80s Bodyguard Stomp Does Halloween in the Valley
80s Bodyguard Stomp Does Halloween in the Valley
Trick-or-treaters in the canyon. FBI on the hunt. And a Sasquatch on the ridge dancing to Olivia Newton-John. A Stomp Roams adventure from 1982.
It’s Halloween weekend. “Rambo: First Blood” has just debuted. “ET: The Extra-Terrestrial” is still the biggest movie of the year. The Valley girl stereotype is in full swing. The Ford Escort is a car that people actually want to drive.
Fantasticals are still hunted. Sew-Doh Science Labs utilizes decades-old legislation to take advantage of outdated federal Fantastical research permits that allow for inhumane misconduct on innocent creatures. Our government still treats anything with claws as a threat.
In San Fernando, one scientist lays a trap for the ultimate capture. An FBI duo get on the case. And in the San Gabriel Mountains, all one sasquatch wants to do is dance.
Until he’s offered a job.
1982 - San Gabriel Mountains, just East of San Fernando.
Slurrrrttt.
The kennel door slid up and a scientist shook out a shivering kit fox (Vulpes Macrotis) who clung to the bars with its dog-like claws.
“Please don’t let me out of my cage. Put me back, please. Let my family go.”
The industrial warehouse of Sew-Doh Science Labs shone bleak fluorescent lights out into the scrub chaparral that gnarled by the loading docks. Hills that graduated into mountains were outlined behind them in the deep dusk. The coyote-like creature with the bushy tail cowed behind a cactus.
A towering shadow stepped forward past the assistant with the kennel and knelt. The man wore an Indiana Jones safari hat but a scientist’s lab frock. He carried a leather-knotted slingshot in a waistbelt with cartridge holders for rounded granite stones. His hands were all stung up by hornets.
“Brave.” He ran one rough hand along the kit fox’s sleek coat. “You’ve been so brave to volunteer for all this research. And your family? Maybe they’ll get a chance to be brave.”
The fox made no eye contact. The man inspected one paw that held a jade compass tattoo, imprinted neatly into the bare carpet that lay under its fur. The assistant handed the man a rolled-up brown Dale’s Food Market shopping bag and the scientist placed the package at the fox’s feet.
“The script is in the bag. Don’t deviate.”
The petite fox shuddered and snatched up the market bag in its jaws. It trotted in the direction of the San Gabriel Mountains and passed under a sliver of fluorescent light that flashed across the scars on the fox’s back.
“Assistant.” The man still knelt.
“Yes, Mr. Hunter.”
“Deliver my makeup kit to my home. Spread the flyers in the mountains.”
Outside a Van Nuys youth center, a clean-shaven, ponytailed man walked out after meeting with allies to outline his speech for Sunday. He wore a “FANTASTICALS HAVE FEELINGS” t-shirt. He reached the spot where he had parked his Chrysler Town & Country wagon. It was empty.
He looked around. A surging squeal of tires churned the night and then the flagrant rush of burnt rubber in his nostrils. He was blinded by headlights. A van door slid open and a pair of arms grabbed him. The last thing he felt was the heavy rag of chemicals pressed against his face.
The van sped off with a parking permit that swung from the rear-view mirror. It read “Sew-Doh Science Labs”.
The boy lay in his Lake View Terrace bed and carefully turned each page of the “Sasquatch Outlaw Adventures” yellowed dime book that held a copyright date of 1910. He reverently traced a finger along the contours of the illustrated beast. Through the wall, the boy could hear the low thrum of hornets.
The front door closed. Hunter Hunter tucked the book back under his pillow. He ran back to his room and pressed his left eye against the door crack. Heavy boots clugked through the hall. His father’s shape moved through the light and he watched him use a rack to hang a lab coat, a safari hat, and a slingshot with belt. Then he knelt by a candlelit shrine for a moment.
“Hunter.”
“Yeah, Pop.”
“Come out in the kitchen light.”
Dr. Rowland Hunter sat at the dining room table and scraped liverwurst on homemade brown bread. He sliced a quarter-inch thick chunk of red onion with a Bowie knife. He held the sandwich up to his eyes.
MRUNCH.
He spoke through mouthfuls:
“We’re going to have another guest soon.”
The boy climbed up on his dad’s lap. He had the caustic strong scent of lab chemicals, with an undertone of leather and honey.
“Another Tusker?”
Rowland Hunter took another bite. “No bridge trolls this time.” He licked liverwurst from his mustache. “Bigger.”
The boy’s eyes grew. “Is it dangerous?”
“Lethal.”
The boy shrugged off his dad’s lap and ran to his costume hanging in the corner: the outfit of professional African hunter Peter Hathaway Capstick. “Can we still trick-or-treat?”
“Absolutely.” Rowland removed the cap from a brown bottle and sniffed it. He poured a splash in a tulip glass. “It’s imperative that you occupy our guest.”
“And how ‘bout my neighborhood friends? Can they still come? Can we still bake a pumpkin?”
Rowland shuddered at the thought of the neighborhood children. A grown bull Wildeboar during the rut was less savage.
“Yes.” He swallowed his drink hard. “All that. You’ll need to remove your friends to the panic room when my colleagues arrive.”
“What are you gonna do with our guest?”
Rowland Hunter stood and moved to a window. He looked out and saw a pair of horses standing still in the neighbors’ suburban yard, and beyond that, the dusky rote canyons that led into scrub pine wilderness.
