Shadow Dragon

by wade coleman

  To manufacture a virus and vaccine, you need glass vats, special equipment to control the environment and filters to separate the virus from the growth media. This equipment was delivered six months ago to the ammo bunkers. The bunkers were built on top of the hill, close to where I crossed the fence. The trees are thick, so you can’t see the buildings until you get close.

  I log the coordinates into my phone and exit out the back door. From what I can tell from the maps, the cameras are mounted to the light poles.

  I exit the front door and walk to the tree line and then head up the hill. I stay off the road that is a little over ten feet wide. You can see where trucks going past keep the trees trimmed. Using the moon shadows that line the road, I teleport to the top of the hill.

  There are six buildings of arched metal roofs covered with earth, with sage growing on the top. Using the superintendent’s key, I open the door to the first building.

  Seeing the rows of glass vats, centrifuges, and bottling equipment, I turn on the video to my goggles. The equipment is set up, but by the dust on top, it’s been weeks since it was last used. I check out the other five buildings. One of them is used for storage, stainless steel shelves stacked with cardboard boxes. According to the shipping manifest, half the virus left two days ago, and the rest leaves tomorrow.

  I open one of the boxes and inside are plastic containers the size of a roll of quarters filled with some powder. Stamped on the top is a number. After grabbing a canister, headlights illuminate the windows.

  Taking off my backpack, I set the charge in the thermite bomb for three minutes. The heat generated will incinerate the virus. Problem solved.

  Exiting the building, I find the shadows that take me back to the parking lot and I make my way to the nearby trees. Lights are coming on all over the compound. Armed men hop in the back of the pickup and head up the hill. Before they get to the top, a fireball lights up the sky and the trees cast deep, long shadows. The darkness takes me in, and from this space, I reach for Kim, feel her presence and reform.

  The fireball fades just as I hear the explosion. When the blast fades, I say, “We should be going now.”

  Startled, Kim turns towards me, “Jesus, Hermes, stop doing that! With your implant, I can’t tell when you are standing next to me.”

  Kim and I leave the truck and take off on our bikes, using the almond trees as cover.

  Twenty minutes and we are out of the orchards and into the hemp fields. Kim and I avoid the road and drive down rows seven-foot-tall stalks of hemp.

  We stop at the roads, look both ways and cross. It takes us an hour, but we make it to the edge of the hemp fields without being seen.

  We stop and rest.

  “How much battery you have?”

  “Less than half and more than quarter?” Kim replies. “You?”

  “Almost half,” I get out my jumpers and connect the batteries in parallel to let the charge balance.

  “So what’s the plan?”

  “To be honest I didn’t think we get this far, but seriously this is the dangerous part, that’s why I wanted to be driving bikes and not a truck.”

  “So the plan is we drive like hell until we hit South Frisco and hide.”

  “More or less. This section of road goes right along the estuary, lots of turns. On the straightaway close the town, that where we’re vulnerable.”

  I check at see the batteries have the same charge and disconnect the jumpers. “Remember, when spare goes dead, flip the switch, and you’re on main power. Then dump the spare; it’s just dead weight.”

  I put back on my helmet, check the mic and get on the highway. “South Frisco is eighty-one miles from here, so stay behind me and take it easy on the accelerator.”

  I lead and keep the speed to 45 mph which is fast for this time of night, especially with no headlights. Drones are cheap, chances are one is looking for us right now.

  We cross the southern border of the Sacramento Estuary and head back north to Frisco.

  Now I wish for clouds. With my new eyes, the full moon is too much light. I want to go faster, but Kim isn’t as good as me on a bike. She’s strong and likes to muscle her machine.

  I like to ride my bike. Find the groove in the pavement and stay in it. Then you can steer with your hips.

  I watch Kim speed up and slowdown in the rear-view mirror. She’s like a penned-up tiger, wanting to break out. But we need to save every joule of energy just in case a drone spots us. Out in the open, we’re vulnerable. We need South Frisco and its web of shadows

  “I’m getting low,” Kim's voice says in my helmet.

