Mothership

by Bill Campbell

  He noticed the shaman behind her.

  “He dreams you,” she said. “He says you be dragon death.”

  “The dragon will kill me?”

  The shaman stepped forward, gripped Mallory’s arm, and spoke fervently.

  “He says you kill the dragon. You save his village.”

  Mallory shook his head. “It’s just a dream.”

  She spoke to the shaman, and his eyes flashed anger as he replied.

  “He says he has power, too,” Kola translated. “Not only you. He desires you bring magic to his village.”

  “There’s his misunderstanding. I haven’t any magic.”

  Kola translated for him, then for the shaman: “He says magic in a box.”

  “What kind of magic? Like a camera?”

  Kola gave Mallory a withering look. “Camera is science, not magic.”

  The shaman pantomimed a large box, and something clicked for Mallory.

  “The bin where I trapped the tooth fairies?”

  Kola translated, and the shaman finally smiled.

  “He says dragon death is tonight,” Kola added.

  “I’m not going anywhere in the dark.”

  “He believes in you,” said Kola. “Why you do not believe in yourself?”

  “My beliefs are stronger in daylight.”

  Kola spoke to the shaman. After he replied, she turned back to Mallory. “Tonight,” she insisted.

  “Where?”

  “His village.”

  “And you think we should go.”

  The answer was in her eyes.

  He risked running into a band of marauding soldiers. Or the dragon, though that seemed less likely: It had already torched the village. Kola was a local, and a trusted MSF employee, and if she insisted it was the right thing to do ….

  He hadn’t come to Africa to be safe.

  “All right.”

  The latched fairy bin was in his tent, because he hadn’t known what else to do with it. Maybe the shaman would bury it as part of his ritual, and at least the clinic would be rid of the fairies. When he picked up the bin, he heard whispery rustlings within it.

  He fetched car keys from the administration tent and led the way toward a Land Rover. As he set the bin in the back, Kola and the shaman were talking.

  “He says I stay,” said Kola. She looked unhappy. “In his dream, only you two.”

  “I see.”

  She shook her head. “Dangerous. No guide.”

  “I’ll have the shaman.”

  “You cannot speak. Cannot ask.”

  “I don’t need directions.” Mallory had already made up his mind. He wasn’t backing out now.

  She stepped back, still looking unhappy. The shaman got in the Land Rover.

  Mallory drove with the headlights on. He couldn’t see otherwise; there was barely any moon. But he worried that the headlights would attract unwanted attention. Both he and the shaman were silent the whole way. At the gully near the village, he stopped the car. They got out. Mallory took his flashlight and the fairy bin. The whispering within it sounded more eerie in the dark.

  The shaman led the way toward the village. The night was quiet, with no small-arms fire. The only sounds were from their trudging through the dry underbrush, and from the cacophony of insects. The bin with the tooth fairies was much lighter than the medical supplies he’d carried on his first trip to the village. Did fairies even have mass? Some things were beyond physics.

  His flashlight outlined burned trees before they reached the village. A gentle breeze carried the smell of smoke. Within the village perimeter, everything except the mud walls of huts had been destroyed. A layer of ash and cinders coated the ground.

  The shaman didn’t stay in the village; probably he had only come to get his bearings. He led Mallory through a grove of trees to another clearing. There was a small hut with the thatch burned away, and in front of it a post with the horns of several oxen.

  A shrine. Now what? A ritual with ox horns and fairies? The fairies would take flight as soon as Mallory opened the bin, off to find more children to prey on.

  The shaman entered the roofless hut. Mallory shined his flashlight around the dirt floor. The shaman knelt in the center, scraping away dirt and ash with his staff, and motioned for Mallory to do the same.

  “If you’d asked, I’d have brought a shovel,” Mallory muttered. He knew the shaman couldn’t understand him. He set down the bin and the flashlight. Finding a stick, he began digging.

  They struck wood a few inches under the dirt. Mallory shined his flashlight into the hole, and the shaman began prying thick sticks out of the opening. Dirt sifted between the remaining sticks into a cavity below.

