by Rhys Ford
“Screw it. Pop the hatch, old man,” I muttered at him, tossing the oven mitts back into the car. “Cari has to have something in the back I can use.”
Cari had shit in the hatch of the Nova. I know. I spent a good five minutes digging through what little crap there was besides the spare tire and slammed the hatch down, tired and sweaty from digging around. Dempsey was chuckling when I came back to the front, his gnarled hand tightly gripping the potholders as he held them up for me to take through the passenger window.
“Go to hell,” I muttered, snatching them from his clenched fingers. “When we get back, I’m going to make tongs out of Razor’s ribs.”
“You go right ahead and do that, kid,” Dempsey gleefully shot back. “I’ll even help hold him down for you.”
THE HILLSIDE was rich with manzanita, California lilac, sage, and chamise, fragrant with their dry, dusty perfumes. There were a few large trees poking up out of the rocks, their twisted branches thick with scraggly pine needles, blue-gray bottle brushes scraping back and forth in the light wind. Outcroppings of lava jutted out from the canyon floor, the slopes dotted with bristles of black hematite flashing in the sunlight. There was movement among the vegetation—small flutters of wings and raspy serpentine shadows working through the tall grasses. None of that interested me. I was there for bigger prey, stupidly armed with only a pair of floral holders and my lack of common sense.
Working through the brush was fairly easy. I had a lighter step than any human, but gravity works the same on any species. All I had to do was make sure that wherever I put my foot down was solid, and the going was pretty easy. There were a couple of places where the sandy loam shifted beneath me, but nothing to send me tumbling ass backward across the strips of sharp pumice folded into the hillside’s landscape. I’d never seen the place when it was either pure Earth or pure Underhill. I couldn’t even tell anyone if I’d been born before or after the Merge. All signs point to before, but my dearly beloved father jacked up my genetics and growth so much there was no telling how old I was or even how long I would live.
But then I made my life as a Stalker for SoCalGov, and if there was one thing that could be said about any Stalker, it was that our life expectancy was about as long as a monarch butterfly. We weren’t known for dying in bed with our boots on. I’d lost count of how many times I recognized a name listed on the Dead Wall at the Post where we picked up our bounties and contracts. It surprised the hell out of me that Dempsey hadn’t bought it more than a few times in the past, but the old man had more lives than the proverbial cat, even though a knee injury had taken him out of the life.
Having him on the run with me was like old times, especially since I was the one doing the hunting and he was still sitting back in the car.
“Here, chickie-chickie,” I muttered mostly to myself. “Come to Oppa.”
I reached the section where the hillside was mostly lava, exactly the environment for the creature I was hunting for. The crenulation was deeper here—folds and ripples of broken-glass-edged rock throwing both sparkles and odd shadows about, making it difficult to read the lay of the land. It might have looked like small hillocks dotting the slope, but I knew better. There were deep crevices and caves with the occasional tumble of rocks from a collapsed tunnel just to keep a guy on his toes. The lava fields along the coast were riddled with different dragons, a holdover from their original hunting grounds in the Underhill. But while the grasslands belonged to mostly Earthly creatures, the canyons along the inner corridor were now home to nesting Underhill birds and relatively safe from predators due to the nature of their roosts—a fireproof sanctuary—which comes in very handy if you are a fire hen or phoenix.
I wasn’t stupid enough to take on a phoenix without a lead-lined semitruck, a barrage of tranquilizers, and a group of people I didn’t care if they survived, but the fire hen was doable, especially since I was only going after chicks.
I just had to get them away from their mama.
I got my first tickle from the telltale warble of an adult hen calling out to warn something off of her territory. Like most species, the female fire hen was the one to worry about. The males were generally smaller and really not very domestic when it came to sticking around to help take care of their offspring, but they sometimes hung around for scraps and to live under the dubious protection of a massive fire-shitting, angry, alpaca-tall female. Part of that was the stupid nature of the male bird itself, but mostly it was because a broody fire hen was possibly more dangerous than a full-size dragon. While both could shoot fire out of an orifice, the dragon would be more likely to snap your head off and eat you, where the fire hen would kick the shit out of you, pin you down, slowly cook your liver, and then nibble on it as you eventually bled out.
