Chapter 4
Twenty minutes later, the tie was undone, sleeves rolled up, stuffy decorum had been ditched, and I was at the far end of the hall, surrounded by a crowd of Hunters as I told them the story about facing off against the Dread Overlord in its home dimension. After the Australians had drawn attention, I’d picked up a mess of assorted Europeans, some Brazilians, two guys from India, and an absolutely stunning woman from South Korea. Apparently, obliterating a great Old One with a doomsday device designed by Isaac Newton was so awesome that it transcended all cultural and language barriers, plus it helped that I did great sound effects.
Careful to leave out the classified or embarrassing parts, such as me being the Chosen One and surviving zombie bites, Agent Franks’ real identity, the fact that the MCB had been infiltrated by a death cult, or that the Condition’s necromancer had once been a member of MHI, it still made for a pretty nifty story. Plus it had been a while since I’d had an audience where it was legal for me to actually tell it to. Everyone at MHI had already heard it a dozen times.
Earl and Julie came by at one point, with Earl just shaking his head in amazement. I wasn’t getting the information that he wanted, but I was certainly succeeding as MHI’s goodwill ambassador. Offending the gnomes and getting beat up that one time had been an aberration on my diplomatic resume. I could be perfectly decent at networking when I put my mind to it. Julie seemed rather proud of me, and gave me one of those wifely I knew you could do it smiles.
I folded the restraining order into a paper airplane and sailed it over to Julie without even interrupting my narrative. She caught, unfolded, and read it while mouthing something that looked suspiciously like ducking mother truckers, but I’m not very good at lip reading. Julie immediately whipped out her phone, surely to call MHI’s own attorneys. Our little spat with PT was about to get even uglier. You did not want to play business hardball against Julie.
I was surprised when Agent Archer had joined my crowd, though he had probably been sent over to make sure I wasn’t giving away any state secrets. So I pointed him out as one of the heroes of the Arbmunep fight, not that I had any idea what he had actually done during that particular fight, since I’d been rather preoccupied at the time. The young agent’s cheeks grew red with embarrassment, but since I’d now singled him out as one of the good guys, he was pretty much trapped into agreeing with me about how stupendous everything had been.
I finished the story with, “And the worst part, since the Dread Overlord wasn’t actually on Earth, we didn’t get to put in for the PUFF bounty!” Most of the Hunters laughed, while a couple of translators hurried to finish the story, and then their charges laughed too. A few of the Hunters didn’t join in, and these were the ones that thought I was full of crap. I couldn’t particularly blame them, since if I hadn’t witnessed the mountain-sized squid god, I wouldn’t have believed myself either.
One German in particular was looking at me like I’d pushed his grandmother off her walker. “You speak about creatures of unbelievable horror so flippantly, I wonder perhaps if you have ever actually seen one.” He was of average height, fit but not big, probably forty, with a neatly trimmed beard and a very stern demeanor. “A great Old One is nothing to joke about. Even speaking of them draws their ire.”
“You think talking about them makes them angry, try hitting one with an alchemical super weapon. I don’t think we’ve met…”
He immediately handed me a rather nice business card. “Klaus Lindemann. I am the commander of Grimm Berlin.” That was one of the companies that Earl had referred to as all right. Several of the other Hunters had apparently heard of the German team as well, because there were some impressed-sounding whispers from the crowd. I stuck the card in my pocket. “I intend no disrespect—”
“That’s normally what someone usually says right before they disrespect you,” I said as I handed him one of my business cards. Owen Z. Pitt. Combat Accountant.
“Yes…but your tale is absurd.”
“You don’t have to take my word for it.”
Lindemann sniffed. “I did not intend to.”
“Agent Archer!”
The Fed jumped, not used to being pointed out in a group of Hunters. He swallowed hard, and Archer was one of those skinny types with the pronounced Adam’s apple, so his discomfort was extra obvious. “Yeah?”
“Sorry about blowing your cover.” Several of the Hunters laughed at that, since the guys with black suits and earpieces were obviously MCB. It didn’t matter what country you were from, every Hunter knew about the MCB, if not personally, then at least by reputation. “Care to tell our honored guests about how me and Franks blasted the Dread Overlord?”
