This story is a crossover between two of my diverse passions: Hercules: The Legendary Journeys and Columbus Blue Jackets Hockey. The characters of Hercules and Iolaus ( belong to the folks at Renaissance Studios, as do others I cannot reveal for plot purposes. The Columbus Blue Jackets, Carolina Hurricanes, Minnesota Wild and Anaheim Mighty Ducks all belong to the National Hockey League. "LAW AND ORDER" and "QUANTUM LEAP belong to Belisarius Productions and Wolf Films respectively. Dartmouth belongs to the Ivy League and Michigan State University to the Big Ten. With the exception of the NHL teams entities included in this story are destined to meet only in MY imagination.
REQUIRED SEXUAL WARNING: Sexual experiences of the characters involved are integral to the plot of this story. If you are looking for graphic descriptions, you need not read any further; it is not that type of story. If you are offended by any sexual encounters (including M/M), or if you are deemed by the laws of your country (or your parents) to be too young to read about sexual experiences, please do not read this story.
VIOLENCE WARNING: There is a small amount of violence in this story -- certainly nothing more than you would see on the television show, or for that matter in the National Hockey League.
LANGUAGE WARNING: The "bad words" in this story are in Serbian (which I am passing off as Croatian on the assurance that they sound virtually the same when spoken). Unless you read this language, or find the same Internet dictionary I used, you won't understand them, anyway.
"And what, exactly, are these boots for?" Hercules asked as he picked up the high-topped leather shoe that had a metal blade running the full length of the sole. The blade was hollowed in places, reinforced in others, and sharpened to a knife-edge on both sides. While wearing these boots, you could definitely do some real damage if you kicked someone, but walking would certainly be difficult.
"You'll see." Iolaus replied with one of his "got you now buddy" smiles.
They had already spent a considerable amount of time dressing in more layers of clothing then they usually wore even when they traveled to the Northland. Pads for the shoulders, lower back, hips, and a protective cup for the genitals were then covered with some of the strangest clothing Hercules had ever seen: heavy woolen stockings, ridiculous short pants, and a comfortable long sweater with letters, numbers and other symbols on it. This had to be another of Iolaus's hair-brained ideas, like the time he thought he could ride the waves on a wooden board; but because they were a team and this was their mission, Hercules had no choice but to go along with it.
While he liked the gauntlet gloves, the final indignity was a helmet, which was going to mat down his hair. What was it in this twenty-first century world that demanded such protection? They had fought all over Greece wearing leather pants and vests.
"What are we going up against this time?"
"Nothing much, just the usual chasing after a warlord who discovers that he too can time travel. Did a bit of damage in this century also, then came to the United States to hide. They never seem to get a clue. This outfit is for our cover."
"Our cover."
"You know, our job, that thing that allows us to be here and chaise the bad guys. That thing that puts money in our pockets so we can buy drinks and spend money on women." Hercules didn't drink and rarely spent money on women but liked to buy vintage books and antique maps. They both preferred upscale apartments with balconies and Jacuzzi tubs. Money was a necessary part of their job.
"You mean we are not going to be karate instructors again. " Usually when they traveled to the late twentieth or early twenty-first century they had found jobs working at small karate studios. It was easy work, allowed Iolaus to meet women, and often provided clues on the person that they were chasing.
"You know how I've been wanting to do something else? When you turned down joining the WWF, I had to find something. You will like this. I am sure. Now just listen."
"Do I have any choice?" He certainly had not wanted to travel around the country pretending he was dropping behemoths onto the ring while teenagers screamed. He was after all the son of Zeus; he had his dignity.
"No, just listen. It is really a simple game, and they are going to pay us a lot of money to do this. Women really dig it too."
"This is a puck." Iolaus picked up a small hard disk about the size and shape of a hunk of horse manure, and handed it to Hercules. Herc put it to his nose, smelled it, and when he was confident that it was not what it looked like, rested it on his knee.
"This is your stick." Iolaus continued. The stick was long, well taped, with a nasty looking curved piece extending from the end. It looked like you could do some real damage with that piece of equipment.
"Got to be careful with this. You are not allowed to have a broken one, so drop it immediately if you think it is broken. You can't use it to trip people, and you can't hit people with either end. Especially don't do this." He took the blade of the stick and poked it in Herc's lower back. Even with the pads it hurt.
"If you can't use it to fight, what good is it?" The big guy asked, still shuddering from the stick in his back.
"You use it to move the puck. You can really get it going if you hit it right?" Iolaus danced around the locker room showing his moves with the stick and an imaginary puck. He was a natural athlete. "You pass the puck to a team mate, he passes it back to you, you fake, you pass again, he shoots, he scores. It's really fun Hercules.
"I am a defenseman. My job is to stop the passes and the shooting. It is great. I get to keep poking my stick under my opponent's trying to dislodge the puck. And I get to fight."
"Fight? You, Iolaus?"
"Yea, that is what attracted me to this game. It is so much more fun than those stupid ball games. You get to hit people. Just not from behind, or not when they don't have the puck. BUT if you get really pissed off, or if they do something nasty to one of your teammates, you can REALLY deck them. Of course, you have to sit in the penalty box for a while, but it is worth it."
"I see you have your name on the back of your sweater. It says Iolaus."
"Yes, but Herc, you don't say it that way. You say it OO-LAY?"
"What? "
"That's part of the cover. I am Richard Iolaus. Or as they say, Ric-oo-lay. I am from Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan."
"Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan," Herc muttered several times under his breath. "Who dreams up these things anyway?"
"Aye. One of the things you have to learn is when you meet a guy, find out how he pronounces his name, it usually has little bearing on how it is spelled. There's one guy here whose name is spelled ROY -- and he calls himself WAUGH. It's crazy. Just have to ask first, pronounce later."
