Dragonpocalypse 1: Burn It All Down Read online

  DRAGONPOCALYPSE

  PART ONE: BURN IT ALL DOWN

  M. R. Bowers

  Copyright © 2013 Matthew Robert Bowers

  All rights reserved.

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  CHOOSE!

  About the author

  PROLOGUE

  The heat was incredible, but these creatures were born in fire. Entering a planet’s atmosphere was nothing to them.

  Nor was this the first time they’d endured a journey such as this. For some of the younger warriors, this was only their second or third planetfall, but there were elders among them who’d been through thirty, sixty, even a hundred of these drops. The oldest warrior present claimed to have been through more than a thousand, and while no one quite believed him, he was old enough for it to be possible.

  For their masters had been at this for quite a long while, longer than anyone living could remember. The masters claimed that the winged ones had always been their slaves, that their ancestors had come into servitude willingly and gratefully, but only the most foolish believed such nonsense. However the initial meeting of the two species had gone, however, no one could dispute that the winged ones were slaves now, and had been for a very long time. Most assumed that they would always be slaves — the masters all did, certainly — but there were some amongst the winged ones who dreamed of the day that they might be free, free to go where they would, and not wreak havoc and destruction for the sakes of those who held them in servitude. There were even those who whispered and plotted and made moves — subtle ones, but moves nonetheless — that would bring that far-off imaginary day a little closer.

  This was not that day, however. This was just another planetfall, just another campaign beginning. The youngest amongst them were still naïve enough to be excited, but the older warriors knew this would be little more than routine. The creatures on this world were small, fragile things, possessing of some advanced technology, true, but nothing that would give the warriors in the pods now breaking through the lower layers of the ionosphere much trouble. There would be a few injuries amongst the warriors, perhaps even a few deaths, but at the end of the day it would be just another slaughter. Then the masters would come, the warriors would slink back to their cages, and the Harvest would begin. As it always did. As, most believed, it always would.

  No one, not even the most imaginative amongst the youngest warriors, had any notion of what lay in store for them on that glittering green and blue planet below. Why would they? The people of Earth seemed unremarkable in almost all regards. And that may, in fact, be the case. However, “almost,” the warriors were about to learn, could be an important — and dangerous — qualifier.

  The pods split up, each veering off for its chosen landing site. And their appointment with humanity.

  CHAPTER ONE

  For Dana to have been where she was when everything began was pure chance, really. She hardly ever came down to the Embarcadero, and she avoided Pier 39 — the tourist trap to end all tourist traps in a town that was already a little too touristy for her taste — at all costs. The last time she’d been down here had been on a busy Saturday a few months back, at the behest of her little sister. When Diana had driven up to Portland for college she’d stopped by for a visit, and she’d wanted the full San Francisco tourist experience. Dana had indulged her, as big sisters are supposed to, but she’d gritted her teeth almost the entire time. So many people.

  And now her mom had asked her for a poster, one of those black-and-white jobs of the Golden Gate Bridge from when it was still being built. Dana could have found it online, but it was just easier to come down here to tourist central. And since one of the perks of being a full-time musician was that you got to set your own hours, she was able to come around three in the afternoon on a Tuesday, when the outdoor shopping center was relatively quiet.

  It was a gorgeous day, so, having purchased the poster, she wandered on down to the end of the pier to look out over the bay. The sky was a bright, brilliant blue, which was reflected back darker in the cold, unusually still waters of the bay below. Out ahead of her was Alcatraz Island, a tiny hump of land in the middle of the bay. Rising up behind it like an older sibling was Angel Island, a much larger hump of land further north of the city. To her left were the iconic International Orange columns of the Golden Gate Bridge, and to her right, the more understated and practical steel girders of the Bay Bridge.

  Her pocket buzzed. Shifting the poster from beneath her right arm to beneath her left, she reached into her purse and fished out her phone.

  PETER, the caller ID proclaimed. She briefly considered letting the call go to voice mail, but answered it, instead. “Hey Pete.”

  “You know what’s amazing about me?”

  Despite herself, Dana smiled. Agreeing to go out with Peter had occurred during one of her rare whimsical moments, though Dana wasn’t entirely sure why she’d continued to go out with him, and, a month later, was in fact still going out with him. Dana’s roommate had a number of thoughts on the matter, most of them revolving around the theory that Dana was emotionally barren and Peter was the cool moisturizing salve her dry and brittle heart needed. Dana herself thought she was just tired of dating self-important musicians, and that a deeply insecure comedian was a nice change of pace. Plus the sex was pretty good.

  “What’s amazing about you … I dunno, you have nice feet, I guess.”

  “I have magnificent feet, but no, that’s not what I meant. What’s amazing about me is my generosity, my connections, the way I pay attention …”

  “Is this leading somewhere, or did you just call me to compliment yourself?”

  “Man, you try and lead into something, paint a picture —“

  “Peter!”

  “I got us into the party Friday night!”

  “What party?”

  “Dana.”

