Fantasy Magazine Issue 50 by unknow

Author:unknow
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: fantasy, magazine, short story, fantasy magazine, short stories
Publisher: Prime Books
Published: 2011-04-29T04:00:00+00:00

VII.

I don’t know much about the organization John Ray and Francis work for. John Ray never answered questions—and he’d pop me one if I kept after him. Francis would probably tell me, but by the time Francis came along, I’d figured out that I didn’t want to know.

So I don’t know how they knew John Ray was dead, or how they knew where to send Francis to find me. I don’t know how they chose Francis, with his glasses and his tweed jacket and his fussy old-lady ways. Couldn’t be more different than John Ray if they’d done it on purpose, which maybe they did.

We were down in Florida, hunting an alligator-spirit. I know how goofy that sounds, but in actual fact, it wasn’t goofy at all. Some nut who thought he was a shaman—which he wasn’t, because we asked the local medicine woman and boy, did we get an earful—anyway, this nutjob walked out into the Everglades and sacrificed himself to the alligators. He hadn’t been a shaman, but the swamp didn’t need him to be.

What happened to John Ray was like this. We went out—on a Wednesday night, not that it matters—and tracked down the alligator that had killed the guy, half by my weird-shit radar and half by this gizmo John Ray cobbled together like a dowsing rod.

I killed the alligator and came out of it with a couple broken bones in one hand, more bruises and scratches than anybody could count, and a genuine alligator bite just above my left knee. Lucky for me, he hadn’t been able to get any real purchase, but it was still going to take the rest of the night for John Ray to make me heal.

That’s the part that always reminds me I’m dead. It takes a fuck of a lot more to put me down than a normal person, but I don’t heal on my own. Somebody’s got to do that for me, and that’s what first John Ray, and now Francis, is for.

John Ray was bitching about that as we started back, and he did not fucking listen to me when I tried to tell him something still felt weird. So even though I know I shouldn’t, I still kind of feel like it was his own fault that he got eaten. Because something was still weird, and he wouldn’t check his fucking gizmo or even quit giving me the hysterical chick look, which was my very least favorite of all John Ray’s looks.

He was getting about fed up enough to hit me, and I was still trying to argue with him, when this bull alligator reared out of the swamp and took his head off in one bite.

I did scream. Just for the record. Screamed and grabbed Stella Mortua and disemboweled the fucking thing before it could get away. And I spent the whole rest of that night slogging around that square mile of swamp, blood dribbling down my leg and my hand hurting like I’d stuck it in a fire, killing alligator after alligator.

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