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"The Kingdom of Gator Joe"
"The Kingdom of Gator Joe"
3/1-3/4/2011
I.
The cottonmouth was thirty inches long but it certainly seemed much larger when it slithered quickly in through the open door of the FIST FOR HIRE office. Mrs Corsones screamed and knocked over her chair as she scrambled to her feet. The black viper coiled and raised its triangular head, gaping its mouth wide to reveal the infamous white interior that gave the snake its most familiar nickname.
Stepping around from behind his desk, Sheng Mo-Yuan remained remarkably calm under the circumstances. "It's all right, it's all right," the young Chujiran said in a soothing voice. "He can't hurt me." The man known as Argent tugged back the sleeve on his suit jacket and approached the coiled snake, which had kept its mouth open in a threat display. Sheng reached down and blithely allowed the cottonmouth to strike. The fangs did not penetrate his bare skin or seem to even cause him discomfort. Seizing the black snake behind its head with one hand and further down the body with the body with his other hand, Argent straightened up and turned his back on his client.
"You might not want to watch this," he said. With a sudden twist, he snapped the snake's neck and held the body until it stopped convulsing. "There," he said. "All over now." Going to his closet, he got a trash can liner from its box on the shelf and placed the dead reptile into one of the bags. He dropped the bundle back in the closet and closed the door for the moment.
Striding over to his office door, he glared suspiciously up and down the empty hall. At one in the morning, his was the only office open in the entire building. Grudgingly satisfied that no one was lurking out there, he closed the door and returned to his desk. His client had righted her chair herself and gotten uneeasily seated where she had been when the snake had appeared.
At just thirty, Sheng Mo-Yuan was five inches over five feet tall, but trim and athletic. Most people took him for Northern Chinese because of his skin tones and eyelid fold, plus the coarse black hair and nearly flat profile. But something in his hawklike nose and high cheekbones contradicted that. The truth about his homeland was far stranger.
Tonight, Argent was wearing a dark brown business suit with a tan shirt and yellow tie. It was a bit flamboyant, but he was so confident and self-assured that he carried it well.
"It bit you, it bit you!" Mrs Corsones yelped. "I saw it. Don't you need a doctor? Should I call 911?!"
Sheng held out his hand to show the tawny skin was unbroken and without even a dent. "I'm fine. Relax. I can... how to explain? I can sort of tense up my skin so it's difficult to break."
"Oh." She calmed down. "Oh, a kind of Kung Fu trick like breaking boards with your hand?"
"Yeah, that's it," said Sheng as he went back around to sit down behind his desk. "When we're done, I'll escort you to a taxi and make sure you get home safely.You know, cottonmouths aren't found within a thousand miles of New York City. Someone brought that snake here and released it out in the hall."
"My heart is beating out of my chest," she told him, placing a thin hand over that heart as she said so. "When I looked up and saw that thing crawling in....!"
He studied her as she calmed down. Joan Corsones was in her late fifties, still a handsome woman with clean-cut features and large blue eyes under a crown of curly blonde hair. Judging by her tailored lilac-blue pantsuit and expensive watch, she was well off. The fingernails had been manicured recently, the make-up was understated but effective. Part of his mind was tempted to hike up his rates for once on this case, which realization made him feel he was getting to be more like the other detectives he knew.
In a light tone intended to calm her down, he said, "At least now we know you aren't imagining things. That snake didn't hitchhike to New York. Someone definitely means you harm."
"In a way, I'm glad that happened. I mean, it was awful and I'm still shaking but at least someone else has seen that I am somehow being.. well, menaced by reptiles."
Sheng Mo-Yuan threw a suspicious glance at the closed office door, feeling an urge to peek out in the hall again. "The good news is that there aren't many dangerous reptiles running around in the Northeast, just copperheads in the woods and you can avoid them."
"There's a problem," she replied. "I live in Virginia, near the Great Dismal Swamp. In the past few years, a healthy population of alligators has been thriving within a mile of my house."
"Alligators..." Argent said. "Well, that livens things up."
"First, I simply have to ask why you keep such strange hours? Your office is open from midnight until eight in the morning. Isn't that odd?"
"I mostly deal with weird and inexplicable cases," Sheng said. "What you might even call the supernatural. I soon realized most of my clients were desperately trying to reach me in the middle of the night, so I figured I might as well be available in those hours. To be honest, my business has boomed since I started staying open overnight."
Mrs Corsones managed a smile as she got hold of herself. "That's actually how I know about you, Mr Sheng. A few years ago, you helped a friend of mine who lives up here in New York. Nora Rendell. You caught a maniac who was stalking her, some nut named Mr Gallows, and got enough evidence to convict him. She could not say enough good things about you. She also told me some of the physical feats she saw you do. Honestly, superhuman feats from her description."
That made Argent preen. "Yes. Well, we all have our gifts. I've been lucky in that regard. When you called earlier, you said something about your son being missing for the past year?"
"Yes. Paul disappeared on his way home from the lab one night eleven months ago. This was when we suspect he was the first person to be a victim of what has become known as Gator Joe."
II.
After they had discussed the case and Sheng had charged a thousand dollar retainer, he signed Mrs Corsones on as a client. He did not charge for expenses except under extraordinary circumstances because his stipend as a KDF member gave him a comfortable income. Getting all the details about Paul Corsones' life and background, he escorted Mrs Corsones to the ground floor and out onto Canal Street. He rode with her in a taxi to her grown daughter's 11th floor apartment on 103rd Street. Sheng searched the apartment with the family's permission, went down and checked the building from the outside and satisfied himself that the apartment was safe at the moment.
Before leaving, Argent got assurances from everyone that either the daughter or her boyfriend would stay with Mrs Corsones for the immediate future and that one of them would accompany her if she left the building. This was vital. Seeing a pair of umbrellas in a stand, he also strongly recommended that they carry one of them whenever going outside, since they would be useful for keeping snakes at a distance. Everyone was still shaken by recent events and they agreed with all his suggestions.
Sheng told them he would be flying to Virginia on the first flight he could book, and he promised to find out what had happened to Paul and to hunt down Gator Joe. His self-assurance included a large portion of conceit, but he was so unselfconscious about it that few people found it offensive. The fact he could actually deliver on what he promised helped his reputation immensely.
Taking another taxi back down to Chinatown and the Hartwicke Building where his office was, Sheng Mo-Yuan tried to remember everything he had read about this 'Gator Joe' character. Most news sources and blogs treated the sightings as a gag or hoax. Only a few of the more lurid conspiracy sites gave Gator Joe any respect. The few photos that existed were so poor in quality as to be inconclusive either way.
The only thing that made Gator Joe worth taking seriously was that five people had gone missing in that area of the Great Dismal Swamp over the past year.
For an hour, Argent searched the hall outside his office, the staircase, the emergency exits, all without finding any convenient clues. 'No one ever drops a book of matches with their nightclub printed on it or a scrap of paper with an enigmatic phrase,' he thought sourly to himself. 'That would make it too easy.' Returning to his office, he saw that two tiny blue and green lights on the other side of the frosted glass panel were blinking steadily. Trom Girl had installed Trom proximity alarms as a favor. He deactivated them with a signal from his Link.
Written in black on the glass panel were the Chinese symbols for 'Chuan Lo Tsing' which could be translated "Hard Worker Fist" or "Fist For Hire." In English beneath that was written ARGENT INVESTIGATIONS and the office hours. He entered his office and flicked on the lights. Argent seriously considered cooking the snake that was lying in a bag in his closet. Back in his native Chujir, the people of his village ate whatever they could pin down and he would have enjoyed some grilled snake. But he had no kitchen here.
Sheng's legal address was 28 East 38th Street, the KDF building where he had a few rooms, but most of the time he could be found here. The office had a full bathroom with a shower stall and the couch was comfortable. By now it was getting close to five o'clock and light was showing at the windows over Canal Street. Dropping down onto the couch, he pulled out his Link and called the 24-hour booking agency the KDF employed. The first flight to Virginia he could manage to get would leave JFK at five-forty that afternoon and he took it. There, that was done.
Gator Joe... he tried to remember every detail he could without going online. For almost a year, people had reported seeing a man with the head and skin of an alligator stalking the edges of the Great Dismal Swamp. Five people had vanished in that period and remained missing without trace. One house had been found with its front door caved in and the interior trashed with nothing taken. There had been one report of two men sighting Gator Joe and taking a few shots at it with a hunting rifle but not doing any noticeable damage.
On the flight, he intended to do more research on developments, but he could not recall any recent appearances of the creature. For the moment, he decided to get some sleep and prepare himself. Hanging his jacket over the back of a chair, loosening his tie and kicking off the dress shoes, Sheng Mo-Yuan stretched out on the couch with a cushion behind his head. Taking a few deep breaths, he smiled at the thought of this new case and drifted off.
III.
