Bob, the Invisible Dragon

by David J. Wighton

  "She can't feel the needles?"

  "She feels nothing. Such a dream will consume her but I can relax her and put her into a deep sleep."

  A few minutes later, Winnie stopped shivering, rolled over onto her side, and began to breathe deeply. "You should climb into bed with her, Yolanda. The dream is gone but she needs the comfort of knowing you're near."

  Yolanda curled up behind Winnie, hand stroking her hair. Meanwhile Momaka went through Winnie's closet and drawers, pulling out anything orange. She bundled those with all of the clothes Winnie had worn to the prison. "Try singing to her. Something soft. Something she'd remember from her childhood. You'll need to stay the night with her, Yolanda. Stay close enough that she can feel your presence while she sleeps. Message me if she starts to shiver again."

  Hank was outside the bedroom when Momaka emerged with the bundle of clothes. He asked if he could go in. "No male smell in the bedroom," Momaka decreed.

  # # # # # # # #

  Winnie woke the next morning to find her mom sleeping beside her. She started to roll out of bed and that roused Yolanda who immediately messaged Momaka.

  "Where's Patella?" Winnie asked her mom. "I have a headache!"

  Winnie ended up in the living room between two wolf blankets. They had tried Will's new visor but that hadn't worked.

  "The visor only stops the noise from outside getting into my head," Winnie explained. "What's already inside my head is what's hurting me."

  "What's ins..." Yolanda started to ask but stopped when Momaka coughed softly.

  The headaches continued through breakfast and lunch. They didn't become worse, but they didn't get better either. Physically Winnie could eat, but she wasn't interested. She managed a cup of soup when Momaka insisted she try a few sips. Physically, Winnie could talk, but she chose not to.

  Late in the afternoon during Momaka's shift, Winnie said. "Double-Tom is inside my head. I can't get him out."

  "You'll have to kill him," Momaka said. "I'll show you how."

  # # # # # # # #

  Granny gave them thirty copies of a picture of Double-Tom standing at the front of his cell. Yolanda found three of Hank's old shirts and jeans in his barter barrel. She also liberated quite a supply of old clothes that were never going to be useful to anybody. Yolanda and Momaka helped Winnie make three scarecrow bodies out of Hank's clothes and used the other liberated hand-me-downs for the stuffing. The head of each scarecrow was a bunched up scraggly sweater with a picture of Double-Tom fastened to the front. Momaka attached Double-Tom's remaining twenty-seven faces to trees while her mother helped Winnie dress for battle. They gave Winnie her bow, an ample supply of arrows, and a scouting report. "Twenty-seven Double-Toms are hiding in the woods. Ignore the scarecrows for now. Find him and kill him."

  Winnie was in camouflage clothes, an eagle feather through each of her two pigtails, and her face in black and red warpaint. The two wolves had an eagle feather fastened through the ruff of their neck fur. They also were in warpaint, although in their case, it was white paint. Yolanda and Momaka watched as Winnie entered the woods and began her crawl. Patella and Scapula separated and began their own stalk.

  About two hours later, Yolanda and Momaka heard the howls of two adult wolves and a baby wolf echoing through the valley. Victory calls. Momaka picked up a bag that clinked, and she and Yolanda went to the clearing where the scarecrows and the hunters awaited.

  "This one is for Scapula," Momaka said and pointed to the scarecrow on the left. "That one is for Patella. Winnie, the middle one is yours. Use this sack of weapons to kill the man who invaded your mind. Keep using the weapons until you are no longer angry or frightened." She emptied the contents of the bag onto the ground and she and Yolanda shimmered out of sight back to the compound.

  "The image of the man was fixed in her head," Momaka said to Yolanda. "So in her head, she is now removing him permanently. This ritual cleansing should also release all of her anger and her fear. We got to her quickly and she had only a tiny exposure to the evil. She should be fine tomorrow."

  "How did you know what to... " Yolanda started to ask an empty room.

