The Monster Hunters

  “And why didn’t you warn us?” cried a different man. A friend put a comforting hand on his shoulder, but he kept on. “My wife might still be alive.”

  “Easy, Stan,” Nancy cautioned. “Well, Harbinger, answer the man’s question.”

  They already didn’t believe him about werewolves, period; he wasn’t going to try to educate them on the finer points of lycanthropic society and the fact that Nikolai had just needed a good murdering. Luckily, before he could think of an answer, one of the guards at the main hall entrance shouted that they had movement in the parking lot. Everyone grabbed for their weapons but relaxed as word spread that it was one of the groups returning. Most of the doubters went back to cursing Earl.

  The patrol came in brushing snow from their coats and stomping it from their boots. All of the scouts were shivering except for the one in the lead. Kerkonen was barely recognizable. She’d ditched her ragged sheriff’s department coat and found a big black parka. When she flipped back the hood, the difference was shocking. His human senses were weak; he felt blurry, slow and hungover, but he could already tell that she was well along the change. Her eyes gleamed just a shade too metallic, her skin was flushed, her movements too fluid. The others might not be able to tell, and she probably didn’t know it herself, but he recognized the signs from experience. Heather Kerkonen was a full-on werewolf.

  And that change had occurred in a matter of hours . . . Normally it took weeks. Earl swallowed hard. That ain’t good.

  “What’d you find, deputy?” asked Nancy.

  “A lot of dead people and even more empty houses. But we found a few more survivors. They’re in the foyer getting checked for bites before I let them in,” she said. “The werewolves are on the move out there. We don’t need any in here.” That statement struck Earl as particularly ironic.

  This time it was Phillip, the high-school principal, that interjected. “Not more of this werewolf nonsense. There’s got to be a rational explanation.”

  Deadly serious, Heather put her shotgun over one shoulder and scanned the crowd. “I figured you might be having this conversation. I’ve got something everyone needs to see. . . .” She motioned two men forward. Each was carrying one end of a tarp-wrapped object that was very clearly a body. “Show them.”

  “Heather, there’s kids here,” said the man supporting the narrower end of the tarp. “Maybe we should—”

  “They need to see it, too. There’s no time for doubt,” Heather said as she pulled her gloves off and eyed Phillip coldly. Earl had seen that look before. She was probably wondering what he tasted like. “Unwrap her.”

  The two men dropped their burden. It hit the wood with a dull thud. As they pulled the blue tarp away, the crowd gasped. A few looked away.

  “Look at it,” Heather ordered.

  The werewolf was female. Deprived of his sense of smell, estimating age was out of the question. Gold eyes open, the lips were pulled back over bloodstained teeth. The cause of death was obvious, since the ribcage had been broken open and the heart was gone. That would certainly do the deed. Even for the fiercest skeptics in the crowd, the mostly humanoid creature was a slap in the face.

  “It must be some sort of undiscovered animal,” Phillip sputtered. “A cryptid! Or some genetic experiment that escaped.”

  “Yep. There’s lots of money in crossing gorillas and timber wolves.” Earl snorted. “Those science types are downright full of wacky fun.”

  Heather squatted beside the corpse, roughly grabbed one wrist, and lifted it without saying a word. The braver members of the front row got up and approached. The young vet was the first to notice Heather’s point. “It’s wearing a wedding ring.”

  The skeptical faction turned to the principal, who had somehow gotten himself appointed as their leader in the last few seconds. “Somebody must have put a ring on the animal.”

  “Crap. Why, Phillip?” someone shouted. “Are you retarded?”

  Heather glared at Phillip. Then she roughly dropped the limb and reached for the gaping chest wound. “I noticed this while I was cutting the heart out before it could regenerate.”

  There was a cluster of people around the werewolf now, looking almost like a football huddle. The soldier spoke again. “What are those bags?”

  “Well, Matthew, those appear to be breast implants,” said Nancy as she stepped away from the huddle, rubbing her eyes. “Well, apparently this thing had a boob job.”

