by Lija Fisher
The person gently put the cryptid in a cage attached to the top of one of the landing skids of the helicopter, climbed in, and flew away, the wind from the blades once again slapping Clivo in the face with dust and dirt.
“Shoot,” he said, before slipping into complete unconsciousness.
VIII
Each time Clivo returned home, he felt the worse for wear, and this time he felt the worst by far—his body still wasn’t working quite right after his confrontation with the demon chicken, as he was now calling the Elwetritsch. He had woken up cold and woozy hours after witnessing the mysterious abduction of the cryptid in the German woods. It had been a slow and painful trudge back to the nearest village, and his long journey home had felt no easier or quicker.
After riding in planes and on buses and ending with a long walk up the mountain, he finally limped toward the front porch, carefully watching his step so he wouldn’t get caught in Jerry’s lasso of doom. He entered the house and poked his head into the kitchen, where there was a loud clanking of dishes and salsa music playing. Charles and Hernando were at the sink washing a large stack of dishes, frilly aprons tied around their waists. Pearl was sitting at the kitchen table, drinking some tea and tapping her feet in rhythm to the music.
“So, anyway, Pearl, the thing about most teenage guys is that they don’t have the intellectual capacity to deal with the physical changes that happen when turning from boys to men,” Charles was saying over his shoulder as he scrubbed the dishes with soapy water. “But me and Hernando here are smart enough to ease into our manhood without totally freaking out.”
“We’re manly men,” Hernando agreed, drying a dish with a checkered towel and gently putting it away.
Pearl put her hand to her mouth and giggled. “Well, it certainly has been much nicer having you boys around since you’ve started cleaning up after yourselves.” Then Pearl noticed Clivo, and her face dropped. “Sweetie! You’re home! Are you okay?”
Clivo gave her a reassuring smile. “I’m fine, Aunt Pearl. Just tired.”
Clivo knew that if he looked as bad as he felt, he probably appeared to be a zombie. His arm suddenly shot out in a spasm and his hand hit the refrigerator. He grimaced in pain, but returned a smile to his face. “Glad to see the fridge is still working.”
Charles and Hernando glanced at him with concern and began to quickly finish up their washing.
Pearl got up from her seat, walked to him, and took his face in her hands. “Sweetie, what are they doing to you at those math and science camps? You look horrible.”
“I’m just tired, Aunt Pearl, but I’m fine.” His leg suddenly jerked, accidentally kicking Julio Iglesias, who went running off with a hiss. “Sorry, kitty, I didn’t see you there.”
Charles pulled off his rubber kitchen gloves and hustled over to usher Clivo out of the room. “Yeah, buddy, I’m sure you’re exhausted, but we just want to hear how the experiment went.”
Hernando gave Pearl a little bow. “Thank you, as always, for a wonderful dinner, Miss Pearl.”
Pearl smiled, but watched with worry as they led Clivo away. “No problem, boys. Maybe you should have Clivo do a bit less addition and subtraction; he looks like he’s about to pass out.”
Charles and Hernando helped Clivo down to the basement, where he collapsed into a chair at the table. He rubbed his hand, which was still red and swollen from the chicken bite.
“Oh my gosh, Clivo, what happened to you?” Stephanie asked, running over with the first-aid kit.
“The ‘harmless chicken’ poisoned me, that’s what happened,” Clivo said, wincing as Stephanie examined the bite.
“You were drugged by the chicken?” Charles asked with a guffaw. Amelia hit him in the arm. “Ow! What? That may be the most awesome thing I’ve ever heard!”
Adam came over and looked at the bite. “Sheesh. We might want to cut out a sample and see what we can decipher about the venom’s properties.”
Clivo shot Adam a look. “We’re not cutting into my hand, but thanks for the offer.” His other arm shot out and knocked over the bowl of fruit. “Argh! Sorry! Just some leftover effects from the pecking.”
Stephanie started applying a bandage to his wound. “Do you need some rest, or do you want to tell us what happened?”
“Believe me, I could sleep for the rest of the summer, but we don’t have time,” Clivo said, the memories of the previous night coming back to him—as much as he could remember, anyway. “A helicopter showed up and took the Elwetritsch. I was right, someone’s been kidnapping the cryptids after I locate them.”
