Chapter Four
5 April 2018
The women took the apartment where we’d had the meeting—it was set up like a normal, two-bedroom apartment. The other was broken into five rooms, not counting the kitchen, with three beds, two couches, and a couple of odd pieces of furniture in the papasan/bean bag category of chair. I ended up on a couch in the room closest to the entrance, for no other reason than I was the most heavily armed.
I’d also spent a couple of hours making lists before going to sleep. Once I climbed out of a very rump sprung couch and read the note on the door, I adjourned to the other apartment, where Diindiisi was overseeing the production of breakfast.
“How do you like your eggs?” Padgett asked from the stove.
“Long as they’re not green, I don’t care,” I replied.
I thumped into a chair, battle-rattle pushing me back from the table.
“I forgot how much fun this crap is to wear all your waking hours,” I said, grimacing.
“Need assistance removing it?” Diindiisi asked.
“No,” I replied. Rising, I pulled the Velcro on the side loose, ducked out of the armor, and dropped it next to me on the floor. “Thank you, though.”
“Where’s everyone else?” I asked as Padgett set a plate of bacon and eggs in front of me.
“They’re downstairs taking stock of supplies here,” Diindiisi replied, sitting down with a cup of coffee. “I haven’t had coffee this good in quite a while.”
“Thank you, ma’am,” Padgett said. “We’ve got plenty of coffee if nothing else.”
“We should be able to keep supplied, at least,” Diindiisi said. “Until we’re pulled to the next intrusion.”
“Is that how you got here?” I asked between mouthfuls of bacon and eggs.
“Yes. Time passes very slowly here between events, generally. There seems to be a controlling power, but I haven’t run across it, yet, to my good fortune. When there is an event, the landscape changes, and you find yourself there—wherever there is—and start all over.”
“Did y’all discuss this while I was sleeping?” I asked.
“No, Father Miller wanted to wait until you were awake,” Padgett admitted.
“Would you mind getting the others so we can discuss it?” Diindiisi asked him.
“Sure, one minute,” Padgett said, dashing out of the apartment.
I ate some damn good eggs. Diindiisi drank coffee. Finally the others came trooping in.
“Finally woke up, I see,” Miller said, drawing out a chair.
“I was tired,” I replied.
“We were discussing important things,” Padgett said.
“Yes, we were,” I replied. “How often are there events, Diindiisi?”
“Time is different in the Shadow Lands,” Diindiisi replied, “so it is hard to say how often they occur.”
“Obviously,” I said.
“We’re essentially going to be replaying the same day for a long time,” she said.
“Groundhog Day?” Padgett asked me.
“I don’t think so. I think she means the weather will be the same. Not much will change until the next event. Which is what makes it hard to keep track of time, right?” I asked Diindiisi.
“Yes,” she replied. “If there is a long time between events, we should be able to build up quite a supply of useful items. I’d suggest that bags or some sort of carrying equipment be high on our list of items so everyone can have a minimum amount of equipment on them at all times if there’s another event.”
“On my list,” I said, dropping my lists on the table.
“You’ve thought about this,” she replied, looking at the lists.
“Yes’m,” I replied around a mouthful of eggs.
“If nothing else, we’ve got proof that we’re no longer in Kansas,” Holt said.
“How so?” Padgett asked.
“There’s a bird bath full of glowing water down there in the chapel,” he replied.
“God provides,” Miller said, handing me several small bottles of water that gave off a pure, calming radiance.
“You know, we could get rich with this stuff,” I said.
“How?” Miller asked.
“We could win the Amazing Randi’s challenge, for one thing,” I said. “Real holy water? We’d put Peter Popov Ministries out of business.”
“I did not become a priest to repeat the mistakes of the Middle Ages,” Miller intoned.
“Oddly enough, I didn’t either,” I replied. “On to other things. Other than Father Miller and Diindiisi, can any of you use fire arms?”
“Why is that important?” Holt asked.
“Couple of reasons I can think of,” I replied. “I killed one of them in the square yesterday.”
“That makes sense,” Holt said.
“I’m pretty good with a rifle,” Dalma said. “Bagged my limit with deer.”
“Scope or open sights?”
