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

DANCY FLAMMARION SITS out the storm in the ruins of a Western Railway of Alabama boxcar, hauled years and years ago off rusting steel rails and summarily left for dead. Left for kudzu vines and possums, copperheads and wandering albino girls looking for shelter against sudden summer rains, shelter from thunder and lightning and wind. It’s sweltering inside the boxcar, despite the downpour, and, indeed, she imagines it might be hotter now than before the rain began. That happens sometimes, in the long Dog Day South Alabama broil. The floor of the boxcar is covered in dead kudzu leaves and rotting plywood, except a few places where she can see the metal floor rusted straight through. The rain against the roof sizzles loudly, singing like frying meat; she sits with her back to one wall, gazing out the open sliding doors at the sheeting rain.

Dancy fishes a can of Libby’s Vienna sausages from her duffel bag, a few mouthfuls of protein shoplifted from a Piggly Wiggly on the outskirts of Enterprise, three days back the way she’s come. She pops the lid and drinks the salty, oily juice before digging the pasty little sausages out with her fingers. Dancy hates Vienna sausages, but beggars can’t be choosers, that’s what her grandmother always said. Neither can thieves, she thinks. Thieves can’t be choosers, either.

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.

“I’m not a hobo,” Dancy says. “I don’t hitchhike, either. And it’s not a knapsack, it’s a duffel bag. It was my great grandfather’s duffel bag, when he fought in World War II. He fought the Germans in the Argonne Forest in 1918, and this was his duffle bag.”

They’ve come to a small clearing near a stream, a place where the trees and vines have left enough room for the sun to reach the ground. Dancy asks the girl to please let go of her, and the girl does. Once again, Dancy looks back towards the road and the dragon. There’s a mounting sense that all of this is wrong, that she hasn’t done what she was meant to do back there. She doesn’t run from the monsters; she doesn’t ever run.

The air here is hot and still. It smells like pine sap and cicadas. The air here smells hot, and Dancy imagines that, rain or no rain, one careless match would be enough to set the world on fire. She drops her heavy duffel bag onto the ground, slips the knife back into her waistband, and looks about her. “Who are you, anyway?” she asks the girl.

“Who are you?”

“I asked first,” Dancy replies.

The girl who dragged her into the forest, away from the boomerangheaded dragon, shrugs, and alright, she says, whatever. “My name’s Jezzie, Jezzie Lilligraven.”

“Jessie?”

“No, Jezzie,” says the girl. “With z’s. It’s short for Jezebel.”

Dancy turns her attention back to the clearing. There’s a big wooden packing crate near the center, and a door and window has been cut into the side facing her. The wood is emblazoned with MAYTAG, and THIS END UP, and a red arrow pointing heavenward. There’s a piece of pale blue calico cloth tacked over the window and there’s a door made from corrugated tin. There aren’t any hinges; it’s just propped in place.

“That’s sort of an odd name,” Dancy says, glancing up at the sky, because the dragon might have followed them. “Who’d name their daughter after Jezebel? She was an evil woman who worshipped Baal and persecuted the prophets of God and his people. She was thrown from a window and fed to wild dogs by Jehu for her sins. Who would name their daughter after someone like that?”

The girl stares at Dancy a moment, rolls her eyes, then heads for the wooden packing crate.

“Yeah, so what’s your name, Little Miss Sunshine, and, by the way, you’re very welcome.”

“Dancy. My name is Dancy Flammarion. And very welcome for what?”

The girl lifts the corrugated tin and sets it aside, leaning it against the outer wall of the crate. Dancy thinks it looks cool in there, within the arms of those shadows.

“Dancy Flammarion? That’s your name?”

“Yeah. So?”

The girl shakes her head and steps into the packing crate, vanishing from view. Dancy can still hear her, though.

“Just, with a name like that, I wouldn’t be ragging on anyone else’s. Ever heard of throwing rocks in glass houses?”

“It’s a town up in Greene County,” Dancy says. “My grandmother was born in Dancy, so my mother named me Dancy.”

“You gonna stand out there or what?” the girl says from inside the packing crate.

“Well, you haven’t invited me in.”

There’s a pause, and then, with an exaggerated politeness, the girl says “Dancy Flammarion, would you like to come inside?”

“Yeah,” Dancy says, checking the sky one last time.

It isn’t as cool inside the crate as she’d hoped, but it’s cooler than it had been inside the abandoned Western Railway of Alabama boxcar. There’s a threadbare rug covering the floor, a rug the color of green apples; there’s a cot set up at one end of the crate and a folding aluminum card table at the other. There’s a blue blanket at the foot bed, neatly folded, and a pillow. Books are stacked under the cot and along the walls. On the table, there’s a box of graham crackers and another box of chocolate moon pies. There are also two cans of pork and beans. Beneath the table is a styrofoam cooler and a plastic jug of water.

“You live here?” Dancy asks, eyeing the water jug, aware now just how parched her mouth and throat is.

