Mickey Reichert - The lost Dragons of Barakhai

More incomprehensible whispers swept the group, and the animals stirred restlessly.

Collins held utterly still as his vision stabilized. Barely trusting himself to speak, he managed, "I'm hurt."

"Yes." The speaker revealed nothing with his tone. "Come."

Collins walked toward the bearded man, and the mixed group filled in the growing gap behind him. The circle tightened, though not enough to keep him from escaping under normal circumstances. The idea of running now incited a raw bubble of nausea. His balance would surely fail him.

The creatures nearest the speaker turned, glancing over their shoulders as they slid, in single file, through an opening Collins had not yet explored. He soon found himself in a small, rough-hewn cave filled with the obligatory stony growths on floor and ceiling. The bearded man led the way through one of that cavern's several exits and into a grotto. There, Collins saw an unusually large number of ledges shadowing a network of low, tunnellike openings and three larger entrances, including the jagged hole they had glided through. A stream wound along one edge, disappearing into a hole on the same side. Each entrance had a guard, one a man holding a pole, another a massive, grizzled wolf, the third a petite woman who looked as if she could not defend herself from her own shadow.

The man who had spoken gestured at a rocky prominence. Though free of slime or moss, it looked shiny with damp. Collins' aching body begged him to rest, but he dared take no chance of offending. "May I sit down, please?"

"Please do," said a voluptuous naked woman with the darkest skin and hair Collins had ever seen. She might have passed for an aboriginal African in his world except that she had threadlike lips, a long, narrow nose, and eyes that appeared more yellow than brown. Her inky hair fell in knotty straightness nearly to her knees, though it covered nothing women of his world would have considered significant for modesty.

Collins plopped heavily down on the ledge, feeling as if he had survived a journey through a wood chipper. He adjusted the crude bandage on his head and dropped the backpack beside him. "My name is Benton Collins," he said. "You can call me Ben."

"Ben," the original speaker repeated. The man held the sword awkwardly. Clearly, he knew or had surmised its purpose, but he had no experience with such a weapon. "Who are you, Ben?"

Collins thought he had already answered that question with his name. He tried to guess the reason for the question, what he would want to know were he the captor. But, first, he needed to figure out the purpose of this mismatched group; and his thoughts slogged through light-headedness and pain for an answer. "I'm from another world. One without switchers and switch-forms."

The way-too-skinny woman piped in, "Are you a royal?"

Collins bit his lower lip, uncertain of the consequences of answering with truth or various lies. He had no way of knowing whether this group held royalty in awed esteem or despised them for inflicting this life of anarchy and imprisonment upon them. The king's ancestors had literally visited the sins of the parents onto the sons and daughters; yet, the current king and his relatives were also innocent descendants. Not that that simple, clearheaded and obvious reasoning prevents wars and resentment in my own world. Preferring to die for honesty than deceit, Collins stuck with the truth. "My world… "he recognized the fallacy of the statement he was about to make and amended it even as he spoke, "… at least my part of it, doesn't have royalty."

Glances circumnavigated the room. They seemed surprised by Collins' pronouncement, which made sense. Having lived under no other form of government, they might find it difficult to understand how others could. Even in his own world, Collins sometimes found it hard to see how communism had flourished and countries continued to accept monarchs, even if only as figureheads. On the other hand, he had loved science and math and suffered through subjects like history, geography, and social studies. He did not consider himself a stereotypical scientist who saw the whole world in black and white: provable theories versus ungrounded superstition. He had even dated a psychology student, albeit unsuccessfully.

The original speaker summed up the modicum of information they had gathered. "So you're not a royal, and yet you also have no switch-form."

"Correct." The snail's pace of the interview ground on Collins, who suddenly remembered the limitations on his time. He finally glanced at his watch. It read 11:08 A.M., to his horror. "Oh, my God! I've got to get moving." He would never have guessed how long he had lain unconscious, curled around his backpack, on the stones. The presence of this gang of switchers, including the dogs, must have kept the cougar from returning to finish him.

Humans and animals alike stared at Collins. Clearly, they believed his ability to go or stay depended wholly on them. And, Collins realized, they were essentially right. He could only attempt to prod them along.

Collins wrenched open his backpack. "Listen, you all seem nice enough, but the life of a man and a cause depend on me hauling ass out of here right now." He seized the Snickers bars and held them up. "Here. You'll like these." Even as he tossed them, Collins had a sudden wild thought. He had read that chocolate was poisonous to most of the animals people kept as pets. On the other hand, he had fed candy to his cat and hamster without any harmful effects that he knew of, and the animals he now faced spent half their lives as humans.

The puppy ran toward the bounty, but its father stopped it with a well-placed paw. The lioness sniffed one candy bar carefully, and a short, sinewy man who had not yet spoken hefted the other two. As he studied them, Collins remembered to add through his pounding headache, "Take the paper off first. The good stuff's inside."

Using his teeth, the man ripped the wrapper and sent it floating to the ground. He took a bite of the Snickers, and a smile lit his face. "This is… great!" He hefted it like a trophy. "Best food I've ever eaten." He handed the one he had tasted to the scrawny girl, who took a delicate nibble.

Her eyes widened. "Delicious."

The short man opened the other two candy bars and passed them around the group while Collins emptied his pockets of dog biscuits and jerky. "You can have all of these, too." No longer worrying about an attack, he went through his pack, emptying it of everything he could spare. Not only could those things work as bribes, but shedding them would lighten his load tremendously. "Here're some clothes. You look like you could use these." He left the selection of T-shirts, jeans, underwear, and socks on the ledge beside him. Finding the medicine bottle, Collins sorted through the Turns to find three Tylenols, which he forced down without water, using several hard swallows and all the saliva he could muster. He returned the bottle to his pack. The Barakhain prisoners could probably use the medicine, too; but he did not want to take the time to explain it. He also kept his toiletries, the binoculars, keys, watch, and beeper but left the speaker wire he had used to lead Falima to the biology laboratory. He looked up at no one in particular. "Now, does any of that buy me the freedom to find the lost dragons?"

The prisoners in human form tore their gazes from the pile to glance at Collins, clearly bewildered. The short man who had opened the Snickers spoke first. "The lost what?"

"Dragons," Collins repeated dutifully, though he doubted that would prove enough. "Humongous scaly creatures with lots of sharp teeth."

"Like the one who attacked you?" the skinny woman tried.

Collins shook his head. "No. No. That's a large furry creature with sharp teeth. I'm talking about dragons. Bigger. Just scales all over. Hairless wings." He glanced up to see two bats hanging upside down from a stalactite over his head and looked for the words to differentiate the dragons from them, without resorting to the word "scales" again. "Enormous creatures. Like alligators with wings, but bigger than elephants."