Luckily I was being paid to do this, because no one in their right mind would even approach the business end of a fire hen much less try to steal a pair of its babies.
There were two chicks—squat black-feathered balls held up by thin, blazingly white legs—digging at the edges of an outcropping when I snuck up on a promising crevice. They were about the size of a kiwi—the bird, not the fruit—and from what I could see, hadn’t quite grown into their fire-starting capabilities yet. Or so I thought.
The slightly larger one twisted about, shoving her head down into her wing to put her ruffled feathers back in place, and I got a really good look at her back end. Her hind feathers were a veritable rainbow of reds, yellows, and oranges. It was a clear sign she’d been a good murder chicken and developed way ahead of nature’s schedule. Her pink eyes were clear, not yet turned to the beady black of an adult, and she’d already picked up on her species’ paranoia, scanning the rocks for predators and protecting the smaller blue-assed male by her side. Chances are they were siblings, but fire hens weren’t known to be picky about their mates. So long as the male was willing to breed more little wildfire chickens, they were tolerated and fed along with any brood she might lay.
“Okay, no sign of momma hen,” I muttered, craning my neck in an attempt to see farther down into the narrow ravine beyond. “Brace yourselves, chickies. You’re coming with me.”
Most people have a glamorized view of Stalkers. Pretty much everything anyone knows is something they learned from movies or vids. Books paint pictures of lone gunmen prowling the prairies and understreets, hunting down their bounties, be they human or creature. There’s never any depiction of long nights slogging through mud holes and dusty caverns looking for a pack of black dogs who’d decimated a homestead or scraping off the remains of a fellow Stalker from your face after they’d been bitten in half by a prismatic dragon. The hero in Stalker stories always rode off into the sunset with a hot love interest and a bag full of money.
Reality never matched up to fiction, and I would bet every last penny I had that no movie or book would ever show the hero of the story tugging on a pair of ruffled floral oven mitts to scoop up a couple of fire chicks.
It was a good look—black jeans, an old blue henley, and orange-flowered frilly gloves barely wide enough to cover my hands, much less reach my wrists.
“And thank fucking Pele for that because I am never going to live this down,” I grumbled, trying to shove my long fingers as far into the thin mitts as I could. “And if Dempsey takes a picture of me coming back with these things, I’m just going to leave the old man out here and he can figure out how to get back to San Diego all on his own.”
The key to grabbing a fire hen—especially a baby one—is to wait until its head is turned. The problem is, like most birds, they tend to shit straight out their rear end like high-powered water pistols. Unlike most birds, their natural defenses are actual flames. When small, along the lines of a butane torch. When fully grown, some have the range and heat of a small red dragon. And the adults were just too freaking big to grab, but some people tried anyway… usually ending up as fire-hen dinner. There’s also the matter of the adults having powerful legs and sharp talons at the end of their hooked toe
s. They were cute enough when they were small—roly-poly feathered grumpy things easily scooped up if someone were careful and armed with a pair of asbestos tongs. But the adults were larger, more ostrich-shaped, and irrationally mean. I’d seen one go out of its way to bring down a pine tree that somehow pissed it off simply by existing.
I did not want mama bird to see me grab these two chicks, and I sure as hell didn’t want to try to outrun her back to the car.
The male was easy, barely a peep when I grabbed at and tucked it under my arm, but the female—like most intelligent females—wasn’t going to take any of my shit. As soon as my oven mitt closed down on her, she let out a banshee klaxon loud enough to warn Kansas of an incoming tornado. My ears were bleeding by the time I had her tucked under my upper arm, and despite the long sleeves of my shirt, she seemed to find a way to dig through the fabric with her beak and pluck out bits of my flesh.
And to make matters worse, I heard the warning cry of an adult fire hen gearing up for battle.
So I did the most sensible thing I’ve ever done.
I ran.
I was always fucking running.
