End Times in Dragon City

by Matt Forbeck

  “We’ll stop you,” I said, not sure I was even convinced of that myself.

  “You’re welcome to try,” she said. “I don’t expect it to make any difference in the long run. I mean, in the end all things die, and then they become mine. You’re no exception to the rule.”

  “We will escape you.” Paolo didn’t seem disturbed by this at all. I suspected the Ruler had been speaking to them through Oscuro for a long while now. “You will have none of us for your repulsive army.”

  “But you won’t have yourselves either, will you?” she said with a wicked grin. “I will concede that hollow victory to you — if you insist.”

  Paolo gazed at his compatriots. “You as little choice in the matter as do we.”

  “Before you incinerate this shell, I wish to tell you something, son of Gib.” She leered at me through Oscuro’s dead face. “In exchange for the service you have done me, I will spare you. You and you alone will be permitted to live and to bear witness to my triumph. It is the least I can do.”

  I pulled my pistol and put two bullets straight through Oscuro’s head. They blew out the back of his skull, and he slumped flat in a useless heap not even the Ruler of the Dead could do anything with. An instant later, Spark dove down from the roof of the chamber and incinerated the body in a flash of fire that sent everyone — even the suicidal elves — flinching at the scorching heat.

  Once Oscuro had been reduced to a heap of ash, I gestured at Paolo and the rest of the elves with my pistol. “I’d offer to kill you idiots myself, but you’re not worth the bullets. If you’re that eager to leave Dragon City, get on your way and good riddance.”

  I spun on my heel and trotted back toward the carpet. “Those of us interested in living have a battle to fight.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  “That was dramatic, Max,” Moira said as we raced downslope on Schaef’s carpet, “but what are we going to do now? Weren’t you depending on the elves to join the fight?”

  I shook my head. “I figured they were useless from the start. I had hoped they’d prove me wrong, but I’m not surprised they didn’t.”

  “Not all elves are like that you know,” said Belle. I noticed she hadn’t mentioned her parents once all night. They wouldn’t have been any help to us anyhow, and I suspected they might already be dead.

  “Of course not,” I said. “But most of the ones that are worth anything are either part of the Guard or are already out there fighting alongside them. The rest are as good as dead, but I suppose that’s been true for decades anyhow.”

  “Centuries,” Belle said.

  “So the dwarves are dug in, and the elves are already headed for the door,” Moira said.

  Danto nodded. “The wizards are wasting their time talking, and Goblintown’s been destroyed.”

  “What about the humans, halflings, and gnomes?” Belle asked.

  “The best of them are already in the Auxiliary Guard,” I said. “The rest of them may defend their homes as well as they can, but that’s not going to give us the fighting force we need to make a difference.”

  “So we’re doomed?” Moira said.

  “I’m not giving up yet.” I reached up and gave Spark a scratch behind the ears. “I know one more place we can try.”

  We flew on in silence for a moment, everyone waiting for me to explain my plan to them. I wondered which one of them would break first.

  Are you sure about this?

  I smiled and nodded. “Trust me,” I said to him.

  The others just glared at me, none of them wanting to be the first to crack. As I suspected would happen, Moira gave up before the others and opened her mouth to ask what I was going on about. It was then that she finally spotted where we were headed.

  Whatever she’d been about to say, she swallowed it and switched to something else instead. “Are you insane?”

  “Probably,” I said as I brought the carpet in over the Garrett, “but I think we’re out of sane choices.”

  I circled around the prison fortress once, peering into the guard towers and the cells. Despite the late hour, every room in the place seemed to be blazing with light. Dazzling spotglows scissored through the sky, most focused downslope at the battle still being fought on the wall below. One of them picked the carpet out of the night and held us in its beam as a cry went up from inside.

  I took the carpet in low and fast, skimming a pair of the prison’s towers. I didn’t know if they had the jailers’ rifles still on hand in there, but I didn’t care to find out the hard way.

  “I need you to get to the Stronghold,” I said to the others. “Get Johan.”

  “What about you?” Moira said, her brow wrinkling in concern as the wind whipped her hair around her face.

  “Take over!” I said to Belle as I drew my wand.

  Without a moment’s hesitation, she slipped into the controller’s spot. As she did, I gave her a kiss and said, “Wish me luck.”

  “For what?”

  I leaped off the side of the carpet, chanting the words to a fast and familiar spell as I went. “Max!” Belle shouted after me as I fell, her tone filled more with frustration and surprise than terror.

  I tapped myself in the chest with my wand, and the air rushing past me as I plummeted toward the Garrett felt like it started to life me upward. In fact, I was still falling, although more like a leaf than a rock.

  I spread my arms and aimed for the prison’s front gate, which stood closed and locked, reinforced with several layers of steel and countless spells. It had been years since I’d practiced this kind of move, but the basics of it came back to me right away. Or so I thought.

  “Dammit.” As I got closer to the gate, I realized I was going to overshoot it. That gave me the choice of either zipping straight past it or slamming bodily into the front of the place. Neither option excited me.

