"Steve wasn't always like this. We've known each other since high school. His family, damn it...you should see it, the psychological pressure they put on him. You have to live up to the Langleys, Stephen". Raleigh shook her head. "It's like living with an invisible force that pushes you, pushes you, without stopping. But we're not teenagers anymore. We're both adults, now, and we have the option of choosing who to listen to".
"So, you and him..."
"...We broke up", said Raleigh. "After that night, Steve chose his path and I chose mine".
Inside of me, a tiny band played and walked triumphantly along the roads of my heart, shaking it so much it seemed like it would jump out of my chest.
"I see", I said. "I'm sorry".
I was shamelessly lying. I wasn't sorry at all. She smiled again and went back to looking at the road.
We talked a bit more. Before leaving, she had LeBon tell her what we knew about Whiskey and the egg's origin, and I told her about what had happened during my search, from Bronson's pub up to general Dao.
After a couple of hours, the adrenaline effect had worn off. The bite was burning. If I tried moving my arm even just a few inches, a strike of intense pain went from my elbow up to my neck, making me clench my teeth. The whole area around the wound was swollen and pulsing, but I wouldn't dare turn or move the arm to look at it. I didn't tell Raleigh anything, but when we passed the border between Nevada and Idaho I started feeling hot, and my head was dizzy.
Before arriving in Boise, I called LeBon and told him to prepare the infirmary. We got to Wild Dragons at eight thirty in the morning. My forehead was wet and I felt weak. I got out of the van with difficulty and Raleigh had to help me bring Whiskey into the store. Dragons were all around the counter, Mustangs and Outbacks everywhere.
"Damn it, Jean. What are the dragons doing on the brochures?"
LeBon came toward us passing between Darwin and Ursus. He wasn't in a wheelchair anymore.
"There was a two day blackout, Jeq, and...Mon dieu! What did they do to him! Wait, I'll help you".
Together we brought Whiskey into the infirmary, followed by the dragons. We put the dragon on one of the beds and I caught my breath. I put my hands on my hips and shook my head, to clear my mind.
"Okay, we need the sample we took for the tests".
"It's in the fridge", said LeBon.
"Good. And you and Raleigh have to go to the farm. The resin I put on him was from the kit. He needs the Pitahaya(12)".
"Okay", Jean and Raleigh nodded.
While they were away, I connected Whiskey to an IV and prepared the mix for the resin. Jean and Raleigh came back after half an hour. I could barely stand at that point. I took the pieces of Pitahaya and put the cactus pulp into the resin mix. I had to spread it on his wounds, but when I took the bandages off, all that blood made me lose my mind.
It won't be enough, it won't be enough, I kept on telling myself.
I was delirious. I took Whiskey and laid him the container with the mix, wings, tail, claws, everything.
"No, Whiskey, don't leave me. You're my dragon..I'll save you, buddy. I'll save you now..."
I felt some hands take me by the shoulders, hugging me. Then I fell to the floor and fainted.
I DON'T REMEMBER ALMOST anything of the day I spent in the hospital. Again. And not even of when they brought me home. I had the impression someone was at my side the whole time.
It was Raleigh, obviously. According to the doctors, the wound had gotten infected because in some way, Whiskey's bite had poisoned me. It's only a hypothesis, but I think the poison was the reason Whiskey was so invincible in the fights. Hobb and Raminskij put it on his teeth before every match. He must have still had some on his fangs, when he bit me in the van.
I woke up forty-eight hours later, with my arm in bandages and my muscles as flimsy as wet paper. I didn't need to ask what had happened to Whiskey. I could see it in Raleigh's wet eyes, in my mother and father's sad faces. I wanted to go see him anyways, at the store. When he saw me arrive, Jean came up and hugged me.
"I'm sorry, Jeq", he said. "He d-didn't make it. I-it was too weak...his heart..."
LeBon burst into tears.
I comforted him as much as I could, my stomach was in knots, and I was a mess.
Then, I went into the infirmary. Alone. All the dragons, now in the Garden again, watched me walk by in silence. Whiskey was still in the resin, curled up. I could hardly make out his shape. The hard and yellowish surface covered him completely, almost as if he were in a giant egg.
