The Monster Hunters

  The door exploded inward and two agents were hurled through, landing and rolling painfully across the floor. Harbinger came in fast, charging directly into the agents standing over Trip and Holly. He went swiftly into the path of their rising muzzles. He attacked, dodged between the guns, struck the agents down with his bare hands, batted aside a rifle, grasped the final Fed by his web gear and slung him back into the wall with a horrible crash.

  I had never seen a man move that quickly.

  Distracted by Harbinger’s superhuman display, I did not see Franks’ movement. He forced his palm into my face, pushing me off balance. He bladed off, protecting his right side, going for his pistol. I struggled forward, trying to reach his gun hand. Time slowed down. The pistol came up and out of the holster.

  “Stop! Stop!” screamed Myers.

  Franks froze. His Glock held in a tight, low retention position. Finger on the trigger. Indexed directly at my sternum. His eyes were locked on mine. If I moved at all, I was dead.

  Julie was still lying on the floor, but had rolled far enough to reach the flamethrower. It was humming, pointed at Myers’ legs. The agent that she had knocked over had pressed his pistol into her back. Harbinger stood over the stunned forms of the other downed Feds. The Fed by Gretchen was holding his leg where her totem stick had stabbed him. Unfortunately he had raised his G36 and it was pointed at Gretchen’s head. I could not see most of the Feds’ expressions behind their black balaclavas, but I imagined that they were about as tense as I was. If one person twitched wrong, a whole bunch of us were going to get shot or immolated. It was the most screwed-up Mexican stand-off I had ever seen.

  Another Fed entered the room, hands held above his head, Sam Haven pushing close behind with the muzzle of his pistol screwed into the back of the agent’s neck just under the helmet.

  “Nobody move or I’ll waste this punk!” Sam shouted. He paused as he studied the complicated situation, before shrugging and spitting some tobacco juices. “Oh . . . never mind. Y’all are ahead of me.” He sounded rather disappointed.

  “Don’t spit on the floor, you ape!” Julie ordered. It may have been scorched and blasted with shrapnel, but it was still her house.

  Harbinger’s hands were empty of weapons, but after the display of physical prowess I had just seen, nobody was in a hurry to mess with him. Five Feds lay on the ground moaning or whimpering. He shouted down the hallway he had entered from, “Milo! How you doing?”

  “Hurry up. There’s like a hundred Feds coming this way. And they looked pissed!”

  “Myers. Turn on your damn phone,” Harbinger commanded. “Do it now.”

  The Fed complied. He slowly reached into the pocket of his suit, pulled out the phone and turned it on. Immediately we all heard that annoying “Take Me Out to the Ball Game.”

  “I hate that ring,” I said, as I looked over Franks’ Glock.

  “Me too,” he agreed, not letting the gun waver at all.

  “I shut it off when we landed. It’s kind of distracting on a raid,” Myers said defensively as he pushed the button to answer it. “This is Agent Myers.”

  “Yes, I will hold for . . .” The senior agent sounded surprised. “Oh . . . Hello, sir . . . Sorry . . . I apologize . . . Yes, sir . . . Yes, sir . . . But this is outside the regular chain of command . . .” We heard half of the conversation. Myers seemed remarkably collected considering Julie had the flamethrower pointed at him. The agent pointing the rifle at Gretchen looked a little shaky. I hoped this did not take long. “But, sir . . . But . . . But . . . We can . . . But . . . Yes, sir . . . I understand . . .” We waited for the conversation to end. “Understood . . . Good-bye, sir.”

  He refolded the phone and dropped it back into this pocket.

  “Stand down,” he shouted. “Everybody stand down.” The guns in the ballroom slowly began to lower. Sam pulled his Sig 220 out of the back of the agent’s neck. Julie set the flamethrower down.

  “Tell the guys outside that too!” Milo blurted from down the hall. “There’s a big black helicopter looking at me!”

  Myers spoke into the radio. “Stand down. All units stand down. That is an order.”

  Tense moments passed as everyone complied. Franks was the last to do so. With the Glock still pointing at my heart he told me simply, “I’ll get to kill you one of these days.” He slowly lowered the weapon and reholstered.

  “Take a number,” I replied.

