Dark Dragons (16 page)

One by one, they reappeared in the world of visible light.

“I foresee a trip to the girls’ shower at school,” Nate said
after opening his visor to reveal an evil smile.  “See who’s shaved and
who’s Brazilian.”

Everyone bust out laughing.

“Aw, man, to see Angela Howard’s double-D titties. . .
.”  Tony trailed off with child-like wonder on his face.

Darren thought of Vanessa in the shower, face upturned into
the hot stream of water, fingers skimming through jet black hair.  He was
about to share that image with his buddies but quickly decided against
it.  Perhaps out of some dutiful sense of honor.

Nate, apparently, didn’t share similar obedience. 
“Vanessa Vasquez!  How ’bout watching cold water boilin’ off the skin of
that hot Puerto Rican habañero? 
Oh, cariño, dame un pedazo de su
pastel de crema!
”

Jorge responded to Nate’s lewd remark with a curt chortle
and a high-five raised in the air, which Nate promptly answered with a hard
slap.  Something about cream pie.

Darren rolled his eyes.

“Only milk will soothe the burn of a hot chili pepper, huh
Darren?” Tony asked with a naughty grin.  He knew full well about Darren’s
unbridled hots for Vanessa.

“Shut up.”  Darren turned to face his Dragonstar. 
“Time to fly, bros,” he said.

“Already?” Tony asked.

“Why not?”

Tony shrugged.  “I dunno.  I think we need to
practice with the close-quarter battle stuff.”

“We don’t need to practice, Tony,” Darren reminded
him.  “We’ve got special forces training already planted.”  He tapped
the side of his helmet with a finger.  “It’s all up here.”

“That’s not what I meant.  I mean we should practice .
. . on some bad guys.”

Darren saw a weird little light in Tony’s eyes.  There was
a hunger for something wild there.  “I don’t get where you’re
going.”  But he did.  Tony wanted to find some god-forbidden hotspot
and jump right into The Shit.

“Y’knows what I’s talkin’ ’bout,” he jived.  “I bet
there’s a patrol of Iranian soldiers romping around in the desert somewhere . .
. or . . . how about those drug cartels down in Mexico who are killing cops and
tourists?  We could . . . you know. . . .” Tony thrummed his fingers on
his pulse rifle “. . . practice.”

A sliver of Darren’s brain, the one that processed
right-and-wrong, was alight.  He wanted to tell Tony to shut up.  He
wanted Nate and Jorge to stop waiting for him to respond and tell Tony to shut
the ‘f’ up, too.  But they didn’t.  Figures.

“Even Spider-Man practiced on diamond burglars and getting
cats out of trees for little old ladies before kicking the Green Goblin’s ass.”

“Then let’s stick to helpless animals,” Darren replied.

Tony smirked and gave Darren a sly look, eyebrows
high.  “How about Marcus Lutze?”

Darren shook his head in disbelief.  “Welcome to the
dark side, young Skywalker.”

“Chicken shit.”

“Tony, we’re not going to practice on people!  Bad guys
or not.  Flight ops training is more important.  If we sharpen our
skills in the cockpit, work out a defensive plan, we won’t have to fight on the
ground.”

And that was that.  Pecking order established.  No
more guessing among the four of them who that robotic AI had selected leader.

“Yes, sir,” came Tony’s dark reply.

Darren stared at him a little longer.  Was Tony really
just a hypnotized monkey like the rest of them, yielding to an implanted demand
to not question orders and comply with his superior?  Or was he just tired
of arguing, waiting for a later time to be uncooperative?

Tony must have been doing a slow burn from Darren’s
continuing stare-down because he suddenly shouted, “I said ‘Yes sir,’ M-F!”

“Thank you.”  Darren turned to face his Dragonstar once
again.  “Fly time, boys.”

“Wait. . . .” Tony said.

Darren turned and caught the alarming——and nearly
hilarious——look on Nate’s and Jorge’s faces, both of them probably thinking
that Darren and Tony were about to pull weapons on one another.

“What?”

Tony put his gloved hand out for a group huddle and threw
Darren a solemn look.  “To D.B.”

Darren nodded his head, his esteem for Tony Simmons
returning to the seven-spot on his One-to-Ten Respect Scale where it had just
crashed to a five moments ago.  “You’re right.”

Everyone placed their palms over Tony’s hand.

“To D.B,” Darren said.  “Wish you were here,
buddy.”  Nothing more was spoken of their old friend.  Out of
respect.

