Monster Girl Base Read online

  The strip of woods ended at a sharp bend in the winding road, and I stopped and looked for mysterious black cars before pedaling forward. The road was clear except for a battered green pickup that idled with its nose pointed down someone’s driveway a few houses away, so I crossed the road, and the pickup’s engine roared to life as I slipped between two nearly identical mock Tudors before any unmarked black vehicles could cruise into view.

  I knew I couldn’t assume that I’d lost the Men in Black cars just because I didn’t see one on the street. I also didn’t know how many of the unmarked black vehicles were out there looking for me. I only had one hope of evading them, and that was making sure I went where they couldn’t see or follow. Fortunately, I’d grown up exploring the trails and woods of Farmington with my bike, so I knew I could dodge the fuckers.

  I usually took the easy route to Sol’s house. I’d head southwest on Grand River Avenue, turn south at Power Road so I could grab a Faygo Rock & Rye pop at the gas station on the corner to fuel my ride, and then take the bridge over M-5 down to Nine Mile Road. Then I’d bike down the narrow, pothole-filled dirt road that stretched from the mailbox at the end of Sol’s property down to his Airstream trailer.

  But today I was going to take the hard route through the nature preserve so these spooks couldn’t follow me.

  My uncle’s Airstream and “workshop” sat on forty acres backing up to a blue heron nesting site, so the city had ended up turning a big chunk of the woods behind him and his widely separated neighbors into a nature preserve. I’d always thought he had bought the land back in the 70’s, when Farmington really had still been a waning farming town near the outskirts of Detroit instead of just another suburb, but now I realized that if he actually owned it on paper, the spooks wouldn’t have needed to follow me to the place. Also, considering my uncle had just told me he was leaving me a few million dollars in an off-shore account, I imagined he probably had a shell company that owned the property, or maybe he was squatting. He’d told me a bunch of times that he’d adamantly refused to sell the property to developers or do anything with it except keep living in the silver Airstream he’d parked on it, but that could have been him just trying to make me think he actually owned it.

  Uncle Sol was turning out to be way more complicated than the slightly zany relative who hated commies, the government, and pretty much anyone who told him what to do.

  The nature preserve was technically a shortcut to Sol’s, but it took so much time to bike through that I only ever did so if I wanted to be alone with my thoughts. Today, though, I figured I could spare the extra few minutes to get to Sol’s if it meant not letting the Men in Black cars know where I was going.

  I pedaled across the lush green backyards of the mock Tudors until I hit the treeline. Then I shifted gears on my bike and started to pedal in hard, slow strokes so I could get across the uneven ground of the forest. I’d been pushing myself to the limits of my speed and agility so I could get away from the Men in Black cars, but I knew this was going to be a test of my endurance.

  My lungs ached, and my legs burned as I propelled myself across the forest floor, but the panic that had been whirling like a tornado in my brain slowed a little. No matter how anxious I was, the shady canopy of the leafy green trees in the nature preserve always calmed me down and put me in a contemplative mood, and since I had gotten away from the Men in Black cars for a few minutes, all I had to focus on was the possibility that I’d lost the last relative I really cared about forever.

  My mom had gotten pregnant with me just a few months after she’d started to date the man I referred to as my sperm donor. When she’d broken the news to him, he’d acted all excited, then disappeared entirely just a few months before I was born. My mom had done her best to raise me without a dad around, but between her shifts at the GM factory and her job as a waitress at an all-night diner, she wasn’t always at home for me as much as I knew she wanted to be.

  Fortunately, Sol had stepped in. He was my mother’s oldest brother, and he’d also been the only one in the family who hadn’t blamed my mom for driving my sperm donor away somehow.

  Sol had been around to watch me when she’d been stuck on an overnight shift or too tired to do anything but sleep. I had fond memories of snuggling up to my uncle on the sofa while he read Ray Bradbury stories to me or showed me old Star Trek reruns.

