This chapter has been proof-read by: AnthonyL

First published on my wordpress: Here

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The parking area where the tanker truck should be was empty. I was certain to have seen a big rig there a month back, but now it was gone. There could be only one explanation for this sudden disappearance, survivors. This was the only possible answer.

There were no corpses or anything suspicious around but it couldn’t be anything else. Then, a sudden rumbling far in the distance made me snap back to what I was previously doing. “Thunder… Better hurry back home.” Since I had been here in this world, I had never seen rain during the day, but you could expect rain every night.

I sat back in my seat and continued my journey back home with butterflies in my stomach. I was not alone, there were more people who had survived than I first expected. Since they took the truck recently, this would mean that they had survived for at least 3 months.

With that in mind, it was highly likely that they were still alive, somewhere in town. As I made a left turn on my street and finally saw my property in the distance, my body began to ache. With salvation and safety in sight, my body had finally begun to relax hence waking up the pain caused by my wounds.

No monster had tried attacking me during my way back. Considering it was currently a ‘red day’, I was perplexed not to have came across anything bad. A small grin formed on my face as the reason for this seemed to be exactly what I had hoped for. The dragon’s head in the back of my truck seemed more valuable than I had first thought.

Finally arriving at the gate of my property, I swiftly opened it and entered with my heavy cargo. I promptly parked the truck and trailer in front of the garage door and exited my vehicle. I needed to disinfect my wounds and clean the blue blood and guts from my guns and other equipment.

Obviously, I wanted to get in my bunker and never come out again, but the dragon’s tail I had brought kept bothering me. In such heat, if I didn’t take care of it tonight, it’ll spoil and turn bad really fast. This world’s climate, seasons and sun cycles were still a total mystery to me.

I had recently gone out of my bunker, during a few rare minutes of storm-less night. The stars in the sky seemed to be the same as the one on earth. I am no professional astronomer so I couldn’t say for sure but, I recognized many familiar constellations.

Shaking away these complicated questions, I began to carry the dragon pieces into the garage but stopped as I was about to unload the head. It was a seriously big head, as big as an elephant’s head. How the hell did I managed to load it in the back of this truck?

No matter how I looked at it, this should have been way too heavy for me to lift. Yet, I clearly remembered rolling it into the back of the truck, and even partially lift it. I then tried to lift it again but as I expected, this thing was way too heavy. Questions were inundating my mind as I wondered how I had accomplished such a feat back then.

Memories of this red mist phenomena during my fight against the evil alien chickens kept popping into my head. There was no other possible explanation, I had used the power of this red mist unconsciously back then since I felt in danger. This was the only explanation as to how I had managed to lift this incredibly heavy dragon head.

Since I had no intentions of eating the head, I decided to leave it in the back of my truck for now. In the worst case scenario, it will attract other dragons. In the best case, it will keep other creatures away from here. I will see what I can do with it tomorrow if my body condition allows me but for now, only the tail needed to be prioritized.

I only had a few hours left on my current mask filter and intended to use it all before retiring for the night. My father’s corvette was starting to get on my nerve, it was taking too much space in the garage and would need to be relocated tomorrow. If Father had heard me say that, he would have whooped my ass.

I placed the tail pieces on an improvised counter and took out a meat cleaver and other sharp knives. The meat was tender, the only hard part was the scale covered skin. As long as I cut around it, I was able to butcher it properly without too much difficulties.

I spend around 2 hours butchering the meat and sealed the pieces in zip-lock bags and saran wrap. I now had a mountain of red meat and began to fill my 2 big freezers with it. Eventually, my two freezers were filled to the brim but I still had more meat left.

Not wanting to waste anything, I pulled out my father’s smoker out of the store room and began to cut the remaining meat in thin slices ready to be smoked. I also placed the dragon’s skin onto racks to dry and be tanned later. By the time I had achieved doing all this, my mask filter had already reached out its maximum lifetime, prompting me to finish for the day.

I closed the garage door and used a steel pipe as chimney to evacuate the smoker’s smoke from a window. The meat would be left there to smoke the entire night. Before finishing for the day, I opened the trailer door and grabbed something I had found at the Canadian Tire store.

They were respiratory masks, usually used by painter or in other professions necessitating the use of toxic substances. I had grabbed all the masks I had found as well as boxes of spare filters. They were called ‘organic vapour cartridges’ and still needed to be tested since I didn’t know if they could filter this ‘red air’.

