Monster Hunter International

  Standing in the midst of the creatures was some thing. At first it appeared to be a man. Cloaked in a huge robe, only the reflection of what appeared to be a polished steel breastplate and helmet could be made out through the unnatural fog. The armor reminded me of the type that the conquistadors had worn. A sense of pure evil emanated from the cloaked being, an icy feeling of dread that I could feel piercing through my consciousness. I could not imagine how horrible it would have been if I had been there in my physical body instead of in this dream. As the image drew closer I could see a mass of withering blackness glistening between the creases of the armor and under the helmet. I could not comprehend what it was, but it certainly was not flesh. Somehow the twitching movement brought back memories of the boxes of live earthworms that my father used to fish with.

  It looked almost like the famous painting of Washington crossing the Delaware, only this time featuring a host of evil undead, and some hideous monstrosity in the place of the great general. There was a name painted on the side of the craft. Antoine-Henri. The lifeboat glided up onto the sand with a crunch, and the vampires immediately sprang out and formed a protective circle around the thing. Some splashed out into the surf to cover that direction. There were six of them, both male and female, and they were unnaturally graceful and swift. They were evil and savage, but somehow beautiful at the same time. A seventh vampire remained in the craft with its master. If the thing was the commander, then that vampire was its lieutenant. I felt a seething hatred around me. It was coming from the Old Man, and it was directed at that seventh and final vampire in particular. It was a tall, pale thing with a hatchet face, slicked back hair, and a dark trench coat that it wore like a uniform. The vampire actually stood at attention as the armored monstrosity glided onto the beach.

  When the thing touched the sand, the whole universe jolted. A blast of discomfort rippled through every living being for hundreds of miles. You may have felt it yourself; an unexplained shiver, a sensation of fear that had come out of nowhere, a crawling feeling in the pit of your gut, a jolt that tore you out of sleep. That was the Cursed One setting foot on his new land.

  The lead vampire announced something in a foreign language. It took me a moment to recognize it as Portuguese, or a dialect thereof. I knew enough of the language to understand.

  "Welcome home, Lord Machado," the creature crowed, bowing deeply. All of the other vampires forming the perimeter immediately bowed as well, the ones in the surf submerging themselves completely in the saltwater waves. It did not matter to them. They did not need air. The abnormal fog drifted up onto the beach, serving as the fanfare for the abomination before us. "Your kingdom awaits."

  The thing was silent. It slowly rotated, taking in the sight. Beneath the cloak and armor I could not tell how it moved, but it was black and damp and slithery. It turned until it looked right at us. I could feel its gaze sweep across us, and if I had been in my body I would have been trembling. I could not see eyes, but somehow it knew we were there. Instantly the vampires jerked up and followed their leader's gaze, somehow locking onto the Old Man and me. I felt fear greater than I ever had before. Greater than when I had died. Greater than anything I could imagine. The creature did not want my life. It wanted my very soul and the soul of every person I had ever loved.

  "Hello, Byreika." The lead vampire smiled, revealing pointed incisors. "My, it certainly has been a while, hasn't it? I see you brought a friend."

  The Cursed One raised a strangely jointed, cloaked limb and pointed at us. I could feel the flash of panic from my incorporeal companion. With an explosion of sand and seawater, several massive shapes crashed into the surf around us. I had not sensed them circling above. Giant horrific things with massive wings beating, they surrounded us, and moved toward us, murder in their blank eyes. They were enormous clawed beasts, horns and talons glistening with sea spray.

  "Get us out of here!" I screamed.

  The world jerked wildly around us as my consciousness was pulled again through the night sky, faster this time than before. The winged monsters below us sprang into pursuit, blasting holes through the ice fog with their gargantuan wings, but they were limited by their physical bodies and we were not. Far more terrifying than the monsters was the feeling of the Cursed One somehow trying to latch onto us to keep us from escaping. It was as if a net of blackness were being thrown, and we were the target. The creatures beneath us rapidly shrank from view. Somehow we slipped through the evil grip as my consciousness screamed across the sky at unbelievable speeds. I had one last view of the MHI compound before I flew through the roof of the barracks and slammed back into my body.

