10

The CRT team leaders met us at an office building downtown the next morning. I didn’t have much experience with the military mindset, but I was fairly impressed with what I saw. After talking to us yesterday, Lucien dispatched not one, but two, of Valente International’s CRTs. Mr. Valente was committed to making sure wendigoes became an extinct species.

I had expected something different from a Corporate Response Team. The phrase made me think of spin doctors and ad executives. Given what they were sent to do, my brain married that image with upscale security guards. I would have been closer if I would have pictured Samuel L. Jackson playing a former military blacktops soldier turned private sector after an early retirement, then cloned multiple times. All six of the leaders struck me as being qualified to take over a third world country with a rubber band, a paper clip, and a few loyal followers.

The difficulty that concerned them wasn’t so much the wendigoes as the presence of civilians. While Valente International was allowed by law to recruit, train, and equip any number of such CRTs, it was illegal for them to operate on U.S. soil. They were worried about how to take down a pair of supernatural predators while attracting minimal attention from the nearby picnickers. I was worried about little things, like the wendigoes killing all of them.

In the end, it was decided that half of one team would go in plain clothes and form a loose ring outside the picnic. The rest would be in full tactical gear and spread out along the top of a hill north and east of the party area. I would arrange for Tia to lead the wendigoes through an open valley below it, but the CRTs were going to deploy thermal sensors throughout the woods in case my “inside man” proved less than reliable in getting the wendigoes into position. Valente told me to keep it simple, so I neglected to mention that my co-conspirator was an adolescent female lake spirit. I’m not sure which of those elements they would have found most objectionable, but I was sure they wouldn’t like it.

I was glad to be done with it. I had been disappointed when Valente first pulled me out of the game, but I had both time to think about it and a night lying next to Veruca. One made me realize just how lucky I had gotten the first time around. The second made me feel like I still had something to live for. Dorothy would be avenged whether I was the one pulling the trigger or not.

The meeting did have one upside to it. I had been curious as to how their plainclothes men would have enough firepower to deal with a wendigo, if one managed to sneak through. I doubted they could carry a flamethrower and still look inconspicuous. Apparently, fire was a common enough job requirement for a Valente CRT that they were well ahead of me. One of them showed me a small black cylinder, only slightly larger than a can of mace. He insisted it was a single-use handheld flamethrower. Unless they were pulling my leg, and they didn’t seem like the type to joke about anything (especially about weaponry), it produced a ten foot long cone for five seconds and would burn in excess of two thousand degrees. In short, it was easily twice as powerful as the burst I had called up through the candles and without any reference to magic.

I asked how I could get one, not really expecting a positive answer. The team leader surprised me by saying I could keep that one, so I did. If I ever ran into another wendigo, it would come in handy. No sooner did I slide it into my pocket then I wondered what I could get a gremlin to build for me if I traded the device off to him.

“Don’t even think about it.”