Hollister J. Beech had been the sheriff of Carbon County since just before or just after the invention of the wheel. Accounts differed. Beech had no close friends, but a few middle-distance ones, including Emery’s late father. That was how the younger Blackburn knew him well enough to nod hello as the lawman stumped into Buckhorn Jack’s Famous Oyster Bar (famous since 1934 for having no oysters), where Emery had more or less holed up since actual monsters started appearing in the hills around Reunion Creek.
“Did you ask for the Marine Corps when you signed up, Emery, or did Uncle Sam play spin the bottle?” was not what Emery had expected by way of a return greeting.
“I wanted the Marines, Sheriff.”
“About what I thought.” Beech was a wind-chiseled sort, all creases and squints under enough hat for any three men, and he leaned against a post while he fixed Emery with a measuring look. “Means you’re a certain sort of brave and a certain sort of foolish, and I’m in the market for both qualities. Heard you got shot, too. Bad?”
“My legs.” Emery half consciously ran a thumb along one seam of his trousers, feeling for the hole that was no longer there under the fabric. “Bad enough at the time, sir, but I guess I’m spry these days.”
“Catchin’ lead tends to make a man cautious, in my experience. The right sort of cautious. Those shotgun pellets I took in ‘28 did more to smarten me up than most of the books I ever read. Look, Emery, what I’m gettin’ at, why I came down from Rawlins is—do you think you’d object to having a gun in your hands again? You got, y’know, any issues?”
“Uh, just magazines, sir.” Emery coughed and sat up straight. “Sorry, Sheriff. That was a dumb-ass joke. What I mean is, I think I’m okay, and what are we even talking about here?”
“Lots of trouble comin’, Emery. Big mess to clean up. Federals are gonna be in on it, army, state police, everybody. But I ain’t goin’ anywhere. Got a remit for another special deputy or two.” Beech jerked a finger at the window, and Emery saw that he’d come to town with something like a convoy, a couple of sedans and a Jeep. Five men milled around, smoking, rifles slung at their shoulders. “Monsters in the woods, by God. We’ll handle it same as coyotes or horse thieves. Take the calls. Do the business. Fill out the paperwork and bill the county.”
“You want . . . you’re offering me a job as a deputy?”
“That’s right. On behalf of the good people of Carbon County, I’m lookin’ for another buddin’ Saint George. You’re young, you’re trained to take orders and handle firearms, and I know you ain’t married. No offense. But what we gotta do will be hard and weird and dangerous.” Beech grinned and tipped his hat. “If it’s any consolation, the pay will also be terrible and your boss will be a duplicitous sweet-talker who delights in passin’ the aforementioned paperwork off on everyone else. Now, you got a ‘Semper Fi’ left in you, son?”
Emery didn’t know what to say. He wasn’t exactly thirsting for adventure. If he’d ever had anything to prove, he felt he’d already proved it on landing beaches and in hospital beds, beyond anyone’s right to question, until the end of his days. In later years, after much thought, he would finally conclude that it was just nice to be wanted, to be invited, to have someone come along and say “You’re the man for the job,” even if one of his qualifications was that he wouldn’t leave a widow if something bit his head off. He nodded.
“Good show. Hop up outta that chair and ride with us. We’ll get you sworn in.” Beech gave his suspenders a tug that had the air of old ceremony and started for the door. “Then we’ll get some coffee and sandwiches, and go dragon hunting.”
Two days later, Emery shot his first dragon. He wasn’t the only one.
The missing persons report came in overnight, so they left Rawlins at the red crack of dawn, tires grinding up veils of alkaline dust on US 30. They passed a checkpoint, olive-drab Deuce and a Half trucks parked in a row, National Guardsmen filling sandbags and manning heavy weapons. Emery spotted a quad-mount machine gun and a pair of 37mm anti-tank guns, their crews staring out into the lightening haze. Unless Emery missed his guess, they were equal parts bored and confused and terrified. Nothing had attacked any of the actual towns in Carbon County yet, not that he’d heard, and that was both a blessing and a complication. Until one of the creatures from the hills and forests actually showed itself, the mere idea of a dragon would steadily enlarge itself in the idle imaginations of those men. It would be thirty feet tall, then forty, then eighty, and then they’d all flip their brains like omelets and soak their pants the first time a sage-grouse squawked at them from a bush. PFC Blackburn had been there, brother.
Emery saw straightaway that Sheriff Beech’s plan to roam with a posse of special deputies was forward thinking. The National Guard and the ad hoc local militias were camping, setting up perimeters, guarding towns and mines and railroads, and that was a dandy public service, but there was no clear command authority yet, no center of communications, and in a place as big and barren as Carbon County, there were too few resources for too many chores. The National Guard wasn’t going to send tanks out to investigate every phone call from an old-timer who heard a noise down by some creek, nor were they going to handle routine incidents like drunks or auto collisions. Beech intended to go about his usual business, and just by coincidence bring along enough firepower to tackle anything with claws and scales that poked its nose out along the way.
Elk Mountain loomed on the southern horizon as they drove out. Two hours later, they were on its northeastern side, on foot, a few hundred yards up from the old Steadman ranch, which had contained people until sometime the previous day. Two upper-story windows were smashed, plus a doghouse and a ramshackle livestock pen had been busted up, leaving smears of blood along with the splintered wood. There were no useful tracks, just a report of something big moving upslope, and so they set to walking.
They were seven men spread out in a line, gingerly pacing their way up a tree-bounded draw, smoking and joking and pretending they all felt just fine. The sun stroked Emery’s shoulders with increasing heat, like a painter dabbing on layer after warm layer, but the wind blowing down from the mountain’s white-dusted peaks was cold, too cold. He didn’t like it. The strange but familiar bulk of an M1 Garand rifle was tucked against his right ribs in an underarm hang, and three spare clips clinked gently in a pouch at his left hip. Puffs of gray dust swirled up waist-high in time with the winds, then blew down past them, like ghosts fleeing the scene. There were no bighorns, no deer, no birds, nor even any bird noises, and as they ascended, the jokes thinned out into silence.
Sheriff Beech had the middle of the line and a fine pair of binoculars, but it was Kinnock Iron Cloud who first pointed at the tree line and drew their eyes to the thing watching them from it. He used a concise and traditional call to tactical alertness: “Jesus H. Coal-Mining Christ, look at that shit!”
It moved immediately into full daylight, gleaming, sinuous, pebble-gray, with mottled black stripes like a tiger’s. Horned and crested, it had a serpentine wedge of a head and limbs like something out of a magazine article on dinosaurs Emery had read years before. Its wings were folded tight; its body was lean, probably twenty-five feet from nostrils to tail, and the golden eyes that fixed on them had an eerie power even at a distance of ninety yards.