  We slow down and stop in the shade of a tree.

  She unclips the leads the spare battery and then releases the bungee cord. Then she pushes the battery out of its mount, and it falls to the ground.

  “In less than a minute, we’re on the road and doing 50 mph,” I say.

  With my light frame and fuel-efficient driving techniques, I get another ten miles on the battery. I slow down when I spot a pair of headlights behind us. My gut tells me they’re bad guys. I twist the throttle without thinking. “Kim, get in front of me.”

  I slow down and unclip the battery cables. I let the car get closer. It could be anyone behind us. But so far it’s been trucks on the road. This car has a diesel engine. The vehicle gets closer, and I release the bungee cord on the battery and twist the throttle.

  The spare battery bounces once and hits their grill. Behind me satisfying crunch of metal and plastic.

  A flash of light behind me and I look in the rear-view mirror. The battery is scrapping under the carriage of the car. It catches fire and then dislodges itself. The car speeds up, and the headlights get closer.

  “Tack, Tack, Tack” is the sound of small weapons fire from behind me. But we’re getting closer to South Frisco, and the trucks get more numerous on the highway. It is easy getting around them on a bike.

  Not so easy for a car. Another twenty minutes and we pass the exit for the Broadmoor and continue zipping down the highway. When the road straightens out, the headlights get closer, and when we hit the turns, they fall behind.

  Just outside the Frisco city limits, Kim says, “I’m out of juice.”

  I stop, and she hops on the back. Instead of taking the main gate into South Frisco, I drive down a concrete-lined stream. Within a few miles, Kim spots a rusted security grate.

  The battery is nearly dead, so I leave the bike in the concrete ditch. Kim and I crawl under a rusted gate.

  “Where are we going?” Kim asks.

  “To the water and troll town.”

  Troll Town is a section of the city near the river that was built to accommodate mutants over seven feet tall. The awnings are made from fabric. The metal shade storefronts and alleys to protect the trolls from direct sunlight. We use the cover to evade a drone overhead.

  “I sense a telepath…and I think he senses me,” Kim says.

  Turning the corner, we continue down the alleyway lined with small plastic crates that have been unloaded and are ready to be picked up.

  Since there is no time for finesse, I break a window, reach through and unlock the door. After walking into the bakery, I text Daniel. “On foot, Troll Town.”

  Kim and I pull the spider-silk hoods over our heads, installing earplugs and headsets. We put on our goggles, mine for night vision, hers to protect from the light of a flash-bang. Kim checks her vest for ammo and slides off the safety on her Mac 10.

  Out the back door, we head down the alley. In the distance, I hear a car door slam.

  Kim turns toward me. “It’s them.”

  “Find a place rich in shadows,” I whisper to Kim through the headset.

  For the next half hour, Kim moves like a cat, and I follow.

  “It’s the telepath who works for Mr. Fukui,” Kim steps through a hole in a chain-link fence. We cross a parking lot and step down into an alley lined with cut bales of hemp ready to be loaded onto barges.

  “T
hat means an old base is connected to Mr. Fukui and the Inner City gang. They’re working together.”

  “Like I said, Jason Baron is behind everything.” Kim finds a loading dock where the shadows are just right. She takes a position by some stacked hemp bales while I stand in the shadow of a street light. Three men pass a few feet from where I’m hiding, the dark elf telepath in the rear. The two bodyguards are wearing ear and eye protection. The telepath is not.

  From within the shadows, I roll a flash-bang directly into the middle of all three. Before they can react, a blinding white glare reveals my hiding place. My goggles and earplugs protect me from harm, as well as the telepath’s bodyguards.

  I recognize the two bodyguards. One is the elf with the ice blue eyes. The other is Mr. Fukui’s dwarf doorman who’s missing his pinky finger. Both of them are unaffected by the flashbang. The telepath is not so lucky, and he drops to the ground in what seems slow motion.

  Running towards the dwarf at an accelerated speed, I raise my arms in a football block, arms up, elbows locked, and slam into him. My spider-skin suit stiffens.