With what I wanted in hand, I closed and locked the trailer before going back to the safety of my underground shelter. I threw my equipment in a corner of the room and walked naked to the back of the main room. There, I took a long and warm shower, making sure to clean properly all the cuts and bruises on my poorly battered skin.

Once that was done, I grabbed a bottle of rubbing alcohol and meticulously disinfected every wound on my body. Blue blood and guts had been in contact with my wounds which made me quite paranoid as to the possible future infections.

Luckily, none of the cuts seemed deep enough to reach the muscles. Some of them could have used a few stitched but I deemed it unnecessary. I had felt enough pain for the day and didn’t feel like piercing myself with a needle on top of it all.

The day had been especially long and scary. Here in my bunker, I could finally relax and feel better about it all but many things were still on my mind. Firstly, will my wounds heal properly? Secondly, that dragon encounter and my two freezers full of meat, and lastly, the survivors.

I keep talking in plural since I doubted anyone except me would have been able to survive this ordeal alone. They had to travel across town, down to the truck stop near my home, take the big rig and drive it back to where they had come from. A surprising feat for someone alone.

If they needed that much fuel, it was obviously to run a generator. That generator was most likely running an air filtration system which had allowed them to survive thus far. “Somewhere in town, where the air is being filtered…” I whispered to myself. Where could that be?

I grabbed some painkillers and antibiotics to prevent infection as I kept pacing around the room, lost in thought while chain smoking cigarettes. Most people don’t own expensive air filtration systems like me. Considering this, it should logically be a public building.

Fire station? Possible but unlikely… Police station? Library?… No. Where could they be? I kept thinking about it but couldn’t come up with anything solid so I pushed the matter aside for later. Right now, I was starving. I had spent hours butchering meat and I was seriously salivating at the thought of eating some, but it was very late.

I was dead tired and didn’t feel like testing its edibility or get sick if it wasn’t. Instead, I simply made some instant ramen noodles and went to bed. I was so tired that I instantly drifted asleep like a baby. Hopefully I won’t go through such dangers in the future.

Thump! Shake* I woke up wondering what was happening. The entire ground was shaking and making my provisions fall off the shelves. I stood up from my bed but couldn’t react as quickly as I wanted due to the soreness of my body. How long had I slept? What was happening?

I quickly looked through my CCTV cameras to shed light on the situation but was met with black screens. Thump! Shake* This time the lights flickered, something had happened to my power grid? Thump! Shake* Fuck! I think I know what is going on outside.

I attracted a dragon to my house didn’t I? And the damned thing is destroying everything above ground. My trailer full of supplies, my solar panels and windmill, everything I needed to survive was being destroyed wasn’t it? Filled with anger, I grabbed my 338 Lapua sniper rifle, loaded its magazine with the deadly rounds and exited my bunker half-naked.

Whatever was destroying my house needed to be taken care of as fast as possible or it meant my death. I nervously exited through the steel doors, ran down the red corridor, then up the stairs and opened the secret trap door. “Gasp!” I couldn’t help but let out a gasp because of what I was seeing.

I should now be in the basement but, I was outside instead. ‘Gulp*’ My house was gone. All around me were burning remains of what was once my family home. It was still night and rain was pouring down, luckily preventing the fire from spreading to the entire neighbourhood. I was in shock, I had just lost everything. To burn under the rain, there were only two possible explanations in my mind.

It was either my smoker that I had left untended that had caused this fire, or a dragon came and burned everything. “Rrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr” A very low growl coming from behind made me jump back in fear. What I saw as I turned around froze me in place. “ROOOOAAAAAARRRRRRRRRRRRRR!!!!!!!!”

A giant red glowing eye was staring at me from beyond the darkness of night, an eye as big as a car. Then, as my eyes finally focused on the dark silhouette, I almost fainted out of fear. It was indeed a dragon, and a very pissed one at that. But this wasn’t the problem.

This dragon which was currently staring at me with fury in its eyes was easily 20 times bigger than the one I had killed earlier. This dragon was as big as an apartment building. “D-don’t tell me… H-his mom?” My stomach sank down so low that it felt like it had reached my feet.

The giant dragon then arched its neck backward and took a deep breath. Knowing what was coming, I tried to jump back down the trapdoor to avoid it but it was too late. The fire was too hot, too powerful. It melted the ground, turning it into lava. The giant wall of flame reached me in the blink of an eye and annihilated everything it touched.

