by Michael Todd
Gabriel smirked, his cheeks high and his lids low. “No, you’re just getting slow in your old age.”
Pandora gasped, putting her hand to her chest. “Twatwaffle!”
Pandora grabbed the remote off a small table next to an armchair and lobbed it at him. Before it reached his spot, he was gone. The remote hit the wall and landed hard on the ground. Katie gave her a blank look and Pandora stomped her foot. “Why does that douchebag get to torture me, but when I get flustered, you look at me like I’m wrong?”
Katie shook her head. “Oh, no, I totally think you should stand up for yourself. I was looking at you that way because I bought that remote two weeks ago after you lobbed it at what you thought was a mouse, which ended up being a ball of lint from the dryer.”
Pandora glanced around. “Ah. Yeah. Sorry about that. Uh, I’ll pay you back?”
Katie jerked her chin up. “Mmhmm. Sure. I’ll just take it out of the sex swing fund.”
Pandora roared, “You monster!”
General Brushwood paced in front of his desk with his hands behind his back. It was his normal morning assistants’ meeting, and he had a lot of work to give out. “You know I hate overloading you girls. And gentleman. But we are still on high alert and we are getting wild intel on something boiling under the surface, so my thoughts have to be elsewhere.”
He pulled out the sheet of paper that had the assignments. “Mary, Amanda, and Star, the three of you will pull everything from 2016, and especially anything that sounds legit about one of our current elected officials that had not been scoured previously.”
Everyone nodded, taking their folders. “Sharyn and Margie, you will be manning the public calls and concerns line. We get a lot of those now, and we try to reply as much as possible.”
He kept moving down the list, assigning each person at least one project to begin working on. “If you manage to finish these, Brianna divide the rest among you.”
As the assistants got up to leave, the door opened and Jehovivich stuck her head in. The general smiled. “Come in, come in. What a pleasant surprise!”
After the staff filed out, she came inside and saluted. “I didn’t mean to come without calling, but a lot of things have been happening. I’ve been digging through the current affairs, and I think I found something very interesting.”
The general showed her over to one of the chairs, then walked behind the desk and took his seat. “You know I like interesting, though in this climate I tend to reserve interesting for good literature or a lecture. You know, something more grounded. But you have come all of this way, so it must be important.”
She shook her head. “In reality, I don’t know if they are important. But from the sound of them, they aren’t something I just want to pass over and never say a word. You know I have your back, and always will. Anyway, within the current intel there has recently been some chatter about strike teams being mobilized. Apparently, there is some sort of operation in Iraq, sent from the UK. The thing is, I looked into it on the national servers, and there aren’t any public, or even top secret, missions happening.”
The general frowned. “Really? Not even from British military?”
Jehovivich shook her head. “Nope. Not even there. I have a friend over there, and they had nothing. But I did find out one last thing. Apparently, the operation has a code name. It is ‘Operation Treasure Hunt.’”
Brushwood narrowed his eyes. “‘Treasure Hunt?’”
Jehovivich shrugged. “That’s the chatter.”
The general rubbed his hand over his stubbly face. “Do you think it has anything to do with the rising conflict in Iraq?”
“I thought that at first, but there are no notes on the conflict, and from what it looks like, they landed in a pretty remote location. The conflict is in Baghdad, mostly,” she replied, crossing her legs and sitting back. “Then I thought about the militias; perhaps they were trying to cut the head off of the snake. Many of the militias are centered in the more rural areas, but I would say that ninety percent of them moved after our last mission to rescue POWs.”
The general shook his head and tapped his fingers on his lips. “What are they doing?”
Jehovivich shrugged. “I have to say, the chatter didn’t feel like it was coming from a military entity. It was a lot less professional-sounding than that.”
He pursed his lips and narrowed his eyes. “You don’t think… I would hope that… Oh, God.”
Jehovivich looked at him confused. “What?”
