Support Your Local Monster Hunter

by Dennis Liggio

  The Case of the Ghostly Runners and the Tall Man (New Avalon Case Files #2)

  There are new rumors of ghost runners on the east side of the city. These transparent joggers wordlessly run in a panic until the mysterious Tall Man appears, then neither are seen again, not until the next occurrence. It seems just like an urban legend, but the gang is approached by a woman who says she saw one of those runners, and she identified the runner as her recently deceased brother! For her sake, the gang explores the rumor, following where it leads - the city morgue, a crime scene, and on into a cold and dark labyrinth where the hallways shift, the cold wind howls, and the walls scream for your fear...

  Damned Lies

  Damned Lies is the true story of things that never happened. It is a fictional memoir of fantastic events. It is a chronicle of self-cloning, of adventure, of magic, of bare-fisted hobo boxing tournaments, of zombies, and more. It's the autobiography of a wild summer adventure out beyond the fields we know. It's the secret of what's hidden in a government bunker, it's the story of helping a nun with a crossbow hunt a vampire, it's the explanation of why you can't have that death ray you really wanted. It's a cautionary tale of just why cloning yourself is a really terrible idea.

  Damned Lies is a big fish story for those who don't fish. It's a shaggy dog story for cat lovers. It's the scifi fantasy humor memoir we'll all wish we dictated on our deathbed. It's why we can't have nice things.

  Damned Lies Strike Back

  Damned Lies Strike Back follows in the great tradition of sequels in that it is bigger, bolder, and dripping with franchise potential. Like a good sequel, it answers all the unanswered questions of the original (except for the ones it doesn't). It is exactly the sequel this world needs.

  This time around, our intrepid hero and friends battle the evil apocalyptic plans of his homicidal clone and a dangerous cult. At the same time he is facing his clone in the present day, he recounts the story of his first year in college where he formed a mystery gang to stop the nefarious plot of evil college professors. It all leads to a climactic sword fight and then a desperate epic battle against a true evil that we all know well...

  Damned Lies of the Dead 3D

  Damned Lies of the Dead 3D is not the zombie novel we need, but it's the zombie novel we deserve. In 1995, Austin, Texas was nearly wiped out by a zombie outbreak. This fact has been long suppressed, but the truth cannot be silenced. Now there is a firsthand account from our intrepid hero of just what happened... and how he survived. Only the dead know the truth...

  The Lost and the Damned

  There is a darkness waking up in the Bellingham mental hospital. Around this evil, the building is twisting and distorting, becoming a place of monsters and murders. With each death, the darkness grows stronger. Doors are opening to other times and other places, reality is shifting.

  Into this comes John Keats, a private detective more accustomed to catching infidelity than missing persons. In pursuit of a half a million dollar bounty, he has tracked down missing rock star Katie Vanders to Bellingham, but he has no idea what waits inside. It should have been easy money: go in, get the girl, and leave. But now that he is in the hospital, he has no way out. The exits are blocked, the hospital is falling apart, and something is chasing him. Even after finding Katie, there is no escape from this trap. His rescue mission has become a game of survival as the hospital twists apart across time and space.

  As deadly secrets are uncovered, a malevolent intelligence is awakening. Can John and Katie figure out how to stop it and escape the hospital, or will they find themselves forever lost in darkness?

  Paper Moon

  Private detective John Keats has another missing person case. Despite the horrors found in Bellingham hospital, the two years since THE LOST AND THE DAMNED have been normal barring nightmares. But the dark parts of this world are not done with him yet. Once again he makes a change from cheating spouses cases to do more traditional detective work, this time searching for the creator of a PBS children's show. The pilot of the show is almost finished, but the creator just disappeared without a single word to anyone. The studio thinks he quit from stress, but not all agree. Despite his work, paranoia and puppets are all John finds in the studio. But his investigation is not over. There's plenty of time for something black and horrible to reach across reality to call his name once more...

  Voices of Madness

  Compelled by screaming voices, sorcerer William Drake travels across America in a desperate attempt to free himself from his misery. But the end of his pain may mean the resurrection of a god long banished from our world. Ripped apart and trapped, this god has gone mad over the centuries.

  As Drake carries out his plans, there is collateral damage. People die, prized possessions are stolen, vengeance is sworn. His actions disrupt the lives of four unlikely heroes who band together in an awkward alliance to stop him. Armchair occultist, Taoist exorcist, college dropout, and punk rock musician - they are a strange set of companions, but they're all that stand between Drake and the mad god.

  Will these four heroes stop Drake in time? Or will the voices spur Drake on to the resurrection of a cosmic madness?

  Cowards and Killers

  "In the end, most of humanity are one of two things: cowards or killers."

  When Michael died, there was no Heaven waiting for him, no eternal rest. There were only two choices: Hell or killing his fellow man. Waking up after death in his own bed, he began receiving calls from a mysterious voice. The voice offers a simple option: become an assassin and kill those it designates. Refuse and the power that keeps him in the world will be removed... and he'll go straight to Hell.

