The Billy Club Bastard Case Files: Gray Dogs, Part 1

The fugitive board of Crown Pharmaceuticals, accused of funding the nefarious Garrisonian Party and creating all manner of strange creatures with their secret chemicals, has been found. With such a high profile target, who better to show off the prowess and cooperation between the Office and the U.S. government than the fabled Heartland Heroes?

This is the first installment of Gray Dogs. It is the seventh and final story in The Billy Club Bastard Case Files: Old Dogs Still Got Teeth. This story features characters from and spoilers for The Heartland Heroes, The Night of the Nagual, and various issues of the Bastion Americana Freedom Journal.

Content warnings: violence, gun violence, animal violence, mild swearing, Nazis, creeps.

SATURDAY AFTERNOON, SEPTEMBER 25, 1943
MAIN STREET, DOWNTOWN
AKRON, OHIO

“This is careless,” Quint Castaño grumbled. He was sweating under his cowboy hat, soaking through his costume at the pits and back. He tried to avoid wearing the heavy, diesel-powered prosthetic arm if he could help it, it weighed a ton, but they had work to do and a crowd watching them do it. They were most of the problem. Them, and the ticking clock. “I don’t care if it was Hoover tipping us off himself, we should not be here.”

“It was, actually,” Archie Bolton pointed out. “He has an undercover with the Garrisonians. Frank Crownand all his yes-men are in there and the Junior Nazis are planning on moving them tonight.”

Bolton was sweating too, but it was his three-inch-thick asbestos suit and heavy armor that were doing it more than anything else.

“Ha, ‘Junior Nazis,’ I like that,” John Calderone said. He chuckled around his wide-bore cigar. The engine on his back rumbled in anticipation. In his Lincoln Landstrider armor he stood head and shoulders above Castaño and Bolton. Its red and chrome details flashed brilliantly in the afternoon sun. He was impossible to miss.

They were standing around like a handful of easy targets, watching a nondescript office building in the middle of downtown Akron, Ohio. A couple of Bureau of Investigation tips had brought them running. The first was that the fugitive board of Crown Pharmaceuticals, wanted for questioning by the Office, Congress, and their shareholders, was holed up there. The second was that they knew they were found out and that the Garrisonians were enacting some plan to disappear ‘em again. Castaño’s mission was to arrest them before they were back in the wind.

“Remind me what we know,” Castaño said, staring at the blank facade.

“About Crown?” Bolton asked. Castaño nodded. “New York company, focuses on medicine production, recently moved into chemicals sales. Former US Army contracts for morphine, amphetamine, sulfa. The reports I read said they do plant and animal testing.”

“What’s that stuff I seen them advertising?” Calderone asked. Castaño let Bolton field that one:

“In the Bastion Americana Freedom Journal? Probably Izopin. That’s for keenness. Or the plant stuff, Phenomen-All? That’s the one that got the Office after them. They found it loose a handful of times, making critters and plants grow large. Unnatural large. One spill is an accident. A few times is suspicious.”

“And they bugged out instead of answering any questions about it,” Castaño concluded.

“Think they got anything in there?” Calderone wondered.

“Like what?” Castaño asked.

“I don’t know, like a rat the size of a horse or something,” Calderone said with a pneumatic shrug. “Or like a snake as long as a bus. Or an alligator that could swallow a subway train. Or – !”

Castaño had to cut him off.

“I don’t think they brought anything like that to Ohio,” he replied. The building the Crown folks were supposedly holed up in was about as boring and generic as they got. Conspicuously boring. It was clearly meant for laying low, not stockpiling dangerous chemicals. As the only true official among the Heroes, Castaño had gotten more of the story than the rest of them had: cruel animal experimentation, the similarities between Vargulf serums and Crown products, the oversized, aggressive plants and animals found up and down the east coast.

“Yeah, if we can pull this kind of crowd, imagine what they’d do for something really strange,” Calderone agreed. He grinned, cigar clenched between his teeth. The look on Castaño’s face turned him serious in an instant. “But you’re in charge now, boss. You think it’s hinky, it’s hinky.”

“Yeah, if there was anyone weirder than us on this block, someone would let us know,” Calderone agreed. He grinned, cigar clenched between his teeth. The look on Castaño’s face turned him serious in an instant. “But you’re in charge now, boss. You think it’s hinky, it’s hinky.”

