by Ward Parker
But before Stanley even hit the ground, Bill was in a firing stance, firing shot after shot with his Glock at the Reptilians overhead.
It got their attention. The three dragons circled and headed toward him.
Bill realized that standing in the middle of the green wasn’t the safest defensive point. He jumped into a sand trap as jets of fire engulfed the fourteenth hole, just missing the prone figure of Stanley.
Bill found good cover beneath the lip of the bunker, put in a new clip, and continued firing as the dragons passed overhead.
The smaller one screamed a screeching, hissing wail. As they flew out of range, one dragon grabbed the young one with its talons to help keep it aloft.
Soon, the dragons disappeared into the night sky.
“No more waiting for the Reptilians to attack,” Bill said, mostly to himself, since Stanley was still blubbering with fear. “It’s time to go on the offensive.”
Bill needed an army to defeat the Reptilians. Oleg and Sol did not an army make. One or two other vampires at Squid Tower might be depended on to follow the call of duty. And there were surely a handful from Stanley’s community who could be convinced to join. Even so, it was pretty pathetic. His Boy Scout troop back in 1912 was a more formidable force than this.
He would have to recruit others besides vampires. Perhaps the werewolves in the buildings next door, though he despised them. Perhaps regular humans, even. Florida had hordes of armed humans, many of whom were already in a militia of some sort. It shouldn’t be too difficult to raise an army of humans. Actually, more of a special forces unit like a Seal team. Led by vampires, of course. Vampires who didn’t let on that they were vampires.
Bill was certain he was destined for this task. He’d spent his later years as a human, and all his years as a vampire, regretting that he hadn’t joined the military when he was young. Of course, back then, he was more of a wimp—not the fearless warrior he was today.
He was a late bloomer, for sure. But now, he had reached the pinnacle of his existence. It was time to fulfill his destiny and save the planet from a sinister enemy.
And it would be fun, too. Just the thought of how much ammo he’d go through got his undead heart racing at three beats a minute.
There was a gun show at the Crab County Fairgrounds this weekend, beginning Friday night after sunset. The place would be overflowing with patriots. Well-armed ones, at that.
At first Bill considered paying for an exhibitor table if it wasn’t too late to do so. He could sit there and hand out pamphlets about the Reptilians and have a sign-up sheet for his special forces unit.
But he discarded this idea. He imagined most of the people stopping at his table would be the kinds of attendees who methodically work their ways through the tables without any real aim or objective. It would be a waste of time and money.
No, he wanted people who were already believers in the Reptilians, who were deeply concerned about them. Men (Bill was too old-fashioned to even imagine women warriors) who were ready to make the commitment to fight back.
So, on Friday night, Bill bought his ticket to the show and, once inside, deployed his recruitment tactic: sandwich board signs. His front and back were covered by foam-core boards with the famous image of Uncle Sam pointing at you from a World War I poster. Bill had written the message: “I want YOU to fight the Reptilians.”
It was a brilliant idea that actually worked. Even though he stood off to the side of the entrance with guys holding signs that said, “Jet contrails turn you gay,” and “Gravity is only a theory,” Bill had many people approach him.
Every few minutes, a different man would ask what he could do to fight the dastardly aliens. All the men were self-selected candidates, already deeply immersed in the conspiracy theory, armed, and eager to use those arms.
By the time the show closed for the night, everyone had left, and the security guards ordered Bill to leave, he had over two hundred email addresses. He figured a third to a half of these men would come through and sign up.
He named his army ERR: Earthlings Resisting Reptilians. Soon, training would begin. And shortly afterwards, their hour of glory would arrive.
“I don’t understand why we only train at night,” said Abe, the African-American former Special Forces sergeant.
“My observation is the Reptilians are most active at night,” Bill replied.