  It dawned on Mallory that this was what the soldiers had been seeking: a giant’s grave. The shaman had known all along. If they were discovered, Mallory was an accomplice. Shit.

  When the wood was out of the way, Mallory shined his flashlight down. The underground chamber was about twelve feet deep. It spread out below, beyond the reach of his light. Descending into the tomb was a ladder made from rope-bound branches. It was human-sized. Had the Dinka built this tomb for the giants? That would explain why they hadn’t told the Chinese.

  The shaman slowly made his way down the ladder. At the bottom, he stepped back.

  Mallory swung his leg onto the ladder. He looked up. The sky was empty except for stars. As he began to descend, the shaman spoke. Mallory shined the flashlight down.

  The shaman pantomimed holding a box. Mallory nodded and got the fairy bin. He put his flashlight in his teeth, the bin on his shoulder, and descended the ladder.

  The ladder was propped against the wall of the chamber. At the bottom, Mallory set the bin on the ground and turned around, shining his flashlight into the cool darkness.

  He shivered. Several huge skeletons lay in fetal positions on the floor. They looked human, resembling the ones in his anatomy lectures. But these were nearly the size of the large dinosaur remains in the British Museum. The chamber was circular, more than twenty feet in diameter, its walls lined with adobe bricks. The roof was made of logs and dried mud. Mallory walked hesitantly among the skeletons. Around the chamber’s perimeter were a half-dozen huge baskets and jars taller than Mallory.

  The shaman knelt in the middle of the tomb, meditating.

  After a few respectful minutes, Mallory lost patience. “We need to get the hell out. We brought the magic box. That was the goal, right?” He wished Kola were here to translate. He gestured behind him at the ladder with his flashlight. “Go now?”

  There was a thunderous crash against the roof. Fist-size chunks of dried mud rained down. Mallory swore and ducked in a crouch, covering his head. His shaking light illuminated a steady shower of adobe and sand from above. As the sound of falling debris tapered off, he heard deep, heavy wheezing from behind him, above. Mallory’s heart raced. He turned, afraid of what he would see.

  At the top of the ladder, the air shimmered like the aurora borealis, and a huge reptilian snout poked down through the opening. A long forked tongue flicked down, tasting the ladder. The creature exhaled, and the air glittered along the full length of the ladder.

  Mallory’s eyes watered from the dust. He gasped for air, barely able to breathe.

  Overhead there were several loud cracks as logs broke, tumbling heavily into the chamber. Mallory scrambled back against the wall. One log barely missed the shaman. He hobbled to join Mallory.

  A huge lizard leg thrust down, between the logs, then the remainder of the roof ceiling collapsed with a roar like a dam breaking. Mallory and the shaman pressed back against the wall, arms wrapped over their heads. All the soil atop the wood collapsed into the chamber, along with the logs themselves.

  Light shimmered through the billowing dust, not from Mallory’s flashlight, but from the aura swirling around the fallen dragon.

  The dragon’s fall hadn’t injured it. It wheezed, turning within the pit, shoving logs aside. Its monstrous bo
dy slithered past Mallory, smelling of ginger and sulfur, radiating heat. Only leaning logs blocked Mallory’s view of the night sky high above.

  Flames blasted the far side of the chamber, setting logs on fire in front of the dragon and sending waves of heat across the pit. The dragon knocked aside burning logs. By the light of the flames and the aura of the dragon’s breath, Mallory saw it pick up a giant femur with its clawed foreleg. Levering it beneath a log, it snapped the bone in half, then shoved it down its gullet.

  The shaman tugged on Mallory’s arm, gesturing toward the fairy bin.

  By the ladder.

  Past the dragon.

  When the shaman foretold Mallory would kill the dragon, he hadn’t said whether the doctor would survive the encounter.

  The shaman tugged again.

  The dragon swallowed the other half of the femur, then pawed through the logs and dirt for another bone.

  Mallory didn’t see how the fairies could have any effect on the dragon. But the old man’s prophecy had been right so far. Mallory decided to time his dash for the moment when the dragon was farthest away from the ladder. That might take a while.

  Abruptly the shaman shoved him.

