Leopard Dreaming (48 page)

‘Hello, little one.’ He noticed his hands on the wheels of the chair, functioning as well as if they’d never been broken. Wriggling his fingers, he fascinated himself at how well he could move them. A mechanical alarm went off in his brain, switched to mute, but still messaging to remind him they were fractured, and that sometime soon the pain was going to kick in and he’d really regret it.

The joey leapt onto his lap, and he startled — in slow motion.

‘Well, hello there, little lady.’ He thought about life, the universe and everything between every word. ‘Where have you been?’ He couldn’t recall her name, but leaned forward to let her sniff his hand. ‘Remember me?’

She latched on around his wrist with her paws, gummed onto his thumb and leaned back on her tail to kick up with her legs.

‘Whoa there!’ He moved to block her and accidentally knocked her on her side. ‘Little rascal. Who taught you to fight?’

She stretched sideways, struggling to flip back onto her feet, and he caught a glimpse of something white stuck to her tummy. Undaunted, she launched back at him, rearing up and latching onto his leg to play like a boxing kangaroo.

‘Come here, you.’ He plucked her up onto his lap using his wrists as tongs to minimise use of his fingers, and discovered that the white slip of paper slid out of her pouch easily along with the crushed remains of a button-shaped tracking device. ‘Bower bird, are you?’

Unfolding the paper as she hopped down, he recognised the hospital stationery and handwriting on the top line.

Sorry, we need time.

You’re better off with Lockman anyway.

Shaky and messy, the lot of it. He’d managed to scrawl the first line before nurses insisted on bandaging his fractured fingers, but the second line he’d never seen before. Made to look like his writing. He could guess who must have forged it. His brain might not be firing on all thrusters yet, but he could guess that much.

‘Bloody Lockman!’

No wonder Mira hadn’t ditched him.

Ben screwed up the note and cast it out the window, where the breeze swept it overboard. He’d only meant to apologise for the time they’d needed to be away from each other in hospital. Damned doctors wouldn’t let her anywhere near him with her poor sight while he needed tubes to drain his internal injuries, and at the time he hadn’t been able to contact her any other way. They’d taken the phone from his room to ensure he got enough rest.

Furious but feeling invincible, he rolled to the helm and found a flare gun. One shot, all he needed. If Lockman wanted a blaze of glory, he could certainly arrange it. Unclipping it, he kissed it, and took it out to
lower the jet boat — where a buzz in the sky caught his attention. He turned and saw a chopper swooping in low and fast over the mangroves.

Dimly, he recognised the sponsored colours for the local Air Sea Rescue’s division of Surf Lifesavers and waved, expecting to see that annoying General Garland and one of her undercover teams of military police finally arriving to provide support to nab Kitching and retrieve Mira and Matron Sanchez. Never soon enough as far as he was concerned.

‘About time!’ he shouted as the first of six men in black fatigues rappelled down to surround him.

They responded with an applause of hands on their T-shaped machine guns; Uzis, or a close variant. Ben recognised them from years of news reports as being the weapon of choice for mercenaries, terrorists and political guerrillas.

The shortest of them looked like a hybrid of Asian nationalities, but Ben decided he had to be hallucinating when the one with the longest hair stepped forward and barked at him with a Russian accent. ‘Where are the others?’

Ben grinned dopily, trying not to laugh as he mimicked the accent. ‘What others, comrade?’

‘He’s alone,’ reported one of the other hallucinations, using a sleek headset with goggles that seemed to let him peer through all the decks.

‘Patterson and Pobody,’ demanded the Russian. ‘Where are they?’

‘Who?’ Then understanding came to him slowly. ‘Oh, the hijackers? They attacked the wrong boat, I think.’

‘Where are they now?’

‘I don’t know,’ he chuckled. ‘Where do hijackers go when they’re not hijacking?’

‘He’s high,’ said the Asian with the funky goggles.

The Russian Asian opened his backpack and threw an armful of black fatigues at Ben. ‘Put them on.’

Ben swayed, blaming it on the boat. He focused on the pocket of the shirt long enough to notice the name Lockman. ‘Oh, no! I don’t want to look like him.’ He pointed at goggle-guy but the face he saw was Lockman’s. ‘That’s his gear, yeah?’

