Chapter 208: Bare-Handed Against a Dragon
Eddie wasn't the kind of man who left people behind.
Twenty years of surviving in a world that had systematically eliminated most of the reasons for optimism hadn't changed that about him. He had Devon on his right and Mike on his left and Rachel behind them, and they were moving as fast as four people could move when one of them had taken a hit, and the jeep was on fire, and the options had gone from limited to extremely limited in the space of about fifteen seconds.
The dragon worked like a falcon — commit to the dive, pull up if it misses, gain altitude, come back around. The difference between a falcon and this was the fire, and the wingspan, and the fact that a rabbit could at least get underground.
There was no underground here. The farm was open ground, the burning tractor covering the best exit route, the crop rows offering concealment that would last approximately until the dragon decided to clear them with a sustained burn rather than a targeted dive.
Which it did.
The tomato plants went in a wave — the specific sound of a large volume of vegetation igniting simultaneously, the heat arriving before the light had finished establishing itself. Eddie felt it on the back of his neck and kept running.
The four of them were being herded back toward what was left of the trellis, the dragon's passes methodical in the way of something that had been hunting for twenty years and had developed a technique for it. No wasted fire. Systematic coverage of the available escape routes.
Eddie ran the calculation and came up with the same answer twice.
He looked at Devon.
Devon looked back at him with the specific expression of a young man who had grown up in this world and understood its outcomes without having to be told.
The dragon came down again.
The fire that left its mouth had the specific quality of something engineered at the biological level for maximum damage — not just heat but a chemical compound that ignited on contact and kept burning, the twin glands in the jaw combining their output at the moment of expulsion. At fifteen meters out, the spray pattern was wide enough to cover the group with margin.
Eddie closed his eyes.
Five seconds passed.
He was still there.
He opened his eyes.
Between the dragon and his group, something was blocking the fire.
The figure was holding the triangular shield at an angle that intercepted the broadest part of the spray pattern, the vibranium surface taking the sustained chemical fire without visible effect — no heat distortion, no discoloration, the material simply refusing to participate in the thermodynamic exchange that should have made it glow. Flame wrapped around the shield's edges and found the figure's coat and shoulders, and the coat burned without burning, the composite material doing what it had been built to do.
The man turned his head.
"Run," Jake said. Not a shout — the specific volume of someone who expected to be heard and wasn't going to repeat himself.
Eddie ran.
The armored vehicles came from the north — Quinn's response to the smoke signal that burning crops made in a landscape where you watched for exactly that. Two modified carriers with water suppression systems, moving with the purposeful speed of a community that had practiced emergency response enough times to have removed the hesitation from it.
Quinn himself came out of the lead vehicle when they stopped, the helmet coming off with the practiced motion of someone who wore it enough that removing it was automatic.
He took in his group first — Eddie, Devon, Rachel, Mike. Alive. Mike was injured. The others were functional.
Eddie was trying to say something that kept not coming out.
Quinn put a hand on his shoulder. "Inside," he said. "You can explain after."
"There's someone out there," Eddie said. "He—" He stopped. Started again. "He blocked it. The fire. He stood between us and the fire and just—"
A sound from the open ground beyond the burning crop perimeter interrupted him.
Something moving fast, then a heavy impact, then the particular scraping sound of something being dragged by force across gravel.
Quinn turned.
A figure came through the smoke, moving in the specific way of something that had been hit by a large amount of force and was processing that information while continuing to function. He tumbled — not uncontrolled, the tumble managing the momentum rather than being managed by it — and came down on one knee with the triangular shield planted in the ground, the impact carving a furrow in the gravel as the body's momentum finished resolving.
One knee down, shield in the ground, black coat settling around him like a statement about the situation.
Ten meters behind him, the dragon came through the smoke.
It was a female — Quinn had seen enough of them at this point to make the identification immediately. Large, the scales the specific dark gray of the older specimens, the eyes tracking the kneeling figure with the focused attention of something that had been in a fight and was determining whether the fight was over.
The dragon didn't breathe fire.
It lunged.
The jaws came down at the kneeling figure with the speed and certainty of something that had never encountered an outcome other than the expected one.
The shield came up.
The dragon's bite closed on vibranium.
Quinn watched the jaw muscles in the dragon's head work — the enormous force that the jaw mechanism generated, the kind of bite pressure that had sheared through reinforced steel plating on military vehicles in the early days when governments were still trying conventional responses. He'd seen what those jaws did to things.
The shield held.
Not bent. Not deformed. It held, and the force that the dragon was applying to it found nowhere to go except back, and the dragon made a sound that Quinn had never heard a dragon make — the involuntary vocal response of something that had hurt itself and was surprised by that fact.
The shield came free as the dragon pulled back, and the figure was already moving — up, onto the dragon's head, the transition from kneeling to climbing happening fast enough that Quinn's eye had trouble tracking the intermediate steps.
He was on top of the dragon's head.
He was hitting it.
Not with a weapon — with his fist. Bare-handed, the right fist connecting with the scaled armor of the dragon's skull in a sequence of impacts that produced sounds that shouldn't have been possible from flesh against that material. The first hit made the dragon's head move. The second made it roar. The third made it stagger.
