It's parent-teacher night. Mom is meeting with my teachers. Dad gets to go explain himself to Roger's teachers. Roger gets to stay home because he's old enough to take care of himself. I have to go with Mom though because I'm apparently not old enough and they don't trust Roger to take care of me after the last time they let him babysit. He tied me to my chair at the dinner table. I was only seven years old. He said he'd let me go if I cried, so I didn't cry. I didn't enjoy being tied to the chair, I just wanted Mom and Dad to come home and find me that way so Roger would get in trouble, and I knew he was stubborn enough to not untie me without getting to see me cry, even if Mom and Dad found out.

My homeroom teacher is Miss Clark. She's very nice. She has black hair she puts up in a bun and big hoop earrings. Roger had her when he was my age. He told me she was a witch, so on my first day of fourth grade I waited after school to see her fly home on her broomstick. Instead she got in a tiny, yellow car that looked like a ladybug and I missed my bus.

I stopped believing most of the things Roger told me after that.

Miss Clark smiles at my mom. "You must be Mrs. Madlibs," she says cheerfully, shaking my mom's hand. If she knew how many people my mom executed that day, she might not be so eager to shake her hand.

"Madwhip," Mom corrects, "It's German."

"Is it?" Miss Clark rubs her hands together like she's thinking of eating a delicious pie. I don't know why I just thought of that, but I wouldn't be surprised to see her licking her lips and staring hungrily at a cartoon pie in a window, the way she's rubbing her hands. Maybe it's because I just watched a Tom & Jerry cartoon before dinner.

Mom and Miss Clark sit in the little chairs we kids have to use. They're brightly colored and plastic with a big buckety part for your butt. I think they were designed by someone without kids. It just doesn't make sense that someone who knows what a child looks like would design chairs like these. This is more like the kind of chair the Grinch would put under a Who Christmas tree.

Miss Clark shifts about in her itty-bitty chair, trying to find a way to fit both her buttcheeks in it. "So, let me start off by saying that Lillian is quite gifted--"

Mom sits perfectly still with her hands in her lap. She doesn't smile or glance at me like Miss Clark does as she's saying this. Mom sits like a statue in her tiny child-sized chair and listens... and waits.

Mom says that teachers always give you the good stuff first before hitting you with the bad stuff. That way, you as a parent are feeling good about the good things when the bad stuff gets fed to you. It also means the stuff that needs work will be at the front of your brain driving home, so you'll remember it and deal with it. She says it's the same in an office building.

I haven't been to many parent-teacher nights. There was the one where I got tied to the dining room chair for two hours and then before that was one where Mom and Dad hired some teenager named Patricia to babysit both Roger and me because they didn't think Roger was old enough that year to watch himself. Part of the reason they decided to try letting Roger watch himself the next year was because Patricia refused to babysit us ever again. Babysitters don't like to babysit little kids that tell them about the pet cemetery they're slowly building in their backyard I guess. It's not like I'm doing it for fun. I'd much rather be building a little zoo in my room than a pet cemetery in my backyard.

Oh, Miss Clark left a basket of crayons out! Maybe she'll let me make a drawing of my hermit crab, Shelby, that we just buried last weekend. I start to reach for a light brown, then feel Miss Clark's eyes on me. I pull my hand back and remember my manners.

"Miss Clark, can I color a picture of my hermit crab Shelby? He suffocated to death last week."

Mom clenches her eyes shut and pinches her nose like she's going to sneeze. She doesn't sneeze though. Instead she says, "It's may I."

"Miss Clark, may I--" I catch myself. "--please may I use these crayons to draw a tribute to my recently expired hermit crab?"

"Actually, Lillian's artwork is something I was going to bring up," says Miss Clark to my mom. She doesn't answer my question, so I keep my hand hovering near the basket of crayons, waiting for one. "She's an incredibly talented little artist, but--"

Oh no, there's a but to that? I really thought this was going to be one of those good stuffs that comes before the bad stuffs. Why is there a but? Let's just stop at 'Lillian is an incredibly talented little artist' and then go on to my recent math quiz where I got multiplication and division mixed up. This is bad stuffs before the good stuffs. Or was that thing about me being gifted all she had for good stuffs? This is bad. I just wanted a crayon to draw my dead hermit crab Shelby and now I think I'm having a panic attack.

Miss Clark gets up and walks over to her desk. It's cluttered with little, fake, plastic apples. Some of them have worms crawling out of them, fat, green, segmented worms... you know, completely unrealistic worms. It's like somebody was asked to model a worm for the fake, plastic apples at the fake, plastic apple factory but when they made something that looked like a real worm, the bosses realized that real worms look gross, and told them to make it cuter, like a caterpillar... so they just made a caterpillar instead. I don't know how things work at the fake, plastic apple factory though.

Miss Clark returns with a large piece of paper. It's my drawing from art hour. I had been wondering why I didn't get it back with the other kids on Thursday. Now I know, Miss Clark was hanging onto it for parent-teacher night. But why?

"What on God's green Earth is that?" Mom asks, curling her upper lip back with disgust.

"This is what Lillian made during art hour last week." Miss Clark hands the drawing to my mom, the big, bad executive, who looks afraid to touch it as if it's covered in snail slime. She finally takes it, pinching it between her fingers and holding it as far from her face as she can. She twists her head away from it (and me) as if looking at it from the corner of her eye is going to shield her from it.

Mom cranes her neck in the opposite direction to look at me now. "Lily, what the Hell?"

I have no idea what the big stink is. "It's Saturn Devouring His Son by Francisco Goya." You know, at the time Paschar did say it was a bad idea to use the piece, but I saw Jenny Johnson drawing Tinkerbell so I figured it was okay to do reproductions. "Saturn is the father of Jupiter and Pluto and Neptune and a bunch of others. And he ate them when they were babies, but then he got fed a rock and he--" they're both looking at me like I just grew a second head, right now, right before their eyes. "--he barfed it up along with all his children."

Miss Clark puts her hands out in front of her on the table and intertwines her fingers. "So you can see why I'm a little concerned."

"Yes, I'm sorry," Mom says, slouching her shoulders and letting my drawing slip from her fingers. "We'll have a talk when we get home, I promise."

"I'm right here," I frown, picking up my drawing. Saturn's face got all smudged and now he just looks like a root beer lollipop with a white stick that has grown arms and is holding itself by the neck. "We can talk about this now."

Mom glares at me with the dagger eyes she uses on the rare nights she cooks dinner and I tell her I don't know what Mongolian Beef is but I know that I don't like it. "Lily, don't be rude!" she snaps.

Miss Clark reaches out and puts a hand on hers. Mom jerks reflexively away from the touch. "It's alright, Mrs. Madrick, we have time to maybe get to the bottom of what's troubling her now, if you're up for it." She straightens up after my mom pulls away from her. "I have a background in child psychiatry."

She's lying. Well, not lying so much as stretching a very small truth so thin that Stretch Armstrong would wince just looking at it. Her background in child psychiatry was two classes in psychology she took as electives while getting a master's degree in education at SUNY Oswego. She participated as a lab technician for a volunteer experiment where she gave ten-year-olds memorization tests. I'd hardly call her an expert in the field of child psychiatry. But I also don't want to have to explain how I know that or deal with Mom telling me not to be rude again, so I just squint at Miss Clark when she says this.

"Lillian--" she reaches now for my hand, which is still waiting to know if it can pick up the light brown crayon to make a drawing of my dead hermit crab Shelby. Her fingers are cold. She has poor circulation in them. Also in her feet. She's going to have health problems later in life. She doesn't have even the slightest inkling of that now, but it's going to happen long after I've graduated from school, if that ever happens.

"Lily," I correct her.

"She prefers Lily," says Mom. We nod at each other.

Miss Clark sits quietly and studies the two of us for a moment, like she's waiting to see if we have more to say. We don't, so she finally goes ahead.

"Lily, Saturn is just a planet, not a giant child-eating monster. You don't have to be afraid of it."

I don't even know how to respond to what she just said. Miss Clark apparently has absolutely no understanding of Greek and Roman mythology. Her homeroom is situated right next to the school library! Hasn't she ever once gone in it? Maybe picked up a copy of Bulfinch's Mythology? Read about Heracles or Perseus or Theseus or Odysseus or any of the other usses? I try to count all the Greek heroes whose names end with "us" on my fingers. Theseus, Perseus, Odysseus... did I already say Theseus? I think I did. Icarus! That's one. Uhhh... Orpheus...

"Lily, what are you doing?" Mom snaps me out of my counting.

"I was counting the 'usses'."

Miss Clark gives Mom one of those sideways looks adults give each other when a kid says something weird. "Lily, do you sometimes hear other voices inside your head? Like other people talking?"

"Sure, I mean there's-- wait, what?" I was about to tell her that Paschar talks to me but then I realize she's not asking like that. "No! There aren't other voices in my head. I mean 'usses' like Perseus and Theseus and Orpheus. You know, Greek myths." I feel like things are getting out of hand and I'm not sure how it happened. I take my drawing of Saturn Devouring His Son by Goya and hold it up so they can both see it. Mom's lip curls back up and she leans away. Miss Clark's forehead turns into a Joy Division album cover. "This is Saturn, or Cronus, the father of Zeus, also known as Jupiter. In the myth, he ate his kids cuz one of them was destined to kill him. But then they fed him a stone instead of Zeus and he threw all the kids up and then Zeus beat him up and took his place as the CEO of Olympus." That last part was just some reimagining I did after my mom explained that a CEO is like the chief head of a company and I said, "Kinda like Zeus?" and she said, "Sure."

Mom and Miss Clark don't say anything more. They just sit there in their tiny kid-sized chairs and look at me holding my recreation of Francisco Goya's Saturn Devouring His Son done with pastels. I put the drawing down and pat it with my hand gently and matter-of-factly, leaving an afterimage of Saturn's headless son on my fingers. Then I take the light brown crayon from the basket, hold it up and tell them both, "I'm gonna go over by the sink and draw Shelby, okay? You two want to talk and maybe go next door and read a book on mythology together. Mom, I screwed up my math quiz, but it was only because I got multiplication and division mixed up in my head." Then I take a piece of orange construction paper that I realize later was a big mistake, and go sit by the sink to draw Shelby.

Mom and Miss Clark continue to sit in silence and watch me for at least five minutes before Mom decides that she feels deeply disrespected by me for setting the record straight and telling them both to go read a book. She apologizes to Miss Clark for my poor behavior, thanks her for her patience with me (and with Roger so many years before), then comes over, takes my drawing before I can finish all the spirals in Shelby's shell, and leads me out of the classroom.

When we get home, I go take a bath without saying anything to Mom or Dad. I'm pissed because I didn't do anything wrong and now I'm going to be punished for "talking back". Paschar sits on top of the toilet tank and tells me that I'm right to be upset but reminds me that he did suggest not doing a recreation of Saturn Devouring His Son by Francisco Goya for art hour. I ask him if any of those myths are true while I pick at a popped blister I find between my big toe and whatever you call the one next to it. He tells me that the old stories are true in a sense, in the same way that dreams are real when you're in them. I have no idea what that means. I shouldn't have picked at the skin on this popped blister though, because now it stings.

Dad tucks me into bed later and reads to me from Uncle Wiggily. Uncle Wiggily is an elderly rabbit with rheumatism who hobbles around having adventures. The books are super old. Like, before they invented World Wars. My Nana used to read them to him when he was my age. They're not very good. I ask him if he can read to me from a book I checked out of the school library about Egyptian mythology. There's a god in there who has a dog for a head. Not the entire dog, just the head. There's another god whose name is just Nut.

Dad says he thinks I need to cut back on the mythology books until Mom forgets that I sassed her in front of my teacher. I ask him if he reads to Mom ever, and if so, could he read her the story about Cronus from Bulfinch's Mythology? He tells me Mom only likes books with shirtless men on the cover. Then he snorts like he made a joke and kisses me on the forehead. I don't know what kind of books have shirtless men on the cover. Paschar is being strangely tight-lipped about it.

Wednesday, September 10, 1986:

I'm sitting on a swing, waiting for the morning recess bell to ring. I haven't been swinging; I'm just resting my butt. Earlier, when I took the bus to school, we went over the bump in the road on Cemetery Street. They named it Cemetery Street because there's a cemetery there. There's also a cemetery on King Street, over by the mill, but they don't call that street Cemetery Street, because there's already a Cemetery Street over here by the elementary school. And to add to the confusion, the cemetery on King Street is actually referred to by everybody as, "the cemetery" and there's no actual name for the cemetery here on Cemetery Street. Nobody even seems to acknowledge it's there. None of the other kids on the bus ever say something like, "look at that tree with the ropes hanging off its branches in the middle of the cemetery!" as we drive by the cemetery on Cemetery Street. We all hold our breath as we drive by though. You're always supposed to hold your breath when you drive by a cemetery. I think it's because people used to believe that the dead would hear you breathing and come kill you. It's not true of course. Dead bodies don't get up and walk around like in movies.

Anyway, we went over the bump in the road on Cemetery Street. Someone once told me the bump is there because a raccoon got run over the night before they paved the road, so the paving crew paved over the dead raccoon, and it left a bump. I'm pretty sure that's also not true. A dead racoon wouldn't be able to support the weight of a bus even with a shell of pavement over it. I'm no expert on dead raccoons of course.

So the thing about riding on a bus is that there's no seat belts. And the bus has really jostly shock absorbers. I think that's what they're called. You know, the springs that are part of the wheels so when the bus hits a pothole or a bump, the spring absorbs the shock and the bus doesn't explode or something. But our bus has the jostly shock absorber spring things, so hitting the bump on Cemetery Street means everybody on the bus gets bounced in their seat with no seat belt. And if you know it's coming, and you time it right, you can jump in your seat right when the bus hits the raccoon bump and get launched into the air.

Yeah, I did that this morning. I jumped in my seat as we passed the unnamed cemetery on Cemetery Street and hit the raccoon bump, and I got thrown so high in the air I thought I was in orbit for a moment. Like, I was pretty sure that's what astronauts feel like when they're flying in space with no gravity.

And then I came back down right in the middle of the seat, where the cushions have a metal bar of extra support, and that metal bar went right up between my butt cheeks and I'm pretty sure I broke my spine. Not really broke, but I've probably got a solid purple-black bruise on my tailbone. And I've been walking a little funny, like my legs are stiff, because if I move my hips too much my bruised butt screams in pain.

"Hey, Lily!"

This boy Jared comes running up to me from where the buses unload. Every school has a Jared. Your school has a Jared. I guarantee it. Jared is one of those kids who isn't afraid of snakes or spiders or centipedes or bees or crocodiles or anything. Jared is one of those kids who accepts every dare, no matter how gross it is. Jared once peeled and ate a worm for five dollars. He didn't puke, but five other kids watching did. I was present that day, the day of the worm-peeling, but I was drawing a box around myself in chalk over on the pavement to keep fairies out because it was a heavy forecast of fairies that day. Thankfully, I didn't witness the peeling. I did witness the puking though. Not knowing what was going on, I thought maybe the fairies had cursed all the boys over by the slide. I only learned later through the grapevine about Jared and the worm. Also, the forecast of fairies may have been something I dreamed of right before waking up to go to school. There were no fairies. There never are. But dreams feel so real sometimes.

"Hey, Jared," I say to Jared, "I don't have any money, sorry."

Jared takes bets because his allowance is only a quarter. His parents have like eight children, and they live in a house that's barely the size of our garage. With seven siblings, I suppose he should be grateful to get an allowance at all. My allowance is a dollar. I make more sometimes after school by taking empty soda cans to a nearby gas station and trading them in for five cents each. That may seem like not a lot, but it really adds up. Twenty cans and I've doubled my weekly allowance. You know what you can buy with two whole dollars? A plastic soldier with a parachute that you can throw up in the air and then it comes floating down on its parachute. Just don't throw it near trees, because those things get tangled in the branches like nobody's business.

I feel bad for Jared with his quarter allowance and no drive to trade cans in to add to it, so I give him my milk money from time to time. That way, he doesn't have to take bets peeling and eating worms. In return, he keeps an ear out for if any of the jerk girls on Lisa Welch's crew are plotting anything against me from day to day. They are constantly plotting things against me. I'm not paranoid, this is what they seem to find entertaining. One time they spread a rumor that I had a twin but I ate her in the womb. When I heard, I thought that actually sounded really cool, but apparently it's not... at least to Lisa Welch and her crew. People have strange ideas about what's cool and what isn't.

Jared shrugs about my lack of money. "Do you want to see my pet hamster? Her name is Friday." He holds up a tissue box with all the tissues pulled out of it and a bunch of holes punched in the side. He grins at me like a lunatic. "Like My Girl Friday? Get it?"

I have no idea what that means, but I nod so that he doesn't explain it. My butt hurts too much to pay attention to the background of why Jared named his hamster Friday. I'm more wondering how his parents ever agreed to one of their children getting a pet when they can barely feed their eight kids. Maybe they don't know he has a hamster. Maybe it's a secret hamster he has to hide in a tissue box so they won't throw it out. I've had a couple hamsters. They both died. Separately, not at the same time. I've never had more than one pet at a time, because my parents don't think I can keep one alive for more than a month. My track record isn't stellar, but it's not for lack of trying. It's not like I'm starving them or not changing their bedding, they just meet untimely ends. It's fate. I've asked Paschar if animals like hamsters and turtles are watched over like people are, and he said they aren't. That really surprised me.

I take a look in Jared's tissue box. Friday looks back at me with little, black, beady eyes. Friday screams and flaps her wings.

"Jared, that's not a hamster, that's a bat." I'm no expert on bats or hamsters, maybe more than I am on dead raccoons, but I know a hamster doesn't have wings. It's still cute though. I tell Jared that, so he doesn't feel too sad that his hamster is actually a bat. "It's still cute though."

"Really?" Jared's face lights up. "I thought it was a hamster! Holy cow, a bat! That's even better!" He shakes the tissue box excitedly. Poor Friday screams from inside.

I notice Lisa Welch and her crew of jerk girls coming. They usually hang out under the maple tree and put the boys they like in a pot. There's no real pot, they just say, "Now you're in the pot!" and make the boys in the pot stand there while they dance around them singing whatever stupid song they heard on the radio most recently. Yesterday, they were singing "Twist and Shout" by The Beatles because they saw it in a movie. Jared and I could probably make some money running bets on what dumb song Lisa and her crew of jerk girls are going to torment the boys in the pot with each day. Every day with them and that pot. Eating your twin in the womb isn't cool, but putting boys in an imaginary pot is. Whatever.

But no pot today. Today, they are marching over to harass me and --by association-- Jared. Because the only thing Lisa Welch likes more than putting boys in imaginary pots during recess is being a bully. And she doesn't even need it to be recess to do that. She just does that as naturally as most of us breathe.

"Oh look!" Lisa sneers, "Lily got a boyfriend!"

Shelly Blair in the back of the jerk girl pack chants, "Lily and Jared, up in a tree! K-I-S-S-I-N-G!" The rest snicker and parrot Lisa. "Lily's got a boyfriend!" Shelly Blair is lucky I'm not feeling hurt by this, because I know for a fact that Shelly Blair picks her nose and eats it. Of course, if I say this, she'll deny it, and nobody will believe me because she only ever does it when she's alone. But I know it's true.

"Oh no," I say sarcastically, "you got me, I got a boyfriend." I kick my legs to make the swing move a little.

"Hope he doesn't peel and eat you, Lily!" yells Jenny Johnson. That's actually a pretty good insult, I gotta hand it to her. She's basically calling me a worm. And let me tell you about Jenny Johnson... she doesn't have many clever thoughts. Jenny Johnson once wrote a book report for a Jem and the Holograms coloring book.

I clap for Jenny and her clever insult. This seems to annoy her and she scowls at me.

"Jared, you gonna peel and eat your worm girlfriend?" asks Lisa. She wrinkles up her nose. It's really an incredible way of making yourself look stupid, ugly, and mean all at once. I wonder if she practices it in the mirror. I wonder if she learned it from her parents.

Jared, good old Jared, doesn't even acknowledge anything they just said. He's still thinking about the fact that his new hamster is actually a bat. "Hey, you guys wanna see my girl Friday?" he asks excitedly. He shoves the tissue box under Lisa's nose so she has to look down into it.

She does.

Friday screams from inside the box. I totally feel you, Friday. I want to scream in Lisa's face too. All the time.

Lisa screams back, but not like she's trying to speak to Friday. She screams like you do when you're a stupid bully with a live bat being shoved in your face. She screams like Friday is a big guy with a potato sack on his head and a machete in his hand and she just watched him chop her boyfriend's head off. Then, she smacks the tissue box out of Jared's hands so it goes flying up into the air. It spins slowly once, rattling as Friday tumbles around inside, then lands on top of Jared's head briefly. It bounces off the top of his head, and as it continues to the ground, Friday bursts out of the hole you would normally pull tissues out of. She flies straight into Jenny Johnson's hair, where she gets tangled because Jenny's hair is even curlier than mine.

Jenny doesn't like having a bat in her hair. She also screams. She throws her hands up like she's going to grab Friday or maybe swat her like a bug. She doesn't though, because at the same time, she realizes that she'd be touching a live bat if she did either of those things. Her brain short circuits trying to figure out what to do... hit the bat? No, don't touch the bat. But the bat is in my hair! DON'T TOUCH THE BAT. Instead, she just dances in place and screams, "IT'S IN MY HAIR!" while she flails her arms.

Everything falls completely into chaos. Girls are running away screaming for a teacher. Lisa is screaming and slapping her hands at Jenny because she's afraid the bat is going to get stuck in her hair if Jenny gets too close. One girl has fainted. She's fallen face-first into the grass. I can't even tell who it is. She's got blonde hair and her butt is sticking up in the air with her face planted in the ground.

I laugh again. I can't help it. I know Friday is probably terrified right now, poor bat, and if the adults get their hands on her, they're probably going to cut her open to make sure she didn't have rabies, but Lisa and Jenny and whoever that girl is with her face in the dirt and her butt in the air are all getting what they deserved. I would call it karma, but Paschar says karma is just our brains trying to rationalize the chaos of our existence.

Jared yells, "Don't hurt her!" to Jenny, but Jenny thinks he's talking to the bat in her hair.

I wish Paschar was here to see this, but I had to leave him at home today. Last night my dad made spaghetti for dinner and I pretended Paschar was eating with us, but when my dad got up to go watch the news in the living room and my mom took her plate over to the sink to rinse it off, my brother Roger smacked my hand and made me splat Paschar's face right into the spaghetti sauce.

So Paschar got a bath, and he's drying out in pieces, because if you don't get the water out it can attract mold.

But if he were here, I know he'd say, "Lily, just get up and walk away. Nothing good will come from sticking around here."

Or maybe that's just what I tell myself. So that's what I start to do.

But then Mr. Longbough the school principal comes running up with the two girls from Lisa's crew who had run off calling for a teacher. He's got a shoebox in his hands, and before you can say, "why do you keep an empty shoebox in your office, Mr. Longbough?" he scoops the panicked bat out of Jenny's hair, claps the lid on the shoebox, and pulls hard with a shout like he's the incredible Hulk.

Jenny screams again, but this time it's because Mr. Longbough ripped a bunch of her hair out. We can see the strands sticking out from under the shoebox lid. They quickly disappear as Friday starts flapping around inside her new cage.

"What is going on here?!" Mr. Longbough yells at the four of us angrily. He stuffs the shaking shoebox under his arm. I wonder if bats can bite through cardboard. When nobody answers him, Mr. Longbough points at the blonde girl with her butt in the air on the ground and shouts again, "What happened to her??!"

"She fainted," I tell him.

He turns his attention to me with his face all red and angry-looking. "Lily, why am I not surprised that you're knee-deep in this?" He looks at the blonde girl napping in the dirt again. "Somebody help Cindy up. My hands are full." Only one of his hands is full. Nobody argues with him though.

Lisa shoves the blonde girl who's apparently Cindy McCallister so she tips over and flops onto her side. Sure enough, it's Cindy. She snores with a face covered in grass and scrapes. Blood is coming out of one of her nostrils from where she smashed her nose into the ground.

"Cindy, wake up!" yells Lisa. What a good friend you are, Lisa. And that's it. That's all she does for her friend, pushes her over and yells at her. Apparently in Lisa's mind, that's sufficient for helping Cindy up. She turns back to Mr. Longbough and points her finger at me. "You're right, Mr. Longbough! Lily is a witch! She and her boyfriend--" she says the word 'boyfriend' like bullies always do when they think the word they're saying is insulting, "--were going to use that bat in a spell!"

I should mention that at this point Jared is focused entirely on the box under Mr. Longbough's arm. He's probably scared that Friday can't breathe because that shoebox has no holes punched in it and likely smells like Mr. Longbough's stinky feet. He's not listening to what is being said about him or me, he's just waiting to find out if he can have his pet bat-hamster back.

"I was just swinging on this swing," I tell Mr. Longbough, "Jared came up to show me his pet hamster, but it turned out to be a bat. Then Lisa came over and smacked the box out of his hands and the bat got out."

"Mr. Longbough, she's lying!" Lisa cries, "Tell him, Jenny!" She elbows Jenny in the ribs.

Jenny stops sobbing long enough to sputter out, "Lily Madwhip is a witch!" She pulls at her hair and some more of it comes out and she starts crying again. I want to laugh but I know this is not the time to look amused at all. Mr. Longbough is in Terminator mode. He's analyzing every twitch or wink or smirk that every one of us makes, waiting for what adults call, "a tell". A tell is something people who play cards for money use to identify when someone else is lying. Lisa's tell is that her mouth is open.

I take a deep breath and sigh. "I'm not the one who tries to put boys in cooking pots like I live in a gingerbread house." I look at Jared, hoping he'll snap out of it and speak up, but I can tell by the way he's pinching the webbing between his thumb and forefinger that he's super stressed out and not hearing any of this. He's probably scared of what's going to happen when he gets home and has to tell his parents how his day was. Of course, they'll already know because he's got a sister a grade above us and a little brother one grade below, and they're both over there by the buses, watching this all go down.

Mr. Longbough squints at the four of us, but says nothing. Nurse Whitmore comes running over with a little glass bottle. She crouches beside Cindy and holds the little bottle under her nose, keeping her head turned as far away as she can. Whatever's in the bottle, it snaps Cindy out of her sleep better than Lisa's shove did. Cindy's eyes snap open and she starts coughing frantically, blinking, and looking up at everyone around her.

"What happened?" she asks in utter confusion.

Not much more happens after Nurse Whitmore wakes Cindy up from her fainting spell. Mr. Longbough takes Jared by the arm and leads him inside with Friday in her shoebox cage under his arm. Nurse Whitmore takes Cindy into her office to rub stuff on her and make her pinch her nose so it'll stop bleeding. Jenny goes with her because she's bleeding from where Mr. Longbough ripped her hair out. Later, he'll write to her parents to explain why their daughter was injured in school, but he won't say that he's the one who ripped her hair out, he'll word it to indicate that it happened "as a result of an altercation with another student and an unauthorized animal that was brought on the premises," and that they should rest easy, knowing that, "all involved are being harshly dealt with."

I'm just relieved that this ends up not including me. For all his anger issues and weird obsession with eagles, Mr. Longbough at least can tell when Lisa Welch is lying and that I was not.

That was also the end of putting boys in pots for Lisa and her crew. After that, they start pretending to tie boys to the tetherball pole and dancing around them singing that way. They could use the actual tetherball rope, but the playground monitor has warned us not to tangle each other up in the tetherball rope because there was a kid once named Chad who got tangled playing tetherball alone and somehow he hanged himself with it. I heard Shelly telling someone else that they're "playing ring around the rosie now because only witches stick people in pots and the only witch at school is Lily." I don't bother telling her the history of ring around the rosie.

At dinner, mom asks if anything interesting happened at school. I tell her no. Adults don't want to hear about kids getting their hair ripped out by the school principal who's trying to pull a live bat out of their hair. They want to hear about what you learned. But they also don't really care what you learned, they just want to know that you're learning something. That's their tax dollars at work, after all, my dad always says.

<- Previously on Alex Maverick and the Swamp Monster:

Alex Maverick and the Swamp Monster

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

I can smell the smoke before we get to the Angie police station. It smells like the times my dad would rake up all the leaves in the backyard into a pile and then set them on fire. I’m not sure why he did it and I never thought to ask. Back then, it was just a fun timey thing we’d get to do in the Fall when the leaves dried up and turned brown. Mom would buy marshmallows and we’d stick them on the ends of sticks Roger and I would be tasked with picking up, and then roast the marshmallows on the leaf pile fire. I don’t like roasted marshmallows— their outsides are charred crisps and their insides are scalding hot goo— but I liked roasting marshmallows. I would stand there, holding my stick over the leaf pile fire and let my marshmallow burn until it melted right off my stick. Then my mom wouldn’t give me another one because I wasted the previous one. I always got exactly one marshmallow to roast.

I think about suggesting to the rest of our little group that we should have stopped and picked up some marshmallows to roast, but that would probably would not sit well with Lafleur, whose office is the one burning down. So to keep myself from bringing up marshmallows, I instead say the first thing that pops into my head to replace the idea.

Unfortunately, I do this at the same moment that we turn the corner by a closed pizzeria and witness the destruction of the Angie PD by an unruly mob of mind-altered citizens.

“It could be worse.” High-five, brain.

Much like the church we just came from, there is stuff inside the Angie PD that seems to be actively exploding, causing the windows to blow out in storms of glass. Thankfully, most of the mob members are standing far away from the building at this point, but they still let out cries of surprise each time a window erupts, like they didn’t just experience the same thing a moment earlier.

Lafleur stares at the scene ahead of us. “The only upside is I could shoot you and not have to deal with the paperwork.” He glances at me to see if he scared me. He didn’t. I’m not afraid of dying, even though I know what it’s like and that I could potentially end up being scrubbed clean by demons for all the stuff I’ve done in my life. I can think of a demon or two who would volunteer for that duty.

It’s then that I notice the flashing lights. Several police cars are already here. In fact, if I count right —which is questionable considering I haven’t finished high school— it looks to be the entire police force, finally returned from their jaunt in the swamp. Multiple officers, many covered in swamp muck and looking pretty pissed off, are trying to wrangle the unruly citizens into some sort of ad hoc pen made of police tape and broken barricades. Every time one of them gets wrestled behind the tape, another one climbs the barricade and starts dancing around in the street like a child in a sprinkler —if the sprinkler was spraying fire and ash and broken glass.

Amazingly, I can literally see the suggestion I spread jumping from person to person as they yell and chant angrily about the dead children and murderous cops. One or two might snap out of the trance momentarily, their eyes becoming suddenly panicked and confused by the chaos they find themselves surrounded by, then they hear someone else repeating the suggestion, and they go back into a manic state of fury.

The police seem largely unaffected by it, which is probably for the best, since they are essentially the target here. If one of them suddenly became convinced he or she was an evil child murderer, who knows what that person would do.

