Chapter 6
Our Mi-24 Hind screamed over the Nevada desert, the ground a dark brown blur beneath us. The pilot’s area was separated from the passenger compartment, so I had no way of looking at Skippy’s instrumentation to guess just how stupidly fast we were flying, but I could tell you this: we were going really fast. All orcs were supernaturally good at something. Skippy’s particular gift was breaking the laws of physics with a helicopter.
Those of us on Harbinger’s team had spent a lot of hours in the Hind, but none of us had ever been aboard with Skippy pushing it like this before. Earl had told Skippy that there was a race, and it was very important that we win this particular race, so Skippy had cranked the stereo to eleven, put on some heavy metal, and kicked our chopper in the butt, dedicated to not bring dishonor to MHI.
“Is it supposed to rattle like that?” Trip asked through clenched teeth.
“Washing machines don’t rattle this much. What do you think?”
Milo was sitting across from me and must have caught the look of distress on my face. “Impressive, huh? There’s no way this baby is supposed to go like this. Maximum speed is only around two hundred. We’re beating that by a good bit. Not too shabby, considering she’s older than some of you guys.” Milo patted the bulkhead tenderly. “And to think, it wasn’t that long ago that she was in two pieces!”
Skippy had put a lot of hours into fixing up his beloved steed after the Arbmunep had knocked it out of the sky. He’d tested it around Cazador and assured us that everything was fine, or as he put it, the engine spirits were pleased. Though we’d all been nervous riding in it, the helicopter had seemed to run okay on our most recent case, but we hadn’t been racing with it, either.
“Not helping, Milo. Not helping at all.” Holly’s voice didn’t sound happy over the headset. Since the gunner’s seat was rather cramped, she was the thinnest one here, and had expressed interest in learning how to fly, Holly was riding forward. She had the best view, but I imagined that it was a lot like having the front seat of a roller coaster.
“Are you kidding? When an orc fixes something, it stays fixed. They’re like wizards with duct tape. Magical duct tape wizards, right, Ed?” Milo reached over and thumped Edward on the shoulder. The orc tilted his goggled head, apparently confused by the red-bearded human touching him. After a moment, Ed went back to looking at the window and listening to the talk radio streaming on his earphones. “Well, Ed is more of a duct tape samurai, but you get the idea.”
All of our rivals were racing for the same place, but as far as I knew, we were the only Hunters with a helicopter. It was still almost three hundred miles to the site, and our pace wasn’t exactly set for fuel efficiency, so we needed to stop and refuel once along the way. MHI owned a decent-sized airplane, but it was parked uselessly in Alabama. We were also the only company with Hunters stationed in Salt Lake City, which was the closest metro area, but unfortunately all of them had been attending ICMHP too.
Earl Harbinger had decided to cover all the bases, so he had paid a ridiculous sum to hire a Gulfstream on short notice. It is amazing how fast you can get flight plans altered when you carry a suitcase full of money everywhere you go. Interestingly enough, another prop plane had taken off on an emergency flight a few minutes before we’d gotten to the airport, hired by someone they had described as a businesslike German man.
The group on the Gulfstream would beat us there by a good margin, but we wouldn’t be too far behind. We had no idea how hard the creature was going to be to track, so the air cover could potentially come in handy. Behind us was a convoy of vehicles, MHI-owned for some, and rentals for our Hunters that had flown in. Obviously, most of us at the conference were travelling light, but Eddings, the Las Vegas team lead, had one hell of a well-stocked armory in their office that was hidden in the basement of a pizza place.
Nearly thirty members of MHI and an unknown number of our rivals were on their way to northeastern Nevada. “This many Hunters will be overkill.” I tried to lighten the mood. “It’s probably just a troll angry that he lost his internet connection.”
Holly wasn’t buying it. “That kind of PUFF money, Z, it’s more likely Godzilla.”
“Or Dracula riding Godzilla,” Trip said.
Since we had a race to win, Skippy had requested that we travel light. Milo had been bummed when he hadn’t been able to take his heavy free samples from the show, but Skippy had said they could load them up for the ride home. Milo was simply too excited to play with them to wait for UPS to ship them back to Alabama. So we had two orcs, four humans, and a small load-out of weapons and ammo, with me being the biggest piece of cargo. It was hard to tell when Skippy was unhappy, what with the mask and all, but he had grumbled something about me being “big, like ox make us slow,” but how that evened out because “blood of great war chief bring good luck.” That was the sort of thing that replaced complex aviation calculations when you were an orc. Because I was related to a rock star, it meant we could go faster.
Thinking about my brother gave me a twinge of guilt, and I promised myself again that I’d go visit him before the conference was over. With the blow his career had taken, he was reduced to working in Vegas, playing shows that would’ve been far below him a couple of years ago. The whole thing was my fault, and Mosh had been avoiding my calls. I was worried about him.
There was a sudden bang. I grabbed onto the overhead straps as the chopper lurched.
“What was that?” Holly asked, alarmed.
“No problem. No problem,” Skippy’s gravelly voice came over the intercom. “Tail rotor break.” He pronounced it row-tor.
“Break? What do you mean break?”
