Dragonpocalypse 1: Burn It All Down

by Matthew Bowers

  And immediately regretted it. San Francisco — quite understandably — had gone insane. A kicked-over anthill would not have been an unjust comparison, only these ants had two-ton metal death machines flying all over the place at ridiculous velocities. Everyone had someplace else to be, it seemed, and were intent on getting there as quickly as they could. Honestly, Dana couldn’t blame them; she was pretty eager to get off the streets herself, though she didn’t know if she would be any safer from those flying monsters at home. Still, it beat sitting around out in the open, waiting to be flame-broiled.

  So she gritted her teeth, clenched down on the steering wheel, and slammed her foot on the accelerator.

  The most direct route back home — the reverse of the way she’d come — would have been to just take the Embarcadero along the water’s edge to I-280. She was about to flip her car around and head in that direction, when there was a terrific crunch of metal and glass from behind her. Checking over her shoulder, she saw that a school bus had tipped over, having apparently been broadsided by some asshole in a Hummer. As she watched, a Jeep tried to avoid the obstruction and failed, flipping over the bus and landing roof-down on the other side with a sickening crunch. Several more cars screeched to a halt, just barely avoiding smashing into the pile-up, only to have the cars behind them not stop fast enough and rear-end them.

  Right. Different route, then.

  Peeling out into traffic in the opposite direction from the crash, she almost died instantly when an SUV in the left-hand lane decided it needed to occupy the same space her little Ford Focus was. Dana shouted “fuck!” and slammed on the accelerator with her foot. Her little car leapt forward just in time for the SUV to careen over into her lane behind her and scrape the side of a car parked along the curb. Dana barely spared it a glance; she was coming up fast behind a VW bus that wasn’t going nearly as fast as Dana — or, she wagered, the driver of the bus — would have liked. Glancing to her left, she slid into the lane the SUV had just vacated and darted past the bus.

  There was a traffic signal coming up fast, but the rest of the drivers on the road seemed to be using the lights as a suggestion at best. The light was red, but Dana saw an opening and went for it, slipping right behind a car which was crossing the intersection from the left, and settling in beside a car making a turn onto her street from the right. The fact that her blatantly illegal and dangerous maneuver didn’t even earn her a honk or a curse from anyone else told her more than anything else just how insane things had quickly become.

  Zipping past the cannery, she saw not only a small park up ahead on the left, but also another fantastic wreck a little further up, where the road swerved to avoid running into the bay. Making a split-second decision, Dana threw the steering wheel to the left and cut across the lanes of oncoming traffic. She shot through a narrow gap in traffic, bounced up over the curb, and cut across the corner of the park. Several people on foot had to throw themselves out of her way, but Dana could barely keep the car straight on the grass, much less swerve in and out of pedestrians. She managed to straighten the car out as she approached a line of trees, hooked a sharp left turn around a large white abstract statue, then found herself on solid pavement again. She wrenched the steering wheel back to the right, to put her on a course up Beach Street parallel to the one she’d been on before her jaunt through the park. Traffic was lighter here, and she floored the accelerator, reaching Van Ness — her second-most direct route home — in a matter of seconds.

  “Oh, fuck me.”

  Van Ness — a straight stretch of road running north-south through the center of the city — was pure pandemonium. Cars were criss-crossing the street in all directions, at all angles. Any semblance of logic, or adherence to traffic laws, was gone. The appearance of the dragons had prompted everyone to panic and drive as if they were in a video game, where the consequences for crashing were negligible at most. Cars were swerving and skidding, sometimes just barely avoiding collisions, sometimes not. Even through her closed windows, Dana could hear the sounds of engines roaring, tires squealing, metal rending, glass shattering. It was cacophonous, and just one more layer of insanity laid over an already insane situation.

  Dana wondered for a moment if she should have stuck to side streets, but then all rational thought left her mind as instinct took over. She jammed her car into the flow of traffic and floored it.

