Still figuring out this serial posting thing, and realized Ch. 1 was too long for one post. Splitting it in half now, and Chapter 2 should be up shortly. 

 

Chapter 1 part 2: Murderous Mermaids

Aisling, March 2049

Near Grand Marais, MN

 

“I still look human, right?” I whispered, ducking and checking my reflection in my pickup’s rearview mirror. Round ears, blond braids, old wool jacket, clunky Sorrel boots – my Northwoods chic was fully intact.

“Yuppers, you’re passing,” he said. “To anyone that don’t got a nose, anyway.”

“How can a scent be sparkly?” I asked him, keeping an eye on Coral and my voice low. She giggled against the guy like she was just as drunk as he was, something pretty much impossible given her toxin tolerance. She glanced at me, and her smile showed too many teeth. I sighed. This could take a while. “Or green, for that matter?”

Nacho shrugged his furry shoulders and pulled a joint out of his vest pocket.

“English don’t got the right words for it,” he said. “And we Rax haven’t figured out our own. Yet.”

“Yeah… Sorry I can’t spend more time helping you guys,” I said, my eyes following Coral. The man looked at her as if he wondered how her flesh might taste hot off a grill.

“Eh, it’s not your fault Grandma bit you and got irradianced,” he said, lighting his joint and taking a long drag on it. “Shit happens.”

“I was a dumbass little kid,” I said. “Really thought that finding a raccoon in the garage meant a cool adventurer like in Guardians of the Galaxy had come to befriend me, not that she was looking for a warm nest to have her babies. Didn’t know about my magic then, and I wanted talking animal friends so bad…”

We stared at the sky for a bit. Empty night stared back, stars blazing.

“Ya ever wonder where the ships go?” Nacho asked, taking a drag on his joint and blowing the smoke out through his little black nose. “Or where they’re coming from?”

“Probably the Stolen Cities,” I said. “Or somewhere further south.”

“Just ‘bout everything is further south from here. ‘Cept Canada. I mean, Out There,” he said, gesturing at the sky.

“Dunno. Mom said their old world is an asteroid belt now. Wouldn’t tell me more after she saw me getting into sci-fi, ‘cuz she thought I’d be too tempted to try making contact.” 

“If they find you, they will take you. And true monsters walk among them.”

I shivered at the memory of her words. Mom had taught me monster-hunting. She knew what she was talking about.

The man slipped an arm around Coral’s waist. She was relatively tall, 5’8”, with rock star looks, but seemed tiny and fragile against him. Her ability to look helpless and vulnerable, when it suited her, was unmatched. He brushed her hair off her shoulder and murmured, too low for human ears to catch, “C’mon, sweetheart. Let’s go down by the rocks. I wanna make you scream, and no one will hear you over the wind.”

I gritted my teeth and fixedly didn’t watch them.

The bar’s door cracked open, and the last two bar staff and our other bandmate finally came out. The girls headed for a shared cabin bike, basically a large enclosed tricycle, pushed it up to the road, and pedaled off home. Rigs walked over, awkwardly carrying his keyboard in one hand and Coral’s guitar in the other. I opened the passenger door and pulled the seat forward, and he heaved them into the minuscule back seat with my bass. DJ gear he hadn’t used that night filled the foot space, leaving just enough room for Nacho to have some space by the window.

“You see Coral come out?” he asked, glancing at me. Rigs mostly took after his Hindu grandmother, with black hair and big brown eyes, but had his Scandinavian-Minnesotan family’s cold tolerance: he was wearing sandals and an old plaid flannel over a Hawaiian shirt and long Bermuda shorts.

“She’s down by the lakeshore with some creeper,” I said. “Guess she got hungry?”

“The barback had a vibe. Admitted he strangled and ate three women over the winter when her whammy got him bragging,” he said. “A hitchhiker, a Native woman traveling up to Canada, and some grandmother living alone in the backwoods. His eyes looked like black holes when he told her.”

“Perfect prey, then,” I said. My friend mostly fed on a certain sort of monster, but had earned her serial killer name after a local cult leader incurred her wrath. A Jane Doe escaped the compound where he’d been trying to breed his way out of the apocalypse, dying of the ruptured ectopic pregnancy his beliefs wouldn’t let her treat. When she stumbled out of the snow, she had barely enough breath to say where she’d come from. 

