The Elementalists

by C Sharp

  He’d even contemplated lying to Mr. Duncan at the van, saying the car was clean, and continuing on his way. But the pay-to-effort ratio of this job was astounding, and despite the fact that he kept screwing things up, at his core, Brent wanted to do the right thing. He just wasn’t sure what was right anymore. For some reason, even though he’d done his job well, once again he felt like things were going all wrong.

  He came to a halt before the thirty-foot-tall, corrugated metal door that had recently been fortified with all manners of backup security. He had no idea how to open it and doubted that he even had the security clearance to do so, but he had to get in there first. He had to help Chloe before that lunatic got to her.

  • • •

  There was a loud, repetitive banging coming from the camera room above. Ezra had had the brilliant idea of barricading the entrance with the heavy bank of video monitors before they’d descended the stairs in their white plastic suits. The whole array of built-in screens had been rolled away from the wall and tipped back onto its side. Chloe had worried then that this might seal them in when it came time to leave with Uktena. Now she was increasingly terrified that it wouldn’t buy them enough time.

  Her hand pulsed red with the bright light of the diamond burning through it, and she could feel the building vibration of the voltage just beneath her skin. But Uktena hadn’t moved from his wilted and sickly state, and Chloe had run out of ideas.

  “YES!” shouted Kirin triumphantly. There was a metallic click, and he bolted up at the other end of the dragon with the open lock brandished over his head. He lowered the prize as he heard the violent clanging above, and he tossed it unceremoniously to the floor when he saw the desperation on Chloe’s face. “You have to make a wish!” he yelled. “Like the dragon said!”

  Chloe leaned in toward the increasingly intense radiance before her. She was starting to get dizzy, and her whole body had begun to tingle as her hair stood on end. Now it felt the way it had when she’d once grabbed hold of an electric cow fence just to see how long she could hold on, but this time there was no jolt of pain with the odd floating sensation.

  She clenched her eyes shut, but still the bright glare of the diamond’s light seared through her lids.

  “Dude, what’s that light? I’m not getting this on camera,” Stan mentioned.

  But Chloe couldn’t acknowledge the outside world. All that mattered was Uktena and the belief that somehow she could make a difference. “You can’t let humanity die,” she whispered.

  The deafening report of semiautomatic gunfire erupted from the camera room above as bullets tore through the door and shredded the monitor bank behind it. Stan, Ezra, and Kirin dropped to the floor and covered their heads, but Chloe remained transfixed before the unmoving dragon.

  “Please, I need you to help us!” she pleaded.

  “WISH IT!” screamed Kirin from his hiding place.

  “Uktena, I wish you would live…wake up and help us to save humanity,” she said just as the door was wrenched open above and Mr. Fitz squeezed through with furious eyes and a smoking rifle.

  Uktena’s lids snapped open, and the black slits in his eyes thinned on Chloe. “MOVE!” boomed the deep grumble of his voice as his focus shifted over her shoulder.

  Chloe looked back to see Mr. Fitz raise the rifle and take aim toward her. Just as she dove to the side, a blinding spear of lightning shot out from Uktena’s jaws to connect with the glass façade above. The camera room imploded just as Mr. Fitz dropped behind the observational seating. Glass shards flew everywhere, seat cushions burst into flame, and the monitors were reduced to sparking hunks of circuit board and melted plastic.

  Below, the sound of the blast was still ringing in their ears, louder than the gunshots by tenfold, which had only moments before seemed like the loudest thing that any of the boys had ever heard. Chloe, however, hadn’t heard a thing. She remained on the floor with her body clenched with residual spasms of electricity coursing through her. She couldn’t see past the blazing white streak that had burned across her corneas, and her ears were dead to the outer world… But in the surprising internal stillness of that protracted moment, her mind bloomed with a heightened sense of awareness that she’d never before dreamed possible.

