Dragon Shield

by Charlie Fletcher

  The shock of the sudden and unprovoked attack triggered a stream of angry and disbelieving profanities that The Fusilier hurled after the cat as it streaked across the road and was lost in the shadows beyond.

  The Fusilier felt Little Tragedy’s cheek and the three gouges that were now scratched across it. Tragedy was trying not to sob, but was clearly in shock.

  ‘What the blinking blink was that for?’ he said. ‘Me and that cat’s old friends. It’s a right old softie normally. It’s gone mad.’

  ‘I should say,’ said The Fusilier, looking over his head at Will as he retrieved his helmet. ‘Homicidal maniac. Should have shot the ruddy thing.’

  Tragedy sniffed and felt his wounded cheek.

  ‘I don’t like this.’ He sniffed. ‘I don’t like any of this.’

  The Fusilier nodded.

  ‘Yep. World’s gone to the dogs when even the cats go mad,’ he said.

  13

  Above the Blue Light

  The feline voice repeated the question.

  Jo did not know the answer. She almost did, but her brain was not working properly. The voice was dangerously mesmerizing and insistent, as if it was also using tones and frequencies too deep for normal ears, but strong enough to make her heart begin to bump out of rhythm.

  ‘WHY COULD YOU MOVE?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘WHY COULD YOU MOVE WHEN OTHERS IN THE CITY COULDN’T?’

  It all came back to her.

  Not in bits and bobs, but all at once, like a great slump of wet snow falling of a steep roof high above her. The weight of memory hit her and buried her, smothering her and cutting her off from everything, and for a long time she just fought wildly against it, thrashing in panic, trying to flail her mind free of the images that were trapping her and making it harder and harder to breathe, let alone think.

  It was remembering to breathe that calmed her down.

  She remembered the pain, the earlier pain from the operations on her knee, and she remembered her mum telling her how to calm her breathing and that everything else would follow, that the pain wouldn’t go, not all at once, but if she thought that every time she exhaled a little bit of it would disappear then that would be how to control it and not let it be the boss.

  Jo decided not to let the panic be the boss either, and breathed it out, breath by breath. It took concentration, but it worked.

  She felt the voice waiting for her to surface.

  ‘AH.’

  ‘This isn’t a safe place.’

  ‘TELL ME YOUR NAME, AND I WILL TELL YOU MINE.’

  Jo paused for a moment.

  ‘Joanna.’

  Only people she didn’t know, or people she didn’t much like called her Joanna. She wasn’t going to give this voice her real name.

  ‘JOANNA. AND WHO IS THIS JOANNA? WHY ARE YOU SPECIAL?’

  ‘I’m just a girl,’ she said. ‘Who are you?’

  Two hands reached down through the surface and sat her up. Only when her head broke clear and emerged into the air did she realize with horror that she had been lying under water. It cascaded off her face and hair as she fishmouthed and stared about her. The four lion-women knelt on the edge of what she now realized was some kind of stone mummy’s coffin. Their faces were cold and intense and focused on hers. A small cat with earrings stood on the back of a frozen museum worker who was bent in front of the sarcophagus.

  This was the moment when Jo could have let the panic take her and sweep her off in its dark undertow.

  She concentrated on breathing. She saw the blue light rippling shadows across the roof, and she caught glimpses of other statues and unmoving people all round her. It was somewhere she’d been before.

  ‘NOW YOU KNOW US!’

  The voice was an exulting growl.

  Jo shook her head.

  ‘No. I mean you’re frightening, and you’re statues and you’re moving and everything. And I think this is the museum. But . . . I don’t know you.’

  The lion-women growled and looked at each other. The cat came forward and put its paws on the edge of the stone, looking up at them. As one, they all turned their faces to Jo’s and leant in. She pushed back against the stone tub until she couldn’t get any further from them.

  The voice dripped with disgust.

  ‘WHEN WE WERE BETRAYED WE WERE RULERS OF THE WORLD. WE WERE TRICKED INTO STONE AND PENNED THERE FOR THOUSANDS OF YEARS. AND NOW WE ARE FORGOTTEN SHARDS IN SOME BARBARIANS’ TREASURE HOUSE.’

  She felt the deep growl of rage as much as heard it.

  ‘I AM BAST, WE ARE SEKHMET. LOOK UPON ME IN ALL MY SHAPES AND TREMBLE!’

  ‘What do you want?’ she said, after a long enough pause had made it clear that something was expected from her, and she had had enough time to batten down that rising panic again.