  Phillip had no response to that revelation.

  “There’s more,” Heather said. “Anybody recognize this?” There was a long moment of silence. The people in the circle all exchanged glances. The audience was struggling to see. Several of the witnesses began to swear.

  “Rose Greer had that same tattoo, same place. We used to work together at the substation before she went to nights,” said one of them.

  It was Nancy that spoke up again, loudly. “Phillip, can you think of any reason somebody would stick a wedding ring on a wild animal, give it breast implants, and then tattoo a little rose on its neck?”

  Phillip, obviously, had no response. Earl was about to make a comment about the kind of weird stuff you could find on the Internet, but now was not the time for sarcasm.

  Heather walked away from the body and turned to the bleachers. Her voice echoed through the entire gym. “Look at it. Look at her. Yesterday that thing was Rose . . .” She let that sink in for a moment. “After she killed everyone at the power company and wrecked the place, she walked home. I caught her eating her husband. That is what we’re facing. There’s more of these out there right now. Some of them are strangers, like the man who tore up our jail. Some of them are our friends, or neighbors, or people you see at the store, or people you go to church with. But not anymore.”

  The huddle had broken up so that everyone could see the twisted corpse.

  “Now they’re something else.” Heather walked over, angry, shotgun still over one shoulder, and kicked the dead werewolf, brutally hard, right in the snout. Blood flecks splattered down the tarp. Earl tensed a bit, but remarkably Heather seemed to be keeping it under control. “They’re the enemy. And we have to destroy them before they get the rest of us.”

  The atmosphere in the room had changed. They were committed now. Heather, a local, had swayed them where he, an outsider, could not. Heather risked a quick glance Earl’s way, as if to see how she’d done. He nodded approvingly. She looked away, almost embarrassed, but not before he caught the flash of gold in her eyes. Tough, to the point, Heather would have made one hell of a good Hunter.

  Too bad he was probably going to have to put her down before the night was through.

  The volunteers left ten minutes later. There were three smaller teams, one for each way out of Copper Lake. Earl had made sure that each team had some of his silver ammo and some MHI phone numbers. Using snowmobiles and moving quick, they might have a chance. He suspected that this Alpha would have set some impediments in their way, and would have loved to go with them, but he was needed on offense. Two bigger teams were heading out momentarily to cause trouble and find survivors.

  Heather joined Earl as he was strapping into his older suit of armor. It was pocked with burn marks and holes, but he was glad that he’d packed the spare. His leather coat fit over it, too, and he needed the added warmth. Humans got cold really easy. They were in the shadows of the main hall; the lights were out to conserve the juice. Heather stopped, folded her arms, and leaned against the trophy case. She watched him for a while, but didn’t speak.

  “This suit has seen better days,” Earl said, trying to make conversation. There was a holster on each hip, gunfighter style. He removed an S&W .45 Nightguard from the bag, checked to make sure the revolver was loaded, and stuffed it into the left holster. “I’m going back out there.”

  “I know. And by the way, saying thank you for me saving your life would be nice. You look pretty healthy for someone who didn’t have a pulse an hour ago.”

  Actually, he was fe
eling all right. Clumsy, slow, less capable than he was used to, but healthy. He had a sneaking suspicion that he should be dead, but that either something had gone wrong, or that amulet had left him alive for some unknowable reason. “Thanks,” Earl answered. “Seriously. Thank you.”

  She bit her lip as she summoned her courage. “Harbinger, level with me . . .”

  He already knew what she was going to ask. “You’ve been cursed.” He kept his voice low so it wouldn’t carry into the auditorium.

  “You sure?”

  He took out the second .45, opened the cylinder, confirmed it was loaded, snapped it shut, and holstered. “I’m positive. Sorry.”

