Dragons' Truth

Chapter 13

Permalink for this paragraph 0 Hundreds of huge, unrecognized flying shapes appeared on the radar approaching San Francisco in no discernible formation.  The military suspected a possible terrorist threat and sent two groups of six fighter jets out to intercept whatever was approaching at hypersonic speeds and report back.  The pilots reported that they couldn’t see anything there at all, but continued to fly towards what their own instruments told them was there.  It was not until they were practically on top of the apparent location of the approaching masses that the pilots first started screaming and the jets started exploding in giant balls of flame and dropping from the sky.  The final words of the pilots before they were never heard from again seemed incoherent and unbelievable.

Permalink for this paragraph 0 “It looks like … dragons.  Hundreds of blue dragons.”

Permalink for this paragraph 0 The men back on the ground didn’t know what to make of it, but they went on full alert and prepared for the worst.  More fighter jets were scrambled, but any that moved towards the approaching swarm gave only less coherent reports.  According to their transmissions, not a single jet had thus far been able to fire any weapon at the apparent enemy before being destroyed.

Permalink for this paragraph 0 The news stations immediately picked up on the story and began panicking the citizens of San Francisco with reports of an unknown enemy’s air forces on approach and dozens of fighter jets downed without a single defensive shot able to be fired.  Some citizens barricaded themselves indoors.  Most did not have basements or bomb shelters, so found whatever space they thought would be the safest.  Others tried to escape in their cars, but enough of them had that idea that traffic simply snarled and stopped and few got far.  Most people, however, remained oblivious or simply didn’t believe the reports.

Permalink for this paragraph 0 Soon enough though, just before reaching the shore, the swarm began to split up.  A line of the unknown attackers spread along the perimeter of the city in both directions, and a line of fire followed behind them as the earth was but in a wide swath and turned to red hot liquid that could not be crossed.  The main mass of the swarm did not waver, but cut a path right through the center of the city, burning as they went.  There were hundreds of them, and their fire en masse was unrelenting.  They cut a line through the city over a mile wide, and stopped for a moment when they met up with those that had secured the perimeter.

Permalink for this paragraph 0 Then the swarm fanned out, each dragon moving with seeming deliberate direction, burning everything in sight.  Those who had tried to take shelter in their homes soon found themselves trapped in burning buildings and burned only as quickly or slowly as their material possessions were flammable.  Those who had tried to flee in their cars now found themselves baking in ovens of their own design, some cars exploding, some with passengers trying to get out and meeting with direct blasts from the dragons working overhead.  Some made it as far as the river of fire that now circled the huge funeral pyre that their city was becoming, but any that tried to venture across it, whether in a Hummer of a Porsche found themselves equally cooked alive.

Permalink for this paragraph 0 Some people took to the streets with their guns and rifles, and those who had thought that guns should be controlled and kept out of citizens’ hands were crossing themselves and reaching for stones or anything else they could find to throw.  Those who had guns were wishing they had thought to buy bigger guns.  Those with bigger guns were trying to make peace with their gods.  Nothing seemed to effect the attacking hordes.  Not rocks, not guns or rifles or fully automatic machine guns.  Not one of these put so much as a dent in their flesh before they rained down a baptism of fire upon all below.  A few children and a few firemen had the idea to try to fight the attacking creatures with water from whichever hoses they had on hand, but the firemen were no more successful than the children, and all turned to ash.

Permalink for this paragraph 0 A few ex-military and a few fanatic people had higher-power firepower, and they found that all the time and effort they had put into trying to prepare themselves to face every foe they could imagine had not prepared them for this.  Their illegal rocket propelled grenades worked just as promised, exploding on target and true to their aim, but the explosions had not effect on the thick and fireproof dragon hides.  Their anti-tank guns, anti-aircraft missiles, Gatling guns, super-powered potato guns, and every other thing they could find to try to defend themselves proved useless.  Each one died in a blaze, though whether they would have considered their defeat glorious is questionable.