“The Jade-horned unicorns of the Andes are known to hold a dust of immortality in their ground-up nose bone. Even the common forest Owlpig carries liquid in its scent glands that rids the common cold.” He blew a piece of snot with one finger into the sink. “We will yet find the answer to what took your mother.”
A cigarette with an inch of ash hung from the lips of FBI fraud unit analyst Hank Hankerton. A piece of crumbcake rested atop the keys of his Commodore 64 computer. He pored through the stack of approved Fantastical research grants from a cubicle that looked out over the D.C. parking lot. A dim bulb poured wan light across the two remaining cars. It was midnight.
He frowned at the profile in front of him. Rowland Hunter. Sew-Doh Science Labs in San Fernando. His name had popped for reports that he might be secretly funneling funds to Fantastical vigilante hunters while posing under the guise of scientific research. Last month he had lured a Tusked Bridge Troll into his home utilizing armed manpower paid for with a federal grant. The scientist had submitted no results for peer review. The creature was speared and taken apart piece by piece.
Hankerton stood and took the packet across the room to the desk of Jessica Jen-Amanda.
“Tell me what you think of this.”
He laid it on the desk. She was brand new. Six weeks out of Quantico. Already a controversial name. She’d been captured on live video attending a Fantastical Rights rally at Independence Mall. She rummaged through the intelligence.
“Rowland Hunter. Scientist. Widower. Still operating with the nuisance kill permits they used to hand out like candy in the 50s.” She shook her head. “Wow. Capturing endangered trolls at spearpoint in a residential neighborhood. Rumored to have tranquilized a family of owlpigs with ‘hornet therapy’. This guy’s a timebomb.”
Hankerton scratched his goatee and re-lit his cigarette. “West Covina field office has been tagging game cameras around the San Gabriel range since those werewolf sightings.”
She nodded. “It’s a hotbed. And R.J. Hutch will be speaking in L.A. Halloween night.”
You thinkin’ the same?”
“Yeah.” She stood up. “Let’s get a team out there. Before this quack train finds himself face to face with an immovable object.”
A 700-pound very-moveable object danced atop a ridge in the Western San Gabriel range with pair of Walkman headphones in his ears.
“Hoh, let’s get physical! Physical!” He bellowed and spun around and pointed at the overstuffed ET: The Extra-Terrestrial doll that he had politely removed through an open first-floor child’s bedroom window in San Bernadino. Littered around his camp was a trail of Reese’s Pieces and an unboxed game of Trivial Pursuit.
“Let me hear your booty talk! Your booty talk!”
“SHADDUP!”
Stomp felt the prickers in his legs before he saw the culprit. A California jackrabbit danced around his ankles and swung at him with two paws wielding a strip of cacti.
“Owie!” Stomp jumped up. “Owcha boo boo!”
The rabbit threw down its spanking cactus. “I’m so sick of you jumping up and down on my roof.” The rabbit shook a paw and pointed down to the earth. “I got eight babies tryin’ to sleep downstairs.”
Stomp gingerly sat down cross-legged next to the ashen remnants of a campfire. “Don’t make your home and babies where I’m dancin’ then, rabbit.”
“You’re not even singing it right, you dumb oaf! It’s ‘Let me hear your body talk’, not ‘booty talk’.” The rabbit shook its head and hopped away.
“Oh.” Stomp took the headphones off and shoved a fistful of dirt in his mouth that contained a single Reese’s Piece. “I like ‘booty talk’.”
His body was alive with an electric fervor. It had been weeks since his last bonk. Practically four months now since he’d accidentally amputated the head of that hiker that had wandered past. And the Walkman he found? That camper was already dead. He had nothing to do with that suspiciously rampant brush fire.
Stomp stuck a pokey stick in the embers and churned them furiously until coals livened and hot ash floated out into the dry sagebrush.
“We don’t need to kill nothin’ no more.” Stomp talked at the ET doll. “We can do good.”
He fed a Reese’s Piece into the ET doll’s mouth. There was a ruckus under some sagebrush and a twin pair of moles poked their bleary-eyed heads out. They stared around, adjusting to the sunlight.
Stomp sat in his buckskin pants, his burlap satchel and sawed-off shotgun within paw’s reach. These moles had lockpick gear attached to waistbelts. Both wore thief gloves. These were heist moles.
The one mole looked at Stomp and smiled a great yellow-toothed grin. “We finished.”
“Finished what?”
The other mole squirmed up out of its hole and showered Stomp with earth. They did a little moley secret handshake and both jumped in the air simultaneously.
“We finished our tunnel,” said the one.
“Straight down the mountain to the Valley,” said the other.
“That whole neighborhood’s gonna be out trick-or-treating this weekend.”
The mole’s partner chimed back in: “We’ll tunnel right in.”
“Burglar up.”
“And tunnel out.”
“So much good robbin’.”
Stomp contemplated this. The little burglar beasts were right. It would be a wonderful weekend for some fall fridge-rooting, cupboard-extracting, tipsy-toed evacuation of valuables. No, no. He was straight now. He could just stay up here forever, living off Reese’s.
“What’s your names, little sirs?”
“Podge.”
“Hodge.”
“That’s just…well, that’s just too cute.”
The one mole – Stomp wasn’t sure if it was Hodge or Podge – sneezed out a little clump of dirt.
Hutchew!
“Are you down to come along, Big Orphaner? Plenty of loot.”