  Coward or killer, he accepts the deal. In a black suit and tie that conceals his identity with a black gun that never runs out of bullets, he is their assassin. But he is not alone: there are other tortured souls who have agreed to the same bargain. They are all Hell-bound; only by killing their targets before the timers on their phones count down do they postpone their fate.

  But this is a fate Michael won't accept. Together with other agents, he plots to rebel against the mysterious voice and the blood-soaked deal. But can they really win this fight when the voice holds all the cards? With each kill, his humanity slips away. Is there a way to escape, or do all roads lead to Hell?

  Cthulhu, Private Investigator

  Cthulhu's partner, Dagon, has been found floating dead in the water at the docks. The Elder Gods have given him three days to find Dagon's killer, or Cthulhu is going to take the fall for it. Starting on the trail of a femme fatale that had hired Dagon, Cthulhu begins searching for the Pnakotic manuscripts and finds himself on everyone's hitlist. Navigating a web of lies and betrayal, he becomes involved with a rogue's gallery of untrustworthy Old Ones who are after the coveted Silver Key. As things hurtle towards their inevitable confusion, he discovers to what deadly lengths the others will go to obtain the Key.

  Excerpt from The Ghoul Pit (Nowak Brothers #4)

  Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap

  The floodlights went on, illuminating the junkyard and creating theater of a thousand shadows. It was a kingdom of discarded memories, twisted metal, totaled cars, and abused appliances. It was a forest of cast-off objects, a labyrinth of dark paths. There were countless places for a man to hide and even more places for things that weren't constrained to the shapes of men to conceal themselves. It was the perfect hunting ground for monsters and the worst environment to be trying to hunt them in. My brother Szandor and I were unfortunately trying to do just that. We were here to kill some centipedes.

  Centipedes don't sound very monstrous. Inconvenient and uncommon, yes, but not monstrous. That we were killing them might make it sound like we were simple exterminators and not the killers of monsters we might be known as, but we didn't have it so easy. If we could have fumigated the whole damn junkyard, we would have done so in a heartbeat. However we lacked that option. These weren't ordinary centipedes. These were five foot long centipedes.

&
nbsp; "Mikkel, do you really think these things are actually five fucking feet long?" asked Szandor. "How do we know that they aren't just... I don't know, one foot long centipedes and Old Man Cooper just got spooked?"

  He had a point. Neither of us had laid eyes upon these centipedes. Nor had we ever encountered centipedes larger than average, despite all the strange creatures we've hunted or have narrowly avoided being killed by. All we had to go on was the testimony of the junkyard owner, Old Man Cooper, a man with a usually severe expression and an extraordinarily bald head who reminded me more of a prison warden than a junkyard owner. We didn't know him nor did we know anyone in common; his call came out of the blue. He vaguely mentioned that an exterminator had referred him to us. Neither my brother nor I knew any exterminators, but I guess in some shop somewhere, there's a note that if something is too crazy for them to handle, that they should refer the customer to us. Maybe we should get that on business cards: For when your exterminator thinks it's too much! Then again, maybe not. If they exist, I really don't want to deal with five foot long roaches. The regular size ones are already too much of a pain.

  Normally when we first talk to people about monsters, they're hesitant, not really admitting they actually saw something. They're always afraid of sounding crazy. On the phone, Old Man Cooper hesitated for only a half second, possibly not due to the paranoia of admitting that he saw a monster, but possibly because I sounded much younger than he expected. After that, he got over his hesitancy and went straight on to the matter at hand with confidence, as if he were calling me about a rat problem. I think that because his problem was enlarged centipedes and not a human-like monsters such as zombies, he could compartmentalize the weirdness of it all. And as it turned out, he didn't have a rat problem anymore - it seemed the centipedes were higher on the food chain and had killed all the rats. His problem was that the centipedes were too far up that food chain. He had a dead dog on his hands.

  At hearing this my brother, who was sitting close to me in our booth at Twin Eagles trying to listen to as much of the call as possible, cursed loudly. He was very anti dog violence. I ignored him and tried to listen to the facts. One of Old Man Cooper's guard dogs had died one night. It was heavily bitten up and partially eaten. Cooper didn't go into too many details because he didn't want to talk about it, but the dog hadn't bled out. Enough was eaten that the dog had died of that. On this subject he was a little spooked and he admitted that he didn't know what to think of the incident. He had walked the junkyard the following day with a shotgun, looking for a breech of the fence where a wolf or a mountain lion or some other wilderness predator could have gotten in. He saw nothing and he told me that the junkyard seemed quieter than usual. However, he had nothing to go on in the death of the dog, so he filed away the incident in the back of his mind as disturbing and strange. He buried the dog, said a prayer for it with his hat against his heart, and moved on.

  After the first dog died, the rest of his guard dogs refused to set foot in the junkyard at night. They seemed to know what had killed the other dog and they didn't want anything to do with the place. When Old Man Cooper forced the dogs into the junkyard to guard the place overnight, he noticed they just stayed by the front gate, whining for him to let them out. He thought they were overreacting, so he left them there. When he showed up in the morning, the dogs were still right at the gate, whining and anxious to be let out. He shook his head in annoyance, but by the end of that day he had a different opinion.

