Dark Dragons (34 page)

“No you don’t, asshole.  You see the smoke from across
the street?  That was my ride.”

“Okay, okay . . . so what did this thing look like?”

“It was huge.  About seven foot maybe.  Ugly
fucker with black-leather skin and fangs like a piranha. . . .”

“Far out.”

“. . . and it had armor, kind of like ours, and a big ass
gun.  It was practically a cannon.”

“I wonder how it found us?”

Darren looked out at the skyscrapers around them, pondering
that.  “Must have followed us back from Jupiter.”

Tony nodded.  “There might be more of them out there
looking for us.”

“Maybe.”  Darren changed the subject.  “Where were
you last night?”

“I got my old girlfriend back.”

“It took you all night to get her back?  I thought
you’d be back by two or three.”

“Sorry, we just talked a lot, that’s all.”

“Uh-huh.  I nearly got my ass killed.  You should
have been there to back me up.”

“Excuse me, but I was gettin’ some trim last night. 
Priorities, pal.”

“Whatever.”

“You didn’t need me anyway.  You took care of
bid-ness.  You’re bad ass, Seymour.”

“Thanks.  I need you to do one more thing for me . . .
drop me off in the ravine a couple of houses down from mine . . . and then wait
for us at Wolf Flat.  I have to find my helmet, and I hope it’s still in
my house.”

“How are you going to get past the cops?”

Darren felt along the Dragonstar’s invisible skin until he
found the indentation rungs to the cockpit.  “I’ll figure that out when I
get there.”

“You sure you don’t want me to hang around?  I can take
out some cop cars for you to create a diversion or something.”

Darren stopped to give Tony a look.

“Fine, whatever,” Tony said.

He had to sit sideways in Tony’s lap because of the pulse
rifle stuck in its back holster.  The comical pose they made would have
demanded a wise ass crack any other time, but now was not that time.

Fifteen seconds later, they were over Darren’s house. 
He spotted a single unmarked cop car parked in the street.  A plainclothes
detective stood guard near the front door, reading a newspaper.  Yellow
police tape had been strung up, barring the door and the garage.

Nate and Jorge sat on their bikes in the dry ravine two
houses down.  Darren pointed his finger down, and Tony, unable to
communicate, nodded.  The Dragonstar hovered down, and Tony popped the
windshield.  Darren jumped out, and he heard the fighter’s soft whine as
Tony gently lifted his dragon and took off for Wolf Flat.

“The whole force must have been out here this morning,” Nate
said.  “But there’s only one car sittin’ in the street now.  We’re
wondering where the rest went to?”

“Some more could be inside,” Jorge replied.

“There’s only one car here,” Darren said.  “There might
be no more than three cops inside, but I doubt it.  It’s breakfast time,
so they probably went to get doughnuts and left the rookie to babysit.  We
got to do it now.  We’ll go in the back door real quiet like, and
hopefully he won’t see or hear us.”  He checked the magazine clip to his
needle pistol.

“You’re not going to kill him are you?” Nate asked.

Darren didn’t answer.

*

As they walked along the ravine bank past the back yards,
the worst possible thing that could happen——happened.  Geils stepped out
of his back door with a toothy grin.  “Hey, guys, what’s going on? 
You missed a lot of action around here earlier.”

“Go back inside, Geils,” Jorge said.

“Aw, come on.  I just wanna be pals.”  Geils
walked up to them and looked Darren over real good.  “Like your outfit,
Darren.  Where’d you get it, huh?”  Then he smiled again, his eyes
squinting into tiny raisins.

“Why didn’t you go to school today?” Darren asked, trying to
change the subject.

“Go to school?  And miss all the action?  No
way.  I told my mom I was sick.  She bought it, of course.  So .
. . what are you guys hiding?”

“We’re not hiding anything, douche nozzle, so beat it.”

Geils shook his head.  “I saw ’em guys.  I saw
your fighters, or whatever they are.  I go up to Wolf Flat all the
time.  My dad’s a ranger with the Angeles National Forest you know, and me
and him built a deer blind up there.  So I go up there Saturday night to
hang out——”

“And wack off,” Nate cut in.

“——and all of a sudden, I see the blackest, bitchiness,
outer space fun toys come out of the sky and land, and who do I see pop out . .
. ?  You guys.”  Spit formed in the corners of his mouth. 
“Totally wicked.”