“Both,” she replied. “Got a cousin who was trying to prove he was a better shot, so he loaned me his Enfield. It was set up with battlefield sights.” She paused, smiling. “Got a twelve point buck with that gun,” she said.
“Holt? Padgett?”
Holt shook his head.
“I was raised around guns,” Padgett said. “But I prefer to throw knives at people.”
“In this line of work, throwing knives doesn’t do much except piss things off. But we could be here for years, so everyone’s going to get a chance to learn,” I said.
“One other thing,” Diindiisi said. “You might feel that learning to defend yourself isn’t that important. The daemons here will not shy from defiling everyone here, including the males.”
“And on that happy note, Diindiisi, Dalma and I are going shopping.”
“Why those two?” Father Miller asked.
“Three reasons. First, they asked, second they both can shoot, and third,” I adopted a bad movie cowboy accent, “You can per-tect the homestead while me an’ tha wimmon folk get supplies from town.”
“Bless you my son, for you seem to have been possessed,” Miller said, crossing himself. “I’ll need to go over the Rite of Exorcism.”
I smirked at him. “But seriously, I need to go search the police station…”
“Do you see something out there?” Diindiisi asked, following my gaze out the window.
Outside was the same dross on lead sky that had been our first sight of the Shadow Lands.
“Just with me,” I said. “Hang on a minute.”
I went into the other apartment, grabbing my phone. It showed an eighty-five percent charge along with ‘No Signal.’ I unlocked it and went to the contacts page. Sure enough, under the ‘Emergency, Work’ listings was one for San Marcos. It was a street address with a six digit number.
“Yes!” I shouted, heading into the other apartment again. “One of our problems may have a solution. Weapons and body armor, at least.”
“Really?” Miller said.
“The guy I work for in Austin, and the vampire that advises him, are both paranoid as fu…frag,” I temporized. “Michelangelo insisted we set up emergency caches in the cities we don’t have an office in.”
“Wait a minute,” Holt said. “Michelangelo? As in the artist slash sculptor?”
“I’m not talking about the ninja turtle,” I said.
“He’s a vampire?” Holt asked again.
“Yup, he’s a vampire. He’s also been looking for the vampire who turned him for the last six hundred years. But that doesn’t bear on what’s happening now.”
While I’d been talking to Holt, Diindiisi had left the room. She came back wearing blue jeans, topped by my tweed jacket. Under the jacket, she had a wide leather belt, with a long Bowie knife on the left, balancing the 1911 I’d given her on the right.
“Working clothes?” I asked.
“Except for the boots, yes,” she replied. “The pants are a bit tight for my tastes, admittedly. All of the heels on most of the women’s footwear I’ve found recently are ridiculous for anything other than walking at a sedate pace.”
I shook my head at that.
“Could we swing by my dorm room at some point?” Dalma asked. “I’d like to pick up some clothes.”
“Right,” I replied. “Father, if you’d re-apply the protective wards when we leave?”
“I’ll keep the research into getting out of here going,” he said.
We trooped downstairs to the SUV but swung by the font first. I filled a pitcher and the CamelBak in my armor.
“You’re going to drink holy water?” Miller asked, aghast.
“If I have to, yes. But I might need to seal a door or two, and ready-made is better than having to find water on the fly. The little bottles you gave me might not be enough,” I said.
“I hadn’t thought of that,” he replied, watching the font refill. “Give me a minute to fill the aspergillum, and I’ll follow you out.”
We piled into the Tacticool Tahoe and drove off, and Miller sprinkled the driveway with holy water as we left. I could have kicked myself when we got there—the address turned out to be down the alley from the Pearl, in the same parking lot we’d met up in the day before.
I looked at the plain steel door set in the brick wall. There wasn’t a door knob.
“How do we get in?” Dalma asked.
“Magic,” I replied, sliding up the steel cover over the keypad next to the door. I fed it the code. With a clunk as the lock disengaged, the door opened.
“Oh my god,” Dalma said, stepping inside. “I’ve gone to heaven.”
“No, but close,” I replied.