Castaño liked that even less than the growing crowd. Once Mickey Malloy had wound up on everyone’s shit list, Castaño had been been the one left to catch every turd rolling downhill. The powers that be had designated him both operations and field leader for the Heartland Heroes experiment. It was like walking a lion on a leash.

Speaking of which, he’d brought an actual lion.

Tanner growled from inside his truck.

“Keep him snoozing,” Castaño ordered. Peter Gimball, always good at looking bored, stood up from where he was leaning on the box truck’s fender, yawned, and pulled out one of his projector guns. The chrome one was what Tanner reacted to, whether Gimball was spotlighting something red or green with it. It could also send a radio signal to a wire in the lion’s brain that zapped him straight to sleep. Good for when the big cat was getting impatient in the car, or if he needed to stop chewing a living man in half.

The truck creaked as all two tons of Tanner slumped to the floor. Gimball spun the pistol on his finger and dropped it back into its holster to a wave of ‘oohs’ and ‘ahs’ from the crowd.

“Happy, boss?” he asked. He arranged his coifed hair with his fingers, straightened his purple domino mask, and brushed dirt from his costume, a reinforced flak jacket designed to look like twin-tailed tuxedo. MGM’s Starpower stayed dressed to the nines, that was his thing.

A camera flashed in the crowd. Even before he was a Heartland Hero, Gimball had been a frequent, if dim, star on the Hollywood red carpet.

“I love you, Peter!” a woman shouted. He flashed the crowd a thousand-dollar smile and posed for photos in front of the armored truck’s grill.

“Starpower, over here!” another photographer called out.

“Don’t rile them up,” Castaño ordered, though Gimball was about as good at taking orders as crowds were at not getting riled up. “Gunnar!”

“Captain Garand! Why aren”t you in jail?” someone in the crowd called out. Castaño ignored that one. He’d had a rough go of it, true, but he wasn’t the violent drunk that the Freedom Journal made him out to be. Between those accusations and and the stupid callsign the Winchester Repeating Arms Company had assigned him, he was getting pretty close to riled himself.

“Gunnar!” he shouted again.

“What?” the bundled engineer grunted from right next to him. If Castaño and Bolton were sweating, Gunnar Agnarsson was baking. His Blizzardier outfit was designed to protect him from his own device, the blizzard gun. While the insulation and furs were helpful at staving off frostbite, they were swamp ass hell the rest of the time.

“Sorry. If anything happens with this crowd, I want you to do the same thing you did in Washington, okay?” Castaño said.

Agnarsson nodded. He brushed some frost off a couple knobs on his strange weapon and adjusted its settings. Depending on its output, he could lay down a smooth sheet of ice, freeze something solid, or build a crystalline wall strong enough to stop bullets. Castaño was interested in that third option. Just like Washington, a frozen barricade would protect the crowd from the action, and vice versa. With the Freedom Journal cursing their names on every street corner in America, it was hard to say how much of any crowd wouldn’t be trying to tear them apart.

“John, follow my lead. Remember, we’re not shooting anyone on Main Street, got it?” Castaño said. He flexed the remaining muscles and sinews left in his amputated arm. The contact pads inside the prosthetic’s socket registered his minute movements and translated them into actions. Panels up and down its riveted sections ratcheted open, revealing the less-lethal elements of Captain Garand’s arsenal.

Castaño had been wearing the arm and training with it for over a month but it still felt alien. His last prosthetic, the one he’d lost in Germany, had looked and moved like a human arm. The one the Winchester company built him felt like it had come off a construction site, with its exposed pistons, hard angles, and crab-like claw.

“Headaches for the jokers, not heartaches for their widows, got it,” Calderone confirmed. He flicked some switches inside his armor and his ammo feeds swapped out buckshot for rubber ball rounds. With three-auto-loading shotguns in each arm, the Lincoln Landstrider was a walking firefight.

Castaño inspected his team. They all looked ready, their uniforms were clean, their logos prominent. The horse and rider Winchester badge stood out in yellow on his chest. He wasn’t a fan of taking cues from corporations, but they had supplied the Heroes with their weapons, including his arm, and they kept fat paychecks coming when when the alternative was the dole as a cripple.

