by Declan Finn
Sean grimaced. “Oh, shut it, Elf. Go get some help, would you?”
Galadren just smiled, and leaped over the railing, and out of sight.
Sean blinked, looked over the rail, and saw that Galadren had grabbed the rail on the next floor down, and continued to do that several more times.
Freaking insane. Also, that's one of my tricks.
Sean took several photos of the man who just tried to kill him, texted it to one of his contacts, expecting to hear back later.
In a matter of seconds, he had a reply.
That was fast.
The text was simple: Scalzi, Bradford J. International assassin. One of a team of 20+.
Sean resisted the urge to throw his phone against a wall.
* * * *
Holy crap, Michael DeValera thought as he watched the display unfold. What the hell was that?
He watched as a blond fellow in white … silk? … performed a controlled fall down the Marriott's core, after running and leaping from rail to rail on a catwalk over a dozen stories up, and tagging a shooter with an arrow from …
No, don't even try to do that math.
DeValera's mouth fell open, and tried to reassess some of the plans he'd made. He'd already taken steps to remove Sean Ryan, and had drawn up plenty of plans, and backup arrangements …
And then there's this freaking guy!
DeValera watched the scene, from Sean babysitting the body to the tall black woman jogging to his side. He had tracked Ryan from the floor below, and had also seen Scalzi. DeValera had known of Scalzi, but never really respected him. Sure, sniping was fine, but one had to be flexible about such things. It was impressive to do one-shot, one-kill, but sometimes, the job called for killing a whole bunch of people.
That one was easy. Athena Marcowitz. Black, Irish, Hispanic, etc etc. Former Secret Service. Probably the official brains of the outfit, while Ryan seems to be more of the lizard brain. How very Jungian. Or was that more Star Trek?
DeValera shook his head. Thankfully, he had some easy plans to make for that … Elf.
* * * *
“Do we assume that the rest of the team is going to just show up and try taking cracks at you?” Athena asked as she watched the crime scene guys pack up.
The Atlanta police department had the perpetrator in custody and hauled away within the hour, though there were a few comments about making him into a pin cushion.
Sean shrugged. “Nah. The Con hasn't even started yet. I can't see them invading a whole convention just to get me.”
“Ten million dollars buys a lot of collateral damage.”
“Indeed.” Sean looked at his phone, checking his schedule. “Alright. Tomorrow, I'm going to give a final briefing to our security guys, and I'm going to have my briefing with the Unhappy Puppies.”
“I thought they were the Tearful Puppies.”
“Yeah, don't ask me, I still have no idea what to do with that name. It's still deranged to me.” He smirked. “By the way, have you gotten your uniforms for tomorrow?”
Athena sighed. “Yup. Two Stormtrooper outfits, one for me, one for Brian.”
“Excellent. Right now, I'm going to go … and take a nap.”
Chapter 6: Tearful Puppies Save the Orphans
Thursday, the day before WyvernCon
The swarm of authors Sean had to meet with required an outdoor patio, outside of the Hyatt, and he was starting to think of the end of most of the black-and-white murder mysteries from the 1930s and 1940s.
As Sean looked over the room, he said, “You're wondering why I called this meeting…”
There was a smattering of laughter among the authors. Some of them Sean recognized, and others were new to him. Two were in the back of the patio, against the wall, typing away on laptops.
Sean leaned forward to the nearest author, the Colonel named Bradley, and said, “Can those two in the back hear me?”
Bradley leaned back, grinned, and lit his cigar. “Absolutely.”
Sean nodded slowly. “Right. So, item one … can someone tell me what youthful canines with mood disorders have to do with a sci-fi and fantasy award?”
Then the laughter started. The biggest man among them stood up, and Sean tried to figure out if he resembled a wrestler named Big Show, or Ming the Merciless. He stood seven feet tall, easily three hundred pounds, with a goatee—the only hair on his head, aside from his eyebrows. Today, he wore a red polo shirt, black suit pants, and Sean could swear he was carrying at least one handgun.