‘You want to impress the girl? You wear the uniform.’ The Russian grinned wickedly and signalled for the co-pilot to lower the rescue sling. ‘Put it on. We take you to her.’

Mira floated through the blue rock, lying flat on her back in a haze of sedation. Panicking in slow motion. Her legs and arms flailed slightly when she concentrated hard enough, but invisible bed sheets restricted her movements. Wheels creaked as her captors rolled her down the length of a long geological fault between sandstone and basalt, and on through a layer of fossils where the whale-sized skeletal belly of a liopleurodon starved for millennia. Its crocodilian jaws gaped bigger than any other creature she’d ever seen in pre-history.

Not real,
she tried to remind herself, but she couldn’t say it aloud. Every time she opened her mouth, her natural gag reflex cut in to stop her from breathing the illusion of blue earth.

‘She needs her shades!’ Freddie shouted. ‘Give them to me!’ Such a rare act of compassion, she knew she had to be dreaming. Turning sharply, she hovered on her back through a rock wall into a cavern, where a long tunnel took three dirty young miners and a pit pony away from her. Ghostly lanterns made the air appear thick and dusty. Yet as she turned a corner, a cool gust of air hit her, as if she was passing an air-conditioner.

Gasping and spluttering, she tried to relax and breathe normally; tried to separate the visible past from the invisible present in her mind to help keep
a slim grasp on reality. Logic told her she was in a long hallway, but her brain and body drifted apart on separate gurneys.
Going crazy!
She tried to close her eyes and focus on pulling herself together literally, but all the horrors of her childhood swept back at her from the darkness of her mind, and invisible monsters attacked her from all directions.

Too scared to open her eyes, too terrified to close them, she sobbed as she squinted, and sensed them watering, but with her arms pinned at her sides she was powerless to wipe away any tears. Her heart pounded harder, fearing the agony that always came with them.

Weakly, she clutched the bed sheets, bracing herself for the sharpest light. White hot, it refracted through salty tears, piercing deep into her brain and permitting her to see through the rarest threshold of time and glimpse the future. Yet the pain never came. As she passed through the delicate lacy threshold from yester-century blue into golden future, she saw the hall around her clearly, along with all its true colours. Grey ceiling and walls. At first, as she passed through the thick veil of the present, she’d glimpsed two Asian men in drab army greens guiding her metal gurney while Freddie Leopard trotted along beside her in bright blue teddy bear pyjamas. He hugged his shaggy wig under his arm, and gazed down at her with a devious grin.

‘Give me her glasses
now
!’ he demanded and his lips moved in sync with his voice for the first time since she’d known him. The trolley came to an abrupt halt in a small room, but his demands only escalated. ‘Would you rather answer to my brother?’

A brown hand passed her shades to him; gold-rimmed Ray-Bans with the lenses set to yester-week muddy-violet, and when he looked at her again with that wicked gleam she knew she was staring at the most dangerous of all his personas — the unpredictable one who could mimic traits from the six others.

No one could frighten her so acutely. Not Freddie the Larrikin, nor Fredarick the Sage, Red the hunter-warrior, Rika the sister-daughter, Icky Ricky the child, or even the beastly Leopard, which presented only rarely as a silent stalker. All paled in comparison to the darkest shade of him. Darick Kitching, the cunning psychopath.

Mira caught a face full of his foul breath as he leaned closer with her glasses and grinned at her.

Don’t!
she cried in her mind, but her lips barely parted. She willed herself to shake her head. He didn’t know she could glimpse the present or future briefly through tears and she much preferred to keep them all blind to that knowledge. Those aspects of her vision were still uncontrollable anyway.

Her neck refused to cooperate. Tears thickened as he studied her with such a menacing expression and lowered her lenses towards her face, but before they could touch her, the shades vanished. Clarity vanished too, along with her tormentor and his colourful pyjamas — replaced in the same instant by a pale golden light that grew so bright it blinded her.

Time seemed to hover, like the psychopath’s hands with her glasses.

