Dragonfly by Jax Hill 

We heard that he was preaching sermons down on the shore, with that gorgeous voice. Mainly he was talking about the serious trouble some of our citizens were going to run into if they didn’t mend their ways. Particularly, he was knocking the people who:

• Sold drugs.
• Sold sex.
• Sold weapons.
• Abused women.
• Stole or vandalized.
• Set a poor example for children.
• Used air conditioning.

The usual stuff you’d think a mad prophet would preach about, except for the air conditioning, I’m not sure where that came in. Most of us had air conditioning in our places, even if we didn’t use it that often. I guess from living outdoors he’d become convinced that filtered air was bad for you.

The funny thing was, the Dunker was getting a following, just like Torstein, but only his following was mostly made up of younger kids, surfers, skaters, like that. And they were taking him seriously, I swear! A bunch of them had cut their hair in crew cuts (which made no sense since his dreads were about three feet long), and they wore t-shirts with a line drawing of the Dunker on them, with a catch phrase printed on them:

“The End is Near.”

Franz had heard that the skaters and surfers were starting to annoy Nikolai because they’d left the shore and would go through different neighborhoods where people were committing these offenses and preach at them — or turn them into the cops if they wouldn’t repent. They were sort of like those Red Beret vigilante groups, except that they were also anti-air conditioning, for the most part.

When Franz told us this, we were rolling on the ground laughing, but Torstein said, “Duncan isn’t a fool. His methods may be strange to us, but he’s right on target with what he’s trying to do. The only thing is, what he wants to do can’t be done by preaching, by setting rules. It can only be done by turning individual hearts.”

“Turn or burn, that’s what the surfer punks are preaching now,” Franz said. “And if they keep getting in the face of Nikolai’s soldiers, they’re gonna be the ones burning.”

“You want to go back to the shore and warn your cousin?” I asked Torstein.

“No,” Torstein said. “But maybe we can go back and visit him, and see these surfer punks for ourselves.”

This time only a few of us went, and we drove our own cars instead of taking the bus. We had gone late in the day; we knew the Dunker would be out in the waves until people started leaving the beach. We found the Dunker, and a couple of his surfer-skater followers in a parking lot, embroiled in a fist-fight with some of Nikolai’s thugs, just as Franz had predicted. Bruiser and Franz had come with me and Pete, Jack and Jazz, and Torstein.

Bruiser and Pete ran out ahead of us to help the Dunker and the surfer punks. Pete was a scrapper. Back in the day, before he got married, he used to get into all kinds of brouhaha’s, and I think he’d kind of missed that since he’d settled down and become a family man. He waded in, fists flying, but Bruiser just started grabbing people by the neck and flinging them out of the fray.

I was thinking it would have been a rout if not for Pete and Bruiser, but then the Dunker sort of exploded. That’s really the only word I can think of for it: he had been grappling down in a crouch with one of the thugs, when he suddenly sprang upright, flinging the thug (who was no lightweight!) forward so he crashed into another thug — the Dunker’s crazy hair went flying as he shook his head and roared. I swear it, he roared! Then he reached out, grabbed the shoulders of the thug he’d just thrown off him and the one he’d caromed into, and he smacked their heads together, just like a cartoon.

And they obligingly toppled to the ground, dazed, just like a cartoon. I expected to see little animated bluebirds flying around their heads.

After that, the other thugs ran. We heard sirens in the distance, so we decided to beat feet, too. We ran up the boardwalk, and the iron-fisted Dunker was laughing. He’d put his arm around Torstein’s shoulders and was dragging him along as we turned the corner into a little blind alley behind a couple of bistros.

Still holding onto Torstein, the Dunker said to his own followers, “This is the man you should be following. He’s the one with the real hope for the future. Compared to him, I’m just a messenger boy.”

Torstein shook his head. “You’re more than that, Duncan, much more.”

“Why were those guys trying to beat you up?” Bruiser asked.

“Because they fear the truth,” the Dunker said portentously in that awesome voice of his.

“You got something more concrete than that?” Bruiser asked.

One of the skater punks said, “Nikolai’s yacht was out, and his little niece came by on her jet ski. Duncan tried to pull her off and dunk her.”

“She got away,” the Dunker said ruefully.

“You know, you shouldn’t antagonize Nikolai,” Bruiser said. “I understand you have your job to do, and you can take care of yourself when it comes to a fistfight with a couple of thugs, but ... they’re just ground-floor with Nikolai. He’s got much stronger and much meaner guys to throw at you.”

The Dunker laughed. “Let him come,” he said. “Things are changing now. The kingdom is coming. Nikolai can’t hold that back.”

“Amen brother,” one of the surfer punks said.

Huh. The kingdom is coming.