Nightstalkers a5-10

by Bob Mayer

  “Oh, oh, oh!” Scout was literally bouncing up and down on the couch. Then she did three cartwheels, ending up in front of Eagle and holding her hand up, but restrained, not quite ready to high five. “Do you know what Nada means?”

  “Isn’t that a light chicken gravy?”

  “Love it!” she squealed as she and Eagle slapped palms.

  “I’ve been waiting to say that forever,” Eagle said, with a worried glance at Nada.

  The rest of the team was lost.

  “So,” Scout said. “Who wants to go swimming?”

  Moms gripped the arms of the chair tightly and grimaced a smile. “Why would we want to go swimming in the Lindsays’ pool?”

  “Welllll,” Scout said. “Earlier I went over there and noticed that the pool water kind of just slid over the edge into the grass and snatched a squirrel and, wellllll, seemed to, like, just absorb it. Kind of gross. Seems like something up your alley. But maybe I’m wrong. Maybe golf is more your game?”

  Roland had grabbed the iPad. “The Lindsays’ house is three blocks over.”

  Moms got out of her chair. “Why didn’t you tell us sooner?”

  “Wellll, you’re all so faaaabulous and on your super-secret mission, which you really haven’t told me about, and were blowing up the golf course all night, so I thought you were kind of busy and when I saw you come back early this morning, everyone looked pretty beat, and it’s not like the pool is gonna go anywhere. And you guys aren’t really sharing,” she added, looking longingly at the pile of guns. “Sometimes it seems like you just got dropped in here like a nanny with a green card, ’cause you are so greeeen! I figured you knew about the carnivorous water.”

  “All right, all right,” Moms said. “You’ve made your point.”

  “Points,” Nada said.

  “Tell us,” Moms said with forced patience.

  “It’s kidney shaped, which is weird for here, but it’s got the slide, which is fun, but also weird for here. It does have a deep end.”

  “What exactly did the water do?” Doc asked patiently, which seemed like an impossibility with Scout around.

  “I told you. It ate a squirrel,” Scout said. “How the hell should I know?”

  “Don’t curse,” Moms said. “It’s not pretty coming from girls.”

  “Her hair’s blue and she can do a handstand longer than any of us,” Nada said, as if that mattered.

  “Thank you,” Scout said with a smile.

  Moms looked at Nada in consternation. “No more bantering. Especially from you. I’m not sure who you are anymore.”

  “Yeah,” Doc agreed. “You’re acting peculiar.”

  “Maybe he just likes me,” Scout said. “People either love me or hate me.”

  “I hate you,” Roland muttered.

  “She’s just a girl,” Nada said.

  “I don’t think so,” Doc observed.

  “Fireflies can’t go into people,” Moms noted.

  “What are Fireflies?” Scout asked for what seemed the twentieth time since the team had met her.

  Moms gave a cold smile. “Nothing, dear.”

  “Great,” Scout said. “You’ve finally become a Senators Club mom. ‘Nothing, dear.’ That means absolutely, positively there’s something.”

  “Enough!” Moms snapped.

  “Describe what happened,” Doc said to Scout. “Please.”

  “It was like this tentacle of water lifted up, about five feet.” Scout was using one of her arms to demonstrate, green-painted fingernails leading the way. “Then it moved horizontal, right over where this cute little squirrel was doing whatever it was doing, and then just shot down, all over the squirrel, which, let me tell you, was not happy. Then it just pulled back into the pool with the squirrel and everything was normal. Except no more squirrel.”

  Roland was on his feet, heading toward the door to the garage. “I know what to do.”

  They followed him into the four-car cavern. Roland pulled a portable generator out from its spot next to the wall. “What kills water?” He tapped the generator.

  “Riiiight,” Scout said. “Let’s roll the generator over to the Lindsays’ pool. No one will notice that. Even though most people are gone for the holidays, there’s still enough around, and someone will notice in three blocks.”

  “You got any better ideas?” Roland challenged.

  “Weelll, if you want to zap the pool,” Scout said, “how about shorting out the pool light and letting the house current do it?”

