Talker 25 Read online

  A carpet of explosions kills two more reds. The last one flees, firing over its shoulder, clearly trying to draw the jets away. Three chase after it. The rest focus on the Silver.

  The Red arcs back around to reengage, only to catch a missile in the chest. When the explosion clears, the dragon’s glow is gone. It somersaults in a lifeless parabola toward the ground.

  When I look back to the main battle, the Silver’s no longer huddled around the dead dragon. It’s on its haunches, in attack position. Like a circus performer snatching knives in midair, it grabs the missiles from the sky and throws them aside.

  I gasp. Those missiles are black. It looks like it’s tracking the jets, too. It opens its mouth wide. The DJs don’t change course. Sam once told me they wear armor that can withstand temperatures up to 10,000 degrees F, but it seems like suicide to dive at an angry dragon that can clearly see you.

  Silver liquid erupts from the dragon’s mouth. It expands out and up into a shimmering funnel that speeds toward the clouds.

  The nearest plane banks too hard and spins out of control. The pilot ejects, twirling like a wobbly boomerang. The parachute attached to his seat opens but gets tangled, and he plummets into the corn.

  Two more jets roar into the funnel. When they emerge from the other side, what looks like ice encases everything. They fall from the sky and shatter on impact.

  A louder explosion thunders in my ears, pulling my attention to the column of smoke forming at the center of Mason-Kline.

  One of the planes smashed into the middle of the housing district. The dragon shelters might provide protection for anybody who made it underground in time, but what about Sam? What if Dad got my text and was out looking for him?

  I force my gaze back to the battle. The dragon continues to toss aside every missile that comes its way.

  But it can’t catch the bullets.

  Rather than fleeing, the dragon puffs its chest, widens its stance, and seems to welcome them. Each volley knocks it a little lower, staggers it a little more, but it refuses to move from its fallen companion’s side.

  As the remaining jets regroup, the Silver’s ice cuts out, and it dims to a dull gray. It unfurls its tattered wings to their full extent, roars once at the heavens, then slumps to the ground beside the dead dragon.

  Maybe they’re brother and sister.

  Keith touches my shoulder. “Inside, Melissa. You don’t want to see this.”

  He guides me into the school. The siren is no longer blaring, and when he closes the door, the sounds of jets and gunfire fade to the background. If not for Sam’s phone clutched in my hand, I might be able to convince myself I’m standing in the lobby of a movie theater, not in the middle of a war zone.

  UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

  HarperCollins Publishers

  ..................................................................

  6

  “Dad’s not answering his phone,” I say as Keith pushes me down the hallway. Outside, another muted explosion. The walls rattle.

  “He probably took shelter.”

  We reach the stairwell that leads thirty feet underground, into a large metal box with enough supplies to keep two hundred students alive for a week. My phone won’t get reception down there. The school shelter’s got a landline, but it’s a secure army channel, for priority use only. Who knows how long it will be before they let us out? It could be hours. Stuck with nothing to do but remember how the last time you were safe in a shelter, your mother wasn’t.

  Now Sam and Dad are both MIA.

  “Can we wait up here?” I ask.

  “It’s not safe, Mel.”

  “But the dragon’s almost dead, right?”

  Keith grabs his mini tablet, enters a couple of passwords, and navigates to the video section of the army database. He loads a live feed that shows the dragon from afar. A soldier in body armor kneels behind a row of corn and lifts a rocket launcher onto his shoulder. Another All-Black loads the tube with a spike-tipped missile.

  With this explosion, the dragon crumbles to its knees.

  “It’s flickering. It won’t be long,” I say, ear pressed to my phone. Voice mail again. I don’t bother leaving a message this time. I look to Keith. “Please.”

  He taps a flashing icon at the bottom of the screen. Another clip pops up, this one transmitted from the cockpit of a dragon jet. The time stamp’s five minutes old.

  Six dragons glide through the stratosphere, wing to wing. Four reds flank two Silvers that are identical in every way save for their brilliant luminosity.