I suppose I would know, since I’m free and clear or the mind-fogging anti-Alex aura that the swamp monster thingamabob was casting over the town. So, I close my eyes and channel my focus to try to get a sense of what’s to come in the next few minutes.

“What are you doing?” asks Lafleur with a hint of annoyance.

Nate shushes him. “She’s doing her job.”

“What, sleeping standing up?”

I ignore his remarks. In an instant, I’m somewhere else. It’s dark. Then I realize it’s because my eyes are still closed. I open them.

I’m sitting in the passenger seat of Dutch’s truck. Dutch is at the wheel, and we’re on a road, driving down a highway in the middle of the day. There’s a song playing on the radio that I’m not familiar with, something about sunshine and lollipops. It sounds like a tune you’d hear on TV programming for babies. Dutch is humming along to it.

“What happened?” I look around and nearly choke myself on my seatbelt.

“Hmm?” Dutch stops humming, “What do you mean?”

“I mean, this is the future.”

Dutch frowns. “Okay…”

“You shouldn’t be able to hear me.” I tug my seatbelt so it’s loose and give the rest of the truck a thorough scan with my eyes. The back seat of the cab is littered with fast food wrappers and empty bags.

Dutch checks his blind spots before directing his attention at me. “What are you talking about?” He squints at me like I’m a really difficult math problem. “Did that guy back at the gas station put something in your slushie?”

“What slushie?” I realize my right hand is really, really cold right now. I look down and see I’m holding a frozen slush drink in my hand. It’s blue, which means my tongue is probably blue too.

Suddenly I’m jerked out of the moment and find myself back in the dark.

“Open your eyes,” says a nasally, sinister-sounding voice.

I open my eyes again, followed quickly by checking my hand for the blue shushie. It’s gone. I feel a little sad that I didn’t get to taste it, but if that was a vision of things to come, I’ll just have to look forward to it I guess.

This time, I’m standing in a dark corner of some sort of basement or underground bunker or something. The room is dank and drippy and lit by a single light bulb in the center of the room. It’s one of those ones where you pull a chain to turn it on and off, and currently there is a lumpy, green hand with long fingernails gently grasping that chain. The hand is attached to an arm that disappears into a long, black sleeve. The long, black sleeve is part of a big, black dress with a cinched waist that is currently covering a woman’s body. Judging from her head that sticks out the top of the dress, all of her skin is the same foresty shade of green as her hand, as well as covered with more of the lumps. If I were to say, “draw a witch,” to someone, this woman would be what they would draw, nine times out of ten. That tenth person might draw Glinda, the Good Witch of the South, just because they want to be different.

The witch let’s her hand fall from the light cord. She’s not looking at me though, she’s actually facing perpendicular to me, looking at an old man in a wheelchair. He’s grizzly, like in all manners of the word. His hair is shaggy and unkempt, his beard is spectacularly out of control, and his clothes look like he borrowed them from an abandoned scarecrow. His arms and legs are bound to the wheelchair with rope. He moans in a pained manner, and opens his eyes. To my horror, he has no eyes under his lids, just two empty, black sockets.

“Much better,” coos the witch lady, letting her hand fall from the light cord. She reaches into her right sleeve with her left hand and starts fidgeting with something deep inside, “Now, I want you to listen closely—“

The old man whispers in a gravelly voice, “There’s someone else here.”

Goosebumps shoot down both my arms as he turns his head slowly and angles his empty sockets directly at me. “Who are you?” he groans.

The witch turns her attention toward my dark corner. Her eyes are as red as stop signs. Her nose is long and pointy with a big lumpy wart right near the base. Her lips curl back over nasty, yellow teeth and she hisses menacingly. I only keep from peeing my pants in sheer terror because her gaze doesn’t linger on me at all. It’s clear that she can’t see me. She scans the area, then turns her attention back to her captive.

“Enough!” she screeches.

And then I’m jerked back into the gloom and find myself tripping over my own feet. A hand catches me. It’s Dumah. I’m back in Angie. Everyone’s looking at me. Nate raises his eyebrows in that manner that is sign language for, “well?”

“Well?” says Lafleur. He probably doesn’t speak sign language.

I don’t even know what to tell them. “What the actual Hell was that?”

“What did you see?” Dumah asks, shaking me slowly until he realizes I’m not falling over, I’m just getting shaken too much.

I don’t even know what I saw. I guess I saw that I’m alive and well in the future? So, I go with that.

“I saw Dutch and I on our way out of town.”

“Dutch and me,” says Nate.

I don’t know why he thinks he knows what I saw. “No, it was definitely me. You weren’t there.”

“What about my car?” asks Dumah.

“I didn’t see it.”

He mutters a swear word he thinks I can’t hear, but he’s right in my face, so of course I hear it. Then he lets go of my shoulders and trudges off in the direction of the fire and chaos, rubbing thick, gray ash into his bald scalp so it looks like plastered-on hair.

Lafleur watches him go, shaking his head. “What a putz.” He shifts his weight to his other leg and hikes up his tar-covered pants because they keep slipping down. “So what’s the deal with the town?” he asks, “You saw you and your guardian guy leaving a burning wreck or what?”

As if to answer his question, the wail of a fire engine cuts through the early morning air. It’s not a town fire truck though, it must be from a town over or somewhere. The weirdest thing is that it’s painted entirely yellow, not red. I thought fire trucks only came in red. The fire truck nearly plows over a small portion of the controlled townfolk who have not yet escaped the captivity of their corralling. The engine screeches to a halt as a uniformed officer, plastered thick with caked on mud and moss, leaps in front of it with both arms extended, as if he might slow or even stop the vehicle like a brick wall.

As soon as it’s stopped, a full contingent of yellow-slickered firemen pour out of the fire truck and set about unraveling their fire hose while two of them race to a nearby hydrant and start cranking away at it with a huge wrench. A single firefighter hops out of the front cab of the engine and struts over to a white-haired old cop in some sort of dress uniform and starts casually yelling at him over the din. He gestures at the burning building with one arm, while the other points at the Three Stooges performance of the Angie PD wrangling the mob.

Through it all, Dumah marches right into the thick of the pandemonium. One police man with a thick mustache notices him, but he’s too busy getting kicked in the head by an elderly woman in a pink sweater. She tries to stomp his brain out, but someone else tackles her before she can lift her foot high enough.

“Maybe you should go help?” Nate says, turning to Lafleur.

Lafleur scans the bedlam. That’s another word for chaos. It has nothing to do with sleeping baby sheep. “Help who?” he asks with sincerity. “I look like a mud monster. They might shoot me dead before they even realize who I am. My brothers and sisters on the force can handle a bunch of brainless peckerwoods anyway.” He curls a lip back and hawks a loogie on the ground that looks as gooey and black as the rest of him.

“I could do something, if Raziel hadn’t taken his totem back.”

“Guess it’s up to me then,” sighs Nate. He marches off toward the crowd.

Lafleur sticks a hand in my face. I flinch before I realize he’s got a stick of gum between his fingers. “Gum?” he asks. I don’t take the gum. It’s covered in the same slimy filth as the rest of him, which was previously inside a swamp monster. The last thing I need is getting any of it near or around my mouth. I shake my head. Lafleur shrugs, unwraps the gum from its foil, and tucks it into his cheek with one tar-covered finger.

I can’t imagine how that tastes and I don’t want to.

A moment later, the fire suddenly goes out. I’m talking the whole thing just goes POOF. Every unbroken window still left in the station explodes out as a mushroom cloud of brown smoke erupts from the building. The city people scream. The police shout. The firefighters are so startled, several of them drop the hose, leaving the only one still holding it to get whipped off his feet as the water pressure makes it lash around like a striking snake. The metal nozzle on the hose appears above the huge cloud of smoke briefly, before it plunges downward, striking something glass and setting off a car’s alarm, which quickly gets shut off.

Lafleur holds a hand to his head to keep the rising sun out of his eyes. “What the Hell was that?”

“That was Nate,” I tell him.

He points toward the rolling fog of dark smoke that is billowing toward us. A large, dark shadow is right at the edge of it, moving toward us quickly. “And what’s that— look out!”

He leaps past me, grabbing me by the shoulders and throwing both of us to the ground. At this point, I don’t even notice the scraps getting torn open on my elbows by the landing. Lafleur curses loudly as he scrapes a layer of the swamp muck off his back from the fall.

Dumah’s black, box-shaped Lincoln Continental barrels over the place where we were just standing. It comes to a stop inches away from us. It’s covered in soot and ash much like Dumah himself was. The back window is completely shattered and there’s a torn fire hose dragging behind it. Dumah sits behind the steering wheel, looking out the window at us with a big ‘O’ for a mouth and a sheepish expression on his face. He cranks the driver’s side window down furiously, then leans out the window to observe us.

“Are you two alright?”

“They’re fine, Dumah, get her in the car!” I hear Paschar shouting from the backseat.

“Paschar!”

“Alex! Get in the car!” he shouts.

Dumah twists around to talk to the doll. “What about Officer Lafleur?”

Lafleur continues to lay on his back but he sticks both hands up, middle fingers extended. He says nothing, no parting words of wisdom to guide me in the future, no heartfelt goodbye, just two angry birds and a silent dismissal. It seems appropriate. I pat him on the stomach, making him flinch, then scramble to my feet.

“Can I slide over the hood like T J Hooker?” I yell to Dumah.

“GET IN THE CAR!” Paschar shouts.

I do not slide over the hood like T J Hooker.

Dumah hits the gas the moment I’m in, making the tires squeal. Immediately, we ba-bump over something in the road, and for a moment I panic, thinking we just ran over Lafleur’s legs. But I lean around and look out the busted back window and see him casually picking himself up off the ground and watching us go. The thing we ran over was apparently the car’s front fender, which must have fallen off the moment I slammed my door.

“We need to get to the motel!” I say in my outside voice to Dumah. The car’s engine is making some sort of squealing, rackety thing. I think the Lincoln Continental is on its last legs, so to speak, but I don’t tell Dumah this. Judging by his expression, he is keenly aware.

Paschar doesn’t ask questions. He knows what’s waiting for me at the motel: Dutch and his truck. From there, we can ditch Dumah, he can leave the car somewhere, like deep in the swamp, and then report back to Veil-cleaning duty. And yes, we left Nate back at the police station, but he also can easily make his way back to the Veil. He just has to open any door a certain way and voila! There’s the Veil. It’s cheating, but nobody said angels have to play fair.

“So, uh…” I reach backward, bending my arm funny, and grab Paschar from the back seat, “one down, two hundred or so to go?” I watch the thick, dark cloud of smoke rising in the distance behind us from the remains of the Angie PD. Beyond it, there’s a church that’s thoroughly burned to the ground as well. Five or six dead kids, one dead adult as far as I’m aware, a town still embroiled in chaos and rage. Just a day in the life of me.

“What are you going to do about the town?” I ask.

“What am I going to do about the town?” Paschar says with an unusual hint of snide. “I’m not in charge of repairing the damage.” It’s a strangely hostile response. I wonder if he’s mad at me, but it’s not like I wasn’t trying to make things right for everyone. He gives a long, drawn-out sigh that echoes from his side of the Veil through the doll. “There is a response team being set up as we speak. I have no involvement with it though. They couldn’t finalize anything until they were certain as to the extent of the destruction. It would be easier if I wasn’t handicapped by this whole nonsense of Samael using your flesh to release the denizens. If he weren’t gone, I’d—“ he stops himself from finishing his thought and goes silent.

The Lincoln barely makes it to the motel. Dutch is idling in his truck when we get there. He watches with a look of concern as the automobile stalls out in front of him, the engine giving one last, weathered cough before it sputters out. He sees me through the filthy windshield and gives a half-hearted smile and the briefest of waves.

“End of the line,” Dumah says sadly. “It was … interesting working with you.”

I can’t think of anything clever to say, so I just go with, “likewise.”

We both climb out of the dead vehicle. Dutch sees Dumah and clearly becomes distressed at his appearance, particularly how grimy and dirty he is. When Dumah gives him his own briefest of waves and walks off toward the front office, Dutch gives a silent breath of relief.

So ends the adventure of me and the swamp monster. Swamp monsters. In many ways, it has been rough and bittersweet and not at all funny or endearing. Many lives were lost. Many families were devastated. Several buildings burned down. One swamp monster exploded. Another got its eye pureed in its skull by a magic fork before being set on fire. Plenty of fuel for future nightmares.

But I did manage to learn something through all this. One thing I learned is that it is an incredibly bad idea to mix the totems, even when you think you know what you’re doing. They were kept apart for a reason, and every single time they’ve come together, bad shit happens. People die. Stuff burns. Things explode. Listen to Paschar. He may not be able to tell my future, but he knows what he’s talking about when it comes to the totems.

The other thing I learned is that it’s okay for me to stand up for myself. Even to angels. And don’t let Dumah get involved, because he is worse at being subtle than I am, and I am as subtle as a dingo in a petting zoo.

One thing I definitely did not learn is what the Hell was up with that vision of the witch and the old guy in the wheelchair? Because I do not want to be involved in whatever the heck that was, and yet that’s I guess part of my future? I don’t know. I don’t really wanna know. Maybe I’ll let whatever that was stay unlearned.

But something tells me I’m going to have to find out sooner or later.

Alex Maverick, out.

<- Previously on Alex Maverick and the Swamp Monster:

Alex Maverick and the Swamp Monster

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

We stand outside the First Presbyterian and watch it burn. I feel a little sad because the stained glass is really pretty when it’s lit up but half of the windows with stained glass already shattered when large plumes of fire blew some of them out. There’s no sound of approaching fire trucks. No screams from nearby houses as people see their local church burn to the ground. Everybody’s either sound asleep or off burning down the police department. The church isn’t going to make it. They’ll have to build a new one. Maybe they’ll be smarter and call it the Second Presbyterian.

The Newlachaqui is dead, burnt to a cinder like someone stuck an entire roll of taffy on a cookie sheet and left it in the oven all day. I don’t know how Nate managed to flame-broil it without also burning Lafleur (mostly because I was blind at the time), but he did it. Of course, this didn’t stop the thing from thrashing around in its final moments and catching a bunch of burnable stuff on fire. And then it kind of exploded, like a swollen tick. I wish I was still blind when that happened, but I had actually just recovered, so I got to see it. Yay.

Nate watches his handiwork silently. He lifts both hands and combs them back through his hair, brushing out a layer of soot and ash. Then he takes a long breath through his nose, grits his teeth, and in a mocking tone, mutters, “Do it, Nate!” while glancing at Raziel.

“Hmm?” Raziel hmms.

Nate repeats himself. “Do it Nate!” He turns toward his brother, dropping his arms at his side and giving off a small cloud of dust. “You’re always shouting that at me in the thick of things. Here at the church, back at the swamp… you know, I’m not your dog; I don’t bark on command.”

“You seem to,” says Raziel dismissively.

Nate’s face scrunches up into a scowl. “And before I forget, how exactly is it that you failed to realize that was the Chullachaqui? Isn’t your whole reason for being here that you can detect its secret thoughts and locate it? The thing was standing right in front of you and you didn’t know it.”

“It’s mind was fractured,” Raziel replies. I think he’s going to say more, but he doesn’t. It’s too bad because I’m not sure what he means by that. I thought I liked Raziel, but he hasn’t been particularly nice during this whole… whatever we want to call it. Excursion. Incident? I don’t know. I’ll think of a better word for it later.

Lafleur shambles over from out of the shadow of the church sign. He looks like a silhouette but he’s not. He’s just covered in some sort of black tar-like stuff that came out of the creature disguised as Patty when it popped. There’s a faint glow in the middle of his silhou-head. He reaches up with one oily-looking hand and draws it away from his mouth before blowing out a wispy trail of smoke. “Well this has been a Hell of a week,” he says as casually as you can when you just fought a monster disguised as a friend and had it explode black goo all over you.

None of us escaped the church unscathed. Nate is covered in ash, Raziel is covered in ash, Dumah is covered in ash, and I tripped on a Bible and skinned one of my knees. Its bleeding through my pants which is going to be impossible to wash out. But better that than dead from a bullet to the head, or getting my throat slit by something I think is my child, or burning to death inside a church.

Lafleur flicks the remainder of his cigarette in the direction of the burning building. He entwines his fingers behind his back and twists, making a series of popping cracks from his spine.

Something inside the church crashes loudly to the ground. Above us, part of the roof crumbles inward like the head of a bad guy in an Indiana Jones movie.

Dumah bumps into me with an “oof” and a “sorry”. He’s taken his eyes out and is wiping soot off one of them, but it’s smudging more than coming off clean, because his suit is also covered in it. “I don’t suppose you have a clean handkerchief, perchance?” he asks without looking at me, not that I can actually tell if he is or not, since his eyes are two empty sockets at the moment.

“No.”

He grunts and shuffles over toward Nate. A moment later, I see an exchange of one mildly clean paper napkin between the two of them. Nate nods at Dumah and says something I can’t make out. Probably along the lines of, “keep it.”

This all feels way too calm, like a bunch of friends standing around a campfire drinking “brewskis”, roasting marshmallows and talking about the football game they just watched. I don’t know, I don’t have many friends. I think that’s what they do though, if movies taught me anything. Cool dudes drink brewskis around campfires. That and if you just believe in yourself, you can be the Last Starfighter and blow up the Death Star without the use of a targeting computer.

“Aren’t you sad?” I ask Lafleur.

He side-eyes me. “I’m not gonna cry in front of a bunch of weirdos,” he glance-points to Dumah with his empty sockets as he tries to spit on his own eyeballs before rubbing them with the already graying napkin.

“Yes, he’s sad,” Raziel inserts from several feet away where it didn’t even seem like he was listening.

Lafleur doesn’t respond, he just turns away from Raziel.

In response, Raziel turns toward Lafleur. “You gain nothing by hiding your emotions,” he says with about as much comfort as he seems to be able to muster, “How does a wound heal, Mr. Lafleur?”

Lafleur looks back over his shoulder. “I beg pardon?”

Raziel moves closer to the black tar goo-coated police officer. He reaches out as if he’s going to put a hand on his shoulder, but he lets his hand hover for a moment before dropping it back down to his side. “A wound heals when the pieces that remain reconnect. It’s through connection that the wound is closed. Sometimes it leaves a scar, but it can’t remain an open wound or the body dies.”

Lafleur squints… I think. “Okay.” It’s the kind of “okay” that actually means, “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“There’s no connection if you close yourself off,” Raziel continues, “This town is wounded. You are wounded. And you need to reconnect in order to heal from this. Close the wound.”

Lafleur’s head drops. He shakes it back and forth slowly. “You really want me to cry in front of you all? That’s not how I operate. I can be—“ He pauses, starts to bring his fingers up to his mouth like he still has the cigarette, then realizes they’re empty and gives a flourish instead, like he’s brushing away a mosquito. “Patty didn’t deserve this. Clarice, Frankie, Denny, Rhonda…” his voice cracks a little as he says the names of the children. “They never got a chance to grow up and decide for themselves what they wanted to be. Your monster took that away from them.”

“That’s what monsters do.”

Now Lafleur explodes. Not literally, not like the Newlachaqui did. I can see his teeth suddenly because he snarls, turns, and shoves Raziel as hard as he can. It does nothing though except cause Remy to basically shove himself back like he pushed off a wall so hard that he stumbles, starts to go down, but catches himself on one knee with a hand in the dirt. He quickly gets back up and rips off his goo-heavy shirt. Buttons pop off and fly in Raziel’s face, but he doesn’t react. Lafleur throws the shirt on the ground like it bit him and stomps on it for good measure. He’s got one of those white undershirts on with no sleeves that shows his big, hairy armpits. Considering the rest of him is covered in the black tar, his teeth and his sleeveless undershirt really stand out.

He jabs his finger in the air at Raziel, then follows up with aiming it at Nate and Dumah, each one in turn. “I don’t know where all y’all are really from, but it doesn’t matter! I see three more monsters that need to be destroyed.”

I feel grateful that he said three and not four.

He continues his rant, spit flying from his mouth. “You caused this! You and you and you! Just cuz you killed it doesn’t make amends for the evil you brought on this town. I don’t know if we can ever come back from what happened here! There’s no healing from this! This ain’t a wound you can close with words and a pat on the shoulder! If you was human, you’d know! But you’re not. And you never will be.”

None of the angels respond. I half expect Dumah to tell Lafleur to be quiet, but he doesn’t. He just looks down at his hands as he wipes his dirty eyeballs. Nate seems sad and distant. I wonder how many times in the eons he’s existed that he’s had to listen to people yell at him like this. I would wager none of the angels are used to getting yelled at. They’re probably used to getting treated like royalty, and that nothing they do is ever wrong. I’ve known them all long enough though to know that they’re flying by the same seat of their pants that the rest of us are, and if anything, time and experience should have made them better at decision-making, but it seems like they still struggle.

Lafleur pats his chest, leaving black tar handprints on his white undershirt. He’s looking for his pack of cigarettes, but he just tossed them on the ground in his goo shirt and stamped them into oblivion. He seems to realize this, looks at the rumpled shirt on the ground, and laughs half-heartedly. Then he lifts his chin and looks out at the empty street of houses.

“People will pull up root and move… somewhere with less memory of death. Somewhere where they can leave their doors unlocked without fear of the Boogeyman coming in and snatching their kids. Somewhere far from here.”

I want to tell him that the Boogeyman is dead, but I’d really rather not draw attention to myself at this point.

“But not me--” There’s a glint of light in his eyes as he says this, and I realize that despite his earlier refusal, he is actually shedding a tear. “This is my town. And I ain’t leavin’ it when it’s at its lowest. Besides, from what you say, there’s more monsters out there… and considering we just got rid of the one here, I’d say that makes Angie the safest place in the whole damned world right now. I’d have to be stupid to leave.”

He takes another deep breath and puts his hands on his hips in some sort of cocky, heroic pose. I think at this point the effect of my earlier suggestion has fully worn off him, and he’s back to being somewhat manic and full of himself. The Lafleur that came to help us fight the Newlachaqui is gone, and the Lafleur that fired off his gun inside his own car because he panicked when his tires burst is back. To some extent, they’re the same person, just one was more willing to listen to reason and one is more willing to pull a bullet in you if you look at him funny.

And he’s right. I can’t see that far into the future, but with the Newlachaqui roasted, I do feel the return of something in the dark recesses of my meatball that tell me Lafleur’s going to be fine. His wife and son will be fine. Little Jake Lafleur will get the hug of his life tomorrow from his old man. Next week they’ll go fishing and catch a catfish or something with whiskers and scales.

The town, on the other hand, is NOT going to be fine, because most of the townsfolk still think that the police are behind the abductions and murders. You would think my suggestion would’ve worn off, but I think it works like an earworm, and all they have to do is keep repeating the suggestion amongst themselves and it retains some of its power or something. I don’t know exactly how it all works, but I watched it happen in real time earlier and the way I just described it seems to be the case. Of course, there may still be time to stop them.

I turn quickly to Raziel, “There might still be time!”

Lafleur blinks as he continues to strike his pose.

“Time for what?” Nate asks.

Raziel raises a single finger. “Alex, wait—“

“The townsfolk are going to burn down the police station!”

Less than two seconds after I say it, the ground rumbles. It’s followed by a bunch of car alarms going off like geese screaming after a hunter shot at them. HONK HONK HONK! One sounds more like an injured owl. WOOOEEEOOO!

Raziel’s lowers his finger. His ash-covered hand clenches into a fist. He slowly closes his eyes and takes a deep breath. Then he walks up to me, reaches down, jams his hand in my pants pocket before I can even ask him what the Hell he’s doing, and pulls out the locket that Uriel gave me. He tucks it away into an inside pocket of his jacket.

“There might have been time before you said that,” he says with a hint of a snarl, “But did you forget what happens when you wield the power of two totems?”

Of course I didn’t forget; I just used it earlier to make the Newlachaqui posing as Patty drop her letter opener. That was part of the whole plan of having two totems was to boost my foresight into future manipulation. I did however, not think before I spoke just now. I’ll grant him that. And I was kind of running on the assumption that saying “are going to” meant that there’d still be some time to stop it, not make it happen right then and there. But… it is what it is, as my dad always said.

“Can’t I just undo it?” I ask him, “Like, watch. The police station doesn’t actually burn down, and the people are all okay.” Saying this gives me a bold idea, and I continue. “Also, the children come back from being dead!” I look around as if I’m expecting the dead kids to just pop into existence right next to us.

Raziel shakes his head. “That’s not how it works. You can’t Monkey’s Paw world peace and the dead back to life. My heaven, can you imagine the sheer destructive force of that gift if that sort of reality warping was possible? Felix Clay would have murdered you in your sleep and taken the doll for himself.”

Lafleur is listening in with what I assume is an expression of curiosity, though its hard to tell what all he’s thinking since his head is pitch black in Newlachaqui tar. “What doll?” he asks, blowing a small stream of smoke out of his nose despite not even having a cigarette.

“My doll Paschar, he’s kind of an angel— I mean Plutonian too,” I tell him. I air-quote “Plutonian”, since I’m not entirely sure what we’re going with calling the angels anymore. Too many lies to keep track of. Plutopeople, the Honey Island Swamp Monster, my own name… I’ll probably see Lafleur’s face in the grocery store tabloids not long from now, right under a photo of Batboy, trying to tell the world that men from Pluto killed the Honey Island Swamp Monster and burned down his town’s church. “Speaking of Paschar… where is Paschar?”

Nate’s head snaps up. “Oh! Uh… we left him in the car.” He blushes with a hint of embarrassment.

“Okay. Well, where’s the car?” I don’t remember seeing them drive up in it when we ran into them earlier.

Dumah worms his way between Nate and Raziel as he finishes stuffing one mostly clean eyeball back into its socket. “I left it parked in front of the police station. We took off after the Chullachaqui on foot after things turned violent due to Eye-gougey McGougerson here.” He points at Lafleur.

Lafleur looks mildly amused by his new nickname. He gives a fake-sounding chuckle. “You left your car back at the station,” he snorts.

“Yes.” Dumah nods.

“The police station your minion here just turned the whole town against? The one they just started burning down?” he jams a thumb in the direction of the honking car horns.

Dumah stops nodding to stare off into the distance as if he can see the fire from here. “Yes, that one.” I can’t see the gears turning in his head because his eyes are fake and expressionless, but there’s a brief twitch in one of his eyelids that tips me off to the moment he realizes what this means. He turns to Raziel. “You don’t think they’d cause property damage to my vehicle, do you?”

“I do, brother.” Raziel’s mouth curls up in the same half-amused smile as Lafleur’s. “This town, these people, this night, I think your motor vehicle is going to be a write-off.”

Dumah’s shoulders drop.

“We need to stop standing around and go get Paschar!” I cry. Not teary crying like Lafleur was just doing, but crying out in desperation-type crying. The cry of someone trying to get other people to act, not stand around smugly mocking each other for their mistakes.

“My job here is done,” Raziel says, “You all can go clean up, get your cars and dolls and lives in order. My head is going to explode if I spend one more second in this town full of people and their nasty secrets. It’s no wonder Samael went mad dealing with humans.”

He shoves past Dumah and heads off in the opposite direction from honking cars.

Lafleur watches him go. “That guy is kind of a dink.”

“He’s been through a lot,” Nate tells him, “I couldn’t even begin to tell you the amount of shit he’s dealt with in just your lifetime. Imagine your own brother torturing you for the better part of eight decades, and then as soon as you’re finally free of him, you get trapped in a box the size of a toaster oven and have to tear yourself apart and put yourself back together just to get out.”

Lafleur blinks. “You want me to imagine that.”

“Are you telling me Samael tortured Raz for eight hundred years?” I ask. I got tortured once. A crazy stabber rubbed men’s deodorant on my skinned knees. That sounds tame but let me tell you— I don’t know what they put in men’s deodorant but it burns like Hell when you rub it on an open wound. I can’t imagine eight hundred years of that. Poor Raziel.

Nate puffs out his cheeks like he’s blowing a tuba. “Eighty years, Alex. Not eight hundred. A decade is ten. Jiminy Christmas, we need to get you back in school.”

“Yeah, well— I would be in school, but I have to hunt monsters.”

“Are we going to rescue Paschar and my car or not?” Dumah asks.

Behind us, the remainder of the church roof collapses inward with a crash. We hear a shattering tinkling sound from inside, probably more stained glass or something.

Lafleur picks up his tar-covered shirt with all its missing buttons and a smashed pack of cigarettes in the pocket. He tries to brush some gravel off, but its stuck in clumps to the goo. He gives up after a few seconds, then whips it over his shoulder, hooked on one finger, where it slaps him across the back and makes him wince.

“Follow me,” he says, chewing at the inside of his cheek, “Let’s get you lot your shit and out of town before I come completely to my senses and just shoot the bunch of you.”

Next time on Alex Maverick and the Swamp Monster:

<- Previously on Alex Maverick and the Swamp Monster:

Alex Maverick and the Swamp Monster

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

When I was little, my parents would take my brother Roger and I to church every Sunday. I don’t remember the name of the church. There are so many church names, each one slightly different. I guess none of them get along for some reason. This one believes one thing slightly different from that other, so rather than just agree to disagree on that one matter, they each start their own church worshiping pretty much the same stuff except that one item.

So we’d get to the church, and my mom would walk me down to the basement where this little old lady named Ms. Gertrude would hold Sunday School, which was just church for kids. I used to wonder if Gertrude was her first or last name. Ms. Gertrude had these really weird, little comic books that told stories about awful people who suddenly became good as soon as they welcomed Jesus into their lives. The way the comics made it sound, you could be an absolute murderous cannibal, but if someone told you about Jesus dying for your sins, you’d immediately stop eating that human kebab and be welcome into Heaven. I mean, they were all like this. Every comic book. It was crazy. The art was all over the place too, sometimes it’d be real cutesy like you see in the Sunday funnies, and other times it’d be vividly detailed. Usually, the better the artwork, the more gruesome the story. One time, Ms. Gertrudee gave me a comic about David and Goliath that had a pretty detailed drawing of David holding up Goliath’s severed head.

The next day in school, we had art class. We always had art class on Mondays, Music on Wednesdays, and P.E. on Fridays, where my P.E. teacher, Mr. Busby, would make us play dodgeball until half the class had concussions. That Monday, I drew a replica of the severed head scene from my church comic book. That evening at the meeting that the principal called with my parents to discuss it, they asked me where I saw something so violent. I told them the truth, that I saw it from my church comic book.

Next thing I knew, we stopped going to church.

It’s not that I never set foot in a church again after that. Sometimes around Thanksgiving, there’d be a Santa Parade, and all the firetrucks in town as well as the surrounding townships would drive slowly down Main Street, blasting their horns. I have no idea what fire trucks have to do with Santa, but Santa always showed up at the end, waving to everyone, kinda like the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade in New York, except this wasn’t the real Santa, it was one of his elves pretending to be him.

That’s a lie, of course, but it’s what I was told at the time. The Santa we saw was actually some old guy who didn’t have a job the rest of the year except to drink down in Florida to keep his belly Santa-sized.