The egg where everything had begun.
LeBon told me the dragons had done it. When I fainted, they had come into the infirmary and surrounded Whiskey. All of them, even Sheela. During the night, they took turns blowing small flaming puffs onto the resin. Raleigh and Jean had tried to stop them, but they wouldn't let anyone near their dying companion.
We buried Whiskey in the place he would have loved the most: next to his Pitahaya, under my uncle's old oak branches. I'm not ashamed to say that I cried as if I had lost a dear friend, or a brother.
Even if our paths had crossed for just a short time, Whiskey had changed my life. He had changed all our lives.
After a few weeks, I gathered enough courage to ask Raleigh out to dinner. She accepted, and...well, you can imagine the rest. We've been together since then, and every day is a good one because I have her by my side. Regarding Jean, in the end he decided to stay in Boise and we became partners. Three companies that sold eggs offered him jobs, but he refused all of them.
"I'm done with eggs. I want to work with real dragons", he told me.
Thanks to his help - and his knack for business - we now raise our own dragons, without buying eggs from anyone. In the Flight Garden there are twenty-three more dragons, and one less: Ben Dameshek took Canberra in the end. They come to visit us once in a while. The Outback and the botanist are made for one another; when he plays D&D with his friends, Canberra sits on his shoulder and fires up the evening. Literally.
Xander Hobb survived the shooting. Surprising, right? And even that bastard Andersen. Cockroaches, we all know, are hard to kill. The police arrested both of them. Andersen was wanted in three countries for homicide, and before being locked up in silence, he ratted on Hobb. I believe he thought it was him to betray them. In any case, it was discovered that Xander Hobb had been involved in illegal fights for some time, and owed a lot of money to someone who had sold his debt to Tajihara. That's why they had turned to him, to take care of and check on Whiskey between one fight and the other.
His dragons and eggs were seized and a month later they ended up at auction. Ten young lilac colored Brits, two Pink Frenches, six Outbacks and five adult green jade Tangs. All in all twenty-three specimens: guess who bought them?
I never saw General Dao again, nor Raminskij. But a few months after my trip to Las Vegas, I read on the newspapers that a famous Japanese business man, a certain Ryo Tajihara, had been killed in an assassination attempt in a hotel room in Tokyo. The assassins were never identified.
Notwithstanding the tragedy of Whiskey's death, things were going for the best. The Drought gave us a dry winter, and at the beginning of the new year, a spring as shy and insecure as a couple of virgins on their wedding night. I had a fantastic girlfriend, a loyal and competent partner, and I had the best job in the world. At this point, my story could be over. And I thought so too, until the fires started.
Everything happened after an incredible storm.
The Dragon and the Red Ball
"...But if we want to use an easier way to explain the phenomenon we've discovered, well then we can say that the Dracospirillum is to nitrifying bacteria what Hulk is to a normal man".
Dr. Howard Leisman, President of the Department of Botany of BSU.
SPRING THAT YEAR ARRIVED early and was very short. The oranges on the tree in my Garden matured quickly, and for the whole month of February the grass around the Outbacks was full of orange peels.
At the beginning, the Fire Monster's aggressions went by almost unobserved. It was only two weeks after the first attack that people noticed a monster was wandering around southern Idaho at night.
As I was saying, everything happened after a big storm, a multiple storm that lasted three days, from the morning of the 4th to the evening of March 7th.
In all of Ada county(13), and the surrounding ones, the lightning strikes caused several fires in the Ghost Farmland. Just a few feet from my store the Boise River flooded, another one of the Drought's cruel ironies. When the first drops arrived, it hadn't rained in four months; after the storm, the mud brought by the river had covered the streets and destroyed about a hundred homes.
Half of Boise was a swamp.
Two days after the end of the storm there was another large fire, this time in the town of Blackfoot. I didn't even hear of the news, because it had been shown only on local news stations. But when, a week later, even "The Snake" bar in Idaho Falls had burned down, everybody started talking about these fires.