  It was about two miles from the north side of town where Van Ness began to where the road cut under U.S. 101, and she didn’t once drop below 50 miles per hour the entire stretch. She wasn’t just eager to get home and off the streets; everyone else was going at least that fast as well, and if she wanted to make it home alive, she needed to keep up with the rest of traffic, insane and unpredictable as it had become. California was famous for its aggressive drivers, one of the few California stereotypes Dana couldn’t argue with, but by and large they were at least predictable. Now though, Dana was faced with a two mile stretch of road in which there was no predicting what anyone would do.

  Dana wasn’t even paying attention to the cars closest to her. She couldn’t afford to do that. She was paying attention to the cars she’d be interacting with five, ten, even twenty or thirty seconds ahead. Her mind frantically took in the twisting mass of cars criss-crossing through lanes and across intersections, the speed of the vehicles and the gaps between them, and somehow fed instructions to her hands and feet. A pickup truck smashed into a station wagon one lane over from her and she barely noticed. A BMW rear-ended her and she just used the extra velocity to propel her through an intersection. All around her were honks and screams and shouts, and she shut it all out. She was only focused on the driving.

  As for the dragons, Dana hadn’t seen them since they’d headed for the city, which both relieved her and made her nervous. She knew they had to still be about — she doubted this level of insanity could sustain itself for this long if the monsters had taken off for parts unknown — but she couldn’t take the time to stick her head out the window and look around for them. For the moment, she’d settle for not being roasted alive in her car; once she got off the road, she’d spare a minute to figure out what the creatures were up to.

  BOOM. Spoke too soon. An explosion several blocks west of her, followed by a dark shadow passing overhead heading east, tore her attention momentarily from the road. She involuntarily looked to her left, just barely catching a glimpse of a long blue tail whipping around a corner, before the creature vanished completely from her sight. Several cars has slammed into one another and a couple more had smashed into telephone poles in the creature’s wake, reminding Dana to keep her eyes on the road.

  And just in time, too. She yanked the steering wheel hard, and just barely managed to swerve around a delivery truck whose driver had apparently been so dumbstruck by the creature passing overhead he’d stopped in the middle of the intersection. Another car, heading west and not interested in stopping, broadsided the truck just as Dana had wrenched her car back into the lane. She saw the car crumple and the truck topple over in her rear-view mirror as she sped away.

  She looked back to the road just in time to see a pedestrian run in front of her car, apparently trying to cross the street. Dana swerved, avoided the person, slammed into the side of another car. Metal shrieked and sparks flew. She caught a glimpse of the other driver’s astonished face before she yanked the steering wheel back in the opposite direction and straightened her car out.

  She was almost to the 101. The overpass was up ahead. Hopefully the traffic would thin out some on the other side, and —

  WHOOSH. A green flash, moving right to left across her field of vision, blasted past, just above the freeway. Tires squealed, metal shrieked, glass shattered. Pieces of concrete fell to the ground from above, followed quickly by a cherry-red Plymouth Fury.

  Dana swung her car to the left even as the Fury collapsed in on itself and she processed what had happened. The driver of the Fury must have swerved to avoid the incoming dragon —

&n
bsp; WHOOSH! The green dragon was back, breathing fire this time, hosing down the top of the 101 with bright orange flames. Dana, now driving parallel with the freeway, had to break and swerve to avoid another car crashing down, this one trailing tendrils of flame. It struck the ground just left of her car, so close her driver’s side window was pelted with shattered glass and droplets of blood.

  WHOOSH. The dragon came by again, on a third strafing run. Dana decided to get while the getting was good, and all but threw her car into a right turn at the next intersection. She managed to shoot out from underneath the other side of the freeway without that monstrosity dropping any more cars on her. She heard more crashes and screams as she sped off, but she resisted the urge to look back.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Traffic on this side of town was indeed lighter, though pedestrians were out in force. She had to slow down to avoid collecting them on the hood of her car. The carnage, for the moment, seemed to all be behind her though, so she felt sanguine about traveling at a safe(r) speed. She still drove as fast as she dared, however, not knowing how soon the dragons would get bored with freeways and skyscrapers and come wandering south.