  Dana blinked. “THE party? The one with —”

  “Yep.”

  “And the blogger who —”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Holy shit!” This prompted a glare from a middle-aged woman passing by, and giggles from her two children, but Dana barely noticed. “How did you even swing that?”

  “I sucked a lot of dicks.”

  “Peter.”

  “My dad knows a guy who knows a guy.”

  “Wow. This is huge. If I can talk with —“

  “Yeah.”

  “And if he can give us some publicity on his —“

  “Yeah!”

  “Holy shit. Thank you so much, Peter. Thank your dad for me.”

  “Yeah, no problem. Hey, maybe one of these days you can thank him yourself.”

  Oy. “Mmmmmmyeah, one of these days!”

  “Uh-huh.” She could hear the smile. “Anyway, I just wanted to …”

  There was silence on the other end. Dana frowned. “Pete, you still there?”

  More silence, and then: “what the fuck?”

  Dana blinked. “Peter?”

  “Yeeeah. Dana, you still down at Pier 39?”

  Dana shook her head at the strange turn the conversation had just taken. “Yeah, why?”

  “Can you see the Golden Gate Bridge from where you are?”

  She turned towards it. “Yeah, why —“

  Her mouth dropped open, and her phone almost slipped from her grip. “What the fuck?”

  “You see it, right? I’m not losing my mind?”

  “What the hell is that?”

  Da
na — and presumably Peter, as well — was staring at the north tower of the Golden Gate Bridge. There was … something … sitting on top of the tower, some kind of big dark shape that Dana couldn’t make out clearly. Gasps and murmurs from the second level of Pier 39 above her told Dana that others had spotted the large dark shape as well.

  Peter was still talking. “Dana, do you have a better view than me? I can’t even tell what that thing is. It’s huge!”

  “No, I — oh, fuck me. Wait a sec.” Fumbling in her purse, Dana extracted a handful of change. Letting most of it fall back into her purse, she came up with a quarter and hurried over to the end of the pier, where a pair of coin-op telescopes were mounted. Feeding a quarter into the grimy sightseeing gadget, she angled the telescope as far to the left as it would go before peering through its viewfinder. It took her a moment to locate the bridge, and another to position the ‘scope so that it was aimed at the north tower, but then —

  “What the fuck?”

  “Dana?”

  She’d almost forgotten the phone she was still holding to her ear. “I don’t even know, dude. It must be some kind of publicity stunt for a movie or something.”

  “What is it?”

  “It’s, it’s like a big bat or something.”

  “A bat?”

  “Yeah, I can see the outline of its wings, and the little claws at the ends, and woahholyshit!” She flinched back from the ‘scope.

  “Dana?!?”

  “Jesus fucking Christ, it moved!”

  “It moved?”

  “It fucking moved! Pete, the fucking thing moved!”

  “Okay, calm down —“

  “You calm down, you fucking asshole, that goddamn thing’s alive!”

  “Come on, there’s no way that —“

  “There’s a goddamn giant fucking bat on the top of the goddamn Golden Gate Bridge and it’s fucking real and it’s fucking alive and —“

  Here a scream from above cut her off. Quickly she moved back to the ‘scope and peered through.

  She gasped.

  “Dana,” Peter said, his voice suddenly soft. “I don’t think that’s a bat.”

  The creature had unfolded its wings and straightened up, craning its long neck towards the sky, and Peter was right. It was definitely not a bat.

  It was difficult to tell through the smudged lens of the coin-op telescope, but the creature’s color seemed to be a dark blue that shimmered slightly in the sunlight. It had a long, slender, powerful-looking body that looked to be at least twenty or thirty feet long. Each wing extended out to at least twice that width, giving it a total wingspan that had to be over sixty feet. The thing was enormous.

  Jagged, irregular spines ran down the thing’s back, from the top of its head to the bottom of its long tail. The tail itself added another forty or fifty feet to the thing’s length. And the head —

  The head was the most unsettling part of the whole creature. It had a long, narrow snout which ended in a beak-like protrusion that looked both sharp and powerful. The spines from the thing’s back came down to around the middle of the its forehead, giving it an even more menacing and sinister countenance than it might have had otherwise. And the eyes …

  Even at this great distance, through the filthy lens of a tourist’s toy that hadn’t been cleaned in thirty years, those eyes gave Dana a cold chill. They were a deep ochre yellow, with vertical slits for pupils, like a cat’s. And maybe it was just the ridges above the eyes that mimicked a human’s furrowed brow, or maybe it was simply her imagination — already faced with an impossible scenario — running wild, but Dana fancied she could perceive a deep, malevolent intelligence in those eyes. It looked around, cocking its head this way and that, until its attention seemed captured by something behind Dana. It raised its head a bit further, its powerful claws shifting on the edge of the bridge tower for the best position. It then straightened its long body, tossed its head back, and screamed.

  Dana almost dropped the phone a second time. The sound went right through her, gave her another chill. It sounded like an incredibly high-pitched air horn, but sharper. It cut through her like nails on a chalkboard, or splinters in her eardrums. She’d never heard a living creature make a sound even remotely close to what that scream sounded like.