  # # # # # # # #

  I'll skip forward in time so that you'll know how this turned out. After the hunt, Winnie returned to her bedroom, scrubbed off her make-up, changed her clothes, and went out for a fly. The wolves joined her but wanted to keep the feathers and war paint. Winnie seemed fine and although Yolanda had been prepared to keep her under close watch for a week, she didn't need to. "I only looked at him for a couple of seconds," Winnie would tell her mom later. "He started to imagine what he was going to do to me and I turned away. We can't let this man get out of prison, Mom."

  About a month after this incident, Yolanda invited Momaka over for tea. Momaka arrived to find a complete antique Japanese tea service arrayed on the dining room table. "For you," Yolanda said simply.

  "This is very old," Momaka said. "Wherever did you find it?"

  "In a rubbish bin in Tokyo."

  "My service was destroyed," Momaka said softly. "It was only an everyday service, but I've missed it. Thank you." And she bowed in thanks. Yolanda returned the bow, also in thanks.

  The two women talked together the whole afternoon. Only snippets of that conversation have ever emerged.

  Back to the Table of Contents

  Chapter 15

  Back to present time now. Previously you saw Winnie and Momaka visit Stu in prison and now you know what came of that. I haven't been able to tell you yet what happened after Wizard and Dreamer took their trip to Georgia to visit the peanut farm. When Dreamer saw the field of yellow flowers, she recognized that she was living the dream that was at the front of her queue. That meant that the next dream to come true would be when Double-Tom killed her. She panicked, tried to fly away, but drove her sling into the ground instead.

  Wizard was beside her immediately. Dreamer was dazed and scratched, but otherwise unharmed. At least physically. Her sling was torn and unworkable. Wiz made sure that she'd be OK by herself for a brief time, went to the farmer, told him that he and his girlfriend had an emergency, and they had to leave now. They were definitely interested in his peanuts and the farmer would hear from them. He took the rental copter to where Dreamer was waiting, bundled her up, returned the copter to the rental company, and headed to the Wilizy's satellite compound in a single sling. He knew that Dreamer had enjoyed her stay there at Christmas, and being with Mac, Yollie, and Melissa might be best for her. Wizard mind-messaged Granny and Wanda what had happened.

  Wizard stayed with Dreamer at the satellite compound for a couple of days, but when Dreamer said that she wouldn't mind if he returned to work, he left. Dreamer spent most of her time taking care of the babies. She also helped William prepare supper and got to know him a bit. He tried to joke with her but she didn't react. She just smiled at him and returned to her chopping. She was, effectively, dream walking. Going through the day-to-day motions of living, but not really being there.

  The moms tried to help her with baby-talking, but she didn't want to. "I'm going to die soon," Dreamer would say. "What's the point?"

  "Stu is in the prison cell right next to Double-Tom," Melissa told her. "Double-Tom is not going to escape. He can't harm you. We're going to protect you."

  "My dreams always come true, Melissa. Plus, I always have more than one dream in my mind. But I have no more dreams waiting in that queue. In my last dream, everything goes black. That means that there'll be no more me."

  To that, they had no answer. Melissa told Wizard he should come back. She also told Granny what was happening and suggested that they needed to speed up the operation's timetable. Granny said that she'd have to confer with Stu since he was running the operation.

  # # # # # # # #

  "Are you sure you can't speed up the operation?" Yolanda asked her mother. She had told Granny about D-T's effect on Winnie. Granny and Wanda had already discussed what had happened in Georgia and how Drea
mer had concluded that she would die soon. Understandably, Wanda wanted to kill D-T immediately. Yesterday was preferable, if Granny could swing it. Now Granny had Yolanda putting pressure on her too.

  "We can't speed it up without jeopardizing the whole plan," Granny told Yolanda. "Stu's having enough difficulty hiding from the inmates who know him. If they see him, his cover is gone immediately. That's why he's supposedly working in the guards' mess. That's why all of the cells around him are empty."

  "Can we take out some steps?"

  "Stu looked at that. It would be difficult. Double-Tom has to come to Stu for help and reveal himself for what he is. He has to believe that Stu is what he's pretending to be. This is going to take time. Double-Tom has been hiding his true self for his entire life; he won't suddenly admit to being what he is."

  "You can't speed it up even a bit?"