Janie’s Vengeance made sure his death took longer than the girl’s.

We both stared at the lakeshore for a bit, united in somber silence. She was escalating, killing more frequently. So far all her victims had more than earned their fates, but…

“So, op status?” Rigs asked, leaning against the pickup.He had an eidetic memory and would note everything for the Underhill Railroad’s encrypted records. I was a Conductor for the organization – a field agent – and he was the northland’s joint Station Manager and Postmaster, organizing ops and running things behind the scenes. “Did you find our Runners?”

Runners were the people fleeing death or enslavement. Those of us who could pass did what we could to help them. 

“Smooth enough, but had a weird complication,” I said. “Opened my landbond all the way to find the new fae. Had some unintended side effects.”

Landbonds were a magical connection between someone like me and the lands and people under their protection. Sometimes mine let me feel the fae and monsters across the area I guarded. 

“Oh?” he asked.

“I’ll get to it. My scan found the newly Changed family: parents with a baby and toddler, two miles up the shore. They’d been chained in a kennel behind the bounty hunter’s home, surrounded by iron and loose dogs. I glamoured the dogs and gave ‘em drugged treats. Thank your grandma for the biscuits, by the way; they snarfed them right up.”

“She put a full cup of bacon grease in ‘em,” he said, grinning. Rigs’ grandma had gotten stranded in Minnesota during a badly timed visit from India in early 2021. An attempt to overthrow the government that January became the first wave of Redcap Changes when the insurrectionists turned into cannibal trolls. Travel shut down, a couple years of civil war followed, and when things were finally starting to settle, the Elsecomers invaded and stole the world’s great cities. Rigs and I were both born around then. His parents later died in a redcap raid and his grandmother ended up raising him. Every kind of food she made was amazing; to Midwestern kids raised to think salt was a spice, her cooking, even lacking access to traditional flavors, was a revelation. 

“There were a couple vehicles on site,” I continued. “I found car keys for an old two-door Toyota, and a couple of portable fuel tanks in an outbuilding. I loaded up blankets, one tank, and as much food as I could scrounge into the car. Then I improvised some explosives and a fuse for the other tank, set that in the bounty hunter’s outdoor sauna, and slashed the tires on his Jeep. Figured that’d do as both a distraction and a warning. Unlocked the family and told them to leave as soon as the dogs fell asleep. They drove past here a few minutes ago. They’ll meet us outside St. Cloud Saturday evening. Oh, I found some work papers and a minor treasure in the garage, where the guy had his job stuff. An envelope was marked “urgent”, but I haven’t checked anything out.”

“Oh yeah?” he asked. I tapped the pickup’s welded-on lockbox, then pulled open a drawer that looked like it was just a seam in the welding.

“Here they are. I also took his law enforcement walkie-talkie and four consumer-grade backups, with double A’s and two solar chargers. They’re stuffed inside the passenger seat. Dibs on one set.”

“Fantastic. Oh, they’ve kept this hush-hush,” Rigs said, scanning the papers. “There’s some sort of stone giant up around the Brule River. The sketch is straight out of a book of Norwegian folktales. Says it crawled out of the Devil’s Kettle last week and it’s been hunting up and down the river gorge since. Ate a couple people two days ago. They’re organizing a big military thing – National Guard, Strangeling Brigade, and every local who can hit the side of a barn with his shotgun is coming up to hunt it.”

“Sounds messy,” I said, gritting my teeth at the thought of that prison labor brigade anywhere near people under my protection.

“What’s the Devil’s Kettle?” Nacho asked, eyes wide.

“There’s a waterfall on the Brule River where half the river goes into an underground cave,” Rigs said. “Nothing that goes in has ever come out. ‘Cept, maybe whatever this thing used to be.”

“Did it sound like a strangeling, or something from…?” I asked. Strangelings were humans turned fae by contagious Elsecomer magic, usually after eating Radiance-tainted food, like the family I’d just rescued. They Changed, warping into creatures from myth, legend, or general weirdness, and the process, or Cascade, sometimes awoke a Hunger in them. They were killed on sight or captured and made prisoner labor for monster hunting. Their kids… disappeared. The family was only a couple days into the process, but the irradianced jerky I’d left with them ought to hold them till they got to safety. Sometimes monsters just crawled out of caves or wandered out of the fog, though. 

