Dark Dragons (30 page)

Todd: “Hey, Mr. Vee, look I just——”

Juan: “Todd, get your shirt on, grab your keys and get out
of my house.”

Vanessa: “Dad!”

Mission Accomplished.  Exfil the area of operation and
return to base.  Darren stood up and tip-toed to the backyard and ambled
around the Vasquez pool toward the spot where he had laid his bike.  When
he turned toward the adjacent yard, he heard rustling in the row of lilac
behind him.  He looked and saw a quick shadow melt into the shrubs and vanish. 
A cat, he figured, but the shadow appeared to be larger than a feline out
hunting for mice.

Marcus?

Shit.
  He peered through the darkness as best he
could but saw nothing.  Quickly, he snatched his bike and peddled across
Vanessa’s neighbor’s yard, past a speedboat parked in the drive and tore ass
down the street.  It would be a long bike ride home.

*

The alien VI probe waited for the human to move on before it
hovered toward the house.  It switched on its sensors and scanned the
home’s layout.  Making sure it remained concealed in the bushes, it moved
toward the kitchen window before slowly rising to peer inside.  A female
sat at the table, her head in her arms, the same one who had unknowingly
stirred the male’s interest earlier.

Sensing this particular display of mating practice might
suggest something important, the probe quickly flashed an invisible scan over
her body and recorded the location of the house.  It transmitted all
acquired data on a sub-space channel and moved on to follow the male.

Tuesday, May 17

The late, late show on channel five looked like
The
Manchurian Candidate
, the original with Frank Sinatra, but the house drew
more of Darren’s attention than the movie right now.  The strange rustling
in the bushes outside Vanessa’s house reminded him that nothing was as it
seemed, and ever since returning home something did not feel right.

He couldn’t stay awake forever, though.  Where the hell
was Tony?  For once, Darren wished his mom would abide by her own ETA, but
midnight always meant three or four in the morning on her time scale.  Not
that she could protect him from Marcus Lutze, but a motherly presence would
certainly be nice.  Darren smiled at the thought of Allison brandishing a
patio chair to ward off Marcus like the big raccoon she heroically repelled
from the garbage can a few nights ago.

The TV movie had something to do with Chinese officers
brainwashing a squad of G.I.’s during the Korean War and sending them back to
America to carry out their nefarious plans.  Real paranoid, Cold War
stuff.  Darren didn’t catch many details because he kept going in and out
of sleep.  Just before his eyes finally closed, he read 12:09 AM on the
cable box.  Darren tried to fight the battle but lost the war.  He
was finally asleep.

*

A howling whistle blows.  Darren turns his head in
the darkness to search for its direction.  The ominous sound comes again,
followed by a low hiss.  A woman moans in terror behind him but he cannot
turn his head to see who it is.  Her shrills of agony grow louder as the
train approaches.

The whistle blows harder, longer.  He hears the
woman’s moan slowly climb to a nerve-twisting scream.  A bubble of icy air
circles him, chilling his skin.

Long plumes of smoke rise above the tree line a distance
away.  The black train screams again while it speeds around the bend with
frightening velocity, blowing fire from its sides.  A child on a tricycle
appears from the dark woods, waving and laughing as he tries to hail the train. 
He watches helplessly as the tricycle’s brakes fail, the train picking up speed
to catch the toddler.  Darren wants to scream, but for some reason
cannot.  His mouth opens in a contorted struggle to warn the engineer to
stop, but he can only watch as the train smashes the child up in a rage of
grinding metal and flame.  The engineer’s fangs glisten in the train’s
fire when it chugs past.

The woman’s screams are louder, piercing his heart with a
cold blade.

He tries to flee, but paralysis overwhelms his body.

The black wheels spit out a long shower of sparks when
the locomotive slows in front of him.  The woman’s piercing shills of
horror burn his senses.  Passenger cars roll up, hissing brakes
engaging.  A bell tolls in the distance.

The silhouette of a man wearing a bowler hat steps into
the opening between the cars, trench coat blowing in the icy wind like raptor
wings flapping around a dying prey.

The man’s eyes glow with fire, and he rears his head in
Darren’s direction.

