Firedrake - Volume 1

by T. Mike McCurley

  “What the hell?” asked a stunned voice. This one was deep and guttural, and Drake pegged it as male.

  “Shotgun pellets in his left eye, flash burn in the right,” Soundstage said simply.

  “Ma’am, I don’t think I’m qualified -” the medic began, but Soundstage cut him off with an amplified shout that echoed from the surrounding walls.

  “Just do it, Anders!”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Anders replied. Drake felt the man’s fingers fumbling clumsily at the lid of his left eye.

  “I’ll do it,” Drake said with a pained sigh. He lifted his hand and pried open the eye, using the tip of a talon to hold open the protective membrane beneath. “This ain’t my first trip to the doc. Give me ten mils of diazepam and about two million units of penicillin. You’ll have to give the injections through my mouth. Needles won’t get through the scales. Once you’ve got the meds in, get some pliers in there and take out the pellets.”

  The blurred image of the medic looked shocked at the bold instructions he had been given. “Look, sir,” the medic began. “I, uh, I’ll give you the shots. No problems there. What I ain’t doing is sticking a pair of pliers in your eye. Not here, not at the hospital, not anywhere. Let me get you to a doctor, ’cause I ain’t -”

  “Yeah, I know You’re not qualified. I heard,” Drake said as the medic trailed off He closed his eye and waved his free hand in a dismissive gesture. “Gimme the shots, then, and get me to the truck. I ain’t gonna fit on your stretcher, so I’ll walk.”

  He opened his mouth wide, using a claw to point to a patch of skin in the roof of his mouth that was paler than most of its surroundings. “Ight vere,” he mumbled, the words distorted by the act of holding his mouth open.

  “Yes, sir,” Anders said. A moment later, Drake felt a sharp sting, followed by a building pressure at the injection site. He could taste the penicillin as drops squeezed past the needle to fall onto his tongue. The needle withdrew and was replaced by another. Shortly after its withdrawal, Drake felt the pain lessen slightly as a wave of euphoria washed over him.

  Anders gripped Drake’s left bicep, indicating with a tugging motion that the big booster should stand. He rose unsteadily to his feet. After two wobbling steps, he paused. “Well, this ain’t working,” he mumbled.

  “Allow me,” Soundstage said, sliding a hand around Drake’s waist. She dislodged the grasp of the medic and ordered Drake to place his right arm over her shoulders. She was surprisingly strong, and managed to support his weight without any difficulty.

  “I’ll meet you at the hospital, Agent Drake,” she said once they had wrestled his enormous form into the ambulance. “I’ve got some questions.”

  “See you there,” Drake muttered, waving a hand at the metallic booster. “Let’s go,” he said to the medic that was driving.

  Anders spent the trip on a cellular phone, arranging a quiet drop-off point at the hospital for his patient. He explained to Drake that they did not wish to create a spectacle, but Drake had no doubt that the reason was that he simply wanted to avoid frightening the other patients by the arrival of a walking dragon. The Valium in his system allowed him to ignore the underlying insult.

  The entry point proved to be a freight elevator in the underground garage, and Drake soon found himself on his back on a laboratory table. Once the assembled doctors had managed to work past their astonishment and curiosity at the form of their new patient, they had decided that his weight might not be supported by a standard bed. He could not help but note the similarities between his own predicament and that of Patriot, who was, to the best of Drake’s knowledge, still supine on a table in the bunker Drake had left along with Manslaughter and Calder.

  “We have the pellets out,” one of the doctors announced after an agonizing thirty minutes. He laid a comforting hand on Drake’s chest as he spoke. There was no trembling of that hand despite Drake’s expectations to the contrary. “Your eye already seems to be repairing itself It’s an amazing feat, Agent Drake.”

  “Told y’all I heal fast,” Drake said in a slurred voice. “Patch it up, will ya?”

  “Do I tell you how to arrest criminals?” teased the voice. “Allow me to do my job my way, please.”

  “What about the right one?”

  “Fully irrigated and coated with an ophthalmic salve. It should be fine in a couple of days.”

