I thought about my town, the old high-school swing sets, and the smell of popcorn in the air at a midnight showing with Dak. I grinned. If he were here, he’d be trying to figure out how to throw fireballs somehow. He’d tell me to suck it up, seize the day, and find a way home. Maybe that was the right advice.
For now, I had to sleep. I flipped to a blank page in my sketchbook and applied the lead of my faithful No. 2. The lead practically moved on its own and, line by line, I realized my tired mind was sketching a rune stone. It was no surprise. They were my go-to doodle, along with faces, eyes, and ninja-versus-snakeman fights. It was a good way to strip off the excitement of the day and worries about the future, losing myself in the scratching of my pencil. My mind had run hot all day, threatening to burn a hole through the bottom of my skull, and now everything in me relaxed.
I finished the stone and scribbled kanji characters at the corner of the paper. I vacillated between writing “fire” or “lightning” on the stone. Finally, I just added them both.
I was physically exhausted, but my mind was still focused on my predicament. I switched gears and sketched what gradually turned into a shotgun. Once I’d started it was hard to stop, and I added a fantasy twist, reworking its shape to make it more streamlined and organic. When the outline was done, I felt tired enough to sleep, but my plan had backfired and I wanted to do more. On the second pass, I gave the weapon a woodwork-and-brass aesthetic, proud that my practice in the steampunk genre had paid off. On the third pass, my shading brought out the gleam of the brass and polish on the wood.
By then, the pencil was heavy and my eyelids spent more time shut than open. I etched nonsense runic markings into the gun’s barrel and drifted. The sketchpad slumped to my chest. I sank into the firm mattress and goose-down pillow. Maybe if I slept, the world would reassemble into something that made sense.
Chapter Four: Hold B to Slay Dragon
The bed rattled me awake and I flailed stupidly for the alarm. “Too early for a fire drill,” I groaned, socketing my head into the pillow. Another rattle. The shrieks outside were making it hard to fall back asleep.
Shrieks? I jerked upright. Reality crashed into me in twenty-foot waves. I hopped from bed and floorboards vibrated beneath my feet like struck piano strings. The bed juddered. A violent tremor in the stone walls cracked my window’s glass. “Earthquake,” I said, half asleep. “Earthquake.” I tripped over something and hit the floor hard.
Then I heard it: a keening that raised gooseflesh over my whole body. The screech fused the cry of a Jurassic Park velociraptor with a jet engine, and as it rose, I clapped my hands to my ears. It crossed overhead with the howl of a freight train and, once passed, the screams outside had grown in volume.
I’d tripped over a metal lump that lay atop my sketchpad, and I reached for it. It was the brasswork shotgun in full-color, three-dimensional glory. The red rune stone also glittered in the room’s dim light. My brain tried to assemble an explanation for this and failed, so instead of processing, I collected my things, shoved the sketchpad into my backpack, and picked up the rune stone and gun.
Adrenaline put my limbs mostly in working order. I hustled through the abandoned front room. The door was swinging on its hinges and plenty of tables and chairs were upended from a crush of people fleeing. The floor rumbled again and dust unsettled from ceiling beams.
I rushed outside.
That jet engine screamed and I glimpsed a silhouette swoop across the striped skin of the moon. The shadow was serpentine and sailed on mammoth wings. “Oh holy living zombie Jesus.” I spun and the city’s air-defense tower was cracked in half; what remained was on fire.
Crowds surged through the streets like confused extras in a Godzilla movie and, true to form, I joined the throng. We barreled down the street without really knowing where to go. Pillars of black smoke rose into the sky and every fifth building was engulfed in flames. I tried to ignore the roaring bonfires on the street, and the shadowed figures within, their jaws slack from their final screams.
A gale blew at my back and I had a sense something flew over me. Massive wings flapped, moving like wet things in the night. I looked in time to see the serpentine chest and tail flicker by, two stories above but close enough to make out the ridges of its individual scales. Fear turned my extremities to ice and liquefied my bowels. My numb legs propelled me from the crowd into an alleyway, and my brain buzzed with alarm. There was room for only a few mental processes, most of my non-terrified mind dedicated to controlling floppy, sprinting legs and to not crapping down the world’s only pair of blue jeans.
