Support Your Local Monster Hunter

by Dennis Liggio

  "They mostly come out at night... mostly..." I said.

  "That's a movie quote, right? You're saying that in a weird voice, so it's gotta be a movie quote."

  I shook my head. "That's not even an obscure one. I can't believe you don't know it. We really need to get you familiar with more movies."

  "I probably have seen the movie," he said. "But the quote is not familiar to me and honestly, I just really don't care. Life is not made up of random movie quotes."

  "Just song references," I countered, knowing his affection for music was as strong as mine for movies.

  Szandor shrugged. "You have your thing, I have mine. I'm sure there's a third person who thinks they're both a pointless waste of time. Fuck that guy."

  I sighed. "That one was maybe 40% negative. Let's just get the gear in place."

  Usually we deal with creatures that have either a taste for human flesh or a general hatred of the living, so we can get away with bumbling around in the dark until hunter and monster find each other, resulting in an awesome fight that we win. But centipedes? We had no clue what they did, what they wanted, what they ate, or any other useful information. We knew that they freaked out the dogs and killed one. They probably had eaten all the junkyard's rats. However, since we weren't going to be offering up a sacrificial dog and weren't trapping our own rats, we went to a less living alternative: raw meat. We had a cooler full of random cuts from the grocery store. While the junkyard owner was going to eventually pay for the meat out of our expenses, we still hadn't bought the fanciest cuts of meat. Szandor kept claiming that if we saved the steaks for last and didn't use them, we could grill them, but I didn't think either of us was going to have the stomach for them after this job. My intuition was that if the meat worked as bait, it'd be ugly.

  Near the gate to the yard we had parked the van and in front of that we had laid out all of our gear. It was our home base. Past that near the start of the piles of junk, we set up what I called The Feeding Station. Lots of meat strewn about, as much meat juice spread along the ground as possible. Unfortunately, meat juice wasn't blood. Blood would be better. Contrary to popular belief, the red liquid in store bought meat is not blood but something else. I hoped it still would be interesting to the centipedes. The Feeding Station was our bait, our honey pot. I wanted the raw meat to draw the hungry centipedes out, and then once exposed, we could kill them. It's a real basic tactic in non-monster hunting, but occasionally it works with ravenous non-standard beasts. There were two major problems with this plan, which Szandor had brought up to me in the van on the way to the grocery.

  "Okay, first off, it might not work at all," he had said. "Sure, they liked rats, but who says they're going to like cow and pig meat? They might only like rats and... uh... dogs. But even if they do like other meats, they might want it living. They could be predators, so they will want to... predat... or whatever the word is."

  "Prey," I had said, keeping my attention on the road. "The word you're looking for is prey. They want to prey upon other animals."

  "Prey upon their prey," he said. "Weird, but okay. Second problem with bait is it working too well."

  "What do you mean?"

  "What would happen if they all came at once?" he said. "We don't know how many there are. We could get overwhelmed, particularly if they saw us as food too."

  "Overwhelmed by centipedes?" I said.

  "Look, the outdoor variety centipedes may not seem impressive, but in volume anything is scary. Remember when Mom took us to that shitty knock off kids birthday place? Imagine a whole goddamn ball pit full of hungry, biting centipedes. I don't want that. Ghastly way to go."

  "That's a horrifying image," I said.

  "Isn't it? So that's why we don't want it."

  His concerns aside, I eventually managed to convince him to go ahead with the plan. So now that we had the cooler full of meat open and the juices sloshed around, it was our time to wait. For the first few minutes, we were ready. We had our weapons on us and we listened for any sound. All we heard was the hum of the floodlights and the whistle of the wind. We think we might have heard a noise far off in the junkyard, but that might have been nothing. No further sound followed and we hadn't gotten a good sense of where it was to go looking for a needle in this haystack. No noise followed even though we waited a few minutes. After that, we relaxed, almost disappointed.

  "Do we need to put a giant fan next to the cooler so that the scent goes into the junkyard?" asked Szandor.

  "We don't have a big fan," I said.

  "There's the flaw in the plan." He paused, scratching the back of his head as he looked around at the absolute nothing happening. "So... beer?"

  I scowled at him and then scanned the dark paths of the junkyard. Finally I reluctantly nodded.

  We grabbed two folding lawn chairs out from the back of the van and set them up at our base. We had a second smaller cooler we had stashed some beers in. We didn't really come here expecting to drink on the job. We might have a little bit of Irish courage here and there, but monster hunting is not really work you should do impaired. But when we set out from New Avalon earlier today, there had been a chance that this was nothing, that Old Man Cooper's ramblings were just an overreaction. Not wanting things to be a total loss, we had stashed a six pack of bottles of a local beer Szandor had found called Huskerville Dew. He was much more excited about it than I, but a good beer was a good beer, so it was enough for me.

  Before he sat down, Szandor let Sheena out of the van. Sheena was Szandor's dog, a gift from a dog breeder in September. She had been small then, but as a mottled Great Dane, she didn't stay that way for long. Ever since she had transformed from puppy to mammoth dog-monster with the mind of a puppy, we had been taking her on our less intense jobs. She was patient and would sit in the van when we needed her to, but it was nice to let her out whenever we could. Now that she was out, she jumped around Szandor, who was actually smiling and holding his beer bottle up high so she wouldn't knock it out of his hand. At the speed her tail was wagging, I wondered if we could use it as a fan.

