"So are you going to take Earl's offer?" I asked Lee, shouting over the noise.
He sighed, distracted from the spectacle. "I suppose. I've been on exactly three missions and been injured on all of them. Doctor Nelson says my leg is going to have permanent nerve damage." He held up his cane and shook it. "I can't be out there beating monster ass with you guys anymore, so I would be a sucker not to take it."
"Good. You're the best man for the job. The archives will be in good hands," Trip stated. He looked strange with the shaved head, but the dreads had to go to make room for bandages after the battle at DeSoya Caverns. Personally I thought Trip looked better. Apparently Holly thought so as well.
"Trip, you sexy geek. Damn it, let's dance." She stood up and grabbed his hand. He began to protest weakly, but he was no match for a determined Holly. I had to laugh as she dragged him out on the dance floor. They made a weird couple.
"Hey." I felt a hand fall on my shoulder. It was Harbinger, looking slightly inebriated and unusually happy. He tossed a small object on the table. "Here."
"What's up, Earl?" I asked as I picked it up.
"It's official. Grant's turned in his resignation. Moving to Hollywood to consult on a big horror movie or some nonsense." He snorted. Grant had not been his usual cocky self since his kidnapping, and he had never spoken about what he had seen or experienced while in the vampires' clutches. I was not surprised to see him go, but I was surprised to discover I might actually miss him. Almost. "Sam's heading out to set up the new team in Denver. So I'm really shorthanded."
I studied the little flat object. "And this way you can keep an eye on me?"
"Promise not to destroy the world or anything and we shouldn't have a problem." He winked at me and left. I twirled the patch between my fingers.
I would wear the green happy face with pride.
It was a few months later, right after Harbinger's team had returned from a difficult contract in the Philippines. Julie and I were at the Shackleford ancestral home. I had volunteered to help her work on the renovations to the old house. I was not particularly skilled at home repair, but I could do manual labor with the best of them. Mostly I loved the opportunity it gave me to spend time with her. I had bought an engagement ring, but so far I had not worked up the courage to actually ask her. Wrestle with ancient evil, fight aswangs, blow up lindwyrms, or fish for luskas? No problem. Ask the woman I love to marry me? Terrifying.
We were sitting in the formal living room. The paint was drying, and I had to admit that it was going to look great. We had returned the missing portrait of Raymond Shackleford Jr. to its spot on the wall. We weren't expecting guests, and having the blank spot kind of ruined the symmetry. I had joked that we should just paint a beard and glasses on Earl's picture so that we wouldn't have to worry about taking it down when company came over. I could tell that Julie had been tempted.
It was about 11:00 p.m. when there was a loud knock on the door.
"Somebody's here," I said stupidly.
Julie was startled from the couch. She reached above the mantle and took down the hidden shotgun, tossed it over to me and, without thinking, I caught it. She took down a carbine and checked the chamber. "Perimeter alarm didn't sound," she said quickly.
"Aw hell." I pumped the 870 and started for the front door. "What now?"
The front entryway smelled of wood glue and sawdust. I approached the door, and signaled silently for her to cover me. Julie moved to the side, and took up a position behind one of the interior columns.
I unlocked the five heavy deadbolts. The ornate doorknob was unusually cold under my fingertips. I kept my right hand on the grip of the shotgun and kept it ready. I turned the knob and yanked the door open. I stepped back, ready to fire.
Nothing.
I sliced the pie, slowly cornering around the opening. The porch was clear. I shined the weapon-mounted light into the darkness. I could not see anything in the yard or in the parking area.
"Did we just get doorbell ditched?" I asked.
"Wait, there's a note." Julie approached cautiously. A small white envelope had been shoved under the door. She cradled the carbine in her arms as she tore it open.
"Careful," I cautioned.
"Don't be such a wuss."
She unfolded the note, adjusted her glasses, and read silently. Julie frowned, her pretty features drew into an anxious knot, and she absently rubbed the unnatural black line on the side of her neck, a habit that she had picked up when she was nervous.
"What is it, honey?" I asked. She passed the note over.
The letter was handwritten. There were two separate messages on the single sheet of paper, with two very different writing styles. The first was almost perfect calligraphy.
Dear Julie,
We just wanted to drop you a note to let you know that we are doing fine. Your daddy is adjusting to his new lifestyle rather well. He has a real flair for it. We have been traveling, and seeing the world, just like we always talked about doing, but never found the time. Now we have all of the time in the world.
We want to offer a truce. I hope there are no hard feelings about the little incident we had. As a mom I just want what is best for all of my children. Now I see that you need to live your life on your own and make your own decisions, no matter how foolish they may be. You need to learn from your own mistakes.
I wish that I could be at the wedding. I like this Owen. He is a good man. He will be a good husband. If you are wondering what wedding, silly me, I have to realize that you can't read minds. Your poor boyfriend broadcasts his thoughts so loudly that I could pick them up from Mexico. The ring is in the armory. It is rather pretty. Congratulations.
One last offer, as you grow old and approach your mortal end, or if your health is fleeing and creeping sickness overtakes your body, if you choose not the cold embrace of death, call upon me, and I will come. You are my daughter and my offer of immortality still stands. Until that time, if you avoid us, we will avoid you. Search for me and I will kill you and destroy everything that you hold dear with a vengeance terrible beyond your imagination.