  “Haug…” The dwarf grunts as he’s thrown backward from the blow to his chest. He lands a few yards from where his feet left the ground.

  The elf with ice blue eyes shoots me square in the chest, and my vest deflects the blow. Out of the corner of my eye, I watch the slug ricochet away.

  Behind the elf, Kim raises her pistol and fires into the back of his head. His lifeless body crumples to the ground. Kim casually walks up to the dwarf struggling to his feet and fires point-blank into the back of his skull. He drops like a puppet with no master. Saving the telepath for last, she turns him over.

  “My employer will kill--.”

  Kim puts the pistol to his kneecap and pulls the trigger.

  The telepath howls so loudly that I wince.

  It’s no use pleading with her, so I resign myself to watch.

  While continuing to scream, Fukui’s telepath curls into a ball.

  “Pig shit, hunting me like I’m some prize to hang on a wall. And you helped Fukui cheat at cards.” Kim’s fires into his other knee. “You couldn’t read the mind of Mark Lukas ‘cause he had an implant, and Mr. Fukui lost big. If you look over there, you can see the implant that got the best of you again.”

  The telepath looks at me, pleading.

  I shake my head. “Sorry, when she gets in a mood it best to let her vent. Gets it out of her system.”

  “Mr. Fukui will hunt you like a dog and kill you for this.”

  I put my hands on my hips. “Probably not. The Kukan will be returned to the Empress of Japan. The loss of the dragon is a public humiliation which will destroy Mr. Fukui’s reputation. And now that he lost his pet telepath, he will be seen as weak and his enemies will come for him. I am the least of his worries.”

  With the truth of my words, the telepath breaks into tears.

  “By the way, my implant’s name is Natasha, and her last memory is you picking her up by the hair and dumping the head into a vat of organ preservative. She really doesn’t like you.”

  Kim takes careful aim and shoots into his heart. Looking with satisfaction, she watches him die.

  “Kim, we gotta go,”

  We head north to the bay on foot. Soon, the whine of an engine sounds above, a drone overhead patrolling the river. Sending a text, I let my dad know we’re on the move again.

  This is the time of night when cargo is unloaded and gets shipped into the city. The streets are filled with Type 1 mutants, trolls carrying large crates. The dwarves are carrying smaller boxes and drive forklifts. These are the working hours for the trolls and dwarves, and it’s very busy now.

  Kim and I stride through the mutants, dodging the organized chaos of a busy loading dock. A car pulls up at the end of the dock and three men boil out. We turn around and head back, but the other side is blocked by a pickup, where another four men stumble out, looking directly at us.

  We turn back towards the car. Three men enter the loading dock with rifles and flank us. The trolls retreat when they see the weapons.

  Kim pulls the pin on a fragmentary grenade and tosses it behind us. I pull the pin on a flash-bang and toss it between us and our stalkers.

  Natasha turns on the speed, and I move to the closest man, kicking him quickly in the knee. As he drops, I catch his rifle. Turning to the next man, the flash-bang goes off, and my goggles go dark for a second. When my vision returns, the other two men have fallen, dazed by the blast.

  I turn to face Kim as the fragmentary grenade detonates. Two men from the truck are knocked off their feet. Kim moves slowly towards me like she’s wading in water, lazily shooting the two men dazed by the flash-bang. I hand her the rifle, and we run across the street. A three round burst zips past just as we make the corner of the building.

  Finding comfort in the shadows, Natasha slows me down again. A few minutes later, two men come looking for us, carrying weapons. Once they pass, Kim aims. The rounds from her thirty-caliber cut through their armor and they go down. Running to the bay, we find a place to hide under the boat docks.

  Suddenly, I’m very tired. I lean against a pier and slide down. Kim gets out a pill from my vest pocket and hands it to me. I put it under my tongue.

  “You were lightning out there, a souped-up badass.”

  “I am so done for the day.”

  I nap for a bit, but my phone wakes me. It’s Dad with a text: “Tracked your phone, boat on the way.”

  Kim stands guard while I recover some strength. The drone makes another pass, and we hide behind the piers.

