Talker 25 (13 page)

He shot me. Not with a bullet, but with some net attached to a winch in the helicopter.

“Gotta get Big Bertha sharp,” the sergeant says. He retrieves a half-moon ax from an overhead bin, glides a whetstone along the blade’s arc. “Cold head. Might take me
three chops with such a thick neck. Hope it’s not messy.”

“You could use one of those electric cutters.”

“Clean, but leaves a nasty smell.”

“Not sure if I should sell it or mount it, Corporal. That’s one sizzling piece of coin, but imagine how much tail I’ll get with that lizard hung in the entryway.”

“What do you think, lizard lover?” the corporal says, running his hand along my thigh. I gag and he laughs.

“I tell you, that Silver’s gonna make a nice addition to the collection.” The sergeant taps one of the two dozen stickers on his helmet—a cartoonish Green’s head, a dumb grin on its face, tongue lolling from its mouth. Two axes form the X across its snout. Different kill tokens from those of the Mason-Kline A-Bs, not from actual dragons, but somehow worse.

The corporal touches his own helmet, not as decorated and without any ax kills. “Gotta get some.”

The sergeant claps him on the shoulder. “You will. Plenty more slithering around in them caves.” He grins at me. “They make the best holiday decorations. You should have seen our last Christmas, dragon sister. My boys put a thousand lights on my largest Red and Green. Lit ’em up bright as the sun. Halle-fuckin-lujah. I played Santa Claus for the neighborhood. Sat right between them. Kids loved it.”

“You got pics, right?” the corporal asks.

“Hell yeah. I’ll send ’em to you. The Silver would work better for Halloween, though, don’t you think?” the sergeant asks me as I begin to cry again. “We’d have to get its glow back. Like a dragon ghost head. That would be some slick-ass—”

“Shut up! Shut up!”

But they don’t.

We finally arrive at a massive military base, a sprawling patch of black surrounded by vacant farm fields. Tetris-shaped buildings protrude from the asphalt. The helicopters settle into a hover, dangling Baby above the tarmac. Armored personnel carriers converge. Two tractors pull a rolling sledge from the tallest structure on the base, a ten-story hangar identical to the dragattoir where they executed the Green that killed Mom.

The tractors center themselves between the APCs, and the helicopters lower Baby onto the sledge. Helmetless men in black doctor coats file from the nearest vehicles.

The sergeant scowls. “Mengeles.”

“Think we’ll at least get our finder’s fee?” the corporal asks as the men cut away the netting around Baby.

The sergeant grunts.

We land, wait inside the helicopter while the black-coated men use hoists to withdraw the tranquilizers. One
jabs a dragon Taser into Baby’s neck. Veins of silver lightning race across her body and vanish at her tail. He waves to an APC. Two A-Bs emerge, each carrying half of a gold dragon collar.

“That a new model?” the corporal asks.

Another grunt. “Probably a cold restrictor.”

The men tie Baby to the sledge with straps around her neck, midsection, and hindquarters. The tractors roll at a slug’s pace toward the dragattoir.

As we step from the helicopter, the corporal shoves me off to a seven-foot-tall man in a black suit. He’s the only person on the tarmac without a gun pointed at me or Baby, but the one who most scares me. He leads me into an Escalade marked
BUREAU OF DRAGON AFFAIRS
.

“I want to call my father,” I say. “Lieutenant Colonel Peter Callahan. I want to call him. I have my rights.”

The last part draws the briefest smile, but no response.

We drive to a small building on the opposite end of the base. The silent agent pulls me from the vehicle, leads me past armed guards into a lobby with gray walls, a handprint scanner, and a freight elevator.

“Where are you taking me?” I ask as he places his hand on the scanner.

The elevator door slides open, and he pushes me in. He presses the solitary button on the inner panel. The digital
display above the door reads
Going Down
for a long minute, disappearing when we hit bottom.

A black painted corridor with old-school fluorescent lights extends beyond sight, steel doors every few feet on either side. He guides me to the fifth on the right, then forces my hand to the adjacent scanner. When he pulls it back, the top of the display shows my name, national registration number, and birth date.

“Is this correct?” the D-man says.

“Can I call my dad? Please.”

He stares at me with hollow eyes. Demon eyes.

