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The party looked at each other in utter disbelief. The knock came again, and a muffled voice, filtered by many layers of branch and root, said, “I know you’re in there! Let me in!”

Lars said, “Who are you?”

“I’m the guy you just tried to murder!”

Blake said, “What are you talking about? You shot first!”

The voice said, “Yeah, but I don’t have the advantage of LITERALLY STOPPING BULLETS!”

Jason cleared his throat and said to Blake, “Yes, about that…”

Blake shouted back, “But you were hunting us!”

“I’m hungry! And cold! You took all the food for yourselves! And all the guns!”

“But we know you have a gun.”

“Just a pistol, and I’m low on ammo.”

Abe spoke, “Stand still. You’re about to be frisked by a tree.” And to the bower, he said, “One of you should frisk him.”

“How do they know what ‘frisk’ means?” Umezawa asked.

“Don’t ruin the magic with such questions,” Abe said.

Blake resumed the conversation. “Who are you? What are you all about?”

“My name is James,” the voice said.

“James Bond?” Umezawa said.

There was a slight pause from outside, with only the sound of tree branches swaying about in regular order. Then the voice said, “James Thurgerson.”

“Are you sure?”

“Oh come on,” said the voice. “You surely know that I have so many aliases and identifications from so many governments that this is a pointless exercise. But I’m shivering, and I don’t think I can survive another night out here, so, yes, James, my mother, surnamed Thurgerson, called me James, and that is my name.”

“At least for now,” said Lars to Blake.

“Tell your tree I’m going to need my Leatherman.”

“He’ll hold on to it for now,” said Abe.

“How do you know it’s a he-tree?” asked Umezawa.

“Would you stop? This is serious,” scolded Abe.

“I’m genuinely curious. And why don’t I have any magical powers?”

“Magically annoying,” Abe said.

“All right,” said the voice. “Your tree has my pistol, my remaining two clips of ammunition for it—9mm short, if you want to know.”

“Not enough fire power to bring down an elk, that’s for sure,” Blake shouted.

“Or a squirrel,” said the voice. “And the tree has my Leatherman multi-tool, complete with its super-lethal 2-inch blade. Aw, and now it has my last can of salmon. Are you sure you guys aren’t Homeland Defense?”

“You have salmon?”

“I always carry two cans, and I ate one yesterday,” the voice said, with a little bit of anxiety coming into it. “I could probably make it last for ano--THOSE ARE MY BALLS.”

“Okay, that’s enough,” Abe said. “Let’s make a vestibule for him.”

“A what?” said Umezawa.

“A receiving room,” Lars said. “See how they’re making a little room to put him in? Make sure they manacle him, too.”

“Are these really necessary?” the voice said. “You’ve disarmed me, and you’ve got me outgunned by a lot.”

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“You did try to kill us. And you killed all those people in cold blood.”

There was a pause. “Well, yeah.” Another pause. “But I can explain. Let me in. I’m freezing.”

“Okay, James Thurgerson, we grant you permission. Stand by.”

Abe gave the command, and with a little burble and snap, James Thurgerson was thrust from outside, where the sun was setting and the cold was crystallizing all things, and into the fire-warmed tree-bower, bound by vines around his hands and feet, and placed in a little cage.

“Oh, no!” said Sano. Abe, Umezawa, and Jason joined in the exclamation, shouting in unison, “A Chinaman!”

Meanwhile, James Thurgerson was saying, “Oh, no! Japanese!” The two races glared at each other.

“What in the hell is wrong with all of you?” demanded Lars.

“He’s a racist!” the teenagers said.

“I was raised in Minneapolis!” said James Thurgerson. “And is anyone more racist than the xenophobic Japanese? Besides all which, I’m Hmong. No, I’m American! I’m an American with Hmong ancestry.”

Sano sniffed in protest.

James Thurgerson took a moment to gaze at Sano, his eyes adjusting to the firelight. “Well, hello there,” he said. “I can be as racist as you want.”

Sano rolled her eyes. “With a Chinaman? I think not!”

“I’m Hmong-American.”

“Psh…you look Chinese to me, and that’s all that matters.”

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Blake was studying James Thurgerson’s face intently. “Who won the World Series in 1954?”

“I don’t know,” said James Thurgerson. “Wasn’t that an old MASH episode?”

“What’s a mash episode?” said Umezawa. “A mashup of white people cable TV shows and anime?”

But Blake was satisfied. “He’s American, all right.”

“My dad couldn’t stop talking about the early years of MASH, how much better it was with McLean Stephenson than Harry Morgan.”

Blake said, “But your dad was Hmong, right?”

“Oh, yeah, for sure. Changed his name to Thurgerson, after some nice Norwegian family whose son he met in Vietnam.”

“Vietnam!” Blake exclaimed. “He didn’t…”

“He did,” said James Thurgerson. “He fought side-by-side with a corporal named Thurgerson, who was killed, and when Nixon gave up the fight, the bastard, my dad got his family to sponsor him—I think the Thurgersons knew the governor, or were related to him, or went to the same church—anyway, I was born here in 1983.”

“The same year MASH went off the air!” said Blake.

“My earliest memory is of Dad flushing the toilet after the final episode ended.”

Blake and Lars burst into laughter. James Thurgerson smiled.

“Let him go, Abe. Let the man go!” Blake demanded.

“Let him go,” Abe said. The cage withdrew, limb-by-limb, root-by-root, until James Thurgerson stood unhindered. Everyone grew silent. The air grew a little stiff.

“About those assassinations…” Umezawa said, handing James Thurgerson a fire-thawed vegan airline dinner.

“Thank you,” said James.