The alleyway dead-ended at a highly inconvenient wall of stones, but I scaled a hay wagon parked in front. The straw pricked my hands as I scrambled atop the mossy wall with the steampunk gun tucked into my armpit. The other side was a community park, full of trees and a little creek that terminated at a pond. I dropped to wet grass, twisting an ankle, and sprint-limped for the bridge across the creek. I could hide in the water underneath. Perfect!
A shadow passed overhead. By reflex, I tucked into a ball and slid through wet grass. Something heavy shook the earth, making me bounce on the lawn.
I peeked from beneath my elbow and the starry sky was clear of Paleolithic monstrosities. Standing, I turned for the bridge and was stopped by a wall. Which was odd, because I hadn’t remembered a wall in my path.
I certainly had not remembered a wall made from dark, rigid bricks, tightly overlapping one another like armor plates, and so logic dictated this was not in fact a wall—but I was in rebellion against logic, since it was being a dick.
I swallowed. The sound of that swallow filled an otherwise eerily silent park, the screams now distant. My mouth opened, but no words came from my tightened throat. No, the only noise at all was the soft flap of folding wings and the gentle, breezy pfffft that indicated my precious blue jeans were ruined.
It was the monster’s neck. I turned my head and its face was on the other side of me, beaky jaws parted to reveal a furnace glow from deep inside its guts. Its eyes were sunk back into the horned mask of bone on its face, and the reflective gold of its sclera held primordial hate. In their depths, I registered my own expression. It seemed to say, “You poor, dead fool.”
The dragon slithered closer around me, trapping me within its coils. It exhaled from two nostrils the size of portholes, and dry heat blew my hair straight back. The beast sniffed and then reared, shaking its head and sneering with disgust.
Was that why terror caused humans to soil themselves? Dak would call it an evolutionary adaptation. Hopefully, the trail of lukewarm shame down the back of my pant legs rendered me inedible.
That brief respite made me remember the brasswork cannon in my hand. My terror-addled brain processed the fact sluggishly, like it was digesting a pound of greasy bacon, churning it over and over to find a way to break the enormity of the substance into something more manageable. But the thought could not be reduced any further than this: I had to shoot the goddamn dragon.
The mechanism to snap open the steampunk gun was convenient for my thumb. I flipped the break action open and my bumbling fingers found the rune stone I’d pocketed, fighting it loose.
The dragon’s head tilted quizzically to one side. A sound whispered from its gaping jaws—human words. I got the impression the dragon was a conduit for them, like some kind of reptilian speaker system. “So, boy,” Dracon said through his pet. “You escaped my orcs. But I have many servants. You have two choices: I crush you here, or you climb astride Asharra and she brings you to—oh. Oh God. What is that stench?”
The rune stone clicked into its slot and I flicked the action shut. I hoisted the gun and trained it on the dragon’s open maw. The metal sights wavered. A decade of target shooting with Uncle Scott did little to correct for five-alarm terror, but I was in a way blessed that my target had a head the size of a Cadillac Escalade.
“A gun?” Dracon asked. “All the power in the universe and you summon a firearm.” He
scoffed. “I should have known to expect something so pedestrian from the likes of you.”
Why did he talk like he knew me? How did he even know what a “firearm” was? Never mind that. It was time to die a crap-stained hero’s death. I squeezed the trigger.
Nothing happened. Uh-oh.
Dracon cackled. “A broken firearm, no less. You artless hack!” The dragon’s jaws opened wider, twitching in preparation to strike.
I squeezed again and held the trigger down. The series of runic scribbles on the gun’s barrel lit up in sequence. As each scribble lit, the gun vibrated harder with unreleased power. Of course, I realized. Hold it down to charge the blast. We’re doing this Metroid-style. When the last scribble lit, I released the trigger and something not entirely fire or lightning erupted from the barrel. The stock punched my shoulder. It went off like a grenade in front of my face.