  He had to move some junked cars that day, so he was out in his bulldozer ("He has his own bulldozer? How fucking awesome is that?" said Szandor later). As the bulldozer pushed an old, creaking Chevy Caprice, Old Man Cooper saw something. It snaked out from under the car he had just moved. It was fast and he caught only a glimpse of it as it slinked under another vehicle. He got out of the bulldozer and shined a light under that car, but whatever had been there was gone. He knew it wasn't a snake - he was adamant about that. He also knew it wasn't a stray cat, not a homeless kid, not even a big rat. He said it was a centipede and he resisted any attempt to get him to admit it as anything else - aside from Szandor getting him later in person to admit it could also be a millipede, but that just made Old Man Cooper hate my brother. This one incident was the only clear look Old Man Cooper had gotten, but it was hardly the only sign to him of something bad in the junkyard. He'd since seen glimpses of things - movement out of the corner of his eyes, the tap of legs on metal, a rotting smell, the hiss of something in the darkness. He stopped letting the dogs into the junkyard at night, and on a few nights - just a few - he went into the junkyard on his own. He was armed, of course, and he never strayed very far from the gate. On the last night, he heard a high pitched keening. At first it was from a pile of cars, but then it was answered from another, and then from another. When he realized it was from all around him, he backed off toward the gate. After that, he wouldn't set foot in his own junkyard at night. That's what made him call us. And now we were setting foot in the junkyard at night.

  Old Man Cooper's junkyard wasn't technically in New Avalon. It was out past the Husks in a northeasterly direction toward the old mines. I guess that was so the Old Man could have a big lot and pay little in taxes, or maybe he just enjoyed making people spend the effort to come to him to get parts for their old cars. We had driven up in the afternoon to meet Old Man Cooper and get a brief tour. We talked about what he wanted and what we couldn't do in his junkyard. Then we discussed our fee. We ended up haggling and agreeing on a price lower than my brother and I wanted; unfortunately there's no going rate for giant centipede extermination and the labor costs involved are hard to express. Ultimately I ended up agreeing so that we got at least something. He needed help and there weren't many other options for him, so we weren't going to walk away and leave him with monsters in his junkyard. We sealed the deal with a handshake. Then my brother and I got dinner at a nearby truck stop restaurant as we waited for night to fall. When it was late enough, we returned to the junkyard where Cooper waited for us. He was nervous and clearly didn't want to be around after dark. We told him we'd take over. Relieved, he gave us a last admonishment to not mess up the place too much, then he drove off in his old pickup.

  "It's not like we're going to destroy the junkyard," said Szandor.

  I eyed him suspiciously, remembering he was indirectly involved in the destruction of a gas station in Cobalt County a few months ago. I decided not to say anything.

  We pulled our van, which I call The Porkchop Express after a favorite movie, up to the gate. The junkyard was like a fortress surrounded by fence and razor wire. The gate itself was a hinged fence. On it was a thin wooden sign saying, Old Man Cooper's Junkyard. He picked that name himself, we weren't intentionally making him sound like a Scooby Doo villain. Szandor opened the gate while I pulled the van up.

  It was a particularly cold January night. Though snow was in the forecast for the week, it wasn't snowing tonight. It was still bitterly cold and the air felt wet. The wind was biting at us as we unloaded the van and brought the gear inside. As he closed the gate behind us, my brother had asked if they really were five foot long centipedes. I still wasn't sure if they were, but we were here to do a job.

  "I have a feeling we're going to find out if the centipedes exist and they are as big as suggested," I said. "And if not centipedes, it might be something more interesting."

  My brother paused and looked over the stacks of junk from the safety of the gate. He was dressed in a beige jumpsuit which he had over his clothes. We both thought this might be a dirty job and we appreciated the extra warmth. At twenty-one, he often looked like an angry young man. The short brown beard he wore made him look a little older, but not much, since he couldn't grow it very long. His hair hadn't been dyed lately, so his brown hair was just cut short, nothing fancy. He pulled on an old football helmet and clicked on the LED he had clipped to the front of the jumpsuit. The floodlights were on overhead, but there will still plenty of dark places in the junkya
rd. The LED would give us light around us in a short distance while not needing a hand like a flashlight. We still had flashlights for distance or just a greater intensity of light.

  I turned on my own LED and made sure my flashlight was hooked to a loop on my suit's waist. I was also dressed in a beige jumpsuit, but I was skipping the helmet tonight. Due to the wind, my long dark hair was pulled back in a pony tail. I am two years older than my brother and a few inches taller, but I bet someone would consider me just as young a kid as him. Anyone who didn't know us might have suggested we were out of our depth; I'm sure Old Man Cooper had some reservations when he had first seen us. But we had hunted many creatures and knew what we were doing - most of the time, at least. I looked over to my brother and remembered some of our adventures. Some of the time, I guess.

  "I wish we weren't doing this at night," said Szandor, looking at the mounds of junk in the dim light. "Lots of places for them to hide, little real cover for us. Hell, they could come out of our cover. Nighttime is all wrong for this."