[Here's just the dragon-slaying sequence, because it's pretty much stand-alone. Main character has no name. Make one up. Excerpted from "Life Is A Temporary Position" by Ross W. Allaire, due out in 2012, right before it all goes to hell. Right? So read up while you can. +RA]
The first Native American girl I ever screwed was the daughter of a chieftain guide for a small band of soldiers through what was to become Illinois, about a century before The Revolutionary War, meaning: The North American Colonial Revolution. We were ostensibly looking for alternate river passages to the Pacific Ocean.
In Illinois.
There was me, Quetza (the girl), her father (the chieftain), their young warrior cousin, a General Ferris Guestwich, a creepy missionary (Father Marquette), a map-maker (Jolliet) and six top-rate American militiamen.
Some names have been changed, because I just can't fucking remember them. I have trouble with my wife's name, her kid's names... I'm constantly starting one's name and meaning the other... it doesn't matter what I do or whose name it is. So yeah... Guestwich.
We killed a pair of dragons. Thunderbirds.
In a natural cul de sac, what must have been a prehistoric waterfall bed, we saw what we presumed was The Female. We could hear her purring while she sunned herself on a giant slab of black rock. Light cream white scales, about fifteen feet from snout to her hind legs, with a fat yellowish belly. Her tail was thrice the length of her body, and looked like a Beta Fish's tail - parts of it were like fine silk, hanging in the air as she flicked the end of it, lazily.
We were perched on a bluff of witch hazel, and she hadn't yet seen us. Quetza's cousin applied war paint while father and daughter prayed silently, arms interlocked. The other soldiers and I prepared our guns a little ways down the incline, brand-new Spanish steel flintlock muskets, for the course.
We never intended to find the Pacific Ocean or any ocean, at any rate... just some fucking dragons. Marquette was there to push out the faded edges of the map of North America, for it's own sake, but the general was determined. He had a mission. We volunteered. The guns were ours to keep if we survived. I sold mine at auction for £800,000 in the early 1930s. The weapons were shiny and amazing at the time, but wildly inaccurate. Guns in general during these days were spectacularly dangerous for all involved.
In fact, in all I've seen something like 26 men (and one very depressed young woman) die in the same way as the first man of our expedition: shooting one's self in the face. Most of the people I saw do this (with muskets) were by accident, as this young man's death was. He was cleaning the chamber, spilled gunpowder from a small collarbone pocket of his jacket, and with a terrible flash and a bang the boy's head and neck (down to the sternum) were completely obliterated. He screamed for a quarter of a second before the explosion, and Father Marquette said he heard it as well. The shot itself, though... the sound... that blast echoed off of every microscopic crack in the natural amphitheatre outside of which we were staging. We had had the element of surprise, but I turned around just in time to see The Female Dragon's eyes looking directly at us.
That face, she was looking at me... green and red dotted war paint stripes, twins on each side in a twirling pattern, and round chunks of black spots around one eye, sagging down to her lower jaw, also a light brown Hitler moustache right at the tip of her curled, smiling lips. The colored stripes and black spots trailed and faded in and out down her neck and spine and tail, all from her eyes.
By this time all of us were staring at her, too, guns glinting in the sun, every one of us standing straight up, perfectly exposed to any enemy... any enemy at all. We were all mesmerized by her eyes, glowing bright like lightning in the daylight, seeming to twinkle, alternating blue and purple and magenta like a storm of clouds swirling around her iris. Each eye must have been the size of a man's head, and she blinked a 2nd set of eyelids before screaming a full-throat cry for help. The message certainly wasn't meant for us. Then she vanished up into the sky. A single flap of her long, straight, transparent wings sent her soaring.
No one knew where to look. Guns swung in every direction in the sky. Curse words were whispered all around. Quetza's cousin and father exchanged a few words between them as they hurriedly prepared bows and arrows. I didn't need to speak the language to translate.
Cousin: "Holy shit, man... that thing is real!"
Father: "I told you so!"
"Yes, but I didn't believe you."
The old man grumbles, and then barks, "Well fuck you too." Then he mumbles something else, and the young warrior's temper (which had been rising from shame) subsides. I assume that it was one of those "I'm sorry, I love you" admissions that family make to each other, especially when about to do battle with a dragon.
It could have been, "Die with honor," for all I know.
In another moment the young warrior was gone, plucked from the earth, and a rush of wind blew us all to the ground. Quetza screamed over the rush, and her father threw himself on top of her. They both were repeating the warrior's name over and over again. "Kahlua! Kahlua!" as The Female Dragon flew off with her lunch. I heard a few crunches from above, and pieces of the young man began to fall. It rained blood all around us, with hurricane force winds from the beating of her wings above. The wind forced the blood rain on our faces, in our ears, mouths...
