Fantasmagoria (19 page)

A shadow fell over the city.

Jack looked up to see the spread wings of a steel-armored war dragon blot the sun. The light shone through tiny tears in the leather as it fell between buildings and landed on top of the drug-addicted megalosaurus, pushing it through the facade of a nearby brownstone. Glass and brick fell amid competing roars—the dinosaur’s like a waterfall, the dragon’s an explosion. But Jack could still hear the children scream over the din. They had been hiding in a second-floor bathroom, half of which was now gone. If any adults had been with them, they were pancaked in rubble.

“Shit.” Jack kept his ass clenched tight.

The dragon perched on the half-prone saurus with its hind legs, its batlike arms spreading its wings wide in triumph. It seemed surprised to find a man underneath.

“You asshole!” Jack screamed at the dragon.

Its jaws snapped once, then twice. Then came the great rumble, like the bellows of an industrial furnace. The dragon was inhaling. It bent its long neck.

“There are kids--”

There was an eruption of flame. With wings lifted over the rubble, the dragon bathed the horn-rimmed dinosaur in the ejecta from its fire-organ. Jack was doused. He screamed and kept screaming as the dragon’s breath blew white-hot.

When the inferno subsided, most of the pseudoflesh had been burned from his body. What remained was black and smoking and clung to his metal exoskeleton, the tips of which glowed red. The air around him shimmered with his own heat.

Jack couldn’t remember ever seeing himself fleshless. He stared at his exoskeleton. It was gilded, etched in ornamentation, and riddled with swooping gaps that teased him with glimpses of the writhing mechanisms underneath. It was beautiful.

The straps broke. Jack fell two stories to the basement and landed with a crash. His metal frame cracked the concrete.

“Fuck.”

Everything hurt. He wasn’t sure he had the energy to stand. He looked from the basement up to the second floor but couldn’t tell if the children were alive or dead. The megalosaur was smoking. The horns that crested its body were still on fire, but it was breathing. Organic armor doesn’t conduct heat, and the animal’s plates were thick and all-encompassing. Jack figured it probably wouldn’t survive its wounds, but it wasn’t dead. And it wasn’t done.

The dragon was only two-thirds the size of its opponent, but its head, neck, breast, and forelimbs were covered in segmented metal armor, a gray-scaled white knight. It stayed perched on the behemoth underneath, trying to use its weight to keep the saurus down.

In their element, war dragons were the top predator, and they knew it. Most were bred for aerial anti-tank combat. One well-trained war dragon with a good plan of attack could single-handedly eliminate an entire column of mobile artillery. They were fast, and their angled metal armor was designed to deflect and detach, meaning they were impervious to any shelling other than a straight kill shot.

Jack looked up. The winged soldier was gloating. It had no inkling of the street brawl it had started.

The saurus lunged. It wasn’t one-tenth as smart as the dragon, but it had a hunter’s instinct, and it went straight for the throat. Its massive jaws clamped around the dragon’s slender, extended neck. Metal bent. Detachable armor clattered to the street under an immeasurable bite-force. The dinosaur pushed forward on legs three times as thick as its flight-worthy opponent and, without letting go of the dragon, rammed it into the opposite row of buildings. Glass and signage fell as smoke billowed from the saurus’s still-smoldering plates.

Jack didn’t wait. He lifted himself as fast as he could and climbed the cracked remnants of a concrete staircase. He still couldn’t move his draw arm, and, like the dinosaur, he was smoking. His left leg had trouble pivoting, and he dragged his foot like a tiny corpse. Each step was hard labor.

But the children were still alive, and when he heard their sobs, Jack collapsed with a sigh against the smoldering ruins of the building’s street-level entryway. Mail from the shattered metal box lay on the ground. Wires sparked.

Across the street, the dragon was whimpering through its half-closed throat. It flapped its wings and scratched at the saurus with clawed feet. It gouged the heavy plates and scraped the ash away in inch-thick grooves, but it was almost breathless and panicking and the damage was haphazard. The saurus wasn’t letting go.

A car screeched to a halt next to the dinosaur’s spiked feet.

“Jack?”

“Verrrnaa-a-a-a-l.” Jack’s voice box stuttered a mechanical drone. He was out of energy. He couldn’t even lift his hands. This was it. The end.

“Jack!” Vernal leapt from the idling car wearing a flower-print sun dress. He had no shoes, his hand was bloody, and his neck was caked in vomit. “Come on, Jack. We gotta go.”

The dragon inhaled as best it could and forced a futile volley of fire into the sky. Its armor was the only thing keeping its neck attached to its body. Its wings flapped and blew dust from the street.

Jack shook his head. He couldn’t move. The gears behind his jaw, just visible through the carved gaps in his skull, turned the corners of his mouth slowly, slowly into a smile. “D-y-y-y-i-i-n-n-n-g-g-g . . .”

Then the shelling began. Twin artillery shots ripped through buildings on both sides of the street like bullets through water. Debris flew and Vernal covered his head.

“Fuck!” The force of the explosions lifted the tiny hairs on his skin and shook his bowels.

The saurus kept the dragon pinned as another shot narrowly missed its flank and cratered into the street, sending chunks of asphalt through the car’s windows. A car alarm sounded as Vernal went down. The saurus pulled the dragon free and spun it by its neck. Vernal looked up as the dragon’s full body flew in an arc overhead. Its tail whipped through the air and struck a bank of windows.

“Like hell!” Vernal lifted his dress and pulled the key from his ass. He pushed Jack, who fell sideways like a rag doll, and stuck the key into the exposed hole in his back. Jack was still hot, and Vernal almost burned himself.

“Ow!”

He wound. One. Two. Three. Four.

The building shook loose dust as another shell landed nearby. The children screamed.

