by Jon Jacks
His lips, too – so delicate one moment, so hard and probing the next – made her conscious as never before of the delightful sensations lying within her own skin, her own undulating form. Lips that narrowed, pouted, kissed lightly. Lips that opened, savoured, swallowed. Lips from between which a mischievous tongue would dart, delivering its own pleasures.
I want you so so much, those lips would unmistakably declare, without a single word leaving them.
A year ago.
That’s all it really was.
But, for her, it was a long long time ago.
A time of immense changes in her life.
Immense hurts.
‘I’m sorry too, Jake,’ she said in reply to his concern at Leon’s loss. ‘Sorry I ever met you.’
If her bitter retort had stung him, he didn’t show it.
‘He must have loved you,’ he said instead. ‘To give his life like that for you.’
‘Not for me, Jake; not in the way you mean anyway. We’ve avoided cruise missiles easily enough before.’
‘That’s why he wanted you to drop me? Because I was the target?’
Celly nodded.
‘So he gave his life because I wanted you saved. Because I want you to have this.’
Producing a memory stick from an internal pocket of her grubby armour, she handed it to him.
‘Because you need to know, Jake.’
Jake rolled the memory stick in his hand, eyeing it curiously.
‘He died for this?’ he asked incredulously. He looked Celly directly in the eye. ‘What about the child, Celly? Isn’t that what he really gave his life for?’
‘Ultimately, yes, of course,’ Celly admitted unapologetically. ‘I would hope that one of the things you did learn about us on the island was that dragons will always protect the child; the child is the future. Without the child, we are ultimately nothing.’
‘Yet he betrayed you Kelly. I was told that it was Leon who pointed the authorities to the island.’
‘He hoped his father, Dr Frobisher, would be given preferences. I understand why he did it. I think he paid for his mistake a few times over, don’t you?’
As Jake nodded in agreement, he heard the lightest of fluttering around him, like the landing of nothing more than a sparrow. But two dragons now stood either side of him, their skin darkened, their armour as black as the night they had seemed to appear from.
‘Why you Celly?’ he asked. ‘Why are you the one leading them?’
‘You mean why do they follow me, the silly little girl you remember from the island?’
‘No, no; I mean, I could never have seen you being responsible for anything like this.’
With a glance to either side, he indicated the surrounding landscape of death and destruction.
‘Both questions have the same answer anyway,’ Celly replied acidly. ‘My parents were their natural leaders in Hong Kong; and when they died, there was no one angrier than me!’
*
‘I take it you can drive?’ the dragon said, pulling out the dead driver of a car and starting it up with a quick punch of his fist and a slicing and twisting of the bared wires. ‘You played a lot of computer games, Celly said?’
‘Sure,’ Jake said, shivering once again after a flight that had taken in a precarious journey across land still being contested by forces on either side. ‘I’ve driven real cars a few times too, thanks.’
‘Straight up this road is where you want to be heading,’ the other dragon said, pointing up a road littered here and there with damaged or abandoned vehicles. ‘This isn’t an important section for either us or your side. Celly said you’ll be picked up soon enough, once the guys tracking you realise you’re no longer in our area.’
‘Pick me up?’ Jake replied bitterly. ‘They tried to kill me earlier!’
‘Only because you were with Celly.’ The dragon slipped out of the driving seat, making way for Jake. ‘She says they’ll want to talk to you, just in case you’ve picked up any info they could use.’
‘Only, don’t give them the stick until you’ve watched it yourself,’ the other dragon said, turning and already beginning to ascend into the air. ‘Oh, and lock your doors and keep your windows up.’
‘Are there any maps in her–’
Having switched on the car’s interior light to familiarise himself with the dashboard controls, Jake looked back out of the door towards where the dragons had been standing. But they had both vanished, fading into the darkness without even the sound that a butterfly might make.
Jake switched on the main beams, swinging the car back onto the road.
He wasn’t sure where he was heading.
But as long as he kept the thunderous roars and bright flashes of explosions behind him, then it was obviously in the right direction.
*
It wasn’t long before Jake came across a number of weary, bedraggled people heading in the same direction that he was, their most precious belongings or what they had deemed as essentials haphazardly piled on their backs. Cars and trucks lay wrecked, abandoned or even ablaze at the sides of the road.
Realising that he had seats to spare, Jake slowed, winding down his window to shout out, ‘I can give a lift to three or fo–’
Before he knew what was happening, and as if he had suddenly drawn their attention to his presence, he was suddenly surrounded by people who seemed to have appeared from nowhere, crowding around his car, pushing hard against its sides, banging frenziedly on the windows, even clambering over the hood. They were all yelling out in a language he didn’t understand, Chinese probably he reasoned, yet it was obvious they were angry, frightened, aggressive.
One of the windows shattered under the incessant blows, a back door was wrenched open. People scrambled onto the back seat, only to be instantly pulled out by someone who briefly took their place.
Jake’s own window exploded in his face. A hand followed, grabbing him violently by the throat, jarring his head again and again against the roof.
