“Yes sir,” Wyman responded. “First thing this morning as ordered, sir.” Keith felt certain that Wyman’s “supplement” was expandinol, and yet he didn’t seem to be experiencing the kind of transformation that Lupe or his opponent in the coliseum had. Either Wyman had built up a tolerance to it or the expandinol had been diluted. Maybe he needed a second dose to trigger the effect?
Keith edged just slightly closer to the door.
“Good man.” Gregson glanced again to the vials of blood in Keith’s hand. “Now tell me, son, you don’t want to give a sample to this guy, do you?”
“No, sir,” Wyman said.
So, not too dumb to figure out who your boss is, Keith thought.
“Did you sign a release?” Gregson spoke to Wyman but fixed his attention on Lee.
“I didn’t bring one. I’m sorry. Look, I’m not trying to get anybody in trouble,” Keith said, trying to take the heat off Lee. “I only want to find out where the pathogen came from to avoid public panic. The samples are just to eliminate him as a source.”
“But I’m afraid without a release and Airman Wyman’s consent I can’t allow this.” Gregson shook his head. “You’re going to have to hand those samples over.”
Some decisions are made after intricate deliberation and soulful thought and some are made in a lightning flash of energy and action that arcs across the consciousness and galvanizes in muscular purpose. It was the latter kind that Keith made when he said, “Okay then, but what about this?”
Gregson, Wyman and even Lee all looked at him with expectant curiosity. Then Keith bolted out the door.
The benefit of wearing a lab coat and carrying blood samples while dashing between the closing doors of the hospital elevator was that it lent Keith the air of a very concerned lab tech. The other medical personnel smiled at him and nodded greetings as the elevator descended. Two women in scrubs chatted about their prospective dinners with an older man in a lab coat. A young man dressed in an MP uniform frowned down at his bandaged right hand.
If any of them heard the strange groaning noise from above them, they didn’t take note. But Keith knew at once that the doors to the elevator shaft were being wrenched open on the floor above. He edged closer to the doors. A moment later the entire car shuddered as something very heavy slammed into the roof. Metallic clangs rang out as blows rained down against the ceiling of the car.
Keith guessed that the expandinol in Wyman’s system had triggered a transformation—probably in response to the stress of Keith stealing his blood. Or maybe it was something that Colonel Gregson had induced. But those were definitely the furious howls and curses of a transformed man coming from overhead. Paxton Carter had produced the same growls and snarls when he’d chased Keith across the sand.
Keith’s heart pounded and he felt sweat rising along the back of his neck. He did not want to be trapped in this small space with another version of Paxton Carter.
The three other occupants of the elevator stared up in shocked confusion and alarm.
“Oh my God!” one of the women whispered. “Is that a cougar?”
Keith considered his mage pistol, but then the elevator stilled and the doors opened. Keith and the other occupants raced out. The women shouted to a group of nurses and the MP called out to a man standing sentry near the hospital doors.
“There’s a fucking cougar on top of the elevator!”
None of them heard Gregson as he came barreling down the stairs. Keith sprinted out the hospital doors. Warm evening air rushed over him, tuning his sweat clammy. He raced down the narrow sidewalk as streetlights all down the wide streets lit up. He wondered how quickly Gregson could put in a call to the MPs? Less than a minute for sure. And the first place they’d expect Keith to go would be to his car, because that was the only means of escape Keith had.
From behind him he heard that familiar howl. Keith glanced back over his shoulder. Purple as a bruise and swollen, Wyman burst through the hospital doors with his uniform in tatters. Blood from his battle with the elevator colored his huge clenched fists. His sunken eyes met Keith’s gaze and he bounded down the steps.
Keith hauled ass for the parking lot and his car. He dodged between airmen and mechanics—many of whom hardly noticed his passage as Wyman charged down the twilit street like something from a horror film. Then the wail of claxons shattered the air. The sound hammered down. Desperation prickled across Keith’s skin. In the distance before him he sighted three MP jeeps zooming up the road.
It would be better to be taken in by the MPs than to get caught by Wyman, but not by a whole lot. Because either way he was going to end up in Gregson’s clutches. If Gregson didn’t straight-out kill him, he would certainly disappear him.
