Steel Dragon

by Kevin McLaughlin

  But he knelt in front of her and helped Drew to roll her onto her back.

  “Hernandez, are you gonna be able to stop it?”

  “No, sir. I don’t have the time or the tools. Shit, this thing looks good!”

  “Then get the hell over here and help us with her. Keith, take her legs.”

  Keith and Hernandez each grabbed a leg, while Jim and Drew took hold of her shoulders. Together, the four of them were able to lift her off the ground—barely.

  “Red, if you can turn your fucking steel skin off, now would be a damn good time,” Hernandez said through gritted teeth.

  She tried to explain that she couldn’t, that her body felt like it had been run over by an oil tanker and deep-fried, but she only managed another gurgle.

  Her team dragged her toward the stairs while she watched the timer.

  Twenty…

  Nineteen…

  They made it to the stairs.

  Eighteen…

  They hauled her up and cursed mightily all the while. She lost sight of the timer when her steel head clonked against a concrete step with enough force to chip a piece of the building off.

  Seventeen…

  Sixteen…

  When they reached the first landing, she could tell they needed to catch their breath but they all knew there wasn’t time.

  Fifteen…fourteen…thirteen.

  At last, they heaved her onto the floor of the building.

  Twelve…

  Not speaking a word, they raced past the pillars.

  Eleven…

  Someone tripped and they lost their grasp. Her body struck the floor with a clang.

  Ten…nine…eight…seven…six…

  They scrambled and lifted her again to push on.

  Five…

  Closer to the door meant closer to safety.

  Four…three.

  They would make it.

  Two.

  The team pushed outside, their breathing labored

  One…

  “Get back. Everyone, get the fuck back!” Drew yelled between ragged, rasping breaths. He should have used his radio to tell the police there was a bomb, but he’d needed both hands to carry Kristen. His kindness might have killed dozens of men.

  Zero.

  The expected detonation failed to materialize.

  They grunted with effort now and shuffled her along while her steel body dragged on the concrete but still, nothing happened. She heard nothing and the building was still intact. Had it been a distraction?

  Dozens of explosions answered her unspoken question. The sequence started at the bottom floor and rippled up through the building. She had the perfect view as her team hauled her backward away from the warehouse. Obviously, her count had been off.

  In a few seconds, the blasts were over and the structure began to fall.

  To Kristen, in her pain-induced delirium, it reminded her of the magic trick where the wizard held a curtain in front of a woman before he dropped it to reveal that the woman had gone. Like a curtain, the building fell straight down. Nothing came from the perimeter of the five-story structure besides a scattering of gravel and a large dust cloud. It looked as if the structure had literally vanished into a cloud.

  “Fuck,” Hernandez cursed. She dropped her teammate and panted as she watched the explosion. “Fuck, fuck, fuck!”

  “What?” Keith panted hoarsely. Her entire team was completely out of breath.

  “Bombs don’t blow things up like that. That was definitely a professional demolition job.”

  “Are you sure?” Drew asked.

  “Yes, I’m fucking sure. Do you know how many times I’ve fantasized about wiring a building like that?”

  “But who would take the time to demolish a building?” the Rookie asked. He stood, forced his hands into the small of his back, and tried to stretch after carrying her out from the building that was now nothing but rubble.

  The team leader took a deep breath before he spoke. When he did, his voice lacked its usual stone-like resolve. He was shaken and tired, two things Kristen rarely saw in the officer. “Someone who hoped to drop every damn pound of it on the steel dragon immobilized in the basement.”

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  The drive back to the station was beyond awkward. No one talked much. Kristen still couldn’t. She managed to revert to her normal skin, but even that had been a huge effort. Everyone else seemed to be lost in thought—about her, no doubt.

  By the time they arrived and unloaded, she was actually excited at the prospect of being yelled at. And she had no doubt that it would happen. It was written on every muscle of Drew’s face.

  “Do you need a hand?” he offered and she took it.

  “Thanks,” she wheezed.

  “You all go on ahead,” he said, and everyone obeyed without even a backward glance. In moments, it was only the two in the parking garage standing at the back of the van.

  “Are you all right, Hall?”

  “Yes, thank you. I’m sore but it’s feeling more and more like I only had a really good work-out. I think Bruce Lee used electroshock to train.” Even as she said it, she knew it was a poor attempt at humor.

  He nodded and continued to do so for what seemed like an unnaturally long time. All the while, the scowl on his face grew meaner and meaner. “Then what the hell were you thinking back there? You rushed ahead like you had a damn death wish. What happened to the months of training we did together? What happened to your team? And it was Wonderkid’s first day. What if he thinks that’s how we do things and he starts rushing in?”

  “Washington is not a steel dragon.” She tried to keep her voice cool.

  “So what? Now that you’re a dragon, you’re above the rules of us puny humans?”

  “No, of course not. Drew, you know that. My dad was a cop for thirty years. I’m a person.”

  “Well, the people on my team follow my orders.” He was red in the face and she had honestly never seen him this worked up.

  “And what would have happened if one of those tasers had a hit another team member instead of me?”

