Burn(63)

She could see whatever it was skimming over treetops that bent in the rush of wind as it passed. It was big, and it just kept coming, fast and huge. She probably should have called for her dad, but a cold ball of fear held her in place. She hadn’t felt like this since her mom had driven off with the electrician, waving out the back window as they disappeared into the forest. They had yet to return.

It had to be a bat. The wings were the wrong shape for a bird. Or there was an Air Force base on the other side of the mountains; she knew that, her dad went there sometimes. Maybe it was—

A geyser of flame shot from the thing less than a mile from her house, lighting up the huge ranger tower that stood there, at first as a silhouette in the night but only for a moment before it exploded.

“Daddy?” she said, quietly.

The thing was still coming, so much faster now it seemed. Would it explode their house, too?

“Daddy?” she said again, a little more loudly. He was doing work in the living room, she knew, but it was just that little bit too far away to hear her.

It got closer, closer, then whoosh it was over the house and gone. She ran out of her bedroom, down the hall, and burst into the living room. Her father looked up from his papers, eyebrows raised.

“Grace?”

She ran right for the front door, flinging it open and barreling out onto the porch, which overlooked the town. She barely realized she was still carrying her book.

“Grace, what are you doing?” her father said, stepping out behind her. “It’s bedtime.”

“There’s a monster,” she said.

Her father looked out to where she was facing. “My God,” he whispered. He put a protective hand on her chest, as if to guide her behind him, but his eyes stayed on the town.

Whatever it was, the giant bird or airplane or whatever, it was lighting up the night like fireworks, moving from house to house over the few rows of streets where people lived in Pinedale. One by one they all exploded. People were running outside now and, even at this distance, Grace could hear them screaming.

The thing went after them, sometimes blasting them into nothing with the fire from its mouth, sometimes picking them up with that same mouth and swallowing them whole. It chased the people into the center of town and breathed its fire on the general store and Mary’s Diner, destroying both, barely leaving enough behind to burn.

“Go to the bunker,” her father said.

“But Daddy—”

“There’s blankets in there. You’ll be warm.”

“What about you?”

He turned to her at that. “I’ll be there in a minute, but it’s not safe out here for you.”

“What is that?”

Her father looked back out into the town. The huge thing was flying high up in the air now, then coming back down with a fast plummet to knock the steeple off the little Presbyterian church that served pretty much all the faiths of Pinedale.

“Go to the bunker,” he said, not yelling, but firmly enough to make her feet move.

She ran out the back, her bare feet gasping against the cold. He’d shown her plenty of times how to work the bunker door, and she was inside in a moment, though not quick enough to stop her teeth from chattering.

Her father had built it when the Russians first started testing what her ears heard as “the bom.” She didn’t know exactly what one was, but it was enough for her father to dig out a hollow under their house, line it with concrete, and stock it with food and blankets. Blankets she was grateful for as she buried herself under them, only just now noticing that Little House in the Big Woods was still in her hand.

How they ran. How they screamed. It was almost medieval, like in “The Wife of Bath’s Tale,” where Chaucer described a dragon attack as the travelers reached an inn. That dragon had been talked out of the air, though, and into providing food for the group.

She would not.

The houses smoldered and popped. The shops at the center of town, too. Even the church had fallen before her. All that was left was a gas station, which she was saving until last. She flew above it, inhaled to blast fire onto two large underground tanks of gasoline that would blow the surrounding area into the sky—

She smelled something . . .

Something terribly, terribly familiar.

She took another circle of the town. There were outlying survivors and a few outbuildings that weren’t worth her bother. What was the point of an attack like this if there weren’t at least a few survivors to report what had happened? The war on this world had to begin sometime, and it might as well be tonight.

But that smell. That something in the air. She breathed in deep—

And it was gone. Strong and present, then vanished.

She racked her dragon mind for what it might be, something so familiar yet elusive. She came up with no explanation, and honestly, felt as if one wasn’t needed. So what if something smelled like her old world? She wasn’t in her old world. She was someone new in a new place altogether. She laughed to herself and circled back to town.

The gas station went up like an atom bomb.

“Grace?” her father said, shutting the airtight door to the shelter. She had felt distant booms rumbling through the ground as the monster continued its wave of destruction.

“I’m here, Daddy,” she said.

He climbed down the short steps and hugged her to himself. “Is it the bom?” she asked.