"Now let me get this right, you are giving me lessons in how to talk."
"Yep!"
"OK."
"What's my name?" Hercules was worried that Iolaus had come up with something akin to what he had used when he was a karate instructor. Telling people his name was Bruce Lee would usually invoke a few minutes of raucous laughter.
"Kevin Herkimer. Figured I had to have something so that if I called you Herc people wouldn't figure it out. "
"Do I really look like a Kevin?"
Iolaus laughed and began lacing on his boots.
"Don't put your skates on yet. We have to go down to the rink. You can sit on the bench and put yours on. But watch me first. It will help."
They walked down a slight ramp. Iolaus had put orange protective pieces over the blades on the bottom of his boots, which he sat down on the bench and removed. Hercules looked around the building and was awed by the 20,000 empty seats surrounding him. Opening a small door, Iolaus moved out onto the slick white surface, delineated with red and blue lines, and moved around balanced on the blades with total aplomb. Since their childhood, he had always taken quickly to new physical activities. He seemed to be thoroughly enjoying moving up and down the rink, stick in hand, skating forward and backwards with ease.
Hercules quickly laced on his boots. It looked like fun. He couldn't wait to try it.
Holding on to the edging of the rink he pulled himself to his feet. One step, two…crash. He hit the hard, freezing cold surface so quickly he hadn't even realized he was falling. It was as if Ares himself had delivered a body punch. Now he understood the whywithall of all the pads and the helmet. This hurt.
Iolaus laughed at his supine friend. He quickly extended his hand and pulled Hercules to his feet. "Baby steps, buddy. Got to get used to this. It's fun when you get the hang of it. " He skated backwards and stopped with a little spin and a puff of ice crystals. "And I hate to tell you this, but you got to learn fast. Season starts in a month and the Blue Jackets have drafted you as their new power forward. You're the guy who has to score."
Hercules moved slowly across the ice not wanting the humiliation of falling again. Iolaus turned his back and skated away. He knew Herc would catch on to this skating bit as quickly as he had, but figured he would wait a little while before he told him about the goalie."
"Where are we anyway, Iolaus, I'm sorry Ric?" Herc asked as they left the arena. It was early September and despite the warmth of the early evening, the sun had begun to exhibit its autumn golden hue.
This mission was slightly different than those they had had in the recent past. Iolaus had been sent ahead to facilitate some of the details necessary for them to live in a new place and time. Herc had stayed behind and learned to deal with the new communications system that they would be using on this trip. When he had suddenly appeared earlier that afternoon in the locker room of a professional sports franchise, he was a little confused. He would have to rely on Iolaus to get him up to speed on their new city, before he could start exploring it himself.
"Columbus, Ohio. Nice place. Heard someone call it the 'Center of the World'". Ric told him with a grin.
"Now the 'navel of the world' was located at the Arch of Severus in ancient Rome. Cuzco, Peru, and Easter Island have also been described by the same phrase." Herc had been known to overthink a situation. " But maybe this is the center of the world? "
"Been thinking about that too Herc. Might be a clue in there somewhere."
"But this is where the guy we are looking for is hiding? Looks like too nice a place."
"Actually right now we're not sure where our "perp" is. Just know he is probably involved with hockey. Don't you just love that word PERP?"
"You've been watching too many re-runs of LAW AND ORDER!" Television shows, but strangely not hockey replays, had been part of Herc's training for this mission.
Iolaus paid no attention to his friend's comments and continued "I thought it would be just as easy to live in Columbus as anywhere. This part of the city is very convenient for us, hockey players, everything is here: the arena, the restaurants, a great market, bars…"
"The women. How many have you met already, RIC?"
"Waiting for you buddy. It's going to have to be a whole new day in Columbus." He swept his hands in a wide gesture and waited for a response that did not come. "So we learn to play hockey, meet a few new women, and sooner or later this PERP will come through on one of the visiting teams, and we will take him. . . come on Herc, let's go get a drink."
Iolaus tried to steer Herc into the MicroBrewery across from the Arena, but his friend insisted they go to the Irish Bar. The food was good; the décor made them feel comfortable, but when the band started playing Herc began to get all teary. Irish bars always filled Herc with the unshared memories of a young man he had taught karate in the late 1970's; a man he was certain was destined to be a hero, but who had since disappeared behind façade of lies constructed to hide the pain of the truth. He kept those memories in a place where Iolaus was not allowed to go, and brought them out only in Irish bars. It was one of the very few things they did not share.
"Got to get you out of here BIG GUY, before you decide you just have to sing DANNY BOY." Iolaus prompted his friend. There is nothing worse than a guy who's been drinking DIET COKE all evening getting all teared up over Irish music, especially when he is supposed to be a hockey player.
Their new apartment was within easy walking district of the Arena District:: a refurbished loft over several first floor art galleries. Iolaus, of course, had already begun to fill it with modern wood and leather furniture and explained that professional hockey players were much more highly paid than karate instructors. He assured Herc that even if they were only in town a few months, they could afford to spend money on the things that would make their life more comfortable.
Herc was glad to see that the phone, cable television, stereo and Internet connections were already in place. He always thought about the young man who had run the 26 miles to Athens from the plains of Marathon to warn of the arrival of the Persians. Now he would just send a notice with encrypted E-mail.
Today, however, there was just SPAM in his in-box. He deleted the ads for credit cards and travel bargains and watched with amusement Iolaus asleep on the floor in front of the television, the twenty-first century equivalent of campfire.