Jack heard—and felt—those wonderful, sputtering clicks as the key turned and turned. He filled with energy. He hadn’t been this strong in weeks. He’d almost forgotten.

Vernal removed the key and stuck it back between his ass cheeks.

Jack scowled at the little man, a head over half his height, and bounded up the stairs to the second floor, dragging his gimp foot. He ripped a blanket off a debris-covered bed and wrapped it around the cowering children as the saurus rammed the dragon with the horns on its head. Two more shells landed nearby.

The reports of the cannon fire were audible now. Jack looked up to see an Imperial zeppelin make a lazy turn in the sky. It was covered in white, Corinthian-carved armor punctuated by artillery bunkers from which tiny cannons peeked. The halls and towers on the roof looked like a small city, a miniature skyline that mirrored the one below. The ship was held aloft by a striated white bladder. Large fans propelled it with force.

There was a puff and a crack and a single shot whistled in an arc of smoke across the sky right toward the melee.

“Damn!” Jack leapt from the shattered-tile bathroom and fell through the hollowed opening of the building, landing in the basement again as the shot missed its target and ripped the upper floors from the brownstone. He covered the children in their blanket with his body. They screamed amid falling brick.

The dragon stumbled in the street, tripping over its wings and trying to flee. The smoking dinosaur charged for a kill strike.

A shell struck the megalosaur in the side. The creature barked and 90 feet of flesh twisted in the air, end over end, from the force of the blast. Blood and bone splattered onto the road as the carcass fell with a minor earthquake.

Jack heard cursing. He picked up the kids and strode the stairs three at a time. The dragon was regaining its breath. It shook its long, horned head back and forth and stumbled, heaving.

Vernal was drenched in saurus blood. He scowled and dripped as Jack sent the children running for safety. As long as Jack kept the dragon occupied, they would be safe. Sirens approached in the distance.

Vernal watched them disappear. “What is it with you and kids?”

Jack glanced up at the recovering dragon, who glowered down at him through a squint half-covered by its white helm. It shook its head.

“Get in the car.” Jack didn’t look at Vernal. It wasn’t a request. The metal man hobbled across the blood-soaked pavement and pointed at the dragon. “You could’ve killed them, you piece of shit.”

The dragon leaned down and turned its head sideways to get a good look at the impudent little machine. It was fleshless and ornate. Bars on its face twisted in anger at skin that wasn’t there.

“You asshole!”

The war dragon lifted his head with a snort.

“Jack . . .”

“You’re supposed to protect people!”

“Jack.”

Again there was the sound of a bellows.

“Shit.” Jack leaped onto the roof of the car in two strides as Vernal hit the gas. The tires squealed against blood-wet asphalt as the bellows rumbled deeper and deeper.

The car accelerated moments before the dragon erupted. Jack felt fire bathe over him again. He smelled burnt saurus blood. Vernal screamed in fear and excitement as the car emerged from the fireball with three of four tires ablaze and careened down Lexington. Traffic had long since cleared, and abandoned cars were the only obstacles. The distant wail of sirens grew louder.

Jack looked back. The dragon was flapping it wings, but the tips snagged against buildings on both sides of the street. It wasn’t used to urban warfare.

“GO!” Jack yelled.

“I am going!” Vernal yelled back through the shattered window.

Clinging to the roof with both hands, Jack glanced at the dragon as Vernal took a corner, nearly throwing him free. “Watch it!”

The dragon jammed its fingerlets into windows, propelling itself up a building to get a flying leap.

“You’re welcome to drive, asshole! This is your god-damned fault anyway. Fuck. Hold on.” Vernal took a left, then a right, and floored it.

“Where are you going?”

“Why did you have to antagonize a war dragon, Jack? And what the hell happened to you? You look like death took a shit all over you.” Vernal hated fleshless mechanoids.

Jack turned and saw flapping wings take to the sky in the distance. It wouldn’t take long for the beast to catch them.

“Just drive!”

The dragon arced high into the sky, turned, and for a moment was weightless; then it fell into a dive, swooping across the skyline of the city right toward the fleeing car.

“Hold on!”

A squad of police cars barreled toward them. Vernal wasn’t slowing down.

“Fuck.” Jack closed his eyes as police cruisers slammed on their brakes and skidded out of the way and into parked cars and shop fronts. Sirens whizzed by.

The dragon banked overhead and threw a fireball. Vernal hit the brakes and Jack fell onto the hood. He clutched the frame of the shattered windshield as the car took a corner at high speed. The fireball spanked a building overhead and waves of heat and glass washed over them. The shadow of the dragon passed. The creature roared and turned in the air as the speeding car ran through an alley and knocked trash into Jack’s face.

Vernal crashed through an open-air market and into a parking structure and wound around the spiral ramp toward the roof.

Jack pulled himself into the passenger’s seat. “Should we really be going up?”

“Hang on.”

The car leapt out of the tunnel as the dragon approached at attack speed. Vernal hit the gas and the dented, flame-tired automobile crashed through a retaining wall, flew over a narrow channel, and landed in a tenement hung with laundry. The walls and floors were cheap and narrow and made to support people rather than machinery, and the car fell through three stories of plywood, drywall, and recycled rebar before lodging itself at a forty-five degree angle.

“Fuck . . .”

Clothes and appliances fell over them. Residents were screaming and running away.

“Where are we?” Jack had been thrown free. He was on the ground. Something in his body was making a terrible clicking sound. He was busted.

The dragon banked overhead and gave a roar. In the distance, someone barked orders over loud speakers. Jack didn’t understand the language, but he got the message. The zeppelin was calling its pet home.

Jack looked around. “Shit.” He immediately recognized the slums of the Old Arcade, the walled enclave of the Black Hand. “This is not good.”