“So the last guy died too?” I had really been hoping that the Feds could have gotten something out of him.
Dad shrugged. “Looked like a liver hit. I’d be amazed if they got him to the hospital before he croaked. I’m getting sloppy in my old age. Mozambiqued the other assholes. Don’t dodge my question, boy.” He glanced at his watch. “I’m missing a fishing trip today because of this.”
“Okay . . .” I had thought about this moment, and the best way to convey it, for a long time, but all of my practiced lines were forgotten under the stare of those hard eyes. My entire life, this man hadn’t ever really approved of me. He had always been gruff and cold. The closest we had ever come to bonding was him teaching me to kill stuff. Well, when all else fails, go for brevity. “I’ll get right to it. Monsters are real. I’m one of the people who hunts them.”
Dad nodded slowly. “Pay good?”
“Pay’s awesome.”
“Monsters?” Dad took off his hat and set it on the small table between us. He scratched his bald spot. “All right then. I’m glad we got this all cleared up.”
That’s it? He showed no emotion. That wasn’t one of the outcomes that I had imagined. “Uh . . . cool. Any questions?”
He intertwined his fingers, put his elbows on the table, and studied me silently. I never could read him, and now was no different. It was like being under an electron microscope as he stared right through my façade of confidence. This man could read me like a teleprompter. “Oh, I got questions—lots.” Then he went back to glaring at me. It was extremely awkward. I shifted uncomfortably in my seat.
I’ve died twice, traveled through time, stopped an alien invasion, and battled just about every terrible being that hell could puke onto the surface of the Earth, but despite those facts, this man could still make me feel like a pathetic fat kid. It really pissed me off. My entire life I had striven to make him proud. I had failed every step of the way. No matter what I did, I would never measure up to his impossible ideals of what it meant to be a real man.
But no more. I knew what I was. And I didn’t have to take his shit anymore. I was going to make him understand. He was on my turf now. “Listen, Dad,” I said as I reached across the table and grabbed him by the arm. “I—”
Black energy crackled inside my skull.
“Damn it, boys. That was pathetic,” I shouted at my sons as I threw my own pack down. Personally, I was exhausted, but I wasn’t about to let them know it. They could never see weakness as an option. The boys were big and strong for their ages, but I had overloaded their bags on purpose. I knew that they had to be hurting bad by now. “That was slow.” I made a big show of looking at my dive watch. “We only averaged thirteen minutes a mile. Thirteen!”
“It was straight uphill!” Owen protested. He had to pause, pull out his asthma inhaler and take a deep puff. He didn’t use it nearly as much as he had when he was younger, but we were several thousand feet higher in elevation than he was used to.
“And the ground was all loose,” David whined. “My feet hurt.”
Damn right their feet hurt. My feet were killing me, and I had done forced marches most of my life. They were only fourteen and eleven. Their pack straps had probably abraded right through the skin of their shoulders by now. “You think if the enemy were right behind us they’d be complaining? Hell no, they would’ve chased us down, raped us to death, then cut us into steaks and eaten us.”
“But ‘the enemy’ aren’t chasing us, Dad. This was supposed to be a camping trip.” My oldest gestured around the mountainside. He had always been a smartass. The kid was incapable of knowing when to shut up. Despite how I was always farming him out to the neighbors for adult-level manual labor, and he was strong as hell, the boy was still pudgy. He paused to wipe the sweat off his face with his tee-shirt, not that it would do much good, since his shirt was already totally saturated.
David started crying. “I can smell Mom’s cooking. Camp’s right there. Can I go sit down now?”
“Yeah, go,” I jerked a thumb back toward camp. I could smell it too, and my stomach rumbled. “And don’t be such a baby.” I felt like a complete asshole as I said it, but I had started having the dream again, at least once a week now. Some nights I couldn’t sleep at all, even when the dream didn’t come, just because I couldn’t get it out of my mind. I didn’t pretend to understand the dream, but I knew it was true. My children couldn’t afford to be weak.
