Mayor Reportedly Seeking Specialist for Wall St Dragon Problem
By: Hana Leshner
Tags: Serial Fiction, Fiction, Fantasy

The day the dragon Furstag flew into Wall Street the Dow Jones dropped 1,000 points. At first, when the shadow of her dark wings stretched over the city, people suspected it was an elaborate publicity hoax by a popular fantasy television show. By the time they realized what was going on, she had nested in the penthouse of 37 Wall Street and SWAT mobile units clogged the street below. Donald Trump was on TV everyday thundering about the incompetence of the mayor and president that allowed an over-sized lizard to roost across the street from his prized Trump Building, adding this was another example of the dangers of illegal immigration. The 37 Wall Street people opposed any plans to destroy the building citing the historic nature of their property. They also spent a good deal of time arguing with their insurance company about the underlying cause of the damage she was incurring. Fire, they claimed, was covered, as was water. An act of terrorism was not covered, however, and the lawyers from Lloyd’s Insurance and Securities insisted the dragon was an instrument of terror sent by parties unknown to cripple the American economy.

From time to time she would crawl out of her lair and glide over the city, diving into Times Square to snatch up an unsuspecting tourist, or set the trees aflame in the park. She seemed to settle into a routine: sleeping until noon, hunting in the afternoon, and hanging out in her sky-high bower, blowing lazy smoke rings until the wee hours. New Yorkers adapted quickly to her schedule, refusing to leave their buildings in the afternoon. Although she was responsible for driving the cost of New York food delivery through the roof, Furstag didn’t affect the American economy as much as everyone had at first predicted. The stock exchange closed the day she landed, but by the next day it had reopened at normal trading hours, after enacting its emergency relocation plan. For a week or so everyone predicted doom and gloom. SWAT, NYFD, and the National Guard patrolled at the bottom of the tower, chafing at the restraints set by the mayor and the president, but everyone was reluctant to have a repeat 9/11 situation on their hands. If they stormed the building, there was little doubt she would have firebombed the whole thing. Instead, they kept the civilians behind the official cordon and resigned themselves to wait for their moment.

The corner hotdog stand was doing a brisk business as crowds of tourists from all over the world flocked to downtown New York trying to time a selfie with her daily sorties. The most popular hashtags on Twitter and Instagram that summer were #dragonbomb and #givesyouwings. She may have declared open season on any and all pedestrians, but it didn’t stop them from coming. Who doesn’t want to catch sight of a dragon? Before long the Westboro Baptist Church, Occupy Wall Street, and Act on Climate set up camps in different corners of Zuccotti Park, each claiming the metaphor of the dragon for their own narratives. Eventually, everything settled into an uneasy stalemate and the news networks had to content themselves with a small dragon cam window that they left up on their websites 24 hours a day to monitor the situation.

It was about this time my phone rang. I knew it was coming and I was even a little surprised it took them so long, but you can’t rush these things. When you have the reputation as a bit of a troublemaker, you come to expect that people will exhaust all their options before they turn to you. While I had only just recently assisted the Romanian government with sensitive “nocturnal issue,” the White House had always kept me at arm’s length, no doubt concerned some political rival would latch onto my credentials and rain derision down on their administration. I’m not one to be petty and I’d like to consider myself a patriot, so I assured the president I would take on the problem immediately. I actually knew more of Furstag’s origins than anyone suspected. I’d been tracking her since the eruption of Eyjafjallajökull in 2010, when she first attracted my attention and fouled up European air traffic for weeks. Fortunately for us and for me, she was actually not quite full grown and having a sort of adolescent temper tantrum more than anything else. When a dragon is intent on destroying a city, it doesn’t take naps, believe you me. Just ask the worthy denizens of Pompeii.

I was ruminating on just this as I climbed out of the subway station blinking in the bright July sun. The guardsmen on duty questioned me as I approached the perimeter but I spotted my handler, the rumpled and harassed George McAvoy from where I stood and he waved me in.

“George. You look like hell.”

“Thanks Angie. You sure know how to cheer a guy up.”

“Anything I don’t already know?”

“It usually flies out for the day in about an hour, so your timing is actually quite good. Let’s get you the tech toys and you can get to work.”

“Please.”

We stepped into one of the mobile units and he introduced me to a special surveillance team. Janice, a slightly heavy woman with a severe blond ponytail and glasses showed me the feeds of the various cameras they’d been able to deploy and the one microphone which piped in the distinct rumble of a dragon snore.

I raised my eyebrows ruefully, “Well, she’s certainly a prima donna isn’t she.”

Janice snorted, “she’s got nothing on my 14-year-old.”

“How do you know it’s a she?” George asked skeptically.

“Just trust me on this one, George.”

“She does bear a distinct resemblance to my mother-in-law,” he conceded.

Suddenly, we heard a horrible growling, scratching, stretching noise as the dragon began to rouse. We exited the mobile unit to look up at the top of the building in anticipation. For two whole minutes we saw nothing and our vigilance relaxed just as a great gust of wind hit us in the face. I looked up and saw dark giant wings unfurling and wafting another gust down onto our heads. The crowd around the perimeter cheered and rushed into action. Shouting, pointing, snapping pics on their phones. They were entranced for a moment as she stretched her wings out and lifted off into the air, rapidly disappearing into a tiny, high-flying speck.

