Dragonsapien (15 page)

The door flew
open, he was dragged out, thrown with a furious wrench of a wrist
into the raging crowd.

Behind him, as
he was pummelled, kicked, snatched at and furiously head-butted, he
was dimly aware that someone had taken his place at the
wheel.

*

As Jake sensed
he was slipping into unconscious, there was a confusing, rippling
glare of painfully bright lights, terrifyingly loud cracks and
frightened yells, a booming thunder of blood surging uselessly
around his brain.

*

The thunderous
booming was still there, but now more muted, less
overwhelming.

Even so, Jake’s
head throbbed, his eyes, when he opened them, remained unfocused
and dizzying.

‘Back in the
land of the living, right son?’ someone close by, perhaps even
leaning over him, said with a pleased chuckle.

‘Where…where am
I? A…a helicopter?’

‘You’re with the
Seventh Cavalry, son – and I mean that quite literally. What
remains of it, anyway; Custer would have been proud!’

*

Light played off
the pure-blue pool, undulating like ribbons of captured stars. The
glow soared up into and illuminated the dim, morning sky like the
beam of an enormous blue searchlight, creating a snatch of midday
in otherwise gloomy surroundings.

The hotel itself
was also an oasis, surrounded as it was by an overcrowded,
frightened city, by an encircling, encroaching war. As Jake had
tried to talk peace with Celly, the dragons’ irresistible advance
had continued, with very little of Japan now remaining under human
control. Tokyo was besieged, as Jake had witnessed himself as,
peering down from the helicopter earlier that morning, he had seen
the long streams of terrified refugees pouring into a city that
would probably fall that night when the dragons attacked once more
in earnest.

Jake had been
promised a seat out on the trains the dragons were allowing to
leave the city, heading south and taking whatever innocents could
be crammed into them. First, though, he could ‘grab a bite to eat,
freshen up – and fill us in on any new info you might have on what
we’re up against.’

The officer sent
to interrogate Jake helped himself now and again to the parts of
the breakfast that Jake insisted he wouldn’t be able to manage; the
toast, the preserves, the fruit.

‘Well, they can
avoid the cruise missiles you’re sending out to kill them,’ Jake
said sourly, pulling his towelling robe tighter around his throat
to keep out the morning chill, ‘unless you’ve got a mug like me out
there with an inbuilt tracker to lead them directly onto their
target.’

‘You as the
target? That what they told you?’ He wiped his fingers clean of
marmalade, munched on the toast in the corners of his mouth.
‘Missiles are being sent out that way all the time. And you being
abducted and all, we didn’t have time to tell anyone to hold back
on firing them in that area. The tracker was there so we could pull
you out if things turned dicey – as, of course, we did.’

He grinned, his
eyes glinting innocently.

‘Great
marmalade, huh? Fresh, you ask me.’

‘I can’t help
you much,’ Jake confessed. ‘I didn’t even know they could breathe
fire to be honest.’

‘Thing is, Jake,
we reckon they’re taking a risk when they do. Sure, it’s one hell
of a set of lungs they’ve got on them – but powerful enough to send
out a jet of flame that doesn’t run the risk of running out of
power and causing a blow back?’

He shook his
head, reached for a mandarin orange and started to peel
it.

‘Have you seen
that happen?’ Jake asked, flinching as he involuntarily imagined
what might happen to Celly if she tried it and it went
wrong.

The officer, who
had earlier introduced himself as Captain Paul Jones, shook his
head again.

‘I don’t need to
see it to know it could happen Jake. I’ve seen their lungs in
autopsies–’

‘You’ve cut them
up? The dragons I mean; cut them up to see what they look like
inside?’

Jones nodded,
gulped down a piece of mandarin.

‘They were
already dead, and we needed to see what we might be up
against.’

‘Might
be
up against? Not
are
up against?’

‘You gone
native, Jake?’ Jones asked with a frown. ‘They were already dead,
Jake; there wasn’t room for them to be buried in Hong Kong, so they
had to ship their dead out to us. We’d be fools, wouldn’t we, not
to take the opportunity to find out the potential dangers we
faced?’

He must have
noticed that Jake felt sickened by what he was hearing, for he
quickly added, ‘Son, these things are
animals
!’

Jake gave a
relieved chuckle. ‘It might seem like that now, but they lived
amongst us for hundreds, maybe even thousands of years, without our
even noticing them.’

‘I meant they’re
literally
animals, Jake. Trust me on this one; I’ve seen it
for myself. You know how these things breed?’

Jake hoped that
Jones didn’t realise he was fighting hard not to blush with
embarrassment.

‘Sure, just like
us – obviously.’

Jones looked at
him as if he were trying to figure out if Jake was just playing
stupid or not.

‘Eggs,’ he said
flatly. ‘They lay
eggs
.’

Jake let out
another relieved chuckle.

‘No, no; the
old
dragons, maybe, sure – but not
these
dragons.
They’ve evolved, just like we did from the apes.’

‘Son, I’ve
seen
it. When I took part in the patrols into Hong Kong,
when we had to go in to make sure their talons were
clipped.’

‘You clipped
their talons?’

‘Too right we
did! Regularly too! Have you seen what they can do to a tank? What
they can do to a man doesn’t bear thinking about. Of
course
they were clipped!’

‘How? Why did
they let you do it?
How
did you do it?’