Archer was like a deer in the headlights. I knew from experience that he was pretty decent at lying to the press, but this wasn’t a bunch of ignorant dupes to be led around by the nose. These folks made their livings killing things that weren’t supposed to exist. “I…uh, can neither confirm nor deny…” He looked around nervously at all the waiting Hunters. “There’s an official MCB press release concerning the events in New Zealand…and…Shoot…That’s all I can say.”
“Thank you, Agent.” Just having the official type corroborate that something had happened was even better, because now their imaginations would fill in the blanks. It gave my story a certain air of legitimacy. “It was really neat. Giant alien death tree and crazy cultists. You guys would’ve loved it.” Archer realized too late that since he hadn’t simply shot me down, he had sort of verified my story to the others, which I’m positive hadn’t been his assignment. The young agent tried to be discreet as he fled the crowd, probably worried that his superiors were going to chew him a new one.
“It’s real enough,” an Englishman told Lindemann. “The New Zealand government has a mutual assistance treaty with the BSS.” His tone suggested that their feelings about their British Supernatural Service were equivalent to our opinion of the MCB. “Their Select Group were carrying on about one of our contracts at the time, but they left in a hurry to help damage control. Word from a chap on the inside was that they had to hide a big one.”
“I’ve seen the aftermath of this Arbmunep beasty,” the leader of the Australians said. “The whole area’s been cordoned off by military research. There’s a new building on the spot. Looks rather like a very unnecessarily big silo, and they won’t say what’s inside.”
Lindemann adjusted his sport coat. “So it seems that something extraordinary did occur in New Zealand.” The admission seemed to pain him. “I stand corrected, Mr. Pitt. You have my apologies.”
“I know what’s in that silo. They’re studying the Arbmunep. From what the cult leader told me, there are more of those things buried all over the world.” Earl had wanted us to gather intel, so it was worth a shot. “And that’s not the weirdest thing we’ve seen lately. MHI has had a few really odd cases over the last few years…Mr. Lindemann used the word extraordinary. I’d say that fits. What about you guys? Anything extraordinary in your neck of the woods?”
One of the other Europeans, a stout older man, leaned forward and said something to his translator. The translator hurried and spoke. “Like this thing that came from underground, there are things beneath Serbia. Tunnels from the middle of the world. The…diggers?” The older man repeated himself. “The diggers of the holes are coming into the light. These are new things, but legend says they have been here before.”
“Us too,” said a bulky man with spiky black hair. “I am from Orzel Biaiy Wojskowy Zawierajacy Kontrakt…White Eagle Military Contracting of Poland. Over last two years, we have seen many things come from below. Monsters came out of ground, revealed entrance to tunnels beneath Lodz. Things were…how you say…hibernating. For a very long time, but they woke up and now they are gone.”
Several others began to speak at once, talking about strange new monsters awaking and dragging themselves out of the earth. My Portuguese sucked, mostly because I’d learned it magically from a five-hundred-year-old dialect, but I could’ve swore one of the Brazilians said something about whole towns going missing. His translator was still trying to catch up when one of the Indians began telling us about how their government had forbidden his company from investigating a village that had been mysteriously depopulated on the border with Pakistan. Both countries were blaming the other, but the initial army scouts had reported finding freshly dug tunnels that led to what appeared to be the ruins of a city deep beneath the surface.
That had only been two months ago.
“It seems that many things long buried wish to be found again,” said the woman from South Korea. Her melodic voice cut right through the chatter, catching all of our attention. Her English was measured and carefully pronounced. “We were cautioned by our ambassador not to speak of it, but I believe we may have a related issue. In our region there was a disturbance on the ocean floor.” I hadn’t noticed that we’d been joined by one of the translators from the People’s Liberation Army. He snapped something at the woman from Korea, and though I couldn’t understand a word of her response, I’m pretty sure her sharp response basically told him to go screw himself. The government interpreter ran off, probably to tell on her.
“Pay no attention to him. There was an incident which was embarrassing to his country’s navy. Our two governments had an agreement not to speak about this, but from what I am hearing now, I believe this should be known to all of you.”
“Your government? You are private or government?” the big Pole asked, suspicious. MHI really did a have a lot in common with our competitors.
“I am privy to some things. You could call me a consultant,” she answered innocently.
