by Sean Grigsby
“Huh?” I said, snapping my head back to the holoreader.
“Something is coming in hot, heading straight for you,” Naveena said. “The propellerheads have been monitoring it since you left Sandusky.”
“Why the fuck was that not the first thing you mentioned!?” I appreciated the propellerheads more than anybody, but sometimes they forget that we’re the ones out here risking our asses for everybody else. Naveena should have known better, too.
“We weren’t sure what it was,” Yolanda said. “And it’s not creating new burrows, it’s using old ones, so no quakes. It’s not moving like a dragon at all.”
“Then what is it?” I asked.
The leviathan thrashed even harder. Any more jerking around and it could overturn the hover trailer. Then we’d be back to square one fighting the stupid dragon, on top of having to fight off the wannabe smoke eaters so they didn’t end up like their wraith pal, whilst dealing with a subterranean mystery guest.
“Um, Captain?” Patrice tapped my thigh. “These volunteer fools are trying to pull some shit.”
Outside Patrice’s window, Harold’s red truck zoomed past with the guys in the open bed hugging their metal poles like teddy bears. With a quick jerk, the truck swerved into our path, forcing Patrice to slam the brakes. We hit a dead stop as Harold’s brake lights blared red, but the truck never came to a complete stop, not until the earth blew open and yellow fire exploded from the ground beneath them.
Our cab filled with a mixture of swear words and screams.
The heat was so intense it shattered our windshield and warped the mirrors, and even the dash. In hindsight, the burst of flames and dirt was perfectly circular, like a cookie cutter made from a flamethrower. The blast was probably twenty feet in circumference, but at the time it seemed like the whole world was ablaze. It was the first time I’d ever felt pain from heat. Though, compared to the tiny cuts the pieces of windshield made across my face, the heat was nothing.
Harold’s truck had disappeared in the fire, but when the flames died down, a charred hunk of metal – completely unrecognizable as a pickup – dropped from the sky in a smoldering heap. One of the guys who’d been sitting in the back of the pickup lay a few feet away from the crater left by the explosion. His whole body was covered in a thick, dark layer of char, steadily smoking into the wind. He tried to army crawl, but soon gave up, rolled to his back, and lifted a smoking arm to the sky, pointing – maybe blaming God for his current predicament. I was amazed he was still alive.
“Williams?” Naveena’s hologram said. “Williams, what happened?”
Gagging against the taste of sulfur on my tongue, I wiped tears from eyes. “Send… backup. Now.”
“We’re on our way.” Naveena and Yolanda disappeared.
“You two,” I brushed glass from my shoulders and looked at Patrice and Afu, “knock the leviathan out again. I’m going to go check on that man out there. Get ready to fight another dragon. Whatever it is, I don’t think it’s emerged yet.”
“You see that fire?” Afu said. “I say we run and wait for backup.”
“That’s not an option,” I said.
Patrice patted palms against her bald head, as if she was checking for burns. After a big breath, she said, “I’m ready, girl.”
All three of our doors popped open, just as three straps behind us snapped in sequence. The metal of our truck’s roof bent in and wobbled from something heavy slithering on top. The little of the windshield that remained fell in jagged pieces.
The leviathan slid off the front of Cannon 15, shifting its head left, then right, hissing like an angry snake on crack. Its entire body quivered and writhed as if it was in pain or listening to a really bad heavy metal song. Then it spotted the surviving volunteer.
“Fuck,” I said.
Securing my helmet, I hopped out and ran, but the leviathan was already speeding across the ash, as fast on land as it was in water. Power jumping put me a couple feet away from its tail, but I was still too late.
The leviathan scooped the dying man into its jaws. The poor guy in the dragon’s mouth was too hurt and exhausted to even scream. The scaly hissed and convulsed seizure-like; it must have had a bad reaction to the Sandman laser. No dragon had ever woken up from the tranq gun before.
I grabbed the scaly’s tail and yanked, but all it only made the bastard turn and glare at me; the burned man’s legs still sticking out of its mouth. With a flick of its tail, the leviathan tossed me toward the deep pit that had opened underneath the pickup truck.
