“I can’t wait to get back to somewhere civilized,” Brian said. “Some place with beer.”
“What do you think could have broken this tree like this?” Jessica asked.
“Don’t know, don’t care,” Brian said. “It was probably blown over in a storm or something.”
“I don’t think so,” Jessica said. “And it doesn’t look like it was chopped down, either. It looks almost like something came along and pushed it over.”
“Like what? A bear?” Brian asked, suddenly sounding alarmed.
“I don’t know. Maybe,” Jessica said. She doubted it, though. There certainly were bears in this area, but she didn’t know of any bear that would be large and strong enough to knock over a tree like this, or even why a bear would do it in the first place. Still, when she looked closer at the bark, there did appear to be fibers on it that might have been bear fur. She picked up a strand of the fur and started to examine it, but before she could look at it too closely, Brian was standing up and stumbling away from the tree as quickly as he could go.
“If there’s bears around here then I’m definitely not sticking around,” Brian said.
“Brian, where the hell are you going?” Jessica asked. “You can’t just go wandering off up here, especially without even putting your boots back on.”
But he wasn’t listening to her. With one boot left behind at the tree and the other still in his hand, he was already moving at a fast jog back the way they had come. Before Jessica could say anything more he disappeared into the bushes off the side of the path.
“Not that way!” Jessica called out after him. “You’re going to break your neck running willy-nilly through the underbrush like that.”
From somewhere deeper in the foliage, Brian made a surprised grunting sound, then went silent.
Jessica froze. Although she had no idea why, her every instinct suddenly told her she needed to be in fight-or-flight mode. “Brian?”
There was still no sound, not him complaining, not him blundering through the underbrush, not even him crying out as he stubbed his toe on something.
Go, she thought to herself. Get back down the trail as fast as possible. It was a stupid thought, she realized. That was what she would have screamed at someone to do if they were in a horror movie, but this was real life. And in real life, something didn’t just come out of the woods to kill someone. In real life, someone as incompatible with nature as Brian was much more likely to stumble off a ledge and down the steep side of the mountain. And if that were the case, then if she ran he would be as good as dead by the time she got back with help.
“Brian? If you’re playing a joke, it’s not funny,” Jessica said. “It can be dangerous out here if you goof around.”
She thought she finally heard something from the direction he had disappeared in. It sounded like something running away through the brush, something very large. Oh crap, it really is a bear, she thought, or maybe a mountain lion. Whatever it was, it seemed to be moving away from her at a very fast pace. Again she fought the urge to run, reasoning that running would only make her look like prey to something like that, and whatever it was must not be in the immediate vicinity anymore anyway. And she couldn’t leave Brian behind, especially if he might be hurt. She might be fully prepared to dump him as soon as they got back to town, but that sure as hell didn’t mean she wanted him harmed in any way.
“Brian? If you can hear me, call out to me.”
Cautiously, she followed the path he had taken into the underbrush, moving slowly and watching her footing carefully just in case there was indeed some kind of drop-off he hadn’t seen. She didn’t get far, though, before her foot squelched in something damp and squishy.
“What the fuck?” she whispered, raising her boot to see what she’d stepped in. It came up dripping red.
“Oh shit. Brian? Brian, can you hear…” She stumbled a couple of steps forward into a patch where the brush was more cleared away. That was finally where she saw the source of the blood.
The two arms lying there with blood sprayed all around them had clearly belonged to Brian. She recognized the small tattoo on his left forearm. That was all there was here, though, to show that Brian, or at least part of him, had been here. Both arms looked like they had been ripped off his body right at the shoulder joints, and the gore, bone, and muscle hanging from them implied that, whatever had removed them, it hadn’t been done with any kind of sharp blade. In fact, they looked more like they had been ripped straight off of his body.
Okay, she thought to herself with the sort of calm that could only come with sudden, inexplicable trauma. Now I can run.
Jessica turned and did exactly that. A few seconds later, something else in the forest, just as she had feared, started to give chase.
Chapter One
This wasn’t exactly Agent Bradley Tennyson’s first day on the job, but it was the first day he could rightfully, truly be called “agent,” and he was certain that he was prepared for anything at all that the agency might throw at him. Or at least, that was what he had thought before he took a seat at the division head’s desk and heard who his first ever partner was going to be.
“The Crag? You have got to be kidding me,” Tennyson said.
His boss looked at him with a raised eyebrow. “I’m surprised you’ve already heard of Agent Crag.”
“Everyone in the academy knows about the Crag,” Tennyson said. “The teachers use him as a cautionary story about what happens when you spend too many years in the agency without a vacation. They say your brain breaks down and you become a basement-dwelling troll. Uh, but please don’t tell him I said that.”
