Hearts and Scales

There weren’t always dragons in the valley. They came after The Blast. Things were different before that—before the economy collapsed and the heat waves scorched the soil and the winters grew long.

The lurid, braided forests of Matanuska had never ceased to be a monument of nature, primal and wild. Even after the leash of humanity found its way around the neck of the northern frontier, the lands had never truly been tamed. The earliest people of the country had understood that to live in the forty-ninth state was to live within the principles of wilderness. That meant survival, first and foremost; thriving meant warm meals and a roof. Living—actually living—was a luxury only awarded to those who could meet those prerequisites.

It’s funny how things circled back.

In the early twenty-first century, Alaska was a nation of tourism—books on wildflowers, postcards, and overly priced T-shirts that ruined after a few runs in the wash. Clusters of civilization sprang up from the ground like blisters on a delicate hand; villages became towns; towns became cities. And not long after, big business began its campaign to lobotomize the state for its natural resources: lumber, natural gas, metal, and oil.

Nature fought back, of course. It was subtle at first: small natural disasters that made inhabiting the land difficult. Nothing too out of the ordinary, “for what great achievement is met without adversity?” as President Harkenger put it. At that time it seemed every great political and industrial campaign began and ended with the attempt to conquer the lands of the north.

It was the empty promises of bureaucracy, materialism, and innovation that set the world ablaze. The dragons just happened to be the unsuspecting weapon. People like to forget that the world was on a self-destructive collision course long before the dragons turned up.

Fifty years down the road the blizzards hit, whiteout storms from the Arctic and North Pacific Ocean that no radio signal could cut through. At the time, it was a scientific anomaly. Looking back, we should have seen it for what it was—a warning.

The Meltdown at Sabletope’s S-23 oil rig was the beginning of the end for those of us unlucky enough to live up here at the time. It was the event horizon from which nothing could return.

Burning at two thousand degrees Celsius, the rig blazed for eight months, twelve days, and seven hours. Responsible for over twelve million gallons of spilled oil, the leak might have been remembered as the greatest environmental disaster in human history; One-hundred-thirty-eight Sabletop union workers dead, seventy-four injured. In the end, it was the destabilized nuclear core of a United States Navy rescue vessel designated U.S.S Kallaweigh that would mark the date in history.

To think it was a boat of should-have-been heroes that did humanity in.

Erupting at roughly 12.7 times the surface temperature of the sun, there's not a sentence of words that could be uttered or written that would describe The Blast. However, for the sake of those who weren’t able to bear witness to the death of our planet, I will attempt to.

It happened in the afternoon, the daylight sky drowned into unnatural darkness by unprecedented brightness, a black silhouette surrounding a perfectly symmetrical shape of unfathomable light. To look at it directly meant liquefying your eyes and facing the full force of the closest thing humanity had ever come to replicating the fist of god.

It shook the Earth to her knees—then cracked a hole in her skull two thousand miles deep. Alaska's shoreline receded five hundred thousand feet that afternoon, the resulting beaches littered with enough irradiated wreckage to register the entire coast of Anchorage as an ecological dead zone for the next seventy years.

I was eight when the shockwave cut across the valley, sundering trees and toppling buildings like they were dominos. I remember the death scream that shook the world, the sound of it painted indelibly in my mind. Sometimes I still hear it in the quiet moments—the bleeding wail.

I hear it now. Then Davis’s gloved hand touches my shoulder, stirring me from the haunted memory.

“Ellen,” he says, the muffled rasp of his voice lower than even a whisper. “We need to move. Cody says he’s picking up Wyrmlings in the area.”

Wyrmlings—the smallest breed of dragon to crawl out from The Scar. Flightless, Wyrmlings tended to travel in packs, migrating through coastal towns to scavenge for food. Even the smallest ones were large enough to swallow three men whole.

“How many?” I ask quietly, adjusting the bag of supplies slung over my shoulder.

“No more than four but that’s four more than we prepared for.”

“I told you all to pack heavy,” I snap.

