DRAGON CHAPTER 5

CHAPTER 5







Terra lay in bed, finding herself just staring at the ceiling, unable to sleep. With a groan, she folded her arms behind her head and looked at the flash drive sitting on her nightstand. “No…” she thought, turning away from it. “I don’t know what’s on that thing…I don’t want it screwing up my laptop…” She looked at it again, then back to the ceiling and watched as the light from a car on the street passed overhead. “then again…” She looked at it for a third time. “They haven’t tried anything yet…And Drake seems more concerned with smoking a pack a day and drinking.” Rolling onto her side, Terra grabbed the device. She looked at it closer, then rolled onto her back again and held it up in front of her, examining it as another car drove down the street. She looked at her alarm clock and saw that it was nearly three in the morning. “Well…today’s a holiday…I guess I could…” Terra flipped her sheets off her body and climbed to her hands and knees. She made her way to the edge of her bed and reached under it, pulling her laptop out and setting it on her mattress.

Hitting the power button, the computer hummed to life and the screen lit up the dark room with a pale blue light. She looked at the flash drive again, feeling uneasy about what she was doing. “I hope I don’t regret this…” she thought. “Here I go…” She tried to find a way to uncover the plug for the device, but found that it seemed to be a single solid object. “How am I supposed to use this…? There’s no way to plug it in.” Her desktop appeared on the screen and she was surprised to seen a window pop up with an image of the device. “What the heck?” Beside the image was an arrow pointing at a red circle on the back of the drive. She picked it up and placed her thumb on the circle. Suddenly, a band of red light lit up on the body of the flash drive and the computer screen went dark with nothing but a flashing text cursor in the upper left corner. “Oh-no…” Terra began to panic, trying everything she could to escape the black screen “Why did I do this!?!”

Just then, a line of text began to appear reading, “Device_authorization: personnel_ID/VS-272/ Pvt. Dej-rick Utan.” The line of text stopped and a flashing underscore appeared at the end. Then another line began to appear. “TT1_SECURITY PROTOCOL:SCANNING: CONTACTING COMMAND<HEX24/LVL3_AUTHORIZATION>”

She watched as the underscore flashed again and her heart began to race when all of a sudden, a wall of code raced down her screen. She yelped and rapidly mashed the keys, trying to exit the screen. “N-No!!! C’mon, exit, exit, exit!!!” The laptop didn’t respond.

After nearly a minute, the lines of code stopped, ending with another line of text. “TT1_SECURITY PROTOCOL:ACCESS APPROVED:<HEX24/LVL3_AUTHORIZATION> CONVERTING:<XD7401:ARTEMIS CODE FORMAT>_<CCT05506: UNIVERSAL CODE FORMAT> ”

The screen flashed again returning to the desktop, though to her surprise it wasn’t hers, or even a desktop that should appear on her brand of laptop. The background was pure white with what seemed to be a crimson ‘V’ with it’s ends tilted outward at a forty five degree angle in the center. In the upper left corner, there was a folder labeled ‘Union City Incident’. She moved her cursor over the folder, but froze again and just stared at the strange desktop before her. “I-I don’t know…Should I?” She looked at her bedroom door nervously. “There’s something going on here…Maybe I shouldn’t get involved…but…” She looked at the folder again. “I wanna know what that thing was…” She took a deep breath, then closing her eyes tight, clicked the folder. Opening her eyes, she watched a window open, with photos organized into a grid-like patter. She leaned in close, seeing some pictures that seemed to be from a first-person perspective and others from what she assumed to be helicopters, all of them showing the same, bombed out, torched, and shattered location. “This is…wow…” She scrolled through the photos, finding more and more pictures of the charred remains of people laying in the streets, then in one of them was another creature. She stared at it, studying it’s strange lizard and canine-like appearance, and getting flashbacks to the previous night. Grabbing her pillow, Terra groaned and wrapped her arms around it, getting a chill just thinking about the creature. “This is a bad idea…I don’t wanna get involved with all this but…” She scrolled through the photos again, finding her herself looking at more bodies, some of which reminded her of the people found in Pompeii. Though on closer inspection these bodies seemed to be little more than ash.  

