Chapter 1: Edgelands Patrol

Excerpt from Strangeling v1
Buy here

The sky stretched brilliant blue above my Jeep, its flawless dome cracked by a solitary launch contrail. The craft creating it gleamed through my binoculars, its odd organic lines as elegant as they were alien. It rose, arcing up to Beyond. The ship seemed almost to dance as it soared away from the stolen Twin Cities.

Spacecraft… damn. The Elsecomers got the dream.

One of my men started explaining to the new kid about how we record intel on the invaders, as well as the cryptids we were currently patrolling for.

…and left us the nightmare.

The sight of a ship was nothing new; we saw odd lights and trails in the sky all the time, and this launch was on a predictable schedule. Earth’s invaders didn’t deign to communicate with us locals, so it was hard to guess what they were up to, but we tracked their activities. They seemed to have spacecraft, anyway, and some kind of weird, mutagenic sorcery. Or perhaps it was technology indistinguishable from such; easiest to just call it magic. Regardless, it had broken the world, wrecking our best tech and Changing people into beings out of myth and folklore.

The air began to somehow thrum, something no one else in the troop ever admitted to feeling. There was a sudden flash of light at the tip of the contrail, and the ship disappeared, as if it had pierced the surface tension of reality and… well, I had no idea, really.

Off they go. Wonder where?

Some bird I didn’t recognize started singing across the river, its haunting trill somehow as alien as the starship.

Must be nice to come and go at will, I thought, getting back into the Jeep’s shotgun seat and putting away the binoculars. I straightened the sleeves on my army uniform, trying to ignore their prison-orange trim. There was no more coming and going for me. Strangeling Brigade was a forced-labor division, kept away from humanity for everyone’s safety. My pointed ears and the antlers growing from my forehead made it instantly obvious why I’d been enlisted.

Still army life, though.

I heard Lieutenant Birch, team lead for the human side of Division 51, confirming the launch in his voice recorder. We didn’t patrol alone. The human soldiers were all under strict orders to shoot the second it looked like any of us strangelings were going bad. I reinforced the importance of those orders at least once a month.

I need that failsafe.

Deep in the darkness inside me, something shifted and growled at that thought.

Not that I’m certain they’d actually follow the order…

Birch finished his notes and waved that he was done.

In the sky above us, the wind began dispersing the starship’s trail.

We collect intel, but never get answers.

Every bit of info might someday help us regain control of Earth, though.

Someday.

They have starships.

We have the junked out remnants of the world Before.

But… someday.

The spring breeze blew through my hair then, seeming almost to laugh at such hubris. Pale sunshine kissed my face. I grinned ruefully to myself.

Brooding is pointless.

And until “someday”, the weather’s lovely and the land’s waking up from winter. Can’t complain.

Along the Mississippi, fifty miles upriver from lost Minneapolis, the cottonwoods were blushing with the first faint greens of spring. Pussy willows bloomed in the low areas and the final bits of snow from last week’s blizzard were dripping away into the thawing soil. The river was running fast and high, chunks of ice from up North swirling on its surface. Breathing in the gusty spring air felt like inhaling raw life.

“You’re in a good mood, Captain,” Sgt. Jones said, putting the Jeep into drive and pulling back onto the dirt track we were patrolling. He was a big black guy who’d already been in the army for a while himself before getting exposed to some of that mutagenic magic. Fine mahogany brown fur covered most of his body now, and he had bat ears and weird folds over the bridge of his nose. Minor Changes, as such things went. He was good at what he did and didn’t want to do a damn thing extra, so he delegated well and didn’t cause problems. It was just about everything you want in a subordinate officer, though he could have been a little more enthusiastic about our work.

“It’s finally spring, and we get to hunt a new type of monster tomorrow!” I replied, grinning widely as he twisted the steering wheel to avoid a sapling growing out of the disintegrating asphalt. Getting away from our usual patrol along the edge of the Elsecomers’ no-go zone was always a treat, not least because we got to drive on roads people actually maintained. “Have you ever gone after a man-eating stone giant?”

“Nope, and yet I still feel my life is complete,” he replied, swerving around a pothole larger than the Jeep. “And sure, it’s the giant you’re looking forward to chasing.”

