She dropped the big bomb. “Twenty-eight days ago, the oni made a very serious attempt at killing the viceroy.”
“Wait!” There was the reaction she was expecting. He stared at her, eyes wide. Pure cameraman, though, that was the only body reaction to his surprise. Thankfully his voice made it worth everything, his normal rich near bass went all squeaky. “You mean they’re here? In Pittsburgh?”
“Yes. Number unknown but possibly in the hundreds, if not thousands. Goal unknown, but obviously hostile to the elves. The elves have reluctantly also admitted that they had a running skirmish with the oni several hundred years ago. It started on Onihida, went across parts of China, and ended in the cave systems that lead to Elfhome. Or used to lead. The oni so scared the shit out of the elves that they blasted the pathways between Elfhome and Earth shut.”
Taggart gazed out the SUV’s windows at the city streets. Mercy Hospital was in one of the better areas of town since it lay protected on two sides by the river. All the windows had glass in them, the sidewalks were clear of weeds, and no wild animals were scurrying for cover. It could be any street in America. “I thought if the EIA was allowing people in, that the trouble had blown over.”
Pittsburgh desperately needed supplies from Earth once a month. There simply were too many people and too little farmland for the city to feed itself, even in the summer months. It would have gridlocked incoming traffic completely if the EIA had tried to turn back everyone not transporting food.
Jane didn’t point out that they’d downloaded all the information to Earth at midnight yesterday. The network had twenty-four hours to realize they were sending their people into a war zone and call them back.
* * *
Hal normally was excitable with a quirky sense of humor. On painkillers, he was manic and loopy. Most people thought Hal was funnier with all politically correct safeguard brakes stripped off and the engine running at full. The nuns of Mercy Hospital, however, were not among that number. If anything, “loathing” was probably an accurate word to how they felt about him. Over the years, they had abandoned all “family only” rules for Jane in order to facilitate her taking him away. As far away as possible. They had hinted that his returning to Earth—permanently—would be a good thing for everyone.
Today was no exception.
Mother Superior of the Sisters of Mercy herself was lying in wait for Jane at the foyer.
“You have to keep in mind we only can restock our supplies once a month. Frankly it always stresses our supplies of medications when Mr. Rogers is having a streak of bad luck. With fighting breaking out right and left…”
“Mother Superior, this is Nigel Reid. Nigel, Mother Superior is head of the nuns that oversee this hospital. Anyone attacked by a monster is brought here to be treated.”
Which of course was all that took. TV hosts were kind of like napalm. You threw them at any major infestation and they cleaned out the area of all hostiles.
Nigel lit up as if introduced to Santa Claus. “Oh, how simply wonderful to meet you!”
Taggart caught what she had done and his eyes glittered with his smile. “That was pure evil.”
“Judicious use of resources is always appropriate.”
For reasons that she could never understand, they always put Hal in pediatrics, as far from the nurses’ station as possible. It was possibly because it was usually the least occupied floor, or perhaps it was a statement on what they thought his mental age was.
He was standing on the window ledge, hospital gown flapping open in the back, as he waved her camera around.
“Hal! What the frick are you doing with my camera? Get down! And don’t you dare break my camera!”
“Jane?” Hal glanced over his shoulder. His two black eyes made him look like a startled raccoon. “Jane!” he cried with joy and then realized he was holding evidence of his crime. “Jane!” And that he was currently mooning her. “Jane!” And in trying to hide the evidence while pinning the flaps of the hospital gown together, he started to wobble dangerously on the window ledge. “Jane!”
Cursing, Jane caught the wrist of the hand holding the camera and jerked him toward her. In what was an unfortunately well-practiced move, she pulled him into a fireman’s carry over her shoulder. “I swear, Hal, I’m going to tell them to tie you to the bed if you pull this shit again!”
She delivered him to said bed.
“But there was this huge bird! It was bigger than me! Black like a crow! Wings this big!” He was attempting to show her by spreading his arms. She, however, was prying her camera free. “Ow! Ow! Ow!”