  “Well, Harbinger. I’m surprised,” Myers said. He looked flustered and angry. He still reminded me of a professor, only now he looked like one who had just found out his tenure had been denied. “That’s outside the chain of command, but you know I’m not going to go against a cabinet-level appointee.”

  “You heard him,” Harbinger stated shortly. “We have a truce. Y’all can get the hell out of here.”

  “For now. As soon as I get orders from the Director, he’s going to be overridden, and then I’m going to arrest every single one of you for assaulting federal agents and aiding and abetting a fugitive.”

  “I figure that will probably take more than forty-eight hours. So by then either the world is going to be destroyed or this is all a moot point. Until then you have your orders,” Harbinger said coldly. “You can take the Place. We clean up the local infestations. We tell you what we know. You leave us alone.”

  The senior agent appeared to mull that over. The idea seemed to leave a bad taste in his mouth. “Fine. For now . . .” Myers said coldly. “We’ll see about that in the long term, Earl.”

  I moved to help Julie stand. She looked shaky. Her wound had reopened, but there was not too much blood. She pushed me away. “I’m okay,” she said.

  “Bull,” I stated. “Let me help you.” I took her by the arm.

  “All units. We’re clear. Hold your fire. Prepare to pull out,” Myers ordered into the radio. The Feds attended to their injured. The five men that Harbinger had attacked were all stirring, though some looked to be nursing broken bones. “You better not have seriously hurt any of my men,” he told Harbinger. “I don’t care how important some people think you are, Earl, I’ll personally make sure your special status is revoked, and I’ll see to it you rot in prison forever.”

  “I didn’t hurt them too bad,” Harbinger said simply. He spread his hands innocently, though he could not mask his predatory confidence. Somehow he had moved, weaponless, through a crowd of ready and armed men, and beaten down any of them that stood in his way. “They shouldn’t have tried to stop me.”

  I remembered how Harbinger had saved me from Darné. At the time I had assumed that it had just been some sort of pro Monster Hunting trick, but after watching him dispatch the Feds with relative ease, I knew that something else was going on. “Just what the hell is he?” I said softly into Julie’s ear. Somehow Harbinger heard me from across the room. He winked.

  “It’s a long story,” she replied brusquely. “Earl, Grant’s missing. Dad’s dead.”

  “No,” Harbinger said. His face fell. “Aw hell.”

  “My men have not reported any other Hunters on the premises,” Myers said. “They probably took your man.”

  “Milo?” Harbinger shouted.

  “I’m not getting Grant’s signal on GPS. It’s either broke or disabled. . . . He was wearing his armor, right?”

  “Yes. He was on guard duty,” she shouted back down the hall.

  “Sorry, Julie. I’ve got nothing.”

  “He will be avenged,” Sam told her. The big cowboy was solemn. “I promise.”

  “If it’s any consolation, I’m sorry. But we’re wasting time,” Myers stated. “I need a Place, and I need it now. You have my word. Whatever thing you have hiding out there, we won’t bother it.”

  “Deal,” Harbinger said. “Julie?”

  “Somewhere inside Natchy Bottom, Mississippi,” she told the room after an instant of hesitation. She would have to grieve later. “You know about it?”

  “Yes. We know it,” the senior agent replied. “
Bad place. Where though? That’s a lot of swamp to cover.”

  “Dad said that it was hidden. You need to talk to the Wendigo to find out where.”

  “Impossible,” Myers said. “Those are just Indian fairy tales.”

  “Nope,” Harbinger said. “The Bottoms belong to him. We have an understanding.”

  “Fine. We’ll handle it. You and your thugs can clean up the local undead outbreaks,” Myers snapped. “We’ll set up on the Place and blow the Cursed One to kingdom come.”

  “One problem,” Julie said. “The Wendigo isn’t going to talk to you. You’re going to be wandering around the woods for weeks. You know what the Bottoms are like. The rules don’t apply there.”

  “Let me guess,” Myers said. He exhaled slowly, apparently trying to control his anger. “This thing will talk to you people though.”

  “He’ll only talk to me,” Harbinger said, before adding with a note of barely concealed disgust, “looks like we’re going with you.”

