And the radio turned to static.
Edward’s head swiveled from side to side, suddenly suspicious. The orc was sensing something. Without a word he disentangled from Tanya, unbuckled himself, moved to the door, unlatched it and slid it open. Disregarding the wind and the potential fall into eternal nothingness, Ed looked back the way we’d come from and twitched in surprise, which was a remarkable display of emotion for the orc warrior. Then he signaled that Julie and I needed to come take a look.
The Last Dragon complex was in the distance, partially visible only as the sheets of mist moved and the unnatural lightning provided illumination, but the gaping hole in the middle of it was obvious. Something had torn its way out of the ground. The central gardens had been replaced with a fresh new hole.
Julie looked at me and mouthed the word, “Management?”
The lightning cracked the gray open above us, and for the briefest instant we could see shape of something vast and winged coming after us.
Chapter 23
I had never been so happy to see Las Vegas before.
One second the Hind was plowing through the storm, and the next we were streaking over the blinding lights of the Strip. The churning mist stopped behind us like it had crashed into an invisible wall. The chopper was vibrating madly. There was a distressing noise coming from our gargoyle-struck tail, but at least if we were going to crash, it was going to be on the solid ground of my home planet.
We had done it. We’d escaped. There had been enough of a head start that the Nachtmar’s newest creation had never been more than a shadow in the fog behind us.
“We made it!” Tanya bit off her yell, probably because she wasn’t sure if Skippy would toss her out if he found out there was an elf aboard.
But Skippy was preoccupied and hadn’t heard. “Row-tor spirits…they fight me. Must hurry. Land…in road,” he warned. “No problem. No problem.” The chopper rotated in a series of jerks and fits. Out the window was a shockingly well-contained pillar of whirling nightmare. Our passage hadn’t made so much as a ripple. “Probably no explode.”
“Can the Nachtmar come across?” Julie asked.
“I’ve got absolutely no idea.” The streets a few hundred yards below seemed surprisingly clear of traffic. There were hundreds of police cars, fire trucks, and military vehicles around the phenomenon, but beyond that, the vehicles I saw seemed to be heading away from the disturbance. In the distance was a continuous chain of barely moving headlights that could only be I-15. Mosh’s memories had been spot-on. The city was being evacuated.
Mosh…I had to reach him. The host’s physical body had been there with him and Holly. I spotted the Taj, the casino that had been holding Dr. Blish. I was unsure how much time had passed since Mosh had been cut off, but it was after sundown here. It felt like we’d only been in the nightmare world for maybe an hour, but time must pass slower there than in the real world.
Skippy picked a clear area. Then, grumbling and fighting the stick, he brought us down. There were soldiers and rescue workers running toward where we were about to set down. Hopefully there would be someone with a clue nearby that could get me to the host. Stricken was a conniving dirtbag, but theoretically we could be on the same team at least enough to defeat this monster. Stricken didn’t want too much collateral damage either. But after that, I was going to snap his neck. If I was really lucky Agent Franks would be back from his secret weapon-supply run.
The ground was a hundred feet away and coming up fast, but despite the chopper’s damage, it didn’t look like it would be too much harder than a normal landing. Skip was just that good. Julie had moved on to focusing on what we needed to do next. There would be time to dwell on my mistakes later. “What do we need to do now?”
“The monster is in two halves. My brother was in that casino right there with the half I need to get to. I think I know how to stop—”
ROOOOOOOOOAAAAAAR!
The sound was louder than our helicopter.
We had been followed.
Far above us, the nightmare dragon erupted through the barrier like a bullet through glass. The pillar of smoke split open around it. The walls of reality unfurled and the nightmare world came pouring into ours. The shadow of the dragon streaked across the sky. Despite its incredible speed, it was so long that it blocked the moon for several seconds, and then cut it in half for another second just with the length of its tail. I hadn’t gotten the best look, but it was huge. It was like standing under one of the MCB C-130s coming in for a landing. Briefly visible out the opposite window now, wings spread wide, the dragon banked, turning over the city, coming back around toward us.
“Punch it, Skip!” Julie shouted.
