Dragonsapien (13 page)

The dragon fired
again, while finishing off the nearest man with a deft, deadly
slash of his already bloodied talons.

Cowering behind
the seat where he’d instinctively thrown himself, a terrified Jake
covered his head, waiting for the shot or swipe of a talon that
would kill him.

The dragon drew
towards him, reached down. He effortlessly picked Jake up by
sinking his talons deep within the parachute pack. It swung around,
stepped back towards the door and, swinging his arm forward and up,
briefly held Jake outside in the violently pounding streams of
air.

Through watery
eyes, Jake saw at least two other dragons clamped to the side of
the hull, their talons embedded within the metal.

That’s what the
metallic clunks they’d heard had been; the dragons latching onto
the side of the hull, waiting for the moment when the emergency
door was opened. These other two were obviously a backup, in case
the first had been unsuccessful in his task.

The dragon leapt
out into the whirling darkness, taking the firmly held Jake with
him. Jake’s stomach lurched frighteningly. His skin, his body,
juddered under the relentless pressure of the brutally throbbing
wind.

And, suddenly,
he was aimlessly suspended in the blackness, the jet plummeting to
earth in flames behind him.

*

Jake was
shivering uncontrollably, both from the intense cold of the night
sky and the fear of being dropped from a height that he had no
chance of surviving. Worse, the straps of his tattered parachute
pack kept on slipping as their holdings continued to tear and
shred. Every now and again, he would suffer a violently lurch
downward, as if at last about to hurtle earthwards.

The earth below
didn’t look real. It looked like a final scene from one of his
end-of-world computer games. It was endless, yet looked the same no
matter the direction in which he looked. The ground was black, an
impenetrable coal black but for the fires that seemed to
remorselessly feed off that darkness like unquenchable coal fires,
or the sudden, bright glare of explosions in the sky above, like
fireballs erupting from the volcanoes of a primordial
landscape.

This was no
game, however, as evidenced by the increasing examples of destroyed
human life and endeavour as they at last began to descend. At
first, it was the mangled wreckage of toppled skyscrapers, then the
burnt out husks of trains, trucks and cars. Finally, there came the
warped liquorice sticks of cooked bodies, the soured cream of bared
skeletons.

No, no, Celly
really
couldn’t
be responsible for this.

No, not
his
Celly.

It must all be a
mistake, a lie.

With an
unclasping of its talons, the dragon let Jake fall the final foot
or two towards the rubble strewn floor. He landed painfully,
striking then sliding across sharp-edged stone and
brick.

He landed almost
at the feet of another dragon, a dragon with its legs casually and
confidently splayed, its wings spread out fully as if serving as a
demonstration of its power, its undeniable superiority.

Even though the
only light came from distant fires, its skin shimmered with the
translucent sparkle of emeralds.

Slowly,
agonisingly, Jake raised his head.

‘Hello Jake,’
Leon said.

*

Suddenly, Jake
was roughly hauled up off the ground from behind.

One of the
dragons began to swiftly search him, ripping apart his clothes here
and there with the deft slash of a talon if it seemed
necessary.

The dragon seem
to think it was necessary far more than Jake did.

‘I haven’t got
any weapons.’

The searching
dragon ignored him.

Leon ignored
him.

‘So, they sent
you
to try and make peace?’ he sneered.

Jake bristled.
He held himself back from saying anything about Leon’s betrayal
that had led to the death of his own mother.

‘I thought
dragons were peaceful,’ he said instead. ‘Celly told me you’d never
fought in any of our wars; you’d always had the influence and
wealth to remain out of it without it looking too
obvious.’

‘He’s clear;
there are no tracking devices.’

The dragon who
had been searching him stepped back and away. Leon nodded towards a
dragon who had landed nearby as Jake had been searched.

‘Clear,’ the
third dragon said, speaking into a small microphone strapped to a
pair of headphones.

‘Could you
imagine what your wars would have been like if we
had
got
involved?’ Leon asked Jake proudly. ‘But we were simply staying out
of them for more selfish reasons; how could we remain hidden
amongst you when any wound would have revealed our
differences?’

‘So that’s it?
Dragons aren’t morally superior to us after all?’

‘Morally
,
we are now equal, I grant you that. But in every
other
way,
we are
clearly
superior!’

With an
elaborate wave of his arms, he indicated the surrounding
chaos.

‘But I don’t
understand,’ Jake admitted. ‘You accepted, once discovered, that
the humans would be terrified of you. There wasn’t even the
slightest protest when you were asked to set up a separate life in
Hong Kong–’

‘Life? Is that
what you call it? Life!’

‘Obviously,
you’d had to leave behind so much, it was never going to be exactly
the same–’

‘Have you
absolutely
no
idea what it was like for us in Hong
Kong?’

‘
I
saw the films, the documentaries–’

‘I can’t believe
this! You’re sent here to make peace, but no one’s bothered, even
now, to tell you the
truth
about Hong Kong?’

‘Truth? You were
happy there, we were told.’

‘Our backs were
strapped in cages, to stop us from transforming!’

‘What? That
can’t be right; otherwise you’d still be there, not here flying
around.’

‘My father and
the Volances were the ones who worked out how to unlock the cages
without the inspection patrols noticing. We had to wait, of course,
until everyone had been unlocked. By that time, my father and
Celly’s parents were dead.’

‘Erdwin and
Perisa?’ Jake was horrified. ‘And your father, Dr Frobisher too.
I’m sorry, I didn’t know.’

