Burn(81)

Twenty-Four


THE DRAGON WOKE.

And knew who she was.

She left her clutch of eggs on the mountaintop. It was morning; she didn’t know how long she’d slept, but it didn’t matter.

It mattered less than anything had ever mattered.

They trapped me, she thought. For thousands of years, they robbed me of who I was.

Because they were afraid.

As she flew up through the thinning winter clouds, she had only one thought in her mind.

They will pay.

She flew north and west, her nose guiding her toward the highest concentration of human smell. Once she was away from the mountains and the forests began to thin, she saw how they infested the land. Long strips of road for their belching cars, vast empty swathes of pitifully weak houses, even down to the great water that dipped into the landscape, where boats spilled oil into the world.

Rage filled her, familiar but now given a rein she could never have imagined. She had been one of them. She had been forced to live as one of them. For century upon century. Her own creation had done this, she remembered now, but she would not make the same mistakes twice. Her new brood would wake to a world where humans were already on the run. The broods after that might wake to a planet where humans had never been.

Look at them here. Humans were vermin, a disease.

She hated them with her whole raging, fiery heart.

It was time they learned their place.

She considered the first large town she flew over, a stinking cesspit with factories and refineries all along the waterfront. But even from this height, the smell was almost choking. She flew on, north, over the strip of concrete she remembered in her old world, one she had driven in a car like the thousands down there, trapped, earthbound, propelled by a fire she never fully understood, until now, until this very morning. The thrill of her new knowledge, the fury of it, rose in her gut again and she couldn’t stop herself from swooping down to freeway level, just over the roofs of the cars, taking a deep breath and—

Oh, the release. The fire—no, fire was wrong, fire had always been wrong, this was more than just flame, this was annihilation, erasure.

Half a dozen cars in front of her disintegrated. Others drove right off the road, smashing into trees and one another at the sight of the destruction, at the sight of her. She blazed the lanes traveling in the same direction as her, then veered into oncoming traffic, already colliding and breaking into itself as they watched her bear down on them, as they watched their end uncurl from the mouth of this impossible beast. She could hear their screams. She could smell the roasting of their skin, the boiling of their fat.

She was their rightful end, coming from the sky.

Seattle approached. As a human, she had visited New York once. She had been overwhelmed by the skyscrapers there, buildings so tall, you had to lean back to even see the top, buildings that gave you vertigo just standing next to them. Seattle had, as yet, no similar heights, which made her angrier still. She’d have liked to knock one over. Ah, well, a conflagration would have to do. She aimed her head to the sky and soared straight up.

From high above, the city was more or less a north/south strip, a massive lake one side, the saltwater Sound on the other. It rose and fell over a number of sharp hills, all thoughts of it bent to the water.

There would be less room to flee.

A buzz sounded on the edge of her hearing. She spotted two small planes, heading toward her. Silvery husks with rounded noses. She remembered some of the information she’d gathered in her undercover role in the government. The planes were F-86s. The fastest ones the military had.

So they knew she was here.

Good.

She whirled about. She flew slower than an airplane—so she assumed, but that was a hypothesis worth testing one day soon—but maneuverability was no contest. She flew down in the simplest of loops, and by the time she’d turned once more, she was on an intercept path with the planes from below.

She inhaled a long breath, but then changed her mind, simply slamming into the planes with her anger. She was winded, but both aircraft crumpled into pieces with a thrilling ease. She watched those pieces fall, fall, fall, a mile out of the sky.

She finished her loop high above the city and let herself fall, too, wings outspread, breath intaken, the buildings growing closer and closer, so close she could see people on the streets screaming, hear a siren starting to wail, the terror beginning to spread.

“I AM YOUR END!” she said, as she let go her breath.

The first building exploded, her fire blasting out the entire ground floor and bringing down the eight floors above it in an almost slow-motion tumble. She breathed in again, held it, felt the temperature rise and rise, before blowing it on an even taller building. The entire front half nearly evaporated before the rest of it toppled backward like it had been shot with a gun.

The people were running, screaming now, going in all directions. She spread her wings and flew this way and that, killing swathes of them by altering her mouth so the spray of fire became exactly as wide as the street. Up they went. Their pointless little lives over in one breath.

She flew over two police cars, parked, with officers outside, their guns aimed at her, bullets flying. She felt them as so much sand on the wind.

They had no idea how to face a dragon. No idea at all.

“I AM FIRE!” she roared over them, her voice, her words, causing more screams and people to stop and stare up at her in wonder. “I CANNOT BE CONSUMED!”