The police thought it was arson and the media started talking about the "monster". In the beginning, I thought it was a coincidence. Bronson's pub and the place burnt in Blackfoot were the gambling houses where Raminskij and his men had forced Whiskey to fight, months before.
"Maybe it's someone taking revenge on those bastards", Raleigh suggested one day.
Jean and I were still cleaning the parking lot in front of Wild Dragons from the debris and mud brought by the flood. For a moment, I leaned on the shovel and looked at her.
"You haven't been around those places recently, right honey?"
She gave me an enigmatic smile, but we were only joking. Raleigh had left professor Abrams' team (well, she had been sent away) and was now paying the price.
The university had sent her to another laboratory - the giant tomato one - and her hours were absurd.
Apparently, to spray calcium and carbon dioxide on the leaves of a giant tomato a machine wasn't enough, it's a job that has to be done by hand. During the week Raleigh stayed at her parents' house, and only spent the weekends at my place.
The media's attention increased when a bunch of witnesses appeared saying they had seen an enormous winged monster, a sort of dragon, tear down the Snake's roof and burn everything. They called it the "Fire Monster". Old prejudices came out from the collective unconscious. Now, every time that church goers walked in front of my store, they crossed themselves. The environmentalists said the monster was "the rebellion of Nature, manipulated and taken advantage of by man".
As it often happens, ignorance generates fear, and fear calls 911.
I saw Sheriff Ertz again. He came to see me in the store along with Antone Davis to check on my Mustangs. It was something ridiculous, even Davis thought so, and as the Representative of the Breeders he had asked to be present during the search. The sheriff's men spent an entire afternoon going through my licenses, counting all my dragons on the trees and checking the safety measures in the dome. Even the public and newspapers seemed convinced it was the doings of a wild Mustang. LeBon, instead, thought otherwise.
"It's not a coincidence, Jeq", he told me the day after the search. "You know it and I know it".
"Whatever you're thinking about, you know it's not possible".
"Oh, yeah?" answered Jean. "So why don't you go check in person?"
"I don't need to", I answered. "This whole story is just a hoax".
But even I wasn't totally convinced of my own words. The doubt tormented me, and there was only one way to clear things up once and for all.
And so, that afternoon, I went to my uncle's farm, just to prove that Jean was wrong and bring back some rationality to this world.
Damn it, I thought during the ride, after the flood all I needed was a dragon hunt.
I parked the van in the driveway and went to the back of the house. During the winter, Raleigh and I had gone to the farm often, to check on the Pitahaya's growth more than anything. Unfortunately, whatever the magic was that had made the plants grow so quickly, had disappeared with Whiskey's death.
In a corner of the garden there was still my uncle's old oak, but it was sliced in half, as if a giant axe had fallen from the sky and hit it. A part of the branches were carbonized, and they hung lifeless from the large gash in the middle of the trunk. Under the oak, the Pitahaya had disappeared. In their place was a large hole in the barren earth. And where we had buried Whiskey, the ground seemed like it had exploded.
No. It's not possible.
I went up to the holes. Small cream colored pieces of stone were scattered around the garden. I picked one of them up and turned it over in my hands. It was porous and hard, as compact as solidified resin.
Touching it gave me goose bumps. All of a sudden, I was six years old and was watching a horror movie in which a mad scientist brought his creature back to life and yelled "IT'S ALIVE! It's ALIVE!". There was no doubt: the cream colored fragments scattered around the ground belonged to the shell Whiskey was set in.
You know, it's already difficult to accept the idea that your dragon in reality is an alien that came to Earth on a meteorite, just think if this dragon comes back to life months later like a new Frankenstein monster. What was Whiskey now, a sort of vindictive zombie dragon?
I covered the hole up and put a few pieces of resin in my pockets.
That evening, when I went back to Wild Dragons, I told Raleigh and LeBon about what I had seen and showed them the fragments. Right away Jean said he didn't think Whiskey was a zombie. His dragon body had been "in a standstill", regenerating in the resin, until the lightning bolt had woken him up. Instead my girlfriend tried to bring us back to reason.
"You're under an illusion. The lightning struck the tree and destroyed the resin with poor Whiskey in it. That's what happened".