Permalink for this paragraph 0 The military forces stationed there did everything they could to fight off the dragons, used every resource at their disposal, and found themselves as ineffective as the civilians had been.  What could be burned was burned, and the most defensible of stone reinforcements could not protect the generals cowering inside as the dragons finally got to show their strength by ripping the bunkers stone from stone until every last soldier was found and killed.  The hundreds of dragons made short work of San Francisco, and soon it was nothing more than a blackened and smoking skeleton of a town.  Two young dragons were left behind to double-check that there were no survivors, and the swarm headed South, along the coast.

Permalink for this paragraph 0 The dragons cut a fiery swatch one hundred miles wide as they tore down the coast, destroying seaports, boats, cars on the road, burning up the countryside and small towns alike.  Nothing in their path survived, not plant or animal, no man-made structure remained standing in their wake of destruction.  They moved fast and furious, and when they arrived at Los Angeles, there was already an exodus underway.  They killed every fleeing person just as efficiently as they had wiped out San Francisco, and they wiped out the rest of the city in the same fashion, cutting a circumference and systematically turning every square mile of the city into a burning, smoldering mass of ash and rubble.

Permalink for this paragraph 0 The devastation continued down the coast after the destruction of Los Angeles was complete.  The dragons’ course burning up every sign of life, every crop, every car, every home, every ship from the coast to a hundred miles inland, and every town they came to, big or small, they dealt with in the same systematic way.  People continued to fight back with no effect.  People continued to try to flee, but it was no use.  The dragons could fly faster than the fastest airplane, and any they saw in the sky came down in a hail of flaming steel and screaming passengers.  The dragons could fly faster than any car could drive, and they baked them or simply vaporized them in bursts of flame hotter than most people knew was possible.  Not six hours had passed since their first appearance off the coast of America when their path of destruction reached San Diego and the Mexican border, and after removing any possibility of life from San Diego and Tijuana, the dragons’ course shifted Eastward, straddling the international border.

Permalink for this paragraph 0 Now the fiery swath the hundreds of dragons were cutting across the face of North America stretched fifty miles to the North and fifty miles to the South of the imagined line separating America from Mexico.  The lack of regard for international boundaries did nothing to soothe the dying souls within their path or to clarify their intent.  The intensity of the devastation they wreaked as they passed over American and Mexican soil alike was total, leaving no sign that life would even be possible in their wake.

Permalink for this paragraph 0 As they passed beyond the ashes of Southern Arizona and began to engulf New Mexico in their reign of terror, a new weapon was launched at them.  At first, a single missile, capable of intercontinental flight but directed at local soil, was launched to overtake them.  They paid it no heed, not changing their course or slowing the destruction below them as they flew.  When it reached their position, a blast unlike any seen on American soil was unleashed as a ten megaton nuclear weapon did its worst to the enemy it sought.  The heat of ten thousand suns burned the air and the earth where it went off, and radiation capable of eradicating life blew in all directions from the blast at the speed of light.  Every electronic component within nearly a kilometer was burnt out of any future operation.  The fallout would devastate whatever it touched, and would contaminate the earth, air, and water for ten thousand years.

Permalink for this paragraph 0 And as the dust was only beginning to settle, the signal coming back to satellites far above, the swarm on the radars re-appeared, the satellite photos of the hundreds of dragons emerged from the murk of the thermonuclear devastation, faster than ever.  It was as though the dragons had sped up, knowing that man’s own weapon had been at least as effective there as they could have been, for as soon as they were out of the ring of debris created by man, they went again to their deadly and efficient destruction of the land below.

Permalink for this paragraph 0 Another barrage, ten missiles now, each one hundred megatons of thermonuclear destruction, was aimed at the rapid movement of the dragon horde.  They still didn’t bother defending themselves against the missiles.  They might have knocked them out of the sky with a simple breath of fire, un-detonated, but they allowed the approach and did not even seem to be knocked off course by the force of the blasts at point blank range.  A force of destruction one hundred times greater than the first blast, the most powerful strike the American military could make without creating enough long-lasting damage to ensure its death, regardless of the effect on the dragons, was unleashed.

