CHAPTER 10

“These white boys aren’t backing off,” Patrice said, taking glances at the side view mirror.

Groaning, I looked into the reflection on my side. Sure enough, Harold and the boys were keeping their distance, but steadily following, all of them glowering like kids in the back seat who’d been told to shut up while grown folks were talking.

Brains in mirror may be smaller than they appear.

“There isn’t much we can do,” I said. “They can talk to Chief when we get to headquarters. If I know Brannigan, he’ll give them a swift kick in the ass.”

“And that’s if he’s in a decent mood,” Afu said.

Patrice shook her head. “Still makes me nervous having a tail like this.”

“I’ll call Brannigan,” I said.

Cannon 15’s holoreader beat me to the punch, chirping with an incoming call. With pitch-black hair hanging to her shoulders, Captain Naveena Jendal appeared. Yolanda paced behind her. Something in me wanted to hang up on my old captain, claim it was a mistake if I ever saw her in person again. I knew I’d have to face Naveena at some point, and hear again how I’d screwed up on that smaug call.

But instead of ending the call, I said, “Um, hi.”

“Are you guys all right?”

A big bump vibrated from behind the cannon truck. I was about to cuss out some rednecks for ramming my apparatus, but looking in the mirror, Harold’s truck hadn’t changed position.

So what the hell was it?

“Cap,” Afu said. “I think the leviathan just moved.”

My throat tightened. “Hold on, Naveena,” I said, leaning out of the window for a look at our quarry. The leviathan lay as unconscious as ever. Maybe we’d just run over a big rock in the road. I told Afu as much.

“Sorry,” I said, turning back to Naveena’s hologram. “Now what were you saying?”

“I’m checking to see if you guys are okay.”

I tried to answer politely. Naveena and I had been on tons of calls together and spent a bunch of time hanging out off shift, too. But it felt like she was sticking her nose into my business, seeing if the new captain wasn’t already fucking up.

“We’re good,” I said. “We’ve got some obnoxious hicks claiming to be volunteer smokies following us, but they’re no biggie. Snagged a leviathan, though. Bringing it back now.”

Yolanda turned and ran over, nearly shoving Naveena out of the holofield. “You caught a leviathan?”

“Would’ve been two,” I said. “But Afu had to kill the other one and it burst into flames like the smaug.”

Yolanda scrunched up her entire face. “Well, that makes no sense.”

“It happened once. Why not a second time?

Maybe this is a new scaly trend taking off.”

“Yeah,” said Yolanda, “but leviathans don’t have any EMP ability and their ignis gland is packed inside a bladder full of water. This throws out my hypothesis.”

“We’re getting off track,” said Naveena. “The reason we called to check on you–”

“Goddamn it!” I yelled. Another bump from behind. I again leaned out of the window, and this time the leviathan was definitely moving, writhing against its restraints. “Shit. I’ll have to call you back, Naveena.”

“There’s something following you underground,” Yolanda shouted.

“Huh?” I said, snapping my head back to the holoreader.

“Something is coming in hot, heading straight for you,” Naveena said. “The propellerheads have been monitoring it since you left Sandusky.”

“Why the fuck was that not the first thing you mentioned!?” I appreciated the propellerheads more than anybody, but sometimes they forget that we’re the ones out here risking our asses for everybody else. Naveena should have known better, too.

“We weren’t sure what it was,” Yolanda said. “And it’s not creating new burrows, it’s using old ones, so no quakes. It’s not moving like a dragon at all.”

“Then what is it?” I asked.

The leviathan thrashed even harder. Any more jerking around and it could overturn the hover trailer. Then we’d be back to square one fighting the stupid dragon, on top of having to fight off the wannabe smoke eaters so they didn’t end up like their wraith pal, whilst dealing with a subterranean mystery guest.

“Um, Captain?” Patrice tapped my thigh. “These volunteer fools are trying to pull some shit.”

Outside Patrice’s window, Harold’s red truck zoomed past with the guys in the open bed hugging their metal poles like teddy bears. With a quick jerk, the truck swerved into our path, forcing Patrice to slam the brakes. We hit a dead stop as Harold’s brake lights blared red, but the truck never came to a complete stop, not until the earth blew open and yellow fire exploded from the ground beneath them.

Our cab filled with a mixture of swear words and screams.

The heat was so intense it shattered our windshield and warped the mirrors, and even the dash. In hindsight, the burst of flames and dirt was perfectly circular, like a cookie cutter made from a flamethrower. The blast was probably twenty feet in circumference, but at the time it seemed like the whole world was ablaze. It was the first time I’d ever felt pain from heat. Though, compared to the tiny cuts the pieces of windshield made across my face, the heat was nothing.

Harold’s truck had disappeared in the fire, but when the flames died down, a charred hunk of metal – completely unrecognizable as a pickup – dropped from the sky in a smoldering heap. One of the guys who’d been sitting in the back of the pickup lay a few feet away from the crater left by the explosion. His whole body was covered in a thick, dark layer of char, steadily smoking into the wind. He tried to army crawl, but soon gave up, rolled to his back, and lifted a smoking arm to the sky, pointing – maybe blaming God for his current predicament. I was amazed he was still alive.

