Project Elfhome

by Wen Spencer

  Taggart laughed. “In other words, who knows if the short version you got is actually based on truth at all?”

  “Yeah. The glorified version is that Maynard and Windwolf met in the woods, just the two of them, and became friends. It’s doubtful because Windwolf always has his bodyguards with him and Maynard would have been with his unit. Whatever. The story goes on to say that the viceroy ran into another unit of American soldiers, this one packing more weapons and under the command of someone totally spooked by all the Elfhome weirdness. The officer in charge tried to use force to corral the elves into some kind of holding area. Next thing you know, Windwolf is totally pissed off and nuking the hell out of the Americans. Maynard stripped off his weapons and walked out to talk to Windwolf. Between them, they made peace. When the UN stepped in, Windwolf insisted that Maynard be put in charge of the UN forces and that’s the way it’s been since year one. Basically most people consider Maynard the god of Pittsburgh in terms of what can and can’t be done.”

  “Is he trustworthy?” Nigel asked. “With all these moles, can he be counted to be still on the elves’ side?”

  “The expansionists think he spends too much time kissing up to Windwolf, but I think they’re missing the point. Maynard knows that we’re stranded on Elfhome ninety-eight percent of the time and there’s an entire world of elves that could wipe us off the map in the twenty-nine days between one Shutdown and the next. He has several thousands of idiots to mess things up and tens of thousands of innocent people to protect from their stupidity. He operates on zero tolerance and that doesn’t make for a lot of friends.”

  And it meant that if he knew that Jane had wreaked havoc at Sandcastle to get back Boo, he would…

  Jane wasn’t sure what he would do. And it scared her.

  * * *

  The Sandcastle parking lot was crawling with EIA dressed in combat camo and armed with assault weapons. It unsettled Jane to see them. It was one thing to know that Pittsburgh had a small army made up of outsiders; it was another to witness them out in force, knowing that they’d been infiltrated and couldn’t be trusted.

  She slowed to a crawl, scanning the troops through the chain-link fence.

  “What is it?” Taggart asked.

  She spotted Maynard among his people. He was easy to pick out, as he was a tall, blond man dressed like an elf. “Just making sure it was actually Maynard that called Dmitri and we weren’t walking into a trap.”

  She pulled into the Sandcastle parking lot and parked as far as she could from the troop carriers. The Pittsburgh Coroner’s van sat tucked between the military vehicles, indicating that the EIA had found the males that she’d shot.

  One of the things that annoyed expansionists the most about Maynard was he always adopted elfin fashion when Viceroy Windwolf was in Pittsburgh. They thought he should wear a business suit or his dress uniform. Despite the elegant clothes, there was no missing the military stamp on him. His long blond hair might be pulled back into a ponytail by a Wind Clan blue ribbon, but he stood at parade rest.

  Because Maynard had asked for Hal, they’d gone in the PB&G production truck. Jane flipped on the remote recording as they locked up the truck. Taggart was carrying PB&G’s ancient camera; Jane’s truck couldn’t handle the CBM’s newer cameras. Jane had her pistol in its kidney holster, but she really didn’t want to have to shoot her way out of any mess. She carried the light reflector as a prop. With Hal in the lead, they all walked across the cracked and weed-choked parking lot to where Maynard waited.

  Hal’s superpower was his charisma; like most TV personalities, he refined it to megawatt power to reach through the camera and charm the audience no matter where they were. Face to face, it was kind of like being run over by a train. “Director Maynard!” Hal extended his hand, smiling broadly, beaming at full power. “Hal Rogers of Pittsburgh Backyard and Garden. Glad to meet you.”

  Maynard did a slight double take as he shook Hal’s hand. Hal had broken his nose just days before and still had the raccoon mask of two black eyes.

  “We were filming a segment on strangle vines.” Hal gingerly touched his nose and theatrically winced in pain. “Got a little too close.”

  “I see,” Maynard said.

  “My studio manager said that you wanted to see me and my crew.” Hal waved to take in Jane and the others to explain the extra bodies. His tone was mildly curious and unconcerned. We’ve done nothing wrong.

