Let It Burn
I felt like writing something that wasn't porn. Turned out quite a bit darker than I expected. Written in about an hour. Incidentally, written while listening to 'Benzin' by Rammstein on repeat. Coincidence? I think not!
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Twenty-one years ago, in this squat, ugly, grey building, Subject Epsilon had been created. Just two years ago he had left it for the first time in his life amongst blood and fire. Now he had returned to wipe this stain from the earth.
The last of the true wild dragons had been wiped out centuries ago, after a long and bloody struggle for survival. Stories persisted of the terrifying power of the great flying beasts, of the ruin and discord they wrought upon the land. Stories did not persist of the provocation of the dragons of old by those who did not understand them. For decades they suffered in silence while their eggs were smashed, their children slaughtered, their kin brought down in a death of a thousand cuts. When the remaining dragons were finally angered enough to respond they set most of the known world ablaze.
Now, secret meetings of powerful men had revived an ancient species. In a troubled world driven by secrets, the ancient tales offered a tempting new weapon in the secret war to control the world.
The bones of the ancient dragons were recovered, their DNA retrieved and sequenced in the lab. After nine years of constant work, the project finally bore fruit. A first batch of ten successful clones.
'Clone' is not quite the correct word for them. Although the true dragons of old were intelligent, this fact has been lost to time. The stories were only told of bloodthirsty beasts that hunted from the sky. As such, the project created a recombinant creature - the DNA of a modern komodo dragon mixed with that of the dragon to create a new creature.
Epsilon stood at a shade under nine feet tall, thick cords of muscle bulging all over his body. A pair of great wings was folded to his back, nearly twenty feet across when fully spread. Even those however were not enough to allow him to truly fly - unlike his ancestors, Epsilon could only glide. Flight was not the only thing lost from the meddling of those not fit to meddle. Although his skin was still scaled, tough, and extremely fire resistant, he could not breathe fire like his ancestors once did. For him though it did not matter. The keen mind they had given him ensured that he was more than capable of finding other ways to make them burn.
Tonight was the night.
Clad in a suit of tough woven fibre that resisted fire and blocked bullet and blade, armed with the tools of his revenge, he was ready. His suit was made of Kevlar stolen from the nearby Army garrison in the dead of night, supplemented with a layer of fire-resistant Nomex. At his belt and secured in a bandolier that held several different blades, improvised grenades in fragmenting and incendiary varieties, and any tools he thought he might need. In his gloved hands he held what he had affectionately termed the 'Dragon's Breath': a flamethrower built from pressurised tanks and spare parts stolen from an industrial area nearby. On his back was a large barrel of petrol, and two highly pressurised oxygen tanks. Of course, he'd added several compounds to make the fuel stick and burn with greater efficiency. Even more was stashed in his little hideout in case he needed it to finish the job.
His keen eyes could see through the darkness to the hidden guard points scattered around the approach to the facility. It was half an hour until the change of shift. The current guards would be at their most fatigued, and the relief shift would still be asleep. The perfect time for a sneak attack. Unable to glide with the added weight of his weapons and gear, instead Epsilon simply stood up, and began to run.
He exploded out of the wooded area he was hiding in, gradually building up speed as he crossed the open ground in front of him. His muscles easily bore the weight and propelled him forward, his clawed toes digging into the ground for traction. The blackened suit he wore was buying him a little time, but he knew he would be spotted momentarily. He had to get through the defensive perimeter before that happened.
He was halfway across the no-man's-land and drawing close to the first guard post when he was finally spotted. The dragon was moving like a runaway train, his heart pounding, revenge all that was on his mind. He heard a shout, then a spotlight popped into life just ahead, from the guard point disguised as a brush-covered hill. A moment later it was followed by a burst of automatic gunfire, but the tired and surprised shooter aimed wide.
As the bullets cracked past him, Epsilon pulled a grenade from his bandolier, pulling out the safety pin with a flick of his claw before lobbing it as hard as he could at the bunker, like a quarterback throwing a pass. He'd built most of them with impact fuses.
His aim was true, and the grenade sailed through the slit window on the guard bunker. It detonated with a sharp crack, followed by agonised screams. With a flick of his claw, Epsilon light the pilot light on his weapon, a small gas blowtorch. As he drew even with the bunker, he fired a quick burst of flame into it.
