[ Post a Response | Big Gulp Message Board ]
Posted by Jonah on May 23, 2009, 1:13 am, in reply to "Dragon Holiday, part 7"
88.198.57.247
“So, where you from anyway?” Susan asked, tilting her head at the tall trees in the nearby swamp, as if the feral-looking reptile had just crawled from under the knot of a cypress knee.
“Southern California, at first.” She raised an eyebrow. “You know that famous picture of that alien ship with the Golden Gate Bridge in the foreground? My parents were on it. And you? Where you from?”
“Grew up near Chicago, originally.” Her voice cracked. She cleared it. “Had an aunt who lived out in New Orleans so I went to the university there and lived with her. Had all sorts of big plans, but things didn’t work out, as you can tell by me being in this podunk backwater shithole of a town.” She immediately squeezed off two quick shots in a row, tagging the same can again as it went flying up, somehow feeling better.
“Nice shooting.”
Susan smiled as she lowered the gun, and then blinked twice. She paused for what seemed like minutes.
“Shadow, what exactly is going on here? You wanted to eat Val last year, remember, you two-faced scalie shit.” She tucked the gun in the back pocket of her jeans. “I want to know exactly what the #### is going on — right here, right now!”
Shadow had a gormless expression: his toothy black jaws slightly hung open.
She rememberd the extraordinay brutality in which Goggles and Shadow had both made a game last year out of disemboweling Mr. Herakles, the father of one of Seth’s earlier victims – his only crime in looking for his missing daughter and wanting justice. Something she herself would have probably done.
“I want to know you better,” said Shadow truthfully, the end of his long, whiplike tail swaying along the ground like an injured black snake. “And to help get you away from Goggles. He’s the one who tried to eat you last year, not me.”
“Not that you wouldn’t have, asshole,” Susan said harshly.
“Sure, at the time. But it didn’t happen that way. Things changed. Seth saved you. Dax said he saved you because he likes you … because you’re the pet a good friend....”
“Not because I want to be,” said Susan, hanging her head. “You dragons forced me into this position. I hate it. I hate being something’s … er — some dragon’s pet. ####!”
A tear hung in the corner of her eye.
“You put yourself in that position. Mr. Herakles wouldn’t have found Seth if it wasn’t for you leading him and his family to him …”
Susan stood there like a ragdoll with the handgun hanging limp along her side. The tear broke free and followed the curve of her dark, round cheek. “I was forced by that asshole father of the missing girl. B-but I saved my own life by coming clean to Val when all that ####ing shit happened.” She sniffed, and wiped the tear away. “It looks like nobody’s going to save me but myself.”
“I think you’re worth protecting.”
“I don’t need no protecting…. Shouldn’t anyways.” She looked down at the ground.
“I also think you can take care of yourself. You’ve changed the last time I saw you. You even look different – more confident.”
“Being Seth’s ‘pet’ is not something I wanted, Shadow. Val wants to be his pet. That’s fine. But I don’t like being subservient to any body, not even a fifteen hundred pound drak.”
“It was a smart choice. Dax respects Seth. So any dragon that respects them, you’re safe.”
Susan allowed herself a thin smile.
“You fought pretty good in there.”
“I had a reason to fight.”
“Meaning —”
“Meaning I like you.”
“Thanks,” said Susan, sniffing and clearing her throat, and for one grateful moment, thankful for a dragon’s natural bluntness. “You’re okay, too, scalie.”
Shadow returned her faint smile in kind, the end of his tail crackled slowly in the dried weeds.
Nobody spoke for what seemed like minutes.
“You know,” said Susan, taking a deep breath, eyeing the small dragon, “before I got mixed up with dragons I played a lot of games. BDSM games. Do you know what that is, right?”
The raptor-like dragon shook his black, pointed head.
“They’re adult games. Games people play. And I almost always was the alpha in these games. Like an alpha female, anyway. At the time it was just that, a role I played. A game, like I said. But now I think that’s what I need to be, for real, to survive all this bullshit I got myself into.”
The dragon half-closed his eyes as if focusing on a mental image, then opened them widely and then cocked his head to the side in a very birdlike manner. “Mm. Did you dress up when you were alpha?”
She smiled. “Leather, and stuff, mostly.”
His raptor head remained cocked, grinning even more, and his small yet numerous sharp, pointed teeth now glinted in the late afternoon sunlight.