Further down, Terra found a video file. She gripped her pillow tight with a shiver. “Maybe…this is enough…” she thought, with her cursor hovering of the play button. Then she suddenly clicked it. It appeared to be footage from a head mounted camera of some kind and it’s wearer was rushing through a raging inferno that had engulfed the city. The camera jerked upward and to her shock, revealed part of a massive white structure in the sky between the buildings. “W-Wait, is that?!”  she paused the footage on the object, hoping she might figure out what it was. “This isn’t making any sense…”

Terra awoke a few hours later with her laptop and the strange flash drive sitting her lap, half buried by her sheets. She let out a yawn and stretched before looking out her window from her bed. “Man…” she mumbled as she tried to clear her throat. “Utan’s gotta be messing with me…” She tapped the space bar on her laptop to wake it up and stared at the photos that were still open on the screen. “Then again…That creature wasn’t exactly normal…” Opening the photo of the Hound corpse again, Terra just stared at it for a moment. Leaning forward with her head resting in her hands, she sighed and looked out her window again. “I need to ask them about it again…These pictures are giving me more questions than answers…”

She got out of bed and walked out into the hall. With another yawn, she walked into the bathroom. She looked at herself in the mirror and flattened her bedhead out with her hands. “That’ll do…” she thought with a tired groan. “I don’t need to go anywhere today anyway…” Yawning yet again, she exited the bathroom and walked downstairs to find Drake sitting on the couch in her living room with the sword unsheathed and wiping the blade with a hand towel from the kitchen. “Drake, what’re you doing?” she asked, not sure if she wanted an answer.

He looked over at her with a grin and slight laugh. “Just some cleaning.” He held the sword at eye level and looked down the blade from the hilt before continuing to run the cloth along it’s edge, causing a soft muted hiss. Seeing the concerned look in her eyes, he laughed. “I didn’t kill anyone.”

Terra groaned and looked at the sword as Drake stood up and swung it a couple of times. “I don’t know how I feel about this…” she mumbled, scratching her head as he sheathed the blade. She cringed at the loud metallic scraping sound as the sword’s ran into the scabbard. “I really don’t…”

“It’s fine.”

She groaned again. “…but…Is it even legal to own a sword here? I’m not familiar with what states allow that…”

Drake laughed and motioned at the front door with the sheathed sword. “Those fuckin’ cops can’t touch me.” he said, getting a shocked look from Terra. “I’ve got some serious connections that they can’t do shit about.”

“Yeah, I kinda noticed.” She showed him the flash drive in her hand. “Your ‘guys’ were in Union city fighting something and shut down all media coverage of the event. They were even keeping it shut down after the city was destroyed.”

Drake set the sword down on her coffee table and was about to speak, when the front door shot open and Utan and Troy ran in. “Drake, we’ve got a situation downtown.” said Troy, pointing back over his shoulder. “We might’ve tracked down that guy.”

He picked up the sword and attached it to his belt. “You’re sure about that?” Terra just stood there watching. “You’ve said that a couple times now.”

“Judging by the police’s reaction to what they’re dealing with, I’m pretty sure.” There was a sudden rumble from somewhere in the city and a faint black smoke started to rise. “Oh shit…” The three of them rushed out of the house and down the street with Terra watching from her front door. She stood there for several seconds before looking at the smoke rising above the buildings. then, with a whimper, she ran after them.


Once Terra caught up with them, she took a moment to catch her breath and looked ahead of her.  She was surprised to see more men in the strange white armor, holding assault rifles, and standing in front of, what seemed to be, a barricade.  Fires raged in the street behind them.  She walked up to Drake, her attention darting all around her, and tapped him on the shoulder.

“Drake? what exactly’s going on?”

He looked back at her, surprised to see her standing there. “What the fuck?” he said, turning to her. “Get the fuck out of here.”

“I’m not going anywhere! What’s going on?!”

Ahead of them, one of the men shouted at everyone to take cover as a police cruiser was launched into the air from behind one of the buildings and slammed into the ground in a ball of fire. Drake fanned the smoke away from him with a cough, then drew his sword and gently pushed Terra away from the cruiser. “You keeping people from reporting this?” he sighed, watching the columns of smoke.

“For now. Our efforts are spread a bit thin.” answered Troy, pulling a pistol from inside his jacket.

Behind them Terra snarled, angered that her questions had been blow off once again. She looked to her right, seeing a gap in the barricade and, with a momentary lapse in her judgement, carefully made her way toward it. She looked around to make sure no one was watching her and squeezed between the large fiberglass-like barrier and the building beside it.

She moved into an alley to her right and took a moment to glance back, hoping no one noticed. “If you’re not gonna answer me, I’ll have to see what’s going on for myself.”

