keep the greed and longing out of his wavering voice.
Feeling the sheets of C-5 clinging to him, he knew that the sooner he got back to New Madrid, the faster he could make his own settlement, free from the bitching presence of Cynthia Pennyroyal. Parker began his search again with a spring in his step. It looked like this would be his last tour through the bones of a nation that no longer existed, and he was fine with that.
15
Dragons
“The first dragon to die was a female named Arethusa. She was really well liked, had risen somewhere in the Finger Lakes region of New York, and was ridden by a cool customer named Daniel Brathwaite. He’d been a middle school principal before everything went nuts, so it pretty much took the end of the world to get his attention. Up until the Battle of Laurel Caverns, we didn’t even know if dragons could be killed. Some of the big ones, the huge third wavers who were near seventy and eighty meters long? They had taken wounds so severe nobody thought they would even leave the field, let alone survive, but their healing properties are beyond anything we’ve ever seen before. You remember that big red and gold dragon Pentecost? She lost an entire forearm to some sort of Tylosaur during the fight for Mobile Bay. There were three of those things attacking her; they were sixty feet long, and half of that was mouth. She killed all three, but not before one of them cut her cleanly off, like it had used a surgeon’s scalpel. The dragon’s screams were—no one wants to remember that noise. I was half a mile away, manning a deck gun and burning through ammo so fast that I thought I’d melt my weapon. The entire bay churned with every kind of swimming monster we’ve ever dug out of the rocks, but these were alive, not fossils, and they were hungry. We lost sixty vessels in less than twenty minutes. The air was pink with mist from sailors and passengers being shredded by that school of swimming death. A small dragon . . . I can’t remember his name, now—maybe it was Rainier? He was skimming the bay at eighty knots, flipping demons into the air, and gutting them with his back legs. Two of them latched onto his tail like bulldogs, but he managed to pull the, I guess, dinosaurs, or whatever, up onto a pier where his rider unloaded an automatic rifle right down the flanks of either creature. Split ‘em like melons; their blood sluiced down that tired old dock and, in seconds, Rainier—yeah, that was him, right—was back on the attack, just raging across the bay, and he still wasn’t making any breathing room for us on the boats. We had half of the Coast Guard there, I swear, but still lost over a thousand sailors and land troops; that isn’t even counting what those friggin’ creatures did to the civvies that were lined up like snacks, waiting to go to Texas. We had armored walls outside Corpus Christi, and we told everyone who wanted to evacuate from Alabama that land travel was a no-go. We led them to their deaths. Those . . . things were waiting for us. Waiting for the people. And they wanted the dragons more than anything; you could tell just by the way they attacked.
“It took six of them to pull Arethusa into the water, then another dozen to pull her under. She fought—don’t think she made it cheap for those bastards; she took a lot of them with her. Her rider was standing in his harness, shooting into the water and just howling like an animal. One of the smaller Tylosaurs went straight through the air and took his head off. When that happened, Arethusa went batshit crazy and decided to die, I think, because she used every single part of her body for offense, and the attackers took advantage of that. It was like watching a pack of hyenas take down a male lion; there was something viscerally wrong about the entire scene. I finally went cold on ammo; most of us did, but some maniac in a fishing boat rammed the whole roiling mass of Tylosaurs and cut them to ribbons with
Feeling the sheets of C-5 clinging to him, he knew that the sooner he got back to New Madrid, the faster he could make his own settlement, free from the bitching presence of Cynthia Pennyroyal. Parker began his search again with a spring in his step. It looked like this would be his last tour through the bones of a nation that no longer existed, and he was fine with that.
15
Dragons
“The first dragon to die was a female named Arethusa. She was really well liked, had risen somewhere in the Finger Lakes region of New York, and was ridden by a cool customer named Daniel Brathwaite. He’d been a middle school principal before everything went nuts, so it pretty much took the end of the world to get his attention. Up until the Battle of Laurel Caverns, we didn’t even know if dragons could be killed. Some of the big ones, the huge third wavers who were near seventy and eighty meters long? They had taken wounds so severe nobody thought they would even leave the field, let alone survive, but their healing properties are beyond anything we’ve ever seen before. You remember that big red and gold dragon Pentecost? She lost an entire forearm to some sort of Tylosaur during the fight for Mobile Bay. There were three of those things attacking her; they were sixty feet long, and half of that was mouth. She killed all three, but not before one of them cut her cleanly off, like it had used a surgeon’s scalpel. The dragon’s screams were—no one wants to remember that noise. I was half a mile away, manning a deck gun and burning through ammo so fast that I thought I’d melt my weapon. The entire bay churned with every kind of swimming monster we’ve ever dug out of the rocks, but these were alive, not fossils, and they were hungry. We lost sixty vessels in less than twenty minutes. The air was pink with mist from sailors and passengers being shredded by that school of swimming death. A small dragon . . . I can’t remember his name, now—maybe it was Rainier? He was skimming the bay at eighty knots, flipping demons into the air, and gutting them with his back legs. Two of them latched onto his tail like bulldogs, but he managed to pull the, I guess, dinosaurs, or whatever, up onto a pier where his rider unloaded an automatic rifle right down the flanks of either creature. Split ‘em like melons; their blood sluiced down that tired old dock and, in seconds, Rainier—yeah, that was him, right—was back on the attack, just raging across the bay, and he still wasn’t making any breathing room for us on the boats. We had half of the Coast Guard there, I swear, but still lost over a thousand sailors and land troops; that isn’t even counting what those friggin’ creatures did to the civvies that were lined up like snacks, waiting to go to Texas. We had armored walls outside Corpus Christi, and we told everyone who wanted to evacuate from Alabama that land travel was a no-go. We led them to their deaths. Those . . . things were waiting for us. Waiting for the people. And they wanted the dragons more than anything; you could tell just by the way they attacked.
“It took six of them to pull Arethusa into the water, then another dozen to pull her under. She fought—don’t think she made it cheap for those bastards; she took a lot of them with her. Her rider was standing in his harness, shooting into the water and just howling like an animal. One of the smaller Tylosaurs went straight through the air and took his head off. When that happened, Arethusa went batshit crazy and decided to die, I think, because she used every single part of her body for offense, and the attackers took advantage of that. It was like watching a pack of hyenas take down a male lion; there was something viscerally wrong about the entire scene. I finally went cold on ammo; most of us did, but some maniac in a fishing boat rammed the whole roiling mass of Tylosaurs and cut them to ribbons with
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