Jonathan Strahan - The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year. Volume 10

When she’s done, she uses a few paper napkins – also lifted from the Piggly Wiggly – to wipe her fingers as clean as she can get them. She catches a little rainwater in the empty can. It’s warm and tastes like grease, but it helps her thirst a little. Starving has never scared her as much as the possibility of dying of thirst, and she’s drunk from worse than an empty Vienna sausage can.

She closes her eyes and manages half an hour’s sleep, a half hour at most. But she dreams of another life she might have lived. She dreams of a talking blackbird – a red-winged blackbird – and the ghost of a girl who was a werewolf before she died. Before Dancy had to kill her. It isn’t a good dream. When she wakes up, the rain has stopped, the clouds have gone, and the world outside the boxcar is wet and steaming in the brilliant August sun. It can’t be very long past noon. She pisses through one of the holes in the floor of the boxcar, already thirsty and wishing she had a few more cans full of the oily sausage-flavored rainwater. She gathers up her green Army surplus duffel bag, worn and patched, patches sewn over patches, and she finds her sunglasses. She stole those, too, from a convenience store somewhere down in Florida. The seraph has never said anything about her thefts. Necessary evils and all, tiny transgressions in the service of the greater good. And she’s made it a rule never to take anything worth more than ten dollars. She keeps a tally, written in pencil on the back of a tourism pamphlet advertising Tarpon Springs. As of today, she owes seventy-three dollars and fifteen cents. She knows she’ll never pay any of it back, but she keeps the tally, anyway.

Dancy climbs down out of the boxcar and opens the black umbrella, almost as patched as the duffel bag; two of the spokes poke out through the nylon fabric.

“Where am I going this time?” she asks, but no one and nothing answers. It’s been days now since the angel appeared, all wrath and fire and terrible swift swords. She’s on her own, until it shows up and shoves her this way or that way. So, she wandered north to Enterprise, then east to this abandoned and left for dead boxcar not far from the banks of the muddy Choctawhatchee River. She makes her way back to the road, rural route something or something else, another anonymous county highway. She parts waist high goldenrod and stinging nettles like Moses dividing the Red Sea. Her T-shirt, jeans, and boots are close to soaked through by the time she reaches the road, which makes her wonder why she bothered taking shelter in the boxcar.

The road is wet and dark and shiny as cottonmouth scales.

Without direction, without instruction, left to her own devices, there’s nothing to do but walk, and so she resumes the march eastward, towards Georgia, still a good thirty or forty miles away. But that’s just as a crow flies, not as she has to walk down this road. And there’s no particular reason to aim for Georgia, except she has no idea where else she’d go.

Dancy walks and sings to herself to take her mind off the heat.

She’s walked no more than half a mile when she sees the dragon.

At first, she thinks she’s seeing nothing but a very large turkey vulture, soaring on the thermals rising up off the blacktop. But then it wheels nearer, far up and silhouetted black against the blue, blue sky, and she can see that whatever it is, it isn’t a turkey vulture. She doesn’t think it’s even a bird, because, for one thing, it doesn’t seem to have feathers. For another, it’s huge. She’s seen big pelicans, but they were, at most, only half as big as the thing in the sky, wing tip to wing tip. She’s seen egrets and herons and eagles, but nothing like this. She stands in the middle of the road and watches, transfixed, not thinking, yet, that maybe this is something to be afraid of, something that could do her harm.

It’s a dragon, she thinks. I’m seeing a dragon, and the angel didn’t warn me. I didn’t even know dragons were real.

The thing in the sky screams. Or it sounds like a scream to Dancy, and the cry sends chill bumps up and down her arms, makes the hairs at the base of her neck stand on end. It’s almost directly overhead now, the creature. She shields her eyes, trying to shut out the glare of the sun, hoping for a better view. It’s sort of like a giant bat, the dragon, because its wings look leathery, taut membranes stretched between bony struts, and the creature might be covered with short, velvety hair like a bat’s. But it’s hard to be sure about these details, it’s so far overhead. The strangest part of all is the dragon’s head. There’s a bony crest on the back of its narrow skull, a crest almost as long as its beak, and the crest makes it’s head look sort of like a boomerang.

The dragon flaps its enormous wings, seven yards across if they’re an inch, and screams again. And that’s when Dancy hears a voice somewhere to her left, calling out from the thicket of beech and pine and creeper vines at the edge of the road. For just a second, she thinks maybe it’s her angel, come, belatedly, to warn her about the dragon and to tell her what she’s supposed to do. Come to reveal this wrinkle in its grand skein – its holy plan for her, whatever comes next. But this isn’t the angel at all. It’s only the voice of a girl who sounds impatient and, maybe, a little frightened.

“Get outta the road,” the girl tells her, somehow managing to whisper and raise her voice at the same time, cautiously raising her voice only as much as she dares. “It’s gonna see you if you don’t get outta the middle of the damn road.”

“But maybe it’s supposed to see me,” Dancy says aloud, though she’d only meant to think that to herself. Already she’s reaching for the Bowie knife tucked into the waistband of her jeans.

“Get outta the road, ” the girl shouts, actually shouting this time, no longer trying not to be heard by the hairy black thing in the sky.

Dancy draws her knife, and the sun flashes off the stainless steel blade. Her hand is sweaty around the handle, that stout hilt carved from the antler of a white-tailed buck.

The dragon soars and banks, and then it dives for her.

Why wasn’t I warned? Why didn’t you tell me there are dragons?

But then she’s being pulled, hauled along with enough force and urgency that she almost loses her balance to tumble head over heels off the asphalt and into a tangle of blackberry briars.

“Jesus,” the girl says, “are you simple? Are you crazy? ”

Dancy looks back over her shoulder just in time to see the dragon swoop low above the road; there can be no doubt that it was coming for her.

“You saw that?” she asks, and the girl tugging her deeper into the woods replies, “Yeah, I saw it. Of course I saw it. What were you doing back there? What did you think you were doing?”

And it’s not that Dancy doesn’t have an answer for her, it’s just that there’s something in the scolding, exasperated tone of the girl’s voice that makes her feel foolish, so she doesn’t reply.

“What the sam hill were you doing out there anyway, strolling down the road with a knapsack and a knife? You a hitchhiker or some sort of hobo?”

I’m going home to see my mother.

I’m going home no more to roam.

I’m just a-going over Jordan,

I’m just a-going over home.

The girl has stopped dragging Dancy, but she hasn’t released the death grip on her wrist and is still leading her through the woods. The girl’s short hair is braided close to her scalp in neat cornrows, and her skin, thinks Dancy, is almost the same deep brown as a Hershey bar. Beads of sweat stand out on the girl’s forehead and upper lip; a bead of sweat hangs from the tip of her nose.