The Slave Train

Cobra kept herself completely still, only the tips of her wings twitching. She peered through the shimmering desert air, heavy with heat, at the open landscape in front of her. She was pale yellow, the perfect color to disguise herself against the desert sand, but her friends were not. Two of them had already been found, but she knew Gale was still out there somewhere, ready to attack. She wasn’t letting him win this time!

Gale was dark gray, and the cloudy horizon shone dark with rain. Once the clouds rolled in closer, the rain would start coming down, but Cobra wasn’t worried. It hardly ever rained here, and when it did, it wasn’t very impressive.

Cobra knew Gale would come from the sky, so she kept her eyes focused upwards. She knew it would be almost impossible to see her from so high up, camouflaged against the ground, and Gale didn’t have their friend Razor’s sharp eyes.

She never expected him to drop out of the sky right in front of her face.

Cobra reared back, jaws opening in surprise, and Gale whipped his tail around to sweep her back legs out from under her. She went crashing to the sand, and Gale crouched in preparation to attack. Cobra’s eyes narrowed. He had forgotten her speed.

She bunched her hind legs under her and darted forward, slipping between Gale’s forelegs. Using her small size to her advantage, she twisted around, raked her claws across Gale’s hind legs, and shot out from under him right before he collapsed. She whirled, fast as a snake, and leaped on top of him before he could get up, positioning her jaws on either side of his neck.

Gale sighed and twisted his neck to look up at her. She jumped off, grinning at him as he climbed to his feet.

“Alright, you got me. I forgot how fast you were,” he admitted. Cobra’s grin widened until it looked almost predatory.

“True. But otherwise you might have won. You appeared out of nowhere!” she exclaimed. Gale nodded.

“I knew you would be expecting me to drop onto your back or behind you, so I used your surprise by landing right in front of you instead.”

“Nice strategy, I like it. Maybe we should start calling you something else. Something...with less power and more stealth,” Cobra teased. Gale's expression turned wounded.

“Nooo, I like my name! I can be powerful like a gale wind, it just wasn’t my strategy this time,” he whined good-naturedly. Cobra turned away.

“Alright, Breeze. Let’s go find the others,” she called over her shoulder, already slipping away.

“Don’t you dare!” she heard Gale’s voice behind her as she disappeared between two cacti.

—————

“Razor! Ash! Where are you guys?” Cobra yelled, swiveling her head back and forth in an attempt to pick up a response. Next to her, Gale shook his head.

“They were supposed to wait for us here,” he said for the sixth time. Cobra resisted the urge to bite him.

“Well obviously they didn’t,” she said instead, glancing around them. The oasis, the only obvious landmark in the desert, stretched around them. It wasn’t tiny, but they should have been able to see two other dragons were they somewhere nearby.

Suddenly Gale’s head shot up.

“What’s that sound?” he asked, turning a confused gaze on her.

She listened, staring off into the distance as she strained to hear whatever it was that had her friend so shaken.

As she perked her ears and followed Gale’s gaze when he turned back towards the noise, a faint whistling noise floated into her consciousness. She’d never heard anything like it, and now she was curious.

“I want to go check it out, but we can’t leave the others,” Gale fretted, head swaying slightly as he wavered.

“They’ll be fine. Once we see what it is, we’ll come back. Anyway, I bet they’re already heading towards that weird noise,” Cobra told him reasonably. Gale shot her a grateful smile before running forwards and leaping into the air.

Cobra ran after him, beating her wings hard in a futile attempt to reach him. Once Gale was comfortably soaring above her, he slowed and waited for her to catch up.

“So what do you think that noise is?” Gale asked once she was skimming across the sky next to him. Their wings beat in unison, separating them by a wingspan, but Cobra could still hear her friend over the sound of the wind whistling past her ears.

“I’ve never heard anything like it before,” she hummed, gazing ahead to where she could still hear the strange noise. It was getting louder as they flew.

“Maybe it’s one of those old human things Java told us about,” Gale mused. Java was an elder in their village, and she often told stories of great human cities that their ancestors had torn apart. According to her tales, huge stone towers lay in pieces on cracked pathways, and rusty metal contraptions littered the ground. Broken shards of a smooth substance that filled holes in the buildings lay scattered across the stone.

“Best idea we have,” Cobra assented, peering ahead. Gray smoke was rising into the air, moving across the horizon, and she’d never seen anything like it.

“Is something on fire?” Gale asked from her left, and she shook her head, still watching the smoky trail.

“I have no idea, but smoke isn’t supposed to do that, right?” she worried, fixing her gaze on the smoke and pushing herself faster. Gale followed suit without question.

