Dominion

by Doug Goodman

“Do you want me to go?” she asked.

  Aidan moaned as he remembered his reactions. “It’s not that simple,” he said.

  “No, I think it is.” Then like the worst person on earth, Aidan looked away.

  I eventually bled for her! I bled for all of them!

  He saw Jax taking off his polo and Mr. Olivarez pointing to him. He saw himself and Alyssa on the bus with him trying to push her away from the crowd.

  That’s not me.

  Malifax’s silence said enough to Aidan. The case was closed. There was nothing more to discuss. He was not a good person.

  I did it for our survival. I only did what I had to stay alive.

  The visions in his head showed wolves fighting off spears and elephants fighting off traps. He saw deer running from hunter’s guns and cows being slaughtered. He saw a bloom of euthanasia. Puppies dropped in a box and the box pumped full of gas. The puppies crying out for mothers that wouldn’t come.

  What are you saying? That you had to do this? That this is your survival?

  He felt that slap against his mind like a tooth scraping across his fissures. The next image showed him and Alyssa in a cabin in the far north with nothing but snow and sky to surround them. She was smiling. They had their arms around each other. They leaned into each other, and their shape formed the tower. He was leaving the tower with his friends. They were leaving in the Humvees and leaving everyone behind.

  So that was it, then. The grand plan. Leave everything but the Artic alone, and they would leave him alone.

  You’re making a deal like I’m Mr. Olivarez.

  There was no way to answer this, so Malifax showed him again the visions. Malifax upped the stakes by showing him pictures of his family and his children.

  That’s what separates us from them, he thought. They have no sense of true altruism. He projected a vision of a mother cradling a child. Malifax countered quickly with a dog nursing pups. Aidan showed people sharing food. Malifax showed wolves sharing a carcass. He showed a doctor. Malifax showed a lion licking another lion’s wounds.

  From him came an image of a boy helping an old woman across the street. It was cartoonish, kind of 90s Nickelodeon because he’d never really seen anyone helping old women across streets, but he thought it would get the point across.

  Malifax projected an image of a gorilla fending off other gorillas from a boy who had fallen into their paddock.

  Altruism.

  Malifax didn’t respond. Despite what he had just seen, Aidan wondered if this was the key difference he saw between animals and humans. Not the kindness of kin or similarity, but true altruism with nothing to gain. Was that what separated humankind? Would animals ever be willing to sacrifice themselves for the lives of others the way that humans would.

  Again, the laughter. It was deep now. Malifax was gone, and only the laughter remained. Whatever argument he had engaged with Malifax had ended. He didn’t know if that was Malifax conceding a point or no longer wanting to argue. Nothing more could be said. They had different beliefs, and that was the end of it.

  The laughter was low-bellied. Aidan’s mind was tired from swimming in the river. If he were back in his body, he would say the adrenaline had worn off. Something like that happened here, but he had no explanation to equate to adrenaline wearing off. He was weary and tired, and wanted to go to sleep, but he swam a little ways more. He was searching for the laughter. He saw dead bodies in the eyes of those he passed through. Dead bodies in the stairwell and in the turrets. Dead bodies in the field of battle.

  He found a very red stream, and in the stream, he saw something that made his soul scream and his body retch. He could not believe what he was looking at. Val, Alyssa, Riley, Colt, and Peter. They were in the garage, surrounded by terrible, snapping wargs. He saw this all through the eyes of Black Fang. That was who was laughing. This was all a distraction while Black Fang captured the rest of the lost boys. While he had been engaged in philosophical wrestling with Malifax, Black Fang had trapped his friends!

  Out of the visions, he fell backward. His arms waved wildly as he tried to catch himself from falling out of his chair. Jax, who had slapped him silly to wake him, reached out to grab him. There was a moment of arms flailing and diving, but Jax was able to keep Aidan from falling on his back.

  Aidan looked around. There was blood everywhere.

  “Where have you been?” Jax asked.

  “How long was I out?”

  “Five minutes?”

  “We gotta get to the garage. Black Fang is here.”

