Firedrake - Volume 1

by T. Mike McCurley

  Firedrake Volume Three: Anger management classes for Drake? That's part of the punishment when Drake finds himself in legal trouble after taking Soundstage on a trip to recover wanted fugitives. What will happen when the new "kinder, gentler" Drake returns to his job just in time for an attack on the safehouse where his brother lives?

  Tales of the Emergence: An anthology of short stories set in the world of Emergence. An indestructible man who fears only his own hidden nature. An angst-ridden teen handed the power of a god. A street cop learns what it means to be part of the team that responds to booster crimes. A night in the life of a boosted kid who wants to be a comic-book hero and encounters more than he expects. Many others that set the stage for the Firedrake series.

  The Good Fight: A free anthology of superhero fiction by the fine men and women of the Pen and Cape Society – of which I am a proud member. Contains an all-new Firedrake short story!

  The Good Fight 2: Villains: A new anthology from the men and women of the Pen and Cape Society. This one is for charity: James Hudnall, long-time comic author, is battling some issues, and the PCS has banded together to show that even Villains can help a good cause! Contains the origin of Professor Pain!

  Deep Space Mine: The horrors of global genocide witnessed by the occupants of a space station. Short and sweet, suited for a quick reading fix.

  Golem - A Jericho Sims tale: After witnessing the ritualistic murder of fellow soldiers in the last days of the Civil War, gunslinger Jericho Sims travels the world in search of their killer. Along the way, he stumbles into situations he never dreamed could exist. Following an encounter with a hostile native, Jericho is left with an arrow in his back and not much time to live. Will the scientist he encounters be his saving grace, or will the man's invention be the death of a town?

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

  T. Mike McCurley lives in a small city in Oklahoma, where indeed, “the wind comes sweeping” and all that. He began writing superhero prose on a whim one day, and found it enjoyable enough to continue, leaving his family to bear the burden of insane keyboard clacking at all hours. His short stories soon formed the backbone of what became known as the world of The Emergence, describing events and players in a world of metahumanity that began in 1963 and has continued to grow since. From there came the stories of the metahuman cop known as Firedrake, which has now filled three books, with a fourth in the works. He is a founding member of the Pen and Cape Society, an online cabal of authors of superhero prose, and his Emergence setting will soon be featured in Lester Smith’s D6xD6 roleplaying game.

  In another (non-writing) life he has been a radiological monitor, an emergency medical technician, a private investigator, a videographer, a certified GLOCK armorer, and a dozen other things too varied and goofy to list in one space together.

  His works can be found linked at www.tmikemccurley.com and at the Pen and Cape Society, www.penandcapesociety.com .

  Follow T. Mike on Twitter at http://twitter.com/T.MikeMcCurley

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  Firedrake Volume Two is available now! Here is an example of the action within:

  Drake grunted as his back impacted with the light post, folding the metal until it broke off with a shriek. For his part, the booster continued his reverse flight until he slammed into the wall of a pharmacy. Concrete shattered under the impact.

  “You should be more careful,” declared the woman in the black bodysuit with a Texas flag emblazoned across the chest. Her voice was low and soft, with a pronounced drawl, and held none of the tension Drake would have expected given the situation at hand.

  Drake had been in Austin for almost a week following the return of Patriot’s mystical cure, taking time off to allow his battered body to heal. In actuality it took only two days for him to return to readiness, but he was enjoying the hospitality and the vacation. It was during the fifth day that the alarm came from the Police Department.

  “Got one out off Guadalupe and 38th that just blew his way through a half-dozen cruisers,” Soundstage announced as she entered the living room of the expansive house in which the city of Austin had allowed its defenders to live. Her helmet, as always, covered her head and was sealed to the armored battle suit she wore. It fed her a constant stream of information from police and other emergency response frequencies, and years of experience let her garner the details she needed with little effort. She moved through the room with purpose, and her amplified voice echoed throughout the building.

  “Awww, not now,” Drake said with mock sadness. “I mean, Oprah’s coming on and everything...”

