The Ol Double Trouble Scaley Shuffle

Time dragged sluggish as the beast lunged.

Glass sprayed out in jagged slivers; a thousand jagged mirrors reflecting the draconic visage like a demonic kalidescope as it crashed through the tall window. Mizuki crashed into my back, arm thrust before us and then there was only the blinding blue-white light and the all-too-familiar sensation of brief weightlessness – but this time the landing was softer, Mizuki coughing in my ear as she took the impact against a pump housing. She shoved me off and I seized her wrist and fairly dragged her out the side man-door as the dragon shook off the impact of magical shield on snout, rezeroed and lunged again, steel shrieking as the huge pump was caved in by the blow. We sprinted for the parking lot; concrete shivering underfoot as the beast writhed and wriggled its way back out the window.

I swept the obvious cover with my red dot but found the shooters fifty meters down the road paralleling the reservoir, running like hell. Gunfire sounded from the warehouse and the dragon’s head twiched towards it like a snake; frilly skin ‘round its head rising as it’s chest seemed to swell. A burst of pressurized water moving so fast it cracked like a whip punched through the warehouse’s window, then a second as the beast swept it across the building. Men emerged from the side; fleeing into the dilapidated barn and fields beyond as the beast reared back and lunged downwards at them – twenty meters of dragon at least–

“YANKEE!” Mizuki was shouting, dragging me by the arm now towards the cemetery. A modest thing encircled by a low stone wall; like countless I’d seen in the rural backwoods of the ‘States; sometimes fifty graves, sometimes hardly a dozen; little places for little villages long since vanished or absorbed by another. Mizuki vaulted the wall and did her best to drag me over after. Facing the memorials, she pointed behind us.

“G-G-G-ET HIM!”

It wasn’t elegant or respectful but the ancestors of Kobe seemed to understand; for from the graves I saw ethereal, bright forms rising; a hint of humanoid in the flowing shapes that shimmered in rainbow hues, like an oil slick on a bright day. They flowed together like a stream and snaked outwards towards the dragon.

I saw Kenta emerging from the pump house, head down as he leaned into a full-bore sprint, trusting us to cover. The rifle hit my shoulder and I hammered the mag empty, recoil punching my shoulder – but it was the spirit-stream that arrested its lunge for Kenta, snapping ‘round it’s body below the head. Huge waves splashed out of the reservoir as its hidden tail thrashed violently. Lightning flashed above; crack-boom rolling away through the sky and the beast answered; sheeting rain visibly parting ‘round its maw from the force of its roar alone.

“KENTA! MANA!” Mizuki screamed, and he dropped his weapon to its sling and stood behind her, both hands on her shoulders, eyes closed in concentration. She looked at me.

“And you, run!” She drew her katana; still quicksilver with radiant moonglow even in the overcast and driving rain, and thrust it heavenward in both hands.

Dropping my own gun I drew the short launcher and reloaded; another 40mm HEDP grenade going downrange with a toomp! – BAM! as it landed. The responding roar was directed at us now; my ears aching even through the earplugs. The next 40mm round tumbled from my fingers as the vibrations I my flesh seemed to find my spine; and next thing I knew I was on all fours. Mizuki’s defensive shield was fully visible now; every inch aglow as it reflected the sonic energy and the rain blown before it.

I staggered upwards, found the round, wiped off the mud. The dragon swelled again, readying another piercing pressurized blast, but the rainbow band cinched tight ‘round it’s body, stopping it from ballooning out. Mizuki’s sword glowed like a beacon as I reloaded and fired, toomp! – BAM

KABAM!

The lightning had faded but not gone; jagged searing-bright bolt still vivid in the afterimage as my eyes ached. Rain drumming on my arms; wet grass against my cheek; a hollow ringing in my ears, and the dragon staring me down.

The rifle swept through the grass in an arc as I shouldered and clicked the hammer on an empty chamber, pulling the slack trigger a few times as I stared into blazing red pupils not ten meters away before realizing it wasn’t moving.

I sat up and reloaded – or tried too, bumping a loaded mag against the bottom of the empty before remembering to eject it. The live one slid out the magazine well, and I was smacking its bottom when a strong hand fell on my shoulder.

I looked up at Kenta, rain in my eyes blurring his face. He plucked one of my earplugs out.

“It’s down,” he said. “It’s over.”

Woozily I tucked one foot under my ass and extended the other before me in a drunk’s approximation of a sitting position, planted the red dot between the dragon’s eyes and clicked – spewed incomprehensible maledictions as I swept the blade of my hand back into the charging handle and clicked – threw the rifle forward which did nothing since it was slung and groped for my strong-side holster.

