Chapter 1 #3
More than that though, these dragons had to be dealt with.
Every kill counted. Summer was coming and vast swathes of the country currently protected from the lizards by snow and freezing temperatures would soon lose that advantage.
There was even the possibility that the dragons would start walking among humans without being detected.
They had human forms; that much was for sure.
There was footage of a dragon dying, turning almost human as it went.
It wasn’t pleasant to look at, but it proved an important point: there had never been an invasion like this.
They were dealing with creatures capable of breathing fire and taking a fighter jet down with their teeth and claws—and who could also shift to walk among the human population.
On close inspection they did look different.
Their eyes weren’t quite right for starters, and their skin had scales in some places, but all of that could be potentially hidden.
“That’s got to be bullshit,” she swore to herself.
She’d seen the footage herself, but it still didn’t seem real to her.
Dragons were huge. Bigger than buses, most of them.
Closer to blue whales. Blue whales with huge wings and fire breath.
How could they possibly take human shape?
And why would they? And what other forms could they take, if human shape wasn’t the only option they had?
There were so many questions, and Aria couldn’t answer any of them. Maybe that was why she felt so drawn by the portal. Even she had to admit that it was weird to hate dragons and simultaneously be tempted to fly into the very heart of a world that must be filled with them.
As she drew closer to Los Angeles, Aria turned off her inner dialog and focused on the matter at hand. Sure enough, just as her commander had said, there was a dragon messing around on the outskirts of the city. It didn’t seem to be taking hostile action—yet, anyway.
Aria was flying near the Tornado’s top speed, covering twenty miles every minute.
Her speed made the dragon seem to loom out of the sky, as it flew in sinuous motions, twisting about like a winged snake.
Unlike the dragons in the portal clouds, she could see this one clearly, and the sight caused a deep existential horror that made her stomach feel like lead.
That thing couldn’t be real. It moved through the air as if the air were water, its powerful body streamlined back from a ferocious head containing teeth that could pierce a tank.
At a distance it had been a dark figure silhouetted against the burning skyline, but she could see now that it was a burnished red hue marked with streaks of black along its eyes and down the length of its spine.
The closer she got, the closer it got. It had seen her and was moving toward her, wings spread wide, mouth open.
She had to be damn careful now with the range.
Too far and she might miss it with her weapons. Too close and she’d be toast.
Aria flipped open the catch over the button for the air-to-air missile and held her finger over it for a second. A prayer appeared in her head almost spontaneously, some part of her responding to the enormity of the act she was about to undertake.
Click.
The missile sped from the belly of her plane.
It was a dead lock, straight for the beast’s heart.
Aria counted the seconds until the dragon would explode into charred meat, but it twisted gracefully at the last moment with one of those easy smooth motions that made her almost envious, and the missile headed off into the wide blue.
They were so close now, and Aria was on a near collision course with the monster.
She threw her plane to the side as the dragon flew past. For a brief moment, Aria and the dragon looked at one another, her stunned face hidden by the mask as she stared into the eyes of the powerful beast that was matching her mile for mile.
A tremor went through her, a recognition of something.
A deep instinctual knowing, the same kind a mouse has when it meets its first cat.
She peeled off, the plane curving sideways through the sky to slip down and under and then rise up behind the dragon. Another missile lock. Another launch. Another miss.
“Fuck!” Aria shouted in frustration. Two failures did not bode well for this mission. In war, you didn’t usually get a third chance. And now the dragon was on the attack.
It came for her hard, spearing through the sky.
Aria yanked the control column and the plane spun out of the dragon’s way, earth and sky switching places several times before she righted herself again.
Los Angeles was coming into view, and she had an idea.
While she had technically been told to get the dragon out of the city, maybe she could follow orders by disobeying them.
She was glad she was in her Tornado. Some of the other pilots had given her hell for it, but unlike their newer birds, her plane could fly anywhere at almost any speed.
Low flight was a specialty of the model.
And that meant she had some chance of escaping the thing behind her if she used her brains rather than the throttle.
Arcing around, Aria headed for Los Angeles. The city had been evicted when the dragon attacks began to spread. There were a few die-hards in the hills and perhaps holed up in bunkers, but her plan wouldn’t put them in harm’s way, though it would give them a hell of a show.
She came screaming down the remains of Sunset Boulevard, the dragon in hot pursuit. Its wingspan and need to keep flapping at slow speeds made it impossible for the creature to catch her down a windy canyon of what had once been a glittering array of shops, offices, hopes and dreams.
The city proper was big enough that she figured she had some chance of losing the dragon if she used the Tornado’s superior maneuverability by slotting in between the buildings, losing it in the maze of the city.
She twisted the controls and the plane turned sideways, sitting on a blade of air as she came roaring between gleaming glass towers. Behind her, the dragon rolled with her and slid through just as easily.
“Dammit! Get off my ass,” she growled, clenching her teeth.
The dragon drew closer, its speed impressive as it managed to keep pace with her through the turns and twists.
It occurred to Aria far too late that she had made the wrong decision in attempting to lose the beast at low speed.
If anything, it was more agile than her. She should have gotten high and fast.
Sweeping out from her last turn, Aria drew the control column back and sent the Tornado into a steep climb.
She was pulling several Gs, but that was the cost of outrunning a dragon.
She had to clench her muscles to stay awake and not black out as the force tried to drain the blood from her head.
There was an unholy juddering as the plane stalled.
And then the worst sound a pilot could ever hear: silence.
There was a moment of weightlessness as her ascent stopped—and then she began to fall, dead engines doing nothing but weighing her toward Earth.
“Fuck! No!” Aria went through all the checks and systems to reactivate dead engines. Nothing worked. Something was wrong. Something was stuck, or sheared, or… something. It didn’t really matter what in the moment because there was nothing she could do about it.
The mechs who usually performed maintenance were stretched at the moment, so it was possible some fault had gone undetected.
The Tornado was nineteen years old, only a couple of years younger than Aria.
A lot could go wrong in nineteen years. The what and the why of the fault didn’t really matter as the plane began to nose down into a dive that could only end in one result.
Cursing, Aria hauled back on the control column, desperate to get the nose up.
Lack of power didn’t mean a crash, but diving and spinning did.
She looked at the ejector button, but decided against using it.
She was already too low to eject safely, and ejecting could easily cripple her if the canopy didn’t open, or the mechanism didn’t fire right.
Over the next thirty seconds, Aria fought with her plane against the very real and very deadly forces of physics that were threatening to end her life. She’d forgotten about the dragon entirely as she speared toward the earth.
“Not like this,” she pleaded with the plane. “Come on, girl, just one more miracle.”
Impact was seconds away and though the plane had leveled out some, she was still going too damn fast. The reverse thrusters were out of operation and the Tornado didn’t have any chutes. She was done. She closed her eyes, said her prayers, and waited for the end.
Fwomp! Screeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee
Huh. So that was how death sounded.
It took Aria a moment to realize that she had not hit the ground.
The plane shuddered and the nose tipped a little higher.
Aria opened her eyes to see that the dragon had her in its talons.
They had sunk through the skin of the craft and taken hold of the support struts.
Above her, she could see the beast’s powerful wings beating hard, providing just enough lift to turn the crash into a survivable landing.
The Tornado hit the desert hard enough to jolt every bone in her body, but left her otherwise intact.
Aria couldn’t believe it. She had come to a halt on the ground and by an unholy miracle, she was alive. She was unharmed. She’d probably bruise, but what were a few bruises when by rights she should have been a smear on the Mojave.
A heavy shuddering heralded the dragon landing in front of her, its body curled in curiosity as its impossibly large head cast a shadow over the cockpit.