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

And what’s the pterosaur, if she’s right, but another sort of invader, maybe not from another planet, but from another time, and what’s the difference? Something evil that should have died in the Flood, when God – in his wisdom – wiped so much evil off the face of Creation.

“Thanks for the water,” Dancy says, and she gets to her feet, finally releasing her hold on the handle of the big Bowie knife.

“You ain’t goin’ back out there,” Jezzie says, still whispering. It’s not a question.

“You said it ain’t never come out here before. That’s cause it’s here for me, Jezebel, not for you. It’s my dragon to fight, not yours.”

“You’re really crazy as a damn betsy bug, you know that?”

All men are mad in some way or the other, and inasmuch as you deal discreetly with your madmen, so deal with God’s madmen...

... so deal with God’s madmen...

Dancy’s mother read her so many books, before the demons finally came for Julia Flammarion, and so many of the books had monsters in them. She sometimes imagines that her mother knew the seraph was coming, so she was preparing her daughter.

“I ain’t lettin’ you go out there,” Jezzie says again, a little louder than before.

“This is what I do, Jezebel,” Dancy replies. “I fight dragons.”

Jezebel very slowly eases her thumb off the hammer, decocking the gun.

“It ain’t a dragon. It’s just an animal.”

“Thank you for the water,” Dancys says again, shouldering her duffel bag.

“If you’ll just wait a few hours, it goes away at night. You could wait here with me, and I could read to you, or I could tell you about the big ol’ alligator snapper I found last summer down at Chatham Bend. Or I could tell you more about the chalk seas. I’ve hardly told you anything about the animals. Did you know, they found a dinosaur up at Selma, back in the 1940s? An actual dinosaur. It was a new kind of duck bill. Then they found another one, related to Tyrannosaurus, at –”

“I’ve already stayed too long,” Dancy says, interrupting her. “You never should have brought me here. All that’s done is put you in danger.”

“Jesus,” Jezzie whispers, staring at the gun in her hands. “You really goin’ out there, ain’t you?”

“Don’t you blaspheme,” Dancy says. “Bad enough you believe all this evolution claptrap, without you gotta also take the Lord’s name in vain.

But, truth be told, all Dancy wants to do is sit in the packing crate with this strange, Godless girl, sipping warm water that tastes like a plastic jug and maybe eating some of those graham crackers and pork and beans. She can’t even remember the last time she had a graham cracker. She remembers how they taste smeared with muscadine and blackberry preserves, and her mouth fills with saliva.

“Then here,” says Jezzie, “you take this,” and she offers Dancy the water jug. Dancy doesn’t turn it down. She almost asks for some of the crackers, too, but that would be rude, asking more when you’ve just been given such a gift. “You won’t need it?” she asks.

“Nah, it ain’t that far back home. And here,” says Jezzie, “you take this, too. You need it more’n me.” And she holds the revolver out to Dancy. The barrel and the cylinder glint faintly in the dim light inside the packing crate.

“How old is that thing anyway?” Dancy asks. “Looks like it could’a been used in the Civil War, it looks so old. Gun that old, it’s liable to blow up in your hands.”

Jezzie shrugs. “I don’t know,” she says. “It was my uncle’s. But I don’t know how old it is. But here, you take it. It’s loaded. Six shots, but I ain’t got no extra bullets.”

“I don’t like guns,” Dancy says again. “You keep it. I got my knife.”

And ain’t that how you slay dragons, with sharp blades? Ain’t my knife as good as any sword ever was?

“Dancy, if you’ll just wait until nightfall –”

“Thank you for the water,” Dancy says for the third time. “That’s what I most need, it’s so hot today.”

“What you most need is some goddamn common sense.”

Dancy almost tells her, again, not to take the Lord’s name in vain, but what’s the point. Ain’t no saving this girl, seduced as she is by atheists and evolutionists.

Just be wasting my breath, that’s all.

“It was nice meeting you, Jezebel Lilligraven,” Dancy says, even if she’s not quite sure that’s true.

“Just be careful,” Jezzie says.

And then Dancy steps out into the sunlight, hardly any less bright or scorching than when she stepped inside the crate, at least an hour before. She looks up at the indifferent sky above the clearing, half expecting to see the dragon, but there’s only the white eye of Heaven gazing back down at her. It can’t be later than three o’clock, she thinks. Still hours and hours left until dusk.

The cicadas are singing again.

When she reaches the edge of the clearing, she looks back just once, and there’s the girl’s face peering out through a part in the calico curtain. She looks frightened; she waves at Dancy, and Dancy waves back.

I’m never gonna see you again, and I kinda wish that wasn’t true.

She walks back into the short stretch of forest dividing the clearing from the road. The going seems a little more difficult than when Jezzie was dragging her along, pell-mell, and once she gets turned around in a kudzu patch, has to retrace her steps, and find a clearer path. She’s drenched in sweat by the time she reaches the gravel shoulder of the highway, and she opens the jug and takes a long swallow. Then she looks again at the blue, blue sky, all the morning’s thunderheads come and gone. There’s no sign of the dragon, so maybe the girl in the crate was right, and maybe it’s flown away back through a hole in time to a world of serpent haunted seas, before Adam and Eve were driven out and cherubim with flaming swords were placed at the gates of Eden that no man or woman would ever again get in. Maybe that’s how it is.

And maybe that girl named after a whore and an idolater is right about all of it, and maybe you don’t know nothin’ about how things really are.

Dancy pushes the thought away, because self doubt’s as dangerous as books that say people evolved from monkeys and slime. Self doubt’s a distraction that can get her killed. She spares one more glance at the summer sky, and then she starts walking again, following the white center line, which will just have to do as a road map until the angel decides to speak to her again.

SAM J. MILLER(www.samjmiller.com) is a writer and a community organizer. His fiction has appeared in Lightspeed, Asimov’s, Clarkesworld , and The Minnesota Review , among others. He work has been nominated for the Nebula and Theodore Sturgeon Awards, and has won the Shirley Jackson Award. He is a graduate of the Clarion Writer’s Workshop and lives in New York City. His debut novel The Art of Starving is forthcoming from HarperCollins. His story “Ghosts of Home” appears elsewhere in this book.

MY SON’S EYES were broken. Emptied out. Frozen over. None of the joy or gladness were there. None of the tears. Normally I’d return from a job and his face would split down the middle with happiness, seeing me for the first time in three months. Now it stayed flat as ice. His eyes leapt away the instant they met mine. His shoulders were broader and his arms more sturdy, and lone hairs now stood on his upper lip, but his eyes were all I saw.

“Thede,” I said, grabbing him.

He let himself be hugged. His arms hung limply at his sides. My lungs could not fill. My chest tightened from the force of all the never-let-me-go bear hugs he had given me over the course of the past fifteen years, and would never give again.