Young Writers Society

Chapter Seventeen - God & Eden

Excerpts from Louis Bekker’s journal

May 29, 1974

Heard over the radio today that terrorists took some school in Ma’alot, Lebanon. They say a lot of people died, mostly teens. Collin said, in his words, that it was probably the Moslems, doing it for their Allah. Honestly though, I don’t really care who did it. They’re all so fucking mad. They say that India now has a nuke. India? That’s some shit right there, I tell you. Maybe they’ll take care of the commies for us. These fucking bombs can wipe a city off the map, can’t help but wonder why they’re talking about a couple kids getting shot in the name of Allah.

To hear the news on the radio is… surreal, I guess. We’re out here in the middle of God-fucking-knows where, getting the shits like crazy from that herbal tea that Mike made, and listening to Jim-what’s-his-name talk about these fucking bombs and terrorists and shit on the nightly news. Maybe the whole world will blow up while we’re out here. Can’t say I wouldn’t mind it, aside from losing The Stones & Bob Dylan on the radio.

I suppose I’m avoiding the elephant in the room here. Yesterday I told Mike what I saw. Why he actually believed me and I’m not currently tied to a tree I might never know. He says that it’s possible they’re living up here. Says that maybe the government knows about it, and gave them a big reserve of land to live on. Strange, because they did the same thing with the indians, and look at what they got now. It’s crazy to hear him talk about what happened to the fuckers when the Euros came across the sea. Extinct-- gone, just like the fucking dodo bird. How can people kill off an entire species? It’s fucking mad, but I guess I'm getting sidetracked now. Mike also says that I ought to tell Collin; he even offered to help. I dunno though. I haven’t seen the two (Or any other) dragons in a week. Maybe it was just my mind playing tricks on me.

Then again, in an era when we have bombs that can destroy the world, are dragons really all that crazy?

---

Louis put down the pen and scanned over what he had just written.

He didn’t exactly know why he had started writing journal entries twelve days ago, he had just seen the small notebook that they had written some of their plans for the robbery in, found that it had a pen tucked conveniently in its cover, and had begun to write. About what? Anything, he supposed. The man had never been a very good writer, and, in the past, had found the activity to be utterly boring in every sense of the word. Yet he wrote; slowly, meticulously, he wrote. Whether it was out of sheer desperation for something, anything, to occupy his time, or perhaps that there was something even deeper going on in his psyche, he didn’t have a clue. A law student, he had been taught, through rigorous lectures and exams, how to write the perfect letter or speech to be used in a court of law. He remembered sitting in his hot dorm room, typing away on the old typewriter his parents had given him, trying to remember how to write “the perfect report”. Structure, articulate, opening, thesis, evidence-- bullshit! All of it was bullshit. Yet in some way, some unknown, unforeseen way, he enjoyed writing in his journal. It was as if he had been a prisoner, a prisoner to the professors and scholars who forced their scholarly ways down his throat until he choked on them. Now, a murderer instead of a law student, a pen and paper instead of a typewriter, his messy shorthand instead of times new roman, he had been liberated.

It seemed as if it needed something more. The journal entry was not yet complete, like a table without paint on it, a drawing without a signature, it required something to call it finished. He picked up the pen and stared at the blank lines below his scribblings, thinking. Louis then wrote down eight words.

He wondered, perhaps he was going insane. Would a sane person kill for money? He surely thought so. Hell, he had watched a man on the subway get stabbed over a Rolex once. (Served the fucker right for wearing that gold thing on the 9 PM train out of central!). People would always kill, he assumed, even without money. He had heard of people tearing and crawling over each other in the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union: the one place where money was meant to be of no issue, an Eden where all was provided by the loving and caring state. Now it seemed that the Eden had people becoming animals, fighting over food. No, he looked at himself as completely sane in that regard.

With the dragons, that was an entirely different thing altogether. He had told then to return to him the very next day, so he could show Collin and Mike, so he could prove them to be real both to the others, and to himself. But had anything happened? No. They had vanished like smoke through the trees, and he had been left to grapple with the resulting thoughts and pray that this whole mess would be over soon, that he could leave with his money and start up a new life. 