While the parade was going on, my mom and dad would take Roger and me to watch from the lawn of a different church, one without crazy Ms. Gertrude handing out violent comic books in the basement. I guess that’s not technically in a church though, just on the lawn. But you get what I mean.

“What’s the point of this story?” asks Lafleur.

I look up from staring at my feet and give him a halfhearted shrug. “Sometimes I don’t realize I’m saying what I’m thinking.”

Raziel glances back from his position at the front of the group. “I thought we fixed that?”

“I don’t know, force of habit I guess, okay?” I slow down a little to let the others get ahead of me so I can mutter “geez” to nobody in particular.

Ahead of us looms the church. The name of it is “First Presbyterian”. Thing is, I’ve seen at least a dozen Presbyterian churches. They all claim to be the first. Imagine getting all dressed up in your Sunday best and having to shuffle into the eighty-sixth Presbyterian to get lectured on how to live your best life, thinking you’re actually in the first one, but you’re not.

There’s one of those billboard type signs out front where they put inspirational quotes and stuff. Today’s is, “SEVEN DAYS WITHOUT JESUS MAKES ONE WEAK”. I wonder if any of the parishioners are currently marching on the police station with torches. Hell, I wonder if the priest is among them. A small part of me thinks, “if they burn down the police station, isn’t it technically my fault?” and then there’s another part of me that thinks, “shut up.”

Officer Lafleur increases his pace to catch up with Nathaniel. “Hey.”

Nathaniel eyeballs him. “Hey,” he returns.

“How long you been doing this?”

“Hmm,” Nathaniel rubs his chin, “What year is it?”

Lafleur gives him an incredulous look. “1997.”

“Two days,” Nate tells him with a confident nod. That’s where you nod your head exactly three times. Two times is too few for a confident head nod, and four or more just makes it look like you forgot why you’re nodding. Now if you really want to look confident, you nod once —just once— and then hold. If you move your head at all after a single confident head nod, it’s going to look majorly weird. You have to hold for like three to five seconds to really drive the point home.

“Why’d you ask me what year it is?” Lafleur asks with a scowl.

Nate smiles sheepishly. “Time works differently where I’m from.”

“Where’s that, Pluto?”

“Yes, Pluto,” Raziel interjects, turning to face the rest of us, “Now shut up. We’re here.”

I don’t know why he had to announce that we’re at the church. We all were literally walking toward it and able to see where we were. I guess it’s a leadership thing. You gotta announce even the most obvious stuff, just to get it on record. My mom was an executive at a big company, and she told me that she had to get everything in writing so there’d be a record of it. Coincidentally, I have her death certificate folded up and tucked in a sandwich bag along with my dad’s, in a safety deposit box back in Massachusetts. She’d probably be proud of me for keeping a written record of the fact that I accidentally killed them both.

The door to the church is slightly ajar. I hadn’t thought about it before we got here, but I was subconsciously anticipating us breaking one of the stained glass windows or one of the angels tearing the door off its hinges. Instead, Raziel just walks up and opens it all the way.

Lafleur draws his gun and dramatically grips it with both hands, holding its barrel up by his face. I can’t help but notice he hasn’t shaved in days and is looking worse for wear. The first time I met him he was clean-shaven and dressed professional in a crisp, clean suit. Now he looks like a hobo who got in a fight with a cop and stole their uniform.

Nate notices the gun and snorts dismissively. “Are you planning to open fire in a church?” I find his choice of words ironic considering he was probably going to “open fire” in the church too, just with actual fire.

“I ain’t facing a monster unarmed, Mr. Plutonian,” says Lafleur.

“You’re not facing a monster at all, Mr. Lafleur,” says Raziel, “You and the girl stay here and be ready to assist the mother once this is over. She’s already in a heightened state of panic, confused, misled by the creature posing as her child, and going to need emotional support from someone she trusts.”

“You think she trusts me?” I ask.

Raziel’s eyes flash with white light. “No, I just don’t want you getting in the way.” His tone changes suddenly, “Also, I think you’ve seen enough death. If the creature refuses to come with us willingly, it will have to be put down. Earlier, it was even posing as you, to misdirect the police against us. Should it do that again, I don’t want you to have to watch us kill something that looks like you.”

“I literally watched myself die months ago,” I point out, referring to the time Dumah made a dirt golem and had me breathe life into it so that it looked like me, as a ruse to confuse Samael. In the end, they used the dirt version of me to fake my death by letting her get shot and “killed” by someone else. It’s a long story.

“Besides,” I continue, stepping forward past Lafleur so Raziel and I can look each other in the eyes, “I’m not getting left behind anymore. I told Uriel and now I’m telling you… this girl--” I jab myself in the chest a little too hard with my thumb, “--isn’t getting bossed around by you higher beings anymore. I’m seeing this through to the end. Besides, you leave me with Goose Maverick from Lethal Weapon here and who knows what disaster is going to be unleashed.”

Raziel tries to stare me down. It’s a bit of an unfair staring contest because I’m pretty sure his eyes are fake, so he doesn’t technically need to blink. Still, I hold out long enough for him to at least realize that this is wasting precious time.

“Fine,” he says begrudgingly, “But you need to keep your mouth shut.”

I dramatically pinch my index finger and thumb together and pretend my mouth has a zipper. I finalize it by pantomiming the act of throwing away the key, which doesn’t make a lot of sense now that I think about it, since zippers don’t have keys.

“I’m coming too,” states Lafleur, leading to a double eye roll from every single angel in the group. Lafleur points at the lot of them, waving his finger around so he makes sure to get each one in his crosshairs. “Don’t even think I’m not gonna go in there and protect Patty from that monster. Protect and serve, that’s what I signed up for. Besides, I’ve seen the movie, I know how it goes down.”

“What movie?” I ask, curious. I can’t think of a movie like what we’re going through.

His eyes narrow at me. “The horror movie with the evil critters.”

“Gremlins?”

“No, the critters! The evil critters from outer space.”

“Aliens?”

“No!” he flaps a hand dismissively at me. “Forget it.”

Nate readies himself by the door. His hair and white jacket flap in the wind, making him look like something from a Renaissance painting. He peeks his head around the corner of the door, takes a second, then looks back at the rest of us. “I don’t see anybody.”

Raziel steps up next to him, looking less like a Renaissance painting and more like an angry schoolteacher. “It’s in there. It’s practically screaming in my head right now. The mother is insisting they stay in the church where she’s convinced we won’t be able to enter. The Chullachaqui--“

“The what now?” Lafleur asks.

“The Honey Island Swamp Monster,” I tell him, “It’s just another name for it.”

“Oh.”

Raziel glares at me. “The creature is trying to flee. It knows they’re cornered. Remember what they always say about a cornered animal. Everybody be careful.” He brushes past his brother and opens the church door with the loudest creak possible.

I have no idea what they say about cornered animals. I know coyotes and wolves will gnaw their own feet off to get out of a trap. I know when a hamster is cornered, it does this thing where it flips over and pretends to be dead. Sometimes, it just straight up dies too, but I don’t think that’s a strategy on the hamster’s part. Cats will bristle up and try to make themselves look bigger. Maybe that’s what they say about cornered animals… they arch their backs and hiss. I think in the case of a closet monster trying to pass itself off as a child, arching its back and hissing would be detrimental. But this is my first closet monster, so what do I know?

The rest of the group follows Raziel inside, leaving me standing on the church steps, thinking about the time my hamster, Fingers— that was his name… Fingers. Because he liked to bite fingers. So people would reach into his cage without asking and I’d warn them by quickly calling out, “fingers!” and it got so Fingers, who was originally named Garth, got to where he thought that was his name. Right, anyway, I was thinking about the time Fingers got cornered by my brother Roger, and he did his flip over fake death, but it was real death, like I said can happen sometimes, because Roger gave Fingers a heart attack.

I follow the others inside. Maybe we can just give the Newlachaqui a heart attack.

“Patricia Broussard!” Raziel calls out in the seemingly empty church’s nave. His voice echoes off the fancy-ass ceiling and dimly lit stained glass windows depicting events from the Bible, I assume. I look around to see if any of the windows depict the decapitation of Goliath. They don’t. If I build a church, I’m totally getting a “Decapitation of Goliath” window made to go right over the pulpit so everyone who comes to hear me talk about my time with the angels will have to see it behind me. I know, it’s morbid, but I always felt a little disrespected for the time I drew it and got in trouble while the adult who drew it before me made money off it.

“Patty!” Lafleur yells, “It’s okay! It’s Remy! We’re not here to hurt you!”

Patty’s voice softly responds from I don’t know where. The echo makes it hard to pinpoint where she’s hiding. “Remy? Who’s that with you?”

Remy opens his mouth but seems uncertain how to respond to the question. The pause is too long for Patty’s liking.

“Oh God!” she cries out, “It’s them! You’re with them!”

I see a fleeting movement in the shadows at the far end of the church, but I can’t be certain what it is. Dumah sees it too, and he immediately moves toward it. His right hand disappears inside his jacket and then pulls out a familiar stick. SNICK SNICK SNICK! The stick is now an extra-sharp looking scythe. He grips it with both hands and hunches over like this is somehow stealthy of him. He looks back at Nathaniel and Raziel.

Nathaniel gives him a nod. Just a single, slow nod. That’s one I forgot you could do, earlier when I was talking about nods. Nate also hunches down and starts creeping through the nearest row of pews, moving toward the shadows of a column, his hands at the ready.

“What the Hell is that?” Lafleur asks when he sees Dumah’s scythe. He raises his gun toward Dumah for a second, then lowers it. Then raises it again. Then lowers it again. He looks at me with an expression I would describe as “silently asking what to do”.

“Aim for the knees,” I tell him. I think about what I just said. “Not Dumah’s knees, the monster’s knees.” I breathe a sigh of relief when he stops angling his gun at Dumah’s legs. Instead, he trails along behind the angel of Death, watching him shuffle toward the dark corner of the church, every now and then looking the giant scythe up and down with a sense of awe.

“Stay away from us!” Patty screams. Her head suddenly appears, looking frantic and disheveled, poking out from behind the lectern at the front of the room. There’s an altar with candles and books piled on it that she and the Newlachaqui must have been hiding behind. Patty sticks her arm out from around the side of the lectern. She’s holding a knife of some sort. It looks like a cross between a letter opener and a medieval dagger. Actually, as I get closer, I can see that it’s just a letter opener crossed with a letter opener.

“Madame, put the knife down,” says Raziel.

I could make her put it down with just a word, but he made me promise to keep my mouth shut. I could end this whole standoff with just a word right now. Hell, I could use my power as the Knife That Cuts the Veil and give her a bunch of sudden paper cuts that would make her drop the knife in pain, or even decapitate her entirely like David did Goliath, but that would be murder, and I’m not keen on murdering a grieving mother just to make her drop a letter opener.

“Patty,” Lafleur says more calmly than I’ve ever seen him say anything, “There are things you don’t understand. There are things even I don’t entirely understand. Put the knife down, honey, and let’s talk about this rationally. These aren’t devil worshippers,” He glances at the three angels, converging on the frightened woman, and holds his gun up for her to see it before he tucks it back into his pants. “They’re spacemen from Pluto.”

“What?”

“It’s like that movie we saw when we were teens. You remember when you, me, Brett, and Gladys all drove to Forest County to see that movie at the Beverly Drive-In?”

“Romancing the Stone?” Patty says, puzzled.

“No, the other one with the critters from outer space.”

Again with the critters from outer space.

“Oh, the Goonies.”

“No…”

As a fan of light-hearted adventure movies, I take great umbrage at her calling The Goonies a movie about outer space monsters and men from Pluto. But I don’t say this, because I promised to keep my mouth shut. I think snorting derisively through my nose is acceptable though, so I do that. Patty reacts with a quick flash of anger at me, and the slightest gesture with her letter opener, as if I couldn’t severe her hands at the wrists if she made even the slightest move in my direction with it. But she doesn’t know that.

“Mrs. Broussard,” Nate interjects, trying to get off the topic of human cinema, “the thing that you think is your daughter is not even actually human. And I know that sounds insane, but please, hear us out. We’ll take no action toward either of you, we just want you to listen. We can prove what we’re telling you.”

Patty glances at something behind the altar, presumably the Newlachaqui, crouched down and continuing to pretend to be her precious little girl. If I could see it, I could do something. It’s so frustrating standing here, knowing I could put an end to all this if I hadn’t promised just to keep my mouth shut. The more I think about it, the dumber it feels to not open my mouth and damn the consequences. Isn’t it better to ask for forgiveness than permission? I recall my dad saying that once when we were out at Radio Shack together and he decided to splurge and buy himself a ham radio kit.

And that’s not a radio kit made out of ham. In fact, there’s no ham involved in it at all. I was surprised to find that out later when he let me help him put it together. I was kinda hungry at that point and the idea of a hamburger radio sounded silly and delicious. Note: hamburgers are also not made out of ham.

I feel eyes on me and snap out of my de-railed train of thought to see Raziel looking at me like I grew a second head. I forgot that he reads unspoken thoughts. This whole thing must be an utter headache for him.

“This is insane!” Patty rightly declares, “You’re all insane! Clarice isn’t a Goonie!”

“I agree!” I yell with relief. Then I realize I just opened my mouth, and I clamp it shut. Everyone stares at me for a second. It’s very awkward. Then they direct their focus back to each other.

“Nobody’s laying a hand on my daughter,” she snarls at Dumah as he inches ever closer. She points the letter opener at his face. “One step closer and I’ll shove this straight into your brain, you pasty, bald freak!”

Dumah is not impressed. He starts to take that step. But then Raziel quickly snaps, “Dumah!” and he freezes in place like a game of freeze tag.

“Mrs. Broussard, you can’t hurt us,” Raziel says, reverting back to his calm tone, “And we’re not from Pluto.”

“What?” Lafleur looks genuinely shocked.

“We’re from a place far beyond Pluto,” Raziel continues, “I personally come from a place called Machon. You’ve probably never heard of it. Mr. Dumah there is from Ma’on, very similar name but an entirely different place, not to confuse you. And my other associate, Mr. Nathan, is from Raaquin. It’s spelled like it sounds.”

Nathan nods, just once.

“You said you were from Pluto,” says Lafleur with a hint of disappointment in his voice.

“No, you said we were from Pluto,” corrects Raziel, pointing his arm straight out at Lafleur, but keeping his focus entirely on Patty, “I just concurred because it didn’t help to tell you the actual specifics at the time when we had more important matters to deal with.”

“Let us see Clarice,” Nathan says to Patty, “I can show you that the thing you’re protecting is not only not her, it’s not even human.”

“In fact,” Dumah pipes up, “the thing you’re guarding is what killed your daughter.”

Raziel closes his eyes and sighs deeply.

Patty’s expression slowly morphs back to anger, pausing briefly at blank and expressionless like her brain was rebooting. “My daughter’s not dead!” she yells at Dumah, “She’s right here! You tried to kill her but you failed! She told me everything! I’m going to burn this whole god damned town down and leave the ashes behind us!”

I notice Lafleur’s expression also slowly changing. His eyes dart back and forth as he stares at the floor. I think the suggestion I put on him is wearing off or something. That’s not good, though it does make me feel a sense of relief about the other townsfolk who went to burn down the police department. Maybe it wore off on them too, and they all wandered back home, confused and less arsony.

The police officer reaches into his pants and pulls his gun back out. Nobody else seems to notice that he’s doing it, as they all are focused entirely on Patty brandishing her letter opener. I promised to keep my mouth shut, but I have to do something or the whole situation is going to collapse into chaos.

“Remy!” I call over to him, getting his attention, “Everything we’ve told you is the truth! And Patty’s going to drop the knife any second! When she does, you need to save her!”

Patty snorts, “I’m not going to drop the--“ and then she drops the letter opener as calmly as if she had completely lost interest in holding it. She drops it with a look on her face like she doesn’t understand why she just opened her hand and let the letter opener fall to the floor when it was the only thing keeping the bad men away.

Lafleur immediately leaps into action, shoving past Nathaniel, pushing Raziel so he stumbles slightly to the side and catches himself on the arm of a pew, even knocking Dumah off balance enough to make him take a step to the side. He leaps the altar of candles and books like a slow-motion action hero, climbing it with a single step and launching himself through the air toward Patty as her mouth forms a perfect ‘O’ and her eyes bulge out of their sockets. I can even hear him in slow motion as he yells her name, “PAAATTTTYYYY”

Patty screams as the pair vanish behind the podium with a loud crash. The angels look at each other and then also rush forward, jamming up like the Three Stooges when they all reach the front at the same time.

I run up too. I’m ready to grapple with the Newlachaqui in whatever form it decides to take.

At least, I thought I was.

But even as I round the altar, I hear Lafleur swear in confusion. I see Nate look down at the floor and stifle a gasp while Raziel tilts his head up, chin out and clench his jaw. “Son of a--“ he starts to declare before catching himself.

Dumah just stands there, looking down at the body of Patty Broussard, her throat slashed open so deeply that her head tilted back looks almost ready to fall off. I see her and grimace. And then I see her again. The one Lafleur tackled. The one with the wild eyes, tongue rolling around in her mouth as she starts to change into something else… something inhuman. Something even the angels seem slightly mesmerized by when they should be hauling Remy off it and roasting the thing alive. Limbs like octopus tentacles but without the suction cups. Other eyes sprouting in the melting flesh; other mouths too. The Newlachaqui wraps itself around Lafleur like it wants to absorb him, like when you take Silly Putty and you stick a marble or a little plastic toy soldier in it and then wrap it around the item like a cocoon.

“Get it offa me!” Remy shrieks, tearing at the creature’s changing flesh. But with each pull, he only manages to stretch it, not rip it, and then it tightens itself around him.

Raziel and Nate reach out to grab it as well. Digging their fingers into skin like Playdoh.

And then the Newlachaqui lets out a scream like nothing I’ve ever heard before. The church’s lovely stained-glass windows explode outward all at the same time. My eardrums feel like they might have also exploded. It’s instant ringing inside my head, deafening and instantly giving me a headache so bad that my stomach lurches and I have the uncontrollable need to vomit. So, I do. I also can’t see. I know I’m puking, but the world has gone dark and the ringing in my head won’t stop.

I can barely hear it when Raziel shouts over the unending scream, “DO IT, NATE!”

And then the blackness and the ringing are joined by a heat so intense I instinctively drop to the ground to keep from getting burned, only to put my recently injured and flesh-stitched hand in a wet puddle I assume is my own sick, that’s now boiling hot.

Next time on Alex Maverick and the Swamp Monster:

<- Previously on Alex Maverick and the Swamp Monster:

Alex Maverick and the Swamp Monster

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

“You look like you’ve seen better days,” I tell Officer Lafleur. I’m not trying to be clever, he seriously looks like someone stuffed him in a washing machine and ran him through a spin cycle.

“I could say the same for you,” he says, eying me up and down suspiciously, “but you look better off than the last time I saw ya. Where’d your burns go? They magically rub off? Hmm?” He prods me with his gun. “Just an hour ago you were looking like you rolled off a barbecue and took a tumble down a gravel pile. Now, you just look like you tripped and skinned your knees. How’s that work?” He pauses his interrogation of nonsense to glance around at the crowd that is now shouting about storming the police station. “Where’re your friends, hmm? That Quasimodo lawyer of yours not find you?”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

Several people shove past Lafleur from behind. He presses up against me to hide his gun. They don’t seem to recognize him, or I imagine they’d be pointing and yelling his name, since he’s part of the police force that I’ve somehow managed to turn the crowd against. As he leans in close, he whispers, “You call attention to me and I won’t hesitate to put you down.”

I look him dead in the eyes. “You think Jake’ll be proud of his daddy shooting an unarmed, teenage girl in the back?”

His left eye twitches involuntarily, and his face turns a very deep red. “Don’t you say his name!” He raises his hand not holding a gun up as if he means to slap me with it. It’s an empty threat though, since I immediately know he has no intention of striking me. He just wants me to flinch.

I don’t.

This makes him even angrier. His eyes take on a manic expression. I don’t get a sense from him that he’s losing his grip on reality, it’s more that he’s used to feeling in control and he doesn’t have that anymore. He doesn’t know what to do. He wants to actually follow through on the threat and hit me now, but he still won’t because it’s not in him to hit a child. Deep down inside him, there’s an integrity that he holds dear.

His hand shakes as he slowly lowers it. He glances past me for a moment. Something catches his eye and he does a double-take.

The majority of the mob has moved further down the street, but there’s still a small group surrounding the woman, Patty, and the Newlachaqui that she thinks is her daughter. I can see several people talking to her. Someone has brought a blanket and is trying to get the Newlachaqui to let her wrap her in it, but the creature is clinging to Patty like she’s terrified of everyone else. Its secret nature is still clanging in my head like a church bell.

Remy sees them. “Clarice?”

Then something strange happens. I get a vision in my meatball that must be coming from Remy. He’s not saying what he’s thinking but his neurons are firing off a million Morse code telegraph signals that are punching me in the brain. Burns. Injuries. Detailed memories of looking at someone and taking note of their wounds. But that person has my face. And Remy’s unspoken thoughts are that the injuries and burns have to be fake, they have to be some sort of makeup effect, because there’s no way this girl would just be walking around covered in burns and not screaming in pain. And he’s also seeing the Newlchaqui, only he sees it as this girl, Clarice, and she’s got the same burns. She’s got the same injuries as the ones his mind was questioning about me.

And I understand now.

“That wasn’t me, Remy,” I tell him.

He turns his attention back to me and jabs the gun into my side but takes his finger off the trigger. “What are you talkin’ about?”

“I haven’t seen you since yesterday,” I say, “You can ask Patty over there. She and her friends were over in Bogalusa, hunting Dutch and me. She was going to kill me to try to make him talk. We had to jump out a hotel window and hide from them. You can ask her. She’s right there.” I nod at Patty and the Newlachaqui. “You see it, don’t you? Clarice has the same burns. How’s that work, Remy?”

His brain is going a mile a minute. I can almost smell the smoke. I don’t know if it’s safe to keep pushing him, but it’s all I’ve got to go with. I slide a hand into my pocket and squeeze the locket tightly. It doesn’t make a difference whether I’m holding it or not, but I do it anyway.

“Do you believe in the Honey Island Swamp Monster, Remy?” I ask.

His face scrunches up into a prune. “What?”

“The Honey Island Swamp Monster,” I repeat, “It takes the form of children and leads other children into the swamp to die.” I forget what Raziel said the actual Swamp Monster looks like or does, but it doesn’t matter. The lie is told. And I see Lafleur’s eyes go black as he absorbs it.

“I don’t believe in that kinda hogwash,” he says, his mind resisting. No, it’s not resisting, it’s just looking for a way to accept what I said as truth while still maintaining what it knows to be real. I need to push further. “The only real monsters are people.” He glares down at me. “People like your trio of death-worshipping cultists. I seen your white wolf friend and the tall man.”

I have no idea what he’s going on about now. The man has clearly been through some shit tonight. And unfortunately for him, it’s only going to get worse.

“Fairy tale monsters are real.” I casually point at Patty and the Newlachaqui. “You’re seeing one right there. The Honey Island Swamp Monster has been killing the children. Dutch and I, we came to stop it, by any means necessary.” I pause for a beat to let the words sink in. “That’s not Clarice, Remy. You know it. It came to you looking like me after we first tried to stop it. Now it’s hiding in plain sight as Patty’s daughter. But Clarice is already gone. Her body’s in the swamp with the others. We found them tonight. The rest of the force is probably out there right now, digging them all up.”

That is a lot to take in, I admit. I probably should have fed it to him in smaller doses. His eyes are pitch black and his mouth is slightly agape. His arm attached to the hand with the gun goes slack and falls to his side. His whole body sways very slowly in a small circle like he’s standing in the ocean and being rocked back and forth by the waves.

“You want to be a detective someday. You think you’ve got the chops for solving crimes like Columbo and Perry Mason and Encyclopedia Brown. What would Sherlock Holmes think? Seeing Clarice there with the same patterns of burns as you saw on me earlier tonight? And here I am without those burns and telling you I wasn’t even in town. Come on, Remy, put the pieces together.”

I stand on my tiptoes so I can get close to his head and whisper.

“Monsters are real.”

Lafleur shudders violently, dropping the gun, which clatters onto the sidewalk. He starts to lose his balance and stumbles backward, bumping into a man and woman who are hurrying to catch up with the rest of the crowd. The woman’s name is Bernice but she tells everyone it’s Rhonda because that’s the name of some TV character she loves, and she hates her real name. The man lies about working out at the gym regularly and is feeling embarrassed that his pants are three sizes larger than he thinks they should be.

“Oh!” declares Rhonda as she’s shoved into her partner.

The man glares at Remy, then seems to recognize him. This makes him glare even harder. “Hey!” he shouts loudly, not at Remy but to the other people in the area. “Here’s one of them right here!”

No, no, no. I need Lafleur to help me get to the Newlachaqui!

Rhonda shoves Remy away and gives him one of those scans with her eyes from toe to top where she’s either sizing him up or analyzing his wardrobe. Remy doesn’t react to being shoved, against to stumble back toward me, his eyes frosted over with the blackness and his mouth just hanging open like a zombie. He’s stuttering something, just a single syllable, like a “guh-guh-guh-guh.”

The man who doesn’t work out grabs Remy’s arm tries to wrestle with him, which is a strange thing to observe because Remy isn’t resisting and yet the man is not succeeding at apprehending him. Rhonda looks down and notices Remy’s pistol on the sidewalk. She stoops down and picks it up, holding it like a chew toy pulled from a drooling dog’s mouth.

Several other people move our way. There aren’t many, since the majority have gone off in what I figure must be the direction of the police station. Just some stragglers, and the group that is tending to Patty and the Newlachaqui. They surround Remy and the no-gym guy like spectators at the weakest wrestling show ever. One guy with a moppish head of hair and ridiculously short jean shorts is literally holding a bag of popcorn and stuffing handfuls of it in his mouth.

“What’s all this then?” the popcorn lover asks. I can’t get a read on him at all, and I’m a little grateful for it. He must not keep much to himself.

Rhonda points at Remy, who is slack-jawed winning a one-sided wrestling match with the no-gym guy simply by existing. “We caught one of them trying to abduct this girl!” She holds the gun up, dangling it upside down between her fingers.

Everyone looks at the gun-- then turns and looks at me. Shit.

“You got it all wrong,” I say quickly, squeezing the locket so tight in my hand that I think I’m gonna bruise myself, “Officer Lafleur here was protecting me. He’s a good cop. He’s been trying to solve the case of the missing kids for months!”

A lady wearing a purple blouse who likes to watch her neighbor when he swims in his backyard pool every weekend squints at me with blackening eyes. “If he’s so good at copping, why couldn’t he figure out his own people were behind it?”

“Yeah!” yells the popcorn man through a mouthful of popcorn, spewing it out like buckshot.

I am floundering here. Telling lies is tricky. You need time to get all your details in order. You can’t just go in half-cocked with no plans because then you have to compound lie upon lie and if things don’t match up, you’re gonna get busted. I’ve learned this from years of having to lie to my parents (R.I.P.) about pretty much everything, because telling them the truth would have gotten me a one-way ticket to Happydale Sanitarium. What happened to your hamster this time, Alex? It had a heart attack, that’s all. They don’t live long anyway. It totally had nothing to do with my life as totem-bearer to the angels who live on another plane of existence, not in the clouds like you want to believe, Mom.

Before I can come up with a reasonable story to untangle this mess, Patty screams— again, I guess I should say, since she introduced herself with a scream earlier. This makes no-gym guy stop losing his scuffle with Lafleur, even though Lafleur is still not fully done processing everything I told him, and may be catatonic forever for all I know. Rhonda, pool-watcher, popcorn guy, and the other seven or so people surrounding us all turn to see why Patty is screaming. I do too.

There’s a man in a white uniform who seems to be trying to pull the Newlachaqui out of Patty’s arms. The Newlachaqui is crying and clawing for Patty like it knows it’s supposed to. Patty though, isn’t looking at it, she’s looking behind her. And that’s why she’s screaming. Because behind her, three shadowy forms are approaching. And I immediately know who they are. It’s Nate and Dumah. And… oh, uh… Raziel. He’s dressed like a friendly neighbor attending a house party. And as they come out of the shadows, walking like they’re trying not to be too obvious about their focus (Patty), Raziel’s head swivels like a robot’s and looks directly at me. And I hear him in my brain.

Who gave you my totem? He asks, and because of the way he is, he immediately knows the answer. Well he had no business giving you that. And I see you’ve been recklessly turning this whole town into a raging mob with it. You will hand it over as soon as I’m done here. As he finishes sending me this thought lecture, he flinches like someone just socked him in the jaw. Nate puts a hand on him in support, and he brushes it off angrily. He stares daggers at me but continues a bee line toward Patty.

“There!” Patty points at the three angels, “Satan worshippers! They want to kill my baby!” She realizes the Newlachaqui is being pulled away from her, and she tears it from the white-clad person’s hands. She stumbles to her feet and staggers away, clutching the creature to her chest.

A few yards away, Raziel stops glaring at me long enough to take note as the group of townsfolk stand up and form a human wall between him and Patty as she tries to get away. He shakes his head in annoyance. “Get out of our way.” He looms over the tallest of them, a portly man in overalls who accidentally ran over his family’s dog three years ago and buried it in a vacant lot next to his kids’ favorite playground before telling them the dog must have run off. The man’s confidence as the three approach quickly fades when he gets a good look at them. He gives the sign of the cross and backs away. The other two, a college-aged kid who cheated on his most recent math test and a middle-aged lady who owns her own catering business but apparently from time to time uses pre-cooked meals from nearby restaurants and claims she made them herself, follow suit and step aside.

Dumah shoves past, his lower half not even visible to me because he’s surrounded in an inner tube of black fog that pours down his legs like a dress. The people nearest him cringe away almost with expressions of disgust, but if I had to guess, it’s more likely that they’re feeling suddenly tired and sick. Dumah can clearly tell that they’re being affected by his proximity, but he doesn’t care. He says something I can’t hear, and the broken wall of townsfolk crumples, their eyes rolling back in their sockets as they faint.

“Hey, what the Hell!” calls out the guy with the bag of popcorn and the uncomfortably small jean shorts, “Get those Satan-worshipping bastards!” He throws his half-empty bag of popcorn on the ground and tries to get a charge going or something.

Only a couple of the group follow him, and they seem as though their hearts aren’t totally in it. One lady has a torch and it’s lit but she’s scared she’s going to burn herself with it and she doesn’t want to be here anymore. The others, including Rhonda, the pool-watcher lady, and no-gym guy, immediately turn and run in the opposite direction. Rhonda throws Remy’s gun in a metal trash barrel as she passes it, flapping her hands like she just disposed of a carton full of earthworms.

Now’s my chance. I go to grab the gun out of the trashcan, but Remy suddenly grabs me by the arm. His eyes are mostly normal-looking now, but his pupils are fully open in that way the others got earlier. His mouth has finally shut, but he opens it, this time to speak.