  I ran through the spells I knew in my head, searching for one that might help, but I realized I didn’t have the time to pull any of them off. Then I felt a pair of talons dig into the shoulders of my jacket and heard a flapping noise overhead. I looked up to see Spark holding on to me, his wings stretched wide and pounding hard to keep me from plastering myself against the Garrett’s entrance.

  Need a hand?

  “Thank you!” I said as the dragonet hauled me back from a painful end and moved to deposit me safely on the long bridge that led up to the front gate instead. A moment later, I made a tiptoe landing right along the bridge and strode up to rap on the gate with my knuckles as if I was stopping by to visit a friend.

  It was a pointless gesture, of course. As thick as the gate was, no one could have heard me on the other side of it if I’d knocked on it with anything less than a battering ram. Still, I suspected the people inside already knew I was there, and a moment later the inner gate swung wide open on a set of well-oiled hinges to prove me right.

  A familiar figure stood framed in the gateway before me, silhouetted in the bright lights glowing behind her. She stared out at me through the steel grid of the outer gate as she approached it, and she stopped right in front of it and spoke. “Max Gibson? You got a lot of nerve showing up here.”

  “You know I wouldn’t if it wasn’t important, Alcina,” I said. “We need to talk.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  “Max, you’re insane,” Alcina said after I explained to her what I wanted.

  She’d let me into the prison to parlay with her. I knew she didn’t see that as a concession to me as much as a means of trapping me in her web, but I was willing to give her that if it meant I could present my plan to her and the rest of the prisoners in the place.

  She’d brought me into the main hall, a cavernous place with barred windows and a reinforced roof, and she’d let me lay it out for her and anyone else who might be listening. At least a hundred people stood crowded into the room around us, giving us just enough room to talk — or to fight if it came to that.

  None of them seemed anything like the faint-hearted f
ools I’d seen up in the Dragon’s Spire. If these people hadn’t been hard-bitten criminals when they’d entered the place — and I was willing to believe in the innocence of a good number of them — the Garrett had stripped them of everything kind and gentle about them, leaving behind only hardened survivors. Despite that, even as I explained myself, I could see that every last one of them was terrified, and I knew what I had to tell them wasn’t going to help with that.

  As I’d spoken about how the Ruler of the Dead would slaughter us all one at a time if we didn’t manage to work together, I could hear murmurs of agreement among my audience. The people incarcerated here may have been the most dangerous souls in Dragon City, but they still considered the city their home. They all had family and friends on the outside. Despite what the Imperial Dragon’s Guard may have done to them, they wanted to help.

  Alcina, on the other hand, didn’t.

  “What makes you think we care about the world outside these walls?” she said with a wicked grin. “The Garrett is the most impregnable prison in the world. How ironic that the Guard stuck us in here to protect the rest of the city from us? Now we’re safe inside here from the Ruler and her army instead.”

  “Once she gets her hands on the Dragon’s corpse —”

  “Which she won’t, and you know it. You can’t scare us with your horror stories, Max. And you can’t get us to join up with the Guard with your lies.”

  “Spoken like a vampire,” I said. “Is your caution rooted in concern for your fellow prisoners? Or are you worried the Ruler of the Dead might deprive you of your food supply?”

  She smirked at that. “I’ve lived in this prison for years without dining on another person. I can last a while longer.” She reached out and ran a long, sharp-nailed finger along my neck. “As tempting as it is to break my long fast.”

  “We don’t have time for this,” I said. “The line of guards at the Great Circle is going to fail soon. When that happens, we’re done for.”

  “Oh, Max,” she said in the kind of condescending tone a bad teacher might use on an troublesome child. “You always did spin the wildest stories.”

  I reached into the pocket of my jacket and produced the crystal ball she’d given me the night before. “Go ahead,” I said. “Take a look.”

  I handed the globe to her, and she held it in her hand like a trophy, raising it up so that we could both peer into it, as could anyone standing nearby. The crowd leaned in closer around us, and I tried to figure out how many of them I might have had a hand in putting into this place. More to the point, I wondered if any of them might still hold enough of a grudge to try to slip a shiv between my ribs while I the visions in the crystal ball distracted me.

  It was a threat I had to ignore. Maybe the presence of Spark on my shoulders would warn them off. I could only hope.

  I stared deep into the globe while Alcina brought the viewpoint in it downslope to the Great Circle and showed us what was happening there. I hadn’t checked in on it myself for a while. I’d seen enough horrors for the night, I’d thought, and it wasn’t like I didn’t know what the Ruler of the Dead’s army meant to do. Watching it wasn’t going to help me stop it.

  Seeing it happen, though, still swiped the air from my lungs.

  I spotted Maurizzio shouting orders at his fellow guards as gunfire erupted all around him. The living dead had topped the wall once more, but this time they hadn’t restricted themselves to the spot near the Great Gate. Dripping wet with the waters of the Crystal River, they’d braved other sections of the wall, trusting in their overwhelming numbers and the fact that the Guard had already used up much of its supply of oil to ensure that they could proceed.

  Once the creatures clambered over the wall, though, they hadn’t simply rushed past and stormed the city proper. Instead, they’d turned to sweep along the battlements and bring the fight directly to the Guard. This had transformed the skirmish from a fight in which snipers in the towers could pick off zombies with impunity to a pitched battle in which they had to take care to avoid hitting their fellow guards with stray shots.