That was possibly the most profound thought of all: the dream of a new, normal life. Louis had never been one to read, but he seemed to remember a laying on his bed when he was a teenager, staying up all night, infatuated with a single book. The book, if his memories served him right, was about a soldier fighting in the first world war. It was a complete and stunning picture of the very definition of hell. In the trenches, knee deep in mud and gore, the men would fight. What for, what for? That was the question that plagued Louis throughout. Yet it was not this senseless fighting that the man found to be so utterly strange. Nor the image of the narrator, laying in a shell hole in the middle of night, who had stabbed a man, only to feel remorse in the final minutes of his enemy’s life and try to save him. Not even after the narrator carried his friend back to a field hospital, only to find that the man had gotten a fragment through his head, killing him instantly. These things, though horribly macabre, never struck Louis as being profound revelations.

That profound revelation came when both Louis and the narrator realized that there was never going to be peace, at least, not for the common foot soldier.

The common foot soldier had lost all care for which side was winning or losing. None of that has any meaning to him. The common foot soldier could return home to his family and friends, be congratulated for his heroic actions, and be hailed as the one who saved the fatherland. All that was nothing to him, though. What was to become of his friends, his comrades, even his supposed enemies, all of whom now lay dead in shell holes and trenches, festering in the mud? For the common foot soldier, and for Louis, ‘normal’ was dead. Louis’ world was the fray. The bank, No Man’s Land. This forest, his trenches. The people, dragons, whatever the fuck else there was, his enemies.

---

Collin stood idly at the edge of the clearing, picking small, paper thin flakes of bark off one of the few birch that lay hidden within the base of the valley. He knew that there were surely more up higher on the mountainsides, but as long as this one here had plenty of the highly-flammable material covering it, he was not planning on hiking anywhere for it. Once he had gathered a handful, he turned and walked to the center of the camp, depositing his catch in an empty can beside the fire pit.

Standing up, he looked to Louis, who sat on a log scribbling something in a notebook. Across the clearing, in the lean-to, he could see Mike cleaning the barrel of a rifle with a bandana. At this, Collin felt the need to call out to the man, as aside from their clothes, the bandanas they carried were some of the few articles of cloth they possessed. He remembered how angry he had been when, a few days ago, Louis had torn up his jacket to make a bandage. He found it kind of ironic: though the men were both highly intelligent, they seemed to be quite incompetent when it came to basic survival.

“Hey,” he said sharply, giving the log which Louis sat on a kick. “We oughta go get some more water, my canteen’s empty.”

Louis gave the man a blank look. “If your canteen is empty, why don’t ‘cha go by yourself.” he retorted looking back down at his damnable book. Louis had been without alcohol, cigarettes, and drugs for weeks now, plus, had been getting eaten alive by mosquitoes and deer flies; he was in no mood to go tromping through the forest to the spring.

Collin furrowed his brow, clicked his teeth, then calmly asked: “Is your canteen empty?”

Before Louis could answer, Collin snatched the small, metal container from his side. Without saying a word, he lunged for it, Collin easily dodging to the right. The man chuckled as Louis stumbled and fell to the dirt.

“You want to know something about water, Bekker?” he muttered, unscrewing the lid of the container. “It’s really fucking hard to come by in the Gobi desert. There, water is the greatest fucking thing on earth. When I was marching through it, our squadron had three prisoners, but only enough water for one.”

Enraged, Louis got to his feet and again lunged at the older man, this time taking a swing at him. Quick and nimble, Collin once more ducked and side stepped.

“Now, shooting two of them would be a waste of ammunition, knifing two of them-- a waste of energy. So do you know what we did? We took a canteen just like this--” Holding the canteen up, he tipped it over and let its contents pour out on the ground, the thirsty earth drinking the liquid up with haste. “and we placed it on top of a dune, and we told them that there was only one way that they’re getting out of the desert alive.” He tossed it back to Louis. “The guy who got to it first had beat one of the others to death with a rock, then tore the other’s jugular out with his teeth. Big bastard, 'e was. I won four packs of cigarettes on that bet! Water is god, an’ it seems like you’re out. Let’s go.”

Louis swore under his breath as he slung the canteen over his shoulder. Collin was a mean bastard if he had ever met one. He wanted to tell the man that this wasn’t the fucking Gobi, and that he had had plenty of water, but held his tongue. No use in trying to argue with him, Louis had found. He had witnessed the man slap Mike after he commented on Collin’s prolific racism. All Mike had said was that the blacks were not responsible for all the economic troubles Collin seemed to encounter. Upon hearing this, Collin struck Mike, then told him that “No one tells me what I can and can’t say. I’ll fucking call the niggers whatever I like!”.