  "Stu has already done that. Wolf will tell D-T that Stu's legal dodge isn't going to work sooner than we had planned. Stu has also scheduled Doc into action sooner. That's all he can do without jeopardizing the operation, Yolanda. What about Dreamer's end? Can Melissa help her?"

  In the end, Yolanda and Granny worked out a plan. Somebody, perhaps Melissa, would tell Dreamer that D-T wasn't her real father. Eventually Dreamer was going to learn that. Perhaps knowing now might help her. Also Melissa would remind Dreamer that she doesn't see dreams of all the good things that happen to her. Perhaps there's a good dream that she doesn't know about yet. One in which Double-Tom confesses to his crimes on a live camera feed.

  # # # # # # # #

  Life returned to normal. Sort of. Wanda herself was dream-walking through her daily life with a huge mass of unexploded anger. To cope, she decided to concentrate on her work. The Clearwater mill couldn't handle the new demands for lumber. She'd expand. An old sawmill was still standing outside Hinton, Alberta. Their lumber would be much closer to Alberta's urban areas than Clearwater's. She'd take a little trip and see if the mill could be made functional and if the tribe were interested in it becoming part of the Clearwater company.

  Dreamer returned to the main compound. She tried to focus her mind on establishing a chocolate industry. Not growing chocolate. Using it. She said that she'd try to look for potential sites for a production facility. Dreamer did try, but she didn't accomplish anything.

  Melissa had told Dreamer some of Stu's plan to deal with Double-Tom. She had also suggested to her when this was all done, some evidence might reveal that Double-Tom wasn't her real father after all. Their builds weren't anything the same. Dreamer heard her but didn't take much notice. "I kind of figured that out already. Knowing it for sure would mean I could hate him without feeling guilty. I guess I'm illegitimate. I always knew that I was different."

  Wizard started working on plans for the peanut industry. Where would they grow them? Where would they process them? What kind of financial model would they have with Alberta?

  Stu reported that he wasn't doing much of anything while he was hiding in the guards' mess. He could develop some chocolate delicacies. He'd add in peanut variations too. With the help of the warden, Stu began receiving weekly shipments of chocolate and peanuts. Initially Stu tested his experiments on the guards.

  Wizard and Dreamer still hung around together, but there was no spark between them. Dreamer was not interested even in holding hands. Nor did she want to study the business bot. "What's the point?" she'd say when Wizard tried to encourage that. She'd still come to the community hall with Wizard when he studied. However he did that alone. Dreamer would put a pillow on Wiz's knees, curl up, and go to sleep. When Wiz was finished, he'd wake her up, they'd walk to Winnie's room, and Dreamer would go back to sleep. She was sleeping twelve hours a day, but complaining of being too tired to even come to the dinner table. Yolanda insisted, but Dreamer was into dream-eating now. She'd eat with them, but couldn't remember what she ate an hour later.

  # # # # # # # #

  Yolanda and Hank were cleaning weapons in an underground bunker and talking about the family. Winnie, Dreamer and Wizard were high on their list of concerns. Wanda too. Then they moved on.

  "How long before Stu wraps up his operation?"

  "Three months at best," Yolanda said. "Stu can't make D-T trust him; he has to pull him in slowly."

  "Is Granny handling the liaison OK?"

  "Definitely. Plus she's working on an independent project that is consuming much of her time. I haven't seen her this determined, or invested into a project, for ... well, forever I think."

  "She was like this when we were killing Zzyk's bikers. Fire in her belly; ice in her head."

  "Good description. That's exactly how she is now. Doc says that she's a different person; he loves this person even more than the other one."

  "His arthritis?" Hank asked.

  "Worse. We should hire a permanent assistant to handle all of his paperwork. Theo doesn't want to do it and it's not fair to pressure him. This is not what he wants to do for his future."

  "What does he want to do?"

  "All he knows is that he doesn't want to be working inside a building."

  "I have a piece of good news," Hank announced.

  "We could use some of that. What?"

  "Lucas came to me. He wants to apply for a job at the Wilizy store in Calgary."

  "Interesting. Doing what?"

  "Construction on the new Cloth and Dye building. He'd be good at that."