“You break my camera, and we can’t shoot for two months. I break your hand, we can still shoot tomorrow.”
“Letting go!” Hal cried. “Letting go!”
She checked the lens for scratches. Camera parts needed to be ordered from Earth. They’d have to wait until next Shutdown to order replacements and then another month for the lens to arrive. If he’d screwed up her camera, she was so going to kill him.
“I was just sitting here when this freaking huge bird came swooping out of nowhere.” Hal was attempting to use his charisma to talk his way out of trouble, only because he was on drugs, he derailed quickly into incoherence. “At least I think it was a bird. Might have been a superhero. I am Batman! Only more like Hawkman—without the goofy cow.” He meant cowl. He put his fingers to his head to make odd points on Hawkman’s cowl. Obviously he hadn’t seen himself in the mirror yet; he already was masked by deep purple bruises. “Cow. Cow. Mooo.” He noticed Taggart for the first time and he went wide-eyed. He tilted his head, still making horns. “My God! You’re Taggart with the unpronounceable first name.”
“Yes, I am.” Taggart rubbed at his face to cover a smile. “And you’re Hal Rogers from Pittsburgh Backyard and Garden.”
“I am.” Hal slowly frowned as he tried to think through the confusion of the painkillers. He glanced about the familiar hospital room, the Boulevard of the Allies just outside his window with the Monongahela River beyond the steep cliff. “This is Pittsburgh. What the fuck are you doing here?”
“I’m wondering myself,” Taggart said.
Hal suddenly lunged at Jane and wrapped both arms around her. “No. You can’t have her!” He hissed like snake. “Jane is mine!”
Normally she didn’t think of Hal as a small man. His personality could fill a room to claustrophobic level, making him seem seven feet tall. In truth, however, he came right to boob-level on her.
“Hal!” Jane worked at prying him off her. “If you want to get out of here, you better get dressed, because I’m not taking you out of here with your ass flapping in the wind.”
“What’s he doing here?” Hal whispered fiercely.
“Get dressed!” She gave him a shove and turned around so she wouldn’t be flashed as well as mooned. Although after eight years working together—and various plant-assisted disrobing and the subsequent ambulance rides—she’d seen the entire package more times than she could count.
“Does Dmitri know he’s here?” Hal asked and then answered himself. “Of course Dmitri knows. Dmitri knows everything. He’s freaking omniscient. That’s just an act when he calls right in the middle of something amazing and goes ‘what are you doing?’ like he doesn’t damn well know you planned a glorious explosion. Just freaking glorious.”
Hal was rambling on about his recent misadventure with high explosives. If Taggart weren’t standing there, she would take advantage of Hal’s drugged state and quiz him on that, because she still was trying to figure out where he got the C4. More importantly, if the source was going to supply him with more in the future.
The network cameraman was eyeing Hal over her shoulder with open surprise and dismay. “What exactly happened this morning? He looks like he’s been flogged.”
“We were victorious!” Hal shouted. “We looked that thing in all seventy-four eyes and burned out its heart!”
Jane sighed and pinched the bridge of her nose. So many things wrong in that sent
ence, she wasn’t even going to try. God, she prayed that Nigel wasn’t anything like Hal. “Right, let’s get going. I want to get home before dark.”
* * *
Technically she lived in Pittsburgh, but barely. The true city’s edge was another mile or so north. Once the township of Coraopolis, the nearly unpopulated neighborhood, however, was one of the points where the Rim had migrated inward via invading Elfhome vegetation. What had been sprawling neighborhoods gathered around Pittsburgh International Airport were now collapsing homes among ironwood forest. The trees were still considered “saplings” but already towered a hundred feet over her driveway. The harsh sun instantly softened in a way that seemed magical.
Chesty jumped out his open window the moment she parked and started a perimeter patrol of the front yard. The cost of living so close to the Rim was that she had to be ever vigilant. Only after he’d made a full sweep of the front yard without signaling danger did she get out and take a deep breath of the green stillness.
