Hear Me Roar

by Rhonda Parrish

  The edge of the lava flow comes into sight. Goldface perks up when she spies the cool ground ahead, and with her, so does the rest of the team. The last few steps go quickly, and then, at last, the cart trundles over the edge of the flow and we’re back on safe ground. Amelia and I both let out a sigh of relief.

  From behind us comes the crack of a whip. “On your left!” shouts Cross as she beats her team into a full gallop and surges past us, throwing a cocky grin over her shoulder.

  “I’m beginning to hate her,” says Amelia.

  “You’re not the only one,” I reply through clenched teeth.

  There’s no time to rest. The other teams have no doubt already begun to cross the lava behind us. I hand the whip over to Amelia. “Want to drive this next bit?”

  She nods, glaring at Cross’s cart vanishing into the distance. Amelia cracks our whip and our team is off.

  It’s the last night of the race and I’m trying to keep Amelia from noticing how keyed up I am. Angel Peaks Rookery has never won the Blacktooth 500. There’s prize money on the line, but that’s not what I care about. I want to prove that we can do it. That our dragons can do it. That being like Arianna Cross is not the only way.

  Amelia is sitting up with her arms wrapped around her knees. I know what it’s like to have insomnia during a race. In training they always tell you the importance of getting enough sleep. They don’t tell you how on earth you’re supposed to do that while adrenaline courses through your veins.

  A movement makes me look up, startled. Arianna Cross is sitting on the edge of our cart, her legs hanging over the side.

  “Nice stunt with the lava,” she says. “Looking forward to tomorrow?”

  “We are, actually,” I say tartly.

  “As am I. It promises to be a most exciting day.” Before either Amelia or I can think of a retort, Cross slips off the cart and disappears into the darkness.

  The air itself is betraying us. We gasp, desperately seeking oxygen in the thin alpine atmosphere, which is tainted by the sulfurous fumes that pour out of vents in the mountainside. Our heads pound. Our limbs are heavy. The dragons are feeling the same effects, but they trudge on, pulling the cart step after agonizing step up the steep trail through Blacktooth Pass.

  Spires of stone jut up nearly vertical on either side of us. True fliers once roosted on these peaks hundreds of years ago when they were still found in the wild. Or anywhere.

  We’re ahead of most of the other teams, but Cross is still in the lead. I’d hoped that our hexapods’ strength would give us an advantage over her on the climb, but somehow, every time we come around a bend, she’s farther ahead. Her dragons run like they fear for their lives and, not for the first time, I wonder what she does to them.

  We reach the crest and look around, surveying the view from the top of the world.

  “Wow,” is all Amelia can say.

  Though the air is hazy with volcanic gases, we can still see for miles. The world spreads out around us on every side, the Blacktooth Range running north and south, the plateau with its fresh layer of lava, the salt flats spreading out clean and white to the east. It’s harsh and stark and breathtakingly beautiful.

  Behind us, the other teams zigzag slowly up the ridge, but there’s only one spot of movement amid the still landscape ahead. Cross.

  I say, “Let’s get her.”

  Amelia nods, a big smile on her face.

  “Whoa, whoa, slowly now, Thunder,” I call as we begin down the slope. The dragons, happy to be on the downhill, want to gallop. They don’t know how quickly the cart could get out of control. But they trust me and allow me to hold them back.

  We pass truck-sized boulders and wide cracks threatening to swallow us into the fiery bowels of the mountain range. Our guirs skid several times and even Goldface loses her footing once, but Slyph and Spark keep the team steady.

  Cross is still putting more distance between us, letting her team run with reckless disregard for either their lives or her own. Goldface screams. She doesn’t like seeing Cross in the lead any more than I do.

  We’re past the hardest part of the descent. So I ease up and let the team go a little faster. Now we’re matching pace with Cross, but it’s not enough. She’ll outstrip us again in the final sprint.

  I let the dragons pick up just a little more speed. Cross’s bright red cart grows larger ahead of us. We’re doing it. We’re really doing it. We’re going to catch her.

  And then I notice the traces going slack. The dragons are still gleefully galloping down the hillside when the prow of the cart nudges the hexapods’ tails. Then it bumps the back of their legs. The cart is no longer being pulled. It’s rolling on its own, and it’s picking up speed.

