“And the smell?”
“Well, you might think it’s weird, but it smelled like someone was burning rubber down there. I nearly choked it was so bad.”
I mentally added it all up: small body, burning rubber smell, and hiding in a dark basement. My guess right off the top of my head was a Bakoo. They’re not too dangerous, but they hate the light and come from a planet that reeks of something close to burning rubber. They even have an ocean there, dark as coal, that burns all the time and yet, things live in it. The universe is a strange place. This didn’t sound like a prank, so my day was off to a good start.
“Okay, I think I may be able to help you. My suggestion is, don’t go back down there unless you have to, and if you do take a high-powered flashlight with you. Should be fine, Mr Parks. When would be a good time and day to come over?”
“The sooner the better. My wife gets back from her sister’s in two days, so I’d rather her not come home to any of this.”
“Would an hour be fine?”
“Perfect.”
We spent the rest of the call talking about rates and passing on directions. I got off the phone with him, messaged Rouge to let her know what I was going to be up to, and then checked my supplies. I had a huge, powerful flashlight ready to go, my gloves, my Tincher, and just in case this Bakoo was a dick, I grabbed a Refulgent. It was something that goes beyond light. This was kept in a metal bottle and had been taken from the heart of a fire demon. Once unleashed and aimed at your target, they’d be blinded before the light devoured them. I’d prefer not to use it on something as simple as a Bakoo, but if it turned out to be a nasty one, I’d have to prove a little nastier than normal.
I packed up, had a third coffee—though drinking it caused me too feel more nervous and jittery than I had as of late—and then I got changed into something somewhat presentable. Before I left, my phone started to ring and out of habit I picked it up without even checking who it was.
“This is Dillon,” I said, and was bombarded with curses and accusations of being a fraud.
“You should rot in Hell. God would never make a world with monsters, you blasphemer. I hope you die from cancer.”
There was more of that, but I hung up without a word and put all unknown numbers back on silent. Only people in my phone book would be able to get through. I hated to do it, but I was busy enough now, thanks to the job at Don Parks’ place.
My head started to pound and my heart was beating a little too heavy in my chest. I knew it would eventually go away, but it was really shitty for the meantime. I decided to down a few Advil before I headed out and drove over to Mr Parks’ house in the East End.
The house was just off of Woodbine, near Kingston Road. In that area, all the houses had a certain look to them, a similar style. They were also very close and cramped together, as though at some point the spaces between houses had been sold off and new houses had been squished into the resulting slots. Nobody had driveways there, or even alleys between them. I’d have a hard time fitting my arm between one property and the next. It was too close for comfort, as far as I was concerned.
Halfway down the street, I found his number and pulled up close to the curb. I didn’t see any signs saying I couldn’t park there, so I risked it. These side streets can be tricky, though. Sometimes it’s just certain hours you can park, other times you have to be parked on a specific side of the street to avoid the dreaded parking enforcement officer.
I walked up the steps to the porch of the house and tried to see if I could smell the burning rubber from out front. There was nothing, so it was unlikely the smell Mr Parks had described was coming from an outside source. I rang the bell and waited. If this was just a Bakoo, I knew it should be no more than an hour until I was on my way again. The work was nice. It gave me time to step away from all the dumb stress I’d been overwhelmed by. I didn’t really want to think about anything that had been going on lately. Not the video, not the whole mess with Chance Anderson, and not—
“Ah, Dillon! Thanks for being so quick. Come on in.”
I couldn’t believe it. My heart sank, my stomach turned into a sea during high winds, and my anger nearly got the better of me. I hate being lied to. When I get tricked, my first thought is throwing a fist at the very least, but I knew whatever the reason for the charade, letting my baser instincts take over would be even worse than anything that might come out of all of it.
“You look surprised to see me,” the hunter who’d been in Godfrey’s the other day said, a smirk on his face. “I figured this would be a good way to meet you on your own ground, in a way. Having you show up in work mode, it’s better than me just showing up at your place, or at your girlfriend’s house.”
“What the hell is this about?” I asked, and bit back all the rage boiling in me. The day had already started to feel like a bit of a rollercoaster. That was the story of my recent life.
“Why don’t you come in so we can talk? I think we have a lot of ground to cover, so we might as well get comfortable.”
“What do I possibly have to say to you? I don’t even know you.”
“We can start with why I’m here. You’ve been fucking up a lot, Dillon. And I mean so much more than ever before. The Collective is not happy. I’ve been sent here to evaluate you and see if we need to take you off this planet, as you are clearly not willing to follow the rules. Now, would you like to come in so we can talk about this, or would you rather everyone on this ugly street know our business?”
I felt trapped, and more than a little afraid. All my fears were coming true in one brief statement. They knew. The beings in charge of all the hunters on Earth were watching us and knew what’d been going on. A few isolated breaks in the rules was one thing, but add them all up and I might be on a one way ticket to some horrible corner of an unknown universe.
“Come on, Dillon. Let’s go inside and we’ll talk about this. I have a friend inside as well, someone who would love to see you.”