“Williams?” Naveena’s hologram said. “Williams, what happened?”

Gagging against the taste of sulfur on my tongue, I wiped tears from eyes. “Send… backup. Now.”

“We’re on our way.” Naveena and Yolanda disappeared.

“You two,” I brushed glass from my shoulders and looked at Patrice and Afu, “knock the leviathan out again. I’m going to go check on that man out there. Get ready to fight another dragon. Whatever it is, I don’t think it’s emerged yet.”

“You see that fire?” Afu said. “I say we run and wait for backup.”

“That’s not an option,” I said.

Patrice patted palms against her bald head, as if she was checking for burns. After a big breath, she said, “I’m ready, girl.”

All three of our doors popped open, just as three straps behind us snapped in sequence. The metal of our truck’s roof bent in and wobbled from something heavy slithering on top. The little of the windshield that remained fell in jagged pieces.

The leviathan slid off the front of Cannon 15, shifting its head left, then right, hissing like an angry snake on crack. Its entire body quivered and writhed as if it was in pain or listening to a really bad heavy metal song. Then it spotted the surviving volunteer.

“Fuck,” I said.

Securing my helmet, I hopped out and ran, but the leviathan was already speeding across the ash, as fast on land as it was in water. Power jumping put me a couple feet away from its tail, but I was still too late.

The leviathan scooped the dying man into its jaws. The poor guy in the dragon’s mouth was too hurt and exhausted to even scream. The scaly hissed and convulsed seizure-like; it must have had a bad reaction to the Sandman laser. No dragon had ever woken up from the tranq gun before.

I grabbed the scaly’s tail and yanked, but all it only made the bastard turn and glare at me; the burned man’s legs still sticking out of its mouth. With a flick of its tail, the leviathan tossed me toward the deep pit that had opened underneath the pickup truck.

I dug both boots and all ten of my armored fingers into the dirt to stop myself at the edge of the crater. And thank Christ, because I’d never peered down such a deep hole. There was no end that I could see, and patches of flames burned in random places all the way down, so it wasn’t for lack of light. And that was another thing.

What made the hole? When a scaly emerges, it’s there in all its ugly, horned monstrousness. It doesn’t make a hole, turn around, and decide to come back later. But I couldn’t worry about that. I had to deal with the spazzing dragon right in front of me.

I heard the snap of bones and a puff of boiling hot steam before I ever got to my feet and turned to face the leviathan. When I did, electricity sparked from the beast’s jaws and a newborn wraith used its gnarly hands to claw out of the leviathan’s white-flaming mouth. The air filled with hisses and shrieks.

Goddamn it. Not again.

I opened the container in my power suit and reached for my wraith remote… which wasn’t there.

Double goddamn it.

It was in Cannon 15’s lockbox. Patrice and Afu ran toward the leviathan, laser swords extended and phumm-ing with each swing of their arms.

I fumbled toward them on aching legs. “Toss me a wraith remo–”

Something swift slammed into my back, sending me into the dirt. By the time I flipped over, the wraith filled my nose with the smell of burned flesh, shrieking with its electric teeth in my face, and its white speckled claws swiping down, about to puncture my skull and finish me off.

The wraith’s dagger-like fingers had to have been less than an inch from my eyeball when the ghost burst into flames.

But they weren’t the white flames the wraith was born from. They weren’t even the canary, neon yellow that had exploded under Harold and company. These flames were black, the same black that shot from a wraith remote when trapping them.

I’d heard of wraiths disappearing out in the wild, but I’d never seen it myself, and it was usually a few weeks until they vanished from their given territory, not forty-five seconds.

With the wraith gone, though, and my eyes toward the sky, I finally saw what the last of Harold’s men had been pointing at before becoming a leviathan snack.

A giant, flaming bird was in the air, and barreling straight down for us.

I rolled onto my feet in a dead run toward the cannon truck. Patrice and Afu were doing a waltz with the leviathan, trying to dodge its attacks and find an opening to power jump in for some slicing and dicing. But the dragon was behaving erratically, like nothing we’d seen before.

Casting to their radios, I yelled, “Get out of there! Head for the truck.”

“What?” Afu said. “We’ve almost got this thing, Cap. Give us a chance.”

“This bitch is bugging like crazy,” said Patrice.

“Big fucking fire bird coming down on us. Jump out of there right now, damn it!”

They looked to each other and instantly retreatjumped toward Cannon 15.

It was a good thing, too, because half a second later, the bird impacted into the earth clutching the leviathan in its talons and emitted a wave of flames in a giant ring that crested just over the top of Cannon 15.

More damaged apparatus on my record.

With an ear-stabbing shriek that would make a wraith wince, the bird raised its beak to the clouds and squawked out a victory as the leviathan writhed helplessly under its weight.

“What the hell kind of dragon is that?” Afu asked.

“That’s no dragon,” I said. “It’s a….”