Dragonsapien by Jon Jacks Page B

That had been the game he
had been playing with Celly the day they had fled to the
island.
    He couldn’t play
that game anymore.
    He couldn’t even
look at the cover.
    He had most of
the very latest games. The best games. The most highly
rated.
    Yet, just like
last year’s best game, he couldn’t play them.
    Not because he
wasn’t good at them
    But because,
like that game, they reminded him too much of things he
didn’t want to be reminded of.
    In fact, the
latest games were even worse. They both reminded him, yet also
sickened him.
    Sickened him
because of the perverted view of dragons they portrayed.
    Dragons that
lived hidden amongst us, unrecognised for what they really
are.
    Even the most
innocent looking neighbour could be a veiled killer. Someone who,
when you were least expecting it, could sever you in two with the
simple slash of an abruptly extended talon.
    You could be in
the mall. At the bus stop. Even just taking a walk in the
park.
    Death was
waiting for you no matter where you were. Death in the form of what
appeared to be a fellow human. Even a child.
    And if the
dragonsapien – the name they’d been given, just as evolved,
intelligent man was homo-sapien – fully transformed into the winged
beast lying beneath that deceptively benign exterior, then you and
everyone around you were really in trouble.
    The dragonsapien
moved swiftly. Acted instinctively. Cruelly.
    A beat of its
wings could shatter every bone in your body. A wrench of its arm
could dismember or decapitate you. Even a rock-hard finger, aimed
directly at your forehead or around your heart, could kill
you.
    Like the films,
the books, and the TV series that had been spawned from the
discovery of the dragonsapiens, the game played loosely with the
truth.
    Who would guess
from the ghoulish descriptions of the murderous actions of the
dragonsapiens that they had, for the most part, gone off peacefully
to live in Hong Kong, an enclave especially set aside for them to
create their own, separate community?
    The only cases
Jake had heard of where their removal from society hadn’t been
peaceful was when the watching crowds, unable to control their fear
and disgust, had attacked the families being herded into the
waiting buses or trains. For a brief moment there would be mayhem
until the well-armed troops quickly and ruthlessly moved
in.
    Many of the
worst scenes of lynch-mob violence had involved wealthy people
falsely accused of being dragons by those hoping to loot a vacated
house, steal a car, or take over a business.
    And the dragons’
reward for allowing themselves to be peaceably stripped of their
belongings and removed from their homes?
    To be portrayed
in all the media as fearsome, irredeemably violent
creatures.
    Should Jake put
things straight?
    Should he use
his experience of actually living amongst a family of dragons to
show what they were really like?
    Should he write
a book, as his avaricious parents had continually urged him to
do?
    He had tried,
unsuccessfully, a number of times to transfer the confused memories
whirling around inside his head to a word processor.
    Publishers had
offered him the aid of ghost writers to tell his tale. Yet as soon
as he began to even talk about his experiences, it all felt too
personal for him, like he was revealing more than he wanted to
about himself, about Celly. Besides, even when he managed to avoid
revealing the more personal elements, he found that the ghost
writers were already twisting what he had to say, bending the
reality until it conformed to ‘more interesting structures’, or
literary theories of ‘character arcs’ and ‘narrative
peaks’.
    Did Napoleon
undergo a ‘character arc’? Did he, towards the end of his life,
mumble something along the lines of, ‘Well whaddya know, I was
wrong all along’? Did he–
    A massive,
deafening on-screen explosion shook Jake out of his meandering
thoughts.
    Damn! I’ve just been wiped out!
    He jumped as
another, louder explosion made