My mind went right to Rouge. Had this piece of shit grabbed her and brought her here to punish me; threaten me? I needed to get in there and see. I all but pushed past him aside, and walked quickly into the house, and he grabbed hold of my wrist.
“You need to relax, Dillon. You’ll see them soon enough.” He shut the door and I tried to pull my hand from his, but his grip was surprisingly strong. “I’m a Thrak. We’re a lot stronger than your species. You’re a Treemor, right?”
“Where is she?” I asked, ignoring his remark and question. I knew what a Thrak was, and yes, they were much stronger than my species. In fact, I always found it strange that a being so large could fit itself into one of the human hosts we use when on Earth.
“What do you mean, she? I don’t think it’s a girl, but hey, what do I know?”
I relaxed a bit at that and Parks let go of my arm.
“Oh! Did you think I had your little girlfriend? No, that’s not allowed. She’s an Earthbound being. You, of all people, should know we’re not allowed to harm something from here. Or maybe you don’t. That might be the problem. Can I get you something to drink?”
Since it wasn’t Rouge in there, I thought for a second of just leaving altogether. What would any of this accomplish? I stopped in the hall and turned back towards the door, ready to go, when Parks put a hand on my shoulder.
“I know you want to leave, but I think it’s time you stop to see how serious things have become, Dillon. I’m going to put all the cards on the table, and then you’ll see where things stand. The Collective isn’t very happy, so maybe, just maybe if I tell you what you’re doing wrong, you can stop it and secure your place here. They don’t want to pull you from here and stick you in some terrible sector of the universe, but with the path you’ve been on as of late, it’s exactly what they’ll do. Now, like I asked a second ago, can I get you something to drink? You look like you could use something.”
; “I’m fine,” I said with reluctance, and followed Parks down the hallway to the living room area. It was dark there, but I could tell something was in the room. I could hear movement, and a slight, almost whimpering sound.
Parks turned the lights on and in the middle of the floor, surrounded by a bright blue couch and a rocking chair, was a Gargar. Not just any Gargar, but the one who had been left to protect Sammy. The very one I sent off to see if the Volteer was still at the house he was living in. It was a bad thing he was here. It was yet another rule I’d broken that Parks and the Collective clearly knew about.
The hits just keep coming.
“I think you know this little guy here. He says he knows you,” Parks said, and leaned down so he was closer to the Gargar. The creature lay on its back, a small black stone sitting on his chest. It looked like it could be a Swart Stone, a crystal from Aaxees region. It has the ability to paralyze certain types of creatures, but can also be used to turn types of liquid solid. The Gargar’s gaze was on me. He looked pathetic as he struggled under the crystal, but it was no use. He wasn’t going to be able to move while it was there.
“Why are you doing this?” I asked Parks in a low voice, already feeling very defeated.
“I’m doing this to show you the errors of your way, Dillon. You let this thing stay here, a creature with no allowable reason to be on this planet. You were sent here by the Collective to ensure order is kept and rules are followed, so tell me, why is this Gargar still here?”
“I left him to protect—”
“No, that’s your job. You’re here to protect this world from things like this ugly little worm. So, try again. Why didn’t you send him back? Why didn’t you dispatch him?”
“You don’t know the whole story. You weren’t there. There was a Daaf and—”
“Did you let it go, too?”
“No! I took care of that, but there was a baby in the room. The Daaf had been attacking it, and it wasn’t the first one to show up there. The Gargar was protecting the child. I made a choice to leave it there to keep the kid safe.”
“You know I have a name,” the Gargar whispered, still wiggling under the crystal.
“Nobody’s talking to you, slug,” Parks said, and gave the Gargar a light kick to the head. That shut him up. “Fine, there was a Daaf there, but you could’ve sealed the breach and made sure none of them came through. Right?”
“Not at the time. I was all out of Firma Pitch. Godfrey said it would be a while before he could get his hands on any, so I made a call and let the Gargar stay.”
“Okay. And when you got some, did you go back?”
I shook my head. “The Gargar was never a real issue, so in the weeks after when my supply had been refilled, I never thought to go back and seal the breach and send the Gargar back to his world. It was an oversight on my part, but nothing bad happened.”
“Until the Volteer came through the breech you failed to seal. Just a little oversight, right, Dillon?”
Oh, shit.
“I can see by your wide-eyed expression that you knew about that too, but did you go and check it out?”
“I never had a chance,” I lied, but it wasn’t very convincing.
“You had time,” the Gargar moaned. “I came to you and asked for help and you told me to go deal with it so you could watch your girlfriend peel her skins off.”
I shot the little bastard a look and wished I had dispatched him all those years ago. It’s the kind of thanks you get. You help someone out, and they find a way to fuck you hard the first chance they get. Sure, I could have dropped what I was doing and gone to deal with it, but there was no sure bet I’d find the Volteer right then and there. I had made a promise to Rouge to help her with a smarmy producer, but as it turned out, he hadn’t even been there. Hindsight is 20/20, I guess.
“So, you thought seeing your girlfriend strip—and we’ll get to that soon enough—was more important than going to stop a Volteer? You do know how dangerous they can be?”
