Dark Dragons (26 page)

‘Scorch?’

Darren grinned.  ‘Just a nickname I gave him.  He
knows a lot more tricks than us, that’s for sure.  He’s been flying and
fighting a hell of a lot longer than us, too.’

‘How is he so accurate?’ Jorge asked.

‘Accurate?’ Nate interjected.  ‘How come he just
doesn’t plain kill you?  He’s gotta toy with you like a cat does a mouse.’

‘Ego,’ Darren replied.

‘You think the Vorvons modified that Dragonstar
somehow?  You know, upgraded the performance.  It just seems he can
do shit we can’t.’

‘That’s a possibility, too,’ Darren said.  ‘But I’ve
come to the conclusion that he’s not as good as he thinks he is.  He lets
his emotions cloud his judgment.  We can use that to our advantage if and
when he comes at us stupid again.’

Darren’s Dragonstar finished the pre-flight and was ready
for operations.  Enough hair-raising adventures and death-defiance for one
day.  Time to go home.

As his Dragonstar lifted off Ganymede’s powdery surface, he
caught movement on the corner of his eye.  He turned but saw only Orion
and bright Sirius to starboard and Jupiter to port.  He looked behind him,
to the right and left, but still nothing.  A meteor, he figured.

*

A metal sphere cloaked within a blanket of active stealth
slid beneath Darren’s Dragonstar and silently attached itself to the fuselage.

Saturday, May 15

Wolf Flat was a mile-wide growth of oak, gray pine and
coyote brush a couple of miles east of Mt. Lukens.  It lay just off the
well-worn hiker trails and dirt roads which crisscrossed the Angeles National
Forest but close enough to Darren’s house——about a one hour walk up one hill
and down another——to serve as temporary base for the Dragonstars.  It was
the best location to park their fighters and keep them from the interloping
eyes of bikers, hikers, and the occasional forest ranger in a pick-up truck.

They set the fighters’ anti-intruder defense to
automatically trigger if anything “two-legged” came within five hundred feet——a
tightly focused, ultrasonic sound creating so much pain, no trespasser could
stay in one spot and tolerate it.  Any determined interloper who managed
to make it within one hundred feet would be met with the hydra shrouds hidden
under the Dragonstars’ cockpits.  Long before the guns kicked in, however,
the main computers would send an alarm to the guys’ PDA’s.  They could then
just activate the autopilots and have them head for the secondary holding area,
that being Fisher Canyon five miles to the north, another off-the-beaten-trail
growth of pine trees.

It was just after ten when they began to make their way back
to civilization uphill along dusty Mt. Lukens Road, the lemon glow of Los
Angeles highlighting the mountain top above.

Darren felt . . . strange.  He really couldn’t set his
mind on it, but something didn’t feel right.  A continuous tingling across
his skin had started the moment he popped the windshield.  A quick sensor
sweep revealed nothing threatening around them, but Darren had decided to wear
his combat armor suit home instead of storing it in the personal effects
compartment.  The other guys wore their clothes.

“Still feeling funny?” Jorge asked.

Darren sent another thought command to the suit’s sensors,
but again nothing.  “I’m telling you, I feel like we’re being
watched.  Don’t you guys feel weird?”

“You’re paranoid,” Tony said.

Darren ignored his chiding, and sent out another sensor
sweep.  The signal only unveiled the presence of a single rabbit scurrying
through the thorny chaparral to their right and a lone owl in a blue oak behind
them.  Maybe it was nothing——just post-battle juices pumping through tight
veins.

*

“Where the fuck have you been?”
Allison shrieked.

So much for the stealthy entrance.  Darren slid the
patio door shut and squint his eyes from the bright kitchen lights.  The
microwave clock read 10:52 PM.

“Outer space,” he answered.  At the last moment, he had
decided to stash his combat suit in the garden shed after predicting this very
encounter.

“Answer me, goddamn it!”  Allison stood next to the
table wearing her “Bear-Hug” nightshirt with the cartoon polar bear and a
fearsome scowl on her face.  The clash was almost comical.  Almost.

“We got lost in the hills,” he lied.  “We were halfway
to Palmdale before we realized where the sun was and——”

“Where’s your cell phone?” Allison shouted.  “Why
didn’t you call?”

Why was she screaming like this?  Allison had allowed
him some leeway before.  Not that her parental responsibilities were lax,
but she always gave Darren plenty of room to be a teenager and trusted him to
stay out of trouble.  There were countless times he hadn’t called and
walked in the door hours late.

“The battery died,” he answered.

“I suppose everyone’s batteries died, too!”

Darren’s eyes caught What’s-His-Name standing just outside
the kitchen lights in his boxers.  He had a discomforting look on his
face, like he was straining not to be seen.  Or maybe because his girl
pal’s son had finally discovered the horrible truth, the unity of the
single-parent household now disrupted by the Intruding Suitor. 
Like I
didn’t know you were banging my mom, fucktard.

That’s why the theatrics——Allison just up’ing the
Mom-in-panic-mode.  “Stop with the Meryl Streep impression, alright?”
Darren said, walking past her to the stairs.  “You’re giving me a
headache.”

“This conversation continues tomorrow, Slick,” she murmured.

A moment later, Darren landed in a heap on his bed, clothes
and shoes still on.  Before he could fall asleep, however, he remembered
the disc-shaped PDA in his front pocket.  He pulled it out and laid it on
his pillow. 
No, not there . . . mom.
  He slipped it under his
pillow just under his ear.

He heard his mother’s voice downstairs:  “Yes, I’d like
to leave a message for Officer O’Ryan when he comes in this morning.  My
son just walked in the backdoor, so I won’t be filing a missing persons
report.”

He let out a sharp huff and rolled his eyes.

“That’s right . . . yes, thank you . . . yes, so am I,
ma’am.”