  Mallory stumbled forward, landing on the dragon’s tail. It slid sideways, hot scales burning his skin, dragging him a couple yards toward the ladder. A leaning log scraped him off the tail, landing him on a giant’s skeletal ribcage.

  Mallory scrambled to his feet. He sprinted toward the ladder, dodging logs and bones. Reaching it, he crouched by the bin. With trembling hands he shook the dirt off it and found the latch. As he opened the bin, he heard the dragon drop its bone.

  Mallory yanked the sheet out. The dragon’s aura swirled around him as it turned to face him.

  He dropped the bin and leapt sideways.

  A blast of fire engulfed the bin. The sheet burst into flame. Within the disintegrating cloth, fairies glowed bright green, spiraling upward like fireworks.

  As Mallory scrambled away, the dragon took a step toward him. Bones in the chamber rattled like tree branches in a storm. The dragon inhaled for another blast of flame.

  The fairies, which Mallory had assumed were dead, darted toward the dragon, flying into its mouth. It shook its head violently, and there was a brief gout of flame before it gagged and swallowed. Its body heaved, long neck swinging side to side as the dragon screamed. It writhed on the floor of the tomb, sending logs rolling in all directions.

  It began biting at its own abdomen, striking again and again like a cobra. Teeth tore through scales and flesh, spraying blood throughout the chamber. Its tail whipped through the tomb, scattering bones and knocking Mallory’s feet out from under him. He fell against a log. Pain shot up his arm. He rolled onto his other side, struggling to crawl away.

  The dragon screamed again, then went into convulsions. By the flames in the tomb, Mallory saw that the dragon had disemboweled itself, tearing open its own gizzard. Blood boiled from it, and Mallory saw that, instead of rocks for grinding bones, the organ was lined with tiny white nodules, like teeth.

  And bright green fairies, harvesting them.

  The dragon’s shudders weakened, its breath fading, and with it, the aura in the pit.

  Eventually, its wheezing stopped, and the only sounds in the tomb were the crackling flames of the logs. The shaman hobbled toward him.

  Mallory looked up at the night sky, scanning for helicopters.

  The Chinese were going to be pissed.

  The Taken

  Tenea D. Johnson

  For all of the construction committee’s planning, some details couldn’t be replicated exactly. So the barracoons that housed the senatorial sons and daughters had approximately two more square feet of space than those historically built for transatlantic slaves. As more hooded figures were shoved into the cage, Kristen Burke, ignorant of the inaccuracy, felt no gratitude for this small luxury.

  She had been the first. First to be stripped down to her thin cotton shirt and silk leggings. First to be branded with ND just below her anklebone. First to have the tape and hood ripped off before they pushed her into the cage.

  That was last night or maybe this morning. There were no clocks or natural light in the warehouse. She knew it hadn’t been more than a day since the agent—or what she thought was an agent—led her into the idling car that was supposed to take her to her father. When she woke up, cotton-mouthed and head pounding, Senator Burke was not among the men dressed in military black who hustled her through the cold and into the warehouse. She’d screamed through the tape over her mouth, but by then she was here, with grim-faced people who seemed to expect her screams.

  Now three women shared the cage with her, shivering and bleary-eyed. She recognized Margaret Eastland from her parents’ dinner parties and Bridget Hardy from her mother’s campaign commercials. Kristen couldn’t place the young blond girl who leaned on her ankle, where they had burned her. Though tears slid down her face, Kristen paid the pain no mind.

  The warehouse was loud. Gates slid open and closed. Men yelled a language she couldn’t understand. Margaret Eastland kept screaming every few minutes, words garbled behind the tape still on her mouth. Somewhere out of sight, metal scraped against metal. Boxes hit floors, and behind all this, more voices rose. Kristen couldn’t see where they came from, but they never stopped or even paused in their monotonous roar. More than once she thought her ears had started bleeding from all the noise. She would wipe at them spastically, only for her hand to come back clean, save for the sheen of sweat.