I dug both boots and all ten of my armored fingers into the dirt to stop myself at the edge of the crater. And thank Christ, because I’d never peered down such a deep hole. There was no end that I could see, and patches of flames burned in random places all the way down, so it wasn’t for lack of light. And that was another thing.
What made the hole? When a scaly emerges, it’s there in all its ugly, horned monstrousness. It doesn’t make a hole, turn around, and decide to come back later. But I couldn’t worry about that. I had to deal with the spazzing dragon right in front of me.
I heard the snap of bones and a puff of boiling hot steam before I ever got to my feet and turned to face the leviathan. When I did, electricity sparked from the beast’s jaws and a newborn wraith used its gnarly hands to claw out of the leviathan’s white-flaming mouth. The air filled with hisses and shrieks.
Goddamn it. Not again.
I opened the container in my power suit and reached for my wraith remote… which wasn’t there.
Double goddamn it.
It was in Cannon 15’s lockbox. Patrice and Afu ran toward the leviathan, laser swords extended and phumm-ing with each swing of their arms.
I fumbled toward them on aching legs. “Toss me a wraith remo–”
Something swift slammed into my back, sending me into the dirt. By the time I flipped over, the wraith filled my nose with the smell of burned flesh, shrieking with its electric teeth in my face, and its white speckled claws swiping down, about to puncture my skull and finish me off.
The wraith’s dagger-like fingers had to have been less than an inch from my eyeball when the ghost burst into flames.
But they weren’t the white flames the wraith was born from. They weren’t even the canary, neon yellow that had exploded under Harold and company. These flames were black, the same black that shot from a wraith remote when trapping them.
I’d heard of wraiths disappearing out in the wild, but I’d never seen it myself, and it was usually a few weeks until they vanished from their given territory, not forty-five seconds.
With the wraith gone, though, and my eyes toward the sky, I finally saw what the last of Harold’s men had been pointing at before becoming a leviathan snack.
A giant, flaming bird was in the air, and barreling straight down for us.
I rolled onto my feet in a dead run toward the cannon truck. Patrice and Afu were doing a waltz with the leviathan, trying to dodge its attacks and find an opening to power jump in for some slicing and dicing. But the dragon was behaving erratically, like nothing we’d seen before.
Casting to their radios, I yelled, “Get out of there! Head for the truck.”
“What?” Afu said. “We’ve almost got this thing, Cap. Give us a chance.”
“This bitch is bugging like crazy,” said Patrice.
“Big fucking fire bird coming down on us. Jump out of there right now, damn it!”
They looked to each other and instantly retreatjumped toward Cannon 15.
It was a good thing, too, because half a second later, the bird impacted into the earth clutching the leviathan in its talons and emitted a wave of flames in a giant ring that crested just over the top of Cannon 15.
More damaged apparatus on my record.
With an ear-stabbing shriek that would make a wraith wince, the bird raised its beak to the clouds and squawked out a victory as the leviathan writhed helplessly under its weight.
“What the hell k
ind of dragon is that?” Afu asked.
“That’s no dragon,” I said. “It’s a….”
CHAPTER 11
“Phoenix!” Patrice finished for me.
That didn’t make any sense. But dragons did? Ghosts did? The realm of possibilities had already been blown wide open a decade ago. We just had to adapt to them and keep the human race going one day at a time. Sense didn’t have anything to do with it, not when it was burning right in front of me and my crew, piercing its beak into the leviathan’s belly.
A phoenix. Shit, I guess it was. The bird was covered entirely in yellow flames. Even its predatory eyes were like bonfires curling toward the sky. Where a cluster of feathers would have been blowing in the wind, instead it was flickering flame. When the bird spread its enormous wings, they became sheets of flight-giving combustion.
The leviathan tried to fight back, snarling and snapping at its attacker. But the phoenix shoved one of its talons in the scaly’s face, holding it down as it ate the dragon alive. Poor sea serpent didn’t ever have a chance, not against something three times bigger and constructed almost completely of fire. Then, as casually as if it had been a twig, the phoenix snapped the leviathan’s neck.