Waking at eleven, he took a hot shower and shaved, although his body's attempts at growing a beard or mustache were vestigial, and changed into a lightweight summer suit of white material. He did not usually wear the KDF flexible armor under his clothes, although a few times it would have been useful. Most of the miniature tools and gadgets, like the lock-opener and the oxygen membrane and the pencil-thin thermite flares, went into the inner pockets he had ordered on his jackets. Sheng normally carried his Glock 17 in a waist holster, but he left it behind now because he would using an airline. He had found that obtaining a gun was quick and easy almost anywhere in the United States. Not that he was concerned, his real faith was in his own abilities.
Another habit he had acquired from being in the Kenneth Dred Foundation was keeping a travel bag always ready. Digging through his closet, he found a pair of khaki shorts and a denim vest, which he added to the bag. Sheng looked around his office to see if he had forgotten anything, slung the travel bag over one shoulder and stepped out into the hallway. As he closed the door behind him, he heard the familiar buzz and click of the Trom alarms arming themselves. For a moment, he felt a twinge that his Uncle Pao was not here to watch the office for him but the old man did enjoy two days off a week and this happened to be one of them.
An elderly couple were just being admitted into the legal advice office down the hall from him. The Hartwicke building had two floors of efficiency apartments at its top and an interesting assortment of businesses on its other stories. The ground floor was taken up mostly by a unisex barber shop and hair salon that seemed to be thriving. Sheng trotted down two flights of stairs, checked his box in the bank of tenant mailboxes by the front door. Only two utility bills were in there, and he felt they could wait until he returned.
After getting to the airport way too early and having to fidget for two hours, the flight was to Virginia was short and unremarkable. It was only four hundred miles, and he found himself walking through the terminal at Norfolk International Airport less than an hour and a half after leaving New York. Sheng claimed his travel bag and crossed the street directly to a car rental service. He settled on a black Jeep Renegade because he felt he might be driving away from paved roads before everything was over. Signing the papers and nodding politely to the explanation of terms took a while, but soon he was driving south on Route 13.
Sheng had never heard of the Great Dismal Swamp, a huge wildlife reserve that extended across parts of North Carolina into Virginia but he had studied maps and a brochure on the flight. Now his head was bristling with statistics and bits of information about cypress trees and marsh cattails and so forth. There were over a hundred thousand acres of the wetland itself, but he was sure he was not going to have to search it all. It was his experience that if he presented himself as a potential victim, the denizens of the Midnight War were more than happy to seek him out.
Sheng stopped at a diner for a fried chicken and biscuits dinner. Finding a roadside motel only a few miles from the Dismal Swamp State Park, Argent took a room for the next few days. He was informed at the desk that the Park itself would not be open to the public for another week, and he was sternly warned not to go wandering into the swamp by himself. Sheng meekly agreed and said he was just taking a break from a long road trip. The clerk gave him a sour look and the keys. "No women in the rooms, either," he growled. "We have enough trouble with the police."
The clerk did not seem like he would be a chatty source of information about Gator Joe or the missing people, so Sheng simply went to his room at the end of the motel and settled in. It was already getting dark this time of year. Once he was satisfied his movements would be concealed by the night, he changed into a plain black T-shirt with the open denim vest over it, khaki shorts and thick cotton socks. He wore the field suit boots that had been crafted individually for him. Not only were they were water-tight and fitted with steel-capped toes, there was a razor blade in a slit at the top of each boot. These had helped him escaped being tied up a few times.
In addition to his large travel bag, Argent had brought the small knapsack which he now shouldered on. It held a change of clothing, first aid kit, flashlight and binoculars and other useful items. He had two canteens of fresh water, one tied to each side of the knapsack. He had not picked up a handgun, so all he carried now was one of the survival knives with its seven-inch serrated blade and compass in the handle. But Sheng was not worried. His own body with its ability to shift from enhanced speed to extra strength to rock-hard density, was almost always all he needed.
Watching until there was no one in sight, Sheng Mo-Yuan slipped out of his motel room and raced across the two-lane road into the woods. He shifted the gralic force in his body into speed and raced through the sparse forest at a clip that would have broken records if anyone had been there with a stopwatch. Ten years of Kumundu training had honed him into peak athletic condition even in a normal state, but when he enhanced his speed he could have passed a whitetail deer without straining.
As he hurtled along, his night vision kicked in. Sheng had been expecting a full blown mangrove swamp like he had seen in the Everglades, but this was just a pine forest with slightly mushy soil. To his right was a good-sized creek that flowed sluggishly. The mosquitos and gnats did not bother him, he had found as a child that his skin automatically tensed up just enough when something like a bug tried to break it. After an hour, Argent slowed down to a brisk walk and started to take in the scenery. Living in Manhattan, he sometimes missed the mountains and fields of his native Chujir and being out here was making him a bit homesick. He dropped to a stroll, listening to the night birds and wondering what species they were. A bat fluttered overhead and he just heard part of its squeak.
Sheng reached around to unfasten his canteen and took a good sip before tying it back on. Maybe, when he got back to New York, he should close his office for a week and return to Chujir. He hadn't seen Tang Ming in yearsand he would like to visit her again. She had been his Sifu and the one who had guided him to leave Chujir for the outside world. As he was thinking this, a splash sounded from the stream to his right and immediately he was back in the present. Argent swung around.
Long black shapes were creeping up out of the water on short legs, heaving up onto the banks of the creek. Two in front of him, two behind him, forming a box with him in the center. Alligators, thirteen feet long, crawling to surround him in the gloom. Sheng focused the energy in his body to enhanced strength and curled his hands into tight fists. He had asked for this.
From the pines to his left lurched a strange figure, slightly over six feet high and wider than the average person. He was wearing only a rough kilt of ragged dirty cloth around his middle and his entire body was covered with hard scaly hide. The long snout opened wide and clashed shut. That alligator head was no mask.
IV.
"I'm going to go out on a limb here, tell me if I'm way off base," Sheng said, "But I think you might be Gator Joe?"
Although he did not move his jaws when he spoke, the creature said in an odd hollow voice, "You have entered my kingdom unbidden and your doom is sealed."
"Wow. How are you doing that?" asked Argent. "Are you sort of whistling your words? You know, like a parrot does?"
"Fool! Do you not realize your extreme peril?" hissed the uncanny voice from the monster. He raised his knobby fists and took a menacing step forward.
"I have to give you credit, you've got the classic evil villain dialogue down pat." Sheng glanced behind him to keep an eye on the two alligators approaching him from the rear. "Can't go wrong with that old-fasioned melodrama."
For a second, Gator Joe seemed confused by Argent's insolence. "Your death is near, Human. Can you not feel how close your final breath draws?"
"Boy, if I only had a nickel for every time I've heard that," Sheng said. Focusing every bit of gralic energy to reinforce his muscular strength, he suddenly crouched and seized the nearest alligator by the tail, braced himself with legs wide apart and swung the huge beast up off its feet entirely. He could not lift the eight hundred pound bulk overhead but he did manage to spin and fling it right into the other alligator a few feet away. The brutes rolled around together and started bellowing and snapping at each other.
"Stop that! Stop that at once!" Gator Joe hissed just as Sheng Mo-Yuan lunged forward and seized him by one scaly arm to hurl him to the ground in a hip throw. As the creature hit the marshy ground and tried to rise, Sheng slammed a side kick to the chest that sent Gator Joe rolling away.
In the next instant, the two alligators charged at Argent from the rear. The Chujiran instantly shifted his gralic focus to speed and leaped up over them to come down behind the reptiles. Now he wished he had taken the time to visit a pawn shop and pick up a gun, any gun. Reaching into an inside pocket of his vest, Sheng drew out two metal tubes not much thicker than pencils and popped off their caps. Instantly, the miniature flares erupted with a harsh actinic glare that stung the eyes to see. Every detail of the alligators and their master stood out vividly in that radiance.
"Better stay back if you don't want to get your noses burned!" he yelled. To his dismay, the four beasts lined up facing him, their jaws gaping to reveal impressive rows of teeth. Standing between them, shielding his eyes from the glare with the back of his hand, Gator Joe hissed, "Those will not protect you for long. You will be in our bellies within the hour."
"No fair," Sheng said, waving the flares from side to side. "I give a donation each year to the World Wildlife Fund." As he spoke, he was rushed by Gator Joe and brought down hard to the ground. Argent just had time to shift his gralic force to durability before he was being hit with a barrage of murderous blows thrown by fists as hard as rock. Even with his enhanced resilience, those punches were damaging.
Sheng tried to bring up his knees to get his legs under Gator Joe and fling him off but the monster was too heavy. The battering was starting to daze him. Sheng drove his elbow up across Gator Joe's throat and shoved, but with his resilience working, he only had normal Human strength and he could not budge the monster.
Savage pain shot through his lower right leg. He saw one of the alligators had clamped its jaws over his shin. Even with all his focus making his body resistant to harm, that bite was agonizing. Instead of trying to wrestle loose or defend himself against Gator Joe's pounding fists, Sheng desperately jammed a hand into his right vest pocket and came up with a metal ball the size of a cherry tomato. As he lobbed it up a foot high into the air, Sheng squeezed his eyes shut and turned his head away.