“Who? Did you get a good look at them?” Amelia asked, sitting a good distance away from Clivo and his flapping arm.
“I’m surprised I saw them at all, with all the hallucinating I was doing,” Clivo said. “All I could make out is that it was one person who jumped out of a helicopter. Sorry, guys, it’s not much to go on.”
“Any bit of information is helpful,” Amelia said, scratching her eyebrow in thought.
Clivo clenched and unclenched his hand a few times once Stephanie was done bandaging it. “Anybody have any ideas why the cryptids would be taken?”
“None.” Stephanie sighed and put away the first-aid kit. “There’s no mention in the chat rooms about any catches, no acquisitions by zoos, no circuses that are suddenly touring with the chupacabra. Whoever is doing this is keeping it really quiet. But we’ll keep looking.”
“Okay,” Clivo said, frustrated that he hadn’t gotten a better look at who took the chicken. “Any chance you have a lead on who the immortal might be, at least?”
Stephanie blushed. “Not at all. It’s not easy for us to admit when we’re stuck. But … we’re stuck.”
Amelia drummed her fingers on the tabletop. “It might be time to consult the Oracles.”
Adam flew into a rage. “No! No Oracles! We don’t need those guys!”
“They’re so obnoxious!” Charles agreed.
Clivo had no idea what was going on. “You guys have an oracle?”
Stephanie smiled. “Oracles. That’s what we call them.”
Charles collapsed into a chair. “That’s what you call them.”
Adam sneered. “We call them dumb.”
“Who are these guys?” Clivo asked, intrigued. “Are they fellow cryptozoologists?”
“Not really,” Stephanie said, tucking a wisp of hair behind her ear. “They’re just encyclopedias of knowledge when it comes to myths. Like we’ve said before, very few stories are pure imagination; there’s usually some kind of truth to them.”
Amelia nodded. “So, when we get stuck, we usually consult the Oracles. Just hearing their stories often gets us to see something differently, thus solving the problem.”
Adam groaned. “Ugh! I hate them!”
Clivo leaned over to Amelia. “Why do Adam and Charles dislike them so much?”
Amelia rolled her eyes. “BBS.”
“Bigger Brain Syndrome,” Stephanie clarified. “When too many smart people are in the same room, they prefer to compete with each other instead of actually listening and learning something.”
“I have nothing to learn from them!” Charles insisted.
“Yes you do, and you have,” Amelia shot back. “Now quit being a baby! You know this is the right call!”
Charles stomped his foot and let out a pouting sound.
“So where are these guys? Can we Skype them?” Clivo asked.
“No, they do things old school,” Amelia replied. “If we want to talk to them, we have to see them on the weekend at their shrine in Boston.”
Adam moaned again. “They are so obnoxious!”
Clivo thought about how to get the Blasters to Boston without Douglas knowing. He was already worried about telling Douglas that someone was stealing the cryptids, so he didn’t want to explain why he needed to fly six people across the country. Douglas still didn’t know about the Blasters, and it just felt right to keep it that way.
But it occu
rred to Clivo that he did still have some of his petty cash. As long as he didn’t use his Diamond Card, Douglas couldn’t track where he was going.
“Okay, who wants to come with me to Boston?” Clivo asked.
Charles snorted. “All of us. We do everything as a team, dude.”
* * *
Before dawn on Saturday morning, Clivo and the Blasters left the house quietly in darkness, walked down the dirt road, and took a bus to a small airport outside of Denver. Clivo stood in the dusty terminal and looked around until he found what he was looking for.
“Serge!” he said, waving.
An extremely muscular man wearing a nice suit that looked like it was about to burst at the seams turned around. “Mr. Wren!” The man had a high-pitched voice that was quite the opposite of what one would expect from such a large, bulked-up person. “I got your message! Is this your special cargo?”
“Yes, sir, these are my friends,” Clivo said, shaking Serge’s hand. Serge was the bodyguard for any Diamond Cardholders who flew out of the Denver area, and he had become a personal friend of Clivo’s. Clivo had wished many times that Serge could protect him on his catches, because the man was so strong he could probably take the Yeti down with one hand. But, as close as he was to Serge, Clivo just couldn’t trust him yet with information about the cryptids.