  Screeching to a halt outside her apartment, Dana peeled her fingers off the steering wheel with some difficulty and shut off the car. Grabbing the poster and the purse, she locked the car, then hurried up the steps to her third-floor apartment.

  Dana unlocked the door, threw it open, and jumped; her roommate, Karen, was standing a couple feet away holding a baseball bat at the ready. Karen lowered the bat when she saw who it was, and Dana sighed.

  “What the hell?” Dana shut the door behind her and tossed her things on the coffee table.

  “Sorry. I thought you might be …”

  “A dragon? I don’t think they’d fit in the hallway.”

  “Maybe a looter?”

  Dana had crossed over to the dining area and was looking out the sliding glass door that led to their small balcony. From there, they had an unobstructed view of the San Francisco skyline. “I don’t think we’ve reached the looting stage yet. People still seem to be in the ‘oh my god what the fuck is happening’ stage.”

  Karen moved to Dana’s side to look out at the city as well. “I guess I don’t blame them,” she said quietly.

  Dana had seen plenty of photographs, both from both the Loma Prieta quake of 1989 and the 1906 earthquake and fire, of San Francisco wrecked and aflame. Neither, however, had come even close to preparing her for the reality now spread out before her.

  At least half the city appeared to be on fire. Flames were consuming nearly every wooden building Dana could see, and angry red and orange gouts of fire were spilling out the windows of a lot of the glass, metal, and concrete structures, as well. As she watched, something in one of the smaller buildings must have ignited, and the building exploded. A brief mushroom cloud bloomed, then faded, and the building was gone. Two more buildings nearby had been caught in the blast, however, and were now burning as well.

  Dana couldn’t see the green dragon — maybe it was still buzzing the freeway — but the blue one was very visible, swooping around buildings, diving down towards the ground, and then rising majestically into the air again. More than once Dana saw the monster dive down out of sight, then come up with something clutched in its claws. The first time this happened she couldn’t tell what the thing was holding, until it opened its claws and let the car it had snatched plummet back down to the ground, a hundred feet below.

  At one point the blue dragon flew at a glass skyscraper and attached itself to the side with its claws, probably sixty stories up. With a violent thrust of its head it shattered a window, then began breathing fire into the open floor. Just a moment later, more windows on the same floor were shattered, this time from within, as office workers flung themselves out of the sixtieth floor to impact, unseen by Dana, on the street below, rather than be burned alive by the monster’s flames.

  Suddenly the green dragon was visible again, clutching — Jesus Christ — a school bus in its claws. It saw what its companion was up to, dropped the bus with a casualness that chilled Dana more than anything else she’d seen that day, and flew over to the building the blue dragon was currently assaulting. The green dragon, in another shockingly casual move, slapped its powerful tail against the side of the building, shattering windows on at least half a dozen floors. It then dragged the tail along the face of the building, the pressure opening even more of the offices to the open outside air. Having exposed maybe a quarter of the building’s floors to the outside, the green dragon flapped its wings a couple times, hovered for a moment before the hole, and then let loose with a stream of flame. More glass shattered under the intense heat as the green dragon utterly annihilated the inside of the skyscraper, along with anyone unlucky enough to still be inside.

  The blue dragon pushed off from the side of the building, nipped lightly at the green dragon, then went off to do the same thing to another building.

  Dana and Karen watched in silence as these two creatures systematically destroyed every skyscraper in downtown San Francisco and murdered everyone within.

  A frantic knocking at the door shattered the grim reverie. Karen raised the bat again as Dana went to answer the knocking.

  It was Peter. He swept Dana up in an intense hug. “Thank god!”

  Dana endured the embrace for a moment, then extracted herself. Sometimes she enjoyed Peter’s over-attentiveness; right now it was just annoying her. “Are you okay?” he asked.