The miniaturized Trom dazzlers were not as powerful as the flash-bang grenades used by the military or by SWAT teams, but this one still detonated with a sharp blast that seemed as if lightning had struck right on top of them. Gator Joe was blinded and deafened and stunned by the concussion. With his dominance gone, the alligators shrank back in pained confusion. Argent managed to throw the massive creature off him and started crawling away.
At that point-blank range, even with his resilience, Sheng was not much better off than Gator Joe. Everything was a grey haze in front of his eyes and he could not hear at all. Remembering that he had come here across a mile of unbroken wetland with the creek now to his left, he got up and tried to run. His left leg gave out. He got up again and limped as quickly as he could into the blur that was all his vision could provide. Sheng's only comfort at the moment was that Gator Joe had been looking right at the dazzler when it had gone off and he would be in even worse shape.
For what seemed like hours but which could only have been minutes, Argent half ran and half hopped away, unable to put much weight on his left leg. He smacked right into a pine tree, bumping his already throbbing head, then kept going. At least he could not hear any signs of pursuit. Yet.
Stopping eventually to catch his breath, leaning up against a tree, Sheng gasped, "That... did not go as well as I had hoped." Already, though, the healing factor provided by the tagra diet was clearing his eyesight and he was starting to regain his hearing slightly. Tel Shai knights such as Sheng and his KDF teammates were extremely difficult to kill because the tagra enabled them to regenerate from damage that would permanently cripple normal Humans. Even though he was starting to recover, Sheng knew he was in no condition for another round with Gator Joe with or without the four giant reptiles.
A hand grabbed his arm from the other side of the tree. "Quick," whispered a heavily accented man's voice. "Come with us."
"Wait, what?" asked Argent, pulling weakly away.
"No time to talk," said the voice. "Come with us if you want to live."
V.
Hauled roughly through the woods for five or six miles, Sheng had come back to a normal condition by the time they slowed down. Even his leg had stopped hurting. Given a little time, Tel Shai knights could recover from anything short of immediately fatal traumas. As his vision cleared, Argent got a better look at the two men who were rushing him away from Gator Joe. They were short, wiry men, both wearing camoflauge pants and boots, one with a baggy white T-shirt and one bare-chested. Both had dark bronzed skin and long black hair, the shirtless one wearing it in a pony-tail.
As they slowed to catch their breath, Argent stepped around to face them both, fists on his hips. "Not that I don't appreciate the escort, fellas. But, correct me if I'm wrong, aren't you Feral Boys?"
"That is what white people call the Unseen Nation," agreed one of them. "The words do not bother us."
"Well, thanks again. I imagine most of what I think I know about your people is inaccurate. Still, aren't you supposed to be in Florida?"
The older Feral Boy, barechested and sporting the ponytail, snorted. "Most of our people are in Florida, but the Unseen Nation is everywhere. We live among you. Many of us do not even look like Indians anymore but our hearts are all loyal."
"So some of you guys are in Manhattan?" Sheng asked, shifting his stance in preparation that these two might attack him next. "Does that explain the cottonmouth that wandered into my office last night?"
"We can talk once we are in safe house," said the older Feral Boy. He started hiking briskly again, and Sheng followed the two of them. He had not mentioned that all he knew about the Feral Boys was from when Josef and Unicorn had fought them a few years earlier. That had been the time Unicorn had gotten Josef to use those goofy trick arrows. His teammates had had nothing good to say about the Feral Boys.
After another twenty minutes of walking, they came upon a miserable shack in a small clearing near a stream that branched off from the main creek. The place was only mismatched boards nailed together in a haphazard way, with chinks plugged by dried mud. Painted in red on the front was a strange hex symbol, what looked like a W with two horizontal lines through it... the Feral Boys totem. The roof was partly scraps of metal, everything from a sheet of corrugated aluminum to a dozen license plates. The door was just a tarp hanging over an opening. As the two Feral Boys approached, one gave a long two-part whistle that ended on an ascending note. The tarp was pulled back and a third native stuck his head out, brandishing a double-barreled shotgun.
"Here is what little safety we may find these days," said the ponytailed Feral Boy. They led Sheng into an interior which contained two mattresses on the floor, a folding table that held a burning oil lamp, and a tiny cast iron wood-burning stove in one corner. The pipe from the stove carried smoke up through a hole in the roof, although he had not noticed any sign of a chimney from outside.
The three Feral Boys remained standing. One propped his shotgun up against a wall and used some rocks to weigh the bottom of the tarp down in the doorway.
"I am Joseph Daniel," said the oldest man, the barechested one with the ponytail. He indicated the other two with a thumb. "Stephen James, Amos Andrew. Tell us your name."
"I'm Sheng Mo-Yuan. Sheng is my last name," the Chujiran said. "I guess I found out the hard way that this Gator Joe is no legend."
Joseph Daniel made a circuit of the single room, searching its corners and seeming satisfied. "We must watch for reptiles. Gator Joe is their lord. Anything that creeps or crawls, he sees what they see. They are his to command."
"Really. That explains why those alligators seemed to following his orders. I don't find that comforting, to be honest. If he can use everything from lizards to snakes as spies, he's going to be hard to hide from." Argent went over and glanced up at the hole in the roof that the stovepipe exited through. It was not a tight seal.
"We saw your fight with Gator Joe. You are no ordinary mortal. Amos Andrew, this man picked up a twelve-footer and threw it. He knocked down Gator Joe twice. He survived a beating from Gator Joe and a twelve footer biting his bare leg. How is this possible?"
"It's just my gift," Sheng said. "I was born this way. Weren't you guys stunned by that grenade that went off?"
"Lucky it is that we were circling around and were not looking at you at that moment," said the oldest Feral Boy. He went over and sat down wearily on one of the mattresses, everyone else turning to face him. "Seeing what you can do, I decided we should help you escape. An alligator can run forty miles an hour for a short time. By now they would have finished eating you."
"This gets better and better. Let's get some basics down. You guys live in this swamp, I take it. I'm sure the government doesn't know about that. What's the relationship between you and Gator Joe?"
The other two Feral Boys watched Joseph Daniel for a cue but their senior member did not answer.
"Come on, give me something to work with," Sheng insisted. "You know, I don't HAVE to go back out there and tackle this humanoid alligator whatever it is, I can just catch a plane home and go about my life. If you want my help, give me a little information."
"So be it. The Unseen Nation keeps its ways to itself," Joseph Daniel intoned. "But you may know this. Gator Joe was born a mortal man like you or I. We made him into what he is with the Velkandu potion passed down from the Fall of Ulgor at the beginning of the world."
"Oh, Alchemy again. That explains a lot right there." Argent began to pace back and forth. The skin on his leg had not been broken by the alligator's teeth and by now only a faint bruise showed on his calf. "Your tribe got hold of an Alchemy serum and has been using it. So you turned one of you into this Gator Joe? How often does this happen? Is there more than one of those jokers running around out there?"
"Not within my lifetime has a Gator Joe been created. Until now," Joseph Daniel said. "Our council down in the Everglades feel we need to grow in number here in the Dismal Swamp, and we should tend the alligators until they are a great herd. To guide the beasts, a Gator Joe was needed."
Vague rustling and scratching noises outside worried the men. Amos Andrew picked up his shotgun again and stood by the tarp over the doorway, head cocked as he listened. The other two gave Sheng an anxious glance.
"Next question," the Chujiran asked, "Is there a way to turn Gator Joe back again? To be honest, I think wrestling with him as a regular Human is a more appealing prospect than tackling the bruiser he is now."
"There is. We have this." Joseph Daniel held up a sixteen ounce plastic water bottle half-filled with a rank-looking amber liquid. "Not much is needed. But this Gator Joe is not as earlier ones are. He will not drink it willingly. He has gone rogue and has his own dreams of empire."
"Oh, we're back to bad news." Sheng found an old Marlin 30-30 lying in one corner. Its mechanism was badly rusted. "I don't think there's much chance of fixing this up. Yeah, what was that about Gator Joe's empire?"
"His control of reptiles is stronger than that of Joes before him," answered the older Feral Boy. "We have witnessed packs of alligators moving together, which they do not do in nature. Gator Joe has dropped hints he wants to start leading alligator raids on campgrounds and tourist groups."
"Alligator raids...!" Sheng muttered. "Damn. Of all the things the world needs, an army of commando alligators is definitely not one of them." He stood up and swung the detached barrel of the rifle experimentally. "This will help. Okay, I guess you should give me that antidote stuff. I'll make Gator Joe chug a bit and we'll put a stop to this alligator army scheme."
The three Feral Boys huddled and discussed the idea in what sounded like Portugese with longer words. Finally, Joseph Daniel came over and held out the plastic bottle. "We feel you are our best hope, Mo-Yuan Sheng.'
"Sheng Mo-Yuan," the Chujiran corrected him. "Family name first. Okay, I'll do it. This isn't my first rodeo in the Monster-Busting Event. Har har." He suddenly moved to pick something small up from a dank corner of the shack. "You say Gator Joe can see whatever a reptile under his control sees?"