  In the next instant, bullet tracers crisscross the sky. The reds split away. Several jets chase them off screen, but the one with the video feed stays on the Silvers.

  Two missiles race into view. The brighter Silver somersaults around and opens its mouth, but nothing happens.

  A blur of red sweeps up from the corner of the screen and throws itself in front of the inbound missiles. When fire and smoke clear, a dragon hovers in the air, its glow gone. It spreads its jaws, releases a tiny puff of fire, and falls head over tail into the clouds.

  The other silver dives after the dead Red, but the brighter one has vanished.

  Keith shuts off the tablet.

  I swallow. “Where did it go?”

  “I don’t know, but it could return.” Keith grabs my arm. “Let’s go.”

  We’re almost to the blast door when my phone vibrates.

  “Dad?” I backstep quickly before the signal dies.

  “Melissa? Why aren’t you in the shelter?” “Sam and I got in a fight. He . . . he ran away. I don’t know where. It’s all my fault, Dad.”

  “It’s not your fault. We’ll go look for him together. Let me talk to Keith.”

  I hand the phone over. A few seconds into the conversation, Keith steers me up the stairs and out the front door. APCs surround the scorched field where the silver made its last stand, All-Blacks pick over shards of ice in the MK High parking lot, and army helicopters create an airspace perimeter against the half-dozen news choppers.

  “You and the young lady need to get back inside, Major,” an All-Black says.

  “Colonel Callahan’s coming to pick up his daughter,” Keith says as I spot Dad’s Prius at the edge of the parking lot. The loud whir of helicopter blades silences his approach.

  The A-B lifts a visor adorned with a patchwork of red dragon scales to reveal a face weathered by age on one side and burned by fire on the other. “This isn’t open for discussion. You don’t have authority here. Why don’t you go back inside and teach your kids to stay in their shelters better?”

  “Watch it, Sergeant,” Keith says. “Let’s go, Melissa.”

  “No, I’m waiting here,” I say. The All-Black smirks at me. “Smile all you want, you don’t have any authority to tell me what to do.”

  He runs his tongue along his upper teeth. “Feisty ragger, aren’t you? Stay out of our way, girl, and if something happens I hope Daddy’s here to help you, because we won’t bail your pretty ass out.”

  I return his smug smile. With his back to the road, he didn’t see Dad drive up. Busy ogling me, he must not have heard him get out of the car either.

  “Daddy is here, Sergeant.” My father stands beside the Prius, arms folded, jaw stiff. He opens the passenger door. “Get in the car, Melissa.”

  I press my middle finger to my lips and kiss it at the burned soldier as I get in.

  “You ever talk to my daughter like that again—” Dad shuts the door, cutting his sentence short, but I happily construct my own dialogue.

  After Dad sends the A-B on his way and talks to Keith, he returns to the car, his features on the volcanic side of angry. I reach over and hug him. The tension in his chest softens, and he’s hugging me back. “I’m sorry, Dad. I’m sorry about everything.”

  He releases me, then starts the car. “I don’t know what I’d do if you or Sam got hurt. You have to protect him. And yourself, Melissa. Keith told me what you did.
” He pulls out of the parking lot wearing a sad smile. “You’re too much like your mother sometimes.”

  Two Humvees block the road into town. Columns of smoke billow into the air from the center of the housing district. A-Bs patrol the parking lots of the adjacent Walmart and Kroger’s, ordering curious shoppers back into black buildings. Punctured siding, chipped concrete, and broken windows mark the storefronts and the homes closest to the high school.

  We stop at the roadblock. Dad lowers his window as an All-Black approaches. Unlike the other soldiers, he’s not wearing a helmet decorated with dragon scales. He’d look young except for his eyes. He salutes.

  “Any news, Captain?” Dad asks.

  “Your son is at the bivouac receiving treatment for smoke inhalation.” He glances at me, then leans in and says something I can’t hear.

