The Monster Hunters

  A few weeks passed with no communications left by Nikolai. Conover said intelligence from his chain of command suggested that the Russian had been called home. We were told to stand down and await further instructions.

  A week later, it was confirmed. Nikolai had returned to Moscow. President Nixon had agreed to draw down any supernatural assets in country. Apparently we weren’t alone, though we’d never met any of the other special task forces in operation. Preparations would be made. First squad would be returned to their regular units; second was going to be flown home with thanks that could never be talked about and a renewed exemption from PUFF. We celebrated.

  Nikolai hit us the next evening. Werewolves are sneaky like that. They get you when you least expect it.

  * * *

  Stark paced down the line of stacked bodies. There were far more at the hospital now than when they’d left to go for help. The senior MCB agent muttered and swore under his breath as he stepped between the heads.

  “We started it, but the other survivors have been dropping bodies off here, too,” Agent Mosher explained. “The guards posted downstairs said that the town has fortified the school and then formed patrols to fight the monsters and gather people. . . . Kind of like I suggested hours ago.”

  Mosher was still bitter. Stark knew that it was because he was too stupid to realize just how much trouble they were going to be in once headquarters found out just what a clusterfuck of a containment this was going to be. Stark was too old to recover from this. This line of bodies and the number of people that knew about them was a career-ending event.

  “Don’t get lippy with me, kid.” Stark stopped his pacing at the last corpse in the line. It was the body of that first infected deputy, Joe Buckley. It was uneven from the rest. Stark knelt and pulled back the sheet. Burning to death was always unpleasant. The skin was all crispy and black, except for where it had split open to expose red muscle. This one was even worse, since he was all twisted up, mostly shaped like a werewolf but not quite all the way there. The unevenness was caused by one hand sticking up, like it was reaching for him, claws all curled up from the heat.

  It bothered Stark quite a bit, like the stupid monster was still being defiant despite the fact that it was dead. Why wouldn’t monsters just fall into line, like everybody else? Stark stood, put his boot on the forearm and pushed down. It wouldn’t budge. Stark grunted and put more weight on it. Ash flaked off and the bones made a sick cracking noise, but the arm finally went down like it was supposed to. Stark nodded and covered the body back up. “That’s more like it,” he whispered.

  Mosher sounded worried. “Are you feeling all right, sir?”

  Stark walked away without responding. He wandered down the hallway, still muttering, bubbling with impotent rage. There was a strange noise, for just a split second. It was barely audible, kind of a hum, but then it was gone. It left his ears ringing and added to his growing headache.

  “You hear that?” Mosher asked nervously.

  “Probably nothing.” Stark ignored his partner. He found a break room with a soda machine in it. At least the generators were running here. He pulled his wallet out from under his armor and thumbed through it.

  Mosher had followed him in like a lost puppy. “Sir? What are we going to do now?”

  “I’m going to get a Dr. Pepper. . . . You got any dollars? All I’ve got is a twenty.”

  This was just like the Pacific Star. One helicopter load of SEALs against an ocean liner full of Deep Ones. There had been so damned many of them. They came out of the walls, through the floor, through the ceiling. They climbed up the sides to slide their slimy heads through the portholes. Every time they’d turned around there were more fish men. All but two of them had been wiped out during the first contact. The fish men had numerical superiority and fucking Dagon on their side. Magic, claws, and ancient mutants against two SEALs? What had Chief Haven expected? Of course Stark had hid. . . . That was the smart thing to do. Hide, and wait for reinforcements.

  But no. Not Sam Haven. Mr. Big Shot Hero. He had to go all balls out and kill ten dozen fish men all by himself and then poke an ancient deity in the eye. Well, who’s dead now, asshole? Yeah. You, Sam. You’re dead, and I’m management.

  “No . . . I . . . I mean . . .” Mosher was so confused, he was beginning to stutter. It was unbecoming in an MCB agent. “What are we going to do about the situation?”