  “You can TiVo it,” Soundstage replied as the reptilian booster fairly leaped up from the chair in which he had been seated.

  “Yeah, ’cause I’m so good at programming things,” Drake said, snorting. “I can’t even get my VCR to stop flashing twelve o’clock." He slithered into his shoulder holsters, clipping the retention straps to his belt.

  “He is coming?” asked another voice.

  “Yeah,” Drake replied, turning to regard the smaller woman standing in the doorway to the room. She wore a lightly-armored bodysuit of jet black accented by a flag emblem. During his short stay, Drake had become acquainted with the slight figure, who went by the name of Sangre. She was more than a foot shorter than Drake, but he never felt he had to look down to see her. The woman had a presence that felt larger than life. She had made the claim to others that she had been in Texas for a hundred years or more, and there were moments when Drake could almost believe it. He had never seen her in action, but Soundstage spoke highly of her skills. Drake had been surprised to discover that Sangre’s personality was even more abrasive than his own. A part of him wanted to introduce her to Colleen Hart, just for the pleasure of watching the interaction.

  “Is this normal?”

  “Who cares about normal, slick? I’m a cop, right? Gotta go where the action is.” He made an effort to produce the most dazzling grin in his entire repertoire just long enough to convince her that he was not serious, then reached out a wide hand to hold open the door beside her.

  “I figure you probably do, yeah,” she replied, missing the intended sarcasm completely, which was another of the few things that had been so noticeable that it registered with Drake. Sangre had an almost limitless inability to understand humor in any form. He shook his head as she passed beneath his outstretched arm and stepped through the doorway.

  The trio had flown to the scene of the incident with due haste, Sangre clinging to Soundstage’s neck like a flag-wearing monkey and Drake winging his way beside them. As they neared the scene, passing rapidly over approaching emergency vehicles, they saw the cause of the problem. It was difficult to miss.

  Standing nearly thirty feet tall and occupying space between a four-story bank building and a library, the man was holding a wrecked Nissan pickup in one hand as though it were no burden. He was grossly fat, and covered in a mat of hair so thick it was like the fur of a dog. He wore no clothing, and in any space where the man’s flesh showed through the hair, it was seen to be covered in lurid tattoos. As the three boosters approached, he flung the Nissan in an overhand throw that had devastating results. It crashed into the front grill of a ladder truck marked for Company 14, sending the massive vehicle skidding sideways. The tail of the truck slammed into a group of storefronts, exploding them outward in showers of glass and brick. The hairy man laughed echoingly and stomped a foot down to smash a bus stop cubicle.

  “That pretty common around here?” Drake asked, jerking his chin toward the rampaging figure.

  “Giant furry naked men? Oh, yeah. All the time,” Soundstage shot back with a chuckling sound. She banked toward the ground. “Here’s your spot, Sangre.”

  “Exercise caution,” the small woman suggested, stepping off the armored back while still in motion. She seemed to hang in the air for a moment, then plummeted toward the ground. Drake slowed his own flight in an effort to turn back to catch her.

  “She’s got it,” Soundstage said. �
��Come on! We need to keep this one contained. If he gets into the city proper, no telling what kind of damage he’ll cause.”

  Confident that the chromed booster knew what she was doing, Drake returned his attention to the matter at hand. The furry man had ripped a stop sign and its post from the ground and thrown it in a sidelong spin that would have decapitated a police officer had his partner not tackled him to the ground a second before the deadly impact. The two men hit the pavement mere inches beneath the whistling missile, which then crashed through the glass front of a cigar store. Beside the store, a group of reporters ducked as glass showered their position.

  Soundstage changed her flight attitude to a hover and engaged her speakers. Her words echoed from the walls of every surrounding building.

  “Unidentified subject! This is the police booster strike force! Cease and desist your destructive activities or we will respond with force!”

