by Baen Books
"Cow!" Jane shouted again.
A big black angus bull came thundering toward the men who scattered in all directions. Jane swore as she realized that the loose bull could only mean a break in the fence, which meant something had taken the eight strands of barbwire down. Worse, Taggart and Nigel weren't heading toward the safety of the trucks. They looped around Batman with the bull chasing them.
The idiots didn't understand that the bull wasn't the real danger.
"Stay!" She gave Chesty the command to keep him out of her line of fire. Snatching up her weapons, she charged from the production truck. She ran toward the water trap, shouting as she ran. "Nigel! Taggart! Stop looping!"
Taggart shouted, waving his arms to get the bull's attention as Nigel scrambled up onto the roof with the Batman statue. Once safe of the bull's charge, Nigel yelled and kicked at the passing bull, trying to lure it away from Taggart.
"No, no, no. Incoming!"
Jane flung the stun grenade ahead of the bull and then ducked down, hands on her ears. Even with sight and hearing shielded, the explosion was a loud brightness on her awareness. The bull staggered backwards, disoriented by the light and noise.
Luckily, Taggart still had his combat reactions. He'd shielded himself from the blast. Unfortunately, he still seemed flabbergasted into inaction. "What the hell was that?"
"It’s a flash bang."
Taggart swore, uncovering his ears. "I know what the hell it is! Why?"
"Because I can't shoot the damn bull without having to pay for it! Get to the truck!" She pointed toward the production truck. Hal knew the drill; he was already clambering into the back.
"Nigel?" She turned to order the Scot down off the low roof.
A saurus loomed over the Batman statue.
"Nigel! Down!"
"Huh?" Nigel hadn't shielded himself from the stun grenade. He was blinded from the flash. He clung to Batman's arm and shuddered like a worm on a fishhook.
"Down!" Jane grabbed Nigel by the leg and yanked him down.
The saurus struck even as Nigel came tumbling down onto Jane. She shouted in wordless dismay as she saw the massive head lunging downwards at them as she and Nigel slammed onto the ground, all elbows and knees. The smell of rotten flesh blasted over them on the saurus' breath.
Nigel twisted and kicked upwards toward the mouthful of daggerlike teeth. The jaws snapped shut on Nigel's foot and the saurus jerked him upwards, off of Jane. For a moment, all she could do was watch in horror as the saurus gripped Nigel in its claws and tore his foot from his leg.
Feel the fear, but don't be it, Jane! Feel the fear, but be Jane, and Jane can kill anything that crosses her path.
She scrambled up, swinging her rifle off her shoulder. Nigel was in the way for a heart shot, so she aimed for the wide left eye. Hold your breath. Squeeze.
Even fifty caliber wasn't strong enough to move the massive head. And like a beheaded chicken, the damn lizard didn't know it was already dead. Something misfired in its brain enough, however, for it to open both claws and drop Nigel. It was all Jane needed. She unloaded the clip into the saurus' chest.
The massive beast staggered to the right and then toppled with a heavy thud.
Her ears ringing from the gunfire, she reloaded and then caught hold of Nigel and dragged him back, keeping her rifle still aimed at the still monster. Nigel's booted foot stayed beside the dinosaur even as she pulled him to safety.
"Hal! Call 911!" she shouted. "Get an ambulance out here."
"No, no, I'm fine." Nigel said weakly. "Just a few scratches." He had parallel furrows on his back, seeping blood. He tried to sit up and she pushed him down.
"Lie still!" Jane jerked off her belt and slapped it around Nigel's thigh and twisted it tight. There was surprisingly little blood. No blood actually.
"Jane. It's all right." Nigel gave a weak little laugh. "I don't have feet."
"What?" Jane cried.
"I was born without all the right bones in my legs. The doctor amputated them at the knee when I was baby. I've never had feet."
Right. She knew that.
#
It was a typical Pittsburgh Backyard & Garden production in terms of content: angry creatures trying to eat them, explosions, screaming, yelling, occasional gunshots, and eventually a dead monster. The actual saurus attack, though, was gorgeously filmed. A true professional, Taggart had locked back on Nigel moments after the flash bang had gone off and kept focus on him despite the fact that he could have been filming the man's death.