  Szandor sank down into the chair next to me. He held out his beer to me and I frowned at him for acting so relaxed when we were on a job. He raised his eyebrow at me and I finally clinked my beer to his, which satisfied him. He leaned back, his other hand scratching the back of Sheena's head.

  "You're in one of your moods again," he said, as if Szandor is one who should ever lecture someone on moods. He was the cynical sourpuss of the century, even if he was trying to change. I knew as soon as I thought this that I really was in a mood. He didn't ask what was wrong, but as he took a sip of beer, I knew that's what door he opened.

  "It's just... we need to be professional," I said, ignoring the beer in my own hand. "The sloppier we are, the more likely we are to get hurt."

  "Yeah, I know that well. But if we do this all like we have a stick up our ass, we might not like who we become." He paused, his hand still scratching Sheena. "We need to balance being professional and being who we are. She doesn't get that because this isn't her job."

  I sighed. Some of my concern was my own and some of it was borrowed concern based on a promise I had made. To my girlfriend, Carly. I had promised to not be reckless and to help my brother not be reckless either. At the time, this seemed easy. But I learned that when you talk in general terms like that, you have the problem that what you think is reckless and what someone else thinks is reckless are two different things. I had been doing my best for my brother and I, but in Carly's mind, it didn't seem enough. But after the aborted failure of Szandor's intervention, she hadn't brought up the issue again. That might have been good, but as her boyfriend, I still knew she felt that way. And that's the type of thing that breeds cold resentment.

  "I just feel like I want things to go smoothly in all areas of my life for once," I said, taking my own sip of beer. "Hunting going well and Carly not mad, or afraid, or worrying, or..."

  "That's a lot of ors," said Szandor. "She feels
a lot of different ways about all this."

  "I don't blame her," I said. "If I were on the outside looking in and someone I loved was doing this, it'd probably worry the shit out of me."

  "I'm doing this," he said. "You aren't super worried about me."

  "I am, actually," I said. "But I'm here to have your back. If I couldn't be here, I'd worry." Like if my brother got into a private war against an army of angry clones, for example.

  "Tell her to start training with a weapon, we'll get her out here," he said. "She can come out and help. Or supervise, as she probably would." Szandor frowned. Carly and he had never really gotten along and he often called her bossy. I won't go into what she has called him.

  "Then I would worry," I said. "I'd rather not have to watch both your backs at the same time. I like that I don't have to worry about her safety on a regular basis."

  "Yeah, she only has to worry about yours."

  I scowled again. This wasn't what I wanted to be talking about. I got out of the chair and walked over to the cooler full of meat. I scanned the junkyard, looking for movement in the shadows, hoping to hear some noise beyond the wind and the hum of the lights.

  "Still nothing. Why?" I said.

  "Maybe there's nothing out there," said Szandor. "Old Man Cooper was seeing things. Needs new glasses."

  "He doesn't wear glasses."

  "Needs to have glasses," corrected my brother.

  "Are we getting this wrong?" I said with frustration.

  "About the glasses?"

  "No, the centipedes. Do they not like meat? Can they not smell it?"

  "It was in the cooler, maybe the meat is too chilled to have enough scent," said Szandor. "Maybe we should have left it longer or bought old, stinky meat."

  I sighed. In the seconds that followed, inspiration hit. This is where I came up with a new plan, something that was born from the creative possibilities of the moment. It was a flash of genius, I think. It salvaged a bust of a night and turned it into something productive. I announced my plan out loud. The new course of action decided, I walked to the van for the right gear.

  "You want me to do what?" said Szandor, standing up to come between me and the van.

  Okay, maybe it hadn't been quite decided just yet. I had suggested that we'd stab the meat with skewers and then walk it around the junkyard, completing a circuit before bringing it back here. We'd get the scent out there and make a trail back to the cooler. It seemed sensible.

  "It'll work, we'll get this job back on track," I said.

  "No way I'm doing that."

  "I'll be doing it too," I said.

  "That's possibly the worst thing I could think of," he said. "We're going to get attacked."

  "It's not like we're tying the meat to us," I said.

  "Oh yes, now that actually would be the worst thing I could think of," said Szandor. "Thanks for letting me know what terrible version of it I didn't even imagine at first."

  "It's not that bad an idea," I said.

  "How about you carry the meat and I'll walk behind you, watching for centipedes?" he suggested. "I'll be like a secret service agent guarding the meat president, which would be you. It would be a great honor to be meat president, I'm willing let you to enjoy that prestige alone."

  "No, it's best if we each carry some and split up," I said. "More ground covered, done faster, and with luck we can draw more of them out."

  "That's a terrible plan, absolutely terrible. I vote against it. Sheena, what are your thoughts? What's your vote?"

