"I saw the whole thing," Wanda said. "You were walking along with your bike and you must have tripped on your shoelace or something because you went down hard. I was in my copter, loading up some cartons. You're probably a little dizzy and you have a bloody nose, dear. Lie back on the grass and pinch this against it." Dee-Dee found a gauze pad resting against her nose and the aboriginal lady guided her hands to it. "Pinch hard. You didn't get any blood on your nice clothes, but keep your hands away from them because they're all scraped and bloody. Just lie back and breathe deeply."
Dee-Dee did as the nice lady instructed, but she looked at her shoes first. One of the shoelaces was undone. Yanker wasn't the only hunter who could plan.
# # # # # # # #
Let's review for a moment what just happened. Yes, Wanda changed the future. But first, she let Yanker kidnap Dee-Dee and bury her under his empty cartons inside his copter. Then he himself was kidnapped. That means, as far as his impending trial was concerned, he was guilty of abducting the young girl. Yanker's past, present, and future lives on that deserted street were not changed by Wanda's actions. His future life beyond that deserted street will be affected by his close encounter with a dragon's talons, but Wanda's time-travel manipulations had nothing to do with that.
However Dee-Dee's future life is a different matter. In preventing her from approaching Yanker's kidnapping site, by rendering her unconscious, by skipping her four minutes into her future, and by placing her onto the ground next to Yanker's empty copter after he had been carried away by a drooling dragon, Wanda removed four minutes of what was going to be Dee-Dee's life. Nobody else's life was affected. Just Dee-Dee's. She was not aware that she had been unconscious for four minutes. She didn't realize that the place where she had tripped and the place where she had woken up were a block apart. She'd never know that she had slipped through Yanker's clutches. She wasn't even aware that a man like Yanker had been waiting for her. She emerged unscathed, with the exception of a few scrapes.
You may ask how Wanda and Momaka were able to plan such a precise operation. Here's what happened. The Raging Gardeners (Granny and the other Wilizy women who hunted down perverts) had conducted a wide-ranging TiTr'ng search for blonde blue-eyed girls who had disappeared in Washington State. A Bremerton girl had gone missing from the Pendergast Regional Park on April 21, 2085. They had TiTr'd to that specific day and place and saw Yanker in action for the first time. That sighting allowed them to find more of his victims. The Raging Gardeners were especially interested in Yanker's escape route into Canada. They made a few plans and Granny polished up her deputy badge.
Starting in April 2085, the Gardeners TiTr'd into Yanker's future in six hour gaps, looking for his next kidnap victim. This was a full team effort. Yolanda was the Gardener who actually found Yanker cutting Dee-Dee's bike chain, but it could have been any of them. Knowing the exact day and time that he'd kidnap Dee-Dee, Wanda and Bob (the invisible dragon) could plan to be there waiting for him.
Melissa had proposed the idea of finding an abduction, TiTr'ng back a couple of minutes, tripping the expected victim, and then skipping her past the kidnap into her future. They knew that they couldn't just rescue the victim from the kidnapper – she'd have the memory of the attack. They had to prevent her from being kidnapped but, at the same time, they had to let Yanker kidnap his victim so that they could convict him for his crime. Melissa had the necessary strategic thinking to come up with the solution. The Gardeners would use this remove a small piece of the victim's life strategy many more times in the years ahead, but only when the kidnapping occurred where nobody could witness it. Fortunately for the victims, and unfortunately for the kidnappers, avoiding witnesses was high on the kidnappers' priorities. The Raging Gardeners had a similar preference for deserted kidnap sites because of Bob's attention grabbing appearance.
# # # # # # # #
Yanker woke up that afternoon to find himself in a clearing. The first thing that he looked for was a beast with sharp talons and a scale covered belly. He didn't see one. He did see two wolves. One wolf started to lick Yanker's neck with a long pink tongue. The other hunched over Yanker's left leg and peed on it. That was Patella letting Yanker know what she thought of him.
"I wouldn't move too quickly if I were you."
