[RoF!V backstory]
Aug. 7th, 2006 09:14 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
watching_youOookay. If you're just coming across this and you don't know what it's all about... basically, it's established Millicanon that the Veronica Mars world and the Reign of Fire world are one and the same, except one got dragons and the other just missed them. There's a Quinn Abercromby in Veronica's world; in fact, she's spoken to him on the phone. This of course means that somewhere, there's a Veronica in Quinn's world.
This is her story.
Note: I went pretty insane with this. I haven't written anything this long that hasn't been for school since way back, when I was big into doing Discworld fic under a really embarassing screenname. Good times. Anyway, just be prepared when you click, because the whole thing is about 6500 words, and my fic skills are probably also a little rusty.
Also, yay! I finally get to use my RoF icons.
(Before.)
It had started in London, of course. They’d known that much for years. But while it was still early on - and early on lasted for half a decade or more - they still had hope that it wouldn’t really spread.
Later on, Veronica would muse how ironic it was that the common name for them came along long before the scientists figured it out. But it was just obvious, wasn’t it? Something in the collective unconscious, a codeword for wings and screeching and fire from above.
Dragons.
Early on, the American President offered reassuring statements often on the news, always reassuring. The army was receiving special training; marine strike troops were learning to work with new weapons, new methods; the threat would be dealt with soon enough.
That was probably why no one in Neptune was very concerned. There were jokes, new slang, colloquialisms, but no real sense of worry. London, after all, was a long way away from California. It was a sign of the times that Dick Casablancas began referring to masturbation as “choking the dragon”. And there were certainly no plans to put homecoming on hold.
That night, Lilly was fabulous and Logan was witty and Duncan was charming, and Veronica sipped too much champagne and confessed to never having gone skinny dipping in the ocean. They laughed and joked and never really got to the dance, in the end - though the time they spent on the beach was really much more worth it, because it didn’t have crepe paper but oh, did it ever have stars. When they returned, chilly from the ocean air, to the limo, they joked about the driver, who’d fallen asleep, hat over his nose.
They never suspected anything.
It came in the night, almost silent, just as Veronica was mentioning how much trouble they’d be in if their parents found out that they’d skipped the dance in favour of getting drunk and playing ‘never have I ever’ by the shore. The only warning was a fast-moving flash of orange - left windows, skylight, right windows - and then the treeline, not twenty feet away, burst into flame.
Logan summed it up perfectly: “What the fuck?”
A shadow, then, across the moon, but none of them put it together, none of them suspected.
“Forest fire?” Lilly asked no one in particular.
Duncan held Veronica closer.
Rapping urgently on the glass, Logan tried to wake the driver. It wasn’t a joke anymore. “Hey! Get us out of here. There’s a fire!”
That the privacy glass was up was probably the only thing that saved their lives, as the next burst of fire spat directly through the windshield.
Screams, confusion. The driver didn’t even wake before he burned to ash. The glass bent, warped, bubbling and curving towards them before shattering and spattering them with hot molten drops.
“Out. OUT!” The upholstery was alight, the minibar was alight - Veronica shoved the others out into the night air, suddenly full of smoke - Lilly’s dress was alight. Logan put that one out with his suit jacket, and held her to calm her. They ran and stumbled, pushing each other, making as much distance as possible between themselves and the limo.
It was everywhere and nowhere, nothing but wings and fear, lost in the smoke and the dark. Veronica couldn’t tell if there were many or just one, and try as she might, she couldn’t get a fix on its direction. When she looked towards the fire it dazzled her eyes, but when she turned back towards the dark she found the brightness of the flames had ruined her night vision.
“We’re out in the open,” Duncan said, with a note of panic. “It could fly down at any minute and --”
“Shut it, Donut!” Lilly cut across him, venomously. “It’s not one of them. It’s not. They haven’t been spotted anywhere near here yet, there’s no way it --”
“It doesn’t matter,” Veronica said, her eyes squinting into the smoke. “Whatever’s going on, we’re not safe here.”
She took Duncan’s hand and squeezed it, for support, and they turned to run up the road. But it landed in front of them. There was no more debate. Definitely a dragon.
It inhaled.
Surrounded on three sides: burning trees, car on fire, dragon - Duncan made for the only remaining option, and pulled Veronica towards the sea. She allowed herself to be dragged from the road, her feet sinking into the sand of the beach, too filled with panic to be able to let herself stumble or hesitate. And then there was heat, intense and overpowering, pressing at her back and throwing her to the ground. It felt as though she had turned about-face to the sun.
In the lull that followed all she could feel was a sharp ringing in her ears, and then footsteps and sand flying up next to her face. She glanced up. Logan was ablaze. He threw himself into the water.
Duncan forced himself to his feet and ran to help his friend, but Veronica could barely move. She twisted in the sand, wincing at the crackling of skin that came from her arms and back, and glanced back over her shoulder.
Lilly was almost beautiful, like the heart of a star. Like an angel, dazzlingly bright. She didn’t scream, didn’t cry out - she simply stood there as the flames crawled over her dress, over her skin and hair - as through showing off, she lifted her arms. Beautiful, like a flower in the sun. She reached towards Veronica, her expression eerily calm.
The dragon breathed fire once again.
Veronica blacked out, and remembered no more.
+++
(After.)
“The question is not, ‘who killed Lilly Kane?’. The question is what. The question is, why?”
They regard her dispassionately.
“I don’t believe any of you truly understand what it is you’re facing.” Her eyes dart around the room, resting for a moment on the visage of each man at the shadowy table. “There are no coincidences, here.”
One of them, one she knows as a chemist, nods at the guard holding her arm, to let her go. She pulls away from him.
The chemist speaks: “Miss...”
“Mars. Veronica Mars.”
“Miss Mars. I’m told you managed to successfully impersonate our security personnel in order to break into this meeting. That shows me that you’re quite intelligent, and I do admire you for it. But I think the question we have before us today is a little out of your league.”
“You’re planning on nuking them, right?”
Another man, this one in a military uniform she can’t quite identify, makes a dismissive sound.
She persists. “You are, aren’t you? It’s not going to work!”
A muttered voice - she only catches the word ‘disarmament’ - and then some quiet, cruel snickering.
“Have you been out there?” Another short laugh from one of the powerful men, and her fist hits the metal table. In such a small space, the sound echoes. “Have you? Of course not! You’ve been safe in your bunkers, in your shelters, in your isolated homes near the arctic. D’you know what they do, after they burn a city down?”
No response, from the men.
“They eat it. They go through, and chew up all the ash. It’s food to them, it’s candy. A nuclear strike is going to be like an all-you can eat buffet!”
The military man mutters, “Can’t eat if they’re dead.”
“If you’re not going to hit the whole world at once,” Veronica snarls, “then don’t even bother. You should know how fast they can travel, how fast they can spread.”
“Maybe we will nuke the whole world at once.”
She stares at him, jaw slack in shock. “You’re insane!”
“I think that’s quite enough,” says a third man, getting to his feet and nodding to the guard. “Thank you for your suggestions, Miss Mars.”
Her arm is taken again - but she notices the chemist frowning, and points.
“You know there’s something to what I’m saying. You know I’m right!”
The chemist opens his mouth to speak, but the other man cuts in first. “Please escort Miss Mars outside.”
+++
Later, in the shelter, she falls onto the couch next to Logan.
“They mentioned you on the radio today,” he tells her.
“Saying good things, I hope.”
He kisses her forehead. “Don’t they always?” After a pause, he adds, “I believe their exact words were, ’violent, crazed anti-nuclear radical’. Did you taser someone again, sweetie?”
Veronica pulls a face and holds up her fingers, her thumb and index finger an inch apart. “Maybe just a little?”
“That’s my girl.” Putting an arm around her shoulders, he says, “Though I’d miss you if they threw you in jail.”
“Good thing there’s no such thing, anymore.”
“I’m guessing the meeting didn’t go to well.”
