Monster Hunter Legion-eARC

  “Why’s everyone having a party in our room?”

  She came over to inspect my face. “Not too bad. By your regular standards, you got off easy. I can barely tell you were in a fight at all. Usually you look like hamburger,” Julie said with a smirk, then gave me a kiss. “Earl rip you a new one yet?”

  “Started to, but this one wasn’t my fault. Long story.” I raised my voice. “Aw, come on, guys. It isn’t funny.” My fellow combatants heard the commotion and followed me in from the hall. Now the suite was really packed. “Seriously, I’ve had a crappy night. Everybody beat it.”

  “And miss the fight?” Julie took me by the hand and led me over to the TV. Someone’s laptop had been hooked to it. It was showing what was obviously a security-camera video from dinner. The video was right at the point where Lacoco and I hit the window; it shattered dramatically around us, and we plunged out of sight. The assembled Hunters had a great chuckle at my expense.

  Holly was sitting on the couch and running the computer. “Hey, Z.”

  “How’d you get out?”

  “Escaped through the kitchen…Here, watch. We’ve seen this five times now. It never gets old.” She backed it up and started over. The file began at the point where Lacoco and I bumped into each other at the crab legs. “The look on your face when the big PT guy hits you with a tray is priceless.”

  “What? He’s not—shit. How did you get—”

  “Melvin,” Holly explained. “Somebody told the troll back at base, so he showed some initiative, broke into the casino’s systems, and lifted the video. Piece of cake for him. We’ve got the buffet from three angles. Don’t worry. I told Melvin that if he stuck this on YouTube I’d kill him. He’s still scared of me.” She saw the very embarrassed Trip standing behind me. “Hey there, Slugger. At one minute and ten seconds in, you totally wreck some dude. Epic face-plant. I didn’t know you had it in you. On the other hand, we’ve got Cooper there getting his ass handed to him by that square-jawed good-looking one…”

  Cooper was trying to get to an angle where he could see the TV in the crowded room. “Hey, he was really strong, okay? I thought I did pretty good.”

  “Video don’t lie, Coop. I was waiting for him to start hitting you with your own arm and repeating why do you keep hitting yourself?” Holly looked up. “Oh, hey, Albert! You guys need to see this. On camera two you can totally see Lee trying to drown some poor bastard in chocolate. The chocolate smackdown is amazing. We should totally sell this online.”

  “Having an IT troll is great,” Lee said. “I’d buy a copy. This is better than pay-per-view.”

  “Sell enough, we might recoup the ridiculous cost of that ice swan,” Julie suggested.

  “Speaking of ice, I could use some for my back…So really, everybody get out.”

  The audience booed. “Come on, Z. Can we watch it one more time?” Holly begged.

  “Fine.”

  There was a chorus of yay from the Hunters. I sighed. My people were completely incorrigible.

  The dream began in the desert.

  The wind was dry and cold. The sun was weak and bitter. Around me was a sea of sagebrush and there were brown rocky mountains not too far away. I was standing in a flat, open area, in the middle of a lifeless circle of hard dirt about a hundred feet across. The sagebrush grew right up to the edge and then stopped. There were buzzards circling overhead, but none of them would fly over the dead circle.

  In the middle of the dead circle was a depression in the dirt. The frozen ground burned under my bare soles as I approached. It was as if the dirt had collapsed, revealing a sinkhole, but as I got closer, I could tell that this was no natural occurrence. Something had dug this place up. Rotten wooden braces shored up the edges of the hole, and a metal ladder, now mostly turned to rust, led down into the darkness.

  Then I was at the bottom of the hole. A single shaft of sunlight, swimming with dust, followed me down. The shaft terminated where it was black and deep, and now there was metal beneath my feet. There was a hatch.

  It had been sealed for a very long time.

  Yet, there was something new. Metal had been exposed through the dust. Scratches. A design had been etched into the metal of the hatch. And as I watched, the scratches began to glow, growing brighter and more vivid in the darkness.

