Roach laughed. “Yeah, you don’t want to corner Tinker.” He took a deep breath. “Anyhow. The logo kind of looks like two ‘H.’ You tell people its “Hal’s Heroes” before you show them the logo and they’ll see it.”
“How much?” Jane wondered if she could get the station to cover the cost. They could give them away in some kind of promotional deal.
“If you want, I could handle the merchandising for Hal’s Heroes. Do some posters. The hat. Have an autograph session…”
It would give Hal much needed ego-boo and salve her own conscience for not telling her cousins about Boo and Tinker. She was fairly sure Roach would keep his mouth shut, but Sean was a DJ for the largest radio station in town, and Andy was a bit of an idiot. “Deal.”
Sean interviewed Hal as they churned up river to where they left off searching for the eggs. They’d let Sean know that they were doing a new show so all the questions were geared at building excitement for its premier. He admitted that Nigel’s section was still in editing as KDKA decided that it didn’t want to make one of their most popular DJ’s a target of the oni. Much to Hal’s delight, it meant that his interview could be aired first.
Shortly before noon, they found the first nest.
Beck’s Run was marked on maps but was diverted underground the last few hundred feet as it was crisscrossed with roads, railroad tracks, and the abandoned paved walking trail. The culvert was wide to allow for flood water and marked with a sign that lay flattened in the undergrowth covering the steep river bank.
“There’s something weird down there,” Geoffrey pointed at where the creek spilled into the Monongahela River.
Hal came out of the wheel house. “I got this. Taggart? Camera.”
He wore his new Hal’s Hero’s boonie hat and a huge grin. With the concealer covering the last of the fading bruises, Hal seemed like his old self as he beamed at the camera.
Nigel held the light reflector as Jane checked on their mobile production system.
“It looks good on this end,” Jane said.
At Jane’s announcement, Hal carefully wiped the glee off his face but not completely out of his eyes. “We’ve found a likely site for the nest. We’ve nosed the Three River Queen into the mouth of Beck’s Run. Down below, in the murky water, we believe lies a nest of thousands of apple-sized eggs of the river monster.”
Hal followed their script and dodged using the word ‘namazu’ without even twitching.
“I’ve come prepared.” Hal lifted up a bucket on a chain. “First we’re going to attempt to fish out some of the eggs to verify we’ve found an actual nest. As you might recall, the fish finder sonar merely shows blimps on a screen. It’s very difficult to determine what the finder is showing. It could be some kind of vegetation or garbage dumped into the river. I’ve drilled holes through the bottom of this bucket so that the water drains out but the eggs will remain inside. It should operate much like a net.”
A second dodge around the fact they were using spells to locate the eggs. Jane had told her cousins she wanted to keep Geoffrey’s scry spells a secret. She didn’t even have to lie when she said that she worried what the oni might do if they thought he was dangerous to their movements in the area. Roach had created a fake fish finder by wrapping a cellphone inside of a bulky plastic housing with fake knobs. A tap on its screen made it display screen shots of the real thing. They’d already filmed Hal explaining how a fish finder worked. They’d carefully scripted the scene so he never stated outright that they were using it to find the nests. They were using smoke and mirrors to keep their cards close to their chest.
Hal lowered the bucket over the side of the boat. They needed to do three takes to get it right as it kept floating away before tipping, filling up with water several yards from the correct position. On the last attempt, he got it to go straight down.
“The eggs are heavier than water, so if we scoop like so through a large mass of eggs, in theory, we should be able to dredge up at least one.
Hal waited until Taggart had the camera into position. Roach was doing a good job keeping their secondary camera on Hal. Like Jane, he’d gotten into photography from their grandmother. He usually worked with still shots to create racing posters.
Hal quickly dragged up the chain, hand over hand. It took a full minute for the bucket to appear, leaking muddy river water.
“Come on. Come on. Be there.” Jane whispered.
“Oh yes!” Hal cried as the bucket reached the edge of the railing. He hauled it in and tipped it so the cameras could see inside. There were two large yellow gelatinous orbs inside. He picked one up and held it out for the camera’s close inspection. It had one red blood line striped across the surface of the egg with veins feathering out from it. “These are fertilized eggs. You can see already the two dark spots that will be the eyes. Peering closely, I can make out the heart beating. Based on the size of this egg, I believe that the newt will be approximately six inches when it hatches. We’re not sure how long that will take. We’re going to put these two eggs into an aquarium so we can monitor their development and know more about these monsters. Knowledge is power.”
This was news to Jane but Nigel was standing by with a second bucket full of river water for the two eggs.
Hal continued to hold out the first egg. “Since every one of these can grow into a forty-foot-long, man-eating monster, we will need to be careful to kill every one of them. We’re going to dredge up as many as we can and then drop dynamite to hopefully kill anything that we missed.”
“We are?” Jane muttered. How did Hal think they were going to dredge up the eggs?
As if on cue — and judging by the fact that Hal had pulled out his cell phone, it probably was on cue — a boat blared its horn just downriver from them. It was a tugboat pushing a set of barges, one of which was loaded with a bright red crane. The long boom of the crane was lowered so the barges could fit under the many bridges that spanned the rivers.
Hal stood up and pointed at the incoming boat. “And here are Hal’s Heroes, Glacial Sand and Gravel, who dredge the bed of the Allegheny River for important road building material, both for Pittsburgh and for export to Earth. They’ve volunteered their services to help keep our city safe from the threat of huge, man-eating monsters!”
The incoming tug boat blared its horn again. Taggart turned to focus on the boat.
She ripped off her mic, grabbed her rifle, and charged for to the bridge.
Hal saw her coming and edged behind Nigel.
“Shit, Hal, what did you do?” Jane scanned the incoming boat with her rifle’s scope. There seemed to be a dozen men and women on board, all in blue jeans, hard helmets, and tall rubber boots.
“They’re friends! We can trust them!” Hal cried. “Please don’t shoot them, Jane! We need them! We need them to dredge up the eggs and we need them to be role model heroes! Pittsburghers who volunteer to stand up and do something. We’ll film giving them hats and calling them heroes and it will be the start of something good.”
“How do you know that you can trust them?”
Hal pointed at Roach.
“They’re my cousins on my dad’s side.” Roach knew to keep the camera on Hal. “Second cousins actually. My great-aunt Esther married their granddad. They’re not Roaches, they’re McAvoys. Please don’t shoot them, Jane. My dad would be pissed.”
She recognized the name. She’d met the McAvoys at Sean’s wedding two years ago. They’d been rabid fans of Hal and offered then to take PB&G out dredging with them. She’d forgotten about them but apparently Hal hadn’t.