Two - A Ragtag Bunch of Idiots
The School is located in scenic Fucking Nowhere, California, also known as Death Valley. It's hours from any town of decent size, which means that rather than blow time on commuting every morning, most of the staff choose to live on location in the provided buildings.
This makes commute time a lot faster, and a lot more enjoyable. Most people work long enough that they take the walk from the barracks -- as they'd called them when I lived in them last -- to the main structure at a cool time of day. As in, early morning and late night.
There's a story about an employee at the School who got sent out of the building for some reason in the middle of the day. He stopped, looked up, and exclaimed, "The sun!"
So the story goes.
It's almost certainly not true.
Anyway. I was reminded of it because, walking on the path from main building to barracks, there was no one else out there with us. And once we got inside the barracks proper, it was quiet as a college dorm the week before exams, though I noticed quite a few doors with Do Not Disturb signs hung on the handles. Night shift workers. (Of course, in college the signs probably would have been ties or socks around the door handle, and had entirely a different meaning, but I digress.)
I waited politely in the hall while Jonathan rummaged in his room. He came out after a while carrying two small suitcases, and handed me one.
"Those are an old pair," he said, "so go ahead and get them ripped up, damaged, whatever." He glared at me and added, "The shirt is new, though, so if you damage it there's going to be hell to pay."
Hey, I know a joke that goes like that, I thought.
"No, that's what happens when Satan goes bald," I said. I wasn't expecting to say it, and you probably weren't expecting to hear it. But where did you think Max got her, ah, impeccable wit from?
Certainly not her mother.
But that's a different subject.
Jonathan looked at me as if I had attempted to summon a dark God, rather than cracked a lame joke. Then understanding dawned over his face.
"Oh. Hell toupee, hell to pay..." He rolled his eyes. "Let's get moving."
We got back to the main building with plenty of time to spare before two o' clock, but believe me, there was no time for us to just relax before we left. I got corralled into helping Don put the catgulls into their travel cages ("because," he explained, "it helps if we release them pretty far away from here. Otherwise they'll just come back home").
Ever put a normal cat in a travel cage?
Imagine that same cat -- scared, furry, and with five pointy ends out of six total -- with wings.
Fortunately, the vast majority of them were half-asleep, which merely made it a matter of timing to get them into the cages.
And other than the wings, they were basically just cats, which made them adorable as hell -- and virtually invisible to the casual observer, whereas ridiculously attractive Erasers are more like giant beacons of something fishy going on in Denmark.
Or that's how Don put it, anyway.
Once we had all twenty catgulls safely in their travel cages (and the travel cages in the back of the van), it was almost time to leave. But Don had, apparently, forgotten to put one of the catgulls in its cage -- he was still holding it absently.
"Uh, Don," I began, "I think you've forgotten something?"
He looked at me, then glanced down at the catgull he was holding. "Oh, no," he said. "This is James. He stays with us and, through a telepathic link, tells us what the rest of the pride have found. Gets rid of annoying travel time for the pride when they find something."
Yes, I regularly deal with telepathic cats -- technically, cats whose DNA had been recombined with a little bird DNA.
I'll bet you want my job.
Don grinned at me. "I'll bet you're thinking that's really cool."
I blinked. What the hell had been going on that suddenly everyone employed at the School could read my mind?
"Actually," Don explained, "you just think really loud. Or to be more exact, your face makes it obvious what you're thinking about."
"Was that a 'your face' joke I just heard?" said Jonathan, surprising me by suddenly appearing out of (what seemed like) nowhere.
"No," said Izzy. We were standing in the parking lot out in back of the main building, and she came out of one of the few outside doors, brushing dust off of her shirt.
"Everyone here?" she asked.
"Crane's getting the Erasers together," I said, feeling quite useless. I was supposed to be the leader, but Izzy seemed to be the one in control.
It was kind of cool.
"OK," Izzy said. "I'm driving."
"Shotgun!" said Jonathan.
"Damn," said Don.
"Where's Crane in all this?" I asked.
"Speak of the devil and he shall appear," said Jonathan, as Crane walked out of the building, accompanied by what looked like the most horrible collection of Erasers ever assembled.
They looked...old. I'd never seen that in Erasers before.
And they looked battle-scarred.
"I'm riding with my homies," said Crane, and together with him, the Erasers piled into their van... and promptly drove off. At speed.
"Please, never let him say that again," said Jonathan.
"I hope Crane remembers to let the catgulls go at the right time," Don said wistfully, staring after the van as it receded down the road.
After that, it seemed like there was nothing left to say, and so we, too, got in the van. (Of course, it was a different van.)