Soon, that voice down in my darkness whispered, more in impressions than actual words. I felt claws stretch inside me. I’ll catch her soon. She’ll be after the giant, too. Then we’ll…

“That girl’s a public safety hazard,” I said, ignoring it. Better not to give the faery whispers any attention. They had too much power over me already. “Somebody’s gotta bring her in.”

“Still think you’re just trying to find a girl prettier than you,” Jones said, shaking his head. “Bet you don’t even know what you’d do if you caught her.”

I gritted my teeth. Pretty was not a word I’d ever imagined describing me, and my strangeling Change had left me looking like I’d just stepped out of a classic fantasy film… except that unlike Middle Earth’s elves, I got to grow flipping antlers out of my forehead. Now I can’t wear a helmet or most hats or ever forget that Elsecomer magic has deformed me.

Jones was right, though. I had no idea what I’d do if I caught her.

I mean, arrest her, of course. But after that?

She irradianced me. She broke my life and turned me into a monster. She’s working for the invaders.

Well, maybe. I’ve never seen signs of her doing intentional harm.

But she’s a monster, like me, and monsters need to be killed or caged!

“Who are you talking about?” the new kid asked from the back seat. Recent inductees did a couple ride-alongs with the team leaders when they first started patrolling. Omar Hassan was of Somali descent, from a family that escaped Minneapolis just before the Elsecomers took the city. He’d Changed on his seventeenth birthday and gotten incarcerated with us last month. His hair had gone whitish blue and marks like lightning appeared all over his skin, and moth-like antennae twitched on his forehead. We’d been having electrical trouble with every system he was around, so he’d probably end up developing some magic along those lines. At least he’d finally stabilized enough to get into a car without shorting out its systems.

“Captain’s hot blond nemesis,” Jones replied. “The ‘Green Lady of the North’. He goes frothing at the lips crazy every time she’s nearby.”

“Oh, I’ve heard of her! With those free strangeling guys up by Duluth, right? They fixed some medical gear that saved my aunt. Have you actually seen her?”

“Yes, and being a connoisseur of the feminine…” Jones made a chef’s kiss to the air. “I mean, give me some curve on a woman, but scrawny blondes apparently do it for Captain. She’s a similar strangeling to him, but seems to actually enjoy it.”

You fucking idiot, I thought. She’s dangerous.

“She’s not a strangeling. She’s an Elsecomer elf,” I snapped. “One of the Beautiful Monsters. And when you saw her, she was cuffing a bomb to your hand.”

“Captain blames her for his Change,” Jones said sympathetically. “It’s hard on him, having someone out there who’s both prettier than him and better at hunting monsters.”

I bit my tongue and made myself count to ten. Jones looked sideways at me, trying to contain his grin.

“A bomb?” Hassan asked, aghast.

“We thought so at the time,” I grumbled.

“Her team was smuggling something into the Edgelands back in January,” Jones said, chuckling. “They do that a couple times a year. We knew they were out there; found ski and sled tracks. Captain senses her somehow, goes nuts every time she’s nearby. So we had multiple patrols out, and she blasted into mine like some comic book speedster, grinned, and cuffed what looked like a briefcase bomb to my wrist. Then she flashed away.”

“Shiiit…” Hassan said.

“It had a walkie talkie attached. We could tell there were electronics inside, and something that smelled like ammonium fertilizer. Guy on the walkie told us to hold our positions, or it’d blow. While everyone was freaking out about that, they got past us,” Jones explained. “Captain eventually got me on one side of a fairly blast-proof door and had Gregor, he’s the big guy with rock skin, break the cuff. Guy on the radio said we’d had it, he was triggering his bomb. Gregor threw it as far as he could, and ‘Never Gonna Give You Up’ started singing from the suitcase in mid-air.”

“It wasn’t funny!” I said, as Jones guffawed.

He and the rest of my troops had thought it was hilarious. And the monster hiding inside me had gone positively rabid with rage.

“It was the best Rick-Roll ever,” Jones said. “I laughed for two days.”

And I spent three days in the snow trying to track those bastards down before coming home with frostbite. Not sure how I even kept all my toes.