“No…is good break. Skip mean…break in.”
“That sounds bad, Skippy!”
“No…The spirits that live in tail rotor…happy together now.”
“You said the spirits were happy before we flew last time!” Trip exclaimed.
“No. Engine spirits happy. Tail rotor spirits…not so much. Very angry tail rotor.”
“Last time I checked, you need a functioning tail rotor to fly a helicopter.”
“No. Not to fly. Only not to spin around. Like circle…Until hit ground. Explode!” Skippy made the horrible wheezing noise that passed for orc laughter. “But rotor happy now! Yay!”
“We’re so gonna die,” I muttered.
“No. No,” Skippy insisted. “Gretchen sacrifice chicken for us. Skip knew. Rotor spirits come ’round.”
Flying with Skippy had been a lot easier back before he was willing to talk to me so much. Now that we were part of the family and he’d opened up about his piloting and maintenance methods, it was frankly unnerving. But the rattling did seem to taper off a bit. Trip began to breathe again. Edward lifted one hand, extended his pointer and pinky fingers and threw the horns, then went back to his talk radio. Milo grinned. “See? Told you so! Orcs are great at fixing things…And I’ll admit, I did help a little.” He sounded rather proud of himself. “I sort of had to. Orcs think welding is black magic.”
And to think, Julie had been upset that Earl had wanted her on the jet, a new vehicle which was serviced by actual mechanics, not a thirty-year-old Soviet flying tank that had been out of service for the last year due to a terrible crash, kept together by a mystical orc, whose wife, the medicine woman, had shaken some chicken bones over it to pronounce it fixed. My poor wife.
Since Julie was our best shot with a rifle, she usually rode in the chopper anytime there might be a need for air cover. It was kind of odd that Earl had ordered her to go with him, but he’d seemed rather overprotective of her lately. Now that Earl had finally relented and told us the rest of the story about what had happened in Copper Lake, I thought I could understand why. He had filled in the rest of the details during the ride to the airport. Earl had been afraid to let anyone else know about Special Task Force Unicorn, but with Stricken showing himself to so many Hunters, the cat was out of the bag.
Why that cat had decided to let itself out was another question…
At least we knew why Earl had been extra sullen since he’d gotten back, with his girlfriend being drafted into a covert group of government-sponsored monsters doing who knew what. Earl wasn’t even able to contact her. He had to go to sleep each night without knowing if she was alive or dead. I’d be pissed off too. And now with Heather Kerkonen in danger, assuming Stricken was telling the truth, Earl had launched us on this mission for personal reasons. I was more than glad to go into harm’s way to help a friend, but ten million bucks was a very nice added incentive.
Once the Hind’s shaking had subsided enough that we could actually read without our eyeballs jittering out of our heads, Milo pulled a map out from his armor and held it between me and Trip. He pointed to where we were heading. “This is the spot of the last attack.” He moved his gloved finger. “This is the closest airfield to the target. They’re a couple hundred miles an hour faster than we are, but they’ll still need to procure ground transport. Ticked as Earl seemed, I figure that won’t take too long…He’s liable to hijack somebody. They should be on site at least half an hour before us.”
“Cops and MCB are already there, so whatever it is has already moved,” Trip pointed out.
“I know, and I’m going to be really upset if I’m missing SHOT Show and this thing has just up and flew away, or ate a big lunch and now it’s going back to sleep for another hundred years, so we waste our time screwing around in the desert while it hibernates and dreams happy monster dreams. That happens all the time…I don’t get to test drive killer robots very often.”
All Hunters hate going into a situation without good intel. There was no doubt Stricken knew more than he told us, and whatever he wasn’t saying was certainly bad news. “If this thing is on the move, and if it really is ten million dollars worth of nasty, then someone else is bound to run into it.”
Holly couldn’t see the map, but she could listen to our conversation. “I’ve been flipping through the radio and the police bands. If I hear anything I’ll let you know.”
“We might get lucky. All the Hunters in airplanes will get there fast to the wrong place, and everybody else in a car will be too slow, but if the creature makes a move in that window, we’ll be in the right position to catch it. They’re too fast or too slow, we’re just right.”
“We can be Team Goldilocks!” Milo exclaimed.
“I like it,” Holly said. “Goldilocks. It has gravitas.”
I ignored them. “If it shows up somewhere else, we’ll be the first to swoop in on it.”
“Us and the MCB,” Milo said. “A bunch of them bailed out of the conference too. Just because Stricken sent all the Hunters doesn’t mean that MCB answers to him.”
“Maybe they do.” Since Myers was gone and Agent Franks wasn’t being shown much love, I had my suspicions about who was actually calling the shots. “MCB will be too busy keeping snoopers out of the area and lying to the press.” I didn’t know if my guess about their internal politics was right or not, but I really didn’t want to get in Franks’ path if I could help it. “If only we had a clue what it was, we might be able to figure where it was heading, how fast, or if it’ll just hunker down. Anything interesting on the map?”
“Nothing major in the area…Pretty desolate. Some little towns here and there. Not very much farming, some mines. It snowed a few days ago, and the desert gets really cold, so there probably won’t be campers to pick off. It would be nice if it was cold-blooded and sleepy…You go out further, Wendover is north. Lots of nothing to the west. I hope it doesn’t go east.”