  She nodded slowly. “I just thought maybe . . . never mind.” Tears welled up in her eyes. “It’s not fair.” Heather stepped away from the trophy case, hands curled into fists. “Shit!” She slammed her fist into the heavy cabinet. The wood splintered, the glass shattered, and trophies and plaques spilled out. It made a terrible racket. Heather drew her hand back, shocked at the hole she’d put through the case. “How—”

  “You’re gonna have to be a little more careful with your temper,” Earl suggested. “Super strength and hitting stuff when you get angry don’t go well together.”

  Half a dozen townsfolk led by the principal converged on the noise within seconds, ready to blast the intruders. Earl waved them off. “Sorry. Kicked your case,” he explained while Heather hid her damaged hand behind her back. Phillip already didn’t like him, so he wasn’t out much taking the rap. “By accident . . . so back off.”

  “Well, when this is over, you owe us a new one,” Phillip muttered as he stomped away.

  When they were alone again, Earl went over to Heather. “Let me see your hand.”

  Reluctantly, she held it out. “I didn’t hit it that hard.” Sure enough, the scratches were already pulling closed. Her hand was quivering. “I can’t believe this. This is just too much.”

  On a purely technical level, Earl was astounded by the regeneration rate of the werewolves created since the surge. On a strictly practical level, he was holding the injured hand of a woman whose eyes were welling up with tears because she’d just realized that her life was over. “It’ll be okay.”

  “No, it won’t.”

  “Yes, it can,” he insisted. “You don’t have to end up like them. It can be controlled.” And if you can’t control it, I’ll have to kill you. Earl quickly dismissed that unpleasant thought.

  “How do you know?” she sniffed.

  He was not good at comforting. It was hard to say, but he didn’t think it mattered now. “Because I’m a werewolf, too.”

  Surprised, Heather jerked her hand away. “What? Get away.” Her nose crinkled as she instinctively smelled to see if he was telling the truth. “No. No, you’re normal . . . Oh shit, what did I just do?” Her eyes widened. “I’m smelling people now! Oh God!”

  Earl raised his hands apologetically. “Well, I was a werewolf. Up until that big magic light sucked it out of me.”

  “Why? How? And why the hell do I believe you?” Heather asked, taking another step back. She folded her arms defensively. “That’s why you’ve got that cage in your truck. That’s how you moved so fast back at the station. But, but why aren’t you . . . evil?”

  So she was getting the urges already. She was hiding it well. “Listen, Heather.” He took a step closer. “I know what you’re feeling right now. You aren’t what you think, you’re what you do. You can fight it.”

  “But I want to kill everybody!” she hissed, then looked around to make sure nobody could hear them. She lowered her voice. “I want to just tear their stupid faces off. I want to break their bones with my bare hands.”

  “That part doesn’t ever really go away, but it does get easier to tune out. The guy that helped me learn this stuff suggested prayer and meditation. So I took up smoking. That seemed to help. Crap . . . I might have to be one of those annoying people that tries to quit and then whines about it,” he muttered. “I hate those people.”

  “You said you were cured by magic.” Heather’s eyes narrowed suspiciously. It did sound ludicrous, even by Earl’s standards. “Hell, why not? I didn’t believe in werewolves, either, so why not magic, too? But you said at the station that there was no cure. You said that people have been looking forever!”

  “What can I say?” Earl shrugged. “Up until an hour ago, I didn’t think there was one.”

  She responded with a sad little laugh. “You know that running joke, about how when a girl talks about her problems, the man just wants to solve the problem, and the girl doesn’t want it solved, she just wants to talk about it?” Heather wiped her eyes. “Screw that noise. How do I solve this?”

  Earl hadn’t thought of that as an option. A cure had always seemed like such a pipe dream, it was either endure or die, but now he was living proof that there was a way. Could that amulet actually cure other werewolves? The possibilities took his breath away. “That amulet, the one your prisoner talked about. That’s the key. It cured me. We’ve got to find it.”

  Having been given some small bit of hope, Heather latched on with both hands. “I can kind of feel it, I think. It’s like this weird buzzing noise that won’t go away.”

