Turbinio

Peaches and Tansies

You've never been one for following a perfectly laid-out plan when it comes to routes or emergencies. During the race, you tend to always take unnecessary breaks simply because you can't stare at the road for long without feeling the tedious, confusing and unnecessary urge to do anything other than follow the road.

With this in mind for one more time, you began to wander around the wagon, picking up small objects and returning them randomly to their proper places messed up by the confusion between Agno and the dinosaur. Both, however, were not at all interested in repeating the morning's fight.

The dinosaur had been imprisoned in one of the peach boxes you'd gotten from a resident of Wrightsville, while Agno slept peacefully between your blankets on the roof of the wagon.

The creature seemed stressed, perhaps hungry. It gnawed at the wooden bars of its prison, not causing significant enough damage for you to worry about it escaping. The sharp, cutting teeth could tear flesh, but not wood. And by the way, that dinosaur seemed itching to tear your flesh apart.

Diego Brando. You stood still, perplexed, for several minutes, staring at the small creature caged in a wooden box. You looked up, the sun was very low and you were already far from Wrightsville. The light filtered through a layer of clouds just above the treetops. The air was heavy with humidity. It would probably rain again by nightfall; the sky was overcast with thick clouds to the east. There were perhaps a few minutes of light left.

You continued on your way, following a gully, not wanting to climb the steep, rocky sides until you had to. The narrow, deep gully curved just beyond a clearing and gave the impression of descending towards the river. Time and time again you had to climb down to make sure the dinosaur was securely fastened; you would decide what to do with it after you had time to think, but you definitely didn't intend to sleep while the creature was alive. You didn't have much information about Diego's abilities, you didn't know the degree of control he could exert over them; but you knew that if that dinosaur was there, it wasn't by chance. You remembered Hot Pants mentioning it as some kind of espionage, and that seemed the most acceptable hypothesis. But what exactly was Diego spying on? You? It seemed too simple for an answer.

You were just about to head back to the wagon when you heard a faint sound behind you. You quickly looked around. The sound had been produced by a stone that had fallen over the edge of the gully, dislodged by the paw of the dinosaur, which had managed to free itself. It looked around, assessing the amount of dead animals and tansies around it. It acted like any other animal, but it was hungry, and you wouldn't have time to take the brakes off Cadichon's mouth so that she could bite it again.

There was a Cuban at the Luco Trudeau hospital called Yudel. He was a nice guy, friendly like all Cubans and very funny when it came to pets. His favorite were dogs. Yudal was a guerrilla from the Pacific Triple Frontier. He and two of his dogs had been hit by a dynamite explosion on the outskirts of a village near Iquique. He mourned the loss of the dogs and often told you stories about them when you sat next to him during the few moments of relaxation in your shifts.

More objectively, he also once told you what to do, and what not to do, if you were attacked by a dog one day. It was too kind to call the scary monster that had been carefully picking its way through the stones a dog, but you still hoped it shared some basic character traits.

"Bicho malvado..." You said firmly, staring into a yellow eye. ''Actually...'' You backed slowly towards your wagon, fearing for Agno and Cadichon too. "You're an absolutely horrible lizard." Speak loudly and firmly, you heard Yudel say. "Probably the worst I've ever seen!" And so you said it, loudly and firmly.