“Why?”
“Dugway Proving Grounds, where the Army stores all of its nastiest chemical and biological weapons. North of that is the test range where the Air Force does bombing practice. The whole thing is bigger than some states. I’m guessing a Russian attack helicopter flying over will raise some eyebrows. I don’t think Skippy wants to get shot down.”
“Skip no like crash again. Just fixed Hind. Crash bad.”
“Regardless of where it’s going, I’m worried about what happens when we find it,” Trip said. “That gigantic dollar figure making you guys nervous? That’s more than master vamp money. What the heck is this thing?”
“Beats me, but I do like the idea of sleeping on a gigantic pile of money,” Holly answered.
“You totally should try it. It’s awesome. I sleep like a baby.” I could get away with saying crap like that in this crowd. Even by MHI standards, I had been the primary on some very impressive bounties, but my closest friends knew that I’d donated most of my Lord Machado money to the families of the Hunters that had died at DeSoya Caverns. Not that I was hurting financially. I’d married a Shackleford.
We stopped at the small airfield along the way and paid way too much for avgas. The only employee had been excited to see us. Our brutal chopper was a lot neater than his usual Cessnas and crop dusters. Even with the red-and-white pseudo-civilian paint job, the Mi-24 still looked dangerous, and therefore interesting. Busy day too, he told us, since a plane full of Germans had landed, topped off, and departed only ten minutes before we’d arrived.
That didn’t make any sense. Why would Lindemann stop early to top off the tanks? The kid said that they were flying in a PAC P-750, which Holly said should have given them plenty of extra range to get to the site. Now Earl would beat Lindemann there for sure.
Unless Lindemann had an idea of where the monster was heading…
I mentioned that once we got back into the air. My personal theory was that maybe Stricken had given the Germans intelligence he hadn’t shared with the rest of us. He’d told Earl about Unicorn’s missing team and no one else. Stricken had called this a contest, but as he’d admitted himself, he wasn’t the type of man that cared about concepts like fairness.
“Maybe Lindemann has a psychic on his team,” was Trip’s guess.
“That’s stupid.”
“Says the psychic.”
I rolled my eyes. “I’m not psychic.”
“Can you read minds?”
“Come on, Trip, we’ve been over this a hundred times. Only in very specific circumstances, after being exposed to a specific artifact of the Old Ones, and the effects don’t seem to last for very long. I haven’t read someone’s mind in like forever. And it isn’t mind reading, it’s just particular memories.”
“Psychic.”
This was an argument I was never going to win. Trip still believed it was a gift from God. Yeah, I suppose it sort of was a gift from a god, just not ours.
“Maybe he’s got someone that can do magic,” Milo supplied.
“Possible, but also stupid.”
“Obviously, because that would be so unlikely, as we’re riding in a helicopter with orcs,” Holly said. “Hell, Earl’s even got a magic-using elf girl with him—”
The helicopter jerked harder this time, slamming all of us back into our seats. Only this time it wasn’t a mechanical effect, but rather because Skippy had freaked out on the controls. “Elf! Elf? Harb Anger has filthy elf?”
“Bad move, Team Goldilocks,” I shouted at Holly.
“Crud. Sorry, Skippy.” Holly had forgotten about the animosity between elves and orcs. They’d been at war since the dawn of time, with both sides blaming the other for all manner of atrocities. Earl deciding to hire one of the trailer park elves was a subject that he’d been planning on broaching to Skippy’s people gradually.
“Elfs?”
“Oh crap.” Milo grabbed his headset. “Listen, Skippy, it isn’t like that.”
“Tribe not…not good enough? Urks brave for Harb Anger? Elfs are evil—filth—grugnulish!”
I had picked up a handful of orcish, but I didn’t know that word, though it was obviously not meant as a compliment.
“Wretched pack of pig dogs…” Milo clarified the Orcish profanity. “I wouldn’t say a pack. We just got the one. Easy, Skippy. Inferior elf magic can be useful for lesser things that we would never bother a noble orc for. It was Earl’s call. He was planning on telling you.”
“Harb Anger…wise chief.” Skippy made a grumbling noise, but he wouldn’t be so easily placated. “Keep elf grugnulish…away. Elf no corrupt tribe!” Skippy continued to mumble for a bit, then he changed the CD to rage-infused Scandinavian death metal and somehow made the stereo go even louder so he wouldn’t have to listen to us. We’d hurt his feelings.
“Way to go, Holly,” Trip said. “We weren’t supposed to mention Tanya.”
At that, Edward, who hadn’t shown the least bit of reaction to his older brother’s fit, leaned forward and removed his ear buds, head turned quizzically to the side, apparently interested for the first time.
