Chapter 22: Dragon Chatter

“You said it talked to you?” the blind nurse insisted. “The dragon?”

“In my head, yeah,” Harvey said, distracted. The big dude had handed him what looked like some sort of expensive crystal dagger at first, only to tell him they’d pulled it out of an alien maggot the size of his forearm. It was approximately two pounds in weight, way too heavy for its size and shape, and a translucent blue color that almost seemed luminescent at the right angle, like fiber optics. “You got this out of a bug?” he asked.

“We think it’s a skull,” the so-called Captain Travis said. Harvey was pretty sure they were all bullshitting him—she didn’t even seem to know basic rank structure—but he was playing along with it, if only because she didn’t seem to be stupid and the others seemed to respect her enough to try and trick him into blind obedience.

Like that was going to fly, post-alien-apocalypse. Oh, you’re a higher rank than me in some military branch of pussies that no longer exists? Here, let me just suck your dick, Captain…

But he’d kept his cool and played their game, because they didn’t seem like bad people and it wasn’t in his best interest to kick their asses and call them out on it. Yet.

“Doug says that thing talks to him in his head, too,” the jarhead said.

“What thing?” Harvey said, testing the dagger’s blade and nicking himself.

The jarhead gestured with a meaty finger at the dagger in Harvey’s hand. Frowning, Harvey turned to the blind man, who confirmed with a nod…approximately three inches too far to the left.

“Uhhh,” Harvey said, offering the dagger back, “not that I don’t believe you guys, but that’s a little far fetched.”

Immediately, the nurse’s face hardened, and Harvey realized he’d made a mistake. Quickly backtracking, he said, “Then again, Earth apparently got fucked and impregnated by an alien spaceship, went into convulsions that knocked down half the world, her water broke, she went into labor, she spewed ash everywhere, and now there’s fire-spitting alien bug-babies squirming around that may or may not turn into dragons. There’s not a lot I won’t believe at this point.”

The other three adults crammed into the tiny cabin with him made varied looks of frustration and agreement, but the little girl—Kelsey—tugged on his snow cammies and, looking up at him innocently, said, “What’s labor?”

The adults in the room glanced at each other pointedly, trying to shuffle off the responsibility of answering that particular query to someone else, because nobody wanted to go there.

“It means having babies,” came a dry croak from the bed. As Harvey and the others turned to look, the Asian chick cocked her head on the pillow, squinting at them from between a black eye, and managed, “Who the fuck are all of you?” She licked her dried, chapped lips, and croaked, “And anyone got water?”

Doug, who had been using a pail of boiled snow to clean her wounds, quickly poured some into a mug and handed it to her.

The mug fell out of her hand and hit the blanket, spilling over the floor, her hand too weak to hold it and the blind man obviously not having been able to see that.

“Shit,” the nurse said, scrambling to find the mug again.

“Lemme see,” Harvey said, reaching for the mug, grabbing it, and sloughing as much of the water as he could off onto the floor before it soaked into the covers. He refilled the cup and held it to the Asian chick, but she didn’t take it. Instead, she was spending a lot of time staring at the gun at his hip, his arctic cammies, and the rank insignia on his collar. Her hand had started to tremble. Her brown almond eyes flickered to his and there was outright suspicion there.

Harvey pushed the cup into her hand gently. “Not a douche,” he said, helping her hold it. “If I’da been here, I woulda shot him myself.”

Well, that might not have been completely true—he probably would have stripped the guy down and sent him running buck-assed naked down the hill for the maggots to eat—but he hoped it would make her feel better.

“He…tried to…rape me…” she croaked, making no move to take the cup or drink.

Tried to, Harvey thought, relieved. At least there wouldn’t be a rapebaby to deal with. “We guessed as much,” he said.

“He was gonna kill me.” She looked at the others as if she wanted confirmation nobody was gonna throw her in jail for giving the fuckwit what he deserved.

“Good job on kicking his sorry ass,” the giant grunted.

“So…” she hesitated, confused. “I’m not gonna get charged?”

Harvey laughed, despite himself. “Charged? For what?”

“For sneaking in here and trying to get a scoop when the barriers were up.”

Harvey stopped laughing. “You’re a reporter.” That made him slightly queasy.

She nodded, a weak little bob of her head, and he felt his hand tighten on the mug.

Reporters were such a pain in the cock, especially in the field. They were always the ones to get your balls handed to you for every little slip-up, ‘cause they were constantly following you around shoving cameras up your asses looking for dirt. Hell, Harvey had lost two guys in his squad to a court-martial for killing a known terrorist who had snuck into their mobile base under the guise of a guy seeking help for his pregnant daughter, seen all their informants coming out of the command tent, and had left his daughter and was gonna sneak out again to tell the rest of the insurgents, who would then proceed to kill all their informants, their families, and their friends’ families. Two good guys who had taken one bad guy out behind the latrines and shot him in the head to prevent the deaths of dozens of others. Boom. In jail for life because some reporter had to take a dump at the wrong time of the night.

