Dragon Town
by Tom Lichtenberg
Copyright 2010 Tom Lichtenberg
Chapter One
"Really?"
Sapphire Karadjian shook her head decisively, as if her boss on the other end of the line could actually see it. She hoped that at least the scorn in her tone would get through, but Meyer Stanwood was impervious to her tones by now. He knew damn well he could give her any assignment he wanted to and she would have to take it. Where else was she going to go? Theirs was the only serious news agency left on the planet, as far as he knew. All of the others had gone down the lucrative path of contractual sensationalism. Stories you could hear about were nothing but stunts, all bought and paid for, while actual events went unreported by everyone except United Press Services.
"It's a joke", Sapphire spat at the phone.
"This one's for real," Stanwood insisted. He was relaxing on his white leather couch, gazing out of his high-rise window at the flat blue Indian Ocean below.
"You don't even know," she insisted. "Just like the last time, 'the village that vanished'? Remember that, huh? This one's for real is what you said then!"
"So they were in hiding," he sighed. "You don't have to remind me."
"But this time it's different," she countered. "That's what you want me to believe. But I don't go around wanting to believe. It's not my thing."
"Nothing but the truth, so help you God," he sighed. "Yes, yes, I know." Stanwood didn't like it, but he had orders to follow, just like anybody else, a phrase he kept repeating to anyone who would listen. It's not like there was a shortage of real life to be reported about, but where was the market? Who wanted to hear it? That's what his bosses kept pestering him with. Gone were the days of facts and figures. They were undeniably boring.
"Let me go back to Guyana," Sapphire pleaded. "The coup is imminent. People are rioting. It could really be happening this time."
"It can wait," Stanwood insisted. "Look, I promise to let you get back to it soon, but first, you have to go cover this story."
"How can you call it a story?" Sapphire asked. "It's a fake. Got to be. I know how it works over there. Those people are beggars for attention. They've done it before, am I right? I didn't even know they'd rebuilt that stadium! It wasn't enough they destroyed it the first time?"
"You know a lot more about it than I do," Stanwood said. "After all, it is your home town."
"One I'd be glad to never go back to," she replied. "Since my father retired I haven't set eyes on the place and I was hoping I wouldn't have to ever again."
"That bad, huh?"
"Dreary," she said. "Did you know there's no 'spring' in Spring Hill Lake? There's a hill, I'll give you that, but there is no lake either. What a pit that place is!" Stanwood knew her resistance was already broken, and it was only a matter of time. No other outfit would let her do what she loved doing most - and what she did better than anyone else - covering civil unrest in the most obscure places. Sapphire had been a war correspondent since she first got out of journalism school, and more than two decades later she was unmatched in courage or correspondent skills. She spoke at least seven languages, had been practically everywhere at one time or another, and had contacts that spies could only dream about. The world was still an incredibly dangerous place, and a woman alone was hardly safe anywhere, but Sapphire was completely undaunted. She had earned all her scars but what frightened her most was the fact that most everywhere nobody cared about anyone else. Her audience was vanishing and she knew it. She reported now for the few and the scattered, and United Press Services were slowly but surely pulling the plug on her mission in life.
And now this, assigned to cover some trivial matter of a sinkhole that swallowed a stadium. As far as Sapphire was concerned, every football stadium in America could be swallowed by sinkholes and it would only have been an improvement. It meant nothing to her that it was Sea Dragons Stadium in the city she happened to come from. She had enough bitterness in her memories about that location. As a child, she had seen a ruthless billionaire wipe out a neighborhood in his lust for that spot, even murdering an old man she cared for to get it. Then, when his precious stadium and shopping mall turned out to be a financial fiasco, the same wealthy crook hadn't hesitated to tear it all down and turn it into rubble again. She thought that the football team was still in Nebraska or some other ridiculous place. She hadn't heard they'd come back, that a new swindler had somehow managed to bilk the taxpayers into rebuilding the football emporium, and she wasn't the least bit interested. President Elbert Gambeaux was about to be thrown to the lions by a furious mob and she couldn't be there? For this? For a hole in the ground? It was stupid.
