The Dragon Seller: A Tale of Love and Dragons

by F. G. Ferrario

  I had never said them before then (I'm not crazy), and I've promised myself I will never do it again. But at that moment, what else could I have done? The SWAT team was about to break into the farm. They might have killed us. They surely would have killed Whiskey. I didn't have any other choice.

  I looked at my Mustangs and yelled: "MANUS INIMICA TYRANNIS!"

  Hearing those secret words, Deirdre roared a powerful WAAAAARG, followed by the other dragons. The walls of the house shook, invested by their fury.

  "MANUS INIMICA TYRANNIS", I yelled again pointing to the door. "Didi, Lute, Drak, Ursus, Nahar! Pugnae vos aptate. Pugnae vos aptate!(16)"

  The Mustangs lined up in front of the door and swelled their chests up. Their necks became big enough to show the pulsing veins under their throat. With their back paws they started scratching the wooden floor, letting out a low growl, their lips pulled back over their fangs. Thick light colored smoke was coming out of their nostrils.

  "What did you tell them?" LeBon's hair was standing on end. "Why are they moving like that?"

  "They're getting ready".

  "For what?"

  "For battle".

  Outside in the garden, the tarp we had hidden Whiskey under moved. After all that racket, the dragon must have woken up completely.

  "Go check on Whiskey", I said to Jean. "We'll take care of things here".

  LeBon fled holding his improvised bat. The SWAT team was already at the door. I pointed the dart rifle and held my breath. Two tear gas bombs came in through the windows and rolled onto the floor, spreading fumes.

  Ursus and Drakkar jumped forward together, grabbed the bombs and flew out the window next to the door. Somebody from the SWAT team screamed in surprise.

  The door fell inwards with a crash, and the agents came into the house. Lutezia flew onto the first one: in a single, fluid paw movement, she tore off the gas mask, tore an eye out and cut half his nose off.

  "Ahhh, my face!"

  Screaming in pain, the agent emptied half a magazine into the ceiling and fell to the ground, holding his bloody face between his hands. The second to come in just barely missed his fallen companion.

  "Rodriguez!" He yelled. "Shoot, Christ! Shoot!"

  He pointed the rifle against Nahar but the male Mustang was quicker. He bit the agent on the balls, making his jaws snap. And when this guy, screaming, tried to hit him with the butt of the rifle, Nahar crawled up his back to his neck and planted his claws between the armor's joints.

  "Ahhh, get it off!"

  The guy started screaming and flailing, trying to get him off. Outside the door, Drakkar and Ursus had thrown the teargas bombs on the ground, among the remaining agents, and were fighting in the cloud of gas.

  "Everyone inside!"

  Two SWAT agents protected by iron shields came in through the door and I tried hitting one with a dart, but my awful aim and shaking hands made me miss the target. The dart stuck above the door frame.

  Protected by shields, the two agents advanced into the living room, only to find themselves in front of Deirdre. The Mustang matron was even scarier than usual. She shot flames at one of the agent's mask and jumped onto the other's chest. The agent tried to get her off with his hands. Deirdre fused the mask's filters with another set of flames and flew away.

  "Shoot Silas, kill it!"

  The first agent tried to hit her with a shot of gunfire but the Mustang was too quick. She dodged the bullets and with her claws cut off the man's right hand. Now there was just total confusion. Dragons and men were fighting and yelling all together.

  I was still trying to load the rifle with another dart, but my fingers were shaking too much.

  In the end I was able to get it into the cylinder and I pointed at the second agent.

  "Jeq, stay down!"

  LeBon came in from the back door and threw me on the ground a second before Whiskey's head peeked into the living room. The dragon prepared a Fire Breath. He pulled up the gas from his enormous chest, with a sound similar to a giant sucking up his soup. Then, he opened his jaws and threw it out.

  Whiskey's flames hit Deirdre, Nahar and the SWATs behind their shields, sweeping the living room from one side to the other like a fiery spear. The couch caught fire, and so did the curtains and rug.