Stomp gazed down at his dwindling supply of Reese’s. His stomach gurgled at him. There was nothing cute about a full-on he-squatch Pastry Rage.
“I’m looking for clean work.”
“You sure?”
Stomp hesitated again.
“I’ll pass, little ones. I’m enjoying myself up here as a nice purehearted soul, playing board games with my good friend.”
The moles looked at the overstuffed ET doll. The backside of the doll had been frayed thin, as if a large creature had methodically clamped the doll between its legs and slept with it repeatedly. Much sweat had been produced. And much, much fraying of the butt region.
Hodge or Podge blinked twice and both moles retreated:
“As if.”
They popped down and disappeared. A voice hollered up:
“Lake View Terrace. Halloween night, Big Orphaner!”
Stomp sat in the breezy morning and plucked out a Trivial Pursuit card. He read it aloud:
“What mountain creature commonly smells like hot vinegar boiled in a public men’s room in summer in Atlanta?”
Stomp flipped over the card and read the answer. “’The North American Stinkprowler, or Sasquatch’. Hm. Owie.”
He folded up the question card and tucked it against a live coal paled in the daylight. The breeze moved through the sagebrush and Stomp’s razor ears picked up a shuffle in the scrub. He instinctively snatched up the shotgun and whipped around.
A piece of paper – a flyer – blew against the shotgun barrel and stuck. He laid down the scatter gun and plucked it off. He searched it up and down, looking at the brazen man on the front and the statement in bold print:
FANTASTICAL RIGHTS CHAMPION R.J. HUTCH TO SPEAK AT HANSEN DAM RALLY HALLOWEEN WEEKEND. WILL ANYONE PROTECT HIM???
Stomp murmured out the description underneath: “’The embattled activist has fought off repeated assassination attempts…son was almost murdered last year…suspected plot against him for Halloween weekend but Hutch won’t back down…”
He crumpled up the flyer and shoved it into the sleeping fire embers with the butt of the shotgun. “R.J. Hutch.” Stomp stood and stretched. “Why haven’t I heard of you?”
Stomp let himself feel the sun tease into his fur and burrow down. It spread through him like sea surf incoming and bubbling through pebbles. The breeze was a branch of warm October tendrils that swirled around his feet. He opened his eyes and looked up.
The kit fox stood rooted, its sandy camouflage outlined against a boulder just above him on the ridge slope. It watched him with a brown Dale’s Food Market shopping bag in its jaws. The creature was not more than 30 pounds, with teeth for tearing. The wind shifted. Stomp smelled the bag.
He jumped up to his feet.
“Bring that down here now.”
The little fox shivered and took two steps forward. Stomp held out a hand and summoned. The fox bound back behind the rock and looked out. It took a few steps forward and came down.
The fox dropped the bag at Stomp’s feet and Stomp tore it open. Poptarts. Brown Sugar Cinnamon. A family box.
Stomp gently, lovingly, placed the entire box in his mouth and gulped it like a snake eats a mouse. He felt the cool burn of cardboard melting in his gut.
“I’m sorry. I didn’t even ask. I don’t know what came over me. So devilish and tasty.”
“It was for you. Call it an advanced payment.”
“A huhwhat?”
The rare mountain fox held out a paw. “Name’s Fixer.”
Stomp shook the little paw and noticed the green compass tattoo that was embedded neatly in the forepaw. The mark carried with it the trust of a 200-year-old network.
“You’re a shepherd?”
“I am what the name says I am.”
“Local?”
“I know these mountains like Laverne knows Shirley.”
“I don’t know what that means.”
“It means do you want a job or what?”
Stomp sat back down by the firepit. He rested his big head on his paws. A sword scar ran the length of his hip from a botched smuggle in the War of 1812. He had a deformed piece of lead from a Colt pistol shot stuck in his left calf – a Dodge City betrayal, 1876. Heck, he had a sliver of Mt. St. Helens stuck in his big toe from two years earlier. His body was a road map of jobs.
“Clean work?”
“The cleanest. You seen this fella?”
Fixer produced a rolled-up flyer and showed Stomp the same poster that blew into camp.
“Yah-huh.”
“He needs protection. And his son. We think someone might try to hit him in his home.”
“Bodyguard job?”
“Yip, but more than that. Undercover work. Two days through Sunday night. After that, they’ll be what you big fellas would call ‘To the Run’.”
“What kinda undercover?”
Fixer hesitated, it seemed almost performatively, and carried on. “You’ll blend in with everyone in costume. You’re gonna need to host Sunday Halloween. Give out candy. Protect our man. Do some good.”
Stomp felt a line of sweat muddle up in his lip fur and stream forth like the salmon of Penobscot Bay. He imagined the buckets filled to the brim, candy corn rich in sugar and packed with nutritious preservatives, apples glazed with the organic wonderment of high fructose corn syrup. Infinite Reese’s Pieces.
“What are you paying, little fixer fox?”
The fox nodded down at a few loose Poptart crumbs in the soil. “As much of that as you can carry out. I’ve got the house and all the schematics right here.”
The fox dug a little rolled-up packet out of its shopping bag. Stomp dug his toes into the earth and peered at a target profile, the neighborhood layout – all the intelligence.
“Come back tomorrow at this time. I gotta do recon.”
