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Chapter One
Claire
“Did I ever tell you about the time that I almost caught Bigfoot?” Marty asked.
A few feet away, Henry gave a loud groan of disapproval. He was a man of science.
Marty ignored him, waiting for my response. I looked uncertainly between the two of them, not sure how to answer. As the only female on the team, it felt like I was being set up for a joke. The men sometimes gave me a hard time, and I carefully avoided walking into their traps.
Marty’s eyes were earnest, and I finally shook my head no. It was the truth, anyway. This was a story I had never heard.
His face lit up, sensing an audience.
“Oh, yeah,” he replied eagerly. “I was in the woods in Idaho. I knew he was close because of the smell. Imagine the worst, skunkiest cabbage that’s ever existed, and multiply it by a thousand. That’s Bigfoot.”
I glanced at Henry again, who just rolled his eyes good-naturedly. I was still wary, not wanting to seem too impressed. Instead, I doubled down on acting like one of the boys.
“Are you sure it wasn’t Finn? He gets pretty ripe after a few days in the woods,” I remarked.
Henry laughed, and I felt proud of my little joke.
“That’s how I got this job, you know,” Marty continued as though I hadn’t said anything. “I was getting a reputation as a Bigfoot hunter, and that’s how the headhunter found me.”
“Huh,” I replied distractedly, assessing some trampled brush.
Something had been through here, but the damage didn’t seem to fit the centaur we were looking for. It looked like it had been made by a smaller animal. I examined it for a moment longer, then dismissed it.
The truth was, in another setting, I would’ve liked to hear more about Bigfoot. It wasn’t like fantastic stories were all that improbable when being shared by the members of a team hired to track down aliens. We knew there was some wild stuff out there, things that seemed far-fetched to ordinary citizens. We’d seen it with our own eyes.
But right now, we had a job to do. And I didn’t want to lose face in front of Henry. Though we all believed in things that most people would scoff at, we also had to remain level-headed and logical. If I got too excited about a campfire story, I ran the risk of never being taken seriously.
In a male-dominated field, that was a risk I couldn’t afford. I already had to be one of the best to keep their respect.
IMRA, or the International Monster Research Association, was a top-secret agency, and our employer. They investigated alien sightings. Some were quickly debunked, unsubstantiated rumors started by people with vivid imaginations and too much time on their hands. Others – and this was the secret part – were very much real. But IMRA would’ve never wanted the public to find out about that.
I hadn’t started off in life with any sort of calling for alien research, unlike Marty, apparently. I’d stumbled into the job mostly by accident, but it had turned out to be a real stroke of luck. I got to be out in the field, tracking and capturing alien monsters.
I’d always been something of a tomboy. I liked working with my hands and being out in nature. I wouldn’t have made it far in a desk job. Computers weren’t my thing.
But this suited me to a T, and it turned out that working for a secret government agency, the pay wasn’t too bad. It was a lot more than I would’ve made as a park ranger, for sure.
There were some drawbacks, of course. We spent a lot of time away from our families, which was why most of the IMRA recruits had little or no family waiting for them at home.
I was no different than the rest. When I came into this world, I had a mother and a brother, but they’d both passed on since then. I’d never known my father, so signing away most of my life to IMRA wasn’t as big of a loss as it might’ve sounded.
We all signed a non-disclosure agreement, vowing to never speak a word about IMRA to anyone outside the agency. But, again, when you had no family and no life outside of work, that problem solved itself.
“WhereisFinn?” Henry blurted out. He was hunched over, studying the ground. He stood up suddenly and craned his neck to see.
“Up here,” a voice called down. We all tilted our heads to the direction of the sound.
Finn had climbed high up in a tree, probably trying to see if he could find any clues from a bird’s-eye viewpoint.
Henry shook his head but said nothing. Silently, we resumed our search. I knew that we were looking for a centaur, but other than that, I really didn’t know what to expect. I didn’t think any of us did, which made our search more complicated.
We’d already been up here in the mountains for several days. We camped out in a tent at night and resumed our hunt every morning. There were a lot of gaps in our knowledge, and it was taking us a long time to get answers.
Were centaurs herbivores or carnivores? Did they sleep at night, or during the day? Did they bed down in the same place every time, or never returned to the same place twice? All of this information we just didn’t know, and it would’ve been useful.
