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

“So...?”

“You askin’ me what I believe instead? I thought the stuff I believe is against God, and you don’t want to hear my blasphemin’ nonsense.”

“It’s really hot in here,” Dancy says, changing the subject. “I sat out the thunderstorm this morning in an old railroad car, and this place might even be as hot as that.”

“You get used to it. Where you from, anyway?”

Dancy glances out the bright rectangular space leading back to the August day.

“Down near Milligan, Florida,” she says, “Place called Shrove Wood. It’s in Okaloosa County. You won’t have heard of it. No one’s heard of Shrove Wood. But that’s where I grew up, near Wampee Creek.”

“You get homesick?”

Now it’s Dancy’s turn to shrug. The cicadas are so loud she imagines that sound shattering the sky, and she imagines, too, the chunks of sky falling down and bleeding blue all over the earth. She thinks about the cabin off Elenore Road that she shared with her grandmother and mother, until the fire. The house where she was born and raised.

“Sometimes I do,” she says.

“What you doin’ out here on the road, then? Why ain’t you back home with your people? You a runway?”

And Dancy almost tells her about the seraph, almost says, My angel, that’s why. She almost tells the girl about the monsters, all the monsters before the dragon and all the monsters still to come, if the seraph is to be believed, and who in their right mind’s gonna say an angel’s a liar? She’s pretty sure even Jezebel wouldn’t say that. She might be a heathen who’s been led astray from the Word of God by evil books, but Dancy doesn’t think she’s crazy.

“I ain’t no runaway. I didn’t have nothin’ to run away from.”

Which, she knows, isn’t exactly true.

“So, where you headed?”

Dancy doesn’t answer that. Instead, she asks, “If you don’t think all those other people are right about what the dragon is, and you think it’s one of them pterosaurs, then you must have an opinion about how it’s here.”

Jezzie fidgets with the laces of her sneakers.

“I got this notion,” she says, “but it doesn’t make much sense. I mean, I don’t think it’s very scientific. I try to be scientific, when I believe something.”

The cicadas are so loud, Dancy wants to cover her ears.

“Okay, so,” Jezzie says, the book in her lap, the waffle-weave dishrag on the rug next to her, “I’ll tell you what I think. But we ain’t gonna argue about it. I ain’t asking you to believe any of it. I know you won’t, but if I tell you, you don’t get to tell me I’m goin’ to Hell just for thinking it.”

“You don’t even believe in Hell.”

“You don’t know that, Dancy Flammarion. You don’t know me.”

“Fine,” Dancy mutters and takes her eyes off the open door. Orange-white after images dance like ghosts about the inside of the packing crate.

“At the end of the Cretaceous Period, something really bad happened. An asteroid – which is like a meteorite, only a lot bigger – it smashed into the Earth, came down right in the Gulf of Mexico, not even so far from here. And it was a gigantic asteroid, maybe big as New York City –”

“You ever been to New York City?”

“No, but that ain’t the point. This asteroid was enormous, and when it hit, the energy released by the explosion was something like two million times more than the largest atomic bomb ever built. You just think of that much energy. You can’t even, not really. But it almost wiped out everything alive, killed off all those sea monsters and the dinosaurs – and the pterosaurs. And maybe it did something else.”

“Did something else like what?”

“Maybe it was so big an explosion, down there in Yucatan –”

“Where?”

“Yucatan, Mexico.”

“But you just said this happened in the Gulf of Mexico.”

“You know why it’s called the Gulf of Mexico?” Jezzie asks, and Dancy doesn’t know, so she shuts up. “But here’s what I think,” Jezzie goes on. “Maybe that explosion was so big it ripped a hole in time. A wormhole or tesseract. And that’s how the pterosaur gets through. It’s interdimensional or something. It ain’t supposed to be here, and it’s probably confused as all get out, but here it is anyway, because it flew right through that rip in time, maybe at the very instant of the impact, before the blast wave and firestorms and tsunamis got it.

“And, shit, maybe it ain’t nothin’ more than an echo, a ghost.”

For an almost a full minute, neither of them says anything. Finally, Dancy breaks the awkward silence hanging between them.

“You’re really just making all this up,” she says.

Jezzie frowns again. “I warned you it wasn’t very scientific.”

And then the throbbing cicada shriek is pierced by the scream Dancy heard back on the road, the cry of the dragon that Jezzie insists isn’t a dragon at all. Instinctively, Dancy ducks her head and reaches for her knife; she notices that Jezzie ducks, as well. They both sit staring at the ceiling of the packing crate, tense as barbed wire.

“That was right overhead,” Dancy whispers. “Does it do that? Does it follow you back here?”

Jezzie slowly shakes her head. “Never has before.”

It didn’t follow her, Dancy thinks. It followed me.

And then she sees what’s in Jezzie’s right hand, an old Colt revolver like the one her grandmother kept around to shoot rattlesnakes.

“You know how to use that?” Dancy asks her, as Jezzie thumbs back the hammer. And the sound of the hammer locking into place is so loud that Dancy realizes the bugs in the trees have gone quiet.

“Wouldn’t be holding it like this if I didn’t.”

“Well, how about put it away,” Dancy tells her. “I don’t like guns.”

Again, Jezzie shakes her head, and she keeps her finger on the trigger of the cocked revolver.

“You never did answer my question,” she says. “What you doin’ out here, if you ain’t a runaway and you ain’t a hobo?”

The day has grown so still and silent that Dancy thinks she can almost hear the blood flowing through her veins, can almost hear the grubs and earthworms plowing through the soil beneath the crate. She hasn’t yet drawn her knife, but her hand’s still on the handle, the carved antler cool and smooth against her perspiring palm. She’s been meaning to find some leather to wrap around the handle, because sweat and blood make it slippery, but she hasn’t gotten around to it.

“I’m goin’ someplace,” she tells the girl.

“Yeah, and just where might that be, Dancy Flammarion?”

“I don’t know yet,” Dancy replies. She didn’t even have to think about the answer. Unlike most things, it’s simple and true.

“I sorta had a feeling you were gonna say something like that.”

“I guess I’ll know when I get there,” Dancy says. “You reckon that thing’s still out there? You reckon it’s flying around right over our heads?”

“How the hell am I supposed to know?” Jezzie asks and frowns.

“Well, you say you know it ain’t no dragon, so I thought maybe –”

“Then you thought wrong.”

The silence is broken then by the sound of enormous wings, slowly rising and falling, beating at the sky, and both girls hold their breath as the flapping grows farther and farther away, finally fading into the distance.

Softened almost into melody, Dancy thinks, remembering a line from a book her mother once read her about monsters from Mars trying to take over the world. But God sent germs to stop them.

... slain by the putrefactive and disease bacteria against which their systems were unprepared; slain as the red weed was being slain; slain, after all man’s devices had failed, by the humblest things that God, in his wisdom, has put upon this earth.