“Hi. I'm Gary Castelo,” he said in a friendly, booming voice that sounded like he should have been cast as the Ghost of Christmas Present. “Commonly known as the Intergalactic Lord of Rage. I'd be the guilty party on that one.”
Sean nodded. “From what I recall, you started it, because … why?”
Gary laughed. It was as loud and as booming as the rest of him. “Simple. I wanted to show that the Hubbles were total crap. It was less about what you wrote and more about who you are and who you knew than anything else.”
“And what do dogs have to do with it?”
“Ever see one of those infomercial ads begging for money at like three in the morning? You know, 'for the children' campaigns with Sally whats-her-name? My parody became Tearful Puppies Save the Orphans. Simple as that.”
Sean nodded slowly. “So, wait, you made Tearful Puppies to get an award you didn't think was worth the paper it was printed on?”
Gary shook his head. “Actually, I wanted to get nominated, just so I could show off what the backlash would be for any conservative who dared entered into the inner sanctum of their little clubhouse. After I got a fun little bit of backlash—”
“Namely hordes of Internet trolls, slander and libel,” interjected one of the writers working in the back. He wore a kilt, and barely even looked up from his laptop as he said that.
“Thanks, Jesse,” Gary said casually. “After TP-2, I didn't bother with the nominations ever again. I made my point. The rest of the fans who followed it, however, didn't want it to be over. So, I turned the reins over to other people. Omar?”
Gary sat, yielding the floor to a man who was of medium height, not much taller than Sean. He wore a neat, light-blue windbreaker. It was like he didn't notice the heat. He adjusted his wire-framed glasses, and waved. His head was perfectly symmetrical, like a basketball, and his thinning hair was neatly combed to one side, less trying to comb over a bald spot than because he had always combed it like that. He wasn't the tallest, nor was he the shortest of the Tearful Puppies. He was of medium height, medium build, with thin hair, almost balding in nature. His head with almost basketball-round, with ears that stuck out like the open doors of a Volkswagen Bug. His smile was big and broad, and almost a death's head grin in nature. Odd, but okay.
“Hi. I'm Omar Gunderson. I was in charge of Tearful Puppies 3?” he said, sounded like he was asking if he had done it. “I made some suggestions about what to nominate. I took in some suggestions. It got ugly.” He shrugged, as though that was it.
Sean cocked his head to one side. “And what happened then? You made your suggestions—did any of them get Hubble nominations?”
“All of them did.”
“Nicely done.”
Omar grinned. It was only a flash. “The thing is? Everyone nominated? Started getting slammed. Everybody. We had one author nominated, Tim Banker? As unpolitical as you can get. He does swords and sorcery novels, some of them he does as urban fantasy—wands and handguns, you could say. We had at least two authors who worked for Redding's Ordinary Tales publisher, and one of their books nominated by TP-3, and yet Kendall Adler decreed that every book was crap, and all of the nominated authors were male, Neo-Nazi, white supremacists.”
Colonel Bradley held his cigar and laughed. “A cute trick, considering that half the nominees were women, and a lot of the others had names I couldn't pronounce, and I speak a dozen languages.”
“Omar,” Gary said warningly, “mention the rest. Come on
.”
“Can't imagine anything.”
“Show them your family photos.”
Omar frowned, as though he didn't want to show off his family, which was new for Sean. He would show off pictures of his wife to anyone who asked nicely.
Sean held out his hand for it, and Omar handed over a photo from his wallet. It was Omar, a pretty little girl of about four, and a black woman.
Sean raised an eyebrow, and handed it back. “And they were calling you a racist online? Are they stupid?”
“Oh, that isn't even the worst part,” Colonel Bradley said. “Tell 'em.”
Omar shrugged, and said nothing. From off to the side, a woman with raven-black hair said, “They called his wife a human shield.”
Sean narrowed his eyes. “They did WHAT?”
Colonel Bradley nodded. “Welcome to my world.”
Omar shrugged. “It wasn't a big deal. I had to deal with worse for the next few months. But after the Hubble noms were in, my job was done. Also, I was called up for the reserves to go into the sand box for a year.”
The woman nodded. “Then they said that he deliberately got called away to a war zone so he didn't have to face the Puppy-Punters,” she said in an accent that sounded Russian.
