by RyFT Brand
nster Collector in:
Back To Work
season one, episode seven
RyFT Brand-Stories
Copyright 2012
Cover Painting by
Lisa Marie Raezer
Illustrations by
T.A. Cuce’
This is a work of fiction. Any similarities to
persons living or dead are purely coincidental.
JAZZ, Monster Collector
Season One: Earth’s Lament
Episode-7: Back To Work
RyFT
It was the second time in my life that I was about to be hit by a train. I guess when you’ve been around as long as I have the odds for it aren’t really all that impressive. Part of me wanted to stand up and embrace the end of struggle and suffering, but I wasn’t one to just lay down and die. So instead I lay down and maybe, possibly, most likely would die.
I dropped into a puddle of my own blood. I’d been set to leaking when I got shot by one of Boss Geeter’s goons. I would have wondered why they hadn’t kept on shooting, but, as I had something close to a half-million tons of hover train barreling toward me, I didn’t have time for research and contemplation.
Despite the burning pain in my side I managed to drag myself between the mallow rails, blew out every square millimeter of air inside me, and thought skinny thoughts, really skinny. This was going to be close.
Hover trains barely skim above the rails, and some of the cars dip down in the center to take advantage of every available bit of space. On a pair of inter-dimensionally conjoined planets powered entirely by magic, space was about the only thing that was in limited supply.
I pressed my face to the gravel, held my breath, and waited. The train would be over me in a microsecond, but, to my adrenalin flooded brain, that microsecond seemed to stretch out to a full, lengthy second and a half; just enough time for me to ponder on how I’d gotten into said fatal predicament.
Boss Geeter had jumped me while I was asleep, the coward, and, after tying me up tight, was in the process of torturing me for information about my supposed involvement with the Clowns, a gang of monsters into face painting, who, unknown to Boss Geeter, had hired me to find out who was hitting them. But, it turns out, someone was hitting Boss Geeter’s gang of miscreants too and he planned to extort me into finding out who was behind the hits. Meanwhile, as a deferred species bond collector, I’m the one who’s supposed to be hitting the monsters, not finding and stopping good folks hitting bad monsters.
See what a second and a half can do?
With a whoosh of air and a throb of mallow pulsers, the train overtook me. All I could do was wait and press into the stone bed as hard as I was able. Car after car shot past. The roar was deafening. I could feel the waves of magic coursing through me, rattling my teeth and shooting pain through the gash in my side. I gritted my teeth and hoped the train wasn’t too long—I couldn’t afford to take a breath. One little thing, a hose left un-stayed or a bolt left a thread or two loose, and I’d be skinned alive. If I did manage to survive the length of it, Boss Geeter’s heavily armed thugs would be waiting for me.
Like I said, looked like that was the end.
Then my head started to swim and a wave of nausea swept through me. At first I wrote if off to blood loss, then I recognized the wretched familiarity of spatial displacement.
I drew breath at last. “No!” I screamed over the din of the passing train, then, all at once, my shout became a roar that echoed inside a hollow box. I kept it up, yelling through my dizziness and nausea and anger. When I ran out of air I let myself relax at last, no longer needing to press myself into the ground, and panted, waiting for my to heartbeat slow.
“Jazz,” a soft, familiar voice spoke from the either. “Are you OK?”
With a great deal of effort that I attempted to conceal, I rolled onto my back and let my eyes flutter open. A porcelain skinned Asian face looked down at me and smiled. A pink, mallow infused bandage was stuck to her forehead and contrasted her jet-black hair. “No, not really.”
DJ’s face tightened with a mix of concern and confusion. “What? Where?” She leaned over close and looked me up and down, then glanced at her blood smeared hand and her eyes and mouth opened wide. “Oh my gods, you’re hurt.” In haste she continued the examination until she found the gash through my padded shirt that matched the one in my side. “Parry, get help, Jazz is hurt, hurt bad.”