“Dunno. It already ate two people,” he said.

I hadn’t experienced the Hunger myself, being born what I was, and Rigs had gone technomancer with his Change – he’d spent a while sucking on live electrical wires and bathing in radio waves. We weren’t sure what had triggered his slow Cascade, but it was already starting when we met in 8th grade. Coral’s dad had force-fed her something that triggered her Change. And me? My mom had been soaked in elven magic before I was born, so contaminated by it I was born able to shape its flows and even the Change itself. We could all pass for human because of that – me as a lanky blonde Northern chick; Rigs as a skinny half-Indian nerd; and Coral a crimson-haired siren, her heritage a mix of Irish and something from sultry climes and turquoise waters. Her Hunger was more complicated than any other I’d helped manage. She needed music like it was oxygen, and sang with groups ranging from Celtic trad sessions to our dive-bar punk rock, and even a Catholic choir. 

And a few times a year, she had to eat the magic of monsters.

“Brule River… isn’t there an owlie tribe up there?” I asked. The man on the shore had one hand slowly closing around Coral’s neck. My ears twitched as she started thrumming, a hum too low for human ears to hear. She whispered something, glanced at us, and they stepped out of view behind the saloon.

“Yeah, Stone Nest Tribe, I think,” Rigs said, glancing after Coral and shuddering. “So. Shall we?”

“Sure, why not. Got cash? We might need to buy some more firewood for the truck on the way back.”

“Yep, no prob. We had a good crowd tonight.”

“Oh, we’ll need some major look-away magic running. The complication I mentioned? An Elsecomer ship buzzed the parking lot a few minutes before Coral came out, then went and stared at the fire I set. They’re probably still zooming around. I think that ping I sent through the land magic caught their attention.”

“There was an actual spaceship out here?” he exclaimed. “I had the oddest feeling for a minute. And you didn’t call me to come see it!?!”

“Oh yeah, come on outside, Rigs, let’s get vaporized together!”

“A spaceship, Dusty! Up close!”

I used different nicknames with virtually every group I was a part of. A neighbor kid started calling me “Dusty Books” in my teens, when I told her I’d rather read than play team sports; it had stuck with my friends.

“You would have done something dumb like try to glitch the ship so you could molest the wreckage,” I shot back. “Don’t even try to argue.”

“We could learn a lot from some nice wreckage…”

Elsecomer tech was seriously different from what we still clung to locally, but Rigs and his technomancer network were doing their damnedest to figure out every scrap we could get our hands on. 

He pursed his lips and crossed his arms. 

“Well, if you just had a UFO encounter while drinking in your pickup with a raccoon,” he said, “you never get to argue again when I call you a redneck.”

The raccoon giggled, then smothered it.

“Nacho, can I get a refill?” I asked while glaring at Rigs.

“Comin’ up!”

“So… was it some sort of scout ship?” Rigs asked, sighing with longing as he glanced up at the sky.

“Looked like a party cruise. Fuckers parked right over the bar and sat in the air laughing at us while Nacho and I freaked the fuck out. They had champagne and fancy clothes and everything. One guy was in a Freeport Guard uniform, but the rest just looked like rich assholes.”

Elsecomers took Minneapolis and St Paul, along with most of the world’s major cities, during the invasion. They remained occupied, with a fifty-mile radius no-go zone surrounding them, the Edgelands. They didn’t allow humans or modern weapons in, but strangelings were allowed if they followed the no-firearms rule. A couple of Freeport Guards had once stopped Coral and I over a flare gun in her backpack, but didn’t want to deal with our canoe full of strangeling kids and let us off with a warning. My glamours had held then too. 

And part of me had wished they’d failed then too.

Owlies said the Twin Cities were now called the Freeport of Many Waters. We out-staters just called them the Stolen Cities.

There was a scream from behind the saloon. The man Coral had lured fled down the shore and out onto the ice. He was fifty feet offshore when it gave out. She followed him, movements leisurely, predatory, inhuman, the frozen sheet perfectly solid beneath her feet. He raised an arm out of the water, reaching for help. His winter clothes started saturating, pulling him down. When his fingers were scrabbling at the edge of the ice, she knelt over him, as if going for a kiss. Her mouth almost touched his as she inhaled his last breath.

