Tyler’s checking my wounds. Her face, hair, vest, and clothes are covered in soot. Her expression is serious, her eyes concerned. When she gets to my leg, she hisses.
“What?” says Monica. “What is it?”
“Are you okay down there, Mo?” asks Tyler.
“Yep,” says Monica. “Rigby’s down.”
“I am not,” says Rigby. His voice is strained and he speaks like his mouth is full and doesn’t know what to do with his tongue.
“You’ve a spear through you,” says Monica.
“And that dead guy over there is the one that did it,” says Rigby. “And I got that one after. My gun’s still up.”
“Fight’s over down here,” says Monica. “Four Epsilons. All down. How bad is Ben?”
Tyler’s looking at me.
I blink and have trouble reopening my eyes. The lids are heavy, like somebody tied bricks to my eyelashes, and they’re gummed too. I don’t want to think about with what.
“I think he cauterized his own leg,” says Tyler.
“Jesus,” says Monica.
“Yeah, this is supposed to be his house,” I say. The words are coming slower than I mean them to. “But I don’t think he’s home.”
I hear Rigby bark a laugh then groan. “Don’t make me laugh, asshole,” says Rigby. “I’ve got this big-ass spear through my middle.”
“I don’t think this is a good idea, Candace,” I hear Amir say. “Candace!”
“What’s happening, Amir?” says Tyler.
“One of the pedo vans is, uh, trying to make its exodus?” says Amir. “Candace is taking exception.”
I hear Candace in the background shouting over an engine beginning to roar, saying something about a tank and a home, and then there’s a tremendous crash from the lobby.
“My house, met God’s house,” I say.
Tyler’s standing. “Are you okay? Amir?”
There’s no response for a moment. Then Amir says, “We're fine. Are we fine? Everybody’s fine, right?”
A huge shape fills the open lobby doors and grows larger. I start trying to move away but Tyler hunches down and puts a hand on my shoulder. “Shh,” she says. “It’s Whately.”
It is too. He touches my neck and then my chest. That hurts and I find I’ve closed my eyes with the pain. I can’t reopen them.
“— we move him?” It’s Tyler.
“Place is on fire, I—.”
My leg's dangling. Hurts. I'm hurt bad. I’m not on the floor. There’s a touch on my face, on my eyelid. It gets pulled back and there’s Whately. He’s saying something, looking all worried. He’s such a nice man. He didn’t deserve what I did to his car. I try to smile.
Pain in my leg makes me scream. I’m in the RV. My leg hit the wall when Whately made the turn to my bedroom.
I get a look at Stacy’s face. She’s horrified, both hands covering her mouth, her eyes are huge and staring at me.
“Most of that isn’t his,” says Tyler. “I think.”
She means all the blood, I'm pretty sure. Yeah, not all of it's mine but I put it all there. I feel sick. I clench my jaw and try not to think about it.
Whately says, “You’re not bad, Ben. Probably feels bad? It’s not bad. Your leg’s the worst, man. But your half-ass cauterization helped and Tyler got your belt around it for a tourniquet so you’ll be fine.” He pats my shoulder. The one that’s not throbbing, bless him. "It looks like you got shot lots. Mad street cred." He stands and turns to Tyler. “I’ve got to get to Rigby,” he says.
Candace says, “I’ve got them pinned against the wall. If we leave to drive around back—.”
“That van’s toast,” says Amir. "It ain't going anywhere."
“Give me a sec,” says Tyler.
I hear the side door slam, then, after a moment, four shots.
The door opens again.
“I took out their tires. Go, go, go,” says Tyler. The side door slams again and the RV lurches backward with a shriek of complaining metal.
Someone takes my hand. It’s Stacy. Her pigtails look ridiculous and sweet.
“Hi,” she says as the RV takes a big bounce over the two or three stairs that lead up into the church.
“Hello!” I say, louder than I meant to. That bounce really hurt. “Did Monica get them all out?”
“Yes,” says Stacy. “Yep. They wheeled them out to the door until you blew up the church then took them outside.”
“I had nothing to do with that,” I say. My lips don’t want to work right and I have to concentrate. “That was the guys with the rocket launchers.”
If you encounter this narrative on Amazon, note that it's taken without the author's consent. Report it.
Stacy says, “Okay,” because it’s clear she doesn’t know what else to say.
“Gonna be lots of kids down there,” I say.
Stacy’s face changes. People give teachers a lot of crap. Nick’s a teacher. He says that, when it comes to kids, the only thing a teacher’s scared of is an administrator. They’ll step in front of gunmen, hurricanes, earthquakes, speeding cars, and tornadoes without a thought for themselves. It’s true too. Every once in a while, you’ll hear a story that proves it. Two teachers tackle a gunman at a movie theater, or pluck a shotgun from a kid’s hands, or they’ll find the teacher shielding her students with her corpse when they dig them out of the landslide or the earthquake or whatever. My reminder that there are kids involved causes every trace of worry and fear to disappear from Stacy’s face like it was never there. She pats my hand and says, “I got this.”
She’s the first out the door when the RV stops, pigtails flying.
Sorry, motorhome.
Whately rumbles out behind her, causing the whole place to shake with his exit. Which hurts.
Amir comes back to stay with me. “Damn, dude,” he says. “You got fucked up.”
“You should see the other guys,” I manage.
Monica appears. I catch a red blur reflected in her fake sunglasses before she snatches them away. Her brows are knit, the valley between is deep. Her huge brown eyes are liquid and beautiful.
“What?” she says.
Amir says, “He said your—.”
“Shut up, Amir,” says Monica. “Ben, we’re going to load Rigby up and then they’re going to take you both to the hospital. I have—.”
“No,” I say. “I—.”
