by Hall, Andrew
Exhausted, Tabitha ran for her life. White fire tore up the car park at her heels, and the dragon swept overhead with a dirty static growl. It spun around low in the air and belched an albino inferno. Tabitha dived and rolled across the tarmac to dodge the searing heat at her back. She looked back at a thundering noise to see the wall of the shopping centre implode and topple into ruins. Another monster; another frantic swarm of spiders. She had to get out of the open, find another building to hide in. A supermarket adjoined the shopping centre, further off down the car park. Hopefully too tight and cramped for the dragon to follow her inside. Tabitha ducked down and ran as the creature flew overhead. She leapt away from another fiery blast and beat out the flames on her jacket sleeve. The supermarket grew larger and larger as she sprinted desperately for the doors. She stopped herself against the steel shutters with a bang, and turned to see the dragon circling the car park towards her. Its white eyes flared, trailing light as they picked her out against the doors. Breathless and panicked, Tabitha sprang her claws out and carved a hole in the metal shutter. The dragon wasn’t slowing down. Tabitha tore her way inside the supermarket. Climbing in through the hole, she looked back to see the dragon diving down towards the doorway.
Inside the supermarket Tabitha sprinted down the main aisle to find a place to hide. The smell of rotten meat in here was unbelievable; buzzing clouds of flies filled a couple of aisles as she passed by. There came a crash then, sudden and deafening, like a plane ploughing through the front wall. The dragon roared in a digital rush and stomped into the store, and tore the front desk apart in its jaws. Tabitha watched it from the corner of an aisle nearby. Its big stretched-rectangle wings curled around into half-pipes; curved hollow legs with two square toes apiece. It stalked down the main aisle and sniffed at the dusty gloom, searching for her with pale eyes in the dark. Tabitha dragged herself away from the corner and ran down the aisle, far from the dim daylight that crept through the front wall of windows. She hid when she heard it coming. Down at the far end of the aisle the creature’s huge head prowled past, smooth and square and stubby-snouted. Tabitha hid away from its searching eyes. Once it moved on, she ran. She heard it smash through the side of an aisle in the main supermarket strip, raining down metal shelves and sacks of barbecue charcoal in a rustling racket. The dragon roared when it heard her hidden footsteps running for the front doors. It bounded back to the demolished doorway, cutting off Tabitha’s escape before she could get there and staring around the store for any sign of her. As she backed away down an aisle, Tabitha’s elbow caught a display stand. A jar of sauce dropped and cracked open on the floor, echoing through the store. Tabitha cringed, heartcore racing. She heard the creature’s prehistoric footsteps, massive and metal, cracking the tiles as it walked. She ran from the sound, hiding away around the far corner at the end of the aisle. Wait – suddenly its footsteps were off to her left. Further into the store. It had passed her by. Tabitha peered around the next aisle; saw nothing. Where was it? Could she make a run for it? Tabitha crept out from her aisle and looked up and down the gloomy main strip. There was a groaning metal creak above her. The creature peered over the top of the shelves above the aisles and saw her there. Tabitha gasped and ran. The wall exploded behind her in a white blast. Then the far wall at the end of her aisle. She ran past fridges that burst into pale flames behind her. Their glass doors blew in jagged shards and shotgunned the opposite shelves. Tabitha screamed and fell to her knee, and hurriedly pulled a shard from her thigh with a silvery squelch. The dragon crashed over the top of the aisle and drowned the shelves in flames, throwing Tabitha to the floor. She crawled away from the blinding blaze and the vast creature stalking through it, and leapt away from another burst that destroyed the floor at her feet. Tabitha scrambled and ran. Another flaming belch hit an aisle like a bomb blast; a thundering assault to destroy her hiding places. Tabitha could only run and dodge the collapsing shelves, and jumped away as lights and air conditioning pipes crashed down from the ceiling. The dragon roared again, and destroyed everything in its path to get to her in the heart of the store. It had overtaken her though, searching the dim grey aisles all around it.