  When recognition came, when I realized what the mark was, I bolted awake.

  The last thing I remember from the dream was that stale air had come hissing out from around the hatch as the container had unsealed.

  Julie found me on the balcony, staring at the gaudy lights of Las Vegas, wondering why I’d had a dream about the evil symbol my father had warned me about last year. She left the sliding glass door open and the air conditioning poured out behind her. Good old Vegas, middle of January and somehow it was eighty outside. She leaned on the balcony next to me and didn’t say anything for a time. Julie knew me too well. “You okay?” One gentle hand stroked my arm.

  I glanced over. She was as beautiful as the day I’d met her. The breeze blew her long dark hair into her face, and she absently gathered a bunch of it and stuck it behind one ear. She’d left her glasses inside, which meant that she hadn’t joined me for the view. The city gave her a bit of a neon halo.

  “Couldn’t sleep,” I answered simply. “Bad dream.”

  “Bad dream…or bad dream?”

  That was a fair question. I did have a bit of a history with that sort of thing; dark premonitions, ancient prophecies, other people’s memories, and that sort of thing, all as a result of my peculiar station I held in the order of the universe. It wasn’t exactly a picnic. “Normal kind.” I think. “Don’t worry about it.”

  “Worrying comes with the territory when you’re married to someone like you. Can’t blame a girl for asking. So what was it?” she asked. I shook my head. “Come on…”

  “There was this thing buried in a desert. Old, not ancient, but way older than us. It had a hatch like a submarine on it. I don’t know…something was living inside, but it was coming out. The mark that Dad drew for me, it had been scratched on there.”

  A scowl crossed her perfect face. “You think it’s time?”

  A year ago my father had finally told me about his past, about his mission, about the reason he’d been such a harsh taskmaster to his sons. He believed that his time was up a long time ago, his life miraculously returned, all so he could prepare one of his sons for something vital. He’d known something bad was coming for most of his life, the end of the world, he’d called it, and he’d done his best to make us ready. One of us had to die to save the world. The events since I’d joined MHI had confirmed to him that I was the one the mysterious Others had been waiting for. He’d told me that when that certain symbol began to appear, the time had come. The rest of his story was on a letter, sealed in an envelope, and locked in a safe, left there after I’d refused to read it. Dad sincerely believed that once I knew the whole story his life would end.

  That was one hell of a burden to put on a son.

  “Naw. Probably not. Just me worrying about stuff is all.”

  “Your dad has been calling a lot lately.”

  “He’s trying to get me to come for a friendly visit. We both know he’s going to ambush me somehow, trying to get me to ‘man up’ so he can get all self-righteous and die a proper martyr. Then I’m supposed to go all kamikaze on something to save the world again. I don’t think so…You know what pisses me off? He got shot in the head once and that makes him the expert? I do this for a living.”

  Julie chuckled. “You know, most couples in their first year of marriage are talking about things like whether they should buy a house—”

  “Which is why I married a chick who already owned a sweet mansion.”

  My attempt at levity failed. “—Or if they should start having kids.”

  That was a sad subject for us. I looked back at the city. “Yeah, well…” As long as Julie bore the Guardian’s mark, we were scared to even think about t
he possibility. We didn’t know exactly what they had done to her, besides keep her alive a few times when she should’ve died, but to what purpose? We knew so little about the Guardian, and the only other person we’d ever met with her same curse, the man that had shared it with her in fact, had been instantly skinned alive by a minor Old One when it had taken that power away. We didn’t dare risk passing that on to a child. “Hell. I don’t know. I just wanted to get some sleep.”

  “You’re watching for a mystery symbol so you know when some new asshole intends to start the apocalypse, and I’m trying to learn how to get rid of these,” she rubbed the magical black marks on her neck, too hard. “And worrying about mystical Guardians and magical time-destroying artifacts, and what to do when Mom inevitably tries to murder us again. The most experienced Hunter we’ve got is preoccupied listening for rumors of a red werewolf, and we’re at a conference with the people that shut us down. A little insomnia is understandable.”