The general picked up the phone and paused. “There might be people on the Council who are trying to use Timothy’s technology to search for something.”
He called Katie’s base, having the admin transfer him to Timothy.
“General, where have you been all my life?”
Brushwood chuckled. “Saving the world, son, with you on my team. And while you are on my team, I need you to hack something for me.”
Timothy giggled. “I love it. It’s been forever. Tell me the details, and let’s do this.”
“It’s a specific location,” the general explained. “If I had to guess, they’re working out of a London safe house.”
Timothy paused. “And this is secret government black-ops-type stuff? Should I be doing this? Just so I know what to fully trash from my drive’s memory and what to deny under penalty of treason.”
The general smirked. “I am not concerned with that at this point.”
Timothy hissed. “Uh oh, sounds like you have reached your bullshit threshold.”
“And then some,” the general grumbled. “If I’m right, they are conducting missions without any oversight or approval using your stolen tech, so you have my blessing. I’m sending you a secure message with the specific location to look.”
Timothy received the message and put the general on speaker as he went into hacker mode. He moved his fingers quickly, pulling up screen after screen and inputting data without conscious thought. He had more than enough experience at hacking government sites and locations, and safe houses weren’t usually the most secure of the facilities.
Within ten minutes, he was successful. “And I’m in. Give me just a second to look through the dataaaa—oh my God! It is my program. Those dirty motherfuckers are looking for a Leviathan, and what’s worse, they think they found one. They’ve already sent two teams to deal with it. Are they insane? Have they not learned anything from recent history?”
Brushwood groaned. “I suppose not. I just hope those teams took the beast out and got home safely for all our sakes.”
Legion walked through the valley, his form growing. The fabric wrapping his body waved around him without even the smallest hint of a breeze. Following him were several groups of people, including soldiers, a few farmers, and a shepherd. You could hear their whispers echoing through the valley and over the hills, tiny little voices ricocheting through the countryside.
“We. Are. Legion.”
9
Juntto and Angie stepped into their apartment, dropping their bags just inside the door. Angie walked over to the couch and sat down, letting out a deep breath, then put her head back and closed her eyes. As usual, she picked up her legs to put them on her coffee table, but instead of hitting it, they fell back to the floor with a thud. She opened one eye and looked up, finding nothing but open space in front of her.
She picked up her head and sat up, looking around. Along the wall under her shelves was her coffee table, sitting just as she had left it, only about seven feet off the mark. Juntto walked out of the bedroom with a hairbrush and a spatula in his hands. “Why were these two things tucked into bed like they were getting ready for a good night’s sleep?”
Angie pursed her lips, unsure of what to say. “Yeah, I don’t know. The coffee table is under the shelves.”
They both started looking around the house, finding things in the strangest places. There were potatoes in the freezer, glassware on the bookshelf, and a box of tampons in the fruit dish.
Juntto and Angie went next door to talk to Katie and Pandora. They were rearranging things as well. “Uh, there is a whole bunch of weird shit going on in our apartment—like tampons-in-the-fruit-bowl kind of weird.”
Katie looked up from moving her trashcan off the couch. “Yeah, uh, there was some strange stuff going on in here while we were gone. When we got here, this entire place was full of ghosts.”
Pandora walked out of the bathroom with gloves, a face mask, and an apron on. “Not to mention that they might have used your bathroom to take a ghost-dump.”
Angie’s nose wrinkled, and she covered her mouth. “Oh, my God, that ruins my entire life right there. There were ghosts shitting in my bathroom? That is absolutely the most horrible horror story you could make up. I don’t even know what to say.”
Katie giggled as Juntto pulled a banana out of a light fixture. “We don’t even have bananas.”
Angie took the piece of fruit. “We did, and now I know where they are. But let’s get back to this ghost-dump. I am seriously pledging right now that I am going to go out and buy a new toilet seat for the bathroom. Maybe even seven gallons of bleach, which I will use to hose the entire place down.”
