by James Maxey
This was a fuel explosion. He knew it before the shockwave even reached him, as molecules of gasoline filled his still enhanced nose. He felt the punch of the shockwave a nanosecond later, the furnace blast of heat, and saw the flames rolling toward him too fast for him to shout out a command that might spare him from the coming pain.
Large hands grabbed him by the arms and jerked him from his feet. He was spun around as Servant hugged him close, turning his back to the blast. The air was still hot as a furnace but as the flames rolled past he found himself unharmed. A few seconds later smoking bits of red hot shrapnel clattered on the ground around them as what was left of the garage rained from the sky.
“Did she just kill himself?” asked App, peeking around Servant’s torso.
“What makes you think she wasn’t trying to kill us?” asked Servant.
App shook his head. “If she’d intended to kill us, she would have waited until we actually reached the garage.”
“If she reads the papers, she has to know an explosion can’t hurt me and you can be rebooted.”
“Which is why it had to be suicide,” said App, raising a hand to shield his face from the heat of the burning remains of the garage.
“Or escape,” said Servant, looking toward the sky. “She can fly, right?”
“Yeah,” said App. “But in broad daylight, we’d see her. Although… spectrum mode!”
He studied the thick vortex of oily black smoke whirling into the sky. In infrared and ultraviolet, the full complexities of the swirling air stood revealed. High up the column, he saw a familiar shape, using the smoke to hide her ascent.
“Found her!” said App, pointing. “Though without Skyrider, I don’t know what good it’s going to do us. She’s already out of range of your jumps, and climbing.”
“Jumping’s not the only option,” said Servant.
“You think you can throw me?” asked App.
“It’s our best option for taking her alive. I could knock her out of the sky by throwing one of these big pieces of scrap metal at her, but I doubt she’d survive the fall.”
“Do it,” said App.
Servant did it. The g-force of the sudden acceleration left App feeling faint, but the rush of cool air swiftly pulled him back to alertness. “Sticky mode,” he shouted as he raced into the swirling smoke. He couldn’t see a thing, but heard the clacking of gears and the whoosh of the dragon’s wings. He stretched his arms out blindly toward the sound.
His fingers brushed against something smooth and hard. He stuck instantly, jerked forward by the dragon’s movement. The next thing he knew, he was free of the smoke. He discovered his fingers had latched onto the sword-like tip of the dragon’s tail, making good, firm, contact with the broad side of the blade. He eyed the razor sharp edge and felt lucky he hadn’t grabbed it. Sticky fingers don’t do much good once they’ve been sliced off.
His weight at the very tip of the tail had thrown off the dragon’s aerodynamics. The creature was spiraling downwards, beating its wings furiously. It swung its tail from side to side, but this did as much to shift the dragon’s body from side to side as it did to toss App around.
The struggle caused the dragon to bank sharply. For a second, App was pretty certain they were heading for a crash landing, until the broad wings once more caught air and their flight leveled out.
“Let go!” the dragon bellowed.
“Not until you land!” App shouted.
“Let go or I’ll kill us both!” the dragon cried. “I’m not going to spend the rest of my life in prison!”
“We’re not here to take you to prison,” shouted App. “We’re here to offer you a job!”
“I warned you,” the dragon said, folding her wings back and diving straight toward the ground.
“Don’t do this!” shouted App.
“I’ve nothing left to live for!” the dragon wailed.
They were too close to the ground for further discussion. Two seconds before impact App said, “Airhead mode!” Instantly, the skin on the top of his head became elastic, filling with hydrogen, leaving him drifting in the air to watch Steam-Dragon meet her untimely end.
Freed of his weight, the dragon proved far more acrobatic than App would have guessed, as she arched her body and spread her wings to turn her downward momentum into forward thrust, avoiding fatal impact with mere inches to spare.