Tabitha stopped running and backed up breathless against a shelf. The dragon had run past her and lost her, and now it was roaring into the empty gloom trying to find her. Tabitha saw her chance, and ran back for the front doors. The creature turned its head at the sound of her footsteps, and scrambled after her. As Tabitha ran for the doors the shelves erupted into a thundering tide behind her. The creature crashed down and cornered her against the wall, a good fifty yards from the doorway and the holy daylight outside. It had her pinned in this dark dank meat-stench hell. Tabitha stared up at it and felt adrenaline fill her alien veins. If she was going to die now, she was going to take the bastard with her. The dragon belched a gout of white fire and torched the wall; a slow-motion napalm tide as she leapt away. As the flames bloomed and burst super-slow behind her, Tabitha sank her rough black feet into the tiled floor and pushed it away beneath her. She leapt for the dragon like a cornered rat, pushing the floor away again and sprinting between the monster’s arms. As the bright glare of the flames died down, the dragon stopped tearing into the wall and realised she wasn’t there. Tabitha flicked her claws out and grabbed onto its back leg, climbing up the grey scales and leaping up onto its hip. The dragon roared like thunder and twisted its body round, and crashed its side against the flaming wall to shake her off. Tabitha was already up on its back though, claws in deep, and clambered and crawled her way between its shoulders to get to its neck. To its head. Gritting her teeth as she climbed, Tabitha imagined burying her claws deep in its big eyes. All her grief and anger and burning hate drove her on, gripping its neck with her claws. Jolting and shaking, the dragon charged for the doorway. Tabitha lost her footing on its neck and slipped, and slammed her tailbone down on a smooth dipped scale between its shoulders. She sank her claws into its scales and held tight as the creature burst through the doorway in a dustcloud, leaping into the blinding sunlight. The dragon growled and launched itself into the air, folding its curved arms back out into wings. Tabitha screamed high over the car park as the dragon twisted and turned in the sky, trying to shake her off. The rushing wind roared in her ears. Suddenly she lost her grip on the scales and felt weightless above the dragon. She was free falling. Tabitha flailed her hands and grasped desperately for the scale she’d been sitting on. She hit the dragon’s back again as it climbed in the air, and regained her grip between its shoulders. The creature levelled out and went into a steep dive, plummeting towards the car park. Tabitha’s stomach twisted like she was on a rollercoaster. She held on tight to a curved lip at the front of the scale she was sitting on. She felt two hand grips there that shivered at her touch, and a harness snapped around her waist and shoulders. Suddenly she was strapped to the scale like a saddle, spinning and screaming high in the air. Something caught her eye then, between the handles in front of her; a glowing white circle emerged on a bony bump on the scale. Panicking, she slammed her palm on it and the whole saddle sank down inside the creature’s body. It was a cockpit. She looked up to see two armoured scales close up the hole above her head, shutting out the sky.
‘What…?’ she mumbled, breathless in the silent dark. Her chest was pounding. Was she safe? All that fighting for her life, was it over just like that? Her mind was a jarring chaos, high on adrenaline. One minute she was about to be eaten by an alien dragon, and now she was sitting inside her would-be killer like a pilot in a ship. Heads weren’t meant to wrap themselves around stuff this strange. A dim white glow grew inside the cockpit then, and the saddle shifted and changed into a seat beneath her. Dots and circles glowed to life on a console in front of her, jutting up like a bony grey ribcage. She wasn’t being thrown around in her seat any more, or straining her body against the harness to stay upright. The dragon had stopped struggling. Or was it a ship? She didn’t have a clue. She just sat there silently for a while, getting her breath
back. Trying to work out what the hell had just happened.
Slowly the walls grew brighter, and Tabitha saw that she was sat in a nest of curving metal shapes around her. She reached for the ribbed console and pulled it closer, and pressed gingerly at the glowing white seeds on it. They were hard like cartilage though, a kind of leathery gel, and made noises like they weren't keen on being pressed. There was a purple symbol glowing gently on the console too; an ornate lotus the size of a beermat. It had a strange figure in the middle, like a fallen-down seven with a dot on top. It didn’t do anything when she pressed it; maybe it was the maker’s badge. An alien brand. Sitting back in the seat she noticed a blue patch dead ahead, just past the ribbed console, growing on the wall in front. The more she looked at the blue patch the bigger it got, until the edge of a cloud appeared. She realised then that she was looking out at the sky, through a window that wasn’t there. In a few more seconds the sky had replaced the front wall of the cockpit and filled her vision entirely, and she looked down and screamed. She saw the car park and the shopping centre way down below. But she couldn’t see her arms or legs. Just the wide world and the gaping vertigo view, hundreds of feet below. Tabitha freaked out and struggled in her seat, and all of a sudden she was back in the cockpit again.
‘What the hell’s going on?’ she demanded, twisting and turning in her harness to look around the cockpit. She saw the walls flex like muscle. They moved in a steady rhythm; probably the creature’s wings beyond the walls on either side. She reached down between her legs and felt the curved lip of the seat there, and she pressed her palm on the dim white circle. The daylight shone down above her as the scales parted over her head, and she rose up on the saddle out of the hatch. Suddenly the wind was whipping her hair about and rushing against her ears. Sure enough the dragon was just hovering in the air, beating its huge wings occasionally. Beyond the sound of the wind and its beating wings she heard a weird drone like jet engines, and looked down the dragon’s sides to see glowing vents between its scales.