Pandora took her gloves off and tossed them in the trash, then pulled her surgical mask down and wiped the sweat from her forehead on the back of her arm. “So, wait. I just need to get this right in my head. Juntto’s big blue butt is okay, but an airy ghost bum freaks you out?”
Angie shivered and put her hand up, shaking her head feverishly. “I accept a lot. Demons. Monsters. Leviathans. And it’s great. Hey, I take it in stride. But a ghost using my commode? I have limits.”
Katie smiled as she walked around collecting random trinkets from all over the house. Juntto shrugged. “Hey, at least they were nice enough to tuck our hairbrush and spatula into bed.”
Pandora looked at him, confused, and he shook his head. “Look, this whole ghost thing is new to me. Souls in my dimension have good enough sense to stay dead once they have passed over. There was no visiting your loved ones, or ever seeing them. They died, they are dead.”
He walked over and sat down in the chair, lurching forward with a grimace and pulling a fork from behind the seat cushion. Katie took it from him, and he leaned back again. “I can understand people who died in accidents, but even they stayed dead in my land. Most of them were killed, so they would be ashamed to come back to life. There is nothing more embarrassing than not watching out and getting a Frost Fork in the belly.”
Katie grimaced. “What is a Frost Fork?”
Juntto waved his hand. “It’s like an Earth pitchfork, except it creates extreme cold. You stab someone with it, and their entire insides freeze. Pretty sucky.”
Angie sat on the arm of his chair. “But what about those who died valiantly? I mean, everyone dies, even frost giants. Just takes longer. So, everyone who dies is disregarded?”
Juntto shook his head. “No, no. We respected their conquests, but nobody wants to return to the site of the defeat. At least, that is your mentality in my dimension. Now, I have to admit, my personal thoughts have changed by leaps and bounds since I joined you guys. I don’t know how I feel about it, really. I know that if I died now, my soul would still miss the people important to me, so I might come back as a ghost. But the ones here on this planet? They are usually lost souls. The rest roll right up to heaven. There aren’t many who would pass that by for a life on Earth, or so I am assuming. Haven’t actually been there.”
Angie stroked her hand down the side of his head, tucking some hair behind his ear. “You are a very different frost giant. You are kinder, more caring, and—”
He interrupted, squeezing her hand. “Empathy. Compassion. Had you told me three years ago that I would feel compassion for human beings, or anyone, really, I would have probably laughed in your face and then stabbed you to show just how uncompassionate I was. I really was a completely different man back then. I’m glad I am not that giant anymore. Looking back, it was a lonely and angry world.”
The safehouse was bustling again, all of the techs stationed around the room, their bookbags lined up next to their desks and their focus on what was going on at the sites. Powell and Xian were not happy with each other. They spent a lot of time together, so it was bound to happen that one day they went their own ways. They were still trying to hold on to the project, but the stress was really getting to both of them.
They had one job, and they had yet to accomplish it. It all came to a head with the accounting of the event right there on the screen in front of them. They were completely mortified, and immediately had a tech hack in and delete the footage.
Xian grabbed a piece of paper out of Powell’s hand, whispering in an angry tone, “You think you are so smart, yet you are for some reason, perplexed that I would have a similar feeling. You are too much for my mind to handle.”
Powell scoffed, glancing around to make sure no one was watching them as he whisper-yelled back, “You, sir, can’t handle me because you are just not as smart as me.”
Xian burst into laughter and shook his head. “You are about as smart as a fucking goat. I am the one who set all this up.”
Powell tilted his head back, holding his stomach, and cackled. “Please! Without me, you would never have found anything.”
Xian put his hands out, still whisper-shouting. “Found what? We are in this fucking mess, and now we don’t know what to do about any of it.”
