Firedrake Chapter 12

The last words of Karma were still ringing in Drake’s ears as reality - or the version to which the reptilian booster was more accustomed - reasserted itself. The first thing Drake noted was that everything was much darker than it had been in Karma’s sanctum. He was standing in the center of a deserted stretch of cracked pavement. Buildings rose around him, their features only dimly illuminated by the single yellow-orange streetlight which fought valiantly against the shadows from some eighty feet away.

“What the…” Drake muttered, glancing around to make some sense of his surroundings. He took in a quick breath through his nostrils, catching the scents of gasoline and smog intermingled with rotting garbage and stagnant water.

The crystal he held in his left hand pulsed with an inner energy, and Drake snarled down at it.

“I knew it was too easy,” he grumbled, tucking the stone into one of the pouches on his belt. Leaping from the ground, he spread his wings and worked them mightily to grab at the air. In seconds he was airborne. Straining against gravity, he slowly began to rise until he came to the top of a nearby building. His feet gripped the stone at the edge of the roof and he turned around to crouch there, looking for all the world like a recently-updated version of a medieval gargoyle. Yellow eyes scanned across the area, looking for any landmark or sign of life that might establish his whereabouts. The sounds of vehicular travel and shouted voices drifted in on the night air, and he was comforted to know that he had not been transported to some alternate reality where everyone was simply gone.

A thought struck him and he reached for his pocket, mentally berating himself for not having considered it before. The tiny cell phone snapped open, its face glowing with a bright blue luminescence. Drake pushed the speed dial setting for Colleen Hart. The phone rang on the other end and Drake held the device to his head, gnawing at his lip as the second ring sounded. His claws tapped impatiently on the concrete as he listened through the third.

“Hart,” came the sound from the other end. It was such a sudden release of tension that Drake nearly dropped his phone.

“Drake,” he reported. “Got the cure.”

“Excellent,” Hart said. Her tone was more relieved than Drake could ever remember hearing. There was a rushing noise suddenly in the phone as Hart covered the mouthpiece with her hand, followed by the muffled sound of Hart announcing his success to whoever else was present in the room with her. The sounds of cheering filtered through.

“What’s your E.T.A.?” Hart asked, the noise requiring her to raise her voice slightly.

“That depends,” Drake said.

“On?”

“On me figuring out just where in the hell that asshole Karma dropped me.”

“What?” Hart asked. All pretense of pleasantry vanished from her voice as it returned instantly to the icy tones with which Drake was so intimately familiar. “What are you saying?”

Drake sighed and rolled his eyes. “What do you think I’m saying? I’m saying I don’t know where I am. He sent me somewhere, but I’ll be damned if I know where. It’s a city or a town or something, but I’m on the outskirts. It’s dark and I can’t see any of those cute little signs that say ’You Are Here’. Run a track on my phone for me.”

Hart shouted orders on the other end of the line and Drake could practically see everyone jumping up to carry out those commands. He waited a moment for the trace to initiate. His phone made a loud chirping sound

“That’s it,” he whispered. “Come and find -”

The line went dead.

Cursing volubly, Drake stared at the screen as a tiny message danced across the screen.

“Signal lost. Battery low.”

Drake threw the device to the concrete of the roof and ground it under his foot. Circuitry and plastic gave way beneath the massive crushing foot with a high-pitched squealing sound. When next his foot lifted, all that remained was a smear of multicolored particles.

“Cheap-ass government crap!” he said, spitting on the pile of debris for good measure. His spittle smoked when it struck the ground. He leaped from the roof and spread his wings, angling for the nearest flicker of light.

Every beat of his wings brought him closer to what Drake would describe as signs of civilization. He noted more and more vehicles in motion, lights in storefronts and an ever-growing number of major buildings. His initial landing point had obviously been far on the outskirts, but the city proper was growing beneath him at a rapid pace.