Permalink for this paragraph 0 The air broke down, the earth lost its former solidity, the force of the blast created a shock wave that knocked nearby El Paso to dust and rubble, and the heat that followed it did the dragons’ job quite efficiently.  They merely continued on their course, cutting a line of destruction across the land, following the international border into Texas as the day turned to dusk.  The thermonuclear weapons’ force of destruction had not seemed to reduce their number at all, but only to speed them on their way.

Permalink for this paragraph 0 As dusk became night, the satellite cameras which could no longer see the dragons themselves, could see the often glowing path of their past destructions laid out across the map, and could easily make out the brilliant glare created by the rapidly spreading conflagration that represented their real progress.  They worked their way along the coast of the Gulf of Mexico, moving inland as they went, cutting now a line ninety miles wide, destroying city after city, killing millions upon millions of citizens without consideration or pause.  When they reached Florida, they burned it down one side and up the other, and as the first light of dawn came crawling upon its shores, it became clear that the dragons’ fiery breath had burned the entire state down to the water line and boiled the Everglades free of life even deeper.

Permalink for this paragraph 0 That day their destruction worked its way up the East Coast, taking no more time to wipe Washington D.C. off the planet than they did to erase any other from existence, and while the President and most Congressmen were long gone by then, the dragons had burned the seat of American power to the ground with a cruel efficiency.  As the day wore on, the path the dragons cut moved no slower, but grew narrower and narrower, so that they were destroying only seventy-five miles of land inland from the Atlantic Ocean by the time night set on the eastern seaboard.

Permalink for this paragraph 0 The dragons continued North, they destroyed Rhode Island as though it were a single town, and half of them took Long Island in one pass while the other half of them knocked Manhattan flat.  If the collapse of two towers under their own weight and immense heat was a painful thing to see, then watching swarms of dragons exact that same fate on every single structure in the city was too painful for words.  If not for cameras feeding images directly to satellite, no human would have lived to tell about that sight, but even in their last moments, the citizens of New York stood strong and broadcast their lives and their deaths to the world.  Before midnight, the dragons reached the tip of Maine and turned West again, melting the frozen North and then charring it black where it once stood white.

Permalink for this paragraph 0 Their path of dismay and disarray, death and pain, grew narrower still as they moved along the Northern international border.  By daybreak, as they passed beyond the charred remnants of Nebraska into Montana, those still watching in shock could see that they were fewer in number than they had been before, now perhaps half as many dragons exacting their apparently very efficient violence against America.  The line they cut in the soil was now only perhaps forty miles wide, but they moved just as fast as they had when they’d started.

Permalink for this paragraph 0 With a relentlessness, the dragons continued onward, and they burned all the way to the Pacific and began again down the coast.  By the time they arrived in Washington, their course had become clear, and citizens had evacuated most cities and towns near the border or the ocean with relative efficiency.  Seattle was already standing silent as a cemetery when the dragons arrived, but they burnt it to the ground.  Portland was a ghost town, but they swallowed it with their flames.  They did not let up, and when they reached the point of their arrival, San Francisco, they simply turned inland, burning a line from West to East, fifteen miles wide.

Permalink for this paragraph 0 They burned all day and all night that fourth day, and as their numbers dwindled down to dozens, they seemed to lose some of their efficiency.  They veered off the straight course down the middle of the Midwest and before sunshine hit Chicago, the dragons’ fire did.  It took them until mid-morning to complete their destruction and move on, as the number of dragons dropped lower and lower.  There were no dragons left behind, none dead or injured.  Radar did not show that any had changed course or separated from the group.  No one could figure it out, but before the path of fire reached the Atlantic again, there was not a single dragon left.

Permalink for this paragraph 0 One hundred and ten million Americans were presumed dead, and another eighty million were living as refugees, having fled their homes near the sea or the borders to Mexico or Canada.  Truly, this was a national disaster, an emergency, and from a secret location, the President addressed the nation, over TV and radio, across emergency frequencies everywhere.  The President let Americans know that after four days without so much as a moment’s rest, the destruction seemed to have stopped altogether.