Our pilot did. Angry rotor spirits be damned, we were not putting down with that thing heading our way. There was a sudden surge of power and we were moving forward just as the now-released mists of the nightmare world came spilling through the street below, engulfing the quarantine and swallowing the soldiers. I couldn’t tell if they were consumed or simply hidden from view, but then we were barreling down the Strip in front of a tsunami of nightmare fog.
The dragon was now above and behind us. It was the color of the night sky, and only random reflectivity from the city lights marked its presence as it tore through the air. Then it was behind us and I could no longer see it, but I could sense the flapping. Something that big and unaerodynamic didn’t fly. It beat the air into submission, and every concussive strike of those membranous wings shook the world. “Can we outrun it?”
“Skip get away.” Suddenly, the world around us turned to scarlet. Fire licked the glass. The chopper screamed as Skippy pointed us straight up. “Fire!” The color turned back to black, and we were free. However, the strain on the chopper had made something worse, and now the vibration was trying to remove the fillings from my teeth. That had changed Skippy’s opinion too. “Never mind.”
“The son of a bitch breathes fire too!”
“It’s a dragon. Did you expect flowers? Skippy, try to shake him between the taller buildings.” Julie got out of her seat, then clipped one of the bungee cords attached to the ceiling to a carabineer on her armor to keep her from falling out. She checked her rifle. She was thinking the same thing I was.
“This asshole wants to dogfight, he’s got himself a dogfight.” I grabbed another one of the cords. Abomination was a short-range weapon, but the case for Milo’s machine gun was still secured under Ed’s seat. I signaled him to get it out. I took the case and opened it up. Ed pulled a belt out of the ammo can. There was only one left. Which was enough to solve most problems, but I didn’t know if a .308 would even put a dent in a monster that big.
Julie was way ahead of me. “Skippy, try to maneuver around him. When you can, head back toward the fed’s quarantine. They’re bound to have something big enough to shoot a dragon down.”
But the pillar of smoke had collapsed and was flooding outward into the city, seemingly heavier than air. “Assuming they can see through the fog.”
“Or that they didn’t all get sucked into the nightmare world already,” Julie answered. “You got a better idea?”
“Trying…” It was taking all of Skippy’s mad skills to keep our damaged bird in the air, and now we were asking him to play high-speed tag between a bunch of casinos.
“If we don’t die, then I’m making you employee of the month,” Julie said.
“Great honor. Skippy not let die!” There was a moment of nauseous weightlessness as Skippy dove at a ten-story building. “Great honor for tribe.”
“What can I do to help?” Tanya asked me.
I loaded the belt into the 240, slammed down the feed-tray cover, and worked the bolt. “Got any fancy elf magic tricks up your sleeve?”
Tanya didn’t even have sleeves. “Not for nothing like this.”
“Then start praying.”
“I’ll ask Elvis Presley for his divine help,” she promised, and I think she was dead serious.
“Y
ou do that.” I yanked the door open and was blasted with wind. Edward came over and helped me get the machine gun onto the door mount. “Ed, your girlfriend is one weird chick.” The orc just gave me a she’s not my girlfriend snort of denial. “Whatever, dude.”
My wife opened the other side door. As Skippy turned, at least one of us would have an angle. “Five bucks says I’m the first one to hit him in the eye,” Julie stated.
“You’re on.” I leaned out. The dragon was behind us. We were flying south down the Las Vegas Strip. The monster’s wingspan was wider than the street, the body long and lean. This was the best look I’d gotten of it so far, and it was frankly terrifying. Its skin was obsidian, so black that it seemed to absorb the brilliant lights of the casinos below. Its head alone was as wide as our chopper. It dwarfed Management. It was a nightmare from a being that caused nightmares. Each rise and fall of the wings was enough to creature turbulence to batter the snot out of our damaged vehicle.
It opened its mouth, and inside was an unfurling stream of liquid flame. It lit up the night. “Evade, Skip! Evade!”
The bolt of superheated gas spanned the distance between us in a heartbeat. Skippy turned us hard as the dragon’s flames filled the space we’d just been in. Hanging on for dear life, I gasped as we narrowly avoided a high-rise tower. I hadn’t even seen it coming.