  “We’re jackknifing. Set the brake!” I call to Amelia.

  She lowers the claw brake, only to watch in horror as it snaps off and tumbles away.

  Someone must have loosened the screws. Cross. She was on our cart last night. But there’s no time to dwell on that. The cart is still gathering speed. If I call the dragons to a halt, it will ram into them and drag them after it. The only thing to do is ride it out and try to steer onto flatter ground where we can slow down.

  The cart goes over a bump, throwing me and Amelia around and scattering our gear. Amelia’s backpack goes flying and lands on the mountainside.

  “The eggs!” she cries leaping from the careening cart.

  “Amelia!” I scream.

  She hits the ground. I flinch at the crunch of the sharp lava rocks. She rolls, then scrambles to her feet and grabs for the backpack. Is she all right? Or, in the heat of the moment, is she just not feeling her injuries?

  I look around for a way to stop. There’s a narrow crevice in the ground beside me, not wide enough for the cart to fall into but wide enough to catch the wheel. It’ll be a hard crash, but it’ll stop the cart.

  I call, “Thunder, Goldface, haw!”

  The dragons swerve, jerking the cart off its runaway course. As the wheel lodges in the crack, the cart comes to a stop with a neck-wrenching jerk that nearly throws me onto the ground. I slam into the side of the cart, wrenching my shoulder. Stars burst across my vision. The wheel snaps off and the dragons are yanked to a sudden halt, yelping and screeching.

  Mindless of my throbbing shoulder, I jump from the cart and rush to Amelia’s side. She’s got bits of gravel lodged in both arms and a bleeding cut on her cheek, but she doesn’t even notice. She opens the backpack and checks the eggs for damage.

  “Amelia, how could you do something like that?” I say. “You could have died and you just lost us the race!”

  Amelia picks up the largest egg. She whispers, “It’s hatching.”

  The egg trembles in her hands. A tiny crack forms at one end, then another. The web of cracks bulges as the baby dragon tries to push its way out. Then, all at once, the shell splits in two and the hatchling lies in Amelia’s arms, wet and sticky with albumen.

  I brace myself for a twisted body and misshapen limbs, but the creature in front of me is nothing like that. It’s small and sleek, with two delicate clawed feet, a long tail, and two broad, membranous wings that it stretches and folds as it lies there on its back, trilling at us.

  I know this dragon. I saw them soaring and wheeling across the sky when I was a little girl.

  “A true flier,” I whisper.

  Amelia nods. She cleans off the hatchling with the edge of her shirt.

  “How?”

  “I read about it when I was studying dragon lineages. All those recessive genes: They’re true flier genes. They’re not gone, just hidden. All I had to do was crossbreed the right dragons.”

  “Amelia,” I say in awe, “You’re a genius.”

  The hatchling sits up on Amelia’s hand and flaps its wings experimentally.

  “I think she’s ready to fly,” says Amelia. She offers the baby dragon to me. I’m filled with awe for the delicate creature in my hands and fo
r the brilliant, amazing girl beside me who saw what I couldn’t see even when it was right in front of me.

  The dragon is so light. I can feel it trembling as it looks around at this strange new world. I raise it on one hand and release it.

  Far below, Arianna Cross drives across the finish line. And the baby dragon takes off into the sky.

  Gwen Katz is an author, artist, game designer, and retired mad scientist who lives in Altadena, CA with her husband and a revolving door of transient animals. Her first novel, Among the Red Stars, tells the story of Russia’s famed all-female bomber squadron, the Night Witches. When she’s not writing, she can often be found in her garden or at the local nature center, teaching kids about wildlife

  DAMASCUS MINCEMEYER

  FATHER CHRISTMAS, MOTHER HUBBARD, THE DRAGON (AND OTHER SELECTED SCENES FROM THE END OF THE WORLD)

  You know, when it was all said and done, the apocalypse kinda sucked.

