CHAPTER 22
Recovery
“That’s better,” said George. He stood up, but had to steady himself by holding the back of a nearby chair. He still felt weak, far too weak to battle a monster or to even fly or communicate with Grog or Pip at the Simple House.
“You still don’t look so good,” said Sara. “Maybe if you drink more electricity?” She pointed to the bare electric chord that lay across the bed where George had been rested since he had been brought to the home of Sara’s uncle.
“No, thanks,” George said. “I’ll need to leave here soon, as I need a much stronger source of energy to save my dragon. Too bad all the fires in the city are out.”
“That not be so bad a thing,” remarked John Mason, from where he sat next to his daughter Sara.
“I’m sorry; of course it isn’t,” said George. “And it’s not ultimately the answer anyway. KraKara has been eating fire for days. I’d never catch up to it in strength by taking in a few fires myself. That’s why I need to get to a power plant.” Now that he felt a little stronger, he was paying more attention to his surroundings. “This is a very nice house,” he noted, glancing around. It looked much like an upper-middle-class American home; much nicer than many of the ramshackle homes he had seen.
“It’s my brother’s suburban home,” said John. “He’s a well-known research scientist who teaches at a university. But his wife's family has money; that explains this nice house. Our own house was the rubble you pulled Sara from in town. It was not as nice as this but it was still very good compared to most homes in our poor country.”
There was a knock at the bedroom door and Joseph came in, looking very anxious. Now that he and his sister were both cleaned up, the fact that he and Sara were twins was even more apparent. “Going to the power plant be no good, mister Mystery Boy,” he said. “The power plant be shut down, and police and solders are everyplace, moving everyone out. They be coming here too in maybe thirty minutes. We need move west with the crowd now or they have us.”
“Are you sure that we can’t trust your officials?” George asked them all. It would be so much easier to have the backing of the local authorities. They had seen him saving their people; surely they would cooperate!
“No way,” said Sara. “They desperate to have American solders come save them. They turn you over to them for sure.”
“Sister be right,” added Joseph. “I hear our Nigerian solders talking about a big reward for you from the Americans. I even see some American solders in town myself.”
Joseph helped John out to the truck while Sara, ignoring George’s protests, helped George. They were going to again hide George in the back of the truck until George performed a feat of magic that astonished all of them.
“So how do I look?” he asked Sara, when they reached the truck.
“God almighty!” she said, when she looked at him closely. Even in the dim moonlight the transformation was obvious. She was so startled that she let go of him, and he almost fell to the ground.
“He’s darker than us!” said Joseph, grinning. “Hair too!”
“True, your skin be very much improved in color,” added their father, between his laughter. “How you do that?”
“Just something my dragon could do,” explained George, “so I figured I could do it too. With my elf armor hidden under clothing, I shouldn’t be recognizable.”
“You youngsters all ride in front then,” said John. “I lay down in back and nurse this leg some, but we’re still going west.”
“Yes Papa,” said Sara, as she helped him climb into the back of the truck before rejoining George and Joseph in the cab.
“Why west?” asked George.
“The monster is going to be moving South to get after Logos city, folks think,” explained Sara. “Besides, we got a place to go west from here.”
In minutes they rejoined the sea of refuges that still fled the city, even though darkness had come hours earlier. Most were on foot, and many were injured. They stopped the truck and squeezed several of the most badly injured people onto the back of it.
“Too many for hospital,” explained Sara. "We will find a doctor for them elsewhere."
“I want to look at them,” George told Sara, as he was climbing onto the flatbed.
“You have medical training?”
“No, but I can sense their injuries. Maybe I can do something about it.” The elf and dragon powers kept his own body healthy; he reasoned that perhaps those healing powers could somehow be extended to others.
Johnny first sat next to a small boy who seemed to be so weak that he was dying. His distraught father had to be persuaded by Sara to allow Johnny to look at him. The boy coughed up blood as Johnny closed his eyes and held the boy’s hand gently. It took enormous concentration in the bouncing truck, but George was finally able to move his conscious self through the boy and find broken bones and torn flesh. ‘Think and it will happen,’ he told himself, and that’s what he did, a tiny bit of flesh or bone at a time, as he knit the boy back together.
George woke to the touch of a cool wet rag on his forehead. He opened his eyes to Sara bending over him in the moonlight. The boy he had healed sat next to her grinning, but Sara looked worried. “You be a true Miracle Boy, George. You saved this little boy. But you be sick now.”
“Only weak, is all. It took much more energy than I thought it would.”
“Papa has an idea about that. You still want to eat fire?”
“Of course.”
They pulled to the side of the road and Joseph siphoned a gallon of precious gasoline from the truck. This was soon splashed over the remains of an abandoned shack and lit.
When the fire had reached its zenith George stumbled into it and extinguished it instantly. He returned to the truck and over the next hour healed everyone completely, including John. However in the end he was again much too tired to stay awake.
White Dragon's Chosen Page 40