“IT’S DOWN!” Kenta was shouting. “IT’S DOWN!”

I looked up at him again and this time lost my balance, falling flat on my back. Rain stung my eyes and I tugged my boonie over my face out of pure habit. Alone in that tiny darkness; rain drumming on the waterproof fabric, I allowed myself to be nothing.

Just for a minute.

* * *

I’d recovered enough to focus my eyes by the time we heard the chopper incoming; the familiar sound of a Blackhawk roaring in from the west; probably from Yokota.

“One of mine!” Kenta told me.

I blinked.

“Special Phenomena Response Division.”

“Oh. Right.” My ears were still ringing a bit. I waggled one electronic earplug and popped it back in – nope, fried. I dug ‘round in my pack for the spares, hoping they were charged. Rotor wash fluttered the brim of my boonie as the bird set down in the field nearby, Kenta running out to meet them.

Mizuki was sitting in a puddle, leaning against the cemetery's low wall. She’d been washed clean by the rain; fluffy chestnut hair soaked and plastered flat across her shoulders, angelic face blank as she studied the grass.

“PETER!” someone shouted over the chopper’s idling whine. Dan vaulted the low wall and clapped a hand on my shoulder.

“Peter,” he panted. “Where’s the alligator?”

I inhaled.

“Peter!”

I switched on an earplug and put it in – the drumming rain’s volume doubled. Perfect working order.

“Where’s the goddamned alligator!?”

I licked my lips. “W h a t,” I said, turning the word over carefully with my tongue before pushing it out, “exactly, at this juncture, in this place, at this time, gives you the impression that I possess this information.”

“You were HUNTING the damn thing, weren’t you?”

I blinked. “Yes. Yes we were.”

“Then where is it!?”

I closed my eyes and rubbed my temples. “Dan. Questions with screamingly obvious answers are one thing, and completely unanswerable ones are another, but I need the golden fuckin’ mean here and you can’t get that by jumping between the other two and hoping it evens out, okay?”

“No damn clue,” Kenta said as he jogged up from behind. “Mizuki tracked one hell of a kagare taint this far; shook a kappa down for info; everything pointed this direction. We’ve got no idea where that thing came from.”

“The hell is it, anyway?”

“Mizuchi,” Kenta said. “Water dragon. Pretty powerful yokai. This one’s young, and we still would’ve been screwed if it hadn’t decided to hole up next to a cemetery with a rainstorm coming on while we had Takamodo with us.”

“Is it dead?”

“Doesn’t matter; even if it survived that it’s not gonna be chatting with us anytime soon.”

Dan looked at the dragon, who wasn’t even blinking away the rain tickling its eyeballs, and frowned. “Who were the goddman shooters?”

“Kurogane,” Mizuki said. She was standing now; looking a little shaky, but her eyes were focused again. “Those weapons.”

Kenta tilted his head. “Beg pardon?”

“They’ve been working on weapons they can channel magic through.”

“… the Special Phenomena Response Division greatly appreciates the heads-up,” Kenta said. Takamodo’s expression darkened, but the expression fell off her face as her shoulders slumped with weariness.

My phone buzzed in my breast pocket. I plucked it out. It buzzed again. Right. I’d muted it earlier so some intel weenie shouting wouldn’t give away my position at a bad moment. I turned up the volume.

“Peter you scum-sucking double-whore from Double Hell.”

I tapped the PTT button. “Hey, Eric. Good timing.”

“NOT REALLY, I’VE BEEN CALLING YOU FOR SIX DAMNED MINUTES NOW! The entire fucking watch floor is trying to climb up my ass with a flashlight, we’ve redirected every drone in Japan for you and I’ve got some pogey-bait scarfing asshole from Langley screaming about us hogging half the fuckin Sapphire constellation and the guy who CALLED for the Priority One escalation WON’T ANSWER HIS PHONE!?”

“Busy fighting a dragon.”

“You lying fuckass son of a bitch–” a rapid clatter of mechanical keyboard keys– “Ho-ly JAY-SUS what the–”

“You missed it!?” I snapped. “It’s never wow, great fight Peter, wow, thanks for slaying a DRAGON Peter, it’s just WHERE’S THE ALLIGATOR, PETER!?”

“I was busy too!” Eric said, “other feeds!” The notional point of an intelligence “watch floor” was to, well, watch things; namely feeds from every sensor imaginable and some unfathomable outside of the darkest of dark programs; but very, very, very few people were cleared for feeds directly following NAIC field agents, and the twenty-plus meter dragon sprawled across Eric’s drone or satellite feed was precisely why. “Namely, the ALLIGATOR!”

