by RyFT Brand
Jazz, Monster Collector in:
Crime Scenes
season one, episode nine
RyFT Brand
Copyright 2014
This is a work of fiction. Any similarities to
persons living or dead are purely coincidental.
JAZZ, Monster Collector
Season One: Earth’s Lament
RyFT Brand
Episode-9: Crime Scenes
“You mind slowing it down there lead foot?” I snapped at the huge, hairy creature piloting the shining, chrome-plated glidesport.
Flashing his fangs, he thumped me with a heavy fist.
“Yo!” I shouted in a playful tone despite the pain from the ribs I figured he’d just cracked. I badly wanted to blast a hole in this creep’s cranium, but I had people counting on me. DJ, DJ, my sidekick, she was counting on me. “Take it easy Squashy, we’re working now, we can fight later.”
“Well don’t make fun of my condition,” he said in a resonant, deep voice. “Especially being that you’re the one who put me in it.”
I shifted in my seat, inconspicuously trying to ease the pain in my side. “I merely accommodated karma. You’re the one who works for a crime boss. And the one who was torturing me. And the one who grabbed me while I was holding a gun.” I’d said enough really, but I couldn’t resist the taunt. “Besides, you’ve still got another foot.”
This time he went to backhand me, which, if I’d let him, just might have knocked my head off. So I decided not to let him.
With a flick of a wrist, I whipped out one of the throwing darts concealed up my sleeve and held it pointy-side out.
“Owwww!” he screeched in a volume that hurt my ears, but not as badly as my dart had hurt his paw. “Get it out! Get it out!” He was waving his hand and thrashing about; the glidesport swerved out of control. Maybe I should have thought more before stabbing the monster driving.
Glidesports run on a wave of magical current that is transmitted from long lines of mallow, a natural source of magic, set into the roads. The attuned vehicles kind of float along as if they were on invisible tracks. Normally these machines remained fixed on the lines, but the big oaf was completely obsessed with the long needle sticking through his paw. “Oww! Oww! Oww!” He kept crying out, flinging his huge, hairy form all over the compartment. As he did he repeatedly banged into the stick. He’d knocked us off the road and out of control.
“Hey!” I shouted. “Get us stopped!”
When I leaned in to make a grab for the controls, he lurched forward and I got my head pinned against the dashboard.
As soon as he reeled away, I sprang back into my seat and pressed my hands to my head. I was surprised it was still essentially round. This thug was huge, hairy, smelly, and strong, really strong. I was a Deferred Species Bond collector, a monster hunter, so those were all too familiar traits to me. But he was having trouble pulling the dart out; he kept wincing like a three-year-old afraid to pull off a band-aid. And there was something else, something in his eyes, a kind of hurt beyond pain. These were not normal monster traits; these were things I wasn’t used to.
That’s when the glidesport careened into a wall.
“Stop this damned machine you idiot!” I shouted, hanging onto the dashboard for all I was worth as we were now shooting sparks into the night as we dragged along a magically constructed wall. The vehicle shimmied and shook, blurring my vision and setting a tremolo into my voice as I yelled over the screech of grinding metal. “Stop it now or I’ll blast off your other big foot.”
“Rarwwwer!” The beast bellowed so loudly I expected my ears to start bleeding. Enough was enough.
“Here,” I shouted, grabbing the beast by the roots of its wrist hairs.
“Ow, ow, ow.” He held his captured arm very still. “That hurts.”
Moving as fast as I could, I yanked the dart out, spilling a trickle of light gray blood from the puncture. A childhood accident left me completely colorblind. Monsters bled black, as black as ink. Human blood, red blood, looked a light shade of gray to me, same as Mickey’s. This monster was a mystery.
“Thanks,” he said and clasped his injured hand with the other. For the first time in a full minute he looked out through the windscreen. His big, orange eyes burst open and he gasped.
Oh crap.
I looked just in time to see two scrawny orcs in ragged clothes, probably free range, come around the corner and into the path of our out-of-control glidesport. They never even had a chance to scream. We mowed them down like a couple of gone-to-seed dandelions.
Hey, at least something good had come out of this fiasco.
“Oh no!” But the big foot seemed anything but happy; in fact he looked outright distraught. This monster was behaving less and less monster-like and that was making me nervous.
He leaned back in the seat. “Take the stick! Stop us!”
My head still felt a little squashed, but I grabbed the stick and, with a loud crunch of chrome, bounced us off the wall like a pool ball and set us on course for the road. I forced a heavy transport to slam on its inertia deniers, but I’d managed us back onto the mallow lane and set the line lock before shifting back into my seat. For a moment we just sat there, my ribs and head throbbing, and the big nasty holding its paw, panting shakily.
Something tickled and I pulled a long, brown hair from my face. I sniffed my fingers. I now stank like the best beside me.
Mickey, the ‘bigfoot,’ slowly released his paw; it looked like it had nearly stopped bleeding. His thick, hairy brow was high on his forehead and his eyes were full of apprehension. “It wasn’t poisoned, was it?”
“Humm,” I said, pretending that I wasn’t quite sure, then, in a rare moment of weakness, told him the truth. “No, it wasn’t. But try to hit me again and you’ll wish it had been.”
“Grrrr.” With an angry grab he took the stick, released the line lock, and made a hard left onto a side street. He mumbled to himself in some language I didn’t understand, but that had a cadence and rhythm than sounded vaguely familiar. After several blocks he pulled over and, shifting the big ‘vertable sideways, slid into a parking space.
With a very ape-like finger, he pushed a button that folded the top back, flung open his door and peeled himself out of the vehicle. He took a handkerchief from his coat pocket and wrapped it around his injured hand, holding it in place with his thumb. Then, with the tails of his huge trench coat draping around him, set his wrinkled fedora on his head and marched around the machine with the clang of a metal prosthetic that set his seven-foot frame into a gated sway.
I watched him for a moment while I ran myself though a quick weapons check. There was a very good chance this was a trap. This wretched beast did, after all, owe me for a foot.
I followed him, keeping enough distance for me to react to any attack. He turned into the alley behind a deferred species flea, tick, and decapamite bathhouse. I entered cautiously. The alley was dark, full of shadows, discarded transport containers, and trash eliminators—there were too many places to hide for my liking. Smelled like a ripe place for an ambush.
The sasquatch, or whatever he was really, had disappeared.
I drew my MacDaddy revolver, my customized seven shot pistol, and, just to be cautious, set the cylinder for the silver load—I wasn’t sure what would kill this thing. “Mickey,” I called no louder than I thought he could hear me.
All sat quiet and still for a long moment. Then a shadow with its hands in its coat pockets shifted into the dim light of the moons. “It was over here.”
I listened to nothing for a
couple seconds, and then sniffed hard, but the Mickey-stink was overpowering, or masking, any other smells. And for the Burbs, Nitsburg’s officially accepted monster neighborhood, that was saying something.
I cocked the gun and moved toward him, keeping all my senses fully alert.
“There’s no one else here,” he said, sounding somewhat offended.
That only made me more apprehensive. “Monsters are everywhere here; some can hide in magical ways.”
I heard Mickey take in a couple of deep sniffs. “There’s no monsters here, just me and you.”
I moved to just out of his arm’s reach, still holding the cocked and ready weapon, and glanced down at massive black-blood splatter stains on the pavement and wall. “Then there’s at least one monster here.”
He growled, grabbed my shoulder and snapped me around; I think he nearly dislocated it. His move was so fast and unexpected I dropped my pistol. It hit the mallow-made pavement and slid away. “I ain’t a monster!”
Ignoring the pain, I