Behind me, Tara steps closer. “They’re early. Wyrmlings don’t usually come in for another two hours,” she protests, the line of her brow wrinkling.

“I’ll make sure to file a complaint to the Wyrmlings.”

Silence filled the space between the thoughts we all knew we were having. Today should have been a simple supply run. Now we were wondering which of us might not make it home.

Colony was a three days hike away, four if the snow refused to drift, and Wyrmlings could track a scent for miles even in a whiteout.

“How far?” I ask, pulling the map out from my packsaddle.

I watch as Cody closes his eyes before reaching out through The Tether. I shiver as I feel his consciousness ripple across mine, the sensation not so different from a brain freeze.

The Tether—we call it that because we’re afraid to name it for what it is: a mutation. Over the years, depleting livestock has forced the human appetite to adapt. With their emergence from The Scar, Dragons hunted just about everything else into extinction; cows, pigs, deer, anything that walked and made noise became a delicacy.

But dragon meat, there was plenty of that to go around.

After a while, some of us developed abilities, a Tether to the reptilian species that hunted us, that we survived off of. For some, the change is small—sharper hearing, heightened awareness, keener eyesight. For others like Cody, it's a mental bridge that allows them to sense the presence of dragons; that's rarer. For the unlucky few, the few like me, the Tether runs deeper.

The thrum of Cody’s Tether sets my skin abuzz, turning the air around me into bumbling flies. I scratch the base of my horns self consciously, the roots of hair surrounding them itching more as the seconds' pass. Crouching behind me, Tara shifts in obvious discomfort, the heel of her heavy winter boot coming down on the tip of my tail.

I stifle the snarl that threatens to rip out of my throat, glaring at her through the tears in my eyes. “Damnit, Tara!” I grumble, pulling the limb closer to my body.

Mumbling through the wraps in her scarf, I watch her retreat a step, “Sorry,” before inching forward with the others to crowd around me for warmth.

I can't blame her too much. On days like this, I’m basically a space heater. While they have to bundle against the cold with layer upon layer of winter clothing, I barely feel it. I still wear clothes, of course, but unlike me they can’t regulate their inner body temperature: another gift of my Tether.

Slowly, the buzzing air around me begins to dwindle, telling me that Cody was returning from his journey through the Bridge.

“Ellen!” Cody shouts.

I smell them before I hear them. It's the stench of burning sulfur and rancid fish, a sickly combination of fetid corpse-breath and unwashed rot.

Then their keening wails cut through the silence, rattling the walls and glass windows of the Super-Cart we were hiding in.

I’m the first to stand up. “They’ve caught our scent! Move!”

The others burst into motion. I take off, running down the center aisle of the store. Davis follows at a more haggard pace, his old more-human legs slowing him down. I hear the familiar voice of Cody shouting somewhere in the distance, the sound of cans and metal shelves toppling. I look back in time to see the first Wyrmling barrel through the metal-framed windows of the Super-Cart entrance the same way a bullet kisses a sheet of paper.

“Christ!” Davis swears, unslinging the deranged-looking harpoon gun from his back.

I shout at him. “Now’s not the time to field test your latest project, Davis!”

The sound of the second Wyrmling bursting through a hole in the ceiling drowns out his response, debris flying in every direction towards me. I dive to the floor as a six-inch piece of rebar burrows itself into the microwave display three feet behind me.

The black-scaled Wyrmling unleashes a bellowing cry, the sheer intensity of it forcing me to cover my sensitive ears. I feel its attention settle on me first, then Davis, then back on me, its snarl cutting a gruesome smile across its massive snout.

Davis yells something unintelligible, firing the contraption at his hip. The harpoon goes flying, skittering off the creature's scales but drawing its attention. It roars, swiping its long tail across the tiled floor and knocking the old man off his feet.

Realizing I no longer have the liberty of conserving ammunition, I unsling the Tonya Rifle from my back and fire off three rounds into the creature's throat and eyes. Screaming, the Wyrmling retreats from its advance on Davis. Using a cement support to cover its more sensitive organs, it blocks two more rounds I send down range as covering fire.