“On the contrary,” his boss said. “I’m willing to bet that George would take that description as a compliment. And he would definitely find it amusing that the academy thinks of him as a what-not-to-do story.”
“Am I being punished?” Tennyson asked. “When I was doing my thing at the academy, did I fuck the kid of some higher up that wants to punish me now?”
“Not at all. Just the opposite.” The division head looked at the monitor of his computer, where presumably he had Tennyson’s file pulled up. “You were at absolutely the top of your class in most things. And you weren’t shy about letting people know it, too. You were brash and you were a braggart. You could also back it up with actions. And I heard all about the Sandman incident right after it happened.”
Tennyson couldn’t help but give a cocky grin. “That was pretty amazing, wasn’t it?”
His boss ignored Tennyson’s moment of patting himself on the back. “But that kind of attitude doesn’t usually get people busting down the door to partner with you. There’s plenty of concerns about how you’ll actually be out in the field. Very few of the senior agents I approached about possibly partnering with you were too keen on the idea that you might completely go off and do your own thing when they needed you by their side the most. Few agents, that is, except for George.”
Tennyson sat back in his chair and thought about everything he’d ever heard about Agent George Crag, or simply “the Crag” to most people. Although Tennyson had never actually seen the man, the word was that the Crag was several years past where he should have retired, yet he was still a solidly built, in-shape man. He had his office deep in the furthest bowels of the agency’s main building. What exactly he did down there, no one was quite sure, but he had a reputation for pursuing the kinds of cases that most people ignored as the ravings of lunatics. “So you’re saying he actually asked for me?” Tennyson asked.
“He did,” the division head said. “He saw your files and said you reminded him of himself when he was young enough to still have something like idealism.”
“I don’t know if idealism is a word I would ever use for myself, sir.”
“Well George did. And here’s the thing about him: he’s not down there in his little basement cave because he’s been exiled down there or anything. He’s there because he wants to be. He’s saved the bacon of m
any a senior agent, and he had favors to call in.”
“So he used them to become the proverbial monster in the dungeon instead of taking your job?” Tennyson asked incredulously.
“Not my job. My boss’s job. Hell, maybe even his boss. He really could have gone that far up the agency. But that’s not what he wanted. He wanted freedom to pursue his own work, and he got it. He wanted all the resources available to do that work, and he got it. So when he spoke to me and my superiors and said, ‘I want Tennyson,’ then guess what?”
“He got it,” Tennyson muttered. “Don’t I have any say in this, though? I mean, what the hell would I even be doing with him? Not to sound too full of myself, but you’ve seen everything I can do. My aptitude tests, my shooting scores, those would all be wasted being his lackey in some moldering corner of the basement.”
“A word of advice, Tennyson: if you ever have to say ‘not to sound too full of myself,’ then you are definitely way too full of yourself,” the boss said. “You might want to tone it down a little bit if you ever do want to get a better assignment.”
Tennyson frowned. “Yes sir.”
“Because I do intend to give you a better assignment. Look, all you have to do is humor the old man for a bit. George goes through partners very quickly. He always finds something about them he doesn’t like and gets one of us to assign him another one. In all likelihood, you’ll only be with him for one case. You can handle a single case, right?”
“Absolutely I can.”
“Good. So just be the old man’s partner for a week or so, and when you’re done, provided you’ve proven you’re really as great as your instructors made you out to be, you’ll probably end up with your pick of the best assignments out there.” The division head stood up, a clear indication that this conversation was almost over. “Do you know how to get down to Agent Crag’s lair?”
“Lair?” Tennyson asked. “You actually call it a lair?”
“You will, too, once you’ve seen it.”
“I’ve heard roughly where it is. The sub-basement, back of the cold records room, right?”
“That’s the place. You better get going. He told me that you were already going to have a busy first day.”
Tennyson wasn’t sure if he should be excited about that or not.
Finding his way to the Crag’s office turned out to be a little more difficult than he had anticipated. It turned out that the deeper levels of the complex were maze-like and ill-kept, with dust over everything and lights flickering overhead as though they were able to fail and plunge Tennyson into some surrealistic labyrinth. He kept taking wrong turns at unclear signage, and after five minutes he started to get the sensation that maybe he’d fallen asleep in the division head’s office and was having some kind of weird nightmare. Finally, though, he saw a light at the end of a dark hallway illuminating a large room full of file boxes on old metal shelves. Going into the room, however, didn’t make any of this feel any less dreamlike.