Tony clamped his hands together and roared, “Let’s do it!”

Darren climbed into his fighter and placed the pulse rifle
in the personal effects compartment above the seat.  The canopy slid shut,
the cabin pressurized and the recliner’s motorized brace locked him in. 
The EKG line on his visor began to bounce like a neon basketball on a
fastbreak, and his mouth had turned to sandpaper.  He found the relay
cable coiled on top of the seat and plugged it into the socket behind his
helmet.

FLIGHT OPERATIONS
,
SIMULATION
, and
DIAGNOSTICS
popped up on his visor in Xrel script.  Darren selected Flight Ops, and as
soon as
THOUGHT UNIT ENGAGED
appeared, he
felt an enormous pressure build in his head and suddenly release, almost like
the painful sensation after eating a bowl of ice cream too fast.  A sharp,
aching headache stole the breath from his lungs, and he clenched his fists
tighter around the hand struts on either side of the recliner.  Cold panic
seeped into him. 
Oh God, what is that?

The fighter’s computer had just done something to him. 
His brain suddenly fell free from the confines of his flesh and now flowed
uninhibited through the fighter as if it were just another component of his
body.  His eyeballs tingled, and his breathing wavered.  He could
actually feel the machinery working, hear the computer signals zipping along
the alien circuits.

The fighter immediately came to life with a whine.  The
center of his visor displayed fighter avionics: altimeter, targeting sights,
global/space positioning, laser-radar display and ECM/communication status.

Then Darren noticed something even more alarming than the
brain reorganization.  The world outside his fighter had
decelerated.  The trees whipped by the stiff Santa Anna winds just seconds
ago now swayed lethargically like no breeze existed.  He spotted a
jetliner in the distance climbing into the sky, so slow that Darren was certain
its engines would stall at that speed.  Yet, the jet continued to inch skyward.

A quick check of his bio-readouts revealed the answer. 
The world hadn’t slowed down. 
He had sped up.
  The alpha-beta
lines on the EEG graph looked like those skittering across a seismograph during
a nine-point-seven.  His brain was simply perceiving and processing the
motions of his environment at a faster rate.  He felt both astounded and
terrified . . . wiping out a squadron of bad guys and erasing an entire city
block in the blink of an eye was no longer a figure of speech.

Darren parted his lips to communicate and discovered that he
couldn’t speak.  His lips and tongue were simply not fast enough to keep
pace with the rapid signals pouring from the speech areas of his energized
brain.  The slurred words coming out of his mouth sounded like those of a
drunk driver trying to talk his way out of a roadside sobriety test.

Before he could wonder how they were going to communicate
with one another, Darren heard in his head-set: ‘I feel funny.  I don’t
like this.’  The voice belonged to Nate, but it sounded different,
processed somehow.

Darren wasn’t actually reading Nate’s mind.  The
fighter’s comm-unit was only rerouting the synaptic-pulses from the
speech-producing areas in his brain to an inverse-signal processor which
converted them into audible words.

‘This is freaky-deaky,’ Tony said.  ‘Can you guys hear
me, okay?’

‘I hear you fine,’ Darren responded.

Nate and Jorge replied affirmatives, too.

Darren’s computer finished the pre-flight check and gave the
okay for final ignition with an electronic chirp.  ‘Roll them out, guys’,
he ordered.

At those words, they thought the engines into
ignition.  Darren felt goose bumps prickle across his skin.  He
turned on the Dragonstar’s radar assimilation field, an active-stealth cloaking
mechanism, and entered his current position into the inertial navigation
matrix.  This was a three-dimensional gyroscope system which kept constant
track of the fighter’s relative position from a known starting point. 
Handy in finding one’s way back.

Slowly, the fighters rose vertically on a cushion of
anti-graviton propulsion, and the landing skids contracted into the
bellies.  Darren looked out at the surrounding trees and saw them dropping
as he climbed.  Los Angeles suddenly appeared as he reached the top. 
‘Oh wow,’ he murmured like Tony on one of his marijuana trips.

A patch of smog hovered over the city, but he could still
see far into Orange County some thirty miles to the southeast.  Traffic on
I-210 was at its usual, rush-hour congestion, and the bright Pacific Ocean
spread out before them, lit with gold in the sun’s light.

‘Where are we going anyway?’ Nate asked.