Yanker found the source of the voice. An elderly aboriginal lady. She was all dressed up in some fancy ceremonial clothes with a black eagle feather in her white hair. "Lie still. That black wolf at your throat is hungry. She's a messy eater at the best of times. Try not to make any sudden movement. I'll be back."
True to her word, the aboriginal chief came back with a high canvas campstool, set it up on Yanker's right side so that he could see her, and then sat down with a groan. Two other women followed her. One was aboriginal and she too had a black feather in her hair and wore ceremonial robes. The other looked Asian and she wore a fancy set of clothes too. Red and black satin. They also sat on campstools, but they were on his left side.
"Scapula, you can go now," the chief said. Scapula took that instruction literally, poised herself over Yanker's right leg, and let rip.
"My badge," the old lady said and held out a shield of some kind for Yanker to see. "I'm known as Granny. I am a deputy of the British Columbia detachment of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. The badge I'm showing you gives me the authority to detain suspected criminals, question them, determine if they have broken any laws, and apply justice as required within the Aboriginal Nation. By treaty, my authority also extends to B.C. This clearing is on Vancouver Island, British Columbia. You're on trial for kidnapping and I will be your judge. Just so you know, kidnapping is a capital crime in B.C."
"I've been kidnapped," Yanker tried.
"I don't know anything about that," Granny said. "I found you here in this clearing and recognized your face. We've been looking at you for some time now." Yanker didn't recognize the significance of the difference of somebody looking AT him, rather than somebody looking FOR him. Time-travellers tend to develop a subtle sense of humour that only they can appreciate.
"If kidnapping is against the law, then somebody broke a law to bring me into B.C. I was kidnapped."
"By whom? It wasn't me. Describe your kidnapper."
"Big scary flying animal of some kind with a long tail, talons on the end of its legs, and a long drooling snout."
"Do you seriously think I'll believe that?"
Yanker shook his head No. "I was drugged," he went to his back-up plan.
"By a flying monster. Sure you were. Would you like to confess to kidnapping a lot of young girls?"
"I'm innocent."
"Set up the big screen," the judge said to the other two women.
# # # # # # # #
To improve his viewing pleasure, Yanker was allowed to put his back against a tree and extend both feet comfortably in front of him. Each wolf put her head on a shoe and appeared to be asleep. Except when he twitched. At that point, they'd do a fang check to see how much edible flesh he had over his anklebones.
"I've put together a little montage of your trips into B.C. Stop me at any time if you wish to relive the lowlights of your life."
Yanker saw himself pulling a girl out of his copter, putting her under restraints, re-chloroforming her, and then putting her back into his copter. Over and over the scene was repeated, but with a different girl each time. The tapes were even date-stamped. Partway through the montage, he noticed that the judge's two helpers had disappeared. He heard scraping sounds in the woods behind him and wondered what they were doing. But only briefly. He was thinking more about how B.C. had surveillance technology that was unheard of in the United States.
"Clear evidence of guilt, I'd say," the judge remarked. "Do you have anything to say in your defense?"
"I never hurt them."
"But you kidnapped them and sold them to somebody who did hurt them. I find you guilty of kidnapping. The penalty is death. We apply justice in B.C. a little differently than you
may like. You'll die in the next five minutes. Perhaps ten minutes depending on how long it takes me to fill out your death certificate." The judge paused. "How painfully you die is yet to be determined." Then she started on her paperwork.
Yanker looked around. Escape was impossible with the wolves lying on his feet. He felt a rush of wind in his hair and looked up. Black shape. Long wings flapping noisily. Black tail trailing behind. Big black scaly head with two long yellow fangs protruding out of dark red lips. "It's the monster," Yanker called out. "I was kidnapped, just like I said."
"Where?" the judge asked.
"Up there," Yanker said and pointed right above the clearing. When he looked up again, nothing was there.
"You're probably hallucinating. Perhaps you're seeing the kind of afterlife that is waiting for you. Why don't you tell me why you've been kidnapping young, blue-eyed, blonde girls? That'll slow down this paperwork."
