by Bryan Fields
Rose concentrated, and Azul emerged onto a patch of matted cattails and shook herself off. She looked at the kids, cocked her head to the side, and made a warbling noise intended to make her sound cute (and therefore harmless). She had cream-colored chest scales, matching back fins, puppy dog-brown eyes, and an iridescent sheen to her wing membranes. Our baby Dragon looked about as threatening as a blueberry muffin.
I pointed. “See, kids? I told you that wasn’t a crocodile.” Azul reinforced the point by kneading the ground with her fore claws and going onto a very feline stretch—claws spread, chest on the ground and backside in the air, wings flared out and up.
The adults in the park were staring and taking pictures, just as we wanted them to. By the time Azul finished her yawn and plopped down on the matted cattails, half a dozen pictures were posted to social media. One person even had the good manners to email a few pictures directly to one of the local television stations. The adults were critical to our plan’s success, but Rose really wanted the children to be drawn in.
The kids were kind of clustered together, not sure what to do, when one boy stepped to the water’s edge. His superhero t-shirt and boy wizard eyeglasses told me all I needed to know about the years of teasing and harassment he’d endured already, and how many more he was undoubtedly facing. None of that mattered right now. He sat at the water’s edge. “I knew it.” he shouted, “I knew you were real! I knew it!”
Mary started to reach for him, but I touched her arm and shook my head. The boy looked over his shoulder at a bigger, beefy-looking kid. “I told you so. That’s a dragon, and it’s real!”
I had to look away for a moment. Merciful Creator, please make his parents as proud of him as I am.
Azul stood up, shuffled forward a few steps, and ducked down behind a patch of cattail leaves. She peeked around the edge, then held up one foreclaw and waved at the kids. “Heh… Heh… Hello,” she said. I tried not to laugh; Rose was making her voice sound like a certain blue-furred space alien who has his own TV show and an army of trigger-happy lawyers. Azul waved again, and all the kids waved back this time. Even a few of the adults joined in.
Two police cars pulled up, one parking so that its dashboard camera was aimed at the lake. Rose had Azul step out so everyone got a clear view of her. The boy wizard stood up and cupped his hands around his mouth. “What’s your name? What do you want us to call you?”
Azul pointed to herself. “AHHH-zhul. Aaa-zul! Azhul!”
One of the cops shook his head. “Did that thing say, ‘Zuul’?”
“No, no,” I said “I think it said ‘Azul’, the Spanish word for ‘blue’.”
“Spanish, huh?” He shook his head. “Someone else can ask that thing for its green card. I’m not getting near it.” He went back to his car and started calling for animal control to come out.
Next to me, Rose shook her head. She wouldn’t be able to maintain the illusion much longer. I patted her hand and twirled my finger in a ‘wrap it up’ gesture. She took a deep breath. Azul reared back, pointed her snout up in the air, and exhaled a twenty-foot jet of flame before slipping into the lake. With a last splash and flick of her tail, Azul vanished. The kids cheered and jumped around all over the place, the adults replayed the footage on their cell phones, and Rose all but collapsed in my arms.
I got Rose to a shaded bench where she could rest. Mary pulled a bottle of water out of her rolling ice chest and handed it to Rose. “Are you all right? Is it shock? Lord knows I’m halfway to fainting myself.”
Rose downed half the bottle. “I’m fine. It’s just…I’ve never seen anything like that. It was a talking Dragon.”
“It can’t be. I mean, there has to be another explanation, right?” Mary looked around, vainly trying to spot a hidden camera or something. When that failed, Mary rounded up her charges and herded them back to her house.
Animal control arrived, and the two young men who emerged from the truck made their way to the spot where Azul had last been seen. They combed the area for any trace of tracks, droppings, or crushed flora. They found nothing, of course. They roped the spot off with police tape just to be sure it attracted plenty of attention from the locals.