  "He's certainly bad at sitting around doing nothing. Did I tell you that he was hiding from me in the afternoons so that he wouldn't have to help with supper? I was not impressed."

  "Difficult time for him right now. All those hormones. I see him pounding on the bag. Sexual frustration, perhaps. At least that's how it was for me. He's been snarly with everybody. I haven't been impressed either."

  "We could speak with the project manager."

  "I offered to do that. Lucas said that he wanted to win the job on his own."

  "That is good news."

  "I have more. I asked him what he was going to do with the money he earned."

  "Chocolate bar wholesaling?"

  "No. He knows a teacher down in Surrey who gives courses on science. The ecology of the forest, I gathered. He didn't say it directly, but I believe he wants to take some lessons from her."

  "That is good news."

  "Big classes? Small classes?"

  "Small. He said something about her tutoring her students."

  "Good. Lucas is smart enough when he puts his mind to it. Perhaps she can get him thinking about something other than sex."

  Back to the Table of Contents

  Chapter 16

  It was the beginning of March when Winnie wandered into Momaka's garden patch and asked, "What'cha doing?"

  "Tending to my hybrids. I'm trying to determine if these peanut plants would be more resistant to mold than the more common peanut plant. What about you?"

  "I was reading through Wizard's third bot on business management and it was getting kind of boring. So I scanned through some of the fourth bot. I'm not going to read any more of them. They're all about making money. I don't want to grow up to be one of those kind of people. They're very close to being considered bankers."

  "You're deciding what you want to be when you're older?"

  "Sure. Lucas might become a construction guy; Theo wants to work outside; Wiz is going to be in business. I had thought that I could be a vet or a doctor. But that got kind of boring too. Once you know where all the systems in the human body go and how they work together, it's not as interesting anymore. But I do like fixing people's hurts. I might look at how brains work. That might be interesting."

  "What about making brand new plants? Would that be interesting to you?"

  "Plants that are entirely different from anything ever seen before?"

  "Yes. Like the peanut plant I'm making."

  "Kind of boring. A peanut is just something to eat."

  "I'm making a brand new tree too. Woul
d you be interested in something like that?"

  "Where is it?"

  "Over here."

  # # # # # # # #

  Momaka showed Winnie her project and explained how it was possible for botanists to make brand new species. Sort of like how moms and dads make babies, but with plants instead.

  "So you've taken a Japanese tree with pink flowers and it sort of had sex with a North American tree with white flowers. Does that mean the baby tree will have pink flowers?"

  "Perhaps. Or some of the trees might have white while others might have red; some might have both. I won't know until I've created a number of the trees."

  "Does that really matter? If a tree has pink, or red, or white flowers?"

  "I don't care about the colour of the flower. I'm creating the new tree because the North American tree is almost extinct. It requires more water than our weather can give it. The Japanese tree is tolerant of drought. It can grow in our climate. If my hybrid works, we'll have beautiful flowering trees in our forests again."

  "But won't you have to wait years to see if the new baby tree will look like you hope it will? And won't you have to wait even more years to see if that tree can mate with another tree of the same kind and have baby trees?"

  "Yes, of course. It will take many years. I might not be alive to see what happens."

  "If I decided to make babies, I'd want to be alive to see them."

  "We don't always get the life that we wish for."

  # # # # # # # #

  "Wolves are very stubborn, you know." Winnie was sitting cross-legged on the ground, drawing interconnected circles in the soil with her forefinger and then erasing them with her palm. Momaka was putting drops of something on the leaves of the peanut plants.

  "No, I didn't know that. Is Patella stubborn?"

  "She was very stubborn when she insisted that she was going to have babies. She nagged me and nagged me about that. So we picked out a father when we were up in the Yukon fighting against the Alaskans. I said that she couldn't just mate with the first wolf that came by, which is what she wanted to do. I said that she should be picky; you know, look him over first. Think about what kind of babies the two of them would have. So we flew around looking at the wolf packs and we both agreed on a big black sire. Then we had to go back to the compound until she was ready to have sex. Patella became very angry with me when I said that I couldn't go the minute she asked. She said that she'd go on her own. So I went up with her, we found the sire, she told me to get lost, and I did. She's angry at me again."