Level Three: Work, or Something Like It
“I can’t believe you yelled at her,” Spooky said in awe.
Treble sat on the couch with his head in his hands. “I know.”
“I mean, you know her friends can like, puree you, right?”
The musician fell backwards into the wall of the couch dramatically, staring up at the ceiling. “I KNOW. She just… god she makes me so damn mad!”
They had all reconvened in their usual dump of a hideout later that afternoon, more out of habit than any kind of strategy meeting. The room was silent for a moment following Treble’s outburst, save for the clickety-clak of a keyboard on the far side of the couch. Distracted from his frustrations by the noise, he lazily slid his gave in that direction.
“Hey Dusty, how’s the research coming?” Treble asked.
“Fuckin eat me,” was the response.
Eyebrows met shaggy hair as Treble responded in surprise, “Whoa, dude. Sorry.”
Dusty sat back in his seat, glaring at the screen. “Sorry, it’s not you. Fuckin office next door changed their wifi password again. Been working on it for like the last half hour.”
Bones spoke up, “And you can’t exactly stroll over there and ask them. I think… aren’t we all banned from that coffee shop?”
“Everyone except Rubble,” Dusty agreed. Then he looked around, distracted from his monotonous task. “Hey, where the hell is that guy, anyway? Does he… is he working today?”
Treble leaned over the side of the couch, digging a pack of smokes out of an old trunk they used for storage. “Yeah, his uncle got a new contract putting in a roundabout out near Crystal Prep.” Tapping the pack on the arm of the couch, he pulled out two sticks: one he put in his mouth, the other he turned upside down and returned to the pack.
“Hey, hit me up, bitch,” grumbled Dusty, obviously in need of something relaxing. Or an approximation thereof.
Treble grinned around his smoke, and tossed his friend the pack. Then he patted his pockets looking for a lighter. “Wait… shit that’s right. I left it in the locker so Cranky wouldn’t fuckin confiscate it again.”
Dusty groaned, pack in one hand and a cigarette half out of the package in the other. “Man. You know I don’t carry lighters anymore.” He moved to hand the pack back when Spooks spoke up.
“I got a light.”
Treble and Dusty both gave their gaunt friend weird looks. Between the four of them, only Dusty and Treble smoked: the former because his parents always had, so he’d picked up on the habit; the latter because he thought it completed his grunge rocker image. Spooks was way to skinny to smoke, for fear he’d pass out in a day, and Rubble just hated the taste. And the smell. Really he just glared whenever someone lit up in his vicinity, save his friends. Because they didn’t care.
Dusty spoke up first, “Uh, you DO?”
Spooks nodded, and rummaged through a pile of miscellaneous crap behind his seat. A bowling ball rolled across the floor, making it’s escape from the heap as the ghostly kid made all kinds of uncharacteristically loud noise digging through scrap. He returned to his seat, holding his ‘light’: an acetylene torch. “Yeah.” The torch blazed to life with a small click. The light blazed bright, reflecting in what the other boys noticed were a pair of welding goggles Spooky hadn’t been wearing a few moments ago.
The smokers traded a slightly worried glance, until Treble shrugged with a blase’ expression. “Eh, fuck it. Better than trying to dig a match out of the kitchen again.” He leaned across the couch and poked the end of his cigarette into the flame. For about a second. “FUCK ME that’s hot!” he yelped, barely holding onto his smoke as he pulled his hand back. He raised an eyebrow as Dusty just lit his smoke off the tip of Treble’s.
“Also better than digging matches out of the kitchen. Fuckin knife drawer,” Dusty grumbled, taking a drag off his fag and returning to the computer.
Spooks put the torch away, setting it a distance from the pile lest the hot metal ignite something else, and picked up a book from a small stack on the other side of his chair. Maybe about ten books in total, they all looked to have seen better days, and were practically bursting at the seems with extra notes, paper clips, and Post-It’s shoved in.
Dusty heard the paper rustle and asked, not turning his head, “How’s your gramps’ notes comin’? Anything decent this time?”