I nod, my chest hitching. “It’s correct.”

He places his hand to the scanner, and a keyboard appears. After he types in a passcode, my picture from last year’s yearbook fills the screen. “Is that you?”

Before blood and bruises. I nod. “Please.”

He enters another passcode. My chest tightens further when I see what comes next.

Melissa Anne Callahan—Class One Insurgent

Crimes: Murder, Treason.

Associations: Loki’s Grunts.

Status: Captured.

“Any other associations?” the D-man asks.

“I’m not . . . I didn’t do that. I’m not a traitor. Please.”

More typing. The door swings open to reveal a cell
illuminated by glowing red, green, and blue rectangles that dance clockwise around the rim of the ceiling. Padded walls. A cot in the back beneath a giant thinscreen. A rusted shower in one corner, a stained toilet in the other.

“Please,” I whisper as he removes the cuffs. “Please don’t make me—”

The demon shoves me into hell and closes the door.

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins Publishers

..................................................................

If
not for the thinscreen, I’d lose track of time.

Fifty-three hour-long episodes of TV’s most popular program have played nonstop. It’s season three now. I never watched the show before because Mom hated it, and when she died, I hated it, but for different reasons. Most everyone else, however, loves
Kissing Dragons
.

From time to time, as I watch the array of lights spin about my black prison, I find myself humming the theme song, a pounding patriotic riff intermixed with techno gunfire and dragon roars. I refrain from roaring, though I want to each time the slot in the bottom of the door opens—every ten episodes—and a paper plate with stale bread and charred meat is passed through.

I try to sleep, but the voices of Frank, Kevin, Mac, and
L.T. (who replaced J.R. after he was killed in season two) wake me. It’s never the gunfire or the dragon howls. Always the voices of the four elite All-Black soldiers.

An hour into my captivity, I stopped screaming for help, for answers, for justice. The walls swallow sound. I might as well be on the other side of the universe.

During episodes three and four, I recited the daily tenets of tae kwon do:
ye ui, yom chi, in nae, guk gi, baekjul boolgool
. I stopped at episode five because I got interested in what was happening onscreen. Exotic foreign locales are more interesting than meaningless foreign words.

It’s not like courtesy applies in this hole at the bottom of the earth. And look where integrity’s gotten me. Perseverance—ha! Self-control, the hardest tenet for me to obey, doesn’t matter now.

And indomitable spirit. I soaked that one right up as a gullible eight-year-old. So what if dragons turned our world black? So what if freedom came with a giant asterisk and tons of small print?

But
baekjul boolgool
didn’t help Mom or Dad. It’s hard to have an indomitable spirit when machines and monsters can destroy everything that’s important in a single breath.

Somewhere into episode fifteen, I decided to shower. I know some perv is watching me from a hidden camera, but I’ve stopped caring. Stripped to my underwear. Washed the
shirt and jeans first. Then me. It was cold, more dirt than water, and it switched between jets and sputters, but it was different and I felt cleaner.

The AC turned on after that. No blankets on the lumpy mattress and my clothes were still wet. Three episodes passed before the shivers ceased.

I attempted to break the thinscreen during episode nineteen, but there’s some sort of reinforced glass protecting it and I only managed to bruise my hands. Before episode twenty-two, I tried out the toilet, squatting so I didn’t have to touch the seat. I tripped over my feet, fell on the floor, and peed myself.

Later I discovered the toilet doesn’t flush. I called for maintenance, but nobody’s come yet.

My shoulder started to throb somewhere into episode twenty-four. I checked the bandage. It was soggy, the muddied color of dried blood. Didn’t reek, though. I remember someone telling me it was bad when a wound smelled. Of course, it’s hard to smell anything over the stench of urine.

Five times a plate of food’s arrived via the slot. The bread’s rock hard and sometimes there are bugs on it, but it’s better than the meat, which comes in tiny portions. I can’t tell if it’s black because of the lighting or because they burned it so bad. It’s tough and salty, but I force myself to eat it, even though it makes me gag.

The last time around I hid by the slot to get a peek at my server. But Mr. Food Man was late and showed up when I was getting a drink from the shower. I thanked him anyway. He didn’t respond, so I sat on the floor beside the door to eat my dinner and watch my show.