He was in charge of the Heroes and his job wasn’t just lock up Junior Nazis, it was to inspire, to do it publicly. And to keep his people alive. No matter how many krauts and traitors they arrested, people expected a spectacle. But the crowd wasn’t an audience, they were bystanders. The bullets and bombs were real. Everything had every opportunity to go sideways, fast.

Hell, the Tridente cell they’d gone to arrest in Philly had blown themselves up rather than go into custody. He’d caught a bullet himself their first time out.

He had to make sure his team remembered it was all real, even if the onlookers forgot.

“Heads on swivels, boys. We know they know we’re coming and I have a T-bone in the ice box that I want to get home to. Y’all remember, same plan as Ashcan. Arch, you’re on lights. Gunnar, you’re crowd control. Calderone, watch those windows,” he listed. “We give them a chance to do it the easy way first. We’re here to arrest them, not kill them.”

“If you want to arrest them, we need a perimeter, not a talkie,” Calderone grunted, blowing a cloud of cigar smoke that Gimball whisked out of his face. “You and me should be shooting tear gas through those windows, have Gunny freeze ‘em solid or Arch blind ‘em as they run out. Get that pussycat roaring to piss their pants.”

“We also have procedures,” Castaño replied like they hadn’t had the same argument a dozen times before. The role the Heroes occupied was somewhere between special agent and war bond hawker. Hell, Castaño wasn’t hardly sure he was on the Army’s roll call anymore. The folks a couple rows up the org chart made those decisions, he just went where they pointed and handcuffed whoever he found there waving the crooked cross. “We’re doing it the safe way, but we also have to make a show of it.”

“Boys, luckily for you, I wasn’t trying to be cop. Sure, there’s the doughnuts, but nobody’s asking for some gumshoe’s autograph, and they’re certainly not getting dates off a municipal salary. You got me here because I’m a showman by trade, not some washed-up shackle jockey. I know how to keep everyone watching,” Gimball said. The other muttered something at that. Goddamn Gimball always had something smart to say.

Too smart for his playboy act.

“Then give ‘em a show and throw on the limelight, Barnum N. Bailey. Let ‘em talk to Uncle Sam,” Castaño ordered. That thousand-dollar-smile wiped clean off Gimball’s pretty-boy face.

“Barnum and Bailey were two people,” he grumbled, but he took out his golden projector pistol and leveled it at the building across the street from their target. He beam adjusted automatically to compensate for wobbles and angles, projecting a two-story-tall, full-color image of Vincent Price in a spangled top hat and white whiskers. Price’s voice sounded out of the gun’s miniature speakers, but the angles and pitch were just so that it wasn’t loud where the Heroes were standing but boomed against the Crown hideout’s facade.

“Hello there. I am your Uncle Sam,” Price began, smirking and nasal, “I am here to implore you to return from that dark night of sedition into which you’ve found yourselves entangled.”

“This is a weird casting choice,” Gimball whispered.

“Shut it,” Castaño hissed.

“You are missed among your countrymen,” Price continued. “Please, in the name of that faded but eternal Old Glory, come home. Be among friends. The fire is warm, your meal is set. Sate yourselves and sink into the comfort of community.”

“MGM had to buy out his contract at Universal for this,” Gimball chirped.

“Aren’t you tired from this conflict? Set aside the arms you took up in anger and raise them to embrace your brothers and sisters in camaraderie,” the thirty-foot, high-flyin’ Price continued. His purr drilled into Castaño’s marrow. He had to agree that Vincent Price was a weird choice for the embodiment of performative patriotism, but those were the reels that MGM had sent.

“Once he wraps up, go loud and start in on your script,” Castaño told Calderone. The Lincoln Landstrider had megaphones installed as standard features, whether they needed to shout at someone loud enough to rattle glass or to sound a foghorn fit for a liberty ship. Castaño was about to move on and then remembered some of the colorful language Calderone had used the last time he made a public address to Nazis: “No improvisations. Script only.”

“Sure thing, boss,” Calderone said. He spat out his cigar and the Landstrider’s helmet slid up and clunked into place, all red steel, gleaming chrome, and molded glass. He stepped out into the street in front of the target building, an icon in crimson.

“America is the land of second chances, of growth and learning. You are welcome back to this great experiment, this hallowed institution that we call democracy,” Vincent Price crowed. He saluted and then faded into the image of an American flag flying high.

The Lincoln Landstrider hissed and posted up in the middle of Main Street. Twin panels on either side of his chest slid open and the megaphones squealed. Castaño winced as Calderone cleared his throat.