“Not yet,” came the wispy reply. “Hees got a lot from the time he wrote about the hecatoncheires. Bunch of wild stuff about like, other All Hallow’s rituals and junk. MAN people get crazy on Halloween.”
Treble lounged against the back of the couch, returning his gaze to the ever-interesting ceiling. A lock of hair fell in his face, and he blew it away, a puff of smoke pushing it aside. “Yeah they do. So how do we know it’s these hecta… hecate… hundred-handed dealies this time instead of one of the million fuckin other things that like to pop up this time of year?”
Bones shrugged. “I don’t, not a hundred percent. But it’s the best match. It’s like, think of it like a Google search. You’re gonna get a bunch of responses no matter what you type in, cause the internet’s crazy like that. But it tries to sort everything by the best matches. Sometimes it’s spot on, sometimes the information just isn’t there, and sometimes there’s so fuckin much of it it just gives you what you think the best fit is. Right now this Greek giant freak show is the best I got. Or, at least, the most likely. It certainly ticks the most boxes, anyway.”
Treble nodded, his gaze still skyward. “Well, that’s all fine and dandy, but what do we do if it’s, you know, not that at all?”
Bones closed the book he was working on, and traded it back into the pile for another one. A piece of paper fell out, and he looked at it interestingly, until deciding it wasn’t relevant. Flipping the new book open carefully, he answered, “Why do you think I gave Rubble armory duty this time? He might come back with like, a tank. Name me one fight an M1-Abrahms doesn’t make easier.”
“Cloverfield,” the other two boys responded.
*DING* "HA! Got it!" Dusty exclaimed, and went to work with renewed vigor.
==========================
Rubble leaned against the side of a cement mixer, catching his breath. The sun had started to set, and the rest of the crew were packing up. He felt a tap on his shoulder, and looked up to see his uncle staring down at him. Which, given how tall Rubble was for his age, said something about the middle-aged bear of a man getting his attention.
“What’s up, Uncle Hammer?”
Jack Hammer, a career foreman and the closest thing Canterlot probably had to the tank his friends were hoping he’d bring home, gave him a wide smile that was missing some teeth. “Ya done good today, son. Hop inna truck, I’ll give ya a ride home.” Though with his accent it sounded more like “yaride”.
Rubble nodded appreciatively, following the big man to an even bigger truck: the kind of heavy-duty modern pickup that tows other pickups when they get tired. Throwing his bag in the back, along with is tool belt and hard hat, Rubble slid into the passenger seat and almost melted into the custom leather. Since the days were getting colder the seats no longer stuck to him like glue after a long day. He felt the truck dip as Jack climbed in, and shake slightly as his uncle slammed the door. There was a slight jingle of keys, then the beast roared to life with vim, vigor, and a lot of horses. A couple of seat belt clicks later, and they pulled out of the site, peeling into traffic with slightly more reckless abandon that would make a normal person comfortable. Rubble relaxed as the pur of the engine reverberated through the seat, into his back.
“So, kid, your mom tells me you got a dance comin’ up. That Fall Formal thing? In’t that where everything went to hellenahandbasket last year?” Jack’s particular dialect had a habit of running words together like freeway accidents.
“Yeah,” Rubble groaned. “Boys’n’me’re tryin’ ta’ keep it from happenin’ again.” Rubble’s own country roots always let slip around his family, though he could make himself sound ‘normal’ with relative ease. He was just too tired to try.
Hammer shook his head as he gave traffic a once-over, his blinker on only for a second as he passed some mini-van with a rather irate mother at the wheel. “Yeah, well, jus’ don’ die. I mean, a year ago I wouldn’ even believe in all this monster fuckery. Now is’ like… what next?” Their family’s specific brand of country also had a tendency to drop ‘unnecessary’ letters like fourth period french.
Rubble straightened himself in his seat, leaning against the window. “God, do I know what you mean.” He let out a sigh as the city passed him, the blur of the paint on the road a stark contrast to the seemingly slow pace of the faraway buildings. He found himself wondering what kind of lives the occupants had, and whether it really was just him and a dozen kids in high school against the world.
