by Ryan Schow
Part of me wants to shrug off these chains, disembowel these chicken neck shit birds, but I wait because patience is a virtue.
That’s when I see him walk in.
Adolf Shitler.
My inner child is beaming!
He looks me over without saying a word. It’s almost as if he’s appraising me, like I’m a piece of art rather than a prisoner. He lifts my hair just above my right ear, which is blood soaked from where I was shot. He looks at my back where I was shot twice, then walks around me and lifts my shirt enough to see the flower of blood where the bullet exited. Yet there is no exit wound.
He lifts my hair on the top of my head, moves his fingers over me and then he says, “You are not a normal child.”
“I’m a monster hunter,” I say. It sounds tough and stupid coming out of my mouth, but dammit if it didn’t sound menacing in my mind.
He gives a slight chuckle, but that chuckle grows into a roar, and as he is crying and laughing he’s also trying to tell his men what I said in German and it’s coming out in fits and starts. And then another body joins us. I sense him, but I also sense he is closed off to me. It’s the smell of clearwood that gives him away.
Aloysius.
“Father, she is not restrained,” he says.
Hitler sobers up, then turns and grabs one of my chains, gives it a mighty yank and then with some residual humor in his voice, he says, “I fear for your eyesight, my son.”
“Those guns you point at her, she could turn them on all of you and end your lives in seconds,” Aloysius says. Turning to his father, he says, “All three of these fools would be dead in an instant.”
Turning to me, he says, “Get out of those chains, Savannah.”
In one single thought, the chains shatter and fall to the floor. Startled, one of the men fires his gun and I somehow manage to stop the bullet millimeters from my eye. I try not to show it, but the sharp intake of air through my nostrils forces them to flair, giving me away.
I reach up, take the round in between my fingers, examine it, then give it back to the shooter. Not sure what to do, he takes it. The other two men are backing away. I stand, turn and face both Hitler and his vampire son.
“I made you play in traffic,” I say to him. “It didn’t end well.”
“Perhaps in some future you do,” he says with a fair amount of amusement in his voice.
“You’d do best to take me seriously, Aloysius.”
“Why is that? Because you’re here to kill my father?”
“Yes.”
Now Hitler is paying attention. Now he’s feeling the gravity of the situation.
“And you think that will stop me?” Aloysius says.
“That’s kind of how it works, douchebag.”
Hitler laughs again, this time a bit more reserved, like he’s not sure how to take this whole conversation.
“I’m glad I can entertain you,” I tell him.
He frowns.
I turn to Aloysius just as Hitler backhands me. I felt it was coming, but Aloysius didn’t. So when he hit me, the smack was so loud and so forceful it shook my head sideways. I turned my body with the hit, making it look real. When I come back though, I use the motion to whip my own hand back. Relying on both physics and my own telekinetic ferocity, I pimp slap the dictator with the kind of force a man like him has never in his life experienced.
Aloysius looks at me, startled.
“That’s right dingleberry,” I say, “I just bitch slapped Hitler.”
He comes after me, but I sidestep him. He changes direction fast, too fast. His hand grabs at me, gets my shirt. I rip the shirt myself where he’s got ahold and he falls away. Hitler is on the ground face-first, knocked out and laying there like a dead fish.
I step away from Aloysius, put up my fists.
He looks at his father.
“He isn’t dead,” I say. “Not yet anyway.”
Aloysius moves toward me lightening fast. I’ve already adjusted for him, though. What he doesn’t expect is the kick I snap in off his nuts. It hits flush. He folds forward, holding back as he gets a touch red in the face.
“Got them nuts,” I say with a grin. “I call that the Dracula Ball Breaker. If it was a drink, it would be two squirts of coconut syrup, a splash of Vodka and eight ounces of bitch juice.”
His fists are up and he’s not amused. Two bone spikes punch through his knuckles and now I know it’s on. I step closer to Hitler, stand in between him and his father.
He hesitates.
Behind me, Hitler’s body levitates into the air ten feet so he’s hanging above us, suspended in mid air.
“You can kill him all you want,” he says, looking up at his unconscious father. I don’t have to look at the former dictator to know that not only did I break his jaw, I shattered it and his teeth completely.
“You say that now…”
“I’ll give you this,” Aloysius says, “you’ve got a wicked backhand. But you’re not that smart.”
“And how’s that?”
“If you kill him, you’ll kill the 2021 version of him, not the version of him that found my mother and made me.”
Shit.
Without waiting, violently, I turn Hitler inside out in a wash of red then step aside catching only part of the downpour.
Aloysius stands there, unmoved, washed in the gore of family. He doesn’t even blink. His fists become so tight, something cracks. His body starts to click and rattle, almost like his bones are breaking and growing at the same time.
He suddenly looks taller, a good twenty pounds heavier.
“You shouldn’t have done that,” he growls. And then he takes his two protruding bones, makes two sharp slashes at his own mouth, opening up his jaw to impossible size. In that mouth are now rows of razor sharp teeth.
Jesus Christ!
Um…so yeah, I admit, I’m sort of shitting my pants right now.
