Grant
Bessie hurtled down from the sky.
“Not so fast girl,” I
yelled so she could hear me over the screaming descent. It felt like I was
riding a hawk diving for a rabbit.
She didn’t slow down.
As we neared the ground, I felt her tense.
Thirty feet above the desert floor she adjusted the angle of
her wings and stalled, she shuddered, her wings went limp, and we hit the
ground — hard.
Drake popped out of Bessie’s mouth on the first bounce.
The impact threw me forward over Bessie’s head, and I
tumbled into the only mud hole for fifty miles.
I didn’t see what happened to Aria, or where she ended up.
I struggled to my hands and knees, and I saw red.
Thick red clay clung to my face like a death mask. “What kind of
lame-brained excuse for a landing was that?” I sputtered. I wiped gooey mud off
my face, and squinted to see.
Bessie lay on her side with her back to me. “Did you hear me, you
over-sized lizard?”
Aria poked her head over Bessie’s neck. “She’s hurt.”
Aria limped toward Bessie’s chest and disappeared out of sight. “She’s
bleeding,” Aria yelled. “Come quick.”
I ran as fast as I could. Between carrying an extra hundred
pounds of mud, and feeling like a band of Ubuntu’s had just used me for a killing-stick
practice dummy, it wasn’t all that quick.
When I rounded Bessie’s tail, I stumbled and brushed against
it. She twitched, like she did during a bad dream, and knocked me down. When I
looked up, I saw Aria’s knee inches in front of me.
“Not now, Grant,”
Aria said. “Bessie’s hurt. Look at this.” She pointed to a blaster gash in
Bessie’s side big enough for me to put my fist into. A trail of dried blood ran
down her side from the wound all the way to her tail.
“She’s lost a lot of
blood,” I said. “We’ve got to get her some water to make up for it.”
Aria started ripping a strip from her skirt. “And she needs that
bandaged before she loses any more.”
“Wait.”
“What?”
“Bessie ain’t a
person,” I said. “She don’t need no human germ infected cloth bandage mucking
up her system. She’s already in bad enough shape.”
Aria flashed me a look that seemed to border between you’re
an idiot, and we can’t
just let her bleed to death. “What do you suggest?”
“Mud,” I said. “And
less attitude.”
“Mud,” she said. “Talk
about infected. And, where you gonna find enough mud to patch that?” She
pointed at the gaping wound still oozing blood.
“Trust me,” I said. “I
can find the mud.”
She really looked at me for the first time. “Looks like you
already did.”
“As far as patching
her with it,” I said. “It’s what dragons do.”
“They’re dragons.
What’re they gonna do?”
“Them dragon’s been living
for thousands of years without no people help.”
(If you popped into my blog here and
are wondering what in tarnation is going on, maybe you might want to click on
over to Episode
1 to find out)
(Did you miss the last episode? Here is
the link to Episode
11)
