No longer a shadow in the intensifying spotlight of the dozens of vehicles lined up before it, the dragon craned its neck higher and lifted its torso, appearing to glory in the growing attention. Extending its wings, it jutted its head forward, then lower, spewing a torrent of flame onto the trailer of the downed truck on the street below. Its sides caught fire instantly, sending up a billow of black smoke that rose in a single plume; a tiny mushroom roiled upward from the melting sheets of steel.
Bohannon stomped on his accelerator.
“What are you doing?” Mara yelled.
“There’s at least one person inside that truck. We need to help him get out!” he yelled.
He pulled the car to the side of the truck cab’s roof, lying perpendicular to the road, so closely that Mara would not have been able to open her door. From her perspective, it looked as if they’d parked next to a wall. Bohannon jumped out, slammed the door and climbed onto the hood of the car, causing it to sway on its shocks. He heard pounding coming from the cab of the truck and took two long measured steps across the wet hood. Feeling no traction in the pooling rain under his feet, he lunged forward and grabbed onto the side of the truck. After regaining his balance, he stepped up onto the hood just over Mara’s head.
From that vantage point, he could see the door handle on the passenger side of the truck facing skyward. Glancing to his right, he could see flames consuming the trailer, creeping closer to the cab. He felt increasing heat under his hands on the frame of the cab. After assessing the door, he decided he would have to crawl out onto it to reach the handle. How could he open it, if he was on top of it? As he searched for an alternative, the door opened, pushed upward with a broom handle. Once it was propped open, a large round head with a long red beard popped out. Grabbing the edges of the door frame, the trucker heaved himself out to sit on the ledge of the upturned cab. Reflected flames danced in his eyes, which bulged from their sockets.
Bohannon reached out to give him a hand, but the man waved it away and said, “Move! I can get down. We’ve got to get out of here! This thing is probably going to blow!”
Bohannon jumped down onto the trunk and turned to ask, “What are you carrying?”
“Paint,” the trucker said, following him down off the car.
“Paint can be flammable, but would it explode?”
“Several thousand aerosol cans might!”
Bohannon grabbed his own door handle on the sedan and pointed to the back door. “Jump in there, and we’ll get you safely away from the fire.”
When he got no response, the detective looked over his shoulder in time to see the trucker jog past a large tree in the median on his way toward the oncoming lanes of traffic. Bohannon opened his door and jumped into the driver’s seat, slinging water from his soaked clothes all over Mara.
He threw the car into gear and stomped on the accelerator. The car spun in place for a second and swerved to the left toward a guardrail mounted along the shoulder of the road. When he threw the steering wheel to the right to avoid a collision, the car slid, its front end pulling to the right and away from the steel barrier and the back end swinging around. The back bumper connected, sending them bouncing toward the center of the slick road in an out-of-control tailspin. Bohannon gave up turning into it and slammed on the brakes.
They stopped moving.
“Wipers!” Mara yelled. Somehow they got turned off.
Bohannon flipped the lever on his steering column, and the wipers cleared the windshield. The car still faced the burning semitruck, but now from the opposite side. A little closer to the overpass, they had their backs to the dragon. Beyond the burning truck, they could make out the headlights of the traffic that had lined up behind them on McLaughlin.
A sudden pop made Mara flinch. Then another and another. Gunfire? A rumble seemed to shake the air, and the sides of the trailers bulged. It reminded Mara of Jiffy Pop, that popcorn in a disposable aluminum skillet that grows into a tin bubble right on the stovetop. The trailers exploded into a fireball that rolled in on itself as it rose into the air. She held a hand up to cover her eyes from the brightness of the blaze, but, within two minutes, the flames receded, and she could see the twisted smoldering debris of the truck, backlit by dozens of headlights.
She said to Bohannon, “Okay, let’s pull over to the patrol car and check on Mom.”