It seemed a
strange thing to say, with so many dead lying about them. But Jake
was genuinely shocked by the news of the death of Celly’s parents.
He had known them, liked them, enjoyed visiting and staying in
their apartment. He had often wished that his own parents could
have been a little bit more like the Volances.

‘It seems
there’s an awful lot you don’t know. Hardly ideal for peace
negotiation, is it, not being fully aware of why your enemy is
fighting you?’

‘I didn’t have
time to be fully briefed, remember?’ Jake snapped back. ‘Someone
snatched me from a plane!’

‘We didn’t want
to give them time or the chance to follow you. We don’t trust
them.’

‘Surely you’ve
got to trust them if you’re wanting to make peace.’

‘We
don’t
want to make peace;
you
do. You haven’t asked how my father,
or the Volances, died.’

Jake abruptly
felt cold with shame. Leon was right. He should have been more
thoughtful, more concerned.

‘I’m sorry; how
did they die?’

‘They starved.
Even as they worked on unlocking the cages, they were dying of
starvation.’

‘There wasn’t
enough food? But we were told–’

‘You were told
lies
! There wasn’t enough to keep us all alive! They wanted
us to squabble, to fight one another, over food–’

‘They’re nearly
here.’

The dragon with
the headphones pointed off into the darkness. Jake followed his
gaze, peering into the night.

At first, he saw
nothing more than the bright glint of an opal, the fiery flash of a
ruby, a wide distance apart and seemingly hovering in the black
sky. Then, in between, and possibly farther back, he caught flares
of gold, glistening streaks of silver.

Soon, the
airborne jewels had become sparkling clusters, had become beating
wings and muscular torsos. The dragons slipped either side of him,
dropping downwards considerably yet remaining in the air, the wings
twisting slightly in their heavy, rhythmic flexing so that the
bodies were rigidly upright, sentry-like.

The miniature
suns, the sparkling stars, were coalescing too, becoming
ridiculously expansive wings, a relatively smaller body supported
beneath, a head from which streamed hair that flowed and rippled as
if it were mercury.

Celly flexed her
wings, moving into a more upright position, retaining lift with
powerful yet deceptively effortless strokes, then began to
languidly drop down towards Jake.

Like the other
dragons, her body was partially armoured, and she carried an
automatic rifle. She also seemed dusty, even, perhaps, bloodied.
Even so, she transformed what little light there was into a golden
aura, descending Jake’s way like an angelic Joan of Arc, a
victorious St Michael.

She was
beautiful.

Magnificent.

Oh how he loved
her.

*

Even as she
landed directly in front of him, Celly could see that Jake was
still the innocent child that he had been while living on the
island.

How much had she
changed over the last year? She was no longer the same person, the
girl that had fallen in love with Jake, regarding it all as some
great adventure, the beginnings of a new, better more exciting
period in her life.

He looked
dishevelled, his clothes shredded so that they hung off him like
rags. He stared at her, wide-eyed, like he was frightened, unsure
what was going to happen next.

Well, let him
worry.

Let him fear
her.

‘Celly.’ He
almost stammered her name in his nervousness. ‘Celly, Leon told me
about your mum and dad; I’m sorry, really sorry. I…I don’t know
what to say.’

‘You don’t?’ She
was deliberately hard, unforgiving. ‘Do you think anything you’d
say would make it any easier?’

‘Well, no, of
course not. That’s what I meant when–’

‘You’re not here
to talk about the death of my mum and dad. You’re here to talk
peace, yes?’

She was pleased
when Leon and the other dragons chuckled. Like her, they found it
amusing that the humans saw a pathetic child like Jake as their
only hope for salvation.

‘Yes; if there
was anything I learned about dragons from you and your parents,
Celly, it was that you were peaceful and didn’t want to hurt
humans–’

‘Peaceful?’
Celly laughed. She glanced about her, observing the surrounding
chaos, the fires burning in the night. ‘I doubt anyone would agree
with you that dragons are peaceful, Jake. And the thing is, I
learned it all from you, Jake.’

‘Me?’

‘Those computer
games you always insisted I play? I learned the effectiveness of
your ruthlessness, your swift actions, without a care if it was the
right action or not, your focus only being on achieving your goal,
no matter the cost, the sacrifices.’

‘It was a
game
, Celly!’

‘For you, maybe.
For me, now, it’s a strategy. A successful one, too.’

‘I don’t think
you really want to wipe out the whole of humanity, Celly. You’ve
proved your point, that we have to accept you back into
society–’

‘That’s it?
That’s
what you think we’re fighting for? How can you come
here asking for peace when you have no idea why we’re
fighting?’

‘But if that’s
not your aim, for everything to return to how it was – then what do
you want, Celly?’

‘You hit upon it
yourself, only a moment ago Jake.’

‘I
did?’

‘You said I
wouldn’t want to wipe out the whole of humanity. To which my reply
would be, “Wouldn’t I?”’

*

Celly’s stare
was unflinching, hard, aggressive.

Her lips were
clamped together, a thin strip of red flesh like an unhealed
wound.

Her armour
was
flaked with blood. Whether her own or that of her
victims, Jake couldn’t tell.

There was a
sternness, a determination, to her expression that Jake had never
seen before. Yes, he believed she could continue this war until
either man or the dragons were no more.

Her golden skin
reflected the fluttering glow of the distant flames, such that it
glistened like smelting metal, swirling with curls of silver, the
angry red of the furnace. Her wings could have been made of flame,
the way they appeared to flicker and move, rise and
fall.