One of the second floor windows in the target building swung open.

Quint Castaño knew the business end of an MG-42 machine gun when he saw one.

“Down!” he shouted. He ducked and twitched his shoulder in a such a way that his arm unfolded into an angular ballistic shield. The other Heroes scrambled for cover as the machine gun opened up with a roar.

“Shit!” Gimball yelled, but Castaño didn’t have time to see why. He tucked tighter and leaned into his shield, pressing against the barrage hammering against him. Another machine gun howled and rounds started sparking off the Landstrider.

Civilians were shouting, screaming, running in every direction. Castaño knew that if his team didn’t do something on the double a lot of folks were going to get hurt. He needed both guns shut down, and the Blue Bolt’s blinding lightning was the fastest way to do it.

“Arch!” he shouted.

The Blue Bulb, goggled, gleaming, the glass globes glowing blue and humming like dynamos, stepped up and pointed his arms at the building.

“Him! Him!” someone shouted from inside. Castaño watched the bullets march across the pavement, tracing a line of shattered asphalt from the Landstrider to the Bulb and the gunners adjusted their aim. The globes reached critical capacity and discharged an instant before the guns would have tore the glowing man to pieces. Castaño turned away as a flash bright enough the dim to sun raked across the building.

The gunners cursed and fell back from the windows. Their weapons fell silent.

“Pete’s down!” the Blizzardier reported. He was cradling Gimball. Despite his faux tux’s armored panels, they’d gotten him in the shoulder. Castaño rushed over and rearranged his arm again. A trio of spray nozzles emerged from his wrist as it snapped back into place.

“Help John and Arch secure that target,” he ordered. The Blizzardier nodded and rushed to the Landstrider’s side.

“Hold on there, Pete,” Castaño muttered in a way he thought might be soothing. He flicked out the bayonet beneath his claw and sliced Gimball’s uniform open. The wound was shallow thanks to the armor, but the bullet had shattered on its way through so the kid’s shoulder was a mess. Castaño sprayed the site in order, naming them aloud as he did to keep track: “Infection, pain, bleeding.”

He dusted the wound with sulfa powder, sprayed a mist of aerosolized morphine across it, then slathered it in skin putty. He tried to ignore the rocking, snarling truck behind them. The gunfire had woken Tanner up, and the smell of blood was getting him riled.

“God damn it,” Gimball swore. Castaño knew all too well how bad the putty stung as it cured, but it was going to keep his insides in and the outside out. The tuxedoed actor clenched his perfect teeth and hissed: “And never call me ‘Pete.’”

“The Hell is this?” Castaño heard Calderone ask, his voice booming through the Landstrider’s megaphones.

“I have no idea,” Bolton replied.

“Me either,” Agnarsson added.

“Let this sit for a minute,” Castaño advised Gimball, then flipped his arm around and let the shotgun barrel emerge, rubber slugs loaded and ready for whatever they were seeing.

It was always something, so he stayed ready for anything.

The thing that so vexed the Lincoln Landstrider, the Blue Bulb, and the Blizzardier stood between them and the front door. And a thing it was.

“Who fights first?” it demanded, voice booming.

“Is that a... I don’t know what that is,” the Landstrider confessed. Castaño had no idea what he was looking at. He knew Crown made animals bigger, but the thing between them and the door was something else entirely.

The thing stood like a man, solid as granite at over six feet tall. A pair of thick horns curled out of the top of its head and terminated in sharp points near its muzzle. It stared at them with hollow eyes tucked beneath a ropy, matted pelt of brown hair that covered every inch of its body. More than anything it reminded Castaño of a goat, save for the gleaming battle ax it was leaning on as if bored.

“I don’t know what you are, but you’re under arrest,” the Landstrider said.

“Then arrest me,” it said, its voice rattling with disuse.

“Drop that ax or I’ll drop it for you,” the Landstrider continued. He leveled his arsenal at the strange figure.

The Goatman raised his hands, letting the heavy weapon thunk to the pavement.

“Don’t move,” the Landstrider advised. He approached the Goatman with performative swagger.

“Those assholes shot me, John!” Gimball shouted from behind them, frantic and furious.

Castaño heard the creak of a truck door opening and felt a rumble rising behind him through his marrow, something prehistoric and horrible.

