Fright Squad

by Flint Maxwell

  A car was coming.

  Against all the pain in my body, I turned. Saw the PT Cruiser.

  But Zack’s on the roof and Maddie is knocked out under that tree. How—?

  Then a rush of wind blew me away, blew me toward unconsciousness.

  11

  The SOD

  But it didn’t blow the penis-tentacle. Try saying that with a straight face.

  No, when I woke up, I found out that it had crushed the penis-tentacle into roadkill.

  Zack was standing over me. Maddie was talking to someone behind him. The world was still painted in that bright light.

  I sat up.

  Zack had a few scratches, a bloody nose, and a bruise forming around his eye, but he was smiling. How the hell could he have been smiling?

  Then I saw it, what was dangling around my neck like a loose choker necklace.

  It was part of Buddy’s detached and flaccid penis. Yep. No longer a tentacle anymore.

  Disgusted and close to vomiting, I grabbed the thing with a loose grip and threw it as far as I could.

  Around me were Buddy’s severed arms and legs. I saw that the great white light wasn’t Heaven calling me up. It was actually the high beams of the PT Cruiser. The car sat idling nearby, its tires smeared with purple and red and green.

  As much as I wanted to keep a sense of having myself under control, I couldn’t resist the urge to vomit. So I did in the church’s bushes.

  “Are you okay?” Zack managed to say around his laughing.

  “No,” I said.

  “Want me to hold your hair back?” he quipped. I punched him in the chest. It was a weak punch.

  “What the hell happened?” I asked.

  Zack pointed behind me. “The Cruiser saved the day, man. Splattered that thing into oblivion.”

  “Great. So now we’re dealing with a ghost car. What is this, a Stephen King movie?” I managed to get off my knees and wipe the corners of my mouth with the sleeve of my torn-up jacket. Something slimy smeared on my face. I hoped it was my blood and nothing else. The thought brought up another heave. My stomach clenched, but nothing came out.

  Zack was patting me on the back when Maddie said, “The Cruiser didn’t save the day. This little guy did.” I turned and saw she was holding up the robed goblin like he’d just thrown a game-winning touchdown pass at the Super Bowl.

  “Holy shit. How did he—” I began but couldn’t find the words.

  Maddie answered. “He used an umbrella to press on the gas pedal and stood up on the driver’s seat. Didn’t you, you good boy?” She now patted the little goblin’s head and it cooed in reply.

  “You saved my life,” I said. I knelt down beside him and my knees cried out in pain, but I ignored it. “I think I finally have a name for you, buddy.”

  “Buddy was the werewolf’s name, Abe,” Zack said.

  “I know that. I was just calling him ‘buddy’ as in friend.”

  “Sorry,” Zack said.

  I turned back to the goblin. “Anyway, I shall call you Slayer. How does that sound?”

  The goblin nodded eagerly.

  “Slayer it is.”

  Maddie frowned. “Can’t you name him something cuter? Like Prince or Cotton?”

  Zack laughed and pointed at the mess on the sidewalk. “Would someone named Cotton do that?”

  Maddie grimaced. “I guess not.”

  “Slayer!” I shouted.

  Zack echoed.

  So did Maddie, though not as enthusiastically. Then, from the basement, the werewolves still chained to their chairs, howled.

  After this ordeal was over, I said, “Well, we better call this in, yeah?”

  “Already did,” Maddie said.

  “Good.” The adrenaline had worn off. I was feeling a good amount of pain, but still, curiosity won out. I took out my own cell phone, which, miraculously, hadn’t cracked or broke, and turned on the flashlight. The werewolf’s human form was mutilated, but it had been long before the Cruiser rolled over it.

  Zack and Maddie looked over my shoulder as I shined the beam on the creature the tentacles were attached to. It was crushed into a fine jelly. The eye that had peered at me was shattered like a runny egg yolk. I was hardly able to tell it even was an eye at some point.

  “What is this?” I asked.

  “No idea. Never seen it before,” Maddie said.

