StarFall Comics
A Division of Pullemouttayerhat Productions
A Wholly-Owned Subsidiary of StarFall Innovations
Proudly Presents:
Swamp Patrol
#2: Needle in a Haystack
cover: A bloodhound sticking its nose through a doorway; a man in a ski mask stands behind the dog, his back to the wall.
Picking up where we left off, Frank and his newly assembled team stood in Inspector Caruthers' front yard, ski masks hiding their faces.
"Who are you people?" Caruthers asked.
"We're the ghosts of Dead-Man's Swamp," Frank replied.
"Who?" It took Caruthers a minute to remember his quote.
"Allow me to introduce my team," Frank offered. "Deerfoot." Janice raced past the Inspector. "Ninja." Pete did a somersaulting leap over Frank's head. "Spear." Brill pulled a quarter from his pocket, tossed it into the air, and shot an arrow through it. "Arsenal." Ted pulled out his cap gun and fired a laser over the Inspector's head. "Doppelgänger." Donna changed into a black panther and growled before returning to normal. "Shelly." She waved. "And myself," he said as he pulled off his ski mask, "Frank Stolid. We talked yesterday in the bar."
Caruthers looked at him doubtfully. "And you kids're going to find my family?"
"We'll search the whole Lehigh Valley to find them," Pete told the Inspector. "If we have to."
"Yeah, sure, kid. Come inside before the neighbors see you." They entered the house.
"This place is a mess," Shelly complained, looking around.
"Well, I haven't bothered cleaning since this happened," Caruthers explained. "I'm still looking for clues."
"Mind if I take a closer look?" Donna asked.
"Kid, Caruthers told her, "I've gone over this place with a magnifying glass. All I've got is a blood stain on the carpet and a bloody baseball bat."
"Let me take a whiff." She shifted her form, turning into a bloodhound. Caruthers, startled, almost dropped the bat onto Arsenal's foot. Luckily, he missed. Doppelgänger sniffed the bat and the blood stain. She quickly returned to her human form.
"I've got a scent," she told the others, wiping her nose. "Boy, does dried blood stink."
"So do your underarms," Brill countered. "Let's go." This place reminds me of that time back home... he thought to himself.
"Whatever you've got, it's something," Caruthers stated. "What's your plan?"
"Quite simply," Frank told him, "we find 'em and break 'em."
"Doesn't sound like much of a plan," Ted muttered.
"We're wasting time standing around here," Frank told the others. "Let's go. Inspector, we'll be in touch."
Frank and the others left via the side door.
They may be just a bunch of dumb kids, Caruthers thought, but something tells me they know what they're doing.
An hour later, back at Shelly's place, Frank and Shelly poked away at the computer.
"You know this is illegal, Frank," she said. "If they find our tap we can kiss all of our plans g'bye."
"I know," he said, flipping through a notebook, "but we won't get caught; if I can find that stealth program you came up with."
And if she's so worried about this being illegal, he thought, then what's she doing with a moves sheet for the upcoming Mortal Kombat IV?
"Here it is." He handed her a laser disk, which she inserted into the computer. Shelly typed in a few commands.
"Here goes nothing," she muttered. The screen of the computer broke into a million different patterns.
"This may take a while," she muttered, mostly to herself.
Meanwhile, Ted and Janice swung from the rooftops downtown. Both had ditched their ski masks.
"Slow down, lady," Ted complained. "I can't keep up with you the pace you're keeping. And how are we supposed to find three people in a city of this size if they don't want to be found?"
"Kwitcherbellyachin, kid," she told him. "It's better than dueling at home with a woman who says she's your mother but made you move away from the family who raised you."
"Is that all," Ted snorted. "At least she wants you around. My mom don't want anything to do with me."
"Why is that?"
"Because I'm a freak," he explained. "With my abilities, I don't fit in with her narrow world view. She even said I should be locked up."
"I think she's scared," Jan told him. "Remember those skinheads last month. With your power, you'd be a perfect recruit."
"I'd never be a skinhead. But all this doesn't find those kids."
"Think. If you were a criminal, holding a woman and two kids hostage, where would you go?"
"Someplace the cops would not look," Ted mused. "Someplace where the noise from the kids would not attract any attenion. The warehouse district?"
Janice thought for a minute as she swung over to another roof. "Too obvious." A thought struck both of them at the same time.
"Bethlehem Steel!"
"I hope this pans out," Donna growled as she prowled in her panther form around Bethlehem Steel's closed secondary plant. "So far, I've got no scents."
"That's okay, Dop," Pete told her. "I didn't think Jan and Ted's idea would have panned out. You might as well shift back."
"Maybe." She raised her nose to the air and sniffed. "I think I've got something." She concentrated, and shifted to a bloodhound. Then she took off down the corridor. Pete had to race to catch up.
"Where are you going, you dumb mutt?!" he called out to her.
"I caught the scent. It leads right over," her voice dropped to a whisper as she approached a door. She poked her nose around it. "here."
Through the doorway, she saw a handsome woman in her mid to late thirties and two preteenaged kids, one boy and one girl, handcuffed to three bunks. A gang of about fifteen skinheads filled the rest of the room. She retreated and shifted back to human.
"It's them," she told Pete.
"I think it's time we get the others," he said, reaching for a cellular phone he had on his belt.
Later that night, Caruthers, Frank, Pete, Donna, Janice, Ted, and Brill stood on the roof of the factory, gazing down through the skylight, observing the skinheads.
"That them?" Frank asked the Inspector.
"That's them," he told them. "I'm gonna love busting those skinhead punks."
"When do we go in?" Ted asked.
"When they're at their weakest," Caruthers stated. "Not a moment before."
"Nice theory," Brill commented to Janice. "Too bad it doesn't always work."
Beneath them, one of the skinheads pulled out a gun and pointed it in the general direction of Caruthers' son.
"NO!" Ted yelled as he jumped through the skylight, brandishing his pistol....