by A. J. Aalto
From Hood: coordinates. Numbers. So not helpful. I scowled up at the helicopter as it circled. He was waving and gesturing again. Also, not helpful. The valley he was pointing into didn’t look, from my vantage point, to have been carved into by road or ATV or, as far as I could tell, human bodies, either. It was clogged with rocky outcroppings in a sea of messy forest. Unlike the plateau above, the hollow was choked with flora, and the fauna was growling behind me. I could see plenty of dips and caves and dark places in the rock, shadowy places behind scrub and under tree, but how could I get there without breaking my neck or snapping an ankle? And where the hell was Batten? I figured he was right behind us, and wondered how that helped me, if at all.
The stonecoat snuffled and made a quick and sudden swipe down at me. I ducked further, cowering down on my bare knees on the rock. His scrabbling fingers met stone, and grit showered my head. I dialed Hood, but his phone pushed to voice mail and I realized why; the chopper would be too loud for him to talk, much less hear it ring.
Above me, the stonecoat started seeking a way down that didn’t involve injury. He backed away, and I felt he was either gearing up to jump, or he’d spotted a path I hadn’t. As if answering my unspoken question, I heard him crashing through the pines and aspens above.
With a frantic thumb, I texted Hood: Don’t see the way.
He texted back: Ledge to your right, six foot gap or so. Hooks back around and opens up to where we're dropping the beef. Looks like there's a path just beyond.
I had to get there before the boggle found the easier way down. With the pebblecoat tucked against my left breast with one arm, I used my free hand to swipe the hair out of my eyes, looking for whatever shelf or ledge Hood was talking about.
Either his perception of distance was way off from up in the chopper, or fear was dicking with my ability to judge the gap, because the shelf to my right did not seem six feet away. I’d never make it that far, even without the baby monster in my arms. I didn’t have much room for a running start, and wasn’t able to use my arms for stability or to grab for anything if I missed.
Are you fucking kidding me? I am going to haunt your skinny, ginger ass if I miss that jump and die. I took a moment to wonder why my phone didn't have a “go fuck yourself” emoji, and sent the text, along with a terrified scowl, to Hood in the chopper.
You got this, Mars.
“Oh yeah, this is how I bite the big one,” I told the tired pebblecoat, who blinked up at me uncomprehendingly. “Leaping around in my underpants with boggle drool on my chest and lube on my face. What will the headlines read?” Then it occurred to me, “Oh, Harry will be so pissed off.” I rolled my eyes, not even able imagine all the fussy, obscure denouncements and invectives he’d stuff my eulogy with. He’d probably burn his black mourning suit, hatband, and cravat from Jay’s of Regent Street, and instead wear regal purple to highlight his disgust. I wondered if he’d add any modern English curses so that my family could commiserate with him properly.
You got this, Mars. “Suuuuuure, I do.”
Just past the shelf, there was another clump of trees and a big boulder. Above the boulder, the stonecoat’s brawny shape appeared. He mounted the boulder and gave a series of territorial barks, throwing his arms wide to exaggerate his size, as if he could impress upon me and the dudes in the helicopter that he just wanted a super-squishy hug, or maybe a starring role in an ugly-assed remake of King Kong. There was a bit of a path behind the monster, probably a hunting trail into the messy scrub, probably his hunting trail. Great. He had the advantage of familiarity with the terrain, here, and I was bumbling around like a mouse through a maze.
“Perfect. So now I’m jumping to a shifty-looking shelf above a bone-breaking drop towards an angry boggle with his baby in my arms.” I ignored the stonecoat’s yowling, because for the moment he couldn’t get to me easily, and I was willing to bet, with his clumsy size and burdensome mass, he wasn’t too eager to tumble, either. I took a few moments to run down a list of people who probably wished this flavor of untimely demise on me. It was annoyingly long, so I gave up halfway through college, with my second-year lab partner's ire over my suckage during our freshwater Kelpie studies. Everybody since then would just have to get their schadenfreude for themselves.
A second helicopter cut the air above me and I said to the pebblecoat, “My luck, that’ll be the media. If I don't stick the landing, I bet I make Tosh.0's Greatest Snuff Fails Holiday Special.”