‘I don’t know,’ Darren replied.  ‘Just follow me. 
I’ll find someplace.’  With that, he booted his interceptor into flight
and turned northeast, avoiding the neighborhood in Big Tugunga Canyon directly
north of them.  He streaked over the forest and then climbed into the sky
at a heart-pounding velocity.  Darren felt his stomach knot up and
chuckled from the rush.  He was flying——and doing it by thought alone.

*

As he gazed out at the clouds around him, Darren’s mind went
back to Tony’s group huddle and of the person spoken there.  D.B. would
have enjoyed this.  He would have been with them Friday night, too, if it
hadn’t been for——well——for what happened back in January.

The Legend of Delbert Morehead was still in its infancy but
so well renowned that even kids from other high schools knew of it.  Only
four months had passed since “the Incident” that rainy winter day, but it had
already reached the status of box-office epic by the time spring came
around.  Delbert “More-Head-Please” was just another castaway on the
Island of Misfit Toys who wandered the school halls in a catatonic state thanks
to Marcus Lutze.  D.B. hung around with Darren, Tony, and Jorge, at first
because of safety in numbers, but later Darren discovered he was a novice
writer, too, and liked to swap ideas with him.  Nate hadn’t been around at
the time . . . still hanging with his homies from Ramsdell Avenue.

Delbert, like Nate, was on the hefty side, but it was his
name that had provoked torment from the Verdugo Valley High Hitler Youth
Club.  What kind of messed-up parents would name their kid Delbert fresh
out of the womb?  And with a last name like Morehead to boot.  Poor
bastard.  To hide his dread secret, he had gone by the name of D.B., but
some punk working off his detention in the principal’s office had stumbled
across D.B.’s records and let it out.  “Delbert More-Head-Please” began
echoing off the walls soon after.  Marcus’s knuckle imprints began showing
up on D.B.’s face soon after.

“You know what?” D.B. mentioned to Darren one time over
pizza at the mall.  “Sometimes I have this dream where I’m trying to crawl
out of this muddy hole but I keep slipping.  Every time I force my fingers
into the wall and pull up, I just ruin the sides and fall even deeper.”

After that, Darren had his own vision of news helicopters
circling the school and SWAT rushing in with riot shields and smashing windows
out. 
“Karen, we have just learned the name of this social afterbirth
as Delbert James Morehead, age 17, virgin, death metal listener and violent
video game player, as the assailant who walked into the cafeteria during lunch
hour and sprayed the place with an AK-47 but not after slipping his big toe
onto the trigger and putting the last round in his mouth.  Thank god for
that, Karen, or Mr. More-Head-Please most certainly would have killed more.”

“He seemed okay.  He was quiet, never bothered
anyone.”

“I can’t believe he would do something like this.”

“No, he never acted violent before.”

“Yeah, I knew him . . . the guy was a (bleep) wack
job.  Caught him (bleep) in the bathroom once.”

Darren kept a wary eye on D.B. after that little moment of
candid openness at Giuseppe’s Pizza, but Delbert never hinted that he would
depart this world with a hole in his head.  In Darren’s opinion, what
happened four weeks later was somehow worse than mass murder/suicide, anyway.

Darren could easily recall every detail of that hour in Mr.
Morgan’s Algebra II class.  He closed his eyes and saw the classroom
now.  He had been sitting in the back where he always did so that he could
establish an early warning radar on Greg Shaw’s paper spitballs.  While
Mr. Morgan was factoring polynomials on the board, Darren spotted Denise Garvey
sitting behind D.B., poking the flab under his shirt with a pen, smiling and
whispering to her friends.  Darren knew something bad was about to happen
but did not expect the severity of revenge which exploded from the second row,
third chair back.

D.B. suddenly lost reality with the world.  He leapt
out of his chair, seized Denise by the hair, and went absolutely caveman on
her.  The girl’s face was covered in blood by the time Mr. Morgan got to
him.  D.B. was still wailing on her, while she screamed and screamed, by
the time Darren jumped on him.  Darren, the teacher, and almost every guy
in class tried to pull him off her, but Delbert Morehead’s mind and
determination had been set.  He simply wouldn’t let off.  Denise was
already unconscious, her jaw to one side, bloody streaks running across her
face, when everyone finally managed to pry him off.  He was mumbling
something, but Darren couldn’t tell what.  The scariest thing was that
D.B. had displayed not one hint of emotion.  No rage, no fright. 
Just a calm, impassive face.  No shouting, no “Bitch, I’ve had it with
you!”  Nothing.