Mr. Bach put the paper down and folded his hands in front of him. “I’ll let you pick your crew and your pay rate. I’ll even fund the next three research expeditions of your choice as a thank you for taking on this project. I know it is rather last minute.”
Wait a second? Three funded research trips? Choosing her own pay and crew? Hellz to the yes.
In that case... “Why, yes, Mr. Bach. I will take the job.”
Even if you do give me the creeps.
Chapter Two
Two weeks later
“Penny for your thoughts?”
Kat glanced up from her laptop and shrieked. Recovering quickly, she hopped up and punched Rick Martinez in the shoulder. Behind him, Cindy keeled over laughing on the hotel bed.
“Ow! Lighten up.” Rick rubbed his shoulder. Then he chuckled as well. “Oh, man. You shoulda seen the look on your face. You were like, ‘Oh my God, the Jersey Devil is gonna get me!’ and jumped about ten feet out of your chair.” He dodged a second punch.
“Eat me.” Kat leaned over her computer and yanked the red devil mask off Rick’s face and dropped it to the floor.
“No thanks. And you better watch out, chica. One of these days, you’re gonna say that to the wrong dude and find yourself flat on your back. Besides, I’m taken.” He made a show out of planting a loud smooch on Cindy’s lips and sat down across from Kat at the small round table next to the window.
“Where the hell did you get that ugly thing?” Kat sneered at the mask which peered upward like a bloodstain against ugly tan carpet.
“Gas station next door,” Cindy chimed in as she tied her long brown hair into a high ponytail with a shockingly neon pink rubber band. She stretched out on the bed and then reached for the remote.
Kat snorted. “Waste of money, if you ask me.”
Rick and Cindy Martinez had been married five years, and they had been working with her longer than that. Cindy was Kat’s best friend, so when Cindy tagged along to “chaperone” the all-male film crew Kat used when working with National Geographic she hadn’t minded. Though her goal was to make sure no one took advantage of the overly trusting zoologist as they followed her around, Cindy had hit it off with Rick right away. They’d been nearly inseparable ever since. The two of them worked well together and knew the equipment. There really hadn’t been any question as to who was right for the job when Kat went about organizing the trip to New Jersey.
However, she would never admit aloud that she’d only hired her two friends and no one else because the project itself embarrassed her. Oh, the ridicule she’d face in the eyes of science. Kat should’ve picked out a rock to hide under for when she returned to her rinky-dink apartment in Tampa. She was still trying to figure out what possessed her to tell Mr. Bach she would make the film. Temporary insanity maybe? Over exhaustion from having to drive to Atlanta to meet with him?
“Learn anything new, Scully?” Rick leaned over to retrieve his mask, which was a mix between a horse face and a classical red devil. It even had the little demon horns at the top and a pointed goatee.
“Scully? Really? X-Files references? If that makes you Mulder, you’re not a very good one. Last I checked, you considered this project to be, and I quote, ‘The most atrociously stupid thing you ever agreed to do, but if you were being paid that much to hunt air, then you would be a fool not to jump on the crazy train before it left the station.’” Kat crossed her arms and raised a brow. Cindy snickered behind her as she flipped channels.
“Just because I don’t believe in horse-faced demon bats doesn’t mean I don’t believe in other monsters.” He reached up a naturally tanned hand and scratched at the back of his head, mussing his short, black hair.
“Uh-huh. Name one you believe in.”
Without missing a beat, Rick chucked the mask on the table in the dramatic fashion of someone dropping a football on the ground in a post-touchdown victory move. “Chupacabra.”
“Oh, God. Here we go again.” Cindy groaned and shook her head.
Kat shared a look with her before facing Rick. “You do realize your grandmother told you those stories to prevent you from wandering off when you played outside.” El chupacabra was a canine-like creature that supposedly sucked the blood out of goats and other small animals if they were unlucky enough to encounter it.
“That’s exactly what Scully would say.”