The 1720s-era pirate brass spyglass was a fine specimen of craftmanship. Stomp lay prone at dusk in a landfill three-hundred yards overlooking the San Fernando Valley with the eyepiece. He was entrenched under a pricker bush. For close to two hours, he’d been distracted by a giant screen nearly two miles away. It was the Sun Valley drive-in theater. Stomp’s lips moved as he watched every word and movement of Rambo: First Blood. It was the third time he’d watched this week.
He finally moved the glass in, in, over, and trained it on a ranch-style home that backed up near Cassaro Canyon. He shifted his weight. His entire lower body broke through the top of a toilet bowl embedded in the hillside. He felt a cold swampy well of muck suction around him and he pulled free.
SHRRRUUUUCK.
He couldn’t help himself. He sniffed between his legs to make sure it was exactly as he thought.
“Stinky stinky stinky,” he whispered.
The town lights were sprinkled below like stars that had been scattered down to earth like seeds. Down on Kurt Street, he watched the man and a boy move around in a lighted kitchen. A couple of horses stood still out back. The duo talked and prepared dinner.
Rowland Hunter took a bite of gristle from a rump roast. Bridge troll was tough meat but tendered up nice in the crockpot. Hunter Hunter dabbled with a fork and stabbed at a pile of meat and onions.
“Things go different this weekend,” Rowland chewed, “what do I always tell you?”
The boy Hunter looked up. “What do you mean, Pop?”
“Things go sideways, you find a way over to the lab basement. You know the codes.”
Stomp snapped the eyeglass shut. He took in the box canyon that backed up the house. He took in the cul-de-sac. The home could only be approached from the front. No exit out the back.
He crawled his way backwards in the brush, back toward camp. He noticed nothing about the blinking red light a few yards away - the game camera stenciled with an FBI serial number.
The boy Hunter washed his plate and ran to his bedroom. He closed the door and retrieved the “Sasquatch Outlaw Adventures” book from under his pillow, and laid down to read it from cover to cover again.
Rowland Hunter left the table and went into the bathroom. He laid a mahogany kit on the counter and clicked it open. He retrieved a razor and shaved his mustache. Then he taped the flyer with R.J. Hutch’s picture and stared at it as he delicately began to apply makeup to his face and wrist.
Fixer lay curled in the fetal position by the dead, cold campfire. He had come alone. He was right on time. He’d been there two hours with no sign of the ‘squatch.
THUMD.
The pair of feet landed directly behind him and a huge paw picked him by his back scruff. He was turned about and looked directly into a pair of hazel eyes.
Stomp set the fox back down gently and patted his head.
“I’m in. Introduce me.”
Hank Hankerton and Jessica Jen-Amanda stood at the fifty-yard line of the Los Angeles Coliseum in leather trench coats and holding coffees. The chopper whipped around them and settled. The blades came to a halt. A unit of eight armed soldiers without insignia spilled out in black uniforms. A crew-cutted leader strode forth and saluted.
“Hidey-ho! Git sommmeee!”
Hank Hankerton lit the nub of a cigarette he kept in a breast pocket and puffed it down to the filter. “This has got to be a caricature.”
The unit leader pumped their hands. “General Sargeant Lieutenant Buzz Lang. Special Ops. Matterhorn Defcon Unit.”
Jessica spoke out the side of her mouth: “Nope. He’s real.”
Lang turned and spoke directly to Hankerton. “My team’s ready to huff and puff. Your secretary can make my men coffee.”
Jessica looked around Mr. Lang and noticed one of the operatives preparing a flamethrower. She spit in her hand and shined up the badge that hung from her neck.
Hankerton tossed the cigarette in the turf. “Jen-Amanda is my colleague. We asked for a light team as a preventative escort. This looks like an airstrike.”
Lang pulled a bundle of rolled-up gloss photos from his back pocket. “You seen these?”
The pair of FBI analysts brushed through them. Various angles showed an adult male sasquatch laying prone on a ridge, holding what appeared to be a relic of a brass spyglass, and finally rolling over to thrust its head between its legs to sniff its own crotch.
Lang smashed a pointer finger down on the photos. “That’s a 700-pound terrorist doing recon on a residential neighborhood. And a Gott-dang pervert.”
Jen-Amanda stared at the close-ups. Concentration was apparent in the creature’s eyes, and hints of creased softness around the edges. She had never seen a live ‘squatch. She cleared her throat and steadied her hands from shaking.
“This only proves the validity of our need for oversight of Dr. Hunter’s activities. We suspect he may enact an illegal operation this weekend. We don’t wish to provoke any of the ah…mountain residents and have a circus on our hands.”
Lang smacked the photos out of her hands. “THIS is a gott-dang terroriss! My men fought bull wildeboar in the Congo while baby lamb recruits like you were sucklin’ on mama sheep’s tee-taws.”
Hankerton stepped in. “Now, sir Lang—”
“General Sargn’t Lietentent. Special Ops. Matterhorn Defcon Unit.”
“Yes. Right. We appreciate your expertise.” He looked over at a soldier stirring up thumb tacks in a hand coffee grinder and pouring them into a mug. “We will assuredly let you know should we need the backup.”
Lang leaned into Hankerton’s face. “That’s real fine, Officer. Real fine. My men and I will bust camp at the Hansen Dam park.” Lang stormed off toward the chopper. “Come on, men! Zippedy-doo-dah!”
Jessica knelt in the turf and retrieved the black-and-white photos of Stomp. She smoothed out his face and placed them in the pocket of her jacket.