  Another rat squirmed in his grip. He lopped off its head. Beside him, a soldier stabbed a knife in the back, severing its spine. The mutated rodent began dragging its back squealing in pain. The soldier stabbed it again in the head.

  “I think we got them all,” Jax said.

  “Incoming!” the Colonel yelled. Jax dove aside as a four-winged roc, black as night, came crashing into the side of the building. It squawked and waved its wings like a thunderbird, sending shards of glass spiraling throughout the floor. A warg sat on its back, a spear in its hand. It raised the spear back over its head and prepared to hurl it into Aidan’s body.

  This was the same monstrous combination that they had seen out on the plains, the one that could instill fear from miles away. The only person who did not try to hide from it was Aidan. The winged damnation reached its beak for Aidan while the warg’s throwing arm slid forward. Jax jumped out from behind a desk and used a turned-over desk as a leaping pad to sidekick the bird in the head. The roc turned on Jax and screeched. He leaped back at it, chopping at its giant orbit with his parang. The first cut dinged off the giant eagle’s patina. The beast jumped to the side, but Jax didn’t let go. While the rider struggled to stay on his mount, the eagle reeled on its side, trying to leap back out. Jax ripped at its patina with his fingers until it blinked. In the instant that it blinked, he struck with his parang, stabbing its giant iris. The roc shook him off. He went flying across the floor, but he was buffeted when he slammed into a cube wall.

  The giant eagle dove away. Its warg rider finally lost his grip on the eagle and fell down into an unused flowerbed. The warg strained to lift itself up after the great fall. As it strained, soldiers attacked it, stabbing its mouth, ears, and eyes with their knives until it was dead. On the horizon, the sky started to grow dark.

  “What’s that?” Colonel Weatherford asked.

  “Bats,” Aidan said.

  For the next scattered minutes, the beasts flung everything they had at the Tooth. It was a fury of blood, wings, and steel. Flame and concussive blasts.

  Then Colonel Weatherford called in “the cannon.”

  “Take cover,” he told everyone present. Soldiers climbed behind cubicle walls and steel desks. A minute later, he yelled, “fire in the hole!” into a receiver. A rumbling noise rose from the ground floor.

  A giant fountain of flames erupted out of the Tooth from all sides. The heat was so intense that it reddened Jax’s skin. Afterwards, Jax noted that some of the glass panes had begun to melt because of the flame. Fireballs erupted from the top of the tower like the concoctions of some mad wizard. Fire scorched the sky. People inside ducked behind whatever they could find to escape the heat.

  Aidan didn’t wonder where all the propellant was coming from. He remembered the giant tanks in the atrium. They had been guarded for good reason. Colonel Weatherford was a clever strategist.

  Balls of liquid flame splashed on the concrete below. When finally the flames died, the sky was monsterless, as if the marauding rocs and bats had disappeared into fiery oblivion.

  “Colonel, I have to go. I have to take care of my family.”

  The Colonel nodded and shook Aidan’s hand, then gave him a can of pepper spray and shouted to the others to get the RPGs loaded. “Don’t know how much more ammo we have, but I want to go out swinging, boys!”

  Jax and Aidan jumped down the rubble in the elevator shaft, sidestepping the remains of the bear, and ran for th
e garage.

  They found the way to the garage almost completely unblocked. There were still screams from the stairs and the occasional rattle of gunfire, but for now, the Christmas Day battle had found some peace.

  Jax burst through the doors of the first level of the garage, knife drawn while Aidan followed slowly behind. Aidan’s arm wasn’t working since the roc made him fly, and his back was screaming at him to stop and fall down, but he had to find his betrothed, his brothers, and the rest of his family.

  “Can you see them like you did the others?” Jax asked.

  Aidan shook his head. Something was different. Something had changed.

  They ran up the garage, and they saw their friends bound and gagged. Some Renfields had tied them up. The lost boys were trying to say something or at least point with their eyes.

  Then Black Fang dropped on them from above. He gripped Jax and shook him like a toy, then flung him across the garage. Jax flipped in the air and crashed into the concrete, hitting his head. The way he hit, all motor control went out of him. His body did not roll, but went down like a football player knocked out during a particularly bad hit. Aidan hoped he was just knocked out.