Minutes later, he heard the sound of the front door shutting
and a car backing out of the drive, the refrigerator closing, the cap from a
beer being twisted off and discarded into the trash.  Darren took his
tennis shoes off and laid down again, then heard a kitchen chair being pulled
from the table.  His mother began sobbing softly.

He wanted to go downstairs and apologize but was too damn
tired to get up.  He would try to remember to apologize tomorrow but then
figured he might forget or refuse to if she pissed him off again.

Darren fell asleep with the sounds of his mother crying over
a beer at the kitchen table.

*

The alien probe slowly hovered out of the dark and circled
the house on a cushion of anti-gravity static, much to the taunting of
neighborhood dogs that could hear the ultrasonic excess of its sensors. 
It slipped under the clothesline and floated over the pool, the water rippling
from its repulsors.  It scanned the back yard again, searching for danger,
and slid towards the patio.  The machine extended an appendage from within
its spherical body and placed a tiny beacon underneath one of the deck
boards.  A light on the device began to blink.

With that, the Vorvon probe slipped quietly back into the
dark foothills.

*

Darren woke around ten that morning with a scorching
migraine.  As he went to the medicine cabinet for Tylenol, he heard the TV
downstairs.  Allison was up.  He popped his pills and descended the
stairs, apologies floating in his head but none seemed really good.  His
mom was still asleep on the couch.  Or maybe she was faking sleep. 
It wouldn’t be the first time.

The TV was tuned to one of the 24-hour news channels, the anchor
talking to someone named Brad Harmon from CalTech.  “. . . Io is a very
volcanic moon, one of the most volcanic bodies in the solar system. . . .”

“That’s right, but we’ve never seen it produce an explosion
of this magnitude.”

Darren felt his headache pulsate just a little harder. 
Of course the explosion was seen from Earth.

“This mysterious burst was on the order of ten to fifteen
million megatons.  The only naturally-occurring explanations for that
could be a supernova, or an exploding star, but of course the Sun is the only
star in our solar system.  Some varieties of black holes are thought to
roam the galaxy at will until they collied with a celestial body, releasing
enormous amounts of energy.”

“Then Io should have been destroyed.”

Dr. Harmon smiled nervously.  “Not necessarily. 
One of the theories for the Tunguska Explosion over Russia in 1908 is that a
very tiny black hole struck our planet . . . but we’re still here.”

“Would a black hole explain the high amounts of radiation
that was recorded from the explosion?  One of the scientists we
interviewed earlier suggested that this explosion was thermonuclear.”

Dr. Harmon smiled nervously.  “That is possible. 
We really don’t know much about black holes and how they interact with the
interstellar medium.  We have no direct, close observations of black holes
to give us hard facts.”

Darren opened the front door to let some cool air flush his
face and help abate the migraine shooting across his forehead.  On the
porch lay a fat Sunday Edition of the
L.A. Times
:

SHOOTOUT IN CHINATOWN

Six bank robbers, four police
officers dead; LAPD denies use of

secret assault unit

Secret assault unit?
  Darren felt just the
slightest chill tingle the skin on his back.  He opened the screen door
and snatched the paper up that had a large picture of three SWAT officers with
submachine guns pinned behind a black SUV.  He flipped the paper over and
saw the front page’s second headline, this one in smaller type at the bottom:

MYSTERY EXPLOSION ABOVE L.A.

Scientists claim meteor as cause
for Friday morning’s blast

The headache now reached full bore, and he sucked air
between his teeth.  Maybe a dip in the pool would help.

For the rest of the afternoon, he lay on the air mattress
with his limbs splayed in the water like a frog floating on a lily pad. 
His sunglasses did not do a very good job keeping the sun’s rays out of his
eyes.

“Mind if I hang with you for a couple of days?”

Darren looked up to see Tony standing at the pool’s edge
with a backpack and a nasty cut on his left cheek.  He did not have to ask
his friend what had happened.  It was either Tony’s asshole dad or his
older brother Curtis, a USC dropout, surf junkie and habitual meth sampler.

Darren nodded and pointed at the tiki bar.  “There’s
Miller Lite in the fridge.”

Tony met Darren’s gaze, and he could tell that a hundred
different thoughts stirred behind Tony’s eyes——eighteen years of childhood lost
in a maelstrom of punching, butter flinging at the kitchen table, hurtful
put-downs or whatever passed for abuse in the Simmons home.  Tony glanced
away, and his eyes burned a hole through the trees to a point a thousand miles
away, maybe wondering where his real mother had run off to so many years
ago——hating her and wanting her at once.  Tony’s new stepmom was okay, but
she always had that creepy Thousand-Yard Stare that soldiers got after a
hundred straight days of hard combat.  Post-Traumatic Syndrome had
replaced family values.  Darren never knew how Tony managed to avoid
assimilating the abusive behaviors of the Simmons clan and keep a piece of
himself distant.

An hour later, Tony was drunk off his ass, lying halfway out
of the sun lounger next to the tiki bar.

A little past one o’clock, Darren heard a car pull up. 
He backstroked over to the opposite end of the pool to get a look.  A
familiar purple Ford Fiesta was parked in the driveway. 
No, it can’t
be!
  His brain went into lock down, all reasoning ceased.  He got
out and walked around the side of the house to check the Fiesta’s license
plate: DBL VEEZ.

Oh . . . my . . . god.

Heart climbing into his throat, afraid to go into the house,
he pushed himself toward the front porch anyway, still dripping wet.

“Elvis, get down!” Allison shouted inside.

Darren opened the screen door.

Vanessa Vasquez stood in the foyer, Elvis on his hind legs
practically humping her.  She was giggling, giving the black lab hearty
scratches behind the ear, when she turned and smiled.  “Hi, Darren.”