  ‘WHAT WE HAD. WHAT WAS TAKEN FROM US. THE HOT SUN ON OUR BACKS AS WE HUNT. THE FEAR. THE GRATITUDE OF THOSE WE FEED AND THOSE WE SUFFER TO LIVE ANOTHER DAY. THE WORSHIP. WE WOULD BE GODS AGAIN!’

  Jo swallowed. She spoke hesitantly.

  ‘Er. That’s not really gong to happen. The world just isn’t like that any more . . .’

  ‘THE WORLD IS AS WE CHOOSE TO MAKE IT! WE HAVE WOKEN AND OUR ANCIENT MAGIC IS WAKENING TOO. LOOK AROUND YOU. YOU SIT IN THE VERY SOURCE. FEEL THE POWER. IT GROWS WITH EVERY HOUR.’

  ‘But you can’t just stop people moving. You can’t just—’

  One of the lion-women lunged forward, muzzle to nose with her, eyes wide in anger. Her mouth didn’t move but the words echoed in Jo’s skull.

  ‘WE HAVE FROZEN PEOPLE JUST AS PEOPLE TRAPPED US INTO THE STONE THAT HELD US FOR SO LONG, SEEING BUT UNMOVING! TIME HAS BEEN OUR JAILER, AND NOW WE CONTROL TIME. DO NOT THINK TO TELL US WHAT IS POSSIBLE!’

  ‘You can’t just . . . stop people. It’s like killing, I mean it is killing.’

  ‘WHAT OF IT? DO YOU THINK WE ARE STRANGERS TO THE DEATH OF MULTITUDES? DO YOU EVEN KNOW WHY THEY WORSHIPPED US? NO. YOU HAVE FORGOTTEN, YOU COLD BARBARIANS OF THE NORTH, BANISHED SO FAR FROM THE REAL WORLD OF SUN AND LIGHT THAT YOU THINK THE PALTRY LION IS KING OF ALL ANIMALS.’

  ‘You—’

  ‘DO NOT SPEAK WHEN BAST SPEAKS.’

  The voice made her ears ring.

  ‘A LION MAY BE KING. BUT A KING IS A WEAKLING NEXT TO A QUEEN, FOR THE LIONESS IS DEADLIER BY FAR, FOR IT IS SHE WHO DOES THE HUNTING. IT IS THE LIONESS WHO GIVES LIFE AND IT IS SHE WHO BRINGS DEATH, AND THAT IS WHY BAST THE LIONESS IS OLD QUEEN OF ALL THE YOUNGER POWERS, BAST AND HER LATER FACE, MIGHTY SEKHMET, AND THAT IS WHY WE WILL RULE AGAIN! DO YOU UNDERSTAND?’

  ‘Yes . . .’

  ‘GOOD. THEN BOW.’

  ‘. . . you’re mad.’

  ‘BE SILENT. BOW!’

  And the strangest thing, amidst all this uncanny weirdness, was that even if she had wanted to, which she didn’t, Jo found she couldn’t. She thought of pretending to bow, to buy time, and even started to try and dip her head to the lion-women, but something inside her just wouldn’t do it.

  She breathed out, hard.

  It was as if she was wired wrong. Maybe if she made a joke of it . . .

  ‘Sorry. Bowing to gods. Not something us barbarians do very well . . .’

  ‘THEN BE STILL!’

  Stone hands grabbed her shoulders and plunged her beneath the flickering blue surface, holding her there until she stiffened and stopped moving, her face stretched wide in panic. Then they lifted her out and held her as the blue water slipped off her and fell back into the sarcophagus, leaving her uncannily as dry as if she hadn’t been fully submerged at all.

  She was dry, but she was now as unmoving as all the other people frozen in time.

  The lion-woman holding her above the blue water looked a question at her sisters and the small cat standing between them.

  ‘WE SHALL WAKE THE GIANT BEETLE. HAVE IT GUARD HER SOMEWHERE CLOSE TO THE DOOR. WHERE SHE MAY BE SEEN BY THOSE WHO MAY SEEK HER.’

  The cat turned away and jumped up onto the ba
ck of a smooth black stone sculpture the shape of a ladybird, but the size of a dining table. It began to vibrate beneath the cat’s paws, as sharp legs unfolded from beneath its carapace and felt for the floor.

  ‘SHE HAS LITTLE TO TELL US. SHE IS JUST MEAT. WE WILL SET AN AMBUSH WITH TWO DRAGONS HIDDEN IN FRONT OF THE BUILDING. SHE MAY DO BETTER BAITING A TRAP.’