Then Keith noticed the flash of silver out of the corner of his eye. Setting sunlight gleamed golden across Hangar 13. A crazy inspiration rushed through Keith’s mind. He turned down the next street and pelted for the hangar. He could only hope he was still as lucky as his NIAD file said he was and as fast as his high school gym told him.
The sentry looked up at him with an expression of recognition.
“There’s an emergency!” Keith shouted. “I have to get to the jets, right now!”
The sentry stepped out of his way and Keith raced past. Out on the tarmac he sighted two of the glossy black jets. The gold letters painted across Annie’s fuselage glowed as they caught the sunlight.
Keith opened FaeBook on his phone and messaged Annie: “Do you have a pilot?”
Her reply came instantly. “Not yet.”
“I’m coming for you.”
A mechanic jogged toward him and Keith waved the security pass that Sergeant Shakur had issued him earlier.
“It’s Annie! I have to get to her! NOW!” Keith shouted as he ran. To his utter relief the mechanic nodded and hurried to a small control station. Annie’s canopy opened just as Keith launched himself up onto the ladder at her side. His breath burned in his chest as he climbed hand over hand. As he swung into the cockpit he saw Wyman racing across the tarmac. Keith shoved the rolling ladder away from Annie with all his strength. The ladder toppled just as Wyman mounted it.
“Close the canopy!” Keith shouted into the headset, only to realize that the canopy was already sealing him in. The air inside the jet stirred with cool little gusts.
“Put on your safety harness, Keith,” Annie instructed him. “The preprogrammed flight is a vertical ascent. Fifteen hundred feet in fifteen seconds.”
Keith felt the entire jet tense as Annie’s engines roared to life.
“Holy fuck.” Keith fumbled into the harness. “Is this plane even pressurized?”
“Sorry, but no,” she said. “I can’t override the program. We take off in five, four—”
Keith heard the heavy thud and glanced out the cockpit to see Wyman clambering up onto the wing.
“Three, two,” Annie murmured. Wyman pressed his swollen face against the cockpit window.
“Don’t worry, Keith.” Annie’s voice remained unperturbed. “He can’t get in.”
“Are you sure?”
“One.”
Annie vaulted forward. Keith rocked back into his seat as if he’d been hurled there. Wyman rolled off Annie’s wing and lay sprawled on the tarmac. Annie giggled, then she surged into the sky and Keith struggled to pull air into his lungs. Tears filled his eyes as a weird numbness crept over him. He was blacking out, he realized.
Then he noticed the blinking blue button just in front of him. He needed a registered pilot’s DNA.
“What are the odds?” Keith gasped as a giddy dizziness swept over him.
His arms felt like sandbags as he pulled one of the vials of blood from the pocket of his lab coat. He daubed a drop of Wyman’s blood on his finger and hit the button.
The crushing pressure immediately dropped away and Keith gasped in a deep breath. Annie leveled off.
“Oh Keith, are you planning to fly me to meet Jerry?” Annie’s voice came soft and breathle
ss.
“Nah, you’re going to fly me to the Denver International Airport ,where we’re going to have Jerry come to us.” Keith found his phone and pressed Gunther’s contact info, then typed:
“I’m going to need you to come and arrest me at Denver International Airport, before the local NIAD branch or Col Gregson can. I love you. PS: Bring the strike force.”
Chapter Ten
Keith spent the next twenty-four hours in NIAD solitary lockup musing aloud to himself about how honorable intentions blur the line between theft and commandeering a vehicle, as well as the line between liberating a sentient being and stealing a piece of military equipment. When, finally, his union rep arrived, she told him to just shut up.
His lawyer arrived ten minutes later and seconded the rep’s advice. Then she explained that the investigation into the circumstances of Keith’s arrest had uncovered Gregson’s much farther-reaching crimes. Major Lee and Sergeant Shakur, as well as six pilots, had agreed to testify. His lawyer had arranged for the majority of the charges against Keith to be dropped in exchange for his testimony.
“Don’t look so smug, Curry,” she told him. “You’re still going to have to pay a whopping fine.”
“But I’m free to go?”