  “They’d be dead, most likely.”

  “See? I had to go in.” She held her hands up to emphasize her point. Even that motion hurt after having so much electricity pumped through her.

  “What would have happened if we didn’t get you out of there? Could you survive a building dropped on your head?”

  She looked down.

  “Hall. Hall! Damn it, Kristen, answer the damn question.”

  “I don’t know,” she murmured, mostly to herself.

  “What was that?”

  “I don’t know!” she finally yelled at him. The effort made her head hurt and she rubbed her temples.

  “That’s my point, Hall. You don’t know your limits. I’ve seen you do some amazing stuff—we all have—but you’re not invincible.”

  “Yes, I am,” she retorted sharply, surprised at the ferocity in her own voice.

  “Are you? Are you really? And what if someone hit you with a rocket right now, like right at this moment? Could you survive that?”

  Kristen clenched her teeth and looked away again. They both knew she couldn’t. The tasers had totally worn her out. “Even if I couldn’t survive, I would have to try. Like you said, those tasers would have killed everyone else. It had to be me.”

  “You know, I’ve seen survivor’s guilt before but this is beyond that.”

  “Survivor’s guilt?” She hadn’t thought much about the term, but the implications struck her in the chest like an arrow.

  “You couldn’t have saved Jonesy. No one could. It’s not your fault he died. It’s not anyone’s fault except the hostile who pulled the trigger.”

  “You’re wrong!” she shouted. “I have to protect my people. I must protect my people.”

  There was a long moment in which he simply watched her, his arms folded and eyes narrowed.

  “You’re still changing, aren’t you?” Drew finally said
.

  She sat on the rear bumper of the SWAT van. It collapsed beneath her weight with a dull crash. She hadn’t realized she’d turned her skin to steel again. It took some effort but she returned to normal, stood again, and began to pace. “I don’t know…yes? Okay, I know there are still powers I can’t use, but I don’t really know what they are. There are these feelings too, sometimes. I don’t have kids but, that’s what it feels like. Like you’re all these defenseless little children and I have to protect you because you’re mine.”

  “We’re not yours, Kristen. We’re not anyone’s. We’re people. That means we’re our own.”

  “I know. Believe me, I know! And the last thing I want is to treat you the way the other dragons treat people, but… Ugh, it’s different. I think there might be a reason dragons are all manipulative or aloof. It’s either to protect people or remove themselves from mankind and ignore that urge completely.”

  “But you can’t protect us.”

  “Yes, I damn well can,” she snapped without meaning too. She shook her head and put it down to weariness. This tired, some of her reactions didn’t even feel like her own.

  “No, Kristen, you protecting us from every encounter will not keep us safe. These are adults you’re talking about. And probably the most capable adults in all of Detroit.”

  “But they can’t stop bullets.” Kristen turned her hand to steel and gestured to Drew.

  “But you can’t stop every damn bullet. What if things had gone differently today? What if, when you ran into the cloud of smoke, those snipers simply unloaded on the whole force?”

  “But they didn’t.”

  “No, they didn’t. But I’m saying that there are many situations where you can’t protect your team. Look, the fact is that we’re all SWAT. We’ve all been shot at. We all signed up for this shit. If you want to keep us safe, you need to do the same thing the rest of us do—work together and trust each other to do our job.”

  “But—”

  “Face it. You went on your own this time and that put us all at risk. We might’ve all been crushed today. How would you feel then?”

  She clenched her teeth and shook her head. That was a low blow. “If the building came down I could have—”

  “You couldn’t have done a damn thing. You were incapacitated. It was a damn miracle we got you out of there. When we busted that step with your head—” Drew snorted and uttered a single short laugh. Kristen knew the sound. It was the laugh you made in the face of death but also the one you made when death took someone from you for no good reason. It was a laugh of desperation, of looking loss in the face and being able to do nothing more. She’d laughed that way when thinking about Jonesy dying in her arms.

  “Thank you,” Kristen said. The words drained some of the tension from her body she hadn’t realized she’d been carrying. “For saving me, I mean.”

  “You’re welcome.” His red face lost some of its color and he actually smiled. “We saved your steel ass back there.”

  It was her turn to laugh. “Yeah. Yeah, I guess you did.”

  “And don’t make us do it again,” Drew yelled loud enough for it to echo in the parking garage, but he didn’t sound angry anymore.

  “Yes, sir.” She nodded smartly.

  “You weigh a goddamn ton. Why do you think I always keep Butters outside the perimeter?”

  She laughed for real this time—An honest, that-was-actually-funny-and-kind-of-rude-laugh. “You know, I bet I could carry him if I needed to.”

  Drew snorted. “That’s good to know. If I decide to use you in that regard, I’ll tell you. Those are the kind of skills we could use on our team. What we don’t want is you trying to save the whole damn world one bust at a time.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “You’re not our dragon overlord. Not yet. You’d better continue to take orders, watch our backs, and let us watch yours until you are.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “All right, then. Now, let’s get inside. We have things to discuss.”

