He tapped in the password to unlock the computer, and then cued up a video. Clepstone was the star attraction—it showed him breaking the wards surrounding the funeral home.
“Is he…”
“Pissing on them? Yup,” Warren said when the video started looping. “Now you know why we’re here.”
“What happened to Clepstone?”
“He’s been by a couple of times to gloat, usually with a—well, I’m not sure what they are, so I’m going to stick with ‘female’ for now—or three hanging off of him.”
“Daemons?”
“Probably. They look human, until you turn your head, and then they look off—the teeth are wrong, or the ears, or they’ve got a tail, or something like that.”
“Fucking Clepstone,” I agreed. “Bastard was always bragging about the number of women he’d had.”
“You hungry?” Warren asked, leading me over to the food supply.
He was right about one thing—we had enough MREs to last a long time. We might have issues with constipation, but there was no way the four of us would run out of food anytime soon.
“They brought all the food out of the kitchen here, as well,” Warren said, pointing to a pile of industrial-sized can goods. “I tossed the meat.”
“Probably a good idea,” I replied, pulling a Pepperoni Pizza Slice MRE out of the box.
“Score,” Warren said.
“Are these that good?”
“Honestly? No. However, compared to some of the shit you get in an MRE? Ambrosia, man, pure ambrosia.”
He pulled out a bag of beef goulash and a couple of bottles of water, and we sat down.
“So, you were telling me about Clepstone?”
“Not much left to tell, other than we haven’t seen him today. That could be because you’re here, or they could have dropped him back in the real world.”
“Right. You want me to talk to Butler?”
“You mind?”
“Part of my job.”
Butler was Catholic, but I didn’t think he’d object to confessing to a “near” Catholic like me.
“Thanks, man. Sounds weird, but I was really worried they were going to feed us into the daemonic equivalent of a woodchipper feet first, and he’d die unshriven.”
“Like I said, all part of the job. You want me to talk to him now?”
“We’ve got time to eat.”
The pizza was a pizza-like substance. Not bad for something the government had been promising for close to thirty years.
They’d put Butler in his own cell. Warren was right; Butler looked like death warmed over.
“He awake?” I asked Townsend.
“Yes, he’s awake,” Butler replied. “I look like hell, and I feel like ass, but I’m awake.”
“I’ll go bug Warren,” Townsend said. “If he has any problems, shout.”
I sat on the bunk across from Butler.
“Damn, Jesse, who’d you piss off?”
“I think you met him. Short, dark-skinned guy with a shiny black beard?”
“Wears a lot of skirts?” Butler said, chuckling and then wincing. “Damn, that hurts.”
“I hear they did a number on you,” I said.
“I was taking a piss when they overran the wards,” Butler said. “Finished, zipped everything in place, and shot two of them in the hallway before the toilet finished flushing.”
I laughed at the thought.
“You know, the thought of going mano-a-mano with daemons with my dork hanging out kinda scared me,” Butler said. “I hear you’re fearless, though.”
“Oh, you heard about that, huh?”
“Dude, everyone’s heard about Jesse Salazar, the man who waved his junk at daemons!”
Butler started coughing. Townsend stuck his head in the cell, listening. Finally, Butler’s cough slowed enough for him to take a breath.
“Sorry about that, fuckers broke some ribs and collapsed one of my lungs. Townsend stuck a great big fucking needle in my side.”
“I could have let you lay there and pant,” Townsend replied.
“Oh, I’m glad you did it, don’t get me wrong,” Butler said. “I just hate really big fucking needles.”
“Don’t be such a pussy,” Townsend said.
“I’m ok, Doc,” Butler said. “I need to talk to Jesse, ok?”
“Sure thing,” Townsend said.
“So, yeah,” Butler said after a couple of minutes. “Warren and Townsend have been doing everything they can to keep my ass alive, but I’m not going to make it.”
“You don’t know that,” I said.
“Yeah, I do, Father,” he replied. “The collapsed lung was just the start. I can feel shit moving inside that isn’t supposed to move. They beat the living shit out of me, and short of a miracle, I’m going to die. I’m good with that, I guess.”
“‘I guess’ seems to indicate you’re not good with it,” I said.
“It’s… it’s just Brenda, you know? I don’t want her to have to wait seven years to have me declared dead.”
“You think she’s going to wait that long for you?” I asked.
He looked at the smirk on my face and smiled. “Yeah, you’re right.”
We both knew Brenda would wait until the day she died for proof he was gone.
“Besides, QMG will make sure she’s taken care of.”
“True.”
“You have anything you want to get off your chest?”
“This is the weirdest confessional I’ve ever been in, Jesse.”
“The job does make strange demands,” I replied.
“Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned…”
* * * * *
Chapter 22 – Diindiisi
Walking from the R&D room to the locker room, Dalma decided to show us a new talent—she sang a song about the “leatheroos” Fred and his band of merry tricksters wore.
“Leatheroos are fun to wear!” She had accompanied this with two high kicks.
“Woman…” Fred growled, ominously.
“They scratch and chafe and pull your hair! Bump-bump.”
