nster Collector in:
A Friendly Place of Dying
season one, episode five
RyFT
Copyright 2011
Cover Painting by
Lisa Marie Raezer
Illustrations by
T.A. Cuce’
This is a work of fiction. Any similarities to
persons living or dead are purely coincidental.
JAZZ, Monster Collector
Season One: Earth’s Lament
RyFT
Episode-5: A Friendly Place of Dying
Beaten, battered, bruised, burned and bound, not to mention exhausted and starving, I slumped against the clear, dome-shaped canopy, my body shaking with the vibrations of the cop’s mini-slope. I was headed to face the magistrate, again, and I was pretty certain she’d throw the book at me, at least she would if she had arms; sentient gas clouds aren’t really equipped for throwing, though they are really good at having raging temper tantrums, take my word for it.
Folks of all sorts called me Jazz, and that was as good a name as any. According to my listing in the com-guide, I was a deferred species bond collector, but what I really did was hunt monsters, I hunted them and I killed them whenever I could. The lethargic leisure seekers of the dimensionally merged planets of Mirth didn’t want to know about anything even slightly off-color, so bond collector suited me just fine.
The slope turned a hard left, I shifted with it, then banged back against the canopy as it straightened out; I didn’t have the strength to sit upright. City hall tower loomed ahead. If I made it to the courts I’d have a whole new title, mallow-mines slave. I’ll try to explain mallow later, but right then my stomach churned. I winced and doubled forward. My gut ached like I’d swallowed a rock, but than that was exactly what I’d done.
The not-now-stone was a little trinket I’d picked up in my journeys. Once ingested it heals any injuries you’ve got, but more then that, it super-charges your energy reserves, takes away hunger, clears up blemishes—it’s truly a cure-all elixir. However (why do these things always have a however?) after using the stone, said user had exactly twenty-four hours to cough it up and wash it in some magical goop called, soul-lution, which I kept in an old pickle jar at my office, or the stone would backlash, meaning that the recipient, namely me, would, in one horrible moment, suffer every injury that the stone had ever healed. And I was just about out of time.
My stomach ached again, and I moaned through gritted teeth, pressing my cuffed hands to my gut.
“Save it Jazz, I’ve seen it all,” Inspector Samuels, beside me in the pilot’s seat, said, not taking his eyes from the approaching tower of Nittsburg city hall, which was a polite way of saying fortress.
“Fine, don’t buy it. But ask yourself, have I ever lied to you?” my voice was stretched thin through the pain.
He laughed, the pig actually laughed. “Yes, you have lied to me Jazz, in fact, that’s all you ever seem to do is lie to me, so much so, that I now wonder if you’ve ever told me the truth.”
Damn, he wasn’t completely wrong, and if I wasn’t in so much pain, I might have laughed too. I glanced at the chrono-scale on the dashboard. By my estimation I had about five minutes before I died one hell of a painful death. “Look, Adam—” I started to say, but a flare of blinding pain cut through my gut and I heaved, nearly loosing my lunch, which was just the stone. Somehow I managed to keep it down, good thing too.
“Cole?” Doubt cast a shadow over Adam’s face. “Are you for real?”
My skin had gone cold and clammy, sweat dripped off my face. I was hunched over, reeling from the sheer pain, but I managed to look up and give him one of those forced smiles that people breathing their last have. “Yeah, I’m for real.”
Samuels’ eyes filled with concern. He set the stun-stick he’d kept trained on me down and nervously griped the yoke with both hands. “Oh man, you’ve been in a bad accident. Look Cole, I’m sorry. I got carried away, was taking things personally, I didn’t consider—”
“Adams?” I grunted out.
“I’m prattling, I know. Hold on, I’ll get you to hospice.” Hitting the siren, he swung the slope in a tight arch, and, unprepared for the sudden turn, my head thumped against the unpadded dash.
What difference would one more lump make? “No, not hospice, they can’t help me.”
“Where to then?” he asked in that ‘take command’ tone of his I found so cute.
“My office.”
He sneered and leaned back in the seat, the slope slowing. His cute tone of voice had turned sarcastic, “I though this wasn’t a trick.”
I couldn’t explain just then as I was riding another wave of intense pain, and using every effort I could to keep from coughing the stone up.
“OK, OK, your office,” he said, veering course again.
Good man. Too bad I wasn’t going to make it. My skin began to tingle, then went super-sensitive. I’d become aware of every root of every hair follicle on my body, then each root began to separate into individual cells, then every cell began to ache with pain. I tried to draw in breath, but it wouldn’t come. I was paralyzed and blind from the agony, but I could still hear for some reason, in fact I could hear everything. The slope’s siren screamed in my ears, and Samuels was talking to me, calling to me, someone outside the ship was listening to some horrible music, a dog was barking, and two men were engaged in a heated argument. It was all too much, I couldn’t shut it out but I couldn’t understand any of it, my ears were overloading.
I must have blanked out because the next thing I knew Samuels was dragging me up the stairs of my office building, calling to me, “Cole! Cole, you have to help me here, I don’t know what to do for you.” He was lugging my dead weight up one step at a time. “Why don’t you have a televator?”
I sucked in a deep breath and my lungs celebrated the rush of oxygen rich air. All at once the pain cleared, my sight returned, and my super-hearing became again just normal, discernable hearing.
“Let go!” I shouted and pushed myself out of his arms, harder then I had intended too, but I didn’t have time to waste on subtlety. This was undoubtedly the pause before the storm—I was down to maybe a couple of seconds. I took the steep stairs two at a time, and blasted through the landing’s double doors. I raced down the short hall to my office, my body supercharged with terror fed adrenaline. I turned the fortunately unlocked knob and wung the door open so hard that the glass etched with, Jazz: Deferred Species Bond Collector, cracked when it hit the wall.
As I should have guessed, Parry was standing in the middle of reception holding the pickle jar in one hand, and the lid in the other. I didn’t have time to be surprised. I stuck as much of my face as I could fit in the mouth of the jar, and simply stopped fighting it. I coughed, gagged, then wretched. The stone hit the soul-lution with a little plop. As soon as it did Parry pulled the jar away, dumping me on the floor, screwed the lid on, and set it on the vid-azine strewn table in the waiting area.
I was panting hard, trying to catch my breath. I could already feel the warmth, and the color, returning to my skin, but I was soaked with sweat and shaking like a quiver-squid, when Samuels burst through the door. His eyes went wide with bewildered fear, but he wasn’t looking at me, his gauze was fixed on the jar.
My heart rate, and my breathing, was slowing. I managed to push myself up onto my elbows. Parry had backed away from the jar. His left hand held his right elbow, his right hand covered his mouth, and, though he’d seen this before, his eyes were quivering.
; The creamy-colored goop inside the jar was rolling and churning like a terrible little storm raged inside; the stone lay barely visible at the bottom. Hundreds of tiny bubbles poured off the stone as if it were dissolving in acid. Now and then little flashes of light appeared and traced patterns through the gel like little fireflies, then would dim, wither, and ultimately disappear. But the worst was the screaming, at least that’s how I’d describe it—like a million tiny voices crying out in pain. I’d been assured by the wizard who, serendipitously, bequeathed me the stone and goop, that there was absolutely nothing alive in the jar, and that the screams were nothing more than gasses released during the cleansing process. I have to tell you though, despite all the terrible things I’d witnessed in my life, the screams that were not screams were still very unnerving.
“What…what is it?” Samuels asked cautiously, as if he doubted he wanted to