As they drew close to the smoke trail, the noise they’d been hearing grew so loud Cobra thought her ears might stop working. The shrill whistling was deafening, and the source soon came into sight.

A huge human contraption--vehicle, Cobra remembered Java saying—made of rusting metal thundered along a familiar track made of parallel wooden bars set between two winding pieces of metal. Cobra was used to seeing the tracks, but she’d never seen them anything other than empty, so she didn’t know what they were for. The tracks faded into the distance both in front of and behind the vehicle, and Cobra turned to the left to follow the vehicle’s path. They had intercepted it from the side, and now she wanted to see where it was going.

Almost as soon as she turned, Cobra regretted it. The vehicle was headed straight for hers and Gale’s village.

Gale must have come to the same conclusion, because he wheeled in the air to block her path.

“It’s going towards our home!” he shouted over the noise of the vehicle, and Cobra nodded grimly.

“Human vehicles never go near dragon villages. That means there must be a dragon who wants to use it against its own kind,” she yelled back.

Gale’s expression turned stony, and he whirled around, beating his wings hard enough to knock Cobra off-balance from the sudden draft. She quickly righted herself and launched herself after him.

—————

The vehicle was faster than them, and soon they were clinging onto its roof as it sped along the tracks, shuddering and vibrating underneath their claws.

It took another ten minutes for the thing to reach their village, but even from her perch on top of it, Cobra could see fearful faces peering out of homes.

A minute later, Cobra felt the vehicle start to slow, and the deafening whistling returned. As soon as it drew close to a stop, she leapt off the roof and dove for her village, landing in front of a group of frightened dragons. A moment later, Gale touched down on her left.

A tense silence enveloped the whole village, and Cobra kept her gaze fixed on the vehicle’s smoking front end. Eventually, a single dragon appeared from a giant, square hole in the side. He flew gracefully down to land a few feet away from Gale and Cobra, and Cobra could see a malicious glint in his eyes. Before she could say anything, he grinned.

“Fire!” The single word was a command and a gleeful opportunity all at once as dragons suddenly poured out from the sides of the vehicle. Fireballs rained from the sky, and Cobra heard screams and pounding footsteps as the dragons behind her fled.

She whipped around and stared at her village, which now crackled as homes went up in flames. Disbelieving, she ran forwards and skidded through the burning buildings, running a path she knew by heart. In seconds she was staring at her own home, flames licking at the blue sky above her, ashes fluttering down to settle on her wings and back.

“Come on, we have to get anyone left here out,” Gale’s voice sounded from behind her, and she turned to look at him. He only offered a grimly determined smile, but it was enough. Cobra shook her head and ran forward, following her friend as they zigzagged through their beloved village.

Flames crackled and spit around her, and the screams, though dimmer, had never completely stopped. Cobra tried to block out the deranged caterwauling coming from who she assumed to be the enemy dragons, and instead focused on Gale’s dusty tail-tip whipping back and forth ahead of her.

The friends ran past a screaming enemy dragon, wounded on the sand, and plunged into the building he had been trying to destroy. Cowering against the only wall not already burning were three tiny dragons, younger than Cobra and Gale. Cobra seized one by the horns and threw him out the door before it set itself ablaze again after her and Gale’s entrance.

Gale grabbed the other two and glanced sideways at Cobra, and she blasted the wall they had been huddled against with a burst of fire. The wall shattered and exploded outwards, and Gale leapt through. Cobra followed and watched as he shoved the two small dragons towards their trembling third sibling before whirling to find anyone else who needed help.

Cobra heard wailing coming from a house nearby and went to run towards it, but suddenly a weight dropped onto her back so hard that her legs crumpled beneath her. Her head hit the sand, bruising her jaw, and she struggled to turn it so that she could see Gale.

He was crouched in a similar position next to her, with a huge enemy dragon pinning him to the floor. Cobra mirrored his grimace as the dragons on their backs fastened restraints around their wings. Cobra thrashed as her captor locked a heavy metal band around her neck, but she wasn’t strong enough to shove him off. She glanced sideways and noticed Gale’s captor fastening the neck band to a similar band around his tail with long metal chains. As she watched, she felt the dragon above her close a band around her own tail, and then the clinking of chains told her what he was doing next.

Gale struggled to stand next to her, but he barely lifted his chest off the ground before his captor shoved a foreleg across the back of his neck to hold him down. The enemy dragon connected his wing bands to his neck restraint before wrestling a metal muzzle onto his face. The muzzle looked like a cage, with leather straps winding tightly around the back of Gale’s head.

Cobra clenched her claws underneath her as her captor fastened a muzzle around her jaws next. Finally, their enemies let them up, but immediately Cobra realized that at some point she had been hobbled by chains linking cuffs around her ankles together. When she stumbled a step forward, the cuffs dug into her scales and she hissed.