  Ever since Sheena had been coming with us on jobs, Szandor had been using her as his loyal peanut gallery, suggesting she had a tie-breaker vote when we disagreed, rather than arguing the poor merits of his own case.

  "What's your vote, girl?" said Szandor, bending down to Sheena's face level. Sheena wagged her tail furiously and tried to lick Szandor's beard off.

  "She doesn't get a vote," I said with a resigned annoyance. We had been through this before.

  "Sure she does, she's a Nowak, isn't she?" said Szandor.

  Sheena Helena Nowak was the dog's official name. Szandor had given her a punk studded collar and a ripped white denim vest with patches of punk bands attached to it with clips. I know he would have figured out a way to give her a multicolored mohawk if he could. I had no say in any of her life choices, though Szandor sometimes referred to her as "our" dog. I even had zero input in her naming.

  ("Why Sheena?" I had asked back when he had gotten her.

  "Because she's a goddamn punk rocker, that's why," he had replied.)

  "What's your counter plan?" I asked.

  "My what?"

  "We've been over this," I said. "You don't just get a veto. If you don't like the plan, then you need to offer some type of alternate. You can't just be a negative asshole... I mean more so."

  Szandor scowled. "I'm working on that, you know that." He paused in thought, then smiled. "Okay, I have a plan. It's even a compromise! We do the baiting, but one of stays here at base camp! Y'know, to wait for the centipedes that come for the cooler and to let the other know!"

  "So someone sits here while the other walks around with meat on a stick?" I said.

  "Exactly!" he said with a smirk. "And it's not you who stays behind."

  I met his gaze and he stood up to it, each of us looking in each other's eyes. Then I smiled. Sensing weakness, he smiled too. "I accept that plan," I said finally, my smile not breaking.

  His grin broadened at my words. "I knew you would see it my way. It's agreed, that's our plan!" He almost laughed in glee.

  Now my smile broadened as he fell into my trap. "Yes, that's our plan. And the one that's staying here is Sheena."

  Szandor's smile faltered. "Wait, what?"

  "She's a Nowak, isn't she? So she's staying here to guard the base. And while she's doing that, you and I are going to bait the centipedes. This is a great plan, brother! Thanks for coming up with it!"

  "That isn't exactly what I meant..." he faltered, searching for a way out of the hole he found himself in. "Maybe she doesn't want to stay here."

  I leaned down to Sheena and used the baby-talk patronizing voice that dog owners use. "Oh, who wants to stay here? Who wants to stay here guarding stuff and hanging around the delicious meat? Who's going to get treats if she's a good guard girl? Is it you? Is it you?"

  Sheena gave a bark while she bounced up and down, tapping her paws excitedly on the ground.

  "See? She's totally fine with this," I said.

  "Maybe we should put this to a vote," said Szandor.

  "We have! She votes she stays here and I vote she stays here," I said. "So it doesn't matter what your vote is. Grab your meat on a stick and we'll get going!"

  Continued in The Ghoul Pit, Available August 2017!

  * * *

  [1] A claim I don't quite buy, but I've hardly travelled the world either.

  [2] Another funding option, but it's based on monthly donations from people, as if they were the patron for your art or business.

  [3] Spiders are an insectoid creature we've encountered before. Sometimes they can control people like puppets, but more on that later.

  [4] And since I now understand that heavy drinking and steamy baths are dangerous together, also no regrets if I never emerged from that warm wonderfulness.

  [5] I'm still hazy on how that actually worked, time-wise.

  [6] An understatement, according to my brother, Yasmin, Dickie, Lem, Carly, Paulie, Meat, Delilah, Maybell the bartender at Twin Eagles, my former coworkers at Helping Hands, my junior high school girlfriend, the girl who cuts my hair, some dude on the subway who claimed to read auras, and really just about anyone who has encountered the topic within earshot of me.

  [7] And mostly not actually lead. I always hear about how lead was toxic and I didn't want that. I was just using heavy grade metal pipes. But lead pipe is easy to say and gets the message across.

  [8] With exceptions depending on the type of gun, of course.

&n
bsp; [9] Absolutely no reason.

  [10] If they were truly undead, this might be the wrong phrase. Vamp-living, if you like.

  [11] I don't think my luck would be good for hailing a cab in South Egan. Cabs don't like picking up there.

  [12] A "classic" movie Mikkel had sat me down to watch one day.

  [13] Barring giant serpent attacks or the armies of morally-ambiguous multinational corporations.

  [14] I've heard people use these words to describe how to tackle all of life's problems. They don't appreciate my excited zombie killing comparison.

  [15] A time-honored tradition among smokers.

  Table of Contents

  Tomorrow's Money

  Bleed Black

  As Long As There Is Whiskey in the World

  I Love It Loud

  No Brakes

  The Approaching Curve

  I'm Not Down

  Thank You For the Venom

  Get Busy Living or Get Busy Dying

  Night Drive

  Vampire Money

  Ready To Fall

  Police On My Back

  Let's Hear It For Rock Bottom

  Tired

  A Warrior's Call

  Cosmic Monsters Inc

  Here's Looking at You Kid

  About the Author

  Excerpt from The Ghoul Pit (Nowak Brothers #4)