  “You,” the warg growled.

  Aidan slowly turned his angle so that he was backing up the garage towards his friends. They were tied to the Humvee grilles.

  “No fire,” the warg growled again. His voice was like granite.

  “No gun.”

  “Useless.”

  The great Warden of the West licked his lips while he watched Aidan with his yellow eyes. The look was enough to make Aidan want to piss his pants. If he had, he wouldn’t have been embarrassed, and years from then, he would gladly retell the fight and always include this part because he was that scared of the warden/dire dog/hellhound/werewolf/whatever it was.

  Suddenly, a gunshot rang out across the garage. Black Fang shirked from the impact, then looked to the lower level. It was Mr. Seward. He was holding an old Magnum pistol and firing patiently and deliberately at Black Fang.

  “Save your friends!” Mr. Seward yelled to Aidan. “I’ve got this black-toothed son of a bitch. Try to destroy my friends, will you?”

  The great wolf padded towards the old man, who shot again at him, crying out, “I am: yet what I am none cares or knows. My friends forsake me like a memory lost; I am the self-consumer of my woes - they rise and vanish in oblivious host like shades in love and death's oblivion lost. And yet I am! and live with shadows tossed!”

  He fired his Magnum to punctuate his speech, and when the end came, he did not flinch nor look away, but looked Black Fang in the eyes as the monster ripped him into two pieces.

  While Black Fang cleaved Mr. Seward, Aidan took those precious few seconds to run up and knock over the closest Renfield to him. Then he began untying his friends, and they helped him fight off the other Renfields, who quickly gave up and ran.

  “Hurry! We’ve got an idea!” Val yelled. He and Alyssa and the others began pushing drums of gasoline down to the edge of the garage ramp. Val punctured the first drums using a knife he forced from one of the slaves. Gasoline stunk in the air and turned the white ramp black.

  A low rumble emanated from the lower floor as Black Fang released his anger. Colt and Peter hurried to push their drums to the side and dump them.

  Aidan reached into the driver side seat of one of the Humvees and grabbed a beer bottle and a bandana, which he stuffed in the bottle. Then he filled the bottle from a gasoline tank that was strapped to the back of the Humvee. His side begged him to put the tank down. Then he lit the bandana with a lighter and ran to the rail.

  “Remember this, dog breath?” he shouted as he flung the Molotov at Black Fang. The glass shattered square on his shoulder, and fire exploded all over his side. Flames flickered down and ignited on the fumes before they reached the ground. In a second, the whole garage ramp brightened to solar yellow, and the great wolf screamed in agony.

  Aidan high fived Peter and hugged Alyssa, but then the great flaming beast leaped out of the fire pit, waving its arms wildly. It kicked Val in the gut and bit down on Riley’s shoulder, shattering every bone.

  “No!” Alyssa screamed.

  The garage stunk of smoldering flesh. Almost all of Black Fang’s hair had burned off, yet the beast came forward, running on pure adrenaline and God knows what else. It knocked Colt down and stomped on him. Something crunched. It tried to bite Colt, but Peter jumped in the way. The wolf gladly bit down on Peter’s arm.

  It wasn’t just pain that Peter felt, but pressure like his arm was pinned between two boulders, and then he was flung out of the way. Aidan pulled Colt clear of the beast as it sank to the floor.

  When Peter came to, he looked down and saw the flaming gasoline rolling down the ramp. At the far end lay Jax, his left foot twitching.

  Peter climbed up. His arm felt like it had been rolled over by a bulldozer. He limped to the side of the garage and climbed up on the bar. With his perfect balance, he walked the rails down to where Jax was lying, and he checked his pulse. There was a pool of blood under his head, but he still had a heartbeat.

  As the flames rolled towards him, he pulled himself and Jax up on the pipes above the flames, then carried him across to the Humvees.

  “Gymnast, much?” Alyssa asked as she helped to pull Jax down.

  “All State,” Peter said.

  Colt was barely moving.

