Dark Dragons (7 page)

Immediately, Darren felt an earthquake might be coming
on.  He had read somewhere that people could often predict earthquakes by
the sudden silence or agitation of animals.  Since the move to California,
he hadn’t been in one.  A mule deer startled him when it trotted quickly
out of the trees not ten feet away and bounced across the clearing to the other
side.  It too had sensed——something.

“Hey, you guys!” he whispered coarsely.  “Get up. 
I think there’s going to be an earthquake!”

They stirred in their sleep.  Tony mumbled something.

“Get up!” he shouted.

“What the fuck, man?” Tony murmured, slowly sitting up in
his sleeping bag.  “You never been in an earthquake, Seymour?  It’s
no big deal.”

Nate rubbed his eyes.  “What makes you think we’re
gonna have a rumble?”

“I don’t know.  The forest got quiet all of a
sudden.  Listen.”

Everyone fell silent to eavesdrop on their
surroundings.  It was definitely eerie with no campfire or the glow of
city lights to help pick out movement of any kind.  Even the moon had
disappeared behind a layer of clouds.  Just an omnipresent wall of
darkness around them.

“Oh, man.  We
are
gonna have a quake,” Darren
heard Nate say off to his left.  “My dad’s bulldog went apeshit the last
time one hit.  Jake’s probably pissin’ on the couch right now and tryin’
to hump the cat, yo.”

“Oh, shit,” Darren murmured.

“Naw, it’s cool, man,” Tony assured him.  “Earthquakes
are only deadly when you’re in town with the gas leaks, fires, and rubble, and
stuff.  Out in the boonies like this, it’s actually pretty exciting. 
Just sit there and let nature rock your world.”

Darren nodded his head. “Sure,” he mumbled.

“This is gonna be so
great!”
Tony exclaimed.

*

“Oh no,” a member of the Tracking and Impact Team
said.  “Sir, we just lost it.”

“What?” Towsley said.  “Lost it?”

“Yes, sir.  It was approaching the southern west coast
when it just winked off the screens.  I had infrared and ultraviolet
tracking, but it just disappeared.  No heat, no light, nothing.”

“Radar?”

The tech shook his head.  “The satellite isn’t
registering a return.”

“Pull up the trajectory,” he said to another officer.

A computer profile of the object’s entry path came up on the
screen.  A long, descending red line began in the stratosphere over Japan,
snaked across the Pacific and ended just before reaching California.

“It’s somewhere in southern Cal,” one of Towsley’s men said.

“Yes, but where?” Towsley replied.

“The best I can do is give us a probability triangle, sir,”
the TIP man said, his fingers moving across his keyboard.  Trajectories,
wind direction and atmospheric pressure data scrolled up on the screen. 
The supercomputer found the average velocity of the object, including direction
and average angle of motion, and began determining impact prediction.  A
moment later, the TIP man shook his head.  “Well I tried, sir, but this is
the best locale I could give us.”

A red triangle covered a small portion of southern
California.  It stretched from Ventura county, across northern and central
Los Angeles county to the southwest corner of San Bernardino county.  A
box of data in the upper left corner of the screen displayed ground
coverage——4,763 square miles.

He turned to his silent staff members who now looked gloomy,
understanding the difficulty they now faced.  “This is an Icarus Hammer
directive, people.”  Then he raised his voice so the others beyond the
group of men standing around him could hear.  “Listen up!  I want our
choppers bound for George Air Force Base in one hour.  We start our search
from there.”

*

They sat motionless in the dark, waiting for the ground to
begin rumbling.  The woods were quiet, but occasionally they would hear
the ghostly munch of leaves or a twig cracking nearby from an agitated
animal.  Spooky shit going bump in the night.

“Ya know, it might be awhile before it happens,” Tony
said.  “Couple hours, maybe.  Let’s smoke a bong and really get off
on it.”

“Shhh!” Darren shot at him.  “I hear something.”

Tony fell silent for a moment to listen, then, “That’s just
a jet or something, man.  Let’s toke on this.”

In the dark, Darren immediately smelled burnt pot under his
nose and realized Tony had shoved his water bong in his face.  Darren
slapped it away.  “Cut it out.  It’s getting louder.”

“Oh, man,” Tony whined.  “I don’t have my screen in
it.”

“Shut up!”

