Monster Hunter Memoir: Saints

  “Depends on what we find when we get to the end of the rainbow. I only brought ten of them.”

  * * *

  We took I-30 out of Texarkana the next day and shortly afterwards found ourselves on God-help-me US 82, the Northeast Texas Trail as it proudly proclaimed.

  Two-lane blacktop and fuck all. And I do mean, fuck all. There were trees and some houses and stuff at least. But it was just…Holy crap. Fuck. All.

  Fortunately, Sam had a lot of stories. So did I. And while he had a sorely awful taste in music—Conway Twitty? Seriously?—it was my car and I was driving and he didn’t actually hate hard rock and what metal we could find, so we got along that way. Because if it had been the other way around, he’d have lost his head to Mo No Ken.

  He hadn’t really asked about the sword but when I’d been working on it I could tell he was looking at it sort of like “who is this fucker with his samurai bullshit?” He had a CAR-15, a Sig P220, and a big-ass bowie knife on his belt to compliment the general cowboy attitude and attire.

  We stopped at a roadhouse for lunch and he fit right in. Me, not so much. I was wearing a tailored MHI polo shirt and khakis. What? I like to look good. Sue me.

  We stayed on 82 for a few hours then started to get more of a movement north from the pendant. So we turned north towards Denison on 69. Up through Durant, Oklahoma, then west again to Madill through more fuck-all and two-lane roads. Fortunately there was light traffic and anything moving slow I could pass with Honeybear, my 1976 Cutlass Supreme. I was totally ignoring the double nickel. If I got stopped, I had half a dozen get-out-of-jail-free cards to call in.

  We did get stopped once, just short of the Oklahoma border, by a Texas Ranger. I was blowing along a back road doing somewhere around a hundred and twenty. He came around a corner in the other direction, slowed, turned on the blue lights and turned around. I just slowed down and pulled over when I saw him slowing.

  He was like some sort of a stereotype. Six foot nine thousand. Blond from what I could see as he got out of his car. He did the get-out-real-slow unfolding thing. Set his hat on his head, and walked up real slow, pulling out his ticket book.

  “You gentlemen in a hurry to get somewhere?” he asked politely.

  I knew the Rangers handled a good bit of their own hoodoo. So I just handed over an MHI card.

  “What’s the incident?” All of a sudden the Ranger was real serious like.

  “We’re tracking a group of kidnappers.” I gestured at the pendant, which was clearly not plumb. “Looks like they’ve headed into Oklahoma. Use of supernatural entities, necromancy, kidnapping for use in the supernatural and, oh yeah, serial first-degree murder.”

  “Keep it between the lines.” He handed me back the card. “I’ll call a couple of buddies up Durant way, case you get stopped up there.”

  “Thank you, Ranger. Keep it. You never know when you’re gonna need it.”

  “Will do.” He tucked it into a pocket.

  I sped off and was over eighty before he was out of sight.

  “I thought all this stuff was OPSEC?” Sam said.

  “Some groups are read in, others aren’t. You’ll learn who is and isn’t wherever you’re working. Rangers are all read in before they hit the road their first day. They’ve got such large patrol areas, they have to be fully in the know. And generally they take care of most of Texas’ hoodoo. Or as they like to put it, one Ranger, one revenant.”

  “I thought it was one Ranger, one riot.”

  “Yeah. Sure.” I chuckled. “And Sam Houston never killed any vampires.”

  * * *

  It was late night as we rolled through a tiny little unnamed hamlet near Madill, Oklahoma. The pendant’s swings had become more pronounced every time we made a turn. It was clear we were getting close. It currently pointed straight ahead and well off plumb.

  “This fits the target type.” I stopped Honeybear on a deserted side road. “Out of the way area, Bible Belt, sort of place you might actually find some virgins. The only reason I can think they’d be out in an area like this is to make a raid. A house somewhere nearby is going to burn tonight unless we stop it.”

  “Frago?” Sam said.

  Fortunately I spoke semifluent pinniped. He was asking for a “fragmentary order” or in other words “what’s the plan?”

  “Rig, find, terminate.”

  “Romeo, Foxtrot, Tango, it is.” Sam got out of the car.

