The Monster Hunters

  “Not my call, Pitt. I just enforce policy. I don’t make it.” He began to walk back to the waiting Blackhawk.

  “You murder survivors and witnesses!” I shouted. “You destroy lives to keep up this illusion of safety! People should know what’s really out there.”

  Myers paused, turned, and shook his head sadly. “Can you imagine what would happen if the world found out the truth? Chaos. Pandemonium. No. People need to be kept safe from themselves, and I’ll do whatever I have to, lie, cheat . . . kill . . . anything, to keep my country safe.” The professor was a dedicated man.

  It was disgusting. “How do you sleep at night?”

  Myers actually chuckled, his normally bureaucratic demeanor apparently damaged by his losses. “I don’t. If you knew what was coming”—he resumed walking, the wind from the rotors snapping his cheap tie over his shoulder and making it difficult to hear—“you wouldn’t sleep anymore either.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” I shouted after him.

  But he didn’t answer. The chopper lifted off a minute later, leaving me to ponder what it was that Myers thought was coming. Clearly there was more to this cult than the Feds were letting on. Lee hobbled around the side of our van. He was in jeans and a Schlock Mercenary tee shirt. He had bailed out of the compound so fast he hadn’t even had time to gear up. Grant must have gotten dressed on the road. The sight of Lee in normal attire made me especially thankful for my friends. They hadn’t hesitated to go after me any more than I had for my own brother. “Z, I’ve got Harbinger on the phone. He’s been trying to reach you.”

  I pulled out my cell phone. It had gotten cracked at some point during the evening’s excitement. “Piece of crap!” I cocked my fist back and chucked it far out into the Alabama River. That small bit of random violence made me feel better.

  Lee shook his head and grinned. “You know the company phones have a warranty on them, right? You could have got that replaced for free. Now you’ll have to buy a new one.”

  I groaned. “What did he say?” I knew it had to be some variation of Pitt, you suck. Go hide at the compound. Lee handed me his phone.

  My boss actually sounded concerned. “How’re y’all doing?”

  “We’re good. Only minor injuries.” I hurried, knowing that he was going to rip me for disobeying his orders. “We got to my brother in time. Agent Franks is dead.” Saying that sounded weird. Franks had always seemed so stoic, so invulnerable, that it was hard to imagine anything being able to end his life.

  “He was a jackass but he was a pro,” Earl said simply.

  I turned away so the others wouldn’t hear. Something that Bia said had been gnawing at me. “The creatures knew I was coming. Somebody told them I was on my way. There is a spy at the compound.”

  There was a long silence at the other end while Earl mulled that over. “Either there or it could have been somebody who’s with me right now. Julie got your message and told everybody else. We’re on our way back. I’ve got an idea. I want you to meet me someplace. Can you ditch the Feds?”

  “Already done.”

  “Okay, Lee’s driving? Pass the phone back to him.”

  I walked back to the others and handed the phone to Lee. “What’s going on?” Grant asked. Lee was listening to instructions and went forward to program an address into the onboard GPS.

  “Earl wants us to meet him somewhere.”

  “I don’t like it. Myers said we should go back to the compound,” Grant said.

  “Screw him,” I said automatically. “When did you start caring what the Feds say?”

  Grant snorted like that was absurd. “I don’t.”

  “You’re just worried that you’re too pretty for prison.” They’d have loved Grant in Tijira. Lee came back. “Where to, man?”

  “Birmingham. Harbinger gave me an address for a house in a neighborhood called Hensley.” Lee said.

  “Never heard of it, but cool.” So Harbinger had something up his sleeve after all. The whole “hide and wait for the bad guys to kill me” plan hadn’t gone real well so far, so hopefully he had found a way to go on the offensive.

  I like being offensive.

  Chapter 8

  Birmingham was the next big city north of Montgomery. It took us awhile to drive the van through all of the various detours that popped up in the aftermath of the concert. It gave Gretchen a chance to bounce around between the seats, applying greasy, smelly ointments to all of our various injuries.