She sighs, and leans her head against his shoulder. His sweater is rough and itchy and smells of smoke, but she doesn’t mind. “What was your first clue?”
“The pouting.” His fingers brush her scarred back.
“:I’m not pouting.”
“Of course not. You just have a lip... thing.”
Veronica turns to face him. “You know this is serious, right? They’re going to start dropping bombs on the United States, not to mention who knows where else. They think it’s going to solve things.”
Logan doesn’t answer for a moment, and she stares at him, startled.
“You don’t believe me.”
“No!” he insists, quickly. “I mean. Well. It’s just kind of hard to argue with the fact that nuclear weapons are really good at killing things. How can you be sure that --”
She pushes away from him, getting to her feet. “I can’t believe I’m hearing this from you! You saw them murder Lilly -”
“Are you still insisting that? They’re just animals, it wasn’t murder --”
“You’ve seen my pictures! You know that I’ve been out there, watching them --”
“Yeah, and I kind of wish you wouldn’t do that!” Logan leans forward in his seat, cupping her hand in his folded palms. “Every time you go out there you take more and more risks, Veronica. How close were you to this last one? How long were you pinned down in those ruins when it decided to eat instead of sleeping? I’m worried that one of these days, you’re not going to come back.”
Veronica’s shock quickly shifts to anger; she pulls her hand away. “I know what I’m doing.”
“I never said you didn’t - Jesus!” He stands, reaching out after her as she retreats from him. “Veronica.”
Without turning back, she spits, “I’ll be in the darkroom.”
When the door is closed behind her, she flicks on the red light, letting her eyes adjust. In a moment she’s surrounded by dragons: in flight, eating, resting, sleeping, tending their eggs. Their images are suspended from the clotheslines that crisscross over her head. She inhales, and the chemical scent is somehow less thick than the atmosphere she’d just left behind.
“I’m going ‘shopping,’” Logan shouts from the next room, and she can practically see him making the air quotes. “We’re out of matches.”
“Fine,” she calls back.
She never sees him again.
+++
Ironically, in the end it’s the bombs that show her the way.
Nuclear winter, however, makes it difficult for her to act upon her theories.
+++
The years pass, and the days grow darker and colder, even in July. The world becomes an increasingly empty place for Veronica, who in time runs out of film, and runs low on food, and is forced to leave her shelter. Even wandering from place to place she rarely sees anyone, and when she does she stays clear, since people are protective of anything they have, these days.
But there are advantages to being alone. It’s harder to be spotted in a group of one, easier to hide. She requires only the smallest living spaces, and if things get dangerous it is all too simple for her to pack up and leave. She is self-sufficient, in a way, scavenging for most of her food, learning tricks like knowing which bugs are alright to eat. On one occasion, after a day of watching the beasts fight over territory, she even has the fortuity to eat a dragon’s egg.
In a folder, she compiles her notes, written on paper and napkins and in the margins of old books that she finds. Her photographs slowly turn yellow but she keeps them, pouring over them for hours at a time, in case they hold a further clue she has not yet uncovered.
By the time it all changes, Veronica does not know how old she is, or how long she has been living this way. Clocks have stopped and calendars are long since out of print. Numbers are used to measure how many, how soon, how bad, and little more.
Despite it all, however, Veronica remains remarkably sane. At night she dreams of Lilly, of Duncan, of Logan; she remembers the night on the beach before it all went wrong, and in her sleep she promises them all that she’ll solve it all someday. She’ll get them justice.
+++
One day Veronica is very nearly crushed by a dragon.
It’s not because she’s not paying attention (because she is) but rather because when she sees it falling from the rain-streaked sky, she’s momentarily confused because is it really falling? That just doesn’t happen. She’s watched them enough to know.
She’s shocked into motion, and hides in a nearby ruin as it hits the ground, struggling. It’s fascinating, confusing - it looks as though it’s been caught up in something. But that of course doesn’t make any sense. What would tangle a dragon’s wings in midair? It turns in the mud, and screams, and Veronica catches a glimpse of metal.
What the hell?
And then the sound pierces the air, and she hugs the ground in a panic. It’s like something from a distant memory, and Veronica struggles to place it - wood cracking in a fire? machine gun shots? no - it’s --
It’s a helicopter. The rain that splatters across her face is ignored as she stares at the sky in nothing short of awe. There’s no way. Just no way. Nothing could survive in the air, with the dragons -
There’s just no way.
But it’s swooping back and hovering over the fallen dragon, even as scattered parachutists land heavily in the mud, and Veronica has to force herself to believe it. The men on the ground move towards the dragon with precision steps, and she watches as they fasten things to the metal net (and it is a net) that holds the beast’s wings in place. It continues to struggle but makes less progress, roaring in frustration, a tiger brought low by ants.
She catches snippets of rain-choked dialogue:
”It’s hell and a half down here, Alex, rain’s not making it easy --”
“Watch him, watch that tail, he’s pissed!”
“Where’re the others? They should be here. Van Zant should be --”
“-- or the rain, would’ve made it hard to figure exactly where --”
“-- soon, I can hear the engines.”
And it’s true, something’s approaching - she can’t tell what but she can say for certain that it’s big. The ground shakes beneath her knees. On the air, despite the rain, there’s the scent of engine-smoke, and it’s been so long that Veronica drinks it in like perfume.
In the next moment, to her surprise, a convoy of military-style jeeps comes over the ridge, followed by... is that a tank? The wet doesn’t even slow them. They quickly surround the dragon, which barks and attempts to spit smoke, but it’s bound too low, too tightly, and it can’t get in a proper breath. And then it’s guns, rifles, body armor, dozens of men all pouring out of the vehicles, their weapons trained on the dragon. But they don’t fire.
“Come on, what are you waiting for?” Veronica whispers to herself, her white-knuckled fists clenched tight. “If you can kill it, then kill it, you bastards.” But at the same time she knows that this is stupid. If bullets could stop them, they’d have been dead long ago.
The answer to her question comes at last as the door to the tank slowly opens. Through the curtains of rain she spies a burly, baldheaded man, chomping improbably on a cigar as he raises himself out of the vehicle, bringing behind him a massive, curved axe. He jumps down and signals, and other broad-shouldered men step forwards, not carrying guns this time but clubs, knives. Primitive but effective weapons.
The dragon is nearly mewling now, as if it knows what is about to happen.
The axe is raised - and someone steps in front of Veronica, obscuring her vision, but she’s able to hear the sound of the edge cutting the air, and the thick, painful crunch of metal meeting hide. Similar sounds follow, and by the time Veronica is able to see again the dragon is a mess of blood, its wings torn all to hell and its head split apart like a melon on the pavement.
No one even cheers.
The axe-wielding man growls orders, his voice deep and carrying: “Fine. We’ll set up here for the night. Make use of anything you can find.” The men begin to scatter, retuning to their jeeps to replace their guns with metal boxes and canvas bags, but their apparent leader continues to shout, looking upwards. “Alex! Can you see a place to set down?”
“Just behind those ruins,” replies a booming female voice, and it takes Veronica a moment to understand that it’s coming from the helicopter. “Looks flat enough. She’ll need to be cleaned and tarped tonight, Van Zant.”
Veronica quickly commits the name to memory as the man nods and waves the helicopter on. His movements, she notices, are practiced, fluid, measured, as though he is taking stock of every bit of energy used, and aiming for peak efficiency. He’s not unlike a machine, she imagines, and the curl of smoke from his cigar gives the impression that he’s powered by steam.
This man killed a dragon and didn’t even blink, she thinks. And she knows immediately that she’s found her hope.
+++
Half of an hour later she’s in one of their makeshift half-tents, protected from the rain by a mixture of tarps and half-fallen brick walls. There’s a fire before her and she’s eating food, real food, hard bread and bits of apple and fresh, clean water.
