They smiled at each other. The four big men. The four killers.
They nodded to one another and turned northwest, walking slowly, without hurry away from the death at Oro Valley, leaving their footprints behind them in the dust of the great rot and ruin.
THE WAKING DRAGON
R.P.L. Johnson
He was in the meadow again. He hated the meadow: hated it for what came next. Knee-high grass stalks stretched away in all directions, bending against the breeze, pulling texture out of the wind in patterns that reminded Ringo of the nap on the surface of a hard-used snooker table. Standing swells in the grass hinted at rolling hillocks of earth beneath like the curves of a woman under silk. To his left, at the limit of the virtuality’s resolution was a darker smudge that could have been a copse of trees. If he’d been allowed to turn his head, the simulation may have drawn in more detail, but he wasn’t and so a smudge it remained.
It seemed real enough, as real as any dream during the act of dreaming, but it wasn’t. It was just a computer simulation planted in his mind. It was fake. Only the pain was real.
The flames started at his feet and spread quickly as if his skin was nothing more than dry paper. He had a second to smell his own flesh burning before the pain started: first the kind that made you angry, then the kind that made you scared.
Ringo was no stranger to pain. Seven years in the Regiment and another four before that in the infantry had given him plenty of opportunity to test his resistance to pain. It was part of his training. He knew the physiology of pain, learned how to deal with it, learned that pain was just a message from the body, a damage report that could be acted upon or ignored.
Pain in the meadow was different. There was no reason for it. He had no body in this place, no flesh to bruise, no bones to break and yet the pain was real and unending. His body produced no adrenaline, no endorphins to dull the edge of it because he had no body. He would not pass out from the attentions of an over-eager torturer because even his consciousness was theirs to control in this place. He wasn't even allowed the release of a scream. He stood in the meadow, a human pillar of fire alone on an endless sea of gently waving grass.
He tried to take himself away from the meadow, away from the pain. He pictured himself in his daughter's room, sitting on the side of her thin bed with the Liverpool Football Club quilt set and the poster of Philippe Couthino above the headboard.
Dad, I'm scared, she said.
It's alright, love, he said to her. The monsters aren't real. And if they're not real, they can't hurt you.
It didn’t work, it never worked, but he tried anyway. What else could he do?
“This can end so easily,” came the voice. The dragon uncoiled from the sky: long, golden loops of serpentine muscle spooling around Ringo, oblivious to the flames that still licked across his flesh. He caught a flash of a thin, fish-like tail with scales that glittered like a butterfly’s wings, then powerful legs with claws of diamond and the endless rope of the creature’s body. The dragon’s head appeared before him, long jaws open and rimmed with teeth as long as crooked fingers.
“Tell us why you are here and the pain will end,” the dragon said. It was speaking Chinese, Ringo could hear the many-toned language of his parents through whatever subroutine played the part of his ears in this place, but the words in his head were English. “Your government has abandoned you, Sergeant. They have denied all knowledge of you and your friends. Why do you protect them when they have failed to protect you?”
Ringo remembered the mission and felt a moment’s pang of guilt as if even drawing on that knowledge was some kind of surrender, but they couldn’t read his thoughts, not even here. If they could, then there would be no need for the torture at all. They could play with his senses, they could intercept and re-interpret and amplify the signals sent by his nerves. They could block his optic nerve and give him visions of anything they chose — the meadow, the dragon — but they couldn’t pluck thoughts from his mind, and so he sought refuge in the past.
It was meant to be a simple snatch and grab. The target was a Chinese scientist, some boffin from one of the government’s military labs. The government ran those places like prison camps. The scientists who worked there never left the complex. They ate in communal refectories and slept in their assigned apartments. It was a place dedicated to work and secrecy but someone had wanted out. He had managed to get a signal to GCHQ in the UK and not just any signal. The boffin had provided a new solution to something called the Navier-Stokes equation. They had tried to explain to Ringo what that meant, but all he had remembered was that it was something to do with turbulence and that finding new solutions to the equations that kept planes in the sky could lead to radical new designs for fighter planes, drones, silent sub propellers and all manner of other hardware that had the brass pissing themselves in a mixture of fear and excitement.
Nobody had thought the Chinese could be so advanced and it looked like the sleeping dragon was showing the west a clean pair of heels in a new arms race most countries didn’t even know had begun.
That knowledge had prompted British military intelligence to take an enormous risk, staging an exfiltration with a military team from inside Chinese territory. It was an act of war, the stakes were that high.
It had been one of the truly great failures. Two of his team had been killed before they even realised they were under attack. He had lost another three in the ensuing firefight. Only he and two of his men had survived. After weeks of interrogation in the meadow, he wasn't sure that had been a good move.
The dragon tightened its coils around him, contracting until its golden scales pressed against his flesh. This was something new. In all his sessions in the meadow, the dragon had never done anything more than taunt him; now it wrapped its body around his and squeezed.
If Ringo had still needed to breathe, the creature would have crushed that breath from him. He felt his bones creak as the pressure built. His legs pressed together, knee pressing against knee with crushing force, the pain magnified by the amped-up sensitivity of the simulation. He felt his pelvis crack as the thing tightened around his hips and he would have collapsed except the dragon was holding him now. From chest to ankles he was enveloped in loops of ever-contracting, golden sinew.
He was sure that, if this was the real world, he would have been dead by now, a pulped mass of broken bones and burst organs, but still the creature squeezed. He felt its flesh becoming part of his, like balls of clay squeezed together by a fist until they became one.
Pressure built inside his skull, an invading darkness outlined with gold like the scales of the dragon. At that moment he was sure he was going to die and the only emotion he felt was relief.
He had been wrong.
The monsters were real.
Ringo woke in his cell, coming to his senses violently as if assaulted by smelling salts. Given the stench in the tiny room, the effect was similar. The worst of the smell came from a concrete pipe about thirty centimetres in diameter that ran across the cell at knee height against the back wall. The pipe was the cell’s only concession to the necessities of sanitation. It was a sewer pipe with a jagged hole smashed in its crown that was the closest the cell came to a toilet and that hole was the source of most of the stench.
The hole was also Ringo’s only connection to his team-mates. He dragged himself over to the pipe and lowered his face into the foetid space, trying to ignore the dark water flowing inches from his lips.