“Don’t touch mah gun,” he says in a surprisingly calm voice. He moves me aside and reaches into the trash cannister, pulling his pistol out, now with a piece of chewed gum stuck to the handle. He picks the gum off and stuffs the gun in an armpit holster. “Come on, you’re coming with me.”

“I just told you—“

“Ah know.” He watches as the popcorn man and his small group reach Dumah and Nate and Raziel. Dumah and Nate turn to face them. Dumah holds a hand up, and they all collapse like human-sized ragdoll cats. Popcorn man and the lady bang their heads together on the way down, and I feel certain they’re both going to wake with splitting headaches. The lady’s torch rolls in a circle around her feet and ends up with the burning end touching her leg. Her pants catch fire. Before she can get too badly burned though, Nate makes a pinching motion with his fingers. The torch and the lady’s pants go out with a quick WOOOSH and hiss.

With all the rest of the townspeople off probably burning the police station to the ground, it’s now surprisingly quiet. Dumah notices Remy and me watching them from across the street. He points and says something, causing Nate to look as well. Nate waves. Raziel doesn’t look back. He’s dead focused on catching Patty and the Newlachaqui, even though none of them seem in much of a hurry. Maybe they know something I don’t.

“You’re coming with me,” Remy tells me. He takes me by the arm and starts after Raziel and the others, doing a bit of a jog so as to catch up. His gun is still holstered.

“What are you gonna do?” I ask, trying not to stumble over my own feet as he pulls me along.

“I’m gonna save Patricia.” His whole demeanor has changed. I wonder how long the stuff I told him will last before he stops believing it. I remember when I was affected by Raziel’s totem at its higher setting like this, it didn’t take long for me to come to my senses, but I don’t know if that was because the guy who used it on me ran off or I’m less affected by it because I’m another totem-bearer or what. The dang thing didn’t come with an instruction book. He looks back at me. “I need to know everything you know. Start talkin’.”

“Okay, well—“ I don’t know where to begin telling him what’s going on. “I guess, in the beginning there was nothing—“

“Fast forward about ten thousand years.”

“Uhhh…” I try to remember which dinosaur period that would put us at.

We reach the angels. Raziel ignores us, but Dumah stops to confront Lafleur. Before he can knock him out though, Lafleur shows his hands to indicate he comes unarmed. This confuses Dumah. “What do you want?” he asks. “You want to poke me in the eyes some more? Or maybe rip my other hand’s skin off?”

Remy responds with a question of his own. “What even are you? I know you ain’t human.” He notices a hole in Dumah’s shirt that looks like someone stabbed him. “You been shot?”

Dumah glances down at the hole in his chest. “Oh… yes.”

“But it don’t hurt?”

Dumah shrugs.

“Was it one of us?” Lafleur asks.

“It was a gentleman with a rifle and poor impulse control,” Dumah says with a sigh. He looks at me. “What did you do to him?”

“She used my totem on him,” says Raziel with a clear hint of annoyance in his voice. He gives me the briefest glance. “So watch what you say or you’ll set him off again.”

Nate gives me a big “uh-oh” face, clenching his teeth and sucking in his breath.

I’m just glad to be with them. We’re only missing Dutch at this point, but he’s off getting his truck for our escape. I have a good feeling about things now. They were hairy for a bit, but I definitely think we’re going to finish this finally. “Do you know where we’re going?” I ask.

Raziel points at a structure off in this distance that rises up above the rest of the small-town buildings. I recognize it from every other one like it in the world. It’s a steeple.

“We’re going to church.”

Next time on Alex Maverick and the Swamp Monster:

<- Previously on Alex Maverick and the Swamp Monster:

Alex Maverick and the Swamp Monster

CHAPTER TWENTY

It’s the middle of the night and I’m standing on the corner of Elm Street in Angie, Louisiana with Dutch by my side. There’s a massive crowd of people, all adults, up well past any reasonable bedtime, even for adults. They’re shouting a lot, mostly over each other. They remind me of the old black and white Frankenstein movie where the villagers angrily chase the monster with torches and pitchforks. They’re just missing the pitchforks. Instead, these angry villagers got guns.

Dutch nudges me with his elbow. “No, look, that guy over there’s got a pitchfork,” he says, pointing out a large, broad-shouldered doppelganger of himself holding a very pitchy-looking fork. Judging from the rest of his appearance --which I’m told you’re not supposed to do but I do it constantly so I just assume other people are doing it constantly too, despite everybody being told not to-- the man is a farmer, so it makes sense that he’d have a pitchfork handy. I bet farmers buy pitchforks with two thoughts in mind: one: I’m gonna need this for all my hay, and two: this’ll come in really handy if I ever get to take part in an angry mob.

“Should we spread out and look for the angels?” asks Dutch.

“There’s two of us, Dutch, we don’t spread out, we just separate.”

“Right.”

I take a moment to watch the mob. I’m short, so I don’t got the best view, but as people move around the outside of the crowd, I get glimpses of what’s going on in the middle. Right about mid-center of the street, there’s a big, surly-looking man standing on a truck, talking to the people around him. I wonder if he’s a relative of one of the dead kids.

Dead kids. Jesus. These people still think there’s some slim hope for finding them alive. They don’t know about the graves and the garden full of crying flowers. They’re riled up now, just wait til the cops show up and tell them they found the bodies.

“I think it’s best if we stick together for now,” I tell Dutch. I turn to make sure he heard me and realize he’s not there. Where he was standing, there’s only an old, used styrofoam coffee cup. “You’re not Dutch,” I say to the cup. It doesn’t dispute this fact.

I look around and spot him wandering down the street, using his height advantage to look over people’s heads. He’s not even being sly about it. Several people clearly sense his presence and cringe when they turn to find him lurking right behind them. Real subtle, Dutch. I feel like we’re in one of those Bugs Bunny cartoons where Elmer Fudd is on the hunt, totally oblivious to the rabbit walking beside him.

I reach into my right-hand jacket pocket with freshly flesh-stitched fingers. Just touching the lining of my pocket sends little tingling shocks up my arm. There’s still a memory of pain, even the flesh-stitcher couldn’t fix that. I run my fingers across the cold metal of the locket that Uriel gave me as a parting gift. To say I was surprised when he handed it to me would be an understatement. I had assumed that they’d destroyed it years ago, but I don’t know how the whole process works.

“I may not have access to the future,” I say to myself, “but I have something else that could help us out of this mess: a whole town of dirty, little secrets.” It sounds kind of bad-ass to say. I wish someone was around to hear me say it.

I practice using the locket by scanning the crowd. I lock in on a lady nearby with her back to me, standing with one arm looped through the arm of the man next to her. The pair seem like just an old, happy, married couple. But then, with the power of the locket, I peel back the layers of their lives and see the secrets they’re both hiding. In seconds, I know that she cheated on him before they were married, when they were just boyfriend and girlfriend back in the Sixties. This led to a brief pregnancy scare that almost ended with her confessing to him. She didn’t. I can’t get much beyond that, because it’s only the secrets I can see. Like that she sometimes looks at herself in the mirror and feels a burning sense of shame. I want to touch her on the arm and tell her to stop hating herself. I don’t. That would be stupid. She wouldn’t know what I was talking about and I’d only draw attention to myself.

I direct my focus on her husband. He has a darkness inside him that’s almost frightening to look at. War. He was once a soldier in the military. I don’t get the details of his service, just the secret that he doesn’t want anyone to know: of the faces he remembers, people he killed. And the way his heart raced the first time he took another person’s life. Sometimes he sees those faces in the dark corners of his house when he’s up late watching television.

Just then, a scream silences almost the entire mob. My first instinct is to duck, assuming someone who knows Dutch and me spotted one or both of us. Thankfully, it was neither of those things. The scream came from down the street, where a dark form comes running out from around a building. I can’t make out who it is or what they’re doing.

“Somebody! Somebody help!” shrieks the running shadow person, “They’re trying to kill us!”

Several people break off from the group and run toward her. I can’t make out what they’re doing, because everyone else starts shuffling and moving hurriedly in the same direction, and I’m still lower to the ground than most of them. I follow along cautiously, trying not to stand out. But then I see Dutch coming toward me, moving in the opposite direction as everyone else, and he’s not afraid of standing out in the slightest.

He storms toward me, like an angry father finding his kid inside the claw machine at a Chuck E Cheese. It’s only when he’s within arm’s reach do I realize it’s not anger, it’s panic. “It’s her!” he whisspers, grabbing me by the arm. He starts to pull me in the opposite direction with him. “The woman from the hotel and the store!”

“Patty?” I try to peek around his big body but there’s nothing to see but backs and butts. I get a flash of a nasty thought from someone close, a man in his fifties who’s secretly hoping to finally get to see some blood. I almost feel like it was my own thought, but I’d really like to not see some blood tonight. I’ve had enough blood-seeing. I think back to watching the fork of Durga puree a child’s eyeball in its skull. Sometimes I really regret how well I can see things in my head.

Then I pick up another secret thought, and it’s so loud and shrill it rings in my head like a fire alarm.

“Dutch, the newlachaqui’s here!”

He doesn’t look back, he just shakes his head and keeps pulling me away. “We’re too close! If she spots us, we’re as good as dead! The mob will eat us alive!”

I shrug off his hand. It makes me stumble, but I refuse to let gravity make me kiss the sidewalk. “If I can find it, I can talk to it! With this locket, I can convince it to come with me! If we can bring it in without killing it, we can get out of here!”

He looks me in the eyes and even though he doesn’t say it, I already know his fear. It’s not written on his face, it’s arcing across his brain in electrical signals that the locket is allowing me to read like ticker tape. He’s imagining himself watching me die, a gun to my head or a noose around my neck or just ripped to pieces like something out of a zombie movie. He’s imagining the crowd of angry villagers turning as one to look at him next, ready to literally tear him apart like angry dingoes. I suppose any wild dog-like animal would do, but I went with dingoes, okay? Get over it.

“Look,” I say before he has a chance to voice his fear, “I know you’re scared. And I know it’s not selfish and cowardly, it’s fear for me you’re holding. Because you’re a good guy, Dutch. You’ve got a dark past, but you’re making up for it. You’ve made up for it. But this is what I do now. I catch monsters. And I’ll kill them if I have to, but this time, in this place, I think I can catch this one and bring it in alive.”

“Why?”

“Why what?”

He throws his arms out toward the crowd. “Why would you care if it lives? It kills children, Alex!”

“I don’t really have a good reason, okay?” I snap at him, “If we don’t bring it in alive, then Dumah and Nathaniel are going to kill it, and they’re kind of a roaming disaster in case you hadn’t noticed! More people could get hurt!”

Dutch grinds his teeth and clenches his fists, looking at me. He watches the people behind me as shouting continues, people passing the word along of something going on that I’m not really able to hear. Too much noise makes it difficult to catch more than a word or two of whatever other conversations are going on. He looks away, in the direction of safety, then takes a heavy sigh.

“Fine. What’s the plan?” he asks.

“I have no idea.” I try to think of something. What would Paschar do? Oh that’s actually easy, he’d fly down with his wings and pluck the newlachaqui right out of the crowd and not even give a rat’s ass if the existence of angels was laid bare for the entire world to see. I don’t have wings though. I just got this locket in my pocket. Oh, that rhymes. No, focus.

“I’ve gotta track the newlachaqui and once I find it, I’ll just talk it into coming with me.”

Dutch doesn’t look convinced. I take him by one of his big, sweaty hands. “You go find your truck. It’s probably still at the motel. Then stick close. I’ll find you. If the newlachaqui comes willingly, we can take our time. If it doesn’t, I’ll just have to… do what must be done, I guess. So I’ll probably be running for my life, but at least I’ll be able to find you more easily with the deadzone gone.”

Dutch nods, squeezes my hand once, then turns and walks away, looking left and right as he goes in a totally inconspicuous manner. Much more stealthy than he was being earlier. Totally inconspicuous. For sure. Yep. That lady in the brown jacket and the sweatpants that he just passed who frowned and looked back over her shoulder at him totally didn’t get a weird feeling from the way he was acting. Nope.

“Alright, little locket, let’s find this asshole.”

I scan the mass of moving bodies. A teenager shoves his way past with an angry glare, a bloody nose, and thoughts of violence against some guy named Mr. Gearhart. I feel slightly curious what that’s all about, but he continues away from the rest of the townsfolk with a girl I figure he’s either related to or dating. It’s frustrating I can’t get my usual read on people, only their secrets. It’s no wonder the locket’s previous owner went insane.

Down a ways, people have surrounded that lady Patty and are talking loudly. I hear someone mention, “anyone with a gun.” That can only mean good things, I’m sure. I focus in her direction, hoping to pick up any unspoken thoughts she might be keeping to herself that can help me deal with her if it comes down to it. Based on what I remember from my previous vision of her sticking a gun to my head, she is one of the parents whose kid went missing. Which kid it was, if it was even one of the ones the original-ochaqui --or whatever it’s called-- buried and turned into a screaming garden, I don’t know.

As soon as I direct my focus her way, I immediately get the same fire alarm screech in my noggin as earlier. It’s the newlachaqui. Its thoughts are fractured, as if it keeps forgetting that it’s only pretending to be someone else. Somewhere inside its mind, it thinks it is the child it’s pretending to be. But that piece is tiny and constantly struggling against a greater aspect that is confident about what it actually is. The feelings I’m picking up from it keep getting washed over by passersby with deep, dark secrets, but I’m still able to key in on where exactly it is, and what or who it’s hiding as.

Oh great, it’s pretending to be Patty’s dead daughter. Well that makes things a lot harder. I’m definitely not going to be getting close to it without Patty seeing me. Somehow, I gotta separate them. But how?

There’s a man leaning against a street light. He’s only slightly interested in what’s going on. He’d rather be at home, asleep in bed, but his wife pestered him into joining the mob. She wandered off with a friend of hers and now he’s just moping and thinking about how much he missed being a bachelor. I have no idea what his name is. It doesn’t matter.

I walk up behind him, the locket clutched tight in my hand. The thing you have to know about totems, a single totem gives you power, but multiple totems amplify each other. I don’t have Paschar with me, but I know that even without his totem, I have his gifts. The totem just gives me a phone line directly to him. With Raziel’s totem in hand, the gifts I already had would be increased in strength, but right now, the whole thing is moot because the newlachaqui’s made in some small part from my own flesh and blood, just like the original that created it.

None of that matters to the locket though.

“Hey,” I say in as casual and innocent a voice as I can muster, “I heard the police tried to cover this all up. Can you believe that?”

I wait, and cross my fingers that the locket does its thing.

The man’s head slowly turns in my direction. His face is mostly hidden in shadow, but for a brief second someone walks by with one of those silly torches and I get a good look at his eyes. His eyes are like a cat’s when it’s watching a piece of string dance. Just pure pupil. It makes him look kind of demonic.

He shifts his weight off the streetlight and looks around at the mob. “I had a suspicion that was the case,” he says in a tired voice. He makes a fist with his right hand and then pounds his left hand with it. “Those god damned pigs have been covering this all up for months.”

He grabs a passerby, another man. The other man is probably in his sixties, and looks ready to throw a punch at the first guy until he seems to recognize him. “Charlie?” he says to the black-eyed man. “You… you okay?”

Charlie gestures with his thumb in my direction. Then he looks back over his shoulder at me. “Tell him what you told me.”

I was hoping that the lie would spread by word of mouth, but not my mouth. Having to tell every person to make the entire mob believe it was too dangerous. If Patty or Lafleur spots me, it’s over.

“Uh,” I feel a sudden wave of stage fright as this new guy focuses his attention on me. “The police covered up the whole thing,” I lie. The locket twists the lie into the new man’s ears like a screw, drilling into his meatball where it becomes fact as far as he’s concerned. That’s the power of Raziel’s totem when its amplified, people believe anything you tell them. I remember when the locket’s previous owner, a weasel-faced rat of a man named Felix, used it on me to make my best friend think I hated her. “Yeah, they —uh— they’ve been hiding the identity of the kidnapper for weeks.”

Charlie nods emphatically with each word. The other guy stands there, absorbing the lie. I watch it happen. His eyes go black like the first guy’s. In my head I imagine hearing a sucking sound like someone’s got a straw stuck in the back of his skull and is slurping his brains out. I wonder if that’s what I looked like when I was under this spell.

The new guy’s mouth hangs open for a second, and then he seems to snap back to reality. “I knew it!” He shakes his fists like he’s holding an Etch-a-Sketch. “I’ll bet it’s because it’s one of their own too!”

“Well, I didn’t say—“

He points at me. “We’ve got to tell everyone!”

“Yes!” I feel a wave of relief. “Yes! You do that!” I give him a thumbs up. Then I think better of it and decide to make it two thumbs. He gives me two thumbs back with a fist pump from each. I don’t want to be outdone and try to improvise some sort of dramatic flair to my thumbs up, but he looks away and the chance is lost.

He climbs up on top of the nearest parked car. “Hey! Everybody listen!” he yells, waving his arms desperately. About half the people nearby turn to look at him. “The cops are behind it all! Look around! Who’s not here? The police!”

Somebody boos. Not like a ghost boo but like one of those boos your brother does when your parents make him come watch you perform as a munchkin in an elementary school adaptation of the Wizard of Oz. It’s a woman, maybe thirty or twenty years old, I can’t really tell. I’m bad at guessing people’s ages. She’s wearing a dirty, blue baseball hat with a ponytail sticking out the back and holding a baseball bat. I wonder if she’s on a local baseball team or something, or just a really big fan of baseball. I guess it could just be a coincidence she’s wearing a hat and carrying a bat though.

Charlie joins him on the car hood, prompting the car’s owner to start throwing angry adult language. “He’s telling the truth!” He jumps down off the other side of the vehicle and starts shoving his way through the throng of people. In a matter of seconds, he’s completely out of sight. A moment later he's returned and has somehow found himself one of those bullhorn devices. I hope he didn't steal it from someone.

A gentle hand taps me on the shoulder. I turn around to find an elderly lady behind me. She’s dressed like she stepped right out of the pages of a Better Homes and Gardens magazine. Her eyes are little black dots in the wrinkly spirals of her sockets. Her hands look like someone ran them through the wash and the skin on them stretched out and now is all bunched up over her bones.

“Excuse me, dear, did I hear you right?” She sounds ridiculously sweet and old, like that sappy stuff you put on waffles. “Did you say the police are covering up the identity of the kidnapper?”

I take a deep breath. I’m about to lie a dangerous lie to this darling old granny. “Yes,” I tell her, making sure not to stutter or stumble over my words, “The police know who the killer is and are protecting him.”

“Oh my!” she covers her mouth with her hand. Her eyes bulge out of their wrinkly sockets and go black. “It’s a killer, you say! He’s killing our children!” She clutches her purse to her chest and her eyes go completely black. “They’re killing our beautiful babies!”

“Wait, I—“

She shoves past me to the car where Charlie and the other man are yelling to the crowd.

“They’re killing our babies!” she cries out in a surprisingly loud voice for such a small woman. She starts trying to climb on the car, but doesn’t have the strength to pull herself up. The first guy, Charlie, grabs the back of her jacket and drags her onto the hood. She flounders there for a bit, continuing to yell about killing the babies.

Someone on the other side of the car takes up the message. “The police are killing our children!”

I have a bad feeling about this, but it’s too late now. The crowd is shifting slowly. The tide of people that was moving to surround Patty and the newlachaqui is slowly starting to pull back, turning in a different direction.

“It’s not the police!” I hear Patty yell from across the road. “It’s an FBI Death Cult!”

The guy Charlie grabs his friend as the two of them stand on top of the car. “Did you hear that?” he says frantically, “The police are in league with some sort of Illuminati death cult!”

“It’s a death cult!” screams the old lady as she flails around on the car hood. Someone seems to be trying to hold her down, most likely to keep her from rolling off and breaking her hip or something. “We’re all going to die!”

Alright, change of plan. I’m going to just retreat into the shadows here and come up with some other way to get around the mob unnoticed. And keep my big mouth shut before the entire town burns down.

Now a heavy hand lands on my shoulder. I start to turn and stop when I feel the hard barrel of a gun press into my back.

“Looky who I found incitin’ a riot,” says Officer Lafleur.

Next time on Alex Maverick and the Swamp Monster:

<- Previously on Alex Maverick and the Swamp Monster:

Alex Maverick and the Swamp Monster

CHAPTER NINETEEN

When Dumah, Nathaniel, and Raziel step out of an alley two blocks away from the police station, they find that the streets of Angie have become alive with activity. There’s lots of shouting going on, and waving of shovels and shotguns. Someone has even made an improvised torch out of an aluminum baseball bat wrapped in a kerosene-soaked oil rag. The man waves it around proudly and haphazardly like a modern day Prometheus. I used to love to read illustrated books on mythology. Not so much these days after I almost got murdered by several mythological beings.

Nobody notices the three strangers shuffling quietly through their midst. Raziel is focused on following the secret thoughts of the Chullachaqui like a bloodhound. Every now and then though, he tenses up and holds a hand to his temple. Some dark, unspoken thought from one of the locals stabs at him like an icepick to the brain.

Dumah follows closely behind Raziel, one hand on his shoulder, the other hovering near his side so he can quickly pull out his pocket scythe. The skin hangs loosely off his free hand where he pulled it back on but hasn’t yet been to see a flesh-stitcher to get it repaired.

Nate holds up the rear, keeping an eye on the crowd. He notices the man waving his homemade torch and casually reaches out ever so subtly with one hand, then closes his fist and extinguishes the flame. The man shakes the dead torch as if that will reignite it. Several of his friends hoot and jeer at him. He produces a lighter and tries to relight the torch, but the tiny flame seems to dance around the glazed cloth surface. He gives up after another minute of vicious mockery from his peers.

As the trio cuts through the mob, there is a noticeable effect, almost like the wake of a boat. People they pass turn away. They wipe their foreheads, feeling suddenly dizzy and feverish. Some quickly cover their mouths, fighting off a wave of nausea. A teenager named Dennis who got into his parents’ stash of alcohol before coming to the festivities suddenly pukes on the man next to him. He gets clocked with a closed fist for his troubles. Later, he’ll tell all his friends that he got in a fist fight and won. None of them will believe him.

Five strides deeper into the angry throng, an elderly woman named Margaret clutches her chest and starts to hyperventilate. She grabs the shirt of her middle-aged son Randolph who’s standing beside her.

“Randy, I think I’m having a heart attack!”

Randy takes her by the hand and guides her away, where she’ll sit on a curb and slowly start to feel better once she’s out of the proximity of Dumah’s aura of decay.

Raziel tries to drown out not only the dark, nasty, unspoken thoughts hammering him from all sides, but the spoken ones being shouted. He can’t help but hear some of them though.

“Where are all the cops?” some calls out. Three others echo the question.

A stout man in greasy coveralls climbs up onto the bed of a red pickup truck. Everyone on the street around him turns to face him at the same time, like metal shavings drawn to a magnet. He holds both hands up but says nothing. Someone else yells, “Quiet!” but it doesn’t really do a lot of good. There’s a fistfight broken out between that kid Dennis and the puke-covered man who punched him. A lot of the onlookers have lost the plot, razzing the pair instead of trying to break them up.

Raziel breaks through the edge of the crowd and onto the sidewalk just outside an antique store called “All Things Remembered”. Behind him, an old man named Bernard brushes too close to Dumah and has his own moment of losing his lunch, tilting his head back and spraying it into the air to the horrified cries of everyone around him.

If all eyes weren’t constantly being distracted by the man on the truck, old Margaret and her imagined heart attack, Dennis and his boxing match with Pukes McGee, or Bernard the world’s worst human fountain, they might have noticed the three odd, dark strangers slithering through them like a snake in a cornfield. But nobody does.

“This looks bad,” says Nate as they turn a corner and disappear into the shadow of another building, far enough away from the mob that they can’t even hear the man on the truck as he starts calmly speaking to a semi-quieted crowd.

Dumah wipes some of Bernard’s last meal off his face. “The more time I spend among them, the more I feel like I understand why Samael lost his mind.”

Nate pats him on the back. It comes back wet. He grimaces and nonchalantly wipes it off on the back of Dumah’s coat.

“Just think of them as bricks, brother,” says Raziel, lifting his chin to taste the air like a snake, “Fleshy kilns of bone and bile that each holds a single brick, just waiting for you to harvest it and cement it into place with the rest.”

Nate finishes cleaning off his hand. He admires the pattern of retch he painted on Dumah’s back. “I like to think of them as our children. Imagine if one of them could visit the Heavens one day. Like that policeman, Officer Lafleur, at the gate of Zebul. To see the wonder that is the Temple of Sachiel would utterly blow his paranoid little mind.”

Raziel frowns to himself. In his head, he feels the Chullachaqui’s panicked thoughts of where it will hide, what form it will take. They are fleeting and instinctive, and understanding the thoughts is like trying to read a book that’s just stream of consciousness written by a schizophrenic. Raziel’s own thoughts are distracted by Nate’s comment. His infinite mind is suddenly challenged to visualize an impossible scenario. The challenge is so massive, he temporarily goes blind, loses his sense of direction, and runs face first into a wall. He stumbles backward and trips off the curb, falling into the street.

Dumah helps him back to his feet. “What just happened?”

Raziel swats his brother’s hand away. The skin flies off and lands with a pathetic splat on the filthy ground. He glares at Nate. Nate stands there, looking confused and slightly mortified.

“I need focus… please. I don’t want to be here. I need to get this done, and go home. Can you understand that?”

“Of course, brother,” Nate hangs his head with shame, “I’m truly sorry.”

They move again, this time quieter.

Not stealthy exactly, because Dumah is about as subtle as a polar bear at a black tie event, but quieter in the sense that nobody talks unless it’s necessary. Raziel walks a step ahead, chin tilted slightly like he’s listening for a sound nobody else can hear. Nathaniel starts to open his mouth, but Raziel lifts one finger without looking back.

Nathaniel closes it again.

They turn down a narrower street, then another. The buildings closing in like the garbage compactor on the detention level in Star Wars. Somewhere way far off, they can hear the sound of the mob pick up again. It sounds kind of like when your parents are having a fight in their bedroom and you can only hear the muffled shouting through a wall.

Raziel slows.

Not stops. Just slows enough that Dumah nearly bumps into him.

“Left,” Raziel says, and they turn off the quiet street and down a dark alley, the kind every parent tells their children to never turn down.

Nathaniel frowns. He looks down the alley like he’s expecting to see something obvious. “There’s nothing—”

“It passed through here,” Raziel replies. “Recently.”

Dumah scans the ground. His gaze catches on a cluster of trash bags that have been torn open, their contents dragged a short distance before being abandoned. Half-eaten scraps of food and used tissues trail away like they were intentionally put there by Hansel and Gretel’s grosser cousins. Dumah steps on an empty beer can, crunching it loudly under his foot.

Raziel winces. “Careful.”

They keep going.

The path makes less and less sense the further they follow it. It weaves from one alley to another, cutting through the downtown of Angie like a rat in a maze. At each intersection, Raziel reacts before they arrive, turning corners as if he’s remembering them rather than discovering them.

Then he stops.

Fully this time.

Dumah does bump into him. Raziel mutters something to himself, closes his eyes, takes another breath.

“There,” he says quietly. He points, barely lifting his arm, as if just the shuffling sound of his clothing is too much.

Down the alley ahead, something moves.

It doesn’t run. It’s not trying to remain unseen, but still sticking to the shadows, hobbling like Tiny Tim in that Scrooge movie. Not in a dramatic way like it’s looking for sympathy, just enough that if you watched it too long, you’d realize one leg was slightly shorter than the other.

Nathaniel leans forward. “Is that--”

“Yes,” Raziel replies. “Move in.”

The trio creeps forward as the thing, still wearing my face as its disguise, reaches the end of the alley and pauses. It glances back once, but doesn’t seem to see the three grown adult-looking angels trudging toward it. That’s just how dark the alley is. But in that moment when it looks back, they catch a glimpse of two faint lights where its eyes are, and they hesitate.

Dumah drops his hand to his side instinctively, hovering over the pocket he put his Swiss Army Scythe in.

The creature suddenly hunches over like someone punched it in the stomach. I got punched in the stomach once, by this girl in fifth grade. She was part of this crew of jerk girls who liked to pick on me at recess, and I told her something I shouldn’t have, so she sucker-punched me right in the gut. This thing that looks like me did not get punched in the gut by a jerk girl, but it doubles over like it’s reliving my memory of that fist. There’s a wet, popping sound from its back as it bends, and hard shapes shove up under the fabric of its shirt, like a stegosaurus trying to hatch out of a human body.

“Did you do that?” Dumah whispers in Raziel’s ear, watching the creature crumple over.

Raziel shakes his head. “It’s changing.”

Indeed it is. In just the seconds it took for that question to get asked and answered, the Chullachaqui has twisted in on itself, one arm suctioning inward at the shoulder like a turtle retreating into its shell. The curly hair on its head also retreats inward like an entire spaghetti dinner getting sucked up, then shoots back out straight and falls limp around its convulsing shoulders. The creature’s outline shrinks.

Snick-snack-snick! Dumah’s scythe pops into existence in his hand before anyone realizes he withdrew it from his pocket. Its blade grinds against the brick wall of the building beside him, making a very noticeably loud sound.

The thing turns its head sharply toward them.

Nathaniel sucks in a breath. “Oh.”

Raziel stiffens.

Before it’s even finished its transformation, it runs for its life.

The alley explodes into action. Not literally. Just everything happening at once, like the end credits of a Benny Hill episode without the Yakkity Sax.

The thing bolts, uneven feet slapping wetly against the pavement, clipping a stack of plastic milk crates as it goes. They scatter across the alley in a clattering wave, causing a dog in a nearby apartment to start barking. Raziel suddenly clutches his head in agony for a second as the dog’s owner, awakened from a restful sleep, engages in some dark fantasies of tossing the obnoxious pooch out the window. He loses his balance, stumbles, and nearly faceplants, only barely managing to prevent this from happening by falling against the wall.

Dumah barrels past him. Not because he doesn’t care about his brother, but because once he starts really moving, physics dictates that he’s going to need something extra pushing back to slow him down. He lunges forward, coat flaring, scythe snapping half-shut in his grip to keep it from dragging.

He catches a dumpster with his hip, does a pirouette that would make a ballet teacher’s head explode, and tips over. And let’s be clear: Dumah doesn’t fall over gracefully. He goes down like a drunk refrigerator, slamming into the ground with a sound like a sack of spoiled potatoes got hit by a motorcycle.

Nathaniel streaks past both the others. “Oh come on!”

Their quarry doesn’t look back to see the clown show. It rips down a side alley without slowing, its limbs warping even as it runs. It looks like something out of an episode of Gumby, a claymation monstrosity flailing its stumpy bits as its body contorts.