"Yes. Why? What have you found?"
Sheng held up a tiny turtle, its legs flailing helplessly in the air. "There you go. I bet Joe is on his way here."
V.
Going outside, Argent saw no sign of any large animals in the immediate vicinity. Yet. Picking up a few dead branches off the ground, he went back in the shack. "But one more thing before I try slugging it out with a geek who has an alligator head. I want to find out what happened to a man who disappeared in this area last year. What can you guys tell me about Paul Corsones?"
Seeing guilty expressions flicker over their faces, Sheng blew up. "I'm trying to help you guys! I'm trying to keep innocent people from being killed and eaten by animals! Start giving me some co-operation here."
Finally, Joseph Daniel mumbled, "Gator Joe can not be one of our Unseen Nation. He must be an outsider."
"Oh, come on. You're telling me that Corsones has been Gator Joe all this time?" The Chujiran made a disgusted noise. "You wonder why you Feral Boys have a bad reputation? Never mind that now." He handed out four branches, the thickest about the size of a softball bat and the other two thinner. "These seem dry enough. Make some torches. You've got oil in that container for the lamp on the table. Rip up your shirts if nothing else is available and wrap the material around one end. I'll take one."
Keeping the rifle barrel, Sheng stood holding the tarp open and glared out at the night. "I swear..." he muttered to himself. He took stock of what he still carried on him. The small knapsack still strapped across his shoulders held mostly spare clothing. In his denim vest were two more pencil-sized flares, another dazzler grenade and a smoke/tear gas capsule. He also had a flashlight, one of the oxygen membranes and a few other miniature gimmicks. The lightweight vest did not carry as much as a full field suit jacket could. The seven-inch survival knive was sheathed at his belt but he didn't think it would be that effective against either the gators or their humanoid master.
In a few minutes, the Unseen Nation men had fashioned workable torches. Sheng chose one and took an ordinary cigarette lighter from one of the dozen inner pockets of his denim vest. "Hold on to this," he said as he handed it to Daniel Joseph.
Peering outside again, Argent saw faint streaks of pink in the eastern sky. Dawn was not far off. As he looked about, long black shapes could be seen moving through the underbrush and between the pines. He gripped the rifle barrel with both hands and smiled grimly. Back in New York, he often complained about being bored when only mundane criminal cases turned up. He always said he wanted to deal with more weird, dangerous Midnight War events. His wish had been granted.
"The gators are taking up their positions," he told the Feral Boys. "Listen, before the party starts, I need to know about that snake that poked its head in my door yesterday."
"Many of our Unseen Nation are still doing as Gator Joe commands," answered Daniel Joseph. "Defying him is dangerous. He has killed with his hands and with his teeth some of our people who stood up to him."
"We three are running from him," added another of the Feral Boys. "This Gator Joe has gone too far. He is a menace to everyone."
"You created a monster and now you're afraid of it," Sheng scoffed. "Like that hasn't happened before to others. All right. I'm going out. Stand by for now."
Lighting his own torch, Argent stepped out into the dim grey haze just before dawn. Facing the shack in a semi-circle were a dozen alligators, all watching with such stillness that they seemed like statues. They had surrounded the hovel at a distance of forty feet, which Sheng knew they could close in a heartbeat. He bent and jammed the end of the torch into the muddy earth so its flickering light brought the whole surreal scene. Sheng held the rifle barrel up behind his right arm so that it could not be seen from in front.
He did not see Gator Joe. Raising his voice, he called out, "Paul! Paul Corsones!"
That brought the reptile-headed man out from the shadows between the pine trees. Wearing only the ragged kilt, the torchlight playing over his scaly hide, Gator Joe stalked through the formation of his creatures and stared. "What is that name to you? Why do you speak it?"
"Because that is who I'm talking to," Sheng answered. "If there is anything of Paul Corsones left in there, I want you to know that your mother and sister both sent me here to find out what happened to you. What do you want me to tell them?"
The grotesque being did not reply at once. "The man you name died a long time ago. But you will not be able to bring any messages. My army has developed a liking for human flesh! I smell more of your kind in that hut. We will feast well tonight."
"Fair warning, I'm not going to fool around with you," the Chujiran said. "No long drawn-out brawls for me. You want me, come and get me." With that, he lifted his left hand palm up and moved the fingers in a beckoning gesture.
Gator Joe hissed and charged forward with his long snout gaping wide. Sheng shifted all his gralic force into strength, braced himself and smashed the rifle barrel across the side of his enemy's flat skull, reversing a backhand in a loop of the same motion that cracked the barrel against the other side of Gator Joe's head. The creature staggered wildly, taken by surprise, but remained standing. His arms dropped. Sheng drew the rifle barrel up and brought it down with both hands right on the top of Gator Joe's skull with an audible cracking noise.
That brought the creature down to his knees, still conscious, still trying to break his fall but dazed. Around them, the alligators stirred and shifted their weight as if uncertain what to do without orders from their master. Sheng shoved Gator Joe over onto his back, dropped down with one knee on the monster's chest and unscrewed the cap of the plastic bottle. He poured as much of the Alchemical potion down the fanged snout as he could, then clamped those jaws shut with both hands. Gator Joe choked and sputtered but was too stunned to resist.
"I've got him!" Argent called to the Feral Boys. "Come out with those torches!" When there was no response from the shack, he yelled, "Dammit, get out here or I swear I will throw this guy in there with you!"
Finally, the three Unseen Nation men emerged and managed to chase the alligators away with the torches. With commands from their lord, the reptiles were confused and uncertain. The fire thrust in their faces alarmed them and they drew back, then started loping away back toward the creek where they belonged.
Keeping his opponent pinned down, one knee on the monster's chest and holding the powerful arms still with all his strength, Sheng watched as Gator Joe began to transform. The snout shortened, the skin faded from armor plates to thick leathery hide. The change accelerated as it went. In a few minutes, with the three Feral Boys standing close by and staring, Gator Joe looked more and more human. No hair appeared, but the face lost its fanged muzzle and became recognizable despite the hide.
Fascinated by the metamorphosis taking place right in front of him, Sheng absently loosened his grip. Gator Joe convulsed, throwing the Chujiran off him, and heaved up onto his feet. He bellowed deep in his chest and swung around to lunge at the Feral Boys. The one named Amos Andrew let loose with both barrels and a full charge caught Gator Joe full in the chest. Even that leather-thick hide was ripped apart at such close range. The dying creature fell over backwards and his feet lifted up in the air before he went limp altogether.
Sheng slapped the shotgun out of the Feral Boy's grasp and let it fall to the ground. The three men gawked at him. "Listen closely," the Chujiran said. "Are you listening? Good. Get going. Get out of this area. Take any of your people that are in the swamp with you. I would say to head south into North Carolina if you can." Seeing that they were still disoriented by everything they had seen in that past few minutes, he continued, "I'm going to call the authorities. Get it? I'm calling the cops. If if you were you guys, I'd make myself scarce."
That sank in. All three of them took off at a full run. Facing an attack squad of alligators or a half-reptile hybrid was outside their ability to full digest, but they understood what it meant to them if the police showed up. Just before they were gone from sight, Argent shouted, "And don't send any more snakes into my office!"
Sheng Mo-Yuan knelt and examined the body. Just before death took hold, the transformation had completed itself. The body of Paul Corsones, naked except for the white kilt, stretched out with much of its chest gone. The Chujiran felt tired, and he was glad to realize it. When he suddenly felt weary under circumstances like this, it meant his body recognized that immediate threats were over and it was safe to step down. Extra strength from the gralic reinforcement faded. Seeing a fallen log over by the shack, he trudged over and plopped down. By now, it was daylight and birds were echoing their assorted calls back and forth.
Sitting there, thinking things over, Sheng decided he would claim he had heard the shotgun blast from a distance and had run up too late to pursue the suspects. Judging by footprints in the muddy earth, there had been a few of them. The dozens of fresh alligator tracks all over the area? He had no idea. Judging by the hex sign painted on the shack, some of those Feral Boys had been living there. Maybe they had been holding Corsones prisoner all this time.
Going over the his story, Argent pared everything down to a minimum. The less he said, the fewer details he offered, the less chance there was he would be tripped up by any discrepancy. Fingerprints on the shotgun were not his. He wiped the rifle barrel he had used as a bludgeon and tossed it over by the shack with the assorted junk and debris. He seriously doubted if the three Feral Boys would be apprehended. They came from a culture with two hundred years practice of disappearing. For a few minutes, he mulled over the realization that there was an unknown number of people across the country who had secret allegiance to the Unseen Nation. Maybe the KDF should look into that. He would discuss it with Sable the next time he saw her.
Sheng unclipped the Link from his belt. Even if there was no cell phone service out here, the microwaves used by the Trom device could reach the nearest town with no difficulty. First, he would call the local sheriff's department. Later, he knew he would have to phone the Corsones family and break the news to them about finding Paul like this. That was a responsibility he faced with regret. All the rest of it, all about Gator Joe and the murderous plan to raid nearby towns with squads of attack alligators, would remain untold.
