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George watched helplessly as the monstrous tentacle swept towards him. Suddenly he felt something grasp him by the arms and pull him away from the danger. With horror he realized it was a great black roc! He tried to struggle against it but it was far too strong. As the roc opened to scream its victory some object flew into its mouth and then exploded, completely blowing off the head of the monster. Monster and Chosen fell to the ground roughly. The roc released George and stumbled stupidly about, awaiting the reformation of its head. George lay stunned and again under the threat of yet another reaching, groping KraKara tentacle. The headless roc walked stupidly directly into the tentacle and was quickly engulfed by it, but the tentacle again reached towards the stunned Chosen.
Again he was grasped by the arms and pulled away, such that the grasping tentacle was once again averted. He wasn’t pulled away very swiftly, however. Several times the tentacle came within a few feet of him, only to recede from him again as he was again pulled away in a different direction. At last he was completely out of KaKara's reach, at least until the monster moved forward again.
“Get the truck,” he heard a human female voice say, and one of his limp arms was abruptly dropped. It had been English, but strangely accented. He turned his head to see the source of the voice, which was still holding him up by his other arm in a sitting position. It was a teenage black girl no older than himself, he was surprised to see. She was small and thin, and might have appeared attractive but for the soot and dirt that covered most of her. Her eyes practically burned with life-energy. She was another very special human!
“Thanks,” he managed to say, just loud enough to be heard over the commotion surrounding them. Screams, sirens, vehicles, fires, and movements of the monster made holding a conversation difficult.
Her eyes went wide as she bent closer. “I see you be alive, boy knight. That be good. After you save me from my house I see you fight the KraKara and the big birds with your dragon, but they be too much for even you. As is often the case, the most stupid be the most powerful.”
He recognized her now. Earlier he had flown her to safety after pulling her from a burning house. “You should get away from here,” he told her. “The monster will keep coming.”
“Me don’t think so. KraKara stop to eat your dragon meal, me think. He not move his fat body since he catch the dragon and birds.”
George struggled into a sitting position. The girl was right. The monster had centered itself where Freedom and the birds had been captured. Its tentacles were receding into the gathering mound around Freedom as it brought all its powers to bear on the problem of digesting the elementals.
“But we get out of here now, while we can,” the girl said. "We got no more grenades to blow up the heads of monster birds."
A small flatbed truck pulled up alongside them, and a boy that could have been twin to the girl got out of the driver’s seat and joined them. “The back of the truck be already full, but we can squeeze you in, Mystery Boy,” he announced, as he and his sister pulled George to the back of the truck and lifted him up onto the back of it without difficulty. Wearing his armor he weighed maybe a hundred and eighty pounds; the pair was much stronger than they looked, George concluded.
The truck was indeed quite full; there were roughly two dozen people already standing, sitting, or lying on the rough wood planking of the truck bed, but they made room for George and the girl, though they studied him with wide eyes, when they weren’t glancing back fearfully at the towering mass that was KraKara. George found himself lying next to a middle aged man that sat with his right arm in a sling. George remembered pulling him from a burning building.
“I see you on American TV, boy,” said the man, as the truck pulled away. “I pray for you to come here and help us, like you say you plan to do. You come, but it be no use. The monster be too strong for you and the White Dragon.”
“You have a name, besides Mystery Boy?” the girl asked. "My name be Sara. My brother Joseph drive the truck, and you talk now to my father John Mason.”
“George is my real name.”
“You out to save the world, Mystery Boy named George?” John asked. Amusement danced in his deep brown eyes, eyes that matched perfectly those of his daughter.
“That’s my plan. I guess I could use a little help though.”
“That’s about all that we can give you, just a little bit of help,” said Sara. “It be the least we can do to thank you for saving us, and also the most we can do.”
“I need to save my dragon.”
“I don’t see how you do that,” said Sara. "But then I not be a super hero. For now we seek only to save ourselves. We go far away. Too many monsters, bombs. and bullets here in the City."
“We go to the nearby high country now,” added John, “to the land of our fathers, where maybe even monsters don’t bother to come. You come with us. Maybe you get better, and then save more of our people.”
“If my dragon dies, I will die. If we die, you will all die. More monsters will come, and nobody will be able to stop them.”
“On the radio your President Jeffers be saying that maybe it be because of you that the monsters came here,” said John. “He says maybe you be the true enemy behind all the trouble.”
The words stunned George. The betrayal wasn’t just local, it went all the way to the top. “The monsters are here now because we are here on Earth, that much is true. But they seek to destroy us because we are the only hope to stop them. We are not the enemy; we seek to save the Earth. Jeffers is an idiot.”
John smiled. “That be what we think also. The world be a complex place, with others fighting and we African people many times in the middle, paying with our blood. What be good, what be bad, it sometimes not be so clear as your white leaders say. But in this country, KraKara be evil death, for all time. That be very clear, and you came to try to save us and to fight this evil, that also is very clear. So what more can we do to help you a little bit, Mystery Boy named George?”
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White Dragon's Chosen Page 37