Serge shook everyone’s hands. “Any friends of Mr. Wren’s are friends of mine.”
“I’m Adam. You are a man who obviously enjoys his protein,” Adam said, looking up at Serge in awe.
Amelia winced as Serge went to take her hand, but then looked at him with surprise. “Amelia. You have a very gentle grip for being as strong as an ox.”
After the introductions were finished, Clivo asked, “Serge, were you able to find someone who’s willing to fly us out of here for cash?”
Serge checked his watch. “Oh, yes, he should be ready for you guys. Come on back, folks, let’s get you settled.”
With his VIPs following, Serge bypassed the airport security checkpoint with a wave at one of the guards, who nodded. Serge led them behind the empty Pangaea Air counter and opened a door that led into the bowels of the airport. They walked through a concrete hallway lit with fluorescent lights, passing a few workers in orange vests. The hall was filled with the whir of airplane engines, and the air smelled like gasoline.
Serge opened a heavy door to the outside, where a clunky cargo plane was already waiting with its twin propellers running.
“Oh no,” Clivo mumbled to himself.
An old man dressed in a brown leather jacket like an English barnstormer came around the tail, his white scarf blowing in the breeze. “Hey, Clivo! Good to see you again!”
“Clivo, you remember Alex?” Serge said.
How could Clivo forget? Alex had flown him to Alaska the previous year to search for the Otterman, and it was a flight Clivo had been sure he wouldn’t survive. Alex was supposed to be a great pilot, but you would never have known it by the haphazard way he zigged and zagged through the clouds.
“It’s nice to see you again, Alex. These are my friends,” Clivo said, already dreading the flight to Boston.
“How you kids doing? You all running away from home or something?” Alex let out a joyful cackle and slapped the plane, causing a screw to come loose and drop to the ground.
Charles looked at Clivo, his lips pulled back in fear until his buckteeth stuck out. “This is your plan? To fly across the country in that garbage heap?”
Clivo did his best to reassure him, even though he wasn’t feeling so sure himself. “Don’t worry, Alex is the best. He flew me to Alaska in an ice storm and we did just fine.”
“Except for a few close calls!” Alex laughed. “Remember when I almost nosedived into that frozen lake? Woo-hee that was a doozy!”
Hernando swooned, and Clivo grabbed his arm to hold him up.
“Take care, ladies, see you soon,” Serge said, gently helping Amelia and Stephanie into the plane.
Adam eyed Serge up and down as he boarded. “When I return, we’re going to have a serious talk about your gym routine. I could use some pointers.”
Serge slapped him on the back and laughed. “Anytime, Adam.”
Adam winced at Serge’s powerful touch and climbed in.
The plane took off into the cloudless skies, with Clivo settling into the front seat next to Alex, who had lowered his goggles and zipped up his leather jacket.
“Okeydokey. Boston, here we come.” Alex reached out to plug some coordinates into a keypad. The second his finger touched the system a shower of sparks flew out, a few of them landing in Clivo’s lap as he frantically brushed them away with his hand. “Whoa! Ha! Does that every time!”
Charles stuck his head between the two of them. “I’d just like to mention that our combined IQ is 810, so if this plane goes down, you’re losing a whole generation of future geniuses, dude.”
“Don’t you worry, my friend! I once landed an airplane in Vietnam with its wings and wheels blown off. Ol’ Bertha here will get us where we need to go!” Alex patted the throttle, which promptly came loose. “Oh boy, that’s not good. Hand me some of that duct tape there, will you, Clivo?” Clivo quickly handed him a roll of duct tape from a seat pocket and Alex secured the device back in place. “There we go! Right as rain.”
Everyone tightened their seat belts as Alex guided the plane into the clouds. As soon as they had reached cruising altitude, Alex stretched his arms behind his head and let out a good, long yawn. He glanced at Clivo. “So, you going to Boston to do some more monster hunting?”
Clivo laughed. Alex had suspected that Clivo was going to Alaska to search for legendary beasts, and the old man had cautioned him against revealing the world’s mysteries. It was more important for people to believe in their myths and magic, he’d said. “Nope. As far as I know there aren’t any mythological beasts in Boston.”
Adam shouted from the back. “What are you talking about, dude? There’s the Boston Bahumagosh!”