“You know where it is!”

“We got hits, we picked it up on the… are you alone?”

I looked up to find Kenta, Mizuki, Dan and a few rain-plastered SPRD agents leaning towards my phone. “Not exactly.”

“Well, suffice to say we picked up your boy – he headed due south from Gyoda. We’ve got a strong trace just northwest of Konosu.”

Mizuki wiped rain from her eyes, and shook her head. “That makes no sense. How would it even…” She gasped. “The canal?”

“Eh? I said.

“The canal, the canal you dumb yankee! Where we fought! Where we both tracked it to! The Kamihoshi turns south there but that’s also where the canal from the great weir on the Tone crosses it and heads south.”

“Sore tte kekkyoku, Arakawa ni tsunagatteru dake desu yo ne?” Kenta said.

I grabbed him by the shirt, reeled him close, pulled the spare translation talisman from my back pocket and stuffed it into his undershirt. “Okay, NOW try it!”

“… we’re gonna have to set up communications better later,” Kenta said. “Radios, too, before our next firefight. Anyway I said–”

“It does, it redirects water from the Tone to the Arakawa and into the Tokyo water supply,” Takamodo said. “But… why go that way? I thought it’d go for a big river. Like the Mississippi.”

“… did you say Tokyo?” I asked.

“Yeah, why?”

“Does that connect to the sewers?”

“Eventually, I guess…” she looked puzzled. “But that’s useless for him. The Mississippi is a beast of a river; we’ve nothing like it here in Japan. Ours have been tamed for years; we redirected the outlet of the Tone itself hundreds of years ago and America’s still struggling to stop the Mississippi bursting through the control dam and down the,” she snapped her fingers, “Ruby or whatever it is in English.”

“Red river.”

“Right, that.”

A cold emptiness blossomed in my chest. I’d underestimated the locals and their knowledge… and, I realized, overestimated it myself. “You ever hear of the great raft?”

“Eh?”

“First settlers, they found the outlet of the Mississippi completely clogged by a log jam hundreds of miles long. Hundreds. And it was at least a thousand years old, maybe more; it reshaped the entire landscape. We demolished it in a decade, tops. New Orleans levees were one of the greatest civil engineering projects in American history and hurricane Katrina smashed ‘em wide open. You’ve managed to harness nature but we’re still grappling it in America; barely holding our own.

“I don’t get your meaning.”

“Haven’t you ever heard the urban legend in America about alligators in the sewers of New York City?”

“Yeah, but…” Mizuki’s face went slack, lips parting. She shared a look with Kenta.

“You don’t think…”

“Think? Think what!?” I demanded, the hollow dread in my chest growing further.

“The G-Cans,” Mizuki said.

“Gwhatnow!?”

“G-cans,” Kenta answered. “Metropolitan Area outer, drainage, bah it’s a huge drainage system. Five huge underground silos, sited alongside every major river heading into Tokyo and linked by a shared sewer line. It draws excess water out of ‘em during the rainy season and pumps it all east to a huge holding tank that dumps it into the Edo river.” He shrugged. “It’s not a sewer, though. Hell, they even give tours.”

“Tours!?”

“Yeah, it’s massive. Huge support pillars in it. They… call it…”

“The underground temple.” Mizuki breathed. “Oh.”

“Fuck,” Dan concluded for all of us.

“But, but it doesn’t make sense,” Mizuki said, face pale. “T-th-the Edo’s a distributary, it branches off the Tone barely four kilometers from where we are! All it had to do was go THIS way!”

“And if it had we would’ve caught it,” Kenta said. “Kurogane’s men must’ve felt so too. Instead we found that.” He nodded at the mizuchi.

“It fooled us,” Takamodo said. “It snuck in the back door. It fooled us, how… how could… it’s a… I don’t, I, I, I don’t–” she was breathing too fast again.

“How far downstream is this temple or whatever!?” Dan asked.

“Under twenty kilometers.” Mizuki answered automatically.

“How fast could that gator move through the canals or whatever?”

“From the west, I… I…” Takamodo grabbed her head in both hands, tears mingling with the rain. “I DON’T KNOW!”

We stood in silence a moment, only the idling whine of the chopper’s turbine and hammering rain filling the air.

“… well, I might be a no-magic rifle custodian with a possible concussion, but I’m gonna go out on a limb here and guess that an ancient voodoo river god beelining for an underground storm drain called the underground temple is a bad thing,” I said.

“We need backup,” Kenta said, pulling out his phone.

“We need air,” Dan said, pulling out his.

I reached out and grabbed their wrists before they could shoulder their weapons. “Guys, we need to go. Right now.”