Ryanne McCarty, watched the little hourglass on her screen and swore at the slow Internet connection, as if it were something new or she could do anything about. She took a sip of her cold coffee and thought "Explain to me now, Ryanne, how this job will do anything to further your career as a sports reporter." She didn't know. Here she was an attractive, intelligent, graduate of an Ivy League college; working in Columbus, Ohio for a weekly free newspaper called THE RAG! She should be working for ESPN or FOX SPORTS, and wondered if she should have given in to her college advisor and left that one item off her resume. She couldn't do it; it was a part of her, something that made her the way she was every minute of every day. It made her different from other women. Ryanne McCarty was a two-time All-American in Women's Ice Hockey at Dartmouth. She was part of a world that male sports journalism just didn't understand.
When her search engine finally loaded she typed in the advanced search parameters. Richard Iolaus - exact phrase: we are sorry this search produced no matching results. Ric Iolaus - exact phrase; same message. Richard Iolaus produced a few more matches, mostly relating to a television show or its fan fiction. Herkimer produced matches relating to cheese and a New York county. She could find nothing on either man, other than their names in a recent Blue Jacket's Press Release. She must be doing something wrong.
She would have to go over to the Arena and check things out in person. It would be so easy if she could just slip on her skates and do a few laps with these guys, get to know one on one, and perhaps even show them a few checks. She laughed. That was NOT going to happen. She probably should consider herself fortunate that THE RAG had at least gotten a press pass that gave her locker room privileges, many said she didn't even deserve those. Instead, until the season started, she would have to be content to sit in the lower bowl, watch the players practicing and take a few notes.
She was pleasantly surprised that the two men she was most interested in finding out about were on the ice when she arrived. They seemed to be just skating casually around the perimeter of the rink while talking to each other. She could not hear their conversation. It came as a total shock when the smaller man allowed his stick to trail behind him and casually hit the back of the larger man's skate with its blade. It was just enough, in the unconsciousness of the skating, to cause him to lose his balance and fall to the ground. Surprisingly he did not help his teammate up off the ice, but he dropped to his knees, straddled him, grabbed on to his jersey and began to pummel the fallen man's chest with left fist.
"Look like it hurts. Come on Herc, hurts doesn't it." He was sure the woman watching could not hear him. "This is how you fight in hockey. Come on big guy, take a swing at me."
"What are you doing?"
"Trying to get a date for this evening."
"What!!"
Ric Iolaus skated backwards, looked down at his friend on the ice, up at the woman in the stands, and smiled. Ryanne McCarty, studied the small blonde defenseman and decided that he had to be insane. That would make a good lead story for the front page of THE RAG.
The large man returned to his feet and skated over to where she had been sitting. He removed his helmet and ran his hand through his long chestnut hair that had obviously gone too long without a visit to the hairstylist. He gave Ryanne, a wide, fully toothed smile, and said "I don't think you are supposed to be here, Miss."
"It's OK, I have press credentials. I'm a reporter." She let it drop. She couldn't bear to say she worked for THE RAG.
"Well in that case, I'm glad to meet you. I'm Kevin Herkimer."
"Ryanne McCarty, and I was wondering if you might be interested in going for a cup of coffee after practice. I have a few things I need to get on you for a story I am writing."
"OK, about 15 minutes. Out in front of the arena. See you." And he skated away like a little boy who just learned he had made the cut for the first team.
"Now you're telling me," Ric Iolaus said as he rinsed off the lather in the shower, "that I put on the show, beat you up, and this lady reporter invites you out for coffee. Is that correct?"
"Yep, that is just about how I see it. You'll have to eat dinner alone tonight, "
"This has got to be an all time first, you having a date and me eating a nuked TV dinner."
"Well, it might not be a date, right now it is just coffee, but you never know do you. Just be fortunate you don't have to kill and cook a rabbit." His grin could best be described as silly, but could also be described as annoying, if you were about to have to walk home and eat dinner alone.
"Hey, is the real Hercules in there someplace? What did you do with my friend."
"He's here, he just learned something tonight?"
"And what, pray tell me, is that?"
"Girls go for the underdog. Can I borrow some of that cologne?"
Kevin returned to the apartment about 10:30, late enough to have scored dinner but too early to indicate the other type of scoring. Ric was lying on the new brown leather couch that had been delivered that afternoon watching tapes of the Detroit Red Wings. He was taking this hockey gig seriously.
"Hey, buddy, we have a big problem." Kevin said to his friend.
"And you're not going to solve it coming home at 10:30 PM, friend. You got to go back to her place, at least until the beds are delivered next week."
"No, not that kind of a problem," he blushed. "Ryanne told me something, I think you missed in your cover story. It seems that two men do just not suddenly appear playing hockey at the major league level. They usually have a trail of statistics from the time they were in elementary school. Most of them are assigned to a professional franchise by the time they finish high school. We have no records, and she has looked a lot."
"What did you do?"
"I had to do something. Fast. I told her I had been playing in Croatia for the last eight years. Records from there are always messed up."
"But you've never even been to Croatia."
"Have too."
"When."
"During the uprising, about 2200 years ago. Went there with Xena."
"Oh! Have you ever been to Moose Jaw, I am going to need help on my cover too."
By 8:00 AM the next morning, thanks to manipulations that can easily be performed with the state-of-the-art electronic communications systems in their apartment, complete hockey histories of Richard Iolaus and Kevin Herkimer could be accessed in several places on the Internet. Several stories were beautiful written in fluent Croatian and festooned with Cyrillic headlines (which Kevin did not realize had not been used since the 18th century, but then neither did anyone accessing the articles.) Kevin did not remember when he had had so much fun on one of their missions. He loved playing hockey and even had a date for the next weekend.
The next few weeks were somewhat of a blur. The rest of the team arrived in Columbus and daily practices took up most of their time. Both of the new team members were playing at a level which convinced reporters that what had been written about their play at other levels was correct and that they both had a future in the National Hockey League. The first draft of an article by Ryanne McCarty questioning the mental stability of Ric Iolaus was safely stored on her C: drive of her computer. Kevin had convinced her, during one of their first conversations in his new king size bed, that his roommate was famous for his somewhat warped sense of humor. She decided to let it go until he did some serious damage in a real game.