Clivo turned around and shot Adam a look to be quiet.
“You know, it’s interesting,” Alex began, scratching his scruffy chin. “Ever since you went to the Revelation Mountains, there’s been no sightings of the Otterman. It’s like he just disappeared.”
“Yeah, I’ve heard the same thing,” Clivo said, not looking at Alex.
Alex shook his head. “It changes people, not having their myths. Makes them feel like there’s no mystery left, nothing more to uncover. We quit being pioneers and just float through life, waiting for something to believe in.”
Hernando spoke quietly from the back. “We’re pioneers, sir. We believe.”
Alex turned, causing the plane to bank sharply to the right, and flashed Hernando a wrinkled smile. “That’s good. You keep that sense of adventure, you hear me?”
“BIRDS!” Clivo shouted.
Alex whirled around and banked the plane sharply to the left to avoid a large flock of black birds that had been about to get chopped up by the propeller. Everyone screamed, but Alex let out a joyous cackle. “Oops! Sorry, fellas! Almost clipped your wings there!”
In the back of the plane, Charles began throwing up into an airsickness bag. Adam let out a sound of disgust. “Dude! Be a man!”
Amelia unbuckled her seat belt and crawled forward until she was next to Alex. “Sir, if someone was stealing creatures like the Otterman, what do you think they’d use them for?”
Clivo looked at her, shocked that she would ask such a pointed question of a stranger, but she nodded at Clivo that it was okay.
Alex took off his brown leather cap and scratched his head. “Well, we had a story about that exact same thing happening a few years ago.”
“Really?” Clivo asked, shifting to face Alex. “What happened?”
Alex took off his goggles and wiped them with his scarf, the plane’s nose slowly drifting downward. “We had this guy in Montana one time. Rob was his name. He was a real magic cookie. He was a homestead
er, meaning he lived in a cabin with no electricity or running water, and only ate what he could hunt, grow, or trap. He was pretty harmless, always kept to himself, though he was never known to be the nicest of fellas.”
“Can you pull the plane up, please?” Charles asked desperately from the back.
“Huh? Oh! Right.” Alex grabbed the controls and pulled the plane to level. “Anyhow, one day Rob comes sauntering into the local bar with a grin on his face, claims he’d trapped a bird larger than anything he had ever seen. When it flapped its wings, he said, it sounded like a thunderstorm was rolling through.”
“The Thunderbird,” Stephanie said from the back. “According to Native American tradition, it’s a giant bird with no head but a massive beak with rows of pointed teeth.”
“Your friends know their stuff,” Alex said with a wink to Clivo. “So, Rob comes into the bar, his chest all puffed out like he’s the baddest dude on the block, and demands free liquor. Of course, Carl, the bartender, scoffs and says that Rob needs to at least trade something for it besides some story about a make-believe bird, and Rob says that in exchange for liquor, he won’t destroy the bar. Well, everyone thought that was a weird exchange; didn’t seem fair that Rob wanted something for nothing.”
“Not fair at all,” Hernando agreed.
Alex continued. “So Carl, the bartender, assumed that Rob had maybe been spending too much time alone and had finally lost it, so he pulled out his shotgun and asked Rob to kindly get out of the bar. Well, Rob stood up and pulled out a giant feather and—now, I was there, so I saw this myself—he swiped that feather across the barrel of the shotgun, shearing the darn thing clear off clean as a whistle. Needless to say, Rob drank to his heart’s content at the bar that day, with nobody saying a word otherwise.”
Amelia looked at Clivo and nodded, her expression telling him everything. The cryptids were definitely evolving better protection mechanisms.
Alex put the goggles back on and folded his hands in his lap. “Before long, Rob was really living high on the hog. He realized that he could ‘trade’ with everybody in town for food and goods, and what he provided in return was the promise not to destroy their homes with those crazy feathers. One guy stood up to him, old Jim Darling, and said that Rob had to contribute something instead of just taking stuff, and I’m not lying when I say that Rob went ahead and sawed Jim’s house right in half. Right in half! After that, nobody dared speak against Rob and just gave him whatever he wanted. Rob quit being a homesteader and became fat and lazy, eating and drinking more than anybody else in town. As long as he had those weapon feathers, he was king.”