She snatched up the baggie and opened it carefully. She tapped some of it into the spoon, her nerves on edge, worried she’d spill it and waste all that was left. But she’d prepared the fix so often her hands could do it on their own at this point, and before she knew it she was pulling back the plunger and filling the syringe with liquid heroin.
Georgia lay down on the bed. The cold sweat on her back made her shiver. She pushed down the waistband of her shorts and yanked up the bottom of her t-shirt. The skin around her left hip was even more discoloured than before. A dull grey patch had spread up from the gash and across the bottom of her belly, her veins turning black and prominent. She inserted the tip of the needle into the grey skin, aiming it down the length of one of the veins, and depressed the plunger with her thumb.
The heroin took effect instantly. There was an immediate rush, like she was zooming forward, and then a sudden pullback, like she was sinking into the bed, falling into a world of comforting nothingness. She closed her eyes, nodding off, and as she submerged into the void, the euphoria enveloped her, warmed her, wrapped around her like a powder-blue Snoopy blanket worn to a cottony softness, and the thrumming in her veins whispered,
peace, peace, peace.
Cotton.
The high always felt like she was stuffed with cotton, an almost embryonic state where she felt nothing, not the aching of her hip, not even the bed beneath her. Everything around her was dulled and muffled to the point of irrelevance. She hated herself for being a slave to the needle, but she would be lying if she said she didn’t still love the high. The warm, drowsy, cottony high. Nothing else mattered when she was high. There was only the initial rush of euphoria and the calm afterglow that gave her an impenetrable sense of safety and warmth. It felt like being loved. She wished it could last forever. But, like love, it never did.
After Drew had walked out on her, she’d fallen into a pit so dark she didn’t recognize herself anymore. She left the last scraps of her life behind, bailed on her lease, and used the money from the sale of her parents’ house to throw herself madly into the hunt for the Dragon. As far as she was concerned, the old Georgia was dead, and all the hurt had died with her. She didn’t have to think about the things left behind if she buried herself in the chase. But the hurt wasn’t really dead, it had only gone deep, and it surfaced like a hungry shark whenever Georgia let her guard down.
Her guard had been down in North Carolina, when she met Zack . . .
The visions led her to an out-of-the-way roadhouse tucked deep in the pines and sweetgum, the building already starting to collapse in on itself. Inside, the floor was littered with bones and chunks of meat, but the Dragon was long gone, the trail cold. Frustrated and angry, she drove aimlessly for hours. She thought of her parents murdered and the Dragon still unpunished, chewed her nails and slapped the steering wheel. Finally she stopped the car and collapsed into sobs.
I can’t do this,
she thought.
I’m sorry, Dad, I can’t!
When the crying waned, she looked up to see she’d stopped before a big bus station somewhere outside Asheville. She went inside to use the restroom, where she cried some more in the stall and hoped no one heard. When she left, she saw a man standing outside the restrooms, hands in his pockets, watching people walk back and forth. He was handsome, a couple of years older than her with a shaggy mop of sandy blond hair, and there was so much hurt in his eyes, such an aura of being lost and alone, that Georgia got the sense she was looking into a mirror. They smiled at each other and started talking. She learned his name was Zack, and by the time the night turned to dawn they were kissing on a bench in a deserted park.
She leaned against Zack’s shoulder and said, “I can’t believe this. I barely know you.” She shook her head. A chuckle escaped her throat. “How the hell did this happen so fast?”
Zack put his hand under her chin and tipped her head up so he could look at her. “I knew the moment I saw you. I saw it in your eyes. You looked like you’d been crying. You don’t have to tell me what happened, that’s not my business, but I think we’re both in the same place. For me, it’s my folks. They’re gone. We had a big fight. My mom called me a disappointment, and my old man told me I was dead to him. I guess that leaves me on my own. An orphan.”
“Me too,” she said. “My parents are gone.” She paused, then forced herself to say the word. “Dead.”
He nodded, held her a little tighter and said, “I think that’s why we were drawn to each other so quickly. We’re kindred spirits.”