I drop into a ball, channel the girl who blew up NY, turned it into a nuclear wasteland, and though I do not have her power, the force I expel explodes out of me like a nitrogen bomb. Aloysius was mid-air diving after me when the blast caught him. My detonation must have ignited all the other bombs inside the lab because what I gave and what came afterwards in terms of explosive charge were two entirely different things.
I’ve never felt myself launch out, but after I exploded outwards, the protective shell I placed around myself so I wouldn’t get hurt came down. In that second, the other bombs went off and I went tumbling through the air. I don’t know how this happened, but when I wake up, I’m draped backwards on the fence, razor wire chewing though my back, both arms blown out of socket, my legs splayed out and ragged.
As I lay there feeling helpless and smoked to death, I realize I did it. I killed that f*cker before he blew up South America and then America. He’s dead. Hitler’s dead! And so is that butt plug son of his. I start to laugh, but it hurts because most of my body is burned really badly and the deep black smoke drifting over the land is both stinging my eyes and roasting my throat.
Closing my eyes, I bring up my dashboard, enter in the date and coordinates for my return, then set it in motion. A moment later, I’m sucked up into the wormhole where the real pain starts. When I’m spat out on the floor in Georgia’s room, it’s as a bloody, burnt corpse that just happens to not be all the way dead.
I land hard, the last of my consciousness all but gone. I hear my three besties gasp and squeal and then I’m out.
And awake.
I see three faces looking down at me, scared. Then I’m out.
And back again.
I roll over, but the skin on the back of my right hand sticks to the floor, pulling off.
“Dammit,” I mumble. It looks like a flap of cooked chicken skin just stuck there. “That’s freaking gross.”
And then I’m out.
And back.
I feel much better, but I know time has passed. How much time I’m not sure. Before I open my eyes and ac
knowledge consciousness, I throw out my tethers, see if they can find Aloysius.
They cannot.
Now I open my eyes and look around. Georgia is asleep on the bed beside me, her body close to mine, but not so close that we’re touching. She was afraid of hurting me.
I feel her stir.
She turns over and sees me looking at her.
“How the hell are you not a toasted marshmallow anymore?” she asks.
“I heal much quicker now,” I tell her, sitting up.
She gives me a hug and starts crying. She’s suddenly sobbing and it’s happening so fast I know she’s been holding these emotions at bay for entirely too long.
“I’m so sorry, Savannah,” she cries. “I was so scared. I’ve never time traveled before and I just…I froze. I couldn’t do it.”
“I know,” I say. “It’s okay. Everything turned out as it was supposed to.”
It didn’t, but whatever. I set out to slay a monster and slayed two instead. Why? Because I kick the most ass ever. I’m a badass bitch is why.
“I hate to interrupt you,” I tell her, “but I’m so hungry.”
She pulls back, wipes her eyes and says, “We can do dinner if you want. It’s nearly four.”
“I want a steak, but I don’t want a steak, if you know what I mean.”
I’d had enough burnt meat to last a lifetime, but for some reason a filet mignon sounds simply divine. With a baked potato, some steamed carrots and a green salad? Oh, hell yeah!
I could totally go for that right now.
Chapter Seventeen
August does the one thing his father has been asking him to do for years: go to his job site with him.
“How will you explain me to your partners, or your employees or whatever?” August asked.
He didn’t need to elaborate this to his father, for Lloyd James was a practical man, not the sort to get his feelings hurt. Dealing with this issue was all about logistics.
“What do you suggest?” his father asked.
“You could say I’m Lenore’s nephew,” August said.
“That’ll work.”
On the way to a potential drill site where the geologist was waiting for him, his father said, “Do you know how oil is created?”
“Not really,” August replied, not terribly excited about meeting with some dude who studies rocks for a living. He was happy that he was with his father, though. And even happier now that the old man was done flipping bitch over everything he’d done.
“Basically oil’s created from the remnants of small plants and animals, like plankton, that died in the old seas somewhere between ten million and six hundred million years ago. After these organisms died, the basically sunk into the sand and mud at the bottom of the sea.”
“So oil is just plants and animals squashed to death forever and a day ago?”
His father laughed. “Sort of, but it’s more complicated than that,” he said.
They came to a stop light and his father turned to face him. There was an excitement in his father’s eye, a spark of life. His father truly was an oil man.
“So these long dead organisms broke down in the sedimentary layers where there was little or no oxygen present,” his father continued. “The microorganisms then broke the remains into carbon-rich compounds, which eventually formed organic layers. The organic matter mixed with the sediment, which produced a fine-grained shale we call source rock.”
“Am I going to need to know this to look at what you’re doing?” August asked just as the light turned green and his father stepped on the Dodge Diesel’s gas.
“Nope.”
“Okay, go ahead,” August said as they hit the freeway on-ramp and gathered speed.
“As new sedimentary layers were deposited, they employed extreme pressure and heat on the source rock. This heat and pressure condensed the organic matter into both crude oil and natural gas. Over time and with the shifting of the earth, the oil flowed out of the source rock and accumulated in thicker, more porous limestone or sandstone. This is called the reservoir rock.”