“Move on,” a gruff voice behind her ordered, and she glanced back to see their captors standing behind them. One of them prodded Cobra in the flank, and she reluctantly struggled to walk, Gale keeping pace with her.

In front of them was the vehicle, and as they neared it Cobra’s captor commanded, “Onto the Train.”

So it was called a train. Cobra pulled herself up into the section of it they had come to, and Gale appeared behind her once she was in. Small, cramped cages lined the walls of the train car, stacked on top of one another until the car was full to bursting. Inside lay all different types of dragons, watching Cobra and Gale with a strange disinterest.

“In,” Gale’s captor grunted, and Gale warily eyed the open cage in front of him. Cobra stared into hers and tried to take a step back, but her captor shoved her forward.

Her head hit the top of the cage with a loud bang, and she instinctively ducked away from it. Behind her, her captor propelled her the rest of the way in and pushed the door shut with a heavy clang.

Dimly Cobra heard Gale shouting something, and then a grunt as he met the same fate as she had, but her head was blossoming with fiery pain and all she could do was drop her chin to the cage floor and close her eyes, hoping that when she woke up, everything would look better.

—————

The smell of rust thickened the air and made it hard to breathe, and Cobra’s nostrils flared as she opened her eyes groggily. Almost no light filtered through the slits in the sides of the train car, and Cobra blinked, trying to see in near blackness. She tried to breathe shallowly, peering around the car at the other inhabitants.

As her eyes adjusted to the darkness, she could make out slumped forms in every cage she could see, and she could hear the harsh breathing of the occupants of the cages above her. She looked closer, searching for Gale, but his dark gray coloring made it nearly impossible to pick him out.

In the cage to her right, a skinny brown dragon poked his nose through the bars and sniffed at her wing. Cobra turned, snarling, and the dragon pulled back, blinking in surprise. Cobra glared at it, trying to tuck her wings in closer despite the metal bands fastening them to her sides, and stood as well as she could in the cramped cage.

“Whoa, whoa, easy there. Ain’t nobody’s gonna hurt’cha here, sweetie,” the dragon rumbled, his voice low and raspy. He had a strange accent that Cobra couldn’t place, and she figured he must be from outside of her neighboring territory. Suddenly the dragon laughed, a deranged and cruel sound, and she looked sharply at him.

“Well, ‘cept the Masters. They got all the pow’r ‘round here. Don’t give ‘em a reason to hate ‘cha, and you just might be alive by the end of this,” he rambled, eyes glinting with a delusional light. Cobra shrank back against the left wall of her cage, as far away from the strange dragon as possible, but she couldn’t quench the burning curiosity that had kindled inside her.

“Who are the Masters?” she asked, slightly afraid of the answer. The dragon grinned. Cobra tried not to grimace when she saw that his teeth were bloodstained.

“They’re the rulers, the ones who destroyed your home,” he replied, and Cobra shoved away memories of burning houses and terrified dragons. She desperately tried not to think about her family.

“What did they do to you?” she asked next, eyeing what little she could see of his bloody, scarred scales and torn wings.

“I was a loser of the Races one too many times. They tore ma’ wings up real bad after the las’ one, jus’ so I couldn’ race no more. Good riddance, I say!” the dragon spat, bloody spittle flying from between his teeth and spattering on the floor of his cage. He seemed too far gone to care, though.

“The Races?” Cobra asked hesitantly, tensing at the sight of the bloody cage floor.

“You’ll find out soon enough, sweetheart. You’ll see.”

Cobra hesitated again, watching as he flicked his tail around his back legs. The end had a chunk torn out of it.

“What’s your name?” she finally asked.

The dragon threw back his head and laughed so loudly that the prisoner to his right hissed at him to be quiet. Cobra caught the muttered words, “Crazy lunatic!” before the prisoner turned away again.

“No one needs names on this Train,” the deranged dragon answered, “but if ya really wanna know, ma’ name’s Jackrabbit. Ya’ know, as an insult to my racing ability. Everyone else just calls me Jack.”

“Yeah, Jabberjack, ‘cause he won’t shut up!” a prisoner somewhere above Cobra shouted, and laughs echoed from all corners of the train car. Some prisoners even gave jeers and mocking whistles, and Cobra got the idea that Jackrabbit was only well-liked because the other prisoners could taunt him without any repercussions.

Jackrabbit turned away and laid his head on his forearms, but he didn’t look upset. He hardly even looked like he knew what was happening.

Cobra shuddered. She needed to find Gale and get off the Train, because she was terrified of what would happen if they didn’t.