The dragon was right behind. One of its wings clipped the edge of the Illusions building and obliterated two floors’ worth of windows. It didn’t seem to notice. The beast was coated in licking flames from flying through its own fiery breath. The fires died, beat out by the wind. So it was impervious to that too. So let’s see how he likes bullets. Having a clean shot, I mashed the trigger and walked a stream of tracers across the dragon’s body. It was so damn big that missing was virtually impossible.
The bullets simply disappeared with no visible effect whatsoever. The nightmare dragon screeched at our defiance. The sound pierced my headset. If at first you don’t succeed, shoot it another hundred times. That’s what’s nice about belt-feds. “Come on, motherfucker!” I kept on shooting, hammering the dragon as the FN churned out spent brass and muzzle flashes. I hit it in the wings, in its dinosaur snout, and all across its body, but didn’t so much as get a flinch. Skippy cranked us hard the other way, I lost sight of the dragon, and then there was another building and Diamond Steve’s roller-coaster track between me and the dragon. We swayed, and it was Julie’s turn. I had volume, she had accuracy, and there was a series of shots, about two a second, as Julie probed for something vital.
“We’re going to need bigger guns,” she stated with forced calm. The dragon crashed through the roller-coaster track. Mockups of famous landmarks were pulverized into dust and splinters. “Way bigger.”
Skippy was swearing. We were slowing down. It was as if our chopper was starting to rotate along with the main rotors. The tail wasn’t keeping up. We were going to corkscrew it into the ground at a hundred miles an hour. With a few mighty beats of its wings, the dragon halved the distance between us. “Skippy, he’s gaining!”
“I try. Not know why…Spirits are displeased!”
“Because we got hit by a gargoyle missile.” The dragon’s jaws snapped shut a few feet behind us. “Tell your spirits to quit their crying and lose this son of a bitch!”
Another fire bolt streaked past. Somehow Skippy rolled us out of the way at the last instant. The hotel just ahead of us took the hit. The concussion shook us hard, then we were pinging and banging our way through a cloud of expanding shrapnel. Tanya screeched as a chunk of hot metal punched a hole through the wall next to her head. The girl had a set of lungs like you wouldn’t believe.
“What? Is that…Elf! There is filthy elf here! No wonder spirits displeased!” Skippy sounded relieved, like that explained everything. “Stow way…Edward, throw out window elf, please. Fix good.”
Edward grumbled, “No…Elf girl. Nice.”
“What? Exszrsd, no!” Skippy was shocked and dismayed at his brother’s betrayal. “Noooo!” The Hind turned on its side to fit between two towers. The dragon was forced to swing around. Skippy launched into a giant tirade in his native, guttural, nearly incomprehensible language. Despite my having a great natural talent for learning languages, so far Orcish had eluded me. It was like trying to understand someone shaking a bucket of rocks. Edward snapped something back. Apparently he was just as terse in Orcish as in English. They went back and forth as the dragon’s tail swept the twenty-foot neon sign off the top of the Paradisio.
Tanya, who I think understood even less of their angry exchange than I did, didn’t help by adding “Yeah!” every time Ed said anything.
“Now is not the time to debate your feelings on interspecies dating,” Julie shouted as she cranked off several more ineffectual shots. Luckily my wife understood a lot more Orcosh than I did. “Tanya, promise Skippy that you won’t use your elf magic to steal their souls.”
“Uh…Okay. I promise?” Apparently soul-stealing hadn’t been on her To Do list. “You better not try to put my ears on your elf-ear necklace.”
“Fine.” Skippy grunted in frustration. “Curse you, row-tor spirits! Stubborn…Exsrzd!” and then Skippy rattled off some complicated instructions in Orcish. The only word I’d picked out of that was sacrifice. “Fast now go!”
Edward slid to the back of the cabin and rummaged around behind the rear seat. He came out a moment later with a cardboard box that had been wedged in. Ed reached inside and pulled out…a chicken? I’m pretty sure it was the same chicken he had stolen up north. The bird was alive and seemed very nervous. For good reason, too. “Seriously, Ed? Seriously?” Julie groaned. “Okay, fine. Whatever. Do it!”