  She wished Eastland would shut up. Or that Bridget Hardy would speak again. They’d shared a few words when Bridget first arrived. As soon as they dumped her in, Bridget started asking questions. Her blue eyes boring into Kristen’s, she’d asked who Kristen was, where had she come from, how long had she been there? Kristen Burke. Manhattan. She didn’t know. Two men had scooped Bridget off the street in front of her Upper East Side apartment with the same story that got Kristen off the NYU campus and into a dark sedan. Everyone who was anyone knew Eastland kept a place in Murray Hill, so they’d probably taken her from there. Kristen would bet on the blond girl too. All Manhattan, all in the last day or two. All senators’ daughters.

  And sons: Five men filled the second cage.

  Kristen didn’t wonder who’d taken them. It was plain as the brand on her skin: “ND,” New Dawn. Rumors about the group ricocheted from the news reports to the Senate Floor to conversation over martinis at Saul’s Bistro. Of all the groups demanding reparations for slavery, none was more feared than New Dawn. They didn’t want educational vouchers or free medical care like the other groups, they wanted everything—land redistribution, financial compensation, and stock in every conglom that had benefited from slavery. And even by 2024, that was all the conglomerations. Worse, New Dawn didn’t believe in legislation or picketing or economic sanctions. They believed in results. The one and only press statement New Dawn ever issued said just that: “We believe in results.” Those words perplexed people outside of political circles. It worried her father’s camp. Like Kristen, they knew what it took to get results.

  A man in a black mask sat on a low stool outside of Kristen’s cage. He’d been staring at Margaret Eastland for the last few hours, the hours she’d spent screaming. Now he looked in Kristen’s direction. He turned his eyes slowly, as if measuring each inch between them. Kristen’s lip quivered, shivers turned to jolts as he turned his full attention on her. Like the dozen other men outside the cages, he was dressed in all black, a mesh mask obscuring his features. It was hard to tell his height, but he seemed big holding a long stun stick. He tapped it on the floor every few minutes, sending blue sparks dancing along the concrete. Kristen tried to look him in the eye, but the mask stopped her. It had an opalescent sheen, making it seem to float in front of his face. The Mask looked her up and down, stopping at her stomach, her breasts, her bent shoulders and sweaty face. The longer he looked, the more her throat tightened, the harder
it became to breathe. She tried to distract herself, craning her neck to look into the men’s cage, but her skin prickled with the weight of his stare. Kristen turned back, looked down at the scratches on her hands, the dirt under her fingernails. After thirty minutes, she began to understand why Eastland screamed.

  Somewhere inside the building a door slammed. Kristen jumped, jabbing her elbow into one of the bars. The Mask laughed at her, then fell silent, staring up at the landing behind the cages. For a moment, she could see the man beneath the mask, the reverence that smoothed out the tight lines around his mouth. She followed his gaze.

  Phillip Tailor, New Dawn’s leader, wore no mask; instead he donned a smile. Like the others, he wore black fatigues. In place of a mask, a pair of opaque glasses covered his eyes. A tall man, he towered over the cages and Kristen felt a spell of vertigo. Tailor nodded acknowledgment at the man guarding Kristen’s cage. Leaning gracefully over the railing, he surveyed the busy warehouse floor. Another Mask, much smaller than Tailor, walked up to him. The Mask said something in that gibberish language and, with another nod, Tailor was gone.

  Abruptly, Eastland stopped screaming. The Mask returned to his original posture, leaving a trail of blue sparks as he slowly dragged the stun stick back to his side. Margaret Eastland slumped against the bars, fingers twitching the last of the voltage from her system. The blond girl scurried farther away from the prone body, pinning Kristen into the corner. Kristen was grateful for the sweat pressed into her skin, grateful for someone to hold onto, and come between her and the apparition who scrutinized her, sparking blue intention across the floor.

  Their captors were yelling more. Still holding the blond girl, Kristen tried to follow one set of gibberish from man to man. The tone suggested commands, but she couldn’t be sure. She looked toward the sound of a bodega gate coming down. This gate was much bigger and going up. The whole wall behind the barracoons recessed into its upper reaches and let dawn in. She smelled saltwater, heard distant traffic, and hoped for a moment. Maybe New Dawn had gotten their ransom. Maybe her father had arrived. Maybe someone would see them and send agents. Maybe, maybe.