  “Try hours,” Drake corrected. “I can’t do days right now.”

  “Agent, I am afraid even with your miraculous powers of healing, I can’t allow you to further endanger your sight by simply ignoring my directions,” said the doctor. The casual, teasing tone was gone, replaced now by a harder edge; the doctor was no stranger to patients trying to shorten their healing time.

  Drake wrapped powerful fingers around the wrist of the doctor. “Who’s in the room with you?” he asked, having noted whispering voices in the background.

  “Two nurses and an intern. Why?”

  “Get them out. Private conversation.”

  After a moment of hesitation, the doctor complied, ordering the others to leave. A minute later, he patted at the hand that still gripped his arm. “They are gone,” he declared. Drake released his grip of the wrist.

  “Doc, I need you to understand why I’m in a hurry. You know about Patriot?”

  “Everyone does,” the doctor said. “Stricken by some debilitating attack that has put him out of action. The rumors are flying.”

  “They ain’t rumors. Fact is, he’s flat on his back just like me. Difference is he ain’t moving or talking. If you can’t fix me up double-quick, Doc, then I need to get a message to my boss. I’m carrying Patriot’s cure.”

  Drake heard the sudden intake of breath from the doctor that told him his words had fully registered. He waited.

  “I can’t make you better overnight,” the doctor admitted, the words a rush of sound as though they had been held behind a suddenly broken dam.

  “Get me a phone, then.”

  “Use mine,” the doctor offered, snapping open a cell. “Give me the number.”

  Drake rattled off a series of numbers that would ring on Hart’s cell. It rang eleven times, and Drake had begun to despair of her answering a call from an unknown source when she abruptly picked up.

  “Director,” she declared.

  “It’s Drake.”

  “Where the hell are you?” she demanded. “Your phone went dead. We tried to trace it -”

  “Shut up a minute!” Drake shouted. He could not take a chance on letting her rail at him any longer without knowing if the phone he was using would fail in the same manner as his own. There was silence on the other end of the line, and he continued. “I’m in Austin, Texas. I got shot in the face and I can’t see jack shit. Get a runner down here to pick up the package.”

  “Shot?”

  “Yes, damn it, shot. Now I’m giving the phone back to the doctor. He’ll tell you where we are. Get someone down here to pick up this thing.”

  Not waiting for her response, Drake handed the telephone back to the doctor and allowed himself to fall back heavily onto the table. His face hurt and he was tired. The efforts of the past several days had left him feeling weary down to his bones, and he hoped that soon the magic crystal Karma had entrusted to him would be used to cure Patriot of whatever it was that had left him in his current state. It would be making that trip without him however, and a small part of him was grateful for that fact.

  “Go back to the mountains for a while,” he mumbled to himself as he heard the doctor depart. “Spend some time in the woods. Get away from all this drama.”

  “Drama’s where we live,” responded the voice of Soundstage. Drake’s face split wide in a smile at the familiar tones.

  “Hey. Didn’t hear you come in,” he said. He rose to a sitting position, letting his legs dangle over the side of the table. He could feel the cool surface of the floor beneath his feet, so low did they reach.

  “Nobody else did, either,” replied Sou
ndstage. “That’s the way I like it.”

  “Brought you your badge,” Soundstage told him after a minute, pressing the familiar gold form into Drake’s palm. He closed his fingers around it, trapping hers with it for an instant. Both metals were cool to the touch.

  “Thanks for your help,” he said.

  “You’re welcome,” she replied, disengaging her fingers from his grasp. “How are the eyes? I heard the docs say it would be a couple of days?”

  “Yeah. Looks like,” Drake said. His upper lip peeled back in a sour expression. “Pardon the pun,” he muttered.

  Soundstage laughed, a quiet sound like static. “So for now you can’t see at all?”

  “Motion out of this one,” Drake said, jerking a thumb carefully at his right eye. “If I try. It stings pretty good, though. Can’t wait ’til the painkillers wear off, you know?”