Bill had assigned Abe as the commander of the human contingent of the ERR Army. They were the twenty-three humans who showed up to the first two meetings, out of the 232 who had given their email addresses to Bill at the gun show. That left four vampires: Sol, Oleg, Stanley, and himself. The trick was hiding the fact the vampires were vampires, while building unit cohesion between the living and the undead.
“I think we should train in daylight, as well,” Abe said. “Soldiers need to be ready to fight twenty-four-seven.”
“Um, good idea, Sergeant. The senior members will undergo different training during daylight hours.”
“You mean you old, pasty-white guys? What’s the deal with that creepy one with the pointy ears?”
“Sol is a good soldier. Don’t judge him by his looks.”
Bill was reluctant to admit he was intimidated by Abe. Not only did Abe have a real military background, unlike Bill, he was aggressive and frequently challenged Bill’s authority. Bill had to face the fact that he and the vampires were elderly weekend warriors. Except for Oleg, they weren’t actual soldiers, compared to the ex-military and ex-law enforcement members who, along with the crazy extremists, constituted ERR.
And Oleg seemed to resent Bill for assuming senior command. But Oleg had fought in the days of muskets. He didn’t appreciate modern military hardware as much as Bill.
Bill and his fellow vampires could keep up (almost) during the drills, because their vampire superpowers overcame the geriatric bodies in which they were trapped, since they were turned years ago. But they had to accept the fact they had become soft. The mellow, pleasure-filled retirement lifestyle, with the nightly visits of the Blood Bus if they didn’t feel like hunting, had lost them their edge. They didn’t have the blind courage of someone like Abe, or Tony, the insane former bank robber who wanted to kill cops as much as Reptilians.
Endless nights sipping pint bags of blood by the swimming pool had stripped Bill of his homicidal instincts. Or maybe he never had any to begin with.
He’d have to work on fixing that.
The first real mission of the ERR Army was a night search-and-destroy patrol in the Everglades. Bill was painfully aware that he didn’t know how to find the Reptilians, but they could find him. And they were able to disappear through invisible portals to return to their home planet.
In essence, Bill’s strategy was to patrol areas where he’d seen Reptilians before, and hopefully draw them out to attack the army. Then, the aliens would be destroyed.
It didn’t begin so well.
The army marched together as one unit. Oleg pointed out that this was a bad strategy, but Bill and Abe didn’t want to split their force into smaller teams until they could measure its performance in the swamps, prairies, and mangrove wetlands of the landscape.
After only thirty minutes of marching along a dirt road, gunfire erupted from the point of the column. Bill and Abe rushed up to see what happened.
“Bagged me a Reptilian, I sure did,” said a bearded guy named Lucius. He wasn’t ex-military. And he’d been booted out of every militia he’d joined.
“That’s not a Reptilian,” Abe said. “It’s an alligator.”
“It’s a reptile, is what it is,” said Lucius.
“Right. A reptile, not a Reptilian.”
“Lucius, didn’t you watch my presentation about Reptilians?” Bill asked.
“Guess I fell asleep during that one.”
“Remember,” Bill said, “they look like very tall humans with strange eyes. When they’re in full reptile mode, they look like dragons.”
“Got it,” Luciu
s said.
The march continued. Bill didn’t expect they would find Reptilians on every mission. They needed to be patient. He’d explained that in his presentation.
Fifteen minutes later, a clamor arose from the rear of the column. Bill and Abe rushed back there to see what happened.
Four skinny twenty-something males stood in their underwear with their hands in the air. They were shaking with fear. Eight ERR members surrounded them with rifles aimed.
“We got ourselves some Reptilians,” said an anti-government militia member named Red. “Look how tall they are.”
“Actually, we’re Norwegian,” said the tallest captive.
His accent sounded Norwegian, Bill believed. He looked kind of Norwegian, too.
“We are here fishing and camping,” the captive explained. “But these guys just dragged us out of our tents.”
“I don’t think they’re Reptilians,” Bill said.
“Reptilians blend into our society,” Red insisted.
“Did you sleep through my presentation?”