  A half-hour later, a fiberglass sub shows up, only a small snorkel for the air and a camera above the surface.

  Kim grabs the side and holds it still. The submarine rises a foot, and the hatch opens. A head from the hole. It’s a young man with eyes made of metal. His horizontal slits emit soft blue-green light. A kid who doesn’t look older than sixteen asks, “Are you Hermes?”

  I get up. “Yeah,” and I slide down the hatch and into the sub. My muscles already stiff, it’s hard moving around. Lying down, Kim craws in next to me. Together, we lay in an area no bigger than a coffin.

  The kid closes the hatch and crawls over us to get to the cockpit. “Turn off your cell phones.” He plugs a cord with a metal socket into a slot behind his ear. “No wireless signals, we’re silent running.”

  The engine starts, and we head downstream.

  “What’s your name?”

  “They call me Creepy Eyes, or Creepy for short.”

  “Seems to mean. How about Steely Dan?” I am thinking of a jazz-rock band.

  He laughs. “Sounds good…so what’s your story?”

  “We did the dinner and movie night out, and then I ran out of gas.”

  He looks at me, the soft blue-green glow coming from the eye slits illuminating the cockpit. “That’s funny, the buzz on the net is that four soldiers and a lieutenant of the Inner-City Gang were iced; it’s not far from where I picked you up.”

  “The total is closer to… seven plus the three stooges.” Kim says.

  “How do you take on so many people?” He looks back at Kim.

  “Ambushing them. You just walk up real quiet and blow the back of their heads off.”

  Creepy smiles and his eyes change color to blood red. “You’re a bad girl. I like bad girls.”

  I change the subject, “Why the metal eyes?”

  He looks at a screen, turns off the motor, and we sink down into the river. A boat speeds over the top of us. Creepy turns the engine back on, and we rise to within a few feet of the surface.

  “I made them myself. I can shape small metal objects just by thinking about it. My body likes metal. I made me a set of eyes and replaced them myself, one at a time.”

  “Steely, I’m not going to lie to you, but that sounds a little…creepy.”

  Creepy throws his head back and laughs while Kim and I look at each other.

  An hour later, I watch h
is screen as he maneuvers into the Ceres’ boat launch. Dan opens the hatch while someone throws a strap across our craft. After being hauled to dry land, we wiggle out of the hatch, saying goodbye to Creepy. I wish him well.

  Kim helps me into a pick-up, Dad’s in the driver’s seat. Kim hops in the back, sits down, and pounds on the glass, letting us know she’s ready to go.

  Dad drives. “Report.”

  “I got half the virus with the thermobaric bomb. The other half was moved two days ago, but I found a shipping manifest.” I show him my goggles. “I recorded it all.” I pull the plastic bottle out of my vest. “This is a powdered virus ready for dispersal.”

  I wait for him to go over a set of railroad tracks. “Look at the cap…It’s got a number stamped on it.”

  He nods, and I put it back in my vest.

  “With this info, the police will have to make an arrest.”

  Daniel looks at the road and then at me. “Nothing normal right now, a lot of encrypted chatter over the airwaves. I wouldn’t trust cops to handle traffic at a two-car funeral.”

  Daniel drives, and I start to nod off. My last image of him is the worry and fatigue on his face.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  I’m at Rick’s bar drinking bourbon, a man with blue skin and crescent moon horns sitting just to my right. I recognize him instantly; the djinn I met in the desert. When I was thirsty, he granted me a wish, and I ended up here. For my second wish, I asked for Kukan’s blessing. I wonder what he’s up to now.

  “Can I buy you a drink?” I ask.

  “Yeah,” he says. The djinn is wearing a pinstripe suit, two-tone Oxford shoes with eyes that swirl like a galaxy.

  “Barkeep, I’ll have tequila infused with chili peppers,” the djinn says.

  “The name’s Rick,” Bogart says and pours a red fluid into a shot glass.

  The djinn drinks it down, and Rick pours another.

  “So, you do you like your wish?” the djinn asks.