“So drilling for oil is about getting through the layers to get to the reservoir rock?”
“In laymen’s terms, yes. The problem is the movements in the earth have trapped the oil and natural gas in these reservoir rocks between layers of granite or marble, which is impermeable rock, or cap rock if you want to get technical.”
“So you’re trying to find these reservoirs, right? That’s what the rock star is about?”
This elicits a laugh from his father. “I spend a crap ton of money on my rock star,” he said. “If you get the wrong geologist—which is ninety percent of these shysters—you can go bankrupt real quick, maybe even get your ass sued into a tent on the side of the interstate. But if you find the right geologist, oh boy, that guy will make you dirty, rotten, filthy stinking rich.”
August’s father started at the bottom of the corporate ladder as a cable tool driller, or a rope choker. He worked his way up the ladder until he learned about a man named Archibald Dreyfus. Dreyfus was an oil man out of South Texas who made a name for himself on his first and only gusher. It was the Jesus Christ of gushers though. The man made a king’s fortune. His bright light burned out quick because he made his millions and retired on the mine.
When you had hundreds of millions of dollars, what else do you need? That was the question. August’s father would say it was the rich man’s responsibility to help make other men wealthy, but Dreyfus didn’t care about that.
He didn’t care about much since he was set for life.
When August’s father approached him with an idea for funding, when he said they could help enrich men like Dreyfus, the old codger shook his head and said “nope.” He was firm. His father left only to return two months later with something far more valuable than an idea or even his own knowledge and experience: he brought a geologist. Marcus Wright. The best in the United States.
Now his father, Dreyfus and Wright were partners.
After an hour of driving, they went off-roading hitting nothing but raw land until, up ahead, August saw what looked like the biggest Tonka Truck he’d ever seen. This mammoth beast looked like it was built from steel plates hammered in place by Thor himself. It had four foot tall tires that were at least three feet wide and looked like Monster Truck tires. In between the tires, a huge stamp plate was mounted. This was taking Hulk smash! to a whole new level.
“What the hell is that?” August asked, mesmerized.
“Thumper truck. Slams those heavy plates into the ground and reads the signals. They used to use explosives, but blowing shit up is only fun if you haven’t lost your hearing, or taken on shrapnel.”
“So that thing’s going to slam into the ground?”
“Yes. But that’s only one tool. Marcus has basically got the best sniffer lab in the state. Plus his own sniffer is amazing when it comes to finding an oil trap worth a damn.”
“So you hammer the earth, and then what?”
“You use seismometers to listen. The way the signal comes back, and the speed it comes back with, will give you good indications on whether you’ve got oil and gas traps.”
They moseyed up to the site, met with Marcus and his team, then discussed things a computer nerd like August just didn’t understand. They were talking about seismic surveys and magnetometers and hydrocarbons—all things that at first went right over his head.
“So in laymen’s terms,” August finally said, “is there a way to even explain what you’re doing?”
“I’ll try,” Marcus said. “In a nutshell, we use a three axis geophone. That’s a x and y horizontal axis and a vertical z measurement for acoustic energy—vibrations for the layman. The thumper over there”—he says, pointing to the truck—“does its thing and the energy returns to the geophone where it’s processed by seismic computers.”
“What are you measuring?” August asked.
“The return times of the introduced energy,” Marcus said
. “To be blunt, we’re doing this to try to compute the location of underground rock strata based on the processed reflections of those sounds.”
“Like a sonogram?”
Marcus looked at August’s father with a look of both surprise and delight. “Looks like Lenore’s got a little oil in the family blood, too.” Turning back to August, he said, “I honestly didn’t think you’d get all that.”
“The truth is, I hardly know what the fuck it is you even said,” August admitted to the uproarious laughter of Marcus and the crew.
With his father’s broad overlay of oil discovery and drilling, he was able to understand bits and pieces of the process. They were basically looking at the shifting in the earth, shifts caused by the change in the earth’s magnetics. From here, with the help of Marcus and his sniffers, they somehow managed to get a feel for possible oil flow.
“So is this site worth the high hopes and ball sweat needed to make our next hundred million?” his father asked.
This was the question…
“From what we’ve found over the last couple of days,” Marcus said, “it’s worth getting some core samples, but this is where you come in.”
His father nodded his head and said, “I think we could have something here.”
“I think it’s worth the gamble,” Marcus said.
“Me, too.”
And with that, Marcus and his father gave sampling instructions to the crew. A few minutes later, August and his father said good-bye and headed for lunch. On the drive out of there, August couldn’t help thinking this Marcus guy was to geology what August was to computers, and for that he started to understand why his father liked the man so much. Half an hour later, they pulled up to a dusty looking boxed structure on the side of the road with big red signage that said, Slappy’s Food Shack.
“If the food here doesn’t convince you there’s a God above, I don’t know what will,” his father said. “The waitresses are pretty damn cute, too.”
Slappy was an old Texan with mottled skin, wet eyes and a toothless mouth that had long ago caved in over his gums. But true to his father’s word, the waitresses were Texas sexy and the burgers were like nothing you could even describe, they were that good.