While that was going on, two news crews and a newspaper reporter joined the fray, trying to get interviews from any eyewitnesses they could find. Mary refused to let the kids talk to the press and threatened to call the cops if the reporters pressed the issue. If the parents wanted the kids to talk to the media, that was their decision to make, not hers. The reporters understood that, and decided to wait until the parents came to pick the kids up.
Rose and I stayed in the house. I didn’t want anyone who knew us to see us on TV. As it happens, I’d forgotten about the Internet. Miranda’s partner (police, not lifestyle) got an email with some cell phone video of Azul and started showing it around. It had a brief shot of me helping Rose sit down right at the end. It was enough for Miranda to ring us up.
“So, why are you guys playing with holograms of dragons? And, seriously, mutilating elk? What is the deal? You got some ‘splainin’ to do, Rosie.”
Rose sighed. “Trust me, there’s nothing I can learn by probing an elk’s ass. We were just at the park today, minding our own business, when this happened. Why weren’t you this interested in all the crap Mavis is trying to pull with us?”
“Your HOA crap doesn’t involve a talking baby Dragon, that’s why. So you had nothing to do with these holographic Dragons people are seeing?” Miranda didn’t sound convinced. “I suppose you didn’t have anything to do with that Terminatrix that swept Ember off her feet at archery practice, either? She came in right after you guys left.”
“How are we responsible for something that happened after we left? What happened with Ember? We’ve been a little busy here.” I tried not to sound too defensive.
“This woman dressed like a redneck amazon walks up to Ember and says, ‘Come with me, for I am your dreams made flesh’. Ember stares at her, then packs up her bow and says, ‘See you guys, I just switched teams’. I don’t think she was talking archery leagues. You two didn’t have anything to do with that?”
I sighed, regretting my streak of compulsive honesty where my friends are concerned. “Yeah, we did. Ember has just taken her first step into a larger world. She’s in good hands. Be happy for her.”
“Fine, be that way. Just… Why not me?” Her voice dropped and I could hear her choking back tears. “Why her? I can switch teams too, if that’s what it takes.”
I hesitated, unsure if explaining would help or hurt. “Miranda, why do you prefer science fiction to fantasy? Spell it out for me again.”
“I can’t get into stuff that can’t ever happen. The technology in some stuff is far-fetched, but it’s technology, not mumbo-jumbo and chicken guts.” She stopped and sighed. “That’s it, isn’t it? Rose isn’t an extraterrestrial. She’s a frakking elf or some shit like that.”
“She’s a Dragon. I’m sorry.”
She sniffled and took a deep breath. “Yeah, well. Dragons are cool. Better than some pointy-eared, jumped-up house cat. Thanks for explaining. Just remember, if you ever meet a spaceman who needs to phone home, his ass is mine.”
“You can probe him all you want,” I promised. I hung up and hugged Rose.
I went back to work while Rose watched the lake from the living room couch. All of the local television stations had news crews doing reports, and many of the kids who had been in the park earlier were back with their parents. I felt Rose gathering power and went to the side window so I could see the lake.
Azul’s head popped out of the water near the little spit of land she’d used earlier and snorted spray everywhere. She looked around and started out of the water, waving one foreclaw and calling out, “Hello!”
As soon as everyone was focused on her and taking pictures, water fountained up from the center of the lake and Mommy Dragon came on stage. Her roar set off car alarms as far away as the golf course parking lot. Azul tur
ned around and dove back under water. Mommy glared at the news crews and puffed out a brief, fifty-foot burst of flame before submerging again.
The chaos was spectacular.
Chapter Six
A Quiet Evening
While Mommy Dragon may have provided the biggest excitement of the evening, she didn’t provide the last. That honor went to Wilbur Brundle, the God-fearing, gun-loving, gold-hoarding assclown of a husband to Mavis Brundle. When he heard Mommy Dragon roar, he dashed out into the street with nothing on but striped boxers and a shotgun, shouting about hippie Communists and godless liberals.