We turned a corner onto an even worse road. A flock of brightly colored draclets burst out of a tall cottonwood in a rainbow of brilliant colors, squawking like parrots. We watched the little cryptids wheel and fly out over the river for a minute.

“What are those?” Hassan asked, fascinated.

“Pocket dragons. Draclets. They’re an invasive exotic out of the stolen Cities. Annoying, but mostly harmless. They act like escaped pets.”

“Coooool. Do they breathe fire?”

“Nah. Their saliva is corrosive though, and they like chewing on rubber and plastic, sometimes metal,” Jones said. “Gotta keep ‘em off the cars. Little fuckers eat windshield wipers like licorice sticks.”

“You’ll probably stay with the gear when we go hunting off-road, to keep them off the vehicles,” I said, and his eyes widened. “No, not alone. We do everything with at least a partner. But they’ll go after the tires, window lining, wipers, and radio antennas.”

“Speaking of radios…” Jones said, glancing at me.

“The Green Lady’s team has a guy with power over technology,” I sighed, tapping my fingers on the Jeep’s door. “The military wants him, bad. He’s blocked our radios, stolen our patrol schedules, and broken the code Lt. Birch came up with for covert communication. And whenever they’re smuggling through the Edgelands, we have to assume they hear every word we say on the radio. So keep that in mind if you need to use your walkie when they’re around.”

“Birch’s code was the Klingon language, Captain,” Jones groaned. “He shouldn’t have been at all surprised to have another obvious geek figure that out. Or tell him he had a flat forehead and his father smelled of elderberries.”

Which he considers the highlight of his Div 51 career. Half the reason we haven’t caught the smugglers is that none of my people want to, I thought, grinding my teeth internally. Especially since that guy said they were trying to figure out how to free us all.

As if strangelings can manage freedom.

“Captain’s hoping to catch the Green Lady when we’re hunting up North, but she might show up down here any day now,” Jones said. “Her runs are almost always on university breaks. We think she’s a student.”

Hassan blinked.

Yeah. I have trouble believing one of the invaders could be a college kid, too. But the timing lines up.

“Can I ask about how things work here?” Hassan asked. “Because we’ve got a captain and a couple of other officers, and Lt. Birch is supposedly in charge but Captain Hart seems to give all the actual orders?”

“Birch is in charge,” I said, though it still stuck in my craw a bit to say those words.

It’s safer this way.

“Captain’s in charge, and the lieutenant is alive despite all expectations purely because they work together,” Jones contradicted me. “But for the human authorities, Birch is in charge. Captain’s the one we follow into and out of battle. Birch is like his trainee.”

“Aide. I’m only a captain informally now,” I said. “The military doesn’t like acknowledging how many people get irradianced in the line of duty, so they strip us of rank, change our names, and have moving public memorials for us. Then they toss us ‘walking ghosts’ into the strangeling prison brigades. Apparently, I’ve got a very nice headstone down in Rochester.”

“We had cryptids killing our officers like flies before Hart got incarcerated,” Jones explained. “Consistently their first target. And hardly any privates lasted more than a year or two, on either side of the troop. The army wasn’t even sending trained officers anymore, just told the human part of the troop to elect leaders from the ranks. Then they bitched about how our incident reports were shit, so since officers didn’t last, the troop elected a nerdy kid fresh out of basic to make them happy.”

“You mean Lt. Birch?” he asked, glancing at the human soldiers’ junked out troop carrier lurching along behind us. We had stenciled Strangeling Brigade Goes In First across the hood; they’re our words now. The Changed troops used to get driven in at gunpoint on monster fights; now we go first because we’re better.

Or because it takes monsters to fight monsters, I thought grimly.

Our freckled, towheaded “leader” waved cheerily back at us. He’s twenty-three, three years younger than me, and we all hoped very hard that someday he might look like an actual adult.

No one’s holding their breath on that, though.

“He got stuck with us because he wrote some sarcastic furry fanfic featuring his old officers,” Jones chuckled. “Got sent over to Div 51 for insubordination. His heart’s in the right place, but his head’s somewhere off in the Delta Quadrant.”

