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Chapter One
“Now, w-w-what did you call that contraption again, Slim Jim? Infer-Ed?”
Slim Jim glared at Boone from over his shoulder, his enormous teeth reaching past his lower lip. Slim Jim had turned into a muskrat man when the Fog rolled in—and muskrat plus man was definitely a strange pairing. As to Boone, the ghostly immortal shrank back because Slim Jim had been pretty intimidating before the Fog rolled in—now with his gigantic yellow teeth and overall irritated demeanor, he was even more so. Bud glanced up from his third can of beer.
“Who’s Ed?”
I bit back a laugh. We’d been inside Slim Jim’s newly refurbished trailer for about an hour, and I was getting really tired of listening to Slim’s intricate monologue about his technology. Bud seemed to be, too, considering the smirk he was fighting to keep off his wolf face.
“It ain’t Ed, ya feckin’ imbeciles, it’sinfrared.”Slim Jim slammed his paw on the table so hard, it shook the monitors around it. Other than the normal necessities, he’d filled his trailer with wires and screens we’d collected at his insistence, creating what I could only describe as a backwoods security office. The boys had been talking about it for weeks, because apparently it was going to revolutionize the way we tracked monsters, or so they said.
“It’s electromagnets.” From the side, Ol’ Ned turned his lizard face and tapped the screen Boone had just been asking about. “Keepin’ it simple for you jugheads.”
Bud walked past the other monster hunters, on his way to the fridge for another beer, and accidentally swatted everyone with his bushy tail—even though he was a wolf man, his tail more looked like it belonged to a husky.
“Why don’t you keep it even more simple for us an’ just tell us what it does,” Bud asked Ol’ Ned as he returned and handed his beer to me so I’d pop the tab since he had a tough time with his enormous paws.
Ol’ Ned nodded, like that wasn’t such a bad idea. “Infrared’ll show when somethin’ alive is on screen.”
“How it do that?” Boone leaned forward, staring at the vague blue shapes of the River’s Edge forest as they appeared on screen.
I cut in to answer. “The infrared camera reveals anything that has heat. Living things have more heat coming outta them, and they show up in reds and yellows.” Slim Jim glanced at me with an impressed look on his beaverish face, and I shrugged. “Listen, my kid’s a science wiz. I had to pick upsomethingfrom her.”
“A good thing too, Twila.” Ol’ Ned adjusted some of the screens with a delicate claw. “Since you’re achin’ for this job, you might as well know what some’a this stuff does.”
“That’s why I’ve been sitting here for the past age waiting for Slim Jim to teach me,” I replied with half-hearted frustration and I didn’t comment on the ‘aching for this job’ part—where the hillbilly monster hunting team was concerned, I was mostly achingnotto be part of it. “Can we get this rolling? By the time we’re done, Sicily’s gonna starve to death.”
“Sorry, Miss Twila.” Slim Jim gave me an endearing grin and faced the screens again. “Now, this one’s got night vision, and we’ll prob’ly have ta upgrade the others to that for ya…”
Despite the droning, itwaspretty impressive how quickly Slim Jim had gotten everything set up. The moment he was back and settled into River’s Edge, he’d started to plan a massive net of surveillance across the entirety of Damnation County.
Sicily and I had to set up a specialty P.O. Box for the whole of Windy Ridge just so we could get the parts Slim Jim needed, but thankfully the rest of the town helped out with the cost of the items. Bartering was the way of things with Dagwood and Devil’s Run, but for towns outside Damnation County, we had to use good old-fashioned money, and most of what Slim Jim needed couldn’t be found in our bordering hick towns. Neither I nor Sicily minded too much; Sicily was interested in the tech side of things, since Slim Jim had a know-how that even she could learn from, and I was just happy to help by manning the cameras, rather than running down random dangerous creatures. I was hoping to spend my evenings (when I wasn’t working at the diner) manning the screens while listening to music, watching shows, and having a little sense of normalcy I’d been craving since the Fog dropped us into monster territory.
“Twila, are yousureyou wanna be the one on the cameras?” Bud’s voice pushed through my tech lesson like a mournful howl. “You’re our best runner. It’d be way more useful to have you out in the field with us…”
“Do I want to be sitting on my ass, watching movies and listening to music while you three sweat your butts off in the middle of the woods?” I tossed him a snide grin and rolled my eyes.“Yes.Anything that keeps me outta your antics, I’m here for.”
“B-b-but, Miss Twila,” Boone said, placing a hand on my shoulder, “you’ll still come out when we find something we can’t handle, r-r-right?” He looked downright worried.
I sighed and rubbed my forehead. As much as I would have loved to put the monster-hunting business behind me, I still needed to eat and I hadn’t wrapped my head around hunting. I moaned about the work from time to time, sure, but the boys and I still had our deal (they caught my food for me), and now with Sheriff Dean as a supplementary monster-team member, it wasn’t as if I was going to be far from the action, anyway.
“Yeah, of course, Boone.” I gave him an absent pat on the hand. “I just want to get some rest where I can. And if I don’t take this job, Sicily will, and then I can say goodbye to her finishing her homework ever again.”
Bud chuckled and raised his can at me, but from behind, Ol’ Ned let out a raspy-sounding gasp and jolted, making all three of us jump in surprise.
“Brother Ned?” Boone turned his whiteish-grey eyes to his friend. Ol’ Ned had poked his lizard nose against the infrared camera and was staring at it intently, reaching for the rickety old mouse we’d found second-hand at a pawn shop in Dagwood.
“I saw somethin’.”
“You d-d-did?” Boone ran to his side. “What you see, Ol’ Ned?”
“I dunno, but sweet molasses, it wassomethin’,”Ol’Ned hissed as he threw back three TUMS to aid his constant GERD. “I’m tryin’a rewind, hang on.”
“You can do that?” Bud whistled from behind everyone else. “Dayum. Nowthat’ssome tech you got there. Summa bitch.”
All of us hovered over the camera. Ol’ Ned clacked some buttons on the keyboard and we watched the time stamp on the screen change, ticking slower as Ol’ Ned activated some kind of built-in slow-mo. Frame by frame, we watched as the cold blue of the trees shifted, a splotch in the back, turning green. Then yellow, then orange, until there was a large flash of bright red that streaked its way across the screen. My stomach dropped as I registered how large the thing was; most of the trees around River’s Edge were too big to wrap your arms around, and this thing was at least that girthy, if not more. I turned to Slim Jim, watching his beady eyes furrow as I tapped a different screen.
“Do we have a night vision camera set up in that area?”