This animal knew the Art of War - demoralize your enemy right from the start.
The storm seemed to subside, and the Female landed back at her place in the cul de sac again (her mouth and chest covered with Kahlua's blood, entrails dangle from a few teeth), and we somehow gathered our wits and started to regroup. We had the high ground, again, and two of the soldiers made a charge down the hill, into the fishbowl. No counter-orders from the general could stop them.
A sound like a giant watery burp exploded from all around us - the Dragon used the amphitheatre for her own defense, to devastating effect. This strange ultrasonic sound she made was painfully loud, and the two men on the hill collapsed in agony as their eardrums burst.
Then fire came pouring out of her mouth, and incinerated both men. The flames lapped up the side of the bluff toward us, while we hugged the dirt. The heat and smell were unbearable. The men's screams faded into the milieu of burning and popping and wheezing. The entire landscape was charred along with them. Everything the fire touched was engulfed, like it was napalm she was vomiting at us.
Only the ground on which we lay began to heat up.
Some feathers hanging off of Quetza's outfit wilted and began to smoke, and she took off down the hill to escape them somehow.
And The Female took to the sky.
I went after the girl first, followed closely by her father. The rest of the party followed, and the dirt itself at the top of the bluff began to glow red in their tracks. I don't even think the dragon was still blowing fire at that point. The sound of so much earth burning filled our ears.
But then we heard a single shriek, a cackle, a few hundred feet above and behind us. She had taken off straight up, once again, and prepared for this next kill.
Quetza tried to keep against a small cliff-face to her right, but scattered rocks near the edge kept sliding her out into the open. I caught up with her here, jumping and running along the top of the little, broken hill. Quetza's father was two paces behind her, ready to force her to the ground or sacrifice himself, whichever the case.
My plan was different. I turned around. The dragon was nearly invisible in the sun, and sweat obscured the finer details of her scales. I squinted through the sight of the gun, then fired. The musket tore a whole in the dragons right wing and pounded the side of her head. The chieftain tackled his daughter as the dragon nearly fell on top of them both. One of her wings grazed the man's shoulder, and cut it with hair-like razors along the edge. She rammed into the side of the small cliff there, then tumbled for several yards before scraping to a stop.
Her blood painted the side of the cliff red, but she was not dead yet. The chieftain got to his feet, and ran madly to the slain dragon. He pounded it's side and back with his fists on his way to the head, and she groaned and wiggled in response. The head and neck barely moved. The silken wings hung in midair in places.
The man's tomahawk drove a wedge between the hemispheres of her brain, and whatever amount of life that was left inside was extinguished. The nephew's death was avenged, and his daughter sat limply on the ground, crying "Kahlua!"
Then we heard the female's mate, her reinforcement, with a similar emotion. He was only a few minutes late. The female was clearly dead, even from afar. Whether or not he was screaming wildly or calling out the name of his wife, like Quetza was of her cousin, I would truly like to know.
It sounded like a word, then became that same deafening burping sound, only faster and deeper. And getting closer.
Fireballs rained down at random, exploding man-sized holes in the ground all around us. Everyone screamed and shouted the same idea at once, "Get cover!" "Run!" "Go!" "Hide!" and so on... I'm assuming. At any rate, that's what we all did, flattening against the crest of the small cliff, discolored with blood. We actually blended in.
This strategy was wrong.
He looped around. I saw his shadow become a small ball on the ground before us, then shoot across the small lawn of thin grass, about two hundred yards off. Then the shadow grew bigger.
He turned only a feet from the ground into a straight path toward us. He too seemed to swim through the air, a bulbous head with grotesque fangs. His scales were golden, and blinded me every few seconds with reflection. His wings were massive, like a cicada's, and mere flips of a gigantic horizontal tail were seemingly all that propelled him along the surface at incredible speed. I have never seen living things move the way these Thunderbirds did, as if only half-real. A fiery light came from his mouth, and that sickly grin was spitting fireballs faster than he was flying.
"Down to the ground! Now!" the general shouted.
I collapsed, and each of us began to inch forward, away from the bloody wall. One of the fireballs rolled over the soldier next to me, tearing him apart. What was left was charred, and the ground beneath was scorched black, smoking or burning, and stained red with his blood. The fireball exploded on impact upon the cliff-face, and came apart like the slimeball it was, running down the wall like snot on fire.