Still, Sapphire was packing her bag. She had always traveled light, and this time would be no exception. A few tops and a spare pair of boots were about all of the luxuries she afforded herself. She kept her hair short to the point of near-baldness so she wouldn't have to be bothered to carry a comb or a brush. She could get a new pair of jeans anywhere so there was never a need to pack up an extra. As for her jacket, she'd worn the same beaten brown leather affair for the past decade or so. Everything else that she needed she found on the screen of her hand-held device - her keys, her wallet, her books and her maps. The size of a credit card, the gadget served all of her worldly needs. She flashed it at the airport gate kiosk and all that was left was the waiting. In the meantime she did some research.
Spring Hill Lake, Arizona. Founded in 1909 as a railroad depot and harbor stop down the river from Wetford, the nearest bigger city. Destroyed by a fire in 1913. Rebuilt by one man, single-handedly almost, in 1919. Jakob Bruin, a former furrier from Winnipeg. 'That seems odd', Sapphire said to herself. She inspected a dark, grainy photo of the man on the very small screen. Bruin was wrapped up in some kind of hairy coat, which made sense and brought a smile to her face. His own face, nearly buried by an overgrown beard, showed a pair of serious, narrowing eyes, the look of a man who could never be stopped. Sapphire imagined him with his bare hands killing the thing he then wore on his back. Behind him, in the photo, was a shell of a train station, hosting a peeling, painted wooden sign with the words 'Spring Hill Lake Depot' barely visible. It didn't look to be very auspicious, and indeed, the entire locale was burned to the ground once again, this time in 1926. Jakob Bruin had perished in the flames.
The town was brought back to life one more time, and this time it stuck. It was rebuilt as part of a public works project during the Great Depression, and took off, in its own meager way, as a trucking depot and warehouse plantation. Big brick buildings had sprung up right out of the ground, or so it appeared to Sapphire as she scanned the historical documents. By the fifties the town was doing quite well, had a mayor and a new city hall, and a lot of new roads and new housing. A generation or so later, when Sapphire was born, it was a small city like any other American one, with teams and parades, colors and trivial lore. It had had its good guys and bad guys, corruptions and scandals, and she was certain there were things she had missed, but she'd left the town the next day after graduating from high school and never looked back. Now that she thought about it, she remembered once being impressed by the town, as a child, when along with a friend she'd explored the whole place, taking buses all around it, as she recalled. She smiled as she thought of their plans to traverse the whole city, marking down on a map every street they'd gone down, planning to do it until the whole map was filled. Of course they hadn't made it that far. The city was bigger than they had thought, and after a while they lost interest. It happens.
Alex Kirkham, that was his name. Sheesh. Alex Kirkham. She hadn't seen him in years. 'Just how many? I don't know, twenty?' she conversed with herself. 'Maybe more, even.' They'd been pretty close, way back when. Sapphire had no siblings herself, and l
ived all alone with her dad, who had to go to work early, so on school mornings he'd drop her at Alex's place, and she'd be taken to school by his family, an arrangement that lasted for years. By high school they'd drifted apart, but still said hello and smiled and waved. His adventurous days were over by then. Sapphire had taken a serious turn, whereas Alex, formerly the more pensive, had gone in the opposite direction, becoming lighter and breezier - 'more shallow' was how she had judged him back then. It was as if he had reached a certain point in his life, looked ahead and didn't like what he saw unfolding before him, and decided to veer off in a simpler direction. He'd gone on to play baseball, a sport he'd formerly derided, and she thought she remembered he'd made a big splash of it somewhere along the line. She looked him up now, but there was nothing about baseball in his on-line details.
'Railroad Safety Inspector?' she blurted out loud in her seat on the plane.