  The guards on wall had been forced to meet the zombies in hand-to-hand combat, pitting their swords and wands and shotguns against the undead horde. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d seen someone use an actual sword in a fight, but I had to admit that the guards made good use of them, slashing and hacking the zombies to pieces with an efficiency and grace that no other weapon could hope to match.

  Letting the zombies get that close, of course, proved trouble. The creatures couldn’t hurt anyone from a distance. They didn’t even have the necessary coordination to throw a rock. But once they got their hands on someone, that victim was doomed.

  The zombies had no fear. You could stab them through the belly over and over, and they never cringed in pain. They just kept biting and clawing and tearing pieces out of you until you fell over and died. And if that one didn’t get you, the next one would. Or the next one, or the next one, in an unending wave of rotting flesh.

  The worst part, of course, was what happened to the guards when they died. Bare moments after their lives left them, they pushed themselves to their feet and joined in the battle once again. This time, though, they fought for the other side.

  While the Guard seemed to have a handle on the zombies at first, the creatures wore them down bit by bit, soldier by soldier, death by death. As we watched in utter and horrified silence — not a person in the prison uttering a word other than a hushed curse — we saw the battle turn against the Guard.

  Maurizzio fought the hardest and the longest, refusing to abandon his post, to retreat from the duty with which he had been charged. He moved like lightning, his self-loading pistol in one hand and his wand in the other. He’d fired the gun so fast and so often that the barrel of it glowed an angry red, and his spells came less and less frequently as he drained every last drop of his mojo away.

  The pistol jammed, the barrel having expanded too much from the heat to let another bullet pass through it. Not missing a beat, Maurizzio began using it as a club to smash zombies over the side of the wall. He drew his sword then — a saber with a wicked edge and glowing blue runes etched along the length of its blade — and he began laying into the undead.

  As his soldiers fell all around him, Maurizzio battled on, his blade dancing to a song of death that hummed only in his head. At times, the weapon moved so fast I couldn’t see more of it than the glowing trail its runes left behind, but the evidence of its handiwork fell left and right until the corpses lay stacked around the Guard captain like cordwood. He fought on for far longer than any human would have lasted, but I could see sweat mingling on his brow with the blood that had splashed there. Even he could not hold out forever.

  As Maurizzio battled on, the clothes of the zombies gathering around him turned from tatters to finery, from rotting gray to vibrant crimson lined with gold. In the end, this was what finally broke him. He slashed out with his sword and ran through a fellow elf dressed in a bloodied guard’s uniform. When he looked up into his victim’s face, he recognized the person on the other end of his blade, and he froze.

  His guard was only down for a moment as he tried to absorb the enormity of the horrors he faced, but that was all it took. The creature he’d run through swiped at him with his hands and caught Maurizzio on the side of his head. He stumbled back, stunned, falling to one knee, and he never rose again.

  At least not with another beat in his heart.

  I reached up and took the crystal ball back from Alcina. “Seen enough?” I asked.

  She nodded in solemn horror. Even as a vampire, the horrors that would soon be crawling up the mountain toward us had sobered her.

  I held the crystal ball before me and stared out at the rest of the prisoners surrounding us. “How about the rest of you?”

  A low murmur rippled through the crowd. I’d shown them their doom, and few of them had been ready to face it.

  “The army of the Ruler of the Dead took d
own the Great Circle in just two nights. How long do you think it will take for them to overwhelm the Garrett?”

  “We might be able to manage.” Alcina ground her jaw in frustration.

  “At best, you’d hold out long enough to starve. And if the Ruler gets her hands on the Dragon’s corpse, you won’t last until dawn.”

  Alcina growled, a noise that sounded far less than human. “What would you have us do?” she said. “You ask us to come to the aid of the people who threw us into this prison to rot, but how are we to manage that? With teeth and shivs?”

  “Come on outside,” I said, speaking not just to Alcina but to everyone assembled in the chamber. “Leave this prison behind and taste the free air again. Then you can tell me if you’d rather die out there on your feet — your liberty once more your own — or be exterminated here like rats in a hole.”

  I walked toward the exit, and no one stopped me. One person — a one-eyed hobgoblin named Stig who I’d caught eating children six years before — followed me out. Another hardcore crook came out after him, then another and another until I had a wide line of them trailing in my wake.

  I raised the enchanted portcullis with a wave of my wand and pushed open the gate beyond it. From there, I strode out onto the long bridge that connected the crag on which Garrett stood to the main part of the mountain’s bulk. The stones shook under my feet from the number of people who trod across them with me.

  The moon shone down on us from a sharp, clear sky. The battle for the city’s fate raged far below us, cracks of gunfire mingling with each other as they echoed through the night. I stopped at the wrought-iron gate that barred the far end of the bridge and turned to wait for the others to join me.

  They spilled out of the Garret now, filling the bridge from one end to the other, turning it into a column of hardened criminals stalking under the open sky. They marched as they emerged from the prison, and somewhere among them someone started up a chant that seemed to grow louder with every step.