‘So are you an animal, or a ship, or what?’ she asked the back of its huge head. It didn’t turn its long neck to acknowledge her. It just hovered there, beating its vast wings every once in a while. Tabitha closed her eyes for a second to steel herself, and looked down at the car park far below. At the wandering monster and the spider swarm trying to find her down there. She must have been seeing what the dragon was seeing, during that vision there in the cockpit. She pressed the white circle on the saddle and sank back down into the cockpit again. Sure enough there was the blue patch of sky in her vision, straight ahead on the front wall. The vision grew faster this time, and suddenly the blue sky outside filled her view. No arms, no legs; she was seeing through the creature’s eyes. She looked down, but didn’t feel her own neck move. It was all inside her head. Tabitha looked around and saw the ship’s grey wings, beating by reflex. Its vision was her vision, but it was more than that. She could feel how it moved. She could turn its body this way and that, steering its huge mass with nothing but a thought. They were plugged together. She took control of its wings, and beat them herself. Tabitha laughed in her seat, shaking her head in disbelief. Maybe this was a dream. Maybe she was about to wake up in her sofa nest in the shopping centre. It just didn’t feel real. Except… she could feel the creature’s energy radiating against her palms on the seat. The first sensation her new hands could actually feel. Some strange electrical affinity. Tabitha tried taking control of the creature. It responded; obeyed. She tucked the ship’s back legs in against its tail. She felt the power of those jet scales swelling in its sides; felt them flaring and rumbling to life. They were her jets. She felt them in her body; the creature’s body. One and the same thing. Tabitha turned the dragon’s head towards the clear morning sky, fired up its engines, and launched them both into the big wide blue.
Tabitha left the shopping centre far behind, soaring over the motorway and heading for woods and distant hills. She watched her winged shadow rippling over roads and corrugated warehouse roofs; a vast dark shape that tumbled like a deathly spectre over the trees below. Together they shot over fields and scattered terrified sheep, whipping up dust clouds in their thundering wake. They swept low over a river and kicked up a misty spray behind them, and climbed and twisted sharply into the endless sky above. The world was a green patchwork, laid out far below. Up above, only shining white clouds and dazzling sunshine. Drunk on flight Tabitha pushed the creature up and up into the blue, until the land far below was shrouded in a distant haze. She gasped in shock and pulled away from the vision, and the dragon dropped from the sky. Something had gripped her just then, tingling her limbs like an electric shock. She took control again, and eased the ship down lower in the sky. Its jet scales fell silent. They headed lower still, gliding silently over fields and villages, until they landed down in a distant town on the roof of a tall hotel building. Tabitha willed herself out of the ship’s eyes and dropped out of her trance. She felt a little dizzy and disoriented from the experience, but not drained at least. When she raised the saddle up through the hatch above and unclipped her harness, Tabitha felt like she’d just finished a rollercoaster ride. She looked down at the hotel roof and wondered how she was going to jump down from the creature’s back. Did she have to park the thing first? Or somehow lie it down on the roof so she could jump off its shoulders? To her surprise it brought its wing around like a platform, waited for her to hop onto it, and then it lowered her gently to the roof.
‘Er, thanks,’ she said awkwardly, looking up at its white eyes that stared straight ahead. She couldn’t believe it. The thing had been trying to kill her a few minutes ago. Now it was completely indifferent. What had changed? Was it her alien hands, some kind of fingerprint when she grabbed the saddle? Or had she just pushed the right button to control it?
‘You’ve got a lot more being nice to do before I forget you were trying to kill me,’ she told it. The ship didn’t so much as look at her. Why wasn’t it trying to grab her, eat her? It perched there like a statue on the rooftop, almost Art-Deco to look at with its strange rectangular wings. At least it wasn’t the one that had killed Will and Liv on the castle walls; Tabitha knew that much. She’d seen that one drop and crash when the jet shot it down. If this had been the same dragon, she’d be tearing it to pieces. Tabitha sat down on the roof and zipped her coat up, rubbing the soreness from her trembling legs. The world was as dead and empty as ever, except now it was a little chillier too. Autumn rust was creeping into the leaves of trees down below on the street. The sun didn’t have that same summer warmth to it any more. Tabitha peered back over her shoulder once in a while, checking on the ship. It just sat there like a giant reptile, staring ahead and doing nothing. What was it? Animal, machine, what? How could it look like both?