I help Davis to his feet. I can smell blood trickling from the back of his head, but I don't have time to think about it before the first Wyrmling sends a rack of Kayak’s soaring through the air, hot on Tara and Cody’s feet.

Our own Wyrmling uses the distraction as an opportunity to swipe at us, claws the size of claymore’s singing through the air. It catches me in the shoulder; I know it does because I feel the warmth spread down my left arm, but I don’t feel the pain.

Davis, who had been reloading, fires off another harpoon, this time catching the Wyrmling in its top-right eye. The overgrown viper recoils, its head knocking into the crumbling concrete pillar with such force that the roof collapses on top of it, pinning it to the floor.

The Wyrmling thrashes, talons sinking into the tile. I dive for my rifle on the floor, scrambling with my clawed hands to reach it in time.

Cody and Tara come sprinting into the open, four, five, six rounds popping in my eardrums. Wyrmling number one chases them, several wounds flowering in its neck where the bullets struck. I watch the creature swipe the gun from Tara’s hand the same moment I feel my own hand close around the stock of mine.

Five pounds of pressure on the trigger sends the first round wide, scratching the Wyrmling’s back with less than a tickle. The second trigger pull fires a round through the inside of the reptile’s left cheek, puncturing the delicate pink flesh and sundering its opening jaw. The third bullet finds the jugular, punching a hole in the beast's vein so wide that I could have fit my arm through it. The fourth bullet puts the monster to rest, cutting through the bottom left eye and bursting the Wyrmling’s frontal cortex, killing it immediately.

Then the gun clicks silent, magazine empty.

I turn to face the second Wyrmling only to realize that the damn thing is free.

Free and watching me. Observing.

I swear I can almost hear the thing laugh, its jaw unhinging with a sickening pop of bone and sinew, it’s malevolent hiss a promise of a terrible, agonizing death.

Then the wyrmling does something I don't think I’ll ever forget.

It flees.

Shopping carts and abandoned merchandise are tossed aside in its wake, its pace a frantic lumber that takes it through the collapsed eastern wall of the produce section.

Breathing hard, Davis helps me stand up. “It's running?” he wheezes. “It had us dead to rights.”

The energy to speak has completely and utterly left me so all that really comes out of my mouth is a strangled sort of sob.

“Yeah,” Davis agrees.

We all just stand there for a few moments, unsure if the second Wyrmling was going to come back, or if we were all just hallucinating a world where nothing made sense. Maybe we had died and this was some strange purgatory afterlife.

Snowflakes drifted down through the yawning hole in the ceiling, dancing in the delicate cross breeze. Silence floods my ears until the only sound I can hear is ringing—the long aftershock proceeding the chaos.

Knees trembling, I take my first few steps and nearly slip in a puddle of my own blood, only managing to keep my balance thanks to Davis.

Cody and Tara stare at me with wide, shell-shocked eyes. This may not have been their first trip out into the wilds beyond the Colony, but it had most certainly been their virgin encounter with a dragon. I can smell the fear that managed to leak its way out of them, the odor making my nose wrinkle.

“I thought you said you counted four,” I manage to say.

Cody looks at me for a moment. “I did.”

"And now?"

"Nothing."

I feel my tail lash behind me, expressing my irritation and confusion as I turn to face the direction the Wyrmling had fled. It was beyond even my range of vision now, vanishing into the pale onslaught of dusting snow.

“Get up,” I tell Cody and Tara, kicking them and pointing to the dead Wyrmling carcass less than four paces away. “Harvest what you can. We make for Silla post before nightfall.”

The two of them scramble to their feet, eager to be out of the cold and away from whatever dangers might be lurking.

I hear Davis saunter up beside me, still holding that ridiculous weapon that I hate to admit might have saved our lives. “What do you suppose that meant—it running away like that?” he asks.

The sigh that escapes me feels like a diatribe all on its own. “I don’t know,” I answer truthfully, “but I’m starving.”