  The door to the room closed and locked. A metallic clank sounded in the room, followed by a soft hiss. Drake felt a gentle brush against his hip. He reached out and felt the round surface of Soundstage’s face, revealed to him now as a removable helmet, placed carefully on the table beside him.

  “Do me a favor. Don’t look at my face,” Soundstage asked. “Even with blurred vision. Nobody knows who’s in the helmet and I’d as soon keep it that way.”

  “Not a problem,” he assured her. “I’d show you who was under this one, but it’s kinda messy when you peel it off.”

  “I guess it would be at that,” she said with a laugh. Without the helmet to add its mechanical edge, the laughter was pleasant.

  “Don’t get many chances to relax and take it off, do you?” he guessed.

  “Not as many as I used to,” she admitted. “Things have picked up around here lately. Some wack-job put Dozer Dave in the hospital last week. He was one of us. Austin’s sponsored boosters, I mean. Me, Dave and Sangre been working Austin for about a year now. Dave’s been here a little longer, and Sangre, well, she tells folks she’s been here for a hundred years.”

  “Feels like I have, too,” Drake said, rubbing a hand across his brow. He paused, then rotated his head back toward where Soundstage stood. He kept his eye closed in accord with her wishes, but felt it polite at least to face in her direction.

  “So this Dozer Dave guy….he a tough bringdown?”

  Soundstage laughed softly, but there was as much sorrow as mirth in it. “They called him the Dozer even before he Emerged. Some kind of football star. Knocked folks down like they weren’t there. When he Emerged, seemed like nothing in the world could stop him. He could charge through walls and come out the other side without his hair even messed up.”

  “So who got him?”

  “Don’t know. We found him out on Anderson Mill Road, off of One-eighty-three. He had a busted light post in his hand, like he’d been fighting with it. You know, like a stick for normals? The whole area was torn to pieces. Crew’s out there still cleaning up. Anyway, he was burned all up. Doctors say it was electrical. Got him from the inside out. He’s in critical upstairs.”

  “I’ll get you a list of zappers from the home office. Might be on the list, might not, but at least it’s someplace for you to start,” Drake offered.

  “Thanks. That’ll help.”

  “Least I can do,” Drake said. “So how about the Camaro cowboys from tonight? What was their deal?”

  “Home invasion. Thrill-killers, basically. PD got a tip on their location. I went up for a look, but damned if I expected to see a dragon ripping their car apart. Nice work stopping them, though. They would have shredded the locals pretty good. Both of them have previous warrants as homicide suspects and they were wired up on Hype.”

  Drake snorted in disgust. Hype, one of the newest designer combat drugs on the market, acted as a direct neural stimulant, enhancing the reflexes of its user. It was not as bad as Kamikaze, which Drake knew was designed to promote aggression by acting on the pleasure centers of the brain, giving its user a feeling of happiness when they committed an act of violence, but it was still not something he enjoyed dealing with. He said as much to Soundstage.

  “Yeah. The norms figure they’ve got to even the playing field when they get to deal with us,” she explained as though that made everything all right.

  “They weren’t expecting me tonight,” Drake spat. “They were out for kicks.”

  “Get some rest,” Soundstage said, her voice soothing and calm. She put a hand on Drake’s shoulder, easing him back into a supine position on the table. He rolled a shoulder up a bit to ease the cramped position of one wing, then settled back as ordered. He ignored the pressure against his lower spine where his tail was in a bind.

  “We’ll have you out of here in no time,” she said.

  “Look, I’m expecting someone from Justice to pay me a visit,” Drake told her. He felt drowsy, and realized that he had been fighting the effects of the narcotics in his system just to keep talking with the woman. “I don’t know how soon they’ll get here, or who it’ll be, but they need to get this like yesterday,” he said. He reached into the pouch on his belt to retrieve the crystal from Karma.

  The pouch was empty.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Drake leaped from the table, a stream of curses echoing from the walls as he jammed his fingers into his belt pouch with such force that the fabric tore. All effects of the drugs in his system seemed to vanish in the sudden rush of adrenalin.

