Firedrake Chapter 14

Drake grunted as his back impacted with the light post, folding the metal until it broke off with a shriek. For his part, the booster continued his reverse flight until he slammed into the wall of a pharmacy. Concrete shattered under the impact.

“You should be more careful,” declared the woman in the black bodysuit with a Texas flag emblazoned across the chest. Her voice was low and soft, with a pronounced drawl, and held none of the tension Drake would have expected given the situation at hand.

Drake had been in Austin for almost a week following the return of Patriot’s mystical cure, taking time off to allow his battered body to heal. In actuality it took only two days for him to return to readiness, but he was enjoying the hospitality and the vacation. It was during the fifth day that the alarm came from the Police Department.

“Got one out off Guadalupe and 38th that just blew his way through a half-dozen cruisers,” Soundstage announced as she entered the living room of the expansive house in which the city of Austin had allowed its defenders to live. Her helmet, as always, covered her head and was sealed to the armored battle suit she wore. It fed her a constant stream of information from police and other emergency response frequencies, and years of experience let her garner the details she needed with little effort. She moved through the room with purpose, and her amplified voice echoed throughout the building.

“Awww, not now,” Drake said with mock sadness. “I mean, Oprah’s coming on and everything...”

“You can TiVo it,” Soundstage replied as the reptilian booster fairly leaped up from the chair in which he had been seated.

“Yeah, ’cause I’m so good at programming things,” Drake said, snorting. “I can’t even get my VCR to stop flashing twelve o’clock.“ He slithered into his shoulder holsters, clipping the retention straps to his belt.

“He is coming?” asked another voice.

“Yeah,” Drake replied, turning to regard the smaller woman standing in the doorway to the room. She wore a lightly-armored bodysuit of jet black accented by a flag emblem. During his short stay, Drake had become acquainted with the slight figure, who went by the name of Sangre. She was more than a foot shorter than Drake, but he never felt he had to look down to see her. The woman had a presence that felt larger than life. She had made the claim to others that she had been in Texas for a hundred years or more, and there were moments when Drake could almost believe it. He had never seen her in action, but Soundstage spoke highly of her skills. Drake had been surprised to discover that Sangre’s personality was even more abrasive than his own. A part of him wanted to introduce her to Colleen Hart, just for the pleasure of watching the interaction.

“Is this normal?”

“Who cares about normal, slick? I’m a cop, right? Gotta go where the action is.” He made an effort to produce the most dazzling grin in his entire repertoire just long enough to convince her that he was not serious, then reached out a wide hand to hold open the door beside her.

“I figure you probably do, yeah,” she replied, missing the intended sarcasm completely, which was another of the few things that had been so noticeable that it registered with Drake. Sangre had an almost limitless inability to understand humor in any form. He shook his head as she passed beneath his outstretched arm and stepped through the doorway.

The trio had flown to the scene of the incident with due haste, Sangre clinging to Soundstage’s neck like a flag-wearing monkey and Drake winging his way beside them. As they neared the scene, passing rapidly over approaching emergency vehicles, they saw the cause of the problem. It was difficult to miss.

Standing nearly thirty feet tall and occupying space between a four-story bank building and a library, the man was holding a wrecked Nissan pickup in one hand as though it were no burden. He was grossly fat, and covered in a mat of hair so thick it was like the fur of a dog. He wore no clothing, and in any space where the man’s flesh showed through the hair, it was seen to be covered in lurid tattoos. As the three boosters approached, he flung the Nissan in an overhand throw that had devastating results. It crashed into the front grill of a ladder truck marked for Company 14, sending the massive vehicle skidding sideways. The tail of the truck slammed into a group of storefronts, exploding them outward in showers of glass and brick. The hairy man laughed echoingly and stomped a foot down to smash a bus stop cubicle.

“That pretty common around here?” Drake asked, jerking his chin toward the rampaging figure.