  Stark was getting a headache. He was sick of Mosher’s whining. He was starting to stick up like that crispy werewolf’s arm. “I’ll think of something. . . . But right now I’ve got other problems.” He put his big hands on the soda machine and shook it. Stark had managed to fix other people’s problems and always kept from getting into anything over his head. He was an ideal government employee. It wasn’t his fault werewolves had taken over a whole town. He kicked the hell out of the soda machine, but it still wouldn’t cooperate.

  The door closed behind Mosher. “Sir, look at yourself. We’ve got more important things to worry about. People are dying out there!”

  This was not an insurmountable problem. Special Agent Douglas Stark of the Monster Control Bureau was a professional. He would get his Dr. Pepper. Failure was not an option. Stark leaned his SCAR rifle in the corner. Studying the machine, he formulated a plan of attack. Drawing his thick SOG knife, he jammed the point in by the lock and began forcing it in, using it as a pry-bar. They’d just blame the property damage on the werewolves. Stark chuckled at his cleverness.

  “Agent Stark? Stark! Are you kidding me?” Exasperated, Mosher slammed his fists down on a table. The noise barely distracted Stark from his important task. “What are we going to do?” A gloved hand landed on Stark’s broad shoulder and spun him around. “Look at me, damn it—”

  Stark lost it. He slammed his armored forearm into Mosher’s chest and drove him back across the break room. Mosher crashed haphazardly into the wall. Stark pressed his elbow against Mosher’s throat and the combat knife against his cheek. Mosher’s face turned red as he struggled for air.

  There are two distinctly different reports at the end of the mission. In the first, a group of SEALs is ambushed in a rescue attempt, until only two remain, a chief and a new officer on his very first assignment. The officer spends the night hiding in a laundry hamper while the chief goes on a one-man suicide mission to save as many hostages as possible from the amphibian servants of an elder god. Except, that lone warrior didn’t like it when the responding MCB cleanup team unnecessarily torched the uninfected survivors. He caused quite a fuss. That makes the first narrative difficult for official channels to swallow.

  “You listen to me, dipshit. I’m not going out there. I’m not getting eggs laid in me.” Stark pushed the knife just enough to break the skin. “And you’re not going out there, either. We stick together. Those are the orders. You hear me, Haven. No eggs!”

  On the other hand, story two says that the SEAL team defeated the Deep Ones, but lost most of their men in the process. Afterward, an MCB cleanup team responded in a professional capacity, following regulations to the letter. One of the surviving SEALs acted in a very irrational manner and made unsubstantiated allegations that the MCB killed some uninfected survivors, probably due to post-traumatic stress.

  Forcibly retire one. Recruit the other to the MCB. “I won.” Stark smiled broadly. “And I’ll win again, because only the survivors get to file the reports.”

  It took Stark a second to realize that it wasn’t Sam Haven he was holding against the wall, they weren’t on a cruise ship, and he couldn’t smell fish. He was strangling Monster Control Bureau Special Agent Gaige Mosher, in a crap town filled with werewolves, and the cold thing pressed against his ear was Mosher’s 10mm Glock 20. Mosher managed to hiss. “Let. Me. Go. Asshole.”

  Stark removed his elbow, withdrew the knife, and stepped back. Mosher lifted his pistol in one hand and kept it on Stark. “Easy, Gaige. That’s insubordination.” Stark carefully lowered the knife to his side. “Come on no
w—”

  “Stay back,” Mosher ordered. He put one hand on the doorknob. “You’ve gone insane. I can’t believe this. You’ve cracked under stress.”

  Stark laughed. “That’s absurd. I was just messing with you. We’ll work through this together.”

  “Bullshit! I’m done with you, Stark. If this is how the MCB works, I’m done with it, too!” Mosher was furious. “I’m done sitting around with my thumb up my ass while people are dying. You chicken-shit, I can’t believe you. We’ve got guns. We’ve got training. We’re supposed to be the heroes. Not janitors. Our duty is to protect this country from monsters.”

  He’d be damned if he was going to get yelled at by some corn-fed Iowa junior jar-head. “Don’t you dare lecture me on duty, boy. I was—”

  “You’re a bureaucrat. You’re a lazy, washed-up, good-for-nothing hack. You push papers, go to meetings, sign the reports, but you’ve forgotten what the job was!”