She smirked. “Did you get that from a movie or something? Do you read romance novels?”
“Make fun all you want, you know I’m right. But I’ve got just the thing. Something that makes life a little more bearable.” He unzipped the backpack at his feet and pulled out a rolled up leather pack. He undid the strap, unrolled it and showed her what was inside.
Remembering how Drew had accused her of being on drugs, Georgia laughed so hard Zack drew back with a mix of shame and horror on his face.
“I . . . I’m sorry,” he stuttered. “I shouldn’t have — ”
Georgia snatched the works out of his hands.
Anything
, she thought,
anything to stop feeling like this.
“Show me how,” she said.
Zack smiled with relief. He took her leg and positioned her foot in his lap. He slipped off her shoe and said, “Here, in the webbing between your toes. So no one sees the tracks.”
He showed her how to prepare the fix, and the first time the needle hit her vein, she understood what she’d been looking for all along. Something to take the pain away and replace it with heaven. The old mewling, weak Georgia and all her hurt fell back into her coffin and stayed there.
Zack didn’t have a home. He was a traveller like her. They drove from state to state in her old car. He asked about the shotgun in the trunk, and when she told him it belonged to her father, he never brought it up again, never asked what her father had needed it for or why she still had it. It was as if he was so grateful to have someone in his life that he didn’t want to risk knowing anything bad. They moved anonymously from motel room to motel room, slipping out in the dead of night, leaving their bills unpaid. When they couldn’t find motels, they found empty shacks in the woods or old warehouse lofts to crash in. When the heroin ran out, Georgia used her money to buy more. When that ran out, she sold what little jewellery she owned. When there was no more jewellery to sell, she’d offered to hock the shotgun . . .
“No, no way,” he said. They were driving on the highway, Zack behind the wheel. Her mind fogged by the afterglow of a high, she didn’t know which highway it was, or even which direction they were heading. All the roads looked the same. Zack’s stringy hair poked out from beneath a black wool cap he’d found in a dumpster behind a Burger King. He shook his head vehemently. “The shotgun, the car, they’re all you have left of your family. I’m not going to let you lose that. You’ve done so much already. Too much. Let me take care of you, okay? I don’t want you to have to do anything. Let me play knight in shining armour for a while. I know what to do. I’ve been scoring a lot longer than you.”
As the sun went down, they parked and found a crumbling old shack in the woods with nothing inside but a bare, soiled mattress and some empty beer bottles and crumpled cigarette packs covered in a mist of cobwebs and mould. Zack spent the night away while Georgia stayed curled up on the mattress, fiending, chewing her fingernails, twisting her hair into knots. Wondering if he would ever come back. It felt like years passed, but he returned in the early morning, his skin glazed with a fine sheen of sweat, his hair messed up. He looked tired.
“Doctor’s got the scrip, babe.”
Georgia crawled off the mattress and stared at the bag in his hand. The score was big, more than they’d had in a long time. “Where did you get all this? How could you afford it?”
“I was at the bus station all night, and then the train station, and some guys there knew where to score.”
“But how . . . ?”
“Don’t worry about it. Get the needle.”
But the doses never lasted long enough. Zack disappeared more and more as their need grew, and when the local cops started recognizing him around the bus and train stations they moved on to the next town or the next state. Zack grew distant. Sometimes he wouldn’t let her touch him. One night, lying together in a Motel 6 in Charleston, Zack whispered into the dark,
“Do you love me? The things I do for money . . . How can you?”
But she was already nodding off from the high and didn’t answer.
She never told him about the Dragon. After what had happened with Drew, she didn’t want to risk losing her only friend, and besides, there was no reason to tell him. The Dragon wasn’t part of her life anymore. As far as she’d been concerned, the hunt was over. When the Dragon killed and the visions came, she put the needle between her toes and let it take her away.