# # # # # # # #
Granny administered the painless death and then she and Wanda carried the body into the clearing where the scraping sounds had originated. The grave was now ready for Yanker. But they put his corpse on the ground next to it.
The copters with the audience are landing now, Granny.
I'm going home, Wanda. I'll be soaking in a tub with lots and lots of soap. Let's talk tomorrow about what Yanker told us.
Granny flickered out of sight. Wanda returned to the clearing where Yanker had been convicted and waited for the others to gather for the ritualized cleansing ceremony. Everything about that ceremony is the same as I described in my previous book, Bob, the Invisible Dragon. Except for the following:
• Wanda and Dreamer were the first two women from the audience to vent their anger on Yanker's dead body. When Dreamer saw how viciously Wanda attacked the dead pervert with her knife, she found another knife and did the same. When they had exhausted their fury and had made their throats raw with their screams, they embraced for the longest time, cleaned up, and then flew back to Clearwater where Dreamer had been living after the terrible incident in Wizard's bedroom. She had tried to meet with Wizard but he had not answered any of her messages.
• Mac entered the burial clearing next and chose to use her own ceremonial sword. She was finished in about five minutes, but part of that time was cleaning up afterwards. The sounds drifting out of the burial clearing were nowhere near as angry as what she had expressed the previous time.
• Momaka had invited Lucas to the ceremony. He was sitting in the trial clearing when the last Franklin wife was finished with the body and had returned. Momaka approached Lucas and asked, "Would you like to participate?" Lucas shrugged his shoulders, went into the clearing, saw the remains, saw the shovel, and began cleaning up the meadow.
After the tree planting ceremony, and after the Franklin women were on their way home, Momaka asked Lucas if he'd like to attend this kind of ceremony again.
"You don't need me," he said. "Any of the women here could have buried the remains."
"I thought perhaps that you might have wanted to release some emotions."
"That pervert did nothing to me. I had no emotions about him at all."
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Chapter 4
It was Friday, June 8 and the Wilizy were stumped. For five days now, all of the Wilizy had been involved under Hank's direction in cutting lumber, pouring cement, fastening hard foam pads to the cement, adding a wood covering, and then making that wood all shiny. They were left with a rectangular, perfectly flat wooden surface lying level on the grass of the compound's central meadow. It measured about 90 feet (26 meters) long and 55 feet (15 meters) wide. They didn't have the foggiest idea what they had just built.
Check that. Some of the adults knew. For those who didn't know, they looked to the one person who could unlock the secret. Winnie. But Yolanda, Hank, Granny, Doc, Wanda, and Wizard were wearing tin-foil sweatbands over their foreheads and that spelled doom for the secret-buster. "I can't see through tinfoil," Winnie told the conspirators. That was kind of wussy, but sadly true. Superman's x-ray vision could be stopped by lead. Winnie's was stopped by tinfoil? What kind of superhero is stopped by tinfoil?
On that Friday, after everybody had watched two large pipes being erected at each end of the shiny floor, Granny made an announcement. "Wilizy general meeting, right here, tomorrow morning, at 10. Breakfast at 9 in the community hall. You'll find out what you built tomorrow."
# # # # # # # #
At 9:00 on Saturday morning, the three families from the satellite community invaded the community hall. The men had arrived at 8:00 but had gone directly to the shiny floor where they had added some features. Wolf, TG, and William came into the community hall at 9:30 and were quickly rushed to the kitchen where they received freshly cooked vittles. Momaka and Stu had been in the kitchen at 6:00 that morning. They too had been kept out of the secret but had been warned to expect a crowd for meals that weekend.
At 10 a.m., the Wilizy wandered over to the shiny floor, each taking a folding chair to sit on, but being first cautioned to keep the chair off the floor because the shiny surface was still soft enough to be scratched. When everybody was seated in two roughly even lines of chairs, Granny came onto the floor. She was wearing white shoes with a soft sole, a pair of black shiny loose pants, and a red singlet. It had a symbol of some sort on the front and a little number 4. When she turned around, the Wilizy saw a bigger number 4 on the back, directly below big letters that spelled out Yollie. Granny was carrying a round brown thing.
