The flame in my hand danced in the dead air. In the corner of the enormous warehouse was the foreman’s office. The glass was fogged over with grime but the lamplight from inside forced its way through.
When I pushed the metal door open and stepped into the office, neither of the figures inside made a move. One, because he would have recognized my smell the moment I stepped into the building. The other, because his brains weren’t exactly in his body. The red-haired teen had a hole in his head larger than the lame piercings he’d slashed into his jacket. His pockmarked skin had lost its insipid pink and was now turning a sickly gray.
The injury was a hard one to identify. A few blows to the skull, that was clear, but his jaw was making a unique statement: broken, dislocated and almost wrenched out of his face. If I had to guess – and I suppose I didn’t have to – I would say that someone held him by the chin, their fingers in his mouth, and drove the back of his head into a wall till they were holding pink jelly.
Pete was sitting on his hairy ass with his back against the wall and his head facing down.
“I’m sorry, Pete,” I said, stepping slowly over to him. “I never woulda thought he’d come after you.” Pete lifted his uneven eyes. “So what’s the plan? You can’t just leave him here?”
“Nope. This isn’t where it happened anyway. There’s a trail from an alley in Swestum if anyone cares to look, and if it leads them to the body, I’m done. He’s covered in my scent from his toes to his tonsils.”
I swatted a spider from my sleeve and a few uncomfortable questions from my mind.
“So, it’s bone-saws and burlap sacks?” I asked, hoping he knew it was a joke.
“The canals are swollen and kicking up their guts right now. There’s a good chance anything we throw in will find its way back to shore. I know another place just out of town.”
All of a sudden, I got really, really tired.
“Not the pit.”
He nodded. “The pit.”
There was plenty of old cloth to wrap him in and plenty of rope to tie him up. While I went about turning the remains of the redhead into a human burrito, carefully covering the parts that were still oozing liquid, Pete was searching in the back of the old motors that once powered the industrial sewing machines. In his Human left hand, he held an old soup container. With his dog-like right, he wiped the remnants of coal and oil from the machinery and collected them in the tin can. The whole scenario was packed with too many things I didn’t like, but once you go out to dump a body you don’t go home till you or the dead are buried.
Pete filled his container with black muck and left me waiting while he slunk out through the cobwebs and into the night. I’d hated the way the redhead had talked while he was alive but it was nothing compared to the way he talked when he was dead. We sat with the spiders and silence saying too damn much to each other.
The puttering of tired pistons rumbled down the side road. I got down on one knee and wrestled the kid over my shoulder. I’d grown soft over the years, but it was hardly a struggle. There was nothing to him. His brains and bravado were in pieces on the floor and all that remained was the shell of a dumb kid who wouldn’t grow up to be a dumb man.
A chain rattled outside. I walked towards the roller door and it grated open with a rusty squeal to reveal the filthy Werewolf beside a first edition Slinger: Model C. The Slinger was a Human-made car that they stopped making over a decade ago. Like most Human inventions outside of Weatherly, they were quickly improved with magical technology and the original models were phased out. Magic-powered automobiles were only just becoming widely available before the Coda killed the power. There has been talk about bringing the Slinger back into production, if they can fire up the factories, but it’s a long way down the list of things to do. If I hadn’t been watching the car puff exhaust, I would have put more money on Pete resurrecting the hollow-skulled punk in the sack on my shoulder.
“Where the hell did you get that?”
“Scrapyard,” barked Pete proudly. “Dozens of cars piling up there since the Dwarves stopped mining. Anything before a Model E has no keys, you just need something to get it pumping. Hopefully we have enough fuel to make the distance.”
The Model C had no roof or doors, just two seats, a trunk, four tires, a big gear stick and a wheel to steer.
I stepped up on the running board of the Slinger and dropped the meat package into the open top of the trunk. I had to fold it over itself to make it fit and then squash it down to make it look less like a body.
We secured the kid with the remaining rope and I jumped in the passenger seat. With his one good hand, Pete drove us out of the side road and on to Second Street. For the first time ever, I was thankful for the death of the streetlights. The night was as dark as our deeds. An occasional lamp danced behind windows, and we passed a few figures waiting on corners or poking out from alleys, but Pete knew the backstreets like his own smell and we made it out of the city without anyone stopping us.
The car sputtered to a stop a mile out of town. I was worried we’d have to unload the kid and drag him by his bootstraps, but Pete just gave the fuel tank a few kicks. It dislodged some dried-up residue inside, and after a couple of cranks, we were coughing down the road once more.
We repeated the clumsy routine all the way to the edge of the redwoods. That’s when the old crate hacked up its dying breath and rattled to a stop for the final time.
“This’ll have to do,” growled Pete, and stepped onto the road. We untied the kid and dragged him to the ground where he landed with a fleshy crunch. Then Pete wrenched the steering wheel all the way to the left and put it into neutral. “Push.”
We forced the dead Slinger off the road, through the gravel, and into an overgrown berry bush that was already rich with debris. The old heap looked at home amongst the hubcaps and brambles as if it had been there for years.
We wrapped two ropes around the sack – mine at his head and Pete’s at his ankles – and lifted them over our shoulders. Pete took the lead, hunched over, and we headed into the forest.
The undergrowth was six inches deep and damn soggy. Our boots made a habit of catching in the slush and sending us tumbling over. Was I so desperate for friends that I’d risk my neck, my health and a good night’s sleep on some dumb midnight march? Was I so convinced that I was somehow to blame for all this? Did I really think it was my fault?
Of course it was. Trace anything back far enough and it was easy for me to take the blame.
It took well over an hour to reach our destination. A Dragon pit is a patch of land that has been irrigated by the magic beneath it. A rare phenomenon. A proper pit takes more than a hundred years to develop. Over the century, a stream of magic would leak into the earth, breaking it down to a kind of cosmic quicksand. Eventually, the soil would be rich enough to become fully active. Once that happened, the next animal that entered into it would be absorbed. That’s how we got Dragons. The animal and the activated earth merged to become one miraculous beast. Then the entire piece of land would get up and walk away leaving a big ol’ crater in its wake. The most common pits were formed out in the Ragged Plains where the explosive desert-dust made life inhospitable for most creatures. Only the leather-backed lizards that could survive the heat wandered into those pits. Therefore, most of the Dragons evolved from those rock-skinned reptiles.