“Giant furry naked men? Oh, yeah. All the time,” Soundstage shot back with a chuckling sound. She banked toward the ground. “Here’s your spot, Sangre.”

“Exercise caution,” the small woman suggested, stepping off the armored back while still in motion. She seemed to hang in the air for a moment, then plummeted toward the ground. Drake slowed his own flight in an effort to turn back to catch her.

“She’s got it,” Soundstage said. “Come on! We need to keep this one contained. If he gets into the city proper, no telling what kind of damage he’ll cause.”

Confident that the chromed booster knew what she was doing, Drake returned his attention to the matter at hand. The furry man had ripped a stop sign and its post from the ground and thrown it in a sidelong spin that would have decapitated a police officer had his partner not tackled him to the ground a second before the deadly impact. The two men hit the pavement mere inches beneath the whistling missile, which then crashed through the glass front of a cigar store. Beside the store, a group of reporters ducked as glass showered their position.

Soundstage changed her flight attitude to a hover and engaged her speakers. Her words echoed from the walls of every surrounding building.

“Unidentified subject! This is the police booster strike force! Cease and desist your destructive activities or we will respond with force!”

There was a moment, Drake noted, when everything went silent. It was almost as though time itself had stopped. For that brief moment, he imagined that even the sounds of the sirens and screaming had ceased, that the car alarms had fallen silent, and that everything had come down to the thunderous noise of his own heartbeat. Then the moment ended, and the enormous man let out a laugh that was chilling in its ferocity.

“Come and get me, cutie!” he roared, the sound nearly as loud as Soundstage’s amplified tones. Bellowing incoherently, the man drove a fist through the facing of the bank building, blasting aside stone and glass to reach a pudgy hand inside.

“He pulls Fay Wray out of there and starts climbing, I’m going home,” Drake said. He folded his wings back and dived toward the ground, building some speed before flaring them wide again and angling upward in a hard climb. The move put enough distance between him and Soundstage that he did not hear her reply, though her laughter was faintly audible.

Drawing his hand back from within the bank, the massive man stuck something into his mouth and began to chew noisily. A muffled cry sounded for a second, then cut off.

“Oh my God! Did he just eat someone?” Soundstage asked. Her volume was still elevated, and more than one horrified police officer shouted an affirmative answer.

“Shut him down!” Soundstage shouted. There was a bark and a roar, and a cone-tipped missile of white and yellow leapt from her left shoulder mount. Scarcely longer than an outstretched arm, the missile flew unerringly toward the man, exploding as it neared him. The shockwave from the detonation shook the surroundings, and the flash of light was brilliant enough it made Drake’s still-tender eyes sting.

“Wanna warn somebody before you do that?” he growled, reaching up to rub at his eyes with the back of one hand.

The giant man squealed at the sudden assault on his senses, flapping a hand before his face to clear the smoke. Fragments from the casing had opened dozens of tiny lacerations on his face, and drops of blood appeared in their wake. Though the missiles were damaging primarily due to their concussion, there was no small amount of shrapnel that accompanied the blast.

From the ground, the police opened up with a veritable arsenal of small arms, peppering the giant with bullets and buckshot rounds. They did little more than make him shout in surprised pain. He followed up a second later by knocking a cornerstone free from the bank facing and sending it crashing to the ground below. Ragged bits of stone hurtled from the shattered rock and slashed across the officers, momentarily silencing their response.

Soundstage flew in closer, intending to challenge the man again, and was astonished to see one great eye close in a wink as the man leered at her.

“Say, baby, looking good,” he said with a suggestive whistle. He licked his lips, waggled his tongue at her, and grinned past teeth in serious need of advanced dental care. An involuntary shiver went through the armored hero as the man added, “I got something for you,” and grabbed at himself obscenely.

“Well, I see that the growth thing isn’t an all-over kind of effect,” she countered, fighting the urge to be sick. Her wrist-guns snapped to full extension above her hands.

