The Monster Hunters

  “What can I do?” I asked.

  “I’ll show you these scraps, these things that Feeder’s left to toy with me. In exchange, I want two things. I won’t help you until you swear you’ll help me.”

  “Name them.” I expected for him to ask me to free him, to destroy this demon in his head, but not what came next.

  “Kill me.”

  I was shocked. That’s not why I was here. I couldn’t do that. I started to respond, but choked. The frozen Hunters surrounded me, their faces scratched out of existence like a pencil drawing brutally scrubbed with an eraser until the paper tore. All happiness had been blotted from this man’s existence, his body was nearly a lifeless husk . . . No. I understood the request.

  I nodded. “And the second?”

  He glared at the jolly, fat Hunter so long that I started to think I was another forgotten memory.

  “Avenge me.”

  This was different than the other times that I had lived through others’ memories. This time I didn’t see through his eyes or feel with his senses, because those were long since muted and passed. Carlos no longer knew what it was like to experience such things.

  Rather it was like I was a bystander as a partial scene unfolded in front of me. Details were few, sounds were painful and flat. The colors had bled into grays and shadows as even simple things like that had been stolen from him. What a horrible way to exist, and this was all that he’d had since 1989. I was watching the welcoming of the new Hunter. Hood smiled and laughed as Carlos’ team greeted him, slapped him on the shoulder, and shook his hand. The only two who had faces were my host and his future nemesis.

  “He came highly recommended. A good friend of mine said that he was talented, that he would be an asset to our team,” Carlos spoke to me, even as he shook phantom hands with Hood. “My friend was a man named Harbinger.”

  “I know him,” I said.

  Carlos shook his head. “I don’t. I only remember what little bit is connected to these few things. That’s all. But I hate him for bringing this monster into my life. Feeder let me keep my hate. It makes him warm.”

  Then we were in an unknown place, an intersection of two streets. A team of Hunters had taken up position around a few cars and were firing into a crowd of shambling zombies. There were hundreds of undead. It was a huge outbreak. Carlos and I walked between the flying bullets and the crowd of rotting undead. He gestured to where his mirror image was leaning over the hood of a car and blasting round after round of buckshot into the approaching mass. “Business was really good. I didn’t realize at first that it was a little too good.”

  A zombie made it over the hood of the first car and Hood took it apart in a spray of machine-gun fire. “It had been kind of slow. We didn’t really have much to do, and my team was getting the least business of any team in the country. Just bad luck I suppose. But then, within a few weeks of Hood’s arrival, we were getting undead outbreaks constantly. Suddenly my team was raking in the dough. We were the stars of the company.”

  A zombie hit Memory Carlos from behind, taking him hard to the pavement. The nearby faceless Hunters were in no position to help and it looked like certain death. But the zombie froze, an inch from taking a bite out of Carlos’ neck. It stayed there for a moment until Carlos could roll over, draw his .45 and put a round into the creature’s brain. The splattered team leader caught a brief glance of Hood, hand extended, two fingers pointing at the frozen zombie. Hood went back to the action as if nothing had happened.

  My host shook his head sadly. “That was my first clue, but in the excitement, I missed it. It went on. Every time we had nothing going on, more undead would pop up somewhere in our region. I was thinking that we had some hardcore necromancer living in the neighborhood, but he was always one step ahead of us. I was too stupid to realize that I saw him every day.”

  More scenes flashed by. Several months had passed since these Hunters had started working together. “By that time, I was a wealthy man, not that I can remember what I did with it. He’s let me remember that I was like a damn superhero to the other Hunters, just to rub it in. Really, I was just a chump. Hood came across as a nice kid, a real joker, a bookworm, an intellectual, and a dork. Everybody loved him. It was a lie, an act. We didn’t realize what he was fixated on.” There was a vision of the two men, sitting on a bench on an ocean pier, drinking and telling stories, unwinding after a long day at work. “It turned out that Hood’s parents were killed when he was just a boy. They were occultists, and had been messing around with the Old Ones back in England. He confided this to me one night. That’s why he became a Hunter. He wanted to fight those things. He was obsessed with them.”

