Two Bears are Better Than One(19)

The trek back to the landing zone was uneventful, but even so it took several hours to hike the miles through undergrowth and brush. And, knowing what she did about the local populations, she had to make sure she wouldn’t have any trouble getting to her gun if something happened along that demanded attention.

She waved as she emerged from the forest, smiling and trying her best to hide the slight limp she’d taken on from soreness in her hip. “Nope,” she called back. “No wolves.”

Her skin crawled just saying the word. “What do you have for me?”

Mission stop talking about myself, accomplished.

The pilot started going over the shipping manifest. Nothing out of the ordinary – powdered milk, military style rations, fire starters, some bacteria to put in her composting toilet, the bare necessities, so to speak.

“Anyway, ain’t much this time,” he said as he finished going over the backpack full of stuff she had to lug back into the woods. “But it is enough that you shouldn’t be carrying it on a bad hip. What happened?”

Shit. I’m terrible at faking pretty much everything. I hope that report isn’t too transparent.

“It’s nothing,” Jill said. “I stepped wrong over a root a couple miles back. No big.”

“You sure? Don’t seem like a very good idea to be out here alone with a screwy hip.”

“I’m not alone,” she said, before she thought. Immediately, a questioning look crept over her pilot’s face. “I mean, there’s plenty of supplies, the hike isn’t a big deal. It takes a while to get to camp, but it’s mostly flat ground. I just need to be more careful.”

He was nodding, slowly. “You sure you’re okay?” he asked again. “I don’t wanna...”

“What?” Jill asked, before she noticed his eyes were focused on the butt of Rogue’s pistol, which was sticking out the top of her shorts. “Oh,” she said with a grin. “Indiana Jones never traveled without insurance, right?”

Jacques laughed. “Indy was a smart one, so are you. You’d have to be crazy to be out here without some way to fend off the bears if they get unruly. Can I see that thing?”

Not able to think of any way to avoid letting Jacques look at the gun without seeming weird, she shrugged, and handed it over. As the heft of Jill’s impeccably cleaned pistol left her hand, her pilot whistled in appreciation. “Nice piece, this. A .357, huh? That’s gotta kick like hell. You shoot this thing much? I mean, it’s a pretty hefty ol’ piece for a—”

“For a girl? Don’t try it, wiseass. I’m a foot taller than you. And anyway, I’ve used it plenty. In fact, I ventilated a couple werewolves with it since I got here.”

No lie like the truth, huh?

“You know why I always liked you, Miss Jilly?” he said, quirking a smile.

“My charm, my wit?”

“Yeah, that,” Jacques gave the gun a final looking over and handed it back. “And the fact that you can somehow make the most ridiculous stories sound absolutely true. Werewolves, huh?”

She shrugged, stuffing the gun back in her waistband. “Silver bullets, too,” she offered. “Gotta use the right tool for the job.”

“You sure you don’t want me to help you with this stuff this time?” Jacques asked, chuckling. “Bum hip and all?”

“Nah, I’m good.”

Nodding slowly, Jacques stepped back up into the helicopter’s pilot seat, sped up the blades, and lifted off. “Stay safe!” he called down. “Bring me some werewolf hides next time! Oh, here, take this, you need it more than I do – don’t keep that thing in your pants! Not saying you sweat all the time, but...” He unhooked something from his belt and hurled it toward her.

“I’ll see what I can do,” Jill shouted over the thrumming rhythm of the chopper’s propeller. She bent over and plucked a holster off the ground, vaguely aware of it as she yelled: “They disappear though, right after you shoot them.”

“I’m sure,” he shouted back. “I’m sure they do. See you in a week!”

As he lifted off, he gave her a loud “Arroooooo!” that faded into whipped up cloud of dust that blew up from the gusts of his chopper blades.

Nodding, and squinting against the sun and the dust, Jill waved at her old friend as he took off over the treetops. “Shit,” she muttered, turning back to the path. “If only you knew.”





-11-


“Sometimes, the woods really are just the woods.”