“Consultant? More like secret agent ninja,” one of the Australians whispered to me. Apparently he was familiar with the woman.
“An anomaly appeared on the ocean floor, in over two thousand meters of water. It rose from the mud overnight.”
“Anomaly?” I asked.
“A city.” When she said that it stunned the whole group. “It is two kilometers across, and sonar indicates that there are approximately twenty structures, the tallest of which was over a hundred meters.”
“Deep Ones, maybe?” the Pole asked.
“Far too advanced for such creatures. We do not know what inhabited it, but we were warned to be on the lookout, since it appeared that the inhabitants abandoned the city as soon as it rose from the mud. We do not know where they went. The beggar’s navy, pardon me, North Korea lost a spy ship over the disturbance, and then the Chinese navy lost a submarine to an unknown force while investigating. They then destroyed the city to keep it from falling into the hands of the Americans.”
“When did this happen?”
“Two weeks ago.”
Her comments caused quite a bit of commotion. “Holy shit!” I exclaimed, and that was one of the most coherent comments of the bunch.
Earl’s hunch had been right. There was a pattern emerging, and it was scary as hell.
I wasn’t the only one with crazy news to report. The South Africans had confirmed to Priest that there had been reports of isolated villages being found totally emptied of people, cooking fires still burning, vehicles still running, all with signs of tunneling nearby. Lee had managed to get a similar story to that of the Korean woman out of one of the Chinese Hunters about the underwater city. National security was one thing, but most Hunters realized that there were some threats out there a lot bigger than any one country. The PLA interpreter was going to have a cow, but none of us gave a crap about their lost submarine, when we were more worried about what had destroyed it. Julie had gotten rumors of strange new activity in the Paris underground from the French, and Earl had heard that one of the Russian companies had lost an entire team to an unknown entity that had begun terrorizing a mine in Siberia.
Earl had ordered us to meet back in his room. A cartoony world map had been bought from the hotel gift shop and affixed to the wall. Pushpins were stuck into various locations as more Hunters reported in. Over the last hour we’d gone through a fifty-pack of pushpins, and there were still more stories coming in.
“How could we have not heard?” Julie asked in amazement. “This is staggering.”
“It isn’t like we all hang out together, and you think our government-mandated secrecy is bad, we’re nothing compared to some of these places.” Earl read a message off of his phone, shook his head sadly, and stuck another pin into a comically distorted Mongolia. “More tunnels…Of course we’ve heard of some of these, but we always thought of them as random monster attacks, outbreaks, craziness…But this…” He stepped away, as if he was trying to see the whole picture.
The three of us studied the map. I couldn’t put my finger on what was troubling me. “Rates have been up before. When I first got hired we were at an all-time high.”
“Sure, but that was stateside, and mostly because of the private Hunting ban. It was individuals, monsters here and there, the natural growth of a predatory population that had lost the best thing that kept it in check. These, on the other hand…” Julie stroked her neck thoughtfully. “These are oddball events with bigger repercussions, and all over the last few years. MHI alone has faced two since then that if they’d gotten out—”
“Three,” Earl corrected. “Copper Lake was another tip-of-the-iceberg type event. If I hadn’t shut that down quick, it could’ve turned a lot worse. Ours were all connected, though. Machado was being used by the Old Ones, then Hood was working for the same Old One, and his daughter was somehow involved in Copper Lake.”
“But that was after we killed their god, Earl! That’s hard for a religion to bounce back from.”
“Christianity seemed to do all right,” he said.
“That’s because it didn’t stick…So, three events related tangentially to the minions of a specific Old One, but he, it…whatever, is toast. So do we think something like him is pulling these strings? These new events, they’re like ours, little things that could spiral out of control in no time.”
“A few,” I answered. “But there are so many where we don’t know what happened. People missing, or some type of creature shows up and then disappears, and most of them with an underground connection.”
“Like they’ve been sleeping for a long time and they’re all starting to wake up. But why, and where are they going? So we’ve got a rash of two types of events, things waking up, and other things poking us with a stick. Testing us.” Earl muttered, staring at the map. “These aren’t outbreaks…This is a mobilization.”
“Of what?”