As he made his way deeper into the settlement, passing over roadways that were packed with cars, Drake looked down to see the strobing red-and-blue lights of a police cruiser moving at speed through one of the streets. It was pursuing a late-model Camaro running without lights. Blinks of fiery orange light were seen coming from the Camaro, followed by the sound of gunshots.

“Now there’s something I can deal with,” Drake said. His wings pulled back into a sleek triangle alongside his body and he arrowed straight down. Seconds before impact, he snapped out his wings and fought against the force of his descent. His feet thudded onto the pavement with surprising intensity, sending shocks of pain through his ankles and knees Ahead of him, still careening toward him at breakneck speed, was the blacked-out Camaro.

“Federal Agent!” Drake bellowed. He held out his badge in his left hand. As expected, the announcement had little effect on those inside the car. The only thing he really noticed was that the gunman in the passengers’ seat switched his aim toward the new threat. A scattering of shotgun pellets spat a glittering path of sparks across the pavement at his feet.

The nose of the car was only a few feet away from his legs when Drake threw himself to the side, dropping his badge and using the long claws of his left hand to rake across the wheels as the Camaro passed. Both tires on that side exploded raggedly, spattering the area with bits of rubber. The car slewed to one side and arced round in a wide circle. The exposed metal of the wheels sent showers of sparks into the night. Inside the car, the men screamed in terror as the vehicle spiraled through two complete spins. The sound of the engine had long since fallen to nearly nothing as the driver released the accelerator in his fear.

The police unit screeched to a halt behind the Camaro as it stopped moving. Drake regained his feet and advanced without waiting for the police. He gripped the frame of the drivers’ door and ripped it completely free of its attachments with a shriek of tortured metal. As the uniformed officer stepped from his cruiser, Drake leaned his face into the Camaro and opened his mouth in his most terrifying grin.

“I said ’Federal Agent’, dumbass!” he shouted as he grabbed the driver by the left shoulder and prepared to throw him from the vehicle.

The passenger leered at Drake from over the frame of a cut-down shotgun, grinning just as wildly as the booster. His finger tightened on the trigger and the vehicle rocked with concussion as the shotgun fired. Drake’s face was battered with pellets that ricocheted from his armored plates and shredded the interior of the vehicle as well as tearing through the exposed skin of both criminals. For his own part, Drake screamed in agony as muzzle blast scorched his eyes. He felt a spike of intense pain envelop the entire left side of his head as at least one of the pellets made its way past the ridges of armor surrounding those tender orbs and buried itself there. Multiple swirling images of the vehicle interior swam in his vision as tears and blood cascaded from his eyes. A second later, and he saw nothing at all through the left eye.

Drake’s head lifted as he arched his back in pain. The unleashed strength of the booster drove his skull through the roof, ripping through the thin metal. Another roar escaped his throat, accompanied by a roiling spurt of flame that lit the night sky as though it were midday. The supporting columns snapped with a screech as his shoulders rose. Great sobbing cries wracked him as he fell free of the car, dropping to one knee onto the pavement. His hands slapped over his aching eyes, and though he could not see it, he could feel that both palms were slicked with blood.

More shots rang out around him. The shotgun’s bass thunder was joined with the sharper barking sound of two separate pistols. The thumping sound of a helicopter’s rotors drifted in, accompanied by an ominous shrieking sound reminiscent of a jet aircraft. Pushing himself to his feet, Drake tottered unsteadily as he used the talons of his right hand to force open his right eye. He was desperate to get some sight of what was going on around him. The nictitating membranes that protected his eyes had snapped shut, and he saw the world around him as a blur of flashing lights and motion. A brilliant flare, accompanied by the deafening blast of the shotgun, gave him a clue as to the shooter’s position, and he threw himself forward as he lashed out with a fist.

The solid impact of his fist let him know he had scored a hit even before he heard the agonized cry of the shooter. He slapped down his hand, fumbling for the driver as he fought to regain his sight. A trio of shots cracked loudly from a position much closer to him, and he felt the hammer blows of the rounds slamming into his chest. The force of the shots drove the air from his lungs in a sulfurous cloud, and past experience told him he would have some severe bruising to deal with, but the armored nature of his skin prevented the bullets from penetrating to his organs.

