Mike and the Mechanics

It took a heck of a lot longer to get my ass back up to where the Agent Murphy and his men were waiting, but I managed it eventually.

I was pretty pissed for having gotten ambushed in the first place, so my mood was grim to say the least. I had little patience for the alternating shocked and sympathetic looks I was getting from those knuckleheads. They were sympathetic because they just couldn’t comprehend that I wasn’t in any pain from my injuries, but shocked with the idea that something down...there...kicked my ass so thoroughly.

They could easily see the mangled end of my arm where the metal infused bone was twisted and crushed as if it had been caught in the grip of a very powerful vise. The vise that got me had some nasty teeth and powerful claws. My one leg was only a little better off. My foot was still connected, but was twisted at a sickening angle. The flesh and ‘muscle’ in my lower calf had been shredded and I was missing the knee cap in that damn leg now, which meant that I couldn’t support any weight on it without the whole thing collapsing on itself.

You shoudl have seen Murphy’s face when he saw me though. He went for his normal arrogant air of superiority that he had in greater measure than most FBI agents, to a ghostly white, he was almost stammering when I emerged from the manhole cover into dead gypsy’s place.

“W-wh-what happened to you Agent Bones?” He asked while trying to help me up off the floor, grunting with exertion.

I pushed him and another agent away with my stubby arm, which they recoiled from rather quickly. “Well, let’s just say I found our guy, sort of.”

“What do you mean, sort of? Didn’t the killer do this to you?”

“Oh yeah, it did. I definitely found our perp. The ‘sort of’ referred to the fact that I don’t think it qualifies as a ‘guy’.” I managed to scramble to my one good leg. I started hobbling towards the exit.

“A woman did this to you?” He followed along, motioning his agents to move ahead while he kept by my side.

“No, let’s just leave it as an ‘it’. Whatever the Hell this thing is, it isn’t human.”

He looked real worried at that assessment. “Is it some kind of animal?”

I was getting tired of this game of 20 questions. “Look, if I knew what the Hell this thing was I’d tell you. But I’ve never seen anything like it. I think you’ve got yourself one nasty supernatural critter running around there. It fucked me up pretty good, but I did some major damage to it as well. I don’t know if that thing will heal up or not, but I need to get a repair job before I go looking for it again.”

“Do you think I should send some men down there to finish it off?”

I looked him dead in the eye. “Only if you want to be writing to their families and arranging funerals for the scraps that thing would leave after it slaughtered and ate them. I’m telling you, this is not your average human killer, or a even a rabid animal of some sort. This thing is a fucking monster. The kind of monster that will give you nightmares for the rest of your damn life. If you send any of your agents down there before I am ready to go again, I’ll have your fucking hide if that thing doesn’t take it before I get the chance.”

That shut him up for a bit.

In blessed silence, I stumbled my way out of the poor old gypsy’s place and dragged my leg up the steps to the worried looks of the agents waiting outside.

Murphy had one more stupid question. “Do you need to go to a...hospital or something?”

I sighed, held up my stump for examination.

He looked at it briefly, winced and looked away, as did the rest of the agents.

“No. I need a ride out to my motor home. I’ll call headquarters and see if they have any qualified mechanics down in Quantico and some spare damn parts. I’ll write up some after action reports from my motor home and send them to you by e-mail or fax. I’ll also ask if you can get someone to bring my motorcycle out to the place for when I am repaired. Is that possible?”

“Uh yeah. I think we can manage that.”

“Good, then let’s get moving.”

* * *

The ride back to my motor home was a quiet one. Murphy took me back himself, leaving his other agents to secure the scene and erect what he hoped would be some barriers to that thing getting loose through the gypsy’s house. I was lost in thought in about who I could contact to find out more about this thing, he had finally gotten the clue that I wasn’t in a talkative mood.

Once I was back inside the motor home, I shut the door without inviting him inside. I did tell him that he would get my report in the morning. Then it was time to make some phone calls, first back to Quantico, and then to my friends in the Organization of Responsible Casters, or ORC for short.

In Quantico I was able to get ahold of my most immediate boss, a short, stocky fellow named Mike Hauser. I had only met Mike a couple of times in person, but he seemed like a well meaning guy who was trying to learn about the program that Drake had created.

To my surprise, Mike told me that he had already acquired a supply of spare parts (I think some were scaveneged from Greg’s body, but some were just spares) from stuff that Drake had left behind and that he had assembled a small team of technicians to study all of the diagrams and specifications that Dr. Geek had so kindly left behind in the NecroLab. He was eager to bring the team up and get a chance to work on me.

Luckily, he was able to get a truck requisitioned and was planning to head up the next morning.

After I finished with Mike, it was time to give the Professor a call.

Jim was very interested in the encounter and asked if I could dump any of my optical images into a computer file and send them his way, so he could run some comparative searches on the image of the thing. I spent the better of the evening figuring out to do that with one hand and no patience, but I was able to link to my PowerBook and record a couple of good still images and zip them off to him.

Then it was time to face the music. I decided to give Ravyn a call. If there was anyone who might know who would have knowledge of something like this, it would be her. Of course, calling her meant having to listen to a scolding of epic proportions, but sometimes even zombies just have take their medicine...