  When I’d gotten old enough to bike over to Sol’s place on my own, I’d head over there at least once a week if the weather was decent, and sometimes Sol would even pick me up from school in his big covered ATV. I would hang out in his workshop doing my homework or just watching him mess around with whatever invention was going to change the world this month.

  Uncle Sol had been there for me when my mom had died in a car crash right in the middle of my senior year of high school. He’d made sure I’d eaten, gotten me to school, and let me sleep in his Airstream trailer when I couldn’t stand to be in the old house without my mom. He’d been the only relative who had bothered to do anything except show up at the funeral or send me a condolence card.

  Sol and I had always been close, but that was when I’d first realized how much I really meant to him, and how important he’d been to me. He’d been the closest thing to a father I’d ever had.

  Unfortunately, Sol’s grip on reality had seemed to take a hit after my mom died, but I couldn’t really blame him. He’d always been a little paranoid about his personal security and fascinated by conspiracy theories, but he’d started muttering about the “pedo-lizard-assholes” watching him just a few months after she’d died. He’d never actually come right out and told me that he suspected the government had caused her death somehow, but I’d found a folder in his trailer that contained the police reports from the crash, annotated in his familiar, loopy handwriting.

  I’d figured his conspiracy theories had been his way of dealing with his grief. Personally, I’d tried to run away from the sadness by digging into all the video games I could, since worlds full of cool monsters seemed a lot more welcoming than one without my mom. It made sense to me that Sol would try to find some kind of greater meaning for her death, but I’d never seriously suspected there was anything more sinister behind it than the drunk driver in the other car falling asleep at the wheel.

  Now that I was being chased by the unmarked black cars that Sol had always warned me about, though, I was starting to wonder if I’d been wrong about that, too.

  I slowed to a stop at the bottom of a forty-foot hill and sucked some fresh, cool air into my burning lungs. I knew the slope up to Uncle Sol’s place was much gentler than the ravine in the park, but I definitely didn’t have the momentum or energy to make it all the way up on my bike alone, especially since I’d spent the last few years playing video games instead of riding hard. I spat out a gob of phlegm that had collected in my throat while I rode, and then I started to wrestle my bike up the slope. I’d been riding through the nature preserve for at least ten or fifteen minutes, and I hadn’t heard any cars crashing through the woods yet, so maybe I’d been able to lose my mysterious pursuers after all.

  When I finally made it up to the chain-link that surrounded Uncle Sol’s property, I shoved aside the section of fence I knew was loose. Then I walked my bike past the thin strip of trees that hid Sol’s home from prying eyes.

  My lungs felt like they were filled with broken glass, and my legs felt like Jell-O. I wasn’t usually this wiped out after my ride to Sol’s, but I’d also never been trying to evade the Men in Black on the ride there before, either. I caught my breath, and then I went around to the front of the trailer, where Sol’s covered ATV was parked in the packed dirt driveway.

  If Sol hadn’t taken the ATV out, then he probably hadn’t been able to escape from the Men in Black cars. But if the Men in Black cars were trying to follow me to Sol’s lab, maybe they didn’t actually know where he lived. If they were still looking for him, then maybe he was still alive.

  Maybe he’d let the email go out
to warn me while he was preparing to flee.

  Maybe I could find Sol before something happened to him after all.

  I tried the doorknob and held my breath.

  The handle turned smoothly all the way. The trailer was unlocked. That wasn’t like Sol. My uncle never left the trailer unlocked unless he was right outside, but I realized he had to have left it open for me so I could grab the C4.

  “Okay, okay,” I muttered as I swung the door open. “Look for Sol. Grab the explosives. Get out.”

  The trailer had always been a little cluttered with Sol’s books and papers, but now it looked like a hoarder’s paradise. Books were piled up in precarious stacks on the floor, the tiny kitchen table and counters were crammed with newspapers, and a snowdrift of papers covered the benches.

  “Sol?” I called out. I didn’t expect an answer, and I didn’t get one, but I checked in the bathroom and tiny bedroom anyway.

  No Sol.