10/10/2016
3/1-3/4/2011
I.
The cottonmouth was thirty inches long but it certainly seemed much larger when it slithered quickly in through the open door of the FIST FOR HIRE office. Mrs Corsones screamed and knocked over her chair as she scrambled to her feet. The black viper coiled and raised its triangular head, gaping its mouth wide to reveal the infamous white interior that gave the snake its most familiar nickname.
Stepping around from behind his desk, Sheng Mo-Yuan remained remarkably calm under the circumstances. "It's all right, it's all right," the young Chujiran said in a soothing voice. "He can't hurt me." The man known as Argent tugged back the sleeve on his suit jacket and approached the coiled snake, which had kept its mouth open in a threat display. Sheng reached down and blithely allowed the cottonmouth to strike. The fangs did not penetrate his bare skin or seem to even cause him discomfort. Seizing the black snake behind its head with one hand and further down the body with the body with his other hand, Argent straightened up and turned his back on his client.
"You might not want to watch this," he said. With a sudden twist, he snapped the snake's neck and held the body until it stopped convulsing. "There," he said. "All over now." Going to his closet, he got a trash can liner from its box on the shelf and placed the dead reptile into one of the bags. He dropped the bundle back in the closet and closed the door for the moment.
Striding over to his office door, he glared suspiciously up and down the empty hall. At one in the morning, his was the only office open in the entire building. Grudgingly satisfied that no one was lurking out there, he closed the door and returned to his desk. His client had righted her chair herself and gotten uneeasily seated where she had been when the snake had appeared.
At just thirty, Sheng Mo-Yuan was five inches over five feet tall, but trim and athletic. Most people took him for Northern Chinese because of his skin tones and eyelid fold, plus the coarse black hair and nearly flat profile. But something in his hawklike nose and high cheekbones contradicted that. The truth about his homeland was far stranger.
Tonight, Argent was wearing a dark brown business suit with a tan shirt and yellow tie. It was a bit flamboyant, but he was so confident and self-assured that he carried it well.
"It bit you, it bit you!" Mrs Corsones yelped. "I saw it. Don't you need a doctor? Should I call 911?!"
Sheng held out his hand to show the tawny skin was unbroken and without even a dent. "I'm fine. Relax. I can... how to explain? I can sort of tense up my skin so it's difficult to break."
"Oh." She calmed down. "Oh, a kind of Kung Fu trick like breaking boards with your hand?"
"Yeah, that's it," said Sheng as he went back around to sit down behind his desk. "When we're done, I'll escort you to a taxi and make sure you get home safely.You know, cottonmouths aren't found within a thousand miles of New York City. Someone brought that snake here and released it out in the hall."
"My heart is beating out of my chest," she told him, placing a thin hand over that heart as she said so. "When I looked up and saw that thing crawling in....!"
He studied her as she calmed down. Joan Corsones was in her late fifties, still a handsome woman with clean-cut features and large blue eyes under a crown of curly blonde hair. Judging by her tailored lilac-blue pantsuit and expensive watch, she was well off. The fingernails had been manicured recently, the make-up was understated but effective. Part of his mind was tempted to hike up his rates for once on this case, which realization made him feel he was getting to be more like the other detectives he knew.
In a light tone intended to calm her down, he said, "At least now we know you aren't imagining things. That snake didn't hitchhike to New York. Someone definitely means you harm."
"In a way, I'm glad that happened. I mean, it was awful and I'm still shaking but at least someone else has seen that I am somehow being.. well, menaced by reptiles."
Sheng Mo-Yuan threw a suspicious glance at the closed office door, feeling an urge to peek out in the hall again. "The good news is that there aren't many dangerous reptiles running around in the Northeast, just copperheads in the woods and you can avoid them."
"There's a problem," she replied. "I live in Virginia, near the Great Dismal Swamp. In the past few years, a healthy population of alligators has been thriving within a mile of my house."
"Alligators..." Argent said. "Well, that livens things up."
"First, I simply have to ask why you keep such strange hours? Your office is open from midnight until eight in the morning. Isn't that odd?"
"I mostly deal with weird and inexplicable cases," Sheng said. "What you might even call the supernatural. I soon realized most of my clients were desperately trying to reach me in the middle of the night, so I figured I might as well be available in those hours. To be honest, my business has boomed since I started staying open overnight."
Mrs Corsones managed a smile as she got hold of herself. "That's actually how I know about you, Mr Sheng. A few years ago, you helped a friend of mine who lives up here in New York. Nora Rendell. You caught a maniac who was stalking her, some nut named Mr Gallows, and got enough evidence to convict him. She could not say enough good things about you. She also told me some of the physical feats she saw you do. Honestly, superhuman feats from her description."
That made Argent preen. "Yes. Well, we all have our gifts. I've been lucky in that regard. When you called earlier, you said something about your son being missing for the past year?"
"Yes. Paul disappeared on his way home from the lab one night eleven months ago. This was when we suspect he was the first person to be a victim of what has become known as Gator Joe."
II.
After they had discussed the case and Sheng had charged a thousand dollar retainer, he signed Mrs Corsones on as a client. He did not charge for expenses except under extraordinary circumstances because his stipend as a KDF member gave him a comfortable income. Getting all the details about Paul Corsones' life and background, he escorted Mrs Corsones to the ground floor and out onto Canal Street. He rode with her in a taxi to her grown daughter's 11th floor apartment on 103rd Street. Sheng searched the apartment with the family's permission, went down and checked the building from the outside and satisfied himself that the apartment was safe at the moment.
Before leaving, Argent got assurances from everyone that either the daughter or her boyfriend would stay with Mrs Corsones for the immediate future and that one of them would accompany her if she left the building. This was vital. Seeing a pair of umbrellas in a stand, he also strongly recommended that they carry one of them whenever going outside, since they would be useful for keeping snakes at a distance. Everyone was still shaken by recent events and they agreed with all his suggestions.
Sheng told them he would be flying to Virginia on the first flight he could book, and he promised to find out what had happened to Paul and to hunt down Gator Joe. His self-assurance included a large portion of conceit, but he was so unselfconscious about it that few people found it offensive. The fact he could actually deliver on what he promised helped his reputation immensely.
Taking another taxi back down to Chinatown and the Hartwicke Building where his office was, Sheng Mo-Yuan tried to remember everything he had read about this 'Gator Joe' character. Most news sources and blogs treated the sightings as a gag or hoax. Only a few of the more lurid conspiracy sites gave Gator Joe any respect. The few photos that existed were so poor in quality as to be inconclusive either way.
The only thing that made Gator Joe worth taking seriously was that five people had gone missing in that area of the Great Dismal Swamp over the past year.
For an hour, Argent searched the hall outside his office, the staircase, the emergency exits, all without finding any convenient clues. 'No one ever drops a book of matches with their nightclub printed on it or a scrap of paper with an enigmatic phrase,' he thought sourly to himself. 'That would make it too easy.' Returning to his office, he saw that two tiny blue and green lights on the other side of the frosted glass panel were blinking steadily. Trom Girl had installed Trom proximity alarms as a favor. He deactivated them with a signal from his Link.
Written in black on the glass panel were the Chinese symbols for 'Chuan Lo Tsing' which could be translated "Hard Worker Fist" or "Fist For Hire." In English beneath that was written ARGENT INVESTIGATIONS and the office hours. He entered his office and flicked on the lights. Argent seriously considered cooking the snake that was lying in a bag in his closet. Back in his native Chujir, the people of his village ate whatever they could pin down and he would have enjoyed some grilled snake. But he had no kitchen here.
Sheng's legal address was 28 East 38th Street, the KDF building where he had a few rooms, but most of the time he could be found here. The office had a full bathroom with a shower stall and the couch was comfortable. By now it was getting close to five o'clock and light was showing at the windows over Canal Street. Dropping down onto the couch, he pulled out his Link and called the 24-hour booking agency the KDF employed. The first flight to Virginia he could manage to get would leave JFK at five-forty that afternoon and he took it. There, that was done.
Gator Joe... he tried to remember every detail he could without going online. For almost a year, people had reported seeing a man with the head and skin of an alligator stalking the edges of the Great Dismal Swamp. Five people had vanished in that period and remained missing without trace. One house had been found with its front door caved in and the interior trashed with nothing taken. There had been one report of two men sighting Gator Joe and taking a few shots at it with a hunting rifle but not doing any noticeable damage.
On the flight, he intended to do more research on developments, but he could not recall any recent appearances of the creature. For the moment, he decided to get some sleep and prepare himself. Hanging his jacket over the back of a chair, loosening his tie and kicking off the dress shoes, Sheng Mo-Yuan stretched out on the couch with a cushion behind his head. Taking a few deep breaths, he smiled at the thought of this new case and drifted off.
III.
