The Other Side

by Joshua McCune

  “Maybe cheesecake is all right.”

  “We can get cake later,” I say. The guys have clustered around the computer tablet.

  “But we have to have it now, yes, yes,” Allie says. “You said . . .” She chokes up.

  I join her on the other side of the booth, keeping one eye on the boys’ table, wishing for my gun. “What’s wrong?”

  “I have to eat my cake before you finish breakfast.” She sniffles. “That way you can’t collect on our bet. Cheesecake can count, right?”

  I kiss her on the head. “Of course it does.” I call over Estelle and hand her the money. “Could you box that cheesecake, please? Don’t worry about the rest.”

  “She has to be all right,” Allie says. “It’s my fault, my fault. Always my fault.”

  “It’s not your fault, Allie. You know that.” I zip up her jacket. “Grackel made her decision. You didn’t do anything wrong.”

  “Yes I did. I didn’t want to tell you, but . . .”

  “What is it?”

  She shakes her head. “You’re going to be mad at me, yes, yes.”

  “Out with it. I won’t be mad.”

  “I blabbed to the Greens,” she blurts, then erupts in tears.

  I hug her tight, half to comfort her, half to muffle her. “It’s okay.” I try to sound calm, but my voice comes out a hushed whisper. “When . . . when was this?”

  “Last week,” she mumbles into my jacket. “I’m sorry. I know I wasn’t supposed to, but you had Colin, and Arabelle was spending all that time flying with Grackel, and—”

  “Shhh.” How damn long does it take someone to pack up a piece of frozen cheesecake?

  “Why didn’t you talk to Maren or Syren or any of the other Reds?”

  “I did, at first. But then they all went to sleep.”

  “You didn’t tell the Greens where we were?”

  “No, no. Never. They wanted to come visit, but I told them we were full.”

  “Good girl. You didn’t do anything wrong,” I say.

  “But we had to leave the island. And Grackel . . .”

  “We would have had to leave one day anyway,” I say.

  The waitress sets a brown bag on our table. I stuff it into my pack, grab Allie’s hand, and head for the exit. The group of boys moves to intercept. I keep my eyes fixed on the linoleum floor and quicken my pace.

  A semicircle of eight legs and boots forms a blockade in front of me.

  “You’re that girl from the net, aren’t you?”

  “You’re confused. Excuse us.” I shoulder between two of them, pulling Allie along after me.

  “Hey, man, we just want to help. That’s wicked backward how they treated her.”

  Her? I look over my shoulder to find three of the guys scrutinizing Allie. The fourth, who I almost bowled over in my effort to escape, glowers at me, but doesn’t show a hint of recognition.

  “What are you talking about?” I ask, afraid I already know the answer.

  “RedJediGrunt’s new vid, man. It’s straight trending.”

  I make a mental note to castrate Preston the next time I see him. “Let me see.” I step in front of Allie, placing a firm hand on her shoulder as she tries to get a peek. Tablet guy loads a clip, and yellow words make a slow crawl down a black background, set to “The Imperial March.”

  “Turn the sound off.”

  “But . . .”

  “Turn it off. I don’t want her to hear this. These things give her nightmares.” Me, too.

  “The United States of America, once home to freedom and democracy, continues to claim that Georgetown and other facilities of its kind are fabrications of the growing, global Dragon Awareness Movement. Despite international pressure, including threats of sanctions and war, the U.S. government refuses to allow U.N. investigators into the country.

  “Since the government continues to hide behind a military wall and the cloak of propaganda, it has fallen on the Jedi of the world to expose the truth. Many terrible things occurred in Georgetown. Unspeakable atrocities against dragons, unprovoked attacks on foreign countries, assassinations of sympathizers, abuse of prisoners. These pale in comparison to what you are about to witness.

  “Some think that, to keep the world safe, the ends justify the means, no matter how great the cost to our humanity. This final video in our series is for those of you who still believe this.”

  The words and background dissolve to a high-def infrared video shot from the ceiling corner of an octagonal room. My legs almost give out. My lungs, too.