Tennyson knew there were several cold case records rooms in the facility, but he doubted any of the other ones looked this cavernous and dilapidated. Some of the shelves full of moldering boxes went all the way up to the ceiling twenty feet above him. And the further he went down the rows of shelves, the older and more damaged the boxes seemed to be. Some of them even looked like they had the dark brown stain of long-dried blood on them, although that could have been a trick of the light.
And somewhere, far at the back of all of this, he could hear a scratchy old voice muttering and cursing quietly to itself.
“Agent Crag?” Tennyson called out. “Um, it’s Agent Bradley Tennyson. I’m supposed to be your new partner.”
“Ah yes, the fresh meat for the grinder is here,” the voice called back. “Come on all the way to the back. Follow your nose, if you have to. The moldier it smells, probably the closer you are to me.”
Tennyson thought at first that he was making a joke about his age, but the closer he got the more of a mildew smell there was in the air. It was the Crag that was causing it though. Agent Crag really had chosen to put his work space in the deepest, dankest, gloomiest spot of the sub-basement. The boxes here were so old that the cardboard was disintegrating or splitting apart from ancient water damage. There was a cleared-out space among the shelves where a number of rusting metal tables were heaped with books, boxes, and a number of murky jars that appeared to have some kind of pickled specimens inside, although the specimens were so old and mushy that nothing could actually be identified.
The Crag stood at one of the tables with a laptop open in front of him, the only modern thing Tennyson could see in the entire room, and even that was a model about ten years out of date. “Out of date model” could also be said of the Crag himself, although it was immediately obvious that out-of-date was nowhere near the same as being in bad shape. Despite his clearly advanced years and papery, liver-spotted skin, the Crag had the height of a pro wrestler, and almost a build to match. He was obviously a man who still spent long hours in the gym. His hair was pure white and neatly trimmed, and there was a mustache on his face that would have been all the rage in the eventies. Despite the decrepitude of everything around him, the Crag wore an immaculately clean and pressed black suit that demanded respect from anyone who saw it.
Tennyson had to admit it. He hadn’t wanted to be, but he was impressed. That still didn’t mean that he was happy to be wasting his time with this old fossil.
“No, young man,” Crag said. “I am most definitely not an ‘old fossil.’”
Tennyson blinked. “How did you… did you just…”
“No, I didn’t read your mind. I knew that’s what you were thinking because that’s what everyone thinks of me. And they can go right ahead and keep doing so for all I care. It means they’re not prepared for me when I come for them.”
“If you don’t mind me asking, how old are you?”
“I do mind, but I’ll still tell you: I’m old enough that I was at this agency when you were still a come-stain in your daddy’s drawers.”
“That’s, uh, colorful.”
“It’s also an old, over-used joke that was never actually funny in the first place, and you should have called me on it.” Crag stepped away from the computer and looked Tennyson up and down. “Everything I’ve heard says you’re the best recruit to graduate from the academy in years.”
Tennyson started to make a smart-ass comment, then thought better of it because the older agent seemed to be testing him. Then he thought better of it again, because he wasn’t going to let this guy just push him around, no matter how long and storied his career at the agency might be. “Decades, actually. Probably the best since before I was a… you know.”
The Crag smirked, and Tennyson felt like he’d been right. He’d been testing Tennyson in some way, all right, and he gave the impression that the younger agent had passed whatever it was. “Well then, let’s prove it right away, shall we?” Crag turned back to the table and grabbed a thick manilla folder that had been sitting there on top of a pile of junk. “Let’s go on to your first case.”
“Wait, now?” Tennyson asked. “I just got here. Shouldn’t I at least get myself settled in around here?”
“No sense in that if you can’t handle the kinds of things that are going to be thrown at you when you work with me. I’ve already picked out something fresh that’s right in my normal jurisdiction, and we’re going to see how long you can last.”
Suddenly Tennyson felt conflicted. He still didn’t actually want to work with this man on whatever forgotten cold cases he’d decided were his forte. But this felt like a blatant challenge. He wanted out of here as fast as possible, yet he wanted to make sure this elder knew exactly how good of an agent he would be losing when Tennyson went on to bigger and better things.
“There’s nothing you can throw at me that I won’t be able to handle,” Tennyson said.
“You say that now,” Crag said as he led him over to a door in the wall. Beyond it w
as a staircase leading up into the more well-lit portions of the building. Damn it. If Tennyson had known about that, he could have avoided getting lost on the way here. “But we’ll see what you say later. Because this thing I’m going to throw at you? It’s big. So big, that’s literally its first name.”
He vanished up the stairs before Tennyson could ask him what he meant, and Tennyson followed.
The Cryptid Files is available from Amazon here!
Or find more great Cryptid books at www.severedpress.com
Cryptid Kingdom (Cryptid Zoo Book 6) Page 16