Instantly, the dragon caught fire and turned to ash. Just like the other leviathan. Just like the smaug.
Afu swallowed, his shaking, armored hand jangling against the side of Cannon 15. “Do… do we kill it.”
“Get your hand off the truck,” I whispered to Afu through gritted teeth. “It’s making too much noise.”
He did as he was told. “And if we do, won’t it just resurrect? That’s what they do, right?”
I tried to slow my breathing down. I was shaking, too. “We won’t kill it if we can get it back to the propellerheads alive. They can study it so we won’t get caught with our pants down if there are others. Patrice?”
No answer.
I turned toward my driver. Her mouth hung open, eyes glued to the phoenix.
“Patrice!”
She flinched and whispered, “Sorry, Cap.” “Get the Sandman trained on the bird,” I said. “Go as slow and quietly as you can.” I knocked knuckles against the dragon skull emblem on her power suit. “Sink or swim.”
“Sink or swim, baby,” she said, but it lacked her usual enthusiasm.
I radioed the propellerheads and requested Jet 1 for an immediate airborne attack – extra foam if they could swing it. They gave me a thirty-minute ETA.
All that was left of the leviathan was a pile of yellow, glowing embers which the phoenix began scooping into its beak. With each swallow the bird grew in size. The flames of its wings crackled as they burned bigger and brighter. Hotter. By the time it had finished eating, it would be double its original height and width. And it was already two stories tall.
It wasn’t that farfetched. The behemoth we’d fought not long ago was an apex predator dragon, feeding off its own kind. But this was different. The phoenix turned scalies into coal for its anatomical furnace.
“What do you want me to do?” Afu asked beside me. “I don’t know what to do!”
I looked into his big brown eyes, and for some goddamned reason I was so happy to be here with him. There was nowhere else I’d rather be. Then, I could have slapped myself. Afu and I were over and there was an inferno bird just a few feet away.
“We need to focus,” I said, too sternly, more to myself than him. That was always my flaw; I projected my own shit onto other people, people I loved.
Used to love!
There was a slight pout to Afu’s lips, even though he was trying hard to keep his head in the game. “I’m doing my best, Captain.”
Pointing to the phoenix, I said, “We’ll surround it, hold it off until Patrice can put it to sleep. Something starts going south, I’ll focus on its flames with my foam. Grab a shield from the truck, and use your laser sword as a last resort. And I mean that, Afu. Don’t kill it unless you absolutely have to.”
“Okay, okay,” he said, raising a defensive hand. “No more monster killing.”
Patrice spoke through my helmet radio. “Cannon is in position, T.”
As Afu and I stepped lightly to either side of the phoenix, the air smelled cleaner than I could ever remember, absent of the funk that dragons and wraiths brought with them. I guess that’s what happens when everything is incinerated. Fuck, I could imagine what this bird could do to a city. My city. We couldn’t let this flying cataclysm escape. Not on my watch. Too many people had died already; stupid people who’d done it to themselves, but still.
Finishing its meal of dragon coal, the phoenix chirped like a satisfied sparrow, which was weird for something the size of a jumbo jet to do. It turned its head to Afu and then me, unconcerned. Flapping its fire wings, the phoenix lifted into the air.
“Patrice, now!” I shouted.
Cannon 15’s Sandman sang as it fired the tranq laser across the horizon. It hit the phoenix under its right wing. And then, in the most fabulous way…
…Not a fucking thing happened.
“It didn’t work!” Afu said.
Thanks, Smokie Obvious.
It wasn’t true that nothing happened. The phoenix got pretty pissed, shrieking and flapping faster to hover just above us. If it had seen our presence before as random spectators, we’d just upgraded ourselves to prime enemies.
“We can’t kill it,” I yelled to remind Afu.
Instinctually, I power jumped and blasted the phoenix’s nearest wing with a foam stream. The flames sizzled and died down when the foam made contact, causing the phoenix to zero in on me. But a few seconds later the wing was back to its full blaze.