Michelangelo was paranoid, but being almost six hundred years old would do that to a fellow. He was also right when it came to logistics—more is better. The caches had been established so that any two teams could roll up, replace all their assorted implements of destruction, and return to the fight. There were even uniform and boot replacements—because there’s nothing like trying to fight the undead bare-assed and barefoot to ruin an otherwise perfect day.
“How wealthy are your employers that they can afford this?” Diindiisi asked.
“Worldwide, ma’am. Most of this is actually paid for by the ‘legal’ side of things. QMG runs professional body guard services, charging a pretty penny for it. There’s Group—we’re paid by governments mostly to protect the innocent from the things that go bump in the night. Most of the major churches, and quite a few minor ones, throw money our way.”
“All of this. Henry would be proud of what he founded,” she said.
“Ma’am, that’s the third time you’ve mentioned Henry. Do you mean Henry Keith?”
“Yes,” she replied. “You know of him?”
“Ma’am, I’ve met him.”
“He stopped hiding his secret?” she asked.
“Ma’am, that ‘secret’ is probably the worst kept secret in the company, other than the number of vampires or ‘Specials’ employed. He hasn’t had to hide his age for fifty years or more, at least as far as QMG is concerned,” I said.
“Has society become that open and accepting of magic?” she asked, looking at the stack of boxed boots.
“Yes and no. Magic is more acceptable than it was when I was born, but Henry’s protected by the company, and we just don’t care,” I said as I unlocked the gun cage. “Dalma, I’m not sure there’s a long arm here that’ll fit your frame,” I added.
There was a pair of very long cases lying flat under the gun rack. I slid out and popped the latches.
“Heyyy now,” Dalma said, looking in the case.
Inside was a Barrett M82. The full-sized, thirty pounds empty, fifty-seven-inch-long version, which was only six inches shorter than Dalma, herself. She was salivating over the big Murfreesboro Five-O. It definitely did not fit her frame. I could also see I was going to lose the argument.
I sighed. “Put them in the SUV.”
We cleared the cache. I did one last thing before leaving. There was a white board on one wall, showing the dates of inspection. At the bottom, I wrote ‘Ninja Pigeon’ before we left.
“What’s a ‘Ninja Pigeon’?” Dalma asked as we were closing up the SUV.
“It’s a joke from my time in Iraq,” I replied. “A way of marking where I’ve been.”
“Surely there’s more to it than that,” Diindiisi said.
“There is. I screwed up at one point, so my Gunny started giving me every shitty job he could think of—more to get my head right than anything else.” I walked around the SUV to climb in. “Anyway, we’re way the hell out in the middle of nowhere, looking for weapons caches that Hajji had been burying everywhere in the Anbar. One of the terps comes over…”
“Hajji? Terps?” Diindiisi asked.
I coughed.
“Sorry, sometimes I forget not everyone was there. Hajji is what we called the guys we were fighting over there—the insurgents, the press called them, I think.”
“From that old cartoon, what was it called, Jonny something, right?” Dalma asked.
I glanced at her in the mirror.
“Jonny Quest, and that would be a wrong answer, thanks for playing. Sure, you heard that kinda shit even over there, but most of them claimed to be devout Muslims, fighting the ‘evil Americans,’ so they got stuck with Hajji, the term for one of the faithful who’d made the trip to Mecca,” I said. “Terps is just a shortened version of interpreter. So this terp, Cheesy…”
“Why Cheesy?” Diindiisi asked.
“He’d ask us for cheeseburgers from the dining facility every time he was on base,” I replied. “Any more questions? No? Good. So, Cheesy comes over with this song and dance number in three part harmony, swearing it looks like someone had been digging under this pigeon coop on this pissant little hard scrabble sand farm we were on. We go over and look at the pile of fossilized pigeon crap under the coop. Sure enough, the pile of ancient fertilizer had been disturbed, and someone had tried to hide it. One of the other Marines drags over the local who lived on the farm, a dude who looked older than Moses himself, right down to the flowing patriarchal beard, so he can answer questions about the pile of pigeon poop. Since someone had been digging under the coop, guess who gets to crawl up under it to make sure there isn’t anything under the shit?”
I pointed at myself.
