First Strike - Chapter One

CHAPTER ONE

I slept on the back seat of the Tahoe, while Gisele and Macarius took turns driving. If Macarius had improved his driving skills, I wasn’t aware of it. They drove, while I dreamed fitfully of an ancient, malevolent god in my head. What woke me up was a jolt from the excited animals stepping on me, as we pulled up to the drive through lane at a McDonalds.

“Ah,” sitting up, I rubbed my face. The first thing I noticed was that the vision in both of my eyes had returned to normal. Except that everything was so bright, it made my headache flare up again. “Where are we?”

“We are at a drive through restaurant,” Macarius announced, turning in the passenger seat to look at me.

What I felt like saying was ‘what clued you in about that, Sherlock?’. Instead of being a jerk I yawned, and asked, “I meant, where is this?”

“A place called Warren, Pennsylvania,” Gisele checked me in the mirror. “You look better, Kazimir.”

“I feel better. Hey, uh, I’m gonna get out, I need to use the bathroom. Get me a Filet-O-Fish, please.” At the moment, I didn’t think my stomach could handle a McD’s burger.

“They have fish?” Boots jumped across me, his back legs thumping into my belly.

“Ah! Hey, watch where you’re stepping, fleabag.” The headache was making me extra cranky.

The cat ignored me. “Is it salmon?”

“No,” I pulled on the door latch to get out. “I don’t know what kind of fish it is, but it sure ain’t salmon.”

In the bathroom, I pulled up my shirt, to check the bandage I had been wearing, since Eadric the dark knight slashed me with a dagger. The weapon might have been poisoned, very probably it was coated with some sort of poison, but I had experienced no ill effects. Except, the wound healed more slowly than it should have. The cut had not been deep, really more of a scratch, and it had closed after four days. Peeling back the bandage, I could see a purple and yellow line, darker than such a minor cut should be. The purple was not dark magical energy, I had checked myself for that, it was just a bruise. A cut that was healing too slowly.

Isabel was concerned about the injury. Not concerned enough to suggest I see a doctor about it, that would require me to explain that I might have been sliced by a poisoned blade, and that would prompt all kinds of uncomfortable questions. As long as I wasn’t sick, and the wound was still healing, though slowly, it was best to leave it alone.

Pressing the bandage back into place, I considered how many near-death experiences I had survived. Too many.

When I walked back out into the parking lot, the Tahoe wasn’t just waiting for me, it was in a parking spot with the engine off. Gisele and Macarius got out, she handed me the bag of food. “We’ll be right back,” she pointed toward the building. “We can’t trust the animals with the food.”

“You got that right.” While the dog and cat pawed at the windows and shouted at me, I stood outside. The engine was off and Gisele took the keys with her, so the window switches didn’t work. Unfortunately, Duke had watched people and he knew how to operate a door handle. “Hey!” Back up against the door, I got it closed again before the cat could squeeze himself out. “You two stay in the car.”

“We’re hungry,” Duke whined, pawing at the window again. Then he got smart, leaping over to the other side and opening that door.

As a fugitive wanted by law enforcement and by a shadowy organized crime group, it’s important to keep a low profile. That means you have to avoid being noticed, like avoid chasing a dog and a very large cat around the parking lot of a fast food place. It was after the lunch rush, and the parking lot only had three other cars, but I could see people inside pointing and laughing as I ran after the dog.

Then it got worse. My focus was on catching Duke, with the logic that I had no chance of catching a cat who could jump from the ground to the top of a car, which is exactly what Boots did. In a flash, he had leapt onto the roof of an SUV and stood on the roof rack, his tail twitching. The dog had stopped running and had his front legs splayed out, his butt in the air. “This isn’t play time, Duke,” I scolded him. “Get back in the car.”

That was a mistake. Watching the dog meant I was not watching the cat, and the cat certainly was watching the bag of food I had put on the hood of the Tahoe, just before I ran after the bad doggy and bad kitty. Boots sprang through the air onto the hood, got the bag in his mouth and ZOOM! He was gone. He sprinted across the parking lot and disappeared into an alley behind a red brick building.

