Joshua McCune - Talker 25

Six dragons glide through the stratosphere, wing to wing. Four Reds flank two Silvers that are identical in every way save for their brilliant luminosity.

In the next instant, bullet tracers crisscross the sky. The Reds split away. Several jets chase them off screen, but the one with the video feed stays on the Silvers.

Two missiles race into view. The brighter Silver somersaults around and opens its mouth, but nothing happens.

A blur of red sweeps up from the corner of the screen and throws itself in front of the inbound missiles. When fire and smoke clear, a dragon hovers in the air, its glow gone. It spreads its jaws, releases a tiny puff of fire, and falls head over tail into the clouds.

The other Silver dives after the dead Red, but the brighter one has vanished.

Keith shuts off the tablet.

I swallow. “Where did it go?”

“I don’t know, but it could return.” Keith grabs my arm. “Let’s go.”

We’re almost to the blast door when my phone vibrates.

“Dad?” I backstep quickly before the signal dies.

“Melissa? Why aren’t you in the shelter?”

“I’m with Keith. Sam and I got in a fight. He . . . he ran away. I don’t know where. It’s all my fault, Dad.”

“It’s not your fault. We’ll go look for him together. Let me talk to Keith.”

I hand the phone over. A few seconds into the conversation, Keith steers me up the stairs and out the front door. APCs surround the scorched field where the Silver made its last stand, All-Blacks pick over shards of ice in the MK High parking lot, and army helicopters create an airspace perimeter against the half-dozen news choppers.

“You and the young lady need to get back inside, Major,” an All-Black says.

“Colonel Callahan’s coming to pick up his daughter,” Keith says as I spot Dad’s Prius at the edge of the parking lot. The loud whir of helicopter blades silences his approach.

The A-B lifts a visor adorned with a patchwork of red dragon scales to reveal a face weathered by age on one side and burned by fire on the other. “This isn’t open for discussion. You don’t have authority here. Why don’t you go back inside and teach your kids to stay in their shelters better?”

“Watch it, Sergeant,” Keith says. “Let’s go, Melissa.”

“No, I’m waiting here,” I say. The All-Black smirks at me. “Smile all you want, you don’t have any authority to tell me what to do.”

He runs his tongue along his upper teeth. “Feisty ragger, aren’t you? Stay out of our way, girl, and if something happens I hope Daddy’s here to help you, because we won’t bail your pretty ass out.”

I return his smug smile. With his back to the road, he didn’t see Dad drive up. Busy ogling me, he must not have heard him get out of the car either.

“Daddy is here, Sergeant.” My father stands beside the Prius, arms folded, jaw stiff. He opens the passenger door. “Get in the car, Melissa.”

I press my middle finger to my lips and kiss it at the burned soldier as I get in.

“You ever talk to my daughter like that again—” Dad shuts the door, cutting his sentence short, but I happily construct my own dialogue.

After Dad sends the A-B on his way and talks to Keith, he returns to the car, his features on the volcanic side of angry. I reach over and hug him. The tension in his chest softens, and he’s hugging me back. “I’m sorry, Dad. I’m sorry about everything.”

He releases me, then starts the car. “I don’t know what I’d do if you or Sam got hurt. You have to protect him. And yourself, Melissa. Keith told me what you did.” He pulls out of the parking lot wearing a sad smile. “You’re too much like your mother sometimes.”

Two Humvees block the road into town. Columns of smoke billow into the air from the center of the housing district. A-Bs patrol the parking lots of the adjacent Walmart and Kroger’s, ordering curious shoppers back inside.

We stop at the roadblock. Dad lowers his window as an All-Black approaches. Unlike the other soldiers, he’s not wearing a helmet decorated with dragon scales. He’d look young except for his eyes. He salutes.

“Any news, Captain?” Dad asks.

“Your son is at the bivouac receiving treatment for smoke inhalation.” He glances at me, then leans in and says something I can’t hear.

Smoke inhalation. We learn about it every year in our Dragon Ed classes. When I was younger, they had a cartoon. I first saw it in second grade. It showed a sharp-toothed Green breathing fire on houses. Most of us laughed. The teacher shushed us as a cyclone of smoke with red eyes and a wicked grin emerged from the destruction and swept across the streets, swallowing uneducated boys and girls in its giant mouth.

Though they stopped using the video after elementary school, the message shown on the screen at the end still looms on placards in many classrooms. “Half the time it’s not the fire that gets you,” I whisper. It was always a joke before.

Dad frowns at me. “Thank you, Captain. I’ll be back to collect samples after I check on my son.”

The All-Black circles his finger in the air. The Humvees clear a lane for us.

“Is Sam okay?” I blurt the instant Dad shuts his window.

“He suffered a mild case of smoke inhalation. He’ll be fine,” he says in his doctor voice, the one he used when Mom was in the hospital.

“What do you mean, ‘fine’?”

“He’s asleep right now.”

“You mean in a coma,” I say. “That’s what you mean, isn’t it? Don’t lie to me, Dad. Please don’t.”

“He’s in an induced sleep, Mel. Not a coma.”

“Then what was all that stuff the A-B was telling you?”

“It’s something to do with the dragons.” He steers the car around a pile of charred timbers. “Something that doesn’t concern you.”

“Stop treating me like I’m still your little girl. Tell me what’s going on.”

After a heavy silence he says, “The dragons have started to breed.”

“I thought they were sterile,” I whisper. In the early days of the dragon war, when terror dominated, it was this belief that gave people hope. For whatever reason, the dragons couldn’t reproduce in our world. That’s what the government said, that’s what scientists said, that’s what parents said. Their numbers were limited. One day they would be gone. But now . . . “How?”

“Cross-pollination,” Dad says.

“Like lion plus tiger equals liger, except with dragons?” I say. “Red plus Green makes Silver?”

“Red plus Blue, we think. We even checked that a few years back,” he says. “Just not under the right thermal conditions.”

I give a bitter laugh. “It’s Dragon Hole, isn’t it? That’s where the Silvers came from. That’s why the All-Blacks came this morning.”

He gives the slightest nod, stares into the smoke. “They plan on destroying it.” He sounds upset. I’m not sure why until he says, “I know it’s the right thing to do, but it seems wrong to kill children.”

My breath sticks in my throat as I stare out the window. That Silver was larger than Old Man Blue. Almost the size of the Green that killed Mom. “That’s a child? Why’s it so big, Dad? Why’s it breathe ice? And it can see black, right?”

“I don’t know, Melissa,” he says, squeezing my hand. “We’ll find out. It’ll be okay.”

Dad weaves the car around shattered glass, holes in the street, chunks of jet. The wreckage worsens as we near the crash site. The homes here resemble split-open dollhouses—roofs, walls, entire sections no longer exist. Street-embedded sprinklers shoot water into their charred guts, ruining whatever the fire didn’t.

A slogan from a local bank back in Virginia pops into my head. “Dragon shelters save lives, not memories.” I don’t remember the rest—something about storing your precious keepsakes in vaults before it’s too late.