“I crawled under there with a bayonet and started probing the disturbed area. Older than Moses is freaking out, because we’re disturbing his pigeons. Cheesy thinks this is the funniest damn thing he’s seen since we had to probe the cellar of an outhouse, so he’s rolling on the ground, losing his shit, he’s laughing so hard. Finally, I come crawling back out, covered in pigeon crap, the dust from pigeon crap, crapped on pigeon feathers, and less identifiable shit. Gunny’s got a fucking smile a mile wide on his face. I reach into my pocket to pull out my lighter to light a cigarette. What comes out of my pocket instead of my lighter is a piece of fossilized pigeon shit. I lost control of my mouth and shouted, ‘How the hell did I get pigeon shit in my pocket!’”
“And?” Dalma asked from the back seat.
“Gunny gives me his Clint Eastwood as Gunny Highway look, saying, ‘It was Ninja Pigeon, dumbass,’ before walking back to his Humvee. Since we were Marines, it became my nickname. I started putting it on white boards anywhere I saw one. Kinda like ‘Kilroy was Here’ in WWII,” I said, making sure everyone had their seat belts on before I started the SUV.
“Kilroy? WWII?” Diindiisi asked.
“I’ll explain those later,” I said. “Let’s just say there’s a lot we need to catch you up on, and leave it at that for now.”
The SUV had settled considerably on its suspension—we’d probably added close to fifteen hundred pounds of ammo, weapons, and gear. Dalma and Diindiisi both had put on body armor. Dalma had grabbed a UMP .45, while Diindiisi was carrying an 870 shotgun—the pump gun was the closest to anything she’d seen back in the day.
I made sure Dalma knew where the selector was, praying she’d keep it on ‘semi’ until we had time for training.
“Let’s go offload,” I said, starting the SUV trundling back down the alley.
“Jesse,” Diindiisi said.
“I see it,” I replied. It had started to rain ectoplasm, again. “Hang on.”
I hit the brakes, dropping the SUV into reverse.
“Raining back here too,” Dalma said.
I mentally flipped a coin and shifted back to drive before easing forward at a walk, waiting for the other shoe to drop. The SUV started to glow.
“Damn, that’s not good,” I said. “Weapons on safe, because this could get nasty.”
“Don’t you mean off safe?” Dalma asked.
“No. Among its many features, the Tacticool Tahoe is armored against small arms fire,” I said. “So if you pop off a round in here, it’s going to ricochet around until one of us stops it.”
“I see,” Dalma said. “Safe it is.”
The first daemon appeared at the head of the alley. There wasn’t much room to accelerate, but I put the pedal to the floor, anyway, and the big Cummins diesel roared in the tight confines of the alley. The daemon tried to get out of the way but didn’t make it—the bumper folded him in half. We were rolling faster than the ectoplasm could withdraw from the blessings on the SUV, and we fishtailed on the ectoplasm at the alley entrance. I got the SUV under control, but not before I hit three parked cars.
“That’s going to be fun to explain,” I shouted.
We were straight again—pointed in the wrong direction, admittedly, but straight. I goosed it. We clipped three more daemons as we accelerated out of the square and went east on Hopkins.
“They’re following us,” Dalma called from the back seat. “I can shoot at them if you want.”
“Don’t!” I shouted. “The windows are armored, just like the sides. Shit! I knew I should have rigged the Golf, even if it meant you driving, Dalma.”
Dalma sniffed.
“What’s a Golf?” Diindiisi asked.
“Machine gun,” I replied. “Technically an M240G. Golf is from the military alphabet.”
“Ah. But why would Dalma have to drive?”
“Can you drive?” I asked.
“A team? Yes. An automobile? No. I’d give it a try if I absolutely had to, but I never learned. Amelia and Fred offered to teach me once if we ever found a car. The few horses that have come through to the Shadow Lands are never quite right after the experience.” She sighed. “Poor animals.”
“Wait, Amelia and Fred?” Dalma asked. “Earhart and Noonan?”
“Yes,” Diindiisi said.
“How long have you…”
“Hang on!” I shouted, again. We’d run out of downtown, shooting past the San Marcos Public Library.
I slung a left hand turn at sixty, rocking the SUV on its suspension, and barreled down Charles S. Austin Drive, my foot firmly planted on the firewall.
“Slow the fuck down!” Dalma screamed. “The railroad tracks!”