And then the depths dragged him under. 

A couple minutes later, Coral strutted up to the parking lot, wiping her mouth. I took one look and handed her my jar of ‘shine. She took it gratefully, sipped, swished a mouthful around, and spat in the snow.

“So, all good?” Rigs asked. “Mermaid hungers satisfied?”

“Yep,” she said, smiling, her teeth gleaming bright. “No cleanup necessary. Like the song says, the Lady holds tight to her dead.”

Nacho’s ears pinned back.

“’Superior’s too cold for bacterial decomp,” I explained. “Bodies sink and don’t come up. Fish and eels will take care of the rest. Okie dokie, gimme a minute to get the gasifier going.”

I hopped back into the pickup bed and stirred up the coals in the gasifier barrel, then started feeding in firewood. The know-how to get a pickup running on the gases let off when wood turns to charcoal was first developed back in World War 2, and now powered a lot of trucks around the Northland. Modern tech was erratic these days; the Elsecomers blocked all wireless beyond public TV and radio channels, and a shit-ton more got damaged in their initial invasion.

The Millenium Partridge was first assembled in 1977, but was mostly replacement parts now. My ride had all the Falcon’s mechanical problems, but absolutely nothing in common with a swift bird of prey. Driving uphill, it made weird pounding sounds similar to a ruffed grouse in mating season, and frequently froze up just like an idiot forest chicken. Fuel was cheap, though, since I could chop it myself.

“You wanna drive?” I asked Rigs. “I’ve got a bit too much whiskey on my breath if we get pulled over.”

He rolled his eyes, took my keys, and hopped into the driver’s seat.

“If you’re too drunk to drive, maybe you’re too drunk to hunt a troll?” he said.

“Eh, I’ll be sober by the time we find it,” I said, boosting Nacho into the back seat and clambering in the passenger side after Coral. “Curse my fae liver. Let’s do this.”

Coral scrunched into me as Rigs shifted gears and pulled out of the parking lot.

“You sure?”

“My sex life just hit its lowest low ever back in the bar’s green room. A monster hunt will remind me I have a purpose in life beyond enabling freakin’ idiots. On a side note, I think I’ll go back to banging only girls for a while.”

“Please, no,” Rigs said. “Your taste in women scares me.”

I grinned.

“What happened?” Coral asked. “I saw Mikey leave all flustered and then you came out and swigged a quarter bottle of vodka. Fae liver or no, that can’t be good for anyone.”

“I shouldn’t kink shame…” I started, then shook my head. “Fuck that. Mikey’s into puppets.”

“Oh my gawd, what?” she exclaimed.

“Besides singing for the Jackalopes, Mikey now has a side gig doing children’s birthday parties. Had one earlier in the evening. Anyway, when my blindfold fell off, he was miming things with a hand puppet. I laughed so hard I think his dick inverted.”

Rigs turned and stared at me.

“This is why I choose to stay single,” he said. “My granny’s multi-armed gods, but you two make me glad I don’t date.”

“No one’s dating here,” I said, far too aware of how dangerous romantic liaisons could be for all three of us. “But a girl’s still got needs. Like right now, I need to kill that giant before those asshats in Strangeling Brigade come up here and start rooting around for anything fae or Else or whatever. Nobody should have to live in a prison and hunt their own kind, and those fuckers are way too industrious about it.”

“They’ll probably be chasing us in a couple days anyway,” Rigs said. “Oh, got another call for help through the grapevine. Beyond the family you saved tonight, we’ll have at least one more Runner for some daring outlaw renegades to sneak into the Edgelands on Saturday.”

“Woohoo,” Coral said, grinning. “Let’s be bad guys!”

“We need more intel on their team,” I said. “That guy in Strangeling Brigade with magic like mine? While he’s busy chasing us, I want you to hit any computers they have in the Box and get everything on their personnel.”

“Will do,” he said.

“Cool. Say, got any speakers along that run on batteries?”

“Sure. Does the Northland’s very own redneck superhero need some beats while she’s fighting trolls?”

I grinned, anticipation buzzing in my veins.

“You betcha.”

____

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