Upstairs, George hurried along a corridor, throwing open the doors, giving the rooms a cursory inspection, finding un-made beds and nightgowns draped over chairs, but no Peony. He was certain that he would be crushed or incinerated, and that certainty grew stronger with each second. In a room at the end of the hall whose window framed a view of the city, ruddy light flickered on creamy wallpaper with a pyramid pattern, and a pudgy, dark-haired woman in a pink flannel robe sat on the edge of the bed, watching Teocinte burn. Her eyes fell upon him and an expression of mirth spread like butter melting across her features. She patted the sheet beside her, inviting him to sit. He wanted to urge her to run, but something in her face, some central weakness, told him not to bother. A muscular balding man pushed past him into the room and, after a hostile glance at George, removed his trousers. The woman turned again to the window, plucking fretfully at the lapel of her robe. Abandoning them to whatever exercise they planned, George fled down the stairs and out into the street, almost overlooking the slight ginger-haired figure squatting on her haunches outside the door, rocking back and forth. Peony didn’t complain when he caught her up – she appeared stunned and uncaring.
Whereas the behavior of the couple in Ali’s had impressed George as being utterly final in its dissolution, the streets were an evolution of that finality, a Babel of dimly perceived sounds and voices, a bedlam of people who clawed and clutched and kicked. At one point somebody knocked him off-balance, sending him to a knee; he put out a hand to prevent a fall and braced against the bruised, misshapen face of a boy who had been trampled beneath the feet of the crowd. He yanked back his hand, repelled, yet this intimate contact with death firmed his resolve and he became single-minded in his pursuit of survival, using his size to full advantage, treating people like impediments, clubbing them with his fist, shoving them down and tossing them aside without a thought for their fate or the state of his soul, stained by one death and now, doubtless, by others. Aghast faces surfaced from the melee and he dispatched them one after the other. Dust and the smell of fear, of fury . . . all the toxins of dementia poisoned the air. Yet he felt immune to fear, unstoppable, invincible in his lack of emotion. Then, as he reached the outskirts of the city, where the dirt street gave out onto an upward slope, the crowd fanning out across it, a splintering crack ripped across the other noises, seeming to come both from inside him and from without. George looked back and saw that the dragon’s leg had buckled, a shockingly white shard of bone protruding from the scales above the knee, blood oozing from the break, and he recognized that Cattanay’s prediction had come to pass.13 Griaule’s gargantuan head swiveled to the left, a malefic golden eye canted downward, and though others must have thought the same, George had the idea that the dragon was staring directly at him, a white star shining deep within his throat. The leg buckled further, the dragon listed toward them, and George sprinted up the hill, running even more desperately than before, carrying Peony under an arm like a small rolled-up rug. The crowd’s wailing became a shriek as they fled from beneath Griaule’s fall.
Perhaps time slowed, subject to a new gravity now that Griaule was truly dying, or perhaps it was simply the chemistry of terror stretching seconds into wider fractions; but George ran for what felt like a long, long time. He heard an eerie hiss and a blast of heat at his back sent him veering out of control; he righted himself and kept going. Time slowed further and he could clearly make out his labored breathing above the ringing in his ears and the shouts of people around him; and then, the last thing he would ever hear: the dragon’s final roar, a percussive sound that shot lightning through his ears and resolved into a fizzing that banished every other sound, grew faint and fainter yet, then faded and faded, stranding him in the midst of a pure unmodulated silence. The earth convulsed, twitching like the skin on a cat’s back, and he was flung through the air, somehow managing to hang onto Peony and shield her from harm. He did not black out, but lay facedown for ten or fifteen minutes, longer perhaps, moving an arm, a leg, not testing his mobility, just incidental movements, content to rest and be thoughtless. When he sat up he found that Peony was unconscious, but breathing steadily. Only then did he turn and gaze through the pall of dust and smoke toward Teocinte.