Powell hissed, gesturing wildly. “What would you like to do? Run to the World Council and tell the truth about how badly we fucked everything up? Hope they have a soft spot in their hearts because we came clean? That isn’t a real thing, and people are only honest about things like that because they know they’re going to get caught and want to earn bonus points before they get taken down. We won’t survive this. It was off the books, and we royally screwed it up. There will be no mercy, and they will want to make sure we don’t talk to anyone about it.”
Xian thrust his arm to the side. “Okay, so you are a pussy, afraid of the World Council. Fine. But in case you have forgotten, we have a Leviathan out there who’s completely free to roam around the world and take people hostage with whatever sick power it has. We morally can’t sit here and just continue to let that stupid alien sonofabitch do whatever the fuck it is doing. It is obvious that this cannot be spun to look good when we are the sole reason people are dying.”
Powell clenched his teeth and balled up his fists. “You are so damn impossible. You think I want to just let that thing roam around? But how do we stop it when we can’t tell them what happened?”
Xian shrugged as he packed things away. “Maybe, just maybe, we can’t. Maybe there isn’t another answer. Maybe owning up to the failure and facing a possible death sentence is the only way we can make this right.”
Powell shook his head. “Are you fucking nuts? I am not putting myself on the damn guillotine.”
His emotions out of control, he crossed his arms over his chest and pinched his nipples to release some of his tension. He hissed through his teeth, the release cooling his muscles and lessening the tension in his shoulders.
Xian grabbed a piece of paper and balled it up, chucking it really hard at him from close range. “Stop it. That isn’t something you can just walk around doing, you fucking freak.”
Powell pulled his arms back and very noticeably tweaked his nipples through his shirt, shaking his chest. “What’s wrong, Xian? You afraid of your own manlihood?”
Xian scoffed. “Yeah, like you’ll get your freak on it, and suddenly it will dry up and run off. Fucking pervert.”
Powell’s mouth dropped open. He didn’t like being called a freak in the least. “Me? You are calling me a freak?”
He swiped his hand hard across the top of Xian’s head, knocking his hairpiece off and across the room. It slid across the floor, stopping at the feet of one of the techs. She shifted her eyes before kicking it back. Powell started laughing so hard he could
barely breathe. Xian walked over and snatched it off the floor, shoving it into his bag.
Powell leaned forward, slapping his hand on the table and cackling in a high-pitched tone. Xian watched him for a moment, completely disgusted. “You know what? Fuck you, Powell. This was a favor for the Chinese government, but I can’t be expected to work with amateurs. Fuck this whole project. Guess what? It’s your country, and it’s your safehouse. I am going to gather my fucking shit and get the hell out of here. I don’t need the money that badly—as if we’ll even get paid after you fucked shit up so bad.”
Powell wiped tears from his eyes and waved his hand. “Dude, seriously? Wait. Hey, don’t go. I was just joking! I mean, when you put that on this morning, did you expect people not to notice that you went from Mr. Clean to Frodo Baggins overnight? It doesn’t look bad, but come on, man! Embrace the baldness.”
Xian stood with his bag on his shoulder, just staring at him. Powell stopped laughing and motioned behind the desks. “Come on, dude. You know I didn’t mean it. Please don’t leave.”
Xian took one hand out of his pocket and jammed his middle finger into the air before walking away.
Katie beat her wings hard to keep pace with Pandora, who was flying next to her. They were both dressed in everyday clothes so they could go to the bank. Katie was wearing a pair of ripped jeans, heeled black boots, a black sweater, and a peacoat. Pandora had been talked out of a tight bodycon dress and into a pair of wide-leg palazzo pants, and Katie had agreed to the light-blue turtleneck sweater that was cut off halfway down her belly. Over the ensemble, she wore a puffy black jacket with a fur hood.
“So, have you seen Ghost? Demi Moore, pottery, the whole nine?” Katie asked.
Pandora shook her head. “We talked about this before, and I hadn’t seen it. Personally, I like the ridiculous movies like Casper. Most of the other movies are about poltergeists, not ghosts. Two completely different things.”