“Oh shit,” I said. “Patrice, we need the chain net.”
“Hold it off for a second,” she said. “I need time to crank the gun.”
We didn’t have a second.
The phoenix aimed for me, cutting through the air like a hot knife. I dove out of the way, but at the last second, the bird flicked its wing and batted me in the side. I stumbled, but landed on my feet just fine. My power suit, however, was on fire.
“Oh, goddamn it!” I slapped at the flames rising from my suit’s armpit, but it was doing as much as a one-legged droid in a foot race.
I blasted the fire with my foam, but the white suds only sizzled away no matter how much I dumped onto it. The fire wasn’t going away.
“Afu, help!”
I was freaking out. Normally, I would have kept my cool and figured something out, but this was beyond my capacity to understand, to get a handle on. And I was so damned exhausted already.
Afu power-jumped over to me as the phoenix, half a mile away, swooped around to come back for a rematch. “Get out of the suit,” he said.
Out of the suit? That was suicide.
The phoenix’s oncoming shriek quickly changed my mind. I hit the latch in the front of my suit and fell to the ground. Afu heaved me onto my feet and we ran for the truck.
I felt the heat at my back and knew the phoenix was right on top of us. The bird’s shriek came next, stabbing my ears so badly I had to cover them with my hands and lose speed – not that my running was doing shit to save me. Then I made the mistake of looking over my shoulder.
The phoenix’s talons were spread open, ready to snag me and Afu. It wouldn’t even have to bite us to finish the job; the flames would do us in way before that.
A loud phloom shot through the air as Patrice fired the chain net out of the cannon. It struck the phoenix, enveloping the bird and cinching around it with quick, magnetic ease. It spiraled through the air away from me and Afu, then thudded through the dusty ashes on the ground, continually squawking.
When the netted phoenix came to a rest, I marched toward my power suit that was still burning and cracked it open like a discarded oyster.
“We should stay back, T,” Afu said. “Yeah? Wait till backup arrives?”
“You’re probably right, Afu, but I’ve got to do this.”
I kept walking. This bird
had officially pissed me off. I wasn’t going to kill it, but I was going to make it very uncomfortable. The flames on my power suit had died down, but I had to kick ashes onto the foam arm so I could grab it and drag the suit toward the phoenix. I didn’t need to get that close, not for what I had in mind. Maybe just ten or fifteen feet away.
“What are you doing?” asked Afu.
Huffing from the strain, I kneeled and aimed my power suit’s foam arm toward the phoenix. It stared at me with those flaming eyes. For a second I hesitated, because the bird wasn’t looking at me like it wanted to eat me or burn me to smithereens, it looked worried. Scared.
I wondered how scared Harold and his guys felt when they were blasted fifty feet into the air.
I jabbed the foam button on my suit and soaked the phoenix with the white goop. It always worked like a charm with dragon breath. The phoenix fire, though, was too damn hot and unkillable. The foam was useless, but dousing the bastard was making me feel better, so there was that.
The phoenix gargled all high-pitched against the foam, and I was careful not to accidentally drown the thing. It sounded like a cappuccino machine frothing up steamed milk.
Then it switched to the sound of a tea kettle about to blow.
“I don’t like this, Tamerica.” Afu only said my full first name when he got serious, and that was close to never.
I dropped my power suit’s arm and looked back at him. He was in a full run, headed my way, as if he was going to tackle me. Behind me, the phoenix trembled faster and faster, fire flashing like a strobe light.
Then Afu did tackle me.
It was just in time. He’d seen something I couldn’t – not while I was neck deep in my rage-fueled birdie bathing. The phoenix exploded, firing molten pieces of chain net like bullets. They scattered everywhere, pinging against Afu’s power armor as he covered me, some dinged off my helmet that I’d thankfully left on. But one of the pieces of shrapnel caught me in the arm.
I screamed into Afu’s ear, and it was a credit to his composure he didn’t roll off me and leave me to the mercy of the flying hot metal.
When the last of the explosion had subsided, Afu sat up and hissed at the sight of my arm.