Dragonsapien by Jon Jacks Page A

he
said, ‘it doesn’t look like your girlfriend wants to talk after
all.’
     
     
    *

Chapter 21
     
    As the plane
began to rapidly lose height, parachutes were handed round, quickly
strapped on. As they waited for the plane to reach a level where
the pressure would allow the emergency door to be opened safely,
they once again heard metallic clunks and tearing against the side
of the hull, glimpsed once again flashes of glittering jewels at
the widows; but nothing further happened. They all breathed a sigh
of relief, waiting for the signal to jettison the door.
    At last, the
door’s handle was urgently wrenched up, the door kicked out into
the black wind hurtling past them. One of Rodgers’ men stepped
towards the door – and was instantly propelled out into the
darkness with a terrified yell, his parachute ripped to shreds in
an instant in a flurry of sharply glistening blades.
    A dragon’s hand
swung through the door into the cabin, the long talons sickeningly
penetrating the next man in the queue. The dying man fell back, the
dragon using him as leverage to pull himself more fully into the
cabin. In his other hand, the dragon held a powerful machine
pistol. The gun barked quickly in succession, Rodgers and two of
his other men taking horrendously mutilating hits that sent them
flying back across the leather seats.
    Rodger’s last
remaining man and the cabin crew drew their own guns, firing at the
dragon. The bullets mainly struck some form of thick armour the
dragon’s body was encased in, but even those that struck skin
seemed to have as little effect as if they’d hit a surface crusted
with diamonds.
    The dragon fired
again, while finishing off the nearest man with a deft, deadly
slash of his already bloodied talons.
    Cowering behind
the seat where he’d instinctively thrown himself, a terrified Jake
covered his head, waiting for the shot or swipe of a talon that
would kill him.
    The dragon drew
towards him, reached down. He effortlessly picked Jake up by
sinking his talons deep within the parachute pack. It swung around,
stepped back towards the door and, swinging his arm forward and up,
briefly held Jake outside in the violently pounding streams of
air.
    Through watery
eyes, Jake saw at least two other dragons clamped to the side of
the hull, their talons embedded within the metal.
    That’s what the
metallic clunks they’d heard had been; the dragons latching onto
the side of the hull, waiting for the moment when the emergency
door was opened. These other two were obviously a backup, in case
the first had been unsuccessful in his task.
    The dragon leapt
out into the whirling darkness, taking the firmly held Jake with
him. Jake’s stomach lurched frighteningly. His skin, his body,
juddered under the relentless pressure of the brutally throbbing
wind.
    And, suddenly,
he was aimlessly suspended in the blackness, the jet plummeting to
earth in flames behind him.
     
     
    *

Chapter 22
     
    Jake was
shivering uncontrollably, both from the intense cold of the night
sky and the fear of being dropped from a height that he had no
chance of surviving. Worse, the straps of his tattered parachute
pack kept on slipping as their holdings continued to tear and
shred. Every now and again, he would suffer a violently lurch
downward, as if at last about to hurtle earthwards.
    The earth below
didn’t look real. It looked like a final scene from one of his
end-of-world computer games. It was endless, yet looked the same no
matter the direction in which he looked. The ground was black, an
impenetrable coal black but for the fires that seemed to
remorselessly feed off that darkness like unquenchable coal fires,
or the sudden, bright glare of explosions in the sky above, like
fireballs erupting from the volcanoes of a primordial
landscape.
    This was no
game, however, as evidenced by the increasing examples of destroyed
human life and endeavour as they at last began to descend. At
first, it was the mangled wreckage of toppled