  “I want you to tell me what happened here,” Maynard said.

  Hal managed to appear only mildly confused while Jane’s heart leapt up her throat. “And I could do this—why?”

  “You do have a doctorate in biology, do you not?”

  “Yes, as a matter of fact, I do,” Hal beamed with pride. “UC-Davis.” Jane couldn’t tell if the confusion that followed was faked or not. “I don’t understand what that has to do with anything.”

  “For reasons I have never understood, the University of Pittsburgh chooses to take its break in the middle of summer instead of the dead of winter.”

  “Horace Mann,” Nigel stated. The r of “Horace” was trilled by his Scottish accent.

  “What?” Maynard and Jane both asked.

  “Horace Mann is why the American schools follow the European standards,” Nigel stated. “In 1843, he toured the schools of Europe and returned to the states to publish a paper on his findings. It was very influential and set many standards that the schools of America follow to this day.”

  Jane had no idea why Nigel might know this odd tidbit of information, but she really wished he’d kept his mouth shut as Maynard was now staring at Nigel and Taggart with fierce concentration.

  After a minute, Maynard tilted his head slightly and pointed at the naturalist. “You’re Nigel Reid, aren’t you?”

  “Yes, I am.” Nigel smiled, turning on his hosting superpowers. “Glad to meet you, Director.”

  Maynard pointed at Taggart. “And you’re Keaweaheulu Taggart.”

  Taggart’s eyebrows went up with surprise. Probably not very many people tried to pronounce his first name and succeeded. “Yes.”

  “Nigel is here to film a new series for NBC,” Hal explained. “We’re showing them the ropes.”

  “Very gracious of them.” Nigel didn’t sound at all like a man that had nearly been eaten by a dinosaur only twenty-four hours earlier. Only a slight tightness around his eyes gave away the fact he was in pain from his rough handling. “Wonderful people. It’s only been five days and already we’ve seen amazing things.”

  Taggart tried for unconcerned and failed. He covered by bringing up the camera to pan over the wreckage of Sandcastle. By the looks of it, the monster must have chased the oni all over the water park as a path of destruction crossed and re-crossed the midway.

  Maynard eyed them with surprise. He took out a mini tablet computer and checked something. “Forgiveness, the last few days have been exceedingly…hectic. Yes, my people have Reid and Taggart entering at Shutdown. Good. Good. As I was saying, the University of Pittsburgh is on summer break and I’m scrambling for biology experts. I have something to show you.”

  He led them past the coroner’s van to a line of dead bodies stretched out on the ground. The first three had each taken a bullet to the head. They had the gravitational strength of black holes on Jane’s focus. She’d killed these people. All three were big brutish-looking males, but so had been her father. They wore face paint to look fiercer. What kind of souls had the paint hidden? Did they leave behind wives and children?

  Taggart put a hand to her shoulder to steady her. She realized that he was telling Maynard that he was a war correspondent and used to dead bodies laid out in a row, but that Jane had never experienced it before.

  “I’m afraid it’s going to become a common sight before this comes to an end,” Maynard said.

  “They have horns.” Hal seemed unaffected by the dead. Considering his degrees, he probably had experience dissecting human bodies. “If elves were the basis of our
fae legends, I wonder if the oni are our demons.”

  “The Japanese use the word ‘oni’ to denote ‘ogre’ or ‘demon,’ depending on the translation,” Nigel said.

  Pittsburgh’s coroner, Tim Covington, and his staff noticed the camera on Taggart’s shoulder first, blazoned with PB&G’s logo. All activity ground to a halt as they were starstruck by Hal’s presence. There was a moment of boyish silliness as Hal clowned with the men and women wearing rubber gloves and face masks. Jane was happy that it took all attention off her and gave her a chance to recover her balance.

  After five minutes, though, she flicked her hand across her throat and Hal used his superpowers to gracefully turn the humans back to work with “I should let you get back to wrapping this all up.”