  I put my arm over her shoulders and pulled Julie in close. “I do love how you always manage to look at the bright side of things.”

  We stood there together for a time, me looking at the pretty flashing casino lights and Julie looking at what I could only assume from the strength of her prescription as a bunch of colorful blurs. Regardless of how strange our life was, as long as we had each other, everything was going to be fine. “It’s four o’clock in the morning. I’m going back to bed,” she finally told me. “Registration starts at nine.”

  “I don’t think I can fall back to sleep just yet.”

  “I said I was going back to bed, not back to sleep.” Julie grabbed a handful of my shirt and pulled me along. “Sleep is for quitters.”

  Chapter 3

  The first annual International Conference of Monster Hunting Professionals was held at the same time as the shooting industry’s big trade show, SHOT (Shooting, Hunting, Outdoor Tradeshow). That had been a good call on the organizer’s part. First off, since we were in a business that officially did not exist, at a conference that didn’t exist, talking about things that didn’t exist, it provided a crowd of tens of thousands that we could easily blend into. Second, it killed two birds with one stone. For those of us that didn’t particularly care to listen to panels about laws, regulations, and the latest trends in blah blah blah, we could sneak down the street to play with all the latest guns and toys. Many of us had gotten memberships for both events. Milo had a federal firearms manufacturer’s license, and both of us had come armed with MHI corporate cards and a stack of purchase orders. You know…Just in case…

  I had been told that there was a certain secret underbelly of the SHOT Show for Monster Hunters. Many of the companies in the gun and gear business knew about us and loved us because we had lots of money and burned through equipment rapidly. So if you wore your company logo or managed to talk to the right sales rep at the right place, you could get peeks behind the curtains at the good stuff that wasn’t available to the public. With hundreds of us from around the world all converged here, that meant there would be even more super-secret cool-guy stuff to play with. Plus, Milo had told me that there were usually tons of free samples.

  As a lifelong gun nut, this news had made my year, and I was so excited to make it over to the SHOT Show that I could taste it. I had already color-coded a map with companies that I needed to hit up, and I had even built a spreadsheet for all of the things we needed to buy. Guns, ammo, new types of armor to experiment with, knives, explosives, and Milo really wanted a killer robot.

  Unfortunately, since I was now management, protocol demanded that I put in some face time at ICMHP first. So here I was, map, spreadsheet, and purchase orders ready to go, and I was roped into attending the opening ceremonies instead. Acres of guns calling my name right across the street, and I was stuck schmoozing.

  Now, there were plenty of panels I did want to attend, though most of those were scheduled in the evenings. I couldn’t wait to hear the nitty-gritty about some of the rare types of monsters that had been encountered and what had proved most effective in destroying them. There was even a Q&A session for the team that had taken down the infamous Glasgow mega-snake. They could keep the laws and ethics nonsense panels. I was in this for the things that would make me a more effective Hunter. The last thing I wanted to do was listen to a lobbyist for equal rights for vampires or some bullshit like that.

  After Julie and I had come down the elevator, we signed in, got name tags, and were hustled through the registration area of the Last Dragon’s conference area. There were all sorts of attendees, academics, lobbyists, salesmen, government types, but mostly Hunters, more Hunters than I’d ever seen, Hunters from all over the world. Hell, according to Julie this was the greatest concentration of Hunters anyone knew of. None of us were dressed for battle and nobody was wearing their war face, but you could tell they were Hunters. You could just smell it on them. These people had seen things that even I hadn’t seen. It was kind of exciting, yet also strangely intimidating, and for the first time I felt myself becoming really excited for this event.

  This morning there appeared to be a few MCB working in conjunction with casino security. I spotted Agent Archer from across the room, and he gave me a brief nod of acknowledgement. I hadn’t seen my former bodyguard since New Zealand. It appeared that the efficient agent was the man in charge of coordinating with the local security. I felt pity for any reporters that tried to make their way into this particular shindig.