Waking at eleven, he took a hot shower and shaved, although his body's attempts at growing a beard or mustache were vestigial, and changed into a lightweight summer suit of white material. He did not usually wear the KDF flexible armor under his clothes, although a few times it would have been useful. Most of the miniature tools and gadgets, like the lock-opener and the oxygen membrane and the pencil-thin thermite flares, went into the inner pockets he had ordered on his jackets. Sheng normally carried his Glock 17 in a waist holster, but he left it behind now because he would using an airline. He had found that obtaining a gun was quick and easy almost anywhere in the United States. Not that he was concerned, his real faith was in his own abilities.
Another habit he had acquired from being in the Kenneth Dred Foundation was keeping a travel bag always ready. Digging through his closet, he found a pair of khaki shorts and a denim vest, which he added to the bag. Sheng looked around his office to see if he had forgotten anything, slung the travel bag over one shoulder and stepped out into the hallway. As he closed the door behind him, he heard the familiar buzz and click of the Trom alarms arming themselves. For a moment, he felt a twinge that his Uncle Pao was not here to watch the office for him but the old man did enjoy two days off a week and this happened to be one of them.
An elderly couple were just being admitted into the legal advice office down the hall from him. The Hartwicke building had two floors of efficiency apartments at its top and an interesting assortment of businesses on its other stories. The ground floor was taken up mostly by a unisex barber shop and hair salon that seemed to be thriving. Sheng trotted down two flights of stairs, checked his box in the bank of tenant mailboxes by the front door. Only two utility bills were in there, and he felt they could wait until he returned.
After getting to the airport way too early and having to fidget for two hours, the flight was to Virginia was short and unremarkable. It was only four hundred miles, and he found himself walking through the terminal at Norfolk International Airport less than an hour and a half after leaving New York. Sheng claimed his travel bag and crossed the street directly to a car rental service. He settled on a black Jeep Renegade because he felt he might be driving away from paved roads before everything was over. Signing the papers and nodding politely to the explanation of terms took a while, but soon he was driving south on Route 13.
Sheng had never heard of the Great Dismal Swamp, a huge wildlife reserve that extended across parts of North Carolina into Virginia but he had studied maps and a brochure on the flight. Now his head was bristling with statistics and bits of information about cypress trees and marsh cattails and so forth. There were over a hundred thousand acres of the wetland itself, but he was sure he was not going to have to search it all. It was his experience that if he presented himself as a potential victim, the denizens of the Midnight War were more than happy to seek him out.
Sheng stopped at a diner for a fried chicken and biscuits dinner. Finding a roadside motel only a few miles from the Dismal Swamp State Park, Argent took a room for the next few days. He was informed at the desk that the Park itself would not be open to the public for another week, and he was sternly warned not to go wandering into the swamp by himself. Sheng meekly agreed and said he was just taking a break from a long road trip. The clerk gave him a sour look and the keys. "No women in the rooms, either," he growled. "We have enough trouble with the police."
The clerk did not seem like he would be a chatty source of information about Gator Joe or the missing people, so Sheng simply went to his room at the end of the motel and settled in. It was already getting dark this time of year. Once he was satisfied his movements would be concealed by the night, he changed into a plain black T-shirt with the open denim vest over it, khaki shorts and thick cotton socks. He wore the field suit boots that had been crafted individually for him. Not only were they were water-tight and fitted with steel-capped toes, there was a razor blade in a slit at the top of each boot. These had helped him escaped being tied up a few times.
In addition to his large travel bag, Argent had brought the small knapsack which he now shouldered on. It held a change of clothing, first aid kit, flashlight and binoculars and other useful items. He had two canteens of fresh water, one tied to each side of the knapsack. He had not picked up a handgun, so all he carried now was one of the survival knives with its seven-inch serrated blade and compass in the handle. But Sheng was not worried. His own body with its ability to shift from enhanced speed to extra strength to rock-hard density, was almost always all he needed.
Watching until there was no one in sight, Sheng Mo-Yuan slipped out of his motel room and raced across the two-lane road into the woods. He shifted the gralic force in his body into speed and raced through the sparse forest at a clip that would have broken records if anyone had been there with a stopwatch. Ten years of Kumundu training had honed him into peak athletic condition even in a normal state, but when he enhanced his speed he could have passed a whitetail deer without straining.
As he hurtled along, his night vision kicked in. Sheng had been expecting a full blown mangrove swamp like he had seen in the Everglades, but this was just a pine forest with slightly mushy soil. To his right was a good-sized creek that flowed sluggishly. The mosquitos and gnats did not bother him, he had found as a child that his skin automatically tensed up just enough when something like a bug tried to break it. After an hour, Argent slowed down to a brisk walk and started to take in the scenery. Living in Manhattan, he sometimes missed the mountains and fields of his native Chujir and being out here was making him a bit homesick. He dropped to a stroll, listening to the night birds and wondering what species they were. A bat fluttered overhead and he just heard part of its squeak.
Sheng reached around to unfasten his canteen and took a good sip before tying it back on. Maybe, when he got back to New York, he should close his office for a week and return to Chujir. He hadn't seen Tang Ming in yearsand he would like to visit her again. She had been his Sifu and the one who had guided him to leave Chujir for the outside world. As he was thinking this, a splash sounded from the stream to his right and immediately he was back in the present. Argent swung around.
Long black shapes were creeping up out of the water on short legs, heaving up onto the banks of the creek. Two in front of him, two behind him, forming a box with him in the center. Alligators, thirteen feet long, crawling to surround him in the gloom. Sheng focused the energy in his body to enhanced strength and curled his hands into tight fists. He had asked for this.
From the pines to his left lurched a strange figure, slightly over six feet high and wider than the average person. He was wearing only a rough kilt of ragged dirty cloth around his middle and his entire body was covered with hard scaly hide. The long snout opened wide and clashed shut. That alligator head was no mask.
IV.
"I'm going to go out on a limb here, tell me if I'm way off base," Sheng said, "But I think you might be Gator Joe?"
Although he did not move his jaws when he spoke, the creature said in an odd hollow voice, "You have entered my kingdom unbidden and your doom is sealed."
"Wow. How are you doing that?" asked Argent. "Are you sort of whistling your words? You know, like a parrot does?"
"Fool! Do you not realize your extreme peril?" hissed the uncanny voice from the monster. He raised his knobby fists and took a menacing step forward.
"I have to give you credit, you've got the classic evil villain dialogue down pat." Sheng glanced behind him to keep an eye on the two alligators approaching him from the rear. "Can't go wrong with that old-fasioned melodrama."
For a second, Gator Joe seemed confused by Argent's insolence. "Your death is near, Human. Can you not feel how close your final breath draws?"
"Boy, if I only had a nickel for every time I've heard that," Sheng said. Focusing every bit of gralic energy to reinforce his muscular strength, he suddenly crouched and seized the nearest alligator by the tail, braced himself with legs wide apart and swung the huge beast up off its feet entirely. He could not lift the eight hundred pound bulk overhead but he did manage to spin and fling it right into the other alligator a few feet away. The brutes rolled around together and started bellowing and snapping at each other.
"Stop that! Stop that at once!" Gator Joe hissed just as Sheng Mo-Yuan lunged forward and seized him by one scaly arm to hurl him to the ground in a hip throw. As the creature hit the marshy ground and tried to rise, Sheng slammed a side kick to the chest that sent Gator Joe rolling away.
In the next instant, the two alligators charged at Argent from the rear. The Chujiran instantly shifted his gralic focus to speed and leaped up over them to come down behind the reptiles. Now he wished he had taken the time to visit a pawn shop and pick up a gun, any gun. Reaching into an inside pocket of his vest, Sheng drew out two metal tubes not much thicker than pencils and popped off their caps. Instantly, the miniature flares erupted with a harsh actinic glare that stung the eyes to see. Every detail of the alligators and their master stood out vividly in that radiance.
"Better stay back if you don't want to get your noses burned!" he yelled. To his dismay, the four beasts lined up facing him, their jaws gaping to reveal impressive rows of teeth. Standing between them, shielding his eyes from the glare with the back of his hand, Gator Joe hissed, "Those will not protect you for long. You will be in our bellies within the hour."
"No fair," Sheng said, waving the flares from side to side. "I give a donation each year to the World Wildlife Fund." As he spoke, he was rushed by Gator Joe and brought down hard to the ground. Argent just had time to shift his gralic force to durability before he was being hit with a barrage of murderous blows thrown by fists as hard as rock. Even with his enhanced resilience, those punches were damaging.
Sheng tried to bring up his knees to get his legs under Gator Joe and fling him off but the monster was too heavy. The battering was starting to daze him. Sheng drove his elbow up across Gator Joe's throat and shoved, but with his resilience working, he only had normal Human strength and he could not budge the monster.
Savage pain shot through his lower right leg. He saw one of the alligators had clamped its jaws over his shin. Even with all his focus making his body resistant to harm, that bite was agonizing. Instead of trying to wrestle loose or defend himself against Gator Joe's pounding fists, Sheng desperately jammed a hand into his right vest pocket and came up with a metal ball the size of a cherry tomato. As he lobbed it up a foot high into the air, Sheng squeezed his eyes shut and turned his head away.