Jane comforted her pang of jealousy with the knowledge that Taggart could only get the footage because she was dealing with the saurus. If she and Hal had an actual crew, they could get shots just as good.
"It's good!" Jane reported to the others. "Let's film a closing."
Nigel had been sanitized and bandaged but opted to put the torn shirt back on to wrap up the episode. He thought it counterbalanced the "very dead" state of the saurus, and Jane had to agree. The men set up to film. With Nigel sitting on the ground beside the massive head and the foot it had torn free, they started to film.
"This is not how I wanted this segment to end," Nigel said. "Considering the alternative, I'm happy to be alive, thanks to our brave and wonderful producer, Jane Kryskill."
Jane blushed hotly. She would have to be sure to edit that silliness out.
"Unbelievably, this is an adolescent male," Nigel continued on a more professional vein. "The elves say that saurus typically only live about a hundred years, which makes them fairly short-lived for an Elfhome species. This male is probably only ten years old and would have reached full maturity around fifteen. That's lucky for us, since if he was an adult, he probably would have had a mate and up to a dozen young nearby."
There was an odd noise over the microphone and after a few seconds, she recognized it. A police siren echoing off the hills as the squad car race toward them. Someone actually called the cops on them?
"Hold up, guys. We're getting company."
A few minutes later a Pittsburgh Police black and white came down the road, braked hard when it spotted their trucks in the parking lot and then came up the driveway at a cautious speed.
Jane went out to meet them, careful to leave all her weapons in the truck.
The responding officer was her best friend, Brandy Lyn Pomeroy-Brooks-Abernethy, which could be a good thing or very bad. Brandy had grown up with a burning desire to be Wonder Woman, complete with golden lasso and bullet deflecting wrist guards. She'd settled on policewoman as the nearest thing, much to the dismay of Honorable Lissa Pomeroy, her grandmother and Pittsburgh's only judge. Brandy gave out tickets to anyone that pissed her off, friend or foe, on the theory that it made it easier to find out who her true friends were. At any hearing, the offenders would find themselves locked in a legal battle between Judge Pomeroy and Brandy, as if it was a contest for Brandy's soul.
Thus Brandy was the only cop in Pittsburgh who would arrest Hal and anyone else rather than ask for an autograph.
"Hey, Jane. We got a call that a war was breaking out. Are you okay?"
"We're fine. Things got a little hairy, but I've got things handled."
Brandy looked at the "Chased by Monsters" truck, then at Jane, and then back again. "Is Hal okay? I heard he set himself on fire the other day."
"He's fine. Network just has us working on this show for a few weeks."
Brandy eyed the CBM's sharp-toothed logo and shook her head. "What do they think you are? A Monster Hunter?"
"Yeah, that's just about right."
She caught sight of Taggart. "Spend all day filming that? Your life is so hard." She noticed then Nigel's bloody, one-foot condition. "What the hell happened to him? I'll call for an ambulance."
"No, don't!" Jane waved her down. "The scratches look worse than they are and he's got a spare foot in the truck."
Brandy's face went to neutral. "A spare?"
"Yeah." Jane felt giggles coming on. It had been a stressful
hour. If she laughed though, Brandy would go into Wonder Woman mode and arrest them all. "It's supposed to come off like that. We'll just pop the other one on."
Brandy put her hands on her hips and glared at Jane. "You didn't shoot any of the cows, did you?"
"We haven't touched the cows!" Jane covered her mouth to keep the giggles in. Technically, they hadn't touched the bull. "I shot the saurus; many, many times. We're just wrapping up."
There was the rumble and snarl of a big diesel engine and a half-ton Ford pickup came growling up the road. It turned into the drive and stopped behind the police car. For a moment, the truck seemed to have no driver. Then the driver's door swung open, a set of steps unfolded, and a tiny little old woman climbed down out of the truck, muttering obscenities the whole way. She looked like she was several inches under five foot tall, seventy pounds wet, and close to a hundred years old if not over it. She slid a cattle prod out from behind the pickup's seat before walking over with a gait that belied her age.