“Just as soon as you put down a payment on that whopping fine.”
Giddy with joy, he put the entire amount on his Technetium card. It reduced his balance by one percent.
His first act when he returned to the office was to file a complaint about Nash’s substandard work ethic. That coupled with Major Lee’s testimony about his failure to respond to her complaints ensured Nash’s transfer to a janitorial position in a hell-world embassy.
After that Keith spent a long time—weeks and weeks—giving deposition after deposition about what he’d learned at Peterson.
A review Colonel Gregson’s activities by NIAD’s intelligence services led to his dismissal from the air force, though no jail time was awarded, which Keith felt was a travesty of justice. But he was happy when two weeks later Jerry returned to active duty as a pilot. Most of the other trans-goblins followed suit, returning to their units. A few stayed with NIAD though. Keith looked forward to meeting them at the strike force cookouts.
As a gesture of thanks, Jerry sent him a gold and blue embroidered Space Wing patch. He even posted a pic of it on FaeBook. After that Keith received several more patches from various trans-goblins he’d help reinstate. More than twenty by the end of it. He put them together in a display frame.
The beginning of June slid by in an unexpected heat wave, so Keith was happy, though nervous, when the solstice came to have a reason to go to foggy San Francisco with Gunther to visit his family.
The extended clan—fifty strong at least—filled the Heartmans’ backyard. The air smelled of eucalyptus and sea spray and hot sauce. One of Gunther’s cousins was already playing a cover of some heavy metal ballad on the bone harp. Gunther peeled off to say hi to his godfather while Keith beelined for Gunther’s mother. She sat on her acacia-wood lounger drinking some sort of flaming cocktail while the younger women tended the big cauldrons of boiling meat.
She greeted Keith warmly, then glanced down at the bag he held.
“What have you got there?”
“I’ve got a present for you.” Keith’s mouth was so dry he could barely speak. “I hope you’ll accept it.”
Agnes unwrapped the patches he’d had mounted and framed. She studied it for some time, clearly perplexed by what she should make of it. In fact she took so long that Gunther’s father and uncle drifted over as well to survey the gift. Gunther’s father seemed just as confused as his mother, but the uncle seemed to understand immediately what Keith was about to do.
Keith knew this because he took out his phone and started filming.
“It’s lovely,” she said. Her brow furrowed slightly in puzzlement at her brother’s sudden videography attack.
Well, now or never.
Keith just hoped he could keep his voice steady.
“Mrs. Heartman, these are the badges given to me by the many trans-goblin service members who I helped regain their rightful rank during my recent investigation. Twenty-two soldiers from nine goblin clans. I hope this will be enough evidence of my courage and strength that you grant me the honor of marrying your son.”
Agnes sat speechless. Keith’s heart sank like a stone. Then she rose, took a deep drink of her cocktail and began some long chant in goblin. The whole family fell silent and attentive, gathering closer.
Keith didn’t understand a word that she said. But at the end of it she took Gunther’s hand and put it in his.
It stayed there till the end of the night.
Acknowledgments
The stories in this book were made possible by so many people that it’s hard to imagine it ever being produced without the great community of independent creators I’ve been privileged to know. First thank you to Josh Lanyon, Astrid Amara and Ginn Hale for their work on the original collection of stories. Jordan Castillo Price for commissioning the second Keith Curry novella for your anthology, Charmed and Dangerous; Tommy Jordan not only for portraying Keith in the audiobook, but for instigating the creation of a whole new set of tales of food inspection for the Lauren Proves Magic Is Real! podcast. Then there are the invisible yet indispensable contributions of editors Anne Scott, JD Hope and Megan Gendell. And finally we come to the even more invisible yet unbelievably generous contributions of my Beloved Wife, which are too numerous to mention.
About the Author
Nicole Kimberling is a novelist and the senior editor at Blind Eye Books. Her first novel, Turnskin, won the Lambda Literary Award. Other works include the Bellingham Mystery Series, set in the Washington town where she resides with her wife of thirty years. She is also the creator and writer of Lauren Proves Magic Is Real!, a serial fiction podcast, which explores the lesser case files of Special Agent Keith Curry, supernatural food inspector.
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