The miniaturized Trom dazzlers were not as powerful as the flash-bang grenades used by the military or by SWAT teams, but this one still detonated with a sharp blast that seemed as if lightning had struck right on top of them. Gator Joe was blinded and deafened and stunned by the concussion. With his dominance gone, the alligators shrank back in pained confusion. Argent managed to throw the massive creature off him and started crawling away.
At that point-blank range, even with his resilience, Sheng was not much better off than Gator Joe. Everything was a grey haze in front of his eyes and he could not hear at all. Remembering that he had come here across a mile of unbroken wetland with the creek now to his left, he got up and tried to run. His left leg gave out. He got up again and limped as quickly as he could into the blur that was all his vision could provide. Sheng's only comfort at the moment was that Gator Joe had been looking right at the dazzler when it had gone off and he would be in even worse shape.
For what seemed like hours but which could only have been minutes, Argent half ran and half hopped away, unable to put much weight on his left leg. He smacked right into a pine tree, bumping his already throbbing head, then kept going. At least he could not hear any signs of pursuit. Yet.
Stopping eventually to catch his breath, leaning up against a tree, Sheng gasped, "That... did not go as well as I had hoped." Already, though, the healing factor provided by the tagra diet was clearing his eyesight and he was starting to regain his hearing slightly. Tel Shai knights such as Sheng and his KDF teammates were extremely difficult to kill because the tagra enabled them to regenerate from damage that would permanently cripple normal Humans. Even though he was starting to recover, Sheng knew he was in no condition for another round with Gator Joe with or without the four giant reptiles.
A hand grabbed his arm from the other side of the tree. "Quick," whispered a heavily accented man's voice. "Come with us."
"Wait, what?" asked Argent, pulling weakly away.
"No time to talk," said the voice. "Come with us if you want to live."
V.
Hauled roughly through the woods for five or six miles, Sheng had come back to a normal condition by the time they slowed down. Even his leg had stopped hurting. Given a little time, Tel Shai knights could recover from anything short of immediately fatal traumas. As his vision cleared, Argent got a better look at the two men who were rushing him away from Gator Joe. They were short, wiry men, both wearing camoflauge pants and boots, one with a baggy white T-shirt and one bare-chested. Both had dark bronzed skin and long black hair, the shirtless one wearing it in a pony-tail.
As they slowed to catch their breath, Argent stepped around to face them both, fists on his hips. "Not that I don't appreciate the escort, fellas. But, correct me if I'm wrong, aren't you Feral Boys?"
"That is what white people call the Unseen Nation," agreed one of them. "The words do not bother us."
"Well, thanks again. I imagine most of what I think I know about your people is inaccurate. Still, aren't you supposed to be in Florida?"
The older Feral Boy, barechested and sporting the ponytail, snorted. "Most of our people are in Florida, but the Unseen Nation is everywhere. We live among you. Many of us do not even look like Indians anymore but our hearts are all loyal."
"So some of you guys are in Manhattan?" Sheng asked, shifting his stance in preparation that these two might attack him next. "Does that explain the cottonmouth that wandered into my office last night?"
"We can talk once we are in safe house," said the older Feral Boy. He started hiking briskly again, and Sheng followed the two of them. He had not mentioned that all he knew about the Feral Boys was from when Josef and Unicorn had fought them a few years earlier. That had been the time Unicorn had gotten Josef to use those goofy trick arrows. His teammates had had nothing good to say about the Feral Boys.
After another twenty minutes of walking, they came upon a miserable shack in a small clearing near a stream that branched off from the main creek. The place was only mismatched boards nailed together in a haphazard way, with chinks plugged by dried mud. Painted in red on the front was a strange hex symbol, what looked like a W with two horizontal lines through it... the Feral Boys totem. The roof was partly scraps of metal, everything from a sheet of corrugated aluminum to a dozen license plates. The door was just a tarp hanging over an opening. As the two Feral Boys approached, one gave a long two-part whistle that ended on an ascending note. The tarp was pulled back and a third native stuck his head out, brandishing a double-barreled shotgun.
"Here is what little safety we may find these days," said the ponytailed Feral Boy. They led Sheng into an interior which contained two mattresses on the floor, a folding table that held a burning oil lamp, and a tiny cast iron wood-burning stove in one corner. The pipe from the stove carried smoke up through a hole in the roof, although he had not noticed any sign of a chimney from outside.
The three Feral Boys remained standing. One propped his shotgun up against a wall and used some rocks to weigh the bottom of the tarp down in the doorway.
"I am Joseph Daniel," said the oldest man, the barechested one with the ponytail. He indicated the other two with a thumb. "Stephen James, Amos Andrew. Tell us your name."
"I'm Sheng Mo-Yuan. Sheng is my last name," the Chujiran said. "I guess I found out the hard way that this Gator Joe is no legend."
Joseph Daniel made a circuit of the single room, searching its corners and seeming satisfied. "We must watch for reptiles. Gator Joe is their lord. Anything that creeps or crawls, he sees what they see. They are his to command."
"Really. That explains why those alligators seemed to following his orders. I don't find that comforting, to be honest. If he can use everything from lizards to snakes as spies, he's going to be hard to hide from." Argent went over and glanced up at the hole in the roof that the stovepipe exited through. It was not a tight seal.
"We saw your fight with Gator Joe. You are no ordinary mortal. Amos Andrew, this man picked up a twelve-footer and threw it. He knocked down Gator Joe twice. He survived a beating from Gator Joe and a twelve footer biting his bare leg. How is this possible?"
"It's just my gift," Sheng said. "I was born this way. Weren't you guys stunned by that grenade that went off?"
"Lucky it is that we were circling around and were not looking at you at that moment," said the oldest Feral Boy. He went over and sat down wearily on one of the mattresses, everyone else turning to face him. "Seeing what you can do, I decided we should help you escape. An alligator can run forty miles an hour for a short time. By now they would have finished eating you."
"This gets better and better. Let's get some basics down. You guys live in this swamp, I take it. I'm sure the government doesn't know about that. What's the relationship between you and Gator Joe?"
The other two Feral Boys watched Joseph Daniel for a cue but their senior member did not answer.
"Come on, give me something to work with," Sheng insisted. "You know, I don't HAVE to go back out there and tackle this humanoid alligator whatever it is, I can just catch a plane home and go about my life. If you want my help, give me a little information."
"So be it. The Unseen Nation keeps its ways to itself," Joseph Daniel intoned. "But you may know this. Gator Joe was born a mortal man like you or I. We made him into what he is with the Velkandu potion passed down from the Fall of Ulgor at the beginning of the world."
"Oh, Alchemy again. That explains a lot right there." Argent began to pace back and forth. The skin on his leg had not been broken by the alligator's teeth and by now only a faint bruise showed on his calf. "Your tribe got hold of an Alchemy serum and has been using it. So you turned one of you into this Gator Joe? How often does this happen? Is there more than one of those jokers running around out there?"
"Not within my lifetime has a Gator Joe been created. Until now," Joseph Daniel said. "Our council down in the Everglades feel we need to grow in number here in the Dismal Swamp, and we should tend the alligators until they are a great herd. To guide the beasts, a Gator Joe was needed."
Vague rustling and scratching noises outside worried the men. Amos Andrew picked up his shotgun again and stood by the tarp over the doorway, head cocked as he listened. The other two gave Sheng an anxious glance.
"Next question," the Chujiran asked, "Is there a way to turn Gator Joe back again? To be honest, I think wrestling with him as a regular Human is a more appealing prospect than tackling the bruiser he is now."
"There is. We have this." Joseph Daniel held up a sixteen ounce plastic water bottle half-filled with a rank-looking amber liquid. "Not much is needed. But this Gator Joe is not as earlier ones are. He will not drink it willingly. He has gone rogue and has his own dreams of empire."
"Oh, we're back to bad news." Sheng found an old Marlin 30-30 lying in one corner. Its mechanism was badly rusted. "I don't think there's much chance of fixing this up. Yeah, what was that about Gator Joe's empire?"
"His control of reptiles is stronger than that of Joes before him," answered the older Feral Boy. "We have witnessed packs of alligators moving together, which they do not do in nature. Gator Joe has dropped hints he wants to start leading alligator raids on campgrounds and tourist groups."
"Alligator raids...!" Sheng muttered. "Damn. Of all the things the world needs, an army of commando alligators is definitely not one of them." He stood up and swung the detached barrel of the rifle experimentally. "This will help. Okay, I guess you should give me that antidote stuff. I'll make Gator Joe chug a bit and we'll put a stop to this alligator army scheme."
The three Feral Boys huddled and discussed the idea in what sounded like Portugese with longer words. Finally, Joseph Daniel came over and held out the plastic bottle. "We feel you are our best hope, Mo-Yuan Sheng.'
"Sheng Mo-Yuan," the Chujiran corrected him. "Family name first. Okay, I'll do it. This isn't my first rodeo in the Monster-Busting Event. Har har." He suddenly moved to pick something small up from a dank corner of the shack. "You say Gator Joe can see whatever a reptile under his control sees?"
"Yes. Why? What have you found?"