Ric on the other hand, having undergone his longest period of celibacy since he was a monk in ninth century France, seriously considering bedding one of the numerous hockey groupies who hung around the arena following practice. Realizing that these women were often more trouble than they were worth, Kevin had convinced him to just relax a bit and he would find someone.
He instead spent a lot of his spare time watching television and became fascinated by reruns of a show called "Quantum Leap" where the main character traveled through time and into the bodies of people about to experience some problem. That was certainly easier than having to establish ones own identity, and he also really liked the idea of an "unseen guide from his own time" who could help isolate and solve the problem. Despite Kevin's admonition that it was only a television show, he thought there were a lot of ideas that would be useful to them in their endeavors.
For the first time that he could remember, Kevin's life had fallen into a comfortable pattern. Ryanne, who lived just two blocks away, loved to join him early in the morning for a run through the OSU campus, followed by an hour of skating. She had a lot of good hockey moves and had actually helped him with wrist shot, explaining that even if he had gotten this far using just power, finesse would take him even farther. Once in a while he would call her his "hockey princess" and she would reward him with a sweaty, icy kiss.
The E-mail announcing the arrival of an encoded message shattered the autumn calm. The Internet certainly had made their jobs easier. Messages in the past had been passed through books and maps, and sometimes used such unreliable methods as notes in bottles and carrier pigeons. Now they would just have to check their E-mail daily and keep their software up to date.
The object of their mission, the man they would have to find and probably kill, had left behind a string of atrocities in early Mesopotamia, colonial Peru, and most recently sub-Saharan Africa and had been identified as someone currently associated with the National Hockey League. Suggested teams were the Minnesota Wild, Carolina Hurricanes, or the Anaheim Mighty Ducks. Kevin was not sure what he found more disconcerting, the fact that his sources, after over two thousand years of searching, had not been able to narrow down the identity of the PERP further, or the fact that he had definitely chosen to play for one of three equally bad hockey teams.
It was not going to be an easy task. As Ric had pointed out shortly after they joined the Blue Jackets, in the past one of the tell-tale signs of the "bad guy" on these adventures of theirs had been the obvious lack of dental hygiene. However, hockey players, by and large either had horrible mouths with broken and missing teeth, or straight white dentures or implants.
Further communications had indicated that the PERP, now even the official communications were using Ric's word, was probably using an alias using the word Black in his surname. Unfortunately there was a Black on the Carolina roster, a Blackwood playing for the Wild and a Blackwell playing for the Mighty Ducks. Kevin was also sure that they all had bad teeth.
Six weeks into the season Ryanne McCarty was walking in the clouds. She had been dating Kevin for just over three months, longer than any man since she was in high school, but even more exciting her career as a sportswriter seemed to have promise. With the help of one of her friends who had been in film school, she had taped a couple of short "women and hockey" features, where she went one-on-one with Kevin, explaining the various rules of the game. ESPN had thought they were creative, had real potential for developing a larger female audience and with one minor change was talking about doing a series of 25 segments. The one change, however, was to replace the six-foot-five-inch Kevin Herkimer with the much smaller Ric Iolaus, who Ryanne topped by a good four inches, because their research indicated that women really seemed to like the curly-haired blonde defensemen.
She wondered what her friends at Dartmouth would say if they saw her now. They had always teased her that if she moved to Columbus, she would probably end up with some former college football player, which they were convinced described all men in Ohio's capital city. Now she found herself heavily involved with a professional hockey player, who, as far as she could tell, had gone from playing from a small highschool in the arrowhead of Minnesota to a semi-pro team in Croatia to the National Hockey League, foregoing any semblance of higher education. There were other, little things about Kevin, which never seemed to quite add up. One of the most disturbing had been the night he had been looking through her bookshelf and found this book on Greek mythology. While she prepared dinner, he had sat enthralled with the book, and finally announced that it had done a much more accurate job of relating a particular story (she couldn't even remember what it was now) than any he had ever read. She had thought it odd that he would have had any interest in Greek mythology and had not noticed until the next day that the book, which had been used in one of her college classes, was not written in English, but in Classical Greek. She never confronted him with that one, allowing herself rather to believe, that he had just looked at the pictures and made a joke about her classical educational background.
One of the computer nerds at the paper had suggested that she thought Kevin looked a lot like the actor who had played Hercules on the television show Hercules: the Legendary Journeys. Ryanne had never seen the show, but rented a tape of one of the prequil movies and watched it one evening. There was a resemblance; she had to admit. That issue was resolved on a road trip to Vancouver where her Kevin had met the actor and his who were filming in Canada.. The three had had a picture taken together. Despite a remarkable similarity in facial features, Kevin Herkimer was about an inch taller, thirty pounds heavier, and fifteen years younger than the actor. He, however, thought it was delightful when he had been called him "Herc" and it was suggested that if Renaissance Studios ever did do another movie, perhaps he should try out for the part.
Ric Iolaus (whose character had not been in the movie Ryanne had rented) had started dating this Goth girl who couldn't be more than nineteen with bright red hair and an unchanging wardrobe of black knit dresses. She had never been to a hockey game in her life before she met the defenseman at a coffee house; and despite the fact that she had accompanied the team on a recent road trip, where they spent most of the off-ice time in the hotel room, still had little interest in the sport. Ryanne was just grateful to have him out of the apartment, and unless ESPN demanded it, out of her life.