  The reconditioning chamber. The bastards were observing us the entire time. Watching us go crazy.

  Not just watching. Making.

  Allie crawls into view, her eyes saner than I’ve ever seen them, and filled with the terror of a newly caged animal. She nears a wall, hands extended, searching for a boundary to the dark prison, and I flinch, knowing what comes next. The CENSIR encircling her head delivers a series of sharp electrical jolts until she changes course.

  For a moment, the walls—giant thinscreens or something—light up with images of dragons breathing fire, insurgents with machine guns, corpses everywhere.

  The vid shifts to the short period between terror cycles when everything was quiet and dark, and in some ways worse, because now you could agonize over the awful images and sounds you’d witnessed. Real or not real? Allie’s rocking on the floor in the middle of the room, knees pulled to her heaving chest, head tucked between them. Every few seconds, she twitches.

  On to a later cycle, Allie slipping toward the wild-eyed, crazy girl I met when I arrived in Georgetown. A girl I still see in some way every day. A girl currently obsessed with eating cake because she doesn’t want to add another dead dragon to the long list of blame she carries in that invisible space between heart and soul.

  I take several breaths until I’m sure my voice’ll come out indifferent. “I see what you mean, but it’s not her. Excuse us.”

  Ignoring their rapid-fire questions, I spin around, grab Allie, and rush out of the Twin Dragons into the cold Alaskan morning. Dark, flurries swirling, it doesn’t take long before the neon glow of the restaurant fades from view.

  When I’m sure nobody’s following us, I stop walking, unzip my pack, and retrieve the doggie bag. Allie leans against a plowed snowbank, wiggling her butt back and forth until she’s fashioned herself a makeshift chair.

  “Cake time?”

  “Cake time.” I plop onto the mound next to her and squeal at the trickle of slush that squirts into my pants. I sigh theatrically. “Whatever happened to our tropical island?”

  Allie laughs. “We’d melt, yes, yes.”

  “I don’t think I’d mind melting,” I say, unboxing the cheesecake.

  Allie’s laughter ends as she looks from the dessert in my hands to the clouded sky. “Grackel didn’t like the cold either. You think she’s in heaven, Melissa? You think God allows dragons up there?”

  She’s asked me that before. I resort to an answer that’s worked in the past. “He’s a fool if he doesn’t.”

  She nods, but doesn’t appear soothed. “What about me? Will I?”

  This is a new one. “Of course.”

  “I don’t think I will, no, no.” Her matter-of-fact tone pierces me deeper than her words. “I don’t remember being normal.”

  I set the cheesecake on the sidewalk, remove my gloves, then take her face between my hands. “Look at me, Allie. I don’t know if heaven or hell exists, but I do know that if there’s some special place where special people go, you’re first in line. You and Baby and Grackel.”

  “But I killed all those dragons. And Major Alderson. And I shot Sarge. And I don’t remember feeling bad about a lot of it. I know I should, but I don’t. Because I’m not normal.”

  “Normal’s far overrated. All the normal people I knew growing up were boring. You and me, we get to talk to dragons and live on our own islands—”

  “You don’t like that.”

  “Yea
h, I wish it was warmer. I wish I wasn’t a reality TV star. And honestly, I’m not a big fan of parachuting in a crate or living in a shipping container, but it’s a lot better than the alternative.”

  “Georgetown?” she whispers.

  “No, silly.” I run a finger from her forehead to her chin. “My mom used to do that to make Sam and me feel better when we were scared or upset. She’s not here anymore, but every time I look at you, Allison Tanner, I realize that’s okay, because I’ve got somebody just as wonderful at my side. So you can take your normal and shove it.”

  She beams. “You’re crying.”

  “It’s the snow. You gonna have your cheesecake now, or what? It’s probably already frozen again.”

  She laughs and hugs me. “I love you, Melissa.”

  “I love you more.”

  “I love you most, yes, yes.” She picks up the cheesecake and takes a large bite. “Ooh, that’s good. Your turn.”

  “Nope. I’m not a fan.”

  “Liar.” She jams it into my face until I take a nibble. “You have to eat. You’re getting pretty scrawny.”