“It’s cool, Ed. Same one you met before in Indiana,” Milo said soothingly. After Earl had been conned into hiring the elf girl for a temp job, it had been Edward who had gone into the pocket dimension with her. It had been a rescue mission, us trying to get to a couple of lost children, but no humans could get past the telepathic assault of the creatures inside. The elf girl’s stupid bravery had been enough to convince Earl to grant her wish and let her have a shot at becoming a Hunter. Ed had seemed happy because he’d gotten to dismember some giant fey monsters. Mission accomplished by the magically immune elf and orc, and MHI had gotten paid, so it had been a good day all around. “No need for…slashy slashy,” Milo pointed at the two sheathed swords balanced between Ed’s knees. “You two seemed to get along okay.”
Edward seemed to ponder that for a minute. The only thing visible beneath the baggy black balaclava were two unblinking yellow eyes. As usual, Edward was a complete cipher. Then he simply put his earbuds back in and returned his attention to the window. Ed always seemed to be in his own little world right up until the time to get his slice and dice on.
With Skippy still occasionally muttering orc profanity into our headsets, we passed the time by running through possible scenarios and coming up with plans and backup plans. Normally this would be the part where I’d nervously triple-check my gear, but there wasn’t enough room to safely maneuver guns inside the crew compartment, and besides, Skippy, who frowned on the idea of someone negligently putting a round through his precious chopper, was already in a bad mood.
“That was Julie on the radio. The jet has landed.” Holly said. “One of our Utah guys arranged for a truck to pick them up. Earl’s group will be on their way to the attack site in a few minutes.”
My watch said we were still at least half an hour out. “What’s the ETA for—”
Holly cut me off. “Hang on. Got something…Highway patrol is going nuts…Shots fired. Officer down…”
We all perked up. Could this be it?
“He’s injured, says he can’t tell what it was, but it’s huge…Some sort of animal…Bug…Something. He’s panicked.”
Trip got excited. “Bet that’s our monster!”
“Drewbeck Road in…Where’s Lutz?”
Milo got the map out in a jiffy. “South of the attack site, not too far west of where we are now.”
“Skippy, hang a left!”
Holly wasn’t much of a navigator, but Skippy got the idea, and I had to grab onto the straps again as Skippy banked us hard to the side. Sideways turned to down and all of the unsecured gear cases slid across the floor. “Easy there, Airwolf!” It would be nice for Skippy to say hang on or something before doing something crazy.
Milo began reading off numbers and Skippy corrected course. The light in the crew compartment changed as we flew toward the rapidly setting sun. “Be there…ten minutes.” The Hind began to rattle harder again as we shed altitude and gained speed. “See stupid elfs do that.”
“Cop’s radio went quiet,” Holly warned. “I’ll alert Julie.”
There’s a certain feeling that comes with the beginning of a new hunt. Excitement, tension, nervous energy, and yeah, even fear…It’s kind of addictive. I could feel it and I could see it on the faces of my companions. Except for Ed, who didn’t seem to care one way or the other. “Let’s blast this thing fast and save them the ride.”
“Think we should use the door gun?” Milo asked.
We still had a few minutes of daylight left, and after that we could always switch to night vision. “You ask that like there was any possible way I’d say no.”
Milo gave me a thumbs up, and went to unzipping the case that held the FN 240 machine gun. Trip opened an ammo can and lifted out one end of a belt of silver 7.62. We’d wait until we slowed down before opening the door to place it on its mount. It was cold outside, and I could only imagine what a two-hundred-mile-an-hour wind chill would be like. Between Milo’s belt-fed and one of Julie’s custom M-14s she’d left aboard if we needed a precise shot, we could rain down some hurt from the sky.
“Airplane above. Go same place as us,” Skippy said. “But go faster.” He sounded offended by that.
“Skip’s right.” Holly said. “Somebody just blew right past us.”
“Can you tell who it is?”
“No idea.”
“More Hunters?” I looked to Trip and Milo, but neither one of them had a clue either. “They must have heard the same distress call. Maybe they’re going to land in a field or something.”
“It’s a really rocky area,” Milo said. “Is it like a bush plane?”
“No, Milo. It’s a big, twin engine prop plane,” Holly said. “And they’re leaving us in the dust.”
“Propel-or,” grumbled Skippy. “Faster than Hind…but boring.”
“They’re way ahead now, hard to see them with the sun. Skippy, I’m borrowing these binoculars.”
That was the same type of plane the German team had rented. “Lindemann.” I know that we weren’t in this for Stricken’s stupid race, but I couldn’t help feeling angry. I’m competitive like that. Money is money, and this was MHI’s territory.“They’re probably going to land on the road.”
“Ooh, he’s good.” Milo whistled. “I wonder how much he had to bribe the rent-a-pilot to try that.”
Holly came back over the intercom. “Okay, I can see a sign for a garage ahead. Couple structures. No other buildings for half a mile. There’s the flashing lights from the police car right in front. I don’t see anything else around. There’s lots of big rocks and the road is curvy. I’m not seeing any long flat spots.”
“It’ll take the Germans a pass or two to find a place to land. We can still get in there before they do.”
“On the bright side, if they do pull it off, maybe they’ll be able to help that highway patrolman in time,” Trip said.
Leave it to Trip to be the voice of compassion. I’d been so distracted at being beaten by our rivals on our own turf that I hadn’t even thought of that unfortunate man. The sad truth of this business was that more often than not we got there to clean up after the monsters had done their thing, and actually rescuing people was rare. “True. But I still want to beat these assholes on principle.”