Four more flew right past, and slammed into the rockface. The general's uniform was singed by splattering fire as he finally rolled away.
Quetza's father moved slowly, and moved her slowly along the ground after us. He rolled her overtop of himself at one point to jockey out of the way of another groundball from the dragon as it whizzed past. Some of the girl's hair caught fire and he tamped it out with his bare hands. (He wore gauntlets.) He was saying something to her in a hushed tone. Every so often she would say a word in unison with him, in whole or part, through her tears.
It was a prayer.
Every line he spoke, they crawled forward a few inches.
The dragon lifted up and away, then turned back around.
We froze. All of us.
Across the way, the male dragon landed gingerly next to his deceased mate, and nudged her leg. He kicked lightly at her midsection, and nuzzled her broken and bloody face with his own blunt nose, then snorted at the ground.
I raised my head up to see, hiding the rest of me body behind a small boulder. A charred thumb and forefinger sat next to me, from another soldier, seared to the rock.
The male dragon did not cry, but it was sniffling. Burning hot lava-like mucus dripped from his nose, and he made a soft, whimpering sound. His feet dug into the ground on which he stood, and trembled.
We had taken away his wife.
As the creature mourned, I got a closer look at him:
His face was like a crocodile's, except for bulbous goldfish eyes and a long grey beard. It may have been a flap of skin, but it looked like it had hair. His main body was shaped like a long tube of muscle narrowing to a horizontal tail, with the legs of an iguana somewhere in the middle. Most of the layers of his scales were reflective gold, except for white circles around his eyes, and a single white stripe down his back. His underbelly and armpits seemed to be sparsely covered with more of that white fur.
He had small arms set apart from his insectoid wings, muscular like his hind legs, but with small webbed hands like a frog.
There was some scar tissue around his snout, and a strange brown blemish spot in his left side, facing me. His feet had some feathery white ruffles at the shins. All of it was something between hair and feathers. That's as best I can describe it.
His wings bent around him, curling to form to the skin. He was unconsciously lowering his guard, out of depression. Even the color of the wings seemed to change, they became clearer.
His scales seemed to grow darker in waves.
The left claw raised from the ground, and lovingly scooped up his wife's head, and held it in place. He opened his jaws their widest, revealing three more rows of disgusting, misshapen triangle teeth, and snatched up his wife's neck in them.
Then he took off to the southeast with her body.
We tracked him downriver for the rest of the day, and dared not make camp in the night. Each of us slept in a star shape, eyes mostly wide with terror, scanning the heavens for a the passing silhouette of winged death on the approach... or at least the hunt.
But Quetza and I still managed to sneak away, and what's more, return un-noticed. Around a bend she made 'number 2' while I made 'number 1' and then, after we were both sufficiently cleaned up (with leaves and underbrush as toilet paper, some water to freshen up) I bent her over a fallen tree and took her from behind. I had to kiss her somehow as well, to keep her from moaning too loudly. I rubbed two fingers in circles and semi-circles around her clitoris with my free hand, not penetrating her out of respect for tradition. Her hymen had to remain intact for her to be married.
Hence the anal.
Halfway through the next day we found the dragon cave. The male dragon sat just inside the cave's mouth (shaped like a fanged frown), and the body of his wife lay in front, effectively blocking the cave's entrance. He seemed to be sleeping. There was no way to approach the cave but from behind, from land - the cave was perched far above the river's edge, with a single vertical slab of bedrock beneath it.
Creatures like this one had apparently persecuted this part of the river for millennia. Fathers had warned their sons to walk their canoes around this place, and never make camp with a fire here, etc. The legend was well-known, and each area of The New World seemed to have its own version, its own Thunderbird and accompanying river bend, cave, etc. Quetza's father's father had, as a boy, seen what we presumed now was the female, escaping only by hiding until it left - two days after.
He hid between a small boulder and a large bush. Ants covered his feet. He could hear the dragon killing other creatures that came near, and occasionally cried out at random. Then it left.
That was his claim (only months before his death) to his only son, over honey wine, many moons ago. Quetza's father was 13 years old when he heard this. Upon Quetza's 13th birthday, she was told the same story, among others.
Marquette and Jolliet (with two guns) stayed at a small rocky beach a mile downstream with the gear and boats, while the rest of us circled around to try and approach the cave from the Northwest.