Oh sh-

Damn it. The knights had left me alone to do one thing, and I screwed it up.

Forgetting the dog for the moment, I ran after the cat, my headache pounding and my mouth dry. Running was not what I needed to be doing right then, my legs were rubbery and my feet felt like my shoes were twenty pounds each. Slogging as fast as I could, I wasn’t yet at the entrance to the alley when the dog raced past me, his nails skittering on the pavement. Duke was running all-out and he is fast, he blew by me like I was standing still, which I kind of was in my miserable condition. For a split second, I wondered in horror about whether the dog and cat had planned for Duke to distract me while Boots grabbed the food, because the two of them are way smarter than any pet should be. Immediately, it was clear that those two had not planned anything together, when I saw Duke slam into the cat who had stopped in the middle of the alley, and was tearing the bag apart.

Oh no.

I did not need a fight between those too, and Duke would lose big time. Boots had sharp claws and-

Oh thank God.

Despite the undeniable fact that he is fierce and feared throughout the land, Duke was smart enough to not get into a fight that wouldn’t have a winner. Instead of squabbling over the food, he grabbed a cardboard Big Mac container and raced away, by which point food was strewn all over the alley.

Two seconds. It took no more than two seconds for Duke to rip open the cardboard lid, gulp down two all-beef patties, special sauce, lettuce, cheese, pickles, onions, on a sesame seed bun, not that I somehow have that old jingle I saw on YouTube stuck in my head. Part of a hamburger bun was still stuck to his nose when he dashed back to snatch a twenty piece box of McNuggets.

Have you ever watched Shark Week? There is always a show about a feeding frenzy, a group of vicious predators who smell blood in the water and go insane with hunger.

Those sharks have never seen a dog and a cat tear into a bag of McDonald’s junk food. The cat was at a big disadvantage because as a carnivore, Mister Boots was only interested in the burgers, fish, chicken, and cheese, whereas Duke would eat everything, including parts of the cardboard boxes and wrappers. While the cat picked through the mess to find the items he wanted, Duke used the advanced and more efficient ‘vacuum cleaner’ technique of just inhaling anything he could get into his mouth, figuring his stomach would sort it out later.

By the time I reached the middle of the alley, the worst of the carnage was over. Grabbing Duke’s collar, I yanked him away from a pile of fries that were in a puddle of dirty water. “Hey!” he protested, somehow sticking to the ground with several tons of force. “I’m eating that!”

“No, you are not. Bad! You are a bad dog, you-” My phone vibrated.

It was Macarius. He was frantic, speaking so fast I couldn’t quite understand him, but it was something like, “Kazimir!” He forgot that in public, he was supposed to call me ‘Matt’ or ‘Matthew’. “Where are you? We cannot find you or the animals, if you have been taken, you-”

“Macarius! I’m fine, I’m fine. Everyone is OK, I had a bit of a problem. Drive, uh-” Where? “Meet me at the other end of the red brick building that is behind the McDonalds.”

“Why? What is happening?”

“I’m a lousy pet sitter, that’s all. Do you see the building? I’m in the alley behind it.”

“I am coming!”

“No, don’t, it-”

He hung up.

The knight from ancient Egypt burst into the alley before I got my phone back in my pocket. He was running so fast, he had to push off the wall and nearly tripped on an overturned trash can. With a hand inside his jacket, ready to draw his pistol, he looked around wild-eyed, his head on a swivel. “Kazimir! What-”

“Matt, please. Call me Matt.”

“Oh.” He didn’t let down his guard at all. “Yes. Why did you leave?”

“I-” Gisele was right behind him, so I waved for both of them to come closer. “These two, got out of the car and stole the bag of food,” I pointed to the ripped bag, the smashed French fries, the packets of ketchup and BBQ sauce.

“What?!” Macarius loomed over Boots, who was still chewing on something. “You are a bad kitty!”

“I feel,” Boots talked through a mouthful of food, “just terrible about that.”

“And you,” Macarius turned his fury on Duke. “I am very disappointed. After we took down the dragon together, I thought you and I were warriors. Brothers in arms.”

