Chapter 5

"Here, take my hand," Anna offered Petrushka. She felt around, found the small boy's arm, then fumbled about with her other hand for her brother. Finding his coat, she latched on.

"I'll go first," Iosif declared. "Dieter, I'm tying my scarf around my middle, here," he guided Dieter's hand to the far end of the long swath. "Keep hold of the end of it."

"Ok, Boss," Dieter made light of the small concession to caution, and firmly grasped the knitted garment. The children now formed into a human coffle, they began to shuffle through the snow toward the small flicker of light they had seen from the edge of the forest.

"Ooooh," Anna blew out when an owl sounded near them.

"Blast!" cursed Iosif a quarter hour later. "We're not getting any closer." The tiny glow seemed to be as far away as ever.

Anna tugged them on. "We can't give up now. We'll never get there if we give up," she debated in inarguable logic.

"Let's go a little further," Dieter urged. "It's only been a few minutes."

"I wanna go back," Petrushka whined. This only served to irritate the other children.

"That's not an option," Iosif snapped. "Unless you want to go back by yourself..." he trailed off meaningfully.

Petrushka turned and searched for the trail behind them, but could see nothing. "I, I, no, I better stay with you," he conceded.

"Alright then," Iosif concluded. Off he marched again.

This time the children struggled on for a much longer time. At last they stopped, heaving, for a breather. Dieter noted that the light had finally begun to appear nearer. Maybe they were almost there. Distances were deceiving in the deep, dark wood.

"Woohoo," exclaimed Petrushka, finally catching the excitement. Encouraged, the cadre shambled off again.

They had gotten far enough to see the light resolve into a flaring torch, something rarely seen in the modern world, when Iosif felt the ground give way beneath his boots. He pitched forward, falling, and all the kids tumbled down after him. It was just a tiny hillock that set off their small spill, but it knocked the stuffing out of them for a moment.

Petrushka's voice wavered out. "Look at the dragon, over there, by the flame." They were still very distant, but they could just make it out. They were flabbergasted to see a giant golden winged reptile huddled beneath the torch's yellow glow.

Anna said in a tiny voice, "Maybe we should go home."

They all turned round and looked behind. "Er, no," said a shaky Iosif. "We can't see our tracks to go back. Unless, Dieter, well, this is your neck of the woods, do you know where the path is?"

Dieter admitted he'd never hiked this remotely into the back country without his parents, and possibly not even with them.

"Maybe the dragon will eat us all up," whined Anna.

"Shut up!" commanded Dieter. "Dragons don't eat little children. That's only in fairy tales!"

"Don't look now," said Iosif, "But dragons don't exist either. What's that?" he nodded toward the beast. No one saw his head tilt, but they knew to what he referred.

They didn't answer.

Wallace took his time waking up. He knew how to do this, he did it all the time. He lay with his eyes closed, listening to the sounds beyond the iron bars. Some of the louder ones made him wince. His hearing seemed to be unusually acute.

Doreen, the dispatcher, was brusquely sending units to a domestic disturbance on the reservation. She was in the radio room at the front of the station.

Deputy Terrance was sitting at his desk in the bullpen, the open area containing the rank and file officers. He was droning a report onto a dictaphone for later transcription. Wallace could hear computer keys clacking at a nearby clerk's desk, where a similar report was being entered directly into the system. Chances were it was the one on Wallace's latest foolish behavior.

He could even hear Sheriff Bill Blair shouting on his phone at some politician he was hoping to bully. That call was happening all the way in the back, in Blair's office. Only Blair had a setup with a door that shut, but like now, it was normally open.

Wallace lay there taking stock of what hurt on his body, something he had done scores of times before. Since he never remembered what happened when first waking up after a blackout, feeling out his injuries gave him some clues to help get him by.

Yup, he must have been fighting, his jaw ached like a sonuva gun, and his knuckles felt like raw hamburger. He hoped he had fought like a warrior, and hadn't been attacked without provocation or simply fallen off a bar stool. He felt the first faint itch, the crawl of his skin. The need in his body for alcohol had begun.