  I’d had to pull a lot of stuff out of Honeybear’s trunk to accommodate Sam’s gear. The Barrett probably wasn’t going to be used, so there went the need for all the .50 cal. I hadn’t been sure if it would be open country or closed so I had my M-14 and the Uzi. Despite the fact that this was pure open country, I went with the Uzi. We’d probably find them around houses.

  I threw my vest on over my armor, zipped it up, then attached the Uzi to it. Sam was rocking the CAR-15 on a single-point sling. Last, I retrieved Mo No Ken.

  “I gotta ask…”

  “Don’t,” I said. “Just watch. Your job, if it comes to close action, is to shoot things to slow them down and let me handle it. Try for head shots if you can make them.”

  Sam just shook his head like I’d said something stupid. “I’ll try and manage.”

  “Especially the wights. If they’ve got revenants, same thing. Wights are stronger, savage, and can paralyze you with a touch. Revenants are going to look more like people, and can use weapons, but their movements are jerky. They’re like automated flesh robots.”

  Whenever possible before an op I stretch. Seems silly. It’s like the pissing thing. I’m one of those guys who fights three-dimensionally. Up, down, sideways, around. I didn’t stretch long but it was long enough to get out the road kinks. And I’d stretched that morning and after each meal, so I was pretty limber. Sam simply grabbed some extra mags and stuck fresh dip in his lip.

  Then we loaded back up. After taking a piss. Sam already knew about that one.

  By the time we were rolling, the pendant was moving. So was our target.

  I kept the lights off and drove by the moonlight. I had NVGs if I needed them but the rubber straps were a bitch to put on. Sam had his stupid cowboy hat on and was holding his NVGs up taking a look around from time to time.

  We found the target on the outskirts of Madill. There was a white panel van parked outside the house and the front door was already busted open. We could hear the screaming from inside through the open windows.

  Someone came out the front door, holding a shotgun. Possibly human, possibly a revenant.

  “Target!” I said, driving Honeybear right into the yard. “Front d—”

  Before I’d finished my warning, Sam stuck the CAR out his window and fired.

  From a moving car, in the dark, nearly a hundred yards away, Sam dropped him with a head shot. Yeah. The newbie would “manage.”

  We stopped and bailed out of the car. The body was already trying to get up, leaking brains be damned.

  “Revenant. Mine.” I swept my sword from the sheath.

  “I’m going in,” Sam said.

  This revenant was new. Fast and strong but not real agile and not particularly bright. It was reaching for its dropped shotgun. Blood sprayed in the moonlight as I ran past swinging Mo No Ken. Then I followed Sam through the door.

  My partner was already shooting. A CAR is really loud inside a small living room.

  A wight was dragging a brown-haired girl by her hair towards the door through the living room as I entered. Sam had knocked one of its eyes out and half its skull off. I didn’t even slow down. One slash down and the hand holding the girl’s hair was still clutching it but on the floor. Slash and one leg was gone. Slash and the head was flying.

  We swept through the house. A human male had been pouring kerosene on the kitchen floor. He dropped his can and went for a pistol stuffed in his waistband. Sam shifted over and put two in his heart. Since cultists had a tendency to rise from the dead, I moved up and slashed as he fell. Blood and
kerosene mingled on the floor from the spilled containers.

  Another wight was in the upstairs hallway. It was just leaving one of the bedrooms. From the screaming, I had expected it to be covered in blood, but neither seemed to have killed anyone yet.

  We didn’t wait for it to change its mind. Sam riddled it with bullets. The wight slammed into the wall, but it was damned near impossible to finish one of these off with a gun. “Hold on!” I moved past Sam. As the wight charged I turned to saber stance, slashed both its wrists and drove the point of Mo No Ken through its eye socket. That didn’t kill it, but it sure as hell slowed it down. It gave me enough time to pull my sword out and do a quick and tight slash.

  Off with their heads. Also doesn’t kill them. You have to burn them to be sure. But as long as you keep the head and body separated, they’re pretty much useless.

  So I punted the head down the stairs as Sam cleared the rooms. Sort of tingles your foot when you kick a wight but doesn’t paralyze. Pro-tip.