"Most of you have never seen anything like this before," Granny started. "That's because, in the Aboriginal Nation, we home-school our children. Our communities are too small and too far apart for us to have school buildings. Before the troubles, every aboriginal kid attended a school. All of them would have spent a lot of time in a large room with a high ceiling and a floor much like this. They'd have called that room a gym, and it's spelled G, Y, M. You're sitting beside an outdoor gym."
"Some of the best days of my life were spent in a gym learning how to play various sports. I'm wearing my old high school team jersey, which I'm surprised I can still fit into. Doc and I met in a gym. He played a sport called hockey, only he didn't play it inside the gym. He played it on frozen rinks of ice, sometimes indoors, and sometimes outdoors. I know you think that I'm teasing you about that, but it's true."
"My favorite sport was basketball. This is a basketball." Granny threw the round brown thing into the air, caught it on the tip of the index finger of her right hand, and then used her left hand to spin the ball on that finger. "Spinning the ball on one finger isn't something that you have to do when you play the sport; it's just fun to do." She tossed the ball into the air, caught it on the index finger of her left hand, and kept it spinning for a few seconds before gathering it into both hands.
"To play an indoor sport like basketball, you first need a flat gym floor – one that gives your ball a good bounce no matter where you are on the floor." Then she gave a demonstration by walking around the gym floor bouncing the ball off the floor with either hand. Walking to the edge of the floor, she bounced the ball on the grass. Or at least tried to. "You can't play a sport like basketball on grass or dirt because the ball won't bounce. We now have a good floor because of the construction crew, Wanda and Wizard who obtained all the equipment and supplies we needed, and Dreamer who personally cut each piece of red oak that makes up the floor of our gym."
Walking to one end of the floor, she pointed to something new. "William, TG, and Wolf put these up this morning. This round thing with the netting is a basketball hoop. To win a basketball game, you have to be able to put the ball through that hoop. Like this." Alternating her left and her right hand, Granny lofted the ball into the air about a dozen times so that it went through the hoop. It made a swishing sound when it passed through the netting.
"Behind the hoop is a backboard. This backboard is not actually made from a board. It's made of hard glass. You are
allowed to bounce the ball off the glass so that it can go into the basket." Granny walked from one side of the hoop to the other flipping the ball into the air, apparently at random, but each time hitting the board first before dropping the ball through the netting. "Wizard found these two backboards and hoops in Japan."
"The basketball that I'm using is a medium-sized ball designed especially for women. We have a dozen of these balls stored away in the community hall. We also have bigger sized basketballs for men and smaller sized balls for children. Again, Wizard found these in Japan. A basketball hoop is supposed to be ten feet off the ground. This is a good height for people who are teenagers and older. But even if they use a small ball, youngsters can find it difficult to learn to shoot properly when the hoop is so high. William, do you mind?"
William took off his shoes and came onto the floor. Holding an electronic wand, he pressed a button and the hoop at the other end of the gym started to lower. "It will stop at the eight foot mark. If you want it even lower, press the down button again." They watched the basket fall further. "Six feet is as low as we've programmed the wand."
"An outside court can be ruined by rain," William said. "Turn and look behind you." Wolf was there with the hose and he drenched the crowd from two paces away. Well, he tried to drench them. The water spattered off the side of something. Nobody got wet.
"We are sitting inside an electronic outdoor gym," Granny continued. "William, TG, and Wolf installed all the electronics this morning. Push a button and no rain can get through the walls or the roof. Neither can any wind. Too sunny for you? Close the baffles. Do you want a breeze? Open the baffles. Want to practice in the middle of the night? Turn on the lights. You can't see them now, but the gym has enough LEDs to light the whole court."
"Pretend that somebody has passed the ball to you but the ball went over your head. Now it's going to leave the court and run down the hill, perhaps into the river? Like this."