CHAPTER 1
Rebel Yell
How was I to know she was forty? She said she was ninety!
I should probably start with the fact that I make most lounge lizards look unambitious. If it’s female and reasonably attractive, I’m going to hit on it. I could blame my father, who never met a coed he wouldn’t give a better grade to for a nice roll in the hay. Dr. Nelson—my friend Joan—says it’s a way to get back at my much-hated mother.
My excuse is I don’t think Hunters should have serious relationships. We die way too often and easy. So surgical strike mixed with the occasional full-on arc light is the only way to go. Using one of the new slang terms in vogue: It’s how I roll.
So when I had gone to bribe some trailer park elves for intel, I ended up chatting up this elf girl named Cheyenne.
Man, she was sweet. Five feet if she was an inch. Buck soaking wet. Curly red hair and I do like redheads. Those deep, blue, slightly tilted elf eyes just smoking with banked fires. Shorts, Candies and a seriously overstrained tube top.
Like the song said, she had Betty Davis eyes.
She looked like a fragile little angel and she nearly broke me in half in the backseat of my Cutlass. If I hadn’t been so in shape, she’d have killed me.
And I’d asked her beforehand how old she was. She said she was ninety which is, in human terms all grown up, okay, even by elf standards. I mean, either way it’s legal, don’t get me wrong.
Thing was, she was forty. Okay, thirty-eight, according to one of her cousins I ended up beating up.
That sort of crosses a line with elves. I tried to make the argument that it wasn’t like I was the first one across the goal line. Did not make inroads on their mad. Her brothers and cousins and some of the other elves from the trailer park, who were very distant relations, were out for my sweet little ass.
Don’t get me wrong, I’d dealt with some serious nasties before. Her toothless brothers were no problem.
A gang of them? Some of those guys were big for elves and they were all carrying sticks with nails in them. And her mom was casting curses right and left.
It was time to get out of Seattle until the heat died down. Like, say, a hundred years. Elves have very long memories and hold onto grudges harder than the last PBR in the cooler.
So I called the home office. And fortunately I got Ray IV instead of Earl. Ray was in town keeping an eye on Susan in her last trimester. So Earl was running the team and, fortunately, out. Earl was sort of a stick-in-the-mud on this stuff.
“Monster Hunter International, Raymond Shackleford the Fourth.”
Ray had to add “the Fourth” part. His dad, Ray III, was still president of the company even after having lost his hand and nearly being burned to death the previous year fighting a lich.
Raymond “Bubba” Shackleford had founded MHI back in 1895 and the business was still family owned and still the premier Monster Hunting outfit on the planet. As next in line, Ray IV was the designated heir apparent if Ray III ever stepped down. Which wasn’t going to happen soon. In the meantime he managed day to day business along with Earl Harbinger, the Operations Manager.
I’d never asked Ray how it felt to have so many bodies between himself and the top spots but it never seemed to bug him.
“Hey, Ray,” I said, relieved. “Chad.”
“Chad, man.” You could hear the grin on the phone. Even though he was part of the family of owners, we’d sort of bonded way back when I was a trainee over pumping iron. “Good to hear from you, buddy. I’m sorry about Jesse. I know that hurt.”
“Absent companions,” I said, shrugging even though he couldn’t see it. “He’s in a better place. Been there.”
A few months before we’d nearly lost most of Team Flaming Warthog taking on a shelob, giant spider mother, and her colony of couch-sized children. The shelob’s body was bigger than an elephant and if she’d been able to spread her legs out, they’d have stretched from one side to the other of Broadway. We’d faced her in a maintenance corridor for an old cistern and she nearly filled it. We did for her and her horde of babies with a mechanical ambush. But it had been a close thing. We damned near got overrun.
My best friend, Jesse Mason, had been bitten in the belly, right up under his armor. He was “just” injected with the paralytic toxin, not a full dose of the flesh-dissolving enzymes. But enough enzyme was always mixed in that it meant he was just going to take longer to dissolve. Nothing in human or mystical medicine was going to save him. He’d face weeks of agony while his abdomen slowly melted into goo.
