Dragonsapien (12 page)

‘The lifts are
too dangerous; they might cut off the power!’

‘What’s going
on?’ Jake demand as they hurtled down the steps, skidding sharply
around the tightly angled corners. ‘Why are the dragons after
me?’

‘Not sure kid;
maybe they intercepted our messages that we were going to pick you
up.’

‘Pick me up?
What for? I’ve told you everything I know!’

Just after Jake
had been lifted off the island, even while he was still on the
helicopter, he’d been probed by Lieutenant Rodgers for any
information he could give them on the dragons. Jake had been
reticent about revealing everything he knew, however, feeling it
was a betrayal of Celly. Even so, the interviews and interrogations
over the next few days – along with the insistent urging from his
parents that he should help the authorities ‘ensure everyone is
safe’– had gradually wheedled more and more out of him until he
felt there was little more for him to add.

‘Yeah, that’s
right; and according to you kid, your girlfriend was going to be no
bother at all for us, right?’

‘Celly? What’s
wrong with her? What’s happened?’

‘What’s wrong
with her? Kid, she’s the one
leading
this
rebellion!’

*

Jake sunk back,
exhausted, into the soft leather of the executive-jet’s plush
seat.

Lieutenant
Rodgers told him he might as well have a sleep; it was a long trip
to China, even travelling at the incredible speeds the jet could
reach.

They had been
transferred to the jet by the helicopter that, gingerly landing on
a large stretch of lawn just outside the apartment block, had
picked them up as smaller helicopters whirled around them,
defending the area. A number of helicopters had already been
brought down, their burning or mangled wreckage jutting out from
the buildings they’d crashed into, or littering the streets or
rooftops.

‘We’re lucky,’
Lieutenant Rodgers had breathed with relief as they’d hurriedly
boarded. ‘It was just a small group sent to get you. They probably
weren’t expecting us to move so quickly, or with such force. We
surprised them.’

Jake hadn’t seen
how many dragons had been involved in the attack. But he did see
one final attack on the fleeing helicopters by a lone dragon who,
whirling freely amongst them, avoided the guns aimed at him with
ease, the bullets instead churning up other helicopters, even the
glass fronted offices of nearby tower blocks. He brought down a
helicopter with a burst of flame that erupted as a blazing jet from
his mouth (so, Celly had lied about that!), only to swoop upwards
into the whirring blades of another helicopter that scattered him
across the sky like a shower of iridescent gems.

‘
You
need to tell me what’s going on,’ Jake insisted vehemently, rising
from the comforting embrace of the leather seat to prevent himself
from succumbing to his shocked weariness.

‘The Drags – the
dragons – have broken out of Hong Kong.’

‘Broken out?
We’re always being told how incredibly happy they are living there.
Besides, I thought they were surrounded by half the Chinese army;
just to reassure people they were safe.’ He spat out the last part
sarcastically.

‘More like two
thirds, plus an international force of more or less equal numbers.
The Drags made mincemeat of them.’

‘When?’ Jake was
incredulous. ‘I haven’t read anything about this in the papers or
seen it on the news!’

‘You think we’re
going to promote this? All our efforts are involved in containing
it; but it’s going to break soon enough, no doubt about
it.’

‘That attack
back there around my apartment is hardly going to help.’

‘That regular
terrorist attack, you mean? Sure, that will sound terrifying
enough; but how do you think they’d take it if they knew Drags were
involved?’

‘What, with
helicopters strewn all over the place? There’s no way you can keep
all that covered up.’

‘Didn’t you just
say you didn’t know that half of China’s fallen, along with Korea
and most of Japan? If we can cover that up, a little spat in the
west end isn’t going to be much of a problem.’

‘Wow!’ Jake
couldn’t hide the fact that he was impressed. ‘But you’re holding
them back now, right?’

‘You’ve seen
them up close kid. These guys are not only like your worst alien
nightmare, but they can blend amongst us as the perfect spies. They
can use our own weapons against us too, patch into our
communications, disable our computers. They’re the perfect enemy,
Jake, in the same way you can have a perfect storm.’

‘All that’s long
hand for you’re not holding them, right?’

Rodgers
nodded.

‘You ask me, it
seems we’re licked, kid. That’s why I got permission to bring you
in.’

‘Me?’ Jake gave
a bitter laugh. ‘What, you want me to wave the white flag for
you?’

‘The flag of
parley
, kid; we need you to talk to your
girlfriend.’

*

Even though it
was now night time and dark outside, Jake didn’t need to be told
when they had reached the edges of China.

They had been
joined just over an hour ago by a fighter jet escort. Jack had
heard their arrival and greetings over the radio, seen their
bright, blinking lights and the pilots dimly illuminated in their
cockpits as they had gracefully swung alongside the passenger jet
and taken up their positions. Now they were passing over a darkened
landscape that was increasingly lit up now and again with the
scarlet flash of an explosion, the blaze of unrecognised buildings,
or briefly illuminated over a vast distance as something flared
brightly in the sky overhead.

The cauldrons of
hell, Jake thought, wondering what suffering was going on down
there.

And Celly was
responsible for all this? It didn’t seem possible.

It didn’t seem
necessary
, either. He had watched, on one of the plane’s
state-of-the-art monitors, scenes of life in Hong Kong before the
revolt. Much of what he saw he had seen before, in films, in
documentaries. But he had also been shown the private interviews
that had taken place with psychiatrists and doctors tasked with
assessing each individual dragon’s mental state before they were
allowed into Hong Kong, the dragon seated in a comfortable,
ultra-modern high backed chair, the interview panel kind, courteous
and considerate.

