Hunting Midnight • Ep 6 • Part 4: Raiders 🦞
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Part 6-4: Raiders
As much as I wanted to stay and eavesdrop forever, I had friends working on what could be a terminally important deadline, so I went to the back alley next. The egress window Persi had used was closed. I phased through it to the inside, and noticed a riot of new footprints on the dusty floor. They’d traced her escape, and locked the hell out of the window. Not a big problem; I was more concerned about clearing the hallway on the fifth than anything else.
I took a moment to return focus to the car and asked for a plan.
They’d gotten close and actually stopped by now, at a gas station nearby. The suspicious headlights had not stopped with them, to my relief. Fergus was inside, feigning to need to use the washroom. He had dropped the book out of the washroom window into the path behind the gas station.
“Best we could come up with,” said Deluxe. “Lucky that he remembered the characteristic of this particular washroom at all.”
“I’ll take any shred of luck I can get at this point,” I said. In response, karma lit my cell phone up with a call from Maive.
“Do you want me to manage communication with your sister?” offered Deluxe.
“If she keeps trying to get in touch, I guess. I told her we were at a business meeting about the restaurant so hopefully she gets the hint.”
“Okay. If only culinary entrepreneurship was our biggest obstacle these days, hm?”
“The worst part is, I don’t think we’re gonna get paid for all this shit, and I have clocked some serious overtime.”
“Well,” said Deluxe, “you did get superpowers.”
“Truth.”
I had a delirious moment of clarity, where I realized that if we somehow survived this mess, and if the rules of whatever game we were playing allowed, I could possibly have a future where my every day, normal life included a variety of insane tricks, including magic invisibility. Creatively dirty thoughts followed on the heels of this, and chasing them came a surprising but not entirely unwelcome wave of horniness.
“God damn it,” I breathed, unable to fully scold myself. I should not have had so much wine earlier.
“What is it?” said Deluxe.
“Oh. Nothing. A wayward thought, just, uh. I’ma go good luck bye.”
I’d gotten a good enough look at the gas station to visualize it and hop my ghost self over there—so I did that and looped around behind it. There was no alley, on account of the empty weedy lot that neighboured the rear of the station. Only an overgrown path that gave access to some other part of the building. The green book had landed in a gross, muddy puddle below a rusty rectangle of a window. Ancient cigarette butts floated in a mass around it. I pictured the dirty water flooding into Fort Ticktock through the portal within the pages, and this made me happy.
Now all I had to do was find a wild animal big enough to move a book, deft enough to open a door and swap the objectives, and either sneaky or tough or scary enough to avoid being killed in the process. This task made me less happy.
Ideally, I’d recruit a wild dog—or better: a pack. But after twenty minutes of flitting about the local shadows, dumpsters, smelly places and trash piles, it became clear that our town’s population of mangy mutts was either located elsewhere, had the night off, or were an invention of my hopeful mind.
Deluxe and Fergus reported the return of the headlamps, and began the first lap of the circuit driving plan. I was low on time and down to one option: my army of raiders was going to be much smaller and furrier than a team of canines.
Besides, if I could handle a zillion bees, what were four or five raccoons?
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Raccoons are probably better anyway, with paws almost like hands... And perhaps more intimidating, as they aren't encountered every day.
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I had a feeling it would be raccoons. Now let's see how well they perform. 😁😁
Drunk Alena is more funny😂😂😂