Clocking Out

Dan picked up halfway through the first ring. “PETER!”

“Ayep.”

“You’re alive,” he said; tone tinged with dark relish of someone hoping to strangle me himself.

“Surprised?”

“You dove into a goddamned portal to Faerie!”

“So that’s a yes…?

“What,” Dan said, “in the actual hell, were you thinking-”

“I got the sumbitch!” I interjected. It’s never good to let Dan build momentum.

“Which the Wild Hunt would’ve done for you, you stupid impulsive suicidal son of a-”

“Oh yeaaaah, the Hunt, yeah, I might’ve heard their horns, yeah, about two miles back right before I followed that prick through the exit portal. I know you’re tight with Tinkerbell McTitties but seriously, next time you drop her a scrying pool tell ‘er those guys need to do some cardio or something because-”

“Well that explains how you escaped Faerie,” Dan cut me off. “Where’d you land?”

I sighed. “Well, there’s good news, and- just a sec.” I shifted the phone to my other shoulder and turned back to the girl, who was now on her feet and waving her gohei at me energetically, still chanting like mad. “Could you, perhaps…” I patted the air. “Not?”

She squeezed her eyes shut and raised the volume a notch.

“… he exited at a Shinto shrine?” Dan said as he caught her shaky norito chant in the background.

“I was right on his ass so he didn’t have time to get picky. Landed right in the sacred spring, too.”

“Oh, you’re in Washington then. Gimmesec, I know a guy at Lewis-McChord, should be able to get you a lift-”

“Sooooooooooo about that…”

The atmosphere of exasperation from his end of the line chilled into dread so abruptly I half expected to see my breath in the air.

“You’re not at Tsubaki, are you.”

“No. No I am n- WOMAN, GODDAMN!” I shouted at the shrine maiden, who was now swinging her gohei in my direction like a baseball bat. “I’m STANDING in goddamned HOLY WATER you- BAH!” I pressed the phone back against my hear in time to hear a cork pop on Dan’s end of the line. “Come on dude it’s not that bad is it-”

“You. Tell. Me.” It wasn’t a request.

“Well, uh…” I turned to scan the tableau. “Well there’s a dead evil wizard in the koi pond-”

“Sacred spring,” he said. “Correction, desecrated sacred spring.”

“-and a Humvee.”

I heard two conspicuous glugs from his end. “Oh come ON, it’s not straight-from-the-bottle bad-”

“You drove through Faerie in an Humvee.”

“The hell you expect me to do with it, fly? I didn’t crash it into a playground which is more than the Marines can mana- WOMAN, if you don’t stop waving that damn thing at me I’m gonna come over there and turn you into a MEAT P- WHO’RE YOU LOOKING AT, STRING BEAN!?” I snapped, rounding on one of the life-sized tengu statues that decorated the temple. “Yeah I saw that. Go’wan buddy, get off that pedestal and we’ll find out who’s got the longer nose right quick.” I shouldered the phone again. “Anyway, just call the direct line to the, uh, whatever they call their department of killing weird shit and they’ll get the clean-up rolling. Doesn’t have to be a big diplomatic– GOTCHA!” With her eyes closed the miko hadn’t noticed me creeping up, and now I had the damned gohei. I raised it as if to strike, sending her fleeing with a shriek.

“–incident,” I finished.

Dan’s silence was icy as a crypt.

“… is this a game to you?” he asked.

“What the hell is that supposed to mean?”

Before he could answer the sound of hustling footsteps came from within the shrine and the paper doors banged open to reveal a woman that looked much like the dark-haired miko, except she wore her hair over the shoulder in a single ponytail and had an apron on.

“Gonnacallyoubackbye” I said and bolted for the Humvee, managing to scoop up the machine gun, leap into the truck and slam the door before a fuzzy house slipper hit the glass at approximately Mach Jesus. I saw the woman – presumably the miko’s mother – stoop to fill her other house slipper with pebbles to make a kosh. Thankfully, while they were upgrading the engine and radio, the agency had also added proper door locks to the Humvee. Unfortunately, they hadn’t added reclining seats, but at least I had games on my phone.

* * *

I’d just started the GBA emulator when someone rapped on my window. I looked up to find a bespectacled woman with short and rather fluffy dark hair peering in at me. Betwen her black kimono and the string tied into a cross-shaped four-loop bow adorning her hair, I took her for a mage.

I killed the idling engine and slid the armored glass open far as it would go.

“Hey,” she said in perfect English.

“Hey,” I replied.

She twirled her finger ‘round to indicate the everything. “What the fuck?”

Answering The Question is always a judgment call – are things irreparable enough that there’s no downside to saying “I’m from the US Federal Government and I’m here to help?” or could they, in fact, get worse? Past the young woman’s shoulder I could see the miko’s mother sitting on the offering box, tapping her slipper-kosh in one hand and glaring at me. I decided to hedge my bets. “I’m from nike. N-A-I-C,” I spelled out the acronym. “US Federal gov-”

“I figured out that part on my own,” she said dryly, scanning the length of the Humvee. “I meant more the pureed corpse and that.” She jerked her thumb over her shoulder at miko-mom, who was now cracking her knuckles.

“Did they not brief you?”

“Mrs. Satsuki called me, not the government.” She jerked her thumb at mikomom again.

“But you are from the Japanese government, right?”