“I do. That’s why I sent this little shit to go see if it was still at the house. But he never came back to me.”
“But you’re the hunter. You should have gone and if it wasn’t there, you could’ve tried—oh I don’t know—hunting it down. Luckily, I ran into this thing and he told me the whole story. I went to the house and took care of the Volteer and then brought the Gargar back here to tell me everything. Apparently, he’s not the only one you’ve let stay here. Is that true?”
I said nothing. I wasn’t going to admit to it, nor was I going to deny it and have him pull some other monster I’d given a break to out of the wood work to throw in my face. I was starting to feel too overwhelmed, and thought again about leaving. I felt choked by the stale air in the house. I shifted the collar of my shirt as though it would help, but the feeling was not physical, I knew that. I was stressed in a way I rarely am, and needed fresh air.
“You okay, Dillon? You sure you don’t want, or need, a drink? You’re looking a tad pale.”
“I don’t want your fucking drink! Got it?”
“You need to calm down. Snapping at me—a guy who’s here to see if you even deserve to be on this planet—is not a good thing. Maybe you should take a deep breath and relax a bit.”
“Just get on with it. I need to get out of here.”
“We’ll see about that,” Parks said, pulling out a silver knife from inside his coat. In the dim, light I could see symbols swirling like smoke on the blade and knew what it was. Similar to my Tincher, it was a spellbound blade, blessed and cursed, used for one thing: to dispatch creatures not meant to be on Earth. With lightning speed, the blade zipped through the air, seeming to cut through the light and leave a trail of shadows behind it. I tensed up, ready for an impact I had no time to stop. There was so much I had wanted to do before leaving here, but he wasn’t going to give me the chance. I closed my eyes, brought Rouge’s face up in my memory, and heard the knife hit home.
I was still there.
The Gargar was not. Only the crystal and a pile of what had made up the creature’s body lay where he had been just moments before.
“Now that that’s done, let’s go sit on the couch like civilized adults and try and sort this out. I have a report to submit.”
We sat there for over thirty minutes and Parks went through all my wrongdoings. He had it all down on paper. He had the Gargar, the Volteer, the fact that I’d allowed seven other beings stay on Earth aside from that, and that I had killed earthbound creatures. He also had the website, the YouTube video, the fact that I had allowed Godfrey to leave his store, and of course the icing on the cake for him was my relationship with Rouge. I listened to it all and was glad he only knew a fraction of the things I’d done wrong. I was actually surprised no mention was made of the fact that I worked with humans at all. The Collective really wants us to roam the shadows, to keep it all quiet, but there’s no real point. It’s easier to work with the people affected by the experiences and with law enforcement to get things resolved faster. In the end though, it seemed as if most of his focus ended up coming down to Rouge, which didn’t surprise me that much. It was pretty much the number one rule one not to break.
And I’d shattered the hell out of it.
“What were you thinking? Having relations with a human is, first off, disgusting, but you know how the Collective sees that. It’s not just the law they set that you’ve been breaking; it’s the laws of the natural order. What if you got her pregnant?”
“I would deal with that when it came,” I said.
“See, there, that’s part of the problem with you, Dillon. You’re way too cavalier about all of it. It’s like you don’t take it seriously at all.”
“I take it more seriously than you can know. You have no idea what this is like, the stress I’m under right now. You’ve been on Earth—what? A week, two tops? The Collective sends y
ou to fuck with me, stress me out, to what end? I do my job. I’ve been doing it a long time.”
“Since 1884 it says,” Parks reads off a paper, and I nodded. Sounds about right. “That’s a long time to be here. That could be part of the problem. You think you’re untouchable, you became complacent and that led you to making mistakes.”
“Mistakes?” I laughed for a moment, though I wanted to yell it at him. “My track record is pretty damn good. And I stopped a Hellion not that long ago.”
“Which the Collective appreciates, but it doesn’t mean you can abuse the rules.”
“Maybe they should appreciate more, instead of sending you here to make my life harder. Aren’t there bigger fish than me to fry in the whole universe? Maybe they could try focusing on the little uprising going on instead of my stupid mistakes and judgement calls.”
Parks looked confused.
“Are you telling me you don’t know anything about the uprising? For the last two years I’ve been dealing with more and more creatures coming through. Most of them are running for their lives because whatever is going on out there is threatening them. But they’re not the only ones getting through. The Hellion used a Porter to get here. I’ve put this stuff in my reports. More than half the creatures I deal with are talking about an uprising, a whole underground fighting against the Collective and what they stand for. You can’t not know about it.”
“Of course I know, and so does the Collective,” Parks said, doing his very best to lie to me, but his eyes gave him away. He had no idea what I was talking about, but that didn’t mean the higher-ups were as blind to the turnings of the universes. “We’re getting sidetracked here, Dillon. All that talk about uprisings is just fluff right now. You are the subject. So, what are we going to do about all this?”
“Clearly, you’re going to write your report and they’ll do what they’ll do. Either way, I’ll be allowed to stay and deal with these monster and demons, or I won’t.”
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