I took in a deep breath, tried to relax my tongue, and felt that scratch in the back of my throat. Another breath swelled my chest and I tasted the faint sizzle of chemicals mixing. I let it all out.
It was the biggest flame I’d ever made, and to this day I still think one of the most impressive. A good fifteen feet of golden, burning air lit up the entire street, hitting the ground right between the last two men. Not even men. Teenagers. Kids in green bandannas who were screaming like little children as the cuffs of their jeans caught fire. I coughed once as my lungs hit empty and burped up a little softball of flames with some black smoke. They ran.
The girl was staring at me and whispering prayers over and over again. She was barely out of her teens. I think I freaked her out just as much as the other guys did.
I debated chasing the bad guys or trying to calm her down, but in the time it took me to decide either one became a lost cause. Then I spent another few seconds deciding if I should say something or go for the dark and silent persona. So many things I hadn’t thought out. In the end, as the last of the flames hissed out on the pavement, I gave her a smile and a nod and hurled myself upward. A quick push off a lamppost gave me some extra “ooomph” and I flew into the night. Less than three seconds and I was a hundred feet up.
I glanced down and saw her still standing there in the middle of the street. She just stared up in amazement. I spread the cape, caught a faint breeze, and started gliding away. And then her shout echoed up to me.
“Thank you!!!”
And that’s how I became the Mighty Dragon.
NOW
Two
St. George balanced on the point of the water tower, the highest point on the lot, and looked down at the fake city.
It was just a couple of buildings and a pair of short roads, and from this angle their facades were obvious. But compared to the rest of the Mount, New York Street looked normal. Normal and peaceful. It wasn’t unusual to find people wandering there, where they could walk two blocks on a sidewalk and pretend the world was still safe and made sense.
He’d visited the Mount twice. Before, when it was just a film studio. A friend of a friend had gotten him on the lot years ago and they’d spent an afternoon walking the choked streets and alleys. At the time, it had seemed like the most amazing place in the world. He remembered the fake city from that visit.
The second time had been at night, in costume. He’d stood on this very spot on top of the water tower and looked past the walls of the studio at the glowing expanse of Hollywood while the wind whipped his cape. He’d felt like an honest-to-God superhero.
It all seemed so long ago.
Just over the West building he could see the North-by-Northwest residential area. Close to a thousand people packed into less than a city block. Stage 15, on the far side of New York Street, has a large cluster of tents set up on the roof. Scavenged solar cells, water barrels, and gardens covered the rooftops.
It had taken two months after they moved into the Mount, but most of the stages had been changed into mass housing. Now there were two dozen families living in each one. The plus side was they all had plenty of space and huge rooftops for private gardens. The downside was two dozen immediate neighbors and lack of privacy.
As they’d all quickly discovered, lack of privacy was the killer. Over a hundred fights broke out the first week. Two of them ended in deaths. Stealth had thrown the murderers over the fence at the North Gower Gate. Their screams hadn’t lasted long, but the lesson had.
He looked over his left shoulder. Far in the distance, halfway to the ocean, he could see the towers of Century City. They’d filmed one of the original Planet of the Apes movies there. Just off to the left, he could see a few thin lines of dark smoke trace paths in the crisp blue sky.
People could say a lot of negative things about the apocalypse, but there was no arguing the air quality in Los Angeles had really improved.
As a gust of wind came from the west, he turned from the film sets and hurled himself off the tower. He soared across what had once been a parking lot and pool for water movies. It had taken them two months to fill it in with all the potting soil and dirt they could scavenge from the Home Depot up on Sunset, plus a few drugstores, but now it was just under half an acre of farmland in the heart of the lot. Over a dozen people walked the rows of soybeans, spinach, and potatoes with watering cans. Their tired eyes looked up at the hero as he flew over them.