“I don’t know, but this is what Myers was seeing. And now I think I know why that son of a bitch was suffering from insomnia. Hell, makes you wonder what else he knew about and couldn’t tell us.”
“You should call Dwayne,” Julie suggested.
“Got his number?” It was a testament to how troubling the situation seemed that Earl wasn’t joking.
“So have we decided all these things are connected?” I asked, already knowing the answer, but hoping to be wrong. “We making this official?”
“I just don’t know how…We’ll need to talk to everyone, get as many Hunters on the lookout as possible,” Earl ordered. “Shouldn’t be a problem, though. From what I saw, word’s already gotten out. Most of us are a suspicious bunch by nature. After the bunch with Z started swapping stories, all the sharp Hunters know something’s up. I wouldn’t be surprised if there are ten maps just like this one in this hotel by now.”
“Thank goodness for this conference or we might not have put things together…” Julie trailed off.
“What?” Then I realized what she’d thought of. “The conference.”
“Thought of that already,” Earl said. “The timing seems a little suspicious to be holding the first annual one of these things. Almost like they wanted all these different bunches of Hunters to put their heads together.”
“One hell of a coincidence. Did the MCB want us to figure this out on our own?” Then I shook my head and answered my own question. “That doesn’t make any sense. They didn’t put this on, but if they were trying to keep these trends secret, why allow the conference to take place at all? Why not just send us all an email and say, ‘Attention, Hunters, be on the lookout for an invasion of mole people.’”
“Maybe it isn’t the MCB pulling the strings…” Earl said.
“Who then?” Julie asked. “Ick-mip has private organizers, but there’s no way they’d be allowed to do this without government approval.”
“Nobody. Never mind.” Earl looked around. Then picked up the notepad from the nightstand table and scribbled a brief note. Not now. Room might be bugged.
Julie and I glanced at the walls nervously.
Earl nodded, deadly serious.
What the hell had we gotten ourselves into?
The mood at ICMHP had changed drastically over the last few hours. Earlier it had been a sort of festive environment. Now half the crowd was somber, as they realized that they weren’t alone and things were messed up all over the rest of the world too, and the other half was really excited, because they’d come to the same conclusion and were now figuring out how they could make money off the situation by blowing things up. Hunters are proactive like that.
I caught a couple of the panels that sounded interesting, where the topics were about the technical end of Hunting. It turned out that the German, Lindemann, was a former member of the elite German counter-terrorism unit GSG-9, and a walking encyclopedia of how to kill dangerous fey. That panel alone was worth the price of admission. Sure, he had insulted me earlier, but at least I had been insulted by the best. Then I went to one of the boring policy ones, but my wife was on the panel so I had no choice. She spent most of it arguing with some idiot professor who was advocating fair trials for intelligent undead. After that was another one on PUFF filing and how to get timely payments from the Treasury, but I snuck out after fifteen minutes of listening to information that I already knew about.
The conversations in the halls were different than before. Stupid Hunters didn’t live long, and we worked in a business that fostered a healthy sense of paranoia. The guests knew that something was up, and many of them had come to the same conclusions that we had. The conference was rigged. The timing was too suspicious. The official policy makers hadn’t wanted the world’s Hunters to know what was going on, but someone else with sufficient pull had arranged to put us all together where the subject would surely arise, but they weren’t direct enough to simply come out and say it.
The keynote address was next. When I had read the description earlier, and it said that it was going to be the MCB director discussing policy, I hadn’t expected there to be much turnout. But now with all of the fresh new conspiracy theories floating around, there was already a crowd formed outside the banquet-hall doors waiting for the keynote to begin. Unfortunately, some of the men loitering around the hall were PT douchebags, which meant that I needed to hang back in order to not violate the restraining order. But since I really wanted to hear what Stark was going to say, I’d just waited until the lights went down before sneaking in. The room was packed, so I didn’t think anyone would notice me. John VanZant, who was also named on the restraining order, was standing in back too. Agent Franks was the last one in, and he just stood there, glowering.
A moment later Director Stark walked out to the podium to sporadic applause. A bunch of unfamiliar bureaucrats came in behind him and sat on folding chairs at the back of the stage. I found it amusing that Stark already had a posse. Myers had got by with just Franks…And then I realized how odd it was that the MCB’s single most famous asset had been stuck out here in nowhere land and not in prestige seats. Was there a reason for that? I looked over at Franks, but his expression was as inscrutable as ever.