  “Maybe she isn’t such a little girl,” Nada said proudly, cuffing her lightly on the head, but forgetting once more about the curling iron.

  “Oww, please stop with the head shit.”

  “Don’t curse,” Nada said.

  “Fuck you,” Scout said, and Nada smiled.

  “This is getting weird even for us,” Eagle said.

  “Oh really,” Scout said. “Now it’s getting too weird? It sounded like Armageddon out there last night on the golf course.”

  Moms had her arms crossed. “To short the pool light, someone would have to get into the water. And probably end up however the squirrel ended up.”

  “I vote for the kid,” Roland said.

  “I’ll do it,” Nada said before he thought it through, which really scared Moms.

  And that’s when everyone finally accepted that Yada Yada Nada, with the glass half-empty and who hated everyone, really liked the runt with the blue hair.

  “You’re so brave,” Scout said and Nada smiled, something as strange as squirrel-eating water.

  “Just kidding,” Scout said as she did a backflip to punctuate the moment.

  “I hate to rain on everyone’s solemn moment,” Doc said, “but electricity doesn’t kill water. Water conducts electricity. As far as we know, electricity has no effect on a Firefly.”

  “There we go with the Firefly again,” Scout said.

  “We could drain the pool with a shaped charge,” Roland said.

  “Brilliant,” Moms said. “Our first priority is containment and you want to disperse the Firefly who knows where? Into the water table? Which flows where?”

  “Cape Fear River Basin,” Eagle said, as always knowing his geography.

  “Let me think,” Roland said.

  “Oh, that’s going to work,” Scout said, and Roland’s lips tightened in anger.

  “Could someone shut her up for a minute?” Roland pleaded to Moms.

  Scout started humming the theme song to the final Jeopardy round, and Nada took her by the arm. “Let’s you and me get something to eat while they work this out. I’m hungry.”

  As they left the garage, Eagle and Roland were arguing about how to kill water, Mom refereeing, while Doc just sighed continuously.

  As the garage door shut behind them, it drowned out the words.

  “I don’t eat during the day,” Scout said as Nada went over to his rucksack.

  “Give me a break,” Nada said.

  “Hey. Every woman here in Senators Club is size two. We either eat and puke or don’t eat at all. I’ve got a lousy gag reflex.”

  “That will cause you problems drowning,” Nada said as he opened the ruck and rummaged in it.

  “What?” Scout said, taken aback for once.

  “I used to teach at the Special Forces Scuba School in Key West,” Nada said. “Everyone in scuba school drowns at least once.”

  “That sounds like fun.”

  Nada paused. “Well, Special Operations takes a lot of things that other people do for fun, teaches you how to do it on the government tab, then makes it miserable. I learned to scuba dive, parachute, ski, and some other things in the army. And it was rarely fun.”

  “And you’re not in the army anymore, right?”

  “Nice try,” Nada said, pulling some meals out of his ruck. “Let’s just say no one is in Kansas anymore on this op.”

  Nada couldn’t figure it out as he read the labels on the meals. The kid was rubbing everyone the wrong wa
y, especially Roland, and even Moms, but the kid rubbed him right. He had no idea why he gave a shit about her. Then he remembered the really smart dog he’d had as a child. It was brilliant. He could tell it which of the tattered stuffed toys to bring and it knew which one. Everyone thought it was just this barrio half-breed mutt, but it was smarter than most of the people wandering the streets shooting each other.

  It bothered him that it bothered the rest of the team that he liked the kid. Like he wasn’t supposed to like anyone? Didn’t any of them think he could be normal? He knew he had more time on the team than anyone else, but that didn’t make him abnormal. Did it?

  “Hey,” Nada said, holding up his favorite freeze-dried meal. “Eggs and ham.” Everyone else on the team hated that one so he always had plenty. In fact, everyone in every unit he’d ever been in hated them. Which started worrying him again. Was he abnormal?

  “Yuck,” Scout said. “Gross me out.”