At the other end of the barricade, Drake lit a cigarette and looked over at Troy. “Make sure Terra doesn’t try to follow me in there, got it?” Troy nodded. “Then I guess it’s time to end this bullshit.” Drake climbed over the barrier and raced down the street toward the smoke. He reached a four-way intersection and stopped, looking around at the scorched remains of people and vehicles that surrounded him. “At least he’s weaker than last time.” he said to himself, creeping onward with his blade gripped tight in his right hand. “Where the fuck are you?”

Terra crossed an empty street and walked down another alley, as a burned, smokey, and putrid scent hit her. “What the heck is that…?” she thought, covering her nose and mouth. She moved forward and her sight slowly became obscured by a thick smoke that billowed down the alley and nearby streets. Then as she reached the next street, she felt something soft under her foot and jumped back when she saw a body on the ground, cut clean in half with it’s organs spilled onto the sidewalk. “H-Holy crap!!!” She kicked the corpse, shoving it away from her in a panic. Terra jumped to her feet and peered through the smoke at the burning remains of cruisers and SWAT vans that packed the road surrounded by piles of bodies. “Oh…my…god…”  She suddenly heard Drake calling out to someone and demanding that they show themselves in the distance, then the sound of footsteps that had a strangely metallic clang to them.

“They are fragile, are they not?” spoke a voice that she didn’t recognize. “Mortals cast to mimic our own appearance, though not in power.” She crept on, drawing closer and closer to the conversation until she saw Drake standing before another man who was pacing back and forth on the roof of a burning bus. Reaching the front end of the bus, he turned back toward her and walked toward the back. He looked like someone from a fantasy novel, wearing a leather duster similar to Drake’s, though heavier and faded to a dark gray with a severely tattered tail. On his left shoulder was what seemed to be a single, damaged, spaulder, and on his hands he wore a pair of blackened steel and leather gauntlets. Her attention drifted from his hands to his hip, where a longsword hung in a black and gold scabbard.

“What’s going on here…?” she thought, before ducking down behind a half wrecked car as the other man looked in her direction. She was shocked by his eyes when she saw them past the bangs of his long, ragged, dirty, black hair. The whites of his eyes were jet black. The deep crimson irises were like a snake’s, and there was a vertical scar across the left eye. “This guy’s not normal…”

“Time is not your ally, Dragon.” he continued. “You failed the test and now you hunt me. But to what end?”

Drake suddenly pulled the pistol from inside his jacket and fired at the other man who leapt back while drawing his sword and using it to parry the bullet. This made Terra more uneasy, knowing there was no possible way someone should be able to block a gunshot nothing more than a blade. The other man snickered to himself and hit the street, skidding backwards to a stop. Terra, her eyes settling on the weapon, was surprised to see that the blade was just as black as his hair.

He held his blade at the ready, pointing the tip straight at Drake. “What do you hope to accomplish?” he called with little to no emotion, before Drake stormed toward him firing another eight shots, each one parried as the first. His magazine empty, Drake rushed him with his sword ready. When he was in range he swung, clashing his blade with his opponent’s and sending sparks flying in all directions. The other man snarled and drew his sword back, keeping  it’s tip fixed on Drake, then thrusted it forward. Thinking fast, Drake knocked the attack aside and caught the black steel blade in his cross guard, locking the two swords together for a moment.

The two combatants suddenly separated, circling each other, looking for any opening they could get. Then Drake rushed forward again, stabbing at his opponent who parried with ease, sliding Drakes attack upward along the broadside of his blade, before preforming a wild swing at his back as he passed by. Drake tried to parry, but, being in mid-step, stumbled on impact. Thinking fast, he used his momentum to spin back around and swung a powerful downward strike, meeting the other man’s blade with his own and sending more sparks raining down on them. The other man snarled and kicked Drake several feet back into the side of the car Terra was hiding behind. Terra scrambled back from the car when it scraped on the street upon impact, then watched in horror as the man jumped at Drake, swinging his sword down at him.

Drake rolled to his left, just as the blade cut through the body of the car, bringing Terra into his line of sight. “OH FUCK!!” he shouted, before rolling out of the way of another downward attack, countering with a slash into the other man’s calf and dropping him to the ground. Drake climbed to his feet, pointing the tip of his blade at his opponent, who was laying back on his left arm in front of him with blood pouring from the wound on the back of his leg.

When Drake raised his sword to strike a fatal blow, the other man, grinning ominously at him, said with a snicker. “Do you believe this the end, Dragon?” He raised his right hand. An emerald green flame forming in his palm. “The hour has not come.” There was a flash of green fire and he vanished.