Lincoln, Fox and the Bad Dog

by D Roland Hess

  Okay.

  I’d given up on planning for things like this a long time ago. The plans never worked. It was best to keep your eyes open, stay loose and not make any of the classic blunders.

  “Fox,” I said, “kinetic force, five foot spread.”

  The gun pulsed in my hand, telling me that it understood the command. Despite its appearance as a fairly normal 1911-style .45 caliber pistol, it had a variety of payloads it could deliver. There was an absolute maximum amount of force it could project, and if you kept it narrow enough, say the diameter of a pencil, it could punch clean holes through organic matter up close and break boards and bones out to twenty feet. But the same amount of force spread out over a five foot diameter was more akin to getting hit with a large, very heavy mattress. In the confines of a small shack, it would be hard to miss something with it.

  “Chip, cover the back,” said Shar. “I’ll watch the roof.”

  She had already said that, but Chip wasn’t listening.

  Babd continued to prowl the perimeter.

  I approached the door, and when I was several feet away, I raised Fox and pulled the trigger. The door, not in the best shape to begin with, blew inward off its rotted hinges. I waited and listened, but there were no additional sounds after the door settled.

  I flipped the night vision system back on. I’d almost walked in without it, which would have been a hilarious way to die.

  At the threshold, I had an idea. Unlike a gun that shot bullets, I didn’t need to worry about what happened if I missed, and I didn’t need to conserve my ammo. I put the muzzle of the gun inside the doorway, and pointed it to the right, covering the inside wall that I couldn’t see.

  I started pulling the trigger and rotating the gun, tracing the outline of the door.

  Whump

  Whump

  Whump

  Each time, the interior walls and ceiling shook.

  Within two seconds, I’d covered the blind spots to the left, right and above the door. Not a sound from it. If the creature had been waiting against the wall to ambush me, it would have squealed at the very least.

  I stepped inside and took in the scene, which was exactly what you’d expect. Empty beer cans, broken kerosene stove, workbench, all old and nasty. Disgusting torn up recliner. Was that a Penthouse on the floor? I quickly scanned the surroundings: walls, ceiling, floor. Left, up, right.

  Nothing.

  I crouched so I could see under the workbench.

  More nothing.

  Where was it? While it hadn’t come back out, it had clearly run around the inside of the place. Its magical blood was smeared everywhere.

  Not a whole lot of choices, then.

  I aimed Fox at the recliner.

  Not for the last time, I wished that my original idea for the mind-reading interface for Fox had panned out. I’d love to dial in a more concentrated two foot radius, but didn’t want to say it out loud and alert the creature to my presence.

  Then again, why not?

  I’d blasted the insides of the place in a very conspicuous fashion. It was hiding. It certainly knew I was here.

  “Fox,” I said, “two foot spread.”

  The chair moved.

  Yep.

  I shot it, twice.

  WHUMP WHUMP

  It squealed, and must have figured it was now or never. The giant centipede thing practically flew out of the torn upholstery, right for me, but I was already set.

  The next shot from Fox knocked it backward, and the one after that caught it in midair and slammed it against the back wall. It crumpled onto the workbench, trying to recover, so I advanced and kept firing. My repeated shots pinned it to the corner between the bench and the wall.

  After about the sixth shot, there was a cracking sound, and it turned gross.

  I hit it three more times, because bugs creep me out.

  It was dead. Its legs twitched, clicking out an insectoid afterthought.

  “Yo,” I shouted, hearing the footsteps behind me. “Are you sure we can’t just light this place on fire? This reeks.”

  “Huh,” said Shar. “Nice work.”

  “Thanks,” I said. “That was surprisingly easy.”

  Shar shrugged.

  “It’s not a nightmare every time,” she said. I looked at the bits of shell, horn, leg, and grime and wondered how exactly this was not a nightmare.

  The magical creature variants -- morphs -- had been popping up more and more frequently over the last five weeks, and we had yet to figure out why. It really chapped Shar’s ass, because we’d actually managed to clear the city out pretty well within a few months of taking over for the now-defunct Congress of the Pittsburgh Neutral Territory. They’d done a shit job of things, and there were more problems than a prevalence of magical nasty things hanging around.

  Of course, having me, Babd and Fox helping in this environment where magic didn’t work very well had been invaluable to the effort. And that had earned me… not much. Maybe a little respect? And not to sell things short, it had kept me alive. A bunch of the Praecants wanted me dead for breaking their holy Compacts, but as long as Shar found me useful I was under the protection of her and her bosses.