The dragon started to arc back up toward the sky, but was still barely ten feet off the ground when a white blur streaked across App’s field of vision. He knew this white blur well. It was Servant, having shed his civilian suit for his combat attire, moving faster than a bullet, jumping up to grab Steam-Dragon by the tail.
Servant shifted back to normal speed as he dropped to the ground, the dragon’s tail still in hand. He planted his feet wide and dug parallel trenches in the field as the dragon lost all momentum. Steam-Dragon landed on her feet and spun around snarling, opening her jaws and blasting Servant directly in the face with a gout of superheated steam.
App had drifted close to the ground, so he called out, “Reset!” As he dropped, the steam cleared, showing Servant completely unharmed.
“We’re from the government,” said Servant said with the ghost of a grin. “We’re here to help.”
Steam-Dragon thrust her jaws forward and snapped them shut around his face. The sound of gears stripping filled the air. Bright blue sparks shot out of vents near the back of the dragon’s head. The dragon drew her head back, her lower jaw dangling uselessly.
“We didn’t come here to fight,” said Servant.
“And I wasn’t put on this earth to surrender,” said the dragon, jumping forward to grab Servant’s shoulders with her fore-talons and raking his belly with her hind-claws. Servant didn’t even flinch as her claws ran harmlessly along his force field.
Steam-Dragon fell back, whipping her sword-tail forward, jabbing it straight against Servant’s heart. The blow bounced off harmlessly.
Servant crossed his arms. “Keep hitting me as long as you’d like. I’m told it’s therapeutic.”
Steam-Dragon crouched, her eyes narrowing. App was surprised to see she’d bothered to build facial expressions into the machine, but, obviously, the dragon was the work of an artist as much as an engineer.
“What the fuck do you want?” the dragon asked, in a voice balanced between outrage and despair.
“We want to talk,” said App, stepping forward. “We know the men you killed last night weren’t exactly angels.”
“They killed Mark!” said Steam-Dragon. “My life is over!”
“You’ve had plenty of time to kill yourself if you really believed that,” said Servant.
“But you’re not put on this earth to surrender,” said App.
“Don’t throw my fucking words back at me,” said Steam-Dragon. “You don’t know me.”
“You’re right,” said App. “And you don’t know us. Why don’t we change that? There a coffee shop around here? Someplace quiet we could go and have a little heart to heart talk?”
“What the hell do you want to know?” she snarled. “You were there last night. You saw me kill those sons of bitches. Since you figured out where I lived, you no doubt know what Mark was up to. You know I went along with it, no matter how fucking stupid I thought he was for getting wrapped up in that bullshit. We all know I’m going to rot in prison for the rest of my fucking life.”
“There’s really no call for profanity,” said Servant.
“We aren’t here to arrest you,” said App.
“Even though I’m guilty?” she asked, her voice nearly a sob. “Things I’ve done…”
“The Covenant couldn’t exist without forgiveness,” said Servant. “Tell us your story. You have my word we’ll never repeat anything you say to the police.”
“Aren’t the Covenant just the same as the police?” she asked. “Don’t you operate under some special authority from Homeland Security?”
“We’re kind of police,” sai
d App. “But we’re police who wear tights. We don’t follow the same rules.”
App braced himself as gears started whirring inside the dragon and it rose up to its full height on all fours. But instead of attacking, a hatch swung open on the underside. A moment later a young woman swung out, dangling in a harness. She matched the picture in his head, mid-twenties, brown hair, skinny build. She wore a Metallica t-shirt dark with sweat and blue jeans that ended at the knees, revealing scarred stumps. She unbuckled her harness and lowered herself to the ground, then reached back up into the dragon’s torso and drew down a pair of long black cylinders. App tensed, thinking they might be some sort of rifle, but then she pressed a button and large cups popped out at one end and two arched feet opened up on the other. She placed the cups over the stumps of her legs. There were no straps to adhere them, but they stayed in place as she lifted herself into a crouch, then came forward from beneath the dragon to stand on her prosthetic legs.