  “Yes, damn it, Tim. The tour bus exploded . . . Yeah, you heard me. Ex-Plode-Ed,” Mosh said into Lee’s borrowed cell phone with quite a bit of consternation. He had wanted to contact his band to let them know that he was still alive. “No, I don’t know what’s going on . . . Atlanta? Hell, I guess we’re probably going to have to cancel it, don’t you think? Since the bus exploded.” He shook his head sadly. “Okay, whatever, I’ll call you back as soon as I can.” My brother handed the borrowed phone back and then banged his forehead against the window.

  Yep, I’ve had nights like that before.

  Mosh wasn’t very responsive and appeared deep in thought. He hadn’t even commented as Gretchen had applied a paste made out of old squirrels and herbs to the scratches on his face and arms. I had thought about taking him to a real hospital but I knew that he was a lot safer with me than floating around out there, alone and a target.

  The worst injury to our contingent had been to Edward. Bia had clubbed him pretty good. He was resting in the back, and Gretchen informed us that he would be just fine. Orcs were built tough.

  The broken windows made conversation difficult but at least the airflow made the evaporating gas stink from my soaked boots bearable. Grant rode shotgun, literally in this case, with a 12-gauge FN auto-loader sitting across his lap. It was still unknown just how much info the Condition had about us but we were a relatively small and vulnerable force out here on our own.

  Lee had asked for details on the monsters while Gretchen pasted an inch-long cut on my scalp shut. I had lost a lot of scars because of the magical healing at DeSoya Caverns but I was having no problem picking up new ones. Lee had pumped his fist in the air when I had told him the details of Force and Violence’s demise. “Yes!” our librarian shouted. “The clay, the explosions, the ghosts, that’s textbook right there. They were giant, animated soul containers. I was right. They were definitely oni, disembodied spirits living inside a created form. That’s awesome.” He turned to look at me over the seat. Apparently I gave him a stupid look. “Don’t you get it?”

  “Uh, no? And watch the road, I’ve already been in two car accidents tonight. Don’t make me make a tacky comment about Asian drivers.”

  “Puh-leeze, like I’ve got a Camry with a giant spoiler on it.”

  Lee flipped back around. “PUFF on an ogre is only like twenty grand, depending on the breed. They’re big but they aren’t anything special. The PUFF bounty on an oni is in the hundreds of thousands.”

  Grant perked right up at that. “You all saw it. I got a confirmed on the purple one. So I’m the primary,” he said smugly. At MHI, the entire company shared bounties, but the team, or in this case, the individual who did the most work, got the most pay. “And to think Earl left me behind to train stupid Newbies while he wasted his time on some wimpy trolls. How many hundreds are we talking about?”

  “I’ll have to look it up. It’s not like anybody has killed one of these in a long time.” Lee almost giggled. He was such a dork when it came to monster lore. “And the best part? The Feds smoked the big one, but the law says that government representatives can’t collect PUFF.”

  “Really? Agents don’t get PUFF?” Grant was incredulous. “That’s . . . that’s crazy. Well, good thing I’m not a Fed! We’ll file the paperwork for an assist on the red one in the morning.” He had been MHI’s golden boy once, but had left in disgrace. Pulling off a great kill in his first few days back would probably help his reputation. “They couldn’t have got him without our providing a
distraction.”

  “Oh, that’ll piss off Myers, but good.” Lee held out his fist for Grant to bump knuckles. Grant looked at him awkwardly for a moment and then did so.

  “On a personal note, it sucks to be the number one target of a godlike interdimensional being, but it sure is good for business,” I added.

  “That’s it.” Mosh finally spoke up. “I’ve had about enough of this shit. PUFF? Ogres? Oni? Who the hell are you people?” He jerked his thumb to where the orcs were sitting quietly in back. “What the hell are those people?” He turned toward me and stabbed one callused fingertip into my armored chest. “And you. You owe me an explanation or you can pull this thing over and let me out right now.”

  I glanced out the window. It was the middle of the night and we were in the country. “Not the best place to hitch a ride, bro.”

  “I swear I’m about to beat you like a tetherball,” Mosh said.

  “Well, it’s a long story,” I began.

  “Give me the short version.”

  “Monsters are real. We make lots of money killing them,” Lee piped in.