Playing hockey in front of over 15,000 screaming fans always made Kevin a little apprehensive. You seemed so exposed. Skating around before the game, he would watch the crowd, wondering who might be there. Tonight was worse. He knew there was a one-in-three chance that the man they were pursuing through time was on the bench of the opposing team. Paul Blackwood did not look like a particularly pleasant person. The right-winger was about six-foot with sloping shoulders, a nasty tattoo on his neck, and dark beady eyes. He would have to keep his eyes on him tonight.
It was midway through the first period when it happened. One of his fellow Blue Jackets had fanned on a pass and the puck had slipped past him and on to the stick of Paul Blackwood, who had a clear path to the Blue Jacket's goalie except for the presence of Ric Iolaus. There was no fear in the eyes of his teammate as Blackwood skated toward him powerfully, head down, and determined to score. However, just before Blackwood should have fired the puck toward the goal, he lifted his stick, leaving the puck for a trailing teammate and dove headfirst into Ric who had been blocking his path to the goal. He saw his friend fly into the air, heard the crack of a breaking bone, and an even louder thud as Iolaus fell unconscious to the ice.
Kevin looked down ice and saw Blackwood standing over his fallen friend, and suddenly it was no longer a game. Raising his stick above his head, he skated toward him. This was war. No one had hurt Iolaus like that in a long, long time.
"Jedi govno!" he shouted. "Kurvo razvaljena!*" His profanity was drowned out by the cheers of the crowd as the trailing Wild player had fired the puck into the goal.
As he skated toward the other end of the ice, three visions crossed his head almost simultaneously: a heavy-set middle aged man with curly red hair, a leering sports reporter with really, really bad teeth, and Paul Blackwood reaching down to comfort the fallen Ric Iolaus. He tried to stop, but two thousand years of fighting instinct took over. He spun around and with a back kick, split the helmet of Paul Blackwood with the blade of his skate.
Ric Iolaus was carried to the dressing room on a stretcher. X-Rays would later confirm a broken right collarbone, a dislocated shoulder, and a badly sprained ankle. Paul Blackwood, spit out a tooth, tossed the pieces of his helmet on the ice and skated back to the Wild bench. The resulting melee resulted in several major penalties and a game misconduct penalty for Kevin Herkimer. The next morning's sports section would feature a picture of Kevin, looking for all practical purposes like the devil incarnate as he skated down the rink. Ryanne McCarty was glad that no distant cousins of the man she thought she was in love with had made it to the game.
Myron Swartz smirked to himself thinking about the chain of fortuitous events that had brought him to his present position. It had begun just a few days earlier when he had shared a beer, or three, with an innocuous bar owner and discussed his job as a hockey reporter. The man had called the next day to offer him a "big news story" in exchange for bench side tickets to tonight's Wild-Columbus Blue Jackets game. While Swartz could not remember exactly what players they had discussed that night, a scrutiny of the Blue Jackets roster had produced a thread of recognition with the name Kevin Herkimer. He had sent a staff photographer to get some personal pictures of the Columbus forward on the guise that he was doing a story of a Minnesota native's unorthodox route to the National Hockey League.
He could not believe how quickly his life had changed from the comfort and security of his position at the hockey desk of the St. Paul Pioneer Press. The crisp coolness of a Minnesota autumn was the perfect antidote for the fevers of the Sudan. Skirmishes on the hockey rink were nothing compared to civil war. The Twin Cities had seemed a perfect place to hide for a while and plan his next endeavor. Now it had been handed to him in the form of a Polaroid picture.
Tonight, when he tried to kill Paul Blackwood with a kick to the head, Kevin Herkimer was transformed from a local boy getting a chance to play in the big time to a name to be would be discussed throughout the league. What Swartz had envisioned as a photo spread that would make his name in hockey journalism had taken on a life of its own. With a little more good luck, and a few phone calls, the pictures, when combined with the one he held in his hand, could be transformed into cold hard cash.
There were ten, count them ten, messages from a Myron Swartz on Ryanne's voice mail when she returned to her apartment. She was sure that she would find an equal number of her work phone. The man HAD to talk to her, IMMEDIATELY. He had something he wanted to show her. She tried hard to place the name, but had no clue what this Minnesota sports reporter wanted to show her so badly that he would fly all the way to Columbus so she could see it. She made an appointment to meet him at the airport the next afternoon, and tried to convince herself that maybe the St. Paul Pioneer Press interested in offering her a job. She did not discuss it with Kevin, who despite the looming threat of league sanctions, right now seemed interested only in caring for his injured teammate/roommate.
They sat in the very rear of the airport bar. Myron Swartz was a smarmy little man with beady eyes and bad teeth. Ryanne was convinced she had made the right decision to meet him only in a public place; she wouldn't even have wanted to have this man in her office. He ordered a Bud Light and extracted a laptop computer from his battered briefcase. Punching a button, she watched as images of Kevin Herkimer appeared on the screen. It was an interesting collage of pictures taken before, after and during games, meshing together to make a border around the screen. She shuddered as one of the two of them, sharing a private moment in a restaurant, came up next to the demonic picture from the Minneapolis Star.
"So what? Sometimes he doesn't photograph well." Myron Swartz's expression did not change.
"Well he did in this one." He hit a button and in the middle of the screen appeared a picture of Kevin Herkimer lying on a bed, post-coitally nude, and beside him was what appeared to be a teenage boy. "This should certainly make him a hero for the masses."
"That doesn't scare me at all, it's a computer generated picture. You can do anything on a computer. Cut head, paste on body, add boy, wrinkle sheets, that doesn't mean a thing."
"Well what about this?" Handed her a small Polaroid original of the picture. It was somewhat faded. She stared at it as she held it in her hand as if it were on fire.
"Look at the date on this picture. September 1977. Kevin Herkimer is 25 or 26 years old. A nude picture of him taken in 1977 would have been in a crib, with a teddy bear. This is not Kevin Herkimer. It doesn't scare me at all."