But it wasn’t a news chopper, it was a bigger, plain white one, with two men in front and one in the back, the cargo bay open. I shaded my eyes and squinted up at it. There seemed to be a couple of uneven bundles in the back, and the third man was working at some ropes. I will never take food delivery for granted again, and swear to the Goddess, if I get out of this alive, I am going to tip the next pizza guy I see way above and beyond “usual and customary.”
I faintly heard Batten shouting above and behind me. The stonecoat heard him, too, and echoed the angry shouting with some of his own.
I couldn’t see Batten, but took a deep breath and yelled, “Come catch this baby. I need both my arms.”
Something was distracting the stonecoat from behind the boulder, and I was guessing it was Batten and his pipe. When the boggle was riled up enough to leave his Kong-like perch, Batten dropped his pipe with an audible clank and ran down the path, shouting, “Chuck it! Marnie, chuck it!”
I cupped the pebblecoat in both hands, steadied it, and pitched it upward with a granny-shooting-free-throws, double-underhand toss. Batten had to backtrack to compensate for my adrenaline-fueled oomph, but he plucked it out of the air and made his way into the forest. I'm not sure it even woke up, but I didn't hear it meeping for its parent as Batten made off with it, hollering at the stonecoat to keep its attention.
I backed up to give myself space to take a running jump as the boggle lumbered after Batten, roaring what I figured must be stonecoat-ese for, “Fuck you, gimme back my kid.” I had maybe four feet worth of runway, which felt like nowhere near enough, and for a second, I considered giving up and just parking my ass on this shelf and letting Batten deal with the situation. The stonecoat paused to tear a tree out by the roots, showering the path with dirt and leaves. He swung it like a club, and my mouth went dry. The image of Kill-Notch pounded by tree bark into human slurry set my feet in motion. Without any further calculation, I put my Keds to the test and bolted for the other shelf, launching into the air and landing hard enough on the next ledge to pitch me forward. I forgot to roll shoulder-to-hip; my dive turned into a belly-grinding, thigh-skinning skid-flop, complete with girlish shriek.
The shriek turned the boggle’s head. I was making the final teetering transfer from shelf to boulder when it came back at me, yellow-eyed and frothing from the mouth.
“No, no!” I scolded, my panic jolting me into angry mother mode. I wagged my finger at him in warning. “Chase the other guy, I’m done. I don't even have your pebble. Go that way!”
At least he didn't smite me with his tree club, but, with surprising quickness, took hold of me by the ponytail instead, and hauled me off the boulder and off my feet. I kicked out at him, Keds connecting with nothing, madly thrashing the air. If you've never been picked up by the hair, it's about as painful as you'd expect. The helicopters circled safely above, and I wished I was in one of them instead. The pebblecoat resumed wailing; either it was less impressed with the cuddles offered by Batten’s hard chest compared to my own soft one, or Batten was doing something to get it to cry out as a distraction.
Whatever it was, the stonecoat decided to find out. He lumbered down the path, with me swinging from one hand like a foul-mouthed Raggedy Ann doll. I squeaked at the pull on my scalp and latched up onto his wrist, gripping hard, trying to get some kind of purchase to keep from being dropped, and take some of the excruciating pressure off my much-abused scalp. The boggle used the tree-club in his other hand to clear the path better, cracking branches and leaving broken trees i
n his wake.
Just ahead of us, several meaty, splintering crashes preceded Batten shouting. My imagination saw beef carcasses landing on his head, but that couldn’t be; dropped from the helicopter’s height, they’d have killed him. The boggle stopped abruptly and lowered the hand that was holding my ponytail enough for my feet to touch ground. Batten and the pebblecoat waited at the mouth of a roomy-looking den. There were, indeed, several beef carcasses partially embedded in the nearby earth. One hadn’t broken through the tree limbs and hung in the branches by some intact ribs, drooling blood. Batten looked winded but unharmed. His jeans were dusty and his t-shirt was splashed with a generous fan of curdled pebblecoat spit-up. That almost made up for my aching scalp, skinned knees, and thudding head.
“Put the pebblecoat down and back away from the meat, Kill-Notch,” I said.
He glanced defiantly from me to the beast's face. “Not until he lets you go.”
“Uh, this isn’t a hostage situation, dude. You can’t bargain with a boggle. He isn’t going to grasp the finer points of the deal.” I winced at a pull on my scalp. “He wins. You put his baby down and get lost. If we’re lucky, when he checks out the food he’ll forget I exist. That is, if he hasn't already.” I craned my face up as best I could, and shouted, “Put me down, bolderhumper! See? Totally ignoring me.”