“Uh…guys?” Holly sounded surprised. “The Germans have gotten out.”
“What?”
“They’ve jumped. When I looked up I saw somebody fall out the door.”
“Parachutes? That crafty bastard.” Well, now I could see why Lindemann had been getting so much admiration from the international Hunters at the conference. Lindemann hadn’t just rented a plane, he’d rented one used by skydivers. They probably even had all of the equipment right there ready to go at the airport. That’s also why they’d stopped early to gas up. Simply get to the general area and wait for the target to show. “Why didn’t we think of that?”
“None of us know how to jump out of airplanes?” Milo asked rhetorically.
Boone and Gregorius both had Special Forces backgrounds, so had Cody, but he was too old for that kind of thing now. So they’d all been jump qualified at one point, but they were all either with Earl or in the convoy coming up from Vegas. The only other member of MHI I could think of that would’ve been ready to do that was Sam Haven, who had been a SEAL, but he was dead. As far as I knew, none of the rest of us were prepared to get out of a perfectly good aircraft while it was still in the sky. “Valid point.”
“I can’t see…Whoa…He’s going to hit! Wait. There’s a chute. Holy shit. It opened right before the ground. There’s another one. They’re landing right on top of the place.”
“Okay,” said Trip. “That’s pretty tough.”
“The ladies love Klaus,” Milo added. “And it sure isn’t because of that accent…All shouty and stuff.”
“Please, not another word about your man crush on Klaus.” I had to hand it to Lindemann, that was a clever move, but would it be ten million dollars clever? We could still get this thing first. They were on foot, had to be lightly armed, and we had mobility on our side. “Okay, Skip. The German team is on point. Let’s back them up. Bring us in to provide cover.”
The three humans in the back unstrapped from our seats and clipped safety carabineers to the ruggedized straps on our armor. The attached bungee cords would keep us from falling out the door and to our deaths if Skippy had to maneuver suddenly. We each checked the man next to us to make sure he’d been properly secured. Edward, as usual, didn’t care, as orcs didn’t really like to pay attention to things like safety. If things got nuts, Ed would stay inside by the sheer power of his badassitude. When everyone was ready, Trip yanked one side door open and I got the other.
A blast of freezing wind struck us. Damn, it’s cold.
Milo and Trip went to work moving the heavy 240 into place on the left. Taking Julie’s rifle, I threw the single-point sling over my head and right arm, because if I dropped her four-thousand-dollar gun out the chopper she’d murder me.
I stuck one leg outside, braced my foot on the step, and leaned out. The skin of my face was exposed, and it immediately stung from the cold. You didn’t think of Nevada as frigid, but in the high desert in January, it was nasty. “Wow! That’s refreshing.” I rocked in a twenty round mag, pulled the bolt back and let it fly, chambering a round of silver .308. Then I was really glad for the sling, because it let me free my hands to dig around in a pouch until I found my ski-mask. I fumbled it on, then got my headset back on over my head.
Trip had gotten the same idea as me and was putting on his mask too. He was from Florida, and normally started shivering at sixty degrees, so he was hating life right about now. Now we matched Ed. Milo, who was from Idaho and seemingly immune to cold, slapped the feed tray down and ran the charging handle of the machine gun. “Left side ready!”
The pouches on my armor were filled with 12-gauge magazines for Abomination. I had one sack of mags for the M-14 on the floor, so I stuck my inside boot through the strap to keep it from sliding away. “Z, ready on the right.”
“One minute,” Skippy roared, so of course that meant it was time to change the music. I don’t know if it was a coincidence, or out of spite because we’d hired an elf, assuming Skippy even understood concepts like nation states, but his choice of Mein Herz Brennt by Rammstein was rather suspicious.
I flipped up the scope covers. I still had a few minutes of light, so I was going to use them as well as possible. I was no Julie, but I wasn’t too shabby with a rifle, and I’d shot this particular heavily modified Troy chassis enough times to know it was a tack driver. It was probably better to start with the scalpel before going to Milo’s meat cleaver. “Give me an angle, Skippy.”
The chopper turned a bit, and the tall sign of the gas station came into view. We were only fifty yards off the ground by the time we crossed the road. The gas station was an ugly building, with a grimy little convenience store attached to a cinder-block garage. The garage door was open, and there was an older car parked inside with the hood up. There was a single gas pump, not even covered by an awning. Twenty yards behind the garage was an old single-wide mobile home. The whole area was lightly dusted with snow.
“The Germans are all in the parking lot.” Holly said. “Friendlies are dressed in gray-and-black camo.”
“Got them.” There were five figures crouched behind a tow truck. Colorful sports parachutes had been quickly abandoned, and the wind was dragging a few of them down the highway like rainbow tumbleweeds.
The police car was parked right next to the garage. The driver’s side door was open and I could see a pair of legs hanging out. As I watched, two of the Germans got up and ran for the police car while the others covered them. Their guns were aimed at the gas station, so I put the rifle to my cheek and glassed the windows to see what they were looking for. I turned the focus knob on the Leopold scope until the picture was crystal clear. A huge shadow zipped across the interior of the convenience store before ducking back down. “What the hell was that?”
