Dragonfire: A Gulliver Swift Adventure

The Race to the Portal

"Harry killed me, I killed Harry, we're even," the wounded physicist managed to say, and it was all Swift could do to not throw him bodily off the chopper. Everyone else aboard would have done it whether he stopped them or not, but the fiery ooze was licking the skids and the creature was no more dead than Felix Caravalho. It was staggering onto its feet, all nine feet of him lumbering with outstretched arms across the platform; so what if it was heaving like a boat in a storm, so what if he had no time to swat the orange tongues consuming his flesh, all he wanted was to clamp his claws around the nearest part of the aircraft and pull it out of the sky, drowning it in the scalding soup sucking at his ankles.

"Lift off! Don't wait, lift off!"

Esteban didn't need the chorus of voices wailing in her ear, white-knuckled hand gripping the stick, grinding gears doing their best to wrench the Koala free of the lava, slowly... painfully...

"If you don't have the chops," Larrabee snarked, "I'm certified on choppers, I'll show you the papers we get back, move over."

"Police aircraft, you're not certified." She pushed him away. "I got it."

What was holding them down wasn't the viscosity of the magma, it was the weight of the immense creature, hands wrapped around the right side skid. It was using the runner as a chinning bar, trying to raise its head high enough to spit fire into the cabin.

Blasting him out from under wasn't going to work, gyroscopic as the gun mounts were they couldn't angle the discharge anywhere near the more than 240 vertical degrees required, and the beast was yanking the fuselage downwards. A new wave of sizzling blobs bombarded the rotors, threatening to solidify like sticks thrust into the spokes of a bicycle. The chopper faltered, but the rotors did not come apart.

"Somebody grab my ankles," Gulliver said, dropping onto his belly and snaking out over the sill. "And get me that gun."

His hand was open behind his back, fingers wiggling with expectation-but no weapon was slapped into his palm, someone making an incredible effort to drag him back by the wrist and groaning: "Let me."

It was the prodigy, on his knees, clothing blood-soaked, complexion waxy.

"Got nothing to lose, I'm dead already," said Bostridge, flashing a grim grin at the physicist staring up at him through the kohl cracking around his confounded eyes. "Don't look so disappointed, Doc. A nick is as good as a direct hit you're talking the aorta, just takes longer to bleed out. Enough time maybe I can fix it you get out of here someone hurries up and hands old Harry that .38."

It was his instantly. "Can you see it from there, no glasses?" the question the archeologist wasn't alone in asking. Even with his glasses his vision had to be a blur, the blood flow to his brain diminishing moment by moment.

"Motherfucker's as big as a house," came the grunted reply, Bostridge crawling out and twisting his upper body under the fuselage, weeping in excruciating pain as he fired. And fired again. The motherfucker roared. The bird came near capsizing. "I just emptied the freaking clip and he's still holding on."

"Hey, Harry?" Swift called down, "it's okay, none of us could have done more."

"Who says I'm done?" He was heaving himself off the lip of the cabin door, angling inward with a tortured outcry as he dropped, landing on the shoulders of the blazing creature. His legs wrapped around its head and so what if he too caught fire, his scissored thighs were back-flipping the unbalanced colossus off his perch. Man and monster like a fused missile wheeled in retrograde through the suffocating fumes, slapping against the turbulent surface of the surge and sinking beneath.

The chopper, released, bounded into the air, gasps of horror greeting the sight of Harry Bostridge waving a last farewell as the boiling cauldron slurped him under. Justin Edward Larrabee II not the only one yelling "go, go!" as a thick fume of noxious gases belched up, the reek raking the linings of their nostrils and burning their lungs.

Esteban, gagging, choking, veered the bird through the lethal yellow fog, volcanic ash and mud pursuing them along the ground, a maddened python snapping at the tail rotor.

"The question," Swift said, "is whether it keeps going or slows down and solidifies before we get to the portal."

"Maybe we don't want to go there," something his daughter thought worth considering.

"Maybe you don't," the billionaire retorted. "Some of us have other ideas."

"She's afraid it wouldn't be just us that gets through," Robertson sharper on the uptake. His camcorder retrieved, he was recording, clueing his viewership: "That thing is getting ahead of us and we're going what?"

"Hundred twenty." A distracted response, Esteban catching a first glimpse of the shimmer of air that marked the portal.

"What happens, it splashes through?"-that was what Lloyd wanted to know.

"Maybe nothing's going to get through." Unless her visual estimate was seriously off-kilter, the opening didn't look as wide as it had been when she'd first piloted the Koala into the Valley of the Mists; "Dr. Tate was worried he couldn't maintain the dimensions."

As the mogul recalled, "he and Harry were talking the exact opposite-they couldn't stop it from spreading, not that it'd snap shut in our face."

"Well, we want to thread the needle we don't crack up going through I'm going to have to slow down."

"Last thing you want is to slow down," Swift increasingly aware of how fast the dimensions were contracting.

"Yeah," Juanita agreed, contradicting herself. "Belay that and buckle up." There were no seatbelts aboard and they all knew it. "Make that brace."

She bore down, the instrumentation jerking deep into the red. Frenzied alarms shrilled, the helicopter with the toes of the lava barely an inch from its tail streaking through the contracting aperture. The surging ash smashed against the narrowing slit, hissing and cursing, giving them the finger.

The aperture slammed shut, cutting it off at the knuckle. It flopped onto the floor in front of the portal, hissing and spluttering. Congealing.

No one noticed, explosions rocking Caravalho's machine. Metal, plastic, and electronic shrapnel flew in all directions, several lengths of cable whipping around the rotors as Esteban flew the chopper into the yard outside the cement plant. The controls wrenched from her hands, it gyrated wildly, striking the exterior of the building and colliding with the vehicles outside-cement trucks, EMT units, police cars, hazmat and coroner's vans-bits and pieces of the engine mount, gear box, and cowling shearing off in all directions.

First responders raced toward it even before the rotor blades like enormous boomerangs whipped through the air as the copter slid to a crippled halt on its side. Ducking, the cops and EMTs clambered through the upended cabin doors, worst fears confirmed by the sight of a tangled pile-up of bodies jammed against an upside-down corner of the cabin.

Police Commissioner Rachel Rose and Deputy Chief William Vicar broke cover, yelling: "Are they okay? Are they alive?"

Looking back over their shoulders, the responders slowly shook their heads. "Shit," she said.

And then one of the responders went "wait."