  As a regular man, Earl could no longer sense the real Hum, let alone the false one. He was groping blind. The only way he was going to find that thing was with Heather’s help. There was still the matter of the Alpha and his forces to deal with, but Earl had been a damn effective Hunter before he’d been cursed. He still had a few tricks up his sleeve. “We’ll head out with the teams, then break off and follow the trail right to that amulet. We find it, and we find the asshole behind this.”

  “Cure me, waste him, save the town. Sounds like a plan.”

  Chapter 16

  The Russians had started it this time.

  Sure, there was a war going on. An awful one, by all accounts, but it was the Soviets that had to go and bring a supernatural element into a normal, shitty human conflict. Let’s say that operations that didn’t actually exist, conducted by hypothetical units, across the border into countries that may or may not have actually been involved, had been too successful. And the Soviets had loaned a specialist of their own to their allies to deal with it. As you may have guessed, there are certain specifics that I’m not allowed to ever get into, especially in a journal.

  A lieutenant colonel with no name and an old man in a shirt and tie with no name gave us the final briefing during the flight into Vietnam. If the communists wanted to escalate on the supernatural front, we were supposed to respond in kind. STFU’s mission was to be put into a location where Americans were not supposed to be, and then kill the shit out of the enemy. Move and repeat.

  I did not like jobs like this. Not that I wasn’t good at them. In fact, I was really good. I’d come to terms with the fact that I was a monster, but I had to be careful just how much I let the animal out to play. Even monsters have rules. Well, some of us anyway.

  Ideally, our actions would attract the attention of the Russian “advisor.” It was hoped that we would then be able to neutralize him. The men without names said that he was known as Nikolai.

  So we went hunting.

  * * *

  After running from the monster, Horst and Lins had climbed over a chain-link fence and broken into a storage unit, where they hid, freezing, until they decided it was probably safe to return to their vehicle to make a run for it. Though scared, he was careful not to show it to Lins as the two huddled in stony silence and listened to the werewolves howl. This situation was so far out of Briarwood’s league that it was depressing.

  The walk back to the Caddy took forever. He’d gotten turned around while running, the snow wasn’t helping matters, and he wouldn’t admit that he was lost. Their odd route was explained away because walking down the open streets seemed like a great way to get picked off by werewolves, so they’d gone through the backyards. After twenty minutes of hopping fences, they’d reach
ed the scorched grocery store and his Cadillac. Horst had been surprised to find that any other members of his crew had survived.

  Jason Lococo was sitting on the hood, scanning for threats. Having burned through his share of silver ammo in the SAW, Loco had taken Jo Ann’s M-4 carbine, which looked like a toy in his hands, to keep watch. Horst almost said something to him about scratching the paint, but the giant looked like he might just open fire, so he refrained.

  “Loco, I’m happy to see you,” Horst said, glad that their big man had been too dumb to flee. Loco just grunted an acknowledgment. “I thought you were toast.”

  “Whew. I’m just glad you didn’t take the car!” Lins exclaimed.

  It was obvious Loco wasn’t happy. “You had the keys.” He hopped off the Caddy, and the shocks sprang up in relief. “Let’s go.”

  “Let’s get out of this stinking town,” Horst agreed.

  “No. We’ve got to get to the hospital,” Loco said as he went around and opened the rear door. “It puked her up.”

  “Jo?” Horst got yet another surprise to find that his girlfriend was still alive. Loco had put her in the back of the Escalade. With the third-row seats put away, there was just enough room for her to lie down. The big man had done his best to clean her up, all of their bottled waters had been emptied, and he had thrown a blanket over her.

  The inside of the Caddy reeked. That new-car scent had been replaced by the stench of monster puke. Jo Ann was shivering. Her face had taken on a sickly grayish-yellow tone, and she was soaked with sweat. Clumps of her long hair had fallen out, leaving purple blotches on her exposed scalp.

  “Ryan?” Jo Ann asked. Even her voice was scratchy. Her eyes were closed, and Horst cringed when he saw they were matted shut with a film of green boogers. “That you?”