  There was a moment, Drake noted, when everything went silent. It was almost as though time itself had stopped. For that brief moment, he imagined that even the sounds of the sirens and screaming had ceased, that the car alarms had fallen silent, and that everything had come down to the thunderous noise of his own heartbeat. Then the moment ended, and the enormous man let out a laugh that was chilling in its ferocity.

  “Come and get me, cutie!” he roared, the sound nearly as loud as Soundstage’s amplified tones. Bellowing incoherently, the man drove a fist through the facing of the bank building, blasting aside stone and glass to reach a pudgy hand inside.

  “He pulls Fay Wray out of there and starts climbing, I’m going home,” Drake said. He folded his wings back and dived toward the ground, building some speed before flaring them wide again and angling upward in a hard climb. The move put enough distance between him and Soundstage that he did not hear her reply, though her laughter was faintly audible.

  Drawing his hand back from within the bank, the massive man stuck something into his mouth and began to chew noisily. A muffled cry sounded for a second, then cut off.

  “Oh my God! Did he just eat someone?” Soundstage asked. Her volume was still elevated, and more than one horrified police officer shouted an affirmative answer.

  “Shut him down!” Soundstage shouted. There was a bark and a roar, and a cone-tipped missile of white and yellow leapt from her left shoulder mount. Scarcely longer than an outstretched arm, the missile flew unerringly toward the man, exploding as it neared him. The shockwave from the detonation shook the surroundings, and the flash of light was brilliant enough it made Drake’s still-tender eyes sting.

  “Wanna warn somebody before you do that?” he growled, reaching up to rub at his eyes with the back of one hand.

  The giant man squealed at the sudden assault on his senses, flapping a hand before his face to clear the smoke. Fragments from the casing had opened dozens of tiny lacerations on his face, and drops of blood appeared in their wake. Though the missiles were damaging primarily due to their concussion, there was no small amount of shrapnel that accompanied the blast.

  From the ground, the police opened up with a veritable arsenal of small arms, peppering the giant with bullets and buckshot rounds. They did little more than make him shout in surprised pain. He followed up a second later by knocking a cornerstone free from the bank facing and sending it crashing to the ground below. Ragged bits of stone hurtled from the shattered rock and slashed across the officers, momentarily silencing their response.

  Soundstage flew in closer, intending to challenge the man again, and was astonished to see one great eye close in a wink as the man leered at her.

  “Say, baby, looking good,” he said with a suggestive whistle. He licked his lips, waggled his tongue at her, and grinned past teeth in serious need of advanced dental care. An involuntary shiver went through the armored hero as the man added, “I got something for you,” and grabbed at himself obscenely.

  “Well, I see that the growth thing isn’t an all-over kind of effect,” she countered, fighting the urge to be sick. Her wrist-guns snapped to full extension above her hands.

  His face reddened as he reached toward her. “I’ll bust your metal ass, bitch!”

  “Want to wash that hand first? I’ve seen where it’s been,” Soundstage responded. Her wrist-guns spat fire, slashing a stream of bullets past his face in an obvious warning shot. The ammunition she used could easily saw parts of the man completely off, and despite the lust-filled taunts he had made, she had no wish to cause permanent harm.

  “Look out! He’s getting bigger!” Drake shouted. He pointed with the tip of a yellowing talon. The giant was indeed increasing in size. He had passed the thirty-five-foot height mark and was still growing.

  The reptilian booster’s warning was a boon to Soundstage, but his flight had taken him too close, considering the increase in reach that his foe had gained. With a backward slap, a hand the size of a car hood smashed into Drake and sent him sailing backward to snap through a light pole and crash into the wall of a pharmacy with a sickening thud.

  “You should be more careful,” Sangre intoned.

  “Yeah,” Drake agreed, coughing. “I was thinking about it, but then I was like, ’Naaa, why try something new now?’”

  “Thank you for the assistance, though,” she added, gesturing to the light pole he had destroyed. It lifted from the ground as if by magic and flew in a spinning arc toward the giant, leaving cable sticking from the ground. Sangre wiggled the fingers of her left hand, arm outstretched toward the scene, and the remains of a destroyed cruiser arced upward toward the giant as well.