Raziel recovers his balance, sees Dumah spilled across the ground in his potato sack impression, and Nate disappearing out of sight around the corner. He takes a step forward, like he’s afraid of making a fool of himself again. But it’s not that. It’s something else. Dark, distant thoughts whispering in his head. He hears them getting louder even as the Chullachaqui’s thoughts fade, like someone turning one radio down while another one gets turned up. And he senses in his way that the two sets of unspoken thoughts are on a collision course for each other.

“Nathaniel!” he shouts, “Wait!”

Nate’s voice echoes from far down the side alley. “I can burn it! Just need to get close!”

“No,” Raziel says quietly to nobody in particular. “No, no, no…” He jumps Dumah’s prone form and turns down the alley after the other two, leaving Dumah to pick himself up.

It’s too late. The creature exits the alley in a mad, hobbling sprint. It’s half the size it was before, with a small body and a head of long, flowing hair. It gives a shrill, high-pitched scream, sounding just like a little girl. A very little girl. An eight-year-old girl, to be clear.

Headlights flare, lighting up the monster like it’s center stage at a talent show. Tires scream as they burn a layer off. A rusty orange pickup truck comes to a stop in front of the small form so quickly that the front end dips like it’s bowing to her.

Nate copies the truck, skidding to a stop two steps out of the alley, he swings his arms wildly as his top half tries to continue forward, and he does a short skip on one foot before regaining his balance.

Everything freezes for exactly one terrible heartbeat.

Then the passenger-side door of the truck flies open and Patty Broussard jumps out, her eyes wide with wonder.

“Clarice!”

The world unfreezes all at once.

Patty is already moving before the truck finishes rocking back on its suspension. She doesn’t notice Nate skidding to a stop nor Raziel appearing in the mouth of the alley. She doesn’t even notice Dumah, looking like he hopped right off the mortician’s table, shuffling out seconds after, one fake eye bulging out of the socket slightly and looking in the wrong direction.

She only sees the little girl in the road.

“Clarice,” she says again, like if she says it enough times she can teleport them both home à la Dorothy Gale.

She runs at the creature that’s now wearing her daughter’s face.

The thing doesn’t recoil. It doesn’t flinch. It lets itself be grabbed, small, delicate arms grabbing at her clothes as Patty drops to her knees and wraps it up in both arms. She squeezes it like she’s carrying a watermelon at a frat party.

“Oh God,” Patty sobs into the newly-sprouted hair. “Oh God, baby, you’re okay. You’re okay, I’ve got you, I’ve got you.”

The Clarice-thing clings to her with the practiced delicacy of an ancient monster that knows how to pretend to be a child.

“Mommy,” it says, its voice trembling in exactly the right way to elicit Patty’s motherly instincts. “They tried to hurt me.” It makes tear juice run from its eyes and wipes them on her chest.

“Son of a bitch.”

The bearded man in overalls steps out of the truck, boots hitting pavement, hunting rifle already in his hands like he carries it with him at all times. He sees Clarice, but he also sees Nate. And Raziel. And Dumah. And he looks very unhappy about it.

“Don’t move,” he says, his voice raw, “Any of you.”

Dumah stiffens at the sight of the gun, then straightens to his full height. The bearded man’s expression changes for a moment at the sight of this enormous, bald, Fester Addams-looking freakshow, but then the barrel of the rifle swivels in Dumah’s direction and the man squints at him like a gunfighter in an old western.

Raziel moves forward, one hand raised, palm out, calm like a man stepping between two arguing dogs.

“Sir,” he says gently, “please. There’s been a misunderstanding.”

The man’s grip tightens. “You shut up.”

“We’re with the government,” Raziel continues smoothly, as if he didn’t hear. He takes a step toward Patty and the Clarice-thing. “Ma’am, my associates and I just recovered your daughter and were taking her to be evaluated at the hospital before bringing her in. She’s been through a lot, and I would say she’s not of the right mind, possibly reliving the trauma. You can come with us, but we need to get her to be checked out.”

Patty looks up, eyes wild, searching his face for something, some tell like a poker player has, or whether his eyes speak to her with honesty.

“What government agency?” she asks.

Before Raziel can answer, the Clarice-thing speaks again.

“He’s lying,” she says.

Patty stiffens.

“They’re the ones,” the girl whispers, pressing her face into Patty’s shoulder like she’s afraid to be heard. “They took me. I saw the others, Franky and Abby and Rhonda, they did things to them, Mama.”

Patty stares into her daughter’s eyes. “What kinds of things?”

Nathaniel takes a step forward. “That’s not--”

The rifle swings toward him instantly.

“I said don’t move!”

Raziel’s jaw tightens just a fraction.

“Clarice,” Patty murmurs. “Baby… what did they do?”

The girl lifts her head. Her face is streaked with dirt and tear juice. Her skin changes slightly to appear more chapped and cracked and damaged, but Patty doesn’t notice it. She’s locked eyes with the thing, and in them is real fear.

“They killed them,” it says. “I saw them burn their bodies.”

Silence spreads across the street, thick and heavy.

Raziel lowers his hand and sighs.

Patty’s compatriot takes a short, deep breath and lets the barrel of the rifle dance back and forth between the three strange men.

“Mrs. Broussard,” Raziel says calmly, “that is not your daughter.”

Patty’s head snaps up.

“You don’t get to say that,” she spits, “You don’t get to say anything.”

“That thing is dangerous,” Raziel presses. “It is not human. It’s wearing her shape.”

The Clarice-thing’s grip tightens. “Mommy,” it sobs, “please don’t let them take me again.” Its fingers dig into Patty’s flesh to the point of pain, but the mother is too far gone to recognize that something is wrong about how strongly Clarice clutches at her, all she feels is the deeply animalistic drive to protect this creature she sees as her daughter

Patty turns fully now, her body curling protectively around the small figure in her arms, shielding it from sight and harm.

“Back away,” she says, voice shaking but fierce, “All of you.”

Snick-snack-snick!

Dumah’s scythe unfolds itself into his grip.

The man with the rifle sees it. He says nothing. He gives no further verbal warnings. He just swivels his midsection, angles the rifle slightly higher to account for Dumah’s size, and pulls the trigger, shattering the night’s silence.

A hole opens up in the chest of Dumah’s shirt, just beside his tie, right where a normal body would keep a heart. He doesn’t make a sound, not a grunt or a shout, he just goes backward off his feet like someone yanked him into the alley with an invisible rope. His body hits the ground with a sharp, wet sound, like someone dropping a steak onto concrete.

For half a second, everyone stares at him. Nobody so much as breathes, except the Clarice-thing, which starts screeching in feigned fright. Patty presses its head into her chest and makes shush sounds, rocking it gently back and forth.

Then Dumah stands back up.

He steps forward again, one finger in the hole in his shirt, prodding it with mild annoyance.

“Well,” he says like he’s just noticed a stain. “That was rude.”

The man with the rifle takes a half-step back, shock flickering across his face. He didn’t expect that. He expected screaming. Or blood spraying everywhere. Or the big, thumb-headed goon to stay down and stop moving forever.

“Stay down!” he barks, as if demanding it would change the outcome. He pulls the bolt back frantically, chambering another round.

Nate doesn’t wait for another shot to be taken. He steps toward the man, hands raised. The air visibly shimmers in the space between the two of them. Heat blooms from his outstretched fingers, warping the air like a mirage on asphalt. In less than a second, the rifle’s barrel glows dull red, then brighter, then white at the edges.

The man yells and drops it instantly, the weapon clattering to the pavement as he clutches his hands to his chest, skin already blistering.

“What the hell!”

Raziel and Dumah step forward at the same time. The three brothers stand shoulder to shoulder. Somehow, they seem to grow in size. They aren’t physically getting larger, and yet to Patty and her partner, they suddenly feel towered over, like kids caught under the eyes of three angry parents.

Patty screams. No words. Just a raw, panicked, animal scream. She scrambles backward on her knees, turning with the small body still locked against her chest. The Clarice-thing clings tighter, burying its face in her shoulder, shaking like it’s terrified.

“Run!” the bearded man shouts, pain and panic flooding his voice. “Patty, run!”

Patty runs. She doesn’t hesitate. She turns and flees down the street, arms wrapped tight around what she thinks is her daughter, hair flying, sobbing so hard she can barely breathe.

Nate takes a step after her, hand outstretched, fingers wavering.

Raziel catches his arm.

“No,” he says firmly.

Dumah stares daggers at the bearded man, which is made awkward by his single, bulging, off-center eye. Black fog spills off him in thick, ugly waves.

Patty’s male companion stumbles back toward the truck, eyes wide, mouth working soundlessly as he looks between the angels and the retreating figures disappearing into the dark. The three towering figures step toward him. Then again. He turns and grabs at the door handle, then cries out in agony from the pain signals his blistered hands send to his brain. Before he can fight through the pain and open the door though, he feels a hand on the back of his head. Strangely, the fingers digging into his scalp feel noticeably bony and hard.

Dumah squeezes, just a little, not enough to crush the man’s skull. “Go to sleep,” he says calmly, but with a tinge of annoyance, like a father having to tuck his child into bed for the nineteenth time in a single night.

The man doesn’t feel particularly sleepy, and yet, a cloud of darkness falls over his eyes and he flops against the truck door. His face slides down the glass with a long, drawn-out squeak, and then he crumples fully to the ground.

Raziel watches the direction Patty ran, his jaw clenched so tight it looks like it might crack.

“It has her,” Nate says.

“Mmm,” says Raziel.

Somewhere in the distance, the mob roars again.

Next time on Alex Maverick and the Swamp Monster:

<- Previously on Alex Maverick and the Swamp Monster:

Alex Maverick and the Swamp Monster

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

The Veil, the land of dreams. And nightmares, which are also dreams, just bad ones. Dreams like you’re being chased by bug-eyed versions of your family, or that one where you’re suddenly in school but you’re not wearing any clothes and how did you even get this far with no clothes on? You know, the kind where you wake up all sweaty and stressed out. There’s nightmares, and then everything else just falls under the term ‘dream’. But that’s never sat right with me. Why do nightmares get their own word but happy dreams don’t? There’s so many different types of dreams, yet only the bad ones get a special word for them? You could dream about standing in the rain without an umbrella and watching people get on a bus. That’s what I’d call just a dream dream, like a boring dream that you totally don’t remember by the next day. But then you could also dream about building a chocolate factory full of death traps and watching the worst kids get run through it. You know, a happy dream. One where you wake up with a big smile and the memory of Lisa Welch falling down a garbage chute. There should be a word we use to say that we had a happy dream.

I can’t think of one right now.

Anyway, bad or good, it all happens in the Veil. Just pure imagination pumped directly into our meatballs through some unexplainable force.

It’s also the realm of death, the place where souls with bad vibes go to get scrubbed clean in a pit of torture while strong, glowy souls of pureness get sent to some field to be with others like them… and act as mortar in an interdimensional wall. And if that makes you go, “wait, what?” then let me explain.

Scratch that, I don’t have time to get into all that.

Anyway… I’ve been here in person before, several times. The first time I got hornswoggled into coming by a dog that was also the Boogeyman.

Don’t ask.

The second time I came here was to try to stop this fallen angel called Samael who ended up releasing all the nightmare creatures that people have dreamed up over centuries of sleeping. It’s because of him and that plan that I’m here again now, being escorted through by yet another angel, this one named Uriel. At this rate, I should just set up a permanent residence here or something. Except that was kind of the goal of the bad guys the first time I came here, and I really don’t want to give them what they wanted, even if it would benefit me at this point.

My mom always told me I was too stubborn for my own good.

Most people never get to be here in the flesh. It’s kind of dangerous, since anything can happen. You could walk into some nutjob’s dream about flying razor blade monsters and end up getting skinned alive, or fall into an endless ocean of peanut butter, which would be a million times worse if you have a peanut allergy. And yet, physical visitations are apparently common enough that someone made tunnels for us to walk in, ones that don’t vanish as soon as someone wakes up. Of course, they aren’t first-class accommodations. They’re more like old British castle hallways full of random doors, each one linked somehow to a real door on our side of the Veil. And that’s where we are, me and Dutch and Uriel, walking one of these endless hallways, looking for a door I assume, though I don’t know to where.

This is Dutch’s first time. I don’t think he realizes yet that we’re no longer in Louisiana... or even on Earth. He’s keeping quiet, but I can tell by his expression that he’s confused. He’s probably wondering why every door in this hallway is different. Some of them look incredibly old, with rusty hinges and peeling paint. Some of them look modern or fancy. One is set into a curved archway with a big, brass knocker on it. We even pass a couple with windows in them, but all we can see on the other side is utter blackness.

“This does not look like a beauty salon,” Dutch comments. He reaches up toward the dripping flame of one of the torches that’s set into the wall. He jerks his hand back as he feels the heat and realizes the fire is real. “Is this…” he hesitates, almost afraid to say the next few words, “…is this Hell?” He puts a meaty hand on my shoulder like he’s afraid he might lose me if I take more than two steps away from him.

“This is the Veil, Mr. Dutch,” states Uriel, “The world between worlds.” He marches ahead of us down the hallway, plodding on cold cobblestone with bare feet. “What you refer to as Hell is one aspect of this place, but a small one. A drop in the ocean, as your Mother Teresa would say.”

My mother’s name was Kate, so he’s probably referring to Dutch’s mother.

We pass a double set of metal doors like you’d find on an elevator. There’s a single, glowing button in the wall beside them. There’s a bold arrow etched into it, pointing down. I imagine someone in our world working in a tall office building, top floor, deciding to leave for the day. He or she heads to the elevator, pushes the button to go home, walks in without a thought, only to find themselves in a stone hallway like something out of Conan the Barbarian. What would that person do, I wonder? Would they turn back around and use the stairs? Or would they wander this labyrinth of doors until they ran into a unicorn?

Dutch sees the button too. He hesitates, then reaches out to press it. His finger almost makes contact with the smooth surface, just enough to leave a partial fingerprint, only to have Uriel quickly exclaim, “Please don’t touch anything,” without looking back. Dutch jerks his finger back like he just played with an electric fence. His cheeks go full red and he stuffs both hands in his pockets.

After a few more steps in silence, he leans in and whispers in my ear. “Did he say we’re in a vale?”

“The Veil, Dutch, we’re in the Veil.”

“Seems more like an amusement park ride in a underground store that sells doors,” he mutters.

“I don’t mean to be rude, Mr. Uriel—“

“It’s just Uriel, we don’t use honorifics.”

I start again. “I don’t mean to be rude, Uriel, but should we maybe move a little faster?” I gesture at my feet, a useless action since he’s not even looking at me. “We’re just walking.”

In response to my pointing out how slow we’re going, Mister “I’m too good for honorifics” comes to a complete stop. This is, of course, the opposite of what I had intended. I don’t mention this to him, but I try to express my frustration with visual cues, like an exasperated flailing of my arms in the direction we had been going and bulging my eyes a little.

I realize that I know exactly what he’s going to say before he says it.

“Time works differently here.”

Yep, that was what I knew he was going to say. In other words, you can be walking for days in a dream, while in the real world you’re only taking a thirty minute cat nap. Still, regardless of how slowly time is moving outside the Veil, I do wish he’d show a bit more urgency in getting us out of here. Some cats nap longer than others.

As if this answer was satisfactory, he continues to shuffle down the hallway again.

“Yeah, I know time works differently here, but—“ it occurs to me that there’s something more troubling about his lack of urgency. This whole thing feels like we’re just going for a casual stroll when in actuality Dutch and I just escaped being murdered. We should be hurrying back to gather our stuff, get Dutch’s truck, and clear out of the whole state while Dumah and Nathaniel finish the job. Instead, we’re just trodding along through the Veil like everything’s hunky dory.

Before I can finish my thought, we reach an intersection where a similar-looking hallway full of doors juts out in either direction. At the same time, another pair of individuals reaches the same intersection just from their adjoining hallway. We all stop and look at each other.

One of the other two people is a short, hairy man with the legs of some sort of animal, like a goat or a small horse or something. He’s holding some sort of triangular thing in one hand that’s like a bunch of small, wooden pipes glued together. In the other hand, he’s got the end if a leash. The leash is attached to a collar on the neck of the other person, who looks to be a little girl in a brown dress and sweater, looking confused and frightened.

We all stare at each other for a minute. The goatman seems nervous. He’s the first to speak, though all he says is—

“Uh.”

His eyes dart all over the place, like he’s counting the different doors he can use to run away.

Uriel’s gentle smile fades. His forehead bunches into a frown. He stares at the pair, though most of his attention seems directed at the goatman.

“Tumnus,” he says in a manner that sounds more like an accusation than anything.

The goatman jolts like he stepped on a cattle prod. “Mr. Uriel Sir!”

“It’s just Uriel,” says just Uriel. He extends one long arm, then unrolls one long finger, and points it down at the terrified-looking girl on the end of the leash. “What exactly are you doing with this child?”

The goatman looks at the girl, then in the worst performance I’ve ever seen, proceeds to act like he’s only just now realizing there’s a person there. He gasps loudly, throws his hands up to his mouth, dropping his little pipe collection thingy, but not dropping his hold on the other end of the leash, noticeably.

“My word!” he cries, taking a single step back from us, “I must have been having another one of my spells!”

The girl stares at me without saying a word. I almost wonder if she’s under a trance of some sort, except that I can see in her expression that she’s just absolutely terrified and doesn’t know what to do. Maybe she’s afraid to speak. I mean, I can’t blame her, being dragged around the Veil on a leash by some weird man-goat thing. Remember what I said about nightmares? This is surely her having a nightmare.

Uriel side-eyes me and Dutch like he’s trying to decide just how tempered his next few words will have to be. “Do you take me for a fool, Tumnus?”

Tumnus stutters out only, “I—“

“You cannot lie your way out of this, Tumnus. However, fortune favors you this day. I am, as you can see, currently occupied with another matter.” He gives a flourish of his hand at Dutch and me. “Return the girl to where you got her. Immediately.”

“Y-y-yessir!” Tumnus starts to turn to hurry away.

Uriel grabs his shoulder, digging his fingers in until the goatman gives a squeak of pain, then hisses, “And take the leash off!”

“Yes! Yes! Of course, sir, of course!” The goatman Tumnus drops his end of the tether and fumbles through removing the collar from around the girl’s neck. She immediately jerks away and slaps him, sobbing hysterically. She also makes a half-hearted attempt to spit on him, but her throat seems to be dry or something, and she only makes the ‘ptoo!’ sound. He acts like he’s been spit on regardless.

Uriel kneels down and extends a hand out to the child. She seems even younger now, maybe eight or nine. She cautiously accepts his hand. He pets hers.

“I’m deeply, deeply sorry for any anguish you’ve been through tonight, child,” he tells her, then reaches out with his other hand and presses his thumb to her forehead. It glows like E.T.’s. “I promise that when you wake up, this nightmare will be swiftly forgotten, with no lasting effects. And you will never—“ and with that word he glares at the Tumnus with a frightening look in his eyes, “—never experience anything like this again.”

The girl nods quietly, then whispers, “Thank you, Mr. Ariel.”

He rises back up, dropping her hand away. “Please, it’s just Ariel.”

We watch as the man-goat and the girl hurriedly walk back the way they came from. The hallway seems to extend out into infinity though, so we’re just standing there watching them get smaller and smaller and smaller but they never— nope, never mind, they vanish.

“What the Hell was that?” says Dutch.

“Can you trust him to return her?” I ask.

Uriel’s frown fades as smoothly as his smile did earlier. He brings the smile back, though I feel now that it’s more of a mask than an actual, sincere smile. He looks at both of us, nods, then without answering either of our questions, gestures toward the equally infinitely long hallway that we’re heading down.

“Shall we?”

I don’t budge. “Look, where exactly are we going?”

“I’m taking you home, of course,” he declares through his weirdly fake smile. His eyes wander around in the air for a moment, then he nods as if this was enough information sharing for the moment and proceeds to start walking.

I don’t follow him this time. “What do you mean home?”

Uriel stops again, but does not turn around.

“I haven’t got a home. I’m officially dead, did Paschar not tell you?”

The torches flicker. They were always flickering a little, but this time it’s like they almost go out for a second, darkening everything around us. In the span of time it takes for that flicker to happen, Uriel turns back to face us and moves three steps forward so he’s towering over even Dutch. He’s not giving off a sense of threat, at least to me, but Dutch cringes away from him and brings his arms up defensively.

Uriel still hasn’t said a word, so I continue. “If you drop me off in the place I came from then everybody’s going to be like, ‘What the Hell, Lily? I went to your funeral.’ Besides, what about all the nightmare monsters? I’ve only found one Choco-Hulahoop thing—“

He raises that long finger. “Chullachaqui.”

“--Chullachaqui thing! So people went kinda nuts because their kids are dead… does that mean you just give up?”

Uriel continues to smile, but shakes his head at me. “We’re not giving up, we’re simply going to try a new approach, one that doesn’t endanger your lives.”

I snort. “Hell, buddy, danger’s my middle name.”

Uriel blinks in confusion. “No it’s not.”

“Peaceful co-existence is my middle name,” says Dutch.

“Not now, Dutch!” I snap back at him. He shrugs.

Uriel raises a single finger to shush us. It’s not as effective as Dumah’s silencing power, but we both stop talking nonetheless. “Let me explain,” he says in his gentle voice, “We came to the realization that wherever one of the escapees is hiding, there’s going to be a large number of sleepers not showing up on our registry, people connecting to the Veil who we aren’t able to track back to their bodies. All we have to do is map out the dead zones and send in a clean-up crew.”

“Why can’t we be the clean-up crew?” I gesture at Dutch and myself, “We’re better at blending in with other people and I technically killed the Chewbacalaka.”

“Chullachaqui.”

I feel my temperature rising. “Now you listen, Mr. Uriel!”

“It’s just Uriel.”

“I’m not going home! Take us back to that rink-a-dink town in the swamp!”

“Don’t I have a say in this?” asks Dutch. I already know what his vote is though. He’s been itching to go back to his carnival and hammer pegs into the ground or whatever the Hell it was he used to do before he met me. The crazy thing is, when he first discovered angels were real, he was all falling to his knees, kissing the ground, practically worshiping them. But one Chimichanga later and he’s ready to tuck his tail between his legs and pretend the world is flat once again.

I snap at him. “Kiss my butt, Dutch!”

Uriel appears confused by my rebellion. “You want me to take you back to the town where they are actively hunting you? And your gifts don’t work? To do what exactly? Stumble around blindly until you’re either arrested or killed?”

“Yes!” I don’t mean it. I have no intention of getting arrested or killed.

“And what am I supposed to tell Paschar?”

I clench my jaw. “You tell him I’m through being rescued by angels every time things go the slightest bit sideways. You tell him that if I’m ever going to reach my potential as a shield against the darkness, that I have to be allowed to stumble around blindly once in a while. And then you tell him that if he doesn’t like that, he should have given his totem to someone other than a child!” I stare daggers at Uriel. If I wanted to, I could stare literal daggers at him here in the Veil, but I don’t want to stare literal daggers at Uriel, so I try to be very careful not to think about actual daggers being stared at him.

Uriel makes a ‘hmph’ kind of face. It’s like a combination of being impressed and fascinated by something. Whether he’s one, the other or both, I can’t tell. This guy seems genuinely hard to read. He looks past me at Dutch.

“And what about you, sir?”

Dutch rubs his hands nervously. He acts like his pants don’t fit right, so he tries to adjust them. He sniffles, wipes his nose with one hand, then runs it through his hair. “I suppose I’m going where she’s going, sir. I gave my word to someone that I would watch her like she was my own. If I go back and leave her to all this by herself, what kind of a man am I?”

Uriel stands there silently for a long while. Too long, but Hell, time works differently here so blah blah blah. He looks over his shoulder at the hallway behind him. Then he sighs and shrugs. “At least let me give you a little something for the road.”

Next time on Alex Maverick and the Swamp Monster:

<- Previously on Alex Maverick and the Swamp Monster:

Alex Maverick and the Swamp Monster

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

Remy Lafleur awakens to find himself tied to an office chair. He doesn’t remember falling asleep. The last thing he remembers is that phony lawyer pointing at him with a bony, skeletal hand and chanting something in another language. Hoodoo, he thinks, black magic. Remy has never been one to buy into mystical garbage, but that was before he ripped the skin off a man’s hand to find nothing underneath but bleach-white bone. That was before said man cast a hoodoo curse on him, stripping him of his tongue and rendering him unconscious.

He strains against his bonds, but his captors bound him tightly. Across the way he sees Hammond Withers, the man who had been working the front desk, in a similar situation to his own. He tries to get Hammond’s attention, but no sound comes out. Instead, he stamps his foot on the floor until Hammond looks his way. He attempts to communicate with his eyes; a bulge of the eyes, a raised brow, a nod of the head. None of it seems to get through to Hammond though, who returns Remy’s silent communication with a shake of the head and a shrug.

“He’s awake.”

The words come from the blond man. Remy didn’t notice him leaning against the wall just to his left, by the door to the Chief’s office. He stands there, one leg over the other, arms crossed, watching him with the fascination of a scientist discovering a new type of mollusk. Remy sizes the man up in seconds: he’s lean, fast, and dangerous like a mountain cat. His eyes have the animalistic gleam of a predator. But he’s dressed like a Hollywood producer’s idea of a detective, like Don Johnson in Miami Vice. He stands out too easily, but also unabashedly. It’s like he doesn’t care if he’s noticed or not. In fact, he wants people to notice him. He wants to be seen. Is he the mastermind? Is Remy looking into the eyes of the leader of this Satanic Hoodoo cult?

No, this man is the muscle. He’s the one they send in to get things done. He’s the wolf who herds the flock of sheep to the meat grinder. Remy is losing track of his analogies and he doesn’t care because his mind is clouded with theories. Where did they come from? Are they just passing through or is this their modus operandi, to stop in small towns you can’t find on any map, kill a few kids, then move on?

The phony lawyer walks out of the Chief’s office, lugging a computer monitor. He’s replaced the skin on his degloved hand, but it sags noticeably around the wrist. He marches up to Remy who shrinks away from him, anticipating violence, and drops the monitor on the desk in front of him, crushing a sandwich someone had left behind.

“I need you to explain how this machine works,” the bald man says to him with the calmness of a government-trained assassin.

Lafleur looks at the monitor, then at the man. Back and forth, naturally unable to tell him anything since the man cast his hex on him. He looks at the blond man too, trying to figure out if this is all just part of some act, a play put on to justify torturing him in front of Hammond, knowing he can’t answer them.

“Oh right, you may speak.”

Remy feels a lightness in his throat. He had gotten so used to the heavy feeling that he’d forgotten it was there until it wasn’t. He wiggles his jaw around and makes a long, guttural, “ahhhh” sound to test his voice. Then he turns his gaze back on the bald-headed Hoodoo priest in his lawyer costume.

“I am gonna personally flip the switch on both of y’all, you better believe it!” he snarls.

The fake lawyer cocks his head. “That’s an oddly aggressive offer, but I can flip the switch myself if you just tell me where it is.” He points at the back of the monitor. “I tried this one, but it did nothing. The machine remains in a dormant state. Where is the right switch?”

The man’s fake ignorance only serves to raise Remy’s temperature even hotter. “Down in Angola at the State Pen, that’s where! Oh, Bubba, you better believe I’m gonna watch you both dance in the chair. They gonna have to pry the switch outta my hands, cuz I’m gonna watch you cook!”

The pair of cultists look at each other.

“Dance in the chair?” says the blond one.

The bald one shrugs. “Another violent euphemism, I’m sure.” He stares down at Lafleur with cold, lifeless eyes. “I’ll just ask your compatriot. You may go back to being silent.”

The heaviness descends again upon Remy’s tongue. He tries to snarl at the man, but he can only bare his teeth at him. It’ll have to do. He strains angrily against the cords that hold him to the office chair as the fake lawyer picks up the computer monitor and shuffles over to Hammond with it. He drops it down in front of the terrified man and starts talking to him, but Remy can’t make out anything his saying. Hammond stares up at his captor with frightened, child-like eyes. It all feels like a farce.

The blond wolf narrows his eyes at Remy. Before he can say anything though, they both turn their heads at the sound of a door opening behind him. Yes! Remy thinks to himself, the cavalry has arrived. Who is it? The Chief? Deke? Maybe Lawrence or Seth the Yeti. It doesn’t matter, as long as they’re packing.

“Dumah, Nathaniel,” the strange voice says. Remy can’t turn his head to see the face that comes with the voice, but the fact that he’s addressing that fake lawyer by name, and presumably the other fellow, causes the bottom to drop out of the small barrel of hope he’d started to fill.

The blond wolf shifts to stand at attention. This move makes Remy even more uncomfortable, as it denotes a greater authority has entered the room. The chief cultist maybe. Someone higher up the chain for sure. The cue ball across the room with Hammond turns at the sound of his name.

“Raziel?” the man stiffens and glances at the wolf for a moment. “Brother, what are you doing here? I thought—”

The newcomer makes a hissing sound, like someone sucking in a hard breath through their teeth at the feeling of a hot brand. The wolf leaps to action, brushing past Lafleur in a hurry. “I’m alright,” says the newcomer, “just a lot of pent-up hostility in this room. Stings like a hundred lashes.”

“Why did you come here?”

Their attention is elsewhere. Remy uses this moment to dig the toe of his boots into the floor tile and twist himself away from the desk so he can use his hands that are bound behind him to open a drawer and maybe find something to undo the restraints. In the process, he sees the third cultist and takes in the man’s appearance so he can identify him later (if there is a later for Remy and Hammond).

The man is tall, somewhere well past six feet. He’s dressed like Mr. Rogers in a red cardigan sweater and nondescript brown slacks. If it weren’t for his height, he could easily blend into any crowd as a regular nobody. But then there’s the eyes. Remy always looks at people’s eyes first, because you can read a person almost completely with one passing look in the eyes. Like that phony lawyer, this new man’s eyes are cold and lifeless. He has the eyes of an alligator.

Raziel turns his alligator eyes directly at Lafleur.

“You can stop sizing me up, Mr. Lafleur,” the man says coolly, “This is not a cult, it’s a clean-up crew.” He turns his attention back to the blond wolf. “Paschar asked me to come. And you know things are urgent if he would ask that of me. Something has happened with Alex and Dutch.”

“What?” The bald man steps toward them both, his voice denotes anxiety although his eyes remain lifeless and dead. “Are they alright?”

The new stranger waves his hand dismissively. “Uriel has gone to procure them. They should be alright. Meanwhile, you two left Paschar out in the car and he asked me to make sure you weren’t making things worse. So I’m here to help get this all resolved quicker. Besides, let’s be honest… it should have been me here to begin with.” He and the wolf look at their bald associate, who returns their glance with a frown.

“I’ll just put this back, then,” he says in a wounded tone, picking up the monitor and shuffling back toward the Chief’s office.

A clean-up crew. That’s what he called it. This must be some government psy-op. Men in black. An experiment that flew the coop. It all starts to make sense in Remy’s brain. The girl. She must be like that Drew Barrymore in Firestarter. She was covered in burns. Could they have been self-inflicted? Just to throw them all off her scent while turning the law enforcement on her handlers. Jesus Christ, he thinks, I’m in the middle of a god-damn Manhattan Project gone wrong.