  Smoke inhalation. We learn about it every year in our Dragon Ed classes. When I was younger, they had a cartoon. I first saw it in second grade. It showed a sharp-toothed Green breathing fire on houses. We were young, so we laughed. The teacher shushed us as a cyclone of smoke with red eyes and a wicked grin emerged from the destruction and swept across the streets, swallowing uneducated boys and girls in its giant mouth.

  Though they stopped using the video after elementary school, the message shown on the screen at the end still looms on placards in many classrooms. “Half the time it’s not the fire that gets you,” I whisper. It was always a joke before.

  Dad frowns my way. “Thank you, Captain. I’ll be back to collect samples after I check on my son.”

  The All-Black circles his finger in the air. The Humvees clear a lane for us.

  “Is Sam okay?” I blurt the instant Dad shuts his window.

  “He suffered a mild case of smoke inhalation. He’ll be fine,” he says in his doctor voice, the one he used when Mom was in the hospital.

  “What do you mean, ‘fine’?”

  “He’s asleep right now.”

  “You mean in a coma,” I say. “That’s what you mean, isn’t it? Don’t lie to me, Dad. Please don’t.”

  “He’s in an induced sleep, Mel. Not a coma.”

  “Then what was all that stuff the A-B was telling you?”

  “It’s something to do with the dragons.” He steers the car around a pile of charred timbers. “Something that doesn’t concern you.”

  “Stop treating me like I’m still your little girl. Tell me what’s going on.”

  After a heavy silence he says, “The dragons have started to breed.”

  “I thought they were sterile,” I whisper. In the early days of the dragon war, when terror dominated, it was this belief that gave people hope. For whatever reason, the dragons couldn’t reproduce in our world. That’s what the government said, that’s what scientists said, that’s what parents said. Their numbers were limited. One day they would be gone. But now . . . “How?”

  “Cross-pollination,” Dad says.

  “Like lion plus tiger equals liger, except with dragons?” I say. “Red plus Green makes Silver?”

  “Red plus Blue, we think. We even checked that a few years back,” he says. “Just not under the right thermal conditions.”

  I give a bitter laugh. “It’s Dragon Hole, isn’t it? That’s where the silvers came from. That’s why the All-Blacks came this morning.”

  He gives the slightest nod, stares into the smoke. “They plan on destroying it.” He sounds upset. I’m not sure why until he says, “I know it’s the right thing to do, but it seems wrong to kill children.”

  My breath sticks in my throat as I stare out the window. That silver was larger than Old Man Blue. Almost the size of the Green that killed Mom. “That’s a child? Why’s it so big, Dad? Why’s it breathe ice? And it can see black, right?”

  “I don’t know, Melissa,” he says, squeezing my hand. “We’ll find out. It’ll be okay.”

  Dad weaves the car around shattered glass, holes in the street, chunks of jet. The wreckage worsens as we near the crash site. The homes here resemble split-open dollhouses—roofs, walls, entire sections no longer exist. Street-embedded sprinklers shoot water into their charred guts, ruining whatever the fire didn’t.

  A slogan from a local bank back in Virginia pops into my head. “Dragon shelters save lives, not memories.” I don’t remember the rest—something about storing your precious keepsakes in vaults before it’s too late.

  There’s Ellen McCormack’s house. What’s left of it. In the city, she would have kept her archaeologist grandmother’s artifacts in the dragon shelter. Or in that bank. But not in Mason-Kline, a military outpost in cornfield, Kansas.

  What about my pictures of Mom?

  “Dad, what happened to our house?”

  He shakes his head. “The wind caught the fire. The sprinklers couldn’t keep up. I got the cat and your brother’s turtles into the shelter.”

  “My pictures?”

  He squeezes my shoulder. “I’m sorry, Mel. We’ve got everything on digital. We’ll get them printed once things are straightened out.”

  I nod and blink hard. It’s not the same. She’d signed and dated them all. Most had messages, little things—See you soon, Mel Mel. Sometimes notes about the dragons she’d salvaged or people she’d befriended. My favorite picture had her out of uniform and on the other side of a picket line, holding a sign protesting the government’s policy to relocate the Blues to dragon “sanctuaries” for observation and research. On the back it said Don’t tell your father, followed by a smiley face and a heart. Dated five years ago, a month after the government declared victory over the dragons.