“Dude, drop your pack. I’ll take it,” Owen offered to his brother as he glared at me. Yeah, the boy may be chunky, but he’d inherited my mean streak. Good. Let him be angry. It gave him something to focus on. David shrugged out of the pack and handed it to his big brother. Owen cradled it in his arms as David ran for our campsite.
“This was supposed to be a fun weekend,” he said.
“Fun is relative,” I answered. “Having the strength and the knowledge to survive anything the world throws at you isn’t supposed to be fun. But it makes you a man. So man up and quit your crying.”
“You don’t always have to be such a jerk.” Owen spat as he walked away.
If only you knew, boy . . . if only you knew.
I took my time following them into camp. The forest was actually very peaceful as sunset approached. He was right. This was supposed to have been a vacation. I had retired from the Army a few years ago, and was now working as a bookkeeper, of all the idiotic things . . . So it wasn’t like I got to spend a lot of time in the great outdoors anymore.
My wife was waiting for me, arms folded, scowling, her blonde hair pulled up underneath a handkerchief. She smelled like wood smoke.
“Keeping the home fires burning, huh?” I joked.
She didn’t think I was funny. “Ten miles? You made them walk ten miles, and after skipping lunch?” She had grown up in a home where they often went hungry because of Communist ineptitude. To my wife, missing a meal as an American was a serious offense, because this was the Land of the Free, damn it.
“I have to do stuff like this . . . You know it.”
God bless her, she at least believed me. “You’ve been distant lately. The dream again?”
“It’s been bad.” The sound of an acoustic guitar started back at the tent. It was actually rather good. David certainly had a gift for that silly thing.
Ilyana nodded slowly, understanding. She was as pretty as the day I had first seen her, sneaking her dissident family over from the wrong side of the Iron Curtain. “You know that I trust you, but what if you’re mistaken? Your children think you’re a beast, you know. You push them too hard. And what if you’re wrong?”
“I pray every day that I’m wrong.” I bit my lip. Saying this made my voice tremble and break, and tears welled up involuntarily in my eyes. “But I know I’m not. I hear the war drums. Some day one of those boys will be known as the god slayer and that’s before it even gets really rough.”
No father should have to know that it is his son’s job to die saving the world.
Dad can cry?
I was back in the room, still clutching Dad’s arm. I let go, shocked by how hard I had been squeezing. There was an imprint on his forearm and he looked at me, stunned.
“Son, what’s wrong?”
It was the same thing that had happened a few days ago with Agent Myers. Somehow I was seeing other people’s memories. I shook my head. Only a few seconds had passed. I was nauseous and dizzy. When I closed my eyes hard I could still see the lightning shapes moving in the corners. They slowly dissipated. Stupid artifact. This vision brought to you by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and the Forces of Evil.
One of his sons had to save the world? I already had. Mordechai had told me that I had been picked before I was born for that job. How had Dad known so long ago? “You had a dream?” I asked. “What’s this dream show you?”
Dad was confused. “What are you talking about?”
I began to babble. “All these years, the way you treated us, the stuff you taught us. T
he shooting, the fighting, the survival skills, it was all because of a dream? God slayer?”
My normally imperturbable old man suddenly looked like he had stuck his finger in a light socket. “How do you know about that?” he demanded.
“Tell me!” I shouted. This startled Mom and Julie.
Dad shoved himself back from the table and stood. “No!” he bellowed. “You can’t know about that. You can never know.”
“Calm down, dear, remember your condition,” Mom scolded.
My father began to pace like a caged bear. It was almost like he was nervous. But that was impossible. “I kept it from you, because . . . I was scared.” He had never said that phrase ever before. Auhangamea Pitt was scared of nothing, or at least that’s what I had told myself my entire life. “I was scared for you, even before you were born. I didn’t want to believe the promise. It was just too terrible, but in the back of my mind, it was always there, so I tried to get you ready. That was my duty. The dream taught me what I had to do. Preparing you boys was my calling. That’s why I’ve done what I’ve done. That’s why I got so mad at David when he ran away. I was so fixated on this that I chased my own son away, and when that happened, I swore that I would forget about the damn dream and never talk about it again. You were grown, and I’d done my best, so my job was finished.”