Jonathan had called shotgun, and Izzy was driving, which left me and Don in the back.
"If you two start anything, I will turn this van around," she said.
Somehow I got the feeling she was kidding.
As soon as we got out of the parking lot, Don opened his laptop and booted it up.
"What are you going to do with that?" I asked as we bumped over the road to the exit.
"Wait a minute," he said.
I stared past his head and out the window. The School, as I've said, is located in the middle of nowhere, and there are precisely two roads off the grounds. One is relatively nice -- the one you enter by. The other is not so nice -- it's how the Erasers get off the property when they need to.
It would be a hell of a place to kill someone. It's also a hell of a place to have a breakdown.
The laptop finished booting up, and Don clicked a few buttons before spinning it around so that I could see the screen.
I wasn't familiar with the program, but it seemed to be a live feed from some sort of camera that was looking, currently, through the front windshield of a van.
Don spun the laptop back around so that the screen faced him. "It's a live feed from the leader of the Eraser team," he explained. "He has a fake eye, and agreed to let me put a camera in it. We also have sound capability through a mike in his eardrum, but it's a little laggy, and they can phone in to the computer for daily reports, but that feature requires Internet access on at least one end of the connection, so I doubt we'll be using it much."
"Just out of interest," said Jonathan from the front seat, "did you breathe once while saying that?"
"Yes," said Don.
"I was just wondering."
We got out of Death Valley no problem, and stopped in a small town for a quick break, and their Starbucks for our first phone-in from the Erasers.
Of course, we had to buy coffee first.
Don tapped a few keys, and then plugged in a pair of headphones. "Wouldn't want the entire Starbucks to hear us talking," he said by way of explanation.
"So what if we want to talk back to them?" said Jonathan.
"We have a messenger program on this end for situations like this where we're in public," Don said. "We type our answer, the computer runs it through a text-to-speech converter, and they 'hear' our answer spoken. Unfortunately it's pretty buggy, so they don't hear a human voice -- they hear a simulator."
Yes, friends, you heard that right: we were instant-messaging Erasers. In a Starbucks.
I know you want my job now.
Don typed in a test message: "Can you hear me now?"
To my surprise, their message appeared in the messenger window as well: "Yes."
"It can do that?" I asked.
"Yeah," said Don, distracted. "The text-to-speech works both ways. Except they have to speak really clearly so the software will understand them."
"Found anything?" he typed.
"No," came their reply after a pause. "Released catgulls as per your instructions."
"Good," Don sighed aloud, and then typed, "Thanks. Your assistance appreciated."
Their response appeared seconds after Don entered his, which made me suspect they'd typed it before he'd responded.
"Need help on one point. We have some leads on the East Coast and some on the West. Which do we follow?"
Don turned to me. "What do you think?"
"Let me have the keyboard," I said.
"Follow both," I typed. "Send the catgulls after those on the East, you go after the ones on the West."
"Good idea," their response read. "Signing off, Fritz out."
"Fritz?" I asked aloud.
"Yeah," said Don, taking the laptop back from me and preparing it for shutdown. "Fritz."
"I seem to have missed rather a lot," I noted as we headed back to the van.
"You did," Izzy said. "We missed you, too."
"Some of us," Jonathan muttered.
"Be nice," Izzy said, "or I'm leaving you here."
The drive was, for the most part, uneventful. I had no idea where we were going, but Izzy seemed to.
It was starting to get dark when I heard an unearthly wail.
"What is that?" Jonathan said, rather too loudly.
Izzy pulled the van over on the side of the highway. "OK, what is going on here?" she asked, turning around to get a better look at what was going on in the back seat.
Don was talking to the cat.
I shit you not.
Talking. To the cat.
I've never quite gotten used to the weirdness entailed in my job.
I mean, it made sense because it was a telepathic cat, but... he was talking to a cat.
And boy, did the cat look excited.
Don looked up from the cat and said, "They've found the flock."
"Excellent!" said Izzy. "Which way do I drive?"
"East coast," said Don.
"Balls," Izzy grumbled. "Who wants to drive?"
"I will," said Jonathan, and the two of them switched places.
"Wait just a minute," I said. "Couldn't we get plane tickets?"
They all stared at me for a moment.
"How would we get James on the plane?" Don asked, holding the cat protectively to his chest. It purred.
"I'm not sure," I admitted.
"Leave it to me," said Jonathan confidently. "I am the king of last-minute planning."
"Yeah, and we all know it," Izzy said under her breath. "Jonathan, set us a course for Los Angeles. We're flyin' out of here!"