“Fuck!” I shouted.
Coming from the other direction, the tracks were steep, but doable. From this side, they were a ramp. At eighty and climbing, we caught air. It wasn’t for long—probably only two Tahoe lengths—but it was still air. We hit, hard, grounding the suspension before continuing down the road.
“Anything close by?” I asked, taking my foot off the gas.
“No, why?”
I slid the Tahoe to a stop.
“Cover me,’ I said, stepping out for a quick walk around. Nothing was obviously leaking.
I opened the back door and grabbed the case with the M240. Inside, along with the gun, was a clamp-on mount for the sun roof.
“Dalma, grab two boxes of seven six two belted from the back, please?” I asked, hitting the button on the door to open the sunroof.
It wasn’t a real ring mount. But with some effort you could fire backward or forwards as needed.
“I’m driving?” Dalma asked, throwing the two cans on the seat.
“You’re driving,” I agreed, clamping the mount in place. I pulled the M240 out of the case, slapped it in place, and loaded the Golf. “Since I’m going to be standing on the back seat and all. Try not to take my head off with a branch, huh?”
“Can’t be worse than your driving,” she replied.
“I also don’t have a harness,” I said. “So take it slow, huh?”
She stepped on the accelerator, revving the engine to redline, then drove off at a very sedate pace. She used the turn signal to go left on Aquarena Springs, and even waited for the light.
“Did you see any traffic?” I asked.
“No, but that doesn’t mean things operate the same way here that they do in the real world. Besides, one of your coworkers could be coming from the other direction,” she said, seriously.
I broke up laughing. “You win. Just get us there in one piece.”
She took a roundabout route back to the funeral home. Along the way we could see evidence of other desecrations—two churches stood blackened. A strip mall still smoldered.
“That’s a break in the pattern,” Diindiisi said.
“How so?” I shouted.
“Normally there’s a reason for the destruction. That looks random,” Diindiisi said.
“Wonder if the daemons have something against coffee shops,” Dalma said. “There was one in that building, along with a pie shop.”
“Who knows what drives the minds of the creatures in the Shadow Lands?” Diindiisi asked.
“Jesse?” Dalma said. “Can we stop by my dorm? We’ll go past it on the way back, I swear.”
“Yes. I’ll stay down here, covering the vehicle while y’all go in. Be quick about it, huh?”
“Ok,” she replied, signaling before turning left.
We tooled over hills and through dales until we arrived at Smith Hall. Dalma and Diindiisi went inside, and I tried to cover 360 degrees by myself until I heard a short, sharp burst of fire from the building they’d entered, followed by two blasts from a shotgun.
I hadn’t quite decided whether I was going to disconnect the Golf and enter the building when the emergency exit on the top floor slammed opened. Dalma, followed by Diindiisi, came trotting down the stairs.
“What happened?” I asked as they both jumped into the front seat.
Dalma tossed a backpack with a kitty on it onto the seat at my feet.
“There were a couple of imps there,” Diindiisi said. “Dalma wanted to check the sights on her gun, so…”
“Besides, I wanted to see how badly it rose on full auto,” Dalma said. “I’ve never shot a submachine gun before.”
“Next time warn me, huh?” I said, as we pulled out of the parking lot and headed to the funeral home. “I almost came inside.”
“That might have been sub-optimal,” Dalma said. “Someone could have been shot.”
“No, really?”
“Yes, really,” she replied.
I swear, I could hear her rolling her eyes at me.
“Jesse, I’m confused,” Diindiisi said, turning in her seat.
“How so?”
“I thought you were a priest,” she said.
“I am ordained, yes,” I said.
“Yet, you swear,” she replied.
“I was a Marine before I became a priest. Sometimes in high stress situations, the Marine comes to the fore,” I said. “This place is probably the definition of ‘high stress.’ My bishop sees it as a weakness of mine. Most of the team leads I work with think it’s funny. My bosses don’t care as long as I get the job done.”
“That makes sense,” Diindiisi said. “Your bishop sounds like a throwback to my time. The rest sound practical.”
“Practical is what works in this business,” I said as we turned into the funeral home parking lot. “Hold up a second.”