The first few minutes of the keynote were more prewritten nonsense. The only interesting bit was about how the United States government would be awarding several large new contracts for monster-related facility security. The accountant part of my brain filed that away, but the Hunter part really wanted to know about this strange underground invasion. Stark changed topics, but now it was more blather about synergy and mission statements. The audience was becoming tense. Now that they knew something was happening worldwide, the Hunters were eager for answers. They wanted meat, and they were being given fluff.
“Tell us what you know!” a man shouted from the center of the room. I couldn’t make out who it was, but I was impressed a bunch like this had been patient this long. Stark pretended that he hadn’t heard and kept reading. Then another Hunter to the side yelled something similar, then another Hunter in back raised a rude question, and the bureaucrats behind Stark began to shift nervously.
Stark reached up and adjusted his suddenly too-tight necktie. It must have been constricting his considerable bulldog jowls. “Easy, everyone. I don’t know what you’re carrying on about.”
“Lies.” That accusation caused some shifting and looking by the MCB in the audience to see who’d said it. Earl Harbinger saved them the trouble of searching, because he simply stood up so everyone could see him. “We know about the pattern. We know about the attacks. Don’t waste our time.”
Stark blanched when he saw who it was. I don’t know what their history was, but it was plain to see that Stark didn’t like, and was a little frightened of, Earl Harbinger. What was it with Earl and collecting personal grudges with MCB Directors? “You need to quiet down or I’ll have security remove you.”
Security? Franks sighed dejectedly. Sweet. I would pay good money to watch Frankenstein and the Wolfman fight. That would be some Clash of the Titans level awesomeness right there. Earl sat back down, but I could tell that he wasn’t done yet. Once Earl got to pushing he wasn’t going to quit until he got what he wanted.
“Now where was I?” The vibrating of Stark’s pocket was picked up over the microphone. He tried to ignore his phone and kept on reading from his increasingly pointless speech.
Agent Franks lifted one hand to his earpiece, scowling. His blunt features twisted into a dangerous scowl, then he walked quickly from the hall. The three government men sitting on the stand behind Stark all reached into their pockets at the same time. The lights of the phone’s displays could be seen across the hall. The G-men exchanged glances, and then two of them stood up and quickly walked off stage. The other agents providing security all began speaking softly into their microphones. Phones began buzzing all across the auditorium, except for a few MCB men who had forgotten to put them on vibrate, and those began to ring. Every single MCB in sight had just gotten a call.
Something was going down.
A murmur rose from the audience. Agent Stark continued reading from his prepared remarks and let the call go to voice mail, but after a few seconds his pocket began buzzing again. He finally looked up from his paper, scanned the audience, saw all the display lights and realized there was a problem. “Better answer this. Probably the wife.” He laughed nervously, covered the microphone with one hand, and turned away to take the call. Stark listened and didn’t make a sound for probably thirty seconds. It was very awkward.
When he turned back around, his eyes were very wide. “Well, uh…Let’s see…Important business. You’ll have to excuse me for a moment.” He took a few halting steps, realized he should probably say something else and came back to the microphone. “I’ll be right back. There is nothing to be concerned about. Please remain seated.” And then the Director of the MCB fled the podium.
The audience murmur evolved into the suspicious muttering of several hundred Hunters. The final government man on the stage looked around, realized he was all alone, then got up and hurried after his boss. A minute passed, but no one came out to fill the void. It was the middle of the keynote address and the spotlight was completely empty. Now we knew something really interesting had happened.
“Bring out the dancing girls!” one of the Australians shouted. There was general nervous laughter.
My phone vibrated. I pulled it out, expecting a text from one of my teammates. Hopefully someone had been able to overhear one of the MCB and had an idea what was going on. But the number was listed as Unknown.
Would you like to know what is going on? Meet in room 212. You have 5 minutes.
That seemed odd, but it wasn’t until I looked up that I realized the really weird part. There were about fifty other Hunters scattered across the room reading their phones too. I recognized most of them as team leaders or managers from the various companies. VanZant, who was standing only a few feet away, showed me his phone.
We had all received the same message.