Emery didn’t mean to lose count of the Fox Deltas he handled, but the work was absorbing and the damn cases just blurred together. Some dragons favored hills and gullies; some of them loved forests. Some of them stole a sheep or two at odd intervals, and some of them tore the walls off family dwellings to get at everyone inside. They all went down if you pulled the right triggers often enough, though, and they all had to be hauled away for special disposal afterward. There was nothing biochemically awry, not that any scientist could ever tell, but dragon flesh and dragon blood simply wouldn’t nourish terrestrial soil. It was almost like a magic curse. Anyhow, there were plenty of old mines and quarries perfect for filling up with rotting Fox Delta detritus, and while the smell was god-awful ghastly discombobulating, it wasn’t like there were many people living near such places to file complaints. In the summer of ‘52, as he was hosing down the steamy, stinking bed of the truck they used for Fox Delta corpses, Emery suddenly realized that it had been weeks since he’d even remembered to keep a tally of dragons killed. So it went.
In ‘53, Dane Burkholder got stepped on by the largest Fox Delta anyone had yet seen in Carbon County, a forty-five footer. Two months later, Otho Sullivan got too close to the foam in a freshly dead specimen’s mouth, and it turned out that what the venom did looked much like a sudden heart attack, from an observer’s perspective. In ‘54, Kinnock Iron Cloud moved his last cribbage peg. He didn’t get his in the field, where his wariness was legend, but in a ravine off US 30, doing twenty miles per hour too fast in the rain. He’d always had a lead foot. In ‘55, Sheriff Beech, hard up for funds and volunteers, brought Miss Delia Sanchez of Dixon on board as the first special deputy in the state to hail from the distaff side of human affairs. She was a flyweight brunette, but the things she did with a bespoke Weatherby dangerous-game rifle put her in the heavyweight class all the way. A week with her on overwatch, drilling neat holes in the foreheads of some very scary scalies, was all it took to shut down foolish teasing indefinitely.
In September ‘56, Hollister J. Beech, gray as campfire ashes, announced that he was unclipping his badge for the last time. He’d wrestled with monsters as well as anyone could, but Emery knew he was tired of late nights and bad dreams and the drinking that never fixed either problem, tired of begging for support from state and federal agencies that seemed ever more inclined to let places like Carbon County fend for themselves like border marches in some medieval adventure story. Emery Blackburn, a certain sort of brave and a certain sort of foolish, had been taking correspondence courses at Beech’s behest for two years. When Beech put out the word that Emery would stand for election as his handpicked successor, that was that, and Emery came first in a field of himself. Sheriff Blackburn it was, just in time for the next phase of the whole mess.
“I don’t understand,” said Emery, his knuckles white on the black Bakelite handset of the phone. It seemed to be his new catchphrase. He was trying it out on all sorts of people, from state legislators to governor’s aides to the smiling federal types who floated through every now and then, dispensing handshakes and good wishes and very little else. Those boys always came in by helicopter, the roads being what they were. “I really don’t understand, sir, how I’m supposed to tell people to stay in their homes when it’s obvious a dragon . . . Yes, sir, yes, I do know that. Ahem. What I mean to say is, when it’s obvious a Charlie Zebra can invite itself in through the wall or the roof anytime it pleases . . . Well, of course they have guns, everybody does these days, but that’s just farting into a high wind unless . . . No, sir, I am not fixing to be disrespectful. I just think that somebody ought to put in a good word for reality every now and . . . hello? Hello? Damn it all to hell!”
“Productive exchange of ideas?” said Delia Sanchez, who was using the spare table in the corner of the sheriff’s office to strip and clean a mesquite-stock bolt-action rifle nearly as big as she was.
“Miracle of modern government.” Emery ran his hands through his bristly hair, which seemed to be perched a touch higher up the front slope these days. “Government invites me to arrange the miracle. I can’t have any more money, because we’re not Laramie or the railroad or the big mines, and I can’t have more heavy ordnance, also because no money, and I can’t have more proper deputies, because no money and no ordnance, so here we are. I get to tell people to try locking their windows and pulling the blinds at night in case a dragon comes by, but when it’s time to fill out the casualty report, I have to be sure to type Charlie Zebra so some sweaty-palmed pin-dick a hundred miles from danger doesn’t get scared reading about it! Aw, I’m sorry, there I go.”
“That’s a dime for the harsh language fund,” said Delia mildly. “Asshole.”
“I’ll put us down for two.” Emery penciled a pair of hash marks on a yellow pad already thick with them. Ready cash being something of an issue, the harsh language fund was conceptual.
Three years now, Emery had been doing a sheriff’s job, and well, but it was no longer just a sheriff’s job. It was two sheriffs’ jobs, maybe three, and all his deputies felt the stretch. The black storms rolled on, and the dragons came with them, and the old way of trying to beat back the strangeness was out of fashion. Road crews were jumpy and needed to work under guard, so the state and county highways deteriorated, people traveled less, and there was sand piling up in the gears of the economy. Local militias helped, sometimes, but the fact was that little towns were going dark. People struck out for the well-defended bigger cities, if they could, and if they were, shall we say, desirable types in the eyes of neighborhood associations. Some people fled to their kinfolk; some left the state. Some hunkered down in place and cut off all contact, until time or dragons did for them.
Emery’s team, and the teams like them all over the sparser parts of the country, could no longer afford to root out every dragon that got reported. Just the really noisy ones, the aggressive types, the confirmed man-eaters. War had become mitigation.
“Sheriff, I got a nasty customer for you.” Claire O’Dell, full-time part-time clerk for basically every department still functioning in the county, came in without a knock and handed Emery a slip of paper. “Up by the Ferris Mountains. Muddy Creek militia tried to roust it.”
“Four dead.” Emery crumpled the report. “Well, that adds a certain sparkle to the morning, doesn’t it?”
“And it’s a talker,” said Claire as she swept back out, toward another phone ringing somewhere. “Yelled all kinds of strange things at the folk that got away.”
“Sweet Lord,” Emery muttered. Sheriff Norbert Tuck up in Laramie County had supposedly dealt with some talking dragons, but Emery had only ever faced the mute and militant kind.
“Ready when you are, Sheriff,” said Delia.
“For what? I don’t want to just sit here and invest more money in the harsh language fund, but the boys won’t be back for another five or six hours.” His other four deputies were out that day dealing with, of all things, a busload of prisoners facing out-of-state extradition. “God dammit, ten cents. This situation sucks, ten cents.”