Resistance by John Birmingham Read Free Book Online

us about the ones you fought in New Orleans? Are they connected to these . . . Drakon . . . which attacked six aircraft last night?’
    She pronounced the word ‘Draykon’.
    ‘ Dar Drakon ,’ he corrected. ‘Dragons. That’s some crazy shit right there, eh?’
    He smiled weakly and shook his head, starting to relax into the interview.
    He noticed Foxy – Georgia. Her name is Georgia – motioning at him to lift the mic a little closer to his mouth.
    ‘I don’t know so much about the dragons,’ he said. ‘But the Hunn? The Horde? Yeah I can tell y’all about them.’
    And he did. At length. Until the screen turned to white noise.

03
    Dave knew something was going down before the video link to New York dropped out. The disturbance in the hall outside would have set his Spidey senses tingling even earlier, had he not been so wrapped up in flirting with Survivor Chick. He was certain she was flirting with him. Right there on cable TV. Smiling and giggling, playing with a few strands of hair while alternately beaming, gasping and shaking her head in mock horror as Dave relayed some of the gnarlier moments from the Battle of New Orleans.
    That’s what they were calling it now, ‘The Battle of New Orleans’. You could hear the capital letters in the way Survivor Chick said it. She was good at her job, getting him to talk, or maybe Georgia Knox was. The diminutive producer in the waffle-weave bathrobe never once looked at Dave while she channelled her questions through to the studio. But she led the two anchors and their guest – ‘the talent’ he heard one of the techs call him – through the entire adventure from the moment he’d landed on the Longreach in J2’s chopper, to Compton ordering the helicopter gunships to open up on the remnants of Urspite’s revengers party. Dave was smart enough not to reveal his true feelings about that. Years of ass-covering practice in the vicious pig circus of Baron’s Petrochemical’s office politics had taught him some discretion. He might have thought that firing on the retreating Horde after he’d negotiated their withdrawal from the field had been an epically dumbass piece of douche-baggage, but he knew better than to hang that out in public. There would probably come a moment to tell the truth of it, or his version of the truth at any rate. But for now, sitting half naked on breakfast television, he didn’t feel like that moment had arrived.
    What had arrived were the Men in Black.
    That was Hooper’s first thought as two of them, then three, then four and then a small army, all wearing dark suits, crisp white shirts, and mostly blue or black ties, burst into the temporary media suite. He’d heard them coming. Or he’d heard the commotion outside the suite, but had just put it down to pushing and shoving between hotel security, and the small pack of would-be agents and reps and ten-percenters scratching at the doors outside. But then the signal to New York dropped out as he was explaining to Elisabeth Hasselbeck – Lizzie he called her now – how braining a shit-faced Urgon Htoth ur Hunn had been his personal Biggest Loser and Marvel Comics origin story moment all rolled into one. Lizzie had even talked him into standing up and taking off his shirt to show America his newfound six-pack. Perhaps she’d forgotten that he wore no pants, or perhaps she was very much aware of the fact. It didn’t matter in the end because hissing white noise suddenly filled the screen.
    He’d finally attended to the muffled shouts and protests outside then. Georgia Knox had started cursing up a storm, and the double doors of the suite had crashed open to admit a phalanx of gorillas in suits. All of them giving the impression they wanted to have a serious word with Mr David Hooper about his unfiled tax returns or unpaid parking fines, or some grim and difficult shit like that.
    ‘Shut it down,’ ordered one suit. Dave assumed he was the man in charge since he seemed pretty