Dalma stopped. I hopped down and reset the ward we’d broken by crossing it.
“Go ahead and pull up to the garage,” I said. “I’ll look for leaks from the Tahoe.”
Everyone helped unload. I found a mechanic’s creeper in the garage and rolled under the SUV to look for leaks.
Miller was waiting for me when I wheeled out from under the back axle.
“Find anything?” he asked. I noticed he’d run everyone else upstairs.
“No. It ran okay on the way back, but I wanted to be sure,” I said.
“How well do you know Diindiisi?” he asked abruptly.
“Met her here. I vaguely remember her being mentioned during training. Other than that, not very well, why?”
“She’s mentioned in the archives I’ve got. Three times,” he said, holding up three fingers as emphasis.
“Ok, give.”
“First time is for a work she co-authored about the Shadow Lands in,” he checked a note. “1908. Rare book.”
“That would explain her knowledge, that and spending over a hundred years here,” I said, sitting up on the creeper.
“Her biography is…interesting. She shouldn’t be what she is,” he said somewhat sternly.
“Why shouldn’t she be what she is?” I asked.
“Her people look down on women of power,” Miller replied.
“Much like your church looks down on female priests, Father,” Diindiisi said, walking from the garage, handing me a glass of water. “Unless things have changed?”
I shook my head no.
“Yes, but…” Miller started.
“But what? Is there a test you’d like me to perform? Hot iron, perhaps? Or, I know, I can drink from the font,” Diindiisi said. “If I don’t melt or fade away, would that prove I’m on the side of right, Father Miller?”
“No, no test is needed,” Miller replied. “I…just wanted Jesse to be aware that you are mentioned in the Church Archives, relating to fighting evil.”
“Did you tell him about the wendigo?” she asked. She opened the back door on the Tahoe and sat on the bumper.
I smacked my head with my hand.
“Wendigo,” I said. “That’s why your name is familiar. Jack the Ripper, right?”
“Yes,” they both said.
“You’ve heard of it,” Diindiisi added.
“Yes, they spent a couple of days on the case in training as an illustration of why you shouldn’t get locked into one kind of thinking when dealing with the monstrous,” I said.
“The two vampires running around London at that point didn’t help things,” she said.
“Two vampires?” Miller asked.
“Yes. Two. Doctor Van Helsing and his companions chased the elder one to earth in Transylvania, permanently inhuming him, while losing Quentin Morris in the process. Van Helsing told a slightly modified version of the story to the Irish author, Stoker, in part to memorialize Morris. Henry Keith and I tracked the second one down in 1891, eliminating her as a threat,” she replied.
“What do the vampires have to do with a wendigo?” Miller asked.
“The elder vampire? Nothing. The second? She was using the wendigo to cover her feeding habits. She didn’t realize we’d killed the wendigo when she returned to London to resume her behavior.”
“I see,” Miller said. “That fills in some gaps in the archives. But I have to ask, why didn’t the Quintus Society release all that information to the church?”
“I was never a full member of the Society, for some of the same reasons you mentioned before, Father. Only the British would be ruled by a Queen but not let women have any power in society,” she said with an exasperated expression. “Given the animosity between the Catholic Church and the Anglican Church at the time, why would they share information? There was some discussion about giving your Church the information even then, which ultimately went nowhere. Father Miller, I’m not a prostitute, nor am I a minion of Satan. I just want to get back to the real world. If I can’t do that, working with you will suffice.”
“I apologize for my mistrust,” Miller said. “I just wasn’t sure. Not being sure makes me nervous.”
“Understand completely,” I said. “Now that we’ve worked that out, what’s for lunch?”
After lunch, Padgett drove us to his house so he could pick up some clothes, which led to another issue.
“That’s new,” Padgett said, looking at the specter standing in front of the house. “Not really. It’s just the first time I’ve actually seen him.”
“Let me guess, the house is haunted,” I said, snarkily.
“You could say that. Usually by something that’s throwing things around at three a.m., not standing there with a grim expression,” he said. “Things were really bad for a while when the ghost found the litter box. He was literally flinging shit at us for a while. The cat protested, I guess, so that stopped.”
“Cats can have that effect on ghosts, from time to time,” I said.