Blindly, he snapped with his teeth, jaws opening and closing rapidly as he roared his frustration and rage. A scream of horror came from the driver, followed by his shout of surrender. Drake stopped trying to bite and let his hand go to the sound, wrapping the massive mitt around the head of the driver and holding the man steadily with painful force. His left hand went back up to cover the injured eye.

“Back away from the car!” shouted an amplified voice. It seemed to be coming from the direction of the police car, but with the echoes from surrounding buildings, Drake could not be certain. He had no wish to put himself at further risk from a police officer who had no way of knowing who the big booster was, though, and released the driver, taking a step back and raising his right hand over his head. In the background, he was aware of the sounds of sirens closing in on the scene.

“Federal Agent!” he called in response to the challenge. “Two in custody! Start me a medic!”

“Stand your ground,” ordered the voice. “Move and I’ll spread you across the street.”

“I ain’t moving,” Drake assured the speaker. “My ID’s in my pocket. Right front.”

“Get it,” said the voice, and it was much quieter now. Drake could tell even without opening his aching right eye that the speaker was standing before him now. “Real slow.”

Drake complied, removing his credentials from within his pocket and extending them. “Francis Drake, Department of Justice. I had a badge, but I dropped it just before the car almost hit -”

“We’ll find it,” the voice said. “Sit down, Agent Drake. EMS is on the way. I have a first aid kit if you would like me to check -”

It was Drake’s turn to cut off the speaker. He waved in the general direction of the wrecked Camaro. “I hit one of those guys pretty hard. Check him out first.”

“The police are tending to them.”

“The police? So who -”

As the question tumbled from his mouth, Drake reached up a hand and forced open the right eye again, blinking back the membrane with more than a little effort. He was looking into a wide, rounded metal face. Black crystalline eyes stared back with no hint of emotion. A quick glance down before he let the eye close again showed Drake that his rescuer was a humanoid machine in form. Only a couple of inches shorter than Drake, the machine would stand a full head taller than most people. It was made of a softly polished grey metal, and was obviously designed to anatomically mimic a human female form, albeit a very muscular copy of one. A sleek box was mounted on each shoulder, and the tips of two cylindrical objects extended from the front of each such box. The arms were heavy things, with wide powerful fingers, and stubby gun barrels that protruded from the top side of the wrists. Around the waist of the machine was a belt festooned with pouches. The legs were sculpted in much the same way as the rest of the machine, and while the whole thing radiated raw power, there was a hint of feminine grace to the manner in which it stood and moved. Once that element fell into place, Drake recognized that the voice was that of a woman.

“—are you?” Drake finished as he closed the eye again. It still burned and stung with the aftereffects of the partially-burned cordite that had entered it when the shotgun went off. The left side of his head was now a solid, burning mass of torment in response to the optic injury. He stumbled a bit and then sat as the machine had bid. He felt the pressure of air from above as the police helicopter settled into a pattern above the scene, using its powerful spotlight to illuminate the area. More sirens could be heard approaching.

“Call me Soundstage. Sponsored booster. What brings you here to Austin?” asked the machine. Drake felt a gentle but strong hand ease his own away from his left eye. A cool sensation told him his eye was being irrigated with something, but he could not tell any more than that beyond the constant throbbing pain.

“Austin? As in Austin, Texas?” Drake asked, his voice cracking with surprise.

“Sure ain’t Canada,” Soundstage said with a laugh. The metal hands eased open Drake’s right eye, letting in the lights of the street. A second later, cool water flowed across the agonized orb.

“That should hold you until EMS can take a look at you,” Soundstage declared, letting the lid close.

“Just get the pellets out,” Drake said through gritted teeth. “I’ll heal. I always do.”

“No offense, Agent, but I’m going to let someone with a better knowledge of medicine deal with that,” came the reply.

“Fine. Whatever. Tell ’em to hurry, though.”