  “I didn’t ask you. I asked my stupid brother, who I’m guessing isn’t really a CPA.” He thumped me in the armor. “I want answers.”

  I laughed. “Short version?”

  Mosh gave me a dangerous look. “Break it down for me.”

  Well, if he wanted to be that way . . . “Cool. Remember last year when my accounting supervisor turned out to be a serial killer? Nope. Werewolf. Remember last time we talked and I told you about my new finance job? Nope. Monster Hunter. These guys are some of my coworkers.” I waved toward Grant and Lee, then I jerked my thumb to the rear. “Those folks back there are orcs, but it’s all good, they’re on our side. That muscle-bound guy who got killed back at the overpass? He was my bodyguard, assigned by a shadow government agency that keeps monsters secret from the public. The things at the concert were mythical creatures hired by a death cult to sacrifice me to a giant space mollusk because they think I poked it in the eye with a nuclear weapon last summer . . . Any questions?”

  Mosh glared. “You always were a dick.”

  “You ready for the long version now?”

  I wrapped up as much of my story as possible by the time our GPS guided us to the location that Harbinger had given Lee. It was in an old, run-down, kind of scary area on the northwest side of Birmingham. We pulled onto a narrow street. To our immediate left was a series of fat, rectangular, red-brick buildings. Each identical building was aesthetically awful, with barred windows and knee-high brown weeds in the neglected yards. We were in the Projects.

  “So, what do you think?” I asked my brother. “We cool?”

  Mosh had been stroking his goatee and quietly looking out the window for the last little while. He turned back to face me. He was still incredulous, but taking it well. “Why didn’t you tell me this before?”

  Honestly, I had wanted to. I shrugged. “If you hadn’t seen what you saw earlier, would you have believed me anyway?”

  “No. I would have told you to put down the crack pipe. But now? Hard to argue with what I saw tonight.” When I had first joined MHI, Harbinger had told me that Hunters’ greatest weapons were the flexibility of their minds—their ability to take in situations, no matter how weird, and just deal with them. I had made a pretty good Hunter, and judging by my brother’s reactions, flexible minds ran in the family.

  Hensley had the look of a tough town. The streets were mostly deserted at this late hour, but there were still knots of rough young men standing under the streetlights on various corners. They glared at us suspiciously as we drove by, not recognizing us as part of their regular customer base. “Friendly place,” Grant said, clutching the shotgun. Now this would certainly be the wrong vehicle to carjack.

  “Come on, trust-fund baby. You haven’t been in the ’hood before?” I asked sarcastically. “This is the kind of place that me and Mosh grew up in. Right, bro?”

  Mosh raised a single eyebrow. We had grown up in a middle-class suburb, but he was quick enough to play along. “Hell yeah, straight up ghetto. Right out of Compton. Slinging . . . gats. Yeah.”

  “Word,” I said.

  “Pimpin’ ain’t easy,” Mosh stated, dead serious.

  Grant shook his head, having his negative opinion of me confirmed again. Lee stifled a laugh, realizing immediately how full of crap we were.

  The GPS computer voice told us to make a turn and head down under a railway into an even older neighborhood. Lee had to hit the brakes to keep from creaming a nasty-looking Chow dog that blundered stupidly in front of us. To the right was a street of small frame houses, each one with a tiny front yard. The indicated address was the only one with lights on. An MHI vehicle was parked in the driveway and another was in the street. We pulled in behind it and stepped out.

  I heard deep barks coming from a dog in the fenced-in backyard. Other than that, this particular street seemed eerily dead. Trash and broken bottles were scattered in the other yards, and every single lawn was dead. There were a lot of smashed windows on this street. It looked like most of the surrounding houses were long since abandoned, leaving this one particular home isolated. It felt good to stretch my legs. There were a few random gunshots in the distance.

  “Owen,” Julie cried as she stepped out of the other MHI vehicle. She ran over and engulfed me in a hug. The Hunters from Esmeralda’s team piled out behind her. I kissed her forehead as she held me tight, almost like she was afraid to let go of me again. “I’m glad you’re okay.”

  “No biggie,” I said modestly.

  Mosh cleared his throat.

