Tyler gets the Akron police to join up with the Willamette sheriff’s office in a joint task force. I’m surprised but she tells me that she was able to convince them because Willamette is better for me. It’s smaller, calmer. Yeah, that makes it a bit harder to push when I have to but there’s also less chance of, I don’t know what to call them, dark flare-ups?

“Yeah, but wouldn’t these guys have more stuff? A larger budget?” I say. "More space?"

Tyler says, “Maybe.”

“So, we’re going to set things up in Willamette because of me?”

Tyler says, “Every lead we have lately is because of you. Akron wanted to check you out. Hence the interrogation. That satisfied them so they’re sending a few detectives with us. Besides, we're already set up there. It makes sense, so no, it's not just about you. Only mostly.” She grins.

We’re standing outside on the sidewalk with Monica who’s got her glasses back on and chewing her gum. She hasn’t said a word since the interview ended. Nobody’s said what we’re doing out here or what we're waiting on but I assume it's a ride since their last car was blown to hell.

“The runes on Adam’s shirt,” I say. “Adam’s. That’s a big deal? I mean, you have pictures of all those runes. They’re on Monica’s rifle and I saw them on the Epsilon’s armor. I take it you can’t just take a picture and learn the rune that way?”

“No,” says Tyler. “It’s how you draw the rune too. If you looked closely, you’d see that the depths of the etchings vary and the order of the lines matter. How you move the hand, how you hold the tool, there might be vocal elements too for some. We don’t know any of those but there are rumors. We know what many of the runes look like, some of what they do, but our practitioners only know so much. Actually, they’re only allowed to know so much.”

“Why’s that?” I ask.

“It’s like Adam said,” says Tyler. “The more they know the more they want to know. Eventually, if they don’t stop they quit and disappear. Every time.”

“Frank,” says Monica.

“Right,” says Tyler. “Otis Frank worked for the FBI in the fifties. He was a practitioner. An Eta. They specialize in protective runes.”

“Like, from heat and cold or something?”

“Yes, but also things like disease, bullets, and radiation, if they’re high enough level,” says Tyler. “This guy got to level three, we think. You learn enough level one runes, you go to level two, and so on. One day, Frank doesn’t show up to work. A week later he robs a bank in broad daylight. He killed a guard and a couple of customers. The local cops shot him Lord knows how many times. We know that over two hundred rounds were expended. If he got so much as a headache from any of it, he never let on. There weren't even any holes in his clothes. He took hostages. We rescued them but lost another couple of agents.”

“Wow.”

“We had to physically barricade him inside the bank until he starved to death,” says Tyler.

“Holy shit.”

“Yeah,” says Tyler. “Power corrupts. That’s enough just for human nature and yes, there are theories that the entities help that corruption along. No one knows why. The agency lost another couple of practitioners that way, though not as spectacularly. Now nobody’s allowed more than two level two runes today.” She’s quiet a moment then says, “What he said about power limiting choice is very interesting.”

“Yeah, like, what’s the endgame?” I say.

Tyler and Monica both look at me.

“Is it just about eating?” I say. “The entities offer power in exchange for eating... possibilities? That’s it?”

“So far as we know,” says Tyler.

That’s when my new home pulls around the corner. I see an unfamiliar gray car towed behind it, so for a moment I’m not sure the RV is mine, but then I see Alex behind the wheel waving at me with Myra beside him.

“Welcome home, Ben,” says Tyler.

We go in through the side door. It’s nice inside. I didn’t get a chance to look yet. My luck pointed me right to it so why bother? I had planned on checking it out in detail after lunch while we waited for the paperwork to be completed. There’s a fire extinguisher right by the door. Good to know. The sink is right in front of me, with some storage cabinets above. The stove is right there beside that, the microwave above. The dinette is to my immediate right, with the television above the table. The booth itself looks comfy. Across from the dinette is an overstuffed loveseat. Past that is the cab and the cabover.