  Okay, I’m being a bit melodramatic. I mean, it hasn’t all been bad. Sure, there’s never enough to eat, there’s no fresh bubblegum, drinking a glass of water is akin to playing Russian roulette with Cholera and you’re more likely to die from accidentally scratching yourself on a rusty nail than Before, but what the hell do you expect when a solar flare fries the entire Eastern Hemisphere and causes the collapse of modern civilization? Roses and sweet honey? At least it’s not like all those movies and video games and comic books where there’s, like, hordes of mutated-giant-mohawked-zombie-cockroaches terrorizing the remnants of mankind in a deserted wasteland.

  I’m a glass-half-full kind of girl, so the plus side of total worldwide destruction is that the petty bureaucratic bullshit that caused most of humanity’s daily stress kinda got pushed aside. No cops to bust you for carrying an open container or hitting the bong, no annoying neighbors in the apartment upstairs vacuuming at three in the morning, and definitely no catty, busy-bodied bitches at the workplace constantly asking, “So, when are you going to get married?”

  The best way to sum it up is to quote John: It’s like a cosmic reset button was hit, Chia, and there’s a sign in the window that says No Law, No Religion, No Problem.

  John’s my buddy, my boy-toy, my let’s-get-it-on-right-here-in-the-ruins best friend with benefits. If I were a different sort of woman, I’d say he’s my soul mate, but I’m not, and he isn’t. I didn’t even know him Before. We met when we were both scavenging through the canned goods aisle of a Wal-Mart outside Tallahassee. I traded him two cans of chicken noodle soup for a roll of toilet paper and we’ve been together ever since.

  Soul mate or not, John’s a sweetheart. He told me once he was a sanitation worker (read: garbage man) back in the day, and that’s why he’s so good at sifting through the wreckage of old stores and identifying what’s prime stuff and what’s irradiated crap. He’s pretty scrappy in a fight, too. Once he took on three armed gang bangers with only a garden trowel when they tried to shake us down for our supplies. That’s when we decided to head up north, which proved to be a good idea because not long after I heard the Southern Militia Confederation started raiding the area and racking up the body count.

  Now, I’ve seen some strange shit with John, like the time we ran afoul of those cultists who gathered under the Gateway Arch in St. Louis to worship a giant Ronald McDonald statue as their god, or when we spent two days trapped by a flash flood at the top of an abandoned roller coaster, or that night we accidentally tipped over a kerosene lamp that caught half of Des Moines on fire. Nothing, but nothing, has ever cranked the weirdometer to eleven like the time Father Christmas inadvertently sent us after Mother Hubbard’s Dragon.

  I’m getting ahead of myself here, which you’ll have to forgive seeing as how my ADHD has gone untreated since the world came down. First I have to tell you about Wall Street. No, not the one buried under the fifty-million tons of rubble that constitutes the Big Rotten Apple these days, smartass. The Wall Street I’m talking about is the name of a trading post just off I-70, west of the interchange with Route 54 near what’s left of Columbia, Missouri. If you’ve never been, think of it as a giant, open-air flea market on equal parts steroids and crack. I mean, you want it, Wall Street’s got it, from pilfered chemical weapons and assault rifles to old party favors and salt packets, and probably more commerce in the new barter economy occurs there than any place between Neo-Texas and the Greater Chicagoland Empire. You run into all walks of life at Wall Street, too--businessmen and con-men, thugs and thieves, bikers, rednecks, rent-boys, dope dealers, the off-their-rocker types, and like anywhere else, after a while you get to know who’s who.

  Father Christmas was a middle-man of sorts, a big, heavy-set black dude with a gnarly white beard, gold rings on every finger and a deep, booming laugh. He conducted his business out of a salvaged carnival tent decked out with holiday lights, right next to a bicycle repair shop and across from Buddy’s Beagle Barbeque. I never even knew his real name, but what I did know was that if you brought your goods to him, Father Christmas would barter you a better deal than fifty other fuckbags who’d just as soon slit your throat than give you anything.

  John and I had just plundered an old CVS Pharmacy in some blink-and-you-miss-it town and loaded up our ten-speeds. When we went to fence our loot John gave me that self-assured, goofy grin of his right before entering.

  “Let me do all the talking,” he said. All I could do was laugh. John’s got a lot going for him, but wheeling-dealing ain’t one of his strong suits; once he traded an entire case of motor oil--solid gold around these parts--for an iPhone, an item which is about as useful as a hockey puck nowadays.