  It’s my turn to laugh. I tickle her. Way too skinny. “Pot or kettle?”

  “Pot.” She shoves a handful of snow down my shirt.

  I thrust a handful down her pants.

  Then we’re both laughing and squealing. Quite loudly. Quite abnormally. And it feels wonderful.

  8

  As we walk hand-in-hand back to the hospital, Allie rattles off names and stories of her new Green buddies. I interrupt with repeated reminders to avoid future discussion. She gives her assent each time, then jumps right back into telling me how great and friendly they are.

  I don’t know if her unwavering love of dragons is some reverse side effect of her reconditioning, or if she’s too young to remember life before the blackout policy. The Reign of Flame, as the media named it, ended almost a decade ago, when a task force led by my father discovered dragons couldn’t see black. Tipped the scales. Five years later, the war was over, the monsters were defeated, the humans were safe.

  There was a point in my life when I clung to those lies, particularly after Mom died. Then I discovered my dragon-talking abilities and got shipped to Georgetown, where I learned that not all monsters come with glowing scales attached. And not all dragons are monsters.

  Unfortunately, most of it’s a gray, globby mess. When the wingless Blues stampeded north, ravaging rain forests and villages on the way to North America, they did so because they were supposedly fleeing the invisible monsters that chased them. In one of our more heated discussions, Grackel informed me, in so many words, that the Reds obliterated our cities in retaliation for the incessant military onslaught, hoping to dissuade further aggression.

  Most everyone can agree on one thing: Greens are the most dangerous dragons, ragers who seem to thrive on war and death. They don’t much like anything, including one another. Which is probably the only reason they don’t currently rule the world.

  I was six when a quintet torched half of New York City. Took them less than thirty minutes. Required ten squadrons of jets to bring them down. Worldwide panic ensued because nobody had ever seen Greens strike in unison before.

  Luckily, it was an aberration.

  Until Oren arrived on the insurgent scene with a unification plan. If he gets his hands on Baby and breeds her . . .

  Allie doesn’t know that on the monster scale, Oren and those Greens rank right up there with our Georgetown captors. And I don’t want her to know. Right and wrong make sense to her in some crazy way I both envy and dread.

  “You can’t talk to them anymore, Allie,” I say as she continues to prattle on about a dragon named Bornak who claims he can roast a deer from five miles away. “Not until I meet them and they get my seal of approval.”

  “Okay, but you can’t be tough. Bornak would make a great camping buddy. He likes to hunt and he makes good fires.”

  When we reach the hospital, Nurse Frown informs us that Colin’s in the recovery room, waking from the anesthesia. “Once he’s stable, you guys are on your own.” With a stern warning not to excite him, she leads us to the patient wing.

  “Mr. Janson, your girlfriend’s here to see you.”

  “Melissa,” Colin says. Slurred. Groggy. But my name.

  Heat rises in my cheeks, and I’m glad for the dim lighting. “His ex,” I say. “No, Frank, it’s me, Sarah.”

  “I knew a Frank,” he says, followed by an extended yawn. “Frank and Kevin and Mac—”

  “From TV,” I interrupt.

  “The fab four. Kissing dragons everywhere they go. Until J.R. got too close. Poor Junior.” His chuckle fades into a quiet snore.

  “Don’t worry, this is normal. The anesthesia should wear off soon,” Nurse Frown says, and leaves.

  I send Allie to the vending machine with a few dollars and instructions to wait in the lobby, then pull up a chair beside Colin. The color’s returned to his cheeks, and his breath comes easily.

  A part of me wants to get into bed beside him, wrap his arm around me, and lay my head on his chest. Stupid. Even if there were time for something, anything, what would he want with someone four years his junior with almost as many physical scars as emotional ones? And even if he could somehow look past all that, there’s the small issue of his dead sister.

  But I like the dream—don’t have many good ones anymore. I lower my head onto him ever so gently, slow my breathing until it matches the rise and fall of his chest.

  I must doze, because the next thing I know, his hand’s on my neck. He seems to be asleep. Maybe it was an accident, maybe he didn’t know I was here.