The meal is not a gesture of trust, it is a repayment. When Veronica approached the camp a nervous sentry had taken a few shots in her direction; it’s lucky that she’s a skinny little thing inside many layers of stolen clothing, or it might be her stomach with a hole in it instead of her coat. So she’s fed, in part as a gesture of apology, and in part because when she lifted her dirty satchel and told Van Zant, “I know how to kill them all,” he’d been curious.
There are others in the tent, watching her with a mixture of mistrust and pity - Alex, the helicopter woman, the only other female Veronica’s seen so far; a soldier man in worn camo-print clothing called ‘Daly’ by the others, who keeps touching his gun; a large black man who set down a parachute pack when he entered, whose name Veronica does not yet know.
And Van Zant.
She can tell what they all feel towards her except for him. He sits with his face half in shadow, half in firelight and doesn’t say much. There’s something about him, the way his skin is too dark but his eyes too bright, that doesn’t look quite normal. It would be unsettling even if Veronica hadn’t just seen him slaughter a dragon.
“Tell your tale, little girl,” Daly tells her at last. He’s clearly impatient and he shows the most blatant distrust towards her. She watches his hand move towards the stock of his gun, and away again.
Veronica leans back, slowly. There’s one piece of apple left on her plate but she leaves it, in a clear gesture. She’s starving, but she’s not desperate.
“Have you ever cut one apart, after you’ve killed it?”
Daly laughs dismissively, the parachutist tells her, “We cut them up plenty.”
She turns towards him, gestures. “But surgically. Analytically. To figure them out.” When no one replies she continues. “I’m not surprised. It’s not easy.”
“You’ve killed --?” Alex interrupts, looking surprised.
Veronica shakes her head, and sighs. “Oh, yes. I keep my tank in my other pants. No. They die, sometimes. They get sick, they fight, they hurt themselves, they die. I’m patient. Good thing is, you have one dead, you keep the others away - but you know that already. That’s why you’re camping here.” She pauses, collects herself, continues. “So I’ve cut them up before, yes. And I’ll tell you something for certain: I’ve never seen a male. Ever.”
Daly mutters some crude joke beneath his breath but the air is tense, and he’s the only one who even grins.
“They don’t reproduce like us, not even close. From what I know, there are only a few males. Maybe half a dozen worldwide. But they’re big, very big, and they travel, much more so than the females. When one meets a female it fertilizes a litter of eggs, all at once. Big enough nest, that could be hundreds, thousands at once. That’s how they spread so fast.”
The parachutist looks at her in suspicious awe. “How the hell did you figure that out?”
Veronica nods to him, and reaches for her satchel. Daly moves for his gun again, but at this point she doesn’t care. She’s already been shot at once today.
“You could say I was lucky. I started out in California. Took a long while before they really got to us. We had newspapers, radio, much longer than the rest of the world. So I was able to watch how it all unfolded.” There’s a low, flat rock, near the fire, and she lays out a well-worn map of the world over top of it. It’s crisscrossed with red lines, handwritten notes, comments from herself to herself. Here and there, there are points and stars, marked boldly, perhaps one per continent. She taps one such point, right over London.
“We know they started here, and spread from here. I guarantee one of the first, maybe even the first, was male. That took Europe. Then south, through Africa, and east. They took China very, very easily: that was the second male, here, in the north. It took a while for them to make it across the Atlantic - that’s not a flight that a normal dragon can make. But I think one leapfrogged eventually. There was a lot of activity there eventually, the Navy sent boats to launch bombers to help in Africa and I think it made it across by taking out those as it went. So, we’ve got one in Brazil. South America, and then up the coast, through Mexico, Texas, up through the eastern states. It slowed for a year or two, which is how long I expect it took a male to mature, this time in New York.”
She looks at Van Zant, but his eyes are on the map, not on her, and it’s hard to tell if he’s even listening. She continues talking regardless.
“From there, North America was just done, gone. Now there are nests everywhere.”
There’s a long silence. Veronica wonders if that was too much, too fast, but it’s too late now. This was a gamble, after all, and there’s no point in gambling if you’re not going to go all in.
Finally, Alex cautiously asks, “So, what do we do with this information?”
“London.” Veronica glances at them all, one by one. “We go to London.”
“And how do you propose we get there?” Daly laughs. “By swimming?”
“Boat would be good,” she says, guardedly, “Plane would be better.”
“I can’t believe I’m hearing this...”
The big parachutist interjects, “Why London? Why there? Why not New York, or Brazil?”
Veronica starts to answer, then stops to cough. She hasn’t spoken this much in years, and the effort tickles her throat and dries her mouth, but she knows better than to ask for water. Finally, “It’s been twenty years since they emerged there. And they really did explode in London, and all over Europe. The Isles in particular. Too much, too fast, I think. I remember one of the theories, before the radio went down, was that the reason they’d been hibernating before was that they’d burned themselves out, as it were, and they decided to sleep until the world repopulated itself.” Self-consciously rubbing her forehead, she adds, “In London they must be close to done, by now. Closer than anywhere else, anyway. They’re going to be desperate, worn thin. If we kill that male and take care to destroy any nests we can, we could take it back from them. Start over, there.”
“But there’s nothing left, over there,” Alex points out.
“Exactly. That’s why this is going to work. They’ve got nothing left to live off of. They’re weak, and that’s because they’re not like us. They can’t plant gardens or keep herds of cattle. We can take it back, bit by bit. It’s not going to be easy, but it’s doable.”
A long silence follows this proclamation, as though it takes a very long time for the very idea to percolate through all of their heads - which it very likely does. Veronica keeps her eyes down, waiting, trying to be as patient as possible.
Finally, a low grumbling voice asks,
“How’re we going to get a plane?”
And it takes Veronica a minute to even realize it’s Van Zant.
“I’m - not entirely certain. I was thinking maybe from a military installation, some place where planes would be kept indoors. We’d need something big, but fast.” She gives him a hesitant glance. “I get the feeling you’d know more about this than I do.”
He makes a noise that doesn’t mean anything, as far as she can tell, and leans forward. Shadows creep over his face, revealing cheeks, chin, brow, lips. “You any good with a gun?”
Sheepish, Veronica shakes her head. “I could probably hit the broad side of a barn, if I stood five feet away.”
Van Zant frowns and Daly interjects, “She’s not going to be any use to us, then. Not that we even need her if we have her plans -”
Stupid, stupid, but it would be hard to say a moment later who fit that title better, as Veronica gets to her feet and in one quick movement throws all of her notes - all of her books and bits of found paper and napkins and old yellow photographs - into the fire.
“- Bitch!” And Daly is standing too, but he’s helpless, the paper’s dry like so much kindling and the fire has lapped it up like a drowning man welcomes the shore. There’s nothing to be done, by any of them.
Veronica feels lightheaded.
Calmly, as though nothing had happened, Van Zant asks, “You any good with computers?”
Feeling as though every muscle in her body might snap with nervous, giddy tension, Veronica shrugs. “Haven’t seen many in the past ten years. But I learn pretty quick.”
“Then you can help Rogers on the radio,” Van Zant says, his voice raising slightly just for a moment to stop any of Daly’s complaints.
Veronica just nods, trying so hard to listen even as she watches the last fifteen years of her life go up into smoke. Funny, she’d always taken so much care to keep her things away from fire.
“But you better rewrite those notes,” Van Zant adds. “We’ll need them when you die.”
+++
That’s something Veronica learns quickly about Van Zant. He doesn’t like to think in terms of ‘if’, just ‘when’. It’s always, when we make it through the night, when we make that shot, when we kill the last of them.
A few months later, when she knows him a bit better, she asks, “But what are you going to do when they’re all gone?”
“Get shitfaced,” he grunts, “Kiss a beautiful woman. Sleep in a bed with a proper pillow.”
“But after that,” she persists. “A week later, a month. A year.”
Van Zant stubs out his cigar, and does not answer.
+++
“They’re living in there. They’re not leaving.”