I think I slammed my back against the ground. I couldn’t see or hear. I rolled around on the grass, scrambled, felt for whatever direction gravity wanted me, and climbed onto shaky legs. Then I fell again. There was no more gun in my hand.
Eventually, when the world coalesced enough to make some sense of it, I discerned the blurry outline of the dragon’s neck, its unmoving body. I could hear nothing but loud ringing. Progress, I supposed. Moving gave me vertigo and I fell to my knees, vomiting. When I looked up again, there was a jagged, charred lump at the end of the dragon’s neck.
I searched in vain for a head.
There wasn’t one.
The brasswork cannon lay on the grass with a plume of smoke like one from a chimney rising from its cavernous barrel. The grass surrounding the barrel had singed black. I crawled over to it and saw the runic scribbles glowing in the orange-hot metal. Somehow, it hadn’t melted. I managed to fumble the gun’s break open without touching the red-hot bits and the rune stone glowed like a coal. I dared not touch it.
I bellied through dragon viscera and blackened scales, the smoking gun dragged along beside me. I put my hand into something lukewarm and lumpy like scrambled eggs. Brain or cooked eye? No idea, but I was completely empty of stomach contents to throw up.
I rolled into the creek, sitting on the pebbled bottom so that water surged to my elbows. The gun made a sound like a hot pan hitting dishwater and the creek around the rune stone bubbled. Once it had cooled, I pushed myself downstream and let the current lap at my soiled pants.
Standing nauseated me, so I checked my ears, relieved there was no blood. I could hear a few things over the loud ringing.
It was funny how I went from terrified to ashamed without ever hitting anything between: I was alive. Huzzah! I’d also pooped myself semi-publicly. Crap! As I wrenched my shoes off—thankful they were clean—I glanced around to make sure no one had arrived on scene yet. I fought my soaked jeans, which had a death grip on my legs. Fortunately, these pants were the right blend of tight and baggy to keep the feces in a sort-of contained area. The boxers were next.
At some point while naked from the waist down in a creek, nestled amid smoldering dragon remains that smelled like someone had lit a Chinese restaurant’s dumpster on fire, I got enough hearing back to notice the other screech in the air. Dread seized my heart. Of course Dracon hadn’t sent just one of his thousands of dragons. Because that would be what a stupid movie villain does.
I waded for the bridge, towing pants and underwear through the water behind me. On the way, I snatched the gun and clicked it shut. It was still warm to the touch.
If I had to fight dragons, I’d have preferred to do it in pants. But sometimes life is just against you.
Once under the bridge, a brisk wind gusted at my back. I spun and faced another dragon, wings expanded with night air, descending at me with Hell rising out of its throat. This one was smaller. Like a bus. I hefted my cannon.
A third dragon soared past this one. Except the third one didn’t slow. It careened through the air, rolling like a cat stuck in a dryer. It thudded to the earth and plowed into the park’s perimeter wall, still as a stone. Dead.
I spotted a figure gliding through the sky from where the third dragon had begun its death tumble. My first thought was a bat. But I realized it was a man, arms stretched to both sides with a thin sheet of fabric slowing his descent to a glide. Not a bat. A bat man.
The dragon that had just landed in the creek opposite me reared back, its neck forming an S-curve in preparation for popping my head off like the seal on a can of human-flavored Pringles. I trained my cannon, but before the dragon or I could act, the black-clad figure dropped through the last dozen yards of space. A glint of steel flashed in the darkness. The dragon’s head peeled slowly off, thumping at my feet.
The rest of its body collapsed. An explosion of gore from its severed neck sprayed the bridge, the creek, and me.
I stood in the creek, naked from the waist down and covered in dragon gunk from the waist up, staring straight into the face of a masked ninja holding a katana. The ninja took one step off the dragon’s neck, stared me down, and said in a gravelly voice: “You killed the big one.”
I spat out a mouthful of dragon blood. “You’re welcome?”
The ninja leveled his katana’s point at my throat. “The big one was mine.”