“No,” the girl replies. “I’m not a hobo. I live down on Parish Road, close to Fort Rucker. That’s an Army base.”

“I’m not a hobo. I done told you that already.”

“Says you. You’re the one out hitchhiking with a knapsack.”

Dancy frowns and looks around the crate again.

“All these books yours?”

“Yeah,” the girl says. “They were my granddad’s, and now they’re mine. My daddy was gonna throw ’em all out, but I saved them. You can have a seat on the cot there, if your britches ain’t too wet and if they ain’t muddy.”

Dancy pats the butt of her jeans, decides they probably are too damp to be sitting on anyone’s bed, and so she settles for a place on the rug, instead.

“It’s nice in here,” Dancy says.

“Thank you,” says Jezzie Lilligraven. “This is where I come to be alone and think, to get away from my brothers and just be by myself.”

“Well, it’s nice,” Dancy says again. Then she notices something else on the floor, something else spaced out here and there along the walls of the packing crate, between the stacks of books – there are pint Mason jars and big two and three big quart jars that might once have held dill pickles or pickled eggs or pickled pig’s feet, but now they’re filled with clear liquid and dead things. Dancy looks at Jezzie and then back at the jars. The one nearest Dancy has a big king snake, black coils and links of cream-colored scales, and the one next to it holds a baby alligator.

“That’s my herpetology collection,” Jezzie says, before Dancy has a chance to ask, and then the girl picks up a yellow and pink waffle-weave dishrag and wipes the sweat off her face.

Dancy looks up at her. “Your what?” she asks.

“It’s the study of reptiles and amphibians. Herpetology.”

“You keep dead things in jars?”

“So I can study them. I caught them myself, and I used rubbing alcohol to preserve them. It ain’t so good as formalin, but where am I gonna get that?”

Dancy rubs at her eyes, which feel at least as dry as her throat.

“You want something to drink?” Jezzie asks, like maybe the girl can read her mind. “I got water, and I got water. But it’s good sweet water, right from our well.”

“Yes, please,” Dancy replies, and Jezzie opens the plastic jug and fills a jelly glass halfway full.

“Now, don’t drink it too fast,” she says. “You’ll get cramps. You might throw up, if you drink it too fast.”

You think I don’t know not to gulp water when I’m this hot and thirsty? she wants to say. You think I don’t know no better? But she keeps the thoughts to herself and sips the water in the jelly glass.

“I like to think one day I’m gonna go away to college,” Jezzie tells her. “I won’t, cause we don’t have the money, and my grades ain’t good enough for no scholarship. But I like to think it, anyway. I have my granddad’s books – like you’ve got your great granddad’s knapsack – and I teach myself everything I can. I don’t have to be ignorant, just cause my family can’t afford college. I might just wind up working at the Wal-Mart or my auntie’s BBQ place, but I don’t have to be ignorant.”

“Keeping snakes in jars, you think that makes you smart?” Dancy asks, and she leans a little nearer the jar with the king snake. Its dead eyes are a milky white. She sets her glass down, picks up one of the books, and she reads the cover aloud – Prehistoric Life by Percy E. Raymond, Third Printing, Harvard University Press.

See? Dancy thinks. I ain’t ignorant, neither. I can read.

“That’s one of my favorites, that one is,” Jezzie tells her. “It’s kinda outta date, cause it was published in 1950, and we know lots more now. I mean, scientists know lots more. But it’s still one of my favorites. It taught me about evolution and geologic time. My teacher wouldn’t teach that, skipped over that part of the textbook so parents wouldn’t complain about –”

“Evolution?” Dancy asks, flipping through the yellowing pages. There are photographs of fossils and dinosaurs and skeletons. “You believe in that, in evolution?”

Jezzie is silent a moment. She sits down on the floor by the table.

“Yeah,” she says. “Yeah, I do. It’s science. It’s how everything alive –”

“It’s against the Bible,” Dancy interrupts, setting the book back down. “The Book of Genesis tells how the world was made.”

“In six days,” Jezzie says.

“Yes, in six days. And if that book says any different it’s against God and Jesus, and it’s blasphemous.”

Jezzie is frowning and looking at her hands. “You sound like my Daddy and Mama and the parson down at First Testament Baptist. You ever read a book like that? You ever read about Charles Darwin and natural selection? You know about Mendel and genetics?”

Dancy puts the book down and picks up her glass again. She takes another swallow, wishing the water were at least a little bit cooler.

“No. I don’t read books that go against God.”

“What you’ve got is a closed mind, Dancy Flammarion. You think you know what’s what, and so you won’t let nothin’ else in.”

“I know I didn’t come from no dirty ol’ monkey,” Dancy mutters.

“Oh, but it don’t bother you to think you came from a fistful of mud?”

Outside, the cicadas have begun singing, and it sounds to Dancy like the trees are in pain, the bugs giving voice to the aching of bark and loblolly pine needles.

Jezzie says, “And you probably think the whole wide world is only ten thousand years old. I bet that’s what you think.”