Harvey actually had to resist the urge to pull the cup away and force himself to continue to hold the mug out for her. She must have sensed his irritation, because she made no move to drink.

Harvey forced himself to relax. “Drink,” he muttered. “The world ain’t the same. Everybody got a clean slate.” Then he thought of Morgan, still lying up there in the mountains because Harvey hadn’t been able to bury him in the frozen, boulder-pocked ground.

“Everybody’s dead,” the Asian woman said with a wry scoff, but she gingerly drank from the mug until the water was gone. “More,” she gasped. Harvey refilled it twice more before she was sated, then handed the mug back to the nurse, who gave the air near his head an irritated look and set the cup on the little nightstand.

Or tried to. He didn’t seat it properly and it tilted off the edge, and Harvey had to catch it and put it back. “What kind of blind man are you, anyway,” he muttered. “Ain’t you guys supposed to have super-senses or something? ’Specially as a nurse?”

“I’ve been blind all of two days, asshole,” Douglass said. “And I’m a doctor, not a nurse. Check the shoes.” He held a foot out, and indeed, it was covered in what once had been plush, expensive loafers. Now they just looked stained and water-warped pieces of shit.

Still, it made Harvey do a double-take. “So you’re a doctor.”

“Bingo. He gets a burrito.” Then, longingly. “Man, I could sure go for a burrito.” As it was, they had portioned off what little food they had found from digging around in the rubble of the lodge. They were looking at a couple weeks between the six of them, if they stretched it. If they didn’t stretch it, they would probably run out of easy edibles in ten days, then stuff like flour, rice, and beans in another five days after that.

“How’d you go blind?” Harvey said, now feeling a little bad for the guy.

“Beats the fuck outta me,” Douglass said. “Just…” He waved a hand in front of his face suddenly, “Shoop. Gone.”

“There was an explosion right before the ship took off,” ‘Captain’ Travis elaborated for him. “Took his sight, left him with something else.”

Harvey squinted at the man. Now that he was looking, he did have the cultured, effeminate look of a high-class medical professional worth his weight in Armani. “What kind of something else?”

The nurse—doctor—look depressed when he shrugged. “I see sounds, see the words people make, see the maggots crawling under the cabin, see your internal organs, but can’t see the goddamn bed I’m sitting on.” He made a disgusted shrug. “I’m just hoping it goes away and I get my eyesight back. This sucks donkey balls.”

Frowning, Harvey glanced at the dagger in the big guy’s hand. “And that is talking to you?”

“Yeah.” Again, the guy looked super depressed. “Hey, anyone think we could make a burrito from that stuff you found?”

“What’s it saying?” Harvey demanded.

The doctor turned to give him an unfocused stare. “What…like right now?”

“You mean it changes?”

Douglass laughed. “All the fucking time. Unless something major’s happening, it’s constantly playing in the background, like a forty-hour speech on loop. Sometimes it changes, but usually that’s just something about how to survive whatever hardship I’m facing at the time.” He squinted at Harvey. “Like you. It said to take you down with a blow to the head, tie you up, and make you submit.”

“So what’s it saying right now?” Harvey said.

Douglass grimaced like the whole thing irritated him, looked like he wouldn’t bother to answer, then reluctantly turned to look directly at the object, cocked his head, then said, “It’s something about how the animals will serve with coercion, and once we’ve had enough generations to breed suitably docile livestock, we need to have them build a great temple for our reunion.” Douglass shrugged. “Before that, it was talking about how to gain the animals’ trust by moving amongst them in disguise, learning from them.”

Harvey frowned, the dragon’s words immediately returning to his mind. “Seek out my children and serve them, offer your bodies to their benefit, or you shall be killed like the useless vermin you are.”

“Doesn’t make any sense so I haven’t bothered anyone with it,” Douglass said, shrugging. He glanced at Rusty. “Seriously. Burritos. Can we try making a burrito?”

“It makes sense,” Harvey whispered, his heart starting to pound.

Douglass turned to frown at him. “Huh?”

“Us,” Harvey said. “We’re the animals.”

There was no comprehension on the man’s face.

“It’s telling the maggots how to subjugate us,” Harvey blurted.

His companions’ faces went pale. “Shit,” Douglass whispered breathlessly. “Shit, I think you’re right.”

“They’re planning to breed us?” ‘Captain’ Travis demanded, a tinge of panic in her tone. “Like cattle?”

“Oh fuck no,” the Asian chick said, already starting to feebly climb out of the bed. “Fuck this, fuck that.”

But it was the dumbass jarhead who looked down at the thing in his hand and said, “This thing’s a radio.”