  A grating sound, as of a garden rake dragging across concrete, split the air with thunderous force. The giant clapped his hands to his ears in pain as the few remaining windows in the buildings around him suddenly disintegrated under the sonic assault. Facing the giant from her hovering position, Soundstage amped the volume a little more as she continued the screaming attack.

  “Well, so far, Soundstage is the only one that’s having any luck,” Drake observed. He flexed his knees and leaped into the air, snapping his wings in a rapid beat as he climbed into the air. “Let’s see if I can’t do a little bit.”

  The car that was flying smashed into the giant’s left knee with a crunch that Drake knew could be either metal or bone giving way. The manner in which the vehicle folded around the joint left little doubt it was the former. It caused the giant distress, though, as evidenced by his pained yelp, and that was enough to bring a grin to Drake’s features.

  Soundstage cranked the volume on her speakers and cut loose with yet another blast of sound. Blood ran from the nose and eyes of the giant in response to the onslaught. The shattered light pole, still spinning, struck the giant in the head repeatedly as Sangre manipulated it from the ground. Drake swept in, feeling no larger than a dog might to a fully grown human in comparison to his opponent, and exhaled mightily, trailing a stream of flame across the hair on the man’s chest. It ignited for a second, then shriveled and stuck to the giant with a sizzling sound.

  A massive hand slapped out at him and Drake was forced to dodge, though he used the barbed tip of his tail to spike into the back of the hand. The move, while psychologically satisfying to Drake, had no noticeable effect on the furry giant.

  “Drake, clear my line!” Soundstage ordered. Without hesitation, Drake folded his wings and let himself fall away, snapping them back open a few moments later and angling his flight to the left as the world erupted into a cacophony of sonic devastation.

  Groaning, the giant bent at the waist and wrapped his fat fingers around the frame of an abandoned taxicab. The metal screamed under the pressure of the hand. Glass shattered and fell free from the windows as he lifted it like a yellow truncheon. Sangre kept the light pole swinging; a mobile bat that left bruises and blood in its path. It smacked across the enormous head and neck, splitting the skin with every strike.

  The giant suddenly rose to his full height, bringing the cab around in a wide arc. The undercarriage and
front bumper hammered into the hovering form of Soundstage, throwing sparks and showering the area with bits of the broken automobile. Fluids from the wrecked machine spattered the bank building. Gasoline and oil flared into brilliant life for a few seconds, giving a hellish aura to the whole location.

  A silver streak sailed clear of the scene, blasting through the upper floors of an apartment building and emerging from the other side. Her fall toward the street was arrested by an ignition of the jets in her boots, and she flew back toward the confrontation. A rent in the abdominal plating as well as several smaller scars and dents in the metal armor gave mute testimony to the power of the blow she had taken.

  “Sangre! Make me some handcuffs!” Drake shouted. He flew at the man once again, dragging both his pistols from beneath his arms. The weapons bucked and roared in his hands. He directed his fire at the frame of the cab, unwilling to fire a round that might cripple the man. Where the rounds impacted, small explosions followed. A second later, the cab disintegrated in a fiery blast as what remained of its fuel supply ignited with a whoomp sound. Yellow-orange flames licked out and fell to the ground in a ghastly display.

  Sangre nodded in response to the request from Drake and focused her attention on the wrecked automobiles and the random bits of scrap that had been generated by the rampaging booster. Strips of metal, pieces of auto chassis, street signs, and more all rose into the air under her command and began to braid themselves together into thick, ropy strands. She forced the metal to respond to her will, ignoring the blood that trickled from her nose and the quivering of her limbs as she fought to control it all at one time.

  With a cry of agony, the giant booster flung the destroyed taxi away from his body. It crashed to the ground and skidded across the pavement, slamming three police cars into new positions before coming to rest. The cries of wounded officers drifted up to Drake’s ears.