“ID?” Trip shouted.
I wasn’t sure what I’d seen. It had been broad, at least four feet across, couldn’t tell how tall, and dark in color. It had seemed…bristly. “Beats the hell out of me, big, but it moves fast.” I kept scanning. The interior of the shop was trashed. Shelves were knocked over. Some of the windows were broken. Something was spilled on the counter. I couldn’t tell if it was blood.
The Hind was still moving, but slowly, gliding over the road. The gas station was in the middle of a small valley. There were hills all around, but there was a clear area for at least fifty yards in every direction. If the thing ran for it, there was nothing for it to hide behind besides sagebrush and rocks smaller than it had been. Unless it was bulletproof, we had it cornered. I turned my view back to the Germans.
The two runners had reached the highway patrolman, and one was dragging him by the arms while the other was walking backwards behind them, eyeing the building. Suddenly the front window of the store shattered outward, but I couldn’t see what had caused it. The Germans rushed back behind the tow truck, but held their fire.
“What did that?” Holly asked.
“Can’t tell…” I searched through the scope. I followed the sparkling trail of broken glass away from the station. Something had been hurled through that window, and I found it on the police car’s hood. “Wait. Got it…Oh hell.”
“What?”
It was hard to tell, because it was so red and mangled, but I was pretty sure I knew what I was looking at. “I think that’s a human torso.”
Something shifted inside the store, knocking over another shelf.
My inclination was to assume there were no survivors inside, hose the place down, then torch it to be sure. But I couldn’t see what Lindemann could see. Maybe he was going to try and reason with it or some nonsense. You never knew. Theoretically, I was in command, but Milo was far more experienced than I was. Earl had left me in charge because Milo wasn’t comfortable with the whole leadership thing, but that didn’t mean I couldn’t pick his superior brain. “How do you think we should play this?”
“Gas pump is far enough away we should be able to destroy the building and not blow us all up. But…” Milo stroked his long red beard thoughtfully. “Klaus has boots on the ground. Let him make the call.”
I could see one of the camouflaged individuals pointing and giving orders. A split second later, all five of them rose and opened fire on the building. The remaining windows shattered. The glass cases inside came apart. One German rose and chucked something into the open garage. Lindemann’s men all ducked as one. A sharp explosion later, a cascade of dust and smoke belched out every opening. A lone hubcab went rolling across the parking lot.
“You know, I’m starting to like these guys,” I said.
The Hind’s nose was pointed at the building as we slowly drifted across the parking lot, and with Milo and me hanging out by the bungee cords, we could both shoot forward. “They don’t get to have all the fun.” Milo let the 240 thunder. Every fifth round was a tracer, and Milo shredded the facade of the convenience store with a continuous stream of red flashes. Cinderblocks puckered, spat, and then broke. Milo kept working the muzzle side to side, absolutely wrecking the place.
“Hee hee hee…Pretty.” Skippy, for one, liked the tracer’s effect.
Once Milo had run through his two hundred rounds, he immediately yanked the cover open, just as Trip pulled over a fresh belt. “It’s cool, but I wish we would’ve brought the mini-gun. Six thousand rpm is so much niftier. In fact, I picked up a brochure for this new model today—”
While Milo carried on about justifying the purchase of another mini-gun, I was still watching, waiting. The place had been shredded, but there was no sign of the creature. It had to have been hit. The question was if we were dealing with something that particularly cared or not.
During our shooting spree, the last slice of orange sun had disappeared. Shadows were lengthening, but too early for night vision. It was a good thing the Leopold gathered so much extra light. I could still see pretty well through it. There was a flicker of movement from inside the destroyed garage. I shifted the scope over just in time to see that something bristly and black was pushing past the car. “Garage!” My finger went inside the trigger guard and flicked the safety forward.
The M14 barked. Shooting while hanging out a helicopter isn’t the most solid of positions, so the scope rose with the recoil. I brought it back down as the shape moved past the car. I fired again, certain that I got it, but my third hurried shot punched a hole in the car’s front fender. I only got the briefest look at the creature, but it seemed insectlike, with long, terrible legs, and a body coated in thick, bristly hair. Only it was the size of a horse.
The monster scuttled around the corner of the building and was quickly out of sight. Four of the Germans went running after it. Their muzzles flashed as they got a clear shot.
There was a strange vibration on my chest. It took me a moment to realize that it was my phone. It was bad timing. They could leave a message.
“Owen, answer your phone,” Holly ordered from up front.
“How—”
“Because one of the guys on the ground is making exaggerated phone motions like we’re playing charades and pointing at us.”
“Oh…” It took me a second to get to the right pouch. There was no way I could hear over the roar of the rotor, but apparently Lindemann had thought of that as well, and sent me a text.
Under control. It is ours.
“You greedy son of a bitch. Lindemann wants us to back off.”
Want to help? Police needs med evac.
I let out a long sigh of disbelief. “Skippy, can you land us close to that tow truck?” Skippy grunted an affirmation. I told the others what the message said. We’d just been monster blocked.