  Myers cursed. The man had a remarkable gift for creative profanity.

  “Looks like we get to work together,” I told Franks cheerfully.

  The silent brute just nodded as he patted his Glock, doubtlessly contemplating the moment he would finally get to use it on me.

  “This is it,” I said. “We know where the Cursed One is going to be. We finish this tomorrow—one way or the other.”

  “About time,” Sam said. “Grant was one of us. That slimy bastard is gonna pay.” The big cowboy kicked at the gravel.

  “Yeah,” Milo added with what was, for him, unusual somberness. He wore his night-vision monocular and scanned back and forth across the property.

  The three of us were standing in the darkened driveway of the Shackleford ancestral home near the vehicles. We were waiting for the others. Gretchen was applying some first aid to Trip after the little bit of “stick time” he had received. Holly was grabbing some gear. Harbinger and Julie were standing about a hundred yards away, talking quietly between themselves. Apparently Julie had a few things that she needed to speak with him about privately. The Feds had left, quite a bit worse for wear after the beating that some of them had received from Harbinger.

  “What do you think they did with him?” I asked. I did not like the way that we were talking about our companion as if he were already dead, but I could not realistically see much hope for the alternative.

  “The Old Man’s journal said that they needed to sacrifice a Hunter to use their device,” Milo said. “I’m guessing that poor Grant is going to get himself sacrificed.”

  “Sucky way to die,” Sam agreed.

  “Do they need to keep him alive until the full moon? There is a possibility he could be alive still.”

  “Maybe,” Milo said. “We can hope.” He sounded doubtful. Most of the seasoned Hunters’ missions involved search and destroy, rather than rescue.

  Having eavesdropped on Grant’s contrition earlier made him somehow more human now, and made his being taken that much more difficult to stomach. But a tiny, ugly part of me hated him even more now, because I could see that Julie was taking his disappearance hard, and I found myself somehow jealous of someone who was probably already dead. We sat in silence for a few moments. In the distance I could see that Julie and Harbinger were arguing. She looked rather angry and animated as the senior Hunter tried to explain something.

  “What do you think they’re fighting about?” I asked.

  “I’m guessing she wants to know if Earl knew that Susan was a vampire,” Milo answered as he looked upward through the night vision. “I can never get over how many stars you can see through one of these things.”

  “Did he know?”

  “Beats me,” Sam answered. “We had our suspicions, of course. We had never found her body, and they had been hunting a vampire. I mean, I guess we all kind of thought about it, but none of us wanted to think it was a real possibility. You gotta understand, we loved Susan. The idea of having any of us turned to the other side . . . well, that . . . That just ain’t no good.”

  “I’ve got a chainsaw with my name on it in my workshop,” Milo told us happily. “If I’m ever killed by undead, I want you guys to chop me up with it. It’s a good chainsaw.”

  “I reckon it is, Milo. I would be honored to chop your head off,” Sam said. I worked with some interesting folks.

  The lights in the house were extinguished. Trip, Holly and Gretchen joined us a moment later. Since we had blown holes in the ballroom, and the Feds had kicked in all of the doors and many of the windows, we could not even lock up anything other than the vault. I just hoped that nobody came up here and looted the place while we were gone.

  Trip was limping and did not look very good. “Now I know how Rodney King felt,” he said through swollen gums. One eye was matted shut, and Gretchen had smeared him with some sort of foul-smelling cream.

  “Yeah, but you ain’t gonna get no million-dollar settlement to blow on hookers and crack like he did,” Sam said wryly. “We’re just waiting for the boss and we can get out of here. We got us some monsters to kill.”

  Julie and Harbinger continued fighting for another minute, before finally coming to some sort of terms. He hugged her as she sobbed on his shoulder.

  “She’s had a tough night,” Milo said simply. Estranged father dead. Boyfriend missing. Mother revealed to be undead. Milo Anderson was a master of understatement. None of us disagreed.

  “I’ve got a question,” Trip asked. “How come Grant didn’t sound the alarm? I woke up when I heard Owen shouting.”

  “Probably snuck up on him,” I lied. In truth I had a pretty good idea of what had happened. Probably something similar to what Susan had tried on me, only Grant had probably not realized what was going on until it was too late.