  “Why’d he tell you?”

  My host laughed. “You’ll see . . .”

  Hood took a long draw from a cigarette before flicking the butt into the ocean. “See, boss, that’s what got me thinking . . .” It was obvious that he’d had too much to drink. “There’s a lot of information about the Elder Things floating around. Why not, and this is just a hypothetical, use their own weapons against them? Harnessing magic is no different than harnessing electricity.”

  Carlos openly scoffed. “That’s insane.”

  “No. Hear me out, mate. You’re a smart chap. It’s like the war, the big one. My grandmother lived through the Battle of Britain and she told me what those V rockets sounded like when they flew over. Pure terror. Evil stuff, right? But as soon as the war was over, bam, the Allies grabbed up every German scientist they could, right? That’s how we put a man on the moon.”

  Carlos took a long drink. “I suppose.”

  “This is the same thing. Just because knowledge originates from a bad use, doesn’t make it bad. It’s still knowledge. We owe it to ourselves to study the Old Ones, not just shun them. Think of what we could do.” Hood grew somber. “Imagine if a group of us, people like me and you, who knew what was really out there, worked together and harnessed that power . . . We could banish death itself!”

  “That’s not how it works. Anything those things touch is tainted. Stay away from it, Marty.” The Carlos of memory tossed his now-empty bottle out into the waves and stood to leave. “You’re drunk and talking stupid. I’ll call you a cab. Go home and get some rest, man.”

  “I thought maybe you would understand . . .” Hood muttered to himself as Carlos walked away.

  Carlos continued his narration as the pier dissolved. “I figured it out eventually. Hood had found something in the archives back at headquarters. Some old book, picked up from who knows where.” The next scene was in a room filled with many shelves, lined with row after row of books. At first I thought we’d come to a library, but then I realized that it was a small apartment, literally packed with books. The titles on the spines were all blurry and forgotten. Hood was sitting at a table, giant tome open before him, a single small bulb providing light enough to read by. The book must have been etched into Carlos’ memory, because it was crystal clear. A massive, leather-bound thing, the pages ancient and covered in symbols and geometries that suggested madness in whoever inked it in blood millennia before.

  “Hey, Marty. Nobody’s been able to get ahold of you. I was getting worried so I had your landlord let me in. Are you okay?” Carlos called as he entered the room, only to jerk to a halt when he saw the open book. “Is that— What are you doing with that thing?”

  “Learning . . .” Hood mumbled as if he was in a trance, not looking up as he traced his hands over the words. The crazed scribbling seemed to move. There was a drawing of the monstrous alien tree, branches like twitching cricket legs. A black smear had been rubbed onto the page above it, like a cloud rising from the tree.

  “Damn it!” Carlos shouted as he shoved the book off the table and onto the floor. The pieces had finally clicked into place for him. The book landed with a thump, open to a page with a picture of a giant squid thing that I knew all too well. He reached across the table and grabbed Hood by the shirt and jerked him forward. “It’s you! You?
??re behind these outbreaks, aren’t you? Answer me, you son of a bitch!”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Hood stammered. Then Carlos slugged him in the face, brutally hard. He grabbed the fat kid by his curly hair, yanked him out of his chair and shoved his face down against the open book. Blood dripped onto the pages.

  “Liar!” Carlos shouted, enraged.

  “All right, all right!” Hood cried. Carlos jerked him up and brutally shoved him back into one of the shelves. Books crashed to the floor. “Let go of me, please,” he sobbed.

  “It was you all along. I can’t believe this!” Carlos released him and stepped away, hurt and disbelief obvious in his voice. “Why? Why’d you do it?”

  “I had to! You don’t understand what’s at stake. We have to learn the mysteries or we’re doomed.”

  “You’re doomed all right. How many innocent people have died because of you? You know what the Feds are going to do when they discover you’ve been raising the dead? You’re going to prison for the rest of your life.”