  "Get out! Everyone get out!" Somebody ordered.

  The air burnt, it became unbreathable. The dragon continued to spit fire. The flames went out of the door for several feet. Where they met the wall, they came back crawling up the ceiling. White-hot drool dripped from Whiskey's teeth onto the floor. A drop fell an inch from my cheek, sizzling. It carbonized the wood in a black tear. Then the flame ended.

  Whiskey roared and I looked at the door. A couple of agents rolled around the gravel, with their uniforms in flames. The SWATs with shields were backing up, bringing the wounded with them, while the Mustangs chased them without mercy.

  I called them back, but the dragons didn't hear me. For an instant I feared they would continue attacking, without any control. But after the second attempt, Deirdre came back. And right after the others followed her.

  "Mon dieu...", murmured LeBon looking at the living room.

  I got up and with a finger took out the wax that had melted in my ears. If the house was a mess before, now "even the ruins were destroyed". The whole wall above the door was as black as coal. The window and door jambs were burning. The couch was in flames, and the smell of burnt leather and plastic filled our noses.

  "It looks like a dragon spit fire in here", I said to lighten the mood.

  LeBon laughed, a nervous laugh. It wasn't over yet.

  Whiskey prepared another Breath. He backed up from the door and before I could stop him, he took flight. He went above the Owens' picket fence and the police vehicles parked in front of the gate, flooding the cars and road with a column of fire. A few agents were able to duck under the Caiman, but most of them fled into the fields screaming. Whiskey swooped around the house again and roared. He must have discovered other hidden agents.

  "The house, Jeq". Jean shook my shoulder. "We have to put out the fire".

  He was right. The flames had attacked the door and window next to the fireplace. They were going up toward the ceiling like an insatiable mass of fire.

  "Get the sleeping bags from the van", I told Jean. "I'll get the water".

  We split and I went back to the kitchen. I emptied the other supply bag onto the floor and took two of the water barrels. An explosion in the garden made me jump.

  When I went to the door, the Knight IV had gotten up to the fence. Maybe the SWAT team wanted to use it as a distraction or maybe they wanted to cut off our escape path. Protected inside the graphene cockpit at stomach height, the operator raised a mechanical arm toward the sky and sprayed gunfire with a machine gun on the forearm. Whiskey avoided the bullets and landed on the robot pushing it backwards.

  Knight and dragon destroyed the fence and rolled into the garden. With a leg, the Mech flipped over my van. The operator tried to get the Knight back up, and Whiskey pressed it onto the ground. The Knight threw a steel punch onto his snout, but my dragon raised his head and avoided it. He opened his jaws and threw up fire onto the cockpit. The graphene got hot, became incandescent, but didn't melt.

  Whiskey scratched the armor with his claws, looking for a weak spot. The operator leaned on an arm to get up and the dragon and the Mech rolled among the barn ruins, clutched to one another.

  I couldn't do anything to help Whiskey. The house was going up in flames and even the Mustangs would find something to chew on penetrating the Mech's armor. I cursed and went back into the house. LeBon and the Mustangs were trying to tame the fire (the dragons gave him moral support more than anything else).

  I got a water barrel and started pouring it on the flaming jambs. My eyes were watering, full of soot. I had taken my t-shirt off and I held it in front of my mouth so as not to breath in smoke. We were able to put out the flames on the ceiling and windows. But the rug and other
furniture were still burning.

  "Give me a hand with these", I said to Jean.

  Together, we lifted the rug and threw it out into the clearing, followed by the wooden table and couch. The fire seemed tamed, but I could still hear my dragon's roars, outside.

  Out of breath, I went back to the garden. Whiskey and the Knight were still fighting. They were facing each other near the split oak. The Mech, whose armor was all scratched and dented, held its arms up, like a boxer. It looked around, trying to understand where the dragon was. Whiskey landed down from the sky on the Knight's back, throwing it on the ground. The Mech moved its arms to get back up, but Whiskey's claws found a crack in the armor. The robot's entrance door bent outwards like the top on a can of tuna. The operator realized he was fucked. He screamed at the top of his lungs.