“We’re thirty miles from the nearest coffee shop,” she said. She glanced back across the field to where her mobile home was now in flames. “I’d invite you inside, but it’s kind of a mess.”
“We can talk right here,” said Servant.
She crossed her arms and said through chattering teeth. “Easy for you to say. I’m fucking freezing. There’s a Hardee’s out on 87. The coffee’s crap, but at least we’d be out of the cold.”
“Wherever you want to go,” said App.
She nodded, then managed something approaching a grin. “Next time I go running from the law, I’ll remember to grab a jacket.”
App took off his suit coat and held it out to her. “You can borrow mine. This Hardee’s you mentioned. It far? Cause we didn’t get here in a car.”
“No problem,” she said. “We can take mine. If it’s not on fire.”
Chapter Eight
Pure of Heart
App felt like a contortionist squeezing into the tiny back seat of Steam-Dragon’s old Mustang. Not that Servant looked any more comfortable in the front seat, with his head bent forward and shoulders barely allowing the door to close. The car reeked of cigarettes and the motor practically deafened App when she cranked it up. Putting the car into gear, she said, “Mind if I smoke?”
“Yes,” said Servant.
“That’s too fucking bad,” she said, pulling out a pack of cigarettes tucked into the driver’s side sun visor. She took her hands off the wheel to light it despite the fact that they were racing down the bumpy dirt road at breakneck speed.
“You always drive this fast?” Servant asked.
She laughed, smoke pouring from her mouth. “I’m taking it slow to be polite. My daddy was a stock car racer. Never made to the big time, but he raced at just about every small track this side of the Mississippi.”
“I remember that from your files,” said App. “His nickname was Rebel. You got your start as a mechanic working side by side with him.”
“Seems y’all know all about me,” she said, reaching the end of the dirt road and peeling out onto the highway. “So y’all know my name is Becky. I’m going to feel stupid calling you App and Servant when we get to Hardees.”
“My real name is Clint,” said Clint. “Clint Christianson.”
“My real name is Johnny Appleton,” said App. “But these days everyone calls me App whether I’m in costume or not.”
“Now that I know your secret identities, you planning to kill me?”
“No one’s killing anyone,” said App. “All we want is to talk. And for you to put out that cigarette.”
“Worried you’ll get cancer?”
“I’m more or less immortal,” said App. “I just hate the smell. My first boyfriend smoked. I’ve hated the stink ever since.”
“Huh,” she said, eying him in the rearview mirror. “I wouldn’t have guessed you were gay.”
“That a problem for you?”
“Naw. It takes all kinds, I guess.” She cracked her window and flicked out the still lit cigarette.
App craned his neck to watch the cigarette bounce along the highway. Behind them he saw flashing red lights as firetrucks turned down the dirt road they’d exited only seconds before. “This job has really altered my moral compass. I’m more bothered by you littering than I was by you killing those guys last night.”
“Those guys had it coming,” she said. “They killed Mark. I saw everything.”
“You were there?” asked Clint.
“Not in person,” she said. “I had a drone tailing Mark. He thought he was all slick, saying he was going to stay up late in the garage to tinker some more on the dragon. I knew he was up to something by his tone. He probably thought I was asleep when I heard the garage door open around two in the morning. I went to the window and saw him pushing his motorcycle down the driveway, getting a long way down the road before he started it so as not to wake me. I sent one of our drones to follow him.”
“You just happened to have drone handy in your bedroom?” asked App.
“Who doesn’t?” she said. “Of course, mine are probably a bit fancier than most. We modified an off-the-shelf model to run on a hydrogen fuel cell. The original battery kept it in the air maybe twenty minutes. After we were done, it could fly for two days, and we’d tied the controller into a cell network. We could pilot it anywhere.”
“Why would you need to build something like this?” asked Clint.