  All at once, she knew the thoughts and emotions of those around her:

  Dude, I can’t see shit! Stan thought as he crawled across the floor, searching for someplace to hide. If we get out of this, I’m gonna get so high! Then Chloe’s attention drifted up and out of the building to find the distant approach of another vast consciousness high above. Something old and wise hurtled through the cold of space with the colorful beacon of Earth growing larger ahead, and the winds of change trailed behind it through the vacuum.

  We need to make a break for that door! Ezra thought as he set his sights on an ‘EXIT’ sign at the top of a metal staircase against the far wall. I can carry both Chloe and Stan up those stairs if I have to! And as he moved to put his plan to action, Chloe’s attention burrowed deep underground to the vantage of a hulking beast as it dug its way up through rock and magma from the center of the world. The phrase I am the Iron King, I am the Iron King, I am the Iron King was growled over and over with every earth-rending swipe of its colossal claws.

  Then the repetition morphed into Please let Chloe be okay! Please let Chloe be okay! Please let Chloe be okay! as Kirin frantically scrambled toward her. She saw herself through Kirin’s worried gaze—smoldering on the floor, with the walkie-talkie smoking at her hip and her lips turned almost the same blue as her eyes… Was she dead? But before he could get close enough to find out, her perception swam away, and she found herself instead in a bottomless well of anger. Something immense, ancient, and wicked stirred within the deepest cleft of the ocean floor, and the earth trembled with dread.

  Then her perception jumped before a raging fire in an ornate fireplace. A familiar high-pitched voice sang along to an unfamiliar pop song blaring on a radio. Baby, you know that I got what you like. Come a little closer, it’s like riding a bike. Just as the scene was coming into focus, Chloe was sucked into the flames. Her thoughts settled instead on the other side of the world—trapped within the hottest furnace of the land. There, a burning presence more powerful still lashed against the prison of stone that had long contained it. It listened to the terrified screams of thousands of human voices high above and found joy in their pain. In that dreadful moment, Chloe possessed both the exultation and horror of what would come.

  YOU MUST RISE! commanded Uktena with a will that sliced through all the others and brought Chloe back into herself. She blinked and saw the room around her once more, just white and blurry at first, but then a giant blue eye came into focus above.

  Her tongue felt too big for her mouth, and she was profoundly shaken by what she had seen. “They’re coming.”

  A hot, heavy breath huffed out of the side of Uktena’s jaws and tousled her hair. “Yes, you have begun to hear the thoughts of the others, just as I have long listened to your pondering,” he answered in a voice that seemed to carry both a deep rumble and a soft whisper at the same time. “You carry the spirit of the land inside you, like the Elementalists of old who put me to sleep beneath the water and soil.” He eyed her closely. “This is how you woke me before the Ascension. Now I see it.”

  Chloe didn’t have a response for that. Her head was spinning as she tried to sit up, and then Kirin was suddenly beside her with his arm around her waist. “Are you okay?” he whispered in her ear.

  Chloe nodded. “I think so.” She looked back to the watching blue eye. “What can we do?”

  “We must go,” announced the dragon above them with his head cocked to listen. “The wicked men come with anger and fear. Their projectiles could pierce my hide in this weakened state.”

  Kirin tried to ignore the fact that a dragon had just spoken as he supported Chloe’s weight and helped her to unsteady feet. “Can you stand on your own?” he asked, gently brushing aside the hai
r that clung to her forehead.

  She nodded and he tentatively let her go. “He’s looking at you expectantly,” Kirin added as they both glanced up to meet the returned intensity in Uktena’s gaze. The focus of that one glacial eye encompassed them both.

  Chloe gave a last squeeze of Kirin’s hand. “Help Stan,” she suggested as she tried to shake off the residual fog of having multiple minds, both familiar and alien, sharing in her perception.

  Kirin moved to take the coffee-coated camera from Stan while he blindly struggled to strip off his brown gloves. Chloe watched them for a second with a sense of understanding she’d not felt before—she was bound to these boys, had known their hearts from within. Was this how the dragon felt about her? And what of the exhilarating and terrible glimpse of the other dragons? Could they still be stopped? None of it would matter if they couldn’t find a way out of this room.