  “This is the end of your career.”

  “Career? You’re still thinking about that? I’m talking about our job. Our job is to be heroes. That’s what I signed up for. Ass-kicking, monster-killing heroes. You can sit here and dick around with your pop machine, I’m going to go do my job.” Careful to keep the Glock on Stark, Mosher opened the door. “See you around, Agent Stark.”

  Stark’s eyes flashed to what was standing in the doorway. “Oh shit.”

  Mosher frowned. “I’m not falling for that.”

  The charred, blackened, twisted form that had been Deputy Joe Buckley rose behind Mosher. The werewolf’s hair had been burned off, exposing thick muscles that cracked and bled as he moved. Ruined lips parted in a snarl of jagged teeth, dripping a slurry of bloody ash. Mosher heard the sound and turned, armor creaking. The agent and the werewolf stood nose to nose.

  And then Joe Buckley bit Mosher on the face.

  Stark blinked as blood splattered him. Mosher screamed and kicked as Buckley dragged him into the hall. There was a series of loud bangs as Mosher ineffectually fired his pistol. Stark hurried and kicked the door shut, but not before he saw that all of his neatly stacked corpses in the hallway were getting up.

  “You suck at this,” Lins told Horst.

  “Screw you,” Horst muttered, lacking the energy to argue. Plus, it was taking all his attention to maneuver the Escalade without getting stuck.

  “No, really, man. You need to go back to whatever it was you did before, because you’re a really lousy monster hunter.”

  They’d gotten lost again. Sure, it was a really small town, but Harbinger had knocked him senseless, maybe even given him a minor concussion, which was making it hard to concentrate, and everything looked the same when it was covered in snow. This was what the stupid GPS was for, but according to it their car was in the middle of a giant blue field.

  There was a terrible moan from the back of the Caddy. Horst cringed, wishing she’d just hurry up and die or something. Jo Ann sounded really bad. He hadn’t checked on her for a while, since the last time he’d looked she’d been so puffy and slimy. She probably should’ve died already, but she was hanging on for some reason, being a pain in the ass.

  “What if she mutates into one of those giant pelican robots?” Lins asked, risking a glance over his shoulder. The side of his head was swollen and purple from Harbinger’s beating.

  “Well, we don’t know what those even are. I figure she’ll either die, or maybe they can fix her. So if she does . . . mutate . . . then we collect the PUFF on her, I guess.”

  Lins stared at him. “Now that’s some cold shit right there.”

  Horst had lost one employee, murdered another, and had another one poisoned. It had been a really tough night. Right then, he’d have collected PUFF on his own mother. “There’s the hospital.”

  “Maybe we should just dump her and get out of here,” Lins suggested.

  “Who’s cold now?”

  “She’s not my girlfriend.”

  “Trust me, Larry,” Horst said. His only surviving employee snorted. “There’s a method to my madness.”

  “Oh, what’s your brilliant plan now? We’re down to what, two guns? How much silver we got left? Your million-dollar werewolf isn’t even a werewolf. What’re we gonna do now, smart guy?”

  Horst smiled. “Remember how I told you it smelled like burned hair when I went in there earlier? That’s because they’d burned a werewolf upstairs. We know Harbinger’s busy, so he probably hasn’t collected it. All that PUFF money, just sitting there. . . .”

  Lins nodded slowly, then grinned. “I take back what I said. That’s good thinking. And we only have to split it two ways.”

  The smile on his face was forced now. “Yeah, totally.” Maybe he should have shot Lococo and Lins at the same time. It wasn’t like he’d been particularly useful.

  How did MHI make this stuff look so easy?

  The lights were on, which meant the generator was still running. At least it would be warm inside. This place was brain-numbingly cold. There were a bunch more cars this time, and he could see people standing in the entrance, and this time they had guns. They didn’t look like Feds or Hunters, though, just regular people, probably standing guard over their injured. “Well, here we are.”

  “What’s that?” Lins asked, pointing toward the second floor.