  14

  The Supermarket Checkout

  Little Tragedy was sitting on the step outside the supermarket trying to get over the horrible surprise of the cat’s betrayal and the pain of the gash it had clawed on its cheek.

  ‘I’m all right,’ he kept on saying, smiling through the tears that were treacherously brimming in his eyes. Then, when it all got too much and he had to sob, he would snatch up the mask and put it in front of his face so the others couldn’t see him cry. And then he would get himself together again, muster a smile and drop the mask until it all got too much again. Then he would repeat the cycle.

  ‘He’s in shock,’ said the Fusilier. ‘Be all right in a jiffy. And if he ain’t, I’ll carry him. We should be getting on and seeing to that arm of yours.’

  Will looked at the bright lights of the supermarket behind them. The bright colours of the shelves were full of life, like a hint of the warm old world before it all froze and went grey with dusk, as it was out on the pavement. He felt thirsty, he felt hungry, and his arm, now the Fusilier drew his attention to it again, definitely still hurt.

  He leant the dragon’s shield against the window and stood up.

  ‘I’ll be back in a minute.’

  ‘Where you going?’ said Tragedy, his voice shaky from behind the mask.

  ‘I’m going in there. There are pills that’ll stop my arm hurting and I need a drink,’ said Will.

  ‘In and out,’ said the Fusilier. ‘Just get what you need. Know what you kids are like in a sweetie shop when no-one’s looking. This ain’t a jolly.’

  Will slipped in the door past a woman with a double-wide buggy in which a pair of twins were stuck in the act of fighting over a juice-box, and then he was inside the supermarket, surrounded by bright light and vibrant colours. It felt like a kind of relief for his starved senses, though the silence was definitely unsettling.

  The aisles were crammed with a rush-hour crowd of commuters stuck in the act of doing a quick shop on their way home: there was an old gent in a long, velvet-collared coat, there were young girls in short skirts and boots, two tubby men in turbans and beards, some skinny-jeaned hipsters with beards and no turbans, there were school-kids and pensioners, a one-legged man in a wheelchair and a long-legged girl on roller-skates. It was as mixed a crowd as London itself. Will couldn’t help pushing the girl to see if the wheels on her boots would allow him to move her, but she remained as stuck as any of them.

  He grinned. And then he felt her arm again. Gingerly, as if she might wake and shout at him at any moment, he reached up and touched her cheek to confirm what he’d felt when he pushed the arm. She was not warm. She was soft, as in made of flesh, but she didn’t feel warm, not like his mother had. He wondered if every stuck person was slowly cooling down, and what that meant. Then he heard the memory of his dad’s voice in his ear saying ‘Trouble with you Will-o is that you think too much. Sometimes you just got to do!’

  So he did: he pushed the nagging worry to the back of his head and got on with raiding the shelves.

  He could have anything he liked. He could have stuff he wasn’t allowed. He snagged a couple of cans of normally forbidden energy drink from the cold shelves and popped the tab on one while pocketing the other. He chugged the sickly sweet and slightly medicinal fizz as he walked on up the confectionery aisle. The Fusilier was wrong: it was a ‘jolly’. He shovelled packets of garishly coloured gummy sours into his pocket, and then rammed them home with a fistful of Mars bars. He left the empty can on a shelf while he struggled to zip his bulging pockets shut.

  Then he opened the next can and chugged that one as he looked for the medicine aisle. He passed a cold cabinet full of sandwiches in triangular packs and stopped to grab a few of them; there were triple-decker all-day breakfast sandwiches that he was never allowed to have although he loved the cold sausage and bacon and egg filling. Out of pocket-space, he shoved them down inside his jacket which now bulged out so badly that he was starting to look like the world’s most obvious shop-lifter.

  Then he saw a rack of prawn mayonnaise sandwiches and felt a sudden pang of sadness: it was Jo’s favourite filling. He took one and wodged it in with the others.

  It was like a promise that he’d get to her and rescue her, somehow.

  He was feeling a little better again when he heard a sudden rap on the glass at the front of the store. He peered down the long aisle and had just time to see The Fusilier pointing agitatedly up at the sky and then turn to him and hold up a hand in a gesture that clearly meant ‘stay’, and then draw his finger across his neck with a grimace that even more clearly meant ‘danger’. The Fusilier grabbed the shield in one hand, Tragedy with the other, and ran out of sight.