  “Stay still,” Alyssa told Colt. He tried not to cry, but the pain was too much. He would have doubled over, but the pain was so intense, he couldn’t move, so he just cried where he lay.

  Val also began to move slowly. Aidan got the thumbs up from him, then went to check on Riley.

  Riley was gasping for air. “Oh, no,” Aidan said despondently.

  “We need a doctor!” Val yelled back to Alyssa. “Something’s wrong with Riley!”

  Alyssa grabbed the first aid kit and ran over. “There are no doctors. What is it?”

  “I don’t know. She can’t breathe.”

  “What do we do? Didn’t you read something about it?” she asked Aidan.

  “Maybe.”

  “There’s no time for maybe, Aidan. Do something.”

  He ran back to the Humvees. “I need something to cut her open and something for air to go into, like a pen.”

  “How about a straw?” Val pulled one out from between seat cushions.

  “That’ll work. I need a knife.”

  “There’s an Exacto in the first aid kit,” Alyssa said.

  Aidan ran back to Riley and took the Exacto out of the kit.

  “I’m sorry, Riley. I don’t know if this will work, but it’s all I can do.”

  Riley’s eyes were rolling and her lips were turning blue. She grabbed Aidan’s arm tightly.

  Aidan looked to Alyssa, then stabbed Riley’s chest with the tip of the knife. Blood began to pour out.

  “Okay, now we need to get the straw in there.”

  He pushed the straw in, but the wound continued to bleed from in and around the straw.

  Riley was grabbing him harder as she gasped for air.

  “What’s happening?” Val asked. “Something’s not right.”

  “Try again” Alyssa said.

  “I don’t know what I’m doing. I’m just stabbing her to death.”

  “Try again!”

  He stabbed her one more time, gently, and lower in her chest. He took the straw out of the one side of her lung and put it in the other spot. Blood dribbled out from inside the straw.

  “I think it’s working!” he shouted.

  But when they looked up at Riley, she was dead.

  They left Jax next to Riley. He had bled out in the back seat of the Humvee while they tried to help Riley. When they came back, he was dead.

  “He saved my life about a million times in the past hour,” Aidan said. “I never got to say thank you.”

  They propped him up next to her. Alyssa teared up when she saw how naturally they fit to
gether side-by-side. She reached into Riley’s pants pocket and pulled out Riley’s cellphone. The first photo was of her in the cold night outside Austin. The last photo was one she took of everyone at the Christmas Eve celebration, not eighteen hours ago. Alyssa wiped her tear and pocketed the phone.

  Colt did not want to move, but he hung from Peter’s shoulders while Peter carried him, and he tried to force back the tears while they laid him down in the Humvee. Laying him down was the most painful part. He cried effusively as they laid him down. Once he was down, though, he felt much better. Nowhere near okay, but much better. Alyssa made him drink some ibuprofen from the first aid kit.

  They drove quietly out of the garage. The battle was mostly over. A few rocs still hovered over the tower, but for the most part, the beasts had fled. The parking lots were littered with the bodies of the dead.

  They stopped outside the atrium. Its steel girders had collapsed, and all the glass was blown out.

  “I want to check in before we leave.”

  Part of Aidan wanted to scream at her to leave, but that was only a small part of him now. He smiled and said, “Okay.”

  “We’ll be just a minute,” he told the others.

  Inside, the place seemed deserted. The few soldiers who remained were covered in blood and ash. They sat down and stared at the spaces in the floors between their knees.

  That’s when Alyssa heard something. It was a sound that frightened her and scared her and drove her to anger all at once. Aidan heard it too, and followed.

  She opened the doorway to the stairs. They heard the sound again, a high-pitched wail, sharp and painful. They ran up the stairs.

  The sound went on and on. It was a piercing sound, the kind of sound that made all people want to cry. Something was very wrong, but maybe there was something they could do to help the baby.

  At the second floor, the baby stopped to take a breath, and then called out again with that horrible sound that drives people insane. Alyssa didn’t know it, but she was crying.

  Third floor and they were almost there. The sound was deafening. They were having to step over bodies now. In another lifetime, maybe Alyssa would have cared, but not with this poor creature needing help.