-Jill


At some point you start to question whether or not the things you think are real, really are.

For Jill, that took three days. A week of nothing – no contact from her bears, no wolves howling, no nothing. She spent her time poking around for the thing she wanted the most: Rogue and King.

Or, at least, some sign that the strange, secretive bears she’d always thought existed, actually did. Or some clue that maybe she wasn’t insane, or that she hadn’t just wasted a four million dollar grant with a bunch of made up bullshit slightly less ridiculous than Bigfoot.

The self-doubt was starting to crush her.

Then again, it always had.

As she packed for another day trek into the woods to find... anything, Jill’s thoughts turned back to her first days working for Fred.

“And this,” he’d said, “is why you don’t say too much when you propose a grant for some edge project that you think no one is going to care about.”

He’d plopped the newest issue of Science, just about the only journal that matters to an explorative biologist, onto Jill’s desk about eight minutes after she’d walked in with a head full of dreams. She’d had these ideas about a population of bears in Yellowstone. The problem was, that for whatever reason, this small group of grizzlies had stopped breeding. They weren’t in any danger, they had plenty of food, they’d just stopped.

“This is why you don’t go to conferences. And if you do, it’s all lip service.” Fred sighed heavily. “I’m sorry. I don’t know what else to say, but just take a look.”

When she saw the cover of the magazine, her heart hit the pit of her stomach. This was everything. Every shred of energy she’d poured into getting this grant all went to utter shit.

“How?” she asked, flipping to the Awarded Grants section. “I mean... how did this happen? How did I get undercut so fast?”

“Fungal growth in forest floor causing Yellowstone grizzly breeding problems? New grant issued - $5m, Dr. Dan Lindemann, GlasCorp Pharmaceuticals.”

Fred looked like he was going to either comfort her or shake his head disapprovingly. Thankfully, he went with the first option. He usually did, which Jill always appreciated. He shrugged. “Well,” he’d begun, “GlasCorp is as close to an evil empire as you’re going to find. They have teams of scientists who do nothing but go to conferences and snipe projects. Especially things that they can somehow twist into extremely expensive drug research.”

“But,” Jill had cut in, “what’s the point? Five million is worth about a buffalo head nickel to those guys. GlasCorp is worth... what? A hundred billion?”

Fred pursed his lips again. “Yeah, well,” he’d said. “The thing is, they aren’t interested in the money. They’re interested in keeping people from figuring out ideas that might compete with them someday.”

With that, Jill pushed back from her desk, in a huff. “This is stupid!” she’d said. “I’m trying to get some bears back to making babies. What the hell does that have to do with drug patents?”

He was still just shaking his head. “They think they found something – or rather, you did, and so they stole it. That’s kind of what they do. But anyway, no reason to be upset. There will always be something else that comes down the pipe.”

Shaking her head, Jill laced up her boots and looked over at the pistol she had laying on the bed. Little did Fred Stanton know, when he told her that something else would come down the pipe, he was sending her down a rabbit hole that would take three years to dig through.

And then, when she did? She let out a bark of laughter. When she did, she ended up in the middle of the Appalachian forest, in some weird place between the two Virginias, mated to a pair of werebears. It ended with her shooting a goddamn werewolf and then being comforted and sexed up by a pair of bears, and—

Before she knew it, tears were rolling down Jill’s cheeks. It was too much. Too absurd, too ridiculous.

“I’ve got to be fucking crazy,” she said to herself, grabbing two handfuls of hair and shaking her head. She sat, heavily, on the bed, then slid down to the floor, shaking her head the whole time. “I’m nuts, I imagined everything, I’m fucking nuts.”

She focused on the beam of sunlight coming through the closed blinds, letting her brain fixate into tunnel vision. “None of this shit makes any sense,” she said under her breath. “None of this is real. It’s all make believe, all a bunch of bullshit kid stories that I think I’m living in.”

The mark on her chest tingled, then itched, but she forced herself to ignore it. “An itchy birthmark? That’s supposed to convince me that shape shifting bears are real? Holy...”