Love,
Mom
P.S. I love what you've done with the old place.
The second message was shorter. The writing was blocky and erratic.
Hey Kids,
How's everything going? I hope y'all are well. I'm doing good. Susan is doing good. We are having lots of fun. I'm still real sorry about the whole thing with the lying and sending you to your deaths in Natchy Bottom, but I had to do it. I hope you understand. No hard feelings. See you around.
Love,
Dad
P.S. Kid, treat my girl good or I'll rip out your heart.
I folded the note, stuck it in the envelope and passed it back. Julie crumpled it into a ball and threw it out the door. I slammed it closed.
"And to think that regular people bitch about their in-laws," I said. "I figure I've got to hold some sort of record on this one."
Julie set her gun against the wall. She fell into my arms with a sigh. I held her tight. "Do you still think normal people suck?" she asked me.
I thought about it for a moment. "Yes. Yes, I do. Normal people suck. Monster Hunting is where it's at."
"Good. I agree." We kissed, vampire mother-in-law be damned. "So where exactly is this ring?"
"Downstairs," I replied nervously. I had had it for weeks. The thought of her saying no was terrifying.
"Owen . . ."
"What, Julie?"
"Yes."
Epilogue
Special Agent Dwayne Myers, interim head of the Monster Control Bureau, had in fact called in his "final option" when they had discovered through the actions of MHI that the Place of Power was just outside of Childersburg, Alabama.
As the moon had approached its zenith, the B1 bomber on station over Alabama had been ordered to release its payload of a single low-yield tactical nuclear device. It was only a five-kiloton weapon, but it would have been of sufficient st
rength to slag the area immediately around the DeSoya Caverns Park. Had "final option" gone according to plan, it would not have stopped the Old One's plot, since the pocket dimension was separated from the normal world until the final close of the ceremony.
When released, the bomb had a clear path to impact. It was programmable to air burst for maximum surface devastation, or to strike the ground first, for more penetration. Since Special Agent Myers believed the target to be inside the underground cave, he had ordered the bomb to strike as deeply as possible before detonation.
By the time the bomb had traveled its course, the rift between worlds had been prepared. The sphere of evil energy had grown to mammoth size. The Old Ones could not cross the rift into our world, but matter from our world could enter into theirs. The five-kiloton nuclear weapon passed cleanly through the rift and entered the plane of the Old Ones.
The resulting explosion split the individual atoms of a legion of the Old Ones' elite troops, and the edge of the blast singed the carapace of the Overlord itself. This was a grave offense.
It called upon its minions to sally forth and destroy the human world utterly, but in those final moments, the rift closed, cutting off entrance for another five hundred years.
Greatly offended by this slight, it called upon its many servants, demanding an explanation of how the feeble mammals had been able to actually cause a small bit of harm to an Old One. The 10,000-foot-tall crustacean commanded them to discern the cause of the explosion.
The minions searched, trying to discover what foul creature could do such a thing. Though their contact with the human world was limited, they were able to piece together a few clues. They were mostly incorrect and confused, but they were happy to give their Dread Overlord an answer, hoping to keep from being flayed alive for eons. It did not take kindly to failure.
They reported back that the attack must have come from a lone human. It was a single mammal who had dared to launch a feeble atom weapon into their plane of existence. The Dread Overlord was joyous to hear that the perpetrator had been identified, so it only devoured a few dozen of its minions. They were digested painfully for an eternity. It ordered a message sent to the world of the humans. There were still ways to send information, and there were a handful of servants on the human world able to listen and obey.
The message was sent across space and time:
To all minions of the Overlord. Find and utterly destroy the human Hunter known as Owen Zastava Pitt.
Author’s Afterword
I was asked to write a special afterword for the Baen Free Library edition of Monster Hunter International. Since MHI came about in a really odd sort of way, I figure I’ll just tell that story.
Like many kids who grow up reading everything that I could get my hands on, I always liked telling stories. I used to fill notebooks with adventures and doodles. But my first serious attempt at writing a novel wasn’t until college. Since I didn’t have a clue what I was doing, I ended up creating a pretty bad thriller full of plot holes. Having written myself into a dead end, I shelved it and walked away. Many years later all of the good scenes, characters, and dialog from that failed novel ended up in Dead Six. It is true what they say, there is no such thing as wasted writing.
Then we started having kids and careers, and all of that grown-up stuff got in the way. I didn’t try writing any fiction for about ten years. Accounting kind of sucks out all your creative energy like that. I got into writing non-fiction for gun magazines freelance and that helped me actually learn how to reliably put words on paper. After a while I started getting the fiction writing bug again, but I wasn’t really sure what I wanted to write about.
I’d always been a huge fan of monster movies, the lower the budget the better. If the actors were paid in beer and pizza and the monster is a dude wearing a rubber suit and some trash bags, I was totally there. I was also a huge gun nut, and it was sort of a running joke among us that most horror movies would be over in five minutes if they were about one of our people instead of the typical, scream, run, and get eaten, vapid college students who were most horror movie characters. So that was how the idea was born. I wanted to write a book about gun nuts in a horror movie situation.
