Jazz, Monster Collector in: Back To Work (season 1, episode 7)

by RyFT Brand

burning pain. Uncle pressed me back down with an arm that always seemed stronger that the skinny, wrinkled appendage should be.

  “Hold on there, we have to get this cleaned up,” he said with a tone that left no room for discussion. “Dang thing’s nasty, probably something shot you with an iron spike, no doubt rusty and dirty. Better hope it wasn’t poisoned.”

  As the pain eased off to merely intense, I opened eyes wet with tears. DJ kneeled at my side wringing her small hands together. Parry wobbled cautiously to his feet. His brown completion had turned green and he looked nauseous. “I don’t know,” I said and forced myself to shoot DJ a reassuring wink, “Poison would make fast work of what you’re trying to do slow.”

  “Is she—” Parry began to say but gagged. “Is Jazz going to be alright?”

  Uncle eased the rag off. It was soaked with blood. “Not if she doesn’t find better playmates she won’t.”

  “Oh Gods—” Slapping a hand to his mouth and hunched over, Parry hurried out of the car.

  Uncle pointed in Parry’s direction. “At least that boy has some manners.” Uncle refolded the rag to a clean spot, applied more of the moonshine, took a snort, and then pressed it back to the gash in my side.

  “Ahhh.” I grimaced and pressed my sore head to the floor. Admittedly, the pain wasn’t as bad this time. Still hurt like hell though.

  He held it there for some time. I opened my eyes and saw him nod toward his toolbox. “I got some gauze and tape in an old soup can, dig them out.”

  DJ pulled an old Campbell’s soup can out of the box. I don’t know where Uncle got all that antique stuff. That can was over a century old, just like me. DJ pulled a roll of two-inch wide gauze and a spool of tape from the can. “Got ‘em.”

  Uncle eased the rag off again. It was covered with much less blood and I was relieved when he set it aside. “Hold still there Humpty-Dumpty.” He pulled a little bottle of glue out of the top pocket of his coat, used his mouth to remove the cap, and then applied a liberal amount of glue to the edge of my loose flap of skin. He quickly pressed the skin down applying ample pressure and I was again reeling though a tidal wave of pain.

  After what felt like hours, he let go. The skin stuck and I appeared to have stopped bleeding.

  He nodded to DJ. “Let’s get her sitting up.”

  They each took an arm and levered me up. With rough, calloused hands, Uncle raised my shirt up to just beneath my small breasts. I caught DJ looking away, which I found out of character. She wasn’t one to be squeamish.

  Uncle began wrapping the gauze around my torso. He was careful to overlap the seams and seemed to make many more passes than he needed to. When the roll ran out he applied several pieces of white tape to the free end and secured it down.

  “Don’t know how much juice you lost” he said standing. “You should get some transfused.”

  “No,” I said more abruptly then I’d meant to. “I’ll have none of that mallow-generated goo pumped inside me.” I took a careful breath in, feeling the restriction of the bandages and the bite of pain from the wound. “I just need some food, a lot of food. My body will make its own.”

  “But Jazz,” DJ said. “You really need the blood. The magic stuff isn’t that bad. In fact it’s better than the real stuff. It will help you heal.”

  “Bull,” I snapped. “Nothing’s better than the real stuff.” I raised my hands as high as I the pain allowed. “Help me up.”

  Uncle and DJ each took an arm and eased me up standing. “Whoa.” Just as they released me my head swam and I swayed backward.

  “Easy, girl.” Uncle held me while I regained my bearings.

  Embarrassment slipped a smile slip onto my lips. “Yeah, I got it now, thanks.”

  He let me go but kept his hands close and open, ready to grab me again. But I held myself steady.

  “You’re in luck one way,” DJ said, smiling. “There’s a small passenger set up front, and they have a food car.

  “Point the way.”

  I leaned heavier on Uncle than I’d care to admit as DJ led us though a long line of cargo cars. It was true; I didn’t like magic anywhere in, on, or near me. But there was something else, something that she didn’t know. Magic and me could make a very volatile combination. There was something inside me that, if mixed with enough magic, could prove much more dangerous than all the monsters I’d ever killed, and I’d killed some real evil titans in my time.

  Along with our food, Parry came to our little booth. He stood, waiting for one of us to slide down and make him some room. After the goblin waiter (there’s nothing creepier than a goblin in a black suit handling your food with those knobby/warty hands.) set our plates down and hobbled out of the car, Uncle stood and motioned for Parry to take his seat.

