Chapter 39- The Dragon's Teeth

Chapter 39

The Dragon’s Teeth

Cavill, Virginia

A terrible shriek split the night air.  A pair of doves broke from their tree and flew away as fast as they could, finally settling on a telegraph pole.  Above the central junction of this two horse town, they looked down on the desolate high street.

Smoke was rising from the chimney of one house and floating up into the sky, obscuring the silent stars above.  In the backyard of another building, a man was digging a hole and putting bloody rags into them.

The apparent serenity was shattered again as there was the rumble of “distant thunder.”  Gun shot after gun shot echoed through the street.  Further along, stood outside an open door, lit by the one of the few remaining house lights, was a solitary figure with a rifle in his hands.

Behind him, cowering the doorway was another man who was looking out past him, looking at the crumpled figure in the road.  There was a splash of blood on the floor and the man in the doorway called out.

“Jesus Tom, you shot him!”

Tom didn’t reply.  He shouldered the modified M14 rifle and moved carefully toward the now prone figure.  He didn’t recognize the man; his face was torn to shreds and not by Tom’s gunshots.  The first round had pulverized his elbow on his right arm.  The second and third had punched dime sized holes through his chest.

“Tom, what’s going on?” called Mike from his shop.

Tom didn’t reply.  He stood over the prone figure and was about to turn around when he heard a hissing growl from the floor.  Tom’s reactions were sharp, perhaps not as fast as when he had been on active duty in Afghanistan but they were still fast  He spun around and fired a shot with the rifle.

Bullets leaving a rifled barrel can spin at over 100,000 revolutions per minute (rpm) depending on the muzzle velocity of the bullet and the pitch of the rifling.  The five point five six milimetre bullet fired from the M14 Garand spun around in a dizzying fashion, reaching an incredible speed.  The bullet slammed into the face of what may have once been a man but was no longer.

There was a small explosion and a splash of blood threw the man’s face back into the cold ground.  There was a terrible guttural moan from the figure on the ground.  Tom, who knew that a shot in the head at this range was one hundred percent sure to kill someone, stepped back.

“Ammo, do you have more ammo for this thing?” he called back.

“You shot him!  You shot him in the head,”

“Yeah I did. But he isn’t dead.  I don’t know what’s going on but he’s not dead.  Now do you have more ammo?”

“What the hell?” asked Michael.

At that point, as if to underline the hell that they were living in, the figure began to drag itself back to its feet.  It’s head was a crumpled ruin, one half of it a dark red cave that dripped black blood to the floor in an obscene rain as it stumbled forward.

Before it reached the light, it seemed like it had no eyes, the one side of its facing missing.  But something became clear as it became visible to Michael.  It had new eyes, three or four of them, Micheal didn’t stick around to count them. They had pushed through the other side of its face and were clustered in the left hand side of its face, sitting above a huge mouth that was filled with jagged black teeth.

Michael Cristakis, a simple soul, broke from his door and ran back into his shop.  Tom  McVay, a much more troubled soul, turned and got inside the shop, slamming the door behind him.  He grabbed the dead bolt and slid it across as the shambling figure slammed into the door.

The plexi-glass buckled under the impact and Tom put his shoulder into the door.  The figure on the other side was strong, stronger than Tom.  Tom had always been stronger than he looked; it was encoded into the McVay DNA.  But there were limits to human strength and endurance.

The being on the other side of the door, slamming away with two huge clawed fists, appeared to have no limit to either.  There was another huge impact and Tom was thrown back.  He redoubled and got back to the door.

He became fairly sure at this point of two things.  One was that Michael Cristakis, the friendly Greek American owner of the pizza shop, had run for his life.  The other was that he was going to die very soon.

Tom had been expecting to die nearly every day since his first fire-fight in Afghanistan, was not especially afraid.  He would die, that was everyone’s fate.  What bothered him was the thought that he was about to beaten, to be overcome.

The door cracked and the entire window buckled inwards.  Tom stepped back and prepared to swing the rifle like a club.  The door cracked again and this time it was wrenched clean of its hinges.

“Tom!” shouted Michael.  He threw a box of shells underarm to Tom who caught it and walked backwards away from the bleeding figure that was now stood in the doorway, where Michael himself had been not long ago.

Tom reloaded as fast as he could.  He flipped the M14’s selector switch to automatic , braced himself and fired from the shoulder.

There was a roar of fire and flame, the store front lit up again as if from some artificial sun and a series of flashbulb images struck Tom’s eyes as he fired.  The strange man-shaped creature jigged and jumped as bullets slammed through it, knocking it backwards and out of the wreckage of the store.

The silence was intense and even with Tom’s experience of combat gunfire, he felt the pressure on his ears.  He dropped the magazine from the rifle, smoke pouring from the barrel and the ejector port.  He loaded a fresh magazine and approached the prone figure but, even at five foot, he could see that it was still moving.

“It’s still not dead,” he said, pretty much to himself.

It lurched back to its feet with an alarming speed and violence.  Tom stepped backwards quickly and fired twice from the hip as he went.  The gunfire had torn its arm from its shoulder and its body was a bloody ruin.  There was a terrible ripping sound and its torso began to split at the neck.  A ragged seam opened up and to Tom’s horror, he saw that a huge maw of teeth had formed in the middle of its body.

Tom stumbled backwards and tripped over the wreckage.  He scrabbled backwards as fast as he could dragging his rifle with him.  The beast lurched in after him and followed him with a lumbering gait.

Tom rolled and fired as he went.  One round hit the ceiling, releasing a cloud of dust and rubble.  Another round exploded into the chip fryer and there was a dull thud, followed by a hiss, followed by a spark, followed by an explosion.  Fire spread with speed across the shop’s ruined interior.