“Go toward the light, brave little bird,” Tanya said.
“More sacrifice!” Skippy bellowed.
The orc grumbled something to the tail rotor spirits, squeezed next to me, and hurled the chicken like a football right out the door. It zipped straight into the smoking tail rotor and disappeared in a flash of feathers.
“Holy crap! Did you see that?” But then I had to concentrate, since the dragon had swung back around on my side. I lit the beast up with the 240.
The shocking part was that our improvised chicken repair seemed to actually do something. Skippy at least sounded happier. “Much better…Hang on.”
The Hind tilted up, then rolled over, and over, and over, and then we were upside down. Every one of us screamed. The lucky ones were pressed against their seat by the g-forces. A gigantic aluminum case that had been wedged beneath the chicken box came free and smacked Ed in the arm. I floated in the air, holding onto the grip of a machine gun, hit my head on the roof, and then landed back on the floor. I was so temporarily disoriented that I’m not even sure what kind of maneuver we performed, but then we were heading back the way we’d come from and the dragon was below us, furious and trying to turn around.
“Go, Skippy, go,” Julie gasped.
The Hind was still making a terrible rattling noise and there was dark smoke trailing behind us. The dragon was banking hard, wings spread wide, and for a moment it was illuminated in a brilliant spotlight for the entire world to see. I didn’t know how complete the evacuation was, but somebody was going to have to some explaining to do. “Get us back to the quarantine line. Let me off and then the rest of you, run like hell.”
Julie looked at me like I was stupid. “That’s not going to happen.”
“You can’t come with me.”
“Really? And why the hell not?”
I really wish there was a better way to handle this…I screwed up my courage and dropped the bomb. “You’re pregnant.”
“Wha—wait…What?” She really hadn’t seen that coming. “I can’t be. How?”
I couldn’t resist. Near-death experiences bring out my inner smartass. “When a mommy and a daddy love each other very much—”
“Aargh! No. But I’m not…How do you know? Wait…Earl…That ass.”
“Yay! Babies
,” said Skippy as way of congratulations.
Tanya agreed. “Aw, cute.”
Julie went white as a sheet, and not just at the prospect of impending motherhood. She was the smart one in our relationship. “It might be hereditary…” She’d realized what I had been thinking. “The Nachtmar called you chosen. He talked about breaking into your mind and enslaving you.”
“Right. That whole bloodline thing. I don’t know, but the poor bastard that’s stuck as its current host is sort of like me. Will this kid be like me too?” I was some sort of cosmic intersection of weirdness, and Julie was all sorts of cursed. I wouldn’t take odds on this one. “Maybe. I hope not, but we’re not going to find out. This thing is not going to possess my kid. No way. Screw that.”
“I can’t leave you—” but even as she said it, she knew she was wrong. Julie bit her lip and nodded. It was a lot of information to process.
“I’ll hit the ground running.” That was wishful thinking. I’d hit the ground limping. “I’ll find Mosh and Holly. They were with the host last. I want the Nachtmar to intercept me. I want both halves of it, him, whatever, in the same place.”
“And then what?”
“I talk them into surrendering.”
“Talk?”
“Yeah. Pretty much.”
“You? Talk? Oh, we’re screwed.”
“Thanks, hon.” I checked out the door. The dragon had got turned around was heading back up the Strip. I wouldn’t have much time at all. My leg was throbbing, and since I hadn’t walked on it for a bit, it was probably going to be extra stiff. “I’ll go as fast as I can.”
Edward was more perceptive than he looked, and he’d seen how buggered up my leg had been earlier. He handed me a flask. “Drink.” It smelled like rancid pond water. “Gretchen make. Help feets.” She was their healer, after all, and I’d benefited from some of her crazy remedies before. She insisted that her magical remedies needed to be fresh and made for a specific person, but this was worth a shot. It tasted worse than it smelled, and burned going down. I passed Gretchen’s magic energy drink back to Edward and tried not to puke. My injured foot began to tingle, which was either a good sign or a bad sign.