Every twenty-four episodes, the lights and screen go off. I want to sleep but can’t. Without lights flashing, without the screen’s loud rhythm, I’m better able to remember my life before Frank, Kevin, Mac, and L.T. (who replaced J.R. after he was killed in season two).

Sam and Dad. Trish. Mason-Kline. Keith. And James. What’s happened to them? Do they know what’s happened to me? Do they think I’m dead?

Maybe that’s better, because what would they think if they saw me now?

Dad would be angry I created so many problems—for myself, for him, for the dragons. Too much like Mom, he’d say. And Trish? She’ll hate me forever if her mother was hurt in the attack. James and Keith? Who knows if they’re even alive, but if so, they’ll never forgive me for losing Baby.

Sam would be the worst. Before he decided to become a dragon jet pilot, he wanted to be a BoDA agent. Would tape a cardboard D to his shirt and roam the house, investigating our actions to make sure we maintained proper compliance to whatever arbitrary rules he’d decreed that day. I
couldn’t wear red for a week because he found it offensive and would shoot me with his plastic dart gun if he spotted any, yelling for me to surrender when I retaliated against his idiocy. Somehow I ended up being the one who got in trouble because I “should know better.”

Now I’m in trouble again. But I don’t know better this time. The right and wrong I learned about in school don’t make sense anymore. Everything’s a confusing shade of gray. Or black.

When the dragons appeared in our world, they wrought death so fast that after the first few weeks, the news started listing towns and cities instead of individual names. Fifteen years later, the world gone black, they’re back to names—just a few each week.

And now it’s the dragons’ turn to suffer. Hunted toward extinction. Slaughtered by All-Blacks or dissected by scientists. Each night at eight, seven Central, a government spokesmodel lists the numbers of Blues, Reds, and Greens killed.

They’ve turned it into a national lottery, most everyone eager to win.

Except for the crazies. Camera crews in tow, one group of nutjobs attempted to commune with a Green hiding in the Appalachians. They were roasted; the Green was executed.

Inspired my new favorite show.

Each episode begins with a warning against amateur dragon hunts. The next fifteen minutes provide details on the enemy. Number of kills, famous buildings destroyed, last known whereabouts. Show some clips of the monster in action, fifteen minutes of teary interviews with victims’ friends and families, then on to the good stuff.

Frank, Kevin, Mac, and L.T. (who replaced J.R. after he was killed in season two) skulk into jungles, rappel down mountains, trudge through swamps. Whispered banter in the early stages gives way to the minor-key soundtrack that accentuates leaves crackling, rocks skittering, water splashing—any noise that might alert the evil dragon and endanger the innocent humans.

Shot in natural light, the armored soldiers are little more than hulking shadows until they come in sight of their glowing quarry, nicknamed Redzilla, Komodo Green, or something else easily remembered for the tie-in video games played by farmboys across the globe.

The fab four sneak into position. Two quick minutes of gunfire, shouts and curses, and the dragon is hogtied and collared. The camera zooms in on the monster’s snarling face. The soldiers use knives to peel scales from its cheeks. Frank, a ruggedly handsome man, sticks his kill token to his helmet and turns to the camera.

“There are many rules critical for a successful dragon
hunt. The first and most important: never wake a sleeping dragon. The sonofabitch’s a lot easier to kiss when asleep.”

I’ve heard this rule before. Episodes one, fourteen, twenty-seven, and thirty—the one where J.R. died because he woke a wily Red. And somewhere else, too.

An episode later, I remember Konrad Kline and his farmboy advice.

Frank bows his head and leads a brief prayer as the Mean Green Machine writhes in the background. The soldiers gather around the dragon and kiss it while giving thumbs-ups, saluting, flashing peace signs. An unseen photographer snaps pictures. After various poses, the dragon hunters disappear out of frame and a large digital X is stamped across the monster’s forehead.

The credits roll to triumphant music. On one side scroll the names of producers, directors, cameramen, and the “brave soldiers of the armed forces”; the other plays a montage of the interviewees hugging their All-Black heroes and laying flowers at graves. At the end, an In Memoriam for the victims.

Who in their right mind could empathize with these monsters after watching an episode of
Kissing Dragons
?