I placed my hands on the table to steady myself. “Dad, listen, it doesn’t matter now, but I need to find out what you’ve seen.”
He shook his head. “I’m . . . I’m not ready.”
It was my turn to be the bossy one for once. “Well, you damn well better get ready then, because some serious shit is going down.”
“Don’t cuss,” Mom snapped automatically.
Dad quit pacing, returned to the table, and slowly sank into the chair. He seemed to shrink. That scared me. “I’ve had this dream for decades. In it, one of my sons has to die to save the world from something terrible. . . .” He sounded tired as he revealed his burden.
This whole thing was so damn shocking that I actually laughed out loud. “Dad, it’s okay! The stuff you taught me paid off. I’ve already saved the world. It’s okay. We beat the terrible thing last summer, and I’m still alive.”
“No,” he stated solemnly, like a man who knew his torment wasn’t yet over.
“Mr. Pitt, really, it’s okay,” Julie said soothingly. It was weird to hear her call my father “Mister,” but it wasn’t like she knew him at all, and she still didn’t know how to pronounce his first name properly anyway. Too many vowels. “Owen’s telling you the truth. I was there. He did what he was supposed to, and we all lived.”
“No.” Dad shook his head. He looked like he was going to cry. I had never seen that before. It was making me very uncomfortable. “What I’ve seen hasn’t happened yet. What you’ve seen so far is nothing. There are still a few signs left.”
“What are you talking about?” I had done my job. I had stopped the Cursed One. What else did they want from me? “Signs?”
My father began to speak, but there was a commotion out in the hall, and a sudden banging on the door. The door flew open, revealing Trip Jones. He was really excited, and his appearance indicated that he had run here. He must have just gotten back from exterminating trolls. “Sorry to interrupt, but you guys need to come with me right now. Z, Julie, you’ve got to see this. It’s really important.”
“Damn it . . .” I muttered. Mom scowled. “Sorry.” I stood and pointed at my father. “We’ll talk later.”
Dad pushed away from the table. “Owen, son . . .” And then he surprised me. He grabbed me awkwardly by the shoulders, pulled me close, and gave me a hug. He had never actually done that before. I was 25 years old, and had never actually been hugged by my father that I could remember. I was too shocked to respond. Finally I patted him on the back.
“Ahh . . . how nice,” Mom said.
After a brief moment, he let go. “Give me time to think, then we’ll talk. I didn’t know if this time would ever really come. I’ll tell you everything.”
Trip jerked his thumb down the hall. “We’ve got to get to Milo’s workshop.”
Chapter 10
Apparently Trip really did believe it was important, because he full on sprinted across the entire compound to Milo’s workshop. Trip had played college football and could run unbelievably fast. I, on the other hand, am a sluggish brute, and preferred only to run when something was chasing me. But apparently this was a big deal, so I hauled butt, yelling hoarsely for various Newbies and Hunters to get out of my way. Unfortunately, Milo’s workshop was set out by itself, most likely isolated to protect everyone else in case one of his inventions went horribly wrong and turned our gear man and his shop into vaporized atoms.
By the time Julie and I got there, Trip was already inside, and I was panting. Julie looked fine. “You should do more cardio,” she said patiently as she opened the door for me.
“Punching bag’s cardio,” I gasped.
“Only when you do it for more than a minute.”
“If I have to punch something for more than a minute”—panting—“it’s time to go to guns.”
“Wait.” She grabbed me by the arm. “This business with your dad . . .”
“I don’t know, but I intend to find out. Come on.”
The inside of Milo’s shop was a mess of machinery of every type: welders, lathes, mills, drill presses, and things that I didn’t even recognize. Miscellaneous guns were piled in every corner and on every shelf. There was even a rocket launcher of some type dangling from a strap hung over the antlers of the crocodile head mounted on the wall.