“C—could you please elaborate?”
Chapter Five: With Apologies to Frank Miller
I was wrong about the ninja’s sword. A katana was curved and single-edged. He held the point of a slender, thirty-inch blade so near my throat I smelled the tang of metal. It was double-edged and straight like a longsword, with the small oval crossguard of a katana. The elegance of the blade and its crossguard had deceived me from a distance, but now its wielder was giving me an up-close introduction to his cutlery. He handled it with care, its edge glowing diamond bright.
“That… looks sharp,” I said. Not to mention lightweight, swift, and held so steady it wavered not a millimeter, nestled close enough that I was afraid when I gulped I’d slit my Adam’s apple on the point.
“You stole my kill,” the ninja said. He stood a scant five-six, up to my shoulders, and wore armor plates over dark-gray clothing that hugged his lean frame. His face was wholly obscured by a porcelain faceplate shaped like a demon’s scowl.
“Stole?” Personally, I’d have been thrilled to come to a dragon fight and find fewer than the expected number of dragons. “You… want to split the XP or something?”
“That was a breeder. The breeders are worth eight hundred crowns,” he explained in a surprisingly reasonable tone. “But you already knew that, didn’t you?” He rotated the sword clockwise, like he was figuring out a more painful way to stick it in.
“What? No! I don’t even like money. Keep it all, I don’t care. Do you want my money? Can’t stand the stuff.”
“The price is paid on the fangs. You destroyed them.”
“We could glue them together.” I glanced at the burning lumps of dragon head. “A sieve might help.”
“Do I look amused?”
“I’m sorry. I don’t have eight hundred crowns! I do have this magical device on my wrist. It tells the time of day to the second and grants the power to speak with dolphins.”
“I’m not known for conversation.” The ninja set the flat of his blade to the side of my neck. At the cool touch of metal my spine stiffened. He slowly lifted the blade and I listened to the rasp of it against my neck.
“Not that I don’t appreciate the vorpal shave—ah!” The sword was up to my ear and it nicked me as he drew it back. “Can you at least kill me after I put pants on?”
“No.”
“I really want to die with pants on.”
“Tell me how you killed the breeder.”
I gestured to the rune-stone cannon in my hand.
“A handheld? Handhelds don’t do that kind of damage.”
“This one did. You want it? It kills dragons real good. I’ll bet it’s worth more than eight hundred crowns.”
The blade flicked back to my throat
, this time so near that I could feel its hum on my sweltering neck.
I groaned. I couldn’t read this guy’s face because of the dumb mask, so the only gauge for his mood was where he put his sword.
“Who did you steal that weapon from?” he asked.
“I found it.”
“On whose body?” he snarled, and the anger was so palpable I feared any answer I gave would mean death.
“Don’t kill me.”
“Whose body!” he roared.
“No one’s! Look, I know this is crazy, but I—I think I made the damn thing. On accident. It’s complicated. I’d explain it if you took that sword from the general vicinity of my vital bits.”
The ninja sheathed his sword in one smooth motion. “The stone, then. Where did you get it?”
“I might have made that too.”
The ninja went still. In an even, severe tone, he said, “You’re not lying. But you could be insane. If you want to avoid an asylum, you’ll provide me two answers.”
“Just no algebra, please,” I whispered.
He pressed his finger into the mossy wall on the underside of the bridge and scratched two symbols into the moss. “Tell me what these are.”
“Is this a trick question?” I asked. “That’s a cross. Like a Christian cross. The other thing is a swastika. Nazis.” I’d already put my finger under my nose like a Hitler mustache before realizing those things didn’t exist in Rune. “I mean… that’s one thing they could be, but they could also be—”
The ninja sighed. “You’re not what I was expecting.”
I blinked. “I’m… expected?” I realized he’d been testing me on my Earthliness, which meant that—like Dracon—this guy seemed to know an awful lot more about my situation than I did. “You’re not about to tell me there’s some long-lost prophecy about me, are you?”
The Accidental God (A Pygmalion Fail Book 1) Page 5