  Pieces of a life more important to me than anything. Gone because I needed to have her by my bedside, to look at whenever I wanted. Gone because of the dragons.

  We drive alongside the crash site, moving no faster than a walk because of the All-Blacks and mounds of debris. A layer of ash covers everything. APCs surround a crater to our right, their mechanical arms digging out remnants of charred jet. The nearby houses will need to be replaced, but anybody who was in a shelter during the battle should be safe.

  I say a silent prayer of thanks. Sam will be okay, and things could have been far worse. It’s amazing the jet didn’t take out any—

  “Oh God.” I cover my mouth. On a clear day, free of smoke and A-Bs, I would have recognized where we were a long time ago.

  The jet didn’t miss a house. It obliterated it.

  It takes me two tries to get my phone out of my pocket. Shaking, I press the speed dial. Calling Trish Potter appears on the screen. I’m raising the phone to my ear when Dad grabs my hand and touches the off button.

  “She won’t get the message for a while, and you shouldn’t worry her unnecessarily.” He wipes the tears from my cheeks. “Once they clear the wreckage, they’ll be able to access the shelter. They’re designed for high-stress impact, Melissa. There’s a good chance Major Potter survived.”

  It’s his doctor tone again, and this time I know he’s lying.

  UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

  HarperCollins Publishers

  ..................................................................

  7

  Black. The color of America.

  After the government instituted its blackout policy a decade ago, cars, houses, and cities went dark in under four months. Psychologists spoke out against what they called “the prevalence of grim,” pointing to the nationwide crime increase and skyrocketing suicide rates. But there were fewer dragon attacks, and the so-called “bright psychs” lost favor with the media.

  The dark world never bothered me much, except in junior high when it became trendy to dress like an A-B. I was one of the few who didn’t dye my hair or wear Smoke® makeup. It was all quite ridiculous.

  Mom hated it. After she died, she was buried in a white coffin in a white dress. Everybody wore pastel colors, like we were at an Easter wedding in a time before the dragons. And there were white roses everywhere. That was ridiculous, too,
but in a wonderful way.

  But today there is only black.

  And it squeezes me from every direction. Black smoke around the car, a constant reminder of Sam. Black soot over Ms. Potter’s dragon shelter, maybe a grave now with scorched jet debris for a tombstone. All-Black soldiers everywhere, modern-day grim reapers.

  Trish and I used to joke how the world would look if dragons couldn’t see pink. Mom would have loved that, if for nothing else than seeing soldiers strut around in fuchsia. I’d settle for pink today, too.

  Anything but black.

  We drive toward the medical bivouac, an eerie carnival tent in the center of a macabre circus. I’m out of the car and sprinting before Dad finishes parking. The All-Black at the entrance lowers his gun after I find my breath and explain why I’m here.

  “Red-haired kid?” he says. “Was hacking up a lung when he came in. Said something about ‘meeting Smokey the Cyclone,’ and laughed.” I grin back tears. The soldier shakes his head. “Guess it’s something with you kids.”

  He pulls up the entrance flap and waves me in.

  Curtained sections run the length of the tent on either side. Coughs and moans echo all around. Medical personnel move between units, practiced and proficient. I ask a nurse about Sam. He leads me to a room at the back.

  I’m ready for the hospital gown, heart monitor, and IV, but the clear plastic mask covering half my brother’s face makes me gasp.

  “He’s under sedation right now,” the nurse says. “Don’t wake him.”

  He closes the curtain and silence engulfs me, broken only by the wispy exhale of Sam’s ventilator and the faint sound of someone crying nearby.

  I slump into the chair beside my brother’s bed. Even asleep, Sam looks as if he’s up to no good. His lips are turned up at the corners beneath the mask, and fiery hair splays from his head like weeds.