Collin was a racist bastard, Mike was the strangest fucker he had ever met. He could’ve at least murdered and robbed with people who were pleasant to be around.

---

Trudging, they made their way through the dim forest. Mossy ground, tree trunks stretching into a green skysphere, a ray of light, having pierced the canopy, fell the earth here and there-- all of it had become ever so familiar to Louis. Louis, the New Yorker, the man who, on a daily basis, had gazed up at the great pyres of steel and concrete that had been erected by man, now walked where no man, aside from the two that stood infront and behind him, had walked. The spring was a good distance up the mountainside, near the base of a cliff, and though the water in the streams and river looked perfectly fine to Louis, Collin insisted they only drink from springs, unless they boil the water otherwise.

Boiled water tasted like shit, so he walked.

Not that Louis minded the walk. Actually, he had to admit, it was quite enjoyable. He had never been a hiker, or an outdoorsman even. Hell, the only times he had ever been camping were when he was a child with his family at a lake in Pennsylvania, and when he went to that huge concert in the upper part of the state. Woodhaven? Woodville? He couldn’t remember its name, that all was an eternity ago.

The three came over a small rise in the terrain, which then rapidly dipped down to form a creekbed. Fed by the spring, the men had to simply follow the stream up to where the water bubbled from the earth. They had walked the route so many times by now that there was a definite path beginning to emerge from the leaves and undergrowth. Branches had been cut by machetes, and moss torn up by boot heels. Funny how soon creatures of habit could form a landmark, Louis observed. They had just reached the creek when Collin stopped in his tracks.

 He squatted down, examining the ground below. “Something was here.” he mumbled, pointing at the rocks alongside the creek. “Look at them rocks, somethin’ musta crossed the river.”

Not being in the mood to go off chasing game for Collin’s survival agenda, Louis barely even slowed his stride, simply bypassing the man. Behind him, he could hear Mike comment on the fact that whatever it was was probably far gone. The last thing he heard before he rounded a bend was the birth of a long string of insults.

After a good twenty minutes of walking, the small ridgeline he walked along ended abruptly, dropping down to a depression at the base of a cliff. From beneath the stone face, there flowed pristine water, clear as the finest glass and cold as death. This water trickled down over a large, flat stone, forming a shallow, oblong pool, the end of which emptied out into the small stream he had been following. Around it, trees parted, allowing a column of sunlight to illuminate the pool. From the first time he had set eyes upon it, Louis had thought that it was so ludicrous for something like that to be on the planet earth. It was otherworldly, something straight out of Eden. Though a declared atheist, Louis had read religious scripture, and throughout every religion, be it Norsk, Islam, or Greek, he had always envisioned Heaven, Valhalla, or Olympus to be places of clouds and pearly gates.

He had been wrong in his assumptions.

This was what a true Eden would look like. A crystal pool, surrounded by moss covered rocks, conifers, and granite cliffs. He smirked as he leaned down to collect water, picturing one of those massive billboards on the side of the road, its big, red letters reading: “Heaven, just north of New Hampshire, right off I-93.” At the bottom would be a small disclaimer warning visitors to beware of dragons.

The final bubbles appeared from his canteen, and he fumbled with the cap, swearing at the screw’s refusal to catch. As he did so, the leaves behind him crunched beneath a boot.

Without looking up, he said in a gruff voice: “About time you showed up, did Collin go off loo-- Offh!”

Louis’ comment broke off as something large and heavy hit his chest, knocking the man backwards. Had Mike just punched him? Had a tree fallen on him? He reeled as the unknown object pushed him down against the rocks, the bright sun above blinding him. It was a force like he had never before experienced. Something so tremendously powerful holding him to the stone. His eyes closed, both in fear and the great shine of the sun.

He heard something splash in the pool, feeling the cold water hit his legs, then, all was quiet.

Against his face, something brushed against him, tickling his nose and feeling similar to that of fishing line, followed by a puff of hot, moist air.

Whatever it was, it certainly was neither man nor tree.

The man opened his eyes slowly, blinking in the bright light. As he regained his focus, the first thing he became aware of was the fact that what was brushing was not fishing line, but a set of three long whiskers. The whiskers, which he found to be more of flesh like protrusion than hairs, sprouted from a grey scaled snout, right below a pair of flared nostrils.

A pair of scaly lips ran the length of the snout, from which the tips of white, pointed teeth protruded.