The visitor has arrived.

*

Darren snapped his eyes open, read the cable box clock——2:42
AM——and sat up so fast he bounced.  He had been asleep for two and a half
hours.

“Mom?”
he shouted to the house.  No answer came.

Darren leaned back in the couch and exhaled air he’d been
holding for some reason, quickly regretting his loud inquiry.  He got up
and went to the kitchen to pour himself some lemonade from the fridge. 
When the liquid touched his throat, a dreadful uneasiness came over him, as if
the cold drink had finally brought him out of the dizziness of sleep into a
world full of danger.

The darkness around him said,
Someone is watching
. 
At that moment, his ears began to ring like cathedral bells at Christmas
mass.  He quickly scanned the dining room and backed up against the wall, hot
panic building inside him.

Slowly, he crept along the wall toward the staircase. 
He heard something click back in the kitchen——weapon?——and his feet grew
roots.  A hum rose listlessly from the silence, reaching a low steady
drone.  Just the refrigerator’s compressor.

Shit
.  Working saliva back into his mouth, he
reached the stairs and bounded quietly up to his room.  Before entering,
he reached around the wall and flicked on the light switch before presenting
the rest of himself as a possible target.  No one there.

Where’s the dog? he thought.  He wanted to call out to
Elvis but vetoed that.

Darren grabbed the pulse rifle he had leaning against his
bed and turned for the door.  He stepped into the hallway and looked
toward the stairs, listening intently for a tremor, a click, any sound that
would send his rifle screaming, but there was only unnerving silence. 
Returning to his room, he opened the closet door where his combat armor suit
lay in pieces.  Darren stripped his clothes off and grabbed the gray sub-suit.

There came a soft pop from downstairs, and the light in his
bedroom went out.  He looked at the alarm clock on his night stand to see
it too was out.  Someone had just cut the power.

Darren trembled in the darkness, tried to muster some John
Wayne-tough guy into his thinking but cowardice had replaced bravado. 
This situation was going to get out of hand.

One of the steps to the staircase suddenly creaked.

Darren dropped the sub-suit and leveled his rifle toward the
open doorway.  Darren knew for as long as he had lived in this house that
he had never——ever——heard the stairs creak.  Had 6-foot-5 Marcus finally
paid him a visit?  He had told Darren not to go to sleep tonight. 
Something in the far corner of his mind, however, told him it wasn’t Marcus.

Darren tried to find the opening to the sub-suit in the
darkness.  He found the left leg and slipped his foot in.  Wrong
slack.

Another creak.

Darren moaned, pulled his left leg out and put his right
foot in.  Within five seconds he had the sub-suit on, and he felt the
flesh-like material conform and tighten around his body with a slither. 
He reached into the closet, groped around for his armor boots, and slipped his
feet in.  The thigh modules came next, then the hip module with the bandolier
compartments.  The cuirass armor slid smoothly over his torso, and he dug
under a pile of board games and dirty clothes for his arm plates and gloves.

There came another creak from the staircase . . . and
another.  The intruder was coming up the stairs much faster now. 
Ears ringing louder, almost unbearably.

Darren found the arm plates and gloves and put them
on.  With every piece of armor donned, the link-up signal went out, and
all of the suit components attached themselves to one another with a quick
prattle of soft clicks.  Darren holstered his needle pistol and
vibro-knife into their appropriate sheaths and dove into his messy closet for
his helmet.  A basketball, old sneakers, countless board games——but no
helmet.  He stopped and thought for a moment, trying to remember where he
put it.

A thin beam of blue light lanced into his bedroom from the
hallway, quickly forcing Darren to forget his helmet.  He seized his pulse
rifle and backed against the wall, watching the laser slowly sweep across his
bed, along the far wall, across the dresser.  Another beam of light joined
the first and inched over the floor as the intruder probed the room.  The
blue lights disappeared.  No, this wasn’t Marcus.

He stood motionless, trying to make not a sound, thinking that
maybe whatever was outside might go away if he just remained still and quiet.