We stepped past the biggest harpoon gun that I had ever seen. It was the size of a riding lawn mower, all stainless steel with a spool of cable thick enough for high-power lines, loaded with a spear as big around as a fence post, and painted on the side was a picture of a creature with a shark’s head ending in squid tentacles with a big slash through it, Ghostbusters style. So that’s where Milo’s discretionary budget had gone lately. If I wasn’t in such a hurry, I would have stopped and admired the monstrosity.
Milo saw me looking at his invention. “Yeah, it is pretty freaking cool. I’m done messing around with stupid luskas. Next time we have to hunt shark-krakens, we do it in style. This sucker could harpoon Godzilla! The guys in Miami are going to love this baby. I call it Leviathan.” He had been waiting for us, pacing, his long red beard bouncing with each step. He had undone the beard braids and the entire thing was in a giant puffy mass that extended halfway down his chest. “Well, anyways, you aren’t going to believe this, but I think I’ve found a way to track down the Condition.” He gestured for us to follow as he headed for the back of the workshop.
There was a roll-up door, and an MHI Crown Vic was parked in one of the few open spaces. Holly was standing near the rear, casually holding her .308 Vepr carbine pointed at the trunk. She smiled when she saw us. “Z, you’re all sweaty. Did we interrupt you two at something?”
I was too out of breath to respond, so I flipped her the bird. She winked. Trip appeared with a ring of keys and moved to the trunk. “Ready?” he asked Holly.
“Born ready,” she said as she planted the big AK against her shoulder and took aim. “Open it.”
“Slow down,” Milo urged. The short man paused to push his glasses back up his nose before getting down to business. “You guys have no sense of presentation. Young Hunters are so excitable. You can’t just spring it on them. You’ve got to work up to it. It’s all about presentation.”
Julie groaned. Milo’s ideas were often good, sometimes bad, usually weird, but always with the best intentions. He was constantly thinking outside the box. Way outside the box. “I swear if there’s Powerpoint involved, someone’s getting shot.”
I was a little impatient, considering that my father had been about to tell me something that was probably really important concerning my destiny and all that jazz. “Come on, Milo. Spill it. How are we going to find the Condition?
”
Milo smiled broadly. “You sent the three of us out to shake down the elves to see if we could find out anything—”
“Useless as usual,” Holly interjected. “Though the Elf Queen asked how the Dreamer was doing. I think she’s got a crush on you, Z. She’s kinda cute for a four-hundred-pounder.”
“But then we get the call to head over to Bessemer for a troll infestation. You guys had to bail, so we took care of it on our own,” Milo said proudly. “How much do you know about trolls?”
“I’ve killed . . .” Julie paused, thinking, “five of them on two separate cases. They’re rubbery, super resilient, heal fast, are very vulnerable to fire, eat anything, but prefer children, and they’re smarter than they look. It’s always best to engage them from a distance, then when they’re down, burn them.”
“Yes, yes,” Milo steepled his fingers, looking briefly like he was teaching elementary school, obviously leading up to the payoff. “All true, but more important . . . what do they do for fun?”
“Hang out under bridges and harass goats?” I asked.
Julie hesitated, flustered. “Well . . . I . . . I don’t actually know.”
“Aha!” Milo shouted, grabbing a bunch of printouts off a nearby table. He shoved the papers into her hands. Julie glanced at them, frowning, then started to pass them off to me.
“Hot stock tips? Free iPods? Discount Viagra? Enlarge your—What the hell?” I asked, as Julie handed printed e-mails to me. Dear Sir, I am Barrister Kojima Loima of Nigeria and I must approach you concerning an opportunity of extreme urgency. My client former Prime Minister Katanga has requested that I safely move his fortune from our country to the U.S. in secrecy. I must transfer a sum of sixty-two million dollars to your bank account— It just went on and on. “What is this?”
“Spam,” Milo said solemnly.