  That is, until an answering cry came from behind her.

  Dana’s head jerked up away from the ‘scope and she spun around. When her eyes lit upon what had made that second cry — presumably what the first monster had been screaming at in the first place — she almost screamed herself. “There’s another one!” she babbled into the phone. “Jesus holy fuck, there’s a goddamn ‘nother one!”

  Perched atop Bay Bridge, on the tower closest to Yerba Buena Island, this one was at least twice as big as its friend on the Golden Gate Bridge. A bright, brilliant green that shimmered gold when the sun hit it, even without the benefit of the ‘scope Dana could see it too had its head raised and its wings spread, in answer to whatever the smaller blue monster had shouted a moment prior.

  Peter was in her ear, asking her to describe what she was seeing. She opened her mouth to attempt to do just that, when both creatures, almost as one, let out another one of those awful screams. Then the green one flapped its wings once, twice, three times, and was in the air.

  Dana whirled around. The blue one was lifting off as well.

  Another monstrous scream from behind made her swing around again. The green one had dropped to the deck of the bridge and was looking down at the road. Dana tried to imagine what it must look like to the drivers on the bridge, this giant green monster towering sixty feet above them, staring down at them with those horrible yellow eyes —

  Fhwoosh. As far away as she was, Dana couldn’t actually hear anything, but she fancied she could. The green monster had opened its beaked mouth, giving Dana a brief glimpse of a thick tongue whipping about inside, and then a gout of flame had issued forth from the creature’s mouth and covered the roadway with fire.

  Another inhuman cry sent her attention back to the Golden Gate Bridge. The blue one was also on the roadway, also vomiting fire out onto the cars below. Brief flare-ups in the steady barrage of flame told Dana that the cars were exploding. She saw tiny points of flame falling off of either side of the bridge, and belatedly realized they were people.

  Other onlookers were starting to gather around her now, pointing and exclaiming and gasping, and the murmur of voices from the second level had increased as well, but Dana barely noticed. Peter was still jibbering in her ear, but she hardly heard that, either. Pretty much all she was hearing was the blood pounding in her ears, and the imagined screams of the people whose flesh was being melted off their bones.

  The fire being spewed by the creature on the Golden Gate Bridge flickered and died. A quick glance back told Dana the creature on the Bay Bridge had also ceased its assault. Whether the monsters had exhausted their supply of flames, or they were simply satisfied with the damage they’d wrought, Dana couldn’t say. She could imagine what the decks of the bridges must look like up close: smoking, blackened pavement, dotted with the charred remains of cars and the charred remains of people.

  Another blood-curdling double cry, and the creatures were airborne again. Swinging her head back and forth, Dana watched as both creatures slowly flapped their wings, gaining altitude. They each rose from their respective bridges, first coming level with the tops of the towers, then rising above them. They each hovered there above the bridges for a moment, flapping their wings to stay aloft, and pointing their angular, beaked heads towards the city.

  Then, with another double-cry that chilled Dana to the core, the creatures dove towards the city of San Francisco.

  People around her were pushing, shouting, screaming, no doubt hurrying to get back to their homes and loved ones — or maybe just get the fuck outta dodge. Dana glanced around at the suddenly empty pier, unsure of what she herself should do.

  “What’s happening?” Peter was shouting through t
he phone Dana was somehow still holding to her ear. “Where’d they go? What’s going on?”

  Dana heard another one of those horrible screams, and the distant sound of an explosion.

  “They’re attacking,” Dana said in a dull monotone. “The dragons are attacking San Francisco.”

  CHAPTER TWO

  “No, I’m coming there. Stay put.” Dana shifted her phone to her other ear as she dug through her purse for her keys. On the sidewalk around her, people were sprinting frantically in both directions. On the street beside her, cars were screeching down the road at ludicrous speeds, and the sound of her roommate’s voice on the phone was almost being drowned out by the sounds of honking from the nearby parking garage. Dana had to raise her voice to make herself heard over the cacophony. “Just, I don’t know, lock the door and stay away from the windows. I’m on my way.” She disconnected the call and dropped the phone in her purse as she climbed into her car.

  She wasn’t a hundred percent sure that heading back to her apartment was the smartest choice to make, but Peter had wanted to meet her there, and she didn’t have any better ideas about what to do. Every time she thought of someplace she should go or someone she should check on, her brain chimed in with four or five other possibilities that were just as valid. Home was as good a place to start as any, though. If nothing else, she could check on her roomie and grab some things. And it was also as good a place as any to meet up with Peter and see what his plans were.

  When she’d arrived at Pier 39 she’d been delighted to find a parking spot on the street. What had been merely convenient before was now a godsend, however, as she wasn’t trapped in the parking garage trying to exit with a hundred other cars. She tossed her purse on the passenger seat, the poster for her mom in the back, and started the car. Checking behind her for any more speeding lunatics, she pulled out into traffic.