Dragon Town

  Chapter Three

  "It was early in the morning, or so I am told," Alex related, as he pretended to inspect the switches at the railroad crossing. Sapphire stood behind him, secretly recording his words with her hand-held device. "The site is under extremely tight security, has been ever since the first day it happened. Of course then it was mostly for safety. Million tons of concrete and steel had come tumbling down, fortunately in the middle of the night when no one was there. But when they went in for the cleanup, that's when the weird stuff started to happen. Every one of them sworn to secrecy know - police, fire, security, feds. Place is fenced off. You can't get within spitting range. Even stopped the news copters from flying overhead. It's a total no-fly zone. It's the secrecy that's attracting the buzz. Always does. All you've ever got to do is tell people they can't go into some place and BAM, it's all anybody wants to be doing after that. Going in there, I mean. They wouldn't tell me too much."

  "How come they told you anything?" Sapphire wanted to know. "Was there a railroad or something in there?"

  "Very funny," Alex laughed. "I see what you're thinking, though. Why would someone like me be having anything to do with something like that? Tell you the truth, it wasn't me. It was Argus."

  "Your little brother?"

  "You remember him, then?"

  "Sure, I do," Sapphire said. "We looked after that tyke, you and me. He used to follow us everywhere. Odd little kid, always quiet and big eyed. There was that one time ..." Sapphire began, but trailed off. She wasn't sure what Alex recalled of that day. She wasn't even sure of her own memories. It had seemed she had saved the little boy from something, somehow, but from what? It was weird.

  "You thought he'd get hit by a car," Alex offered. He hadn't really witnessed the event. One moment he'd been sitting there, chatting with old Mason Henry, the next thing he knew there was Sapphire, yelling and running off into the street, grabbing Argus and holding the kid while he struggled and cried.

  "In the meantime, Uncle Charlie disappeared," Alex added.

  "He did," Sapphire nodded. "He never came back?"

  "Never saw him again," Alex frowned. He'd missed his uncle, had really loved the man.

  "I wonder what happened to him," Sapphire queried. "I didn't really notice. I was only going after Argus. I don't even know why. It seemed like the right thing to do, and then, when it was all over, I couldn't explain. I thought he was in danger, but was he? There was nothing out there in that old empty lot. And your uncle, where did he get to?"

  "He must have just wandered off," Alex said. "He was acting pretty crazy, you know."

  "I guess," Sapphire said. Uncle Charlie had been obsessed, kept talking about a place where he'd been, a place that wasn't actually a place, or a time, or something like that. They never knew what he was talking about. The old man, Mason Henry, he had an idea, but then again he might have been kind of nuts too, missing his wife who had vanished, facing threats from the mob about selling his house and all that. It was never explained. The only thing Sapphire had ever been certain about was that she'd acted on instinct, and she'd do it again. She had never once doubted herself since that day.

  "You were saying?" she prompted Alex to go on.

  "Argus, right," Alex said. He'd also been sifting through the images of that long ago afternoon. "It was the girl I was telling you about, but let me back up. I told you about all the security, right? Because from the very first day when the hole opened up and the stadium collapsed, the place erupted in fire. In the beginning they thought it was all of the wiring in the structure, but it wasn't. They put out those flames, but the burning went on. They started pulling out rubble but, and here it gets strange, the metal, it wouldn't come out. The concrete, they managed to get some of that, but the metal, the steel, it stuck to the dozers, and then pulled them in. Anything metal got stuck and went in, and when I say 'went in', I mean into the hole. Trucks started going into the hole, like they were being pulled down by something, like there was a huge magnet that was sucking them in, and the whole thing - that's a joke, get it? The 'hole' thing? It was like it was feasting on trucks and tools and equipment and whatever it could. Some of the workmen say they felt it was tugging at them as they scrambled to get the hell back up to the street. That sinkhole was eating the stadium, literally! Like it was not just a hole that somehow opened up in the ground and whatever was sitting on top of it fell. Uh-uh, it's like it is a lot more than that. The concrete and steel began vanishing into the depths, and it's a big hole, I'm sure you know. More than seventy yards in diameter and deeper than that and still falling. Well, once the stadium was literally digested - and by then it was only a week and there was no one left who dared go in there - they got to seeing what was really down there. It's like an inverted volcano. I mean, seriously, there is magma, and lava and it's all flowing down. It's "derupting", that's a term they've been using these days. Have you heard it?"

  "Nope," Sapphire shrugged. She hadn't heard any of this, only that the hole was said to be expanding with no end in sight, and that security was strict and no one really knew why.

  "But what's all that got to do about Argus?" she wondered.

  "I'm coming to that," Alex said. "You see, into the second week the whole thing was wrapped up. No more information coming out and the people who knew were paid not to talk. The authorities were trying to cover it up, and I mean actually trying to cover it, with tarp, or fabric, or anything they could think of, but nothing would work. It would all get burned off or somehow done away with. The thing doesn't want to be covered. It's hard to explain. Impossible, really, but there's something about it that seems to have, I don't know, call it 'a will'. The thing has a mind of its own. I know it sounds crazy. It's only a hole, but believe me, it isn't just only a hole."

  Alex paused to wipe his brow. He knew that it sounded insane. He'd been telling himself the same thing for a week now, ever since the day he was summoned.

  "So the only people who were in there one morning, inside the perimeter I mean, were a handful of guards and a guy from the department of energy who was trying to figure out if you could harness the thing like a source of renewable energy! Deep down in the hole it's all rubble - rocks, dirt, gravel and a few bits of steel from the structure that are still being consumed by the heat. One of the guards heard some rattling. He looks down, way down in the hole, and he sees a little bit of a landslide, some pebbles and dirt falling down in the hole, nothing special. Then he looks over a bit to the side and there is this girl coming out of the hole. Literally, I mean it, scrambling up from the rocks and the rubble. This girl's maybe nine, maybe ten, got short hair like yours and her head is on fire. That's what the witnesses said, the few that there were. The guard, he calls out to the others and the scientist too and they see her, working her way up the side and her hair is all smoldering red, and her overalls, she's wearing overalls, are smoking too with bits of flame flashing up now and then. She's got a serious look on her face, her very smudged face, by the way. The girl is all filthy and charred but she comes up quite calmly and clambers over the side of the hole to the street, where the guards all gather around her. They're towering over this girl but she's calm as can be, she looks over them one at a time and then, in a very plain voice, she asks them, 'which one of you is Argus Kirkham?'