"You ready? We need to make this quick. I got a date with a long-legged redhead," Bogie bragged, glancing down at his sister. His five-foot-eleven frame towered over Sam's diminutive stature.
"So what else is new?"
"Do I feel lucky?" he joked, doing his Eastwood imitation.
"Talk about clichés."
Laughing, he got down to business. "You ready to rock and roll a few gargoyles?"
"Yeah. But be careful. I smell trouble in there. So keep your mind on the business at hand and not the pleasure to come. I mean, your date."
He gave her a dirty look. "I'm not a kid anymore. I can take care of myself—and you, too!"
"Just humor me."
Sometimes Sam felt thirty going on fifty, while Bogie was twenty-three going on sixteen. He truly loved getting decked out in weird work outfits and being attacked by all kinds of bizarre creatures; he saw it as a neverending adventure. To Sam, this was business pure and simple. It was pride in a job well done. Although, to be honest, she would probably miss the action if she ever worked at anything else.
"Don't fire until you see the yellow of their eyes," she warned. "Stay with me. No winging it, and no flying solo. We play by the rules or we don't play at all." Her baby brother sometimes forgot procedure in his desire for adventure.
Bogie rolled his eyes, muttering under his breath as he checked his steel-mesh coveralls for extra dart cartridges. They wouldn't want to run out. In the dangerous task of hunting supernatural prey, preparation and precaution were the watch words of any day or night.
"On the count of three, we bust in and shoot them with the dart guns," Sam said. "Remember to look to the rafters. Our visual scans from last night showed ten of the ugly little critters up there."
"Gotcha," her brother replied. He clearly didn't like being told what to do.
They both tensed, adrenaline running high, ready to do combat with the four-foot creatures and their extremely sharp teeth and claws. Gargoyles were also dynamic aerial artists; with their three-foot wingspans, they had the ability to dive bomb victims with startling accuracy.
"One, two…" she began, but was interrupted by her brother's gleeful, "Three!" Then they were off at a fast run, Sam trying hard to keep up with the long-legged gait of her brother.
Cursing his brief head start under her breath, she ran harder, her tranquilizer rifle heavy as her feet pounded into the dirt. She hated it when Bogie took point, since she was the elder sibling and it should have been her who first courted danger. After all, Bogie and her Uncle Myles were all the family she had left after that unfortunate Godzilla incident had killed her parents eleven years ago.
Bogie hit the old slat doors hard, slamming them, open. From inside Sam could hear the gargoyles' cries of rage and shock. The crunching noises stopped abruptly, and the sound of flapping wings filled the air.
Inside, Sam got a good look at the gargoyles taking to flight. She immediately raised her rifle and began firing. On her right, Bogie did the same. Her first two shots were aimed true, and two gargoyles plummeted to earth. Her brother wasn't as lucky: his first shot went wide.
"Hey, you hit my gargoyle," he called out in frustration.
"You snooze, you lose," she replied. She had to keep him on his toes.
Her baby brother responded by hitting a gargoyle dead-on. His third shot was high, but it clipped a fiercely hissing gargoyle in the wing, doing enough damage so that the creature was forced to land, barely able to flap. It quickly passed out, and the score was tied; between the siblings' shots, four heavily clawed gargoyles were now lying on the cement floor.
Bogie shouted with glee and Sam grinned, when a sudden loud noise caused Sam to duck.
"Nuts!" The gargoyles were regrouping to pluck some hair, which meant soon they would begin the thing she disliked most about this kind of assignment: the spitting. Gargoyles spat like camels but were less attractive. Sam gritted her teeth.
Yep, she realized as she felt a large wad of spittle hit her chest. She'd been right. And the mustard yellow goo with bits of wings and thin legs sticking out reminded her of her car window on a warm spring day when she was out driving in the country.
Sparing a quick glance at her brother, she noted he too was covered in regurgitated bugs. Really it wasn't surprising, considering a gargoyle's main diet was insects. But, oh, how she hated these glob-spitting pests. Getting bug guts out of her work clothes was harder than getting them off her windshield.
Firing rapidly, Sam managed to hit two more of the dive-bombing little buggers. Bogie also hit another two, which left them with two. That pair, suddenly realizing their fallen comrades still had not risen, fled into the rafters.
"Rats! I hate it went they hide there," Sam griped.
Ignoring her ill humor, Bogie pointed after the largest of the gargoyles, one which had just finished hacking a huge glob of yellow at them.
"Wow! Did you see that? I bet that fellow spat his wad at least nine feet. That's pretty impressive. I'll have to measure it for the record books."
Sam gave him a disbelieving look. "Here we are, covered in crud, and you're impressed with these spitting suckers?" Boys would be boys, she decided cynically, even in her line of work. "You guys and your pissing contests."
Grinning, her brother gave her a high five.
She ignored him and said: "Get off your duff and let's see if we can sew up these last fly-by-nights."
Fifteen minutes later, the final gargoyle fell to earth. Checking her watch nervously, Sam noted that the first of them had fallen over twenty minutes ago. That left less than ten minutes before the knockout serum would wear off, less than ten minutes for them to bake these gargoyles with their sunlamp.
Since gargoyles reverted to stone once the first rays of the sun hit them, it was fortunate for Paranormal busters everywhere that a high-powered lamp could get the same effect. Sam sighed wistfully. It would be so easy to just buy a huge sunlamp and turn it on full blast when entering a gargoyle-infested building, morphing all the creatures to stone; the problem with that scenario was, as soon as the bright light hit them, the gargoyles would go rock hard. If they were in flight they would then crash to the earth, cracking to pieces and literally biting the dust.
No, while she might not like the nasty bug-spitting bastards, since they played hell with her laundry bills, she didn't want to cause their deaths. The Hammetts had always gone to great lengths to see that whatever supernatural pests or monsters they captured were removed and sent to some other location, preferably one that wanted them. Also, gargoyles were on the endangered supernatural species list, and the fine for killing them was hefty.
Yes, Sam was conscientious about her family vow to do right by Busted creatures. She had moved ghosts to castles in Scotland, enjoying how fine they looked in kilts, and had turned attention-grabbing apparitions who could project into skeletal form over to universities where medical students could study them to their hearts' content. She had delivered gremlins to Spielberg in Los Angeles, and had herded bath-loving, fire-breathing dragons to Arkansas to fuel that state's numerous hot springs. Sam had also laid a few ghosts to rest, but only at their request to receive their heavenly reward.
Tonight's captives were going to be sent to South America, where a scientific expedition was underway in the Amazon jungle. There the gargoyles would be used for pest controclass="underline" the scientists would work in bug-free comfort, while the gargoyles would have the feast of their lifetimes.