“Shut up, Ben,” says Monica. “You have to go. Rigby too, okay?” She chokes back a sob. “They have to check you out but we’ll warn them about your curses. Trust them to figure it out, okay?”
I nod.
“I have to stay with Tyler,” she says. She’s crying.
Of course, she has to stay with Tyler. They aren’t hurt. They have to manage the crime scene. I don’t know why Monica’s crying. I'm confused.
She says, “I want to go with you but I can’t.” She touches my face. God, she’s beautiful.
“Okay,” I say.
Behind them, I see the tip of a bloody spear enter the motorhome. Its tip dips into the wood of the cabinet below the sink, withdraws, then angles up and to the right as it passes over the sink to slip into the side of the wall. A shadow blocks the doorway.
“It’s no use,” I hear Whately say. “Damn spear is ten feet long. We’ll never get it in here. I’ll hold him. Let’s go.”
Amir looks at me, his mouth hanging open.
I don't understand.
Amir says to me, “They can’t get him inside. The spear’s too long and they can’t remove it here. Uh, I guess we don’t have anything to cut the shaft? So, we’re gonna take him to the hospital like this, with Whately’s ass hanging out the door.”
“I’m gonna need you too, Amir,” says Whately. “Help me keep him up and braced. Candace, this’ll all be for nothing if you shake us loose or take a turn too fast. You go down the middle of the road too. Take up both lanes. We don't want anybody clipping the end of the spear if they pass. Ignore the honking. Slow and steady wins the race, okay?”
“Okay,” says Candace. She sounds strong. I’m proud of her.
The motorhome backs up, turns around, and before it starts moving forward, I’m asleep.
I wake up and I’m still in my own bed. Whately’s there, checking my vitals. He tells me that, no, I haven’t been here the whole time. I was taken into the hospital, given all kinds of tests, and stitches, and I’ll be fine. I needed a transfusion. Then, when they were working on my leg, something went wrong and I needed another one. Tyler and I have the same blood type and she was right there filling out reports, so she saved my life again.
I’ve been asleep for a full day and he fills me in. The first thing he says is that everybody in our little group is fine. None of us are dead. The rest of his briefing is a little all over the place, with different bits occurring to him as he works.
When the police finally arrived at Good Friends of Our Savior Church, they found the children singing songs with Stacy Nostrum and Dr. Melanie Linn. They had the bigger kids helping the little kids and Whately’s grandma cradled the littlest one, age five, on her lap.
The sheriff and another deputy exploded right when they figure the pastor did as they dealt with the intruders at St. Alphonsus school, where the gunmen also exploded, killing another deputy and Torelli had to have Abernathy’s femur removed from his spleen. The detective will recover but he'll be in the hospital for a while.
The dragon is gone.
Once they got the fire under control, they found dead Epsilons and bone fragments of the Exploders, but no sign of the dragon’s remains. If it hadn’t been for the security cameras recording the whole thing nobody would have believed us. Whately tells me that according to Tyler, there’s never been a summoning like that as far as she knows. He says there’s something more there. Something that Tyler hasn’t told him and won’t say. He shrugs then tells me Rigby’s fine. He’ll be in the hospital for a good long time but he’s expected to make a full recovery. Lots of people out there walking around with only one kidney.
Whately insists I'll be okay. I’ll just have one hell of a scar on my leg.
He tells me Tyler’s fine too.
“Tyler?” I say. "She got hurt?"
“Yeah, those burns?” he says. “You saw them, right?”
The last time I saw Tyler she was speckled with soot. No, not soot. She used that napalm sword. She must've been splashed when she used it. Those were burns. Black ones. Third degree maybe.
“She’s got a new hairdo now,” says Whately. “And unless you know what you’re looking at, you’d think the burns were freckles.”
“Freckles?”
“Yeah, okay some of them are big, true, but freckles get that way sometimes,” says Whately. “Turns out that she’s always had them anyway. Covered them up with makeup. I think she looks even cuter.” He sighs. “I wish she didn’t play for the other team. And knowing that some of those are fucking burns from a flaming sword makes her look like a bad-ass Pippi Longstocking, only without the red hair. It’s working for her.”
He tells me that Amir’s here in the cabover, still going through the church’s records. He’s already found out lots of stuff. The preacher’s name was David Fonteneau who went by the name “Pastor Dave.” He kept a journal. Dave saw what he thought was a meteor strike in his backyard a little over ten years ago. In the crater was a weird metal drum. Dave took it inside. Later he and his wife, Marcy, opened the goddamn thing because of course they did. Inside was what sounds like that green goop I found in the big mixing bowl that got injected into Otter. That shit that chased me.
Whately says that a puff of green smoke came out of the goop to hit Mrs. Fonteneau right in the face. She coughed a bit but seemed fine, but later Dave caught Marcy eating the stuff, right out of the drum, at three in the morning. Soon after, she was able to, quote, “know things no one could know.” That and she knew a whole bunch of runes, even though Dave knew his wife never had a sponsor. Dave decided that Marcy was a prophet of the Lord because that’s what she told him she was. She was the one who told him how to inject that stuff into people’s necks to make them more compliant and bring them even closer to the Lord. It'd remove the doubt from the faithful, making them true servants of Providence. Dave could get them to do whatever. It was her idea to build that monstrous church they had such trouble filling, and she masterminded the kidnapping plot. She told Dave that performing that ritual with enough sacrifices would bring about the End Times and the Rapture. This world would end and belong wholly to God.
Tyler told Whately that with the summoning complete but not enough sacrifices, the contract demanded something be sent, so we got that dragon. It was supposed to be so much worse. Maybe the world could have ended. If that’s the case, Tyler won’t tell Whately.
There’s no sign of Marcy Fonteneau anywhere. She’s not using her credit cards and nobody has seen the woman in months.