Orphan of Mythcorp by R.S. Darling

towards the stairs, past the
door he’d just lambasted.
    “ Right,” I nodded. “But first tell me
why you’re helping Ash. What’s in it for you? And how do you even
know a high-school boy? That’s like, kind of creepy pedophile
stuff.” Before he could bark at me again, my darn thermo went off;
I realized I could see Nimrods breath.
    I only had one more vial of nanites left in
the case, and if I didn’t catch the 407 bus by midnight, it was
going to be a long, cold walk home. Zombies don’t like the cold. I
sighed and descended.
    The taxidermist behind me was surprisingly
silent as we descended; shocking considering his obvious weight
issue. A nice guy would say he was big-boned, but really he was
just fat. When I reached the floor, he shoved me out the way and
started limping to the right. The drone of a servomotor was all the
noise he made.
    I followed him.
    Crates of plastic baseball trophies sat up
ahead and to our right. I thought to check them out, maybe filch
one or two for myself while the hunter went about searching for
mythical files. But when I reached in to grab me up a trophy,
Nimrod snatched the crate out of my reach.
    “ Hey, what gives?”
    “ Shh,” he hissed. And then box after
box of plastic effigies was removed. Nimrod looked like a man on a
mission, not saying a word, bald head sporting beads of sweat. When
all twelve crates had been relocated, I stood looking at an
enormous green safe.
    It had one of those old chrome wheels
for a lock-crank, and if you moved just right, you could see it
trying to escape—downwards. One huge green safe. “So,” I said, scratching my stiff crap-colored
hair, “how exactly did you know this was here?” My first guess
would’ve been that he was telepathic and had picked this nugget of
knowledge from the mind of some records clerk.
    “ I asked around.”
    Somehow that didn’t make me picture him
sitting down having a cup of Chai with elected officials and
whoever else might know where any lingering Mythcorp files lay
hidden. I could, however, imagine him ‘asking’ with a hammer, or
perhaps with a length of pipe in his hands.
    “ Don’t suppose you happened to have
asked for the combination?”
    Nimrod might or might not have smiled there.
His face was so bruised and degraded by scars that it was hard to
tell. He reached inside his bear-skin coat and removed a real
tinker kind of gizmo. It was about a foot long, with tines sticking
out on one end and a knurled red handle on the other.
    “ Did you steal that from Doctor
Frankenstein?” I accused.
    “ This is the combination,” he rasped
out, and without further ado, Nimrod went to work on the safe, his
gizmo getting a workout under his expert hands. Whenever he twisted
the thing, his metallic right hand on its hilt, a god-awful screech
filled the basement. The grinding of the tines inside the lock was
enough deafen angels.
    I covered my ears, sound being one of the few
things left that hurts me. “Hurry up.”
    “ Relax,” he muttered. “We’re
done.”
    After stuffing the gizmo back in his bear
pouch, Nimrod grabbed the helm-crank and cranked on it. A bit of
grinding and some elbow grease and he produced a real pleasing
click from the safe. With one final tug he cracked it, yanked it
right open.
    Metal shavings fluttered down to the floor,
crimped flat by Nimrod as he drew the door all the way open and
stepped back. No sound as we investigated.
    “ Are those the blueprints of
Mythcorp?”
    He shrugged, started to reach inside the
safe. His hand paused mid-reach.
    “ What?” I whispered.
    “ Shh,” his focus zinged from the
innards of the safe to the block-glass basement windows. He scanned
these as if his life depended on it, the bruised flesh around his
left eye crinkling and the red pupil of his right, narrowing. “You
hear that?”
    “ Hear what?” looking around, seeing
nothing. “Let’s just grab whatever’s in there and—”
    “ It’s him,” Nimrod checked his