HAAAAAAAAAAAaaaaaaaaaaaaa!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Pant* Pant* Pant* Pant* Pant* Pant*” I woke up in a puddle of my own sweat. My heart was beating like no tomorrow and my mind was in shambles. “A-a dream?…” Panicked, I put on some pants and ran out to the garage. It was still night, the garage was pitch-dark and the only light came from the dim flame of the smoker.

The smoker was running out of wood but everything else seemed perfectly normal. I restocked the smoker with wood, then slowly crawled alongside my father’s corvette. Trying not to make a sound, I stealthily crawled up to the garage door with the intention of looking outside through one of the small windows.

I should have used the CCTV cameras first instead of running outside like a moron. Because I didn’t know what to expect, I was terrified to look out the window. I stood up, inch by inch until my eyes finally reached the necessary height to see out the window.

It was incredibly dark and I couldn’t see anything except one thing, two glowing red eyes only a few meters away from me. “Gasp!*” My two legs gave way, making me fall on my ass. I was having a panic attack. I had difficulty breathing, my chest was tight and I felt like vomiting.

I remained there, leaning on my father’s corvette’s front bumper, looking pathetic as I was trying to regain my composure. There were absolutely no sounds other than the sound of rain, and everything was way too quiet for a giant creature like a dragon to be here.

I crawled on my stomach the entire way but I finally managed to get back inside. Silently closing the door, I ran down the trapdoor, stairs and the red corridor. I hurried into my bunker and ran to my computers to look through my CCTV cameras. This was the first thing I should have done after waking up after all.

I carefully inspected each screen, there was no movement anywhere. Everything seemed calm but when I looked at the camera aimed at the front of the garage door, there they were again. These blood chilling, glowing red eyes.

This time though, I could clearly see what was going on by switching to night vision. These glowing eyes were those of the severed dragon head. So these eyes would still emit light even after the dragon’s death. This was truly peculiar, they were not glowing but seemingly bioluminescent.

(Bioluminescence: is the production and emission of light by a living organism. It is a form of chemiluminescence. Bioluminescence occurs widely in marine vertebrates and invertebrates, as well as in some fungi, microorganisms including some bioluminescent bacteria and terrestrial invertebrates such as fireflies.)

Truly fascinating even though it is equally chilling. You couldn’t help but think it was still alive since this process should normally occur only when the creature is alive. (As far as I know…) Finally calmed down, I sat at the end of my bed and lit a cigarette. My thoughts were in total disorder.

My body was annoyingly sore and I had slept only a few hours. I will need to get this head further away from my home tomorrow just in case. As I was smoking, I kept thinking about the possible location of the survivors. I eventually finished my cigarette and laid on my bed, still lost in thought.

Then it came to me out of nowhere. “The hospital!” Of course that’s where they were. After all you needed good air filtration in an operating room, or for patients with respiratory sicknesses. The hospital also had an emergency generator which would have saved everybody during the crisis!

This was amazing, this meant that the total number of survivors was potentially huge. There could be a hundred people stuck inside the hospital right now, but the big problem was that the hospital was located on the other side of town to the west. Between 4 to 5 kilometres away from here to be more precise.

Having figured out where they probably were, I ended up finding sleep rapidly. Luckily this time, it was a dreamless rest. I woke up in the morning with aching muscles and pain in my joints. I felt like crap but pulled myself out of bed with the taste of red meat in mind.

The cuts on my body were still very sensitive and had yet to close but at least they didn’t bleed. I put on some clean clothes, grabbed my shotgun and went out in the garage. The smoker was doing its job perfectly and the meat looked delicious. I decided to leave the meat in the smoker for a bit longer and went back inside after putting more wood into it.

I sat at the table and grabbed my head with both hands while recalling yesterday’s events. I was happy to learn about the survivors but couldn’t help but feel anxious about it. I missed it when I thought I was alone but now that I knew I wasn’t alone, I didn’t feel like meeting them anymore.

Then I hatched a splendid idea. My property has a large antenna linked to various types of radio waves. If they had a CB radio, we could talk to each other like on the telephone. (Internet ancestor) My antenna was powerful enough to receive from them even if they had a small range antenna.

This was a perfect plan, after all I couldn’t blindly trust them. Some of them might want to beat the location of my bunker out of me then kill me. In these types of scenarios, other humans are your biggest threat. I will establish contact, secretly gather information about them, then decide what to do.