Sheng held up a tiny turtle, its legs flailing helplessly in the air. "There you go. I bet Joe is on his way here."
V.
Going outside, Argent saw no sign of any large animals in the immediate vicinity. Yet. Picking up a few dead branches off the ground, he went back in the shack. "But one more thing before I try slugging it out with a geek who has an alligator head. I want to find out what happened to a man who disappeared in this area last year. What can you guys tell me about Paul Corsones?"
Seeing guilty expressions flicker over their faces, Sheng blew up. "I'm trying to help you guys! I'm trying to keep innocent people from being killed and eaten by animals! Start giving me some co-operation here."
Finally, Joseph Daniel mumbled, "Gator Joe can not be one of our Unseen Nation. He must be an outsider."
"Oh, come on. You're telling me that Corsones has been Gator Joe all this time?" The Chujiran made a disgusted noise. "You wonder why you Feral Boys have a bad reputation? Never mind that now." He handed out four branches, the thickest about the size of a softball bat and the other two thinner. "These seem dry enough. Make some torches. You've got oil in that container for the lamp on the table. Rip up your shirts if nothing else is available and wrap the material around one end. I'll take one."
Keeping the rifle barrel, Sheng stood holding the tarp open and glared out at the night. "I swear..." he muttered to himself. He took stock of what he still carried on him. The small knapsack still strapped across his shoulders held mostly spare clothing. In his denim vest were two more pencil-sized flares, another dazzler grenade and a smoke/tear gas capsule. He also had a flashlight, one of the oxygen membranes and a few other miniature gimmicks. The lightweight vest did not carry as much as a full field suit jacket could. The seven-inch survival knive was sheathed at his belt but he didn't think it would be that effective against either the gators or their humanoid master.
In a few minutes, the Unseen Nation men had fashioned workable torches. Sheng chose one and took an ordinary cigarette lighter from one of the dozen inner pockets of his denim vest. "Hold on to this," he said as he handed it to Daniel Joseph.
Peering outside again, Argent saw faint streaks of pink in the eastern sky. Dawn was not far off. As he looked about, long black shapes could be seen moving through the underbrush and between the pines. He gripped the rifle barrel with both hands and smiled grimly. Back in New York, he often complained about being bored when only mundane criminal cases turned up. He always said he wanted to deal with more weird, dangerous Midnight War events. His wish had been granted.
"The gators are taking up their positions," he told the Feral Boys. "Listen, before the party starts, I need to know about that snake that poked its head in my door yesterday."
"Many of our Unseen Nation are still doing as Gator Joe commands," answered Daniel Joseph. "Defying him is dangerous. He has killed with his hands and with his teeth some of our people who stood up to him."
"We three are running from him," added another of the Feral Boys. "This Gator Joe has gone too far. He is a menace to everyone."
"You created a monster and now you're afraid of it," Sheng scoffed. "Like that hasn't happened before to others. All right. I'm going out. Stand by for now."
Lighting his own torch, Argent stepped out into the dim grey haze just before dawn. Facing the shack in a semi-circle were a dozen alligators, all watching with such stillness that they seemed like statues. They had surrounded the hovel at a distance of forty feet, which Sheng knew they could close in a heartbeat. He bent and jammed the end of the torch into the muddy earth so its flickering light brought the whole surreal scene. Sheng held the rifle barrel up behind his right arm so that it could not be seen from in front.
He did not see Gator Joe. Raising his voice, he called out, "Paul! Paul Corsones!"
That brought the reptile-headed man out from the shadows between the pine trees. Wearing only the ragged kilt, the torchlight playing over his scaly hide, Gator Joe stalked through the formation of his creatures and stared. "What is that name to you? Why do you speak it?"
"Because that is who I'm talking to," Sheng answered. "If there is anything of Paul Corsones left in there, I want you to know that your mother and sister both sent me here to find out what happened to you. What do you want me to tell them?"
The grotesque being did not reply at once. "The man you name died a long time ago. But you will not be able to bring any messages. My army has developed a liking for human flesh! I smell more of your kind in that hut. We will feast well tonight."
"Fair warning, I'm not going to fool around with you," the Chujiran said. "No long drawn-out brawls for me. You want me, come and get me." With that, he lifted his left hand palm up and moved the fingers in a beckoning gesture.
Gator Joe hissed and charged forward with his long snout gaping wide. Sheng shifted all his gralic force into strength, braced himself and smashed the rifle barrel across the side of his enemy's flat skull, reversing a backhand in a loop of the same motion that cracked the barrel against the other side of Gator Joe's head. The creature staggered wildly, taken by surprise, but remained standing. His arms dropped. Sheng drew the rifle barrel up and brought it down with both hands right on the top of Gator Joe's skull with an audible cracking noise.
That brought the creature down to his knees, still conscious, still trying to break his fall but dazed. Around them, the alligators stirred and shifted their weight as if uncertain what to do without orders from their master. Sheng shoved Gator Joe over onto his back, dropped down with one knee on the monster's chest and unscrewed the cap of the plastic bottle. He poured as much of the Alchemical potion down the fanged snout as he could, then clamped those jaws shut with both hands. Gator Joe choked and sputtered but was too stunned to resist.
"I've got him!" Argent called to the Feral Boys. "Come out with those torches!" When there was no response from the shack, he yelled, "Dammit, get out here or I swear I will throw this guy in there with you!"
Finally, the three Unseen Nation men emerged and managed to chase the alligators away with the torches. With commands from their lord, the reptiles were confused and uncertain. The fire thrust in their faces alarmed them and they drew back, then started loping away back toward the creek where they belonged.
Keeping his opponent pinned down, one knee on the monster's chest and holding the powerful arms still with all his strength, Sheng watched as Gator Joe began to transform. The snout shortened, the skin faded from armor plates to thick leathery hide. The change accelerated as it went. In a few minutes, with the three Feral Boys standing close by and staring, Gator Joe looked more and more human. No hair appeared, but the face lost its fanged muzzle and became recognizable despite the hide.
Fascinated by the metamorphosis taking place right in front of him, Sheng absently loosened his grip. Gator Joe convulsed, throwing the Chujiran off him, and heaved up onto his feet. He bellowed deep in his chest and swung around to lunge at the Feral Boys. The one named Amos Andrew let loose with both barrels and a full charge caught Gator Joe full in the chest. Even that leather-thick hide was ripped apart at such close range. The dying creature fell over backwards and his feet lifted up in the air before he went limp altogether.
Sheng slapped the shotgun out of the Feral Boy's grasp and let it fall to the ground. The three men gawked at him. "Listen closely," the Chujiran said. "Are you listening? Good. Get going. Get out of this area. Take any of your people that are in the swamp with you. I would say to head south into North Carolina if you can." Seeing that they were still disoriented by everything they had seen in that past few minutes, he continued, "I'm going to call the authorities. Get it? I'm calling the cops. If if you were you guys, I'd make myself scarce."
That sank in. All three of them took off at a full run. Facing an attack squad of alligators or a half-reptile hybrid was outside their ability to full digest, but they understood what it meant to them if the police showed up. Just before they were gone from sight, Argent shouted, "And don't send any more snakes into my office!"
Sheng Mo-Yuan knelt and examined the body. Just before death took hold, the transformation had completed itself. The body of Paul Corsones, naked except for the white kilt, stretched out with much of its chest gone. The Chujiran felt tired, and he was glad to realize it. When he suddenly felt weary under circumstances like this, it meant his body recognized that immediate threats were over and it was safe to step down. Extra strength from the gralic reinforcement faded. Seeing a fallen log over by the shack, he trudged over and plopped down. By now, it was daylight and birds were echoing their assorted calls back and forth.
Sitting there, thinking things over, Sheng decided he would claim he had heard the shotgun blast from a distance and had run up too late to pursue the suspects. Judging by footprints in the muddy earth, there had been a few of them. The dozens of fresh alligator tracks all over the area? He had no idea. Judging by the hex sign painted on the shack, some of those Feral Boys had been living there. Maybe they had been holding Corsones prisoner all this time.
Going over the his story, Argent pared everything down to a minimum. The less he said, the fewer details he offered, the less chance there was he would be tripped up by any discrepancy. Fingerprints on the shotgun were not his. He wiped the rifle barrel he had used as a bludgeon and tossed it over by the shack with the assorted junk and debris. He seriously doubted if the three Feral Boys would be apprehended. They came from a culture with two hundred years practice of disappearing. For a few minutes, he mulled over the realization that there was an unknown number of people across the country who had secret allegiance to the Unseen Nation. Maybe the KDF should look into that. He would discuss it with Sable the next time he saw her.
Sheng unclipped the Link from his belt. Even if there was no cell phone service out here, the microwaves used by the Trom device could reach the nearest town with no difficulty. First, he would call the local sheriff's department. Later, he knew he would have to phone the Corsones family and break the news to them about finding Paul like this. That was a responsibility he faced with regret. All the rest of it, all about Gator Joe and the murderous plan to raid nearby towns with squads of attack alligators, would remain untold.
10/10/2016