“Because we could,” said Becky as they whipped into the parking lot of the Hardees, tires squealing. “Building stuff together is what made us…” Her voice trailed off. She swallowed hard. “Made us such a great couple.”
“Look,” said Clint. “We don’t have to go in to talk if you’d rather stay out here.”
“No,” she said, opening her car door. “I’ll… I’ll hold things together if I’m in public.”
“Great,” said App. “Because I’ll need chiropractic care if I’m in this backseat one minute longer.”
Inside, Becky and App ordered coffees, while Clint got a little carton of milk.
“I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone over the age of 10 drink from one of those little cartons before,” App said as they took seats in the back of the restaurant. At mid-morning, the place was nearly empty.
Clint shrugged. “I don’t drink caffeine. Or anything with processed sugar. My body is a temple.”
“You sound like a Bible-thumper,” said Becky.
“I’m a man of faith, yes,” said Clint.
“Oh Lord,” she said, rolling her eyes. “I can tell right now you and me ain’t getting along.”
“You a fellow heathen?” asked App.
“More or less,” said Becky. “I went to church with an old boyfriend before I joined the army, but was never, you know, born again. Then, in the army… stuff happened.”
“Losing your legs?” asked Clint.
She shook her head. “Not just the legs. I mean, you get over to Syria… I wasn’t supposed to see combat. I had a safe job in a green zone, far from the fighting. But every day I saw the dead and dying passing through the base on the way back stateside. A lot of guys I worked with said this is a Holy War. But if war can be holy… maybe nothing’s holy. If this really is all part of God’s plan, sign me up for the opposition, because God’s a world class dick.”
“You can’t blame God for the atrocities of man,” said Clint.
“Why can’t I?” she asked. “You Bible thumpers give him credit for the sun rising in the morning. If he gets the praise, he also gets the blame.”
“God doesn’t want violence committed in his name.”
“Then He could stop it, right?” she asked. “I mean, that’s what makes God a god, isn’t it? The power to make whatever he wants into reality by wiggling his fingers. He could turn every gun in the world into dust just by willing it.”
“People would just make more guns,” said Clint.
“Yeah. But maybe the world would get a few days of peace. And you know what might make re
al peace? If people over there had enough food. If they had medicine for their kids, and roofs over their heads. I don’t know if the war is causing poverty or poverty is causing the war, but God could fix it all, couldn’t he? Make the deserts green, make the rivers safe to drink again. Either he chooses not to fix the world, or he doesn’t have the power to do so.”
“Since you weren’t in combat, how’d you get injured?” App asked, wanting to change the subject.
Becky smiled wistfully. “Sometimes, the planes that flew out of our base couldn’t find targets. They’d return loaded with bombs. I was at the airstrip the day one of these planes hit the runway with its front landing gear compromised after passing through a sandstorm. There were a hundred different fail safes in place to make certain the bombs wouldn’t explode in a crash, but apparently no one had thought of the hundred and first way these things might go off by accident. The crash left a crater two hundred yards across. Thirty people died. I’m lucky, I guess.” She shook her head as she said this.
“So you came back stateside,” said Clint. “Got a job at the airport.”
She nodded. “Yeah. I could have gone on disability, but I knew that I’d kill myself, just sitting around feeling sorry. I needed to keep working. First day on the job, I met Mark. Saw the dragon tattoo on his neck. Told him I used to have one myself… on my left calf.” She took a deep breath as her eyes grew distant. After taking a drink of her coffee, she said, “When he found out I was a vet, he asked me how come I didn’t have a pair of those fancy computerized prosthetic legs he’d read about on the internet. That led to me ranting about the bullshit I’d had to put up with at the VA. I was a candidate for prosthetics, but the waiting list was, like, two years long.”
“That’s crazy,” said App.
“You don’t have to tell me,” she said. “But apparently they give priority to soldiers injured in actual combat, and those of us who just have accidents get shoved to the back. So Mark told me I should come over to his place sometime. He said he might be able to build me some legs.”