She sits hunched and watches as Van Zant receives the news from a nervous young grunt. Must have been barely five before the burning times started, Veronica decides, taking in the lines of his face. He has so much hope in his eyes, carefully buried but still shining much too brightly.
“There’s only one that might work, in there?” Van Zant asks. “There isn’t another that we could use instead?”
The boy shakes his head.
To one side, with her second collection of notebooks before her, Veronica waits and examines Van Zant. As ever he is hard to read.
“We really need that plane,” she says eventually, her voice low but insistent.
She immediately realizes that it was the wrong thing to say; Van Zant turns towards her so violently that she flinches. “Mars. Get Rogers, get to the radio. If we’re going to do this we’re going to do it right.”
He leaves, and the boy follows, and Veronica starts to worry.
+++
”We’re moving in.”
“Confirmed.”
Veronica pulls the van doors shut behind her to block out unwelcome noise. Rogers is already in action, and Veronica quickly grabs her own low-backed chair to face the wall of readouts and calculated maps opposite his.
“How we doing?” she asks, catching her breath. When Van Zant tells you to do something, you do it yesterday.
Rogers shakes his head, causing headphone wires to dance around his face and neck. “Just started, Alpha’s moving in to the hangar through a back door. Sky team’s going to try for the roof. Not sure how much use the maps will be but you stick on them, Mars. Alright?”
Veronica nods and clips in: headset, mouthpiece, all radio connections active. Everything’s green.
The transmissions come in, short and clipped, military lingo, often overlapping, cutting each other off. Four squads on the ground with three teams each, one team in the sky, and two more squads for backup. This is a full operation, and quite different from fighting a dragon. It’s not clockwork here, it’s effort, dangerous work, it’s fighting people.
Their only advantage is surprise.
Only five minutes in and shots are fired. They can be heard even inside the van, and their suddenness makes Veronica look up, as if she could see through the thick walls; she knows that if she received no warning, here on the listening end of everything, then something’s wrong. And indeed -
“They’re shooting at us. They’ve spotted us!”
It’s from the man she now knows as Gideon, on the flyer team, and that’s bad news: they can’t afford to loose flyers or parachutes, and they certainly can’t afford to lose the helicopter.
“Shit,” says Rogers, somewhere, and Veronica’s already turning on her own mic.
“Alpha team, can you spot the aggressors?”
A hesitation, silence on the comm. Veronica knows better than to tell them to hurry up. “Negative. We’re splitting. Tell Gideon to watch his ass.”
The leader of Bravo speaks up, immediately after: “We’re in, I can see them. Wait - shit - Alpha-two, watch it, they’re on the catwalks, they’re right above --”
Scattered gunfire, this time while the connection is still active, loud enough to force the volume maximums on Veronica’s headphones. She cries out and pulls them away from her ears for a moment, which was, as Rogers told her on the first day, the number one thing that you just don’t do. But he’s doing his own job, tracking the verticals and keeping in touch with both Van Zant and Alex, and he doesn’t notice.
It’s less than five seconds that the headphones are off but when Veronica puts them back on someone’s already screaming, “For God’s sake, tell Charlie to pull back!” and three of the signals on Alpha-two are registering static.
“Charlie squad, stop whatever the hell it is you’re doing and pull back!” she tells them urgently, reopening all the channels.
But it’s too late: more gunfire, and four, five more signals die.
“Asleep at the fucking wheel--!” the leader of Bravo-one curses, even as other voices pour in. They’re everywhere, they saw us coming, they’re better armed than we thought, we’re dying.
Signals are flatlining left and right, pulses dying like it’s the plague in there, and all she can do is watch and think, Just keep going, just a little further, we need that plane! But they should have guessed, she should have guessed. People have so little these days, anything they manage to grab they cling to with their lives.
She shakes her head and realizes, Van Zant knew.
And she takes the reports and makes her own maps of the hangar and changes them on the fly, and tries to get control of everything, but she can’t, just can’t. No matter where she tells them to go, the plane-people get there first, or get there fiercer. And the soldiers alternate between barking orders at each other and cursing her name and her plan and her existence. Despite her efforts, they just keep dying.
Rogers nudges her, hard, from behind, and she realizes that he’d been trying to get her attention for some time, though she just didn’t notice. “What?”
“Van Zant says, patch him through.”
“What?”
He doesn’t bother repeating it again, just leans across her and her equipment board and pulls out her headset, pushing a different wire into the jack in its place. And that’s that. She’s been replaced.
“You’re set, Van Zant,” Rogers says through his mic even as his boyish eyes give her a warning look. That’s the breaks. Don’t do anything stupid.
None of this stops Veronica from slamming the door in frustration as she leaves.
+++
It’s a long wait, out of the loop and in the dark. Distant noises could just as easily be shots as thunder.
Veronica sits hunched over her notes until the fabric of her tent is viciously perforated with bullets which shatter the candle-lamp by her side; after that she huddles in a corner with her knees tucked to her chest and watches the fading beams of sunlight as they cut like knives through the bullet-holes. Anxiousness rests heavy in her stomach, and too often she feels her mouth suddenly fill with saliva, a precursor to the vomit that she forces back down. She feels ashamed, but isn’t quite sure why. Because people are dying on behalf of her plan? Or because, for the first time in almost twenty years, she’s experiencing regret?
She finds herself wishing Lilly were alive, as if Lilly would know how to deal with this.
+++
At some point it must be that she drifts off, because she wakes to find Daly throwing something in her face. It’s chains, metal - for one paranoid moment she thinks it’s knives he’s tossed at her, and throws up her hands to protect her face.
“We’re out there dying and you’re in here, asleep? Bitch.”
He turns away from her and violently flips the table, sending paper and lamp-glass scattering across the floor, just as Alex enters the tent. She looks weary and drawn, and has little energy to do much but tsk and sidestep the fallen glass.
Veronica glances down at the things Daly tossed at her, picking up one smooth shape of metal and running her finger over the indentations on it, noticing at last it’s a dog tag. There are dozens of them, with names she knows and names she doesn’t, some of them still spotted in blood. Feeling ill, she struggles to her feet and moves to pull them all off of her, shaking them off of her fingers and wrists and pulling the chains out of her hair, grabbing one where it had fallen into her lapel pocket. She leaves them where they fall; they’re too eerie, a little net of death, signs of guilt from ghosts.
“Is it over?” she asks, looking more at Alex than at Daly, which is just as well because Daly isn’t meeting her eyes.
“It’s over,” Alex confirms.
The tent flap opens again and it’s Van Zant this time, looking grim. “Forty-eight. They were forty-eight, maybe more if some ran. They took us nearly two to one.”
Daly laughs, bitterly. “But it’s worth it, right? Because now we’ve got a plane full of bullet holes with only two engines. That was the plan, wasn’t it?”
And he spits at Veronica, but just as suddenly Van Zant is there, his hands clutching Daly’s collar, nearly lifting him off the ground.
“Ain’t your decision,” he hisses, his syllables clipped. “Never was, never will be. But you got issues, you take them up with me. I lead, here. And you follow. Got it?”
It takes some shaking, but Daly eventually mutters something like consent, and lurks away, leaving the tent in a quieted rage. Just as soon as he’s gone, Veronica opens her mouth to express her thanks, but Van Zant turns on her, too.
“Don’t even say anything. This better goddamn well work, Mars. Or we’re all dead.”
She says nothing. After some time it’s just her and Alex, neither of them speaking. Alex bends and picks up the dog tags, one by one, still lying where Veronica shook them off. She takes them and untangles them and holds them close and proper, and when she’s got them all, she leaves, too.
+++
It does work, eventually.
They don’t have the fuel to really test it. It’s an all-or-nothing shot, waking at the crack of dawn when the light’s good for confusing the dragons. They load everything, everyone, they get on board, they hold their breath.
And even though it’s close, the plane takes off.