  They walked to the lounge in companionable silence. Kristen could hear from the hallway that they hadn’t been the only ones having a heated discussion.

  “Because, for fuck’s sake, I’m an explosives expert!” That was Hernandez, obviously.

  “And that means you know their intentions?” That was the new guy, Washington the Wonderkid.

  Drew stopped in the doorway. She peered around his massive shoulders to see Hernandez and the Wonderkid toe to toe. Both had bulging neck veins and her face was red, while Jim’s headed toward purple.

  “Hernandez, Washington, sit down and have a donut.” Drew’s voice was like water on flames.

  Both backed down immediately. Washington settled into a chair. Hernandez snatched a donut and crammed in beside Butters on the couch. Her scowl remained, but she always scowled so that was no indication that of any continued aggression.

  “Now, Hernandez, tell me what you’re arguing about.” The team leader sounded as if he had asked a fourth grader to explain their science fair project.

  “I said it in the van and I’ll say it again—those were professional-level explosives. The way that building came down was absolutely perfect.”

  He nodded. “It’s hard to disagree with that. Washington, what was your argument?”

  “That if those explosives were so damn professional, why didn’t they use them to kill any cops? They had enough power in there to kill every damn officer, but they didn’t. How is that professional?”

  “Maybe their target wasn’t your average cop,” Beanpole said from the wall. His arms were folded and he had remained completely silent and unmoving. Kristen hadn’t even noticed him.

  “That’s what I thought too.” Butters gestured with a jelly donut and sprinkled powdered sugar on Hernandez. Fortunately, she didn’t seem to notice.

  “What do you mean?” Drew asked the sniper even though he probably already knew exactly what he was getting at. He was simply trying to involve the entire team. Kristen had no doubt it was either for Washington’s benefit—it was his first day, after all—or for hers. Obviously, the man valued teamwork in all things.

  “Well, the perps must’ve set that place to blow long before any officers arrived.” Butters’ accent made her think of a southern lawyer pontificating before a judge. “On top of that, they had weapons that could hurt a steel dragon. The Rookie said the barbs on those tasers were odd. Did anyone else notice them?”

  Drew nodded. “They were magnetic. I noticed that too.”

  So had she, what with them sticking to her steel skin instead of bouncing off.

  “And then there’s the fact that they kept the regular cops away and didn’t even attempt to hurt even one of them.”

  The sniper let the evidence linger in the room for a moment. She had a feeling that everyone had the same thought, so when she cleared her throat and spoke, she wasn’t surprised to see everyone nod with her. “The whole thing was a trap for me.”

  “And we walked right into it,” Drew agreed.

  “More like the dragon led us into it.” Washington glared at her.

  No one said anything for a moment, and she understood that they’d all had similar thoughts about how it had played out. She was about to swallow her pride and apologize to the whole group but thankfully, Drew spoke first.

  “We’ve already discussed Hall’s recklessness. She’s now on probation and we’ve agreed there will be consequences if she tries to play rescue the damsel in distress again.”

  “Probation?” she whined.

  Everyone laughed.

  He hadn’t said anything about that but she realized he hadn’t intended to. His purpose was that he wanted her reaction to be genuine because it would remind the team that she was still one of them. He really was a good leader.

  “Seriously, next time you want to pull shit like that, let me know so I can at least bring my magic fucking sword.” Hernandez snorted.

  “And my ax,” Keith adde
d.

  Everyone laughed and some of the tension drained from the room.

  There was a pleasant moment for a second before Washington effectively shattered it. “So, the question then becomes why are hostiles trained with straight-up military tactics and targeting Detroit’s Lost Dragon?”

  “Do you think they were military?” Keith asked.

  Jim shrugged. “Their movements were. I doubt it was an actual military force, of course, which means they were probably hired professionals, and—given their gear—not cheap ones.”

  “Maybe it has something to do with whoever was behind the gang violence,” Kristen said.

  Hernandez shook her head. “For fuck’s sake, Hall. I miss Jonesy too, but not everything’s about him.”

  “No…no, I think she might be on to something.” Drew rubbed his chin and frowned in thought. “We know that whoever was behind the gang violence is still out there. Dragon SWAT said it was a dragon and we never caught one.”

  “Neither did they,” Hernandez added.

  “Right, exactly. Which means there’s someone out there who tried to take over the city and was stopped because of one person. The same person who was almost crushed today by a professional hit team.”

  “Fuck,” the woman said and perfectly summed up how Kristen felt.

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Captain Hansen was openly skeptical about the idea that a criminal mastermind was trying to maneuver their dragon into a position to hurt her. She still, however, ordered the team to spend their week training at the abandoned apartment complex where Kristen had first learned the many nuances of forced and dynamic entries.

  Drew was far more committed to the idea of her being the target than the captain was, and he designed drills to reflect it.

  Honestly, she was impressed with his creativity.

  “Right.” He addressed them in a brisk tone that demanded they stand at attention despite running drills all morning. “We have a report of people’s cutlery sticking to the ceiling and TVs not working. We think it’s on the third floor.”