A knock at the door sounded, and her body jerked in the seat. Second time she’d jumped in surprise, and she was not amused by it. From outside, someone muttered “room service,” and Rick strolled over to the door to see what was up. No one had placed an order, so it was with baffled surprise that Kat observed Rick accepting a bottle of wine from the hotel employee before the young woman mumbled something and turned on her heel to scamper off.
Rick placed the bottle beside Kat. It was a red wine in a frosted-over, clear bottle with a foreign label. The characters written across it seemed as though they might be Greek, but she had snoozed through foreign languages, learning what she needed to know only when she needed to know it. It could be Russian or ancient Sumerian, but she wouldn’t know the difference. She was all about the animal sciences and really didn’t give a crap about the human ones. They were jackasses in history, and they were jackasses in the present. Aside from a few close friends and family, Kat would rather deal with animals than humans on any given day.
“What’s this?” she asked, picking up the bottle. It was cool to the touch, like it had been chilled before delivery. The rosy liquid inside swished around with movement; in the fading sunlight it could easily pass for blood. Very thinned out blood, anyway.
Okay, morbid much? Second time you’ve compared things to blood tonight. Get it together, Kat.
“It’s a gift from our employer. I guess it is all yours since we don’t drink alcohol.” The last time Rick drank was in his college days. He’d blacked out and then woken up in jail for public indecency. It seemed drunken streaking through a sorority house was frowned upon in modern society. He’d gone cold turkey ever since. When they started dating, Cindy stopped drinking as well to keep him from temptation. Kat thought it was nice seeing the support she gave him in cutting it out of her life too.
“This looks like expensive wine.” Kat searched for a year marked on the bottle but only saw the foreign label. “I guess it would be rude not to drink it. I’ll try a glass, well, plastic cup, rather, before bed.” She’d have to see if the hotel store had a corkscrew. Although she wasn’t sure why Mr. Bach wanted her boozed up to film his documentary. Then she focused back on the computer screen where artistic renderings of the Jersey Devil awaited her attention and decided being drunk might actually help her survive the project.
Kat set the bottle aside and resumed her research. The number of police reports, urban legends, sightings, and supposed facts Mr. Bach had e-mailed her the week before still boggled her mind. She kept reading them over and over again, trying to determine the best course of action. Some of the official reports were laughable and beyond farfetched. She really had her work cut out for her and not because it was a far cry from felines. Not to mention, the reasoning for her part in the project still wasn’t clear to her other than using her looks to sell the product. So this is what selling out feels like, eh? Kat shook her head. She needed the money and the funded projects. Exactly. You sold out.
Kat rested her face against her hand, leaning her elbow on the table, and made a real effort not to smack her forehead into her laptop repeatedly. “This thing has an origin story to coincide with the first documented sightings, and it has been seen all through the area since the eighteenth century. If it was even possible for one of these things to exist, there is no way it could have survived this long, unless it was part of a breeding population. If it came into existence the way the legend suggests, there isn’t anything it could have bred with, logically, to create offspring in its image. It would have to be immortal for people to continue having sightings, and immortality is a fairy tale.”
“Could be asexual reproduction.” Cindy proposed.
Kat shook her head. “No. Parthenogenesis has never been proven in any mammal species. Aside from the serpentine tail, the other features of this thing come from mammals. Besides, where is the bone evidence to prove these things are even out there alive, let alone dying or reproducing?”
She was getting a massive headache. Kat didn’t know how she would pull this documentary off given her own skepticism. Mr. Bach wanted believable, but she’d be lucky if she could force an authentic smile for the camera while talking about the subject. “No animal is immortal. So how is it still being sighted if not a case of mistaken identity or hoaxes?” Her question was more for herself to decipher than her companions, and she quickly scribbled it in the margin of her notebook to go back to later.
“And what was the origin of it again? You were very vague in the whole we-leave-in-two-weeks-pack-a-bag method of pulling us onto this project.” Cindy had grown bored with the television and began filing her nails. She held one hand out in front of her to inspect her work. “Come to think of it, you haven’t said much more on the subject itself since then.”