  A pair of guards in battered tactical police riot gear and armed with sport crossbows frisked us before allowing us entrance to the tent. Inside was a warehouse’s worth of goods of every imaginable kind, from dehydrated food to sleeping bags and old camping equipment to a junkyard’s amount of car parts and more bottles of booze than even I could possibly drink. It was like the world’s biggest, most fucked-up pawn shop, and in the rear of the place, sitting in a recliner behind an office desk was the man himself, dressed in a threadbare pinstriped suit with holes in the elbows, surrounded by even more guards and a harem’s allotment of women, all of them far chubbier and healthier-looking than ninety-nine percent of the rest of Wall Street’s patrons, which was solid testament to Father Christmas’s ability to secure basic necessities.

  As soon as he spotted us, Father Christmas’s face cracked a wide smile, bearing a grill of gold teeth. “Well, well,” he said, walking over to us. “If is isn’t Chia Pet Hepburn and her trusty sidekick John the Boy Blunder. Last I heard, you two were on the catering list for that cannibal enclave over in Kansas City. Guess you made it through without becoming someone’s baby back ribs, huh?”

  “Grill marks clash with my tattoos,” I said, unloading my duffel bag on his desk. “We’ve got some stuff for you.”

  “Let me see,” Father Christmas sorted through the items, his smile slipping away. “Maxi-pads? Expired iodine? What’s this, an earwax cleaning kit?” He looked at me. “This is the most pathetic offering you’ve ever tried to sell me on.”

  “It’s getting scarce out there. Stores aren’t as easy to scrounge from as they used to be,” John said, pulling out an unopened case of body spray from his backpack. “What about this?”

  Father Christmas shrugged his massive shoulders. “It won’t go very far in helping the stink around here, but they’ll go fast anyway,” he pointed to our bicycles. “Still rocking the Huffy’s, I see. Now those would go for some good trade. Had a lot of complaints lately from the motorcycle crowd about gasoline sources drying up. Those damn Texas honkies are strangling the market. There’s gonna be war over that, you watch,” Father Christmas sized up our meager lot. “I’ll give you a couple cartons of Pall Mall’s and a few jars of peanut butter I just got in, but that’s the most I can offer this time.”

  “You trying to kill me or what?” I asked, ripping into the
cigarettes, lighting one up. “I’m so allergic to peanuts.”

  John tried to press for a better bargain, but Father Christmas held firm. As we were about to leave, though, he held up a ringed finger and smiled again. “There is one thing that could fetch a sweet deal for you, Chia Pet, if you’re willing”

  I groaned, flicking some ashes on the ground. “I’ve told you before, I’m not going to let you pimp me out to that warlord chick who runs Las Vegas. I don’t care how much of a fetish she has for girls with spiky Skittles-colored hair, pussycat’s not on my restaurant’s tasting menu, you follow me?”

  Father Christmas chuckled. “It’s not that, although the offer still stands if you change your mind,” he sighed. “There’s a commune down in Fulton, and their leader’s contacted me about procuring some antibiotics, which wasn’t too difficult, but actually getting the order there has been challenging,” Father Christmas’s face grew serious then. “I’ve sent two shipments down that way, but neither group of mine returned. That’s six of my guards either missing or dead, and I’ve heard rumors from traders that others have disappeared in that area, too. Someone with your Wile E. Coyote ingenuity, though, might just have a shot at getting the shipment to Fulton and finding out what the hell’s going on.”

  “Wait a minute,” I said. “Your own guys, fully armed and armored, can’t get through, but you’d be perfectly willing to send us to the slaughter?” I cringed. “Doesn’t sound like a very kosher kabob in my book.”

  Father Christmas cocked an eye and walked back to his desk, opening one of the drawers. “See these?” He jangled a set of keys. “There’s a place out near the old University that I keep stocked with enough food and provisions for an army. A safe house of sorts, you might say. I’ve even had it rigged up on solar panels, so there’s refrigeration, electricity, everything. You do this for me and it’s yours. All of it. Heck, you two could retire there like a couple of blue-haired bitties in Florida.”