There was no path. We could not even forge one. There was no level ground at all to be found. The only way that this path was easier than the sheer cliff we faced before was that this terrain had handholds. But not many. Crags of rock bent at weird angles everywhere, as if pushed in a great rockslide, and we had to move along a small edge where there was barely enough room for one foot. I tried not to inhale deeply so that my body's center of gravity wasn't too far past that edge. Quetza moved with ease, being so thin. She took off her moccasins for the course. Her father had to remove his head-dress so he could press his head directly up against the rock. He was grey on the top of his head, but his sideburns and thin beard were still dark black.
The ledge led to a small clearing, where a tree as wide as a house stood in stark contrast to the barren shale and limestone all around us. The tree had to have been over 500 years old... maybe a thousand feet tall. Smaller trees stood around it, and we could see the familiar peak of the front of the cave beyond those trees. The mouth was the gaping hole of a lava tube. I know this now.
The peak was maybe a few yards across, and the opening was like a pointed dome, surrounded by flatland.
Among those smaller trees, perhaps only 30-50 years old, was what appeared to be a moderate-sized shelter lashed together out of large tree branches and rope made of various vines. The shelter seemed to have two distinct parts to it, one very much older than the other - decrepit, covered in moss, and overgrown with small bushes. The newer one was the smaller of the two. We approached with caution, each man moving his fingers about his weapon, eagerly.
General Guestwich could taste the victory, but was too scared to realize it. His face betrayed no fear, but his pace was slow and deliberate. The sword gleamed in one hand, the musket in the other. His bayonet was affixed. A silver cross hung around his neck.
The larger shelter stirred, and small figures could be seen moving inside. Strange grunting noises carried over to us in the afternoon breeze. These shadows ran for the front of the shelter (nearest the cave) in a single file, and we readied the grips on our guns (again), and strafed right to come around front. What began to appear in the shelter doorway was not at all what any of us had expected. A family of four, what looked like Spanish settlers, shouting angrily.
The father approached the general and chieftain while his wife tried to rouse the dragon by kicking him in his tail. The tail stopped for a moment, then continued swaying lazily back and forth. The children tried to pick up rocks to throw at us, and me and the other remaining soldier (Ens. Garrison Hewlett) saw quite plainly why they were merely 'trying' to fight with tools with such apparent difficulty: for they had no fingers. None of them had any fingers, only small nubs of scar tissue. Offhand I'd say all the wounds had been cauterized.
And the strange guttural shouting sounds, with no language or intonation between phrases - their tongues were gone, too.
The husband took two giant steps forward, and soundly struck the chieftain in his chest with a nub fist. The chief didn't fight back, he couldn't even bring himself to look the man in the eye.
Quetza shuddered and began to cry.
The children ran and joined their mother to incite the dragon into action, into its (usual) murderous rage. But it wouldn't budge. It grunted slowly in a deep yawning sound, and licked its lips. The massive head lifted up off the ground, turned directly at me and the other soldier, puffed out a pathetic black cloud of smoke from its monstrous nostrils, and laid back down.
The soldier and I exchanged another furtive glance, and begin to approach the dragon, covering the general.
I slowed my pace, and let the other soldier be the middle man.
To my right, Daddy was still busy with the chief, trying to goad him on, intermittently breaking down into tears. At center, Mommy and the kids raged at the sight, and started beating the dragon mercilessly with their stumps. Indecipherable epithets were thrown in all directions. It was unnerving, and we all lowered our guns so as not to harm the family. We tried to show them we meant no harm. To them. They were solely dependent on the dragons for food. They were their slave children. I guess the beasts were unable to procreate, whether from time or the apparent differences in each's species... there's no way to know.
At the time we were really all too awestruck...
General Guestwich tediously approached The Last Dragon. The family altogether seemed to realize he had no interest in them, at all. The mother and children turned on him at once, trying to pry his gun and sword away, kicking him as best they could. They were weak, famished, and desperate. Somewhere in the middle of the fracas, the general cried out as The Mother swung a kneecap directly into his groin. The sword's blade cut air, and then flesh. Blood drew from her neck, and the woman gasped in terror.
The other soldier and the chieftain ran to the aide of the general, and ripped the rest of the family away. They were met with resistance. Stockholm Syndrome, before it was Stockholm Syndrome: these people would do anything to stop us from killing that dragon.
In the ensuing seconds, in the subconscious communication of the fight itself, the family's attacks became desperately merciless, lacking all honor or form. The soldier, the chieftain, and the general, in my opinion had no choice but to at least match the level of force with their defense, and The Teenaged Daughter went down first, to the ground. The Father became outraged and defended her against Hewlett's rifle butt, and The Son (only a small boy) redoubled his efforts, savagely kicking and biting the shins and kneecaps of the chieftain. Blood was drawn thrice over, and the boy already had two black eyes from kicks to the face. Their eyes were wild. The line between near-deadly force and deadly force began to blur.
