F the Halls

Four

Expression forbidding, Peregrine lowered her gun.  "Get in the car."

Fields turned from his perusal of the rapidly receding red light.  "Uh, okay.  Where are we going?"

"You heard the man."

Fields blinked.  "What—the bit about catching him?  Peregrine, his slei...the thing he's in can fly!  There's no way we can catch him."

His partner's steely glare cracked into an even more disturbing grin.  "Not with that attitude.  Now, get in and hold on—I loves me a challenge."

In the relatively short time Fields had been partnered with Peregrine in the F-Files, he had already experienced more episodes of gut-wrenching fear, more incidents of life-threatening peril and more occasions of high-stakes drama than he had in the rest of his entire life.  He'd battled inter-dimensional monsters, he'd dangled from sentient dragons and he'd confronted concepts his deepest, darkest sub-conscious could never have conceived of.  He'd even helped to save the world once or twice.

But for all that, he could safely say that for pure, unadulterated terror, the following ten minutes of car/sleigh-chase topped them all.

Hanging precariously out of his window, so as to keep the telltale red light in sight, he shouted frantic directions at Peregrine, in a desperate and occasionally even successful attempt to keep her eyes on the road.  Or sometimes, on the pavement.  Or the lawn.  Or the sports field.  Or, on one particularly nerve-wracking occasion, the pier.

And somehow, astonishingly—despite the not insignificant handicap posed by having to dodge, traverse, rundown, run over or, not infrequently, break, the inordinate amount of stuff that got in their way—they managed to keep their airborne target in sight.

So much so that they skidded to a halt outside its next house-call, just minutes after its arrival, to once again find the shadowy vehicle parked on the roof.  Of its jolly, generously built occupant, however, there was no sign.

"He must be inside," said Peregrine.  "You get up there and cut him off from his ride, while I go in and see what he's up to."

"But that's someone's house," protested Fields.  "How are you going to get in?"

"Oh, I have my ways."

Fields decided this was one of those times when the less he knew, the better.  He glanced up at the gabled roof.  "Okay, then.  But how am I going to get up there?"

Peregrine flicked open a compartment on the dash.  "Ejector seat?"

He hurriedly raised his hands.  "You know what?  Seems like a nice night for a climb.  See you soon, I guess."

A frantic scramble, a barked shin and a torn jacket later he found himself on the roof, standing alongside what was undeniably (despite his very best efforts to do so) a reindeer-drawn sleigh.  Shaking his head in bewilderment, he made his wary way along the line of stamping, snorting creatures until he arrived at the lead animal—a fine, strapping beast, sporting an incandescent, glowing, red nose.

"I'll be damned," he muttered, staring into the reindeer's eyes.

"Now, now, young man.  Cursing is a surefire way to make the naughty list."

Fields whirled towards the speaker standing behind him—white-bearded, clad in red and carrying a large sack over his shoulder.  Twinkling eyes regarded him from a rosy, full-cheeked face.

"Off home to bed with you, and mayhaps in the morn, you shall wake to a present or two.  Ho-ho—"

"Enough!" snapped Fields.  "Enough with the ho-hos, enough with the naughty list crap and enough with whatever the hell is going on here."  He drew his gun.  "I want some answers, and I want them now."

"That makes two of us."  Peregrine's soot-covered face emerged from the chimney, followed by the hand holding her gun.  "There's nobody downstairs, which kind of makes me wonder—what's in the sack, fatty?"

The apparent-Santa's cheerful face looked from one agent to the other, and then—with the briefest of preliminary shivers—vanished, along with the rest of his substantial body.  In his stead there stood a diminutive, tentacled creature, a bizarre apparition that reminded Fields of nothing so much as an octopus, provided said octopus was a six-limbed example that had learned to stand on four legs, while utilising the other two as wavy, flexible arms.  The sack remained in place, now floating above the creature's head.

"Oh, come on," it whined.  "You cannot be serious.  This was my last abduction for the night.  The last one!  I was so close to getting away with it.  My first time out, my very first night on the job, and you guys had to go and ruin it.  Thanks a lot."

Fields almost found himself wishing for Santa back.  "Sorry, what?  What the hell are you talking about?  For that matter, what the hell are you?"

"An alien, Fields," said Peregrine, climbing out of the chimney.  "An alien from...?" she prompted, waggling her gun at the creature.

"Tau Ceti," it muttered.  "Here on a research run.  Checking out the galactic competition, you might say.  I was going to put 'em all back, you know.  We're not savages, and our first mandate is to do no harm.  Just a few head-scans, the odd probe or two, a bit of a memory-wipe and then back to bed, with no one any the wiser."  He looked from one agent to the other.  "How about it?  If you let me take this lot back to the mother-ship, I can probably rustle you up a ray-gun, or something.  You'd be doing me a big favour—my supervisor is a real piece-of-work."

"Forget it, Squidward," said Peregrine.  "You're taking everyone straight back, starting with whoever you've got in the sack there.  But tell me one thing—what's with the whole Santa deal?"

"Opportunity."  The Tau Cetian's voice became just a little smug.  "When researching your world, while reviewing your entertainment broadcasts, I came across the knowledge that on the night of my visit—on this night—you Earthlings would be expecting a jolly, fat man to be flying around in a sleigh.  So, rather than the stealthy approach of snatching a few hillbillies from the middle of nowhere, I thought I would simply hide in plain sight, and select from the pick of the crop.  All that was required was a little hologrammatic assistance.  Assistance which is clearly no longer necessary."

The sleigh and reindeer vanished, to be replaced by a pure-white spacecraft, gleaming softly in the moonlight.

"I would have gotten away with it, too, if it hadn't been for you meddlers.  Anyway, as the jig is up, I'll put everyone back, just as you've asked."

"Damn straight," agreed Fields.  "And we're coming along, to make sure you do."

"We are?" asked Peregrine.

"You are?" asked the alien.

"We are," confirmed Fields.  He gave Peregrine a lopsided grin.  "After all, it is...you know, Christmas.  We wouldn't want anybody to miss it."

And so it was, that rather than pizza and solitude and Home Alone, Fields' Christmas Eve consisted of a car-chase and an alien encounter and a ride in a spaceship. Along with one more curious little incident.

"Peregrine?" he breathed, staring out one of the white craft's windows, as it zoomed into the clouds.

"Yes, partner?"

"Do you see what I'm seeing?"

She looked.  "You mean the low-flying thing down there, with the red light on the front?"

"Yes."

Peregrine considered for a moment.  "Nah."

"Good," said Fields.  "Neither do I."