“Let me try something,” Diindiisi said. She reached into the leather-wrapped bundle she’d brought along and took out some sage.
“Uh, last time someone tried smudging him out, he really got pissed off,” Padgett said.
“Smudging?” Diindiisi asked.
“Lighting sage on fire, waving it about to ‘clear the negative waves’ or some shit,” Padgett replied.
“I wasn’t going to light it,” Diindiisi said with a chuckle.
She took a stem out of the bundle of sage, stripped off the leaves, and crushed them before casting them to the winds. She walked over to the specter and held a low-voiced conversation with him.
Padgett looked at me.
“You see a lot of this in your line of work, Father?” he asked.
“Nope. First time. Usually ghosts aren’t worth the effort—sure we can exorcise them, but unless they’re a major league poltergeist, most of them don’t do any damage. Most folks don’t even see them. Too busy with other things to care, most of the time,” I replied.
Diindiisi bowed to the ghost, who stepped aside. She waved Padgett over and followed him inside. They came out a few minutes later with several bags. Padgett dumped the bags in the back seat. Diindiisi started shifting the load around in the back of the SUV.
“I’ve got to ask…”
“I talked to the spirit,” she replied. “Asked his permission. He’s actually quite the gentleman.”
“So what was the sage for?”
“It clears my mind, allowing me to focus. If I’m being honest, the smoke sets my teeth on edge.” She laughed, and I smiled back.
“Do me a favor?” I asked.
We were waiting on Padgett to bring out the third and final load. Apparently, he was travelling a lot more heavily than Dalma.
“Sure. What?”
“Step up to the driver’s side, turn the key to ‘ACC,’ and look at the fuel gauge. It should be the one on the top left, above the one that looks like an oil lamp,” I said.
I heard the ignition click.
“Just above a quarter,” she said.
“What’s up?” Padgett called from the porch.
“Gonna need to fuel up before we head back,” I said. “Any place close to get diesel?”
“There are a couple places out by the highway. How’re you going to pay for it?” he asked.
“We’re not. We are going to swing by Farmall Supply before we head back to the casa,” I said.
“What the hell are we getting at Farmall Supply?” he asked.
“A hand pump,” I replied. “Drop it down into the fill cap on the underground tank and you don’t have to pay for the fuel.”
“That sounds like work,” he said.
“It is,” I replied.
“I’m getting paid for this, right?” he asked.
“At some point, if we make it back to the real world, we’ll talk fiduciary recompense,” I said as he climbed into the front seat and started the Tahoe.
“That sounds frightening and downright sexy at the same time,” he replied, dropping the SUV into gear before driving off. The specter had taken up a guarding position, again.
“When we make it back, the experts are going to want to pick your brain, so they’ll pay a lot of money to talk with you,” I replied. “That’s not including if you find you want to go to work for QMG and Group.” I waved to the ghost.
He waved back. It was that kind of day.
“What is Group?” Padgett asked.
“Yes, you’ve mentioned ‘Group’ several times now,” Diindiisi said over the wind roar.
“It’s the unofficial name for those of us who kill monsters. Officially we’re Personal Security Specialists, just like every other bodyguard working for QMG, but back in the 1960’s and early 1970’s, the company hired a bunch of former Special Forces operators. I’m not sure there’s a historical reference for SF,” I said to answer Diindiisi’s obvious question. “They’re good at sneaking around and killing things and talking with and teaching the locals how to do the same. Anyway, most of the guys they hired came from First Special Forces Group, which they’d just called Group while they were in the service. They brought the name with them.”
It started raining fish.
“Nice. Fortean Phenomenon,’ I said as Padgett slalomed around the fish flopping on the concrete.
“Stop a minute,” Diindiisi said.
Padgett slid the SUV to a stop, and Diindiisi hopped out and ran back to the fish pile. She grabbed three or four of the largest, carried them back to the SUV, and tossed them into the back where they flopped around on top of Padgett’s gear.
He grimaced at me in the mirror.
“I haven’t had salmon in years,” she said, “that didn’t come out of a can. Nasty stuff that.”
“Dinner tonight, I guess,” I replied as Padgett rolled back toward the funeral home.
* * * * *