She expected the man to crumble; he did not. His eyes got brighter with delight.
"I knew that guy was full of it, telling me that it was the hockey player with him. But this is even better. OUT MAGAZINE will pay big money for this picture of a television star."
Ryanne McCarty was walking away before he finished the sentence. She knew the identity of the man in the picture. On his right groin, in the area where on a woman would be covered by a bikini, was a small blue tattoo. She had noticed the tattoo early in her relationship with Kevin, but he had never commented on it. Thinking the design most unusual she had looked it up on the Internet. The search had revealed it was an ancient Greek warrior's mark. This, along with the other inconsistencies about her new lover, she had filed away for future explanation. It was now time to ask questions.
Kevin had decided that it was "time to talk" even before Ryanne had called. They had only briefly talked over the phone since their return from Minnesota. An Internet search after his receipt of white envelope with no return address containing only the words "I'm Sorry" had produced a newspaper obituary of a Minnesota bar owner who had taken his own life two days before. He stopped at a liquor store and purchased a liter of Oban, a single-malt Scotch. For the first time in a long, long time, he felt that he was going to need a drink, or maybe ten, to get him through this night.
He placed the bottle on her coffee table and poured them both a glass. "What I am going to tell you tonight, is going to be difficult, both to understand and to accept. I am going to tell you the "WHAT AND WHY" first, please don't interrupt. We will get to the "HOW" later and that is even going to be more difficult.
"Believe me Ryanne I really love you. I love you more than I have loved any woman for a long, long time. Please, drink this Scotch. It is going to be very, very. . . " She had seen the picture, it was going to be more than difficult, it was going to be virtually impossible.
"In 1977 there was this karate instructor, Bruce Lee, don't laugh, please don't laugh. He worked at a small studio in Northern Virginia, just outside Washington DC. One of his students was a teenager named Bryan O'Rourke. " It was the first time in years that name had passed his lips. "Nice kid, smart, didn't look like an athlete at all, but had a true warrior's heart. He loved karate and had progressed very, very quickly. Bruce would take him out for coffee after he finished his lesson and they would talk for hours. "
Ryanne drank one glass of scotch fairly quickly and poured another.
"If you want to stop, and drink, until you think you are ready to listen, please tell me. Just don't ask any questions, it is difficult enough as it is."
The first thing she wanted to ask him if how stupid a karate instructor would have to be to call himself 'Bruce Lee', but chose just to drink and listen.
"When Bryan missed two, maybe three, lessons, Bruce called his parents. They told him that Bryan had attempted suicide, but was recovering and wanted badly to return to the studio. He agreed to work with their son, hoping to heal him physically and mentally through the use of martial arts.
"Bryan hadn't yet resumed his training, but one afternoon he called Bruce and told him that he needed to see him, and asked that he come over to his house. When he got there he was surprised to find the boy home alone. In retrospect it was a big mistake to go to the boy's room, but I guess Bruce was too naïve to even think about it. All he could think about was the pain this young man had to be going through. They sat and talked for a long time. The story he told was painful. It involved a father who had died when he was about five and a stepfather who had beat him from the time he started dating his mother. Even as a small child, he would be locked outside the house for hours at a time. Now he had decided he was gay, and had no idea how to tell his family. Suicide seemed an easier answer.
"It was more than I could take. He was such a wonderful boy, such a proud and strong soul. I held him in my arms and tried to comfort him. Then I did something that I probably shouldn't have done, but I never regretted it. It came from a place deep within me. A part of me that you will probably never understand. A part of my youth. A time when life and mores were different. I slowly removed his clothes and made love to him. Not hot passionate sex, but gentle love. The kind of love a warrior made sometimes before he went to battle when he rightly feared that both he and his comrade would die the next day. I wanted to show him that it was alright. That I understood. It wasn't a sin. It was love, and love could never be bad. I thought he understood, but I was never sure. The only thing I am sure of is that after we had finished, he pulled out this Polaroid camera, put it on auto, and took our picture."
"I saw the picture. Myron Swartz has it." Ryanne had noticed immediately that the pronoun had changed, no amount of Scotch could hide that. He was confessing a story that not only challenged their relationship and his sexuality; it challenged his very existence.
"I know, he called me about it, too." He commented and continued with the story. " Bryan never resumed his lessons. Bruce never heard from him again. For years I wondered if he had been successful in killing himself the next time he tried. I don't know if there were other times in between, but I know he was successful the last time he tried. Last week, just after I saw him at the game in Minnesota.
"I don't know why Bryan kept the picture all these years. I like to think it was a source of comfort to him, but after it turned up in the hands of Myron Swartz, I am forced to admit that he might have kept it to hurt me. Maybe what I did was wrong. Legally. Morally. But I did it out of love. And believe me, Ryanne, I love you, too."
She watched as the tears streamed down his face. The part of her that was a woman wanted to hold him tightly and comfort him. The part of her that was a reporter over took and asked; "But that was 24 years ago, how old are you anyway?"
"Well, that is part of the "HOW" of this story, but if you really want to know, and I can't be exactly sure because of what the Christians did to the calendar, but I believe that I am about 2237 years old -- give or take a few decades. I know my birthday is the spring equinox, if that helps at all."
"I probably should ask you what kind of fool you expect me to be to even begin to buy this story. That the year I was born you rape a teenager boy and tell me you did it out of love. Tell me it is because of some WARRIOR THING. Excuse me! What are you, some sort of "ancient being" directly from a story on the Sci-Fi channel? What do you do, travel through time trying to catch bad guys, or what?"
"Exactly, and it wasn't rape."
