//------------------------------// // Chapter 1 // Story: Nine Millimeter Vorpal Sword // by totallynotabrony //------------------------------// This wasn’t the desert.  Or rather, the correct desert. Nancy was still shaking off sleep, but she was already pretty sure this was nowhere near El Centro.  The rock at her back seemed sharper than she remembered, poking against her kevlar vest. The sand was a different color.  The mountains looked closer. The air smelled like sulfur.   Surely she hadn’t been asleep that long. Getting up, Nancy paused to brush the sand off her camouflage trousers and then turned to head back to the radio station.  She kept turning. Where did it go? After turning three hundred sixty degrees and still not seeing the tower, substation, chain link fence, or government pickup truck, Nancy began to get worried.  She glanced at the sky, but the low, ugly clouds prevented taking a direction on the sun. Her watch showed that it was three in the morning. While that sounded about right, it didn’t look like it; even with the cloudcover it was clearly daytime.  Her cell phone was equally useless, though in the desert it hadn’t gotten any reception before, either. Nancy looked at the mountains, and then turned to stare at the flat desert in the other direction.  El Centro should be opposite the mountains, but she was growing concerned that she wasn’t anywhere near where she had been.  Besides, she was now, apparently, relatively closer to the peaks. On impulse, she set off towards the mountains at a fast walk, deciding it was better than walking deeper into the desert.   The situation was already unknown, so it was imperative to be prepared.  Along the way, she reassured herself with her hands and eyes that her gear was good to go. Tan suede boots, check.  Tan USS Higgins ballcap keeping her dark hair in place, check.  Navy Working Uniform Type III green digital camouflage with sleeves rolled, check.  Black kevlar vest with one SAPI plate, check. Partially-filled CamelBak, check. Government-issued Gerber multitool, check.  M16A3 rifle carried on a sling and three magazines, check. M9 pistol in a leg holster and three magazines, check. She did a brass check on both weapons and put them back on safety. Even as relatively close as the mountains looked now, they were still probably miles away.  Nancy had plenty of time to think. She walked and had a cigarette. She’d volunteered to leave the ship in San Diego amid coronavirus mitigation and go take the night shift guarding some Navy radio station in the desert to the east.  Nancy didn’t know what it was for. Maybe related to the nearby Naval Air Station El Centro. Either way, spending twelve hours a day in the middle of nowhere had given her a good sense of why volunteering for things was generally a bad idea - even before whatever had just happened to her had happened. Nancy watched anime sometimes and there was a word for her predicament in the back of her mind, but she refused to consider it. At least not until she saw the dragon. It was only a glimpse, appearing through the low clouds for a few seconds, but it definitely wasn’t a California Condor.  Wings, four legs, tail. Nancy instinctively dropped to a crouch, hands on her weapons. Basketball-sized rocks had begun to dot the landscape as she got closer to the mountains, but that wasn’t even close to being adequate cover for an attack.  The dragon was only a distant, dark silhouette, but after a moment vanished back into the clouds. A dragon!? “What the fuck,” Nancy muttered under her breath. She considered going back the way she came, but reluctantly decided to press on, reasoning that she was more likely to find essentials - food, water, cover - in the mountains before her rather than the desert behind her.  Plus, a dragon? No, she must have just misinterpreted it. She started walking again, and shortly came to the first few scrubish plants as the terrain got a little rougher and started to slope up. The sky seemed to be darkening, though the clouds remained thick.  Despite the mismatch in time, it seemed that night was coming on. Nancy had been working the night shift, but didn’t have a light outside of her cell phone or lighter. She paused to have another cigarette, wondering if she should be rationing the remaining pack.  Glancing around to see how far she’d come, there was a faint glimmer perpendicular to her course.  Staring at it for several seconds, Nancy realized that it was a light, or maybe a string of lights, moving slowly but smoothly along.  It seemed like a vehicle or several vehicles. As she watched, they seemed to be coming closer, but were still miles away, and not on an intercept course.  It was now too dark to see if there were dust clouds. Nancy reasoned that if she kept going forward, she might eventually reach the road or railway or whatever was out there.  This was the first sign of civilization she’d seen since appearing wherever she was, and her pace quickened. The mountain continued to climb and Nancy lost sight of the lights beyond the slope.  Though, she was beginning to notice sort of an orange glow around the summits ahead and reflecting off the clouds. It soon became apparent why as she reached a peak in the terrain.  In a wide, bowl valley beyond, multiple lava pools dotted the ground.  That also explained the smell in the air. In the distance, silhouetted against the glowing pools of lava, Nancy saw something move.  She wasn’t sure if it was vapor from the volcanic ground, or if there was actually something out there. Knowing the lights she had seen earlier were probably ahead, she crested the rim of the valley and started down.  