The Very Last Days of Mr Grey (22 page)

“There,” Ehd said.

Without another word, the two agents dropped in unison, off the skyscraper, and toward the ground, as the dragon stopped its maneuvering and headed in the same direction they’d detected the signal from, sending a helicopter into a brief uncontrolled spin as the dragon clipped it.

Only one camera lens happened to catch the men apparently jumping to their deaths, and it followed them all the way down.

Later, it would be assumed they had died in the fall, because when they impacted, a shockwave of dust and asphalt knocked the camera and it went flying, shattering the lens and going crazily out of focus as the lens was whacked off.

But even if there were speculations that those two suicides looked oddly familiar, oddly like the two men who’d wreaked so much havoc on the city, especially when compared to a dragon, with all the other footage to go through—not to mention the accusations and conspiracies on how these men were government agents of some sort, local, foreign, or otherwise—that information got lost in the noise for a very, very long time.

So this was it. Mason was in control. He could put the dragon back where it had come from. Mason didn’t know if the place he’d rescued Martynn from was Hell; he didn’t believe in Hell. But the place he’d been to was real. Martynn was real.

He looked up into the sky. The dragon was real.

And it was up to him to stop it.

Now the only thing left to decide, was how. He couldn’t exactly fly up there and grab it. He’d have to lure it somehow.

He frowned. What would lure a dragon?

A cow might work. Of course, that assumed the thing ate, and wasn’t just an evil beast of destruction.

“What are you doing!”

Mason looked at the bench where Martynn was sitting. It was in the shelter of some trees. Mason was surprised to see he could make out all the details of Martynn’s face, even at this distance. It hadn’t just been in Hell, then. His vision really was better.

He wondered how his vision had improved so markedly.

“What do you want me to do? Jump up and grab it?”

There was a pause, then, “Can you do that?”

Mason shook his head and turned back to the dragon. It spewed fire at a news helicopter that had ventured too close, which spun and spiraled around the aircraft before being blown by its rotors onto a conveniently near building.

It must have been spewing a liquid that was on fire, rather than just flame.

Unless it was magic flame, he reasoned.

He couldn’t jump up there and grab it, but maybe he could make a door…

“I have an idea!” he shouted needlessly. A door appeared. He opened it, and was looking out onto sky. Through it, in the distance, he could see a dragon, coming straight toward him.

Okay, so that part was taken care of. Now what? It wasn’t big enough for the dragon to come through.

Maybe he could land on its back.
That’s a great idea
.

He looked up to the sky, where the dragon was flying. Wow, that was high.

He could make two doors. Then he could… Well, he didn’t know what then.

Jump
, a voice whispered. It wasn’t his. But it was his.

It was the high place phenomenon. And he’d been fascinated with it ever since learning about it. It’d been a while since he’d thought about it, and now all manner of gruesome thoughts filled his head: the dragon chewing him, falling to the pavement, the sensation of not being able to do anything about it. The sudden halt at the end, that would…

That would what? Kill him? He’d fallen before.

With a feeling like letting go, Mason Grey stepped through the open doorway, and blinked out of existence.

Second Lieutenant Myers had been having a great day. He had been spending it with his new wife, and they had been spending it
very
well.

Had been
, as in, not anymore.

Unfortunately, he hadn’t listened to the new Missus Myers about going out, finding a nice hotel, and not leaving or even opening the door for anything but room service, and they had instead stayed on base.

And so when a mother fucking dragon burst into the skies over New York City, of course it was Lieutenant Myers who, through no fault of his own, was retrieved and quickly put in a jet, and sent into said skies.

Now, Myers, flying through the air in a billion dollar jet, sending missiles and bullets at previously alluded to mother fucker, and trying to avoid taking out the idiot civvie choppers, all the while praying to God someone would get the skies cleared, saw something else crazy in a night that had just about had its fill.

He stopped firing. “Uh, General,” the lieutenant radioed, “I’ve got a… a bogey.”

“Would you mind being more specific, Lieutenant?”

“I’m not certain, but there appears to be a man, flying.”