  “My own experts will deal with the gunshot victims.” Maynard indicated the coroner’s staff who were putting the oni that Jane had killed into body bags. “This is why I called you in.” He crossed to a second line of bodies—or, more correctly, random body parts. He pointed down at the upper torso of a male. The body was torn in two, exposing the bottom of the ribcage. The lungs and heart had gone with lower half—most likely down the gullet of the river monster.

  “Something went through this area last night. Judging by the bite marks, it’s huge.” Maynard walked forward, pointing to other half-eaten bodies. “And hungry, or maybe travels in a pack. And there’s this.” He stooped to indicate a feathery-looking vinelike pattern marking the chests, arms and legs of the various dead. “Covington says that this is indicative of lightning strikes. Only it didn’t storm last night and there’s no power lines down in the area.”

  Jane was counting the dead. Boo had told them that there were fourteen oni guarding over her and Joey. Jane had shot three. If the river monster had killed the rest, then there were no witnesses to their rescue mission. The bits and pieces gathered together, though, seemed too few. Had they escaped or were they eaten whole?

  “The elves can throw lightning,” Hal said. “Are you sure that one of them wasn’t the cause of these burns?”

  “Only Windwolf can do that and he was with me last night.” Maynard pointed toward the river. “There are tracks of something large.”

  “We had asked viewers to phone in sightings of monsters so we could film them.” Jane worked on their alibi as Hal and Nigel examined the tracks. “We were in the South Hills yesterday filming a saurus that Grandma Gertie e-mailed in. It nearly ate Nigel. One of our tips was a sighting of a large river monster. We thought we spotted it from the Fort Pitt Bridge the day after Startup, but when we searched for it the next morning, we couldn’t find any trace of it.”

  Maynard gave her a hard look. “You didn’t think to mention this to anyone?”

  “Actually we asked both your river patrols and the police to keep an eye out for it.”

  He consulted his tablet again and sighed. “Forgiveness. I see that you did. What did you see?”

  “Not much,” Jane lied and prayed that the man never saw their footage. “When we saw this thing, we didn’t realize it could leave the river. That’s why we went after the saurus; a dinosaur in the suburbs seemed more dangerous than something confined to the water. This is a game changer; we need to find this thing and stop it.”

  And Jane meant every word of it. Because of the jumpfish, no one strayed too close to the riverbank. Downriver of Sandcastle, though, there were thousands of people living just outside of jumpfish range of the water. It was one thing to have this thing rampaging through an abandoned water park in one of the emptiest neighborhoods in Pittsburgh. It was quite another if it came ashore on the North Side or downtown.

  With the Pittsburgh Police spread thin and the EIA busy trying to find the kidnapped princess while cleaning house of oni moles, there was no one else able to deal with such a large, dangerous monster.

  “We’ll take care of this,” Jane said.

  “You sure?” Maynard asked.

  “We’ve been solving problems like this for years.” Hal could truthfully claim it, too. “We can handle this.”

  Maynard raised his hand to his ear and listened to some report over an earpiece. His eyes narrowed and he glanced toward the parking lot. A lone hoverbike was coming at breakneck speed.

  Jane didn’t realize she’d growled with anger until Taggart asked quietly, “Who is that?”

  “Wicked Witch of the West on her broom stick,” Hal said.

  Jane backhanded Hal with her free hand. “Chloe Polanski.” Maynard knew PB&G’s reputation, but he’d called Dmitri for Hal’s help. He’d only recognized the men who appeared in front of the camera, not Jane who normally stayed behind it. Nor had she introduced herself—she rarely did. Thus he probably didn’t know her father had been a sniper. The three perfect headshots meant nothing to him. Chloe, though, had covered Boo’s kidnapping and gotten to know Jane’s family well. If she saw the bodies…

  Jane had to be sure that Chloe was too preoccupied to notice until the oni were safely body-bagged. “Do you mind if we film a public announcement warning people to stay away from the river and to report anything unusual they see?” Jane shifted so that her back was to the dead oni.

  Maynard nodded after moment of thought. “Yes, that would probably be a good course of action.”