  Then it hit me. I started laughing and Maddie and Zack looked at me like I was crazy. Slayer tried mimicking and didn’t do a good job of it. His laughter sounded like a person with lung cancer’s mucus-y coughs.

  “It finally happened,” Zack said as I continued to laugh. “The last screw has been knocked loose.”

  “What is it, Abe?” Maddie asked.

  I shook my head and wiped tears from my eyes. “I did it,” I said. “I beat thy tentacles of death.”

  See? No big deal.

  “Oh, you didn’t really believe Val, did you?” Zack asked. “She makes all that stuff up.”

  “Tell that to the tentacle that knocked you on the church’s roof and knocked me back to the forest,” Maddie said.

  Zack was silent then.

  I turned to Slayer and raised a hand. “High five!” I said.

  Surprisingly, the goblin knew what I meant and he jumped up and smacked my palm. It might’ve been the best high five I’d ever gotten.

  “Octavius will know what it is,” Maddie said. “He knows everything.”

  “And if he doesn’t?” Zack asked. He was hunkered down, poking the remains of the fractured eyeball with a stick. You would have thought he’d learned his lesson by then.

  “He’ll know someone who does know,” Maddie answered.

  I, on the other hand, didn’t think anyone would know. In a world of unspeakable monsters that were well documented and sought after by BEAST, this didn’t ring anything close to a bell. We never went over tentacles bursting from dead werewolves in the Academy.

  “Look,” Maddie said. Headlights danced on the street, bathing us in its white light. “Should be him, now.”

  “I hope so,” I said. “It’ll be a tough time trying to explain this to the local cops, especially Woodhaven cops. That sheriff with his big gun, who talks with a Texas accent, would take one look at this and throw us in jail.”

  The car slowed.

  I saw it wasn’t Octavius and it wasn’t the local law enforcement. At first, I didn’t recognize who it was, and thought it might be a curious civilian. Lord knew that had happened before. They were easier to persuade than the cops, but still, this was really out there. The Academy taught us all about persuading civilians in more normal situations.

  “Oh, shit,” Zack said, standing up.

  The car stopped, parked with two wheels on the strip of asphalt and two wheels in the grass. A tall, lean man with a lit cigarette jutting from his mouth got out of the driver’s side. A woman more muscle than anything else got out of the passenger’s side. She wore her hair in a ponytail, so tight it made her skin look like it had been painted over her skull. Her ponytail was even tighter than Maddie’s. I didn’t think that was possible.

  “The SOD,” I whispered. “Go figure.”

  “And I thought this night couldn’t get any—” Zack began.

  I was about to tell Zack not to finish that thought when—

  “Hey, bozos!” the man said. He pointed at Slayer. “Violation!” Then he pointed at the ruined body that was once a werewolf that had a gelatinous blob with an eye and tentacles coming out of him and said, “Now, that’s just gross…but…violation!”

  The wolves in the basement got to howling again.

  “Violation! Violation!” The man pitched the cigarette into the grass.

  “You idiots even know what you’re doing?” the woman asked.

  I had seen these people before only once, but that was all it took to know I didn’t like them.

  “We’re BEAST NOD,” I said. I started digging around my pocket for my identification, but the
agent interrupted me.

  “You don’t look like BEAST,” the woman said. She strode past me and got a better look at the ruined corpse of Buddy Wolverton.

  The man fetched another cigarette, cupped his hand around the flame of his match, and lit it. Twirls of smoke trailed out of the corners of his mouth and out of his nose. “Apparently BEAST just hires anyone these days.” He walked from the car’s side and bumped Zack’s shoulder as he went past. He had to go out of his way to hit Zack.

  I saw the flash of anger on my partner’s face. I reached out and gripped him on the forearm before he could do anything stupid.

  “How about Dynamic Douche Destroyers?” Zack mumbled, obviously meaning the SOD were douches.

  SOD was the Southern Ohio Division of BEAST, and these agents in particular thought they were God’s gifts to monster slaying.

  “I’m Agent Lorne,” the man said, “and this is Agent Dalton. We’re from SOD so you all can pack up your book-bags and head home to your mommies.” Agent Lorne thought this was real funny. He laughed so much, I thought the cigarette was going to fall from his mouth.