Veronica sits apart from the others and watches out one of the few windows that remains intact, not welded over. The ground slips away behind them, becomes nothing but a patchwork of old roads and ashen buildings. Eventually it becomes the sea. And then after that, it’s clouds, just endless grey, like smoke in your eyes.
This is her story.
Note: I went pretty insane with this. I haven't written anything this long that hasn't been for school since way back, when I was big into doing Discworld fic under a really embarassing screenname. Good times. Anyway, just be prepared when you click, because the whole thing is about 6500 words, and my fic skills are probably also a little rusty.
Also, yay! I finally get to use my RoF icons.
(Before.)
It had started in London, of course. They’d known that much for years. But while it was still early on - and early on lasted for half a decade or more - they still had hope that it wouldn’t really spread.
Later on, Veronica would muse how ironic it was that the common name for them came along long before the scientists figured it out. But it was just obvious, wasn’t it? Something in the collective unconscious, a codeword for wings and screeching and fire from above.
Dragons.
Early on, the American President offered reassuring statements often on the news, always reassuring. The army was receiving special training; marine strike troops were learning to work with new weapons, new methods; the threat would be dealt with soon enough.
That was probably why no one in Neptune was very concerned. There were jokes, new slang, colloquialisms, but no real sense of worry. London, after all, was a long way away from California. It was a sign of the times that Dick Casablancas began referring to masturbation as “choking the dragon”. And there were certainly no plans to put homecoming on hold.
That night, Lilly was fabulous and Logan was witty and Duncan was charming, and Veronica sipped too much champagne and confessed to never having gone skinny dipping in the ocean. They laughed and joked and never really got to the dance, in the end - though the time they spent on the beach was really much more worth it, because it didn’t have crepe paper but oh, did it ever have stars. When they returned, chilly from the ocean air, to the limo, they joked about the driver, who’d fallen asleep, hat over his nose.
They never suspected anything.
It came in the night, almost silent, just as Veronica was mentioning how much trouble they’d be in if their parents found out that they’d skipped the dance in favour of getting drunk and playing ‘never have I ever’ by the shore. The only warning was a fast-moving flash of orange - left windows, skylight, right windows - and then the treeline, not twenty feet away, burst into flame.
Logan summed it up perfectly: “What the fuck?”
A shadow, then, across the moon, but none of them put it together, none of them suspected.
“Forest fire?” Lilly asked no one in particular.
Duncan held Veronica closer.
Rapping urgently on the glass, Logan tried to wake the driver. It wasn’t a joke anymore. “Hey! Get us out of here. There’s a fire!”
That the privacy glass was up was probably the only thing that saved their lives, as the next burst of fire spat directly through the windshield.
Screams, confusion. The driver didn’t even wake before he burned to ash. The glass bent, warped, bubbling and curving towards them before shattering and spattering them with hot molten drops.
“Out. OUT!” The upholstery was alight, the minibar was alight - Veronica shoved the others out into the night air, suddenly full of smoke - Lilly’s dress was alight. Logan put that one out with his suit jacket, and held her to calm her. They ran and stumbled, pushing each other, making as much distance as possible between themselves and the limo.
It was everywhere and nowhere, nothing but wings and fear, lost in the smoke and the dark. Veronica couldn’t tell if there were many or just one, and try as she might, she couldn’t get a fix on its direction. When she looked towards the fire it dazzled her eyes, but when she turned back towards the dark she found the brightness of the flames had ruined her night vision.
“We’re out in the open,” Duncan said, with a note of panic. “It could fly down at any minute and --”
“Shut it, Donut!” Lilly cut across him, venomously. “It’s not one of them. It’s not. They haven’t been spotted anywhere near here yet, there’s no way it --”
“It doesn’t matter,” Veronica said, her eyes squinting into the smoke. “Whatever’s going on, we’re not safe here.”
She took Duncan’s hand and squeezed it, for support, and they turned to run up the road. But it landed in front of them. There was no more debate. Definitely a dragon.
It inhaled.
Surrounded on three sides: burning trees, car on fire, dragon - Duncan made for the only remaining option, and pulled Veronica towards the sea. She allowed herself to be dragged from the road, her feet sinking into the sand of the beach, too filled with panic to be able to let herself stumble or hesitate. And then there was heat, intense and overpowering, pressing at her back and throwing her to the ground. It felt as though she had turned about-face to the sun.
In the lull that followed all she could feel was a sharp ringing in her ears, and then footsteps and sand flying up next to her face. She glanced up. Logan was ablaze. He threw himself into the water.
Duncan forced himself to his feet and ran to help his friend, but Veronica could barely move. She twisted in the sand, wincing at the crackling of skin that came from her arms and back, and glanced back over her shoulder.
Lilly was almost beautiful, like the heart of a star. Like an angel, dazzlingly bright. She didn’t scream, didn’t cry out - she simply stood there as the flames crawled over her dress, over her skin and hair - as through showing off, she lifted her arms. Beautiful, like a flower in the sun. She reached towards Veronica, her expression eerily calm.
The dragon breathed fire once again.
Veronica blacked out, and remembered no more.
+++
(After.)
“The question is not, ‘who killed Lilly Kane?’. The question is what. The question is, why?”
They regard her dispassionately.
“I don’t believe any of you truly understand what it is you’re facing.” Her eyes dart around the room, resting for a moment on the visage of each man at the shadowy table. “There are no coincidences, here.”
One of them, one she knows as a chemist, nods at the guard holding her arm, to let her go. She pulls away from him.
The chemist speaks: “Miss...”
“Mars. Veronica Mars.”
“Miss Mars. I’m told you managed to successfully impersonate our security personnel in order to break into this meeting. That shows me that you’re quite intelligent, and I do admire you for it. But I think the question we have before us today is a little out of your league.”
“You’re planning on nuking them, right?”
Another man, this one in a military uniform she can’t quite identify, makes a dismissive sound.
She persists. “You are, aren’t you? It’s not going to work!”
A muttered voice - she only catches the word ‘disarmament’ - and then some quiet, cruel snickering.
“Have you been out there?” Another short laugh from one of the powerful men, and her fist hits the metal table. In such a small space, the sound echoes. “Have you? Of course not! You’ve been safe in your bunkers, in your shelters, in your isolated homes near the arctic. D’you know what they do, after they burn a city down?”
No response, from the men.
“They eat it. They go through, and chew up all the ash. It’s food to them, it’s candy. A nuclear strike is going to be like an all-you can eat buffet!”
The military man mutters, “Can’t eat if they’re dead.”
“If you’re not going to hit the whole world at once,” Veronica snarls, “then don’t even bother. You should know how fast they can travel, how fast they can spread.”
“Maybe we will nuke the whole world at once.”
She stares at him, jaw slack in shock. “You’re insane!”
“I think that’s quite enough,” says a third man, getting to his feet and nodding to the guard. “Thank you for your suggestions, Miss Mars.”
Her arm is taken again - but she notices the chemist frowning, and points.
“You know there’s something to what I’m saying. You know I’m right!”
The chemist opens his mouth to speak, but the other man cuts in first. “Please escort Miss Mars outside.”
+++
Later, in the shelter, she falls onto the couch next to Logan.
“They mentioned you on the radio today,” he tells her.
“Saying good things, I hope.”
He kisses her forehead. “Don’t they always?” After a pause, he adds, “I believe their exact words were, ’violent, crazed anti-nuclear radical’. Did you taser someone again, sweetie?”
Veronica pulls a face and holds up her fingers, her thumb and index finger an inch apart. “Maybe just a little?”
“That’s my girl.” Putting an arm around her shoulders, he says, “Though I’d miss you if they threw you in jail.”
“Good thing there’s no such thing, anymore.”
“I’m guessing the meeting didn’t go to well.”
She sighs, and leans her head against his shoulder. His sweater is rough and itchy and smells of smoke, but she doesn’t mind. “What was your first clue?”
“The pouting.” His fingers brush her scarred back.