  The family was alive. They were all paralyzed from the wights. The fuckers were going to burn them alive in their own beds.

  “Clear!” Sam looked out the bedroom window. “The van’s gone.” The rest of the kidnappers had bailed while we’d been fighting their wights. “These folks gonna be okay?”

  “The paralysis will wear off.” I ran for the stairs. “We have to catch that van.”

  Sam was right behind me. “You’re not half good with that sword, are you?”

  “Bit,” I said. “We can’t let them get too far ahead.”

  “We’ve still got the tracker.”

  “Odds are one of these was the vessel,” I said.

  “Shit.”

  When we got downstairs, I paused to kick the wight’s head again into the front hallway. Then found the other one and rolled it towards the front door. Then both of them got kicked out the front door. Did I ever mention I used to play soccer? Both heads soared into the neighboring yards. Let them try to join up with the bodies now. I added the revenant’s head for good measure. Made it across the road with that one.

  “Which way did they go?” I asked as we got back in the car.

  “That way,” Sam said, pointing behind us.

  I spun Honeybear around in a doughnut and handed him my sword.

  “Wipe and sheathe that, would you? Watch your fingers.”

  “Check it out. Tracker’s still working.”

  Sure enough, Madam Courtney’s little amulet was still swaying.

  We pounded up Main Street in a cloud of dust and a hail of gravel. And Sam had to start singing.

  “Dirt road main street.” He sang, lustily and badly. “She walked off in baaare feet!”

  “I’ve got perfect pitch, you fucker,” I said.

  “Think they’re singing the same song?” Sam asked.

  There were taillights way ahead of us.

  “They are not getting away.”

  They had a big head start, but there was no way a Chevy van was going to outrun Honeybear. I took the turn left onto Highway 70 in a spray of gravel. This time of night there was virtually no traffic. I put my foot down. The road was more or less straight and I watched it, the van, and my compression meter until I got to the right poundage. Then I hit the big red button.

  “You got nitrous in this thing?” Sam bellowed in delight.

  “Fuck yeah, I got nitrous.”

  “I’m going to pass them.” I was gaining on the van and still accelerating. “Then get past them. Then you lean out and hit them with that LAW in the back seat. Right in the engine block.”

  “Might not be many people to question.”

  “MCB can hire a necromancer to question them after they’re dead, but they are not getting away.”

  “Except we don’t know if they got any hostages out of that house before we got there,” Sam pointed out.

  He was right. “Shit.”

  “Just stick on them.”

  The van suddenly slowed, braked and turned onto a side road.

  “And now we’re losing them again,” Sam said.

  “Hang on.”

  I turned off the nitrous, hit the parking brake and did a moonshiner’s turn. Then we were headed back their way again.

  The side road was dirt again and went straight on to nowhere. The washboard effect was rattling the hell out of Honeybear. I wasn’t sure what they were thinking of doing but I doubted it was good.

  “Get ready for a furball when we get up to them,” I said. “This is probably going to involve gunplay. So you’ll be more at home than I.”

  “Gunfights I can handle,” Sam said. “You can leave the Highlander katana in the car.”

  “You watched that movie?”

  “I fucking love that movie,” Sam said. “There can be only one!”

  Ahead of the van I spotted the lights of an oil rig. There was a tractor trailer parked there, and a bunch of figures milling around.

  “Looks like our kidnappers weren’t traveling alone.”

  The van slammed on the brakes, the doors flew open, and several people jumped out. From the way they were greeted, the people waiting with the semi were definitely their allies. The bodies passing in front of the headlights were moving in a jerky, twitchy manner.

  “Revenants,” I said.

  “Needing decapitation. Looks like you’ve got an excuse to bring a sword to a gunfight, MacLeod.”

  There were muzzle flashes ahead. Luckily, revenants were terrible shots, but they were shooting a lot. Bullets smashed into my grill. One headlight went out. Honeybear’s window cracked. Sam leaned out the window and started shooting like crazy, only from their reactions, he was actually hitting them.

  Rather than stop in the open and get pinned down, I drove right through the revenants. The first one got clipped and flew off into the weeds. The next went right under the bumper and I could feel it crunch under the tires and undercarriage. I hoped that one didn’t break my oil pan.