So I gave him grace with a .45 round up under his chin and blew my best friend’s brains all over my lap and chest.
His official death certificate said “death due to kinetic trauma (automobile accident).” We never seemed to officially die the way we really did.
Both Jesse’s death and the last moments of that battle still had our team, and me in particular, a little shaken. Not that I was going to use that as an excuse.
“Yeah,” I said. “It’s got me a little off my game. How’s Susan?”
“Round and keeps saying she looks like shit.”
“Be a cold day in hell.” I’m not going to compare myself to Lancelot or anything, but I had a serious crush on my friend and sort-of-boss’s wife. Susan was a real foxy lady. Even if she gained a hundred pounds without being pregnant, I still wouldn’t kick her out of bed for eating crackers. Not that she would. She was one of those women with the amazing ability to lose every ounce of baby weight within weeks. Probably ’cause, like her husband, she was a workout-aholic.
Of course, later we lost Susan and, in a way, Ray as well. But that’s a different story.
“So, you never call, you never write,” Ray said. “This must be business.”
“Sort of. Look, before we get into it, I asked her how old she was. She said she was ninety.”
“Oh, no,” Ray sighed in exasperation. “Fey or elf?”
“Elf,” I muttered. “And, seriously, Fey? There’s ugly, then there’s Fey-ugly! They’ve got…tentacles and stuff.”
“Well, if it had been that Fey princess there’d be nowhere on earth you could hide from her mom. And what did I tell you about getting involved with trailer park elves, Chad?”
“Don’t,” I said.
“How old was she?” Ray asked.
“Forty.”
“Forty?” Ray said. “Forty? That’s what, like seventeen in elf years?”
“She didn’t look forty! She sure as hell didn’t act forty! The local elves are pissed.”
Ray sighed in exasperation. “Okay, okay. Team Warthog doesn’t need to lose another heavy hitter. Especially now. But it just so happens I was going to call you.”
“Oh?” Shit. If I’d waited a few days I’d have probably been offered something and never have had to fess up.
“Remember how I asked you if you’d like to be on my team?”
“I’ll take Happy Face,” I said, immediately. The Happy Face demon was the logo of the company and MHI’s premier team. It was run by Earl Harbinger and with Susan out of the loop, Ray III pretty much sidelined and Ray IV watching the store, I could see where they could use help.
The reason I’d turned it down the first time was that I hate heat. Happy Face bounced all over the place; they’d come in as reinforcements for our lich, but they concentrated in the Southeast and South America. I went through Parris Island in summer and learned to hate the bugs and heat and humidity of tropical and subtropical latitudes. I was from Kentucky, which occasionally had pretty hard summers, but the truth was there were few things more beautiful than a Kentucky summer.
Alabama and Mississippi, not so much.
But that was better than sticks with nails in them and elf curses. They can suck a guy’s soul into an alternate dimension and shit. I was wearing a neck full of antiscrying charms and they didn’t seem to be working. Cheyenne’s overprotective mother kept finding me. Then pickup trucks full of redneck elves in tank tops and mullets carrying big freaking sticks would pull into the parking lot and I’d have to jump out a back window. Again.
“Wasn’t the offer,” Ray said. “We’ve got bigger concerns. I was thinking about your reason for turning it down. I’m talking about New Orleans.”
I’d heard the rumors in the company. New Orleans was heating up in more than purely thermal terms. The word was that their last couple months had been unusually busy. They were making beaucoup PUFF bounties but had the casualties to match.
I wouldn’t mind the PUFF. Not that I ever had time to spend the money I made as it was. I was sort of a workaholic when it came to monster hunting. The only time I ever took off was when I was in recovery.
But the heat. The humidity. The bugs.
Dimensions with teeth. Big sticks.