  There was a wide, corrugated metal wall designed to rise and slide across the ceiling, like an oversized garage door. But one look at the complex touch panel told her that there would be no easy clicker to open it. Her eyes shot up to the shattered observatory, and just then the overhead sprinkler system switched on with a spray of cold water raining down across the room. “How do we get out of here?” she asked Uktena.

  But it was Ezra who stepped beside her with the answer. “Over there.”

  In the far corner of the room, a metal stairwell rose sharply to an exit for the roof. There was another touch-panel lock and a sign that read “HELIPAD” beside it.

  “Sometimes they come and go through that door, from the bladed machines that land above,” Uktena said.

  “Can you change into your human form?” she suggested.

  The dragon’s head dipped with the hint of shame. “I am still too weak.” Then he extended his long neck to examine the white featureless ceiling. “Go through the door and stand aside. I will break through here and join you above.”

  Kirin cleared his throat and spoke up. “I can tell from here that that door is locked, and there is honestly no way I can get through it in time.”

  Uktena peered at him for a second and then angled his head to regard Stan, who was staring up at him through squinty eyes with an enormous grin. Coffee was streaked across his face in brown lines. “Dude, are you getting this?” he whispered to Kirin while reaching for the camera.

  The dragon turned back to the door with a resonant inhale. His chest and throat expanded rapidly before another brilliant stab of lightning blew the door outward off its hinges. The humans all flinched half a second later as the room shook with an extraordinary BANG!

  GO! Uktena commanded directly into their minds, past the ringing in their ears. Ezra nudged Chloe ahead, and soon all four of them had started to run. They could hear a muffled thwopping from above as Chloe led the way up the steps two at a time. She glanced behind her to see Ezra following with calm determination while Kirin guided Stan stumbling up the stairs in the rear with his camera still held on the action behind him.

  That was when Mr. Fitz popped up from beneath the shattered windowsill and opened fire. The dragon flinched as bullets smacked into him, and his accompanying roar made the whole room vibrate. He unfurled his leathery wings and ducked beneath while the bullets continued to tear through.

  Kirin wasn’t sure what was happening as his eyes glazed over and an intense pressure gathered in his inner ears. No longer could he sense his feet pounding up the stairs or his hand clinging to the metal railing. Instead, he felt that he was spread all across the room, gathering in puddles on the floor and falling through the air from the ceiling. He was underwater and yet somehow the water itself—every drop was a part of him, ready to answer his call. And at once, all of it, all of him, rushed toward the man with the gun.

  Stan kept recording as an inexplicable rogue wave gathered from the floor and crashed through the shattered window of the observatory. Mr. Fitz was thrown back in a tumbling heap, and the remnants of the fires that had started there were instantly snuffed out.

  With the momentary reprieve, Uktena extended the massive reach of his wingspan to fill the room before whipping the spiked outer strut of his right wing through the wall of the observation deck. The already-broken space was completely bisected as large chunks of the upper floor fell away and the steel eyebeam in the far wall was bent outward. The dragon wrenched the wing from the sparking heap, and a clutter of camera equipment and the wreckage of a sofa tumbled out with it. There was no sign of Mr. Fitz amid the ruin.

  The dragon peered back to give Kirin a guarded look, just as the team topped the stairwell and hesitated in the blackened doorjamb. Kirin was pale and disoriented. “What just happened?”

  The others didn’t know how to answer. “Don’t kill anyone!” Chloe yelled to Uktena, though the words still sounded distant in her own ears. The dragon ignored her, folding his wings again as he shifted his attention toward the ceiling. For a moment, he reminded Chloe of Shipwreck as his back legs took a series of little steps while he readied to jump.

  “Hurry!” she shouted as they lunged through the smoldering hole to the rooftop, only to be immediately buffeted by the wind and cold beyond. It had started to snow, and the spinning rotor of the helicopter whipped the white drift into a little tornado as it gained speed toward takeoff.

  Inside the cockpit, the pilot watched the instruments closely as he waited for the green light to pull back on the stick. He was surprised to see four wet and oddly dressed teenagers stumble out to the deck. The girl waved frantically, as if trying to get his attention, and then she shouted something that was inaudible beneath the pulse of the rotors. He started to worry in earnest as she scrambled after her cohorts in an alarming attempt to gain distance from his position.