At that moment, his entire skin prickled into gooseflesh,
teeth tingling, and he knew he was about to be attacked, seconds before there
came a great whoosh of motion at the door.  A humongous shadow spun
through the doorway, and Darren cried out, saw it was carrying a weapon of some
kind.  He had already pressed the trigger before leveling his pulse rifle,
and the laser bursts tore through the floor in front of him before blasting the
door off its hinges, strobe lighting his bedroom with blinding intensity.

The shadow vaulted back out of the bedroom with astonishing
agility, and a volley of laser fire suddenly came through the wall from the
hallway.  Darren dove for the floor, one bolt nearly striking his
head.  With the rifle’s trigger still pressed, he managed to blast his
clothes dresser in a thousand pieces before finally aiming toward the wall and
the hallway on the other side.  He heard the alien intruder shriek, the
sound like a shrill bird and a bear singing with one another.

The Vorvon must have stumbled back toward the stairway,
because Darren heard the descending crash as the creature bounced down into the
living room.  He got to his feet and stepped into the hallway littered
with chunks of smoking drywall and wood studs.  The alien, wearing some
kind of protective armor suit and helmet, got to its feet and sprang away from
the stairs out of sight.  Darren saw that the alien had to be at least
seven feet tall but moved like a damn gazelle.

Nagging anger suddenly tore through him with such suddenness
that he didn’t realize what it was.  A few seconds ago he had been
cowering in fear but now found himself rolling in a wave of fury and not sure
why.  Another Pavlov’s Dog.  A response had ignited in his
reprogrammed brain, and the only reaction was rage.

Darren took one stride toward the stairway and jumped. 
He landed on the bottom most step and rolled down to his sides toward the
kitchen.  The alien’s lasers went wide, striking fiery holes across the
wall into the den behind him.  He retreated backwards into the kitchen,
spraying his escape with pulse-fire, the house charged with the atmosphere of
some futuristic saloon fight, the air full of wild, drunken belligerence.

The Vorvon had a large weapon cradled in its right arm but
held something else in its left hand——small and metallic, pointing the object
in Darren’s direction.  He spun around and ran for the patio door, not
wanting to see what the weapon did, and shattered the glass with a single burst
from his rifle, quelling the anger inside him so that he could flee instead.

*

Pickens Canyon Channel, a partial concrete gully built to
drain winter flood waters from the foothills, ran south parallel with Sutton
Cannon Drive.  It had excellent tree and bush cover for most of its
length, and Darren made excellent use of the shelter it provided.  He had
quietly jogged just over a mile before sprinting up the ravine bank and
crouching next to a Dumpster behind an elementary school to catch his
breath.  The concrete water channel, where Tony and his fellow
skateboarders liked to shred when it was dry, had its own highway overpass
which took the stream over Interstate 210, eventually emptying into the Los
Angeles River down in Glendale.  Nate’s house lay just on the other side
of the highway next to the overpass.  Darren had at least another mile to
go.  Nate had better damn well be home, he thought.

Darren scanned his surroundings but saw no killer
alien.  Or
aliens.
  He didn’t have his helmet, so he couldn’t
communicate with anyone.  Nor could he use his battlefield imager and 3D
map builder, the gauss gun launcher, the computerized gun sight to his pulse
rifle or the floating scout cameras.  His only sure bet remaining was his
pulse rifle, the vibro-knife, the needle pistol, and a five-mag clip of
grenades already loaded in the rifle’s under-barrel EPG launcher.  He
checked the tiny bandolier compartments on his hip plate and found three
grenade mags and one 100-pin clip of needle pistol ammo.  Again, no suit
computer, but at least he had some decent firepower.

Darren stood up and peered over the Dumpster to gauge his
surroundings once more.  It appeared to be clear, but his biological
intruder alarm was still making both ears ring.  He wiped the salty sweat
from his eyes and combed his slick hair back with a gloved hand. 
Screw
it.
  Darren turned, ran back down to the dry channel and continued
south, this time at a dead run, expecting a laser blast from any direction to
bring him down.  He felt exposed and vulnerable, stalked by an unseen
enemy, much like Scorch in the invisible Dragonstar had taunted him across
Jupiter and its moons.