I’d unclipped and was ready to hop out by the time our tires hit pavement. Klaus Lindemann was waiting for me, wearing an odd suit of mottled gray-and-black body armor, with just a bit of a confident smile on his face. He was holding a G3K in one hand and my business card in the other. So that’s how he’d had my number. “I had hoped you were aboard. Thank you, Mr. Pitt, for your help,” he had to shout to be heard over the chopper. “However, we were first. We will take it from here.”
“My ass you will.”
“Your ass I will take from here?” Lindemann asked, totally sincere. “I am afraid I am unfamiliar with that expression.”
My crew knew what to do, and they’d all bailed out right after me. It took Holly the longest to get extricated from the front cockpit, but as our best medic, she went right over to the wounded man while Trip and Milo covered her. Edward sauntered over to stand behind me, still tucking swords into various places.
“We’re not here to poach your bounty, but you don’t know what that thing is. We’re coming with you.”
Lindemann paused to listen to his own radio. “It does not matter what it is, because it is disabled and soon to be dead. My men have it.”
“Z!” Holly ran over. “The cop’s in bad shape. Several bad lacerations and a shitload of blood loss. He needs a doctor now.”
“We applied a tourniquet,” Lindemann said. “The wound on his leg was very severe.”
Too bad Gretchen hadn’t come with us. Even if there was an ambulance on the way, we were in the sticks, and Skippy was still the fastest way out. “Load him in the Hind. We don’t know what hit him though…”
“Don’t worry. If he starts to change into something I’ll toss him out the door.” It was hard to argue with Holly’s brand of ruthless enthusiasm, plus Trip was already carrying him to the chopper, regardless of whatever I would’ve said anyway. “So unless he turns into a werebird, that should do the trick.” Holly went back to her new charge.
“I will make sure MHI is put in for an assist.” Lindemann tried to soothe me.
It didn’t work. “Damn right you will.” I walked back to the Hind, put Julie’s rifle back and took out Abomination. As nice as Julie’s rifle was, having my fat, mean, full-auto 12-gauge Kalashnikov with its silver inlaid bayonet and hefty grenade launcher was strangely comforting. “Because I’m going with you.”
“That isn’t necessary.”
“Maybe it’s got a friend.” I turned away from Lindemann. Milo had come up behind me. “Get him to the hospital and update Julie. Trip and Ed are with me.” Edward patted a sword hilt to demonstrate he understood.
Milo nodded approvingly at Lindemann. “That whole parachute thing was pretty nifty.”
“Thank you.” Lindemann gave a little bow. “You must be Milo Anderson, the Edison of Monster Hunting, the DaVinci of creative destruction, or would that be destructive creation. Your work is legendary.”
I swear that Milo blushed. “Oh, totally exaggerated.”
“Give me a freaking break.” I was still in a bad mood about losing out on a ridiculous bounty by a matter of seconds. “Come on.”
Lindemann, Trip, and I made our way around the garage as the Hind lifted off and sped away with the rest of my team. It always seems extra quiet after you’ve been listening to the Hind and Skippy’s music when it was suddenly gone. The windswept desert was eerily still.
“Klaus Lindemann, this is Trip Jones,” I said, gesturing at my friend as he pulled off his ski mask. It was a lot warmer without the airflow. Trip shook Lindemann’s hand. “One of MHI’s best.”
“Now you’re just sucking up,” Trip replied with a smile.
“And this is Edward.” Of course, his mask stayed on. I hadn’t thought about how to introduce our orc, since it was supposed to be a secret that we had them. Thankfully, in the near darkness, the green skin and yellow eyes didn’t stand out as much. Ed didn’t offer to shake hands. “He’s our…administrative assistant.”
“I see…” Lindemann said, studying Edward and his many edged weapons, but not commenting further.
The creature’s trail was easy enough to follow in the snow, having left a chaotic pattern of two-inch-circumference holes in the snow. The boots of Lindemann’s men had obliterated many of the tracks. I recognized the little pockmarks in the snow as spots where hot brass had hit and immediately melted through.
“I can assure you, gentlemen. I would not cheat you out of the assist money. We run a scrupulous operation at Grimm Berlin. Mr. Harbinger, I have no doubt, would assure you of our integrity.”
“He’s spoken highly of you.” Well, he put them in the All Right category instead of the Asshole category, which was about as good a compliment as you could get from Earl Harbinger. “I don’t doubt you. More than anything I’m curious to see what all the fuss is about.”
“Ah, well in that case, we are in agreement.” There was a small wooden shed with a bit of light seeping out around the edges of the door, but we could see from the tracks that the monster hadn’t gone anywhere near it. Stepping over a chicken-wire fence and making our way through a dead vegetable garden, we found the other four Hunters at the side of the old trailer house. They were standing in a semicircle, rifles shouldered, weapon-mounted flashlights illuminating one spot on the ground at the end of the trailer. One of the Hunters called out in German, then immediately began to rattle off a bunch of information to his boss.
“They swept the house. Empty. There appeared to be a single occupant. An older man. The mechanic. Certainly the corpse that is now decorating the policeman’s automobile.”