“No. You showed drawings of what they look like in their natural form. You showed us pictures of dragons. And you showed us photos of some of the famous people who are really Reptilians, like two ex-presidents, the Pope, and a 1980s hair-metal band. They all looked like normal people. Like our prisoners.”
“Reptilians infiltrate the highest levels of society,” Bill said. “They don’t go camping in a mosquito-infested swamp.”
“Then what the heck are we doing here?”
“You really didn’t pay attention to my presentation. I put a lot of time into building those charts and graphs. What I said in the presentation was the Everglades is a crossroads where the Reptilians come in and out of our world. They’re travelling through here. Not camping in tents.”
“This stuff is too complicated,” Red said.
“That’s why you need to spend more time on the internet learning about conspiracies. It makes you much smarter. Let these people go.”
“Wait,” Abe said. “I want to check one thing I learned on the internet.”
He walked to the nearest Norwegian and yanked down his boxer shorts. Everyone turned their heads away.
“Oh, sorry. Yeah, they’re not Reptilians. Let them go.”
“Sorry,” Bill called out as the embarrassed and annoyed Norwegians hurried back to their campsite.
“These guys need more training,” Abe said to Bill.
“I could give my presentation again.”
“Maybe spice it up a little this time. And not as many slides.”
Movement caught his eye. The troops were at the southern point of the Everglades on the shore of Florida Bay. A belt of mangrove trees lined the shoreline to their west.
The air was shimmering just in front of it. Bill could see it clearly with his vampire vision. Even the guys who had night-vision goggles didn’t seem to notice.
Something slipped out of the shimmering section of air and crawled into the cover of the mangroves. Bill sprinted toward it.
He reached the mangroves and stepped into calf-deep water to get around the tangled roots. Through the branches, he saw the creature scurrying away from him. But he plunged through the narrow trees, slipping on their underground roots, diving forward to tackle it.
He held it in his arms as it squirmed to get away, scraping him with its claws. He stood, the small dragon firmly in his grasp. It weighed thirty or forty pounds, like a medium-sized dog. But much stronger.
“Calm down. I’ve got you.”
A small blast of flame shot from the creature’s nostrils and burned some leaves.
To the average person, it would look like a baby dragon. But Bill knew what it really was.
“It’s a baby Reptilian,” he shouted to the troops. “Yes! We have a hostage. They’ll surely do what we say now that we have one of their babies. This, gentlemen, could turn the tide of the war.”
“Your dragon friend contacted me,” Agnes said on the phone as Missy drove back to Jellyfish Beach. “He spoke to me telepathically.”
“Yeah, he enjoys doing that.”
“He said his daughter was captured by an army of militant humans and vampires.”
“Oh, my. Bill has been busy.”
“Yes, he’s organized a militia of other nut jobs like himself. All heavily armed, from what Oleg told me.”
“Oleg is with them?”
“Not anymore. He and Sol continued to play soldier with Bill, even after he disrupted the parley with Ronnie. But Oleg said they quit the militia after what just happened. He said they’re all a bunch of idiots, and now that they have a hostage, things could go very badly.”
“What did Ronnie say?”
“He said things will go very badly. Especially if he doesn’t get his daughter back unharmed.”
“Oh, my.”
“I don’t know why a young dragon would be on her own at a time like this,” Agnes said.
“She probably wasn’t alone. She was most likely part of a group, including adults, traveling together. I’m guessing Bill came upon the young dragon just as she was passing through a gateway.”
“Regardless of what happened, we need to put a stop to this. Both dragons and vampires have been lost. Some humans, too, from what I’ve heard. Now, this incident will cause a major escalation.”
Missy spent the rest of the drive trying to reach Ronnie telepathically. Which was difficult since she wasn’t a telepath. He must have sensed her efforts, because when she was about an hour outside of Jellyfish Beach, words entered her head. They were in Ronnie’s voice with its slight Southern accent.
Get me my daughter back now.