Fred tried an appeal to authority. “Diindiisi, can you do nothing about this troublesome wench?”
“I could try a verse with her,” I replied.
“I miss Jesse,” Fred grumped.
“You know, he’d have probably offered to take you to the Iron Bear in that outfit,” Padgett said.
“Enough!” Fred shouted, rolling his eyes heavenward before storming off.
“He’s a bit touchy this morning,” I said to Ozzie. “Is there a problem?”
“Yes, but it’s not what you think. Well, probably not what you think,” Ozzie said. “He’d planned on wearing a pair of leather pants, but they were too loose, so he ended up in chaps like everyone else.”
“He had an issue because they were too loose?” I asked.
“Yes, well, those pants didn’t have belt loops,” Alfie said. “So when he tried to walk around a bit to see what he could do, they slipped.”
“And that made him feel uncomfortable?”
“No…but my comment that if he wore them, and his hands were full while we were interrogating Tatsuo, he could keep the pants up if he kept his shapely butt cheeks clenched in a death grip on the back seam probably didn’t help,” Alfie said.
“You know, he does have a nice ass,” Dalma said to Padgett.
“Gurl. You just noticing that?”
“I can still hear you, the acoustics here are wonderful, thanks for asking,” Fred said, increasing his pace.
“Yes, I see,” I said. “Although they are right, you do have a nice ass, Fred.”
“Diindiisi! What would Jesse say, you hitting on another man?” Dalma asked, shock on her face.
“He’d probably agree with my assessment, and then add ‘if I were into dwarfs’ or something like that,” I said with a sigh.
“We’re going to get him back,” Dalma said.
“Oh, I know that,” I replie
d. “I just miss him. You understand?”
“Yes,” she replied. “Would you like to talk about it?”
“If you’d like,” I said. “It’s a nice morning, we can sit outside.”
“My concept of a nice morning is different from yours, but if you can take it, so can I,” Dalma said.
“It is a bit chilly, I suppose,” I said, taking a seat on a bench. “I…I guess I’m just getting used to weather again.”
“I can’t imagine spending a hundred years there.”
“I didn’t know it was that long until Jesse told me—I had to deal with the day-to-day survival aspect. Some things were strange, I’ll admit.”
“Such as?”
“Labels on cans. One way I could tell time had passed was to look at can labels. Even then, the first time I came across a can of Spam, I wasn’t sure what it was.”
“Spam takes some getting used to,” Dalma said.
“But you asked about Jesse,” I said.
“Yes. You seem to be handling things rather well. To be honest, I’d be freaking out about it.”
“Jesse and I talked about things like this happening when we first got married,” I said.
“Wait, you talked about plane-walking when you got married?”
“No—well, yes, in a roundabout way,” I said with a laugh. “We’re still not sure if having spent a large amount of time on a different plane makes you more likely to accidentally plane walk.”
“Sola reminds me of that every time he takes blood,” she replied, rubbing her elbow. “Damn vampire.”
“I don’t like it either, to be perfectly honest,” I said, “but it could be worse.”
“Yeah, they could be drawing six vials, like on Jesse. Thank God for not having a baseline sample.”
“They’ll probably want to draw more, depending on where he is,” I said.
“Not to change the subject,” she started.
“But to change the subject,” I answered.
“Yes. You said you talked about it?”
“Jesse was concerned when we first got married that we might have long periods of separation due to work—especially with both of us falling under the ‘religious expert’ classification. There was no guarantee we’d both end up on the same team.”
“Or even in the same city,” Dalma added.
“Yes. Therefore, we had a long talk about it in…London I think it was. He wanted to make sure I was comfortable with the possibility.”
“How’d you answer him?”
“Science.”
“Science?”
“Yes.” I laughed. “You remember that class in cross-cultural aesthetics they made us take in training?”
“Haven’t found a use for that yet.”
“You’re fitting in better than everyone else with the dwarfs,” I said.
“That? That’s not cross-cultural, that’s just…okay, I see your point. So you laid some of that bullshit on Jesse?”
“Not exactly. I pointed out that while I had been in the Shadow Lands for over a hundred years, and had spent twenty-four years travelling the great societies of the Gilded Age, I was born on the Great Plains at a time when a winter hunt might mean the hunter not coming back. Even the act of hunting might mean days of separation.”
“He bought that?”
“No, he called it complete and utter bullshit, which it was. However, he got that I understood that we might have to spend time apart. It helps if I pretend he’s out hunting for the winter,” I said.
“Oh. Would you mind if I asked you one more question?”
“Go ahead.”
“You two seemed to get married awful quickly. You went from him rescuing you to getting married.”
“Jesse had a problem with that, too,” I said. “Even after I made my most compelling argument, he still said he wasn’t sure.”
She looked me over from the soles of my feet to the top of my head. “I’m sure your best argument was ‘compelling.’”
“You think I threw myself on him like some three-penny dollymop?”
“What’s a dollymop?”
“Prostitute,” I replied. “But no, I didn’t use my body to ensnare him. I didn’t even use the ‘I had a vision’ argument, although I told him that once.”