Having one more thing off my mind suddenly reopened my appetite. I grabbed one of the steaks which had yet to fully freeze and placed it in the microwave in defrost mode. I then prepared a hot pan and used dragon fat as butter.

I grabbed the precious piece of meat out of the microwave and gently placed it in the sizzling pan. TSSZZzzzzzzz* The smell was divine, a mix between beef and chicken. It was a total saliva inundation in my mouth and I was even considering eating the damned thing mid-rare, but just to be safe I decided to have it well cooked.

While this was cooking, I rapidly made a batch of powdered mash potato with powdered milk as accompaniment. I grabbed a plate, placed the mash potato and the steak next to each other. I sat at the table and cried. I was so fucking happy, this was the best day in my life. I wolfed the entire thing down while crying my eyes out.

Satisfied, I laid on my bed and digested peacefully. I needed to deal with my cargo today and I had still yet to decide what I was going to do with the dragon’s head. Before I could decide anything, a familiar dizziness overcame me. ‘Red mist’ poisoning once again, the meat!

I ran to the toilet and stuffed my index finger down my throat until I had completely emptied my stomach. But the dizziness wasn’t going away, I was slowly losing consciousness. I had too much red gas inside me, I needed to evacuate some.

Trying to remember the sensation of going super saiyan from yesterday, I began to try to force it all out of me. As I did so, the dizziness turned into a state of drunkenness. Everything around me seemed to slow down and I felt in control of every pore on my body.

As I wished it, red mist began to leak from my skin. First it was trickles, then torrents. My skin was burning and screaming as I forced more and more out of me. The room became filled with it and the air filtration system couldn’t keep up.

I kept concentrating on this feeling and continued expelling it until I stopped feeling sick. Sensing I had reached a tolerable level of red mist, I stopped expelling it from my body. The air in the room eventually cleaned up and I felt instantly better. “Fiuff… Crap now I’m hungry again…”

I had almost died again, but this time I had learned something incredibly important. With this ability, I didn’t need a gas mask anymore. I just had to regularly keep expelling some gas out. (No pun intended)

This time I opted for something safe, some canned ravioli. I would need to increase my red gas tolerance quite a bit to be able to spoil myself with some dragon steaks. “Sniff, sob sob sob*”

The rest of the day was productive and happily uneventful. Not a single creature stepped foot on my property and I am certain that it is this dragon’s head’s doing. Curious to know how heavy this head was, I used a winch and a crane scale that Father and I used to weigh our catches. We loved hunting and fishing. Knowing how heavy our catch was was an important part of it.

Conclusion, almost a thousand pounds. I was agape, unable to believe my eyes. While under the effect of this red gas, I had managed to partially lift a thousand pounds? Me, the neet, smoker who only does some exercises every day. Amazing, I will need to experiment with that later.

Thank to the gas expulsion technique, I spent the entire day in the garage. I took Father’s corvette outside and parked it on the side of the house. Feeling that my yard was safer than ever thanks to Mr Dragon, I unloaded the trailer, placed everything important in the bunker and the rest in the basement.

I also took the dried meat out of the smoker and stored it in air sealed bags. Next, I placed the dragon’s head a bit further away from the house on the side of the driveway, then began to make a small workshop in the garage by placing various tools and work surfaces everywhere.

The sun was finally setting and I had spent a very productive day to say the least. I went back inside, ate some canned meatballs and watched a few movies before bed. The next day, I did my exercises and red air training but stayed inside the entire day. I felt lazy… I also ate a mouthful of steak. Mmmmmm, I got sick but it was worth it.

One week later, my wounds were already closed and healing properly. I spent the entire week crafting various things in my new workshop. I used my large stock of gunpowder to make some pipe bombs and various traps. I was not a professional in explosives so I kept it as simple as possible.

I also welded a V-shaped plow in front of my new pick-up truck to clear the obstacles out of my way, placed a generator and all the tools I might need in the future in the back and reinforced the windows. I also filled the tires with a green gooey product that is supposed to automatically fix any punctures and allow me to ride a few more kilometres safely.

I prepared a portable CB radio and everything else I judged necessary to establish my first contact with survivors. My yard was very peaceful since I had placed the dragon’s head in the middle of it. I had ended up doing a quick autopsy of this severed head and discovered something interesting.