“:I’m not pouting.”
“Of course not. You just have a lip... thing.”
Veronica turns to face him. “You know this is serious, right? They’re going to start dropping bombs on the United States, not to mention who knows where else. They think it’s going to solve things.”
Logan doesn’t answer for a moment, and she stares at him, startled.
“You don’t believe me.”
“No!” he insists, quickly. “I mean. Well. It’s just kind of hard to argue with the fact that nuclear weapons are really good at killing things. How can you be sure that --”
She pushes away from him, getting to her feet. “I can’t believe I’m hearing this from you! You saw them murder Lilly -”
“Are you still insisting that? They’re just animals, it wasn’t murder --”
“You’ve seen my pictures! You know that I’ve been out there, watching them --”
“Yeah, and I kind of wish you wouldn’t do that!” Logan leans forward in his seat, cupping her hand in his folded palms. “Every time you go out there you take more and more risks, Veronica. How close were you to this last one? How long were you pinned down in those ruins when it decided to eat instead of sleeping? I’m worried that one of these days, you’re not going to come back.”
Veronica’s shock quickly shifts to anger; she pulls her hand away. “I know what I’m doing.”
“I never said you didn’t - Jesus!” He stands, reaching out after her as she retreats from him. “Veronica.”
Without turning back, she spits, “I’ll be in the darkroom.”
When the door is closed behind her, she flicks on the red light, letting her eyes adjust. In a moment she’s surrounded by dragons: in flight, eating, resting, sleeping, tending their eggs. Their images are suspended from the clotheslines that crisscross over her head. She inhales, and the chemical scent is somehow less thick than the atmosphere she’d just left behind.
“I’m going ‘shopping,’” Logan shouts from the next room, and she can practically see him making the air quotes. “We’re out of matches.”
“Fine,” she calls back.
She never sees him again.
+++
Ironically, in the end it’s the bombs that show her the way.
Nuclear winter, however, makes it difficult for her to act upon her theories.
+++
The years pass, and the days grow darker and colder, even in July. The world becomes an increasingly empty place for Veronica, who in time runs out of film, and runs low on food, and is forced to leave her shelter. Even wandering from place to place she rarely sees anyone, and when she does she stays clear, since people are protective of anything they have, these days.
But there are advantages to being alone. It’s harder to be spotted in a group of one, easier to hide. She requires only the smallest living spaces, and if things get dangerous it is all too simple for her to pack up and leave. She is self-sufficient, in a way, scavenging for most of her food, learning tricks like knowing which bugs are alright to eat. On one occasion, after a day of watching the beasts fight over territory, she even has the fortuity to eat a dragon’s egg.
In a folder, she compiles her notes, written on paper and napkins and in the margins of old books that she finds. Her photographs slowly turn yellow but she keeps them, pouring over them for hours at a time, in case they hold a further clue she has not yet uncovered.
By the time it all changes, Veronica does not know how old she is, or how long she has been living this way. Clocks have stopped and calendars are long since out of print. Numbers are used to measure how many, how soon, how bad, and little more.
Despite it all, however, Veronica remains remarkably sane. At night she dreams of Lilly, of Duncan, of Logan; she remembers the night on the beach before it all went wrong, and in her sleep she promises them all that she’ll solve it all someday. She’ll get them justice.
+++
One day Veronica is very nearly crushed by a dragon.
It’s not because she’s not paying attention (because she is) but rather because when she sees it falling from the rain-streaked sky, she’s momentarily confused because is it really falling? That just doesn’t happen. She’s watched them enough to know.
She’s shocked into motion, and hides in a nearby ruin as it hits the ground, struggling. It’s fascinating, confusing - it looks as though it’s been caught up in something. But that of course doesn’t make any sense. What would tangle a dragon’s wings in midair? It turns in the mud, and screams, and Veronica catches a glimpse of metal.
What the hell?
And then the sound pierces the air, and she hugs the ground in a panic. It’s like something from a distant memory, and Veronica struggles to place it - wood cracking in a fire? machine gun shots? no - it’s --
It’s a helicopter. The rain that splatters across her face is ignored as she stares at the sky in nothing short of awe. There’s no way. Just no way. Nothing could survive in the air, with the dragons -
There’s just no way.
But it’s swooping back and hovering over the fallen dragon, even as scattered parachutists land heavily in the mud, and Veronica has to force herself to believe it. The men on the ground move towards the dragon with precision steps, and she watches as they fasten things to the metal net (and it is a net) that holds the beast’s wings in place. It continues to struggle but makes less progress, roaring in frustration, a tiger brought low by ants.
She catches snippets of rain-choked dialogue:
”It’s hell and a half down here, Alex, rain’s not making it easy --”
“Watch him, watch that tail, he’s pissed!”
“Where’re the others? They should be here. Van Zant should be --”
“-- or the rain, would’ve made it hard to figure exactly where --”
“-- soon, I can hear the engines.”
And it’s true, something’s approaching - she can’t tell what but she can say for certain that it’s big. The ground shakes beneath her knees. On the air, despite the rain, there’s the scent of engine-smoke, and it’s been so long that Veronica drinks it in like perfume.
In the next moment, to her surprise, a convoy of military-style jeeps comes over the ridge, followed by... is that a tank? The wet doesn’t even slow them. They quickly surround the dragon, which barks and attempts to spit smoke, but it’s bound too low, too tightly, and it can’t get in a proper breath. And then it’s guns, rifles, body armor, dozens of men all pouring out of the vehicles, their weapons trained on the dragon. But they don’t fire.
“Come on, what are you waiting for?” Veronica whispers to herself, her white-knuckled fists clenched tight. “If you can kill it, then kill it, you bastards.” But at the same time she knows that this is stupid. If bullets could stop them, they’d have been dead long ago.
The answer to her question comes at last as the door to the tank slowly opens. Through the curtains of rain she spies a burly, baldheaded man, chomping improbably on a cigar as he raises himself out of the vehicle, bringing behind him a massive, curved axe. He jumps down and signals, and other broad-shouldered men step forwards, not carrying guns this time but clubs, knives. Primitive but effective weapons.
The dragon is nearly mewling now, as if it knows what is about to happen.
The axe is raised - and someone steps in front of Veronica, obscuring her vision, but she’s able to hear the sound of the edge cutting the air, and the thick, painful crunch of metal meeting hide. Similar sounds follow, and by the time Veronica is able to see again the dragon is a mess of blood, its wings torn all to hell and its head split apart like a melon on the pavement.
No one even cheers.
The axe-wielding man growls orders, his voice deep and carrying: “Fine. We’ll set up here for the night. Make use of anything you can find.” The men begin to scatter, retuning to their jeeps to replace their guns with metal boxes and canvas bags, but their apparent leader continues to shout, looking upwards. “Alex! Can you see a place to set down?”
“Just behind those ruins,” replies a booming female voice, and it takes Veronica a moment to understand that it’s coming from the helicopter. “Looks flat enough. She’ll need to be cleaned and tarped tonight, Van Zant.”
Veronica quickly commits the name to memory as the man nods and waves the helicopter on. His movements, she notices, are practiced, fluid, measured, as though he is taking stock of every bit of energy used, and aiming for peak efficiency. He’s not unlike a machine, she imagines, and the curl of smoke from his cigar gives the impression that he’s powered by steam.
This man killed a dragon and didn’t even blink, she thinks. And she knows immediately that she’s found her hope.
+++
Half of an hour later she’s in one of their makeshift half-tents, protected from the rain by a mixture of tarps and half-fallen brick walls. There’s a fire before her and she’s eating food, real food, hard bread and bits of apple and fresh, clean water.
The meal is not a gesture of trust, it is a repayment. When Veronica approached the camp a nervous sentry had taken a few shots in her direction; it’s lucky that she’s a skinny little thing inside many layers of stolen clothing, or it might be her stomach with a hole in it instead of her coat. So she’s fed, in part as a gesture of apology, and in part because when she lifted her dirty satchel and told Van Zant, “I know how to kill them all,” he’d been curious.