  I grabbed a plate and began scooping in food as quickly as I could. I didn’t care for those mallow-made dishes one bit, but I was right at the edge of starvation. At least I hoped that was why my head was swimming and my fingers were shaking, a poisoned iron-spike wasn’t unheard of.

  “Where are you going?” DJ, now seated beside Parry, asked.

  Uncle picked up his sandwich. “I got work to do; might be able to jury rig that wreck of yours.”

  My eyes open wider. My jaw would have dropped as well, but it was full of half chewed food; didn’t stop me from talking though. “Ship is here?”

  Parry’s brow wrinkled and he stared hard at my face.

  “Yeah,” DJ said. I was glad to see that her limitless enthusiasm hadn’t been dampened by the explosion. “Uncle met us here once he learned that Ship had been brought aboard.”

  I swallowed hard because my mouth was overstuffed and my food hadn’t been fully chewed. Then I shoveled in another heaping spoonful of Breakfast Oncies. About the closest thing I could match this to would be yogurt with an oatmeal consistency that had chunks of dried fruit in it. Though I doubted there was any dairy or fruit in the concoction. For magically created sustenance though, it wasn’t terrible. “So, you just happened to be taking this train back from hospice?”

  Parry shook his head. “I can’t understand her.”

  DJ nodded. “Yeah, isn’t that weird?” Then she dipped a swarmmy-fry into her nougat sauce and shoved it in her mouth.

  I finished chewing and swallowed this time. “A little too weird. So how did you find me?”

  “We didn’t,” Parry said.

  “Ship picked you up on its sensors and alerted Uncle,” as she spoke, DJ conducted her words with a waggling swarmmy fry. Swarmmys were about the closest thing to a potato one could get on Mirth since the Monsanto pandemic, made from a sort of two-legged sea-sponge with an eerily human face that kicked and crawled around the ocean floor. No one’s been able to prove that they’re sentient, buy there’s still some debate. They looked and smelled gross to me, but then I hadn’t been raised on Mirth.

  I opened my mouth for another load, but I held the spoon back to speak. “By alerting Uncle that I was about to be hit by a train, you mean that he began to cheer.”

  DJ shrugged, chewing.

  “It was effective.” Parry still looked a little green around his eyes and lips.

  “And then Uncle ran us to that cargo car. He was able to use the trans-loader to teleport you aboard.”

  “About that,” I said wagging a finger. “I’ve told you—”

  “Please, Jazz,” Parry, in an uncharacteristic moment of assertiveness, said. “Just be thankful that we saved you.”

  I spooned a heaping load into my mouth. “Thank you.”

  Parry pressed a hand to his mouth. He may have barfed a little.

  “So what happened to you?” DJ asked.

  My side was still hurting bad, but my head felt better. The food and drink had stopped my hands shaking. My headache had decreased, leaving room for the memories to flow back in.

  “Boss Geeter invited me to a meeting.”

  Parry cautiously removed his hand from his mouth. “Who’s Boss Geeter?
”

  “Gangster,” DJ blurted to Parry, then turned back to me and her face wrinkled with doubt. “He invited you?”

  “Yes,” I said, pouring tea from the pot into my mug. “By which I mean he bashed my head in, tied me to a chair, and attempted to torture information out of me.”

  The grooves on DJ forehead deepened. “What kind of information?”

  I knew DJ was worried that Geeter had learned about the Not Now Stone, or, even more worrisome, had somehow figured out my little secret. “He wanted to know why I met with the clowns.”

  “Great Moogie,” Parry cursed. “This is getting worse.”

  “What did you tell him?” DJ asked.

  “Nothing, really. Turns out his gang’s getting hit too. He wants me to find out who’s doing the deeds.”

  “Oh even better,” Parry’s hands waved and the color returned to his face. Worrying was his greatest source of strength. “So now we’re going to work for gangsters too. Hey, maybe there’s an acidic blob somewhere that needs to hire a monster collector…oh that’s right, a blob is a monster, just like clowns and gangsters. You do know that you’re a deferred species bond collector, don’t you?”

  DJ traced a finger through the condensation on her glass of Berries-n-Beats juice and ignored Parry. “What did you tell him?”

  “You mean after I shot him?”

  DJ shrugged.

  “I told him no,” I said, then a flash of memory started me to snicker.