Louis flicked his eyes up, meeting the narrowed, yellow eyes of the snout’s owner. It was here that he realized what, albeit, who he was actually looking at, as well as the fact that, though the dragon’s head was only slightly larger than a human’s, the creature possessed an incredibly large pair of eyes, eyes that sat below a formidable set of horns. These eyes looked right through him, like burning circles in the sky.

The creature gave another huff, giving Louis another blast of moist air, before sitting back on its-- his haunches. His. Louis had been nearly killed by this creature, and had spoken to him. He had introduced himself, conversed, and interacted with the dragon, now he had just been attacked. Why? The questions flooded his mind, and he searched for answers.

For a moment the two sized each other up, and Louis found an opaque conclusion in his thoughts. Something was wrong. 

Louis swallowed, gently trying to push what turned out to be the dragon’s tail off his chest. “H-hello, uhh…” He stammered, trying to remember the beast’s name.

“Nimbus.” the scaled creature growled, finishing his sentence for him. “And hello to you, Louis Bekker.”

Again Louis swallowed. The dragon had a thick accent, similar to that of Louis’ Welsh philosophy professor, making Louis all the more unsure as to how to best talk to him. On top of that, he seemed to speak in a sporadic fashion, voice cracking and jerking about.

Eventually, all that Louis was able to say was: “Your, uh, tail…” He pointed at the thick appendage, but all Nimbus did was simply look at it, then back up to Louis.

“My tail stays where it be, Louis Bekker, lest you are harmless.”

Louis felt something poke him in the side, and realized what the creature meant. Slowly, he reached down to his waist, pulled his pistol from its holster, and tossed the weapon aside. As soon as it hit the moss, Louis felt the tail slide off his chest, the scales feeling surprisingly smooth, almost flesh-like.

He examined the dragon as it sat with its head lowered before him. Now, without the creature bearing over him, he go a truly good look at Nimbus. This was in no way the typical image of a dragon, what was expected and told in lore to be a proud, massive beast. The dragon, Louis realized, looked more like one of the teenaged heroin addicts that inhabited the streets of New York than what the movies and Tolkien novels would have one believe. His body was fidgety and wiry, eyes, flicking from focal point to focal point, a large scar crowning the top of his head, one which looked only freshly healed. The look to the creature’s eyes seemed oddly familiar, yet Louis could not adequately place his finger on where he had seen the look in the past. Perhaps in the eyes of the Vietnam vets that walked the streets, perhaps on faces of dying dogs.

His head was not lowered in a defensive way, nor threatening, but desperate.

“N-Nimbus, you okay, buddy?” He mentally kicked himself as he said the words, not knowing why he had just called a mythical creature with wings, scales, and a wicked set of teeth ‘buddy’. Well, he thought, why did he sit for two hours talking with him and his friend a few days ago? Like terrorist attacks, the word ‘buddy’ seemed mundane.

At the sound of his voice, Louis saw the dragon’s eyes snap back to meet his. “Okay? Nimbus?” the dragon chirped frantically. “You fucking think I’m okay, ‘buddy’?” the dragon mimicked, snarling. Louis flinched at his harsh words. Hearing the dragon curse was utterly profound and out-of-place. He thought of it as akin to what it would be like to meet a unicorn, only to find that it had a voice like Muhammid Ali. 

"Never, ever okay!" the drake continued, his voice growing high pitched. “You...you--” 

Nimbus suddenly froze, body becoming rigid and the spikes along his spine raising. Louis furrowed his brow, trying to figure out what had happened. The dragon’s eyes were no longer on him, but had risen, now staring up the embankment. Louis twisted, trying to see what the dragon saw.

The blue barrel of a shotgun glistened in the sunlight, the calloused finger of Collin tense on the trigger.

~Post Chapter Notes~

So this is somewhat of a rough draft. I'm going on a camping trip tomorrow, and I'll be away for a week, so this is the last chance I get to upload a chapter. It's really bad, but I'll improve it later, once I get input on it. Say what you want, just know that I've only given it the old once over. No real proofreading or editing here!

So, what did we learn in this chapter? Nothing much, except that I suck at needless filler. It's difficult to describe Nimbus from an outsider's perspective. And yes, he has whiskers. Why didn't I mention them earlier? Because I hadn't drawn him for the 50th time an realized that they would make him look kinda cool, and that they are mundane.