Sean groaned at the level of stupid he was going to have to face in the days to come. “Okay. So, great. Wonderful. Shoot me now.” He studied the woman who filled in what Omar wouldn't. She was sturdily built, with more of an oval face. She even had dimples. She was a few pounds on the heavy side, but overall, quite cute. “And who are you, by the way, ma'am?”
“Rachel Hartley, Vile Yet Glamorous Fairy Princess,” she said. “Hello. Nice to meet you.”
Sean restrained a facepalm. “Where do you guys get these nicknames?”
“Some we give ourselves,” Rachel explained. “Some we get from the Internet, and some we get from other authors.”
The author with the kilt said, “I'm Shiva, destroyer of worlds … I wiped out the human race a few times in my books.”
Sean held up his hands. “Hold on, let's backtrack a moment. What the heck happened with all of the Hubble nominations?”
“Old Noah Ward got them,” Rachel said.
“Who?”
“There's a process with the Hubbles where you can vote 'No Award' in the category,” Omar Gunderson explained. “Johnny Noah Prada was behind a movement for fans to No Award everything that was Puppy related, no matter what the work or who the author was. Pretty much everything was given a No Award.”
“And they boasted about it,” Rachel added. “They made a farce out of the awards ceremony just to crow about it, then shouted down anyone who disapproved of it. Charles RR Martinez gave out his own awards in his own hotel room to people who 'should' have gotten an award. He then went online, and bitched that if Robin Whitehead—a twenty-year veteran of science fiction—hadn't been a Tearful Puppy nomination, she would have won for best editor, even though she got more votes than ever, and she was still out-voted by the schmucks.”
Sean tried to reconcile this with the person he met. “Funny, he came off as the sane one.”
“Yes, he did last year, too. But that's what happens when the rest of them are insane.”
“And this year,” Gary said, “came the SWATting.”
“Yes, tell me about that,” Sean said.
“I think I can help with that,” came a new voice from the side.
Sean looked up and flinched. “Oh for the love of God. What are you doing here?”
Colonel Bradley looked from the newcomer to Sean. “You two know each other?”
The new author came up to Sean with a big grin. He was a six-foot blond male, slightly overweight, with silver-framed glasses unsuccessfully hiding a somewhat bemused look. His black t-shirt had a drawing of a wizard’s library, complete with a wizard, sitting at his desk, and a brilliantly red-scaled dragon coming out of the wizard’s Personal Computer. He carried a stack of books and an iPad.
“Oh, Sean? He and I go back to the war of the Vatican. It's old home week. By the way, everybody, I'm Matthew Kovach.”
The Colonel looked the blond man up and down, and Sean could see the man's wheels turning. This author had shoulders that stopped just short of being broad, and the extra weight didn't make him look like he could even hold a gun without dropping him back on his ass.
“How've you been, Sean? Have the IRS stopped giving you a colonoscopy at this point?”
“You so don't want to know.” He waved at the group of authors. “How do you know these people?”
“I wrote up their SWATting events.” He handed Sean his tablet. “Take a look.”
“Seriously?”
Matthew Kovach coughed into a close fist. “I may have taken some liberties. Not many.”
Sean eyed him suspiciously. “Are you kidding me?”
* * * *
January
In the middle of the night, SWAT carefully navigated the minefield, and maneuvered under, around, and through the barbed wire. At long last, they slipped past the mysteriously bloodstained crosses lining the walkway.
The house itself was built like a fortress, or perhaps a bunker. The SWAT leader looked over at the team behind him, and waved for some explosives. At the end, they decided on enough C4 to blow open a bunker.
Suddenly, the door opened, and Colonel George Bradley, Grand Master himself, dressed like Patton emerged. With a voice of a Drill Sergeant crossed with George C. Scott, he barked, “TEN-HUT”
The SWAT members with military training immediately snapped to. The few non-veteran members look confused, until Bradley came nose-to-nose with them. “I SAID TEN-HUT.”