The detective kept his eyes on the road. “Um, I think something is happening.” He pointed out the windshield. The two neat lines of traffic disintegrated into a writhing mass, as the lead vehicles tried to back up, and others navigated onto the road’s shoulders, trying to turn around. Cars slammed into each other with sickening crunches and metallic screeches. Two orderly lines of vehicles devolved into carnival bumper cars before their eyes. Horns and alarms pealed. The spasm of vehicular panic turned into a knot of paralysis, and drivers and passengers popped from their cars, oblivious to the downpour, expressions of pure fear on their faces, as they stared past Bohannon’s car.
Mara unsnapped her seat belt, lowered her window and thrust the top half of her body from it, twisting to look behind the car and up at the overpass. Sam tried to follow suit from the backseat, but Mara pushed his head back into the car as a black mass swooped down from the road above.
“Get down!” she screamed, scrambling to get her torso inside. She slapped Bohannon in the shoulder and added, “Drive! He’s coming!”
Flames poured over the car.
Bohannon shifted the car into gear but could not see through the fire consuming his hood to steer around the wreckage of the truck. He flipped the lever back into Park and yelled, “No time. Get out! Get out now, before the gas tank blows!”
They each jumped from the car and into the rain. Bohannon pointed them to the shoulder of the road and jogged to the left. Stepping over a guardrail, they turned back toward the car, which now burned more brightly than the remains of the semi. Sam and the detective stared at the fire, but Mara looked upward, tracking the dragon. It dove directly toward the long tangled knot of abandoned cars on the roadway, spewed a river of fire across their roofs and flew upward into the black night, away from the ambience of the streetlights. Screams rang out in the distance, but, to Mara, it sounded more like shock than fear or pain. It looked like people had exited their cars before they ignited. At least that’s what she told herself.
Glancing down at Sam, her eyes widened. “Where is Cam?”
Sam’s phone rang in his jeans pocket, as he turned pale and turned toward the pyre that had been Bohannon’s car.
“Please tell me that you didn’t leave Cam in there,” she said.
Sam stared down at his phone and the screen said CAM. He tapped the screen. “HELP ME!” Cam’s voice crackled from the speaker. Sam made a step toward the car, but Mara grabbed his shoulder.
“You can’t go back in there,” she said, taking his phone. She held it up in the palm of her hand, and it disappeared in a spark of light. A moment later, another flash filled the air above her palm, and Cam’s head appeared. It almost rolled off her palm, but she raised her other hand and grabbed it. She fumbled with the head for a moment, pulled a finger out of its mouth and turned it around. “Are you all right?”
Cam’s eyes were scrunched closed, and his lips were pressed into a straight line. A twitch had developed in his left cheek beneath a large patch of blackened skin.
Mara shook the head. “Cam? Are you still in there?”
His eyes snapped open, a look of surprise. “What? What happened?” After a pause, he focused on her and said, “Of course I’m still in here. Where would I be?”
“Are you hurt?” Sam asked.
Cam’s eyes rolled over to him. “I’ve been hit by a car, decapitated, almost roasted alive in another car and nearly blinded by a flash of light that somehow landed me here. I would say ‘hurt’ would be minimizing my condition at the moment.”
Mara handed him to Sam. “He sounds all right for the time being.”
Sam swung th
e head under his arm like a basketball. “You zapped my phone into that burning car, didn’t you? Couldn’t you have just swapped him with a piece of scrap metal or something?” He kicked a piece of chrome from the destroyed truck lying next to the guardrail.
“Sorry, didn’t occur to me,” Mara said.
“Well, you’ll have to get me another one,” he said.
“First, we need to get out of this alive,” Bohannon said, just as one of the streetlights exploded and went dark on their side of the road near the remains of the traffic jam. The tall pole on which it was mounted let out a metallic screech as it toppled and crashed across the hoods of several cars.
CHAPTER 31
Another streetlight, this one also on the same side of the road but closer to where they stood, went dark with a crash. That was followed by the one next to where they stood. The pole of this one did not fall, but Mara heard pieces of glass and metal fall to the pavement. It was difficult to look straight up, with the rain coming down so hard. She pointed past the smoldering pile that was Bohannon’s car toward the still-strobing blue lights coming from the patrol car wedged between the guardrails and pylons below the overpass.
