Women Love Fest - Day Two - Jo Harvelle
Jo still looks too young, too sweet to pull off a cop ID, or an FBI badge. She sticks with girl reporter, or college student, or sometimes just 'pretty girl at the bar who's really interested in the wild animal attacks'.
That last one works well enough often enough that she grieves for humanity.
She puts the crappy motel television on a movie channel playing 1950s horror movies and she spreads her bags out on the shiny, scratchy bedspread.
Her bullets are carefully divided and color coded. 9mm, .45, .454, 30.06.
Lead, silver, aconite, hollow points full of Holy Water and tipped with wax, have to be careful with those, keep them clean and check them before every hunt. let the wax get too hot and it'll drip, jam the gun, be the end of her.
It's gonna take a lot more than poor gun maintenance to take Jo Harvelle down.
Shotgun shells full of rock salt, silver filings, plain old lead. Wooden stakes, knives of silver and steel that fit her hand with a comfort nothing else has ever brought her.
Jo never doubted for a minute that she was born to this. She knows her mother always says she wanted different things for her, but that's a mother's job. Jo's pretty sure her mother never actually thought she'd do something different, but felt like she had to try, had to say something, even if it broke something between them.
That's a mother's job and Jo doesn't hold that against her.
Hex bags and a tiny sack full of graveyard dirt. Goofer dust. A big burlap sack of rock salt and a box of rosaries. The King James Bible, a dictionary of American Indian legends, a book called "A Comprehensive Guide to American Folklore."
The obituary sections of a dozen different newspapers, old and from scattered cities. Scribbled all over in blue ballpoint pen, circles and arrows and question marks. Notes in the margins in Jo's schoolgirl hand.
Blocks of C-4 and coils of magnesium ribbon.
Jo hasn't talked to her mother in weeks. They pass messages through the grudgingly neutral medium of Rufus. Your mother's worried about you. She says there's banshee activity in eastern Kentucky. Tell her I'm fine. And I'll take care of it.
Her first-aid kit would rival most modern clinics. She has emergency road flares and glow sticks and flat, silvery blankets to preserve body heat. She knows how to find water in the wild and make a fishhook out of the clasp of her bra.
A poltergeist tossed her through a single pane window three towns back. She cleaned herself up and pressed butterfly bandages over the worst of the cuts, watching over her shoulder in the mirror of the motel bathroom. It was hard to get the ones along the ridge of her spine and she thinks maybe she'll have some scars from it.
She accepts this. Packs away her books and weapons. Her spell materials and emergency supplies.
Jo settles back against the creaking headboard with her shotgun on her lap and watches seed pods from outer space take over the town in black and white.
Burn them, she thinks. Burn them and get out of town. Come back with reinforcements. And flamethrowers.
This movie doesn't scare Jo. She knows how to make firebombs.