Georgia’s eyes fluttered open in her motel room. She felt sweaty and heavy and only half awake. Part of her was still in the cottony void, still on the road with Zack looking for the next score. The room was dark, and she wondered if the other bedside lamp had burned out too. She didn’t remember turning it off. The bathroom door creaked open. She heard the clank of something metallic and heavy hitting the floor, then heard it again. A dark form walked out of the bathroom, each footstep like someone knocking a baseball bat against a pipe. Her eyes struggled to adjust to the dark, but she kept losing focus on the figure. It was a man, that much she knew. A man in an ancient suit of armour so black it seemed to suck the light out of the room. A black helmet covered his head, the visor down over his face.
She wanted to tell him she was sorry. For not having killed the Dragon yet. For being a drug addict. For being weak. She was too drowsy to speak, but she knew nothing she could say would matter anyway. She’d let him down, and his disappointment stung her like a slap in the face.
He reached for his helmet, lifted the visor. There was no face inside, only an infinite blackness. The blackness enveloped her, and within it images appeared.
She saw golden-haired Siegfried, millennia ago, spearing the dragon Fafnir before the mouth of a misty Teutonic cave. Further back in time, she saw Thor, his muscles straining through his skin as he thrashed the Midgard Serpent Jörmungandr against the rugged, rocky fjords of Norway; and further still to Indra, in his colourful Hindu headdress, wrestling with the three-headed serpent Vritra the Enveloper in the jungles of India; and the Hittite storm god Tarhun, bolts of lightning glinting off the edges of his double-bladed axe as he slew the dragon Illuyankas amid the olive groves of Turkey; all the way back to Marduk of Sumer, a titanic shadow against the black emptiness of space, cutting the dragon Tiamat to pieces and creating the world from her bones.
Dragonslayers. The old ones, from long ago. She’d only been seven years old the first time she heard their names . . .
Georgia wandered into the living room, wiping the candy stickiness of her midday snack from her chubby fingers. The afternoon sun through the windows painted a rosy golden glow over her father sitting on the couch. He was reading an old book, its scaly leather binding tattered and falling apart.
“What’s that?” Georgia asked. Her father started, so engrossed in reading he hadn’t heard her come in. He closed the book quickly, but she climbed onto the couch next to him. “What are you reading, Daddy?”
Her father sighed. “I hadn’t planned to show this to you until you were much older.”
“Is it bad?”
“No, not exactly. Here, it’s okay, take a look.” He opened the book again, positioning it so she could see. The first pages were full of woodcut illustrations and reproduced paintings of giant serpents and lizards.
“They look like dragons,” Georgia said.
“They are.”
Georgia laughed. Her father was being silly. Everyone knew dragons weren’t real.
She saw his eyes scan the pages, so she did the same. Next to the illustrations were stanzas of poetry written in languages she didn’t recognize. Someone had penciled English translations in the margins beside them in handwriting that looked a lot like her father’s. She read along with him, tales of dragons and gods and heroes, but the strange names like Illuyankas and Marduk confused and frustrated her. Her father stroked her hair, and she snuggled against him, the familiar scent of tobacco and aftershave clouding over her.
“It’s okay, Georgia,” he said. “You’ll understand better when you’re older. I really should have waited, but . . .” He shrugged. “This book will yours someday.”
“It’s got a lot of stories in it,” Georgia said. “Too many to read.” Her father laughed at that, and Georgia felt sunshine inside. She liked making him laugh.
“You think it’s too much, huh?” he said. “Well, here’s a secret, kiddo. It’s all actually the same story. The same story told throughout time, just with different names and in different places. It’s a story we’re part of now. You and me and Mom.”
He turned the pages until he found what he was looking for — a painting of a man in a black suit of armour and a black helmet sitting astride a rearing horse. A halo burned over the man’s helmet, and in his hand was a long lance, its tip buried in the breast of a small, winged dragon dying in the dirt below. Beneath the painting were the words “Saint George, by Gustave Moreau, 1870-1889.”
“Another dragon?” she moaned, bored. When would her father let her go outside again? The sun was almost down, and then it’d be dinnertime and off to bed before she knew it.