Jack gave his nephew a sideways glance, worry tugging at the corners of his eyes like fishhooks. “Rubble, I want you to know… I’m proud of ya’. I know yer mom an’ I say it all the time, but we really mean it. I mean, I know y’all get into trouble more often’n’not, but yer a good kid. Hell, yer spendin’ your afernoon diggin’ ditches an’ haulin’ broke rocks ‘stead’a hangin’ wit yer friends. I know yer grades ain’ all that an’ a bag a’ chips, but who’s worried about straight A’s when yer savin’ the world?”
Rubble looked to his uncle long enough to give him a grateful smile. It wasn’t like people didn’t know what they did. There weren’t many, but their families at least had some idea. Most of Canterlot, if not the county, had an inkling of the supernatural happenings in the city, mainly because a bunch of them had gone viral over the last year or two. Not everyone knew everything, of course not. And only a small handful of folks knew what Rubble and his friends got up to in the dark. They’d decided a long time ago that their families should know, had to know, in case something happened to them. They didn’t all approve, and at first there had been more than enough resistance to their shenanigans to make things difficult, but now it was just… something they did. Something they lived with.
Uncle Jack Hammer was one of those that had fought tooth and nail at first when he’d heard about their antics. Actually, his first response was that they were making up bullshit to cover the other trouble he thought they were getting into. There had been a moment, much like with the other boys’ families, where he’d been forced to accept the truth of what was going on, and at that point he’d adamantly objected to Rubble’s monster-fighting “hobby”. ’I already lost a brother to one war, I ain’t losin’ a nephew to another’, he’d argued. But that hadn’t stopped Rubble, or any of the boys. They’d just kept fighting. Sneaking out when they had to. They’d all gotten good at picking locks and jumping out of second-story windows.
Eventually, Hammer had come to the realization that there wasn’t any stopping the boy. Kicking and screaming he’d been, but he’d come. So he did the next best thing he could to keep his nephew alive: teach him how to fight. How to really fight. None of that swing-wild hope-you-hit-something back-alley brawling that had left Rubble with more injuries than answers. Hammer hadn’t always been a foreman, but he also hadn’t been a military man like his brother. He’d learned all his fighting in the ring in high school and college: kickboxing, akido, and a little good old fashioned karate. He’d grown out of some of it, and wasn’t the best teacher, but he knew enough to make him dangerous, and to keep his ‘student’ alive.
At his behest, though Hammer would never use that word in his lifetime, Rubble had also started taking actual self-defence classes. The kid had learned his way around a combat knife, a set of brass knuckles, and was slowly but surely learning akido from someone with more recent training than twenty years ago.
Truth be told, Hammer was almost glad his almost-a-son had started fighting monsters. That way he wouldn’t work out his aggression on someone that didn’t deserve it. He also wanted the boy to learn a bit more discipline than he seemed to demonstrate, if only so the boy could keep his head about him when he had to go into the real world. Of course, between the fighting, the lessons, school, and the odd job he did for his uncle’s construction company, the boy really had no hope of a social life outside of his monster-fighting club.
Which frankly saved Jack the trouble of the birds-and-the-bees talk, although he had an idea the kid probably knew more than he did. Damn internet.
After what seemed like an eternity, they’d turned onto the road Rubble lived on with his mom: a segment of military housing that, while not grand, did its best to cater to widows and widowers of servicemen and women. Jack pulled into the driveway of the small two-bedroom house, and put the truck in park. He left the engine running, though, to have a word or two more before they got out of the car. “Listen, kid. We are proud a ya’. An’… an’ he would be, too.”
Rubble started a bit at the rare mention of his father, but smiled despite himself. “Yeah. Maybe. Maybe he wouldn’t want his son off fighting battles before he’d even trudged his way through high school.”
“Or maybe,” Hammer retorted, in a rare moment of insight, “Your old man would’ve picked up somethin’ heavy and ran in swingin’ right next to ya.”