“We sure as hell don’t tell ’em to slow down,” laughed Soundstage.

Despite the pain, Drake managed a chuckle at her quip. A moment later, the sounds of booted feet running to his side, accompanied by the rolling noises of an EMS cot, announced the arrival of the paramedic crew. The boots squeaked on the pavement as they came to an abrupt halt.

“What the hell?” asked a stunned voice. This one was deep and guttural, and Drake pegged it as male.

“Shotgun pellets in his left eye, flash burn in the right,” Soundstage said simply.

“Ma’am, I don’t think I’m qualified -” the medic began, but Soundstage cut him off with an amplified shout that echoed from the surrounding walls.

“Just do it, Anders!”

“Yes, ma’am,” Anders replied. Drake felt the man’s fingers fumbling clumsily at the lid of his left eye.

“I’ll do it,” Drake said with a pained sigh. He lifted his hand and pried open the eye, using the tip of a talon to hold open the protective membrane beneath. “This ain’t my first trip to the doc. Give me ten mils of diazepam and about two million units of penicillin. You’ll have to give the injections through my mouth. Needles won’t get through the scales. Once you’ve got the meds in, get some pliers in there and take out the pellets.”

The blurred image of the medic looked shocked at the bold instructions he had been given. “Look, sir,” the medic began. “I, uh, I’ll give you the shots. No problems there. What I ain’t doing is sticking a pair of pliers in your eye. Not here, not at the hospital, not anywhere. Let me get you to a doctor, ’cause I ain’t -” “Yeah, I know You’re not qualified. I heard,” Drake said as the medic trailed off He closed his eye and waved his free hand in a dismissive gesture. “Gimme the shots, then, and get me to the truck. I ain’t gonna fit on your stretcher, so I’ll walk.”

He opened his mouth wide, using a claw to point to a patch of skin in the roof of his mouth that was paler than most of its surroundings. “Ight vere,” he mumbled, the words distorted by the act of holding his mouth open.

“Yes, sir,” Anders said. A moment later, Drake felt a sharp sting, followed by a building pressure at the injection site. He could taste the penicillin as drops squeezed past the needle to fall onto his tongue. The needle withdrew and was replaced by another. Shortly after its withdrawal, Drake felt the pain lessen slightly as a wave of euphoria washed over him.

Anders gripped Drake’s left bicep, indicating with a tugging motion that the big booster should stand. He rose unsteadily to his feet. After two wobbling steps, he paused. “Well, this ain’t working,” he mumbled.

“Allow me,” Soundstage said, sliding a hand around Drake’s waist. She dislodged the grasp of the medic and ordered Drake to place his right arm over her shoulders. She was surprisingly strong, and managed to support his weight without any difficulty.

“I’ll meet you at the hospital, Agent Drake,” she said once they had wrestled his enormous form into the ambulance. “I’ve got some questions.”

“See you there,” Drake muttered, waving a hand at the metallic booster. “Let’s go,” he said to the medic that was driving.

Anders spent the trip on a cellular phone, arranging a quiet drop-off point at the hospital for his patient. He explained to Drake that they did not wish to create a spectacle, but Drake had no doubt that the reason was that he simply wanted to avoid frightening the other patients by the arrival of a walking dragon. The Valium in his system allowed him to ignore the underlying insult.

The entry point proved to be a freight elevator in the underground garage, and Drake soon found himself on his back on a laboratory table. Once the assembled doctors had managed to work past their astonishment and curiosity at the form of their new patient, they had decided that his weight might not be supported by a standard bed. He could not help but note the similarities between his own predicament and that of Patriot, who was, to the best of Drake’s knowledge, still supine on a table in the bunker Drake had left along with Manslaughter and Calder.

“We have the pellets out,” one of the doctors announced after an agonizing thirty minutes. He laid a comforting hand on Drake’s chest as he spoke. There was no trembling of that hand despite Drake’s expectations to the contrary. “Your eye already seems to be repairing itself It’s an amazing feat, Agent Drake.”