"I should tell you to get out of my apartment, get out of my life, except for one thing. I know it is you in that picture. You, Kevin Herkimer, not some made up "Bruce Lee" character. I have spent a lot of time the last few months, and sometimes we engage in a sexual activity which brings "eye to eye" with that blue tattoo of yours. When I saw it in the picture, I knew it WAS you."
"Yes, it was me. And my name is Hercules."
"What? Come on!"
Yet, she sat and listened. He explained it all to her, as best he could. How, for over two millennia, he and his best friend Iolaus had been traveling through time, sometimes forward, sometimes backward, to help apprehend evil doers who seemed to have the same power of transport. Except for the fact that it explained things that had always seemed a mystery to her, like his lack of a family and a past, his ability to read and speak many obscure languages, and his relationship with his demented roommate, there was no way she should even begin to believe this fabrication.
"I have reason to believe, after all this, that the person I am looking for this visit is Myron Swartz. Things have been bollixed up this time, I thought at first that maybe it was because this is the first time in centuries that I have had a relationship with a woman."
"Yea, boys are so much more convenient. Don't mess up your brain or your mission."
"No, not like that at all. Bryan was the only boy, since, since my own time. I now think the problems we are having were caused by the encryption software my boss uses being incompatible with that in the computer I have in my apartment, but it could have been US. I don't know, Ryanne."
"So the problem is either sex or software." He did not respond to her comment.
"Anyway I saw Swartz that night in Minnesota. I hadn't taken it far enough. I knew I was looking for someone named "Black" but hadn't thought of translating it into different languages. My fault. Really slipped up and it almost cost me. I guess I should consider myself fortunate, because I was ready to kill Paul Blackwood when he hurt Iolaus. I don't know what would have happened then. It was a miracle that I saw Swartz and O'Rourke at exactly the same instance as I skated down the ice, and was able to stop. .. well almost stop."
"If you call splitting someone's hockey helmet with your skate 'almost stopping,' I guess you were lucky. But I was thinking. If this story is true, Swartz is still out there, he still has the picture, and he is about to do some major damage to someone only tangentially associated with your life. The first thing I have to do is make a telephone call, to the former goalie on my Dartmouth team, she is pretty high up at OUT MAGAZINE and we need to stop Myron Swartz."
There was no one in the offices at that time of night, but Ryanne left a detailed message. She told her that the picture Swartz had was not only a forgery but had been stolen from the estate of a recently deceased businessman. She pleaded with her friend for a one issue reprieve so that she would explain everything. She hung up the phone, and hoped for the best.
"Now," she said to her former lover, "that we have a little breathing space, I think you had better tell me just what this Myron Swartz did and maybe we can figure out how to get him."
"Well, about 3500 years ago in ancient Mesopotamia, he killed . . .
"Nah, Herc, you can tell me that later, tell me what he did recently that made you come here. To this time."
He related the details, of African tribal warfare, paid mercenaries, and mass genocide. She listened intently, even while she walked around the room, sorted through books and turned on her computer.
"I have to send some E-mails. Wish I had your encryption software, but this has got to go out now. It's already morning in Africa and I am sure that there are a couple of people I know there who are most interested in the whereabouts of a certain Minnesota sports reporter."
"Who what?"
"Well you see lover, not all Ivy League graduates go into journalism, a few of them also work in the United States State Department. " She laughed. He never dreamed he would ever see her laugh again.
Iolaus was awake, waiting for him when he returned to the apartment. He placed the half-bottle of scotch on their coffee table and looked at his friend.
"You told her. Everything?"
"Almost everything. Do I look that bad."
"Yes, and smell too. You reek of scotch. How many did you drink?"
"Not that much. Probably enough to have a headache in about an hour, I really feel sorry for Ryanne. "
"She's not going to know what hit her, is she?"
"And not just from the scotch. The things I told her were pretty strange and horrible. She was wonderful though. I think she has solved all our problems."
"What, you got to be kidding me. SHE solved OUR problems. Are you sure you told her everything."
"Well let's put it this way. She has a lot of friends. Mr. Swartz won't be bothering us for a while, and the actors can sleep. . .
"Let's not get into actors' sleeping habits shall we. I don't think they would want us to go there."
"Good idea, Iolaus." Herc continued. "I guess I need to tell you everything too. Do you want some scotch?"
"No way big guy, I am going to be sober when you come clean with this one."
Iolaus was torn between letting Herc stumble through the whole story once again or telling him that he had most of it figured out already. He had seen the Minnesota newspaper clipping, put the name, a past visit to Washington D.C. and the misty eyes in Irish bars together and had a pretty good idea of what his friend was about to divulge.
"Well, Iolaus, it's like this. Remember when I was working as Bruce Lee, in D.C., back in the late 1970's. . . Well. .. I…remember…
This was not going to work. "I remember. You got all involved with that little Bryan guy and when he ran away, for some reason you thought it was your fault. What did you do to him anyway?"
"That is what I am trying to tell you. " Herc poured himself a glass of scotch and drank it quickly. "Gods, Iolaus, it is harder telling you than it was telling Ryanne."
Iolaus reached over with his unslung hand, and touched his friend gently. "Why did I say that? I know what you did to him. He called me the next day. Laughing, teasing. He told me that he had had sex with my lover. Was really proud of it. Wanted to make me mad."
"What? He though you were my lover? You!!"
"He was a teenager, right? Just coming out. Thought every good looking guy was gay. And, honestly buddy, you hadn't helped him much on that, had you? I was really gentle with him because I knew he was your friend. I told him that what you had done with him was something to cherish. Something you did only for him. But I also told him that if he thought he could laugh and tease anyone about what you had done, then he didn't deserve to have you as a lover -- or a friend. I was probably the reason he ran away."
Herc had picked up the bottle and was walking out of the room to his bedroom.
"So it wasn't that bad telling Ryanne?" Iolaus continued the conversation as Herc walked away.