That still left all of that pesky plot stuff to work out, but I figured I’d come up with something. Gun nuts fighting monsters… Okay, now what? I started creating characters and brainstorming ideas but I still had no idea what I was doing.
Then one day I was on an internet forum called the Firing Line and a hilarious Texas sheriff’s deputy who went by the handle of Lawdog created a thread called Lines I’d Like to Hear in a Horror Movie Someday, and then a whole bunch of really funny gun nuts started making up some great out-of-context dialog.
Then I read one particular quote and the entire thing just clicked. It is the quote from Dillis Freeman that I used to open this very book, you know the one about brain-eating zombies and a target rich environment. That made everything fall into place and MHI was born. My gun nuts weren’t in this for fun, they were in this to make a living. And that solved the whole problem of the movie being over in five minutes, because it allowed me to have more monsters and bigger monsters.
Sweet.
I still had no clue what I was doing, but now I was a man on a mission. I was going to write a monster book and I was going to publish it so that people would actually read it. I figured this was achievable… Probably.
I’d once read this novel that had been a number-one New York Times bestseller, a huge international hit, and they’d even made a big budget movie out of it, but frankly, I thought the book sucked. It was supposed to be an adventure but it was incredibly boring. I thought maybe that was just an anomaly, so I tried another of that author’s thrillers, but it sucked too, and then another of his massive bestsellers, and I hated them all. And no, I won’t identify the author in question because since then I’ve met him in person and he is a super nice guy, but I told my wife that if this guy could be the number-one best seller in the country, then surely I could at least get published. She told me to quit whining and prove it. That is exactly the kind of support an aspiring writer needs, so I got to work!
As a side note to give an idea of how helpful the lovely Mrs. Correia is to my writing process, the Enchanted Forest Trailer Park was because of her. One night I was working on MHI and she was reading a fantasy novel, when she gave an exasperated sigh and tossed the book on the floor. I asked what was the matter? She replied, “I’m so sick and tired of elves always being the same! They’re always beautiful and wise and majestic and all that. Just once I’d like to see somebody have elves that weren’t so perfect… Why can’t we have…I don’t know…redneck elves?”
It was like in the cartoons when the lightbulb turns on over the character’s head. “Rednecks you say? Hmmm…” Twenty minutes of brainstorming later and we were knocking pixies out of the bug zapper with pink bunny slippers.
It takes me about four to six months to write a novel now. Trust me, that wasn’t the case when I was starting out. A year later I was showing MHI to anybody who would take the time to read it. I was actually a little surprised how positive my feedback was, and being a businessman I made sure to give the manuscript to people who would be harsh. I wasn’t fishing for praise, I honestly wanted to make this thing good enough to sell. At this point I discovered the value of really good alpha readers willing to hurt an author’s delicate lilac-scented feelings.
Once I was confident that the book was pretty darn good I started shopping it around to publishing houses and literary agents. I spent the next year getting rejected by everybody and their dog. One nice thing during all of this was that many of my rejections weren’t form letters, but were instead some variation of “well, you’re pretty good, but we just don’t think we can market this.” As an optimistic aspiring author I took anything that wasn’t a form letter as a compliment. However, after getting rejected over a hundred times I started thinking to myself that just because they didn’t know
how to market this book didn’t mean it wasn’t marketable. I was pretty good at business and I knew my target audience, so I decided, what the heck, let’s self-publish MHI.
For the record, I no longer have that big box of rejection letters. After I made the New York Times bestseller list for the first time I took that box out to the desert and blew it to bits with ten pounds of Tannerite binary explosives.
So back to self-publishing… Now keep in mind, this was pre eBook revolution, so self-publishing meant $25 crappy quality paperbacks from a Print on Demand service written by some guy you’ve never heard of, which is not exactly the sort of thing a reader impulse buys. That is not a recipe for success.
My strategy was simple. I was well known on internet gun forums, so I’d try to sell it to the people who’d inspired me to begin with. Now I often get asked how come there is so much indepth gun detail in MHI? The answer is simple, I actually took the manuscript and increased the gun nuttery for my target audience. They wanted monsters and guns, well by golly, I was going to give them all the guns.
Meanwhile, I ended up participating in an online fiction serial project on another internet forum. This online serial had been started by this guy named Mike Kupari, who at the time I had only met on the internet. He started writing this nifty paramilitary thriller that I thought was pretty darn good, so I asked if he minded if I jumped in with him. He thought that was a great idea, and the readers loved it. Our collaboration worked out surprisingly well, we picked up a ton of fans, and that gave me a base of readers willing enough to take a chance on my novel. Fast forward several years, and Mike is now a Baen author as well.
As we were leading up to the publication of MHI, one of the fans of the online serial, Tony Von Krag, asked to see the manuscript. He said that he used to work for a bookstore, he’d love to pass it on to the owner, and maybe he’d order some copies to stock. Luckily for me, the owner in question turned out to be Don Blyly of Uncle Hugo’s in Minneapolis, which is one of the most popular independent bookstores in America.