His face reddened as he reached toward her. “I’ll bust your metal ass, bitch!”

“Want to wash that hand first? I’ve seen where it’s been,” Soundstage responded. Her wrist-guns spat fire, slashing a stream of bullets past his face in an obvious warning shot. The ammunition she used could easily saw parts of the man completely off, and despite the lust-filled taunts he had made, she had no wish to cause permanent harm.

“Look out! He’s getting bigger!” Drake shouted. He pointed with the tip of a yellowing talon. The giant was indeed increasing in size. He had passed the thirty-five-foot height mark and was still growing.

The reptilian booster’s warning was a boon to Soundstage, but his flight had taken him too close, considering the increase in reach that his foe had gained. With a backward slap, a hand the size of a car hood smashed into Drake and sent him sailing backward to snap through a light pole and crash into the wall of a pharmacy with a sickening thud.

“You should be more careful,” Sangre intoned.

“Yeah,” Drake agreed, coughing. “I was thinking about it, but then I was like, ’Naaa, why try something new now?’”

“Thank you for the assistance, though,” she added, gesturing to the light pole he had destroyed. It lifted from the ground as if by magic and flew in a spinning arc toward the giant, leaving cable sticking from the ground. Sangre wiggled the fingers of her left hand, arm outstretched toward the scene, and the remains of a destroyed cruiser arced upward toward the giant as well.

A grating sound, as of a garden rake dragging across concrete, split the air with thunderous force. The giant clapped his hands to his ears in pain as the few remaining windows in the buildings around him suddenly disintegrated under the sonic assault. Facing the giant from her hovering position, Soundstage amped the volume a little more as she continued the screaming attack.

“Well, so far, Soundstage is the only one that’s having any luck,” Drake observed. He flexed his knees and leaped into the air, snapping his wings in a rapid beat as he climbed into the air. “Let’s see if I can’t do a little bit.”

The car that was flying smashed into the giant’s left knee with a crunch that Drake knew could be either metal or bone giving way. The manner in which the vehicle folded around the joint left little doubt it was the former. It caused the giant distress, though, as evidenced by his pained yelp, and that was enough to bring a grin to Drake’s features.

Soundstage cranked the volume on her speakers and cut loose with yet another blast of sound. Blood ran from the nose and eyes of the giant in response to the onslaught. The shattered light pole, still spinning, struck the giant in the head repeatedly as Sangre manipulated it from the ground. Drake swept in, feeling no larger than a dog might to a fully grown human in comparison to his opponent, and exhaled mightily, trailing a stream of flame across the hair on the man’s chest. It ignited for a second, then shriveled and stuck to the giant with a sizzling sound.

A massive hand slapped out at him and Drake was forced to dodge, though he used the barbed tip of his tail to spike into the back of the hand. The move, while psychologically satisfying to Drake, had no noticeable effect on the furry giant.

“Drake, clear my line!” Soundstage ordered. Without hesitation, Drake folded his wings and let himself fall away, snapping them back open a few moments later and angling his flight to the left as the world erupted into a cacophony of sonic devastation.

Groaning, the giant bent at the waist and wrapped his fat fingers around the frame of an abandoned taxicab. The metal screamed under the pressure of the hand. Glass shattered and fell free from the windows as he lifted it like a yellow truncheon. Sangre kept the light pole swinging; a mobile bat that left bruises and blood in its path. It smacked across the enormous head and neck, splitting the skin with every strike.

The giant suddenly rose to his full height, bringing the cab around in a wide arc. The undercarriage and front bumper hammered into the hovering form of Soundstage, throwing sparks and showering the area with bits of the broken automobile. Fluids from the wrecked machine spattered the bank building. Gasoline and oil flared into brilliant life for a few seconds, giving a hellish aura to the whole location.