The shield was still between the dragon's jaws, preventing it from closing its mouth and producing fire. The dragon was trying to fly and couldn't find the orientation for it. The hits on its skull were disrupting something — equilibrium, maybe, the inner-ear analog that the species used to maintain flight orientation.
The dragon went down.
Seven meters up, and then the ground, the impact producing the specific sound of twelve tons of biology meeting the earth at a velocity the earth registered. The gravel radius from the impact point was significant.
The figure went with it — thrown by the landing, tumbling, coat wrapping in the specific way that a coat wrapped when the body inside it was moving faster than the coat's design had accounted for. He rolled across ten meters of gravel and came to a stop.
The dragon spit the shield out of its mouth.
Nobody in the armored vehicles moved. The driver of the lead carrier had stopped mid-reach for the ignition and hadn't resumed.
Quinn was watching the spot where the figure had stopped moving.
Ten seconds.
The figure got up.
Not slowly, not with the careful inventory of someone assessing damage. He stood, dusted the gravel off the coat with the specific efficiency of someone doing a routine post-activity check, and looked at the dragon.
The dragon looked at him.
The standoff lasted approximately three seconds.
Jake reached up and adjusted his tie, which had come loose during the fall. He looked at the shield on the ground between him and the dragon. He looked at the dragon.
He started running.
Quinn had a motorcycle once, before the world ended, and he'd had it up to speeds that most reasonable people considered inadvisable. The figure moving across the gravel toward the downed dragon was moving faster than that motorcycle had moved, and he was doing it on foot, and there was no mechanical explanation available.
He crossed the distance to the shield in a single motion — grabbed it without stopping, the forward momentum incorporating the weight of the vibranium without losing appreciable speed — and continued toward the dragon.
The dragon was recovering. The equilibrium disruption was resolving, the wing muscles finding their orientation again, the massive body beginning the sequence of motions that preceded liftoff.
It was four meters off the ground when the figure left his own.
The leap covered the gap between man and dragon with the specific geometry of something calculated rather than improvised — not straight up, but angled, the trajectory accounting for the dragon's upward movement and arriving at the hind leg at the exact moment and position where the shield's edge made contact with the scales.
The vibranium edge pierced.
Not far — the scales were significant armor and the angle wasn't optimal — but enough. The scaled hide parted and the blood that came out was dark and hot and fell in drops that steamed when they hit the cold morning ground.
The dragon screamed.
Not the attack roar Quinn was familiar with. Something else — the involuntary, uncontrolled sound of something that had never been hurt and had just been hurt and didn't have a behavioral response for the experience.
It climbed. Fast. The injured leg tucked, the wing strokes urgent, the dragon going vertical in the way that very large things went vertical when they'd decided a situation was no longer manageable and were removing themselves from it.
Within forty seconds it was a shape against the overcast sky. Within another thirty it was gone.
Jake landed from the drop, adjusted for the distance, and stood on the gravel and watched it go.
He reached into the coat and retrieved a small device — checked something on it, put it back. The Red Queen tracking the compound's signal, Quinn would later understand, monitoring the female's position in real time.
Quinn got out of the armored vehicle.
Jake heard him coming and turned.
The two men looked at each other across the gravel field — the aftermath of a dragon encounter that had produced an outcome Quinn had never seen produce in twenty years of managing this particular problem.
"Quinn," Jake said.
Quinn stopped. "You know my name."
"I know a lot about this area," Jake said. "And about the situation you're managing." He looked at the burning crop rows, the destroyed jeep, the smoke settling across the valley. "Eddie's group is okay. Mike took a hit — he'll need attention, but it's not critical."
Quinn processed this. "You fought a dragon with your fists."
"And a shield," Jake said.
"The shield didn't do most of it."
"No," Jake agreed.
Quinn looked at him with the specific expression of a man who had developed an exceptionally well-calibrated sense of what was possible and was currently encountering something outside that calibration. "Who are you?"
"Someone with the same problem you have," Jake said. "Dragons. Specifically, I need access to the male." He met Quinn's eyes. "I'm not here to kill it."
Quinn's expression moved through several things in rapid sequence. "You're not here to—" He stopped. "There is one male. One. And you're not here to kill it."
"No," Jake said.
"Then what are you here to do?"
Jake looked at the sky where the female had disappeared.
"I already started," he said.
Quinn looked at the empty sky. At the gravel where the dragon had been. At the blood, still steaming faintly where it had fallen.
He looked at Jake.
"You'd better come inside," he said, in the tone of someone who had no clear framework for the conversation they were about to have and was going to have it anyway, because the alternative was standing in a gravel field next to a man who punched dragons and that was less productive.
They walked toward the armored vehicles, and behind them the smoke from the burning farm drifted south in the gray English morning, and Quinn's mind was already assembling the conversation he was going to need to have with Van Zan about the variable that had just appeared in their operational landscape.
Van Zan, he suspected, was not going to take it well.
Van Zan never took anything well. That was, simultaneously, his greatest strength and most consistent problem.
Quinn walked and thought and looked at the man beside him and decided that whatever came next, the day had already produced more genuine surprise than the previous twenty years combined.
That was something.
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