There were also
numerous facts and figures of the supplies that were daily bussed
into the city and its environs, trainload after trainload of food,
medicines, clothes and whatever other items a modern civilised life
demanded. It all took place under the eyes of the Red Cross and UN
too, so it seemed odd when it switched to shots of dragons
complaining that all this was ‘inadequate’.

‘Inadequate?’ a
UN President stormed. ‘Could that be anything to do, I wonder, with
their have becoming used to their previous, privileged lives, and
their lack of understanding of how must humans would consider their
present lives the height of luxury?’

‘How are you
going to arrange this meeting?’ Jake asked Rodgers who, making the
most of his luxurious surroundings, was lounging back in his seat
as he sipped a large whisky.

‘As I said
earlier, they’ve patched into our communications and cracked most
of our codes; we’ve let them know you’re wanting to meet
her.’

‘What if she
doesn’t want to meet me? It was over a year ago. Just a teenage
fling.’ Jake managed to hide his bitterness.

‘They just tried
to snatch you back there, didn’t they? She must still hold a candle
for you, kid.’

‘Really? It
seemed to me they were more likely out to try and turn me
into
a candle!’

Rodgers shook
his head, took another slow, thoughtful drink of his whisky before
saying, ‘If they wanted to kill you, there wouldn’t have been much
we could have done to stop it.’

He said it with
a sense of admiration for his enemies’ capabilities.

‘I reckon,’ he
continued, ‘they thought they were doing you a favour. I reckon
your girlfriend was worried we were going to use you as a hostage,
a bargaining chip.’

‘A hostage? Why
would Celly think that? Why would she care?’

‘Because she
knows we’re losing, knows we’re desperate. She knew we were coming
after you, but at the time she didn’t know why. Now she does.
She’ll–’

One of the
fighter pilots screamed a garbled, static-mangled warning across
the intercom connection.

‘Incoming
bogeys, directly…gorilla…sandwiched–’

The message
broke off as abruptly as it had interrupted them.

Jake peered out
of the window, scanned the sky.

One of the
fighter planes was angling and dropping away, flame licking across
its wings, enveloping or emanating from one of its engines. With a
lightning-like crack and sunburst of yellow light, it vanished,
becoming nothing more than falling, glinting slivers of metal
caught in the lights of the fighter that had been rushing to its
rescue.

The executive
jet rocked and jolted as the force of the explosion hit it side
on.

‘How can they
bring down a jet?’ Jake yelled fearfully at Rodgers. ‘How can they
keep up with it?’

‘They’ve
captured weapons off our own troops. They’ve even got a couple of
submarines out at sea; armed with nukes too.’

The directions
from the pilots coming over on the intercom rapidly went from
urgent to panicked.

‘Bogey
dope…closing…I can’t see them… down, down, I’m down!…no joy…
faded…no joy!’

Rodgers listened
intensely, apprehensively.

‘They can’t lock
onto their targets. It’s just Drags out there,’ he said. ‘Bet you
those missile aren’t hitting anything,’ he added, drawing Jake’s
attention to the odd crump of a far off explosion.

‘Tumbleweed…threat…split…Christmas tree!’

With a
thunderous ‘whoommphh!’ another fighter was transformed into a
whirling ball of flame, vanishing into the darkness as it fell
away. There was a sudden burst of light off to the other side of
their jet as one of the fighters turned on a number of
lights.

In the light,
Jake caught the flash, the sparkle, of precious gems, passing at
what appeared to be unimaginable speed above and below the fighter.
The plane’s engines instantaneously erupted into flame. A few
seconds later, it exploded, a rolling fire that ever so briefly
swirled in the night sky.

The intercom
went dead.

‘Damn! The other
fighter boy must be down too!’ Rodgers snarled worriedly, his face
creased with fear.

A ridiculously
swift blur of glistening gemstones swept past the windows on either
side. It was instantly followed by hard, metallic clunks and
scraping on the hull and wings as the lozenges of steel netting
clashed against the windows.

There was a loud
whirring, a clanking, a screaming from one of the engines as it
sucked in the netting, churning it around in its own innards until
everything was ripped apart. It exploded into flame with a jolting,
ear-bursting bang that drowned out the pained screeching of the
other wing’s engine as it, too, greedily devoured the
netting.

When the second
engine burst into flame, it lit the passenger compartment up with a
flowing, scarlet glow.

Rodgers turned
towards Jake, a surprisingly apologetic look on his
face.

‘Sorry kid,’ he
said, ‘it doesn’t look like your girlfriend wants to talk after
all.’

*

As the plane
began to rapidly lose height, parachutes were handed round, quickly
strapped on. As they waited for the plane to reach a level where
the pressure would allow the emergency door to be opened safely,
they once again heard metallic clunks and tearing against the side
of the hull, glimpsed once again flashes of glittering jewels at
the widows; but nothing further happened. They all breathed a sigh
of relief, waiting for the signal to jettison the door.

At last, the
door’s handle was urgently wrenched up, the door kicked out into
the black wind hurtling past them. One of Rodgers’ men stepped
towards the door – and was instantly propelled out into the
darkness with a terrified yell, his parachute ripped to shreds in
an instant in a flurry of sharply glistening blades.

A dragon’s hand
swung through the door into the cabin, the long talons sickeningly
penetrating the next man in the queue. The dying man fell back, the
dragon using him as leverage to pull himself more fully into the
cabin. In his other hand, the dragon held a powerful machine
pistol. The gun barked quickly in succession, Rodgers and two of
his other men taking horrendously mutilating hits that sent them
flying back across the leather seats.

Rodger’s last
remaining man and the cabin crew drew their own guns, firing at the
dragon. The bullets mainly struck some form of thick armour the
dragon’s body was encased in, but even those that struck skin
seemed to have as little effect as if they’d hit a surface crusted
with diamonds.