“Yeah, because you laughed so hard when I tried to tell you about the project that you couldn’t stand up. So you laid there on the floor guffawing, crying from it, and clutching your stomach like an alien would shoot out of it if you continued on that way. Which you did. For nearly an hour.” If only she had videotaped it. One to show the grandkids.
“Well, yeah. I expected it to be the usual, not something that sounds like a bad Frankenstein’s monster attempt. And who the hell uses words like guffawing?”
“Whatever. As the legend goes—”
“Hold up.” Cindy jumped to her feet and grabbed the hotel keycard off the table. “Let’s film this so we don’t have to listen to crazy talk twice while Ricardo here is trying to contain his amusement.” Rick grinned like a fool as she pulled him to his feet and pushed him past the calico-patterned curtains of various greens and reds. She shoved him out the door with the keycard to collect his equipment from their room, three doors down to the right. Cindy made a shooing gesture with a wave of her hand at Rick’s retreating form.
They joked with each other, but they knew the project was a wonderful opportunity for all of them. Rick had filmed some weddings here or there, but he had a hard time working for other employers. He’d encountered every issue from pushy directors to ignorant assholes who assumed he was an illegal alien when he was an American citizen, as were his parents before him. His grandparents had come to the States from Mexico in the sixties. He was born and raised in Texas, and his father had been a wealthy landowner there. Rick was full of good humor and a great husband to Cindy. On top of it all, he was an excellent cameraman who could navigate his way out of a maze using tracking skills and the sky.
Then there was Cindy. She was a true-blue Southern girl through and through. Born and raised in Alabama, she’d moved to Florida after college and met Kat. Both had recently moved into the Tampa area, excited about warm weather and Florida beaches. She was as girly as they came. She loved pink, always had fresh-cut flowers in her house, and her fingernails were never void of color. While Rick had become the most important aspect of her life, Cindy still occasionally kicked him out for a few moments of girl time with her best friend.
Cindy flopped back on the bed, the back of one hand against her forehead, imitating a theatrical swoon. “I thought he’d never leave. He’s such an attention whore.”
Kat giggled. She knew Cindy was well aware Rick hadn’t been part of the previous conversation. “You married him knowing he’d be in the middle of everything.”
“You’re right.” She sat up in the middle of the bed. Her white shirt and light blue jeans stood out against the dark comforter. “What was I thinking?”
“I know exactly what you were thinking.” Kat wagged her eyebrows, getting herself smacked with a pillow in response.
“Do you think we’ll find the Jersey Devil? I mean there has to be something causing all the sightings in the area. The most recent one was three weeks ago, about a twenty-minute drive away. Don’t give me that look. I read your notes while you were napping in the car. I find it interesting. Hilarious, but interesting.”
Kat flopped on the foot of the bed and stared at the bumpy ceiling. The hotel room had the faint smell of lemon cleaner in the air. And the chair had been uncomfortable. She rubbed her thigh where the cougar had bit into her. “Mass hysteria maybe. People wanting attention. Large owls scaring people in the dark. Teenagers chasing their friends while wearing demon costumes.” She nodded toward Rick’s mask. “I doubt anyone will ever find a specimen that remotely resembles the Jersey Devil. And if they do, I bet you fifty bucks it’s a hoax.” She had read there were a few local stops that claimed to have skeletal remains, and resigned herself to the knowledge she’d have to go take samples from them before they left town, even though she knew if the bones were legit someone would have reported it already.
“Your scar is bothering you, isn’t it?”
“It still feels a little tender sometimes. I think I sat in the chair too long.”
Cindy hadn’t been in the woods the day of the cougar attack. She’d been in the hotel suite, cooking dinner, when she received the call from Rick and rushed to meet them at the hospital where Kat had been air-lifted. Cindy sat with her in the hospital, held her hand, and shared her despair as the news anchor sang the praise of the animal control officials who hunted the poor cat down and ended its life for being true to its species. For defending its territory and protecting its young. She also called Kat’s family to inform them of the accident, even though Kat rarely stayed in contact with them due to schedules and distance. And it was Cindy who helped her through physical therapy, always smiling and sunny even when Kat was at her lowest.