  As we were riding up the escalator into the conference center, Julie tapped me on the shoulder. “Look who’s here.”

  I followed her pointing finger. “Well, obviously it wouldn’t be a party without Agent Franks.” The hulking agent was standing off to the side, watching the passing crowd of Hunters with dispassionate eyes, probably deciding which ones were the greatest threats and in what order he would eliminate them if necessary. Though the hall was crowded with guests, they seemed to instinctively part around Franks, like seals with a killer whale in the surf. He was a one-man wall of intimidation. And they didn’t even know that he wasn’t really human.

  “Lovely.”

  “Don’t misunderstand him. Under that violent, frightening, remorseless killing machine exterior, he’s got the heart of a saint…Or two. Probably two hearts. I’m going to say hi.”

  “Knock yourself out, hon.”

  Franks saw me coming. His lips parted in what was either disgust or annoyance, but it certainly wasn’t a smile. I waved happily. “Franks, buddy! How you been? You’re looking well. Are those new ears?”

  “Pitt…” Franks didn’t seem to appreciate me talking about his secret in public.

  The taciturn monster Agent Franks and I had an odd relationship. We had killed a great Old One together. Normally that would be a wonderful way to make friends with someone, only I don’t think Franks had friends, nor did he want any, and if he got the order, I had no doubt he would shoot me dead without the slightest hesitation and then not feel even a glimmer of remorse. At best, Franks respected me a tiny bit more than he did most people, but as far as I could tell, he thought of most people as insects, so that wasn’t saying much. “How you been?”

  He looked around the crowd and grunted.

  “Me too, thanks for asking,” I said. Franks scowled. That was usually what passed for conversation with the man made out of spare parts. “So what brings you here?”

  “Orders.”

  I could almost have sworn that he sounded bitter about that. “Myers around?” Franks raised a single eyebrow, as if to say you haven’t heard? The fact that I understood that gesture told me that I had spent entirely too much time around Franks. “Wait. What happened to your boss?”

  “They’ll announce it.” He really didn’t sound happy now. Another agent came up next to Franks and whispered something to him. “Reporter or protestor?” Franks listened as the agent kept whispering. Not that he actually displayed any emotion; having something to do seemed to cheer him up, or maybe I was jus
t projecting, like when you have a conversation with a plant. “Someone is trying to get in without a badge.” He began walking away.

  “Well, don’t kill anybody.”

  Franks paused for a second. “Why not?”

  “Uh…Never mind. See you around, Franks.”

  I followed the crowd. Luckily there was a table of coffee and snacks, so I grabbed a couple of doughnuts on the way in. The opening ceremonies were being held in a gigantic ballroom. A stage and podium had been set up in the front, and the rest of the room had been filled with chairs. My wife spotted me and waved. She’d saved us a few seats.

  Earl was shaking hands with some old acquaintances. He joined us a moment later with “I hate these sorts of things.”

  We sat toward the back. Julie was wearing a conservative dress that just screamed business, Earl was in his leather jacket like normal and extra irritable because there wasn’t a smoking area anywhere nearby, and Nate was in a suit and had a bandage on his nose from last night. The poor kid looked rough, but that was understandable since getting hit by Lacoco was like getting hit by a truck. There were other members of MHI in the mass of Hunters filing in. Many of us had been smart enough to skip this part to go look at guns. I didn’t see Lacoco, which was probably a good thing, and I had no idea if Tanya the elf had ever turned up either. Obviously, Skippy and Edward, who had been working our last case with us, didn’t like crowds and had volunteered to stay with the chopper at the airport. That was unfortunate, because if we’d had Edward’s Orc Fu at the buffet fight we would’ve totally kicked ass.

  Julie had been doing this for years and Earl had been doing this for a really long time, so between the two of them they knew almost everybody and kept up a running commentary as the other participants came in. “Those are the boys from Tokyo. They positively own the giant monster business. I’ll have to introduce you. They’re all right.”