  I awoke screaming, tearing at my sheets, and crying for the Old Man to save us from the Cursed One. Trip was standing at my bedside, shaking me.

  "Owen! Dude! Wake up. It was a dream. Calm down."

  Gasping for air and lying back on the sweat-stained sheets, it was only a dream. The storm. The Old Man. The Cursed One. The vampires. It was all a dream. Everything was fine.

  "I had the worst nightmare," I gasped.

  "No kidding. You were really freaking out. Everybody was. Just a couple of minutes ago everybody in the barracks woke up. Like the whole place was having a nightmare or something. I get the feeling that something really bad just happened."

  Then our door opened. Earl Harbinger and Sam Haven were standing in the hall, both were suited up in full armor, bristling with ammunition and weapons.

  "What's the racket?" Harbinger asked.

  "Just a bad dream," I answered.

  The Director of Operations frowned at me. He had felt the strange sensation as well. "Both of you. Grab your stuff. Get over to the armory and get suited up. We have a mission. Consider the weekend cancelled," Harbinger ordered, as he slung an ancient Thompson submachine gun over his shoulder.

  "We have a ship to catch," grunted Sam, while twirling the ends of his mighty mustache. "Think of this as a field trip."

  Chapter 7

  The small boat rolled on the harsh waves, leaving me with a slightly nauseous and uncomfortable feeling. I held onto the guardrail until my knuckles were white, or at least I'm sure they would have been if I could have seen them through my gloves. I had been uncomfortable since the coast had disappeared. The ocean stretched as far as my eye could see. The sun had risen shortly before we launched, and now cast a golden light over the blue surface. I'm sure that if I wasn't mentally preparing myself to go into battle I might have found it a stunning sight. I had never really been out to sea before, other than brief trips on tourist boats off the California coast. I'm sure some of my father's islander ancestors would have scoffed at that.

  There were ten of us Hunters on the small boat, the Brilliant Mistake, which Harbinger had hired to transport us to our target. I did not take the name of the boat as a good omen, but once the captain had been given a large wad of cash, he had assured us that the name was in reference to a favorite song and not to any flaw in his boat's design or crew. I still did not like it either way. It was a rusty, old, creaky thing, but it had been available, and even better, the crew didn't look like the type that talked too much.

  We had assembled before midnight at the compound, burdened with all manner of equipment and weaponry. Most of us had been loaded into MHI's cargo plane, an old but serviceable former U.S. Mail carrier. It did not look like much, but it got the job done, and it could haul a ton of gear. Then we had flown first to a small airstrip outside of Atlanta, where we had picked up another team of Hunters, before arriving at our final destination, another small airport on the Georgia coast. The rest had taken the slower, but necessary for this mission, helicopter and rendezvoused with us there while Harbinger was securing us a boat. The team leaders had spent the flight memorizing diagrams e-mailed to us from a French shipyard.

  In Georgia we had broken into two groups. The larger group boarded the Brilliant Mistake under cover of darkness and the smaller group took the helicopter. The plan was for the airborne unit to fly over o
ur target to scope it out, and then to drop some of the Hunters onto the ship. That unit would secure a rope ladder for the rest of us to climb up, while the helicopter provided covering fire if necessary. Both vehicles would stay nearby in case we needed a quick escape route.

  It sounded simple enough. My job was to do exactly what the smart people told me, and carry lots of extra ammunition.

  Trip stood beside me at the railing. Unlike yours truly, he did not appear to be feeling seasick at all, but rather seemed to be enjoying himself. He was descended from Jamaican fishermen, so he must have been more in touch with his ancestors' seafaring genes than I was. I had told him about my dream.

  "I still have nightmares. I think most of us do," he told me. I knew that some of the zombies that he had been forced to dispatch had been some of his friends and former students. Something like that is bound to weigh heavy on a man's mind. "Something weird was in the air last night."

  "But I heard the instructors' meeting about us. I knew about this mission before they came to get us. Explain that."