Batten opened his mouth to argue, then lowered the pebblecoat to the ground at his feet and started backing away slowly.
“Further,” I advised as he sank out of view behind tree and bush. “Then circle around past us and get your ass up that path. Text Hood to land the choppers if they aren’t already.” I searched the sky but could neither see nor hear them. “I want to go home, eat a late lunch, and have a good cry in the bath.”
He said from the trees, “Not leaving you here with that thing.”
“Try not to take this personally, Jerkface,” I said, “but you fucking off right now would be best for everyone. I want to quiet this situation down and then get the hell out.”
“You’re hardly Jane fucking Goodall, Snickerdoodle.”
“You don’t know,” I squawked, glaring up at the boggle when I couldn’t find Batten’s face in the forest to scowl at. “He doesn’t know. I could totally be Jane Goodall, right? Back me up here, big fella.”
I heard a wet, hoarking snorrfff seconds before the boggle hit me in the forehead with a throatful of phlegm.
“If that was a pre-mating ritual,” I said, cramming one eye closed against the hot dribble, “you should know I’ve got commitment issues.”
He took my arm in his big hand and held me up to inspect me with one bulging, yellow eye, while my legs dangled off the ground. My shoulder screamed at the yank, and I groaned in protest. “I didn’t get rid of the other guy so we could be all Me-Tarzan-You-Jane in the woods.”
The boggle huffed and sniffed my face a little. His breath was like a coil of old tar spooling out of a pit of putrefying bodies. I gagged and tried to squeeze my whole face shut, but that didn’t work, so I coughed and shuddered and begged, “Please, no kissing on the first date.”
The boggle’s tongue lolled out and I sighed.
“I could really go for a fucking espresso right now,” I ground out, staring into an eye that was easily as big as my entire head. His lashes brushed my nose as he swung me even closer. “You’re not going to eat me, are you? We had such a nice day together. Let’s not spoil it with Marnie-carnage.”
He growled low in the back of his throat, a deep rumble, and shook me. My teeth rattled. On impulse, I heaved my legs up and wrapped them around the stony forearm that held me. He snorted with surprise and tried to shake me off, letting go of me as though I were a disgusting parasite.
“Oh no,” I said, hanging on tight with both arms and legs. “This is my chance, see? I can be the preternatural biologist who--” grunt, wheeze, “full-on wrestled a boggle with her bare hands, never mind her bare legs. Let’s see Devarsi Patel or Jane Goodall do this.” My ankles were slipping, and it took all my strength to hold on. Hood’s morning training hadn’t equipped me for this obstacle, but I was up to ten chin-ups, now, and my upper body strength was a lot better than it had been. I clenched my teeth and made determined snarly noises, because sometimes that helps.
The stonecoat waddled over to the new den and started to swipe his arm along the rock to wipe me off. Instead of becoming Marnie Jam, I let go of him and hit the ground on my side with a breath-stealing thud. I heard something go crunch-tinkle. My new watch.
Satisfactorily de-geeked, the boggle promptly set about ignoring me, and sniffed at his baby. Perhaps to reassure the little one that everything was all right, he made a sound like a big cat purring, and then grabbed his broken tree club.
“This is the part where I duck, right?” I said, holding up my hands and waving them as if to say no-no. The ruins of my watch fell away in a shiny tangle. “You hit me with that thing, and this relationship is over.” I scooted backwards and to the side, scuttling crab-style, not taking my eyes off the monster, monitoring his every move.
In one final, angry charge, he gallomped past me at Batten’s retreating form up the path, swinging his tree-club. I could see other men now, milling down that path to help us, Hood at the forefront. I waved them away, while Batten did the same, fleeing toward them making go back motions with his hands. The boggle didn’t put up much of a chase; he didn’t want to stray from his new lair too far, now that his baby was safe. I hurried up the path as close as I dared to get, planning to fade into the trees to let him pass.
The boggle sighed, squatted, and dropped an enormous pile of feces on the path, a clump of which separated from the rest and began to roll like a cannonball in my general direction.