“Oh hell no. Some of the Monster Division guys have my phone number and it’s hard to ignore calls from your best client-” A catchy ditty I half-recognized interrupted her, and she pulled out a phone. “Speak of the devil,” she sighed upon checking the screen, then answered it. “Hai hai yankee o mitsuketa yo, bye byee~” she said, then hung up. “So where were we – right. What the fuck!?”

Keeping one eye on “Mrs. Satsuki,” I opened the Humvee’s door and turned sideways in my seat to face her. She was wearing a black kimono with red rope as a belt, holding the hem above the water with one hand. “The stiff was a wizard. Shape-shifter, body-enhancement, that kinda stuff. Guess it wasn’t enough for him because he drew a circle on the ground in goat blood and then he killed a bunch of people.”

“How many?”

“I’ll let you know once they’re done counting arms and legs.

The woman grimaced. “Did he contract with an outsider or just a kami? I mean a spirit? Direct binding or servitude contract or just knowledge deal?”

I shrugged. “Whatever it was, it didn’t react well to holy water.”

She blinked. “… you’re not a mage, are you.”

“Nope.”

“Then what are you?”

I checked my watch. “Hungry.”

“I mean how did you win a hand-to-hand fight with a shapeshifting specialist?”

“I made sure the pointy end of the knife went into the other guy. Pretty simple.”

“Knife?”

I showed her and she snatched it away from me. She mumbled a spell – then another, and another, brow furrowing deeper with each one as it stubbornly refused to react. She handed it back and without preamble reached out and seized my bicep, squeezing it tightly.

“Uh–”

She released me, scanned me head to toe, quirked her mouth uncertainly, and stalked off towards the corpse.

“Well, okay, nice to meet you too,” I said, picking up my smartphone again. When you tell the laws of physics to sit down and shut up on a regular basis, some eccentricity is pretty normal – and given the spectrum of mages included “shapeshift into chimeric horrors to conduct murder sprees,” I’d long ago stopped sweating their interpersonal skills.

Not that I was one to judge, anyway. I picked up my phone again. I was just finishing level five when the little crewman sitting in his chibi artillery vehicle turned to look right out the screen at me, slowly lifting a pixelated knife-hand. I sighed in disgust and looked up to see a a handsome, well-built young man in a crisp shit, slacks and tie, glaring ruin and wrath at me with the young miko half-hiding behind him, jabbing her finger at me. That must be the “Monster Division” man and from the way he strode towards me, he was taking the complaints seriously.

I slammed the door and locked it. He arrived a moment later, not even stopping to remove his shoes and socks. He was just composing himself to say something stern when I slid the window closed. Eyes widening, he raised his voice, so I just started the engine and let the 6.6 liter Duramax’s throaty purr drown out what little made it through the thick armored glass.

The fluffy-haired magess quick-walked back to us, kimono’s hem dragging forgotten in the water. A conversation – or perhaps just a lecture – quickly ensued; with much pointing from her (to her phone, the corpse and unfortunately, me,) as New Guy gazed down at her five-foot nothing frame, arms crossed.

I sighed and rubbed my weary eyes. You can never just waste the baddie and dip, oh no. He’s always ~connected~ to something, it’s “just getting started,” it’s the “tip of the iceberg,” it’s “bigger than one guy,” its a cult, a coven, a conspiracy to summon creepy-crawlie carnivorous cookie monsters and we all gotta go do gumshoe shit right now, as a Team, because clearly the Violence Application Technician is vital to the derring-do detective bullshit. And from the way little miss mage was pointing around I doubted they were discussing my grand theft gohei.

I started scanning for options. The shimenawa adorned trees were both massive and close-set; the ropes actually linking them together – a truly formidable spiritual barrier before you factored in the shrine – but the vehicular barrier was merely incidental. And two of them were spaced a bit further apart than the others.

I popped the transmission into auto, wheeled the beast around and dove back into the koi pond. Fish paused to give me puzzled looks through the windows as I sunk to their level, water squirting in faster and faster through door seals and drain holes as the depth increased, but luck was with me and the depth wasn’t much more than Miss Kimono-Clad was tall. Water climbed up to my neck, but I was already soaked from the first dunk so it hardly mattered. I emerged from the opposite side and carefully approached the trees. My left tire started creeping up the wide-spreading sloping base of a camphor tree like a ramp, suspension creaking as I took up all the travel it could give me, right tire still firmly on earth. Gingerly turning the wheel right far as I dared, I buckled myself in, tightened the belt, and goosed the gas.

Rubber squealed as it slid off the smooth bark, but the Humvee’d jumped forward enough to catch the left-side frame rail against the tree. Now tilted at a steep rightward angle I gently pressed the accelerator and slid along the tree. The trunk opposite folded the passenger-side mirror back against the side panels politely, and then I felt the rear driver-side tire engage bark. Clenching my buttcheeks, I goosed her one last time and the whole vehicle squeezed through the gap, left-side coming back to earth with a resounding crash that slammed my tailbone into the seat and bounced my skull off the roof – but I was through.

“Right out of Silent Cartographer!” I laughed, flipping the blank-faced magus and government guy the bird in my rearview. “Let’s see Pokemon players do that shit, you weren’t raised on the streets I was, son!” I laid on the gas, dodging through close-set trees, and abruptly found myself in the bright sunny open, rice paddies stretching out all around. Turning, I circled the small “forest-” a small holy grove that’d been preserved amidst the agriculture, I presumed – and found the proper road, a torii gate marking the transition into a green tunnel leading shrineward. I put it in my rearview and roared away down the grassy footpath.

For a few minutes I just drove; following footpath to dirt to paved road, and only then did I remember–

–I was hungry.