"She knew."
"She knew? Everything?"
"Except for the one thing I couldn't tell her." Once again a bedroom door came between Herc and his friend of the ages.
The league imposed a five game suspension on Kevin Herkimer and a $50,000 fine; twice what Ryanne McCarty made annually in her job as a journalist. The disappearance of Myron Swartz was only briefly mentioned in his workplace and not reported in either the St. Paul Pioneer Press or the Minneapolis Star-Tribune. Dartmouth graduates also work in covert government agencies. Ric Iolaus had been seen, arm in a sling, in the company of models from Victoria's Secret who now found him irresistible. Things could have continued on as before, but Ryanne knew that that was not going to be the case.
Kevin had told her one night that they would probably be leaving soon. On past trips it was usually easy for a couple of karate instructors to just leave town, but in this case because of the publicity the visit had generated, they were going to have to leave publicly. That could only mean one thing. She knew she would awake some morning to the headline that two hockey players had been killed in some horrible accident. The town would be in shock, and she would probably never play or watch hockey again.
"I only have one more question. I guess it is part of a bigger WHY? But exactly WHO do you work for. WHO sends you on these missions?" She asked him one night, knowing it would be their last together.
"I don't know?"
"You don't know? You have been bouncing all over this planet, all over time, and you have no idea who is sending you."
"What did you expect me to tell you, that I worked for GOD. The GODS I knew wouldn't have cared. The GOD you know would think is sacrilegious, mumbo jumbo, meddling . Just not his style; if he has a style. I guess it is a FORCE greater than that. You know the same force that keeps the planets in their orbits and moves the continents. I just know I get my messages from a guy named Autolycus. Used to call himself the King of Thieves and was always convincing people he had some sort of security business. I bought in, convinced my best friend Iolaus to come with me, and it has been a great life.
"Haven't you ever wondered," he continued, "why with all the horrible things that happen in the world, it just doesn't bleed, become infected, decay and die. It's because of us. We go in, clean it out, and leave it to heal. It works! Believe me it works."
She smiled and tears ran down her face.
"You still didn't tell her." Iolaus said when Herc came in about 1 AM. "We are going tonight and you didn't tell her."
"I told her want she wanted to know, what she needed to know. I just couldn't tell her what I wanted her to know. I think it would have been too hard on her." Herc was babbling.
"What is it with you and this woman? Why can't you tell her?"
"I told her what we did. I told her why we did it. I told her we were going to die soon. I told her . . .you know Iolaus. I may have slipped up."
"Slipped up, how?"
"I think I called her Serena when I kissed her good-bye."
"Come on Herc, we need to go for a drive."
Ryanne awoke the next morning to a radio report that Kevin Herkimer and Ric Iolaus had been killed in an automobile accident when a heavily medicated Iolaus had driven his yellow Ford Explorer off a section of I-670 and into the Scioto River. They couldn't have gotten more public. She kind of wished she had gotten to know Iolaus better.
Dr. Serena Ryanne Johnson sat in her office at Michigan State University and looked at the massive lighted display on the wall. It was just a portion of an even larger project she had been working on for the past eight years, a project for which she had gained both herself and the university national recognition.
It had not been an easy path to get here. Perhaps another woman would have taken the six million dollars in insurance proceeds, she received from the policies the Columbus Blue Jackets had purchased on the lives of Kevin Herkimer and Ric Iolaus, moved to paradise and lived out her life drinking exotic rum drinks and watching the sun set. All she knew was since the accident Ryanne McCarty no longer had any interest in doing Hockey "informances" on any network. Not only did she want to go back to school; she wanted to pursue the study of history in a whole new light.
The Ivy League Universities thought she was crazy, told her to go away and stay away. She started working east through state universities, and finally found someone at Michigan State who was willing to listen. He explained that the university had a tradition of looking at things from new perspectives, but in order for anyone to listen, she would have to enroll in a Ph.D. program and do it by the numbers. She could use the idea as part of her thesis, but would probably have great difficulty getting funding for the amount of computer power she told him was necessary. She did not tell him that most of that was already sitting in her own bank account.
It took years, a host of undergraduate and graduate assistants from several different disciplines, but today it was a reality. In the same way that twenty-five years ago people began to find it difficult to look at a topographical map of the earth without the inclusion convection currents showing areas of divergence, convergence and subjection, the whole of human history now was part seen as part of an interconnecting web. The past, present and future were not static. They moved. The board on her wall was only a small representation of what was contained in a bank of computers elsewhere on the university.
She was married now, and had a charming five-year-old daughter. When she wasn't teaching, she traveled the world and spoke about her work, which had been hailed as second only to the "Human Genome Project" in scope and importance. Every once in a while she would receive an encrypted E-mail that told her to look for a blip on a certain segment of the chart. A few keystrokes would bring that period of history into focus and she would watch in delight as things would change before her very eyes. History was not static. She loved watching the world heal.
Sometimes tears would come to her eyes, as she watched, the movement of the lights that only she knew represented the travels of two men. It was the part of the story she never did get to tell anyone; the part only she knew.
She missed him terribly. Not the hockey player who had had a short affair with the woman athlete who had thought her own first name was too "strange and feminine" to use when she played sports in high school and college. She never thought of him as dead, he was just on an "extended road trip." She missed the man, who had bared his heart and soul and told her things "strange and terrible"; but could never tell her that final detail he had been so close to revealing as he kissed her goodbye and called her by the name only her family still used. As the ancient demigod walked out of her apartment, and out of her world, she heard his cry to the city where no one was listening the words "She was my wife."
She thought about how many times in the course of history her path might have crossed with that of Hercules. Glancing again at the display on the wall, she wondered if there might be something that she could do to insure that the next time they met, he would realize that she now knew about their connection.
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