Dragon Virus by Laura Anne Gilman Page B

friend to man.” And then he starts to scream.
    o0o
    He’d bled then, nose, mouth and ears. I had him down on
the ground, cuffed so he’d stop tearing at himself, when the other Wheelies
showed up to cart him away. They hate arriving after the fun. One, older, male,
intent-eyed, had grilled me on everything the rapture had said, word for word,
until it was set in his mind. He’d still be questioning me if another call hadn’t
come in over the radio that I had to respond to.
    “All Raptures are nuts.” I’ve finished the story, make a
gesture of dismissal, telling her to go away, leave me the hell alone. Molly
finally takes the hint. Two hours left on my shift, and I’ve a day’s worth of
paperwork to do.
    This, though, I could close easy. “Subject was taken by
authorized family members.
    On his behalf they refused medical treatment.”
    o0o
    I initialed the report, put it in the “finished” stack. No
follow-up, no documentation required. Wheelies took care of their own. Not that
it took much. Raptures went splat ten times out of ten. The only question was
how long it would take, and how they’d do it.
    Rapture was the partying ground of adolescent boys. The
theory was a post-millennial gender hysteria, founded and fed by Wheelie
rhetoric. If I were a Wheelie kid, I’d probably start babbling too. Easy to
dismiss in a world filled with crazies and needies.
    The rest of the files — open cases, on-going investigations
— practically vibrated under my hand. Normalcy. Stability. Humanity. People I
could actually help. Or at least give closure to.
    Wheelies have told us what the Raptures mean. God’s coming,
and He’s pissed. The blood of the lamb isn’t a hall pass; repent and pray the
afterlife won’t be too horrifying. You dismissed them because that’s what sane
people do. But the look on the Rapture’s face — on the boy’s face — it’s going to stay with me.
    “… dragons... the dragons are filled with stars.”
    o0o
    At home, the air filter on high, I unload my gun, put it
and the bullets and the holster into the drawer. Dying for a drink, something
to ice over my brain for a couple-three hours.
    When you catch a Wheelie case, you’re supposed to go for
debriefing. Homeland’s high on tracking them, like they’re some big threat.
Catch a Rapture, and you go for a full shrink-down, no excuses, no avoidance.
Most cops shrug it off; if it doesn’t require digging and stitching, it’s not
supposed to bother us. Macho bullshit. I couldn’t wait to scrape my brain off
and hand it to someone else.
    “… they are no friend to man...”
    Why the hell did he pick me, my shift, my town.
    Life’s a bitch. I put the bottle down, unopened, and went to
bed.
    And dreamed of red skies in the middle of the night, fire
and smoke and screaming. The moon was cast in red shadows, silver scales
glinting in the reflected flares. Woke sweating, swearing. Clock glowed dim in
the pitch of the room: 3 a.m.
    A surge of my body got me off the bed, padded bare-assed to
the window. Blackout curtains for when I was on night shift; I push them aside
like there will be fresh air on the other side and stare through the glass up
into a still, silent sky. The stars hung clearly, stable, secure in their
place.
    “… full of dragons...”
    “… they’re clawing at me, tearing... they’ll tear us apart.”
    I stopped going to church sometime around the time I started
drinking. Nothing to do with each other, just a happenstance of timing. Most of
what I know of the Bible comes from the leaflets the Wheelies, Thumpers, or
local Baptist do-gooders all put in the station foyer. They want to save us.
Now is not a good time to be godless.
    Something wiggles against my memory, skates through my
brain. It’s not quite there, not quite real.
    The smart thing would be to go back to bed, dump it all
tomorrow morning, be given mental absolution with talk of dream symbolism, the
subconscious, emotional defenses working themselves