  Infected, a smile curled DJ’s lips. “What?”

  “Just remembering him yelping and jumping around when Moxie flew up his—”

  “Hey,” Parry snapped looking around the car. “Where is Moxie?”

  I had to stop and think. The last time I’d seen her she was flying straight toward that dwarf island troll. Parry wasn’t going to like this. “I think she’s back in the warehouse where they held me.”

  His dark eyebrow shot straight up and melded into his hairline. “You abandoned her to those gangsters! Jazz, how could you? You know, I just cannot—”

  The pulse of a portable tele-com interrupted what surly would have been Parry’s long, arduous rant. He removed the hockey puck like disc from his jacket pocket, set it on the table, and read off the name in the projector field. His head tipped back with the weight of it, and then he glared at me.

  I shrugged like I didn’t care because I didn’t.

  He touched the green answer dot in the projection. A stout, hairless woman, who looked to be in her forties but was more than likely in her eighties (mallow cell-lift kept humans looking much younger. And the whole hairless thing was a favorite fashion for members of the hoi-polloi.) She was an elitist. “Mr. Parry,” she said in an effected, nasally voice—yeah, definitely elitist, probably from Welmont. “I want to know what you are doing about that horrible creature that consumed my darling little Fe-Fe. I cannot sleep knowing that that murderer is still out there on the loose and my little apricot…” the fat blowhard began to choke up. She dabbed at her eyes with a lacy handkerchief despite that I strongly suspected she’d had eye replacement surgery and would have given up her tear ducts in the process. She drew in a deep breath and snorted it out though her nose like an angry bull. “I demand that you do something about it this instant!”

  “Tell her to get stuffed,” I said into my tea mug.

  DJ’s eyes widened and she pressed a finger to her lips.

  “What was that?” the blowhard asked, turning her holographic head like she could see me. “Is that monster collector there with you?”

  “No,” Parry spat out. “Jazz isn’t here, she’s just stopping to pick up a bond from the Enforcer Corps headquarters and then she’s heading directly to Welmont.”

  “You make sure that she is, or she’ll never work in the Upland quarter again, I am very influential.”

  “I’d rather work for Boss Geeter—” DJ clamped a hand over my mouth just before I could add my observation that the dwarf island troll was better looking than the bloated hoi-polloi curmudgeon.

  “What was that?” the flickering hologram asked.

  “Just the vid-vision, ma’am,” Parry said, then added, “I’ll turn it off,” showing his teeth, he shot me an angry glare. “Jazz is a consummate professional. She’ll have your monster apprehended before the end of the day.”

  “Well she’d better have or I’ll report her for mal-promifacation.” The hologram switched off with a loud blip.

  I began pouring a second mug of tea. “I don’t have time for this right now.”

  Parry stared at me, his eyes seeped frustration and aggravation. Maybe it wasn’t such a bad day.

  DJ slid out of the booth and started pulling on the yellow gloves with red stripes that matched her slightly singed jumper. “Come on Jazz, let’s go get this paleo-bear over with and then it will be done. You can’t afford another mal-promification report, remember what the magistrate said. Besides,” she tossed her shiny black hair back over her shoulder and shot me a sly smile. “It will be fun.”

  I sighed. I was tired, sore, and my side was throbbing. Still, she was right, it would be fun. “OK,” I said and slid out of the booth.

  Parry’s eyes rounded over. “Really? You’ll do it?”

  I began buckling the straps that secured by padded shirt, careful to not over tighten those closest to my fresh wound. “Sure, I could use some fun.”

  DJ zipped up the slick, banana-yellow jumper that made her look like a race car driver. “What’s the plan?”

  I glanced out the window and spotted Noirshed Bridge. “We’re nearly at the Dormunt stop. I’ll give Uncle a hand with Ship. You continue to my office, pick up my weapons and battle jacket, and then meet us at Uncle’s shop.”

  Parry stood and slid to my side. “What about me?”

  “Run up to city hall and pick up that paleo-bear bond. Oh, and pay my traffic tickets while you’re there so we can get DJ’s scooter and my bike out of impound.”

  “What am I supposed to pay the fines with?” Parry called as we headed to the end of the car.

  I held the door and let DJ walk though. “What’s left of whatever you’re using to pay for breakfast I guess.” I heard Parry whining as I pulled the door shut.

  “I can not believe that you abandoned me in Clowntown like that,” Ship said in his effected, lilting synthetic voice.