This wasn’t beginning to feel like the rousing of an
earthquake.  Something else entirely.  What Tony had described as
only being a jet didn’t sound like one either.  The engine pitch was
lower, and it pulsated slightly.  Not like the continuous, high-pitched
roar of jet turbines.

Darren stood up as warm Santa Ana rustled his shaggy
hair.  His eyes darted around the darkness, but he couldn’t see
anything.  The rumbling——whatever it could be——grew louder, coming closer.

“Is that a jet?” Tony asked.

“I can’t see anything,” Nate murmured with sudden dread in
his voice.

Something was coming toward them from out of the
darkness.  Something big.  The deep growl of a great machine vibrated
in Darren’s chest, and he wanted to run but couldn’t tell from what direction.

“What is it?” Nate shouted.

The howl of warbling engines erupted directly above them and
moved eastward.  Darren went to his knees, terrified of whatever it could
be would come crashing down on him.

*

The ship descended acutely, almost too quickly for a soft
landing, its axis pivoting as it roared out of the sky toward the woods on the
other side of the clearing.  It pitched up and tried to clear the trees
but sheared off the tops as it rotated sideways into the forest.  Finally,
it struck the surface, heaving tons of timber and earth into the air.

*

The ground rumbled under Darren’s feet, rattled his teeth,
shook his senses.  He found himself mashing his mouth with both fists,
embarrassingly, like a little girl and quickly pushed them away despite the
terror.  After the sounds slowly echoed away, silence returned to the
Angeles National Forest.

Finally, he got his lips to move.  “Jesus, was that a
plane?”

“Let’s bug outta here,” Nate begged, gathering up his
sleeping bag.

Jorge followed suit, scrambling for his shoes.  “I’m
with you, ese.”

Darren and Tony, however, remained transfixed to their
spots, trying to see into the darkness toward the east.

“Come on, you guys!” Nate shouted.

“What do you mean, come on?” Darren said.  “People
might be hurt.”

“With body parts laying all over the place?”

“People might be dying, Nate, so don’t be an idiot.”

“Screw that,” Nate spat.  “Let’s get back to the
house.”

“You and Jorge can pussy out if you want,” Darren
said.  “Tony and I are going to help.”

Darren went inside the shanty to grab his high-tops and took
the flashlight out of his backpack.  He walked past them and continued
across the clearing.  “You can stay if you want.  I’m going.”

“Body parts!” Nate spat.  “Think about it! 
Headless bodies still strapped in their seats!”

“Tony, are you coming?” Darren asked.

Tony was quiet for a moment.  A real long moment. 
Then he murmured, “Yeah,” and followed Darren into the darkness.

*

At the end of the flashlight beam came a rolling cloud of
dust billowing out of the trees like thick brown fog.  Darren put his palm
to his mouth and squinted.  Through the odor of fresh dug-up earth and
cracked timber, he smelled something hot, something electric.  Then he
nearly tripped over a tree trunk.  There were several strewn all over.

“Somebody oughta go tell the cops,” Nate said.  “That
should be me.”

“We may need your help, so shut up,” Darren replied.

“I can’t handle dead bodies, man.”

The dust began to settle.  Darren could see something
at the extreme limit of his flashlight.  A huge metal wall.

“There it is,” he whispered.  Darren waved the
flashlight up higher, trying to pick out colored tail markings——Southwest,
United, Delta, whatever.  He couldn’t see the top of the jet because of
the swirling dust.  “No body parts yet, Nate.”  But Nate didn’t offer
a reply, or a retort.

As a warm Pacific breeze swept in to push the fading dust
away, strange outlines began to take shape around them.  Pieces of
wreckage, snapped tree trunks, bubbling puddles of what looked like steaming
mercury.  Spilled fuel?

Darren approached the side of the plane and touched the
surface.  Warm.  He walked further along its length toward what he
assumed to be the nose.  One thing he noticed immediately, which bothered
him, was that he couldn’t smell smoke or see any fires for that matter. 
How could a jet take a dive into the ground without disintegrating into a
million flaming pieces?

Darren swept his flashlight across the hull once again, up,
down, sideways.  The notion of a crashed passenger airliner began to fade
from his mind, slowly replaced by the realm of irrationality where the silly
shit lived.  He had walked a good forty yards and still had not spotted
any wings or the tail.  It was bigger than a 747.

