“Oh, hell,” said Beech. “Don’t even bother with the head, boys! Damn thing’s the size of an elephant. Break it down, legs and joints.”
Heart pounding, Emery knelt, brought up the Garand he’d zeroed just the day before, and laid his sights on a myth. Then the myth started to move, and showed the nest of knives it had for teeth. The rifle was a cold hard habit that kept Emery’s mind from wandering, and so as volley after volley of smoke and noise rose around him, he squeezed off his first eight, slow and on the mark, then moved to reload while the spent clip was still in the air. Eight, steady. Reload. Eight again.
The dragon made it forty yards. Once they had all recovered themselves and stopped dancing around like adrenalized, temporarily deafened chickens, they counted a total of ninety-seven rounds expended from their collection of Garands and hunting rifles.
“God Almighty,” yelled the sheriff as he surveyed the corpse. The blood was steaming where it touched the ground, fuming up like something in a laboratory, and the air smelled like metal. “I gotta get a photographer out here. Look at this mess. Look at how lucky we were! We’re gonna need big-game pieces. Elephant guns.”
“You’re gonna need stretchers and blankets,” said Iron Cloud, returning from a brief examination of the trees from which the dragon had emerged.
Emery got just close enough to see what he’d found. Sheep, mostly, still as stuffed animals. Behind that, a pair of booted feet could be seen. A woman’s feet, sticking out from under a torn plaid skirt. The rest of her was in assorted places nearby.
That was Emery’s first. After that, his hands would never be empty long enough for a rifle to start feeling unfamiliar.
So it was war again, basically, across Wyoming and the world. The first black storms scattered dragons from Iceland to New Guinea, from Germany to Poughkeepsie, and after a few weeks of fighting, there came a fresh wave of storms to deliver more of the hungry things. Like Emery, people adjusted, refined their solutions, studied their opponents, and mostly pointed bigger guns at them.
There was no explanation, not that scientists could ever pry out of the creatures. No mysterious comet, no wave of flying saucers, no gateway to the center of the earth that had suddenly been flung open. Museums of natural history filled up with fresh dragon bones, and all the comparative anatomists swore by their microscopes that the dragons were carbon-based, warm-blooded, oxygen-breathing reptilians with no connection to any known fossil record from our planet.
“Reckon I know where they came from,” said Darius Barlow, oldest of Beech’s special deputies. They were all gathered at the county offices one quiet night in late ‘47, enjoying one of the occasional closed-door cribbage games they all agreed never happened at the county offices. “Reckon it was your goddamn people.”
Sitting directly across from him, Kinnock Iron Cloud, half Arapaho, let the corners of his mouth pull apart in that plausible approximation of a smile reserved for the placation of big-talk jackasses.
“You know what I mean,” continued Barlow. “Could be doing anything up there on the reservation. Could be calling this shit, dancing it up, making a deal with all those things.”
“Hey now, Dare, that’s bonkers,” said Otho Sullivan.
“You know what’s bonkers? Dragons are shittin’ bonkers!” Barlow slapped the table. “They’re real, so what else might be real, huh? Why not magic? You got cousins putting these things out there in the world, Iron Cloud? You all laughing at us behind our backs, pulling down county money while the dragons get your revenge for you?”
“It’s got nothing to do with us,” said Iron Cloud, more calmly that Emery would have thought possible. “I can prove it. Plain and simple logic.”
“Can you, now?” said Barlow.
“If my people, by which I will generously assume you mean the Arapaho and not the fuckin’ Anglo-Dutch, had the power to call up a bunch of dragons and make a deal to bring the white man’s business to a screeching halt, why the hell wait? We would’ve done it eighty years ago, dumbass.”
Tense silence held for a few seconds, and then Barlow barked a laugh.
“Ah, shit,” he said. “You may have me there.”
“All you suckers would work for me now, assuming you could speak a civilized language. If you couldn’t, I’d stick your asses on a tiny reservation. In Maine.” Iron Cloud casually set down one of his cards. “That makes the count fifteen, two points for me. Moving that peg on the board is as far as my revenge goes, gentlemen. When it comes to dragons, we’re all in it together.”
That was a fine sentiment, not entirely supported by the facts of the case.
Existing human wars ground to a halt, but new ones started up, all thanks to the black storms, which became a near-monthly recurrence, with their fresh cargoes of monsters. News from around the world was bewildering.
On the radio, Emery heard some Soviet minister or another proclaiming that “the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics has no dragon problem,” which struck him as the clearest possible indication they were up to their collarbones in claws and scales, same as everyone else.
In places like Chicago and New York City and Washington, D.C., the war against the dragons was absolute, and absolutely surgical. Neighborhoods were quartered and re-quartered every week, parklands scoured, thick walls manned day and night. In less populated areas, the war was waged with a more flexible vigor. In New Mexico, atomic weapons tests were conducted against nesting concentrations of dragons. In Wyoming and Montana, Army Air Force planes used napalm and rockets to support people like Emery, whose involvement was more cost-effective for their own side and more sporting for the other.
Dragons couldn’t actually fly, thank God, but the ones with wings could do an impressive sort of hop and glide, which was how that first one had ravaged the Steadman place without leaving a mess of tracks. Nor could they breathe fire, but there were reports that some of them were venomous, which Emery judged a darkly comical cherry on top of the carnivorous sundae. The smallest dragon he encountered in his first three years as a special deputy was sixteen feet long, and even it had jaws like a hydraulic press. If a critter like that chomped you in half like a county fair hot dog, the hell did it need to poison you for, too?
Emery and his colleagues responded with whatever they could cadge from sympathetic National Guard noncoms, federal grants, and even the occasional unguarded supply truck or Quonset hut. The Carbon County special deputies hit the field with BARs, light machine guns, and sport rifles chambered up for the .458 Winchester Lancelot, purpose-designed for dragon control. For a while they even had a bazooka, which notched up a steady stream of kills and was stored in an unlocked shack, on the honor system. That worked surprisingly well, until the spring of ‘51, when Darius Barlow got it into his head that the postmaster of Medicine Bow was fooling around with his wife during Barlow’s extended absences on department business. That postmaster’s 1940 Buick Super, fortunately uninhabited, took a high-explosive rocket through the trunk. Barlow was all but horsewhipped out of his job by old Beech, but this didn’t prevent a stony-faced National Guard colonel from taking their bazooka away like a disappointed father shitcanning a BB gun.
Procedures evolved, manuals were written, and even if what they all achieved (the army, the guard, the Wyoming Highway Patrol, the local sheriffs and their increasingly permanent “special deputies”) was more of a weird, bloody equilibrium than anything resembling the old normalcy, well, at least they were keeping busy. The official radio parlance for a dragon became “CZ,” Charlie Zebra, which stood for “crypto-zoological.” Internally, the sheriff’s department took to calling them “Fox Delta incidents,” with the “Delta” meaning dragon and the “Fox” standing for exactly what you’d imagine it to stand for.