When I step up into it, I find that the wall to my left encases a nice-sized refrigerator. Past that are the bunks, the door to the bathroom, and then the master bedroom, I guess is what you’d call it, that has a sliding cloth divider.

I like it.

Myra ducks out of the cab toward us and greets us with a smile as her husband follows her.

“Myra!” I say. It’s good to see her. “I didn’t expect you guys to make a delivery!”

The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation.

Myra hugs me.

The last hug I had was with Candace and Stacy at the diner right before the flashmob days ago. It feels good. After a moment, there’s barely room but Myra edges past me to greet the agents, and here’s Alex, grinning, and he pulls me into a hug too.

“You guys didn’t have to do this,” I say. I’m a little emotional. I sit down on the loveseat.

“Nah,” says Alex. “We had to come over here anyway and Myra had to sign the paperwork and wanted to check out the RV — I’m sorry, we were told emphatically that it’s a motorhome, my apologies — and make sure it got the full work up.”

“And did it?” I ask.

Myra says, “Oh yes.” She sits in the booth and Alex sits beside me. Tyler, grinning, sits beside Myra. Monica explores the rear, peeking at the booths and the bathroom, the bedroom. “This thing is as protected as I could make it. It’s doubled the cost, of course, but given your situation, it should be worth it. We also paid a little extra to guarantee they keep at least one more model on the lot until further notice, just in case the worst happens, though I can’t figure out what that’d be. All the runes are in inconspicuous places, very tasteful.”

Tyler says, “I feel that I have to remind everybody that we are not in a parking space?”

Alex slaps my shoulder and says, “Keys are in the ignition, Ben.”

“Thanks, you guys,” I say. “You’re good friends.”

“Aw,” says Alex. “It’s what you pay us for.”

I pause. I look at them all. Monica is standing, leaning against the refrigerator, her expression inscrutable. “I don’t pay you to be nice to me. To be here. I wouldn’t. Couldn’t do that. I don’t know how you can even be around me without worrying we’re going to be hit by Sputnik or something out of the blue.”

Monica snorts but she doesn’t say anything.

Tyler says, “Ben, your record with friendlies is pretty good. Do you know how many innocents were hurt today in your fight in the parking lot?”

Nobody’s told me. I haven’t been able to ask.

“None,” she says. "Someone should have said. I'm sorry."

I boggle.

“None,” she repeats. “All that chaos, cars and bikes zooming around, flying through the air, all the gunfire, and the only people hurt were the bikers and the Epsilons. No one was hurt at the bank. Yes, the hospital was different and the medical examiner died, but you were nowhere near it and that wasn’t a matter of chance. Ben, we might be safer around you than anywhere.”

Myra says, “And it’s never boring.”

“Gives me something to do,” says Alex with a shrug.

Monica points at me. “I tell you guys that this man right here got into a sword fight against a Captain of the Knights of Epsilon?”

Tyler plays along. “No shit?” She turns to the Wests. “A captain fights with a napalm sword.”

Alex says, “A napalm sword?”

I move to the driver’s seat to get us moving. Don't want to get a ticket right in front of the police station. I work for the FBI. It'd be embarrassing.

“Yeah,” says Monica. “Drips fire pudding. Very scary. Ben fought him with a skateboard. Kicked his ass.”

They give me some time alone. To drive and calm down. Monica is right. I really need to let these people be my friends, if they wanted. I decide that I could do much worse than this bunch. Then I decide I'll protect them with every fiber of my being. All of them. Whatever comes.

Tyler joins me in the cab ten minutes later. She says, “Myra says all your packages came today that you had delivered to the bed and breakfast. She didn’t open them but they’re in your big honking dresser in your bedroom.”

“Wow,” I say. “That was kind of her." I slap the wheel. "That’s it. I’m buying you all ponies.”

Tyler laughs. She says, “Did you really dive through the window of that van? Past the driver?”

“It was more of a cannonball than a dive.”