He was sweated. Damp. His fur smelt like the alcohol that naturally metabolized out of his bloodstream and flushed from his pores. He wore a forest green Vietnam Veteran’s jacket with the sleeves ripped off. And a red Rambo bandana.
“Remember, it’s two days. You can sleep in the horse stalls out back. Meet me at the ridge Sunday night for payment.”
Fixer slunk from behind a flowerpot on Rowland Hunter’s porch and trotted up the street and into the chaparral. Stomp carried his burlap satchel on his back, shotgun slung down at his side.
He shifted his feet and rang the doorbell.
Fixer stopped at the wilderness edge. He looked back once. That was a dead ‘squatch walking. He turned and disappeared into the brush.
The door swung open.
The man stood, clean-shaven with a ponytail down the back. He wore a “FANTASTICALS HAVE FEELINGS” t-shirt and held a cup of steaming tea in one hand.
“Oh. Oh. Delightful to meet you. So big and handsome.”
The man extended a hand. Stomp grasped it lightly so as not to break every finger bone. He noticed bumps along the man’s wrist, like bee stings. They led up to the jade compass tattoo that decorated the man’s forearm.
Stomp nodded once.
“R.J. Hutch. Activist. This is my son, Hunter.”
Stomp peered into the dim room. The boy peeked his head around from behind the door. His mouth dropped. Stomp walked through. The door slammed shut.
Sparse. Functional. In one corner was a shrine with a single candle lit in front of a picture of a woman. Stomp kept his grip on the shotgun.
“Hungry?”
Stomp peeked an eye through the blinds. A couple of Ford Escorts sat in the cul-de-sac. A dusty ’78 Camaro. An ’82 Volvo station wagon.
“Always.”
The ponytailed man rummaged in his fridge. He came out with a plate of zucchini and cauliflower.
“I’m a vegetarian myself.” He licked his lips. “Can’t even stand the scent of meat.”
Stomp looked at the limp cold vegetables. “What kinda sugar you got?”
The boy Hunter was still agape in the living room. He ran forward in his pajamas. “We got lots of candy. You can help me do pumpkins before my friends get here.”
“Your friends?”
“Yeah! Every kid in the neighborhood is coming.”
“Ut oh.”
“Since you’re undercover, you can host trick-or-treating.”
“Oh no.”
Stomp’s vision faded to a week in 1931, Northern Maine, when 11 orphan children pinned him down and shaved him.
“Oh ho, munchkin.” The activist tussled his son’s hair. “Let’s be careful about how many neighbors we have running around here tomorrow.”
Stomp moved out of the kitchen and down the hall, opening doors and peeking in rooms. Bathroom. Closet. He opened the second-to-last door and looked around. The wall was covered with cartoonishly illustrated sasquatch posters. Each rendition showed an oafish ‘squatch with belligerently large feet.
“Huh.” Stomp stared down at his perfectly reasonable toes. “They got my feets all wrong.”
He came to the last door. He tried the handle. A low thrum came through the wood. Stomp pressed his ear against. It sounded like a generator. He paused and listened and then moved back to the kitchen.
“Stay away from the windows the next two days. After your speech thingy, we’ll go To the Run.”
Stomp saw a flicker lacking recognition in Hutch’s eyes. “To the Run?” He put the tray of vegetables back in the fridge. “Yes, of course. In hiding. Won’t be able to stay here while it’s hot.”
Stomp’s nostrils twitched. He rotated his head slowly to the large-sized variety bag of Reese’s Pieces awaiting Halloween on the kitchen counter. He began to itch all over.
“I’m just going to go outside now. Buh-bye.”
Stomp opened the back door and jogged out to the horse stable. The pair of mares stared at him mutely.
“Ladies.”
He laid his pack in an empty stall. No hay lay on the ground but there was a single haybale against the wall. Stomp picked up the bale with one hand and dropped it in the center.
BOOMF.
His fist came down and put a sledge mark in the center. Then he reached his fists in the straw and pulled the bale in half like a person breaks a loaf of bread. Stomp snuggled down. Stars shone through slits in the open-aired roof.
He curled up like a giant furry baby in a Rambo bandana. His lips moved as he slept:
“Nothing is over…nothin’…you just don’t turn it off…”
Rowland Hunter clamped all the blinds and locked his bedroom door.
From his closet, he removed a seven-foot harpoon made of black ash. The hardened wood was engraved with glyphs burnt into the shaft. The end of the spear was embedded with an eight-inch bull unicorn horn, smuggled into the States from La Mosquitia, Honduras. The artifact was more than six-hundred-years old. Still lethal.
He ran his hands along the engravings and frowned at the spearpoint. He sat for several minutes with a fingernail, working on the edge of the horn, removing a dried piece of freshly caked blood.
In Stomp’s dream, four little mallets punched his kidneys from underneath like kettle drums. Rhythmically. Painfully.
He snapped both eyes open.
“Hee-chah! Hew-chah! Wut-chew!”
The little squeaks rung his ears and he rolled over. Four little mole fists were raised above the ground. Showers of dark soil lay crumbled. A pair of heads popped up. In overalls, wearing welder’s glasses, it was the heist moles.
“That bale was our escape hatch, ya big thwarter!”
“Yeah, our escape hatch!”
Stomp looked down at a tunnel that looked like a locomotive-sized earthworm had driven through.
“Damn, you brush rats can dig.”
“We had to come up for air,” said Hodge—or Podge.
“Yeah, some kind of bunker wall in the yard. Blocking progress.”