Taggart slid out of her SUV and stood taking in her ancestral home in the sun-dappled forest. The massive stone walls. The turrets. The gables. “Wow.”
“Welcome to Hyeholde.”
“This is not what I expected,” he said quietly, as if not to disturb the peace. “A castle? Here?”
“When my great-great-grandfather proposed to my grandmother, he promised her a castle. He never mentioned that they’d have to build it with their own hands. It took them seven years just to finish the West Room.”
He laughed. “So you are a native guide.”
“You can’t get much more native without being an elf.”
“Mine!” Hal cried from the backseat for the zillionth time since leaving the hospital.
“So, you live here alone?” Taggart obviously was asking if Hal lived with her.
“Yes.” She hoped the brusque answer would stop any more questions, but she hoped in vain.
“Your family went back to Earth?”
“Don’t ask personal questions.” Jane added a glare so he’d get the point.
“She’s got lots and lots and lots of family in Pittsburgh,” Hal shouted. “And they all drive her nuts, so she hides out in her Fortress of Solitude.”
“Shush, you.” Jane considered duct tape for Hal’s mouth. God knows what he might tell the New Yorkers. She keyed open her gun safe and took out her assault rifle. “Stay with the SUV until I’ve checked the house.”
* * *
Her great-great-grandfather had built the castle to be a restaurant, so it had an industrial-sized kitchen. She’d opened it up into one of the smaller dining rooms to add in a small eating and living room space. She got Hal settled on her big leather couch and assigned Nigel the task of keeping him there, one way or another. For the next hour as she squirreled away her supplies, fed Chesty and made a simple dinner, Hal ranted at hyperactive speed about his time doing network television.
She knew the pain medication was wearing off when Hal grew quiet.
When she paused to check on him, Hal asked, “Why are they here?” in a small miserable voice that sounded nothing like the normal Hal.
She opened her mouth to answer and realized that she really didn’t know why the two were there. She’d been so caught up in trying to wriggle out of responsibility and taking care of Hal that she hadn’t actually found out the details.
He probably hadn’t asked Nigel because, despite the friendly banter, he didn’t trust the man. The common thread of his stories, she realized, was that on Earth he’d been betrayed, and abandoned for more famous stars, by people he thought he could trust. Wives. Producers. And ultimately fans. Had he kept to old Earth stories in order to keep from playing up anything connected to PB&G?
“They’ve got a network show called Chased by Monsters, and Dmitri wants me to keep them out of trouble,” she explained.
Hal frowned and looked at Taggart, who was now slumped in the matching chair, looking exhausted. “You’re not here because Network is betting on a war?”
“Depends on who you ask,” Taggart said. “Ask me, no. I’m never doing that again. I’ve had enough of the stench of blood. I wouldn’t put it past Network though; certainly they suddenly green-lighted our show after months of having us on hold.”
“Wait. What?” Jane had missed something important.
“Taggart is an award-winning war correspondent,” Nigel said because Taggart apparently was modest and Hal was falling into a stupor. “Network probably okayed our show because it created a win-win for them. If there’s a war, they have one of the best men trapped inside. If there isn’t, they get what promises to be a hit show.”
It suddenly made sense why Network hadn’t warned Dmitri last Shutdown about the men’s arrival and yet had given them a freshly painted truck. The decision had been made to send them after they’d processed WQED’s last news dump, and then it was too late to send an e-mail to Pittsburgh.
Jane swore. “Bastards.”
Nigel spread his hands slightly in a “what are you going to do” motion. “It gets us what we wanted, so we can’t really complain.”
“We’ve been trying to get onto Elfhome to film documentaries for years.” Taggart scrubbed at his face. “The UN has a chokehold on information coming out of Pittsburgh. Most people wouldn’t notice it. We notice because there’s a huge black hole where things like wildlife documentaries should be. Jane Goodall’s work produced sixty years of film. Jacques-Yves Cousteau alone had thousands of hours of documentaries. Oxford Scientific Films did four seasons on meerkats. What do we have from Elfhome in nearly thirty years? A whole new world with fascinating people, plants and animals? Zip.”
