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Episode 049 |
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“Sometimes you just have to…bow to the absurd.” Captain Jean-Luc Picard, Star Trek: The
Next Generation Lisa shut the door to her dorm room carefully, wincing
as she pulled it completely closed. In
the short hallway, she yawned exhaustedly, a backpack slung over her
shoulders. She heard footsteps and
turned to see Irene behind her, carrying a small suitcase. “Hey,” she called. “Not used to the hours, I see,” she said, continuing to
walk as Lisa followed. “Yeah,” Lisa yawned.
“Sarah told me to go to sleep at one so I could wake up at eight so
that I’d be fresh for the whole night.” “This place can run some chaos on your body if you’re
not careful,” Irene said, pushing the button at the elevator at the end of
the hall. “The trick is to keep crazy
hours on your own. Like if you go two
or three weeks without doing anything nuts like get up at…” She paused and looked at her watch. She suddenly whimpered. “I’m missing my shows.” She shook it off with some effort. “Anyway, an obnoxious hour. Like I was saying, just do it to yourself
every now and then. Just stay up all
night or sleep all day and work all night or something like that. Trust me, it helps.” The elevator doors slid open to reveal Sarah standing
before them both. Dressed in a crisp
suit beneath her black trench coat, she gave them both a powerful stare. Tucked under her arm was a clipboard while
a small briefcase leaned against her leg.
“Good evening,” she said as they both got on. “So I hear we’ve got escort duty,” Irene said. “Yeah.
I just can’t wait to be cooped up in an airplane with that giant
monster again.” “You won’t even see it,” Sarah maintained, watching the
artistic metal floor counter slowly slide to the right as they approached the
upper floors. “It’s going to be in a
box that Dr. Jones is building.” “Great,” Irene said, rolling her eyes. “Then it will have six spy cameras in the
off chance we decide to change clothes.” “More than likely,” Sarah joked without a smile. The office door opened as Alex knocked on it. Assif sat at his desk, flipping through a
file on top of a large stack of papers.
“You know, the purpose of knocking is nullified if you don’t wait for
a response,” he said before closing the folder. “We can block the extradition,” Alex said. “Eliot suggested that we ask for
justification for their claim to the body.”
Assif leaned back in his seat, listening. “Assuming this is like any other
body-release, which we are assuming, then it shouldn’t be any harder than
simply saying ‘why do you want it’.” “They have justified it,” Assif said. “They what?” Alex said. Assif turned at his desk to a stack of folders on the
corner. He lowered down to look into
the middle of them, then grabbed the top of the folders and put them on the
floor. He extended a folder that had
been in the middle to Alex. “You’ve
never heard of the Clan of Caine before?” “No,” Alex said, opening the folder. “You said they were an obscure…” He paused, then looked at Assif, nearly
dropping the folder. “You’re kidding
me.” “No,” Assif lamented.
“They’re serious.” “They legitimately think that they’re descended from
Grendel.” Alex asked in clarification.
“From the Epic of Beowulf. Grendel.” “None other,” Assif said. “The group is claiming that because this thing
is considered to be a possible origin of the Grendel myth, they have a right
to inspect and consider the body for themselves before allowing it to be
‘turned over to the world at large’.” “Do they not care that we’ve got the best materials for
dealing with the body?” Alex asked. “We do technologically,” Assif accepted. “Magically, though, is a different
matter. The Clan of Caine is a pretty
diverse group. They might well be able
to find stuff out about the body that even we wouldn’t be able to. “But still,” Alex said with dismay. “Grendel?
I mean, I know we traffic in weird stuff, vampires and ghosts and the
like, but Grendel? That’s like
claiming that Pecos Bill was real.” “I agree,” Assif lied, the reference lost on him. “Never the less, they’re recognized as the
Clan of Caine, the same clan which Grendel supposedly descended from, at
least that’s according to Beowulf, a story that pretty much every person on
this planet with a high school level education has read.” Alex sighed.
“We’ll go back to the drawing board.”
He turned and headed out. “Please feel free to hurry,” Assif said, stopping Alex
at the door. “Sarah’s already
preparing the body for transport.” It was the size of a small swimming pool. The color of obsidian, the giant tomb was made of hard
steel and was cold to the touch. The
top half was lifted up to reveal a carefully spaced mold of soft foam. At the base of the top piece, a host of
controls were set into a small control panel, a digital display listing off
the status of the machinery within the device. Jason knelt before the box, his eyes closed. He held his hand against the metal, his
breath coming out in gasps of white clouds. Jason sat at a kitchen counter. In the country home, the wooden cabinets
smelled of cinnamon and sun-drenched afternoons. On the wall, a clock shaped like a cat
slowly ticked away the comfortable time.
Before him on the island counter, a smaller version of the box, no
larger than a toaster, sat quietly. He
reached to his left, pulling out a sheet of plastic covering and put it on
top of the box. He began to take out
more pieces of plastic covering it. Away from Jason, Sarah stood with Emma, both holding
cups of coffee. “What’s he doing?” she
asked. “Applying psychic defenses,” Emma answered,
yawning. “I already put on a bunch of
magic stuff. When he’s done, I’ll
finish up and then we’ll put the body in.” “For some reason, I don’t like going to these lengths,”
Sarah confided in the empty examination room.
“I feel like the more effort we put into this, the more likely it is
something will go wrong.” “Well, you need to take care when moving a magical
creature,” Emma pointed. “Magic things
don’t like to be moved in general.
Doubly so when it’s being moved via technology. And especially so after it’s dead.” Sarah shook her head.
“I have little sympathy for monsters.” “And that might be why monsters have little sympathy
for anyone else,” Emma countered before strolling absently away. The dark winds of the Parisian night blew hard. The flags over the airport tower flapped
violently as the gusts coursed through the air. The turning light of the airport swept
consistently across the sky while the ever-present roar of airplane engines
dulled the ambient sounds. On the roof of the tower, Isaiah sat on his stomach,
watching. Through the scope on his
rifle, he had a vantage of the entire tarmac of the airport. Carefully keeping an eye out, he watched as
the large black box was slowly rolled up the ramp into the UN supply plane. On the ground, Alex and Til stood on either side of the
ramp, keeping a watch out. Both were
dressed in tactical gear, carrying large machine guns. They kept a constant vigil along the flat
landing strips, their attention constantly shifting at the slightest movement
or sound. Inside the nondescript gray plane shaped like a bloated
frog, Sarah watched as the huge box was rolled on the conveyor belt as well
as pulled by two large pulleys. Behind
her, Lisa had nodded off on one of the benches while Irene worked on a
laptop. “Leaving from a commercial airport was one of Sarah’s
more ridiculous ideas,” Assif insisted as he stood next to Eliot. Staring out through the bay windows of the
Admiral’s Lounge, the two watched as the plane was slowly loaded with its
precious cargo. “I can appreciate that
every time we use a military air port, it gets the government’s hackles
raised, but at least they have their own security to provide.” “This place has Isaiah on the roof and Til with a
machine gun so large, Arnold Schwarzenegger would feel inadequate,” Eliot
said with a grin, sipping a mug of coffee.
“There’s no better security in the known world.” Assif didn’t respond. The
industrial conveyor belt came to a halt.
Irene looked up and Sarah pointed to the huge box as she stepped down
the ramp to Alex and Til. “We’re
good,” she called over the wind, giving them both a thumbs up. Alex nodded to her, then looked at Til. As they both began to walk away, the ramp
began to rise. |
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