The door flew open, he was dragged out, thrown with a furious wrench of a wrist into the raging crowd.
Behind him, as he was pummelled, kicked, snatched at and furiously head-butted, he was dimly aware that someone had taken his place at the wheel.
*
Chapter 26
As Jake sensed he was slipping into unconscious, there was a confusing, rippling glare of painfully bright lights, terrifyingly loud cracks and frightened yells, a booming thunder of blood surging uselessly around his brain.
*
The thunderous booming was still there, but now more muted, less overwhelming.
Even so, Jake’s head throbbed, his eyes, when he opened them, remained unfocused and dizzying.
‘Back in the land of the living, right son?’ someone close by, perhaps even leaning over him, said with a pleased chuckle.
‘Where…where am I? A…a helicopter?’
‘You’re with the Seventh Cavalry, son – and I mean that quite literally. What remains of it, anyway; Custer would have been proud!’
*
Chapter 27
Light played off the pure-blue pool, undulating like ribbons of captured stars. The glow soared up into and illuminated the dim, morning sky like the beam of an enormous blue searchlight, creating a snatch of midday in otherwise gloomy surroundings.
The hotel itself was also an oasis, surrounded as it was by an overcrowded, frightened city, by an encircling, encroaching war. As Jake had tried to talk peace with Celly, the dragons’ irresistible advance had continued, with very little of Japan now remaining under human control. Tokyo was besieged, as Jake had witnessed himself as, peering down from the helicopter earlier that morning, he had seen the long streams of terrified refugees pouring into a city that would probably fall that night when the dragons attacked once more in earnest.
Jake had been promised a seat out on the trains the dragons were allowing to leave the city, heading south and taking whatever innocents could be
crammed into them. First, though, he could ‘grab a bite to eat, freshen up – and fill us in on any new info you might have on what we’re up against.’
The officer sent to interrogate Jake helped himself now and again to the parts of the breakfast that Jake insisted he wouldn’t be able to manage; the toast, the preserves, the fruit.
‘Well, they can avoid the cruise missiles you’re sending out to kill them,’ Jake said sourly, pulling his towelling robe tighter around his throat to keep out the morning chill, ‘unless you’ve got a mug like me out there with an inbuilt tracker to lead them directly onto their target.’
‘You as the target? That what they told you?’ He wiped his fingers clean of marmalade, munched on the toast in the corners of his mouth. ‘Missiles are being sent out that way all the time. And you being abducted and all, we didn’t have time to tell anyone to hold back on firing them in that area. The tracker was there so we could pull you out if things turned dicey – as, of course, we did.’
He grinned, his eyes glinting innocently.
‘Great marmalade, huh? Fresh, you ask me.’
‘I can’t help you much,’ Jake confessed. ‘I didn’t even know they could breathe fire to be honest.’
‘Thing is, Jake, we reckon they’re taking a risk when they do. Sure, it’s one hell of a set of lungs they’ve got on them – but powerful enough to send out a jet of flame that doesn’t run the risk of running out of power and causing a blow back?’
He shook his head, reached for a mandarin orange and started to peel it.
‘Have you seen that happen?’ Jake asked, flinching as he involuntarily imagined what might happen to Celly if she tried it and it went wrong.
The officer, who had earlier introduced himself as Captain Paul Jones, shook his head again.
‘I don’t need to see it to know it could happen Jake. I’ve seen their lungs in autopsies–’
‘You’ve cut them up? The dragons I mean; cut them up to see what they look like inside?’
Jones nodded, gulped down a piece of mandarin.
‘They were already dead, and we needed to see what we might be up against.’
‘Might be up against? Not are up against?’
‘You gone native, Jake?’ Jones asked with a frown. ‘They were already dead, Jake; there wasn’t room for them to be buried in Hong Kong, so they had to ship their dead out to us. We’d be fools, wouldn’t we, not to take the opportunity to find out the potential dangers we faced?’
He must have noticed that Jake felt sickened by what he was hearing, for he quickly added, ‘Son, these things are animals!’
Jake gave a relieved chuckle. ‘It might seem like that now, but they lived amongst us for hundreds, maybe even thousands of years, without our even noticing them.’
‘I meant they’re literally animals, Jake. Trust me on this one; I’ve seen it for myself. You know how these things breed?’
Jake hoped that Jones didn’t realise he was fighting hard not to blush with embarrassment.
‘Sure, just like us – obviously.’
Jones looked at him as if he were trying to figure out if Jake was just playing stupid or not.
‘Eggs,’ he said flatly. ‘They lay eggs.’
Jake let out another relieved chuckle.
‘No, no; the old dragons, maybe, sure – but not these dragons. They’ve evolved, just like we did from the apes.’
‘Son, I’ve seen it. When I took part in the patrols into Hong Kong, when we had to go in to make sure their talons were clipped.’
‘You clipped their talons?’
‘Too right we did! Regularly too! Have you seen what they can do to a tank? What they can do to a man doesn’t bear thinking about. Of course they were clipped!’