  “Agent Drake?” asked Soundstage from a position to his left. He whirled in her direction, forgetting for a moment his promise not to look at her even through blurred eyes.

  “I had a crystal!” he cried, his breath coming in ragged gasps. He held out his hand, using his thumb and a finger to indicate approximate size. “It was about like this. Glowed blue. Did you see it?”

  “No, not personally. What is it?”

  “We have to go back.”

  “Go back where?” she asked.

  “Back! Back to the crime scene. I must have lost it in the fight.”

  “Is it that important? I mean, you need to rest, and -”

  “Huh-unh,” he grunted, shaking his head back and forth so sharply that his neck joints cracked. “No rest. We gotta find it.”

  “Why?” she asked, a tone of suspicion creeping into her voice.

  “Everybody’s gonna know anyway,” Drake muttered, taking a deep breath. He had already told the doctor, who probably was telling six of his closest golf buddies and spreading the gossip net wider by the second. What harm could there be in advising the booster who had helped him?

  “It’s Patriot’s cure.”

  “Understood,” Soundstage said in a clipped voice. All further discussion ceased as he heard the sound of her slipping on the helmet of her suit and engaging the seals around its rim. She wrapped a cool arm around his back as she had at the scene. “I’ll be your eyes.”

  She led him out of the room and down a hallway until coming to an exterior door. She hit the crash bar and forced open the portal, letting a bright ray of sunlight in as a distant alarm began to wail.

  “Emergency exit,” she explained as they stepped out of the hospital. “Hold tight.”

  Drake’s world became a scream of raw sonic fury as he felt a rush of heat near his feet. He suddenly understood the sound he had heard during the fight with the criminals. Exhaust jets in the boots of Soundstage’s suit were powering her flight - their flight, to be more accurate, for he was now held securely in the iron-strong grasp of the Austin hero as she flew them through the air and back toward the scene of the initial incident.

  “Why didn’t you tell me that you had the cure?” she asked, her voice once again the cold mechanical thing it had been when first he had heard it. An amplifier boosted the sound above that of the jets.

  “I wasn’t planning on telling anyone,” he shouted. He felt her flinch.

  “Don’t yell,” she said back. “I’ve got acoustic sensors in the suit that feed me what I need. You yell and it futzes with the system.
So what happened?”

  “Got sent here by some dumbass with a sick sense of humor,” he told her. “I was supposed to go back to where the Man was, but got dropped off here instead.”

  “How’s that work?” she asked, angling to avoid a startled flock of birds.

  “Don’t ask,” he growled angrily. Mentally, he was adding Karma to his list of people he would one day like to see eviscerated. He fought the natural urge to spread his wings wider as he felt them begin to descend. Soundstage was in charge of the flight.

  “Any ideas what I’m looking for? Is it gonna show up on thermo? Infrared?”

  “You got a magic detector?” he shot back, wishing instantly he had not.

  “Got a what?”

  “It’s a magic cure,” he admitted. The hissing sound of her laughter emerged.

  “Ain’t no such thing,” she said.

  “Yeah? Ain’t no dragons in the world, either.”

  “Good point. Ironic as all hell, but a good point,” she said.

  “Near as I can tell, this guy we got the cure from can do pretty much anything he wants. I guess that’s his boost.”

  “That’d be handy,” she said. Drake felt their attitude shift as she prepared to land and he flexed his legs to absorb the impact. It was surprisingly soft.

  “All right, we’re here,” she told him as the scream of the jets faded to a memory. “It’s still closed as an active crime scene, so at least we don’t have to worry about anyone running us down.”

  “Take me over to where I was when I hit the car.”

  Soundstage guided him across the broken tarmac for a short span and then stopped. “Here,” she said as she turned his shoulders slightly. “This is how you were facing, at least according to the skid marks they left behind.”

  Drake nodded and lowered himself to one knee, pantomiming the brutal slashing maneuver that had taken out the tires of the Camaro. He could hear the thumping sounds of Soundstage walking away. A moment later, she spoke.

  “I’m over to your right, where we found your badge. You had it in your hand before the attack.”