I said something that went a little like, “Waaahoo…nergh!” and tried to dodge it. I jogged left and hit a tree trunk. The rolling shitball hit a jagged shard of rock and also veered left. It stopped abruptly when my shoe effectively pegged it to the ground. I slumped into a small shape against the tree while the boggle thumped past me, returning to the food cache and his offspring.
There was a great shuffling noise. The boggle began sweeping the ground with his big gibbon-like arms, gathering to him all manner of rocks, dust, dirt, and grime. Nesting motions. He swatted a beef carcass from the trees. The pebblecoat peeped happily, hungrily. The boggle gave me one more glance, emitted several short huffs and a dismissive growl. Your work is done, here, lady. You suck as a babysitter. Time to go.
I refused to look down at my shit-smeared Keds, or to meet anyone’s eye, as I tramped back to the waiting men. “This just caps off my day.”
Hood commiserated with a grimace. “But, hey, they seems to be settling into their new home.”
“Oh goody,” I said. “I’m so happy for them. I need more Juicy Fruit.”
“I chewed it all, sorry,” Hood said with an apologetic shrug. “I owe you a pack.”
I waved that away. “I need to make some notes. Where’s my notebook?”
Hood winced. “Left that in the pit. But I had the Jeep driver fetch your pants. Maybe he grabbed everything in your little pile, there?”
“Perfect,” I sighed, scuffling my shoe in the dirt and shaking it. The poop was sap-like and gluey, like ghoul scum. And how sad is my life, I thought, if I can easily compare the two? I scraped my foot on the stones, but there was no way it was coming off. I doubted a blowtorch would clean them. I ruin more sneakers in horrible, monster-flavored ways, than any reasonable person should be forced to deal with.
Batten sauntered over, one hand stuck in the front pocket of his Wranglers, the other holding my cargo pants. He had a pleased swagger going on that, from my dirty, exhausted, post-terrified angle, dialed my mood to hostile.
“Helicopter’s waiting, kiddo. Driver brought your stuff up. Your gloves are in the Jeep.” He offered me my pants. I took them, looked down at my shit-smeared Keds, and was suddenly too tired to even consider the logistics of getting my nice, more or less cl
ean pants back on.
Hood smiled behind his fist and cleared his throat. “Hey, Mars? What’s in your hair?”
Batten told him, “Boggle horked a loogie on her.”
There was a twitch beginning in the corner of my right eye. I nodded but no longer trusted myself to speak.
“Your one eye looks red and puffy,” Hood said. “Let me call you a medic?”
“Condom lube stings. Are we done with the embarrassing fluids assessment?” Hood accepted my refusal with a nod, and instead of summoning a paramedic, prodded my ribs a bit to make sure nothing was broken. I tolerated it for a minute or so before swatting his hands away. “I’m fine. I’m great, in fact. I’ve never been better,” I deadpanned. “My life is amazing.”
Hood patted my head, and I winced.
“Boggle used her ponytail as a handle,” Batten supplied helpfully.
“A handle,” Hood repeated. He did one more check of my ribs, hands deftly dodging my tired attempts to block him. “Doesn’t seem like anything’s busted,” he concluded.
“Except my fancy-schmancy watch. The FBI owes me a new t-shirt and a watch. And a pair of sneakers.” Now that the adrenalin was dissipating, I was shaky and exhausted. My teeth chattered briefly despite the heat.
Batten’s voice had gone warm and gentle; he dipped his head close to my shoulder so Hood wouldn’t know it. “Ready to go home, Snickerdoodle?”
I pressed my lips together hard so they didn’t quake, and nodded rapidly. Kill-Notch waited for Hood to turn away before offering to cup my elbow and help me in a trembling lurch up to the Jeep.
“Better lose those.” Batten smiled down at my Keds. “Don’t know how Le Pique feels about his vehicles, but you’re not getting in my SUV with shitty sneakers.”
* * * * *
The ride back to civilization was blessedly peaceful in the cool, silent mix of primo air conditioning and no shits left to give today. I was barefoot, having abandoned my sneakers in one of the quarry's trash cans; I'd stuffed my socks in one of my cargo pockets. My injuries were too numerous to list, but I sure as hell would try, if given half the chance to complain. No doubt, Harry would want a full accounting of my day. If I altered the events slightly to make myself sound smart and brave and kickass, I might get some pampering aftercare. I’d have to play my cards carefully.