“Wow,” said Abe. “This is just like The Captor standalone episode in The Morose Alpaca! You have no idea! Except the bars were metal, and there was a key, and it was in a building, not outside. But, see…”

“Come on, Abe,” said Lars. “Really? Right now?”

“No, really!” insisted Abe. “Abigail was being chased by a male yokai while she was applying for a license to work for the manor lord as a hairdresser—”

“Was this a male frog ghost, then?” Lars asked.

“No, no. This is a standalone episode, not part of the main storyline arcs.”

“Ah, I see, so she was pursued by a male ghost…”

“Very annoyed, she was. She ran into the manor prison galley—”

“Was there food in this galley?” asked Umazawa.

“It was named by the manor lord as a galley because he served in the British Navy, and that’s what they call a prison.”

“Are you sure you don’t mean a brig?” asked Umezawa.

“Yeah, in the Navy it’s called a brig,” said Lars.

“No, that’s a different thing altogether,” said Abe. “Let me clarify. A galley can be a kitchen, like we had on the airplane. But in naval speak, especially to an Admiral in the British Navy, it was an important way to keep discipline in a society. This is all explained in a long arc where the manor lord was the main character who befriended Abigail and Nami before he was bewitched and forced to betray—”

“Bewitched, bothered, and bewildered,” Sano sang. “That’s how we learned to say our l’s and r’s in New York. Very liquid song, don’t you think?” She giggled. James Thurgerson stopped eating and stared, bewitched.

Abe plowed ahead: “She ran into the galley, where there was a prison cell, and she lay down on the prison cot, pretending to make herself…uh… ‘available’ to the yokai, as a lowly licensed quasi-servant—Nami was outside playing croquet with the manor lord, by the way—and then, when the yokai was about to take possession of her, she jumped up, fled from the cell, and slammed the door behind her. That’s how she escaped.”

“But yokai are incorporeal,” said Lars.

“It was a magic cell.”

“This is josei?”

“I already explained, Lars, that it’s fusion, so that the manga could be made into an anime. The story is great.”

“Hmph,” said Lars.

“Nothing as good as Thundercats,” said Blake.

Abe fumed as Lars laughed, saying, “Come on, Abe, that episode doesn’t resemble our situation in the very least!”

“Well, I think so.”

“So,” Umezawa said to James Thurgerson, “you were assassinating yokai?”

“Ha!” said James Thurgerson. “Not at all. Those were my captors. I was making sure they didn’t survive. They were delivering me over to the government, and I wasn’t about to go without a fight. Well, I wasn’t about to leave any of them alive.”

“Captors?” Jason asked.

“It was cold-blooded!” Abe said.

“So it was,” James Thurgerson said. “Cold blood for cold blood.”

“Government captors?” Blake asked.

“Not quite,” said James Thurgerson. “And before you and I exchanged fire, I figured you for government agents trying to track me down.”

“To neutralize you?”

“I wasn’t sure, and I wasn’t taking chances. They were trying to deliver me over to the government for research, but then those two idiot pilots got cutesy. I don’t know why they didn’t just mail a letter to them broadcasting their exact day, time, second, and coordinates. I shot them out of spite, even though they were dead, just to show them who was boss. They’re the bad guys, too.”

“Letter to whom?” Blake said.

“Recognize these?” Lars said, holding up the four epaulettes.

“What are those?” said James Thurgerson, his eyes narrowing into slits. “Oh, is that where they hid it?”

“Hid what?” Blake demanded.

“Transmitter. It bounces a composite signal off a weather satellite, but it’s all encoded as innocent-looking packets, passing through the satellite antenna and routed to a secret transmitter—”

“I WAS RIGHT!” Blake shouted, smiling broadly. “See, Lars? And I was even right about the Chinese.”

“That’s a stretch. He’s Hmong.”

“You wait and see. Anyway, Jim, go ahead.”

James Thurgerson blinked and said, “—but the thing about secret transmitters is that as long as more than one person knows about it, the whole world knows about it, or at least as many people as want to know about it, so they were listening to every transmission.”

“That’s how they found us.”

“The pilots deviated from the flight path so much that a cub scout would have been suspicious,” James Thurgerson said. He nodded toward the epaulettes. “Those are still valuable, though. They can be recoded, even though they’re hardware-linked to the satellite transmitter and the amplifier—I looked for that, too, by the way. I think it was smashed all to bits in the crash. Still, they’re going to want those back.”

“Right again!” exclaimed Blake.

“So how did you survive?” Umezawa asked. “We were all asleep from a gas.”

“Kōun'na,” said James Thurgerson. “Chemtrails. Another flag, waving in the air, to guide heat-seeking missiles.”

“These pilots were well-trained?”

“The very best-trained. They were arrogant. They thought they were rubbing victory in their faces, and, well…”

“In whose faces?” asked Blake.

“How did you survive, then? The gas didn’t go that far aft,” said Umezawa.

“Forward,” Abe corrected.

“Whatever.”

James Thurgerson shook his head. “You guys haven’t figured this out, yet? Even though this kid here can command trees, and one of you can stop projectiles?”

“Magically,” said Lars.

“Science,” said Blake.

James Thurgerson sighed. “Fellas, I’m—oh, and you too, my fair little Japanese vixen—fellas, don’t you get it? I’m Superman!”

“You’re the dingus!” Blake shouted.

“The what?”

“You’re the dingus they’re after,” Lars said. “They’re not after these things at all.”

“Well, maybe not ‘not at all,’ Lars,” said Blake. “Valuable technological payload in your hand.”

“Yes,” said James Thurgerson. “I am the technological payload that was disguised by a plane-full of innocent travelers.”

“You’re the dingus.”

“I’m the dingus.”

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