  “Well, I almost died twelve times and I found out dragons are real, but otherwise it’s been a pretty good day. You?”

  Peter gave her a “must you?” look, then went to peer out the window. “Holy crap,” he murmured.

  “Pretty much covers it,” Dana agreed.

  Peter turned back to face them. “We need to get out of town.”

  “I’m sold,” Karen said.

  Dana had been thinking along similar lines. She didn’t know if these monsters were just starting with San Francisco and would be moving on after they finished burning it to the ground, or if they intended to set up shop here, but either way, getting the hell out of town seemed preferable to sticking around and waiting to be char-broiled.

  “I’m heading down to L.A.,” Dana decided. “Gonna pack up the car real quick and go stay with my folks for a while.”

  Peter frowned. “Are you sure? You can come stay with my folks in the foothills; it’s closer.”

  Dana gestured towards the window, and San Francisco beyond. “Why would I want to be closer to that?”

  Peter glanced back over his shoulder. “Fair point.”

  Karen looked lost. “My … my parents are in Ohio.”

  Dana smiled. “Pack a bag, kiddo. You can come with me.”

  Karen’s entire body sagged with relief. “Really?” She rushed forward and hugged Dana.

  Dana returned the hug, pointedly not looking at Peter. She didn’t want to meet his parents, she sure didn’t want to go stay with them, and she didn’t much want him tagging along to stay with hers, either. Despite his eagerness, it was a little too soon for that in her mind, dragon attacks or no.

  Fortunately, he didn’t say anything. As Karen rushed off to her room to pack a bag, Peter picked the TV remote off the coffee table and turned on the set. Predictably, the carnage outside was what was on.

  Except no, it wasn’t.

  “Oh my god,” Peter murmured.

  Karen rushed back out. “What? What?”

  Dana pointed at the set.

  Karen turned and paled.

  A shaky hand-held video, probably shot on someone’s cell phone, tracked the course of three dragons — two yellow and a red — across the iconic New York City skyline. They dove as one towards the street, out of sight of the rooftop the amateur cameraperson was filming from, and a horrified “oh my God! Oh my God!” could be heard from either the cameraperson or one of their friends.

  The screen cut to the image of an unsm
iling news anchor in a brightly lit studio. “I’m told we also have some amateur footage from the west coast now, I’m not sure where along the … ah, this is from Seattle —“

  Another shaky hand-held shot, another dragon. This one was a soft pink, and it wasn’t flying, it was merely crouching. The camera zoomed out, and Dana saw that the pink dragon was perched atop the Space Needle.

  A news helicopter entered the frame, heading cautiously towards the dragon, no doubt trying to get some close-up footage, or maybe an interview. The camera zoomed back in to see how this would go; predictably, the dragon didn’t seem interested. It roared, that horrible high-pitched scream Dana had become uncomfortably familiar with, and lashed out with its tail. The muscular tail smacked the side of the chopper, denting the door and shattering the windshield. The aircraft wobbled, dropped, and quickly vanished from sight. The cameraperson zoomed back out to try and locate the chopper, but it had either safely evacuated the area, or had dropped below the line of buildings and crashed.

  A barrage of images followed which Dana could barely keep track of. London. Paris. Tokyo. Moscow. Washington D.C.. Every major city in the world, it seemed, was under attack. Dragons of all shapes, sizes, and colors were laying waste to every population center they could find.

  “Indeed, this seems to have been a carefully considered attack,” the news anchor was saying. “Multiple witness from each attack site report seeing a “meteor-like object” falling from the sky just hours before the attacks began. The sightings are too numerous to be written off as hoaxes or coincidence, and we actually have some footage, I believe … yes, there we are … what you’re seeing there is the wreckage left behind by the meteorite which fell near Salt Lake City, in Utah. As you can see, it resembles a giant leathery egg which has been cracked open and hollowed out. Incredible as it sounds, it seems very likely that this, and others like it, were the conveyances which brought the creatures not only to their targets, but to the planet Earth itself.”