  "No, Whiskey, don't kill him!" I yelled running toward the exoskeleton.

  With horror, I saw the dragon slide a paw into the Mech and with a yank rip the operator out. He raised him into the air, still attached to the seat with the safety belt.

  The agent screamed, flailing his arms in terror.

  "Heeeelp! Let me go!"

  Whiskey smelled him and threw him aside, disgusted. Apparently, the man wasn't his objective. The operator and seat flew beyond the barn, toward the Mora canal.

  "Wow!" said Jean, following them with his eyes.

  We heard him land in the dry bed with a muffled thud!, then the man started screaming again, even louder. It must have been a hard landing.

  Victorious, bent over the Mech's carcass, Whiskey let out a deafening WAAAA that forced us to put our hands on our ears, then with his tail and front paws he grabbed the Knight IV. He opened his wings and picked it up, while the five Mustangs gathered around him.

  "What does he want to do, now?" Jean asked me with his hands on his head.

  "I have no idea", I answered.

  With the Mech in his paws, the dragon went about thirty feet into the air, surrounded by the Mustangs, and we followed them around the whole garden. The dragons flew above my uncle's house, headed toward the road. We went back to the windows just in time to see Whiskey drop the Mech on the Caiman like a rag doll. The exoskeleton slammed onto the mobile tower and flipped the armored tank onto its side.

  "Ohholyshit", I murmured.

  "Wooo! Go Whiskey!" Yelled LeBon. "Take that, fils-putain!"

  I couldn't believe we were able to fight them off. I looked at Jean. His clothes were in shreds, half his face full of cuts where it wasn't dirty with ashes, his eyes red and cheeks streaked. I must have been even worse. But we had made it.

  When the dragons came back, we went out into the garden to welcome them. We hugged all six of them and for a fantastic minute nothing happened.

  Then, the ambulances and other agents started to arrive. The road filled with armed men again. At this point I expected they would try another raid, but Bowman (or whoever had taken command) chose to wait. When I walked around the house to check out the situation, I saw a dozen men positioned on the other side of the canal and just as many in the Owens' farm. We were back at the starting point.

  AT SIX TWENTY-TWO the journalists arrived and the show began.

  The area filled with curious onlookers. The media vans blocked the road, and lots of people went into the fields to see what was going on. The police were barely able to keep everyone in place without compromising the string of officers that were monitoring the farm. With so many eyes on them, Bowman and Ertz couldn't screw up anymore, and were forced to rethink their plans.

  The good old Ram was destroyed. During the fight between Whiskey and the Knight it had flipped over, lost two wheels and the right side had a ten foot gash toward the inside. Even so, we preferred to stay inside its upturned stomach than in the house. I had gotten my laptop from my backpack and thanks to the internet we could follow the journalists that were storming the blockade beyond the canal.

  Outside the van, the dragons were eating portions of rice, water and cereals that Jean had brought from the store. After the battle they were super hungry. Whiskey was eating the whole eleven pound bag of rice, a one week ration for a normal dragon. Jean and I, instead, were eating chicken sandwiches.

  "Look, there's the CNN lady".

  I showed LeBon Erin Coscarello, the journalist that had done the story from Kemmerer two days before, even if it seemed like centuries had gone by to me. Coscarello was in the first row in front of the police tape and was calling Bowman and Ertz out loud.

  "Oh, what gloomy faces", commented LeBon with a smile.

  The two officers discussed for a few seconds, then Ertz went over to the journalists and put his hands on his belt. The journalists gathered around him.

  "Deputy Ertz, what's going on?" A woman asked him. "Is it true the Greenbelt Monster is hiding in this farm?"

  Ertz smiled trying to seem charming and confident.

  "I can't confirm this information, Elen".

  "Did you raid the place?" another journalist asked him. "What can you tell me about the eight officers that have been brought to St. Luke's?"

  Ertz tightened his jaw.

  "No comment", he answered.