“Told y’all I heal fast,” Drake said in a slurred voice. “Patch it up, will ya?”

“Do I tell you how to arrest criminals?” teased the voice. “Allow me to do my job my way, please.”

“What about the right one?”

“Fully irrigated and coated with an ophthalmic salve. It should be fine in a couple of days.”

“Try hours,” Drake corrected. “I can’t do days right now.”

“Agent, I am afraid even with your miraculous powers of healing, I can’t allow you to further endanger your sight by simply ignoring my directions,” said the doctor. The casual, teasing tone was gone, replaced now by a harder edge; the doctor was no stranger to patients trying to shorten their healing time.

Drake wrapped powerful fingers around the wrist of the doctor. “Who’s in the room with you?” he asked, having noted whispering voices in the background.

“Two nurses and an intern. Why?”

“Get them out. Private conversation.”

After a moment of hesitation, the doctor complied, ordering the others to leave. A minute later, he patted at the hand that still gripped his arm. “They are gone,” he declared. Drake released his grip of the wrist.

“Doc, I need you to understand why I’m in a hurry. You know about Patriot?”

“Everyone does,” the doctor said. “Stricken by some debilitating attack that has put him out of action. The rumors are flying.”

“They ain’t rumors. Fact is, he’s flat on his back just like me. Difference is he ain’t moving or talking. If you can’t fix me up double-quick, Doc, then I need to get a message to my boss. I’m carrying Patriot’s cure.”

Drake heard the sudden intake of breath from the doctor that told him his words had fully registered. He waited.

“I can’t make you better overnight,” the doctor admitted, the words a rush of sound as though they had been held behind a suddenly broken dam.

“Get me a phone, then.”

“Use mine,” the doctor offered, snapping open a cell. “Give me the number.”

Drake rattled off a series of numbers that would ring on Hart’s cell. It rang eleven times, and Drake had begun to despair of her answering a call from an unknown source when she abruptly picked up.

“Director,” she declared.

“It’s Drake.”

“Where the hell are you?” she demanded. “Your phone went dead. We tried to trace it -”

“Shut up a minute!” Drake shouted. He could not take a chance on letting her rail at him any longer without knowing if the phone he was using would fail in the same manner as his own. There was silence on the other end of the line, and he continued. “I’m in Austin, Texas. I got shot in the face and I can’t see jack shit. Get a runner down here to pick up the package.”

“Shot?”

“Yes, damn it, shot. Now I’m giving the phone back to the doctor. He’ll tell you where we are. Get someone down here to pick up this thing.”

Not waiting for her response, Drake handed the telephone back to the doctor and allowed himself to fall back heavily onto the table. His face hurt and he was tired. The efforts of the past several days had left him feeling weary down to his bones, and he hoped that soon the magic crystal Karma had entrusted to him would be used to cure Patriot of whatever it was that had left him in his current state. It would be making that trip without him however, and a small part of him was grateful for that fact.

“Go back to the mountains for a while,” he mumbled to himself as he heard the doctor depart. “Spend some time in the woods. Get away from all this drama.”

“Drama’s where we live,” responded the voice of Soundstage. Drake’s face split wide in a smile at the familiar tones.

“Hey. Didn’t hear you come in,” he said. He rose to a sitting position, letting his legs dangle over the side of the table. He could feel the cool surface of the floor beneath his feet, so low did they reach.

“Nobody else did, either,” replied Soundstage. “That’s the way I like it.”

“Brought you your badge,” Soundstage told him after a minute, pressing the familiar gold form into Drake’s palm. He closed his fingers around it, trapping hers with it for an instant. Both metals were cool to the touch.

“Thanks for your help,” he said.

“You’re welcome,” she replied, disengaging her fingers from his grasp. “How are the eyes? I heard the docs say it would be a couple of days?”

“Yeah. Looks like,” Drake said. His upper lip peeled back in a sour expression. “Pardon the pun,” he muttered.

Soundstage laughed, a quiet sound like static. “So for now you can’t see at all?”