  Holly knew the truth. “Vampires can be seductive. You saw what she was wearing. She probably floated in as mist, put on some of Julie’s things, and bit Grant when he thought he was going to get lucky. Then she tried the same thing on Z here . . .” She pointed at me. “So did you score with your friend’s dead mom?”

  “It sounds gross when you put it that way.” It didn’t do me much good to lie at that point. “I got to second base before I realized she wasn’t breathing,” I stammered with no small amount of embarrassment. “Hey, I thought she was Julie.” And then I felt really stupid for saying that. Luckily she was still standing far enough away to have not heard.

  “Way to go, Big Guy.” Sam punched me in the shoulder. “If you had been a little dumber, you could have put a whole new meaning to ‘staking’ vampires.”

  “That’s horrible,” Trip said as he pressed a bag of ice against the side of his head.

  “Whatever. She would’ve bit you next,” Holly said.

  “Probably not. I would have sounded the alarm,” he answered.

  “Sure you would have . . . church boy.”

  “No really, I’ve never . . .” He caught himself. “Uh . . . never mind.”

  “No way.” Holly sounded stunned. “Are you saying . . . No way. You’re what? Twenty-seven?”

  Trip looked very uncomfortable.

  “Saving it for marriage?” Milo interjected, looking alien with his massive beard poking out from under his night vision. “Good for you, Trip.” At least he had the Mormon contingent’s approval.

  “I didn’t know you Rastafarians did that kind of thing,” Sam said. “I figured you all partied.”

  “Baptist,” Trip said quickly.

  “Oh, I just figured with the funky hair and whatnot. You should shave that thing then. You would look good.” Sam spat into the gravel. I made a mental note never to listen to the fashion advice of a man with a mullet and a puffy trucker hat.

  “Yeah, you would look like Shaft,” I added helpfully. “Not the old one, the new one.”

  “Chicks dig that on a black dude. Be sure to get yourself laid then, kid,” Sam told him with great confidence.

  “But . . . Wait . . . It’s a person
al choice, damn it,” Trip sputtered.

  “Okay guys. Here’s the plan.” Thankfully Harbinger interrupted. He lit a cigarette as he approached. It was back to business. Julie looked sad, but resolute and determined. The director just looked angry. “Back to base. Gear up. We will form an assault element. We’re going to meet the Feds in Natchy Bottom in the morning. Milo, load up everything you can think of. Julie, Sam, you two contact every other team in the country. Have them drop whatever they’re working on and get back here now. Our team hits the Bottoms, everybody else hits the local outbreaks.” He pointed at me. “Newbie squad, take a car. Take Gretchen back to her people.”

  I had almost forgotten about the small woman. She was so quiet, and cloaked in her shapeless robes she nearly disappeared in the shadows. Harbinger bowed toward her in a sign of sincere respect, and said something in her language. It sounded like gurgles and clicks to me. She replied, gravelly and deep.

  “Thank you, Gretchen. You bring great honor to your clan,” he said and turned back to me. “Get her home. She isn’t a warrior, but she performed like one tonight. MHI will always be in her clan’s debt. There is a little road just north of the compound. Follow it. She’ll show you the way. Don’t get jumpy if they get weird on you, remember they’re our friends.”

  The group dispersed to their tasks. I grabbed Julie by the arm. “Wait.” I didn’t know what to say, but I needed to say something.

  She turned around, great dark circles under her eyes. “What? What is it, Owen?”

  “I’m sorry about your parents, and I’m sorry about Grant . . .”

  She raised her hand and cut me off. “No. No you’re not.”

  “No, I . . .” I stammered.

  “You wanted Grant dead, didn’t you?” she snapped. “Well, looks like you got your wish.” She spun and walked away.

  The compound was not that far away from the Shackleford home. We took Grant’s car. The interior was immaculate and the XM stations were all preprogrammed for classical music. At least I could hear again; Gretchen’s purple goo had worked well. Trip and Holly were in the back seat, and Gretchen rode up front. I passed the lane leading to the compound, and slowed down as Gretchen pointed out a tiny path cloaked in trees and moss. The narrow road was so overgrown with vegetation that the headlights only cut a small swath before us.