“Flying what?”

“No, just flying. Or falling… He just fell from the sky, sir.”

“Repeat that.”

“He just fell. A, um, a door appeared, then he fell from it. Sir, he… He fell right onto the dragon’s back. They, they appear to be fighting.” The pilot pulled up to circle back around behind the dragon, as he was now heading away fast.

“To clarify, a man appeared in the air through a door—floating in the air—then fell onto the target’s back and is presently attempting to disable?”

“I— It appears so. Sir.”

“Copy. Standby.”

General Peters shook his head. He was sweating, despite the bunker’s cooled air. And while the president of the United States sat right by his side—never more his commander in chief than now—she wasn’t the reason he was sweating. Nor were the arriving politicians. He was sweating because this actually might be real. And dammit, he was excited. He knew he shouldn’t be, but he couldn’t help it. If it hadn’t been for the president beside him, he would have left command to someone else, and had one of his Air Force boys take him out to see it firsthand.

He’d grown up reading about dragons, and now, here one was.

As far as the man falling from the sky, well, normally, he’d think his pilot had lost it, but if there were dragons, then a man falling from a door in the sky seemed acceptable enough to not dismiss out of hand.

He’d withhold any judgments for now, and wait until he got secondary visual confirmation from his techs before deciding what to do next.

He looked at the monitors showing the havoc in the city.

That might take a while.

Back over the city, the lieutenant flew a hold around the target and the man attacking it, and watched in disbelief.

He was actually punching it. Punching a dragon. Lieutenant Myers had heard of guys punching sharks, but this was a whole new level. It was like seeing Chuck Norris in action.

Then something too fast to follow happened—especially at this distance.

All Myers could see was the outcome of the action: The dragon screeched, spurted fire behind it, at its own body, and brought its wings in.

It hung in the air for a beautiful moment, illuminated by the setting sun. Then it began to fall, slowly turning in the air.

This quickly spiraled into a nose dive.

Myers was again shocked when he saw the man holding tight to the thing,
still
punching it.

The spinning mass of man and beast plunged toward the ground and very shortly thereafter crashed, taking out a small building, which would turn out to be a liquor store. (Later donations would pour in and the liquor store owner, now a multimillionaire because of this generosity, would not rebuild and instead erect a monument in its place, where it would stand, unblemished, for years. But not forever.)

Ehd and Fredriks were, frankly, shocked when Mr Grey somehow managed to get on the dragon’s back. If he was able to teleport around his dream, he was either close to waking up, or close to… Well, it wasn’t worth thinking about. Not in a dream where their thoughts might not be their own, might be subject to leakage.

They were so stunned by this that they stopped briefly, long enough for the dream apparitions chasing them to catch up. The apparitions had been with them since shortly after dropping from the roof, and their numbers only seemed to grow, some in vehicles, some on foot, some on other wheeled things.

Then Ehd and Fredriks shook themselves from their stupor, changed direction, and were off, following Mr Grey’s new path on the dragon’s back. If only they could fly, their job would be so much easier. Instead, they ran through the streets of New York, eyes skyward, picking up more apparitions as they went. There was no guarantee Mr Grey could use the things against them, but even if he could, the two consuls weren’t trying to surprise him anyway.

The apparitions pointed devices at Ehd and Fredriks, devices, they knew, were meant to capture their image. The only thing that worried Ehd was that in a dream, who knew what else they could capture.

He looked to his partner. “Degradation?”

“None.” Fredriks glanced at Ehd, then at the vehicles behind them. “Perhaps it is a way to keep an eye on us.”

“Perhaps.”

Fredriks nodded. “But we should do something about it.”

“Just in case.”

And then the dragon screeched, and their attention was drawn skyward again.

“Perhaps he isn’t riding it,” Fredriks said, in reference to their previous unspoken assumption that Mr Grey’s mounting of the dragon had been in an effort to get away.

“He is fighting himself.”

“Perhaps the dragon is his insanity.” Fredriks had dealt with Dreamers before, and little about their creations made sense. So why not a dragon to represent this state?