  Maybe he did.

  When I grasp his fingers to disentangle myself, he murmurs, “You’re fine where you are. Quite fine.”

  I sit up and exaggerate a stretch. “Sorry about that. Got tired. Glad you’re okay.”

  A dopey smile crosses his face. “You’re my girlfriend, huh?”

  I look away. “That’s our cover. Your idea?”

  “Should have been,” he says, then launches into another ramble about Kissing Dragons, ending with “It didn’t get good again until you were on there. Absolutely stunning.”

  “It was all fake,” I say, standing. “That girl never existed.”

  I’m almost to the door when he says, “You’re wrong. I see her every day.”

  I make the mistake of glancing back. He’s looking at me. Such soulful eyes.

  No! I spin around and break into a run, but I’m too slow.

  “So beautiful she doesn’t even know it. Like my sister.”

  I flee. Through the lobby, outside, down the empty road toward the morning moon that hangs low over the darkness of the river. My lungs knot up, my legs turn to dry ice, and my heartbeat thunders in my ears. But it is not enough to drown the memory of that look and those words.

  I’m almost to the river when my feet slip from under me and I fall hard onto my injured ribs. Mewling, I roll onto my stomach. Behind the blood pounding in my ears and my own pathetic moans, I hear dragons.

  Then the jets come, with their percussive gunfire and shrieking missiles. I push myself to my knees and glance toward the eastern horizon. The clouds are ablaze with abstract blue streaks, a chaotic collage of tracer dots, and fuzzy green balls of light. An aurora borealis of war.

  Not real.

  I dip my hands into the snow and press them to my face. The cold stings, but the cacophony remains. When I split my fingers and peek skyward, the air battle looms, ever bright.

  Two Greens emerge from the clouds in fast pursuit of a jet that’s lost one of its thrusters. They pinch in around him, blasting fire in turns. Not orange like normal dragonfire, but azure. Beautiful.

  A stream of flame envelops the wing. The plane wobbles, twirls into a flat spin. The pilot ejects, his black parachute cast in a vivid green glow. There’s a brief roaring match between the dragons. The smaller one darts under the larger one and inhales the chute.
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br />   I look away. “Not real. Not real. Not real.”

  Can’t be. Sirens would be blaring. People would be scrambling for dragon shelters. Standard operating procedure for—

  For cities painted black, for cities where dragons aren’t confused with UFOs.

  I spring to my feet, calling for Randon and Baby, but neither answers. Still asleep? I look toward their hiding spot in the outlying mountains. Far from the battle. Safe for now.

  But Allie and Colin aren’t. At any moment, a jet could spin out of control and crash into Dillingham, or dragons might break loose from the battle and decide to have an impromptu shish kebab of locals and cheechakos.

  I search the surrounding cars, find a beat-up black Jeep the owner didn’t bother to lock. No keys inside, so I sprint to the adjoining house. I start to knock, but then test the knob. It gives. I sneak in. It’s dark inside. I fumble around, locate a pair of switches, turn on the porch and foyer lights. I snatch a set of keys from a bowl on an end table and race back to the Jeep.

  I grind the gears twice before the clutch engages, then floor the accelerator. A rooster tail of snow explodes behind me, and the car hurls forward in chaotic swerves. Thankfully, the road’s wide and nobody’s on it. I ease off the gas pedal, gain control, and speed toward the hospital.

  I’m a couple of blocks away when a trio of Greens swoops out of the clouds, the figures atop them little more than snowy specks. They break from the battle and dive toward Dillingham.

  I lay on the horn to wake the residents. The dragons grow larger in the rearview mirror, their reflections rippling across the river. The shoreline buildings are well within range, but they don’t open fire.

  What are they waiting for?

  The hospital sign comes into view faster than expected. I slam on the brakes and turn the wheel a sharp right. I leap out, leaving the engine puttering in neutral. A police siren whines in the distance.

  The sheriff’s calling out orders over a bullhorn from somewhere that sounds a few blocks away. “Keep clear of outer walls and windows. Seek cover beneath tables or in bathtubs or closets.”