Duke’s tail went between his legs, and his ears drooped. “I was hungry.”

Macarius shook his head sadly. “A warrior does not acknowledge want, or hunger, or any form of weakness. He remains true to his cause, no matter the hardship.”

“Sorry,” Duke hung his head, miserable.

The cat reached a paw for a chicken nugget, and Macarius kicked the nugget away, wagging a scolding finger at the cat. “No more chicken for you! Those nuggets were mine.”

“Possession is nine tenths of the law,” Boots sniffed. “I saw that on-”

“Yeah, I know,” I sighed. “Law and Order. Gisele, the animals need to cut down their TV time, OK?”

Before she could answer, Macarius scooped up the cat and held it eye to eye. Mister Boots hissed and extended his claws. “You think I fear you, because you come from the realm of evil?” The warrior’s laugh was bitter. “Tell me, Old One, what would happen in your land, if someone took away your food?”

Boots bared his fangs, then shrugged. “You have a fair point, warrior.” With a sigh, he added, “Ah, I chafe at the restrictions upon me in this existence.”

“Hey, we all feel like that,” I jabbed a finger in the cat’s face. “That’s no excuse. You need me to help your people in the Nether? That means we are a team. We work together, we make sacrifices together. To do my part, I need the knights, and I need Isabel and Mike. I need Azib, too, and Duke. So far, I haven’t seen that I need you for anything.”

“I warned you about Apophis.”

“Eh, I already knew that being is a god or a demon or something. Knowing the name? I don’t see how that helps. You get free food, shelter and medical care. If you want to be on your own, I’ll open a portal and toss you through it. Otherwise, you’re with us, and you live by the rules, understood?”

“Your rules,” the cat tried to look tough and defiant, that wasn’t easy when he was dangling in the air, held at arm’s length by Macarius.

“Our rules. The team, our team, if you want to be part of this team. That´s why you´re still here, right? Why you didn´t go through the portal with the dragon? I don’t get to do everything I want; I check with Mike and Isabel to make sure I don’t cause problems for everyone. I ask advice from Gisele and Macarius when the subject is something they might know. Duke led the way for us to find you, when you were caught in the leg trap.”

He stared at me. Blinked. Sighed. “Perhaps you are right. I am an Old One, it is difficult for me to swallow my pride on occasion.”

“I am the world’s only wizard. I can stop bullets. I made a dragon fall out of the sky, I opened a portal and I fought a god and won. I kick ass, and yet somehow I still find a way to swallow my pride when I need to. Can you do that?”

“I will try. Regarding my pride?”

“Oh, yeah,¨ I understood. ¨Macarius, put him down, please.”

The Egyptian knight could have released the cat and let him fall, but instead he gently set the cat down. “You also ate my Big Mac, you are a bad kitty.”

“If it makes you feel any better, I did not enjoy that special sauce,” the cat made a gagging sound.

“Ha!” Duke laughed. “Mister Boots thinks he’s too good to eat our food.”

“Hey, he’s a cat. What’s your excuse for misbehaving?” I asked him.

Duke’s ears went back. “I was hungry. You don’t feed me enough.”

“You get plenty of food.”

“I don’t get as much as I want. You decide how much food I get. That is oppression. Gisele says we should fight the power.”

She rolled her eyes. “That is not exactly what-”

“By getting my own food, I am liberating myself from the profit-driven capitalist food industrial complex,” his tail thumped on the pavement.

“OK, first,” I held up one finger. “You didn’t feed yourself; Boots stole that food.”

“Hmm,” Duke considered that, and his ears perked up. “Wow, so, Mister Boots is like Robin Hood?”

“What? No, he-”

“Boots takes from the rich, and gives to those who have nothing.”

“He didn’t give you anything, you had to fight him for it.”

“The revolutionary brotherhood can sometimes disagree about the best means to overthrow our oppressors.”

“I am not even going to ask where you heard that.”

“It was-”

“I do not care. Gisele, he got these ideas from you, please handle this.”

“Matthew,” her eyes darted to the parking lot at the end of the alley. “There might be another problem we need to deal with. As I came out of the bathroom, several people in the restaurant were shouting, and taking photos with their phones. They said a man was chasing a dog and a very large cat. One of them mentioned Instagram.”