  “Give it a try,” Nada said, and there was something in his tone that made Scout pause.

  “All right,” she said reluctantly as he led her to the kitchen.

  He put a pot on the stove to boil water, something even he could manage in a kitchen. They waited in silence. Then he searched through way too many drawers and cabinets before he gave up and pulled out his mess kit and split it, one part for Scout and the other for him, although he did find a spoon for her. He broke the freeze-dried glop into two parts, one in each, then poured boiling water on it.

  “I do have to admit,” Nada said, “everyone gives me their eggs and ham.”

  “Gives, not trades?”

  “Gives.”

  “And you gave Roland your other meal.” Scout leaned over as the solid mass began dissolving in the boiled water. “Smells like someone already ate it and gagged it back up. Like mother birds do.”

  “I know,” Nada said, and his face felt like it was breaking into a million pieces because he was smiling and he wasn’t used to it.

  “Oh,” Scout said. “I get it. You eat it ’cause no one else likes it. You give them your other meals.” Her feet were drumming against the wood base of the kitchen bar.

  Nada froze, never having thought of that. It actually was kind of a lousy meal.

  But Scout took a spoonful and put it in her mouth. She didn’t start spewing, which he took as a good sign. Nada took a mouthful. They sat across from each other, eating the one meal everyone hated.

  “Nada?”

  He froze with his plastic spoon halfway to his mouth, which reminded him of how during Isolation before an op they used to tear apart their meal packages, tossing away the extra plastic spoons because they weighed too much and you only needed one spoon to eat. They stripped the meals down to the very basics before mission launch because they carried everything, and when it came between choosing to carry an extra meal or extra rounds or an extra plastic spoon, it always went in favor of the rounds. For the first time he also realized how weird that kind of math was.

  “I can call you that, right?” Scout asked, bringing him back to the room and the present.

  “Sure,” he mumbled.

  “Gross. Don’t talk with your mouth full.”

  He sealed his lips and continued chewing, happy that she wasn’t ten years older or else he’d be signing off another chunk of his pay to more spousal support. Maybe he should get a dog, he fantasized for a moment, but that made him think of Skippy and he swallowed hard.

  “Where’s the trash?”

  Scout pointed to a cabinet.

  “How can you tell? They all look the same.”

  “It’s all in the placement,” Scout said. “Are you going to throw out your eggs and ham?”

  Nada nodded.

  Scout smiled. “Great. Me too. But we’ll use the garbage disposal. And you should have known it was bad when they couldn’t even call it ham and eggs.”

  She took both parts of the kit and turned the water on. She scraped the food off and turned on the grinding disposal. When she was done, she washed them and dried them, then handed them back to Nada.

  “That was an experience,” Scout said as he put the kit back in his ruck.

  She was twirling her hair with one hand and gnawing on the fingers on the other. “You aren’t that different from this place, you know?”

  “What do you mean?” He picked up his camouflage Camel-Bak and took a few deep slugs from the end of the blue hose.

  “Can I have some of that?”

  “Use the sink, I’m sure it’s better water.”

  “I want that.”

  Nada stared at her, then walked over and handed it to her. “What did you mean?”

  “I think you’re hiding your real self behind all this ‘Nada’ BS like everyone around here hides behind baby grand pianos and golf courses and fancy cars.”

  Nada looked at the tiny girl with blue hair sipping from his CamelBak. He definitely had to get a dog when they got back to the Ranch, but then the problem was who would take care of it when they were on an op. Ms. Jones? Doubtful. “What?”

  “You’ve got the same look on your face as when I first met you,” Scout said. “Like you’re someplace else and just existing here.”

  Nada blinked, but the door to the garage opened and Moms came in, followed by the rest of the team, still arguing. Nada was oddly grateful to the team for interrupting his conversation with Scout.

  “We need to call in an Acme,” Moms said. “I’ll get Ms. Jones on it.”

  Roland groaned.

  “You know how to kill a pool?” Moms asked.

  “Blow it up.” Which was usually Mac’s response to every situation, but Roland liked blowing things up also.