‘One by one, a
bit like the animals trooping into the ark. When they turned up for
what they thought were interviews for a nice little apartment in
Hong Kong. The chair clamped around them, drugged them a little
while we went to work on their talons–’

‘And cages? You
caged their wings too?’

‘Sure; same
thing as with the talons, son. We couldn’t allow them to transform,
when just one beat of those wings could break a man’s back. How
many soldiers would take part in the patrols if we didn’t keep the
dragons caged and sedated? And that, like I say, is when I saw it;
damn near turned my stomach it did?’

‘What, the
cages?’

He looked at
Jake like he might be playing being stupid again.

‘No, not the
cage
! The
eggs
! They lay eggs! Just how sick is
that
?’

*

Celly had lied
to him again.

Just like she
had about the dragons being able to breathe fire.

The dragons
did
lay eggs!

And, as Jones
had said, that, was really really sick!

Jones had left
now, leaving Jake to finish what was left of his breakfast, to
freshen up with a shower in his room and put on the fresh change of
clothes they’d bought him. As he placed what was left of his old
clothes in the waste basket beneath the room’s desk, something fell
out of his one and only complete pocket, falling to the floor with
a light clump on the thick carpet.

He bent down,
picked it up.

It was the
memory stick that Celly had given him.

He was about to
throw it into the basket with the rest of his clothes – funny, he
thought, how even now I’m trying to keep things tidy, when by
tomorrow the whole hotel will probably be a tangled wreck – when he
noticed that a laptop lay on top of the desk.

He twirled the
stick between his fingers, wondering if–

He opened up and
switched the computer on, plugged in the stick.

Was it just
going to be more of Celly’s lies?

Or would it –
even worse – be nothing more than a crude, taunting video revealing
the love that had grown between her and Leon?

*

Jake sat by the
pool, where he’d been told by Jones to wait until a soldier called
to take him to the station.

No one was in
the pool. It had been left as a banqueting ground for a large flock
of swallows, who continually swooped down to feast on the hundreds
of small insects trapped by and floating on the lazily swelling
waves.

There were few
other people left in the hotel, but they were all people like him,
sitting around the pool waiting to be collected.

Privileged
people, who would be saved from the wrath of the
dragons.

Being both
well-educated and highly intelligent, the dragons had soon realised
that the food being shipped into Hong Kong had been not only
stripped of any nutritional value, but had also been laced with
sedatives and even deadly bacteria. Medicines, too, had been
adulterated, frequently causing more problems than they
cured.

As he had now
seen for himself on the video contained on the memory stick, the
dragons had been left with no choice but to separate the better
quality food from the dangerous and the drugged. The young, the
healthy, were supplied with the former. The older dragons,
including Celly’s parents and Leon’s father, despite their
organisational and leadership skills, either ate the latter or
starved.

Either way, the
second group had soon begun to die, the numbers increasing with
every passing week. And as the growing numbers of dead were shipped
out, the quantity of food being shipped in diminished.

It made
discovering a means of breaking free of the cages ever more
urgent.

Breaking
free.

Jake hadn’t
realised it, of course, from Leon’s fleeting referral to escaping
the cages, but
breaking
free of them was an apt, ugly
description of part of the method employed.

He had cringed
when he had watched the young dragons dislocating their wings to
shrug off the cages.

As the video
ended, Jake had been expecting some form of summation from Celly, a
personal message to him, perhaps, or at least an instruction on how
she expected him to use the revelations contained on the memory
stick.

But there was
nothing. Not even a last shot of her.

(Though he had
caught glimpses of her now and again in certain shots throughout
the film.)

Of course, the
message of the video was plain enough.

The dragons had
been left with no choice but to revolt and fight for their
lives.

The swallows
arched down towards the pool’s delicate waves, picked up their tit
bits, gracefully rose back into the air. It could be a metaphor for
what was soon about to happen to Tokyo and the people left trapped
within it, Jake realised; though why the insects seemed drawn to
the pool, like moths to a flame, he wasn’t sure.

‘Excuse me,’ he
said to a politely smiling waiter who arrived at his table with the
fifth fresh orange juice Jake had ordered, ‘what makes the insects
fly into the water?’

Although Jake
had no understanding of Japanese, he couldn’t fail to recognise
that the waiter was apologising for his own lack of understanding.
A woman seated at a nearby table interrupted, speaking to the
waiter in what Jake presumed must be an adequate level of Japanese
for the man began to enthusiastically answer, including in his
reply an undulating of his hands replicating the rippling of the
water.

‘He says that
normally the filter is on, so you don’t see so many insects,’ the
woman explained to Jake. ‘But he believes that the rippling light
confuses them.’

The waiter
smiled and nodded.

‘Thank you,’
Jake said to him, nodding his thanks. ‘And thank you to you too,’
he added, turning back to smile gratefully at the woman.

‘
It’s
a strange thing to be worrying about at a time like this; insects,’
the woman said, giving him a weak smile in return, her eyes creased
and soulless.

‘Yes, yes,
you’re right,’ Jake admitted, turning back to see the waiter
briskly walking back between the tables, a number of empty bottles
and glasses held high on his silver platter.

Would he be one
of the lucky ones who would be allowed to leave? Jake
wondered.

He stared back
at the pool, focusing on the rippling light. Yes, the waiter’s
explanation seemed reasonable. Hadn’t even he been bewildered by
the fluctuating lights of the helicopter as it descended over the
mob who, he was sure, had been about to kill him?