She had also been the one to argue with Kat that she wasn’t selling out by doing the Jersey Devil documentary, even though Kat still believed she had. At least it would fund future fieldwork, which other scientists would understand, especially since she hadn’t been able to do much more than research at home until she healed enough to walk. The cat had taken a good bite out of her leg. Since money was short due to medical bills, Kat was forced to return to the labs, but the sterile environment reminded her of the hospital. Sitting at home, pouting over her online banking account, she’d received the call from Bach Industries. When Mr. Bach offered the job to her, she’d caved so fast, it was tragic.
However, Kat worried the scientific community would never let her live it down. The only reason she didn’t hear smart-ass comments about her screw-up with the cougar was because she’d been badly injured. Most people knew good and well Kat had learned her lesson, and she wouldn’t make the same mistake twice. As for this project, she didn’t anticipate any danger aside from the damage to her reputation because the people she usually worked with didn’t take cryptozoology seriously at all.
The beep of a keycard being swiped through the mechanized door lock had her glancing up as Rick stepped into the room carrying a camera bag, a tripod, and a microphone on a stick he referred to as a boom. When following her about as she worked, he had a handheld camera and a microphone that would be attached on her person so she didn’t have to be right in front of the camera to talk. But for interior shoots, he liked to use the better equipment.
Cindy bounced off the bed and assisted him as he set up. Kat wasn’t much help with the technical aspects of filming, so she left that part to the Martinezes. She just had to look pretty and sound knowledgeable while she let Rick and Cindy do the recording, editing, and all that fun stuff.
As they powered up the equipment, Kat meandered to the bathroom mirror to ensure she looked presentable for the camera. Her long coppery hair was pulled back loosely, a few strands curled down beside her face, and the rest was softly contained in an elastic band but not harshly slicked flat. Kat genuinely didn’t like to wear a lot of makeup, but the came
ra and hotel lighting had the tendency to make her look like Casper. She powdered her face, hiding the few faint freckles that bridged across her nose. A little blush and a quick layer of lip balm finished her off.
“One day you will wish you let me do your makeup,” Cindy called from the other room, and Kat smiled. Cindy could make a frog look like a princess if given cosmetics to work with.
Brushing lint off the sleeve of her dark gray cotton T-shirt, Kat wandered back into the main room. Rick had opened the curtains as far as they would go, and the setting sun allowed a small window of natural light. He positioned Kat’s chair where the light would benefit the shot, and Kat, the best. She reclaimed her chair, sat up straight, took a deep breath, and smiled.
“Ready?”
“Just a moment.” Rick angled the camera on the tripod, centering Kat in the shot. After retrieving the boom from the bed, he handed it to Cindy, and she positioned it to where the microphone would not be visible as the camera rolled. Rick hit a button on the camera. Then he nodded.
Here goes nothing.
“The Jersey Devil may very well be one of America’s most notorious monsters. It makes its home in the New Jersey Pine Barrens, a densely forested area that stretches about one million acres. The origin of the legend begins in the eighteenth century, and some sources even pinpoint the exact year to be 1735. The most prominent version of the story involves a woman known as Deborah Leeds. While in the throes of birth to her thirteenth child, she cried out, ‘Let this one be a devil!’ Not long after the child was born, it supposedly sprouted wings and flew up the chimney, where it disappeared into the forest. In the early twentieth century, more and more reported sightings were documented, raising a panic that the creature was really lurking out in the pinelands.”
Kat paused, keeping a tight grip on her facial muscles. She struggled to avoid making a face in order to continue, “The appearance of the Jersey Devil is varied at times, but more often than not, pretty standard. It has a horse-like head, a humanesque torso, and stands on two feet, which are often described as goat-like with cloven hooves. It has wings resembling those of a bat and a serpentine, forked tail.”
The Cursed Satyroi: Volume One Collection Page 2