Actually, dragons don’t breathe fire, they spit it. I had discovered 2 glands in the back of its mouth which sprayed some nasty smelling liquids if squeezed hard enough. The gland on the right and left side of its mouth were secreting 2 different liquids.

One was yellow, the other brown. Individually, these two liquids were inoffensive but if mixed, a chemical reaction happened and immediately took flame. The reaction was incredibly violent and could melt through metal if enough liquid was used. I ended up milking the two glands dry and conserved the two precious fluids in glass jars. I named these liquids ‘dragon napalm’. I knew this could come in handy later.

At the moment, I was in the garage once again, trying to create a bigger bomb by using a pipe bomb and a propane tank. I tried to use a timer but I am not an electrician or a bomb specialist so I opted for a simple long fuse instead. The garage door was opened, and music was playing through my ipod.

Needless to say, I had gained a lot of confidence these last days. I was now able to stay outside more than 12 hours without needing to expel the red mist out of my body. This meant that I could finally eat half a normal steak without getting sick. Having completed my propane bomb, I grabbed my rifle and decided to go for a walk.

I was near the border to the otherworldly forest to the east but I had never explored it. Wearing full hunting camouflage gear and rifle in hand, I began to walk through the neighbours’ yards and rapidly reached a clear demarcation in the land. You could see an obvious line between what had came from earth, and what was from this world.

The grass was a different tone of green and the trees became very different looking, more exotic. All around my property were apple, plum, pear, cherry and other various fruit trees, but none of them had produced fruits. Back on earth, it should be winter right now but here, the heat only seemed to get more and more unbearable each day.

With my world’s trees not producing any fruits, I wondered if the plants from this world were even comestible to humans. I even began to think of making a garden to grow vegetables from earth since my provisions wouldn’t last forever, especially if there were many survivors still around.

I stood there, a few feet away from the border to this unknown world, afraid of stepping foot out of my world’s soil. As I was about to step foot into the unknown, I heard a sudden rustling in the long grass behind me. I immediately grabbed my machete and turned around to face what was coming and it was them again. These fucking hell dogs.

They had been waiting for me all this time, these bastards were persistent. They were two, charging at high speed toward me. They were just far enough to give me time to begin expelling red mist and enter the now familiar trance. I could see the creatures running in slow motion toward me but this time, I was calm and collected.

In a few swift movements, I charged at the beasts and slashed the first one in half. The second one received a kick to the jaw which beheaded him instantly. The red mist was hurling all around me, creating a small hurricane shielding me from fear and most attacks. These dogs were nothing more than bugs for me to step on.

With that taken care of, I sheathed my machete and turned back toward the unknown forest once again. I didn’t want to do it but I needed to learn more about this world in order to survive. I couldn’t always stay hidden in my bunker. I gathered my courage and stepped foot into the unknown.

The ground was smoochy and covered with humid moss and wet soil. All the trees were from different species I had never seen before. Some were small, other were normal size, but those that attracted my attention the most were the giant skyscraper like trees.

I silently advanced through the forest rifle in hand, trying not to make a sound. The noises in this forest were all foreign. Some sounded like cicadas, but other sounded as if they were straight out of horror movies. Everything was scary, even the plants. Some giants flowers like things gave me the creeps. I couldn’t help but imagine them as carnivorous plants.

I walked up to a medium sized tree and began to tap on it with my machete. To my surprise, I could chip off chunks of wood very easily. Then I used my hands and realized just how soft the wood was. I was probably still under the effect of my going super sayan earlier but was amazed to see that I was able to dig my fingers into the trunk.

This tree was as soft as styrofoam and I could bring it down bare handed. No need for chainsaws when dealing with styrofoam trees after all. The plants were similar, very fragile and easy to destroy. Some of the trees had thorns but they seemed incapable of piercing my skin and would always end up breaking before penetrating it.

Feeling like I was in a styrofoam world, I couldn’t help but totally destroy a few trees by simply kicking them. It was fun, but I hadn’t come here to play. I didn’t want to get too far away and get lost so I turned around and headed back home. I had discovered something important again, most flora and fauna living in this world were fragile things.

Once back home, I boiled some noodle and made tomato sauce macaroni. After my meal, I began to gather everything I had crafted this last week and placed them on the table. My preparations were completed and I was pretty certain to have thought of everything.

“Tomorrow is the day I meet with these survivors.”