Parry was there, ut-oh, I knew where this was going.
“What, she’s hurt? Where? What happened?” Parry, my secretary/business partner ran into view, his electric-blue eyes searching me. “Oh no, the train hit her, I knew it.” He sucked in a great breath. “She’s…bleeding…” His eyes rolled up, his fingers trembled, and, with a little mouse-like squeak, he collapsed to the floor at my feet. Fortunately, due to his stature, he didn’t have far to fall.
DJ paid him no more than a glance then began wrangling my arm out of the shirt. “Hold on Jazz, we’ll get you help.”
“We’ll?” I managed to ask just before a wave of sharp pain had me sucking in slurpy air.
“Sorry, I’m sorry,” DJ said, trying to move even more slowly.
“Stop being sorry girl, she did herself. Just get her out of the shirt, we need to plug the leak,” a deep, resonate voice, scuffed and scratched by many years of use, spoke from out of view.
I didn’t need to see his face to recognize that stink of mallow and grease. “Hello, Uncle.”
I grimaced again as DJ drew my arm out fully and pulled my battle shirt over my shoulder. The look on her face told me that it didn’t look good.
“Why is it every time I see you girl, something’s leaking something? And hello.”
“Purely coincidental—oww, easy.”
“Sorr—” DJ began to say, but caught herself. She looked back over her shoulder. “This is bad, she needs hospice.”
Uncle stepped over and knelt beside me. His white hair and beard contrasted his dark completion. Not many humans sported beards anymore, opting instead to have the follicles removed by mallow-section. They claimed it made them look more evolved, I think it was really to make them look even less ‘monster-like.’ He looked at my wound with the same cloudy-eyed inspection he used on flycraft.
“Well?” I asked.
“I’ve seen worse, but I’ve seen better too.”
DJ leaned her mouth very close to my ear and whispered. “Use the stone Jazz, go ahead, you have too.”
“Can’t,” I grunted as my head swam with pain. “It’s still in the jar, scrubbing.”
Uncle shook his wrinkled head. “You and that damned stone, that things gonna tear you up yet.” He pointed a long, strong finger at DJ. “Go get my tool box girl and you hurry.”
With a quick nod DJ sprang to her feet and raced off, having to jump over Parry’s stirring form.
“You gonna tighten my lug-nuts?”
I saw Uncle stifle a snicker. “You’re a fool child, you know that?”
I heard a soft moan from the floor. “Yeah, I know. Parry OK?”
“He’s fine,” Uncle said without even looking. He dug into a deep pocket of his knee-length canvas coat and pulled out a rag, looked like it had been a muscle style undershirt. He pressed the rag to the wound. He was rough handed but was nearly as good at patching up people as he was at machines. And, with all the magic healing available on Mirth, not many folks knew good old fashioned first aide.
In a bustle and a commotion of rattling metal, DJ ran back inside the car heaving, two handed, Uncle’s long, red toolbox. With a grunt she dropped it down beside
him. “There,” she said between pants. “I went as fast as I could.”
“That’s fine,” he said and flipped open the lid. He dug through the box, noisily shifting tools.
DJ slid her small hands in her pockets and gazed down. “How are you feeling, Jazz?”
She’s a good trusty sidekick. “Terrible. How are you feeling?”
“Fine,” she said a little too quickly.
“Really? That explosion you were caught in, and the resulting bandage on your face, looked pretty terrible to me.”
“Hospice patched me up good; cleared the concussion. They wanted me to stay in stasis overnight, but I, knowing how you always say, refused.”
“Good girl.” I grimaced and caught my breath as Uncle pulled the rag away.
Uncle had an old, glass bottle in hand. It was half full with a clear liquid that he began to sprinkle on the rag.
I closed my eyes and waded through a crest of pain. “That rocket fuel?”
“Close enough,” he said, took a hit off the bottle, then set the rag to my ragged wound.
“Ahhhh!” I arched up with a