  “Fuck,” I muttered as I shut the bedroom door, headed over to the bench, shoved aside a pile of papers with a sweep of my arm, and then opened the padded top of the seat.

  The hollow bench was filled with bricks of C4. It looked like there was enough to blow up the whole city, and there were a separate stack of computer-chippy meat-thermometer looking detonators on the side.

  “Holy shit… ” I stared at the explosives for a second, and then I grabbed four bricks and detonators and headed out of the trailer. I’d never actually used these explosives before, but sometimes Sol would have me watch when he fucked around with small batches of explosives, so I kind of had an idea of how they worked: put the detonator in the plastic, hit the go button, twist the timer to the right amount, and then hit the go button again to start the timer.

  “I can’t believe I have to blow up your workshop, Sol,” I said under my breath as I exited the trailer.

  Fortunately, I knew the lab wasn’t far. All I had to do was follow the narrow grassy trail that led a few hundred yards through the woods.

  Sol’s workshop was an old garage with no house attached, and for “Wiccan-ritual aesthetic reasons” he’d arranged a bunch of old cars in a circle around the building with their headlights facing out like automotive guardians.

  I slipped in through the unlocked side door, blinked in the sudden darkness, and then waited for the motion detector to kick in.

  It only took a second before the halo-shaped fluorescent light above buzzed to life.

  The garage lab was as cluttered as a four-year old’s play room. Old wooden workbenches and stainless steel shelves covered with half-dismantled engines and blinking LED lights were scattered everywhere. Sharpened yard tools that Sol kept as stealth weapons hung on the walls next to old-fashioned beige PC monitors that were hooked into the general tangle of colored wires that covered the concrete floor. These wires connected to 80’s style computer towers that stood like silent guardians on the far wall of the room. They still hummed and chewed on data, and now that I was taking a closer look at everything, I recalled that I’d once seen my uncle working inside of one of the computers, and the internals had looked far more modern than a computer of that time period would have been.

  What had my uncle been working on? Why did the government want it?

  Chalkboards covered with scribbled equations and scrawled obscenities stood in a ring around the room, but none of the equations and notes meant anything to me. They didn’t even look like they were written in English or Latin, and as I stared at one of the weird spirally-symbols etched in chalk, my head started to spin a little, so I quickly glanced away.

  My stomach sank as I looked around the Sol-less room. I set the C4 down on one of the shelves, then started to check in the corners and under the workbenches. I even grabbed a ladder and checked in the crawlspace above the garage, but the only thing up there was insulation and a few dead bats.

  “Okay, Uncle Sol,” I called out as I started to climb down from the ladder. I knew he wasn’t in the garage, but some part of me had hoped he’d jump out from behind a chalkboard and tell me this was all some kind of elaborate practical joke or something. “This is it. I’m gonna blow up your lab, just like you asked. Big boom, puff of smoke, life’s work gone. You sure you want me to do this?”

  I hadn’t really expected an answer, and I didn’t get one. So, I placed two of the C4 bricks in opposing corners of the garage, set one down in the middle of the floor, and headed outside with the last brick. My plan was to put the last one on the car, flip all the detonator timers on, go back to the Airstream, and set one of those.

  Then I would get the hell away from here.

  I still wasn’t sure if the Men in Black cars had gotten Sol already or if he’d managed to escape, but either way, he was gone, and I didn’t think I’d be able to find him. I knew he was too smart to leave any clues if he’d managed to disappear on his own, so I tried to accept that I was never going to see him again.

  And whatever had caused all the trouble, it was in that ’72 Lincoln.

  I closed the garage door and went to find the car Sol had wanted me to destroy.

  The big, boxy sedan was so battered and banged up it looked like it had been in a demolition derby. Dark blue paint peeled in the craters of its dented body and exposed rusted stainless steel underneath. The grille and bumper both hung off at odd angles, and the hubcaps were gone entirely. The keys were hanging out of the driver’s side lock as though begging someone to take it for the saddest of joyrides. It was a piece of shit, but somewhere inside it was the key to Uncle Sol’s disappearance.