  Babd found her way inside the shack, walked past me and sniffed the remains of the centithing.

  “You have killed it,” she said.

  “You’re a genius.”

  “Holy shit,” said Chip, making his way inside with a flashlight so bright I was thinking the beam might set the place on fire.

  “I agree,” I said. “It’s nasty.”

  “I mean that,” said Chip. He directed our gaze with the flashlight.

  In the near corner of the room was some percentage of a woman’s body. A sizable portion of her torso was missing. It was very fresh, and very gross. Apparently the smell wasn’t just dead bug.

  A case of wrong-place-wrong-time, or was this connected?

  “Look,” said Shar, pointing to the floor. A summoning circle was transcribed there.

  “You think she called the morph?” I said.

  “I’ll bet.”

  The woman’s eyes were blackened, as was the skin around them.

  “You think the little caterpillar dude ate that much of her?”

  Shar shrugged.

  “Morphs can be hungry little shits,” she said.

  “I don’t know,” said Chip. “Wouldn’t that thing have taken a bunch of small bites? It’s mouth is, like, the size of my hand. This looks like it was a couple of bigger bites.”

  “You’re on CSI now, Chip?” said Shar.

  The pendant around the dead woman’s neck caught my eye. Praecants often had small tokens or pieces of gear that they had spent significant time and effort imbuing with magical properties. There were some alloys that were particularly good for storing magical energy, and the artifacts (eg. rings, pendants, belt buckles) were usually covered with magical writing. They could be a great ace in the hole if you were in magical trouble.

  The pendant looked like one of these -- I’d seen dozens -- but it had no magical aura. It was made of iron, and had magical symbols on it. But no actual magic. That was strange. The pendant itself was shaped like a curvy letter “w” with a “p” growing up out of the center stem.

  I took it. The chain that held it was thin and silver, and it snapped easily.

  “What’s that?” said Chip.

  “Dunno,” I said. I hadn’t trusted them a year ago when they gave the option to either work for them or die, and I continued not to trust them. I wanted leverage over them, my own set of aces in the hole. Or was it ace in the holes?

  They could have the normal stuff for their evidence locker and their research. The dead bodies and voodoo dolls and bits of morphed magical monster. I wanted the stuff that didn’t make sense.

  “Nothing magical,” I said, holding it up. “Look. It’s iron.”

  Shar already had her phone out, calling for cleanup. Not sure why she was that way, but from the first tim
e I’d met her, she was never interested in aftermath. She had a whole second crew for that. If there was anything left worth examining, the cleanup crew would collect it and get it back to Wynn at the lab. I’d keep the necklace, because it didn’t add up, and I didn’t trust the Praecants with it.

  Shar snorted.

  “Hey Lincoln,” she said, “you coming out with me and Chip?”

  “Gwen and I are getting together tonight,” I said. “So that’s a No.”

  “I thought you two were like, done for good?”

  “We’re just talking.”

  Maybe true. Maybe not. I wasn’t sure.

  I had less than two hours. I figured I was a mess and needed time to get cleaned up.

  My phone buzzed in my pocket, and I remembered that it had buzzed back in the woods too. I don’t let notifications from too many people get through, and now that I wasn’t stalking something dangerous through the forest, I took off one of my gloves and pulled out my phone.

  It was Gwen.

  not feeling great. have to cancel. Sorry

  The previous message I’d gotten when I was back in the woods was from her too:

  call you in a bit -- might have to ditch

  I wasn’t sure how I felt. It was a relief, sure, because the Mathematician in my head was only telling me Very Bad Things about what we’d talk about tonight. So I wouldn’t have to hear any of those words that he was predicting. I wouldn’t have to say them. But it was kicking the can down the road. Mr. Mathematician shook his head and pointed to the printouts and drew a little picture of the dinosaurs heading out for dinner while the asteroid crept in past Mars.

  No reason Shar needed to know I was free tonight though.

  I didn’t relish the thought of watching the Praecant and her lackeys get plastered on the Southside, which is no doubt what she had on the agenda. I put the thoughts and feelings about Gwen in a little box and put it on a shelf somewhere in my head. The Praecants were fond of keeping me in the dark about things, so I didn’t mind having an information imbalance in my favor for once.

  “This has been fun y’all, but I need to go get cleaned up,” I said.

  “Lincoln,” said Shar, “everyone else is boring.”

  “Hey, I’m right here,” said Chip.