  “That was lame,” Maddie said. Her arms were crossed and her stare was like ice. She currently wore her don’t-mess-with-me face. And you really didn’t want to when she was wearing that face. Trust me, I’d known from experience. Apparently, Lorne believed it too, because he stopped laughing pretty quick.

  “We’re all professionals,” I said. “Let’s act like it.” It didn’t go over my head that I’d just poked a dead guy with a stick and wrestled with a penis-tentacle, but they didn’t know that yet.

  “NOD?” Dalton said. She was up now, a smile spreading on her face. “You think NOD is considered professional?” It was her turn to bust out in laughter.

  We just stood there and took it. That’s the best way to describe it. What could we do? Fight back? Get into a insult match? We all knew we couldn’t, and I didn’t want to waste my time, but I still couldn’t help but be angry at the way they treated us. We did all the hard work. We killed the werewolf and the tentacles, and I think that at least deserved some respect. Right?

  Not according to them.

  Once the laughing stopped, Lorne said, “Brief us.”

  None of us spoke for a moment, unsure of who would be in charge of telling what happened. I mean, we really weren’t even sure. Tentacles in a werewolf? What the hell did that even mean?

  “Jesus Christ,” Dalton sneered.

  “Would it make it easier for you retards if I got some crayons and construction paper for you so you can draw it out for us?” Lorne asked.

  This, of course, threw the SOD agents into another fit of laughter.

  Rather than fall for their immature games, I ignored their guffaws and spoke up. I told them all about our mission to apprehend the escaped werewolf and how, using the file, we traced one of Wolverton’s old pack-mates to this church, and while there, Buddy Wolverton attacked us. I told them about the ensuing fight, the transformation from werewolf to man, and then, at last, the tentacles and the blob with the eye in it.

  “Bullshit,” was all Lorne said. By this time he was already working on his fourth cigarette since getting out of the car. “Werewolves aren’t full of tentacles.”

  I pointed to what was left of the blob. It really didn’t look the way it had when it was alive and wriggling, though, and that didn’t help our case much.

  “That’s a fucking spleen,” Dalton said. She was as brash and ignorant as Lorne.

  It wasn’t a spleen. I didn’t know what a spleen looked like, but that sure wasn’t it.

  Naturally, Lorne, the male, picked up a stick (the same stick Zack had used to poke the tentacle hidden in Buddy Wolverton’s skin no less), and jabbed at the thing he thought was a spleen.

  With a whoosh and a harsh smell not unlike roadkill, what was left of the alien eye went up in a puff of dust. Maddie stepped back and covered her mouth, not like she was going to hurl, but like she didn’t want to inhale any of that crap.

  Slayer squealed and hid behind my leg, gripping behind my knee with claws too sharp. I barely noticed, though, because I was hypnotized by this display of the unexplainable.

  Still, this didn’t convince the SOD agents. They shrugged it off and remained tight-lipped until Dalton, scanning the scene, asked why there was a penis in the mulch by the church. Guess it didn’t stay on the roof.

  “Long story,” I said. I had deliberately left out the part about Buddy’s dick slapping me in the face, and Zack and Maddie, God bless them, hadn’t called me out on it.

  “Part of the accident,” Zack said.

  The reason the SOD agents were so upset with our killing of Buddy Wolverton was because they had been looking for him.

  I tried arguing that Buddy was in our district, but the agents weren’t having it.

  Not long after this, thank God, (because I was close to punching Lorne in the face) Octavius arrived on the scene with a few other BEAST agents back from their field assignments—three men and two ladies, all with better manners than Agents Lorne and Dalton. They set up a perimeter and then Octavius sent them to the local law enforcement before we had a lot of explaining to do. About a dozen calls had come into the sheriff’s office asking after the gunshots, a dozen more complaining about some dog growling its head off.

  Now that Octavius was here, I felt a little better. Again, I had to tell the story. Again, the SOD agents snickered at our inclusion of the tentacles and the alien object planted inside of the werewolf. At some point, Dalton kicked the basement window and she yelled for the wolves in Werewolves Anonymous to shut the hell up!