Jane didn't know the woman but Brandy did.
"Hi Grandma Gertie."
Oh, this was famous Grandma Gertie Betts, and she was over a hundred years old, having been born in the late 1920s. She'd been slowly annexing large sections of the South Hills to her farm, producing everything from apples to zucchini. She didn't have any children but a horde of adopted "grandchildren" that helped her run her various businesses.
"Well, god damn it, you could have fucking told me that you got my fucking email!" Gertie came to glare at Jane. "If I'd know it was PB&G down here, making all this fucking noise, I wouldn't have called the fucking police!"
Note to self, Jane thought, make an effort to swear less. I so don't want to grow into this woman. "We're sorry. Thank you for the tip."
"I would have shot the fucking thing myself but it's always such a hoot to see Hal be Hal." Yes, all stories of Grandma Gertie fully indicated that she would. If nothing else, there were two rifles on the gun rack in her pickup. "You two didn't smash up anything, did you? This is Hal we're talking about."
Jane considered a moment. Normally they did do property damage but today they'd been fairly conservative. "No. We didn't damage anything."
"Good. Its been a pain in the ass to get some of these hauled in from all over Pittsburgh but it makes a nice place for all my kids to come play."
Brandy escaped, leaving Jane to fend with Grandma Gertie. Jane in turn handed her over to Hal to keep busy while they finished shooting. Unfortunately, tiny women reminded Hal of the nuns of Mercy Hospital and he kept sending Jane pleading looks to rescue him.
Once they wrapped, she rescued Hal with an autographed official slickie produced by WQED on the show and a handful of still shots of Grandma Gertie with the other two men. Then firmly she escorted the old woman back to her pickup.
"Thanks again for the tip. New York gave us a very tight schedule which we'll only be able to keep if we can find subjects to film."
"I'll tell my kids to keep their eyes and ears open." Gertie slid the cattle prod in behind the seat and used the stepladder to climb the several feet up into her pickup. "But now, I've got a bull to find and chase home."
There was a little troll doll in the shadows of Grandma Gertie's dashboard, slyly grinning at Jane. The sight of it made Jane's heart go heavy and sink. She was about to pull back when the other details sunk in. The troll doll was wearing a little Viking helmet.
"Oh my god! Helga!" Jane snatched up the doll. There was a black smudge on the pushup nose and the cascade of white hair was dirty and ratty, but it was Helga. On her bare toes were the touches of purple paint for nail polish. Jane could barely breathe. "Where did you find her?"
"Those troll dolls used to be popular way back. I never saw a Viking girl before though."
"Where did you find it?" Jane shouted.
"I didn't find it, it found me." Gertie touched old thin fingers to the doll. "A few weeks ago I gathered up a herd of the kids and took them all to Sandcastle to get the dragon. I didn't think anyone would be there and everything would be free for the taking, but there were a bunch of people squatting there, using the swimming pools as fish tanks, although god knows why. There's been plenty enough fish in the river since we took to visiting Elfhome. We pulled the ride apart to get the statue and took it. Sometime in the confusion, the doll slipped into my truck."
#
For first time in her life, she abandoned Hal and her schedule. She wanted to head straight to Sandcastle, but her father had trained too well to go alone. She raced after Brandy, knowing that this close to lunch that she'd stop at the only food place still open.
McMicking's was a little deli at the Arlington lightrail stop. It was actually two tiny houses built on trailers. Ellen ran a tightly stocked deli and lunch counter out of one while she slept in the other. She made her store mobile just in case business became too poor she would be forced to move. Arlington was her third location. She had started at Library and worked back towards Pittsburgh, keeping to the light rail tracks.
Brandy was perched on the hood of her squad car, finishing off a bowl of Ellen's famous pumpkin and spinach curry over jasmine rice.
Jane waved the troll doll. "Look! Look!"
"Yeah, I see it." Brandy twiddled her fingers in a "give me" sign. "It's a doll. An ugly doll. Use your words. Tell me why it's important."