I’d heard the girls were hot. And they called it the Big Easy for a reason.
“I’ll take it. I’d take sweeping Hades with a broom at the moment. I’m having to move from hotel to hotel to avoid her mom’s curses. And some of those elves are monsters.”
“Pack your stuff,” Ray said. “You’re headed to New Orleans.”
* * *
I had all my really necessary stuff in the trunk of Honeybear. Clothes, my armor, lots of various guns, ammo, bladed weapons and miscellanea you need in monster hunting. I’d gotten Dr. Lucius to oversee Allied Van Lines packing up my apartment when it became obvious that Seattle was a done deal. I was going to miss the University District. I liked the food, I liked the atmosphere, I liked the coeds, I had lots of contacts.
Big sticks with nails in them. Alternate dimensions with things with teeth.
I hit the road and didn’t look back.
It is a long…damned…drive from Seattle to New Orleans. And most of it seems to be through the driest country in the world. And the freaking mountains. I thought the freaking mountains would never end. Then the plains started and I found myself missing mountains.
That trip took me right past Jesse’s home town of Yuma, Colorado. His mom still lived there. She’d lost her husband to a “hunting accident” (werewolf), then her oldest son to a “car wreck.”
It was part of the job that families rarely knew what their sons, daughters, fathers, mothers did for a living. I knew Jesse had sent money home. Like me, he made more than he could spend in his limited free time. I knew she had to wonder what he really did for a living. He told me one time he’d told her he’d gotten a job with Microtel. As often as we were over there, it was close to truth. But it would have been hard to explain getting the money with just a high school diploma.
Stop by and reopen that wound? I didn’t think she knew me from Adam. I didn’t even know if Jesse ever mentioned me. Women, booze and monster killing had been most of our conversations.
And did I violate federal law and tell her the truth? Would she even believe me?
I had the address. I think, in the end, it was a selfish decision. I was looking for some closure. Stupid, but there you go.
Yuma is a small town in the Colorado high plains, not far from the Kansas border. Flat as hell. After two years in Seattle and working in the Cascades and Grand Tetons, the complete lack of relief was disorienting. It was flatter than the areas around Lejeune and that’s saying something. Or maybe it was just the complete lack of trees that made it seem that way.
It also was arid as hell. Some of the areas on the dry side of Washington had been like that. Just not as flat. The many empty lots were barren. Most of them didn’t even have grass growing in them.
The houses were mostly pretty run-down. The sun and incessant wind just sort of baked them, I guess. Off the two US highways that crossed through town, most of the side roads were unpaved dirt.
I could never figure out what people in a town like this did for a living.
The house was a two-story Cape Cod. The yard was watered and green, well maintained, the house had a fresh coat of paint on it. Windows were clean.
There was a pink flamingo in the yard and for a second I hunched up in the seat and reached for my weapon when I saw a red hat in the bushes. But it was just a plaster statue. Probably.
Might have been a gnome. I’d be able to tell when I got closer.
Probably a statue. If it had been real, Jesse would have plugged the son of a bitch for being on his property the couple of times he went home.
I parked on the street and sat there with the car running and the AC playing on me, working up the courage. There was a battered pickup in the driveway. Jesse had mentioned having a couple of brothers and sisters who were still living at home.
There was someone peeking out the front window. I’d been spotted. I could run like a coward, easy enough, or I could get out and face the music.
I got out and walked to the front door. I went around the neatly manicured lawn.
The doorbell played “There’s No Place Like Home.”
I tried not to burst into tears.
A pretty teenage girl opened the door. Blonde hair, maybe sixteen, you could see Jesse in her eyes and cheekbones.
“Can I help you?” she inquired in an uncertain tone.
I guess my face was a picture.
“I’m looking for Mrs. Janet Mason, miss,” I said formally. “Is she in?”
“I’ll get her,” the girl said, shutting the door.