“Let’s make a run for it. We can’t stay out here in the open,” Mara said.
The others nodded, and they all stepped over the guardrail at the edge of the median. Sam stopped and pointed into the air across the road. “Look. It’s him. He’s knocking out all the lights.”
Above, flashes of tail and talon swung down from the murky darkness and struck the streetlight directly across the road from them, the one closest to the overpass. Then in rapid sequence, two more lights went out, farther down the road. Now the only light was ambient and indirect, the distant glow of the city and the intermittent sweep of headlights from across the median.
“Don’t stop,” Mara said. They still had a ways to go. “He’s just trying to rattle us. We’ve got to get to Mom and Hannah.”
Bohannon who jogged a few steps ahead, looked back over his shoulder and said, “No, he’s not playing around. He means to hurt us. He’s purposely isolating us, and, when he’s done with the lights, he’s going to come after us. It’s like a lion hunting a gazelle or something.”
“Let me worry about that,” Mara said. “Let’s just get over there.”
“What exactly do you think you can do about him?” he asked.
Sam stumbled over a piece of truck debris on the pavement. He lost his balance midstride and sped up attempting to regain equilibrium, but the increased momentum made it worse, forcing him to tumble toward the road. He reached out to break his fall, losing his grip on Cam’s head. Rolling several feet on his crown, Cam came to rest next to the curb at the left shoulder of the road in a small stream of running water.
As Sam turned to retrieve him, Mara waved him off. “Keep going. I’ll get him. Get to Mom and Hannah. Don’t let anything distract you.”
Sam and Bohannon paused for a millisecond, as Mara turned back the way they had come. She waved an arm at them. “I said GO!” They turned, and continued toward the overpass and the flashing lights.
Mara ran to the curb and picked up Cam’s head. Wiping running water from his hair and face, she picked a piece of grit off his forehead and said, “Are you all right?”
She never heard his response. A loud roar shattered the air just a few feet above her head. A black shadow slid over her, causing her to cringe and look upward. Diving directly at her, the dragon swept upward at the last minute, sending a wall of air and water gushing downward. Mara leaned into the onslaught, raising her right hand to cover her eyes, while maintaining a tight grip on Cam’s head by pressing him into her side with her left arm. When the wing-swept gust passed, Mara wiped wet hair from her face and looked upward.
The dragon had alighted back on its perch atop the overpass, staring down at the road below. Mara glanced downward toward her brother and the detective who were about halfway between her and the patrol car under the overpass. As they approached, the dragon swung its head in their direction, craning its neck downward. Mara didn’t think it could actually reach them, but when the creature reared back at if to draw a breath, she didn’t wait to see if it would exhale.
She raised her right hand into the air, her palm facing the dragon. A burst of lightning shot from her hand and struck the creature’s haunches, knocking it off balance and sending it tumbling into the side of the overpass. For a few seconds, it grappled to maintain hold of the balustrade on which it stood. As it pulled back from Sam and Bohannon, the dragon screamed so loudly that the water on the roadway rippled. They stopped running and looked upward, then turned to Mara.
She waved at them and said, “Don’t stop!”
Bohannon tapped Sam on the shoulder, and they jogged into the darkness of the overpass.
“What did you just do?” Cam asked from under her arm. “Did you just emit electricity from your hand, or am I just suffering from some sort of malfunction in my sensors?”
“Shush, I’ll explain later. Just hang on, and don’t freak out, no matter what happens,” she said.
“Given what has already—”
She placed her left hand over his mouth and slowly stepped forward, keeping her eyes locked on the large dark shadow looming above. The dragon had raised its left wing and nuzzled its torso where the bolt struck. Low growls came with intermittent snuffles mixed with the gritty scratching sounds of its talons digging into concrete and metal. It seemed to be nursing its wound, not paying her any attention.
