“Seriously, shut up,” I scolded the chicks, and found my footing. The hillside turned from loam to gravel and back again every few steps, making the going tough, but the fire hen behind me didn’t seem to be having the same problems. “Okay, hold on. We’re going to do this ass first, because if we don’t, your momma’s going to snip my head off.”
I flung myself down the rest of the way, praying gravity would push me down with enough momentum to give me breathing room between the car and the large bird barreling down on me. The fire hen was coming at an angle, so I could see her out of the corner of my eye as she ate up the distance between us, her long ivory legs flying up and down in a blur, talons digging into the ground and kicking up whirlwinds of dust with each loping step. She was a nightmare of a chicken, her elongated bright pink wattle flapping about her stretched-out neck, beak parted so her forked black tongue whipped back and forth as she ran. Unlike other birds, she had teeth—long ones. Probably a throwback to whatever ancient reptilian Underhill creature she descended from, but they were sharp and hooked, perfect for tearing into soft flesh and ripping out chunks to eat.
Much like her furious daughter was doing to my sleeved arm.
I tried to steer my slide as best I could, but my ass took a beating, seemingly finding every bump and rock along the way. The course was short—only a few seconds—but my weight was enough to get me up to a good speed and we flew down the slope, the chickens under my arms ruffling in the faint wind, framed by the floral horrors cupping their chests. The female blasted a short wave of flames along the way—a sputtering spray of embers and sparks—but it was mostly sulfurous gas and outrage. I didn’t check on the male. He seemed content to be along for the ride, unconcerned about his fate and possibly believing he’d somehow gained the power of flight, a trait not shared by any other fire hen or cock in existence.
Not content with screaming at me, their mother stretched her body out, and it bulged, the sunset-hued feathers along her rump and underbelly going bright as she cut in closer. I swerved as best I could to avoid a chunk of lava, but it caught my shoulder, leaving a stinging scrape I would be feeling for a few hours. Glancing back quickly, I had just enough time to add my own screaming to the cacophony, some primal part of my brain believing that if I made enough noise, I could somehow go faster and avoid the inevitable storm heading my way.
Because while fire hens couldn’t fly, they sure as hell could jump up like demented feathered ninja, fold their legs in, aim their asses forward, and blast anything in their path.
Unfortunately, the mother bird was fully engorged with fire and spite, and I was definitely in her fiery ass’s path.
I hit the flats running, feeling the scorch of her blast at my back. The long grasses at my feet erupted into a smoldering fire, slowly catching, then rapidly dying out as the prairie sheaves quickly swelled with excess water to extinguish the flames. The dirt turned dry, its moisture sucked clean, but it was still packed tight enough for me to get a good purchase. Sprinting, I headed for the Nova, shouting for Dempsey to open the passenger-side door for me.
The car’s gasoline–fuel cell hybrid V-8 engine was rumbling, but the door wasn’t opening and I was getting close. The chicks’ mother was still tight on my ass, probably gearing up for another flamethrower attack, but I couldn’t spare her a glance. I needed to get into the car and gone before she reached the road or I’d learn firsthand what it was like to fall victim to her teeth and hooked talons.
“Dempsey! Open the fucking door!” I shouted, sucking in a mouthful of dry air. The chicks under my arms were squirming, and I almost lost the female when my right foot hit a rock hidden in the grasses. The male cheeped at me, thrilled for the little jog, or perhaps it finally dawned on him he was being taken away from his nest. “Momma’s on my ass, old man!”
I was nearly twenty yards from the car when I finally saw Dempsey slumped over the steering wheel, his slack face turned toward me, a blob of pasty gray flesh dotted with silvering stubble and a large red nose. He wasn’t moving, or at least not that I could see.
So I dropped the damned fire hens and pushed every last bit of energy I had in me to get to the car.
I didn’t care about the bounty. Hell, I didn’t even care if the mother fire hen caught me, so long as she let me go long enough to get to the old man. Panic clotted my veins, thickening the air in my lungs and shutting down my brain. Ice crackled through my blood, and I dove through the passenger window and slammed into Dempsey’s limp body.
The glass scraped my belly, and I hit the center console hard, but I struck Dempsey even harder. His chest jerked, and his shoulder slammed into the door, but his open eyes only rolled to their whites and the cutting remark with its accompanying slap never came. His head lolled back and his chest stuttered when I hit him, his tongue swollen and pushing out from between his teeth, a pink mass held back by yellowed ivories stinking of cigar smoke and cheap whiskey. A silver flask fell out of his right hand, joining the dead cigar end on the floor by his feet.
“Come on, you old bastard.” It was too cold all of a sudden and my teeth were chattering an imperfect rhythm, much like the one beating in Dempsey’s chest. His breathing was shallow, and somewhere I heard a scrabble of thumps coming from the side of the car.
The Nova was cramped, and I hurt everywhere, bleeding in spots and seared along my ribs, but none of that mattered. Not even the enraged fire hen attacking the Nova’s back quarter panel or the money I’d left on the prairie flat mattered. My world was suddenly only as big as the two front seats of a smelly 1977 Nova and the man struggling to breathe in my arms.
I tugged off the oven mitts, then threw them out the window, needing to free my hands. Pulling Dempsey’s dead weight over to the other side of the car took me way too long, and I kept checking to see if he was still breathing.
If he was still with me.
“Stick with me, Dempsey,” I muttered at him, kicking the flask out of the way so I could get my foot on the gas pedal while I threw the Nova into Drive. My eyes were burning, but I couldn’t give in to their sting. The drive was going to be long and furious, and I couldn’t waste my time on sentiment. Not now. Maybe not ever. “Hold on, old man, and when we get you all fixed up, you can kick my ass for losing the bounty and Najiri’s damned oven mitts.”
Two
NIGHT SEIZED the sky beyond the San Diego shoreline, but the city’s sparkling lights held it back, a glittering cloak of flashing reds and steady whites, pushing away the edge of blue from its outskirts. From Medical’s upper floors, I could see where the night surrendered to the sprawling metropolis’s defiance, peeling back the darkness in waves of cloudy blue. An air ambulance whipped around one of the glistening glass towers studding the city’s crescent, its red lights flashing rapidly as it approached.
“I’ve never seen one actually fly,” Ryder said quietly, approaching me on silent feet. “Whoever is inside must be very important for them to risk it so close to Pendle. It’s brave of them to pilot that, to risk being plucked out of the sky and eaten.”
He wasn’t wrong. Any type of air travel was dangerous, a far cry from the days before the Merge when giant planes skipped across the atmosphere, whisking people around the world. Now the air was populated with dragons and other airborne creatures with a healthy dislike for sharing the skies, and nothing said “quick meal” like a tube full of meat unable to defend itself from flying fangs and teeth. There were areas and times where a hasty flight was possible—between hatchings and mating seasons—but those were mostly along the interior regions, far away from the coast where dragons dominated the black lava fields separating San Diego County from the rest of SoCal.