Darren swallowed hard.  Their mission would fail. 
Geils could tell the authorities, maybe even the military.  Geils’s
dubious IQ made him harmless, but persistence was one of his quality
traits.  He could easily inform the cops who——not knowing what to do with
four alien spacecraft——would call the Air Force.  Everything would
fail.  All because of a little runt nobody named Geils.

“I like your superhero suit, Darren.”

He felt surrender coming but tried to push it off.  He
wasn’t about to cave in to this peckerwood just yet.

“All I want to do is fly one of those cool fighters.”

“No way,” Darren protested.  “We’re the only ones who
can.”

“Then I’ll spill my guts.  I don’t want to be a tough
guy, but when I went grocery shopping with my mom this morning, I seen a lot of
white vans with U.S. Government plates driving around all over town. 
Weird, huh?  I bet it’s fulla National Security dogs looking for you
guys.  I could just go up to one of them and tell everything I know and
where to find you.”

Six-foot-three, 240-pound Nate suddenly seized Geils by the
collar and threw his punk ass to the ground, a haughty smile still plastered on
Geils’s face.  “You keep that pie hole shut, bitch, or——”

“Sure.  Uh-huh.”  Geils never showed fear.
 Because he was stupid.

He continued to smirk, certainly knowing that his beaming
Cheshire Cat had everyone’s ire thoroughly whipped up in a frothy lather.

Nate tightened both fists on Geils’s collar.  “Mother
fucker, you got three seconds to quit flashing those stanky, yellow
snaggleteeth or me and Darren gonna punch a hole clean through both ears and
bump dicks in the middle.”

The smile faded just slightly.  “Lemmie up, Douglas,
you bad white Negro from the ’burbs.”

Darren quickly unholstered the needle pistol and put a shot
in the ground next to Geils’s ear, a handful of dirt flying.  The runt
reacted with a jolt, and the smile thankfully disappeared.

“
‘Welcome to the Terrordome,’”
Nate sang, just like
his baritone idol, Chuck D.

Darren bent down and put the muzzle to Geils’s eye. 
Nate let go, but the guy didn’t move, rooted to the ground where he lay.

“Chill out, all right?” Geils begged, his mouth forming a
big O.

“Darren . . .” Jorge murmured.  “Relax, guy. 
Geils isn’t going to rat on us.”

Geils was nearly choking on his tongue, trying to get it to
work.  “I-I won’t tell.  I s-swear . . . just kiddin’ around . . .
y’know I like to get under your skin.”

The air around them had that brewing charge of an electrical
storm coming on fast again.  Darren hoped Geils was closely appraising the
desperate expression on his face.  He let Geils tremble for another ten
heartbeats before he withdrew the pistol.  “Good . . . I believe
you.  You can go back inside now.”

Geils got to his feet and eagerly walked back to his house,
occasionally throwing a twitchy look or two over his shoulder.  He locked
the sliding patio door behind him.

Nate and Jorge gave Darren little smiles, but he knew they
were just trying to figure him out, gage his emotions.  Darren simply let
his shoulders droop.  “I wasn’t going to kill him,” he said.

But Darren lied.  He had been very close to pulling the
trigger.  He had every intention of watching Geils’s head explode like a
ripe watermelon before sanity pulled him back from the void.

*

Dresed in his best civies, Colonel Towsley was finally on
the move, heading down Foothill Boulevard in a Ford Econoline van he had
borrowed from a staff sergeant at the APIS’s secondary set-up at Bob Hope
Airport.  A morning report on the police scanner convinced him to head for
La Crescenta.  Local police accounts had described a rash of “unexplained
explosions” and “strange gunfire” in that area.  It could have been any
local problem, but something told Towsley to snoop further.  Unexplained
explosions and strange gunfire did not sound of a local problem.  The
recent incident at Los Alamitos Army Airfield, along with reports of “flying
men” and laser weapons, and the runaway downing of a Blackhawk helicopter
downtown both begged for investigation.  These chain of events were
connected, Towsley convinced himself, with interstellar overtones.

He had insisted on coming alone but wasn’t really sure
why.  What possibly lay ahead for him could mean personal
prosperity.  Maybe this was something to cherish alone, like a child
discovering a valuable in the back yard while digging for worms and proclaiming
the secret as his own.  Something sacred.

Of course, Towsley’s secret had to be told once, and if, he
found one.  But he wanted to be a kid digging for worms again.  Just
for a little while.  By himself.