As I made my way around the Hunters, I finally got a good look at the creature.
“That’s it?” Trip was incredulous.
It was a giant spider. Or what was left of one. It had been riddled with bullet holes. It was hunched up on itself, its exact shape hard to see. Trip’s reaction was understandable. Sure, a tarantula the size of a loveseat was terrifying, but not ten million dollars terrifying. By our standards, something like this wasn’t that abnormal, and depending on the size and severity of the infestation, was worth a few thousand bucks, tops.
“I do not understand,” Lindemann said. He barked a command at one of his men, who leaned into his rifle and cranked off several shots. The bullets struck, splattering the snow with bits and pieces of fuzzy meat. It didn’t even twitch. Certain that it was dead, Lindemann walked right up to it and shoved it with his boot. It rolled over on its back. The eight legs splayed open, revealing the damaged underbelly. Yellow guts rolled out into the snow. “Curious.”
He was thinking the same thing I was. “This is too simple. One of the guys from my Newbie class got a dozen of these things with a homemade bomb.”
Too bad Albert Lee wasn’t here. He was an expert on giant spiders, but then again, our librarian had rapidly become an expert on everything. Lee had even instituted a companywide program of our Hunters turning in mandatory after-action reports for every case, all so he could catalog monster behaviors, reactions, and vulnerabilities, then analyze the results, and file them for future reference. It was a really good idea, but I’d hated writing reports at first. It felt too much like school, but after Lee had given me crap for being needlessly stuffy and doing things like never using any contractions in my early reports, I’d loosened up, and now writing about my cases came more naturally.
One of the other Germans spoke English. “Could there be more of these around?”
“For that sort of bounty, there would have to be a colony of them…” Lindemann said. “Which one of you dropped the spider?”
“It was me,” said another of the men, surely speaking English for me and Trip’s convenience. These Europeans were so helpful like that.
“Good work, Hugo. We shall stuff it and make a toy for your children to play on. It will look rather nice in your flat. That is all such a meager beast is useful for.” Lindemann kicked the monster again for good measure. “What game is this Stricken playing at? Why waste all of our time for this?”
“I survived the Stuttgart Massacre,” said Hugo. “I saw horrors you cannot imagine. The chancellor herself personally presented me with the bounty payment and certificate of appreciation. I hate to think we will make far more money for shooting a large bug than for surviving hell on earth. It makes no sense.”
“I intend to collect the bounty promised,” Lindemann vowed. “There is much the American government does that makes no sense…” he looked at me. “No offense.”
I snorted. He wasn’t going to get an argument out of me on that one. “MCB will be coming from the first attack site soon. Cops will be on the way too.”
“Take photos,” Lindemann directed. “I have heard rumor that the Monster Control Bureau will destroy evidence to keep from paying bounties.” That was a new one on me, but two digital cameras were flashing within seconds. These guys were certainly efficient.
Trip took me aside. “Something’s fishy.”
“I know. This is too easy.” I wasn’t about to say anything about Earl’s girlfriend in front of the Germans, but there was no way a single giant spider took out a werewolf.
“A very wise man once said there ain’t no such thing as a free lunch. This seems suspiciously like free lunch territory to me.” Trip looked over at the trailer. “I’m going to poke around.”
“Take Ed. Keep him away from the Feds too. Myers’ whole provisional don’t ask, don’t tell if you’re an orc might not be in effect anymore.” I wish I had thought of that before keeping Edward here. “Where’d he go anyway?”
Trip pointed. Edward had walked over to the dead spider and was examining it. He drew one of the many knives strapped to his body, squatted down, and sawed off the last few inches of one of the legs. He speared the chunk of leg, dropped it into a cloth, wrapped it up, and stuck it inside his coat. “What’s wrong, Ed?”
Edward looked at me, seemingly confused. He struggled to find the words. His English wasn’t nearly as good as his brother’s. “Spy-der…Not real.”
“Looks real to me,” Trip said. “What do you mean?”
“Not real.” Edward shrugged. “Fake.” Our orc patted his coat. “For show.” Then he wandered over to inspect the nearby shed. Curious, I followed him.
Ed held up one hand, motioning me to stop. In one sharp movement he drew one of his swords. Trip and I instinctively shouldered our guns and pointed them at the shed. Lindemann caught the movement and raised his H&K. The three of us fanned out. Edward looked over at me and nodded, then he ripped open the door.
It was a chicken coop.
The light I had seen earlier was a single large bulb designed to keep the birds warm. There were a few straw-covered shelves where the chickens made nests and laid eggs. Edward looked around inside, then sheathed his sword. Trip and I slowly lowered our weapons. Edward picked out a large white chicken, reached down, and scooped it up.
The bird seemed rather nervous. “Edward, why do you have a chicken?”
Edward tucked the chicken carefully under one arm. “Sacrifice…For tail row-tor spirits.” Then he walked toward the trailer. It took the befuddled Trip a second to realize that was where he had been heading to begin with and he followed along.
Lindemann paused by my side. “Your administrative assistant is an odd sort.”
“Chicken theft? That’s totally going on his next evaluation.”