  I was never going to understand what he’d made, and I knew it was better if I didn’t know exactly why the government was after him, but I could at least be the one to carry out his last wishes.

  So, I opened the door, leaned inside, and set my last brick of C4 on the dashboard, but then hesitated before I plunged the detonator stick into the putty.

  I was pretty sure a single brick of C4 could take out a normal car, but if I was going to blow up Sol’s stuff, I needed to do it right, and I needed to do it right the first time. I wanted to make sure I didn’t leave a single trace of whatever he’d been building in the Lincoln, and I definitely wanted to make sure I didn’t leave behind any scraps of Sol’s lab for the Men in Black cars to sift through.

  “It should be in the engine,” I said to myself, and then I grabbed the C4, leaned back out of the car, and walked around to its front.

  When I got to the front of the car, I moved my hand to the massive hunk of sheet metal that covered the beast’s engine. The hood bounced a little under my hand, and I realized the metal was a lot warmer than it should have been. It didn’t exactly burn my palms, but it felt like it had been sitting out under the hot summer sun instead of a cloudy spring sky. It seemed like whatever was in there was still running.

  “Huh.” I frowned, then crouched down a little to get a closer look. I couldn’t hear any noise coming from under the hood, but maybe it was just really quiet, the way electric cars never made any noise until the person driving them honked at you. I peered into the gap between the hood and engine and saw a faint but unmistakable yellowish glow.

  “What the fuck was he trying to build inside you?” I muttered. I knew Uncle Sol had told me not to mess with the car, but he wasn’t there to see me do it, and I figured if the yellow glow was going to irradiate me or something I’d already gotten a big enough dose anyway, so I slipped my fingers under the hood and told myself one peek couldn’t hurt me.

  The hood lifted easily, but I nearly dropped it when I saw what was inside.

  The motor was completely gone, and it had been replaced with a stainless steel panel that had three different blinking digital readouts. The top readout was red, and it displayed a string of numbers that didn’t really make any sense to me. The yellow middle readout displayed all zeroes and had a set of up and down arrow buttons next to it, and the bottom green readout only displayed zeroes. It looked a lot like the flux capacitor panel from Back t
o the Future, except there were no helpful labels to explain what anything meant. Even the big red switch at the bottom was unmarked.

  “Did you build a fucking time machine out of a Lincoln Continental?” I asked my absent uncle. My hand automatically went to my pocket so I could take a picture, but I’d left my phone at home, so I just stared at the panel in wonder.

  Now, I had to blow what was probably my uncle’s most successful invention.

  “You! Get your fucking hands up--now, now, now!” The voice was deep and authoritative, but full of panic, and it came from behind me.

  My hands shot up immediately, my heart definitely skipped three or four beats, and my head reeled. I jerked my head around to see who was yelling at me, and the rest of my body followed.

  I was surrounded by clones of Agent K from Men in Black, right down to the suit and shades. Maybe my freaked-out brain was exaggerating how alike they were, but I was definitely seeing different shades of Tommy Lee Jones and Josh Brolin in Ray-Bans all around me.

  And all of the Men in Black were pointing enormous guns at me. Some of them were pistols, some of them were rifles, and some of them looked like old-fashioned ray guns.

  I’d fucked up, and now they’d found me.

  “On the ground!” The voice belonged to the oldest Tommy Lee Clones with the biggest, shiniest gun. “Now, now, now--”

  My knees were starting to wobble, and I didn’t trust myself to kneel down quickly without falling flat on my face, but I had to avoid getting a bullet through the head, or whatever one of those ray guns might do to me. Also, my vision was starting to get a little spotty, what with all the hyperventilating I suddenly realized I was doing.

  “Uh, gimme a second … ” I choked out. I sucked in a long, deep breath and leaned back against the car as I tried to get my balance back.

  Then my elbow hit something, and I felt a click under the bone.

  “Shit,” I groaned as an eerie mechanical whine started up from the panel behind me, and it was so loud I could barely hear anything else.