The rocks here were bigger, verging on boulders, and she had to take a meandering path through them. Even trying to be careful in the darkness, her boots slipped on the loose stones a couple of times. Getting closer, Nancy saw now that there were definitely dark figures moving around near the lava pits.  They weren’t obviously human shapes, either. Dragons near lava - did that make sense? Well, if one assumed dragons existed.   She shook her head and adjusted course to keep her distance, only to draw up short at the sound of voices.  If they were loud enough to be heard over her steps, then she must be close. Nancy dropped into a crouch. As she listened, however, she was less sure that it was speech.  It didn’t sound like a language, much less one she understood. She dropped even lower behind a nearby boulder as the voices - two of them - seemed to be accompanied by heavy steps.  Two shapes loomed out of the darkness, definitely not human. Nancy’s heart rate spiked and she gasped before she could stop herself.  It was too dark to see details, but the silhouettes were, well...dragons.  What else was shaped like a lizard with wings? Her CamelBak had a few sips of water left, but her mouth had gone dry. The dragons weren’t even fifteen feet away, but apparently didn’t hear her.  The voices, if she could call them that, seemed to be having a conversation. Were these - Nancy could barely bring herself to think it - dragons intelligent?  Both of them seemed to be bipedal and taller than her. As they passed, Nancy started to move again, doing her best to step silently.  She was on her way to another boulder for cover when there was a screech that made her hair stand on end.  A streak of light from deeper down in the valley shot skyward, and then a massive, though relatively quiet, explosion lit the sky, streamers of multicolored light spreading and beginning to curve back to the earth. It took Nancy half a second to realize that the sudden bloom of light had revealed that she was surrounded by at least a dozen dragons she hadn’t noticed in the darkness.  She ducked, hoping they were focused on what was apparently some kind of fireworks show. Did dragons have fireworks? Why was she thinking about that at a time like this?  Nancy glanced from around her rock, but couldn’t tell if there were any eyes on her.  Keeping low, she started to move to her next cover. She was suddenly flipped forward as something grabbed at her leg.  Nancy let out an involuntary shout and twisted, trying to kick with her other foot.  In the dim light of the still fading burst shell, she saw a portly brown shape - her mind identifying it as a dragon but still refusing to believe it.  There were two horns on its head and some kind of flail on the end of its tail. The wings were smaller than many of the other dragons. All these little details didn’t help in the slightest as Nancy tried to free herself from its grasp around her ankle by struggling and kicking.  The dragon swiped its other clawed foreleg at her. Nancy did her best to deflect it, but her strength was no match against the scaly limb. Fortunately, the ceramic SAPI plate and most of the kevlar in the front of her vest held firm, the dragon’s claws only ripping some of the nylon loops on the outside.  Nancy’s hands frantically searched for her rifle, but lying on her back, she wasn’t sure where it had gone. She didn’t have time to find it, either, as the dragon lifted her into the air, upside down.  The rifle dropped past her head, falling to the end of the sling. Nancy grabbed her sidearm.  At least it was exactly where she expected it.  The dragon lifted her higher and started to open its mouth.  She pointed at the dragons’ face, not even bothering with sights, and pulled the trigger as fast as the pistol would cycle. In the next instant, she was in freefall.  There was time to see a spray of blood from her target, and then she hit the rocks below with her head. It was probably only a few seconds between when Nancy had hit the ground and when she started to regain consciousness, but that was far too long.  A dragon had discovered her, she’d attacked it, and if she was as surrounded as she thought, this was a bad place to be incapacitated. She got to her hands and knees, trying to urge herself to move faster.  The pistol was still in her hand and she started to crawl away from the scene.  It took her a moment to realize that she was hearing more of those dragon sounds - voices? - and they carried a note of alarm. She got her feet under her and spared a glance back.  Even with the fireworks it was too dark to make out details, but the dragon she’d shot was down.  Others were moving closer. Nancy wasn’t immediately sure how many rounds she’d fired.  Five, maybe. She stuffed the pistol back in its holster and started to transition to her rifle as the crowd started to circle and close on her. There was a purple flash brighter than the fireworks and an accompanying pop.  The light revealed two new figures, who seemed to have appeared from thin air.  One looked like a relatively svelte dragon, the other was different. A steady light appeared just above it, finally bringing useable illumination to the area.   This newcomer appeared to be a horse.  Finally, something Nancy recognized that her brain didn’t have to second-guess.  Though, maybe she was wrong about that because the horse was purple and it spoke. Whatever it said was added to by the dragon standing beside it, and the other dragons all around seemed to start talking quickly, and at once.  That didn’t stop them from enclosing Nancy, either, and some seemed to be pointing at her. She was standing next to a dragon with at least two bullet holes in its face.  Nancy turned to run. She didn’t know where she was going to go, or what she was going to have to face to get there, but it was better than being here. She made it two steps before something resembling thick purple light slammed her to the ground.