At the same time, the plane took off behind them, carrying away the guards and the representatives of the United Nations who had coordinated the handover of girls from this year's selected countries. Rahel looked around, perturbed. Only now did chaos truly break out: it was mass panic.
It hit them all in the same moment that there really was no turning back now. For her part, Rahel watched the plane depart almost longingly and swallowed hard, trying to keep calm as the other girls screamed and sobbed more loudly, calling out god knows what and trying to tear themselves away, when the dragon suddenly grabbed her around the middle, lifting her up and then simply depositing her on his own shoulders.
She gasped in fright, fidgeted briefly, squeaking shrilly as she tried to find balance, as he, without a word, morphed underneath her into the huge, black dragon she'd first seen. She wound up sitting in a hollow of his neck, directly in front of a large, fleshy plate that helped secure her there at the top of his back. She was nearly spread-eagled over his now much thicker neck. "Whoa! What is this shit?" she shouted. The air flared with startled yells and high screeching sounds as the other girls found themselves in a similar position, high atop the beasts.
The monster was already spreading its wings wide below her and ducked down. Involuntarily Rahel sank her fingers into one of the smaller jagged plates that grew out of his neck and gasped tremulously, feeling pale and tiny. She gasped again in shock.
By then he had jumped off the ground and was flying up into the sky with long, sweeping wingbeats—not as jerkily as she would have thought; it was more of a gradual, merry-go-round sort of sensation. The ground was growing more distant beneath them as he gently bobbed up and down. "Ohhhhh ... ohhh God ...!" she breathed involuntarily and ducked down low under the headwind, then covered her face with her arms as she felt insects pelting her skin. This lasted only a matter of seconds, then the danger seemed to be past and she looked up briefly, only to near-miss an enormous bird, which croaked past and almost went spiralling to the ground as it veered to avoid her. A scream escaped her and she ducked down again, deciding it was safer to lie flat against the dragon's neck, closing her eyes, which were tearing up, and her mouth, which was dry as dust, so that she didn't swallow a swarm of insects, like a bat on its night rounds. From somewhere she heard more shrill screeching and choking noises; the girls were all loudly begging the dragons to land again, in English, Chinese, Spanish...their desperation transcended language. But of course the monsters didn't heed a word of it.
Rahel, shaking with fear, tried to get her breath back under control, her racing heartbeat and her thoughts, which likely wouldn't matter one bit in a moment—when, for example, the dragon swooped sharply and she fell off him. He was guaranteed to catch her then and cut her up with razor-sharp claws—yes, really mangle her... Oh God in heaven! But she didn't fall and he didn't make any steep turns, either. She just held on with her hands and feet and kept breathing, in and out, regularly, just focusing on the effort. She counted her breaths and simply hung on miserably until the dragon landed somewhere. She almost relaxed a little and even yawned wearily. Oops—better not to do that; she promptly gagged as a fly flew into her throat. She swallowed reflexively and the poor bug actually wound up in her stomach.
...Crap.
But beggars couldn't be choosers—and who could say what this leader would offer her for gruesome fare at some later point: pork stomach or mashed pig brain on banana leaves. Oh, just thinking that that might actually happen almost made her vomit right then and there.
Then the dragon suddenly sank down, straight towards a small island, which became larger as they neared. He ultimately landed very smoothly a few minutes later, without so much as a hop, in a big forest clearing ringed by giant sequoias.
Oh wow!
Involuntarily, Rahel straightened up, still trembling, and looked around hastily, only then breathing a sigh of relief at having survived this first ordeal unharmed. The other dragons landed right next to them.
Her relief was short, however, for then she found herself panting hard on the ground—one of the creatures had actually landed far too close and his outstretched wing had swept her down from the back of her black dragon. It took her breath away for a moment and her arm and shoulder hurt terribly. But before Rahel understood what had happened to her, the girl on the other dragon shrieked and went flying through the air as well. Another dragon jumped up into action and caught the girl quickly with its claw, but let then let her roll to the ground, for the Leader was bellowing, screeching and growling like a crazy steam locomotive. He attacked the dragon who'd unseated her, driving him into the ground in the best display of a most brutal death match ever seen.
The earth shook, girls shrieked shrilly, and their dragons scattered and stamped wildly.
Insane, Rahel thought, gasping for breath, leaning hard on the ground in an attempt to regain her breath. The dragons were all scattering like startled birds, taking themselves and the other girls to safety, away from the clearing, between and behind the thick trees. Well—everyone but Rahel and the other girl who'd fallen. Doubtless the monsters hadn't even noticed them lying there on the ground.
Rahel crawled backwards as fast as she could, as one end of a tail swept just over her head, and then rose, staggering, and ran to a huge sequoia tree. Fortunately, it had dense and towering roots that might give her some cover as the earth quaked, the dragons roared, hissed, and screeched as they battled and rolled about. The black one, actually the much smaller of the two, slashed and bit the much larger gray and the blood fell heavy on the ground and up onto the tree root against which she was leaning, luckily on the other side. For real, it was madness how these dragons with their huge t-rex fangs attacked each other. But the giant, gray dragon had no chance against the leader; Rahel watched as the behemoth took on his human form again and went crashing into the next tree, making it shake to the canopy and sending little monkeys and birds screeching from the tree top.
Oh man, the guy must have just broken all his bones with that stunt, but her black dragon still didn't seem to be finished with his bloody adversary on the ground; he glowered down at him, approached, and raised his gigantic dragon talons before him, poised to finally pound him into the ground. He was now so dangerously close to her, his sword tail missing her by only a hair as it swept from side to side—she could feel its wind against her face as it missed her by fractions of an inch. She moved, gasping, in a sprinting sideways gait around the tree trunk and then, ducking her head, ran further towards another thick tree trunk that had fallen over, where she leaned in and climbed over, moving quickly, gasping for air, her head and shoulders pressed into the wood. She closed her eyes, moaning softly, because her arm was sending hot waves of pain from where she'd fallen, the blow with the wing—oh Christ, it might even be broken; she felt something funny just below the shoulder and the area was swelling. "Shit, shit, SHIT!" she whimpered wildly and cradled it firmly against her chest.