  They didn’t.

  I just wanted to go home.

  “Could be a parasite,” Octavius mused. The way he spoke wasn’t hopeful.

  “Could be bullshit,” Agent Lorne said. Not even the head of the NOD got a SOD’s respect. Didn’t irk Octavius, though. He was a gentlemen through and through. The only time he seemed the least bit heated was when Lorne and Dalton called in their own forensic team.

  Because this had happened in our jurisdiction, Octavius said it was a job for our forensic specialists.

  Lorne wasn’t hearing it. He pulled his badge free and shoved it in Octavius’s face. On this, I saw his first name was Gaylord and he’d probably been teased mercilessly for it, and I didn’t feel as angry about the way he was treating us now that I understood. Then he pulled his mission papers that detailed their pursuit of Buddy Wolverton.

  Octavius, much to our displeasure, stood down.

  We packed up and headed home.

  “Meet back at the office, sir?” I asked Octavius.

  He didn’t answer right away. I looked sidelong toward Maddie and Zack. They shrugged. Something was wrong with Octavius, and I didn’t think it was taking all of the heat from the SOD.

  “Sir?”

  “Huh?” Octavius’s eyes were glazed over and hazy, looking more and more like a haunted monster than before, but he spun and returned our gazes, perhaps hearing an echo of what I’d asked and he answered, “No, no, Abraham. Get some rest. All of you. You all did a great job. I’m sorry I thrust this mission upon you on such short notice.”

  “It was nothing, Captain,” Zack said. No one else called Octavius “Captain.”

  “Yes, it was, Mr. Murphy. I put your lives on the line with this mission.”

  “We can handle ourselves, sir,” Maddie said.

  Octavius smiled. It was a tired smile. “I know you can, Madilyn. And you did. However…” he trailed off.

  Slayer was currently riding pig-back on Zack and he made a confused noise. “However what, Captain?” Zack asked.

  “Ah, it’s nothing. Nothing I can say for sure. We’ll talk about it tomorrow. For now, get some rest.”

  We passed curious onlookers on our way out of Woodhaven. The SOD agents called more of their own in and made the whole thing look like a circus show. People were edging closer and closer to the church, where, in the basement below,
a score of werewolves sniffed their tasty flesh on the air. So were the local cops, too curious to take the old “This is a government issue” excuse seriously.

  But it was SOD’s problem now, no matter how much that pissed me off.

  I was really tired, too tired to truly care.

  The sun would be up soon and I’d sleep the day away. I needed that.

  Gosh, sometimes I felt like a vampire.

  12

  An Unexpected Visitor

  I got back to my apartment around five in the morning. It was pretty crappy—one bedroom, one bathroom and a closet-sized kitchen. Rent was cheap, though.

  Once, I had it all planned out. In a few years, I’d hopefully have enough experience under my belt with the NOD of SPOOKY where I could be promoted somewhere else (which didn’t seem as great after meeting Lorne and Dalton) or hopefully be managing my own division in another state. This seemed like the natural career path just as long as a penis-tentacle didn’t cut my career short. Then maybe I could afford a nicer place, even have a wife and a family, too. I often pictured what it would be like if I married Lola, the receptionist, but I didn’t have the courage to ask her out. I had a long way to go. Despite doing pretty well that night, I didn’t feel much different. More pain than usual, but no changes in confidence or swagger level.

  Thinking about that made me wish I wasn’t alone.

  Before I’d left the scene at the church, Octavius said it was a liability for us to take one of the goblins from HQ, so he was sent back to his own place with the other goblins. I felt bad for him.

  Maddie and Zack went to the local burger joint that was opened 24/7.

  “Kicking werewolf ass gives you quite the appetite,” Zack had said.

  “Wanna come?” Maddie had offered. “We’re gonna go see my mom’s new puppy after.”

  I turned them down. It didn’t seem like we kicked the werewolf’s ass as much as it kicked our ass, at least in my case.

  I should’ve went with them, sleep be damned.