lives on the line and corpses to be explained. Everyone was dying and he had to fix it somehow—and all without a phone signal.

  “Everyone is dying, Mister Irwin,” he said desperately.

  And then Bodi found a spark in his brain to say something intelligent. “Ain’t nobody dying, Squib, ’cept maybe me. And by the sound of it, help is on the way.”

  Squib thought on this. Nobody was dying. Only Bodi Irwin was in need of urgent help, and the sound of sirens on the water confirmed that the cavalry was surging upriver. After the hoo-ha in New Orleans, there was probably a whole flotilla of lawmakers strapping on their Kevlar right now.

  “Okay,” he said. “Okay, I think I got something. It’s crazy, but not as crazy as the truth.”

  And he told Bodi his plan.

  “Yup,” said Bodi. “That’s just about the biggest heap of . . .”

  Then Bodi joined the other two in unconsciousness, and Squib could only hope he had been about to say, That’s just about the biggest heap of genius I ever heard.

  Which was a well-known phrase, wasn’t it?

  Even if it wasn’t, Squib had no choice, no help, and no better ideas, so it was either get busy trying or get busy waiting for the cops to arrive.

  What would Vern do? he asked himself.

  That was easy. Vern would cuss a little, scratch his behind, then get busy.

  Well, all right then.

  “Fuck a duck,” said Squib, scratching the sopping ass of his jeans, then took his momma under the arms and dragged her toward the pirogue.

  Chapter 20

  VERN WOKE FEELING LIKE HE’D BEEN PASSED THROUGH THE KIND of malevolent mangler that Stephen King might have dreamed up. He felt so bad that it was quite possible he was actually dead and in dragon hell. Memories a
nd personality meant nothing while confined to that fugue; there was just the punishing drudge of pain. No, that wasn’t true—it wasn’t all agony; there were parts of him that felt tender or nauseated, his brain for example. Vern would have said the word for the way his brain felt was “peeled.” Which was never a good thing as far as brains were concerned. His ass also felt peeled, which didn’t generally bode well for asses either.

  Vern had no choice but to endure, which he did for about half a day till his cells had regenerated enough that he was upgraded from “at death’s door” to merely “gravely injured.” And perhaps half a day after that he regained control of his faculties, not all of them, but enough to marshal the energy to exclaim, “By the throbbing shaft of Azazel.”

  Which had been a popular expletive, back in the day.

  He opened his various eyelids, all of which felt like they were coated in grit, to find Elodie Moreau staring down at him with a worried expression.

  “Groundhog Day,” said Vern. “I’m stuck in this dream where you’re watching me recuperate.”

  “It ain’t no dream, Mister Vern,” said Elodie. “We’re both here, sure enough.”

  “One of us smells like the inside of a deep fryer,” noted Vern. “I’m guessing that’d be me.”

  Elodie raised his head and stuck a sippy cup straw in his mouth, and while Vern sucked she said, “Yeah, I guess. We’ve been getting oil into you any way we could. You’ve been guzzling in your sleep, and Squib borrowed my basting brush. You’re like a Christmas goose with all the fat he painted onto you. No offense.”

  “None taken, Miss Elodie. It does seem to be doing the trick.”

  “We soaked bandages for your wings,” continued Elodie. “I figured maybe something more refined for that tissue, delicate and all as it looks. So Bodi purchased some grade-A coconut oil for that.”