She blinked, and when she reopened her eyes and strained to see through the golden haze of her salty tears, she saw the room as it would be eventually, abuzz with scientists. Three men, three women and three androgynous workers, all reclined in their workstations; smooth metal couches with monitors suspended over them at comfortable angles. All wore the same golden coveralls and worked doggedly on projects that involved holographic projections of eyes and other lenses, as if they were still attempting to reverse engineer the peculiar refractive properties of her eyes, without any success. A date on the nearest monitor blinked as if stunned to see her too.

The year: 2332.

Cold metal touched her ear, making her flinch, in her mind at least, and she felt the arms of her invisible shades slide down into place, causing the golden scientists to vanish. The room emptied of furniture and stripped down to bare walls with taped electrical fixtures, and two more androgynous workers appeared in the far corner, also wearing coveralls, and both painting the ceiling a muddy-golden shade of violet.

As Mira’s synapses sparked with the new input, freedom from pain permitted a new level of clarity, and it occurred to her that she’d never worn shades while crying and looking forward in time before. The coloured filters seemed equally helpful in refocusing both past and future. If her hands were free, she would have played with the hue controls out of pure curiosity. Violet seemed to take her at least a week in either direction through time, and her naked eyes behaved similarly with her natural blue shade for at least a century, so it seemed logical that the light spectrums for both past and future behaved like reflections — assuming the saltiness and refractive index of her tears could remain consistent.

She wondered if shades of red could whisk her forward as many millennia into the future as they could into history.

‘Leave us!’ barked the psychopath. ‘I can’t hurt her now, you fools. She’s the key to our future!’

Mira shuddered at the sound of his Velcro fly ripping open.

‘Get out, I said! You heard my brother’s promise. I get an hour alone with her!’

Dimly, she heard them leave, and her heart pounded harder; adrenaline and fear working to metabolise the sedative in her system a great deal faster.

She had to get away from him.

‘That’s my girl,’ he whispered. He leaned so near she noticed his breath now reeked of peppermint and felt cool
against her ear. His hand caressed her cheek, making her cringe. ‘Drift back to me on the raft of reality.’

‘Please don’t,’ she pleaded, surprised to hear the words make it to her lips this time. Yet synchronised perfectly, his sweaty hand clamped down over her mouth with his own plea for her silence.

He leaned over her, the weight of his bony chest enough to restrict her breathing. ‘Easy, girl. I’m too old to be any real threat to you.’ He stroked her hair, but she couldn’t move.

‘Don’t!’ She summoned enough strength to turn away. ‘Don’t touch me.’

‘Shush, now.’ He hummed a few bars from
Ode to Joy,
but coming from him, her mother’s favourite tune sounded devious and creepy. ‘Let the sedative be your friend. Relax and stay numb so this won’t hurt as much.’

She heard the unmistakable sound of Velcro again, but realised he was fastening himself closed instead of dropping his pants. Confused, she tried to sit up, but the sedative maintained its grip on her, allowing him to hold her down with a single bony finger.

‘Can you see me, girl?’

Trembling, she shook her head. Tears fell, her vision cleared and time swept backwards from future to past so fast she felt dizzy — but still no agony. Not even a twinge of pain. She could barely believe it.

‘Answer me!’

She shook her head again, since she’d only glimpsed him a second time briefly as time swept through the slimmer spectrum of the present. Too fragile in comparison.

He clutched both sides of her head unexpectedly and fumbled over the controls to her hues. Shades of yester-violet darkened to coal black. She’d never been able to endure the pain of that hue before, and in reflex she clamped her eyes shut, expecting pain again.

‘Open!’ he commanded, and made it so, probing behind her shades and peeling open her lids forcibly. Using his thumbs, he also wiped the corners of her eyes dry to ensure she saw everything he chose without the distortion of tears.

‘See the truth!’

Surprisingly, his face appeared through the darkness, looming over her.

His menacing glare softened to one of compassion. Grey eyes, pink skin and blue collar. Wrinkles cracked the corners of his eyes as he smiled at her. ‘There now. See? The shades and sedatives aren’t such an evil combination now, are they?’

‘I can see you?’ She shook her head, hardly daring to believe it. Hallucinations always seemed more real than reality, especially during sedation or medication.

‘Abomination no more, my dear. I’ve repaired you temporarily so you can help me do what we must do together.’