The Return of the Beasts

There weren’t always dragons in the Valley.

Yet here in year is 2032; and there be dragons. We faced a pandemic, political turmoil and a million other things that beat us down in the years following 2020. Yet we persevered for a while, riding the waves of randomness that the years brought. But the universe was winding up for a curveball. People joked and theorized back then about the apocalypse and how it might take shape. The fiction based around it was quite entertaining to be honest, but the reality was far more strange then we could ever imagine. The real Apocalypse when it finally came in the summer off 2022 was entirely unpredicted and unforeseen with dragons literally crawling from the depths of the earth like a specter of hell instead of humanity’s hubris.

The dragon hoard that assaulted mankind nothing like Skyrim or any number of fantastical media. This was an unwelcome reality: gritty and brutal. There was no magical sword or McGuffin to slay them like popular fiction or myths would claim. This was a battle to the death with no holds barred. These things were monsters through and through.

When the dragons appeared we were blindsided. They started attacking in the Middle East during a conflict between some minor factions (no one even remembers the war or who started it - the whole thing was totally over-shadowed by this new threat). Saudi Arabia and Iraq were the first to fall with nearby nations soon to follow. No one believed the stories that came from the fleeing refugees - to be fair the reports of flying lizards were hard to believe in the first place, not just when they came from people who were half delirious from thirst.

It took the governments a week to confirm it wasn’t some new type of aircraft or whatever military doodad they thought could be destroying the cities; by then it was too late. The Dragons were fast in their conquest. Within that week there were hundreds of them flying around the desert, with more popping up from the sand and spreading like the fire they released upon the world. Within the following weeks there were dragons reported seemingly everywhere. You couldn’t flip through the channels on TV without seeing a new report of an attack. Governments started rallying troops to fight this newly confirmed threat.

They were largely ineffectual. The world fell into chaos and turmoil in record time. By the end of 2022 the world was largely embroiled in the conflict, with large swaths of the globe fighting a guerrilla war against the dragons. But it wasn’t going well, it would take a large coordinated assault to take out just a few of the creatures. With the only weapons that proved reliably effective were missiles and heavy bombardment by tanks.

A Dragons hide can easily repel small arms fire and mounted weapon systems from vehicles. They aren’t massive creatures like the old stories tell, but they are the size of a small elephant. Lithe and surprisingly graceful on the ground and in the air, they are deadly combatants causing chaos with their fire that burns at nearly 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit and a piercing gaze that can paralyze a man from 50 meters. They have claws half a meter long and the strength to disembowel a man or armored vehicle, or fling them away with ease. Ultimately the dragons would prove to be wolves among the sheep.

Saying this I realize I’ve been speaking like all of this mess has been scientifically studied and explained. It has not. We don’t know how they breathe fire, or how they can paralyze a person by looking into their eyes or why the soldiers that do survive encounters with them feel a terror so profound we can’t even get them to speak again without pharmaceutical help.

All that being said, I didn’t believe in magic or anything like that before this all began. Who would? We live in a society that has been able to explain 99% of the universe with science - but failing that, I’m not sure why these things have happened. Hell, we don’t even know where they came from exactly.

I do know that despite all the carnage that these beasts have wrought, humans will still fight back with everything in our arsenal. Unconfirmed reports tell that the Russians even nuked an infested city last year, rumor has it they were attacking a nest, so governments are obviously still desperately trying to fight back. But, we’re mostly on our own out here. Underground in any place where we can scrape by. Here in the ruins of San Jose we’re forced to hide in small enclaves that barely keep us hidden from the dragons. Occasionally we can see them in the distance from our current fortress, Levi Stadium.

We have no contact with the outside world, the government hasn’t or can’t reach our position reliably although we have had some limited contact, and the officers SJPD have been gathering refugees from the immediate area to join us. Our little resistance movement, which is feeling more like a community or family in recent months, is constantly increasing in size and strength. Who knows how long it’ll take before we’re ready too make our move to reclaim the city. Months? Years? It doesn’t matter, we will take back our city and our lives. It’s not just a dream anymore, we’ll make it a reality.

After all, there weren’t always dragons in the valley.