“Guess this is our stop.”
They shrugged and suddenly disappeared.
“Who are you talking to?”
Stomp turned. The boy Hunter stood with a steaming cup of coffee. The kid was dressed in an African safari hunter’s outfit.
“Myself.” Stomp stood in front of the gaping tunnel. “I have morning terrors.”
“My Pop told me to bring you coffee. He’s helping me bake a pumpkin. We can do carving together now.”
“Uh-kay.”
Stomp walked with the boy across the yard. He peered out into the canyon and held the shotgun down by his side.
“What are you, a six-hundred pounder?”
“I don’t know.”
“What do you think you taste like? If you were a cannibal, would you eat yourself?”
“I…I don’t know.”
“I read all about you, you know. How many people have you killed?”
Stomp looked down at the ground. “I just want to be good.”
A white van rolled to the edge of the cul-de-sac entrance and eased to a stop sign. Hankerton sat in the passenger seat with binoculars and a cigarette.
“Stay on Christy Avenue. We don’t want to be in a direct sightline.”
Jen-Amanda let the van drift back in neutral a few feet and yanked the parking brake. A couple Ford Escorts and a Volvo Station Wagon were in the cul-de-sac. They were still in the rancher’s line of sight but perpendicular instead of nose forward.
“Quiet here,” said Hankerton.
The neighborhood was sleepy. Nothing but the sun stirred.
“It won’t be for long. That rally is at the Hansen Dam.”
“Wide open. Multiple entry points.”
“It’ll surely draw in mountain Fantasticals. This guy will make a move.”
“We’ve got Lang over there setting up his team right now,” said Hankerton.
Jessica looked to her colleague. “As if a slew of mercenaries will help. Oh. My. God.”
Hankerton’s cigarette dropped in his lap. The two of them scrambled for their binoculars.
The giant figure that strolled out into the open sunlit yard with a young boy took Jessica Jen-Amanda back to six years old in West Virginia. She was struck with the memory of a group of town farmers riding down main street, all of them sitting with their legs dangling off the back of a flatbed truck. Town folk cheered as they rambled through with the hulking lump of fur that lay in the center of the truck. Jen-Amanda ran to the street edge to see what was on the truck, just as the face passed by. Its listless tongue and eye whites rolled at her as flies buzzed around the corpse. It was the image that drove her to ace her exams as a Fantastical negotiations expert at Quantico.
“Look at the way he moves,” she whispered. “So graceful. And just right out in the wide open.”
Hankerton lit his cigarette nub back up and puffed. “It’s Halloween. It’s the one day of the year they might get away with blending in.”
“So brazen.”
The rancher front door swung and a clean-shaven ponytailed man walked out with a pair of pumpkins.
“Wha—what?” Jen-Amanda ruffled through her folder. “R.J. Hutch. This makes no sense.”
Hankerton picked up the brand-new two-pound Motorola DynaTAC 8000x cell phone embedded in the dash.
“What are you doing?”
“Calling the Covina field office. Find out if R.J. Hutch’s family has reported him missing.”
Buzz Lang’s team did jumping jacks, chewed tobacco, and threw knives at a crude troll target pinned to a tree at the Hansen Dam horse park. Lang strode through and paused next to a man who ran a light cloth along the turret of a flamethrower.
“We gonna have barbecue to-night!”
“Yeah, sir! Hidey-ho! Zippedy doo dah!”
A communications man dashed up. “Sir, you got Command on the sat phone at the truck.”
Lang leaned against the armored truck and held the phone to his ear. “General Sarn’t Ltn’t Lang. Special Ops. Matterhorn Defcon Unit. Speaking.”
The comms man stood close and could hear the voice babbling through on the other end. He shivered. The call came straight from National Security at Fort Meade.
“Uh huh.” Lang nodded.
“…location…evacuate…kill…”
His men gathered round the truck with growing curiosity.
“Uh huh. And the carcass?”
Lang hung up.
“Boys, National Security received a SAT photo. Our boy has infiltrated a Lake View Terrace home. Suspected to have taken two hostages and forced them to carve pumpkins.” He licked his lips and looked around. “We got ourselves an order for a raid on this sick sumbitch. We hit at 1800. Leave no bodies.”
Stomp lay his shotgun on the living room table. The thrum from the back hall room seemed to have escalated to an urgent buzz. Mr. Hutch was putting a tray of pumpkin seeds in the oven. The man discerned him with eyes that were much harder than those of a hippie Fantastical speaker.
“I have a question for you, Mr. Stomp.”
“Uh huh.”
“Do you consider yourself to be a part of a selfish species?”
Stomp didn’t answer.
“Because I fight for your kind. I sacrifice myself. All so you can hide in the mountains.”
The man set a timer and seemed to hunch over the oven. “I sometimes wonder if it isn’t your turn to give.”
Stomp felt the scar rise up on his side, where he’d caught shrapnel at Harper’s Ferry. The bare patch prickled on his back, where a musket ball had skimmed him on a damp night as he rode couriers through Boston. He still had a pair of sew-gator teeth in his side from a battle in lower Manhattan.
Stomp turned for the door. “I am here now.”
Eight pairs of eyeballs greeted him on the porch through masks. There were three ETs, a Smurf, two Darth Vaders, and a Muppet. And one boy in blackface.
“Oh.” Stomp shook his head. “Oh boy. This is…”
“Candy,” said one.