He stopped to look at his friends.  “I don’t think this
is a plane.”

Saturday, May 15

“Then what is it?” Tony asked.

“What do you think?” Darren replied.

It took Tony three seconds to answer.  “Oh, get off the
babysitter.  It can’t be.  Maybe it’s just a top secret Air Force jet
. . . or something.”

“Tony, look at it . . .
it’s not a jet!”

Jorge took a step back and murmured something in Spanish. 
Nate’s mouth just hung open, a blank stare in his eyes.

Darren continued forward, his flashlight darting back and
forth.  Immediately, a low-pitched drone rose from the stillness.

“What’s that?” Jorge whispered.

Darren stopped and listened, trying to hear over his
pounding heart.  A jet of hot steam burst from a ruptured line above them
and breached the silence.  The boys jumped, and Darren felt everything
inside him twitch.  The steam slowly died when whatever inside relieved
the last of its pressure.  Darren waited for something else to surprise
him, and when he deemed it safe, continued forward.  The hum wavered now,
but he couldn’t tell from what part of the ship.  The whole vessel sounded
alive.

They came to a large wound in the hull that strangely did
not appear to be the result of the crash.  Jagged sections of hull
plating, torn cable conduits and bulkheads had been rent inwards as if struck
from the outside.  The crash would have done this to a much larger section
of the vessel, not just this small area, and the damage went several feet into
the ship’s guts.  Something fast and nasty had done this

“Looks like something hit it,” Darren whispered.

*

The creature paused for a moment, then continued to
advance.  A young male.  Human.  As were the other three. 
The computer could not determine if the creatures were suitable for the
“objectives.”  Too many variables.  These humans were considerably
younger than its intended selection, but young males were more stalwart than
older ones: sturdier bones, higher pain thresholds, quicker reflexes, yet
intelligence and logic levels were significantly inferior along with a tendency
toward incorrect decision-making.

The AI had little choice.  The Vorvon menace drew near,
and the freighter was beyond repair with only vapors for fuel remaining. 
It took the computer just milliseconds to decide.

Steady . . . steady. . . .

*

Darren was about to turn and tell his friends to high-tail
it when something large and metallic appeared from the top of the ship in front
of them.  Sudden, hot fear had not forced the urge to flee but to plant
him where he stood.  His stupefied friends next to him apparently had
identical reactions.  No one could move, and Darren quickly discovered it
wasn’t by terror alone.

He literally could not rouse his muscles!  Something
had shut down the brain’s ability to stir the body into action.  His first
response was to scream, long and hard with shameless intensity, but his lungs
had turned to granite.

The thing slowly hovering down toward them was metallic,
ovoid-shaped, maybe six feet wide, emitting warbling chatter like a
computerized songbird punctuated with a low drone.  A large panel slid
open, and Darren saw that the machine now looked like a large, robotic
eye.  He could see fluid machinery behind the glass pulsating almost
organically like a pumping heart.  A long, wavering arc of bright green
light erupted, and Darren suddenly heard a buzzing inside his head begin to
build to a loud growl.

The eye swept blue beams of light over his body in curious
patterns:  from the head down, left and right across his head, shoulders,
chest and waist, almost as——

——
as if it’s measuring me.

The laser beams then moved on to his friends, and when it
finally finished with Nate, the green glow inside suddenly exploded with the
brilliance of stadium lights.  Darren lost touch with the world around him
and could no longer recall where he was or his own identity, all of his
cognitive functions nullified.  He felt hot urine run down his legs, heard
ringing in his ears.  Blood trickled out of one nostril.  It felt
like rape——whatever rape felt like.  He was at the mercy of this fiendish
machine and prayed for his life to continue.

A deep bass sound emanated from the machine and a new, more
terrifying procedure began.  Blindness suddenly closed Darren into his own
universe.  He saw the sharp image of his dad’s crumpled Mustang being
towed away, brown stains of dried blood on the seats . . . watched his grandma
bath him in a plastic baby tub, and then the doctor trying to give him a
vaccination while he screamed and kicked as Allison tried to steer his eyes
toward the Cookie Monster poster on the wall; he saw Aunt Michelle’s dog
shitting on her carpet, Mr. Rogers feeding his fish on TV, the umbilical cord
being cut from his belly. . . .