  His eyes flicked over just in time to see the window slide open as a large man dressed in black crawled through. “What’s that moron doing?” The man fell from the wall into the snow drift. It was a pretty significant drop. “Weird. Wonder what’s got into him?” The man immediately popped up out of the snow and limped toward them. “Stark?”

  “Who?” Lins asked.

  “The MCB guy,” Horst began to explain, but Stark turned, raised a pistol in one hand, and fired off several quick shots at the window he’d just jumped from. “Shit!”

  Horst threw it into reverse. The tires began to spin on the ice. He looked over his shoulder, clear, and then spun back around. He nearly jumped out of his skin when Stark crashed face-first into the driver’s side window. Stark banged on the glass. Another shape came out the window, only this one didn’t even try to slow its descent. It just dived out, head-first, and disappeared into the drift.

  They began to roll backward; Stark ran alongside. He was shouting something that looked like Help me. The black shape came out of the snow. Stark turned and fired several times. The shape went back down. This time Horst could hear him clearly. “Let me in!” Stark reached the back door and began tugging on the handle, but it was locked. “Let me in, you pricks!” He began to fall behind. “Pricks!”

  “Ryan, look!” Lins shouted.

  The glass front doors of the hospital were now coated in red. . . . But there’d been men standing there just a second ago. . . . “Whoa.” One door swung open, and a man in a big floppy wool hat spilled out, running for his life. He slipped and fell as a woman followed him out the door. She was moving weird, all crouched over, but fast. Her clothing was ripped apart and hanging off. She was on him in a second, raking him with her fingers, only they weren’t fingers at all. They were black claws. The snow all around them turned pink. “Whoa,” Horst repeated.

  Fixated on the sight, he drove their back bumper right into the side of a parked truck. They lurched to a sudden halt. Horst whacked his chin on the steering wheel.

  Agent Stark caught up. He shattered the backseat window with his pistol, and then reached through to unlock the door. He slid inside. “Drive! Drive, you idiot! Drive!” Horst put it in gear and gunned it. Unable to gain traction, the wheels just spun. “Not like that, damn it!” The thing that had been chasing Stark was up and coming after them. Stark shoved both hands out the window and started shooting. The gun was right behind Horst’s left shoulder. It was extremely loud.

  Lins was saying something. “—slow at first. Get it rolling.”

  More things were coming out the front of the hospital. One door was open, but they just crashed through the glass of the other a
nd kept on running. They looked like people, but they weren’t. Some of them appeared more like the werewolf pictures he’d been shown in Newbie training, but not quite. It was like they were stuck in between the two forms, all ungainly and messed up. They weren’t hairy at all, though their skin seemed too tight, like you could see the color of their muscles through it, but they had claws and they had fangs and they were coming this way fast.

  “Drive, or I’ll kill you myself!” Stark shouted in Horst’s ear while he reloaded his pistol.

  It took all his self-control to do it correctly. He gently fed the Caddy gas. Easy. Slowly. Which was difficult when a horde of shrieking lunatics were heading right at you.

  A tire caught, they started forward, and then they were gaining traction and speed. Horst began to laugh, but it turned into a shriek as one of the monsters landed on the hood. He was wearing a black armor suit and had a short rifle slung across his chest, though the thing seemed totally unaware of the fact it possessed a gun at all. Most of the face was missing except for a long strip of scalp dangling across the bright red skull. He still had both eyes, only they were impossibly wide, milky-white, and utterly dead. The thing opened a mouth full of long, pointy teeth but made no sound. The half-werewolf slammed a gloved fist into the windshield, shattering it right between the front seats and obscuring their view.

  “Mosher!” Stark shouted. He leaned forward and stuck his pistol between Horst and Lins. He cranked off at least half a dozen deafening shots before the thing disappeared from the hood.

  “What’s a Mosher?” Lins cried.

  “My partner.” Stark was panting. “Was my partner. He already changed into one of them! Infection to transformation in seconds; death followed by almost instantaneous reanimation. . . . Oh, this is bad. This is bad.”

  They were on the road. Horst checked his mirror. The monsters were running along behind, and they were keeping up. The first man that had come out of the hospital was convulsing and twitching on the ground. A second later, he popped up and ran after the rest of the pack.