  He shrugged. "You know how it is when you wake up confused. Your brain chemistry's all screwed up. Your unconscious mind just fills in the blanks as needed. We found out about this right after your dream. Seems like the logical thing to me."

  "Seems to me that if you want to be logical, you sure did go into the wrong line of work."

  He ignored that. "And six master vampires working together? That isn't supposed to happen either."

  "Seven," I corrected him. I couldn't forget about the one in the boat, the sharp-faced one that had so enraged and terrified the Old Man.

  "Either way. That has never happened. They're too powerful, and too territorial. According to Harbinger there probably aren't that many Masters in the whole world. Besides, how could you tell they were so powerful? All of them look the same." That much was true. From what we had been taught all vampires looked pretty much human, unless you caught them feeding.

  "I don't know how I knew. I just did. And there were huge winged monsters, but I didn't get a good look at them. But the other thing, the thing in the boat. That was the scariest. I mean it was the worst thing I've ever seen." I nervously checked my Remington 870 for the twentieth time. It was still there.

  "Quit worrying about your dream, man. We've got real stuff to worry about. Let's put our game faces on." He slugged me in the arm, hard. Damn football players.

  Sam Haven had us gather at the rear of the boat for a briefing, away from the ears of the crew, who I was positive were already really curious what the ten strangers in body armor and carrying guns were doing on their boat. Lucky for us, fifteen thousand dollars in cash for one day of work was considered good enough money to put up with all manner of weirdness. Of course it was half up front, the other half after they picked us up. Since we were the waterborne team, Harbinger had placed our former Navy man in charge. Thus Sam was even louder than normal. He and Milo were on the boat with us, and the rest of their team was in the chopper. One of the Newbies, Chuck Mead, a former Army Ranger, was up there as well. He knew how to rappel and that was a handy skill to have for this mission.

  "Listen up, folks. Here's the deal." Sam began to brief us as he methodically unloaded, checked each round and reloaded his rifle. The rear of the boat smelled like fish. "A few hours ago we were contacted by the French corporation that owns the freighter. It was destined for the USA carrying an extremely valuable cargo. The freighter lost contact a week ago in the Atlantic. The last transmissions indicated some sort of supernatural problem."

  "What did they say?" asked one of the Hunters out of Atlanta, whom I had not met.

  "Unknown. Mostly gibberish. They did say monsters, but they didn't say what kinds. But this was an experienced crew so it is doubtful if they did something stupid." Sam's personal weapon was a very strange choice. It was a Marlin .45-70 lever action carbine. Very slow to reload. Low capacity. Slow rate of fire. But as he had pointed out while boarding, the 450-grain hard-cast bullets he was shooting could go through a buffalo longways. That was no small comfort, just in case the freighter had been taken over by militant evil bison.

  "What's the ship's name?" someone asked.

  Sam shrugged. "Something French. Hell if I know."

  "Why did they contact us? The frogs hate hiring American Hunters." That was from the man named Boone. He was the leader of the other team, and from what I had seen so far, he was a serious professional. According to what I had heard on the trip, he had recently gotten off of active duty with the Army Special Forces in Afghanistan, and had been eager to get back into hunting when the company reopened. Boone was a lean and good-natured guy, and his team was ready to follow his lead into anything. I took that as a good sign. He had a stubby Russian Krinkov slung from his chest, and apparently his team's logo was a mini-lop bunny armed with a switchblade.

  "We weren't their first choice. The day after they lost contact a French team was dispatched to intercept. They flew out to the freighter, and their last transmission indicated that they'd landed and were starting to clear the ship. They haven't been heard from since."

  "Well, that's great," Boone said.

  "Wait, it gets better," Milo Anderson interjected. "Jean Darné was the leader of the French team."

  Several of the experienced Hunters began to mutter. Boone swore.

  "Who is this Dar Nay guy? And why is that bad?" I asked.

  "He was the best that they had. Probably the best team lead in Europe. You know they didn't do anything sloppy. Whatever is on that boat is serious," said one of the experienced Hunters, a South African immigrant named Priest.