  “It’s in the water,” Moms said, “not the pool itself. Like I said, we destroy the integrity of the pool we spread the Firefly who knows where. It’s never been in a liquid before according to our history. We go Acme.”

  * * *

  While they waited for the Acme, Moms sent Roland and Doc over to recon the pool. They drove one of the SUVs and Doc dialed up a bunch of codes on a transmitter. It took him all of three seconds to turn off the alarm system for the house and get the garage door to go up. They pulled in, shutting the door behind them.

  Roland had his machine gun, which Doc found rather amusing, since they were reconning water in a pool, but it was a comfort to the big man, and Doc had been on the team long enough to know not to make the big man uncomfortable. They wove their way through the enormous house, although it wasn’t quite as big as the Winslows’ since it was three streets down from the top of the ridge.

  There were lots and lots of pictures. There was a framed photograph of presumably the Lindsays in snow gear and holding skis, and engraved on the frame: Snowbird 2010.

  Roland was looking about, shaking his head. “They can’t remember anywhere they been and what they done? They got to take pictures of every place?” Every member of the Nightstalkers was extremely camera shy. In fact, it was against Protocol for them to have their photo taken.

  There was a psychology paper for the writing in here, Doc thought as they penetrated further into the house, going by photo after photo of the same people. Roland paused as they passed one door. Doc looked around him to see what had caused him to stop. It was the family room, with big-screen TV, comfy chairs, and a bunch of pictures. But what had grabbed Roland’s attention was that an entire wall was covered by a map of the world.

  “That’s pretty cool,” Roland said, walking over, machine gun resting on his shoulder.

  There were a number of different-colored pins scattered around the map — four different colors, in fact — and there was even a legend set in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, north and west of Hawaii, explaining what the colors meant.

  Green: Places the Lindsays have been.

  Blue: Places the Lindsays have plans to go to.

  Yellow: Places one or more of the Lindsays have been but not all.

  Red: Places the Lindsays dream of going.
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br />   “What the fuck?” Roland muttered. He stepped back and looked at the map, noting the colored pins. “I’ve been more places than they even dream of going.”

  “Yes, but it wasn’t for the tourism and you usually didn’t land with the airplane,” Doc noted. He pointed at some of the pins. “And it wasn’t Hawaii or Sydney or Hong Kong. It was usually some place no one wants to go to. Note no pins in Iraq, Iran, or Afghanistan.”

  “I don’t get this place or these people,” Roland said as they left the room. Not for the first and probably not for the last time.

  They reached the sliding glass door that opened to the backyard. The yard had a high, solid wood fence around it. The pool was indeed kidney shaped with a slide. It looked deceivingly tranquil, not like one that had eaten a squirrel earlier.

  “How about I throw a frag in it?” Roland suggested.

  “We already used our Fourth of July excuse,” Doc said. “And remember what Moms said about dispersing the water.”

  “Maybe the girl is wrong,” Roland said. “Maybe she made it up, just to get Nada to pay her?”

  “You think?” Doc said, turning to look Roland in the eyes. “You think she would lie to us about this?”

  The big man shifted his feet. “Well, no.”

  “Okay, then,” Doc said. “I will tell you what, though. You feel like tossing the barbecue grill over there into the pool? Just to see what happens?”

  That made Roland happy. He slung his machine gun over his shoulder and slid open the patio door.

  “Careful,” Doc warned. “Water can be pretty powerful. People underestimate it. Remember it killed hundreds of thousands during the tsunami.” Doc pulled out his phone and began filming Roland’s assault on the pool.

  Roland got behind the grill, turned it toward the pool, and then ran a few steps pushing it, before releasing. The momentum carried it over the edge and it toppled in.

  It promptly sank. Roland turned to Doc and shrugged, just as the pool ejected the grill up into the air thirty feet.

  Roland dove out of the way as it crashed down exactly where he’d been standing. A half-dozen water tentacles rose out of the pool, groping toward Roland. He ran toward Doc, who slammed the door shut as he passed. The tentacles reached the glass door and began sliding about.