A silver streak sailed clear of the scene, blasting through the upper floors of an apartment building and emerging from the other side. Her fall toward the street was arrested by an ignition of the jets in her boots, and she flew back toward the confrontation. A rent in the abdominal plating as well as several smaller scars and dents in the metal armor gave mute testimony to the power of the blow she had taken.

“Sangre! Make me some handcuffs!” Drake shouted. He flew at the man once again, dragging both his pistols from beneath his arms. The weapons bucked and roared in his hands. He directed his fire at the frame of the cab, unwilling to fire a round that might cripple the man. Where the rounds impacted, small explosions followed. A second later, the cab disintegrated in a fiery blast as what remained of its fuel supply ignited with a whoomp sound. Yellow-orange flames licked out and fell to the ground in a ghastly display.

Sangre nodded in response to the request from Drake and focused her attention on the wrecked automobiles and the random bits of scrap that had been generated by the rampaging booster. Strips of metal, pieces of auto chassis, street signs, and more all rose into the air under her command and began to braid themselves together into thick, ropy strands. She forced the metal to respond to her will, ignoring the blood that trickled from her nose and the quivering of her limbs as she fought to control it all at one time.

With a cry of agony, the giant booster flung the destroyed taxi away from his body. It crashed to the ground and skidded across the pavement, slamming three police cars into new positions before coming to rest. The cries of wounded officers drifted up to Drake’s ears.

“Rockets!” Soundstage shouted, a second before three more missiles spewed forth from her shoulder mounts and detonated in the face of the giant. The concussion seemed to stun him for a moment, and Drake took advantage of the distraction to sweep wide and come in from the monster’s right side. He attached himself to the side of the giant’s head, anchoring his position with the sharp points of his talons. He spoke in a clear voice into the wax-encrusted ear he was facing.

“Stop moving, slick, or I’ll blow a hole through the side of your head,” he commanded.

“Get your ugly ass off my head!” roared the giant, swinging up a hand to swat Drake as if he were no more than an insect. Diving aside, Drake allowed the man to slap himself in the head.

“I’m ugly? Seen a fifty-foot mirror lately?” Drake taunted, bringing his wings in close and building speed as he raked a set of talons across the man’s face. Foot-long lacerations appeared in the oily skin.

Soundstage proved she was back in the fight with another focused sonic attack that was horrendous enough to make Drake wince. He looked over to where Sangre stood. The black-clad booster nodded in understanding as he shouted his request.

“Restraints!” he yelled, sweeping an arm forward toward the massive man.

As though Drake himself was commanding their motion, yards of twisted debris slithered across the ground and wrapped themselves around the legs of the giant, looking for all the world like colossal metal snakes. They intertwined and rolled on themselves in a fluid motion that nonetheless carried with it horrific creaking sounds as the tortured metal bent to the magnetic forces Sangre manipulated.

“You stupid son -” the giant began, but he never finished. He was trying to move forward, and the ropes of steel ensnared his feet. He fought for a brief second in an attempt to regain his composure and balance, but failed. A terrified scream rent the air as he began to fall, arms flailing aimlessly in a futile attempt to right himself.

“Clear the area!” Soundstage bellowed through her speakers. Any of the emergency crews that had not already fled dropped what they were doing and started running in a desperate attempt to get out of the way before the building-sized booster landed atop their positions.

The ground shuddered as the enormous figure slammed face-first onto the pavement. Two fire trucks and an ambulance vanished beneath his bulk. Clouds of dust billowed up from the concussion of his impact, and what few windows remained in the surrounding city block cracked with the transmitted force. The nearby police cars leaped six inches into the air and crashed back down. His head slammed into the front of the cigar store through which he had earlier thrown a stop sign, and brown eyes the size of televisions rolled back in the sockets as consciousness fled from the behemoth. Drool ran from his mouth in a veritable river.

“That’s got him,” Sangre reported from her vantage point. Her arms dropped back by her side and she slumped against the blue frame of a mailbox as her efforts caught up to her.