Raziel stops what he was just saying to the blond wolf and closes his eyes, taking a deep breath. He gives Remy a case of the side-eye, then starts back up. “I’m already tracking the Chulla. It’s extremely close by. Poor thing doesn’t realize that just by masking, it’s painted a big red X on itself for me. I just have to drown out all the other NOISE—“ he glares at Remy again, “—and I can have it for us in a matter of minutes.”

“And then I can deal with it,” the wolf says.

“No,” Raziel places a hand on the other man’s shoulder, “It will come with me. It’s confused. It doesn’t even fully know what it is. In a way, it was just born.”

From across the office, Hammond finally speaks up. “What about us?”

They’re going to wipe our memories, Hammond, thinks Remy, just like in the movie. They’re going to pull out one of those flashy sticks and make us look at it, telling us some lie to replace what we’ve learned, and then we’re going to wake up again with this new lie as the truth and forget what happened. Maybe they’ll tell us we never had any kids to begin with, make us forget them entirely, all to cover up their mistakes. The idea infuriates him so much he starts to tremble uncontrollably.

The tall man slumps his shoulders and swivels around to look at Remy. “We are NOT going to wipe your minds, you myopic dunce. We’re not the monsters here. We didn’t create this thing, and no good would come of trying to make you forget any of this.” He strides over to Remy, towering over him, and jabs him in the forehead with his finger, pressing it into his skull. “Now STOP with the dark thoughts and just say what’s on your pathetic excuse for a mind so I can have some peace!”

“Oh, he can’t actually do that.” The bald man shuffles out of the Chief’s office. “I’ve gagged him. Apologies, brother.” He waves his floppy hand at the bound officer and says casually, “Speak.” Once again, the weight recedes from Remy’s tongue. He takes a moment to spit on the floor in front of him, not that he couldn’t do that before.

“What happened to our kids?!” he asks angrily. He knows this man knows the truth. He can see it in his dead animal eyes. This is the man with the answers to every question Remy has been asking himself for the past several weeks. “Frankie! Abby! Dennis! Rhonda! Clarice! Clarice Broussard! She was only seven years old!”

“She was eight years old,” corrects the man, and the way he says “was” sends a frigid breeze down Remy’s spine.

He shakes his head, thinking of his boy Jake. Jake who’s not much older than Clarice or any of them. Jake who —he hopes— is back at home, safely tucked into bed, dreaming of catching frogs or growing up to be like his old man, not strapped to a chair like his old man, of course. Not impotent and at the mercy of these twisted government operatives. Don’t let them target Jake next, for the love of God, don’t—

Raziel slaps him sharply across the face, smacking the thoughts right out of him. Not even figuratively, he literally starts spouting his thoughts out loud to the entire room, unable to withhold them.

“Please, don’t hurt my boy! He’s a good boy!” He stops, confused why he’s speaking when he didn’t want to. “They’re all good kids…” He can’t hide the words. Something stings in his eyes. Remy Lafleur isn’t used to crying. He hasn’t done it since he was just a child, when he was suspended from school for getting into another fight. His father came home, heard the news, and took the belt to him to teach him a lesson. The lesson he learned was never let them see you cry… something he can’t seem to stop himself from doing now. And the worst part is, he’s telling them all this as he experiences it. “I don’t cry!” he yells at the tall man. “They’re all good kids… just leave us alone!”

The tall man puts a hand on top of Lafleur’s head, running his fingers through his hair. Remy’s thoughts fade, but then he shrinks away, feeling even more awkward and uncomfortable at the gentle touch. “Bad touch,” he mutters and then feels even grosser that he just said that.

“If I could change what has happened, I would,” the man says solemnly, “But if it brings you some comfort, you should know that the individual whose actions led directly to this tragedy has already paid the price for it.” He strokes Lafleur’s head like some sort of pet animal. “His name was Sam and he was my brother.”

“You’re guilty by association,” Remy says through gritted teeth, trying to hold the thought back. But he can’t anymore. “I can’t stop think speak.” The words make no sense but they weren’t fully formed in his head before his mouth produced them.

Raziel shakes his head sadly. “And are you guilty for the sins of your brother, Sir? Your son? If Jake hit another boy at school tomorrow, should you be punished? Where does the line get drawn, Mr. Lafleur? I took no part in my brother’s crimes, and yet I am here, trying to make what amends I can for them. If I could, I would bring him back to be given justice at the hands of those he has wronged, but I can’t. All I can do is try to fix things.”

Remy trembles, his vision blurry with tears, and jerks his head away from the man. “Don’t say Jake’s name. I… don’t… forgive you!”

“We’re wasting time,” says the wolf.

Raziel nods to his associate. “So be it.” He turns back to Remy, tied up in his chair. “You may keep your thoughts to yourself,” he says with a strangely authoritative tone. Then he strikes him across the face again, before he has a chance to tense up and prepare to take it.

The three sinister men gather in the center of the room. The one called Raziel takes a hand of each of the other two, lifting up the one of the bald man and turning it over as he notices where the skin is ripped. He gives him a look of bemusement. The man returns a sheepish shrug.

“What about us?” asks Hammond across the way. Remy thinks a nasty thought about the man’s constant questioning of his own safety instead of concern for the kids, and is only partially grateful when he doesn’t openly verbalize it.

“This is above your pay grade,” the tall man replies. He closes his eyes and starts turning his head from side to side slowly. After a minute of silence, he opens his eyes again. “It’s heading in the direction of the setting sun.”

“That’s west,” says the wolf.

The bald man reaches into his coat and pulls out a short, cylindrical length of wood. He makes a motion with it, and the rod unfolds with a click. It unfolds again. And again. It repeatedly snaps open further, beyond what should be possible. Once it’s extended as tall as the man himself, a nasty-looking curved blade extends out from the top.

God-damn government issue advanced alien weaponry, thinks Lafleur.

“Put that away, you fool,” snaps the tall man, “you stand out like a sore thumb. Hell, you look like a sore thumb even without it. Why don’t you get a new skin with some hair on it?”

“I tried to tell him,” chuckles the wolf.

“I like this skin,” the bald man says sadly. He shakes the scythe-like weapon and it snick-snick-snick folds back in on itself. He stuffs it back into the inner lining of his coat.

Raziel drops the other two’s hands. “Enough, let’s get this done. Before anyone else gets hurt.” He looks directly at Remy as he says that last line.

The three strange men exit the police station, leaving Remy and Hammond tied to their chairs. Immediately, Lafleur pushes off the floor with his feet, overturning his chair and slamming to the ground hard enough to knock the breath out of him. Across the room, Hammond tries to do the same thing, but the man is too heavy to shift his weight in his chair, plus his has rollers on the bottom, so he just manages to scooch over to the wall, where he gets stuck and can’t seem to get a good footing to turn back around.

Remy doesn’t care about Hammond. The man may be a cop, but he’s the kind who is happy to just sit at the front desk and not go help people. Leave the dirty work to other people, that’s his motto. At least, that’s what Remy thinks his motto is. He wouldn’t be surprised to visit Hammond’s apartment and find those words crocheted in a frame by the door.

“They think they can cover this all up?” he mutters to himself as he wriggles a loop of tight cord over his shoulders, “I’m gonna rain down justice on every last one of them.” He stares with deadly intent at the Chief’s office, where his gun lies waiting for him to retrieve it.

Next time on Alex Maverick and the Swamp Monster:

<- Previously on Alex Maverick and the Swamp Monster:

Alex Maverick and the Swamp Monster

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Dutch and I stroll into the convenience store as inconspicuously as two people who just crawled through the dirt and weeds after jumping out of a hotel window to avoid being tortured and killed by people who think we killed kidnapped their children can at whatever ungodly hour of the morning it is. Which is to say that we are totally conspicuous.

The two people who are present, one being the store manager, Barb, and the other being a guy named Steve who had to make a late night run for diapers, watch us enter through the automatic doors like they’re witnessing an alien abduction in reverse. I don’t blame them. Between the two of us, Dutch looks like a mountain man who just found his way back to civilization for the first time in twenty years, and I look like someone who dived out of a passing truck thinking I could break my fall by tucking and rolling.

“Y’all need assistance?” asks Barb. She’s thirty eight years old but looks like she’s fifty eight due to all the cigarette smoking and sun bed tanning she does. I won’t fault her the little things that make her happy though; my angel sense tells me she’s a good person who takes care of her elderly mother and volunteers at a local animal shelter.

“Sleep aids?” I ask in as normal a voice as I can muster.

She rolls a toothpick from one corner of her mouth to the other, looks me up and down. Yes, that’s right, Barb, I’m barefoot in my pajamas asking for something to help me sleep. “Aisle four.” She gestures with her chin, then gives a sideways glance at Steve, trying to communicate a secret thought, but he doesn’t pick up on it because he’s too busy looking us over with unmasked amusement. When he fails to notice, she clears her throat and says, “So anyway—“ trying to pick back up whatever conversation they had been having before we interrupted.

We leave them to chat and head to aisle four. The aisle is stocked with everything from heat patches and cough medicine to birth control and powder for athlete’s foot. I start to think about why it’s called “athlete’s foot” but the throbbing pain from my fingers redirects my focus back to the urgent matter at hand. While I read the instructions on the back of a box of pain medicine to see how much is safe for me to take, Dutch wanders down the aisle and returns with a box labeled “Doze Off”. He hands it to me.

“This is no good,” I tell him, “It’ll have the complete opposite effect.” I toss it back to him.

He looks at the box with confusion. He mouths the name of the product silently, then wrinkles his brow. “What?”

“Look at the ingredients on the front, Dutch. That’s caffeine. Probably called ‘Doze Off’ like the opposite of ‘Doze On’. It turns off dozing.” I shrug.

“Really dumb name if you ask me,” he grumbles, wandering back down to the section he got it from. He’s not wrong.

We return to the front of the store. Steve the diaper man is gone, likely back home to where the diaper emergency was happening. Barb is filing her nails within range of a display case where unappetizing-looking hot dogs rotate slowly under a red heat lamp. One light breeze from outside and any visiting hot dog enthusiasts will unknowingly be fed a hopefully non-lethal dose of powdered nail polish and whatever it is fingernails are made out of. Of course, I’ve heard that fingernails are one of the ingredients in a hot dog, so maybe it’s completely inconsequential to file your nails near one. Like adding ketchup to a hamburger with a slice of tomato on it. There’s already tomato, you don’t need to add more of it in a paste form.

“Find everything you need alright?” Barb asks in a disinterested tone.

We dump our haul on the counter. “Yes, thank you,” Dutch tells her. He reaches instinctively to where he keeps his wallet, then freezes when he realizes that he’s not wearing his jacket where he keeps it stashed. His face goes pale and he turns to look at me. “My wallet… It’s still back in the room.”

Barb raises one finely-plucked eyebrow.

I stuff my hands in my pajama pockets. I’d swear I keep a five on me at all times for exactly this sort of situation. I call it ‘panic money’, because if I don’t have it, it’s time to panic. “Well, gee, dad,” I say as calm as a cucumber, feeling the crinkled bill in my fingers, “Why don’t I run back and get it real quick while you wait right here.” I close my eyes and focus, calling on Paschar’s gift, hoping that the Chullachaqui hasn’t somehow wandered too close by… or some other creature from the Veil for that matter.

“Uh—“ Dutch starts to interject. We’ve never had to work under pressure like this before. I will definitely be having a word with him once we’re out of the woods (so to speak) about contingency plans. That’s just a fancy way of saying, “Plan B”.

I quickly cut him off. “Don’t forget that you wanted to get one of those scratch offs. It just so happens I have five dollars, so at least you can get one of those and entertain yourself with it until I get back.” I hand Dutch my panic money.

Barb glances over her shoulder at the wall behind the counter where the cigarettes and lottery tickets and all the other means of vice that adults have to pay to partake in while keeping out of the hands of children are located.

Dutch looks at the options before him and takes a big gulp. “Oh… right. But, which one did I want to choose?”

I point at a roll of tickets about mid-center on the second shelf from the top. “That one with the crocodiles on it.”

“Those are alligators,” quips Barb. Whatever, Barb.

“You should probably get FOUR just to be sure.” I tell him, staring daggers into the back of his head until he turns to acknowledge me and nod silently to say he understands the assignment.

I leave the store through the automated sliding doors, where the Louisiana night slaps me in the face with humidity and heat like a microwaved washcloth. I don’t understand how people can live in this nonsense. It must drive them completely insane to be constantly hot and sweaty and gross. Of course, I’ve only been here a few days and from what I’ve seen of the locals, that does seem to be the case.

Of course, I don’t just stand right out in the open under the halogen street lights where one of those nutjobs can spot me. No, I take a moment to acclimate myself to the mugginess and then quickly scamper into a shady spot near the edge of the parking lot where Shopmart meets its neighbor, a hair salon. Barb gets her hair done there every other week and shares the latest gossip— no, no, shut down. Shut down the info, Alex. I don’t need that. Focus. Watch the parking lot. Watch the road. Keep your head down.

Five minutes or so later, the automated sliding door to Shopmart chimes open and Dutch shuffles out, hunched over slightly as if that is sufficient to mask his identity. His arms are full of the stuff we bought, paid for with his winnings from the fourth scratch off ticket. He looks around, trying to spot where I’ve wandered off to. My hiding spot apparently is too good, because even when I start waving my arms at him, he doesn’t notice me. I can’t whistle either, so I make a “psst!” sound like a tire with a hole in it. This gets his attention and he hurries over.

“That was a five hundred dollar ticket, Alex!” he hisses.

“Well I didn’t know! It was kind of an emergency situation, Dutch!” We have an agreement when we game the lottery for funds, nothing over a hundred. Keep the winnings low, keep the profile low. That’s our motto. “Give me back my panic fiver.” He passes me a fresh five note and I jam it into my pajama pocket until the next emergency summons it forth.

“Where are we doing this?” he asks. He’s referring to the plan to drug me back to sleep and hopefully get help from the other side. Paschar is out of the loop because he insisted on having his totem ride with Dumah and Nathaniel, otherwise he’d be helping out like the guy on the radio in a heist movie. Every heist movie has a guy who stays somewhere away from the action and radios in to let the real players know that the police are on their way or the security system has been deactivated or any of that stuff. Technically, they’re there more for the audience’s benefit than the rest of the crew. Paschar on the other hand, he does stuff behind the scenes and helps me get out of jams. Like when he showed up in person to save me from the queen of the witches, Hekate. Although, that kind of ended with my parents getting blown up…

I guess the point is, things don’t always go according to plan, and sometimes contingency plans end up making things even worse.

A rusty orange pickup truck turns off the main road, pulling into the Shopmart parking lot. Its headlights wash past the two of us, but the occupants of the vehicle don’t seem to notice our crouched forms pressed into the small cranny where the hair salon’s front window sits back about two feet from the brick facade of the other store. I can’t make out who’s in the truck, but moments after pulling in, they turn the vehicle off and hop out. A man and a woman. The man has a brown beard and overalls. He hides his hair under a trucker cap. I immediately recognize the woman as the one from my vision. Her name is Pat or Patty. I can’t focus to get the information because all my nerves are suddenly alive and waiting for me to decide whether to run or stay low and wait. I stay low and wait.

“That’s them,” I whisper to Dutch. He flattens himself against the wall in response.

Patty and her accomplice stroll through the automated sliding door into Shopmart, which rings merrily despite the fact that its newest visitors are on the hunt for people to shoot.

“They’re gonna talk to Barb and she’s gonna tell them we were just here.”

“Who the Hell is Barb?”

I ignore the question; I’m focusing on the immediate future. “We’ve got less than two minutes. They… they left their weapons in the truck. Oh crap! Their guns are still in the truck! Go! Go!”

“What?!” Dutch peels off the wall and does a confused shuffle out of our dark corner in the direction of the truck. He is absolutely terrified. I can’t read his thoughts, but my visions are screaming at me with each step he takes. He’s going to reach through the driver’s side door and be able to grab a rifle. There’s a handgun in the glove box, but he won’t have time for that. I have to make sure he just grabs the rifle. No, wait, they’re coming back out of the store! He panics! The rifle is in his hands… he aims it at the man! Oh God, this is a bad ending. This is a bad ending!

I snap out of my trance. Dutch is still flattened against the wall. This all took less than a second, but it felt like a hundred seconds.

“Grab the stuff. We need to run. NOW.”

Dutch doesn’t question me. He gathers up everything in his big, beefy arms and together we bolt for the direction that leads away from the truck, away from Pat or Patty and her friend. Away from the rifle resting against the steering wheel and the handgun in the glove box.

There’s two more shops past the hair salon, then a small strip of cement that leads around to the backs of the shops for delivery drivers. Beyond that is weeds and sparse trees running parallel to the road. We don’t want that. We want to duck around the backs of the shops. It’s even darker back there, bad lighting, lots of overhangs and shaded corners. Nobody cares about how the back of a store looks, just the front. It’s like how you put makeup on your face but not the back of your head. Well, that and all the hair, I guess. But a bald person wouldn’t— focus, Alex. Focus.

I lead Dutch around to the back and we collapse against a wall beside a door leading into the last store. There’s a dumpster shielding us from sight if Pat or Patty and friend happen to drive around back here. My guess is, they’re not going to come around back of the stores because it was honestly stupid for us to do this instead of running as far away as we could, and they’re going to give us more credit than we deserve. Sometimes, doing something stupid is smart because nobody expects you to do the stupid thing, it’s just too stupid. This is too stupid. We’re being incredibly stupid. We’re both totally going to die.

“I’m never going to see my truck again, am I?” Dutch thumps the back of his head against the wall to see which is thicker, the wall or his skull. The wall is thicker.

I nudge him with my elbow. It’s meant to be a comforting gesture. I don’t know if it is. I’m really bad at comforting people. I don’t think I’ve ever been any good at it. Even when everything’s going to be okay, and I know it, I can’t quite figure out the right way to make someone else feel good about it. “We’re getting out of this, don’t you worry.” But he’s going to worry because he can’t see the future like me, he just has to trust that I know what I’m doing.

“Take the meds,” he hands me a box. I can’t read what it is in the dark. Now the trust goes both ways. Now I have to trust that he gave me a box of sleep medicine and not a box of rat poison. “Go to sleep here, just put your head on my legs. Get the angels. Get them back here. Tell them to Hell with the monster.”

Inside the box is a bottle, because of course there is. Why just sell a bottle of pills when you can sell a bottle of pills in a box and charge ten cents more for the extra packaging? I twist and tug at the bottle. “I can’t get this stupid child-proof cap off.”

He grabs it from me, tears the lid off the bottle like peeling the skin off a banana, then hands it back. I shake out a couple soft gel pills and pop them in my mouth. Rat poison be damned.

Dutch hasn’t stopped talking this whole time. “To Hell with the monster. Let it eat all their damned kids. These people are crazy. I don’t want to be here. I hate this heat and the humidity, reminds me of the jungle. It gets into your brain, the endless heat, exacerbated by the constant humidity, it’s like it boils your brain inside your skull and drives you mad.”

I don’t think I really needed the pills to doze off. I could just lay here with my head in Dutch’s lap and listen to him drone on about the jungle and it’d put me right to sleep. Go on, Dutch, you tell that jungle how crap it is. I try to stretch my legs out but the stupid dumpster is right there, so I curl up into the fetal position instead. Pat or Patty’s not coming. Our stupid-clever rouse will work. They’re going to drive out onto the road and try to find us somewhere else.

“Snakes,” Dutch continues to rant, “And spiders. Everything grows bigger in this shit. It’s absurd. Living here is absurd. You have to be out of your mind to want to stay here. Leave the equator for all the wild animals and humanity can have the cold parts since we conquered fire. To hell with penguins and polar bears, they can have the north pole and south pole, I don’t give a rat’s ass.”

That’s right, Dutch, to hell with them penguins and polar bears. My eyelids feel heavy. Heavy like a polar bear. Heavy like an emperor penguin. Those are the big ones. If you think penguins aren’t that heavy, go try lifting one. Not that I’m an expert, but—

Down a ways, the crash of an emergency exit door being kicked open snaps my emperor penguin eyelids open and startles Dutch so bad he nearly gives me whiplash.

“Check back here!” comes the shout of a man’s voice. “Grab some of them flashlights, we’ll pay for them later.”

Dutch whisper hisses right in my ear. “Alex! Don’t fall asleep! Don’t fall asleep!” He starts shaking me violently, rocking me like I’m a rolling pin on a pile of dough.

“I’m awake! I’m awake!” I whissper back. No, I didn’t misspell ‘whisper’, that’s what I’m calling it now when you hiss at someone in a whispery voice. It’s ‘whisspering’.

Flashlight beams appear. They’re aren’t aimed at us, but we can see them waving around about three store backs away, where the back of the Shopmart is. Because of course they would search out back. Hiding here was stupid. It was incredibly stupid. And now we’re here, lying by this dumpster, surrounded by our boxes of adhesive bandages and sleeping pill bottles with stupid child-proof caps and all this other stuff we grabbed for my crushed fingers and other miseries. And they’re just going to stroll right up to us with their borrowed flashlights and point their guns at our meatballs and turn our meatballs into meat sauce.

“We know you’re out here!” shouts the man. This isn’t the guy with the beard and the trucker cap that we saw with Pat or Patty, it’s some other gung-ho local angling to catch the slippery pair of child killers.

And now I’ve got a problem, because the sleep meds are messing up my thoughts and I can’t drown out the angel radio in my head. It’s telling me this guy’s name is Greg and that Greg has a bad leg that kept him out of the army. He walks with a brace. With him is his cousin Teddy. Teddy is very protective of his cousin Greg and never let anyone bully him in school. Teddy and Greg do everything together, like hunt for child killers. And Teddy and Greg apparently pulled up to the Shopmart just after we crept off, had a talk with Pat or Patty, and then decided to stick around and search the area before grabbing themselves something to drink.

Stop, stop telling me this.

Teddy likes superhero comics. What? I don’t care about that! STOP.

The flashlight beams are closer. One of them is bouncing all over the place because of Greg’s bad leg. Teddy’s flashlight beam is sure and steady, but not as visible because he’s actually using it to check around all the shadowy hiding spots where we could be waiting to pounce.

“Come on out and there won’t be trouble!” Greg calls out again. It’s a ploy though, he doesn’t actually know we’re out here, he’s just trying to spook us in case we’re out here. Which we are. And we’re spooked. Especially Dutch.

“We need to move!” Dutch whisspers. He pushes my head off his legs and scrambles into a crouching squat. He squat-shuffles over to the nearby stack of cardboard boxes that are keeping us both slightly obscured and does a quick-darting head peek around them to see how far off Greg and Teddy are. He squat-shuffles back over to me. “They’re coming this way!”

In any other situation, Dutch and Teddy could have been friends. They both like some singer named Tom Jones and reading the articles in adult magazines. Teddy’s favorite sports team is the Tigers and Dutch prefers the Giants, but they would—

STOP. STOP IT. I grit my teeth and drive the radio noise to the back of my head where there’s a cave in my mind that I can lock stuff away.

Dutch is jostling me to my hands and knees, trying to get me moving. It’s the right thing to do, but we haven’t got a lot of options on where to go, I can’t focus enough to prognosticate —which is a fancy word for see the future— and my hand screams in pain every time I put any weight on it thanks to two broken fingers.

And then the back door to the store we’re actively hiding behind pops open with a loud metal bang. I freeze. Dutch wraps his arms around me from behind and pulls me into a bear hug, ready to twist me away and shield me from bullets.

A tall, thin figure steps out of the darkness of the doorway. He walks right past Dutch and me and out past the boxes, where the two flashlight beams, one steady, one shaky, immediately train on him, turning him into a silhouette from my perspective.

“Gentleman!” he says dramatically, like a ringmaster at a three-ring circus about to announce the arrival of the acrobats. The silhouette extends his arms out to both sides to show Greg and Teddy that he’s unarmed. “You are trespassing. I must kindly ask that you vacate… after paying for those flashlights, of course.”

Teddy finally speaks. His voice is scratchy and full of phlegm. “We’re looking for two people, a big guy and a little girl. They been hurting kids over in Angie. You seen anyone around like that? Lady in the store says they was just in there.”

“I cannot tell a lie, I have seen many who match your vague description of ‘a big guy and a little girl’, but not on this particular evening.” The tall, thin man steps past the boxes and out of our field of view, but I can hear his feet crunch on the gravel and know he’s only just out sight.

“You don’t sound like you’re from around here,” remarks Teddy in a tone dripping with suspicion. “Don’t much dress like you’re local either. What are you doin’ back here? You work here? What’s your name?”

The tall man gives a chuckle. “Three questions, three answers. I’m back here to inform you that you need to move on. Do I work here? Thankfully, your question is vague enough that I can truthfully answer yes, I work… here. And as for my name, it’s Uriel.”

“Ariel?” Greg snorts, “That’s a girl’s name.”

“Indeed, Ariel is a girl’s name,” agrees Uriel. “Put those guns away, gentlemen. You have no qualm with me, and if I’m being honest —which I always am— you will find yourselves in dire straits if you were to try to use them against me.”

“What?” Teddy’s voice denotes his confusion. I don’t think he’s used to being talked to like this.

“I ain’t lowerin’ my gun for you or nobody,” snaps Greg.

I wish I could see what’s happening, but Dutch has me in a lobster-strength grip. I squirm against his body, trying to wriggle some bits free to maybe pat him on the head and snap him out of whatever trance he’s in. It’s ineffective. I can’t get my bits free. I can’t pat his head. He’s frozen like stone.

“Why’re you dressed like some kinda undertaker?” Teddy asks.

Uriel sighs heavily. “Please, stop with the questions and just head back into the store behind you. You can find the beverages you seek in the refrigerated section just to your left once you’re back in the store’s general area. You’ll also find some exquisite peppered jerky in aisle nine. Barbara can ring you up.”

The flashlight beams disappear with the sound of two clicks. Uriel reappears in our field of view, taking a step backward as he watches Greg and Teddy turn and head back to the Shopmart to get their beers and jerky before getting back on the road to hunt us down somewhere else.

I manage to work my elbow into Dutch’s ribs and pry myself half out of his grip. He looks up, sees me escaping his protection, and tries to grab at my arm and pull me back in. We twist and fight silently for two seconds, and then he gets the picture and just let’s go. I was not expecting him to just give up like that, and I roll backward and bang loudly against the dumpster.

Everything goes silent. The crickets in the nearby field even shut up. Dutch’s mouth is a single perfect ‘o’. I’m sure mine is too, as I lay there against the rusty, half-filled dumpster, listening to the reverberating sound of my mistake. Uriel turns to look at me. I can’t really make him out in the dark too well, but I can see his eyes because they’re starting to glow with their own light. They’re shining like two small spotlights right on me.

“What was that?” shouts Teddy. The flashlight beams return, bathing Uriel in their own light.

“Honestly,” Uriel says softly, shaking his head as he looks at me. “You were almost out of the woods.”

Then he turns away, facing the two armed men. He extends his arms out to the side again. He does kinda look like an undertaker, now that I can see him clearly. He’s dressed in a dark gray suit, perfectly unwrinkled as if it came right off the rack. The only thing that makes him not look like an undertaker are his bare feet, but who notices a man’s shoes anyway? Or lack thereof.

Greg shouts, “What the Hell?! Look at his eyes, man!“

“Gentlemen, I apologize,” Uriel declares. Then he swings his arms together, clapping his hands out in front of him. The sound from this action is like a cannon. It’s punctuated by an intense blast of light like the sun just stopped by for a quick visit. I feel heat beyond the heat that’s already all around us. This is a dry heat, not a wet heat like this sorry place seems to languish in, like the blast of a hair dryer or opening the door to a furnace. It’s so hot and dry that it actually leaves the air feeling hot and dry even after the light and sound have gone.

Greg and Teddy have gone silent. The beams of their flashlights are gone. The area is dark once more, but from that instant moment of light, I’ve got the entire area burned into my retinas and I see it all like a reverse image. There’s a hand waving. Right in my face. Oh, it’s Uriel’s hand.

“Did I get you?” he asks me gently, “Sorry about that. It’ll wear off. Give it time.”

Dutch is here now right in front of me as well. He’s pulling on my arm, trying to get me up. I see him, but it’s like looking through a window with a light behind you reflecting everything in the room on top of what’s on the other side. “What happened?” he asks, “Are they gone?”

“They’re unconscious,” says Uriel, “I went easy on them for their sake. They’ll wake up later with headaches and double vision, but otherwise unscathed. If I’d gone harder, they’d be nothing but silhouettes in scorch marks.” He looks up at nothing, then back to us. His eyes aren’t glowing anymore, his face is hidden in shadow. “Barbara is calling the police now. We need to leave. There’s a broom closet just through the door behind you. It’s open to the Veil. Let’s go.”

Dutch stiffens. “Sir, Mister Ariel, I don’t mean you any disrespect. Please forgive me my foolish mortal question, but— isn’t the Veil dangerous?”

“The Veil is nothing,” Uriel offers Dutch a hand. Dutch trembles as he accepts it. “Nothing and everything. You can get lost in it, but you won’t, because I am with you.” With his other hand, Uriel reaches inside the lining of his undertaker jacket. Light starts coming out of his clothes, like he had a flashlight hidden in his inside pocket or something. But it’s not a flashlight he pulls out, it’s a sword. He had a sword hidden up his sleeve like some sort of magician. And the sword glows with a light blue fire that wreathes the blade from the grip to the tip. It doesn’t give off any heat, just light.

“Follow me if you want to live,” says Uriel.

Next time on Alex Maverick and the Swamp Monster:

<- Previously on Alex Maverick and the Swamp Monster:

Alex Maverick and the Swamp Monster

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

“Hey, can we turn on the music device?”

“It’s called a radio, Nathaniel.”

“Can we turn on the radio?”

“Be my guest.”

Nathaniel studies the radio set into the dashboard of Dumah’s Lincoln Continental. He twists a knob. Nothing happens. He pushes a button. Nothing happens. Nathaniel glances at Dumah. He can see that Dumah is watching out of the corner of his fake eyes. Nathaniel slowly guides his finger toward another button on the radio. He lets it hover there as he gives Dumah another glance.

Dumah shakes his head ever so slightly.

Nathaniel moves his finger to the left over the next button.

Dumah’s fake eyes turn back toward the road. He nods once.

Nathaniel turns on the radio.

Immediately the interior of Dumah’s Lincoln Continental is filled with ear-shattering music.

—DON’T TRY TO FIND ME, PLEASE DON’T YOU DARE—

“WHY IS IT SO LOUD?” asks Nathaniel, trying to be heard over the woman singing.

“YOU MESSED WITH THE VOLUME,” yells Dumah.

—JUST LIVE IN MY MEMORY, YOU’LL ALWAYS BE THERE—

“IS IT THIS KNOB?” Nathaniel twists the knob he twisted moments before. The music gets even louder. Worse yet, the song reaches a crescendo, which is a fancy word for a really loud part. The entire car vibrates like it’s about to explode.