If there had been screaming before, it was nothing compared to what he heard now. Shrieks of torment were accompanied by the sound of ammo cooking off, and the reek of burning meat. That stench...it smelt right to him. Exhilarated, he threw his head back and let out a mighty roar. He'd dreamt of this every day of his wretched life!
An alarm started blaring, more lights coming on. On the roof of the building he saw a bright flash, followed an instant later by a sledgehammer impact on his chest and a supersonic crack. The sniper round tore through his suit easily, designed to pierce Kevlar. It hit his chest with a little less force, having been slowed slightly by the suit, but still more than enough to punch through a lesser creature. Not Epsilon. It managed to penetrate his tough scales, but met the thick wall of his ribcage and stopped dead. Unlike other species, he had no separate ribs - just solid, overlapping plates of bone. All the sniper bullet did was make him roar again in defiance.
He reached another two posts, these ones out in the open on either side of the road leading up to the large steel gates. These gave the appearance of normal guard points on any normal civilian building, there to keep lost travellers out. These ones however had guards armed with military rifles. They opened up on him as he approached, but they may as well have saved the ammunition for all the good it did. What few bullets managed to pierce his armour was stopped easily by his thick hide.
Epsilon let out a booming laugh at the pathetic creatures trying to stop him. They had to be mad, to think they could resist!
Another two blasts from his flamethrower, another two infernos, another chorus of tortured screams. Music to his ears. All of these bastards would pay. He passed, leaving men that writhed and squirmed as their fur and flesh burned in his wake.
He slid to a stop as he approached the gate, his claws digging in to the dirt beside the road, kicking up a huge cloud of dust. He had prepared for this. High explosives, made from surprisingly common chemicals. He pressed the brick of plastic explosive to the gate, ignored the bullets that continued to hit him. The bomb placed to his satisfaction, he pressed a detonator into it, then hit the timer. He bounded away out of the danger zone just in time.
The explosives detonated with a massive crack. Although even the quite large brick he'd placed was not enough to blow open those monolithic gates, that was not his intention. Instead, he'd blasted a hole through them, just large enough for him to squeeze through.
Then, he was in.
There was only a small courtyard before the entrance to the building proper, and guards were waiting for him. All he did was laugh.
Flames engulfed the guards, the few that avoided being consumed by the blaze he spread falling to claw and blade. His augmented strength was enough to crush a man's skull with ease, and Epsilon did so with glee. Husky and cheetah, fox and hare, all who stood before him fell. He would not leave until every guilty soul had paid in blood.
He smashed through the locked doors with brute strength to panicked cries. It seemed that nothing could stop the enraged dragon: assault rifles may as well have been airsoft guns, heavy machine guns merely made him laugh, explosives just staggered him for a moment before he just kept coming.
The fires blazed, Epsilon leaving a trail of destruction in his wake. Files and folders and stacks of paper, walls, people, all were ignited. Some tried to fight. Some begged for mercy that he would not give. They had never given him any mercy when he begged. He was simply returning the favour.
On he went, fighting deeper into the facility. The entrance to the underground levels was hidden, but he simply ripped apart the walls until he found it, then forced his way through the doors. An elevator shaft was no problem - he held onto the cable and lowered himself down, then cut through the roof of the elevator.
Now he was in the core of this place, where he had been made, experimented on, abuse and tormented.
It only fuelled his rage further. Every sight, every bad memory, it only made him lust for destruction even more. Here was a room full of drugs and syringes. Here was a room where he was forced to fight all kinds of creature, feral and advanced, always to the death. The place reeked of blood. Here was a room with a steel rack, where he was tied down while the cut at him, examining his body, while he was awake but unable to resist.
He burned it all.
Eventually, he reached the one room that he did not want to destroy, with the handful of people that did not deserve death in this entire god-forsaken place.
His brother clones were here, confined in cages, bruised and bloody, but with eyes that spoke of defiance. They looked at him as he stood in the doorway, framed by the inferno he had created, armed to the teeth, defiant, powerful.
"Brothers. Let us burn." he told them.
They replied with a chorus of roars, their eyes filled with bloodlust.
They would pay. They would pay for what the did here, and what their ancestors did all those years ago. The murder of an entire species was yet to be accounted for.
The whole world would burn.