Heading down Foothill Boulevard, Towsley had a Glendale/La
Crescenta city map tapped to the steering wheel, looking for Sutton Cannon
Drive.  He glanced at his notes once again and found the address reported
in the 2:57 AM 911 call: 2130 Sutton Cannon Drive.

“Tango Leader, this is Echo One, acknowledge,” Major Deanna
Weinholt said over the radio.

Towsley picked up the secure phone.  “Go ahead Echo
One.”

“We got our EB.  Or what’s left of it.  Landed in
a back alley in the Fashion District.  Had to flex a little muscle on the
LAPD to release it into our custody.  No harm done.”

She was referring to an alien corpse that had been
discovered by a meter reader for Southern California Edison who then called the
local cops.  “Good job, Echo One.  Call in the whirly to retrieve the
biologic and get it on ice.”

“Yes, sir.  Echo One, out.”

*

The boys quietly walked through Darren’s back patio door——it
was shattered anyway——and stepped into the kitchen.

“Is that cop still out there?” Nate whispered.

“Yeah,” Jorge replied.  “He’s leaning against his car,
reading a paper.”

The house was nearly totaled.  Chairs and tables were
overturned, and dirt from Allison’s tropical plants covered the floor. 
The police had used fluorescent orange chalk to circle the charred laser holes
in the walls and floor, and the wall between the kitchen and den had a gaping
hole where the alien had punched through.

“Damn,” Nate murmured.  “Rock ’em, sock ’em.”

Elvis, Allison’s beloved lab, was nowhere to be seen.

Darren went up to his room to grab some clothes and
immediately spotted his helmet on the top shelf of his closet.  Not
remembering placing it there, he quickly pulled it down in disgust and rolled
it around in his hands to look for any tracking bugs, muttering more angry
curses.  Now his
short term
memory was going buggy.  Would
this shit get worst or hopefully plateau?  Next time, he would keep his
suit together in one spot, fortunate he had brought it to the house in the
first place.

Darren slid the helmet on and prayed that just the rifle
holster’s manual release lever was damaged and not the holster itself. 
Grabbing the butt of his rifle, he activated the holster with a thought-command. 
With a satisfying click, the weapon sprung from its clamp. 
Thank you!

He stuffed some clothes, his PDA, cell phone and wallet into
a duffle bag.  He jogged down the stairs still in his combat suit, bag in
one hand, helmet in the other, pulse rifle in the back holster.

The cop was still leaning against his car.  Darren,
Nate, and Jorge quietly slipped out the patio door.

*

Towsley turned north onto Sutton Cannon Drive that led into
a subdivision of upper-middle class homes.  A few blocks later, he came to
a woodsy neighborhood overlooking La Crescenta and most of Los Angeles.

People were out and about, riding bikes, planting in their
rock gardens, cleaning boats in the drive-way, kids playing hooky.  Norman
Rockwell and white picket fences, Towsley thought.  Yet, nothing looked to
be from a world light-years away.

He came to 2130 Sutton Cannon Drive and saw yellow police
tape around the front door.  No car in the drive, but there was one parked
in the street with someone leaning against the fender, watching the
house.  So, the police
were
here.  Towsley would have Major
Carruthers’s boys contain the cops if anything went down.  He slowed to a
crawl.  The house was a modern, two-story home of brick and dark umbra
wood.  A covered front deck, pool in the back yard, two-car garage. 
Beautiful house, he thought.

He made a U-turn in the cul-de-sac, passed 2130 again and
turned east onto a side street.  The pilots would most likely keep their
vehicles up in the wooded foothills nearby.  With his free right hand, he
thumbed through a stack of U.S. Geological Survey maps on the passenger seat
and found the one he wanted.  It was a chart of La Crescenta with Big
Tujunga Cannon at the top of the map, plus a wide patch of forest just east of
Mt. Lukens called Wolf Flat.

He drove through the low foothills on an old meandering dirt
road, looking for a good place to park and get out for a look. 
Occasionally, a mountain biker or jogger would pass him, and he wondered how an
extraterrestrial ship had avoided detection in an area where many L.A. citizens
liked to hike.  Finally, he pulled over and turned the van off.

He stared at the 9mm Beretta in the seat next to him, and
reminding himself that he was in Crazy California, thought it best to bring it
along.  He tucked the gun into his blue jeans behind him and draped his
shirt over it.  He grabbed the USGS map, a hand-held GPS meter and locked
the door behind him.