“Birch was doing his best,” I said, sighing internally. “For a certain value of the word. He just needed real training and some structure. We’re as effective as we are because he’s good at writing fiction.”

“He’s basically our liaison with the real army and human world now,” Jones explained. “It takes about five seconds here for the new human soldiers to realize they’re in much better hands with Hart leading the troop. He was already military and had full officer training, after all. Bit of a hero, in fact. It’s their lives on the line if they report the actual situation.”

“You mean there’s no one in this unit that volunteered for it?”

“Well, Birch enjoys himself,” Jones said, and I gave him a look.

“Dude pretends he’s on Away Missions while patrolling! He’s got a handheld voice recorder and keeps ‘officer logs’ of every outing! Then he writes fanfics based on them.”

Of course he does.

I NEVER want to learn what goes on in his stories.

“Human soldiers don’t get sent to Div 51 because they’re standard army issue,” I said, sighing internally. “We get the… ah… interesting ones.”

“He means the weirdos and misfits,” Jones said, shrugging as he swerved around another sapling growing in the middle of the road. “Works for us.”

It wasn’t inaccurate. I stared out at the passing trees, the weight of everything I’d lost with my Change hitting me again. I’d been “promising” once, fast-tracked into an officer career, with a solid family behind me and a fiancée ready to start a new one. The people I’d worked with had volunteered for service and been good enough to be placed in elite units. I had loved it.

I’d had a future. I’d had a life…

Something large moved between the trees.

“Cryptid!” I yelled, and the patrol skidded to a halt. Weapons fell into ready hands, both human and strangeling.

The creature slunk between the trees towards us, bulky, huge. It moved like nothing earthly.

A sudden shiver ran through me, electric, making my ears twitch and antlers tingle. Darkness stirred inside me, waking up.

What stepped onto the broken road looked like the toothy cousin of a water buffalo, seven feet tall at the shoulder, all claws and fangs and heavy slabs of muscle.

That thing is not an herbivore.

It looked at my troops and licked fanged chops. Drool oozed out of its mouth, falling in thick cords past its teeth. It eased back, muscles tensing, preparing to charge us.

Something inside me purred, and a smilodon grin answered that challenge.

But it is prey. My prey.

In my core, darkness stretched its claws. Teeth glinted through shifting green shadows. I felt my hands put down my gun and reach for the combat knife at my hip, and there wasn’t a thing I could do to stop them.

“Shit, it’s happening agai…” I managed to choke out before the faery monster inside me surged out of its hiding place and took over.

Everything went black.

“Captain. Captain! It’s down. It’s dead. You’re okay. Everyone’s okay. Put the knife down. Oh gods, don’t lick it, that’s disgusting.”

Birch’s voice came to me as if echoing from miles away. I was… where was I? Down in darkness, bound, where writhing silver vines held me in place, holding me, gagging even my mouth. But also, not. Something delicious was on my lips, but iron burned my tongue. I stood up and my body moved with clean, inhuman fluidity, lithe and elegant, explosively powerful.

“You want him back?” my voice asked. I caught a glimpse of Birch, terrified, looking like he was staring down a demon. He nodded, the whites of his eyes showing all the way around, holding his ground.

Magic flickered out from me, reaching for his mind, and slid off strong mental shielding.

It wasn’t just his writing skills I valued Birch for.

“Please give us back our captain,” he repeated, extremely carefully, holding empty hands up. “The beast is dead. You’ve had your blood.”

My shoulders shrugged carelessly, but I felt the stab of pain run through me, like pure distilled loneliness.

“Oh, fine, he’s good enough at cleaning up messes,” my monster said, and suddenly I was falling upwards into my body. There was a disorienting sensation of everything spinning, of vines flexing and coiling around and through my mind and soul. The world tipped. I went straight to my knees. A bloody knife dropped from my hand, skittering off the very efficiently dead beast in front of me. Jones and a half dozen of my closest troops looked up around me, moving like a hunting pack, eyes glowing with feral magic.

They went completely still. Jones blinked and shook his head, and the others followed him.

“Ah, not this crap again,” he said, as I pulled myself to the edge of the road and started heaving.

Chapter 2>

Buy “Strangeling”