A couple of minutes later the door opened again and a middle-aged woman looked out. She was wiping her hands on a dish rag.
“Whatever you’re selling—” the woman said in a stern tone.
“I was a co-worker of Jesse’s.” I cut her off. “I was just passing through and stopped to offer my condolences.”
“Oh,” she said, just a bit stunned. “I…”
“Chad.” I held out my hand. “Oliver Chadwick Gardenier, ma’am.”
“Chad!” she said delightedly. “Jesse talked so much about you! Come in, come in…”
* * *
Jesse had talked about me. His mother, and family, knew what he did. They knew how their husband and father had died, but not Jesse.
“Was it quick?” was the main question from Mrs. Mason. She was sitting on the couch in the formal living room and twisted her hands together as she asked it. She’d served tea and cookies after asking if I wanted something stronger. The answer was yes but I said no.
“Pretty quick. He…didn’t die in a lot of pain.”
“What got him?” the sister, Dauphine, asked, her face pinched.
“Giant spider. It was a nest. Big one. We’d set up a mechanical ambush in a corridor. Lots of directional mines, machine gun, we brought out the works. All the fire beforehand cut the detonation circuits. We managed to get it to blow but not before our position got overrun. Jesse got bit. It was quick. It’s a paralytic, mostly. He barely felt it.”
I wasn’t about to say that I’d blown his head off.
“Portland was about to get overrun. Thousands would have died. He died how he lived. A hero.”
“He’s in a better place,” Mrs. Mason said. You could see it wasn’t pro forma. She was a believer. But there was a nagging doubt in the tone.
“He is, ma’am,” I said definitely. “Been there. It’s nice. It’s practically the last thing I told him.”
“You’ve been to heaven?” Bobby, his younger brother, said skeptically.
“I died,” I said matter-of-factly, looking him in the eye. “In the bombing of the Marine barracks in Beirut, Bobby. Had a chat with Saint Peter while fishing. Got the choice of continue to in-processing or come back. God said he had something for me to do, something important, something about ‘being the best candidate.’ So here I am. I’d doubt that except there was stuff about a sign, which I later found, and it led me to Monster Hunting. So…mission from God, I guess.
“And ma’am,” I said, taking her hand, “I know from Jesse that you’re…pretty fundamental on some stuff. Trust me when I say Jesus is a lot more forgiving than your average small-town preacher. Jesse is in a better place. So’s your husband. We’re the ones stuck here in this…” I couldn’t say crap hole to this woman. “…vale of tears. We’ll all see him, again, soon enough. Based on odds, I’d say I’ll be first,” I added with a grin.
“You seem so…” Dauphine said, frowning. “Okay with it.”
“Did you love Jesse?” I asked.
“Yes,” Dauphine said, tearing up.
“Then you have to want what’s best for him. And heaven is, trust me, better than this place. Although the fishing is really boring. The fish just swim right up, spit the hook out and go back out to be caught again.”
“Now I know you’re joking,” Dauphine said.
“God’s truth,” I said. “But it’s so green. God, it’s so green. I miss him, too. I’ll miss him as long as I live. But he’s the lucky one. And I loved him like the brother I wished I’d had. So I’m happy for him and he’d want me to keep going. So I keep going. Grief is a selfish emotion.”
“Where are you going?” Mrs. Mason asked.
“New Orleans. They’re getting hammered. Based on their activity rate, I’m going to be seeing Jesse real soon now.”
I wouldn’t stay for dinner or stay over. I’d made that commitment before I even stopped. Especially once I saw Dauphine I made up my mind to hit the road as fast as possible.
I made sure Mrs. Mason was okay for money. Jesse hadn’t just sent money home, he’d invested it at my insistence. He’d had a nice chunk of change when he died. I could see she was careful with it but I planned on sending some to her as well. I wasn’t going to need it.
Then I hit the road and headed for Kansas.
Kansas was Yuma multiplied by a thousand and on steroids. Kansas gives you too much time to think.