Hunter Hunter sat up on the porch rail in his safari costume. “My friends came early.”
“Candy,” said another.
“No candy yet, children. It’s only 5 o’clock. Another hour.” Stomp looked to the boy in blackface. “My, what a perfectly appropriate costume you have on this Halloween in 1982.”
The children moved closer. The neighbors were beginning to stir and come out on the street. Two moms in Jane Fonda workout costumes power-walked past.
“Hey, great costume, stud!”
“So bitchin’!”
The children moved closer.
“Candy, nerd!”
One of the children plucked up a pair of garden shears from the porch steps.
Snip Snip
Another reached into the half-finished porch pumpkin and removed a handful of guts.
“Candy, candy, candy,” they chanted.
They moved in. He was pressed on all sides. Their hands reached out.
Snip. Snip.
Narg—NOT. APPROPRIATE. NARGGGGG!
At the end of the cul-de-sac, Hankerton and Jen-Amanda watched through binoculars. Hankerton lowered his and nubbed a cig out on his knee. “Animals.”
Another panel view crept past them at the corner and turned down the cul-de-sac. It parked behind a white Ford Escort. Jen-Amanda lowered her binocs and read the stenciling on the back door:
SEW-DOH SCIENCE LABS
Four men in lab coats spilled out the back and put on Chewbacca masks. One of them retrieved a crossbow and equipped it with a six-inch metallic dart.
“Jee-zus,” said Hankerton.
The whole neighborhood was spilling outside in costume. Mothers and children were adjusting and fixing masks. Getting their candy buckets ready.
The Motorola cell phone rang. Jen-Amanda picked it up with two hands.
“Uh huh. Yep. Thanks.”
She hung up.
“R.J. Hutch’s body was found by a hiker in Indian Springs this morning.”
Hankerton reached behind the seat and pulled out a box of rubber bullets. He shook his head.
“I can’t believe I’m gonna lose my pension over this. Rookie, when’d you last spend time at the range?”
Stomp slammed the door behind him. Pumpkin guts dripped from his head. Patches of fur were missing from his chest where he had been snipped. The activist was by the oven, staring trancelike at his egg timer.
It dinged. He swung open the oven door.
Stomp’s chest heaved. “No assassins. You’re safe.”
His shotgun was missing from the table. Stomp walked in the kitchen slow. Mr. Hutch was now wearing a belt with an old-timey slingshot and a grouping of rounded granite stones. He dropped the pumpkin seeds on the counter.
“Ow, crap!”
A billow of steam escaped the oven and clouded around his body. Mr. Hutch wiped a hand towel up the condensation on his arms. Stomp noticed the jade compass tattoo, and the smear of smudged green left on the towel.
Stomp nodded at the slingshot. “I thought this was a rally against violence.”
Mr. Hutch looked down at his waist. “This? I wear this as a form of protest.” He nodded at Stomp. “Like the Vietnam jacket you’re wearing.”
Stomp looked down. “Oh, I’m just Rambo.”
Stomp recognized the leather slingshot belt as something from the 1880s and ‘90s, back when Fantastical hunters roamed the plains and slaughtered unicorns and wildeboars in competition. He felt an electric buzz shiver through his fingers.
“I’m going to check the side rooms again. Make sure they’re safe.”
Stomp moved down the hall straight to the last locked door. It was steel reinforced, but that didn’t matter. Stomp karate-chopped a fist out and the door swung in. The thrum echoed in this space. He peered down a flight of steps that led to another door.
Stomp walked down to the bottom and pressed his ear against. The heist moles had said a bunker blocked their progress. He listened.
ZRRRRRRMMMMM
Stomp stood back and kicked the door in.
He didn’t immediately know where he was standing. He waved a hand and felt flutters. There was a light string. He pulled it.
The room illuminated. Hornets swam freely about the space. They buzzed in and out of nests built atop items in a museum of taxidermy.
A stuffed eight-foot Tusked Bridge Troll stood in the corner, its sightless eyes staring. A rare Central American Jade Unicorn stood in another corner. Straight ahead was a series of kennels filled with dirty blankets and water bowls.
Stomp backed out. He clicked off the light. Closed the door gentle-like. At the top of the steps, he could not close the first door. He had broken the lock.
Stomp called loudly in the kitchen:
“Time to trick-or-treat!” Stomp picked up the large-sized bag of Reese’s from the counter. “Gonna hand out some candy now.”
Rowland Hunter looked down at the smudged tattoo on his arm. He quickly moved to the hall. The end door was ajar.
5:57 p.m.
Stomp moved the porch bench so that his back faced the side that led to the canyon. The boy Hunter sat on the porch rail facing him and swung his legs back and forth.
Kids in costumes started to stream past. They gleefully approached and held out their buckets.
“Oh hoh! Look at you, young ones.”
Stomp dropped a piece in each child’s bucket and nonchalantly slid a handful in his pants pocket. Hunter squinted at Stomp in the fading sun.
“I dreamed forever of meeting one of you. My dad is really glad you’re here.”
Stomp swallowed and flexed out a smile. He dropped a piece of candy in Luke Skywalker’s bucket. “Hunter, boy.”
“Yeah, Mr. Stomp?”
“Could you do something for me? Go out to your dad’s station wagon. Get in the trunk and lay down.”
“But we’re just starting.”
Stomp grabbed the boy from the railing and pushed him off the porch. “Go. Now.”