“If we take it out, then maybe—”

“We break him out of the dream.”

The dragon fell.

They didn’t stop their chase—they were past being surprised by Mr Grey (or so they thought)—just redirected it, watching as the dragon plunged below the rooftops and out of sight, and altered their course accordingly.

“There.” Ehd pointed. “This next turn.”

They were still a block away when they heard a loud crash, saw a cloud of dust shoot up into the air.

They sped up. The vehicles following jolted slightly in the new imprints the men’s feet made. One bicyclist—capturing not so amateur footage on his new three thousand dollar Sony mirrorless—was thrown from his bike when his front wheel caught one of these unexpected depressions.

A van close behind—with what appeared to be a man atop it—in an attempt to avoid running over the bicyclist himself, instead crunched over the bike and the new Sony.

This had the effect of destroying two cameras. One on the bike, the other on the van.

The Sony would be back in working order after a new lens and lens mount, and the footage from both would be recoverable. But by that time, it would already be too late.

Julie Chung’s hair was blowing wildly as she balanced precariously by the door of the helicopter, leaning just enough in front of the open helicopter door so that she was in the shot with the dragon.

“As you can see Bob, we have a dragon. It appears to be, yes, it is shooting fire. Now this is something we’ve seen dragons do in movies, and here is confirmation.”

A picture-in-picture box appeared, featuring an anchor back in the studio. “It certainly is extraordinary. Can you tell us about these, uh, I don’t know what we’re calling them, but these Men in Black?”

In the main image, the woman gestured down at the streets. The camera panned away from her and zoomed in on the streets below. Her disembodied voice floated over the image of two men running fast, pursued by several vehicles. “As you can see, these men are moving very fast. It is not yet clear whether they are aided by some type of vehicle. But—”

The anchor put his hand to his ear, and the screen filled with this image. “Uh, sorry Julie, we’re getting word that Steven has footage from the street. We’re going to him now.”

“Okay Bob, we’ll keep an eye out up here.”

“Great, Julie. Steven?”

An image from the top of a van filled the main image, reducing the anchor to a small box once again. Nonetheless, the anchor’s shocked expression was still visible even at the reduced size.

There was massive wind noise as Steven spoke. “Bob,” he screamed over the wind, “we’re here on the street following these men. As you can see, we are traveling at a good speed, I think about thirty-five right now. But these men aren’t slowing. It’s unclear who they work for, but they are heading in the direction of the dragon. And—”

The men sped up and the van swerved suddenly, crunching over a bicycle. Steven was thrown out of the frame, then the lens of the camera slammed into the roof.

Blackness.

Back to the studio. “Oh dear. Steven? Are you okay?” The anchor put a hand to his ear. “I’ve just gotten word that the dragon has been taken down. I repeat, the dragon has been taken down. Julie can you—”

“—means what I think it does.” The reporter paused. “Sorry, we had some overlap there I think. As I said, it appears a man has somehow taken out the dragon. They both— Well—” She pointed, and the camera zoomed in on the wreck. “I think it speaks for itself.”

While the city of New York lost its fucking mind, Private Ryan Peters (Private Peters, if you would, or just Peters) was loading up into the back of an M35 transport truck, unsure of how he felt. He was what you might call a prepper, and joining the National Guard had seemed like a good idea, in preparation for The Eventuality. He didn’t know exactly what that would be, but he’d had his theories.

All of which had been blown to shit when a dragon appeared. And so it was that the apocalypse was not, then, playing out how he had expected it to. He had been—and still was—ready for any number of outcomes. Zombies? Check, got plenty of ammo and a defensible homestead. Nuclear attack? Check, selfsame bunker and supplies. Alien invasion? Well, that one was a bit iffy. It would depend on how advanced the aliens were. But, assuming they were just advanced enough to make it across the galaxy undetected by humans and had a ship capable of supporting a force large enough to take over Earth but couldn’t perform x-rays twenty feet in the ground and assuming that the aliens themselves were vulnerable to bullets and would perform the takeover primarily by ground assault, then check there too.