  “Oh, Julie, this is—”

  “David!” Julie said, letting go of me, and grabbing Mosh by the hand. She was almost as tall as he was. “Oh, I’ve heard so much about you!”

  Mosh looked surprised, first because of the use of his real name, and second because of how strong her handshake was. I’d had that reaction the first time I’d met her too. “You must be Julie . . . You know, I’ve never dated a Julie,” Mosh smirked. “But I did date Ms. July once and you are way prettier.”

  Julie hesitated, not sure how to take that particular compliment. “He actually did,” I explained with a sigh. My brother had dated centerfolds, supermodels, and famous actresses. Where I turned into a stammering moron around women, Mosh had always been smooth.

  Mosh grinned. “Z really talked you up.”

  “I bet. He’s a regular poet,” she said. “I’ve wanted to meet his family forever. We’ve got so much to talk about, but first—” She jerked her head toward the house. “Owen, Earl’s waiting for you inside.”

  “What is this place?” I asked.

  “I don’t know. He wouldn’t say. He was adamant: just you, and . . .” Her pause indicated that the next part was going to suck. “You need to leave your weapons out here.” She raised her hands defensively. “Yes, yes, I know. He knew you’d freak out, but he said he didn’t want to offend them.”

  Them? “Oh, what now?” I groaned. I hated being unarmed on principle, let alone after the week that I’d had, but I trusted Earl. I unslung Abomination. “Fine . . .” It took me almost a minute to completely disarm.

  Skippy joined us. He took one glance at the lit house, then shook his head sadly. “Trouble,” he muttered before wandering off.

  Under the orange streetlights, Mosh looked a bit apprehensive about being left with a bunch of heavily armed strangers. He grabbed me by the arm and leaned in close. “Where are you going?”

  “Just hang out, man. Besides, Julie can explain all this stuff way better than I can.”

  “Yeah, about that, you said she was hot, but . . . damn.” He whistled. “How the hell did someone like her go for someone like you?”

  “My charming personality.” I shrugged his hand off. “Now back off before I scissor-kick you in the neck. I’ll be back in a minute. Just relax.”

  A moment later I found myself at the waist-high chain-link gate in f
ront of the house. There was a plastic sign with a cartoon pit bull printed on it saying beware of dog. I lifted the latch, and walked up the path. Nothing came out to bite me. This yard was free of trash but the grass was just as brown and dead as the neighbors’. The streetlights were blocked by a few overgrown trees, and most of the yard was cloaked in shadow. There was one of those cheesy garden gnomes in the desiccated bushes of the flower bed but nothing else that gave a clue to the personality of the residents. Light was coming through the window but the blinds were drawn, so I couldn’t see a thing inside.

  This place gave me a bad vibe. I stepped up onto the porch and went to ring the doorbell, but paused as there was a flicker of light from the flower bed. I glanced down and realized it was orange ashes from the end of a fat cigar. The lawn ornament returned the lighter to the inside of its blue shirt, dusted the ashes out of its white beard, and swiveled its head toward me. Beady eyes peaked out from under a pointy red hat.

  I stood there awkwardly. “Hi.”

  “What you lookin’ at?” the tiny little man said. “Got a problem?”

  “No.”

  “Damn right, punk-ass bitch, best step off my porch,” he said around his massive cigar. He was a stocky eighteen inches tall, not including the hat, but his attitude indicated he meant business. “Hunters think they’re tough, actin’ up in here like they run the place? Ringin’ that bell’s gonna wake up Momma, and you don’t wanna wake up Momma.” He lifted his shirt, exposing the butt of a small pistol shoved in his waistband. “You hear me, big man?”

  “Hey, I don’t want trouble.”

  “That’s right, you don’t. I don’t take nothin’ off no Hunters,” he snarled around the cigar, one diminutive hand landing on the gun. “Move.”

  I stepped off the porch, my hands still held in front of me defensively. This was a strange encounter, even by my admittedly jaded standards. “I’m looking for Earl Harbinger.”

  “Your boy’s around back with my homies. We owe him a favor, only reason I don’t go upside your head and show your crew what’s up. I’m addicted to killin’, so don’t go temptin’ me.”