  I hit the brakes and slid in sideways behind the van. A girl had been dragged from the back. A man dressed in black was wrestling her around, trying to use her as a human shield. Two more armed men came running out from behind the van.

  Sam was out of Honeybear before it had even stopped moving.

  In a flash he raised the CAR, fired two shots, then shifted over and fired two more. Both gunmen fell. He must have run dry, because he immediately dropped the carbine and drew his pistol. The last cultist put a knife to the girl’s throat and began screaming his demands just as Sam put a .45 through the bridge of his nose. No hesitation.

  They’d gone down so fast the dust from Honeybear hadn’t even caught up to us yet. The girl was still standing in the headlights, stunned, the kidnapper’s blood all over her nightgown.

  The last two humans had climbed into the tractor trailer. It began rumbling off. Were they seriously trying to escape in that thing? Yes, they were. It began to rumble towards us. I realized that among other things it could crush Honeybear like a tin can. I needed to stop that truck fast.

  A badly broken revenant came limping up as I got out, so I took it down with two swipes of Mo No Ken, then reached into the back seat and took out one of the LAWs. I extended the tube and aimed it at the truck’s grill.

  “Shit!” Sam realized what I was doing, grabbed the girl, and pulled her behind the van so she wouldn’t get hit with shrapnel.

  The rocket exploded and shredded the front of the truck. The engine began to burn as it came to a stop.

  None of the dead had been Thornton. Madam Courtney’s warrior loas were rejoicing tonight, but this didn’t feel complete yet. Alpha and omega. I knew I still had something I needed to do.

  The truck was partially engulfed in flames when I got the door open and pulled the driver out. He had been hammered by the explosion, intestines spilling out of his enormous fat gut.

  I didn’t bother with kindness. Not for the likes of him. I tossed him out of the truck onto the ground. The passenger was a girl—dea
d as she was going to get short of the roasting her body was about to endure. I recognized her. Sherri Harvey. Fifteen. Probably seventeen now. One of the sleepover party from Pueblo, who Madam Courtney had declared lost to the darkness. Son of a bitch.

  I jumped down to the ground and looked down at my only brother.

  “Well, hello, Thornton. Long time no see.”

  “I need a hospital,” Thornton gasped. He was trying to fit his intestines back in his gut.

  “Seriously?” I said. “You have to know the penalty for what you’ve been doing. And that it has nothing in the way of appeal. I’m going to get paid for killing you and your girlfriend. So I gotta ask you, bro. What the fuck? Even for you, stealing little girls is low. And you’re about the lowest sack of shit I know.”

  “Chad?” Thornton said.

  I realized he hadn’t even recognized me.

  “Yeah, Thornton, it’s Chad. Now, again. What the fuck? Kidnapping virgins? Why?”

  “Fuck you, you little bitch,” Thornton shouted. “Get me a doctor! You have to help me! I’m your brother!”

  “Oh, wrong answer.”

  The fire from the destroyed engine was basically contained under the body of the truck. I reached down, grabbed a fistful of his intestines and pitched them in the fire.

  Thornton had been my nightmare growing up. So abusive I still carried the physical scars much less the emotional ones. Despite that, if I didn’t need the information I wouldn’t have done it. But later I had to admit to my father confessor it felt good to get the bastard back. I had to say a lot of rosaries. Not for doing it, but for it feeling good.

  Thornton started screaming. There are nerve endings in intestines.

  I pulled the intestines out of the fire like reeling in a line.

  “Want me to do that again? Answer me!”

  “You’re why! It was you!”

  “That makes no sense at all!”

  “Remember Debby Southfield?”

  “Who?” I asked, confused.

  “Debby Southfield. My prom date.”

  “Oh…” That had come out of left field. “Cute brunette? Kinda chubby?”

  He was getting weak from blood loss, going into shock. “She spent the whole time at the house talking to you! And the whole rest of the night talking about how cool you were. You were four years younger than I was but every time a girl came around it was all about Chad! Chad! Chad! ‘Chad’s so dreamy.’ ‘Thornton, your brother is really cute.’ You got all the girls, you little fucker! I had to work for it! You just smiled and they all came running! Why do you think I fucking hate them so much!”