2nd Hit: Renegade Agents of A.R.S.A., #2

By Ima Erthwitch

The last drop of oil pumped out of the earth on the day Treya's life changed forever. A global collapse, yes, but no zombies, no nuclear WW3 and resultant mutants. Just earthquakes and portals opening to alternate universes. Deep in the Ozarks, a rebel-held holler controls one of the portals. They're using alternate trade goods to keep it and themselves hidden from the government. While Treya trains to become a government agent assasin, she learns secrets that could get her killed. Who to trust, and who not, becomes the question of the day as she develops her unique innate paranormal skills at tracking humans across realms and reincarnations to bring them in for justice twice removed from their human forms.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Erthwitch Publishing
• Release date: Mar 31, 2019
• ISBN: 9781386723585

Book preview

1 | How I Became an ARSA Bounty Hunter

It was Thursday, August 15, 2020 at 0200 when the message arrived for my father. The last active oil well in the world had just begun sucking air and the first of the catastrophic earthquakes had occurred.

I had been sleeping, of course. The sound of activity in the one-room hut that had become our home away from home caused me to sit up and take notice.

Wake up, Father said. There was a frantic edge to his voice. Get dressed. We have to go.

What happened? I asked.

Mother stood bent over a suitcase on her bed, hurriedly throwing clothes into it. She looked back at me.

Just do as your father said. We don’t have much time. Her voice was calm. When mother spoke calmly, it usually meant trouble. Something big had happened and her way of compensating for fear was to totally block it out.

I had inherited that trait from her. It served me well in times of need, but often after the dust settled and it was safe to fall apart, I experienced the effects of something like PTSD.

With a deep breath, I drew my anxiety inside me and studied the ceiling for a few seconds while I centered. A few fronds of palm and grass leaves hung down, but for the most part, all of it had stayed glued into the mud and moss added on top.

My father read the message out loud to me while I prepared myself mentally with my meditation. Maybe he thought it would get me moving faster, I don’t know. At least the earthquake hadn’t happened here. It surely devastated California and Nevada, though.

I thought about what it meant that the last drop of oil had been drawn out of Mother Gaia. The earthquakes were expected. Geologists and Seismologists around the world had rang the warning bells often, though they’d been ignored and written off as paranoid conspiracies.

Why did this affect our lives here? Whatever the significance, it lit a fire under my father. I rolled out of the bed and began helping.

All three of us worked quietly, if hurriedly.

This hidden village in the deep rain forest of Brazil had been my home. The people my extended family. I’d never experienced that before and I’d liked it. Back home it was only me and my parents. I had no aunts or uncles, or cousins or siblings.

Here, I’d known how it felt to have it all. My father had been good friends with the tribal chief and by extension I’d become a friend as well. I didn’t know how that relationship became formed between him and my father, I only knew it had already existed when we arrived here last year.

Just the day before I’d been initiated into the tribe as one of them. A huge honor that even a fifteen year old could appreciate.

With my dark skin and light hair, I’d never truly been accepted anywhere else and had never made friends. My coloring marked me as a genetic experiment, and people were leery of such things at home.

And what was feared was often hated.

The Yanoamoi people had accepted me without question, but they did laugh at my lack of skill in any of the areas considered important.

I could not procure or prepare a meal from the jungle around us. This was most disapproved, so they set about rectifying the situation almost immediately.

By the time of my initiation, I could hunt and bring home even the wiliest of creatures in the rainforest. At the ceremony, the chief presented me with my very own blowgun and a little tin can of curare paste to go with.

My father presented me with another little rectangular tin can containing stainless steel needles for the darts. These were special. He’d had them fabricated specifically for me and I have no idea who the work had been done by.

These needles were large bore and had a ball bearing inside them. There was a chamber, similar to the chamber on a gun, to load the bead of curare. When the dart struck a target, the bead pushed the curare into the victim, delivering a much larger dose than a dab on the tip of an arrow or dart might.

I took special care to pack the blowgun carefully. The tins of curare and darts went into separate pockets in my cargo pants.

At the time the darts had been given to me, I had no idea why I might need such a technology. Since then, I’ve learned a lot of things my father knew that had been kept from me.

I learned a few things about myself. One of them was that I had an ability to smell things others couldn’t. Not just how a thing smells. But how each thing smells. How each person smells.

For a long time, this was the only thing I thought was unusual about me. Like I said, I was a result of some genetic modifications and experimentation. The ways this affected me wouldn’t become obvious for many more years.

My parents sheltered me and made me feel like the little things I would have ordinarily noticed were normal. And since I didn’t socialize much there hadn’t been many opportunities to know just how different I really was.

Other differences would show themselves later. Puberty triggered the smell thing, so I’d had time to become accustomed to it before we’d gotten the message about the oil and had to leave.

We boarded the sea plane via floating dock on the Amazon River. My adopted family gathered at the bank to wave as the engines revved and we taxied away into the dark sky. It was only a short hop to the international airport from there and after that the long and tedious flight to Chicago O’Hare. From there to XNA would only be a couple of hours.

All in all, I’d find myself back in the unfriendly space in the Ozarks in less than twenty-four uneventful hours.

The university had a car waiting for us at the airport and we all three re-entered our duplex apartment house with droopy eyes.

Before I got into bed, I took my blowgun out of the suitcase and planted it into the potted plant next to my bed thinking I’d never use it again. It could at least be a stake to hold up the spindly stem for my lucky bamboo.