The confused boy jogged out halfway into the cul-de-sac and turned. Stomp motioned him forward. The boy opened the beige station wagon door and climbed in the back and looked out at Stomp. He smiled at the boy and pressed his paws together in thanks. His eyes were distracted by the movement in the street.
Hankerton and Jen-Amanda had just adjusted their bulletproof vests when the four men in Wookie masks spread out and began to casually move towards the house. They got out of the van and started up the sidewalk. They kept their weapons holstered and smiled at trick-or-treaters.
Up from behind them, an engine roared.
Buzz Lang’s men hung from the sides of the armored black truck with helmets on and weapons in high ready position. Full-frontal. They blared a deafening horn:
RONKKKK. RONK. RONKKKK.
Kids laughed and cheered. Mothers and dads yanked their kids from the street. The four men in lab coats approached the porch.
Stomp sat, back rested casually against the porch slats. His legs were spread wide open in rest. He reached up as if in slow-motion and tied his red Rambo bandana tight around his furred skull. No shotgun. No exit. The menace children had left the garden shears on the porch.
The men in lab coats were feet away. Parents and children screamed now as the armored truck roared up. The lead Wookie-masked scientist lifted a crossbow to fire. Stomp knelt gently as if in surrender and put his hands in the air. The first man stepped up the porch. Stomp swooped one hand down and in a fluid motion, whipped the garden shears forward.
GARK. GARKKKK.
The man dropped the crossbow. He staggered about in a Wookie mask with a pair of garden shears embedded in his throat.
Buzz Lang and his men spilled out. He strode forward and cocked a rifle.
“Zippedy doo dah! Gittt sommmeeee!”
The men opened fire on Stomp. Hankerton and Jen-Amanda opened fire on the men.
Stomp turned to leap into the front door and there was a banshee cry from within:
“HARAHHHHHHH!”
Rowland Hunter burst through the front door in a safari hat with a seven-foot horn-edged spear. He charged the blade into Stomp’s gut. The two fell to the floor and rolled around. Bullets zinged through windows and porch struts and rained wood and glass. In the station wagon, young Hunter Hunter gasped.
Stomp knew he could roll over once and easily crush the man, but the spearpoint was embedded in his side, and beyond that:
“I don’t want to hurt you!” Stomp bellowed. “Ple-he-hease.”
Buzz Lang bellowed from the street: “Hostages are clear! Leave no bodies!”
The soldier with the flamethrower flanked the side of the house and let it rip.
SHHHHHHHHHHH. SHHHHH.
The rancher went up and flames engulfed the insides.
Rowland Hunter grunted and the ponytail wig fell off. Smoke and flames ran through the living room. They broiled out the windows and shot out the open front door. Rowland Hunter lay on top of Stomp and pressed the spear in deeper.
“Die for my wife,” he grunted. “Die for science.” He leaned in with all his strength. “Die for me.”
The automatic fire was scattered and distracted by Hankerton and Jen-Amanda, but a few men moved in and streamed rounds at the porch. Stomp had to move. Hunter Hunter pounded on the station wagon glass with distress and tears etched on his face.
Stomp cocked his arm back once and gave the lightest punch he could. Rowland Hunter flew back through the front door, totally unconscious. Stomp ripped the spear from his side and threw it behind him into the street. He leaned forward to drag the man to safety. Flames boiled out and bullets ripped through his arms and he fell back.
RARGGG.
Stomp leapt sideways through the porch.
KRAKK.
Hunter Hunter opened the station wagon handle and ran out into the street. Jen-Amanda rushed forth and grabbed the child up with one arm and swung them behind the Ford Escort.
“Pop! Pop!” The boy yelled. “Pop! Pop!”
Stomp lay smoldering in the side yard. The gunfire sounded distant just a few feet further away. He could hear the flames.
“Psst!”
Stomp looked across the yard to the horse stall. It was the heist moles.
“Come on! Come on, Big One!”
“I can’t,” Stomp cried. “I gotta save the guy. I gotta do good.”
“You’ll be dead – come on!”
Stomp crawled through the grass and the little mole hands grabbed at him as he fell face first into the hole. Stomp crawled forward in the dark, deep into the bowels of the canyon.
Sirens roared into the development. Lang’s team retreated to the truck and high-fived and whooped into the air. Jessica Jen-Amanda cradled the boy in the Peter Hathaway Capstick African hunter’s outfit. Hunter leaned over under the car, in shock, and pulled out the bloodied unicorn spear that had rolled into the street.
Hunter Hunter sat with the spear in two hands, as Jessica Jen-Amanda ran a hand through the boy’s hair, and firemen lay water on the flames.
Deep in the San Gabriel Mountains, Stomp sat in a ravine in the dark with his head between his legs. A candy package crinkled in the dark. He had a pile of melted Reese’s Piece’s cradled in his lap. He undid the wrapper and dumped another packet in his mouth.
“They drew first blood, not me.” He packed a clump of chocolate in his gut wound. A nightjar trilled in the brush. “They drew first blood.”
I’m so glad you came along for Stomp’s attempt to “be good” in a world he struggles so hard to navigate. If you’d like to support Stomp Roams, you can share the story or tap that little “subscribe” button. Learn more about the author at www.jonathandelp.com.
How deep into this world do you want to go? Read Stomp’s last adventure, Stomp Robs a Cloudbrew Beer Truck, as Stomp seeks redemption and smuggles precious cargo through the Klamath-Siskiyou Range in a stolen beer truck.
