Broken(43)

    Winter limped away, toward the ramp to the Gulfstream, and I watched Bastian start to return to his feet now, but twice as big as he had been before, his body distorting horribly. His shirt ripped open to reveal wings, and his head and neck grew longer and larger. His legs seemed to fatten out, and a tail extended. He continued to swell, his skin disappearing as it turned to scales, and he grew larger and larger. He reached the size of a four-story building, his skin scaled like a snake, but with feathers around his head, his body elongated like a serpent’s, but with wings. He looked like a cross between a bird, a snake and a Chinese dragon, some mythical combination that made me drop the M4 without even bothering to reload.

    He stared down at me from far above, bigger than the plane that was supposed to carry him away from me—me, the danger that they had feared, something so miniscule in comparison to what Bastian had become that I wondered why they had worried at all. With a roar of exhaled breath, he knocked me off my feet. I looked up at him, towering above me, and tried to find any reason to hope that I could possibly win against something so grotesque, so large. I wondered why I had ever thought I had a chance; a scared little girl in a world that was so much bigger than I had ever imagined.





20.





    I quivered below the creature that Bastian had become, not quite shuddering, but my fingers buried in the snow as he towered over me, head atop the tall, snake-like body, wings extended wider than the wings of the Gulfstream. They were feathered, and with a single flap he rose above me, a creature out of a movie that was larger than any life I could imagine.

    Get up, Little Doll, I heard Wolfe shout in my ears over the flapping of Bastian’s wings.

    “I can’t!” I cried out, sitting there on my ass, looking up at the thing above me. “I can’t beat that!”

    Go, Little Doll.

    Move, Bjorn said.

    You can destroy it, Gavrikov told me.

    Go, Zack whispered.

    I got haltingly to my feet, my legs unsteady, and Bastian hovered above me, each beat of his wings threatening to throw me back to the ground. “How do I beat something like that?”

    Look for weaknesses, Bjorn suggested.

    “It’s a friggin’ flying dragon!” I shouted. “Where the hell am I gonna find a weakness?”

    “Don’t kill her!” I heard Old Man Winter shout from behind Bastian. He was atop the ramp of the jet, and I wondered if Old Man Winter was a weakness for Bastian. It really didn’t matter if he was, because the likelihood I’d be able to reach him with Bastian between us was somewhere between nil and zilch.

    “Not being able to kill me is a weakness, I suppose,” I whispered.

    Bastian swept his tail in a wide arc toward me, as though it were a sock filled with a paperweight that dangled off the end of his body, and I tried to jump it but didn’t quite succeed. The tail hit me squarely in the legs and caused me to flip. I landed on my front, my hands catching me. My wrists felt the impact, as did my face, which snapped down and hit the snowy ground. I didn’t feel the snow when I hit, though; to me it seemed like I’d been slammed into the asphalt beneath it. My nose started to bleed, and I came to rest with my face in the powder. I wanted to lie there, but as I looked up I saw Old Man Winter still standing atop the ramp, watching me.

    “Oh, no you don’t, you son of a bitch,” I whispered as I spit blood out of my mouth. Bastian remained just above the ground, the gentle flap of his wings keeping him aloft about five feet overhead but little more than that. His tail was at rest now, extended back behind him. Proportionally, he wasn’t nearly as long as a snake of his size would be, but he was long enough to look a little like one. I reached under my coat and pulled out a pistol, a bigger-bodied one. I had no idea what I was going to shoot with it, but I suspected the eyes were the only weak point. Assuming I could hit them; they small targets, far away, and in constant motion.

    The tail swooped toward me again, but this time I was ready, and I nailed the timing. I jumped and cleared it, catching myself as I landed on my feet in the snow. He threw the tail at me again, like a whip this time, and I dodged right. I fired three shots at his face, but he made no reaction but to hiss and dart toward me with his head.

    I lunged to the side, throwing myself into a shoulder roll that spared me from his wrath as he tore into the metal side of the building behind me. He ripped through it easily with the force of his blow, and his head remained there for a moment, the rest of his body still floating a few feet off the ground.