  And as simple as that Will was alone with nothing more than a jacket stuffed with sweets and sandwiches and a mouthful of all-day breakfast that suddenly tasted like mud.

  Unsure what to do, or where to go, he kept his eyes fixed on the front of the store, because that’s where whatever the danger was would most likely arrive. He edged slowly backwards, thinking he’d be safer out of the bright lights that only moments before had seemed so cheerful and full of life.

  It’s lucky he kept looking in that direction because he saw the cat a moment before it saw him, and was able to stop moving before it did.

  He froze in the act of unconsciously pushing his jacket sleeve up his arm, his left hand on his right wrist. It was an awkward position, but in a way he was relieved at what he saw. He had thought from the urgency of the Fusilier’s sign language that something more threatening than a bronze house-cat had appeared outside.

  He wondered what it was about this cat, Hodge, that had put the fear into the two statues and made them run. The Fusilier had, after all, and without much worry, shot and killed a dragon, and dragons were much bigger and breathed fire. Maybe they still liked the cat despite it gashing Little Tragedy’s cheek. He could understand that: no-one wants to shoot a cat, after all. Which just left a lingering question at the back of his mind: why had they looked so urgent about it? Then something stepped in behind the cat and answered that question horribly.

  It was another dragon, its scales painted the same municipal silver as the others, its mouth the same angry red, its fangs just as large.

  The cat raised a paw and scraped its claws down the window, making a horrible scree-ing noise that made Will’s guts churn in fear. At least it felt like fear, but was also the effect of two highly carbonated cans of energy drink chugged at speed. Maybe that’s why he suddenly felt nauseous.

  The cat looked round at the dragon and the monster stepped closer to the window. The stone hawk Horus fluttered down to land between them, its blue-lit eyes scanning through the glass like little searchlights. Will thought there was something very familiar about it and its little pharaoh’s cap, but before he could remember where he’d seen it the cat scree-ed its claws down the window again as if insisting, its eyes turning back to look right down the aisle Will was standing in. He hoped he looked indistinguishable from the other frozen people. He wanted to swallow, wanted to wet his suddenly dry mouth, but he didn’t. He just stared back and fought the irresistible urge to blink.

  The dragon’s head peered from side to side above the insistent stare of the cat and the unblinking eye of Horus as the long neck snaked left and right, trying to make out what the cat was clearly wanting it to see.

  Will didn’t breathe.

  The cat yowled, as if saying something to the dragon, and the dragon’s mouth opened and let out a roar that shook the tins on the shelf next to Will. Horus shook his stone feathers and lofted off, back away into the night. Despite him
self Will swallowed. The dragon didn’t see it, because it strutted away from the window and tried to get in the door.

  And here Will – much to his relief – noticed something Jo and he had first seen in the hospital when Jo was happily stealing Smarties from the kid upending them into his mouth: the frozen people didn’t move. Just as he had not been able to push the girl on roller-skates, the dragon seemed to be unable to move the woman with the double-wide buggy out of its way to make enough room to come inside the supermarket for a closer look at whatever the unpleasant cat was trying to draw its attention to.

  Will allowed himself a shallow breath of relief. The normally immobile statues might be on the move, but the flip side of things – the world gone ‘vicey-versey’ as Tragedy had said – was that the normally mobile people, the ‘Regulars’ were as unmovable as the statues usually were.

  That was going to save him.

  It was a happy thought.

  And it lasted for at least three seconds, right up until the dragon growled in frustration and gave

  up trying to fold its angular, wing-hobbled shape above, round or through the human barricade of the woman and her children and just stepped sideways and head-butted the glass window instead.

  Just as Jo had been unable to move the kid in the bed, but had been able to steal some of his Smarties, so the Dragon was clearly able to move things if not people. And in this case the head-butt broke the window into smithereens of glass, hardened fragments that Will could hear being ground to powder beneath the dragon’s metal talons as it stepped purposefully inside the shop.

  Will would have run, but he didn’t dare look behind him to see if there was anywhere to run to. He just stayed still and listened to his heart begin to trip-hammer while his mind raced furiously round and round in increasingly panicked circles trying to work out what to do.

  The dragon crunched past the checkout lanes, and as it went, it carefully pushed at the unmoving people. At first Will thought it was doing it out of pure malice, like a drunk who bumps into people in a crowd on purpose, looking for a fight. Then he realized the dragon was just being methodical: if the people didn’t move, they weren’t what it was looking for. And he was pretty sure that when the dragon came to him, he would stumble and give himself away.