The species as a whole is pretty, with sleek hematite feathers and multicolored ruffled bottoms. Problem with those feathers, as glossy as they were, they were slippery, and trying to keep hold of the chicks as I ran proved difficult. They slid about, crashing against my ribs and into the crook of my elbow. At some point the female cawed out loudly to her mother, either encouraging the older bird to sever my head from my neck or perhaps cursing her for being so lax in her duties that a lowly elfin was able to snatch her up from their hillside. Either way, their mother screamed back in return, shouting to the heavens what she was going to do to me once she caught me.
Thankfully, I didn’t speak fire hen or I’d have probably run faster.
I nearly lost my footing on the sands as the loam slid away from my foot, and I must have squeezed the female a bit, because a second after I righted myself, she erupted with a warble of hot flames from her rear end, setting a sage bush on fire.
“Odin’s—” My curse was cut off by the sudden drop of the hill underneath me. I hadn’t seen the dip, and by the time I did, it was too late to adjust for it. I went down in a less than graceful tumble across the canyon slope, hitting every bit of chaparral and lava jut along the way.
The male squawked his displeasure when we finally came to a stop against a small boulder, but the female was furious and let loose a stream of orange-tinted flames from her nether regions, practically cooking the sand to glass. She struggled against my arm, pecking furiously at any part of me she could reach. Finding every tender bit of skin she could, she dug and twisted, sometimes going back for a second round on a particularly soft area just to make sure I knew she was pissed.
Their mother didn’t sound too happy either.
Her cries were strident, more pissy than alarmed. She knew she could run me down once I got into the open. I could only hope for a long head start, because once we hit the flat land between the ravine edge and the blacktop road winding through the hills, I was screwed. Once upright, I clutched the chicks closer, not liking the spread of heat running down my ribs. The female was gearing up for another blast, one stronger than the ones she’d already given me, and if I didn’t get the chicks down to the Nova and into the asbestos-lined kennel sitting in its hatch, she was going to turn me into a pile of elfin shawarma for her mother and stupid brother to feast on.
“Seriously, shut up,” I scolded the chicks, and found my footing. The hillside turned from loam to gravel and back again every few steps, making the going tough, but the fire hen behind me didn’t seem to be having the same problems. “Okay, hold on. We’re going to do this ass first, because if we don’t, your momma’s going to snip my head off.”
I flung myself down the rest of the way, praying gravity would push me down with enough momentum to give me breathing room between the car and the large bird barreling down on me. The fire hen was coming at an angle, so I could see her out of the corner of my eye as she ate up the distance between us, her long ivory legs flying up and down in a blur, talons digging into the ground and kicking up whirlwinds of dust with each loping step. She was a nightmare of a chicken, her elongated bright pink wattle flapping about her stretched-out neck, beak parted so her forked black tongue whipped back and forth as she ran. Unlike other birds, she had teeth—long ones. Probably a throwback to whatever ancient reptilian Underhill creature she descended from, but they were sharp and hooked, perfect for tearing into soft flesh and ripping out chunks to eat.
Much like her furious daughter was doing to my sleeved arm.
I tried to steer my slide as best I could, but my ass took a beating, seemingly finding every bump and rock along the way. The course was short—only a few seconds—but my weight was enough to get me up to a good speed and we flew down the slope, the chickens under my arms ruffling in the faint wind, framed by the floral horrors cupping their chests. The female blasted a short wave of flames along the way—a sputtering spray of embers and sparks—but it was mostly sulfurous gas and outrage. I didn’t check on the male. He seemed content to be along for the ride, unconcerned about his fate and possibly believing he’d somehow gained the power of flight, a trait not shared by any other fire hen or cock in existence.
Not content with screaming at me, their mother stretched her body out, and it bulged, the sunset-hued feathers along her rump and underbelly going bright as she cut in closer. I swerved as best I could to avoid a chunk of lava, but it caught my shoulder, leaving a stinging scrape I would be feeling for a few hours. Glancing back quickly, I had just enough time to add my own screaming to the cacophony, some primal part of my brain believing that if I made enough noise, I could somehow go faster and avoid the inevitable storm heading my way.