  "So we're going in hard and fast." Sam worked the lever on his Marlin and chambered a round. "Since we don't know what's on that freighter we're coming ready for anything. Everybody is armed with something that shoots silver, even if it is just your handgun. We have every specialty round for the shotguns that we can think of. Big fifties. RPGs, flamethrowers, thermite, C4, and I even have a chainsaw around here somewhere. The Hind will stay airborne and provide covering fire if we need to bail out."

  "Mission parameters?" Boone asked.

  "Don't hurt the cargo. Cargo is boxed in the hold. Apparently it's priceless art or some shit. So no bullet holes or fire in the hold. Rest of the ship is open game. If we can save any crew or the French Hunters, do it. Don't sink the ship."

  "What's the contract worth?" Boone again.

  "Julie negotiated it, so of course it's a good deal. We got a million up front. If the cargo is unharmed then MHI gets another 3.5 mil. The more the cargo is damaged, the less we get. If we sink the ship then we don't get nothing. So let's not sink the ship."

  We continued to cover details. There had been thirty crew, a ten-man security detail for the cargo, and a dozen French Hunters. So if we were dealing with an undead infestation we were looking at over fifty potential hostiles, not including whatever started the infection to begin with. The Hunters hazarded guesses about what we could face on the ship, including weird, but not unheard of things like Saughafin, fish-men, or just a plain old giant killer mollusk. As we continued toward our target we tried to iron out details and figure out any potential problems. Luckily for us, radar indicated that the freighter had stopped moving last night, so it must have dropped anchor. At least it would not be steaming toward land any longer, but it also raised the question what exactly had dropped the anchor.

  "The freighter was headed for points northward. Two days ago, it turned south and has been paralleling the coast. GPS transponder is still working, so we know right where she is," Sam told us over a spread-out blueprint of the ship. "When we pull alongside, just try not to fall off the ladder. The fall probably won't kill you, but we ain't got time to screw around fishing you out."

  Finally we could see the freighter. It was a massive gray construction, with superstructure rising high into the air. It was a beautiful summer morning, but I could not help but feel an ominous shiver when I looked at the otherwise-normal-looki
ng ship. I knew from the briefing that the mammoth ship was just under 600 feet long and displaced over 15,000 tons. Sam had assured us that the ship was not as big as it appeared, since most of the interior was open cargo space, but it was still going to be a beast to search.

  Suddenly there was a massive roar as the bulbous helicopter flew low over us and charged the freighter. Wind and salt spray buffeted those of us at the railings. A figure manning a door gun waved at us as they passed. "Show offs!" Milo yelled and waved back.

  MHI's helicopter was a surplus MI-24 Hind. Harbinger had picked it up for next to nothing after the collapse of communism. It was possibly the ugliest thing ever designed, but it was considered a flying tank for a reason. Utilitarian in comfort, it was nonetheless reliable and versatile. It was missing its missiles and rocket pods because the Feds would not allow it in the country that way. Instead the pylons had been replaced with storage compartments for gear and extra fuel. It was big enough to carry eight of us, and could carry enough weight and had enough fuel that the entire team could be evacuated on it if necessary, provided we did not mind hanging off of the wing pylons. It was fast, but it lacked maneuverability at low speeds.

  In its original communist paint job it had been a strange enough sight that the company had avoided using the Hind during daylight hours over populated areas. A few flights had resulted in calls to the authorities that Red Dawn was happening for real. To combat this, Harbinger had ordered the chopper painted white and red, so now it was usually mistaken for a med-evac or search-and-rescue helicopter instead. They had, however, taken the liberty of painting a huge pair of sharp-toothed jaws around the cockpit. That was a nice touch.

  The chopper swept quickly over the freighter, banked hard, and made another pass. It slowed until it was hovering and then lazily rotated over the center of the ship. Sam Haven stood nearby, listening intently into his earpiece. All of us were on the same radio net and could listen along. We had been warned to stay off of the radio unless absolutely necessary, except to check in every five minutes once we were onboard.