Most of the crowd had been knocked to the ground, by the deafening sound and surprise rather than anything else. But not Tank and Peter. They stood looking on, knowing that nothing, either human or dragon, could have withstood that kind of blast. Their friend was gone. No more. Tears streamed down their cheeks. Fatigue tore at their ravaged bodies. Even if they'd wanted to go into the crater and look for the remains, they couldn't. Understandably, they were spent.
Peter was startled out of thoughts of his friend first, as a face appeared right in front of his. A policeman was moving his mouth... talking, but Peter, like most of the others, was having trouble hearing, what with the explosion and all the screaming, shouting and crying going on all around him.
'Odd,' he thought, 'the policeman seems mad, angry even.' It made no sense at all to the young dragon. After all, it was he who'd just lost a best friend. Tank as well. All the others had effectively been saved. Just as he was about to tell the officer exactly what he could do in a biologically specific way, he felt something grab his hands from behind, forcing them together. Instinctively, he tried to turn round, but a firm pressure on his neck prevented him from doing so. Wondering just what on earth was going on, it was then that he spotted Tank being wrestled to the ground by three police officers.
'Have they all gone mad?' he thought, struggling more than a little. But it was all to no avail. Even the mighty Tank could offer little in the way of resistance, not with practically all his energy depleted.
With their hands cable tied behind their backs, both friends were forcibly marched towards the waiting police cars. As they passed the crowd, angry shouts and jeers assaulted their ears. Neither friend had any idea what was going on, their heads still ringing and their hearing more than a little impaired from the sound of the blast. That is until a lacrosse player carrying an infant in her arms came right up to them and shouted,
"WHY? Why did you do it? Why blow up our lovely clubhouse? WHY?"
As the mother and infant were pushed out of the way by the heavy handed police officers, Tank and Peter exchanged horrified glances. But worse was to come, well, for Peter anyway. While Tank was squeezed forcibly into the back seat of one of the police cars, a familiar figure approached the edge of the crowd, right next to where Peter stood. The look on her face cut his heart like a knife. The pain he felt there and then was a hundred times worse than anything he'd felt while battling Manson on the artificial pitch less than a year ago. Tears streaked down her beautiful face, smudging what little make up she wore. Her look said it all... betrayal, hurt, injustice... LIES! Opening his mouth to explain, to explain how they'd both saved them all, it was too late. She'd turned and disappeared back into the crowd, whilst he was now being firmly shoved into the other police car. As the ignition in the car purred into life and the driver spun around and headed out onto the main road, he couldn't help but think about everything he'd just lost.
36
Houston... There Seems To Be A Problem!
In all, fourteen laminium bombs had exploded across the world, making it the bloodiest and deadliest day in the planet's history. Places hit included Montreal Canada, Seattle USA, Wong Chan Thailand, Chicago USA, Macclesfield UK, Moscow Russia, Melbourne Australia, Ankara Turkey, Cape Town South Africa, Mumbai India, Balikpapan Indonesia, Shanghai China, Lisbon Portugal and of course the clubhouse in Salisbridge. If the bomb at the laminium ball match, the one that had Steel clinging to life by just a thread, was taken into account, then altogether that made fifteen... the exact number of chunks of metal the evil dragon Manson had stolen from Cropptech. At least, that was the council's thinking, and indeed their hope that there would be no more. No more devastation, no more loss of life. In dragon terms, the death toll was still being revised, but it numbered well into the tens of thousands. For the humans, it was different. Because of where the bombs had been placed, mainly in built up urban areas of highly populated cities, the death toll and casualty count were much higher. At least a hundred thousand people had died across the world, with many more injured and wounded. Significantly, the count was still continuing, and growing.
Almost every dragon on the planet, including the king and his councillors, hadn't slept a wink since the terrorism had started. For that's what it was... TERRORISM! As for who'd committed it and what their goal was, the dragon council were still trying to figure that out. To start with, the priority had been to respond to those in need, dragon and human alike, with the King's Guard having been dispatched to each site with instructions to use their abilities to help both sets of communities. They'd been warned that it would be unlikely they would find injured dragons, given the power of the psychic blast waves. They would be either dead, killed by the wave, or alive and relatively healthy. And so there was little they could do below ground, in which case they were all instructed to help the human world above in any way that they could. There would also be dragons disguised as humans who'd been killed by the deadly psychic blast wave on the surface, some being well out of the physical radius of the explosion. It was important to recover their bodies before the humans did. While it was almost impossible to distinguish a dragon in human form from an actual human, the council didn't want to take the chance of autopsies being performed on their kind, just in case the psychic wave had done some molecular damage to the dead dragon's DNA. King's Guards from across the planet scrambled to get to the nearest site, not only to help with the rescue efforts, but to effect the recovery of all the dragon corpses, leaving only a skeleton force left to cope with their normal duties, if anything could be described as 'normal' ever again. At least having agreed on that much, but very little else, the council was as fragmented as it had ever been, holed up inside the council chambers. Watching from on high, the king was frustrated beyond belief at the arguing going on below him. Most of the councillors were up in wings about something, a couple stressing their point that it must have been one of the many human terrorist groups that had committed the atrocities, and that they should be hunted down and punished. Others argued against, claiming it was highly unlikely. And so it went on. Some argued that it was the dark dragon Manson; after all, he'd stolen the laminium from which the bombs had been crafted. There was a further call to round up all the King's Guards across the planet in an attempt to find the deadly dragon and bring him to justice, rather than waste valuable resources and time helping out the humans on the surface. And so it continued, all the time the king watching them like a hawk, studying each and every one of them, particularly what they said.
* * *
It had taken some fifteen hours for the first dragons to arrive at the site of the Salisbridge explosion, a travesty in dragon terms. Every single witness had long since disappeared, making it impossible to erase their memories of the event. Dragon investigators, disguised as government officials, took in the huge, still smouldering, crater from its edge. One or two marvelled at the ingenuity of the mantra used to contain the blast and prevent the same destruction that had occurred elsewhere across the planet. Others scoured the dark, smoky depths for signs of anything at all amongst the rubble and scorched earth.
* * *
Five miles away, Peter and Tank were being released from their incarceration, neither of them too happy about how things had played out. They'd endured all sorts of verbal abuse from everyone, officers and prisoners alike. And despite their dragon training against such things, everything that was said... HURT! Words cut like the sharpest chainsaw sliding through butter, the looks felt as though they'd been gutted with a screwdriver, while the small, unnecessary punches and pushes when they'd been moved about, tore at their very being. They'd saved everyone, lost their best friend in the process and then for Peter, there was... JANICE! Regardless of their magical energy recharging, the two friends were devastated, emotional and washed out. Despite being locked up for over fifteen hours, they kept their counsel and waited for what they hoped would be a dragon rescue of some sort. Unable to believe that it had taken this long, that is until they were briefed on what had happed across the world by another prisoner who'd just arrived, to say they were staggered was an understatement. When the chief constable (a dragon of course) finally got round to signing their release papers, he explained that because of Tank's actions in creating the mantra surrounding the clubhouse, the whole site had been deemed secondary to the other emergencies across the globe, hence the reason why no dragon had attended the scene up until now, and why their fate had only just come to light.