  “You’re boring, Chip,” she said. “You think a dash of whisky in your tea is a wild time.”

  Chip sighed.

  “It’s true,” he said. “Lincoln, come on. Rescue me from my eternal lameness.”

  “Obligations,” I said.

  “How about after?” said Shar. “Bring your girl along if she’s still your girl.”

  And then something happened that…

  Have you ever heard a sound retroactively? It’s like, while you were hearing it you weren’t aware of it, but then something triggers you and your brain serves up the memory of the sound, hitting the “skip back” button on the mental DVR?

  So it wasn’t until the roar was in full bloom and the back wall of the shack exploded toward us and a huge bloody stinger sprouted from Chip’s chest that I realized I’d been hearing something like an approaching freight train for the past ten seconds.

  We were nearly blinded by the light coming off the morph, a true monster, and the biggest one I’d ever seen. Its body was maybe the size of a Clydesdale, but it was leonine, with a grotesque human-like face surrounded by a shining mane. It had a thick tail that curled over the head like a scorpion’s. Chip hung from the end of it, dead already. His skin had blackened around the eyes.

  Shar was firing at it, and I think she had been for several seconds. I felt that I had been stunned, and wasn’t even sure how long I’d been standing there dumbstruck.

  Things were loud and bright already, so I figured fuck it.

  “Fox, incendiary rounds!” I yelled and didn’t wait to feel him buzz.

  I pointed the gun at the thing and started squeezing the trigger. Fire exploded as the rounds hit its glowing fur.

  Shar was shouting at me.

  What was it?

  Get out!

  The shack was collapsing.

  I had no idea where Babd had gotten to.

  Let me be clear. This wasn’t the first time that things had gone completely south on a Track and Terminate, and it ended up being only me, Fox, Babd and Shar left standing. It’s happened enough that we kind of have a routine down. Retreat in opposing directions, at something like a 120 degree angle from each other if the surroundings allow, maintaining fire. Babd plays free safety if her body is big enough. A magically active area makes it easier, because Shar can nuke the thing once we get enough separation from it. That wasn’t going to work here though.

  As we fired, Shar with conventional bullets and me with the magical exploding rounds from Fox, the thing was flinching, but honestly, it wasn’t paying us too much attention. It lowered Chip’s body to the ground in front of it, placed a massive paw on his legs, and pulled him off the stinger.

  Shar ceased fire, so I did too. It didn’t seem to be interested in us at all.

  It put its face down toward Chip, and from the cracking sounds I guessed it was taking a bite out of him. But that’s what these things did. They mutated from regular animals into creatures, and went looking for Praecants, trying to get themselves a deliciously magical morsel before they popped out of existence.

  “Pull back,” said Shar, in my earpiece.

  Where was Babd?

  I still didn’t see her.

  “Fox,” I said, “kinetic force, one foot millimeter blade.” Despite the mixing of measurement systems, Fox would interpret that into a projection of force one foot wide and only about a millimeter thick. The amount of force he could generate stayed about constant, so concentrating it like that in one direction would be about the same as hitting something with a full swing from a nearly indestructible, razor sharp axe.

  If the thing came my way, we’d see how well it did without one of its front legs.

  But still, it wasn’t interested. The Sclorpion (lion/scorpion!) kept snacking on Chip. There was a joke in there, and I was sure that Shar was thinking it too. Potato? Chocolate? I kind of wanted to yell for Babd, but I also didn’t want to get the massive creature’s attention.

  “You have a plan?” I asked, into my throat mic.

  “I already said ‘pull back’,” came her response.

  “Yeah. Okay.”

  “Converge back at the tree line.”

  I threw a quick glance over my shoulder to make sure something else gigantic and terrible wasn’t creeping up behind me, and nothing was. Keeping both my attention and Fox trained on the creature, I started to carefully backwalk. Babd had either bolted in the other direction, or, if she had somehow gotten lost in the melee inside the shack, she would simply abandon that body, go find another dog to inhabit and catch up with us later.

  That’s when the monster raised its head and started to sniff the air. It let out an enormous sigh of contentment and started moving in my direction with a degree of lightness that denied its obvious bulk.

  “Lincoln, find cover,” said Shar.

  Like, no shit.

  I looked around, but there was nothing -- the upward sloping hill behind me and the trees so far back that they might as well have been halfway around the world.

  The monster looked me in the eyes and picked up speed.

  Get A Walk in the Park, With Monsters now!

  Table of Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  >   D Roland Hess, Lincoln, Fox and the Bad Dog