Drake dropped unceremoniously to the ground beside her, slipping a strong arm beneath her thin frame and lifting her to her full height. He looked at the emerald eyes that peeked from within her mask, winking at her as he saw that she was all right.

“Let’s go kick him while he’s down,” he joked, easily lifting Sangre into his arms. In the street beside the fallen giant, Soundstage was touching down on screaming jets of energy. She looked as though she had been in a blender, but ignored her own appearance long enough to check on the emergency crews. Those that had been injured were being tended to by those who had not, and she was content to go examine the body of their opponent.

The man had begun to shrink, and Soundstage wondered aloud if his ability was only functional while conscious. It took less than a minute for him to reach the size of a normal human. Drake slipped a pair of durite cuffs from his belt and cinched them down tightly onto the hairy wrists.

“What was his problem, anyway?” he asked of the surrounding officers. Across the street from him, the reporters that had arrived to film the battle were beginning to move in. They seemed reluctant to approach Drake, and he had no problem being pleased about that.

“Had a thing about the bank. Word on the initial call is that he was causing a disturbance inside. We got here and he went nuts on us. When we tried to hook him up, he started growing. Tore right out of his clothes and kept on getting bigger. We figured it’d be best to get some help in here,” said one of the officers. He had a foot-long tear in his uniform shirt, and a rapidly-swelling black eye.

Most of the reporters and police circled around Soundstage and Sangre, the two boosters with whom they were familiar, and many actively avoided the reptilian booster that towered above them. Drake, in turn, freely ignored them and returned his attention to his prisoner. He snagged a blanket from one of the EMS crews and covered the man, then knelt on the pavement and waited for the first flicker of consciousness to show on the dirty face.

“My name’s Drake. I’m a Federal Agent,” he said to the man when the eyelids began to flicker open. A low moan made its way from the man’s throat in response to the quiet voice.

“Here’s the deal,” Drake continued. “I put my cuffs on you, slick. They’re made out of durite, so if you try to grow again, you’re gonna cut your hands off. Now I don’t know how pissed off you really are, so if that’s what you want, then go ahead. But I wouldn’t recommend it. That’ll make it real hard to hold a fork in the prison cafeteria.”

“Want….want to go home,” groaned the man. Tears ran from his eyes as he spoke.

“Well, that’s gonna be a problem,” Drake said. He stood and motioned to the officers. “These gentlemen are going to take you somewhere to get you checked out and then we’ll be transporting you to a Federal holding facility.”

The man sounded confused when he asked, “Facility for what?”

“For people who eat bank managers,” Drake responded with a smile. His tone was patronizing. “It’s okay. There’s a bunch of folks there. You’ll make lots of new friends.”

Turning away, he rolled his eyes and made a snorting sound. He left the crying man in the custody of several police officers and walked over to drop a heavy hand on Soundstage’s shoulder as she provided a statement to the reporters that had thronged around the boosters and police following the incident. She turned to look at him, the crystal eyes as impassive as always, though Drake could practically feel the smile on her face beneath the helmet. He guided her away from the clamoring media presence to speak alone with her.

“If this is how you spend your days, kid, I think I’m going back to work,” he said.

“Aww, come on. It wasn’t that bad, was it?”

“Hey, I was supposed to be on vacation,” he replied with a chuckle.

“Yeah? Why do I get the feeling this was the closest you’ve ever been to one of those?” she asked.

“Well, it has been a while,” he admitted.

“Tell you what,” she offered, holding up a chromed index finger. “Lady Justice Day is coming up. I’ll take you out for some real Texas barbecue if you’ll hang around through then.”

Drake made a show of looking up, as though he were thinking hard on the offer, then broke out into a grin. “Sounds like fun. It’s a deal,” he said. He then leaned in close, whispering so no one else could possibly overhear. “Partly ’cause I like the company, but mostly ’cause I wanna see you try to eat through the helmet.”