  Suddenly Hood went from simpering to in command. The change was shocking, like somebody had flipped a switch and another personality stepped forward. “Oh, that’s where you’re wrong, mate. You won’t tell the Feds a word.” Blood ran down his nose and dripped down the crease of his double chin but he didn’t wipe it away. His eyes burned with the fervor of a true believer and for the first time I saw the man who would become the Shadow Lord. “Because you’re going down with me if you do. I’ll say that you ordered me to raise those zombies for the PUFF bounties.”

  “Oh, I am, huh?” Carlos responded as he pulled his pistol from inside his waistband. “We’ll see about that.”

  “You won’t shoot me,” Hood stated flatly. “If I die, then I’ve left evidence for the authorities that not only did I create those undead, but that I did it on behalf of not just you, but all of MHI. The government will destroy you all for that. You love this company too much.”

  “Bastard!” The angry Hunter raised the gun and pushed it into Hood’s cheek.

  “Do it. I dare you,” Hood snapped. “Kill your teammate. Murder your friend. Then explain that to the authorities. Explain that to the others while you try to convince them I wasn’t making enough zombies to make you a millionaire.”

  Carlos hesitated, doubt creasing his features. “Damn!” he shoved the fat kid to the floor and stomped away, trapped. He paced back and forth for a moment. “You idiot. What’ve you done?”

  “I’m fulfilling my destiny. I’m going to stop the Old Ones, once and for all.” He finally paused to wipe his nose. “The bounties are funding my research. Animating the dead is letting me hone my skills. This is just the beginning of an epic work. You’ll see.”

  Carlos shoved his pistol back into its holster before grabbing Hood by the neck and dragging him toward the door. “No. You’re coming with me. We’re going to see Harbinger. He’ll know what to do.”

  We were back in the original void. Darkness in every direction.

  “I didn’t know what else to do. He was my responsibility and I failed. I turned to the one man who I knew would have the answers. We left that night, me, Hood, and that infernal book, and caught the first flight. I remember that he came along willingly, telling me the whole time about how he was right and how he would persuade Harbinger to see. I think he wanted me to dwell on his argument . . . When we arrived, there were a bunch of Hunters there, and unfortunately, it was the full moon. I had been too preoccupied to even realize that, so we weren’t able to speak to him.”

  The night Hood died, I thought to myself.

  “Exactly,” he answered. There was a terrible, rending sonic wail. It came from the distant void. “Feeder’s coming. I have to finish this.”

  We were standing on the edge of a circle of chaos. The little stone shack, the old slave quarters of the Shackleford family estate, was before us. Hunters were milling around. There was blood everywhere, stark red against the black and white of the rest of the world. Hood’s dismembered body was at the entrance. A faceless Hunter was holding the body, trying in vain to help. I knew that the erased man was Myers. Other unknowns attended to a second injured person. A leg, severed at the knee, lay half chewed off to the side.

  “He committed suicide.”

  “So I thought. Nobody but me knew about Hood’s crimes. I felt terrible. I blamed myself for his death and the whole situation. I had failed.”

  I walked through the carnage. Hood was obviously dead, literally torn apart. There was now a struggle, a fight, between Myers and someone else who could only have been Ray Shackleford. The words were erased, but I knew that Myers wanted nothing more than to avenge his friend’s death. “You never told the others.”

  “No. I didn’t. I thought that Hood had killed himself out of guilt. Everyone loved him. What good would tarnishing his memory serve? Plus, I was afraid . . . somehow I could have done something different, somehow it was my fault. No, it was my secret to bear. No evidence ever arose after his death, so Hood must have been bluffing about that, so I just left it alone. I hid his stupid book.”

  “You didn’t destroy it?”

  “I couldn’t. It wouldn’t burn. I should have tried harder.”

  Suddenly, something rose over the Shackleford ancestral home, above the slave quarters, a shadow as big as the house, only shaped like an earwig. The sonic wail tripled in intensity as the shadow of pincers covered the full moon.