“How’d you even fit?”

“I came in at an angle?” I say. “Ass first.”

Tyler laughs.

“Monica says you’re my big sister now,” I say.

“Did she,” says Tyler. She’s smirking. “And it’s ‘Monica’ now is it? She prefers ‘Mo.’”

“She’s not a ‘Mo,’” I say. “My guess is that she thinks that’s more butch. She doesn’t need that. She doesn’t need to… present. Monica Ochoa has nothing to prove to me or anybody. She’s tough as hell. You see the hill she went off-roading down?”

Tyler says, “She doesn’t hate you, you know.”

“She’s mad at me again.”

Tyler shakes her head in wonder. “She didn’t want to interview you,” says Tyler. “She shouldn’t have. She’s suspended. I’ll expedite it as quick as I can, which’ll be pretty quick. That parking lot had cameras. Plus, we’re in a crisis situation. She'll be back on the job tomorrow or the next day probably.”

“Crisis. The mass event?”

“Yes.”

“Somebody’s going to sacrifice a lot of people at once, aren’t they?”

“We think so.”

“What’ll that do?”

“They’re rare,” says Tyler. “The last one we know about happened in a place called Tunguska, 1908. It blew up an area roughly the size of London, England, started forest fires, hurt some people. We’re still not sure but with think it may have altered weather patterns for a time which may have been the motive but that's just a guess.”

“My God.”

“Yeah, so what’ll it do? We have no idea, just that we need to stop it.”

“Cal?”

“Yeah?”

“Why’d Monica interview me then if she didn't want to?”

“She didn’t want anybody else to do it either.”

“I do not understand her.”

“There are few who do.”

It’s about five-thirty in the evening when I pull up into the front parking lot of the Willamette Sheriff’s office.

When I get up, I see that Monica has my packages open and is arranging things on the dinette table.

I stare at her.

“What?” she says. Then, “Slingshots? Lead and steel ammo. Darts. Interesting. Rubber balls? Throwing knives…. You trying to be some sort of fucked up combination of a ninja and Dennis the Menace?"

“Yes.”

Myra says, “I told her not to.”

Alex says, “She did.”

Monica nods. “She did. Hey, I shook ‘em first. Anything that didn’t rattle, I left alone. I've no need to see your new boxers.” She picks up a slingshot. “This will only piss off your target. A lot.”

“I did pretty well with a library card and a skateboard, and I don’t want to kill anybody.”

“When you’re ready,” Monica says and stands. “We’ll get you a pistol or something.”

“Slingshots don’t jam,” I say.

“Granted,” says Monica. “Modern weapons rarely do. Depending on the model. Revolvers? Almost never, though when they do it’ll generally take you out of the fight.” She rubs her chin. “Something to consider. Maybe one of each?”

I turn to the Wests. “Thank you so much for helping me, guys. I mean it.”

Alex says, “You’re a good man, Ben. And you’re making us a lot of money.”

Myra swats him. “Don’t be like that.” She hugs me. “You are though. Lots.”

I take a moment to store my purchases in the cabinets closest to the door, over the fridge as everybody else piles out.

Sheriff Abernathy is standing outside with three people I don’t know. A woman and two men. The woman is shaking Tyler’s hand.

Tyler says, “This is Detective Valentino. She’s heading up the Akron contingent for our little group.”

Valentino is in her late fifties, neat as a pin in her pinstriped gray pantsuit and white blouse. Her gray hair is in a flawless bun, tight at the back of her head. She smiles and nods to me. She says, “This is Detective Schaffer,” indicating the taller of the two other men. Schaffer is in his thirties, dark and lean with a heavy brow. He looks like he runs over people on a basketball court. “And this is Detective Teasdale.” Teasdale is in his early thirties, African American with a shaved head and stocky build. He shakes my hand.

“Hi, I’m Ben.”

“If Romper Room is over, can we get to work,” says Abernathy. “Please?”