  “Well think how bad I feel knowing that you somehow survived.”

  “How dare you, you pink-skinned human piece of—”

  I slammed both sticks forward. The roar of Ship’s twin avi-star thrusters drowned out his undoubtedly long stream of demonic curses. Beings from the nether realms sure knew how to curse. Ship, my highly modified yard switcher, was, technically, a flycraft, a mallow powered vehicle that used gyroscopes tuned with the lay lines, the veins of magic that run through, over, and around planets mirth, though by design, Ship was closer in construction to a forklift than a sleek, fighting flycraft.

  But Ship could hold his own, especially when I had my hands on the flight-sticks and my feet strapped into the multi-plane pedals. Just to prove it, I pulled both sticks back hard while simultaneously drawing the left pedal up and pushing the right pedal down. Ship arched up in a sharp accent and began turning a series of corkscrews.

  “What the hell are you doing?” he shouted. “I just got pieced back together because of your reckless antics; are you trying to tear me apart again?”

  “Relax,” I ordered, leveling Ship out and easing off the throttle levers. “I’m just checking how well you’re responding, some of those repairs were really fudged.”

  “Well you could ask for a diagnostic instead of risking tearing me to smithereens,” he said as his usually high pitched lilt descended into the baritone he reserved for sarcasm.

  “Never trust diagnostics, I’d rather check it myself. Besides, it’s better to know if something’s wrong before we run into any Cranks.”

  “Cranks!” he screeched. “I thought we were
taking the charted routes to Welmont.” I decided then and there that the next time I trapped a demon’s soul inside a flycraft, I’d make sure it was something fearless like a decender wraith, instead of a twitchy hover demon.

  “We’re not going to Welmont, we’re going to Faeitshire.”

  “Faeitshire!” This time Ship’s screech was joined by another.

  I lifted one of my helmet’s leather earflaps and cocked my head, still keeping one eye peeled ahead. “You OK back there?”

  “I’m fine,” DJ lied. Ship was a single-seater, designed for one worker shuffling litair barges and super-freighters around in the shipping yards. To fly with me she had to curl into Ship’s tiny cargo hold. Fortunately she was just a wisp of a girl. “Parry said we were going to Welmont,” she shouted over all the cockpit noise.

  I smiled, let the earflap drop, and gripped the stick. “Parry’s in a need to know information conduit. Last week I tracked the paleo-bear to the Evendowns. My guess is it was headed to the fairy camp. If it isn’t there I’ll bet the fae know where it is.”

  “Don’t the fae have a bounty out on your head?” DJ shouted.

  “No…I don’t think so. I’ll handle it either way. You hold on, I’ll get us across the between lands as quickly and as uneventfully as possible.”

  “Oh no you will not,” Ship snapped. “You’re not running me ragged because you forced your nutty companion into my hold.”

  “You’ll do as you’re told,” I said and, with a sneer, squeezed the throttle levers in hard against the grips. Ship shot ahead with a great deal more force than any dockworker should have—like I said, he was, aside from being a royal pain in my posterior, heavily modified. By ignoring his complaining, and pushing him to his limits, I made short time of the trip.

  But anytime I experienced an absence of bad luck, I got nervous. “Ship, do you have anything on the long range sensors?” I asked as I eased back the throttles and dropped to just above tree level.

  “Well I don’t know, milady. Why don’t you take a glance at the color-coded monitor?”

  The damned demon knew damned well that, due to a childhood accident, I was completely colorblind. “That’s two tin can, one for the screen remark, and another for the milady. Keep it up and I’ll trade you to a garbage barger.”

  “Dear gods, can’t take a joke, can we?” he said as if I would believe he’d been joking. “There appears to be no other ships in sensor range, Jazz.”

  “Fine,” just as I spoke I spotted a clearing and dropped Ship into a small gap in the trees. We settled down onto a thick bed of pine needles. I was careful to cut the thrusters before touchdown to avoid a fire. I could always start one later if I needed to.

  “Jazz,” DJ called from behind my seat. “Can you hurry; I have to go to the bathroom.”

  “Quick as I can.” I popped the clear canopy, opening the front of ship up like a restaurant refrigerator, stood and drew my macdaddy revolver from my shoulder holster. I listened a moment and opened up my shadow sight. The accident that took my color-vision also gave me something. Aside from night vision, I’d gained the ability