There are others in the tent, watching her with a mixture of mistrust and pity - Alex, the helicopter woman, the only other female Veronica’s seen so far; a soldier man in worn camo-print clothing called ‘Daly’ by the others, who keeps touching his gun; a large black man who set down a parachute pack when he entered, whose name Veronica does not yet know.
And Van Zant.
She can tell what they all feel towards her except for him. He sits with his face half in shadow, half in firelight and doesn’t say much. There’s something about him, the way his skin is too dark but his eyes too bright, that doesn’t look quite normal. It would be unsettling even if Veronica hadn’t just seen him slaughter a dragon.
“Tell your tale, little girl,” Daly tells her at last. He’s clearly impatient and he shows the most blatant distrust towards her. She watches his hand move towards the stock of his gun, and away again.
Veronica leans back, slowly. There’s one piece of apple left on her plate but she leaves it, in a clear gesture. She’s starving, but she’s not desperate.
“Have you ever cut one apart, after you’ve killed it?”
Daly laughs dismissively, the parachutist tells her, “We cut them up plenty.”
She turns towards him, gestures. “But surgically. Analytically. To figure them out.” When no one replies she continues. “I’m not surprised. It’s not easy.”
“You’ve killed --?” Alex interrupts, looking surprised.
Veronica shakes her head, and sighs. “Oh, yes. I keep my tank in my other pants. No. They die, sometimes. They get sick, they fight, they hurt themselves, they die. I’m patient. Good thing is, you have one dead, you keep the others away - but you know that already. That’s why you’re camping here.” She pauses, collects herself, continues. “So I’ve cut them up before, yes. And I’ll tell you something for certain: I’ve never seen a male. Ever.”
Daly mutters some crude joke beneath his breath but the air is tense, and he’s the only one who even grins.
“They don’t reproduce like us, not even close. From what I know, there are only a few males. Maybe half a dozen worldwide. But they’re big, very big, and they travel, much more so than the females. When one meets a female it fertilizes a litter of eggs, all at once. Big enough nest, that could be hundreds, thousands at once. That’s how they spread so fast.”
The parachutist looks at her in suspicious awe. “How the hell did you figure that out?”
Veronica nods to him, and reaches for her satchel. Daly moves for his gun again, but at this point she doesn’t care. She’s already been shot at once today.
“You could say I was lucky. I started out in California. Took a long while before they really got to us. We had newspapers, radio, much longer than the rest of the world. So I was able to watch how it all unfolded.” There’s a low, flat rock, near the fire, and she lays out a well-worn map of the world over top of it. It’s crisscrossed with red lines, handwritten notes, comments from herself to herself. Here and there, there are points and stars, marked boldly, perhaps one per continent. She taps one such point, right over London.
“We know they started here, and spread from here. I guarantee one of the first, maybe even the first, was male. That took Europe. Then south, through Africa, and east. They took China very, very easily: that was the second male, here, in the north. It took a while for them to make it across the Atlantic - that’s not a flight that a normal dragon can make. But I think one leapfrogged eventually. There was a lot of activity there eventually, the Navy sent boats to launch bombers to help in Africa and I think it made it across by taking out those as it went. So, we’ve got one in Brazil. South America, and then up the coast, through Mexico, Texas, up through the eastern states. It slowed for a year or two, which is how long I expect it took a male to mature, this time in New York.”
She looks at Van Zant, but his eyes are on the map, not on her, and it’s hard to tell if he’s even listening. She continues talking regardless.
“From there, North America was just done, gone. Now there are nests everywhere.”
There’s a long silence. Veronica wonders if that was too much, too fast, but it’s too late now. This was a gamble, after all, and there’s no point in gambling if you’re not going to go all in.
Finally, Alex cautiously asks, “So, what do we do with this information?”
“London.” Veronica glances at them all, one by one. “We go to London.”
“And how do you propose we get there?” Daly laughs. “By swimming?”
“Boat would be good,” she says, guardedly, “Plane would be better.”
“I can’t believe I’m hearing this...”
The big parachutist interjects, “Why London? Why there? Why not New York, or Brazil?”
Veronica starts to answer, then stops to cough. She hasn’t spoken this much in years, and the effort tickles her throat and dries her mouth, but she knows better than to ask for water. Finally, “It’s been twenty years since they emerged there. And they really did explode in London, and all over Europe. The Isles in particular. Too much, too fast, I think. I remember one of the theories, before the radio went down, was that the reason they’d been hibernating before was that they’d burned themselves out, as it were, and they decided to sleep until the world repopulated itself.” Self-consciously rubbing her forehead, she adds, “In London they must be close to done, by now. Closer than anywhere else, anyway. They’re going to be desperate, worn thin. If we kill that male and take care to destroy any nests we can, we could take it back from them. Start over, there.”
“But there’s nothing left, over there,” Alex points out.
“Exactly. That’s why this is going to work. They’ve got nothing left to live off of. They’re weak, and that’s because they’re not like us. They can’t plant gardens or keep herds of cattle. We can take it back, bit by bit. It’s not going to be easy, but it’s doable.”
A long silence follows this proclamation, as though it takes a very long time for the very idea to percolate through all of their heads - which it very likely does. Veronica keeps her eyes down, waiting, trying to be as patient as possible.
Finally, a low grumbling voice asks,
“How’re we going to get a plane?”
And it takes Veronica a minute to even realize it’s Van Zant.
“I’m - not entirely certain. I was thinking maybe from a military installation, some place where planes would be kept indoors. We’d need something big, but fast.” She gives him a hesitant glance. “I get the feeling you’d know more about this than I do.”
He makes a noise that doesn’t mean anything, as far as she can tell, and leans forward. Shadows creep over his face, revealing cheeks, chin, brow, lips. “You any good with a gun?”
Sheepish, Veronica shakes her head. “I could probably hit the broad side of a barn, if I stood five feet away.”
Van Zant frowns and Daly interjects, “She’s not going to be any use to us, then. Not that we even need her if we have her plans -”
Stupid, stupid, but it would be hard to say a moment later who fit that title better, as Veronica gets to her feet and in one quick movement throws all of her notes - all of her books and bits of found paper and napkins and old yellow photographs - into the fire.
“- Bitch!” And Daly is standing too, but he’s helpless, the paper’s dry like so much kindling and the fire has lapped it up like a drowning man welcomes the shore. There’s nothing to be done, by any of them.
Veronica feels lightheaded.
Calmly, as though nothing had happened, Van Zant asks, “You any good with computers?”
Feeling as though every muscle in her body might snap with nervous, giddy tension, Veronica shrugs. “Haven’t seen many in the past ten years. But I learn pretty quick.”
“Then you can help Rogers on the radio,” Van Zant says, his voice raising slightly just for a moment to stop any of Daly’s complaints.
Veronica just nods, trying so hard to listen even as she watches the last fifteen years of her life go up into smoke. Funny, she’d always taken so much care to keep her things away from fire.
“But you better rewrite those notes,” Van Zant adds. “We’ll need them when you die.”
+++
That’s something Veronica learns quickly about Van Zant. He doesn’t like to think in terms of ‘if’, just ‘when’. It’s always, when we make it through the night, when we make that shot, when we kill the last of them.
A few months later, when she knows him a bit better, she asks, “But what are you going to do when they’re all gone?”
“Get shitfaced,” he grunts, “Kiss a beautiful woman. Sleep in a bed with a proper pillow.”
“But after that,” she persists. “A week later, a month. A year.”
Van Zant stubs out his cigar, and does not answer.
+++
“They’re living in there. They’re not leaving.”
She sits hunched and watches as Van Zant receives the news from a nervous young grunt. Must have been barely five before the burning times started, Veronica decides, taking in the lines of his face. He has so much hope in his eyes, carefully buried but still shining much too brightly.
