“Al Rosen, that’s the answer I was looking for, but sure, a death threat is equally compelling. Third point’s yours.”
“Listen well. The sun can never find me, the moon can never hide me, all men give half their lives to me.”
“Ugh,” said Emery. “Sorry. Drawing a blank.”
“You are going into a tree, little Sheriff Emery Blackburn.” The dragon chuckled. “Choose your next question wisely.”
“I already have.” Emery cleared his throat. “My final riddle. The fuck is your problem?”
“What?”
“You heard me: The. Fuck. Is. Your. Problem?”
“Trifling, half-witted little piss-jester! Your life is forfeit. That’s no riddle!”
“I’d say it’s actually the defining conundrum of your existence,” said Emery as he gave a mocking two-fingered salute, which was a prearranged signal for Delia, who was supposed to have been using all the time he could buy her to quietly slip into a good firing position a few hundred yards back.
The trick to head-shotting a draconic target, as when shooting an elephant, was to picture an imaginary line on the forehead directly between the creature’s eye sockets and to place your shot in the middle of that line. Delia favored 450-grain copper-jacketed tungsten carbide armor-piercers, which meant the creature was angry with Emery only for another half second or so before its cares were made irrelevant. A flat crack echoed over the rocks and trees, and Emery had to dash clear as the dragon’s body flopped forward and rolled twenty or thirty yards down the slope, just missing him. Delia came up a few minutes later and joined him beside the steaming corpse.
“You two have a good visit?”
“Well, I found out it wasn’t a baseball fan,” said Emery. “Nice shot.”
“Thanks. Dandy skull on this one. Looking at it now, I think if I’d been a couple inches off to either side, it would’ve just glanced—”
“Think I like you better when you let me pretend you’re infallible, Delia.” Emery’s hands were trembling. He shoved them in his pockets again, told himself it was just a cold wind, but the air around the dragon remained a golden false summer, and it stirred not at all.
They went back the next day, every deputy in tow, to get the bodies of the poor bastards from Muddy Creek, and to haul down the carcass of the riddling dragon, which became a complex matter when they spotted not one but three other Fox Deltas moving about in plain sight at various points in the surrounding valley. Avoiding a tangle with one or more of them would require some interesting driving, as they had been known to take severe offense at the sight of humans handling dragon remains.
“What happened to the tanks?” said Special Deputy Howard Jones. “What happened to the planes, the artillery, the radio network? Why are they just letting this go on?”
“I’ve been asking the same questions,” said Emery. “The phone calls keep getting shorter and shorter.”
‘61 was the year they laid out the first Exclusion Zones, and the fellow from the Department of the Interior who helicoptered in to explain things was as chipper as a whiskey priest with new bottles to hide.
“We’re not sealing these areas off. We’re not putting up fences or any nonsense like that. Waste of taxpayer money. All we’re saying is, if you wander into those areas, or choose to stay there in some sort of unincorporated community, we won’t be providing services, we won’t send anyone after you. You’re on your own.”
Emery stared at the maps spread before him, his deputies, and a dozen other Wyoming sheriffs in the briefing bunker on the outskirts of the fortress-city of Cheyenne. Red lines crosshatched out all the areas within the continental United States in which the state and federal governments were essentially giving up and letting the Charlie Zebra anomalies roam free. Emery saw very little that surprised him. The blue symbols of special security zones enclosed the big cities, the major coal and uranium areas, the suburbs around Minneapolis, the farmlands of Wisconsin and Iowa, plus long straight rail and highway corridors. Everything from Boston to Atlanta was locked up tight. The red zones were all over the west, the empty far north, most of the deserts. Mississippi, northern Louisiana, Georgia, and Alabama looked like they’d had an outbreak of map measles. Emery didn’t need to be told who mostly lived in those places. Reservations were all EZs, too. Wind River Reservation, a few counties to the northwest, was completely blotted out with pay-no-mind lines. Emery wondered if the inhabitants would even be able to tell the difference.
“You haven’t exactly been providing services,” said Emery, with deliberate mildness. “Nor sending anyone out as is.”
“I was speaking in the plural. All civil authorities, from Washington on down. This only makes your job easier, Sheriff! You’re Carbon County, right? The jurisdiction you need to worry about just got forty percent smaller.”
“My budget’s already eighty percent smaller, relative to ten years ago. Any chance it might bounce back into proportion?”
“Aw, Sheriff, come now. Pragmatic decisions must be made. We’ve got a lot of resources, but they’re not infinite.”
“Not out here, they’re not,” said Mac Nimmo, sheriff of Sweetwater County, with a scowl. “You’re amputating, is what you’re doing.”
“Oh, be reasonable,” said the man from DOI, whose dark suit was starting to get even darker under the armpits. “It’s nobody’s fault, but we have to face the facts. The Charlie Zebra situation, it’s an act of God, a sort of parallel ecology, and we can save everyone a lot of time and money and risk by simply not poking at it.”
“Didn’t need to get this bad,” continued Nimmo. “We’ve had years to fight, years to keep their numbers down, but we never had the right tools or support.”
“The situation wasn’t amenable. We couldn’t keep the whole country on a war footing forever!”
“Nope.” Nimmo paused to light a fresh cigarette. “Just the right parts of it.”
“I can’t believe what I’m hearing. I thought you men would be delighted! Where’s that famous spirit of the west, that, uh, rugged individualism?”
“If you’re leaving us such a peach of a situation,” said Emery, “why don’t you stay on out here for a while, get yourself some sort of liaison position? See how we get on with our spirit of the west and our thriving dragon population.”
“Charlie Zebra,” said the federal man.
“Charlie Zebra should be hanging out with Huckleberry Hound, my friend. Those things are dragons! You want to set the nomenclature, get us some goddamn money, some new guns and machine tools, some vehicles that aren’t falling apart!”
“They’re messin’ up the weather,” said Nimmo. “They’re out there howling and moaning to one another, night after night, and it’s doing something. It’s warmer every year, where it oughtn’t be. Growing season lasts longer.”
“Now that’s just a local anomaly, Sheriff. Don’t talk nonsense.” The federal man suddenly seemed very nervous. “We all hate the black storms, of course, but there’s no systemic proof of any lasting meteorological effects since the Charlie . . . dragon incidents began. Just no proof at all. Don’t frighten yourselves or your constituents with that kind of loose talk.”