Because while fire hens couldn’t fly, they sure as hell could jump up like demented feathered ninja, fold their legs in, aim their asses forward, and blast anything in their path.
Unfortunately, the mother bird was fully engorged with fire and spite, and I was definitely in her fiery ass’s path.
I hit the flats running, feeling the scorch of her blast at my back. The long grasses at my feet erupted into a smoldering fire, slowly catching, then rapidly dying out as the prairie sheaves quickly swelled with excess water to extinguish the flames. The dirt turned dry, its moisture sucked clean, but it was still packed tight enough for me to get a good purchase. Sprinting, I headed for the Nova, shouting for Dempsey to open the passenger-side door for me.
The car’s gasoline–fuel cell hybrid V-8 engine was rumbling, but the door wasn’t opening and I was getting close. The chicks’ mother was still tight on my ass, probably gearing up for another flamethrower attack, but I couldn’t spare her a glance. I needed to get into the car and gone before she reached the road or I’d learn firsthand what it was like to fall victim to her teeth and hooked talons.
“Dempsey! Open the fucking door!” I shouted, sucking in a mouthful of dry air. The chicks under my arms were squirming, and I almost lost the female when my right foot hit a rock hidden in the grasses. The male cheeped at me, thrilled for the little jog, or perhaps it finally dawned on him he was being taken away from his nest. “Momma’s on my ass, old man!”
I was nearly twenty yards from the car when I finally saw Dempsey slumped over the steering wheel, his slack face turned toward me, a blob of pasty gray flesh dotted with silvering stubble and a large red nose. He wasn’t moving, or at least not that I could see.
So I dropped the damned fire hens and pushed every last bit of energy I had in me to get to the car.
I didn’t care about the bounty. Hell, I didn’t even care if the mother fire hen caught me, so long as she let me go long enough to get to the old man. Panic clotted my veins, thickening the air in my lungs and shutting down my brain. Ice crackled through my blood, and I dove through the passenger window and slammed into Dempsey’s limp body.
The glass scraped my be
lly, and I hit the center console hard, but I struck Dempsey even harder. His chest jerked, and his shoulder slammed into the door, but his open eyes only rolled to their whites and the cutting remark with its accompanying slap never came. His head lolled back and his chest stuttered when I hit him, his tongue swollen and pushing out from between his teeth, a pink mass held back by yellowed ivories stinking of cigar smoke and cheap whiskey. A silver flask fell out of his right hand, joining the dead cigar end on the floor by his feet.
“Come on, you old bastard.” It was too cold all of a sudden and my teeth were chattering an imperfect rhythm, much like the one beating in Dempsey’s chest. His breathing was shallow, and somewhere I heard a scrabble of thumps coming from the side of the car.
The Nova was cramped, and I hurt everywhere, bleeding in spots and seared along my ribs, but none of that mattered. Not even the enraged fire hen attacking the Nova’s back quarter panel or the money I’d left on the prairie flat mattered. My world was suddenly only as big as the two front seats of a smelly 1977 Nova and the man struggling to breathe in my arms.
I tugged off the oven mitts, then threw them out the window, needing to free my hands. Pulling Dempsey’s dead weight over to the other side of the car took me way too long, and I kept checking to see if he was still breathing.
If he was still with me.
“Stick with me, Dempsey,” I muttered at him, kicking the flask out of the way so I could get my foot on the gas pedal while I threw the Nova into Drive. My eyes were burning, but I couldn’t give in to their sting. The drive was going to be long and furious, and I couldn’t waste my time on sentiment. Not now. Maybe not ever. “Hold on, old man, and when we get you all fixed up, you can kick my ass for losing the bounty and Najiri’s damned oven mitts.”
Two
NIGHT SEIZED the sky beyond the San Diego shoreline, but the city’s sparkling lights held it back, a glittering cloak of flashing reds and steady whites, pushing away the edge of blue from its outskirts. From Medical’s upper floors, I could see where the night surrendered to the sprawling metropolis’s defiance, peeling back the darkness in waves of cloudy blue. An air ambulance whipped around one of the glistening glass towers studding the city’s crescent, its red lights flashing rapidly as it approached.