  Jane waved Taggart to aim the camera at Maynard and lifted the reflector. “Hal…”

  “Raccoon boy.” Hal pointed at his face.

  There wasn’t time for makeup. “Nigel. Highlight the basics: unknown beast wreaks havoc at Sandcastle, multiple dead, size of beast estimated to be quite large, able to move both in the water and out. People are to stay away from the river and report any sightings. Go!”

  Nigel hit his mark beside Maynard, squared off with the Director, set his face on “serious” and the moment that Taggart indicated he was rolling, launched into commentary. “This is Nigel Reid, coming to you from Sandcastle Waterpark for NBC. I’m here with Director Maynard of the EIA.”

  Nigel glossed quickly over the oni, suggesting only that those dead were killed by the monster. Taggart gave Jane a questioning glance but any discussion would be picked up by the camera’s microphone. Silence was ingrained into the cameraman.

  Jane watched out the corner of her eye as Chloe dismounted her hoverbike. Take the bait. Take the bait.

  “Director, obviously this is a massive creature.” Nigel managed to guide the director even farther from the coroner’s van by indicating the tracks leading down to the river. “The footprints are nearly two feet wide. We can see the wide, smooth drag mark that is classic for crocodile. This creature appears to be long and low to the ground.”

  Maynard took out his tablet and started to take notes. “What else can you tell me about this creature?”

  Everything.

  Nigel continued on as if they hadn’t actually seen the monster in question. “The largest known crocodile is the saltwater crocodile which can reach up to twenty-two feet and weighs up to four thousand, four hundred pounds. They are aggressive hunters and are considered very dangerous to humans in areas where they are found. The creature that attacked Sandcastle is easily twice the size of the largest known crocodile.”

  “Twice?” Maynard echoed with dismay.

  “Yes, that’s what these tracks indicate.” Nigel pointed to the large footprints in the dirt. “We’re looking for an animal that is over forty feet in length. It’s most likely a very strong swimmer and able to leave the water at any low point in the river and walk inland for—well—until it decides to turn around.”

  Chloe kept coming, laser-targeted on Maynard. She walked past Tim Covington without even glancing at him.

  “And the electricity burns?” Maynard checked on Chloe’s progress. He kept his face expressionless but clearly he didn’t like the woman any more than Jane did.

  “I would have to say that this creature must be electrogenic, or capable of generating an electric field. Fish that are electrogenic have an electric organ, which is made up of
modified nerve or muscle tissue. These flat, disklike cells number in the thousands and they’re stacked, each one of them producing 0.15 volts. So in essence, they’re like little batteries, carrying a charge from the exchange of positive sodium and potassium ions within the animal’s body. The cells individually generate a very small amount but this is multiplied by thousands of cells. A six-foot electric eel can generate six hundred volts; this is comparable to the third rail of a mass transit system.”

  “So the Sandcastle monster could be seven times more powerful?”

  “Yes, it could be. It’s obviously generating not only more voltage but also more amps, which makes it quite deadly. By the entry burns on these bodies, the electricity appears to be arcing through the air to its victims, much like a bolt of lightning.”

  Chloe might have arrived on a hoverbike wearing a helmet, but not a hair of her blond bob was out of place. Jane had no idea how she managed it; the only reason Jane kept her long hair in a ponytail was otherwise it looked like a rat’s nest by the end of the day.

  Chloe surprised Jane by waiting until Nigel paused before she started to talk. “What are you idiots doing here?”

  “Taping a show.” Jane tried for the intelligence level that Chloe assigned them. Don’t mind us, we’re not running around wiping out enemy camps.

  “This is not a backyard or garden.” Chloe waved toward the hole that Hal had blasted into the back of the one building during their last visit. “And someone already beat you to blowing this place up.”

  “Giant man-eating fish is what we do.” Jane ignored the bit about blowing things up. Behind Chloe, Covington was zipping up the first body bag. Two more to go. “We’re filming this segment to air during the news. We need to warn viewers to keep on the lookout for the creature.”