‘How? Why did they let you do it? How did you do it?’
‘One by one, a bit like the animals trooping into the ark. When they turned up for what they thought were interviews for a nice little apartment in Hong Kong. The chair clamped around them, drugged them a little while we went to work on their talons–’
‘And cages? You caged their wings too?’
‘Sure; same thing as with the talons, son. We couldn’t allow them to transform, when just one beat of those wings could break a man’s back. How many soldiers would take part in the patrols if we didn’t keep the dragons caged and sedated? And that, like I say, is when I saw it; damn near turned my stomach it did?’
‘What, the cages?’
He looked at Jake like he might be playing being stupid again.
‘No, not the cage! The eggs! They lay eggs! Just how sick is that?’
*
Chapter 28
Celly had lied to him again.
Just like she had about the dragons being able to breathe fire.
The dragons did lay eggs!
And, as Jones had said, that, was really really sick!
Jones had left now, leaving Jake to finish what was left of his breakfast, to freshen up with a shower in his room and put on the fresh change of clothes they’d bought him. As he placed what was left of his old clothes in the waste basket beneath the room’s desk, something fell out of his one and only complete pocket, falling to the floor with a light clump on the thick carpet.
He bent down, picked it up.
It was the memory stick that Celly had given him.
He was about to throw it into the basket with the rest of his clothes – funny, he thought, how even now I’m trying to keep things tidy, when by tomorrow the whole hotel will probably be a tangled wreck – when he noticed that a laptop lay on top of the desk.
He twirled the stick between his fingers, wondering if–
He opened up and switched the computer on, plugged in the stick.
Was it just going to be more of Celly’s lies?
Or would it – even worse – be nothing more than a crude, taunting video revealing the love that had grown between her and Leon?
*
Jake sat by the pool, where he’d been told by Jones to wait until a soldier called to take him to the station.
No one was in the pool. It had been left as a banqueting ground for a large flock of swallows, who continually swooped down to feast on the hundreds of small insects trapped by and floating on the lazily swelling waves.
There were few other people left in the hotel, but they were all people like him, sitting around the pool waiting to be collected.
Privileged people, who would be saved from the wrath of the dragons.
Being both well-educated and highly intelligent, the dragons had soon realised that the food being shipped into Hong Kong had been not only stripped of any nutritional value, but had also been laced with sedatives and even deadly bacteria. Medicines, too, had been adulterated, frequently causing more problems than they cured.
As he had now seen for himself on the video contained on the memory stick, the dragons had been left with no choice but to separate the better quality food from the dangerous and the drugged. The young, the healthy, were supplied with the former. The older dragons, including Celly’s parents and Leon’s father, despite their organisational and leadership skills, either ate the latter or starved.
Either way, the second group had soon begun to die, the numbers increasing with every passing week. And as the growing numbers of dead were shipped out, the quantity of food being shipped in diminished.
It made discovering a means of breaking free of the cages ever more urgent.
Breaking free.
Jake hadn’t realised it, of course, from Leon’s fleeting referral to escaping the cages, but breaking free of them was an apt, ugly description of part of the method employed.
He had cringed when he had watched the young dragons dislocating their wings to shrug off the cages.
As the video ended, Jake had been expecting some form of summation from Celly, a personal message to him, perhaps, or at least an instruction on how she expected him to use the revelations contained on the memory stick.
&n
bsp; But there was nothing. Not even a last shot of her.
(Though he had caught glimpses of her now and again in certain shots throughout the film.)
Of course, the message of the video was plain enough.
The dragons had been left with no choice but to revolt and fight for their lives.
The swallows arched down towards the pool’s delicate waves, picked up their tit bits, gracefully rose back into the air. It could be a metaphor for what was soon about to happen to Tokyo and the people left trapped within it, Jake realised; though why the insects seemed drawn to the pool, like moths to a flame, he wasn’t sure.
‘Excuse me,’ he said to a politely smiling waiter who arrived at his table with the fifth fresh orange juice Jake had ordered, ‘what makes the insects fly into the water?’
Although Jake had no understanding of Japanese, he couldn’t fail to recognise that the waiter was apologising for his own lack of understanding. A woman seated at a nearby table interrupted, speaking to the waiter in what Jake presumed must be an adequate level of Japanese for the man began to enthusiastically answer, including in his reply an undulating of his hands replicating the rippling of the water.
‘He says that normally the filter is on, so you don’t see so many insects,’ the woman explained to Jake. ‘But he believes that the rippling light confuses them.’
The waiter smiled and nodded.
‘Thank you,’ Jake said to him, nodding his thanks. ‘And thank you to you too,’ he added, turning back to smile gratefully at the woman.
‘It’s a strange thing to be worrying about at a time like this; insects,’ the woman said, giving him a weak smile in return, her eyes creased and soulless.
‘Yes, yes, you’re right,’ Jake admitted, turning back to see the waiter briskly walking back between the tables, a number of empty bottles and glasses held high on his silver platter.
Would he be one of the lucky ones who would be allowed to leave? Jake wondered.