The last of the SWAT team complied. Bradley drifted up and down the line, inspecting all of them. “I have never seen such an under-equipped, slipshod entry. Where are your wire clippers! Where are your sappers! Where are your sniper teams! My wife could have taken you out a dozen times by now!”
Bradley stopped and turned, waving off in one direction. “Hi honey, I love you!”
Bradley turned back to the SWAT team. “Who trained you people? Johnny Prada? Kurds?”
A Junior SWAT member stammered, “Buu-u-u-ut, aren't the Kurds supposed to be the good fighters—”
“SILENCE, FOOL. Drop and give me fifty. You there, drop your equipment on this man so he knows how to do a REAL push up!”
That done, Bradley continued his inspection. “As I was saying, I have never seen a more pathetic attempt at entry. How appalled am I, Sergeant Major?"
A non-com suddenly appeared at Bradley's elbow, also in full uniform, but wearing more guns than the entire SWAT team put together. “Ve-ry, Sir.”
Bradley came to parade-ground rest. “All right. It ap-pears that the only way I'm ever going to get a decent SWATting is to train you myself. Every man, fall back to the FOB. We're going to do this again, and again, and a-gain, until we get it right. In this second run through, I'm going to use my defenses. On the third try, I will be using live ammunition. AM I UNDERSTOOD?”
The SWAT team barked as one, “SIR! YES, SIR!”
Bradley: “MOVE IT, MOVE IT, MOVE IT! AND WATCH FOR THE LANDMINES! THEY'RE STILL ACTIVE!”
* * * *
Atlanta, GA
Sean Ryan finished reading the SWATting of Colonel Bradley, then looked at Matthew Kovach like the man had grown three heads. “What the hell is this?” he demanded, handing the author back his iPad.
“More or less what happened,” Kovach said.
“Come on, this is so unbelievable, no one has land mines—”
Bradley cleared his throat. “I do.”
Sean's head whipped around so fast, whiplash was not out of the question. “Really? How much of this was real?”
“I don't have any bloodstained crosses,” he said casually. “And I didn't force the SWAT team to undergo training. And I certainly don't act like that around my wife.”
Bradley's phone rang and he immediately answered it. He hopped u
p and marched off to the side, the last words he heard from him were “Hey, honey. How are you, pumpkin?” in a voice so sweet, he sounded like someone else.
Sean blinked as though he'd been slapped. “Huh. Well, I guess there can be a lot more truth in fiction than I thought.”
“Just wait until you see my books,” Kovach said.
Sean frowned, “I'm almost afraid to ask.” He looked back to the authors. “Now, all of you people have been SWATted?”
Everybody nodded, even the two on laptops.
“Now, did anyone actually die during any of these? Obviously, none of you did, but were there casualties?”
The author on the laptop, in the kilt, laughed. “I only had a few of them bruised. My kids play rough.”
Sean blinked, opened his mouth, and he saw Matthew Kovach already scrolling through his iPad to find that write-up. “I don't think I want to know just now. Though I must ask: your name, sir?”
“Jesse James.”
Of course you are. “Your parents sure they wanted Jesse? Not William or Henry?”
“Like I haven't heard that one—” James stopped and looked up from his computer for a moment, still typing without looking at the screen. “Okay, I haven't actually heard that one before. They usually ask where my brother Frank is.”
“Glad I can oblige.” He looked over the others. “Any other casualties?”
One of the others, who looked like a straight Freddy Mercury, with mustache and slicked-back black hair, chuckled. “Only scrapes and bruises.”
“Even I survived mine,” Kovach joked. His smile faded. “But seriously, Sean, the SMURFs have pulled out all of the stops trying to sabotage the livelihoods of everyone here. Check out Amazon sometime, and see how many one-star reviews out and out state that it's because the author is a Puppy backer, and you'll see that this has been a concerted effort. It's a little annoying at this point.” The author smiled. “Let's just say I'm happy that I've kept my temper in check.”
Sean nodded. He'd seen a few of the bodies Kovach had left behind. “Gotcha.” He looked back to the others. “I have to ask, then—why didn't a single one of you ask WyvernCon for more security? Let's say this is all true, that none of you, and none of your fans, made even the slightest threat against the SMUTs—”