  The journalists asked him more questions, but Ertz had his lips sealed. In lack of answers, they started making ridiculous assumptions and giving out the most shocking gossip: "the monster ate two officers"; "according to our sources, the dragon is keeping three prisoners inside its cave under this farm"; "It's sixty-five feet long and weighs eleven tons". A helicopter flew around the farm and CNN, followed by all the other news stations, showed the image of Whiskey next to our flipped over van. "Here's the first exclusive images of the monster".

  "What type of dragon is it? It's enormous!" commented the anchorman in the studio.

  The so-called "dragon expert" at his side, Harold Waters, a guy I had never heard of, folded his hands together.

  "Well, Adam, it's clearly a hybrid, as you can see from the back section that lacks any bulging bones. Look at the images closely. Even the back is hyper-developed. This dragon is a genetic monstrosity, maybe the result of a perverted cross between the Mustang species and..."

  I cursed under my breath and got up while the expert continued to babble.

  "I've had enough of this bullshit. Let's get ready".

  I left the van and went over to Whiskey. I gave him a couple of pats on the neck and he wagged his long tail.

  "You're not serious", said LeBon following me.

  "Of course I'm serious. We need to leave".

  We had talked about it while the officers were busy containing the arrival of rubberneckers and journalists. It was clear now that Raleigh wouldn't be arriving. I hadn't heard from her since she had warned me of the police block on the state road. Maybe she hadn't even been able to reach the university.

  It's useless to keep on hoping, I told myself. I have to face reality.

  "They're only wasting time", I said pointing to the road. "They're waiting for the National Guard. The longer we stay here, the less chance we have of getting away".

  "You really want to run away flying on a dragon?"

  "Do you have any other solutions, Jean? We're surrounded, but they don't have any more drones to control the sky. If we fly away now, we could make it. But when the Guard gets here...well...we'll be fucked. They won't send a handful of unprepared SWATs against us. They'll have Mechs, lasers, drone hunters and all this just as an appetizer. My Mustangs can keep a battalion at bay, but what about us two?"

  "But if we run away now, Jeq, it's like we're giving them a reason", said LeBon.

  "And what will we gain if we let ourselves be captured or even worse, get killed?"

  "No", LeBon put his hands up and shook his head. "I refuse to get on the dragon".

  "Jean, it's not the time to pay any attention to phobias".

  "It's not a phobia", he answered. "You want to fly on a fucking dragon. Take a good look at him! He doesn't have a saddle, the scales are as slick as mirrors. We'll fal
l down at the first turn. And if they follow us, where will we go then? No, no, I'm staying here".

  "Damn it, pig-headed French. Hey, what..."

  Suddenly, I noticed there was a strange silence.

  "What's wrong, Jeq? Did you hear something?"

  "Shh", I said.

  I went back to the van and looked at the pc. The image was stopped on the expert's idiot face, and the streaming signal blocked on "Loading". There was no more internet connection.

  It can't be a coincidence. I took the smartphone from my pocket and looked at the signal: that one had disappeared as well.

  "They're here", I said to LeBon.

  In the dusk sky small black dots had appeared. Coming from all sides at about sixty feet above ground.

  Drones. Damned drones. I looked at Jean.

  "We need to leave. Now".

  "No".

  "Get on the damned dragon, fucking French asshole!"

  LeBon didn't want to listen to me. He went back into the house and around the barricade in the kitchen, taking the dart rifle.

  "Jean, hurry up damn it!"

  "They're two more darts, I can make it", he said going toward the door.

  "Do you want to listen to me?" I shook him by the shoulders. "We need to go now".

  Beyond the gravel, the short brick wall and road, dark shadows took position. The ticking of the hunters echoed on the asphalt. Their red eyes glistened.

  LeBon put a hand on my arm.

  "Go, Jeq. Allez!"

  He pushed me away and went out the door. What could I do? There wasn't any time left. If I stayed, I was screwed too. I wanted to fight with Jean, but I had to save Whiskey, and this didn't leave me a choice.

  "Thanks, Jean". I turned around and fled toward the garden.