“There’s only one that might work, in there?” Van Zant asks. “There isn’t another that we could use instead?”
The boy shakes his head.
To one side, with her second collection of notebooks before her, Veronica waits and examines Van Zant. As ever he is hard to read.
“We really need that plane,” she says eventually, her voice low but insistent.
She immediately realizes that it was the wrong thing to say; Van Zant turns towards her so violently that she flinches. “Mars. Get Rogers, get to the radio. If we’re going to do this we’re going to do it right.”
He leaves, and the boy follows, and Veronica starts to worry.
+++
”We’re moving in.”
“Confirmed.”
Veronica pulls the van doors shut behind her to block out unwelcome noise. Rogers is already in action, and Veronica quickly grabs her own low-backed chair to face the wall of readouts and calculated maps opposite his.
“How we doing?” she asks, catching her breath. When Van Zant tells you to do something, you do it yesterday.
Rogers shakes his head, causing headphone wires to dance around his face and neck. “Just started, Alpha’s moving in to the hangar through a back door. Sky team’s going to try for the roof. Not sure how much use the maps will be but you stick on them, Mars. Alright?”
Veronica nods and clips in: headset, mouthpiece, all radio connections active. Everything’s green.
The transmissions come in, short and clipped, military lingo, often overlapping, cutting each other off. Four squads on the ground with three teams each, one team in the sky, and two more squads for backup. This is a full operation, and quite different from fighting a dragon. It’s not clockwork here, it’s effort, dangerous work, it’s fighting people.
Their only advantage is surprise.
Only five minutes in and shots are fired. They can be heard even inside the van, and their suddenness makes Veronica look up, as if she could see through the thick walls; she knows that if she received no warning, here on the listening end of everything, then something’s wrong. And indeed -
“They’re shooting at us. They’ve spotted us!”
It’s from the man she now knows as Gideon, on the flyer team, and that’s bad news: they can’t afford to loose flyers or parachutes, and they certainly can’t afford to lose the helicopter.
“Shit,” says Rogers, somewhere, and Veronica’s already turning on her own mic.
“Alpha team, can you spot the aggressors?”
A hesitation, silence on the comm. Veronica knows better than to tell them to hurry up. “Negative. We’re splitting. Tell Gideon to watch his ass.”
The leader of Bravo speaks up, immediately after: “We’re in, I can see them. Wait - shit - Alpha-two, watch it, they’re on the catwalks, they’re right above --”
Scattered gunfire, this time while the connection is still active, loud enough to force the volume maximums on Veronica’s headphones. She cries out and pulls them away from her ears for a moment, which was, as Rogers told her on the first day, the number one thing that you just don’t do. But he’s doing his own job, tracking the verticals and keeping in touch with both Van Zant and Alex, and he doesn’t notice.
It’s less than five seconds that the headphones are off but when Veronica puts them back on someone’s already screaming, “For God’s sake, tell Charlie to pull back!” and three of the signals on Alpha-two are registering static.
“Charlie squad, stop whatever the hell it is you’re doing and pull back!” she tells them urgently, reopening all the channels.
But it’s too late: more gunfire, and four, five more signals die.
“Asleep at the fucking wheel--!” the leader of Bravo-one curses, even as other voices pour in. They’re everywhere, they saw us coming, they’re better armed than we thought, we’re dying.
Signals are flatlining left and right, pulses dying like it’s the plague in there, and all she can do is watch and think, Just keep going, just a little further, we need that plane! But they should have guessed, she should have guessed. People have so little these days, anything they manage to grab they cling to with their lives.
She shakes her head and realizes, Van Zant knew.
And she takes the reports and makes her own maps of the hangar and changes them on the fly, and tries to get control of everything, but she can’t, just can’t. No matter where she tells them to go, the plane-people get there first, or get there fiercer. And the soldiers alternate between barking orders at each other and cursing her name and her plan and her existence. Despite her efforts, they just keep dying.
Rogers nudges her, hard, from behind, and she realizes that he’d been trying to get her attention for some time, though she just didn’t notice. “What?”
“Van Zant says, patch him through.”
“What?”
He doesn’t bother repeating it again, just leans across her and her equipment board and pulls out her headset, pushing a different wire into the jack in its place. And that’s that. She’s been replaced.
“You’re set, Van Zant,” Rogers says through his mic even as his boyish eyes give her a warning look. That’s the breaks. Don’t do anything stupid.
None of this stops Veronica from slamming the door in frustration as she leaves.
+++
It’s a long wait, out of the loop and in the dark. Distant noises could just as easily be shots as thunder.
Veronica sits hunched over her notes until the fabric of her tent is viciously perforated with bullets which shatter the candle-lamp by her side; after that she huddles in a corner with her knees tucked to her chest and watches the fading beams of sunlight as they cut like knives through the bullet-holes. Anxiousness rests heavy in her stomach, and too often she feels her mouth suddenly fill with saliva, a precursor to the vomit that she forces back down. She feels ashamed, but isn’t quite sure why. Because people are dying on behalf of her plan? Or because, for the first time in almost twenty years, she’s experiencing regret?
She finds herself wishing Lilly were alive, as if Lilly would know how to deal with this.
+++
At some point it must be that she drifts off, because she wakes to find Daly throwing something in her face. It’s chains, metal - for one paranoid moment she thinks it’s knives he’s tossed at her, and throws up her hands to protect her face.
“We’re out there dying and you’re in here, asleep? Bitch.”
He turns away from her and violently flips the table, sending paper and lamp-glass scattering across the floor, just as Alex enters the tent. She looks weary and drawn, and has little energy to do much but tsk and sidestep the fallen glass.
Veronica glances down at the things Daly tossed at her, picking up one smooth shape of metal and running her finger over the indentations on it, noticing at last it’s a dog tag. There are dozens of them, with names she knows and names she doesn’t, some of them still spotted in blood. Feeling ill, she struggles to her feet and moves to pull them all off of her, shaking them off of her fingers and wrists and pulling the chains out of her hair, grabbing one where it had fallen into her lapel pocket. She leaves them where they fall; they’re too eerie, a little net of death, signs of guilt from ghosts.
“Is it over?” she asks, looking more at Alex than at Daly, which is just as well because Daly isn’t meeting her eyes.
“It’s over,” Alex confirms.
The tent flap opens again and it’s Van Zant this time, looking grim. “Forty-eight. They were forty-eight, maybe more if some ran. They took us nearly two to one.”
Daly laughs, bitterly. “But it’s worth it, right? Because now we’ve got a plane full of bullet holes with only two engines. That was the plan, wasn’t it?”
And he spits at Veronica, but just as suddenly Van Zant is there, his hands clutching Daly’s collar, nearly lifting him off the ground.
“Ain’t your decision,” he hisses, his syllables clipped. “Never was, never will be. But you got issues, you take them up with me. I lead, here. And you follow. Got it?”
It takes some shaking, but Daly eventually mutters something like consent, and lurks away, leaving the tent in a quieted rage. Just as soon as he’s gone, Veronica opens her mouth to express her thanks, but Van Zant turns on her, too.
“Don’t even say anything. This better goddamn well work, Mars. Or we’re all dead.”
She says nothing. After some time it’s just her and Alex, neither of them speaking. Alex bends and picks up the dog tags, one by one, still lying where Veronica shook them off. She takes them and untangles them and holds them close and proper, and when she’s got them all, she leaves, too.
+++
It does work, eventually.
They don’t have the fuel to really test it. It’s an all-or-nothing shot, waking at the crack of dawn when the light’s good for confusing the dragons. They load everything, everyone, they get on board, they hold their breath.
And even though it’s close, the plane takes off.
Veronica sits apart from the others and watches out one of the few windows that remains intact, not welded over. The ground slips away behind them, becomes nothing but a patchwork of old roads and ashen buildings. Eventually it becomes the sea. And then after that, it’s clouds, just endless grey, like smoke in your eyes.