  Chloe had just made it over a low wall to the next section of rooftop when the floor below the helicopter erupted. Jagged slabs of concrete flew into the air, and the helicopter was thrown onto its side. The spinning blades clipped the landing pad and came apart in a violent pitch of flying shards. A large spike of metal buried into the wall just inches beyond Kirin before the vehicle tipped over the edge and fell with a loud crash onto the lower roof.

  The kids watched with a mixture of awe and horror as the dragon climbed from the hole and let out a deep, bestial roar that pierced the winter night. In the darkened hills behind him, a quick string of lightning flashes touched down in the same spot. The tumble of thunder came a few seconds later, as if in answer to Uktena’s call.

  That man in the helicopter is probably dead! Chloe realized. I’m responsible for that and for Mr. Fitz, too! She was up and screaming a second later. “Uktena, you have to stop! You can’t kill people!” The words still sounded mushy and dull in her ears.

  He turned the fury of his sparking gaze on her and lashed his thoughts across her mind. These are bad men! They will die for their insolence!

  Chloe stood her ground and stepped closer. “NO! Even if they’re bad, these men you’ve hurt were just taking orders!” The pressure of a headache was building in her temples and along her brow.

  Then I will wait here to kill the ones who gave the orders and any of their servants who try to stop me. Uktena’s attention shifted to the sky, where a blinking light approached below the clouds.

  “That’s not what I meant!” Chloe fought to ignore the swell of nausea that was rising in her gut. Uktena acted like he didn’t hear her.

  Stan got to his knees and started to film again from behind the wall as Kirin fought to regain his composure. Ezra climbed over to join Chloe. “We need to go now,” Ezra said with his hand on her arm.

  “If they catch us after this, I’m not sure we’ll ever be released again,” added Stan.

  Uktena continued to stare at the growing light in the sky as steam rose from his quickly heating scales. Already the silvery sheen had returned to his form, and he looked somehow much larger now that he was outside beneath the sky, compared to the sickly worm that had been chained and drugged beneath the fluor
escents below. He still gave no indication that he’d heard the pleading of the human beside him.

  “We risked everything to break you free!” Chloe’s chin was trembling and her eyes were beginning to water. “You have to help us!”

  The dragon met her desperate gaze, and for a moment the deep sadness returned to him. “I cannot help you.”

  “But I wished for you to live,” protested Chloe. “You said it would be your death that brought the others! But you didn’t die, so the prophecy can’t be true!”

  “It was a wasted wish,” Uktena countered quietly. “The Ascension has already begun. My death was to be the spark that started it, but it was the pain of my slow dying that finally awoke my brethren.” He lowered his head. “The tipping point has been reached. There is no stopping it now.”

  The sound of an approaching helicopter cut through the cold silence that followed. Chloe felt like she was on the verge of collapse, just as Kirin’s rubberized fingers found hers and held her up. “That’s not good enough,” she whispered, just as Derek Fitz stumbled through the doorway and opened fire.

  Ezra tackled Kirin and Chloe to the roof as bullets streamed overhead and slammed into Uktena. The dragon blinked and flinched away, though now the bullets burst against his scales without breaking through. Still, the crazed security guard was screaming his best battle cry as he braced and continued to pump round after round at Uktena’s head.

  The dragon’s serpentine form retracted instantly and spiraled into motion. Stan kept filming as the fifty-foot-long tail whipped around in a wide arc to catch Mr. Fitz broadside. He folded in half the wrong way before he was flung pinwheeling a hundred yards across the roof like a rag doll. Thankfully the shattered body went down out of sight over the far side of the building, though they could still hear the meaty landing against the pavement. Stan dropped his eyes from the viewfinder just long enough to heave his dinner over the wall. The pulsing adrenaline in his system allowed him to recover quickly, and he shot to his feet a moment later with the camera lens swinging to catch the approach of the second helicopter.