“Then how?”
“I got to know him,” she said. “And remember, I come from a culture that lacks the modern American belief in ‘true love’ that lasts forever. I saw Jesse that first time and knew he was the one, however.”
Tatsuo came out of the locker room, followed by the dwarfs. “Are we going to go put the Piasa to the question?”
“No,” I said, rising.
“Why not?” she asked, an edge of upset in her tone.
“Wouldn’t do any good even if we could talk to him,” Fred said. “Goodhart asked me to look over the reports of their conversations with him. They’re getting nothing from that dragon.”
“How so?”
“First, everything has to go through the translator, who the Piasa says has an accent that isn’t right. Because of this, the scaly bastard is only slightly cooperative.”
“Well, I can see that,” Tatsuo replied, “I mean, if he can’t understand them, it’s hard for him.”
“They found a Mississauga shaman who was willing to fly down from Canada and listen in. He says the Jesuit, whom he trained, by the way, doesn’t have an accent, and the difference is linguistic drift over the course of centuries—after all, the Piasa originally spoke with a different tribe, and there could be some differences in word use.”
“Well, it has been…”
Fred held up a hand, interrupting her. “Problem with that is, the Piasa has learned some English. The second day he was here, he asked for ‘another strange, hairless bison’ in Algonquin. Day three, he asked for a cow—inserting the English word neatly into the Algonquin sentence.”
“So he’s learning?”
“Or he’s faking it,” Fred said. “I’m voting for the second option. The company borrowed a couple of C-RAMs from the government to cover him. He never asked what they were.”
“I wouldn’t either,” Tatsuo said. “What is a C-RAM, anyway?”
“The military uses it to protect troops in the field. It’s a radar attached to a heavy-duty machine gun.”
“Sounds like it’s beneath his notice.”
“So if you were sitting in a field being fed and someone rolled a pair of boxes smelling of gunpowder and death onto the edge of the field, you wouldn’t ask questions?”
“When you put it that way…you may have a point.”
“He also asked if the test equipment they were using to monitor him was a ‘tricorder.’”
“Wait, what?”
“He said tricorder. I can play the recording if you’d like.”
“No, I believe you,” Tatsuo said. “I just can’t believe he’d lie about that.”
“Lie about what? He’s obviously been awake for a while. From the sound of things, he’s got cable in whatever hole he’s lying up in these days.”
“That…that old bastard!” Tatsuo shouted.
“You know, come to think of it, it might be worth it to take her to see him,” Fred said.
“You think?”
“Oh, yeah. The scaly old bastard would see her as a dragon right off. When his Ancient Lithic Wyrm tongue failed, he’d probably try running through any languages he knew just to get into her pants,” Fred said.
“Ewww, gross, you perverted little runt! As if I’d…ewwwwwwwwwwwwww!”
Fred grinned, blew on his fingertips, and buffed them on his jacket.
“Gotcha,” he said, walking toward the parking lot.
“I hate you,” Tatsuo said, following him.
“I’m sure you do,” Fred replied, turning to me. “Will the elves be meeting us on site?”
“Yes. They wanted time to sight in their new weapons.”
“I take it you have plans to put the mages to the test?”
“Yes. Something simple. You could show them your pert buttocks as a distraction,” I said.
Fred stopped. “I can show them…you’re kidding, right? Please, tell me you’re kidding, Diindiisi.”
I repeated his finger blowing gesture.
“Got you.”
“I swear to the Forge Gods, I’m joining a monastery when we get Jesse back. Some deep monastery where I never see another human or dragon again!” Fred stomped off again.
“You know, Foreman, he’s quite good at stomping,” Tatsuo said.
“It’s a dwarf thing,” Ozzie said. “Stomping is good for the blood pressure. Keeps a dwarf fit.”
“It does wonders for the glutes,” Tatsuo said, her eyes round and full of innocence.
“I haven’t figured out if you’re being honest or just screwing with us,” Ozzie said.
“Oh, love, you should know her tell by now,” Alfie said from his right side. “Watch her eyes.”
“I can’t help it,” Tatsuo said. “My grandmother made me watch Urusei Yatsura when she thought my mother wasn’t paying attention. Anime is bad enough, but when you don’t speak Japanese, the best thing on bootleg VHS tapes is the commercials.”
“You have any questions about that, Diindiisi?” Dalma asked.
“I believe she is referencing some sort of entertainment program, only available in an untranslated format that was originally recorded from broadcast television,” I replied.
“You…you looked that up.”
“No,” I replied. “Jesse told me about some things his dad watched when he was a kid.”
“Has Jesse been watching anime with you?”
“Jesse hates it,” I said. “I don’t see the attraction, myself. Unless you’re into yaoi, Dalma?”
“No.”
“Well, then,” Alfie said. “Foreman, may I ask you something?”
“As long as you’re not looking for anime recommendations, yes,” I answered.
“Are we… are we going to be able to rescue Jesse?”
“Yes.”
* * * * *
Chapter 23 – Jesse
“The Lord has put away all your sins,” I said when I finished absolving Butler.
Last Call Page 17