Mara slow-walked forward, toward the dragon, not angling to the wrecked patrol car that presumably held her mother and niece. As she approached, the rain relented somewhat, and it became easier to look up. Fifty feet away she stopped in the middle of the road, standing between the two lanes. She was now close enough to enter the dragon’s peripheral vision, because it looked up from its ministrations and stared down at her. Slowly it lowered its raised wing and glared at her, its eyes brightening like embers in the wind.
Mara stretched her neck and turned her face upward. “You cannot stay here, in this realm, any longer. You do not belong here.”
It pulled back its wet scaly lips, exposing rows of fangs, and hissed. Spittle, clearly more viscous than the rain, ran down its jaw and swung in ropes to the roadway.
“Ping, if you are in there, if some part of you can still understand what I’m saying, I need you to stop this. I need you to get control of this, until I can retrieve the Chronicle and figure out a way to send this … this thing back.” She rubbed her eyes and took a deep breath. “If you can’t do that, then I am going to have to stop it myself, and I’m not sure I can do that without hurting you.”
She stared up into the face of the dragon, seeking some hint of her mentor in the armored countenance that glared back at her. She could detect nothing but raw, seething hate.
“Do something!” she screamed, stomping a foot, sending a small splash of water into the air.
Suddenly the dragon lurched to its left. Mara couldn’t figure out what it was doing, until it lurched to the left again and raised its right claw, ripping a chunk of concrete and rebar from the side of the overpass. Letting out a roar, it tossed the man-size piece of debris onto the roadway below, just twenty feet in front of Mara. Some kind of gauntlet.
Mara took a step back.
“Please, Ping! I know you’re in there somewhere. Help me, please.”
Something fluttered. Mara cocked an ear upward, straining to identify the sound and where it came from. The dragon turned its snout skyward and straightened from its crouch. Something flickered in the clouds, and the sound grew louder, until it became the recognizable chop-chop-chop of helicopter blades cutting through the air.
Mara tensed as she watched the dragon track the sound, its head turning slowly in a circle with the overpass as its center. As she followed the dragon’s gaze to just over her head, the helicopter broke through the clouds, and a beam of light sliced through the night, landing directly
on the dragon’s chest.
The creature raised its wings, leaned forward, its whole body coiled like a spring about to leap into the air.
“No!” Mara yelled.
She raised her hand, sending another bolt of lightning upward, striking the dragon in the ribs, just as its feet left its perch. Recoiling in midair, its wings dropped in front of its body, providing enough lift to keep it from tumbling to the roadway but not enough to propel it upward toward the approaching helicopter.
Twisting in the air, the dragon roared and flapped, its torso rolling in the air. Its tail struck the side of the overpass, seemingly giving it balance and the chance to get its flight under control. Chunks of debris clattered onto the roadway. Gaining a little altitude, the dragon momentarily hovered over the overpass, then turned, not to the helicopter but toward Mara, who bent over to place Cam’s head on the street behind her feet.
Looking up in time to see a stream of fire pouring down, she raised her hand. And the flame froze. Everything stopped.
The dragon hung suspended about four feet above the edge of the overpass some forty feet above where Mara stood. Passing through stilled raindrops—some of which were being vaporized into little tufts of steam—a diagonal frozen river of flame sliced through the darkness from the mouth of the dragon to just above Mara’s head.
Rain had stopped beating the pavement. She glanced to her right, straight up into the air. Just below the black clouds, unmoving, hung the helicopter, frozen in place as if it were a photograph. The thumping was gone and so were the sounds of traffic in the distance. The night was silent.
Mara turned on her heel and squinted through the tree branches that obscured the oncoming lanes across the median. Cars appeared to be stopped in motion. Not parked but frozen in place. Rain trailed off vehicles, forming thin steams suspended in their wakes, and fans of water stalled in midsluice next to tires. She turned to look down at Cam’s face. He too appeared animate but unmoving, his mouth half open, interrupted in some expression of amazement.
Broken Dragon (The Chronicles of Mara Lantern, Book 3) Page 16