  FOOD. The scream slammed through my skull.

  “Holy shit!”

  “Feeder’s here,” Carlos said nonchalantly. “Good. I won’t miss this one anyway. Come on, I’ve got one more. Three years later.”

  A new place, a large older house in a pine forest, on the top of a hill. A team of Hunters were moving quickly through the darkened trees, weapons hot. They were sweaty, panting, a few of them had sustained injuries. This memory was the clearest of all. The others even had faces.

  Carlos must be reading my mind. “Yeah, Feeder hasn’t touched this one. This is the worst of all. I couldn’t tell you who any of these people are, but it likes to let me watch them die, again and again.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  “Don’t be. This is now the only memory I have left of my entire life. Well, there’s actually one other. I can remember mi madre singing nursery songs to me when I was little. I think that’s the oldest one I’ve got. For some reason, Feeder has left that one alone. I think he likes the music . . . Please, don’t forget your promise.”

  “I won’t.”

  “Good,” he said. “Watch.”

  There were six of them. They were coming up on the house in three pairs, moving fast. They stopped in the trees just outside the yard. I focused in on their leader as he tried his radio, frustration was plain on Carlos’ face. “We lost radio contact as soon as we arrived. Then we were cut off, surrounded, driven through the forest by undead. It wasn’t until later that I realized we’d been herded to this place. He wanted it that way. He wanted us on our own at the end. He knew our methods, our procedures, he knew exactly what we’d do.”

  The Hunters hit the house. One pair on the back door, one on the front, the final held the perimeter. The teams cleared the Victorian-style house, finding it empty, boarded-up, furniture sitting under tarps, covered in dust. The first pair discovered the stairs to the basement.

  “He lured us in. We were surrounded, no comms. The case was supposed to have been straightforward, basic monsters on the property, not that I can remember what they were supposed to be at this point, or where this even is, but we sure weren’t prepared for what we found.”

  The basement was utterly normal, except for one concrete wall where the foundation had been chipped away to reveal a hole. The ancient tunnel wound down into the earth. The Hunters prepared to check it out.

  “No escape, so I decided to try the tunnel. It might have led to a way out, or it might have led to whatever was controlling the monsters attacking us. I was
such a fool. I let my ego cloud my judgment. I remember that I only made three big mistakes in my career. First was ever trusting Hood. Keeping his secret was number two. Going down that hole was my last.”

  Time passed as the Hunters went steadily downward, their unease growing at each step, noise of the undead trailing behind them a constant companion. They set ambushes, slowed their pursuers, but there were always more. At the end, the tunnel opened into a large, artificial room. Creatures—impossible creations of mismatched body parts from various animals, armor-plated monstrosities—rose up around them and cut through the Hunters with ease. They put up an amazing fight but were finally overrun. The memory was allowed to linger on the final suffering of each individual, chopped to bits at the ends of meat-cleaver arms or lacerated by serrated-steel teeth.

  Carlos awoke a short while later, bound to a table with leather straps, someone calling his name. I recognized who was speaking immediately. The shadow man’s appearance in the memory was the same as in the present. He hadn’t even aged. This time he was wearing a white rubber butcher’s apron, splattered with blood. He smiled broadly at Carlos.

  “Hey, mate. How have you been?”

  “Where are my men?”

  “Recruited into my army.” The necromancer paused to pull a sheet off of another operating table. Carlos screamed when he saw the bodies of two of his team in the process of being stitched back together into something else. The Hunter thrashed against his bonds in vain. “I’m improving on God’s creation.”

  Carlos continued to struggle, insane at the sight of his friends. “I’ll kill you! I’ll kill you! You son of a bitch! I’ll kill you!”

  “Please . . . You didn’t have the stomach to do it before and that’s what brings us here today, I’m afraid. It pains me to do this, but I gave you an opportunity to see my side of things, only you wouldn’t listen. You had to be self-righteous and stubborn. So now, the time has come for you to pay for your mistakes. But take comfort, your sacrifice will not have been in vain.”