Later, more than a decade later, I’d learn secrets later about my parents work.

Most importantly, I learned the real reason we’d been there stationed in the jungle. I thought he and mother had been cataloging the medicinal plants. That’s why we’d made journeys all over the world. It was what they did for a living.

In reality, they were cataloging portals to other dimensions.

And that undercover work had been the reason for the late night sting the night we arrived home in northwest Arkansas.

It was during this ordeal that I received my invitation to work for ARSA as the bounty hunter I am now. But I didn’t cash in on that invitation for eleven years. I wanted nothing to do with the government that had in all likelihood killed my parents.

During those eleven years I worked the job that had been assigned to me, lived in the housing assigned to me, and only interacted with the people directly related to work and housing.

Basically, I was a prisoner. The entire land was under martial law. For all I knew, the whole world had fallen under the One Government that had been laboring to evolve for many years. I later found out that indeed, it had.

Everyone had been concentrated into the cities and assigned numbers and housing, with all aspects of their lives micromanaged and documented by the officials in charge.

Bentonville, Arkansas was my city.

I held out for as long as I could. But eventually, I did take the tattered envelope and card to the ARSA complex.

Surprisingly, it was honored even after so much time had passed.

I became an ARSA Bounty Hunter.

Well. I say I am a bounty hunter, but I’m not really. Not yet. I’m still in training. And I’ve just had an encounter with a monster from another realm. From an alternate world adjacent to ours. Not really a portal, but a spot in space where the fabric is thin enough to see and interact with things on the other side.

Let’s just say it was an eye-opening and adrenaline pumping experience. 

2 | Outrunning Monsters

Istumbled and came to a rolling stop at the feet of my mentor, Dersuss. Jumped up and kept running uphill

It’s coming! I yelled back without stopping. Until I realized he wasn’t following me.

I stopped but my muscles burned, ready to blast again.

It’s okay now, he said. We’re outside the boundary.

That was all it took. I dropped to the ground and let out a deep breath. My body trembled from the exertion and the still not yet spent adrenaline. My mind poured over what had just happened, trying to make sense of it.

After days of bushwhacking through the steep and rocky Ozark hills in the Upper Buffalo River wilderness area, we had finally caught up with Avery. She was my first target, and it was her first death. I surprised myself by actually going through with it and I’m still not sure if that’s a good surprise, or a bad one. This job comes with a lot of moral ambiguities.

At any rate, I put the curare’ into her. It wasn’t my fault Dersuss decided to resuscitate her before the poison did its job. I’d done mine.

Dersuss’s real name is DRSS, but since that’s impossible to pronounce, I just call him Dersuss. Since he’s the one in charge and I’m just in training, I figured I should just do what he says and go along. To a point.

In the hours leading up to the first kill, I’d even tapped into some new skills I didn’t know I had, like hearing a heartbeat signature and using belly fire to warm myself in the chilly autumn air. I’ll never forget what I learned about farkleberries and the hazards of drinking spring water.

But the most important thing I learned was the usefulness of a skill I already knew I had. I could track someone by scent. Not like a bloodhound following the scent laid down by foot or body contact, but by a scent trail in the air.

But now I am out of curare and darts, except for the one dart that was still in the blowgun. Eli grabbed my tin when it fell and then disappeared again right at the same moment Dersuss pulled the trigger. He meant to shoot Eli, not Avery.

What was done was done. We had to start looking for Avery’s next form and I had no idea where to start. Before we could do that I needed more curare and darts. And before we could go in search of that, we had to return to headquarters for Phase One debriefing.

And before that we apparently had to go somewhere else on the Dersuss list of all important things to do.

INSTEAD OF GOING BACK toward the cabin after leaving Avery’s dead body, Dersuss continued eastward through the trees. It was the same direction we had been taking Avery. We were still in the large bottom land valley. Where there might have once been fields, it was now thickets. Eventually we did exit the scrub cedars and elms to enter a less overgrown field behind a long-abandoned house. Fat, round cedar trees stood randomly here and there, but other than that the field was mostly comprised of tall bluestem with silvery tufted seed heads. In the distance I could see a solid tree line where the mountain rose behind that. I braced myself for more climbing among the rocky washes. No other obvious pass between hills was in sight. What I really wanted to see was water.

It was afternoon and my hands were still sticky and stank of blood. Between the two of us we only had a few sips of water in our canteens left, so hand-washing wasn’t priority at the moment. Dersuss had been in such a hurry to leave the scene of Avery’s death that he wouldn’t let me take enough time to get them clean. He still jogged ahead of me at a steady pace.

Can you slow down a little? I asked between breaths. At this rate I’d have to stop for a good long break soon.

No. He just kept up the jog.

Okay, enough was enough. I had to stop for a breather at least.

You don’t want to do that, I heard him say as I stopped and leaned against the half-submerged boulder at the side of our path. I pushed myself higher on it to find a sort of comfortable seat.

Keep up! He yelled back at me, but he didn’t slow down.

At that moment the ground vibrated slightly. Not enough to make me think it was an earthquake, but enough that I had to ask myself what it could be. I looked around. Nothing. Wait ... there was something. But I had no clue what it was. The earth vibrated again, a harder shake that did feel like an earthquake. And a rumble accompanied it this time.

About five hundred feet away, past the tall grasses and another big rock, the air wavered. I could make out something large lumbering toward me through the rippled space