Quetza ran toward me, and embraced me. She couldn't bear to look. I watched, and held her.
Within seconds, The Slave-Child Family lay dead around the men, and the general was free to approach the dragon. He did so watchfully, as quietly as he could. A single snort from the beast let him know that it did not matter. He was on radar. Large, thin, antennae-like whiskers hung about the dragon's eyes and nose, like a cat. (Marquette had told us, last night on the river, that we were "battling The Antichrist." A now-complacent, depressed antichrist.)
The general came round the front of the dragon's cave, standing on a small, flat piece of bedrock, a hundred or so feet above the river bend. The dragon swung its head out toward him, and suspended it at an angle. It presented the softest part of its skin, the underside of his neck. It could have been a kosher kill.
The general understood the order, and lined himself up at a safe distance to hack off the dragon's head.
From where I stood, the entire scene was visible: the dead family (some splattered and scattered body parts), the heartbroken dragon, the obliging general, the corpse of the female (mutilated: the chest cavity torn open, the heart and lungs removed, the bloody claws of the male dragon, still resting against her shattered ribs, and the large pile of bones on which he lay (spilling out of the mouth of the cave, the general tip-toeing around the strewn fragments). The damned dragon's mouth was caked in blood. The family's mouths stunk of the same blood. They had eaten her heart.
He raised his sword, and struck. Then struck again.
Not kosher.
The chieftain lowered his head.
Hewlett removed his helm, and prayed.
I stroked Quetza's hair as she sobbed. She shuddered at the blows of the sword, and whispered the prayers of her people while the sound of blood rushing out of the dragon's neck echoed off the surrounding rocks. It was so quiet otherwise, I could also hear the river below us.
The chieftain turned from the sight and looked for Quetza, a momentary look of desperation crossed his eyes (at her not being where he'd left her) turning into nervous fury at the sight of his daughter in the arms of a white man. I gaped back at him. With perfect timing Quetza finally lifted her head from my shoulder, and wiped some stray tears from her cheeks, sniffing cutely. She smiled as our eyes met, and then she kissed me. I don't know what she was thinking. Of course, my eyes darted right to the chieftain, and her fingers crawled up the back of my neck. Her mouth opened for a French kiss, a very romantic one, and he began running toward us, and inhaled deeply to scream loudly. "QUETZA!!" There was another word after that, but I don't know what it meant. Probably something derogatory.
I backed away just as the chieftain grabbed her arm, to rip her away. Strands of her hair clung to my beard, and a strand of saliva stretched between us and fell to the ground. Her left breast popped out of her vest-shirt with the force of her father's grasp. His grip would leave a bruise.
She was about to say something, maybe my name, when her father's machete slit her throat. He did it with such force that there was no sound but the gurgling, adding a high treble gurgle with the cacophony of gurgles and wheezes still emanating from the dragon.
A foul smelling gas was seeping from one set of tubes in his throat, and a milky orange goo was leaking out of another.
Quetza twitched on the ground, dying. I stood, motionless, staring only at her father. He stared right back, cleaning his blade and re-sheathing it, willing to attack me again if I showed the least bit of intent. I did not.
He spat at the ground near my feet.
The general guiltily lit a cigar, and flicked a large wooden match carelessly to the ground. Before it even touched the large pool of hot bodily fluids, a fire was igniting, and spreading. It seemed to suck away the air before beginning to pop. Guestwich went up like a matchstick himself, having just finished the remainder of his flask of grain alcohol. Hewlett leapt away, but he was already safe.
We watched as the dragons body caught fire, and pool of flame started to run off the side of the cliff into the river below. Quetza's dead hand was burning over yonder, along with The Slave Family. The general was simply gone, and I saw only a passing glance of Quetza's father before he walked directly toward the dragon's fully-engulfed body, without so much as a scream or a goodbye.
Ens. Hewlett screamed "DON'T!"
After the fire had largely subsided (only cinders of the old slave shelter and some bones at the cave's mouth glowed in the twilight - and those only a mere fraction of the bones still inside the cave, undisturbed). A storm brewed, and there he and I parted ways. He went downriver to retrieve the others, and I followed the Mississippi northward. I resigned my commission. I told him I was thru being a continental legionnaire, or a big game hunter.
"What shall I say became of you?" he asked.
I snorted, and shook my head. "Why...? What will you say became of any of this?"
%uFEFF[+RA]
p.s.: picture = dragon shark