“She’s heading for the park.” George reported after the crackle of frantic traffic on his earpiece subsided. I turned to him with urgency. “I need to get in there.”

George gave me a comms unit with a headset and radioed the sniper team in place that he was sending in the specialist. George and Janice nodded me good luck. I marched straight in the front doors through the marble lobby past the elevators towards the emergency staircase. The stairs were sooty and charred but relatively intact, so I climbed up twenty-something floors to the top, appreciating all my recent mountain climbing forays, which had primed me for this ascent.

As I neared the top, I lightened my tread and remarked how eerily silent the building was. When I finally reached the penthouse level, I eased out of the stairwell into the hall. The air was dense with lingering smoke but I could see that the devastation was nearly total. Throughout the entire floor, only a few pieces of the walls were still standing. The entire upper level, which probably had been two spacious apartments separated by a hall had become one giant dragon’s den, reeking of burnt wood and charred flesh, complete with the new dragon-sized hole she had created in the ceiling. I stepped over a pile of marble debris and crunched right through a brittle set of half-incinerated bones.

I began a thorough search, sifting through broken mirrors, smashed tile, splintered and smoldering remnants of mid-century teak indiscriminately mixed with mahogany, all blanketed with a thick layer of ash. I knew it would be there, I just needed to keep looking. After I had turned over almost every piece of debris in the place, I spied something out of the corner of my eye that looking promising. Against the remaining bottom portion of wall in a far corner, there stood what used to be a kitchen and a wilted, melted steel box that had once been an oven. While it was impossible to open, it looked as thought it could possibly still hold what I was looking for. I looked around for a piece of debris, I could use to pry it open. Settling on a short piece of pipe I went to work here and there but the oven had been welded shut by Furstag’s flames. Even more convinced, I radioed down to George that I needed a cutting torch ASAP. This time, I took the elevator and met him at the front where he stood with a questioning look, wheeling an Oxy-Ace torch with gas tanks.

“I sure hope you know what you’re doing Angie. She’s due back very soon. She’s been sighted near Time’s Square and then even as far north as Harlem, but she’s got to be on her way back by now.” He paused his lecture to proffer me eye protection and a set of gloves.

“Thanks George.” I put on the goggles and a pair of gloves, grabbed the torch and wheeled it inside. The elevator dinged as I stepped out onto the rubble of the penthouse. I set to work with the blow torch. Eventually, I managed to get a fist sized hole in the thing and reached inside, closing my hands on the rough round object I had hoped was within. I smiled and pulled out the stone and examined it. Furstag’s heartstone: a black porous rock most likely containing a reddish crumbly core. I was mesmerized for a moment. How many tiny heartstones had I smashed trying to release the beautiful center, that summer when I was six, before my mother taught me of their significance?

Suddenly, I heard wings flapping and she was above me. I held the heartstone in front of me like a shield. She shrieked at me and flapped her wings menacingly. Her scales, a rich eggplant color shot through with gold, glistened in the afternoon sun, smoke crept out of her nostrils, and her eyes, two giant yellow pools of flame, glared at me. She was beautiful and terrible and she knew it. But I stood my ground.

“You need to go home. This bender has gone on long enough.” I scolded.

She hissed at me scornfully, but she stayed her flame, confirming the power I now held over the situation.

“Come on Furstag. I can see you are already getting bored in Manhattan. What’s next Brooklyn? If you’re not out of here by tomorrow, I’m going to deliver this to Grelda, and I would not want to be you.”

She spiraled up into the sky screeching in frustration and dive-bombed on me with incredible speed. My headset crackled with panicked questions and I ripped it out of my ear. I stared up at her approaching form, unblinking, heart pounding in one of the riskiest games of chicken I have ever played.

She stopped a mere six inches from my face, snapping her enormous jaws, her sweat and saliva showering me, steaming and putrid.

I feigned nonchalance. “Which do you think would upset your mother more, the fact that you’ve made such a scene or the fact that you’ve allowed yourself to be robbed?”

She began huffing and puffing, blowing steam and smoke, and I thought maybe she was going to hyperventilate. “If she passes out, she’s going to crush me,” I thought. Calm her down.

“I’m going to hang onto this for now. If you keep up your end of this, nothing bad will happen. Just wait until dark and you can make your exit.”

She exhaled a mouthful of smoke and she curled up in a corner of the den, glaring with the ill grace in her defeat. I slipped the heartstone into my backpack, backed towards the staircase. As I trudged down the twenty some odd stairs again, I thought wistfully of the elevator, but was reluctant to put myself and the heartstone back inside a metal box.

At the ground level, I met a worried and wondering George.

“Well?”

“She’ll be out in 24 hours.”

“How do you know?”

I thought about making a quip about executing a hostile takeover but I settled for an imperious smirk instead.

George shook his head. “You better be right.”

“I’m right, and now I need a bath. See you round George. I’ll send my invoice to Sylvia.” I walked out of the cordon past the crowds towards my hotel.

I was soaking in my tub down the street, when I heard a rush of giant wings past the hotel. I hurried to the window to peer out, but she was already gone, with any luck, winging her way home.