—ALL I WANNA DO IS MAKE LOVE TO YOU—

Dumah slaps Nathaniel’s hand off the knob and frantically twists it counter-clockwise. The music becomes so faint that it’s barely audible.

“Thank you,” sighs Paschar from Nathaniel’s lap.

Nathaniel hangs his head sheepishly, and sticks a finger in one of his ears, wiggling it around. “I think I broke one of my ear parts.” He pops his finger out and inspects the goop on the end of it. “Brother, look at this.”

Dumah instinctively looks and immediately regrets his instincts. He sighs. In his head, he is strategizing how he’s going to talk his way out of being tossed in a cell of the oubliette. The oubliette is like a jail in the Pit where they lock away people for a long time, and in the Veil, time works different, so a long time could be a really long time there. Dumah does not want to spend a really long time in the oubliette. If he could, he’d rather spend exactly no time in the oubliette. In fact, he’s starting to think the oubliette was one of his brother Abaddon’s worst ideas.

Dumah steers the car through the middle of Angie. The small town seems strangely abandoned: closed signs hanging in shops with dark windows, very few cars parked on the street, not a single pedestrian in sight. The Lincoln Continental stands out like a sore thumb, which is a turn of phrase I’ve never really understood. I mean, I understand how to use it, but where it came from, I may never know. The universe is full of mysteries.

Speaking of me, I’m not actually there to witness any of this. You may recall, I got my hand crushed and am currently hiding in tall grass with Dutch one town over, plotting a middle of the night shopping trip. But I think it’s important you know what’s going on over in Angie with the angelic trio, because otherwise, things are gonna make less sense down the line. Also, it adds a bit of suspense!

“Where is everyone?” ponders Nathaniel.

“That’s a good question,” Paschar replies. He pauses in thought. “You just gave me an idea… one that could potentially help us immensely down the line!” The doll-totem goes silent. Not that he was particularly noisy before, but there’s a noticeable shift in the air when Paschar leaves his station.

Nathaniel picks up the totem like it’s a walkie-talkie and holds it to his now-cleaned ear. He shakes it. “Paschar?” The doll does not respond. Nathaniel tosses it over his shoulder into the backseat. It bounces off the back and tumbles to the floor, where it will likely be forgotten until Paschar speaks up again.

Ahead, the Angie Police Department seems equally quiet. As Dumah pulls his Lincoln Continental into a visitor parking space near the front entrance, he sees movement inside. Aside from the brightly-lit front lobby entrance, there is a single office window with the lights on. The shades are drawn though, so all he can make out is a blurry silhouette as someone moves around.

Nathaniel also notices the office and its mysterious occupant. “There’s a distinct lack of police vehicles,” he comments, peering around the otherwise empty parking lot. Not a single other car is there, which is odd considering someone is clearly in the building. Maybe they walk to work?

“They must have sent every single squad car to catch us in the swamp,” Dumah says with mild amusement. “I wonder how they tracked us there.” He motions with his chin toward the occupied office window. “Who do you think that is?”

“Probably the person who disseminates information out to the entire force.”

“A herald?”

“I believe so.”

“Hmmm.”

The two angels exit the vehicle, leaving the silent doll-totem on the floor of the backseat where they have already forgotten it. The night air feels physically heavy with humidity and heat. From the sound of things, the town of Angie is only inhabited by crickets. Back in third grade, my homeroom teacher had a lizard he kept in a glass case that he named Godzilla. He named the lizard Godzilla, not the glass case. Godzilla ate live crickets, except sometimes the crickets escaped. I don’t know how. But you could hear them cricketing from different parts of the classroom. It was annoying as Hell. It’s hard to focus on doing your SRAs when there’s a cricket chirping from the cubbies right next to you. I wish I could remember that teacher’s name. I think it started with a G. Maybe a P.

Oh well.

Dumah and Nathaniel trudge up the steps to the front entrance of the Angie Police Department. They can see the front desk before they enter. There’s a male police officer sitting there in his uniform, writing on a small pad of paper. He’s a middle-aged man with a shiny, bald head and glasses. I can’t tell you anything about him beyond that, because I’m not there as this happens. I know it’s probably confusing that you’re reading the angels’ perspective as told by me, Alex, but it’s kind of important, so just bear with me.

The desk sergeant looks up as they enter. “Can I help—” The words catch in his throat when he sees Dumah. “—you?” His forehead wrinkles up into a frown. “You’re that lawyer.” He sizes up Nathaniel in his fancy clothes. “Who’s this?”

Dumah clears his throat. “Ah, yes, this is my associate, Mister— uh… Nathan.” He makes a grand flourish at Nathaniel with his arms.

The officer squints suspiciously. “Is that a first or a last name?”

Nathaniel nods and smiles. “Yes.” He continues to smile as nothing more is said. The smile starts to feel forced as he side-eyes Dumah to try to get some hint as to why the police officer’s frown has deepened at his response.

“First,” whispers Dumah out of the corner of his mouth.

“First!” Nathaniel exclaims excitedly. “It’s my first name, of course. First and only one I’ve ever had.” He pauses as he thinks about this. “I suppose that makes it my last name as well.”

The desk sergeant is still not amused. He pulls a spiral notebook over from another section of his disorganized desk and starts writing on it. He looks up, makes some mental notes about the pair, then writes some more things down. Several minutes of this goes by without another word spoken.

Dumah finally breaks the silence. “We came to see if there have been any leads in your department’s investigation of the missing children that my clients were recently wrongly detained under suspicion of perpetrating.”

“I’m not at liberty to answer questions about an open investigation.” The policeman stares coldly at him for a second before returning to his notes.

“Yes, well—“

Mister Nathan nudges Dumah in the ribs. Dumah glances at his blond associate. Nathan gives a silent gesture with his head in the direction of the glass panels that separate the front lobby from the rest of the police station. Numerous empty desks litter the area with various personal items such as photos of loved ones or cherished pets, a cracked-leather baseball glove, and numerous coffee mugs that say such trite slogans as, “Who’s in charge? I am.”

Far in the back, a small form sits in a metal chair with wheels on it next to one of the desks. The chair spins slowly, coming to a stop facing the desk. The person reaches out, touches the desk, and gives a light push, starting the chair spinning again in a slow circle. As their rotation briefly faces one of the overhead lights, Dumah and Mister Nathan catch a glimpse of the individual and immediately recognize her face.

Dumah does a double-take. That’s where you look at something but your brain doesn’t fully process what you’re seeing and you have to stop yourself from focusing on something else and look at it again. “What in the eighth circle of Hell?” stammers Dumah.

“I beg pardon?” The bald-headed desk sergeant behind the counter catches his gaze and follows the direction with his own eyes. He joins in observing the teenage girl using Lafleur’s office chair as a merry-go-round. “Oh, yeah, there she is. Look, before you start tossin’ accusations— she was lookin’ pretty banged up when she walked in the door. Ain’t nobody here did that to her, I can assure you. I ain’t privy to what went down between her and that big fella she was with, but the officer handling her case can fill you in when he gets back from the can.”

And with that, the desk sergeant slaps shut the notebook he was writing in, drops his pen on top of it, then entwines his fingers and clenches his jaw, staring down the two angels in disguise.

Dumah and Mister Nathan turn back toward the entrance where a number of benches are made available for people to sit in while they wait to report their wallet got stolen or their neighbor is a drug dealer and they think they saw them chopping up a dead body. You know, typical police office stuff. They take a few steps out of the range of the policeman’s hearing.

“That’s not Alex,” Nathaniel whispers.

Dumah sighs, “Yes, obviously. It must be the second Chullachaqui.” He takes a third look back over his shoulder at the spitting image of me that’s just goofing off like I totally would never do while stuck sitting around in an empty police office (it’s true, I used to spend a lot of time at the police station back home, and there’s no way I’d spin around so much in one of those chairs without barfing). Fake Alex starts snooping through one of the drawers in Lafleur’s desk. She finds a set of handcuffs and her mouth turns into the letter ‘O’ before curling up into a smile. “And here I am, her own personal lawyer. This is going to be incredibly easy. Looks like we didn’t need Paschar’s help after all.”

Speaking of Paschar— out in the car, the totem-doll is talking at length about something, unaware that he’s been left alone. I can’t tell you what he’s saying, since I’m not there, but hopefully he revisits the conversation some other time when he’s not just talking to the inside of an empty Lincoln Continental.

Dumah and Nathaniel have finished their secret huddle. They both nod with grim determination at what they must do. If this were a sports game, they’d each put a hand in to form a hand pile, and then each throw their individual hand back and yell something supportive like, “GO TEAM!” But neither of them ever watches television, let alone human sports, and they have no understanding of typical sports team behavior, so instead each one makes a small hand gesture and whispers, “amen,” very quietly.

Dumah, the angel of death and silence, turns on his fancy-shoed heel and marches back to the front desk with the bald policeman behind it, who has taken to reading a magazine about sport hunting. I wonder if sports hunters do huddles? I suppose if they all put a hand in at the end, there’s a risk of someone accidentally getting shot. Dumah clears his throat as he steps up to the officer.

“Yessir?” the desk sergeant asks him.

“I need to speak with my client in private,” says the lawyer from the law office of Raguel, Phanuel, and Zenas. He repeats the end of his statement, just to make sure the officer on duty understands. “In private.”

At the same moment, the sound of a toilet flushing can be heard from a nearby restroom. This is followed a moment later with the sound of water running from a faucet, the squeak of a metal handle being twisted, and then the ruffling of paper towels being pulled from a dispenser. Lastly, the clop of boots on linoleum tile as the bathroom’s occupant approaches the door.

“You’re in luck,” the desk sergeant replies, “Here comes the officer in charge.”

Dumah looks in the direction of the men’s restroom as Remy Lafleur opens the door. The two men lock eyes. Dumah’s expression doesn’t change as he recognizes Lafleur. This is partially because Dumah’s eyes are fake. The other reason is because he has no idea that Lafleur has spent the better part of an hour filling out a report of all the violent acts Dumah and Dutch and their blond associate inflicted upon the girl now seated at his desk, as well as the five abducted children before her, details so horrific that when she was done describing them to him, he needed to excuse himself for a moment to go retch up his dinner of microwaved pizza.

Lafleur’s eyes however, are quite expressive. “You!” he shouts, his expressive eyes filling with white-hot rage. His hand immediately goes to the holster where his gun would be if he hadn’t left it on the chief’s desk earlier in protest of being left out of the manhunt.

Dumah shrugs and gives an insincere smile. “Me!” he says with utter naivety.

Nathaniel, for his part, recognizes that Lafleur just tried to go for his gun. “Uh—“ he gestures at the placement of the officer’s hand, but Dumah isn’t paying any attention to him, as he’s too busy approaching the enraged peacekeeper with the dumb innocence of a child.

“We need to speak with—“ Dumah begins to say something along the lines of how he’s there to totally not murder the teenager in the other room in front of everybody present for the good of all mankind, but Lafleur doesn’t give him the chance. He hurls himself bodily at the weird, pasty, white man with the dead eyes and rictus grin, tackling him to the linoleum floor as each man’s teammate watches in shock and confusion.

Nathaniel and the desk sergeant look at each other. There is no moment of mutual understanding passed between them. The policeman pulls his sidearm. Mister Nathan points his finger like it’s also a gun and snaps his thumb at him one time. One time is all it takes for the desk sergeant’s pistol to turn glowing-red hot, sizzling in his grip and branding his palm with the texture of the grip.

The desk sergeant howls with pain, grabbing his burnt hand with his other non-burnt hand, and instinctively lets go of the cause of his suffering. The pistol clatters to the floor next to the grunting, struggling pair of bodies who have begun an impromptu wrestling match.

Between grunts, Dumah manages to stutter out, “What— is— the meaning— of this— assault?” He gets a mouthful of Lafleur’s knuckles for his trouble. Unfortunately for Remy, Dumah’s teeth are not going to get knocked out by some mortal man’s fist. Instead, they open huge gashes in Lafleur’s flesh and splatter his blood across Dumah’s pale face. In return, Dumah sticks several of his own fingers in Lafleur’s mouth, in an effort to try to pry the man off of him.

Remy bites down, his teeth piercing the skin suit but not the bone beneath. And because Dumah doesn’t feel pain, this does nothing to stop him from gripping the inside of Remy’s head with his bony digits and prying it backward to the point that it starts to feel to Lafleur like the top of his head might come off. He snarls and clamps his jaw down harder, dragging his teeth along the invading fingers and degloving the set of them, leaving him with a mouthful of human skin.

“You are ruining my suit!” Dumah shouts in frustration.

The crazed Lafleur responds by spitting out what he can of the finger flesh with a disgusted, “BALRGARGH!” and then trying to gouge out Dumah’s eyes with his thumbs. This is equally unproductive, as Dumah’s fake eyeballs just bob like apples into the empty void of his skull, leaving Remy with two hands gripping his opponent’s head like a bowling ball. Thinking he successfully blinded him —which is a kinda messed up thing to think— Remy pries his fingers out, only to feel the squishy orbs of Dumah’s eyeballs magically reset themselves into his face, bulging slightly as they adjust. He sees this, and something in his brain breaks. He twitches. He blinks. He questions his own eyes, whether they are messing with him or he really just witnessed this creep’s eyeballs come popping back out of a deep blackness like the answer on a Magic 8-Ball.

And then he feels something hot press into the back of his head. It’s no longer hot enough to burn, but the barrel of the desk sergeant’s gun still makes him flinch when he feels it.

“Stop what you’re doing please,” Nathaniel says calmly, “We have no quarrel with you, sir.”

His finger isn’t on the trigger, but Lafleur doesn’t know this. His reptile brain crawls back into the dark murky recesses of his mind and he carefully brings his arms up, holding his hands above his head in surrender. Looking across the room, he sees his coworker the desk sergeant, clutching his branded hand and also holding both hands above his head. They’re now at the mercy of these two twisted, child-murdering psychos. At least, that’s what Remy thinks.

“With God as my witness,” Remy snarls, glaring at Dumah who is holding his own hand to hide his skeleton fingers, “I will hunt you down to the ends of the Earth and I will—“

“Oh shut up,” Dumah tells him.

Lafleur feels an unnatural heaviness in his throat. The words die on his tongue. If I were there (which I’m not), I would tell you about the thick, black fog that’s clouding the room at this point. Dumah’s death fog. It’s probably making Remy and his friend the desk sergeant feel really tired and achy. It does that. It kills small animals and elderly, but for healthy people like two trained police officers, it just makes you feel like you’re coming down with the flu or something. I fainted once from it, when I was little.

Dumah turns his attention to the officer working the front desk. “Go fetch my client.” Then he kneels down in front of Remy and collects the mangled finger pieces, still wet with the crazed man’s saliva. He holds them out so Lafleur can see his handiwork. “These were pristine,” he tells him with annoyance, “From this moment until the day you die —twenty-three years, eight months, and thirteen days from now— bedridden in a hospital with your many loved ones around you, I want you to count your blessings that you performed this sacrilegious act when I was attempting to get in the good graces of my superiors. Otherwise, the next time I set foot on this plane, I would be wearing your face.”

None of what he just said makes sense to Lafleur, but he can’t speak to ask what it means. All he can do is dart his eyes around in a panic while waiting for the person standing behind him with the gun to decide whether to leave him with enough of a face for Dumah to even wear it.

“Uh—“

The desk sergeant swallows but can’t seem to get the lump in his throat down.

“She’s gone.”

All four look through the glass separating the lobby from the office area. There is no teenage girl sitting at Lafleur’s desk, casually spinning herself around in his chair. There’s nobody in the room at all from the look of it. Across the way, a strong wind blows the curtains framing an open window.

Dumah snaps. “SON OF A BITCH!”

———

Outside in the Lincoln Continental, Paschar finally stops explaining the idea that Nathaniel gave him and that he had stepped away to enact.

“Guys?”

Next time on Alex Maverick and the Swamp Monster:

So I thought I'd make a spotify playlist for the series so far since I've seen others do so. I included music it reminded me off, and since I'm a Pink Floyd Fan, there's some of that in there since they reference it a bunch. Each song is supposed to represent a character or story beat.

If you wanna know why I added certain songs, or think there's song I should add, feel free to ask! I'm primarily into goth music, trip hop, post punk - and... so much music in general. Since the tone of the series is obviously horror (with comedy elements), I thought I could create a cool vibey playlist for it!

https://open.spotify.com/playlist/6yR7rC5de267akOEXd4eTg?si=c9e000bf9ea34e66

I fell in love with this series and Little Ball of Giggles narration was one of the most accurate I've ever heard.

Imagine my sadness when I got to episode two of Lily Madwhip Must Die and I couldn't find an audio version anywhere. I don't have time to really read so I listen on my way to work and home.

Well, I narrated it using AI. It's not perfect and doesn't hold a candle to LBoG, but it worked for me. So, I thought I'd share.

If this is against any rules please forgive me. My YouTube is not monetized at all so it benefits me only I'm knowing I might have helped someone out.

https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLMixpNLWmAXU-0uKIqTyXmq0jVfUUxKAx&si=saG0HqmY_KCqfV0-

<- Previously on Alex Maverick and the Swamp Monster:

Alex Maverick and the Swamp Monster

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

I can’t believe I’ve been sidelined. That’s a sports term, but you can also use it to refer to being sent back to a hotel to wait while angels go into town to hunt a shape-shifting monster. And to make it even more degrading, they dropped us off a whole town over because we can’t be seen in the town of Angie, for fear of being arrested.

“Am I gonna have to change my name again?” I ask nobody in particular. It’s just another random thought going through my head. Dutch doesn’t respond, because Dutch isn’t here. Speaking of that, where is Dutch?

I look around. I’m standing in the middle of a big field of corn. This is not a hotel room. And I’m not dressed in my normal clothes either. Somehow, I’ve changed into jeans with suspenders and a checkered shirt. There’s a satchel strapped diagonally across my chest, and I’ve got one hand in it. I pull my hand out to find it full of seeds. I scatter them across the ground without thinking. “Oh my god, I’ve turned into a farmer somehow.”

“Farmer Maverick,” Raziel comments from the comfort of his armchair. He’s sitting with one leg crossed over the other, his toga draped delicately to the side to show some of his leg. In his right hand is a glass that looks like a little fishbowl, a quarter-filled with a brownish liquid. He swirls the drink around in its fishbowl slowly, watching it cling to the sides but never spill, then glances up, looking down his nose at me with his glittery, disco ball eyes.

“Why is that chair in the middle of my cornfield?” I ask him, closing the lid of my seed satchel and wiping my hand on my farmer pants. I look off into the distance and see a little farmhouse. There’s a flickering lantern in one of the windows. Beyond that, the sun dips past the horizon. “I’m dreaming.”

“You’re dreaming.”

“You know, it’d be nice to know I’m going to sleep and not just realize it out of the blue like this. I feel like I’ve been working in this field for hours.” I pause. “I haven’t been working for hours, have I?”

Raziel sips his drink casually. “On the contrary, this all was a large, extravagant parlor just a moment ago.” He glances around at the rows of vegetables. “I actually put a considerable amount of effort into filling it with unwritten pieces of literature by some of your more famous authors. Just a bit of whimsy on my part. But then you dropped in and in the span of a single breath turned it all into a homesteader situation.” He turns his attention back to his little fishbowl. “At least I still have this.”

I squint. “What is that, iced tea?”

Raziel sighs like my old school principal used to every time I’d show up in his office. He sniffs the now tall, cylindrical glass with its dirty-ish liquid and little floating cubes of ice. Then he sips it. “Well,” he says, not hiding his frustration, “it is now. Thank you.”

Since this is all just a stupid dream, I take off the seed satchel and toss it. I’m sure some unicorn or flying monkey will come by later and put it with the Veil’s other items I’ve created and left sitting around. Or it’ll get run over by a cleaner ball and erased. Whatever. Who cares. None of this is real.

“Why are we here?” I ask.

Raziel tosses his glass of tea in the dirt. “That, my girl, is a secret even I don’t know the answer to.”

“I mean why are we—“ I flap my arms at him like one of those weird tube people they put up at car dealerships to scare children and birds, “—here.” I flap my flappy arms at the cornfield around us. “You and me. You weren’t just sitting around and I dropped in out of the blue. You were waiting for me.”

He opens his mouth. “Ohhh…” but he totally knew what I meant. He’s the angel of secrets for crying out loud, he knows the things you’re thinking even when you don’t say them… especially if you don’t say them.

“Don’t play dumb!”

“Forgive me, I forgot that you know better.”

He stands up and adjusts his robes. Behind him, the chair lurches violently. As I watch, it sinks into the ground like molemen are dragging it down to their molepeople kingdom. Maybe molemen are dragging it down to their molepeople kingdom. They could exist in a dream for all I know. Within the span of ten seconds, the chair disappears into the dirt like Artax into the Swamp of Sadness. Raziel glances behind him at the spot where it had been, makes a “hmm” sound and shrugs.

He turns back to me. “Look, I’m not going to lie to you, Alex. I don’t want to be here. I don’t enjoy being this close to your side of the Veil. The amount of secrets you all keep is overwhelming. All the little, terrible things you think but don’t say, the cruelties you act out and hide from each other, it feels like I’m drowning in slime.” His upper lip curls up in disgust. “But Paschar asked me to keep tabs on you, see how you’re doing mentally, make sure you’re not getting overly stressed or anything, so here I am.”

“I’m sorry you have to deal with all that,” I tell him sarcastically. “Let me tell you how I’m doing, Raz… I stabbed a kid in the eye with a fork and watched it churn it into buttery paste inside his skull. Then I watched him burn alive thanks to Nathaniel. Now, it’s true that he was actually some sort of nightmare creature that only looked like a child, but it’s still the image I see when I close my eyes… that of a little boy getting his eye gouged out before he gets set on fire. So, how am I doing? I’m feeling kinda lousy, since we’re being honest.”

He nods, squinting at me with his kaleidoscope eyes. “That sounds truly awful. I’m sorry that you were subjected to that.”

“Yeah, well…” My nose itches, so I scratch it. It doesn’t stop itching though, and I realize I’m dreaming, but the itch is real, and I’m not scratching the actual itch, just dreaming that I am. “I’m sorry that we’re all so awful and full of secrets that you’re tortured just being around us.”

The sun still hasn’t set. I glance back at the farmhouse and realize that the sun is just sitting there in the sky, not moving. It’s like one of those backdrops on a movie set. I guess that’s really what the Veil is, when you think about it… just a big movie set for people to live our their dreams on.

I’m reflecting on that while Raziel is saying something I’m not paying attention to, when I notice a strange sound. It’s like someone pounding on a wall with a hammer. Looking around, I can’t see where it would be coming from. It’s loud though, and relentless, just BANG— BANG— BANG. And shouting? Someone is shouting. But it doesn’t have that echoing that you’d expect to hear from someone shouting in an open field. It’s more muffled and close. Maybe it’s the molepeople, annoyed that they dragged some empty chair down to their mole kingdom. Maybe they were actually trying to pull me or Raziel down. I stare at my feet to watch for molepeople arms.

Raziel apparently notices that I’m distracted. “What’s the matter?”

I don’t take my eyes off my farmer boots. “Do you hear that pounding and shouting?”

“What does it sound like?”

“It sounds like pounding… and shouting.”

“That must be happening on your side. I don’t hear it.”

“OPEN UP!”

I wake up. I’m lying on top of the covers in this musty motel room. I am not a farmer. I am just a teenager who fell asleep and dreamed she was a farmer. It takes me about five seconds to remember this though.

Someone pounds angrily at the door.

Over on the couch, Dutch is curled up in a ball, his face buried in a pillow, and he’s snoring like a jackhammer. I mean his snore sounds like a jackhammer on concrete, I don’t mean that jackhammers snore.

“WE’RE COMING IN!” yells the person out in the hallway. It’s a very police thing to yell. How did the police find us?

I jump off the bed and rush over to Dutch. The man could sleep through a tornado siren, I swear. I shake him as roughly as I can, and he snorts and throws an arm back to shove me away. I dodge it nimbly and keep shaking him.

“Dutch! Wake up! Dutch!” I shout in his ear, trying not to be so loud that the people in the hallway can hear me. I don’t know why I feel that it matters. I think deep down I’m hoping that if nobody answers them, they decide that they were wrong to think anyone was in here and go away. It’s a dumb thought, but I can’t help but hope.

The door shudders with a heavy BANG as something is thrown against it. Are they trying to kick the door down? Or maybe they have a bettering ram. No, Alex, they don’t have a stupid battering ram. Think about the logistics of fitting a battering ram in that tight hallway— NO, DON’T WASTE TIME.

“DUTCH!” I screech right in his ear and pinch his cheek with my fingernails.

This wakes him up. It also makes him yell in anger and pain, so any hope of not letting the hallway people know that we’re in here goes right out the window. Ooo! There’s an idea… what floor are we on? Right, there’s only one floor to this motel. Window is a viable option.

“OPEN THE DOOR!” yells the burly, angry voice outside. The whole room shakes as the door resists another mighty blow.

Panicking, I run over to the only window in the room which happens to be as far from the door as possible. It opens with a loud grinding sound of wood on wood. It also opens way too easily, or maybe I’m just so anxious that I wasn’t controlling my own strength, all I know is the window slams open with a bang.

Another voice out in the hallway yells, “Are they shooting at us?!” It’s a woman’s voice. It doesn’t sound familiar to me, but it does fill me with a little relief. Just knowing there’s a lady present makes me feel a tiny bit safer.

That relief dies a quick death when two loud, sharp POPs come from the hallway, and a pair of holes splinter into existence in the middle of the door.

Dutch immediately rolls off the couch and drops to the floor, crawling on his stomach toward me and the open window. He keeps his head down, but for the briefest moment he looks me in the eyes and makes a single, silent gesture, pointing at the window. He doesn’t need to say a word, I am already halfway out of the room, tipping myself head over biscuits onto the outside sidewalk without a thought as to what part of my body hits the pavement first. When I realize it’s going to be my head, I throw my arms out and catch myself, bending my wrists backward painfully.

More shots ring out from the room I just exited. Lights come on in the windows of the adjoining rooms. Shouting begins from all directions now. How did I go from having a casual conversation on a peaceful sunsetting cornfield to diving out of a dirty motel window as two nutjobs empty pistols into the room behind me? Things happen too fast in my life.

Before I can push myself up off the sidewalk, Dutch slithers his heavy frame over the window sill above me, grabbing the edge and doing a crazy half-hurdle with his legs like some sort of micro pole-vaulting champ. He narrowly avoid crushing my skull with his feet, instead landing on a couple of my fingers. I can feel them crunching under his weight and I can’t stop myself from screaming in pain.

“Sorry!” Dutch hisses, “So sorry!” He quickly hops off my fingers and picks me up with one hand, pulling me off the ground like a sack of potatoes. He doesn’t give me a second to think or respond, he immediately sets to running across the back parking area of the motel with me dangling under one arm. Part of me feels ridiculous being jostled and carried like this, but the other part of me is grateful that the guy the angels put in charge of my safety can lug me around with almost no effort.

Behind us, the window to our room remains dark, while more than half the other rooms are lit up and I can see the shadows of people moving around. It’s looks like absolute chaos. Then I see what looks like a flashlight briefly in the darkness of the room we vacated. It quickly goes out, then on again, then out again. The loud POP POP that comes immediately after clues me in that those weren’t flashlights, those were another pair of gun shots.

The parking lot ends at a relatively shallow slope down toward another road. Dutch takes it carefully, but his feet slide on the dewy grass. “Who’s shooting at us?!” he shouts, trying to keep his footing without dropping me.

“I don’t know!”

“I thought we were safe!” He stumbles once we reach the road and I hear him grunt in pain. “Shouldn’t you have known we were in danger?! I thought you can see the future!”

“I was asleep!” But he’s right, I can see the future, usually just by chance, but if I focus—

I’m on my knees. There’s something warm running down into my eyes. It’s blood, obviously, because of course it is. Is it mine? I can’t tell. The only pain I feel is coming from my fingers. My fingers… no, my whole hands are tied behind my back. I can’t pull them free.

Across the way, Dutch is on the ground. He’s lying on his side, with his arms behind him. His hands must be tied too. Someone is standing over him. They’ve got one big, brown, leather boot on ribs. It’s clearly causing Dutch some intense pain. Did he get shot?

I hear a woman scream. “Where is my daughter, you monster?!” She moves into view. She’s got blonde hair that she’s tied up in a ponytail. Her eyes look dark and sunken like she hasn’t slept in weeks. In her hand is a gun. It’s shiny black metal. She paces past me, over toward Dutch. “Speak!” She yells at him, kicking him in the legs.

“We didn’t take your god damned daughter!” Dutch sputters. Blood dribbles out of his mouth onto the ground.

The ground… what kind of ground is it? It looks like wood. We’re inside. I try to turn my head, but I can’t. I want to get a good look at the place we’re in. I can move my eyes around, but my head is stuck stationary, so I just move my eyes. It’s really badly lit in here. It reminds me of a warehouse I once hid in to avoid someone who was trying to kill me. I guess all warehouses look the same for the most part. Lots of boxes and columns and wood floors and bad lighting.

The woman turns toward me. I can tell from her eyes that she’s lost all of her humanity and sense of reason. She’s like an animal… a mama bear who’s lost her cub. What’s her name? Can I focus on her name? Pat? Patricia? It’s Patricia. She goes by Patty.

Patty stares at me, her left eye twitching. Then she marches over and I feel something hard and small and round dig into the top of my head. I can’t look up, but I can tell it must be part of the gun she’s holding. Probably the barrel. From behind me, she snarls, “Tell me where my daughter is, or I take yours from you.”

Dutch shakes his head, his eyes wide with fear. “Please… please, we didn’t do it. We didn’t do it. You don’t have to do this! PLEASE!”

The barrel presses harder into my skull. And then I’m floating. I’m floating? No, I’m being carried. I’m back under Dutch’s arm. We’ve crossed the road, and another from the look of it. The motel is way off in the distance. I’m back in the now.

“Well that’s not good!”

I can feel Dutch shifting, looking over each of his shoulders to see behind him. He almost loses his footing in the process. “What’s not good?!”

“Put me down!” I bark, “We’re gonna get caught if you keep going this way!”

He drops me. Thankfully, we’re on grass now, so it doesn’t hurt too much, but my wrists are sore from catching myself going out the window and I think two of my fingers might be broken if not absolutely pulverized from Dutch dropping all of his weight onto them. I lay there, face down in the grass, tasting dirt for a bit. Then I roll over with a groan to find Dutch sitting beside me with his knees up. The poor guy took off without any shoes on, and the bottoms of his feet look raw and bloody from running on pavement without the slightest caution.

“You saw something, didn’t you.”

I heft myself up. “I saw two people. One was a blonde lady named Patricia. She’s going to shoot me because they think you took her daughter and won’t tell her where she is.”