Now, I make no apologies for being a liberal fellow, but let me say this: Dragons are the embodiment of fiscal conservatism and unrestricted free-market capitalism. I understand that point of view; I don’t have any choice. Rose knows more about how Wall Street and our financial sector works than I ever will, and if it weren’t for her aversion to holding a job, I’m sure she would be a killer investment advisor. She even has Manya’s parents calling her for feedback and suggestions on the businesses they’re considering investing in.
Conservatives of that stripe I can and do get along with. Not the Wilburs of the world. A person who equates being different with being evil and less than Human is someone I have no use for. In Wilbur’s case, that attitude went down to the bone. At the neighborhood summer picnic last month, he gave his friends little American flags on toothpicks and told them to mark their food so he knew what was safe for a real American to eat. I respect him for serving in Vietnam and for the good he does as a Shriner, but I do not like the man.
Good old Wilbur wasn’t content to stand in the street waving his shotgun; he started yelling profanity at the folks in the park, which all the parents out there loved. More words were exchanged, until the police got him turned around and back inside his house.
We had a quiet night, but Rose had used far more energy than she was used to and the effort left her exhausted. I tucked her into bed and went downstairs to watch the news. There was a teaser about Azul, but first, a brief interview with a biology professor from CU Boulder. She was one of the team that had analyzed Rose’s leftovers, and she had determined the Estes Park Mystery Creature had a bite force of over 30,000 Newtons. Tyrannosaurus Rex, by comparison, had an estimated bite force of between 40 and 50, 000 Newtons. She added, “Crocodiles have the greatest bite force of any creature alive today, measuring 17,000 to 20,000 Newtons. For a crocodile to have done this, it would have had to be twenty-five to thirty feet long. I don’t even care to guess how it got to the top of that cliff, or how it might have transported three full-grown elk from the meadow where they were killed to the site where they were eaten.”
The biologist showed off a set of broken elk bones. “What we see here is a pattern of bite marks matching what we would expect to see from something like a T-Rex, but with skeletal disarticulation done by a digitigrade hand with an opposable thumb. If someone is trying to pass this event off as a hoax, they’ve got a lot of their science right.”
“Do you think this is a cover-up?” the reporter asked.
“I don’t have enough information to draw a conclusion yet,” the biologist replied. “But the physical evidence raises an enormous number of questions.”
The newscast moved to Azul next. They showed a boy named Martin (the boy wizard), talking about how our little hatchling was real. The segment closed with a note that the police would be searching the lake with marine radar tomorrow. The official theory was that Azul was someone’s pet alligator or monitor lizard, possibly dyed blue as a joke. The news segment ended with a few ideas viewers had submitted as possible explanations. Mirrors, holograms, a prank by a stage magician, the list of ideas just went on and on.
Yep. This is not the Dragon you are looking for. Move along.
The phone rang. I answered to keep it from waking Rose. The caller turned out to be from a collection agency. The HOA had turned the fines suspended by the court over to these bozos. I took the information down and called our lawyer. On advice of counsel, I called the bozos back and paid the fines in order to mitigate my damages. The matter would be submitted to the judge handling our case and the money added to our claim against the HOA.
I wasn’t angry about all this; in fact, I was downright tickled. We had solid proof now that the HOA was ignoring the judge’s orders. If stupidity was painful, the world wouldn’t be half as amusing as it is. Through it all, I let Rose sleep. Azul had a busy night ahead of her tonight.
Illusions can do a lot, but tonight we wanted physical evidence, just to mess with the folks who were writing Azul off as a visual hoax. Rose transformed herself in the garage around four in the morning. Without all the mass transfer needed for her adult body, the change was almost instant. I opened the door for her and stayed in the area in case she had to get under cover fast.
Azul started off by eating Mavis’ roses. She dug up their brick border and scratched her back on the mailbox post, pushing it over at an angle. She looked in the front window, leaving it smeared with hatchie drool. She left a trail of muddy footprints back into the lake, where Rose transformed herself back to Human and scampered back into the house. She took a quick shower and we went to bed.