“Ohhhhh, this is not good. Damn it, this is a big problem. Boots, Duke, you two just screwed everything up for all of us.”

The dog hung his head. The cat was unrepentant. “I took a bag of food, that wasn’t even very good. How am I responsible for-”

“You are a predator, so let me explain in terms you might understand. We are being hunted, by people we don’t know. We don’t know who they are, and they don’t know where we are, but what they do know is that they are looking for a guy my age, traveling with another man, a young woman, and a dog who looks like Duke. If someone from the Order sees the photos posted online, they might recognize us. They will also now know we also have a very large, a very unusual cat with us, and they will know we were here, now. They- Oh, I just realized someone probably got a photo of our car. They will have the license plate. We need to swap plates, then ditch the car. Damn it!”

Macarius kept cool. “What should we do, Kazimir?”

“Get the car- No. Gisele, you get the car. Mike told me that someone, probably the Order but it could be that Russian mob guy you two beat up at that Mexican restaurant, they are looking for you as a long haired ginger. Uh, they’re looking for a young woman with red hair. You changed your hair color and cut it shorter after that, but you might need to do something like that again.”

“Good,” she smiled. “I talked about that with Isabel.”

“Uh, great,” that wasn’t a good time for me to get into a discussion about hair color choices. “Bring the car around to the street there,” I pointed to the other end of the alley. “Pick up Macarius and Duke there. Boots and I will meet you at the gas station on the corner,” I showed her using the map on my phone. “That way, no one will see the dog and cat together.”

Gisele tilted her head. “They will see an unusually large cat with you.”

“No, they won’t,” I picked up a small, battered, soft-sided suitcase that had been discarded near a trash bin. “Boots, you are going for a ride, in this.”

The cat hissed at me.

He hissed even worse when I stuffed him in the suitcase.

There were no further incidents, I got into the Tahoe at the gas station, and Gisele pulled back out onto the road, headed northeast. Boots glared hatred at me when I unzipped the suitcase to let him out, but he didn’t bite or scratch me. He did hop over the seat into the back and sulked, that was OK with me. We were going back to the house, that was the plan. Now that the wyvern was dead and the dragon had gone home, we needed a new plan. We needed a plan, period. Mike was driving the box truck to Pittsburgh, where he would rinse out the back, wipe down the cab, and leave it parked on a street in a sketchy part of town with the keys on the seat. We would never have to worry about seeing that truck again, it would probably be stripped for parts. Isabel had the Jeep, she was following Mike and would go to the house from Pittsburgh. They would not be immediately leaving Pittsburgh, though, Mike had important business there first. The ‘business’ is that he wanted something he called a ‘Pittsburgh sandwich’. It was sort of a Philly cheesesteak, with French fries, coleslaw, and tomatoes. If you were super hungry, you could also get a fried egg on top of the sandwich. Apparently, Mike had been introduced to that specialty a couple years ago when he was in the Steel City.

It sounded uh-MAY-zing and I asked him to bring one back for me, but he declined, saying the sandwich would be too soggy by the time he got to the house.

I think he would just be too tempted to eat it.

Anyway, we got back on the road, and I leaned my head back to chill out. Macarius wanted to talk.

“Kazimir, we must talk about this.” Macarius frowned at Duke. “The dog’s instincts are a problem.”

“Hey!” Duke looked at us. “I am right here.”

I scratched behind his ears. “His instincts are also why he attacked a dragon, without anyone asking him to.”

“Mmm,” Macarius nodded. “This is true.”

“Overall, I’m OK with his instincts. That does not mean,” I tapped the dog’s head. “That you can ignore when I tell you not to do something.”

“I don’t want to be a bad dog,” he avoided looking at me. “I just can’t stop myself sometimes.”

“Work on it, OK? You are an outstanding dog.”

He perked right up. “I am?”

“Absolutely. In fact, I think you might be the best dog.”

“Ooooooh.”

“I’m gonna barf,” Boots gagged from behind me.