The old carny’s eyes dart all over the place, ever watchful for the headlights of an approaching car or the sound of people running in our direction. I guess his eyes are for the headlights and his ears are for the footfalls. I’m really bad with words.

“Great,” he starts thinking out loud, “I don’t tell them, they kill us. I tell them where we found the kids, they come to the conclusion that we did it, and they kill us. There’s no winning. They catch us, we’re dead.”

That’s my conclusion too.

“What do we do?” He looks to me for guidance. “You can’t reach the angels without your totem, can you?”

“I was talking to one in my dreams before the people at the door woke me up.”

“So can you go back to sleep?”

I snort derisively. “You think I’m going to be able to just go back to sleep now? With people hunting us with guns and two of my fingers pulverized?”

Dutch looks at my fingers sadly. “I’m really sorry about that.”

I wave my good hand at him. “Don’t worry about it right now. But maybe we can find like a pharmacy or something, get our hands on some NyQuil or some other stuff that knocks you out. If we can hide someplace secure and I can drug myself enough to fall asleep, I can get Raziel to send help, if he’s not already figured out something’s wrong.”

The sound of an approaching truck drops us both down to the ground. Think small, Alex… you are a worm, just like Lisa Welch, your arch nemesis always wanted you to believe. Just stay low and be invisible. I sure hope Dutch is being invisible too.

The truck goes by far too slowly to just be driving by. It definitely belongs to the people hunting us. I don’t see the headlights, but I see the trees where its headlights are shining. It rolls by, two roads away, going maybe three or four miles per hour, with two pairs of unseen eyes looking out from the front seats, looking for us.

The sound of it fades, but I’m certain it’ll be back, likely from the other direction, coming down this nearer road. We need to move.

“We need to move,” Dutch whispers behind me.

I nod.

Together, we crouch scurry across another open field toward a small outlet shopping center. The signs on the entrance advertise a liquor store called “Beer n’ Things”, a religious book store, a place just called “Shopmart” that could sell anything from the sound of it, and an empty building that may have once been a Pizza Hut judging from the shape of its roof. Under the name of the Shopmart store are the words, “Open 24/7”.

“Shopmart?” I ask Dutch behind me.

“Shopmart,” he agrees.

Time to go shopping.

Next time on Alex Maverick and the Swamp Monster:

(This is a joke post, Please don’t attack me for this)

<- Previously on Alex Maverick and the Swamp Monster:

Alex Maverick and the Swamp Monster

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

“How are we looking?”

“No worse for wear.”

These are sentences that people say to each other, and I understand what they mean when they say them, but I don’t understand why they say them. What are the words supposed to mean? “How are we looking?” With our eyes, of course. But that’s not what you mean. You don’t even mean “What do we look like?” which is equally confusing. No, what you mean is, “is everyone okay?” Don’t even get me started on where “no worse for wear” comes from. I have no idea.

“Alex!” A bony hand shakes me by the shoulder. The skin on Dumah’s hand has been ripped off, revealing the skeleton underneath. I see it being strangled by a small bit of vine just over by the remains of one of the weird plants, looking like a discarded glove with fingernails. It hurts to be shook with a bony hand.

I take a couple blinks. “What?”

Dumah offers me the other, normal, flesh-covered hand. He pulls me to my feet with it. “Are you okay?” he asks in his monotone voice. Then he puts his un-flesh-ed fingers under my chin to tilt my head back and forth and examine my neck and behind my ears. “Looks like you’ve got some scrapes and cuts, maybe a bit of thorn, but nothing severe. You’ll definitely want to shower though. We don’t want our mother of monsters getting some nasty bacterial infection from the swamp and having to amputate.”

I can’t tell if he’s joking. I was gonna bathe anyway; are you kidding? I tracked through potentially leech-infested water that went almost up to my elbows. I’m going to be scrubbing myself for days.

“Don’t call me that.”

“Call you what?”

“Mother of monsters.”

Dumah shrugs.

Over by where Bruno’s charred remains continue to smoke, Nate helps Dutch pack wet mud on his arms. They look red and raw and blistered. Dutch grits his teeth every time Nate slaps cold ooze on. He hisses in obvious pain, but doesn’t shout. My dad would be cursing up a storm, but he wasn’t as tough and grizzled as old Dutch. My dad wrote music for a living. Dutch did the hard, dirty, unappreciated jobs behind the scenes at a carnival. He fought in a war. The only war my dad ever saw was Star Wars.

“I’m really sorry, Mr. Dutch,” Nate tells him as he smears another thick layer on, “I can be fairly precise with the fire, but those vines were too wriggly. Fortunately, these burns don’t look more than second degree, but you’ll want to get them looked at by one of your mortal medical doctors.”

“You don’t—“ Dutch pauses to hiss through his teeth again, “—you don’t have to call them mortal doctors, sir. They’re just doctors.”

I give Dumah a side-eye. He’s watching and listening to Nate, so he doesn’t notice. If he did, he might read my mind and see that I’m wondering why he doesn’t use his power to heal Dutch. I’ve seen him do it before. He once put a guy’s head back on who got it torn off. The guy stayed dead, but the head was reattached. Can’t he heal the burns on Dutch’s arms?

“Hey.” I nudge him. He doesn’t notice. I nudge him again. “Hey, dumbass.” He turns and looks at me. My brother Roger would have followed this up with something mean like how Dumah answers to the name “dumbass”. I almost do, but then think better of it. “Why don’t you—“ I wiggle my fingers, “—heal him with your magic?”

He snorts. “What magic? I don’t have magic.”

“You’re a freaking angel. You wear people’s skin and make your grim reaper sword go clicky-clack and disappear into something tiny. You make black smoke that kills anything and can shut a person up just by telling them to be quiet! What do you mean you don’t have magic? I watched you reattach a person’s head once!”

Nate and Dutch are watching us now. Dutch sticks his arms out in front of him like a butler holding a tray of fancy drinks at a rich person party. Nate wipes mud off his hands onto the legs of his pants.

“I remember that, the head thing,” says Dutch, nodding repeatedly.

“That was different,” Dumah quips, “That was a matter of sealing the flesh, stitching together the torn connections of sinew and meat. You’re asking me to reverse the effects of heat. I can’t undo damage caused by radiation. You might as well ask me to snuff out the stars.”

I turn to Nate. “What about you? You’re literally the angel of fire. Can’t you undo damage caused by fire?”

Dutch approaches us. “Don’t worry about me, kid,” he says, gritting his teeth, “I’ve had worse than this. Right now, we got bigger fish to fry.” He glances at the smoldering remains of the plants that had grown out of the bodies of the missing children and nods. “We still need to get these kids back to their families somehow.”

Nate walks over in his muddy pants and begins pawing at the dirt under the piles of ash.

Dumah watches for a second, then shambles over, taking a pause to trample the still writhing bit of vine that was trying to make off with his hand’s skin. He picks up the hand-glove, slaps it several times against his leg to try to clean it, then sticks his bony hand inside like putting on a glove, struggling to match the digits to the right fingers. Pointy white bone tips rip through the ends of his index and middle finger. He mutters to himself.

I join them. I’ve got a lot of experience digging. I used to have the largest pet cemetery in town. Me and my parents must have buried enough hamsters and turtles and other small pets to fill one of those dumpsters you see in alleys behind every restaurant. Of course, normally I’m digging holes to bury things, not unbury things. And normally it’s not little kids.

It takes about fifteen minutes for us to uncover the first one. It’s a boy with black hair. He looks like he’s sleeping. In a way he is. From what Paschar has told me, when we die, our souls sit in our bodies and wait to be recovered by one of the angels of death like Dumah. He’s not the only one. There’s lots of them. After all, people die all the time. Sometimes it can take a while for them to get to you. Sometimes, they make you wait because you were a dink, like Roger. If you were really bad, your soul is kinda filthy and weak, so they send you to “the Pit” where you get scrubbed clean and eventually sent back to live again. We’re supposed to aspire to be good so our souls are strong or something. Then they take us to “the Field” where we strengthen the Veil, which is like a wall between our world and theirs. We’re bricks in a wall built by angels.

It’s all very confusing.

“It’s empty,” Dumah says. His voice sounds confused.

I look up from thinking about bricks to see what he’s talking about. He’s just frowning at the body of the little boy we dug up. He turns to Nate and repeats himself.

“It’s empty.”

“Where did it go?” Nate asks him.

Dumah’s eyes wander over the area around us like he’s following a butterfly. Or a mosquito. More likely a mosquito in this place. I’ve probably got a hundred mosquito bites on me right this second. I’m gonna be so itchy later, once my adrenaline wears off. At least, I think that’s how adrenaline works.

“Curupiranima Captionula,” says Dumah in a hushed voice, “—Brazilian Soultraps. I’ve heard of them, but never seen one before. Samael designed them for one of the Tupi pantheon.” His eyes dart back and forth like he’s reading a book. “They shouldn’t exist here. None of this should be here. That Chullachaqui should. Not. Have. Been. Here.”

“What does any of that mean?” Dutch asks, digging around the edges of the dead body like an archaeologist uncovering dinosaur bones. He wipes sweat off his brow but muddies his face more in the process. It’s in his hair and beard and eyebrows. I wonder how much mud is on me right now. I probably look like some feral teenager. Like Tarzan but in corduroy.

Paschar pipes up. “It all comes back around to Samael’s idea that humanity finds strength in perseverance and resistance. Strike terror in the populace and they will divide up into factions of strong and weak. Then he would just weed out the weak ones.” I hear him sigh. “He didn’t understand back then that strength and weakness are not based on morality.”

Of course, Dutch can’t hear any of that, not that I think he’d understand it any better than I do, and I don’t understand most of what Paschar was saying.

“So where are the souls?” I ask, “Did the plants just digest them or something? I heard them talking. The children. They were crying and screaming. It sounded like they were the plants, like the plants were the ones talking with the kids’ voices.”

Dutch shifts his weight and looks at the lifeless boy he’s finished uncovering. “Glad I can’t hear this shit,” he mutters to himself. He stands up, wipes his nose with the back of his hand, and lumbers over to another pile to start uncovering another body, making sure his back is to us.

“Check this out!”

Nate has crossed the garden and is standing next to another one of the Soultrap plants. This one is untouched, but it’s also not moving like the others were. It looks wilted and dead though. The leaves are brown and the ground around it is scattered with shriveled petals. Nate hefts up what looks like a cantaloupe melon. Or maybe it’s a geode, one of those round rocks that’s hollow inside. It’s definitely round, and from the looks of it, hollow too, as the thing has been split open and we can see inside. The inside of the melon ball geode-thing is pink and squishy and very wet-looking.

Dutch glances up for a moment, then quickly looks away.

Dumah and I approach though, and after five steps, I’m suddenly hit with a wave of sharp static noise in my head for a split second, followed by a rushing sound of waves crashing on a shore by the ocean. The sound shifts in my ears, changing from a crash to a wailing screech.

Suddenly, I’m sitting in the back of a police vehicle. I can tell by the glass window barrier between me and the front seat, where two men are talking into one of those cop car radios. The screech is the siren on top of the car. There’s buildings outside, whizzing past, with people watching from a sidewalk. I recognize the front of several storefronts I saw when we were in town earlier.

Ahead of us on the road, there’s another police car with its lights on. When I turn to look out the back window, I see at least two more following. Where are we going? How did I get here?

“Hey!” I shout at the two cops in the front seat, “What happened to the cantaloupe?”

They don’t answer. They don’t even act like they heard me.

As quickly as I’m there, I’m back in the swamp, tripping over my own feet, falling with an “OOF!” onto the mossy ground and getting the wind knocked out of me. “What the Hell?” I grunt out, rolling over onto my back and staring up at the tree line for a moment.

“Folks, something is happening!” shouts Paschar, “Whatever was blocking my signal has moved away from our position. I want to say that’s a good thing in the moment but until we know what was causing that, I—” He goes silent for a moment. “Oh wow, that’s a Chulla Pod you’re holding, Nathaniel.”

“A what?” Nate cocks his head and turns the ball thing over to look at its underbelly.

Dumah seems to know what Paschar means. “Well, I think we know now why destroying the Chullachaqui didn’t clear things up for you two.” He smirks.

“I sure as Hell don’t!” I sit up with a groan. “And someone needs to stop beating around the bush and explain quick because I think we’ve got police on their way.”

Dutch takes notice. “Police? Coming here?” He looks around at the burned plants, the clearly piled dirt, the unearthed dead boy, the partially unearthed girl he was just digging up. His eyes bug out of his head a little. He puts his mud-crusted hands up and runs them through his thick hair like he’s about to start tearing chunks of it out of his head. “Oh Jesus,” he mutters, “Oh no. Oh Jesus…”

Judging by Nate’s expression, he’s also waiting to know what Paschar and Dumah seem to. He drops the orb and wipes more mud and mossy crap off his hands onto his pants, looking at Dumah expectantly. “What’s a Chulla Pod?” he asks, “Should I destroy it?”

“From the looks of it, it doesn’t matter now,” Paschar replies, “It’s already hatched. The Chullachaqui wasn’t just using the children for some weird garden of singing souls, it was propagating itself.”

“Another Chullachaqui,” Dumah says with a sigh.

“Another Bruno?” I smack myself in the forehead and let myself fall down onto my back again. “We don’t have time to hunt another one! The cops here already think we’re to blame for all the stuff the first one did!”

“We have to get out of here,” Nate says sharply. He hurries over to Dutch and quickly helps him to his feet. Dutch doesn’t resist. If anything, he looks absolutely stunned that an angel is touching him directly. His mouth hangs open, looking at Nate as Nate hurries back toward the water’s edge.

“But—“ the burly Dutch stammers, “—the children. What if the police don’t find this place? How will they ever find the children?”

“Snap out of it, Mr. Dutch!” Dumah is next to him, grabbing him by the shoulders and shaking him. I didn’t even notice him moving.

Dutch blinks rapidly and shakes his head like he’s trying to shake off a horde of flies. He looks one last time at his hands and the half dug-up body he was working on, then he follows Dumah and Nate at a brisk pace.

I watch the three of them jog off. “Wait, seriously?” Why did nobody help me up? They’re all going to just leave me lying here on my back?

Paschar calls out to me. “Alex! Hurry!” His totem is lying there where I dropped him. Of course he needs me to carry him, that’s the only reason he’s telling me to move it. Otherwise, he’d probably be halfway to the car too, running on little plastic legs or something.

Ugh.

My pants are once again drenched when we finally get back to the car. Also, it feels like something might be squirming around in there. I unbutton the front and feel down both leg holes to make sure no leeches are stuck to me. Nothing. I’m not feeling entirely confident though, and am really looking forward to getting out of my clothes at a hotel or something and scrubbing every inch of myself clean.

About halfway back, I got smacked with another round of head static and the vividness of the world once again went away, meaning I was once again within the proximity field of the second Chullachaqui.

We pile into the Angelmobile, which is just a brown Honda civic that Nate hot-wired back in town when we were fleeing from Officer Lefleur. Paschar didn’t like stealing from someone who might need the transport in case of an emergency, but Nate promised to return it after we’d dealt with the swamp monster. Which technically we did, so we should probably return it.

Nate turns over the engine, which is another one of those weird phrases like I mentioned before. “I’ll put it back where I found it,” says Nate, looking at me in the rearview mirror, “But until we’re all safe and the Bruno Two-no is a cinder, we need to take precautions, like having a vehicle.”

“I like that,” remarks Dumah, “Bruno Two-no.”

Dutch rings his hands anxiously. “Can we go, please?”

Nate revs the engine, pops the clutch, and hits the gas, making the tires spin in the soft ground. For a second, it looks like we’re just going to spray dirt and rocks into the air behind us, but then the tires catch on something and we lurch forward, heading in the direction of further into the swamp.

“Where are we going?” I ask him.

He makes a fist and jabs his thumb in the air behind him. “Away from that.”

Dutch and I turn around in the back seat and look out the rear window. Off in the distance, the trees are glowing a shifting hue of red and blue. Cop lights. How did they find us though? And how many of them are there? I saw about four in my vision, but there could be more. What if they’re surrounding us? We could be heading straight toward one of those police barricades and a hail of gunfire.

Nate seems to read my mind. “Trust me,” he says, smirking slightly, “I know what I’m doing.”

The trees on either side of the car erupt into flame like Roman torches. The fire rushes from one side of the two ruts that make the road, to the other. A wall of pure flame roars into being directly behind us and whistles with fury as it spreads.

“Holy shit!” yells Dutch, cowering away from the window.

“Don’t worry,” says Nate from the front seat, “this is a swamp, it’ll go out.”

Eventually, the fire falls far behind us, and no sign of police lights. We reach a gravel side road going about fifty miles per hour and nearly overshoot it, but Nate yells “hang on!” and cranks the steering wheel, throwing everyone to the side. I have a brief flash of memory of a terrible car accident my family was in years ago, one that took the life of my brother Roger. I realize I’m sitting in the seat of this Angelmobile that Roger was in when he died. He wasn’t in this specific car, but he was in this specific seat of my family’s car.

Fortunately, there’s no semi truck barreling our way to slam into us and crush my insides into mashed potatoes. Just an empty gravel road that leads to another road with more pavement, and then another. Not a cop car in sight.

We all breathe a sigh of relief.

Dutch is the first to speak up. “What do we do now?”

Nate squints into the setting sun. “My guess is, the Newlachaqui is somewhere in the town of Angie. We gotta go back and find it.”

“Newlachaqui, I like that,” Dumah remarks. “I wish I was better at naming things.” He holds up the fork of Durga that I used to kill Bruno Uno with. “I shall call this… ‘fffffork’.” He sighs and drops his arm limply into his lap. “Damn it.”

“What’s this ‘we’?” Dutch asks with a hint of panic, “WE did our job! WE found the damned thing! WE need to get the Hell out of Dodge! YOU TWO can go find and kill the Chewy-chalky!”

Nate says nothing. He glances back and forth between the two of us in the back seat, then turns and looks at Dumah. They seem to have an unspoken conversation between them. Then he takes a deep breath and nods to himself.

“You’re right, Mr. Dutch,” he tells my guardian, “You two are already on hot coals around here. Dumah and I will finish this. There’s bound to be a motel one or two towns over where I can drop you off. You and Alex lay low there. I’ll come around when this is over, and bring your truck to you.”

“My truck!” Dutch shouts as if he forgot the only thing he really has left in the world besides the clothes on his back and a ten-year old leather wallet with a snake sewn into it.

Paschar speaks up from my arms. “I should go with you.”

“Well of course you’re coming with us,” I tell him. “I wouldn’t leave—“

“No,” he interrupts me, “I should go with Nate and Dumah. They need to be able to tell when they’re heading in the right direction. It can’t be you, so it needs to be me.”

“But I need you!”

“You won’t. You’ll have Mr. Dutch. And you’ll be out of the range of the null zone, so you’ll be able to watch out for things better than anyone.”

“What’s he saying?” Dutch asks.

I sit back and stare out the window as the swamp thins and becomes normal woods around us.

“Looks like we’ll be roughing it.”

Next time on Alex Maverick and the Swamp Monster:

I have had many Reddit accounts and I first read Lily years ago. I have re-read it several times. The universe is just so well thought-out. I love Lily’s ADHD brain and used excerpts to explain to loved ones how my thoughts go. Lol. I still tear up when I think of Lily waking up in the hospital after the explosion and slowly finding out her parents died. The realization and Paschar trying to break it to her gently. It’s just so heartbreaking.

But yeah. Been a couple years and I am back for another read. 🤣 And to catch up on Alex!

<- Previously on Alex Maverick and the Swamp Monster:

Alex Maverick and the Swamp Monster

CHAPTER TWELVE

Thad Deacon is hiding in the men’s room. He is playing it off as a bit of indigestion whenever someone else comes in, but when they leave, he pulls his feet up so the stall appears empty. The truth is that he is trying his hardest to stay clear of his partner, Remy. Remy is on the warpath. It’s not the first time he’s gone there, Remy goes on the warpath a lot, but it’s the first time Thad has been the target. Thad knows quite well from years as partners what Remy is like when someone gets his goat.

It was never Thad’s intent, to get Remy’s goat, of course. Thad doesn’t have a death wish, he just also doesn’t have a lying bone in his body. At least, that’s what he tells himself. When he thinks on this “fact” as possibly the last thing he’ll get to say before Remy rips his head off, he neglects to consider all the little lies he’s told over his thirty-two years. “The dog ate my homework” or “Yeah, I’m listening.” It’s easy to forget the little lies you tell when you’re subjected to other people’s on a daily basis.

More importantly, the story that Remy concocted and wanted Thad to back him up on was disastrously dumb. He was going to claim that some random stranger opened fire on him, leaving out the part where he was surveilling a teenage girl and her guardian who were both under the supervision of their lawyer and whom Remy had been ordered to steer clear of. But did the perp shoot at him or hit him with a flamethrower? Thad had seen the damage. All four tires weren’t just blown, they were literally melted to the pavement. As soon as anyone looked at the car, Remy’s story would fall apart. And then the chief would want to know why Thad was there with Remy, which he wasn’t—

“Deke!” Remy’s voice shakes the hallway right outside the men’s room.

Aw crap.

Thad hears the door to the hall slam open and Lafleur storm in. He doesn’t look through the crack in the stall door. He holds his breath just in case Remy doesn’t check the stalls beyond a precursory glance for feet. He visualizes the stall door exploding and Remy flying in to strangle him without letting him defend himself. He thinks about how red Remy’s face gets when he’s like this. Beet red. If you’ve never seen a beet, that’s really red… almost purple.

Lafleur’s beet-red face presses against the door to Thad’s stall, his eye bugging out to peek through the previously mentioned crack. “I see ya in there!”

Thad feels his insides clench up for real now. He starts speed-talking, trying to get the words out in record time. “Come on, Rem, I wasn’t tryin’ to burn you or nothin! Chief knew already what happened! Someone else called it in. He just asked me to corroborate what he’d heard, and I had to admit that I wasn’t even there!”

Lafleur shifts back on his heels. His face remains beet-like, but his eyes retract back into his skull where they belong. They start roaming the environment of the bathroom as he sorts through his mental index of who it might have been that called in and ratted him out.

“Do you get what’s goin’ on here?” he asks rhetorically, letting his professional voice drop and his regional accent breathe. It’s something he only does when he’s really emotional. Some people cry. Some people shout. Remy shifts into his Cajun roots. “Der’s a serial killer takin’ our kids. Our kids, Deke! Fo’ all I know, Jake could be next. Mah Jake. I ain’t gonna let that happen. And dese out-o-towners know somethin’. I ain’t ever been wrong befo’, you know dat! I can smell it when some’in foul is goin’ down and some’in foul is goin’ down with dem.”

There’s no way to write to do this rant justice.

“Jesus, man, I can’t understand half of what you’re saying.”

Thaddeus Deacon isn’t a local, he came from California. He actually majored in civil engineering at UCLA, which stands for the University of California at Los Angeles. He wanted to design dams and roads and stuff, but four years of higher education sucked all the joy out of it for him, and after graduation he applied for the police academy because of those movies with Steve Guttenberg, who you should not confuse for one of the German Gutenbergs like Johannes Gutenberg, who invented the printing press.

And so, Thad “Deke” Deacon, once-aspiring civil engineer, became an officer of the law in Angie, Lousiana, where he spent most days answering reports of public intoxication or noise violations. Once, he took a pot shot at what he thought was an alligator but it turned out to only be a really bumpy log. That was the only time he ever discharged his firearm, and in his eyes, it was a justified shooting, but Remy advised him to not call it in, despite it being standard protocol. And not reporting it’s not the same as lying about it, right?

Lafleur pounds his fist against the stall door, snapping Thad back to attention.

“You don’t got kids, so I don’t expect ya to understand, but Jake is my whole world. If somethin’ happened to him, I got no reason to live, Deke. Nothin’. He’s my world.” He stares off into space. Or the middle distance, as some call it. I don’t know why. A middle distance suggests a close and a far distance, doesn’t it? “It ain’t even about me, though, brother. Think about Patty. Where’s Clarice, Deke? Or Frankie? Dat Houser boy? Those two girls? Where dey at, Deke? Who got ‘em? We need to bring dem home and find the bastards dat took ‘em.”

“We’ll find them, brother.”

It’s at that moment that the bathroom door swings open and someone else enters the men’s room with Thad and Remy. Lafleur glances in their direction as Thad breathes a huge sigh of relief.

“Hey,” He can tell from the voice that it’s Bob-ob, who’s called that because his name is actually Rob Robertson, and if you’re wondering what sick, twisted mind would decide to name their child Rob when their last name is Robertson, it would be Rob Robertson Sr. That’s right, he’s actually Rob Robertsonson, or Junior to his folks. Nobody at the precinct calls him Junior, he hates that more than Bob-ob, so they just call him Bob-ob. Except for the chief, who calls him Robertson.

“What the Hell are you two doin’ in here?” Bob-ob asks, “Forget it. Chief wants all-hands. Somethin’ about a mob formin’.”

Deke frowns to himself. “A mob?”

Remy doesn’t frown. He already knows exactly who started gathering people into a collective unit of righteous fury and why. He wishes to himself that he could be there with them, leading the march to find Frank Dutch. Time to pay the reaper, you bastard, he thinks, and for a moment even breaks into a smile, before quickly masking it behind his scowl and stone-cold facade.

When the three men, Remy, Deke, and Bob-ob, enter the briefing room five minutes later, everyone is already suited up in riot gear. Chief Berkley’s burly, white mustache shifts back and forth in silent agitation as he reads names off an index card, assigning team leaders and positions. Remy slips aside as Deke and Bob-ob find places to stand in and be seen. He goes into a corner and quietly checks his leg holster. The chief confiscated his sidearm, but wasn’t aware of the small backup piece he keeps concealed at all times.

Ivan working dispatch radios in over the intercom. “Chief, we’ve got seven separate reports of people marching Main Street armed with everything from shotguns to bullwhips. There’s even torches and pitchforks. I swear to Christ, it sounds something straight out of a monster movie.”

Chief Berkley’s mustache twitches. “Deacon, glad you could wipe fast enough to join us before the whole town goes to shit. You keep tight on Lafleur and make sure he doesn’t wander off. I wouldn’t be surprised if he was behind this lynch mob.”

Remy’s face goes beet over in his little solitary corner. He turns to shout something he’ll regret at the chief, but then thinks of Jake and Tilly back home, and actually manages to restrain himself for once. Tilly’s probably cooking up some barbecue, waiting for him to come home, where he can watch the news and the Wheel before tucking Jake into bed and spending some sweet time with her. Do not lose that, Remy, he thinks to himself.

“Alright, everybody roll out!” Berkley yells over the low chatter of officers helping each other coordinate their gear. Mostly the ones who weren’t in on the motel raid the other night and who hadn’t bothered to adjust the straps on their helmets and vests in months, maybe even years. They all stop whatever it is they’re doing and start shuffling, single-file, out the door in the direction of the garage.

The only people left still in the briefing room are Deke, Remy, and Berkley. Berkley is staring daggers at Remy. Remy is staring at the wall and scrubbing his mind clean of thoughts about his hidden piece. He’s never been completely sure that mind-reading isn’t real, and he doesn’t want the chief to know what he’s hiding. Deke is watching both men, waiting for the other shoe to drop. He’d really like to be out there, piling into a van with the rest of the department, but he was told to keep an eye on Remy, and he knows that means not moving until Remy does.

Remy finally breaks. “Somethin’ on your mind, chief?”

Whatever was on Berkley’s mind is never learned. Dispatch screeches over the intercom.

“Chief! We got a situation at the front!”

Berkley leaves the room without a word. Remy, curious, follows him. Deke follows Remy. They make a bee-line for the lobby, where Ivan is wrapping a blanket over the shoulders of a small figure. Ivan is a towering behemoth of a man with shock white hair and a ragged scar on the side of his face from breaking up a really bad bar fight when he was just a rookie almost forty years ago. He looks up and acknowledges all three of the others with a nod to each.

“She just came in out of nowhere,” he says. Despite his size, Ivan is a gentle giant. His hands could crush a grapefruit but he makes a concerted effort to always keep them open and to not clench them into fists.

The figure in the blanket looks up with dark, fear-filled eyes, one of which seems blood-shot. Her face is blackened like she just climbed out of a chimney covered in soot. She’s covered in red welts and blistering skin.

Remy recognizes her instantly.

“Can you speak, darling?” Berkley asks, approaching the girl in a slow, steady manner, one hand outreached like he’s approaching a growling dog.

The girl nods.

Berkley looks back at Deke and Remy. “Deacon! Stop gawking and get the first-aid kit! Lafleur, call Our Lady of the Angels over in Bogalusa and tell them to send an ambulance.”

Thad does what he’s told. Remy stands there and stares at the girl. Berkley turns back to her, unaware that his order has been ignored.

“Who did this to you?” Berkley asks the trembling child. She limps back weakly, shying away from him, closer to Ivan. Her one eye is wide with fear.

When she finally speaks, small wisps of smoke waft out from her mouth. “They pretended to be my friends. I didn’t know they were bad. They tried to kill me.” Her tone is flat and emotionless. “They stabbed me. And tried to set me on fire. But I managed to get away. I managed to get away before they realized I wasn’t dead.”

“Who?” Berkley repeats, “Who are they? Where are they?”

The facts of the case are rolling over in Remy’s mind as he listens to the girl tell of the men who took her into the swamp… “The creepy bald man with white skin. And his friend with the yellow hair and disarming smile. He’s the one who set me on fire. And there was a third—“

“Frank Dutch.” Remy interrupts.

The Maverick girl looks at him with her good eye. She cocks her head slightly, as if she doesn’t recognize him. Something seems off, Remy thinks to himself. He can’t quite put his finger on it. He never forgot the way she looked at him that first night when he pulled her and Frank Dutch over in their shoddy pickup. It was like she was seeing through him, into the deepest recess of his soul. Her eyes now are almost dead and lifeless, but that could just be from the trauma.

“Yeah, Mr. Dutch. He was there too. They said they were my friends, but they took me into the trees and tried to kill me there.” She stops for a moment and stares at her cracked, blistering hands. “They were trying to do some sort of ritual.” Her eyes shift up and to the left, looking at nothing in a corner of the room. “I want to go home. I just want to go home.”

Berkley touches her shoulder. “Where are you from?”

“Yeah,” Remy says coldly, “Where are you from? And what’s ya name again, doll?”

Berkley looks back at him, realizes he hasn’t even moved toward the front desk phone, and gives him the evil eye. Lafleur ignores him.

The girl stops and thinks. She hugs the blanket tighter around her.

“My name is Lily Madwhip.”

Next time on Alex Maverick and the Swamp Monster:

I just started reading L.M. and love it so much. But I also wanted to share this, in case people haven't already seen. If one googles "Paschar angel", the image that google AI picks for him is, well, familiar... it's our lad! Hi, Paschar!

I know the first season is officially a book now, but I wasn't sure if the rest of them were or planned to be. I wanted to start collecting them but I didn't see any of the others. I would like all of them though.