“Don’t!” was all he could mange before MGM’s mutated, gigantic spokeslion bounded off the tailgate and shook out his green-black mane. The truck lurched on its shocks as the massive cat landed on the street. Gimball pulled his chrome projector pistol out of his holster, grunting as he jostled his wounded shoulder.

“Get him, Tanner,” he snarled. He leveled the pistol and settled a green light on the Goatman’s chest. Castaño dove out of the way as the giant lion bounded past him. Tanner’s lips were curled back to reveal fangs as long as kitchen knives.

The Goatman braced as Tanner pounced.

Castaño didn’t see the actual punch, but the lion seemed to stop and change direction in mid-air. Tanner landed and stumbled, dazed. He stumbled for a few steps, nearly tripping over his own paws.

The Goatman rubbed his knuckles then grabbed the end of his snout and pulled upward. The goat face detached, peeling off a cape of brown fur that hung over his head and down his back. The horns stayed affixed to a steel helmet like something out of an opera. The blonde, bearded white man smirked, cruel on his scarred, pale face.

“A good fight,” he said. He stooped and picked up his ax. It edge gleamed razor-sharp in the sunlight as he approached the stunned lion. Tanner’s fur might have been treated to stop bullets but a sharp blade could still carve him to pieces.

“Cover Tanner!” Castaño shouted. He and the Landstrider brought their weapons to bear, unleashing a deafening barrage of steel-cored rubber balls at the advancing Goatman. Their impacts should have reduced him to pulp.

Castaño knew his sights were dialed in, but he didn’t see a single shot connect; it was like his shots had evaporated in mid-air. The Goatman kept advancing, unhurried by the onslaught.

“I got the gunners!” the Blizzardier called out. A white jet shot over Castaño’s head at the building’s second floor, encasing it in a foot-thick band of blue ice in an instant.

“I’m going live!” the Landstrider boomed. Castaño could hear the big machine’s ammo feeds cycle from rubber to lead.

“No!” Castaño shouted back, “Too many civilians! Grab him.”

Folks were still screaming up and down the street, rushing in and out of the buildings around them.

“Fine,” the Landstrider grunted.

The Landstrider lurched forward, two tons of powder-coated steel and bullet-proof glass. His hydraulics hissed. Once he had the Goatman in his grip, the strange man wasn’t going anywhere. His every step rattled windows up and down the block. He was three yards away when he stopped like he’d run into a brick wall.

“Not so fast!” a weedy man shouted for the safe house’s front door. He was lanky and balding, dressed in a suit and sporting a pencil-thin mustache. He had a strange gun leveled at the Landstrider, a carbine-sized contraption with conduits all over it and a radar array sticking out the end.

Castaño knew the face: Ned Garver, the traitorous top of the Office’s most-wanted list. He also recognized the weapon: a terahertz radiation projector. The weird device used invisible waves to manipulate the air itself, turning it denser than steel, hotter than flame, or louder and faster than a tornado. It was the second time he’d been on the wrong side of one, the first time was in Germany.

He wished he was surprised to see Garver using it against his own countrymen.

“Stay back!” Garver ordered, then pulled the trigger. The invisible force holding the Landstrider back surged, bowling him over. Sparks flew as the armored man skipped across the pavement. Castaño managed to duck to the side, only a couple inches from getting creamed by two tons of steel.

Castaño could hear sirens in the distance. With the way the Abwehr recruited, Castaño had felt safer leaving the locals out of the raid. When the Akron police department did show, he’d put it at fifty-fifty odds whether they’d be there as back-up for the Heroes or for the fugitives.

The Heroes had to work quick.

“Arch, they brought the big guns,” he shouted.

The Blue Bulb understood his instructions. He twisted a dial on his belt buckle and the electric whine emanating from his glowing globes changed its tone. His blonde hair stood up straight in a stripe down the middle of his scalp.

“Down!” he yelled. The orbs on his arms flared brighter than the sun. When the whine reached its crescendo, twin forks of blue lightning burst forth from his hands. They snapped and spat and descended on the Goatman and Garver. Castaño had seen those raking arcs burst men into parts and set buildings on fire.

The blue energies crashed into the Garrisonian agents like a pair of blinding wrecking balls.

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Copyright © 2025 Daniel Baldwin. All rights reserved.

Written and edited by Daniel Baldwin. Art by Tyrelle Smith.