Just after six in the morning, Mavis started pounding on our door, ringing the doorbell, and screaming. “Open this door! I know it was you!” Bloody Hell, even at this hour of the morning she had her hair and makeup done.
I had Rose get some video of Mavis and then I called the cops. I showed them the restraining order when they arrived and Mavis got another trip to the stripy hole. I told the cops—honestly—I had no idea why she was banging on our door and blaming us for the damage to her yard. We had been very careful not to leave any tracks pointing at us.
The officer I talked to came back. “She didn’t have a reason. She just knows that you two are responsible. Can you think of any reason she might say that?”
“Officer, our lawyer has made it clear we are to avoid contact with them. I’m not going to pay four hundred an hour for a lawyer and then ignore his advice. We’re staying away.”
“You keep doing that,” he said. We waved goodbye and went out to get breakfast at a hole in the wall café that caters to construction workers and day laborers. In other words, low prices for big helpings of tasty chow. Exactly what the Dragon ordered.
While we were eating, one of our blue-collar fellow diners made an excellent point during a discussion of Azul and the elk killings. He said, “Some smart-ass can fake foot prints, and they can make all this stuff show up on video using a computer. Dogs can kill an elk and eat it. What we haven’t seen, and what can’t be faked, is the pile of shit something that size would leave. Until I see something crap out what’s left of three grown elk, I ain’t going to believe it.”
“Oh, dear,” Rose whispered. “We forgot the fewmets.”
I shook my head. “I don’t think we should leave any. Analysis would show a lot more than elk meat. Enquiring minds would want to know why this mysterious creature is dining on pizza and burritos. Someone might make the leap from big form to little. And we really don’t want anyone matching all of this to those mysterious coins.” We were keeping our voices down, but the close quarters in the restaurant encouraged a wee bit of circumlocution.
Rose thought for a moment and nodded. “Yeah, the fewmets would really hit the wind turbine then.” We got a sack of breakfast burritos to go and headed home as soon as I could pay the check.
While we were out, neighbors, news crews, and curious onlookers streamed into Mavis’ yard to get a look at the tracks Azul left behind. Some New Age types showed up, playing drums and waving crystals while they soaked up the leftover ‘Dragon energy’. When the Brundles finally did get home from the jail, Wilbur Brundle chased everyone away from his house by spraying them with his garden hose. It made for excellent television.
Rose and I went out to meet the biology team working on the tracks and such Azul had left behind. Rose brought th
em lemonade and we let the team use our bathroom. We met Martin and his parents, Charles and Vicki. Martin wanted to talk to the biology team, and when they saw him, they wanted to interview him as well. We let them use our dining room and spent the time getting to know Charles and Vicki.
Charles was a sommelier at a high-end restaurant in Boulder, while Vicki was a high school music teacher. When we shook hands, I noticed that Vicki’s nails were shaped so that point of the nail was on the side, rather than centered, and she always kept her fingers curled against her palm if she wasn’t actively using them. Then we got to talking about the HOA, and I forgot all about Vicki’s fingers.
They were also in a long-running argument with the HOA. Charles was a veteran of two tours in Iraq. The day he returned home, he started flying the American flag and a POW/MIA flag next to his front door. Our HOA took exception to this and has been fining them fifty dollars a day per flag for the last year, despite the fact that prohibiting flag displays is illegal. Charles was now getting ready to run for the HOA board. I took away his beer and got him a bottle of some OMFG-good artisan dark ale a friend of mine brews. This man was not going to drink commercial crap while he was in my house.
We did give Azul a few moments of fame while everyone was gathered around. She popped out of the reeds and hooted at the biology team. Two of them tried to approach her, but she looked around at the crowd on the shore and dove back under water. It was just enough; a visual thrill for everyone who was there, but no physical or recorded evidence to back it up.
The afternoon turned into a nice evening, with burgers, bratwurst, and grilled sweet corn, served outside while we watched a lightning storm over the eastern plains. It was the kind of evening you hope for but can never get just by planning. Naturally, the next morning arrived and spoiled everything.