"Boo had this when she disappeared." Jane pushed the troll into Brandy's hand. "It showed up in Grandma Gertie's pickup when they were at Sandcastle. Boo is at Sandcastle."
Brandy examined the toy, shaking her head. "How can you know it’s the same one? We had a couple of these when I was a kid. They all look alike. Same beady eyes, big grin, pug nose and wild looking hair."
"With a Viking helmet?"
"No. But my personal experience isn't a true statement of how many Viking trolls there are in Pittsburgh."
Jane snatched the doll back and smacked Brandy with it. "Stop talking like your grandmother!"
"You come roaring up, waving a doll, talking all crazy about your little sister? I know what comes next. You're going to want me to go busting down doors and get ugly in someone's face. I'm just telling you what my grandmother is going to say when this hits her court."
"This is Sergeant Helga Teufel Hunden. She was my mom's doll before she gave it to me." All their toys were hand me downs and second hand store finds. Everything had been battered and ugly and half-broken even before they got hold of it. Helga had the virtue of being seemingly indestructible. "Before I gave her to Boo, I replaced her hair, and repainted her helmet and I made her a purple dress and I painted her toes to match. I can guarantee that even if there's a shitload of these dolls in Pittsburgh, this is the only one with purple toes."
"Good enough. But it's been six years. Someone could have found it lying on the ground in the Strip District the day she went missing and has been drifting person to person since then."
"Someone put it in Grandma Gertie's truck when they were at Sandcastle…"
"It could have been put into her truck at anytime, anywhere, by anyone. You know she doesn't lock her truck and has dozens of kids underfoot all the time. Everyone calls her Grandma for a reason."
"Why are you being so pig-headed about this?"
"Because I've watched your family tear itself apart and then have to rebuild itself every time we find anything even remotely connected to your sister's disappearance. That girl's body that we found in the woods two years ago. And the boy's skeleton two years before that. It's suddenly the day that she disappeared and you're all blaming each other for not keeping close enough watch on her."
"So for peace of mind, you want us to just say 'she's dead, end of story'."
"No, that's not what I said," Brandy growled. "Look it doesn't make sense. If Boo was the person that put the doll in Grandma Gertie's truck, why didn't she just stay there?"
"I don't know!"
"Jane, I love you like a sister, and if this was any other time, I'd round up some people an
d go tear Sandcastle apart. No one seems have noticed, but the shit hit the fan thirty days ago. A week after Windwolf was nearly killed, EIA started major housecleaning. They have two NSA agents going through all their personnel files and they started seizing EIA employees, Gestapo-style, and throwing them in jail."
"I – I haven't heard that."
"No one has. Someone is keeping a tight lid on the news. They opened up the county jail to hold them all."
"Wait? They're holding them? Why didn't they ship them to Earth for trail?"
"Because they're not human. The EIA has been infiltrated by the oni. It went as high as Director Maynard's personal assistant, who turned out to have a tail and dog-ears. The oni were using magic somehow to look human. The EIA was spending too much time trying to keep more oni from slipping into Pittsburgh to transport the ones in holding to the border."
"Why didn't you tell me this?"
"Because it's coming down from on high that hush-hush is best for Pittsburgh. Let the EIA clean house. The thing is that the EIA did most of the heavy lifting, and we have been picking up the slack. Now Tinker's been kidnapped, we don’t have the resources to follow ghost leads."
"Please!"
Brandy looked away, shaking her head. "Jane. I can't. I can't drop everything because of a toy found in a pickup truck weeks ago. Grandma Gertie is getting old. That doll could have been in the truck for days before she noticed it. She could have been anywhere when it was put into her pickup. And why would a little girl who disappeared six years ago, put a doll in a truck, and do nothing else?"
"Brandy!"
Brandy's shoulder radio crackled and her dispatcher directed her to head to a shooting and added that an ambulance was responding. "I have a job to do! I have to do it because no one else is going to!"
#
The Chased by Monsters production truck pulled into McMicking's parking lot just as Brandy raced away.
"How did you find me?" Jane snapped. She didn't want them there, reminding her that she had her own job to do, one that no one else could do.
All three men tapped their right temple to indicate the headset she was wearing.