“Maybe the networks don’t think they’ll sell.”
Taggart snorted. “Documentaries are funded differently. Production companies like ours often fold their profit back into the next film, along with money from private investors, government grant money and philanthropists who have a special interest in the source material. Normally we make a film and then market off the rights to networks. It gives us creative control over what we do.”
Nigel nodded along with Taggart’s explanation. “We’ve had the money for the last three years, but our visa applications kept getting turned down. We just didn’t have the clout to force them through. So we decided to see if a major network would have better luck—and they did.”
“But you’re stuck filming crap now.” Hal snorted. “Chased by Monsters? Better be damn good at running.”
“And exactly how do you get hurt filming a landscaping show?” Taggart retorted.
“If it can’t kill us, we don’t film it,” Jane said, to stop the fighting before it could start. “There’s a lot of dangerous flora and fauna in Pittsburgh and it doesn’t stay beyond the Rim. It comes into people’s backyards and sets up shop. We teach our viewers how to deal with it, but it means we have to actually get close enough to get hurt.”
“Deal with, as in kill?” Nigel seemed flabbergasted.
“This isn’t Earth. These aren’t endangered species. This morning we were dealing with a very large strangle vine in a neighborhood with lots of children. There’s no way to move it to someplace where it isn’t a danger, especially while it’s actively trying to kill anything that stumbles into its path. Pets. Children. Automated lawnmowers.”
“That one is always amusing to watch but it always ends badly for the lawnmower,” Hal said.
“Well, yes, the idea behind ‘chased’ is that we aren’t hunting the creatures,” Nigel said.
She remembered that they’d mentioned a list when they first met Chesty. “Which creatures?”
They had a list that made Pittsburgh Backyard and Garden’s fare look tame. She stared at it in horror. Half the animals were mythical—possibly—and certainly never seen near Pittsburgh. Did they have the pull to get them all the way to the Easternlands to find out? Humans were discouraged from leaving Pittsburgh city limits, with the exception of the train crews, who actually got to tr
avel to the East Coast. The elves normally forbade humans from traveling to the other continents. Fame, however, opened many doors.
“What, exactly, did the network set up for you in terms of visas?” she said.
“Why?” Taggart asked.
“Many of these animals aren’t native to the Westernlands.” She scrolled down and a laugh of disbelief or perhaps fear slipped out. “Basilisk? Bigfoot?”
“We thought we should list all legendary animals,” Nigel said, explaining—apparently without realizing it—why they had visa problems. “Can’t hurt to ask. Dragons are real, right?”
“Elves say they are.” Jane desperately wanted a Scotch, but if she had one, Hal couldn’t resist having one, and she didn’t want go back down that road. “This list is suicidal if you’re not willing to defend yourself. This isn’t Earth, where you can sit in your Jeep and take pictures of lions, or go sit in the middle of a bunch of apes. Most of these things will peel open a SUV like it’s a can of sardines and make a snack of everything inside.”
“It would be amusing to watch but it would end badly for you,” Hal murmured. It was hard to tell if he was making a play on his previous statement or if he didn’t realize he was repeating himself.
“The list is a starting point.” Nigel leaned forward, face lighting up with inner fire. “To get us in the door. What we want is all of Elfhome. To revel in all that it has to offer. The virgin ironwood forest. The beautiful immortal elves. The strange and magical beasts. And the humans that live peacefully side by side with all this.”
Jane shook her head, trying to resist the power of a TV host beaming at her one-on-one. “Don’t snow-job me.”
“I’ve seen this kind of shit before,” Taggart said with quiet intensity. “When a country goes dark, its means someone has something it’s trying to hide. And often what they’re hiding is horrible war crimes like mass graves and attempted genocide. Someone is keeping the media out of Pittsburgh.”
* * *
The knowledge that there were people sharing her house, people whose safety she was responsible for, weighed heavily on her. It sank her into the murky waters of old nightmares, where well-founded grief blurred into something strange and nearly unrecognizable.