Susan began loading up another magazine, feeling bolder. She cut him a sideways look, and the thing she really wanted to say spilled out of her mouth before she could stop it.
“I wish I could combine my dracophilia with being dominant.... Um, but I found that no male dragon’s willing to take on a submissive role, at least I never found one.” She now looked at him with a wily glance. She snapped the magazine in place, turned, and took aim at the remaining targets on the short wooden fence, her finger on the trigger. She turned her head again, “That is, unless I could find a male willing to take a big chance — perhaps just for the thrill of it....”
Shadow’s grin only grew wider.
* * *
“It is hardly for you to decide the policies adopted by the dragon council,” said Dax, looking over at Goggles, who was still fiddling with his broken eyepiece. “And undoubtedly the council will make recommendations and when they do you will certainly be advised of their decision....”
Goggles gave a feverish hiss-laugh as he fiddled with his broken eyepiece. He had pulled out a small toolkit from a nylon fanny pack — a dragon’s preferred method of carrying items such as money, keys, ID, talon-trimmers, or in Goggle’s case, tools and a spare battery pack. Val, who had been paying attention to their discussion for the last five minutes, wondered at what other surprises the tech-obsessed drak was hiding on his person. “You think the council is going to accept human predation than you’re as crazy as I am!” said Goggles, attempting to twist two broken wires together with his large-taloned fingers.
“If it is true that the council takes instruction from its constituents, and it is also true that we dragons are becoming more discreet over consuming the lesser known human populace, then it follows logically that any further intrusion into reducing the numbers of the homeless and runaways, the ne’er-do-wells and other human flotsam and jetson will be of lesser consequence to us.”
“YOU SEE?” roared Goggles, pointing a taloned finger at Dax. “He is as crazy as I am.” Seth boomed in laughter.
Dax dimissed Goggle’s remark with a casual wave of his hand. He then put his fingers together in thought.
“It’s not unreasonable,” continued Goggles. “If you keep eating human fodder, it’s a matter of time before you get caught, no matter who they are, or aren’t. And that’s my point. As clever as you think you are, you’re going to screw up, you’re going to eat some human you shouldn’t, and you’re going to be sent to prison or worse. The council has little protection for someone like you.” Goggles stared at him beadily. “How many, anyway? Close to four hundred, isn’t it?”
“Closer to five now.”
Goggles shook his head, the tiny broken wires still fumbling in his meathooks for hands. “Raptor Christ...”
“Trim your talons,” Seth said. Val walked over and assisted Goggles.
“As far as I’m aware, there is no investigation in place that is currently focused on my location,” said Dax coolly, his fingers still together in a very thoughtful pose. He watched Valerie tie the wires together quickly with her much more nimble fingers. “After all, Goggles, you would tell me if there was.”
“Not even technology can be at all places at once,” Goggles said, pushing Val back impatiently with the back of his hand. Val cut him a dirty look as she walked away, angrily mumbling words like “inconsiderate” and “stupid scalie” among a number of other colorful phrases. Goggles strapped the battery pack to his arm and continued, “Plus, there are ‘off the grid’ investigators who deliberately stay unplugged from the Net to deny dragons like me any chance to track what they’re doing.”
He put his tools away, plugged in the mended wire and flipped one of the green-colored lens down over an eye, soon his scaly fingers swiping and poking in the air as if they were hitting a keyboard only he could see. He nodded approvingly at the makeshift repair.
Dax flicked the notion away. “I doubt that. I’d know.”
“You could be tracked right now by an investigator using old analog and eyeball techniques, and we wouldn’t know.”
Dax shook his head.
“Are you so sure, Dax?” interjected Val. “Have you always been so confident in your own superiority?”
“Not at all. I was brought up by humans. That whole ordeal was actually quite a blow to my self-esteem for a very good long while.”
Everyone in the room — human and dragon — gaped in surprise. Goggles lifted his lens stunned at Dax.
“You had a human family? You?” Val said. “’You’?”
The dragon tilted his head quizzically, his eyes followed the astonished expressions in the room. “Is it really so much of a shock?”
Silence.
“Well — ‘yeah’.” Val sighed, as if the dragon had said two plus two is three.
“So tell us.”
“It’s not important.”
He leaned over at the dragon tech. “So how are your data goggles...?”
“No, tell us,” Seth interjected. “I’m curious myself now.” Goggles nodded as well, leaning forward in his chair.
Dax looked at each one again, and then rolled his eyes and sighed like a martyr.
153
Responses: