Prairie Fire by E. K. Johnston Read Free Book Online Page B

choreographed so that no two patrols overlapped, and every day you had to break down your camp and move into the zone, still without contacting the other patrol. We carried everything with us, along with GPS monitors that kept us on track and let the commanders know we’d done the right amount of walking. If executed correctly, the whole exercise was entirely benign and unadventurous.
    It was, to put it bluntly, the most tedious thing I’d ever done. The fire crew, who had already spent a fair amount of time training with one another, kept mostly to themselves except during meals. Davis and Ilko, the other medic, were bored because no one even got blisters, and I learned very quickly that leaving the engineers to their own devices ended badly in a hurry, even if neither of them had access to explosives.
    We did get on well enough, though. Owen and I never walked beside each other during the day, though we did spar with each other because no one else was good enough to go as fast as we did. It was the sparring that finally won over the fire crew, because while I wasn’t as good as Owen, I was better at instructing, and by the third or fourth time I’d called him on a mistake, the others started asking for my help in their own drills. They trained with swords for the same reason I did: in case of emergency. Also, it was good for stamina and upper body strength, and that came in handy for the fire crews and the engineers. I have no idea what the medics thought of it. In return, the fire crew helped me come up with ways to speed through my firearm practice, which I still struggled with. By the fifth day, when we reached the farthest part of the base from the main barracks, we were a team, even though I was still going to cheat and refer to the bulk of them by musical shorthand when it came time to memorialize them in music, if not make up their names outright.
    I was used to farmland and being able to see the horizon most of the time. I had been with Owen when he’d slayed dragons in woodlots, but that didn’t happen very often. I knew how to scan the horizon and listen for the sounds of dragon flight, even if I was in a moving vehicle. I was learning the woods, the sounds that were made, but I wasn’t very good at it yet. Fortunately for us, Gratton and Parker, two of our fire crew from Northern Ontario, were used to a view blocked by trees.
    â€œWhat’s that smell?” Courtney asked. (Theoretically we were supposed to call each other by last name when we were on drill, but Courtney had been three beds down from me during the first part of Basic, and I figured that seeing her naked qualified me to call her by her given name, unless there was a superior officer around.)
    â€œIt smells like a dragon,” Owen said. He meant that it smelled like Manitoulin, but I was the only person who knew that.
    I looked at the GPS. I did most of our navigating because it was the only thing we could think of for me to do.
    â€œWe’re coming up on the Orange Zone,” I told them, and everyone shivered.
    In the sixties, apparently before common sense was invented, Gagetown had served as a research facility in addition to being a training camp and the regimental base of the Black Watch. One of the experiments had involved the controlled slaying of dragons, mostly of the small, coastal variety—though both “small” and “controlled” were relative terms—to determine the full environmental effect of dragon death.
    The experiment was never really completed, because the effects were ruled too devastating for them to continue. Most of the St. John River watershed had been contaminated, killing dozens of river fish and animal and plant species before the damage was brought under very expensive control. The ground had been left, and nothing had yet grown on it, even though it had been fifty years. I’m not sure why anyone was surprised by that. The Sahara had been a desert for