Ronnie, please let’s talk, she replied in her head. But he didn’t answer.
How could she get a bunch of hotheads to listen when they were itching for a fight?
She would have to do something extremely risky.
10
Reptile Revolt
Sol and Oleg lay on sun loungers near the swimming pool, moon-bathing. It was a pleasant night, and the pool wasn’t crowded. Sol smoked a fat cigar, shirtless and in a bathing suit that was bright red against his pale-as-death skin. He hadn’t felt this relaxed in ages.
“This is what retirement is about,” Oleg said.
“You got that right,” Sol replied. “I worked as a clerk for forty-five years. Back in those days, in the sixteen hundreds, retirement had a different meaning. It just meant you were too old to work. You suffered in poverty until you croaked. Unless your kids were doing well enough to take you in and feed you.”
“It was the same when I was human,” Oleg said.
“When my eyes started to go kaput on me, I knew my days were numbered. It was like a death sentence. Little did I know I was going to be turned into a vampire, my meager savings would grow from compound interest over the centuries, and I would end up buying an oceanfront condo in Florida. It ain’t the most luxurious community, but Squid Tower sure beats the streets of South Boston where I would’ve starved to death as an old man.”
“I know what you mean,” Oleg said, still with his heavy Russian accent despite being in America for over a hundred years.
“And we almost ruined it all by falling under the spell of Bill,” Sol said. “What were we thinking?”
“When I saw the men he recruited, I knew we were in trouble,” Oleg said. “There was no discipline, no standards. Even the men who had served in the military acted like sociopaths.”
“That’s for sure. It was a motley crew, all right. But what the heck happened to Bill? I always thought he was a kook, but he’s gone off the deep end with all his weapon hoarding. And now, this thing with the Reptilians? I’m sorry, but I just don’t buy it.”
“I do not believe it either. I couldn’t even if I tried. The reason I went along was a sense of solidarity with my vampire friends.”
“Same here. Sure, I like to shoot a gun now and then. But who wants to spend the evening with a bunch of thugs
who think they’re Rambo and want to take down the government?”
“When I saw that baby dragon, I was finished with Bill. Any idiot could see it was a dragon, not an imaginary Reptilian. That baby has a very angry mother. We could have ended up torched to death like Marvin.”
Sol sat up and looked at Oleg. “You really think that’s how he died? From a dragon?”
“Well, after the dragon came here and torched Bill’s balcony, I believed that’s what happened to Marvin.”
“I don’t believe that. Nope. I think Bill killed Marvin.”
“You do?” Oleg asked, incredulous. “And you still joined his militia?”
“I didn’t really mind him killing Marvin. I hated Marvin.”
“Yeah. So did I.”
“But that doesn’t change the fact that Bill locked him on his balcony and let him get sun-torched. I used to hear them arguing all the time. And Bill is definitely cold-blooded enough to do it. What I don’t understand, is why he took up Marvin’s Reptilian conspiracy theory.”
“Yes, exactly. If what you say is true, he eliminated a lunatic only to become one himself.”
“And now, a dragon is probably going to eliminate Bill. To paraphrase an American expression, the reptiles have come home to roost.”
“There is a similar expression in Russian.” Oleg said it in his native tongue, though it was complete gibberish to Sol.
“To paraphrase,” Oleg said, “the squashed salamander once believed he was so smart.”
“Good one,” Sol said, puffing on his cigar. “Good one.”
Ronnie, the dragon, was the Anointed One, according to dragon mystics. Ever since his species was driven off the planet by humans wearing armor, dragons have dreamed of reclaiming their glory. Centuries upon centuries of hiding in vast wilderness areas and escaping to the In Between for safety allowed their numbers to increase.
As humans developed sophisticated weaponry, the dragons knew they faced much more dangerous adversaries than knights. If dragons were ever to regain their status as apex predators, they would need a great dragon to lead them against a human species with effective ways of wiping them out again.
