The Dead Have A Thousand Dreams by Richard Sanders

evidently
had crawled out of the woods and had gotten run over while it was
trying to cross.
    I got out. Somebody had to
move the carcass, drag it off to the side. Nickie and Wooly
approached it with me.
    It was ugly . The slick, scaly body was
crushed flat in the middle by a tire track. Its eyes were closed in
death and its long tongue was still flapped out of its
mouth.
    “Holy shit,” Nickie said
slowly, not with disgust but with realization. “Holy shit. The
dragon will stop you in the middle of the road.”
    “What?” Said
Wooly.
    “The dragon will stop you.
It’s what she said. It’s just what she said.”
    “Wait,” said Wooly. “What
did she say? What did she exactly say?”
    “Watch out for the dragon
in the road. When you leave the gate, the dragon will stop
you.”
    Wooly’s head moved with a
dull nod. “Not on the side of the road. In the middle.”
    Nitrogen ice is one of the
coldest substances in the core of the earth. I felt like I had 18
pounds of it flowing through my blood stream.
    For once Wooly had nothing
to say. He didn’t have to say anything—the meaning of this thing
was pretty damn clear. We kept staring down at the ghost-creature.
A lizard, a dragon, a half-curled reptilian tongue. I could almost
say I was starting to slide into a dream, but that wasn’t it. Just
the opposite, in fact. I felt like I was sliding into a moment of
revelation. I felt like all the questions were about to be
answered, like all the secrets were about to be told.
     
    >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
     
     

CHAPTER 5
    WORD FOR FUCKING
WORD
    >>MONDAY JUNE 18 (3
days to go)
     
    MONDAY JUNE 18, 10:00
a.m.
    YOU CAN LOOK IT
UP
    Here’s a prediction even I
could’ve made: Wooly was in some mood after the slain-dragon encounter. Soon as he
got home he stomped into the living room and pulled Georgiana’s
photo off the wall. “Fuck this thing. I don’t care what I paid for
it.” Only the intercession of Genevieve, saying she’d put it in
storage, prevented him from trash-smashing the thing to pieces. His
bad case of the jitters stayed with him through the rest of the
day. “I always knew something like this was going to happen,” he
said over dinner. “I didn’t know what it was, what it would be, not
exactly, but I always knew it would be like this.”
    Next morning we found him
slumped at the kitchen table, Genevieve flitting around him like a
worried moth. Not only was he slit-eyed tired but shadows seemed to
have grown into his face. The shadows weren’t just from exhaustion.
You can see coloring like that if you peek inside a closed
casket.
    An empty glass filmed with
orange juice residue sat in front of him. Eggs, milk and cereal
stood on the counter but he didn’t want anything. Something about
him suggested he’d been sitting in the same spot for a long time,
maybe for hours.
    Genevieve was biting her
lip so hard it looked like she was about to bleed. “I’m tired of all this
fortune telling shit, all this occult spitunia. You think she can
tell the future? Anybody can tell the future.”
    “Really,” said
Wooly.
    “You want to know what the
future’s going to bring? The sun will die and the earth will
perish. You can look it up.”
    “Yeah, but how about a
little before that? How about like three days from now, cause that’s when
she says I’m going to die.”
    Wooly told us he’d made an
emergency appointment with his doctor, 1:30. “What if it’s in me?” he said. “What
if the death is coming from inside ? I want to make sure it
isn’t. I have to take every precaution.”
    Genevieve was pacing along
the counter now, picking things up—the milk, the cereal—and putting
them down again. “Maybe she said some things that maybe seemed to come true,
that could be. But that doesn’t mean everything she said’s going to come
true.”
    “Yeah?” said Wooly. “Can
you guarantee it? Can you get it in writing?”
    “No, but I can tell you to
take it down some, stop torturing