“Motion out of this one,” Drake said, jerking a thumb carefully at his right eye. “If I try. It stings pretty good, though. Can’t wait ’til the painkillers wear off, you know?”

The door to the room closed and locked. A metallic clank sounded in the room, followed by a soft hiss. Drake felt a gentle brush against his hip. He reached out and felt the round surface of Soundstage’s face, revealed to him now as a removable helmet, placed carefully on the table beside him.

“Do me a favor. Don’t look at my face,” Soundstage asked. “Even with blurred vision. Nobody knows who’s in the helmet and I’d as soon keep it that way.”

“Not a problem,” he assured her. “I’d show you who was under this one, but it’s kinda messy when you peel it off.”

“I guess it would be at that.,” she said with a laugh. Without the helmet to add its mechanical edge, the laughter was pleasant.

“Don’t get many chances to relax and take it off, do you?” he guessed.

“Not as many as I used to,” she admitted. “Things have picked up around here lately. Some wack-job put Dozer Dave in the hospital last week. He was one of us. Austin’s sponsored boosters, I mean. Me, Dave and Sangre been working Austin for about a year now. Dave’s been here a little longer, and Sangre, well, she tells folks she’s been here for a hundred years.”

“Feels like I have, too,” Drake said, rubbing a hand across his brow. He paused, then rotated his head back toward where Soundstage stood. He kept his eye closed in accord with her wishes, but felt it polite at least to face in her direction.

“So this Dozer Dave guy….he a tough bringdown?”

Soundstage laughed softly, but there was as much sorrow as mirth in it. “They called him the Dozer even before he Emerged. Some kind of football star. Knocked folks down like they weren’t there. When he Emerged, seemed like nothing in the world could stop him. He could charge through walls and come out the other side without his hair even messed up.”

“So who got him?”

“Don’t know. We found him out on Anderson Mill Road, off of One-eighty-three. He had a busted light post in his hand, like he’d been fighting with it. You know, like a stick for normals? The whole area was torn to pieces. Crew’s out there still cleaning up. Anyway, he was burned all up. Doctors say it was electrical. Got him from the inside out. He’s in critical upstairs.”

“I’ll get you a list of zappers from the home office. Might be on the list, might not, but at least it’s someplace for you to start,” Drake offered.

“Thanks. That’ll help.”

“Least I can do,” Drake said. “So how about the Camaro cowboys from tonight? What was their deal?”

“Home invasion. Thrill-killers, basically. PD got a tip on their location. I went up for a look, but damned if I expected to see a dragon ripping their car apart. Nice work stopping them, though. They would have shredded the locals pretty good. Both of them have previous warrants as homicide suspects and they were wired up on Hype.”

Drake snorted in disgust. Hype, one of the newest designer combat drugs on the market, acted as a direct neural stimulant, enhancing the reflexes of its user. It was not as bad as Kamikaze, which Drake knew was designed to promote aggression by acting on the pleasure centers of the brain, giving its user a feeling of happiness when they committed an act of violence, but it was still not something he enjoyed dealing with. He said as much to Soundstage.

“Yeah. The norms figure they’ve got to even the playing field when they get to deal with us,” she explained as though that made everything all right.

“They weren’t expecting me tonight,” Drake spat. “They were out for kicks.”

“Get some rest,” Soundstage said, her voice soothing and calm. She put a hand on Drake’s shoulder, easing him back into a supine position on the table. He rolled a shoulder up a bit to ease the cramped position of one wing, then settled back as ordered. He ignored the pressure against his lower spine where his tail was in a bind.

“We’ll have you out of here in no time,” she said.

“Look, I’m expecting someone from Justice to pay me a visit,” Drake told her. He felt drowsy, and realized that he had been fighting the effects of the narcotics in his system just to keep talking with the woman. “I don’t know how soon they’ll get here, or who it’ll be, but they need to get this like yesterday,” he said. He reached into the pouch on his belt to retrieve the crystal from Karma.

The pouch was empty.