“No, I don’t know how old the world is, Jezebel” – and Dancy says her name like it’s an accusation – “but I know how long it took to make it.”

Jezzie sighs and shakes her head. “That’s just a sad thing, someone with a mind that ain’t got no room for anythin’ but what some preacher says.”

“This water ain’t sweet,” Dancy says, after she’s emptied the glass. “It’s warm, and it tastes like that plastic jug.”

Jezzie reaches over and takes the glass from Dancy. “Closed minded and ungrateful,” she sighs. “You don’t look like someone in a position to be picky about the water she’s drinking.”

“I ain’t ungrateful. But you said –”

“You want more, or is my water not good enough for a close-mind, Biblethumpin’, holy-roller hobo?”

“I’m fine, thank you,” Dancy says, though she isn’t. She could easily drink another half glass of the water. But the girl’s right. It was ungrateful, saying what she did, and she’s too ashamed to ask for more.

I shouldn’t even be here. I should be out there on the road. I don’t run. I don’t get to run.

“That thing in the sky, you seen that before?” Dancy asks.

Jezzie nods and pours more water into the glass, even though Dancy hasn’t asked for it. She sets the glass down on the rug, take it or leave it, and then she looks up at the ceiling of the packing crate.

“Yeah,” Jezzie answers, “I’ve seen it lots. People around here been seein’ it on and off since I was little. They call it a thunderbird, and a demon, but that ain’t what it is.”

“It’s a dragon,” Dancy says.

Jezzie laughs and shakes her head again. “It ain’t no damn dragon, girl. There’s no such thing as dragons.”

Dancy feels her face flush, and she wants to get up and walk out, leave this heathen girl alone with her dead snakes and Godless books. Instead, she picks up the glass and takes another sip. Instead, she asks, “Then what is it, if it ain’t no dragon? You’re so smart, Jezebel, you tell me what I saw out there.”

“Long time ago,” Jezzie says, finally taking her eyes off the ceiling of the crate. “Back about seventy million years ago –”

“The world ain’t nearly that old,” Dancy says.

“– all these parts round here were covered over by a shallow tropical ocean, like the sea down around the Florida Keys. And there were strange animals in the ocean back then, animals that went extinct, and if we were to see them today, we’d call them sea monsters – the mosasaurs, plesiosaurs, giant turtles. And in the sky –”

“But,” Dancy interrupts, “when the Flood came, Noah’s Flood, everything was under water, the whole world, for forty days and forty nights.”

“Dancy, you want to hear my answer, or you want to talk?” Jezzie asks and crosses her arms. “You asked me a question, and now I’m tryin’ to answer it.”

Dancy just shrugs and takes another sip of water. After a moment or two, Jezzie continues.

“That was during what’s called the Cretaceous Period,” she says, “because of how these shallow seas laid down layers of chalk. In Latin, chalk is creta.”

Sweat rolls down Dancy’s forehead and into the corner of her left eye. It stings.

“I asked you about the dragon,” she says, squinting, “not for a Latin lesson. And chalk doesn’t come from the sea.”

“Have you ever even seen the inside of schoolhouse?”

Dancy rubs her eye, then stops and stares at Jezzie. The girl’s glaring back at her. She has the look of someone whose accustomed to being patient, the look of someone who frequently suffers fools, even though she isn’t very good at it. It’s a very adult look, and it makes Dancy wish she’d never stepped inside the packing crate.

“In the sky,” Jezzie says again, “there were animals called pterosaurs, huge flying reptiles, and if you were to run into one today – which you did – yeah, you’d likely call it a dragon.” Then she takes the copy of Prehistoric Life, opens it, and thumbs through the pages. She quickly finds what she’s looking for, then turns the book around so Dancy cans see, too. On Page 169, there’s a drawing of a skeleton, the skeleton of a boomerang-headed monster. The skeleton of Dancy’s dragon.

“I’m not in any sorta mood to sit here and argue about scripture and science with you, Dancy Flammarion. But you asked a question, and I answered it as best I can.”

Dancy takes the book from her and sits studying the drawing.

“‘Skeleton of Puhteranodon,’” she reads.

“No. You don’t say the ‘P,’” Jezzie tells her. “The ‘P’ is silent.”

Sweat drips from Dancy’s bangs and spatters the page. “How?” she asks.

“How what?”

“How if these things were around so long ago, and they ain’t around anymore, did one try to eat me not even half an hour ago? You know all this stuff, then you explain, Jezebel, how is it that happened?”

“I don’t know,” Jezzie admits. She leans back against the cot and wipes her face with the dishrag again. “I heard some people say it’s the Devil, and that he’s haunting us cause of wicked things people do. Others say it’s some kind of Indian god the Muskogee Creek used to pray to and make human sacrifices to. The guy runs the Winn-Dixie, he says it came outta a UFO from outer space.”

“But you don’t think any of that’s true.”

Jezzie frowns. She shrugs and takes the book back from Dancy. “No, I don’t suppose I do. It’s all just superstition and tall tales, that’s all it is.”

“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.

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.