"No, I'm telling you. He's an alien, we don't know what he's capable of", Jean answered.
"I'm going to go look for him", I said interrupting the discussion. "Maybe this monster is just an invention of the media. But if it's really Whiskey, I need to know".
"Okay. I want to come with you", said Raleigh.
"Absolutely not".
"You have to admit, Jeq, you would be safer with her".
"You", I said pointing to Jean, "not helping, man. And you. We're not discussing it. Those people walk around armed. Do you know how to dodge bullets too, karate girl?"
Raleigh challenged me with a look.
"No, do you?"
For a moment I looked at Raleigh without knowing how to answer.
Damned women, she got me again.
"I'm only saying that...I mean...", I stuttered. "I don't want to get into any fights with anyone, okay? First I have to see this elusive "monster" with my own eyes. Maybe it really is another dragon, a wild Mustang perhaps".
"No, I know it's him", said Jean.
"Whiskey or not", said Raleigh, "this being has already burnt down two places. And if it tries to attack you too?"
"Okay, in that case it will be a pleasure to call upon you to protect me. I'll use you as human shields", I shook a hand in front of me, "so if it tries to set me on fire you will be the first to be hit by the flames. Happy?"
Raleigh grabbed me by the shirt and kissed me.
"Call me every hour, or the fiery breath of a dragon will be the last of your problems".
"Yes, my lady", I answered with a bow.
Then I looked at Jean and went toward the counter.
"Okay, let's see the map".
MAYBE YOU DON'T KNOW IT, but here in the United States we have plenty of legendary monsters. And I'm not only talking about the famous Bigfoot in California or the Chupacabra that wanders around southern Texas. Every respectable lake has its sea monster. In southern Idaho, Bear Lake houses Isabella, a monstrous water serpent like the creature that lives in Lochness lake, in Scotland.
In the north, in the Pend Oreille lake, one of the deepest in the USA, another sea monster swims around happy an
d cheerful, attacking a tourist every twenty or thirty years, just to keep in shape. The journalists call it Paddler. The Paddler of Pend Oreille.
Obviously, there are plenty of grainy photos and numerous anecdotes on the sightings of these monsters. If it's true that every lake has its monster, every respectable monster has its museum, and at least one resident who's seen it in person, back in the '70s.
"I was this close to its jaws", he'll tell you gazing toward the lake with an enigmatic look. "It almost tore off one of my arms with its sharp teeth. And then it disappeared, down in the dark abyss of the lake".
These stories, these legends and exaggerated witnesses, are perhaps all bullshit for tourists, but show our thirst for mystery. A lake is just a lake, there's nothing fascinating about it for the human spirit. A lake with a monster in it, instead, is something entirely different.
The fires in those days, however, weren't invented at all, as The Snake's carbonized remains testified. And if it was a monster, it was probably my monster.
That night LeBon and I looked at the Idaho state map, trying to trace a path of the attacks. According to Jean, Whiskey was following step by step the same route he had gone gone down during his captivity. If his theory was right, the next objective would be the amusement park in Bountyfull. There was only one way to find out.
THE NEXT DAY I LEFT for Utah alone.
This time, Lutezia accompanied me instead of Deirdre. That winter, my empress with the heart of steel had turned five, the time when Mustangs reach sexual maturity. Even just to get close to her, I had to cross a court of horny and super jealous Mustangs. And I was the one who had hatched all of them. Those assholes.
In any case, Lutezia was great as a bodyguard. Deirdre's rival was a Tarantino movie concentrated in forty inches of impenetrable scales, sharp claws and pointed fangs. And she couldn't wait to show me how long her tail was.
When I got to the city, in the early afternoon, I went straight to Laguna's to check on the situation. I found the park open, and full of people. Talking with the Catapult owner (a gut stirring ride built like a giant's slingshot. Yes, people go crazy to have themselves shot in the air like this) I found out that since the police had arrested Foley, a company in Salt Lake had bought the park. The illegal fights had stopped, and a lot of despicable people that hung around Foley had left as well. The locals had started enjoying the amusement park again, and business was better than before.
The Dragon Seller: A Tale of Love and Dragons Page 18