Lindsay Buroker: Torrent

The sergeant returned and waved for his men to stand back. He drew Simon and me aside. Actually, he drew Simon aside, and I tagged along to keep him from sticking his foot in his mouth.

“You see anything out there?” he asked.

I blinked. He wanted intel from us?

“Yup.” Simon started to reach for his phone, but one of the privates with rifles tensed, and he only pointed at his pocket. “If I can get my phone out, I can show you some new pictures.”

The sergeant nodded. “Go ahead.”

“We were over in those rocks.” Simon pulled out the phone, but it didn’t respond when he punched the button. A few drops of water dripped from the corner of the case. “Ugh. Forgot. It fell in too. Damn, I had a couple of blurry ones from when the monster was chasing us into that-” he glanced at me, “-hole.”

Broken phone or not, the sergeant’s eyes were riveted to Simon. “You saw it in the Dells, you said? So far, the people we’ve talked to… nobody’s leads have panned out. But you actually had some pictures up on your site.”

“Yeah, we’ve seen it a couple of times.” Simon stood a little taller. “Today, it was definitely over there, between the rail trail and the lake. It sort of… cornered us for a bit. We hid in the hole until it left, but it might still be out there.”

Or under 50,000 tons of rocks. I wasn’t about to say it though, not if these guys might leave us alone to go investigate.

“Got it,” the sergeant said. “Look, you kids leave this to us. You’re going to get yourselves killed running around out here with-” he frowned at the sword, “-toys. Curfew’s at ten. If we catch you out again, we’ll have to detain you.”

“We understand,” I said as contritely as I could manage and dragged Simon toward the car. He was staring and sputtering at the “toy” comment. Temi took it in stride, merely unlocking the trunk and waving for me to toss our gear, toy included, into it. I was all too happy to set the sword in the back.

My calf had redoubled its throbbing, so I was glad when nobody rushed to claim the shotgun seat. I plopped down, stretching my legs out as far as I could. My foot nudged something, but I didn’t think anything of it.

“Uhm, Temi?” Simon asked. “Wo-would you like m-me to drive? If your leg hurts, I mean.”

“Thank you, but my knee would prefer the greater leg room up here.”

“You could have Del’s seat,” he offered.

“Hey,” I said.

“I’ll drive for now,” Temi said. “But thank you for the offer.” Something about the look she gave me implied she wasn’t sure Simon should be trusted with her car. I wasn’t sure he wouldn’t take the opportunity to break a few speed limits myself, but I thought he’d genuinely wanted to help with her discomfort if he could.

I shifted again as we drove out of the parking lot, trying to find a comfortable spot for my leg. It must have swollen quite a bit, because my sock felt too tight. My foot bumped something again. Figuring it was Temi’s purse, I reached down to move it-and halted as soon as my fingers brushed the leather cover.

“Simon? I think I found your tablet.”

“What?” Simon leaned forward. “How?”

“I don’t know,” I said, though my heart beat faster. Was it possible Alektryon had escaped with it, chanced across the Jag, and returned the tablet when he saw the opportunity? But how would he have known the car belonged to us? Or what a car was for that matter?

Simon reached for the tablet, but I batted his hand away, and flipped the cover open. The drawing app was still up. My breath caught. His words from before were still there, the ones claiming he wouldn’t be anyone’s slave again, but there were a couple of new words in careful script.

“Is it still working?” Simon asked. “Did it get wet? Or, oh, what’s that?” He’d seen the drawing app.

“A new message,” I said.

We were speeding along the highway back into town, but the roads were empty, and Temi took a long look over.

“In Greek?” she asked.

“Yeah.”

“What’s it say?” Simon asked.

“Roughly… Be wary. They are the enemies of humanity.”

“Similar to what the Roman said, right?” Temi asked.

“Well, it doesn’t matter anyway,” Simon said. “I don’t think we’re going to see those guys again.”

“Probably not.” I’d barely made it out of that chamber alive; it was hard to imagine someone else going in deeper and surviving.

I couldn’t say that I’d miss Jakatra and Eleriss exactly, but I missed not solving any of the mysteries surrounding them. Would we ever learn who they were and where they’d come from? Not to mention who had created that monster, why it’d crawled out of the ocean in L.A., and why it’d killed all those people… Eleriss’s warning that there would be more monsters made me uneasy, and I wondered if we should have tossed the sword in the lake when we’d had a chance. Only time would tell.

Thanks to the curfew, the town was quiet, and we didn’t see another soul on the way back to the Motel 6. Temi had brought the sword inside, and it lay next to her on one of the beds. It didn’t glow when she wasn’t holding it, but it started up like a touch lamp whenever she brushed the hilt.

“Not too bad,” Simon said from the desk. He had the calculator up on his MacBook and had dug a scale out of the van. Our flakes of gold rested on its surface. “Given the spot price of gold, an estimate of the amount of pure stuff in our ore sample, and a subtraction of our expenses, including new headlights, a new windshield, food and motel bills, medical services-” he nodded toward Temi’s bandaged hand and my bandaged leg, “-and also minus the coin you won’t let me sell until you’ve researched it further, we’ve made over three thousand dollars for our work this last week.”

“Technically we didn’t get paid for the week’s work,” I said. “We got paid for scraping gold out of a crack before a tunnel filled up with water.”

Simon waved my objection away. “One must find a way to fund one’s philanthropy efforts. This was no different. Oh!” He leaned back toward the screen. “I forgot about the money we made from our web traffic. I wish we could have taken a few pictures of the dead monster to throw up there.”

“Three thousand dollars,” Temi said as Simon crunched more numbers.

I could tell from the wry twist of her lips that she found the amount more amusing than inspiring. Simon and I hadn’t made much more than that in the entire previous month, so I could hardly complain. But then I hadn’t won prize money at Wimbledon in a previous life either.

A sickly bleep came from the heater. My phone had been as unresponsive as Simon’s after the flood. I’d taken it out of its supposedly waterproof and drop-proof case to let it dry in hopes that it would come to life again. The bleep, however anemic, was promising.

“Text message from Autumn,” I announced with a sense of guilt. I’d forgotten that Eleriss and Jakatra had been after her before our diversion.

Three messages sent an hour or two apart offered variations of, Are you all right??

Yes , I tapped in, the cursor responding with irritating sluggishness. I’d have to find someone who could do more for the phone than setting it to dry by a heat vent. Are you? Has anyone bugged you?

No, made it to Phoenix safely. Ran the blood.

I paused, afraid to ask. Aside from a gold coin, an item that could have been minted anywhere, and the sword, an item a soldier had dismissed as a toy at first glance, we didn’t have any proof that there were strange… people from a strange culture roaming Arizona. Without proof, any article I attempted to submit about our encounter would be laughed into the rejection pile. But the blood… the blood was something tangible.