N. Wilson - The Dragon's Tooth

Horace looked up at Cyrus, and then into Antigone’s eyes. His brow was furrowed. “Unfortunately, the answer to your question is no. Dead is one thing that he certainly is not.”

Cyrus swallowed. His throat had tightened and his serpent necklace felt suddenly heavy. He had nothing to say. He wanted to disbelieve, but he couldn’t — not with everything he had already seen. He looked at his sister, and her dark eyes were worried.

The car surged forward and swooped around an RV. The Archer was visible in the distance. Cyrus leaned against his window. The Golden Lady was on her pole. But she wasn’t golden. She was pale. Dead.

As the car approached, she began to glimmer. The tooth was returning.

“Who are they?” Antigone pointed at the motel. Three men were picking through the rubble. A fourth hopped out of Skelton’s camper.

All four looked up as the big car screamed past. Two of them were tall and identical, pale green in the daylight. The other two were bare-shouldered. Tattooed. One bearded, one bald.

The driver ignored a double yellow line and passed two cars at once. Two minutes later, they were nearing town. And traffic lights. The first one was red.

“Um …” Cyrus sat up.

They shot through it.

Antigone looked around the interior of the car. They slowed slightly for traffic and ran the next light. She grabbed her brother and tugged him back in his seat. “Buckle, Cy. We’re in trouble.”

There weren’t any seat belts.

The car accelerated and skimmed past a police car, nearly clipping its side mirror. Cyrus and Antigone wheeled around, watching the patrol car flick on its lights and then quickly miniaturize behind them. They were already through the small town. Fields and highway stretched ahead.

Horace cleared his throat. “Please don’t worry yourselves. This car is a thing of beauty. She came off the line in 1938 and track-tested above three hundred feet per second. They won’t catch up to us. Gunner up there isn’t even pushing her yet, are you, Gunn?”

Cyrus turned back around, watching the tall driver’s hands on the wheel. Something slammed into the roof above him.

A hole appeared in the leather ceiling and tiny feathers snowed down from the upholstery. Another. And another. Like hammer blows. Like piercing hail. Lead hail.

The car swerved. Glass shattered. Bullets rained down.

John Horace Lawney jerked and fell to his side.

The car jumped off the road, roared down a bank, and sent a wire fence sprouting into the sky. Cyrus bounced against the ceiling and grabbed at the door. Antigone rattled on the floor with Horace.

“Hang on!” Gunner yelled, and he cranked the wheel. The car twisted sideways, sailing at airplane speeds through a pasture of sun-browned grass. Seed heads lashed and whistled at the doors, and a cloud of dust and chaff and splattered plant rose up around them.

On his knees, Cyrus stared out his window. Bellowing cows were running, cows that hadn’t been meant to run, two-ton milk jugs, spotted black and white. One of them froze, panicked, unable to choose a route.

Cyrus braced himself, but the car swung in time, slamming his face against the glass. Antigone and a bleeding Horace tumbled up beside him.

Another fence flipped up the hood and off the roof, and they were heading downhill, past a barn, sliding by a farmhouse, through someone’s garden and beneath a tree, thumping an ancient tire swing into orbit, jumping a ditch, and fishtailing onto a gravel road.

“Everyone okay?” Gunner glanced in his mirror. “We all alive?”

“No!” Antigone was stretching the lawyer onto his back between the seats. “Stop! Horace got hit in the shoulder, right by his neck.”

“Can’t stop.” Gunner shook his head. “He breathing?”

“I think so!” Antigone yelled. She leaned her ear down to Horace’s mouth as he coughed, misting her cheek with blood.

“Get some pressure on the wound!” Gunner yelled. “Cyrus, get your window down and squeeze on out. I need your eyes on the sky the next couple miles. And hang on! I don’t want to lose you!”

Cyrus cranked his window down and immediately went deaf with the roar and rattle of gravel and wind. The driver lobbed back a pair of goggles.

“Pull ’em tight!” he yelled. “Tight!”

Antigone, white-faced, was crouched on the floor, pressing a wadded-up suit coat against the little man’s shoulder. Looking into his sister’s terrified eyes, Cyrus took a breath, pulled down his goggles, and fished himself out the window and into a hurricane.

Gripping the inside of the car, Cyrus eased his rear up onto the door, and his chin rose above the roof. The goggles shook, and his nose felt like it might disappear. The roof of the car was pocked with holes, and dust tornadoed on the road behind them. Gradually, gently, Cyrus looked up. At first, with his head shaking in the wind, he could only make out two contrails. And birds. Three of them. Maybe hawks or crows. High and circling.

Too big. Wrong wings. Kites? Hang gliders? The three shapes crossed paths and adjusted, forming a triangle. They were descending, following the car.

Cyrus turned his face forward, into the car’s absurd speed, and the spatter of bugs stung his cheeks. In the distance, Lake Michigan, a smooth plane of perfect blue, stretched to the horizon. Beside it, the buildings of Milwaukee were clustered like a collection of models.

A minute later, gasping and wiping his face, Cyrus told the driver what he’d seen.

“We have to get to a hospital,” Antigone said. “We have to call the police.”

“We have to change routes,” said the driver. “No more front gate for us. They’ll be waiting. It’ll push our time, but you can make it. And don’t you worry about Johnny Horace. Not just yet. He’s taken worse. He doesn’t know how to die.” The car accelerated even more. “Let’s see how fast the old girl can run.”

Cyrus and Antigone bounced on the floor of the car, popping like corn around the unconscious lawyer, taking turns pressing down on the man’s bloody shoulder until Antigone began to be sick and Cyrus pushed her away.

“C’mon, Horace,” he muttered, leaning all of his weight against the wound. But the car still bounced, and his hands bounced with it, releasing pressure. He had never seen so much blood; he’d never felt so much of it run between his fingers, fingers that were beginning to stick together with the clotting.

“His face,” Antigone said behind him. She was breathing hard. “It’s white. He’s going to die, Cyrus.”

“No.” Cyrus wedged his legs against the door and pushed down harder through the bouncing.

Eventually, the car found asphalt, but the turns were no longer smooth, and Cyrus had to fight to keep from being thrown into his sister or against the doors.

Traffic grew, and soon, the car slowed. Buildings began to dance past the windows.

The turns grew harder. Full lefts and full rights. Squealing U-turns.

Antigone’s face was gray and damp. Cyrus’s arms were shaking as he adjusted the bloody ball of Horace’s suit coat against the little man’s neck. The flow had almost stopped. Might not be any more blood to bleed.

The car squealed to a stop beside a Dumpster. Gunner jumped out and jerked open the rear door.

“C’mon!” He grabbed Antigone’s arms and pulled her out. Then he grabbed Horace by the ankles and dragged him through the door until he was sitting in a scum puddle on the asphalt.

Cyrus stepped out of the car and looked around. They were in a narrow, foul-smelling alley, but on top of the foul smell, blowing out of a big silver vent in the brick wall beside the Dumpster, he could smell pizza.

The driver scooped Horace up off the ground and staggered toward the alley mouth, his shoes clicking as he went.