“Hey, you be quiet, cat,¨ I jabbed a finger at him. ¨I didn’t see you fight a dragon.”

Boots had no answer for that.

“Certainly,” Macarius nodded. “I have not known any other dog to fight a dragon. Duke may be the first.”

“The best,” I ruffled his fur.

“Does this mean,” Duke leaned into my scratching hand. “I get a treat?”

“Don’t push it, mutt.”

Mike might have regretted eating a giant sandwich, after I called him with the bad news. I got right to business. “Hey, we sort of have a problem.”

“Sort of?”

“We have a problem.”

“In the future, just say that.”

“Right.” I explained what happened.

Most of his initial reply I didn’t hear, he must have pressed the phone to his chest to muffle the sound. What I did hear were the usual curse words, plus some new ones that I guessed were Kiwi slang, and cool enough that I wanted to make a note of them on my phone. Mike is a pro. When he spoke to me again, he didn’t play the blame game. He could have reminded me that it had been my decision to save the cat from the leg trap, and my decision to bring a potentially dangerous unknown threat with us, and my decision to allow Boots to decide whether to go back through the portal or not. Like I said, Mike is a pro. By himself, he would have been logical and unemotional when we found the cat, found the grimlik who didn’t belong in our world. He would simply have eliminated the threat. He also would have thrown the cat back through the portal, whether Boots wanted to go or not.

And Mike certainly would not have made a spectacle of himself in public, by chasing a cat and dog around the parking lot of a fast food place. If I became an unwilling minor internet celebrity because of a cellphone video, it would be a hundred percent my fault.

“Are you wearing your glamour charm thing?”

“Always,” I assured him. That was true, I never took the thing off. “It happened fast, I think by the time anyone decided the situation was worth taking a photo, I was running toward the alley. A photo or video would only show my back.”

“And Duke.”

“Right, and Duke. Mike, any photo or video will show the Tahoe’s license plate.”

“We usually change vehicles anyway when an op is over. Change of plan, then. Meet us in, uh, give me a minute.” He had a muffled conversation with Isabel, then, “Go north toward Buffalo, I’ll give you a specific place to meet us later.”

“OK. Sorry about this.”

“Kaz, a screw-up is an opportunity to learn. Just, we can’t have this happen again.”

“It won’t.”

“I’m not worried about you. The animals need to buy in, or they can’t be with us, you understand that? We can bring them to a safe house and keep them there.”

“That will not be necessary.”

“Be sure about that.” He ended the call.

As Gisele put on the turn signal to pull into another fast food place, this time across the border in New York state, Macarius turned in the seat to glare and point at the dog and cat. “We are going to get food, for us, not for you. Nothing for the two of you, do you understand?”

Duke just hung his head, Boots silently glared back.

“Good,” Macarius was satisfied. “We should put both of you on a diet of nothing but salad for the next week.”

“Salad?” Duke whimpered.

“Uh, we can’t actually do that,” I said. “Not to Boots. Cats have to eat meat, they need it to get vitamins and amino acids, and I think cats can’t digest carbohydrates. They have to get glucose from breaking down proteins.”

He raised an eyebrow in a ‘when did you become an expert?’ gesture.

With a shrug, I added, “A woman I worked with wanted to feed her cat a vegan diet, but the vet told her cats can’t do that.”

Duke pawed at my leg. “What’s a vegan? Can I eat it?”

“A vegan isn’t a thing you eat, it’s a person who only eats plants.”

“Oh, yuck.”

“You like toast, right?”

“Yes, so?”

“Toast is bread, and bread is made from plants. So are potato chips.”

“I do like those. What about cheese?”

“Cheese is not made from plants.”

“What about bunnies? They eat plants? Are they vegans?”

“Uh, technically, I guess they are?”

His tail thumped on the seat. “I can eat bunnies.”

“No, you eat what I feed you.”

“But-”

“No bunnies. And no skunks.”

“This is so unfair.”

While Mike and Isabel got delicious sliced beef sandwiches, I settled for a lukewarm fish burger and a box of fries that had sat under the heat lamp too long.

How had my life gone so horribly wrong?