The construction company had blueprints of the building. The stairs that the various victims had descended went to a basement. There were two more subbasements on the blueprints and the foreman warned that given the age of the building and how often it had been renovated the blueprints were, at best, a guideline.
The sun had set on the drive over, not that it would matter down below. The area around the pit was lit by Klieg lights, which was just going to impede our night-vision when we descended.
We carried all the spare gear over to the hole. As we did, one of the MCB guys came striding over with fury writ on his face.
“We said no flamethrowers!” he snapped, angrily.
“It’s a back-up,” Doctor Nelson snapped back. “We’re going to have to burn them somehow and at some point. That’s the only way to kill trolls. And if there are more than two we’re going to have to use incendiaries. Trolls don’t die for anything but fire.”
“And no explosives!” he said, ignoring her and pointing at the satchel charges Phil was carrying. The satchel charges were claymore bags wrapped thoroughly in rigger tape.
“They’re not explosives,” Phil said. “They’re thermite.”
“Just let us do our job and you go…intimidate a witness or something,” Doctor Nelson said, wearily. The Nelsons disliked the MCB even more than most hunters. “We’ll keep this as discreet as we can.”
Based on the crowd gathered outside the chain-link fence, that wasn’t going to be terribly discreet. The MCB Agent went over to try and scare them off.
“I’ve got point,” I said as Doctor Nelson started to lead the way. I held up the Uzi. “Better for this sort of work.” Doctor Nelson was carrying an FN-FAL which would be difficult to use in tight conditions.
“Very well,” Joan said. “Just don’t get yourself killed. And no grandstanding with your sword.”
I really should have listened to her on that point. We turned on our flashlights on and descended into the musty darkness. The blueprints showed the basements to be a maze. This was going to be fun.
As I reached the base of the stairs I swung the Uzi around, checking the shadows for trolls. The base of the stairs was an open room. The room was mostly filled with debris from the demolition above. Dust, brick ranging from bits to whole blocks, some broken two-by-fours. There were two entries, one forward, one to the left. Both of them had doors that were smashed open and lying on the floor. The damage looked to be old. On the right wall was an old, framed photograph of what was probably Spokane in the 1950s. It didn’t look to have changed much.
I looked over my shoulder at the good doctor and gestured left and forward.
She pointed left. Left it was.
Left was a corridor that ended at a right turn. It had rooms off of it at intervals. Some of them had smashed open doors, others were open. We cleared each cautiously. Louis, at the trail position, carefully sprayed paint on the walls indicating the best way out, a simple sideways V pointed towards the exit.
We slowly cleared the entire basement. Some of the rooms were filled with the debris of years of businesses coming and going from the building above. Others were swept clean. In one we found what looked to be a partial human carcass. We marked it on the map for later. Seriously, how bad does a business have to be to notice it was losing employees in the basement?
Then I thought about Microtel. Whoever it was probably just got terminated for failing to show up the next day.
In many areas the dust had been scuffed by something large. In one spot there was a clear footprint. Doctor Nelson pointed it out to me and mouthed: “Troll.”
So now I knew what a troll print looked like.
The stairs we’d taken down only led to this level. The next two levels down shared a stairwell that was catty-corner from the one we’d used. Getting back to the air was going to be a bitch if we had to run.
Doctor Nelson obviously had thought of the same thing.
“Louis, Brad, head back to the top and get the spare gear,” Joan said. “We’ll cache it here before we head down.”
“Will do,” Brad said.
The stairs down were open, not a closed stairwell like modern buildings. I peaked over the side and sighed.
“Be nice to just throw a bunch of incendiaries into this place and torch it,” I said. The construction internally seemed to be mostly wood.
“If we have to use fire it’s going to be bad, anyway,” Joan said. “We’ll be trapped below-ground with fire all around us. That’s not a good position to be in.”
“Plus it’s hard to collect the PUFF when all the evidence is burned up,” Phil said. “The last time we had to get a PUFF adjuster.”
I took off my helmet and donned my protective mask. It wouldn’t give me oxygen in the event of a fire but it would screen out the smoke and was rated to reduce the air temperature.
“What’s a PUFF adjuster?” I asked, my voice muffled.
“Somebody you never want to deal with,” Joan said, pulling out her own mask.
“Think MCB is bad?” Phil said, donning his. “PUFF adjusters are worse than shoggoths.”
“They can be a tad intimidating,” Joan said.
Phil and Louis finally turned up with the spare gear, took one look at us wearing our masks and donned theirs.
“Ready?” Doctor Nelson asked.
I rotated my neck. The drive had left me horribly bound up. I wanted to just stretch for about thirty minutes to get the kinks out.
“As I’ll ever be,” I said.
I took the stairs sideways, shining the light downward, looking for any threats. Nothing.
The next level down was much like the first, a maze of twisty passages all alike. There were three directions to go, right, left and an office forward. The door was half wood, with a frosted glass window on it that read “Quality Control Department.” Surprisingly, it was undamaged.
Doctor Nelson gestured at the door and I tried the knob. Locked. I slammed my foot into the door and the ancient, rusty, latch gave way. Then the door slammed back into my face and I was nose to nose with my first troll.
The thing was about six-eight, gray-green, skeletally thin and looked like a mass of rubber tubes all bound together. It swiped at me before I could dodge and knocked me sideways so hard I flew ten feet down the passageway. I managed to turn in mid-air, thanks to copious limbering exercises and martial arts training, and skidded instead of slamming. Before I’d even stopped I was firing.
The whole team was pouring fire into the troll but it wasn’t stopping. The troll hit Doctor Nelson and she flew the other way, slamming into a wall and falling in a heap.
I stopped firing as the troll raked Phil’s armor and tore the front open like it was paper. I came back to my feet in a roll and drew Mo No Ken.
“Assei!” I screamed, charging forward and slashing at the troll’s left arm.
It came off with an audible “Pop” and dropped to the floor.
“MY ARM!” the troll bellowed, looking down at the twitching limb. “FILTHY HUMAN!”
“Sorry,” I said, taking a high stance. “Did that get your goat?”
“NOT MAKE BILLY-GOAT JOKE!” The troll leapt at me and swiping with its one good arm.
I didn’t so much cut as hold Mo No Ken out, simply lean back and slide it downwards. The troll’s arm went right through the sword, about half way up its forearm. The hand continued due to momentum and landed on my chest. It even managed to hold on and started finger walking up towards my neck.
The troll’s momentum carried it towards me so I stepped to the side and let it go past then cut downward into the back of its right leg, taking out the tendons. As its damaged leg went out from under it, it dropped its head down to me height and I took it off with one more swipe of the sword.
Unfortunately, all the various bits were still twitching and moving. The body was trying trollfully to writhe its way to the head to reattach, the arm on the floor was flopping towards the body and both the missing limbs
were regrowing as I watched. Then the one finger walking up my armor got to my throat and started strangling me. I pulled it off and tossed it down the corridor.
“He seemed a little gruff,” I said as Louis helped Doctor Nelson to her feet. She was favoring her right arm which had taken the majority of the impact.
“They really don’t like billy-goat jokes, Chad,” Brad said. He was working on Phil’s injuries. The troll’s long talons had slashed his chest but the cuts looked superficial. His armor was in tatters, though.
“I noticed,” I said, wiping down Mo No Ken. “But he really didn’t seem all that tough.”
“That was a little one,” Doctor Nelson said. “And we’re still going to have to burn it.”
I pulled out a thermite grenade with my left hand and held it up.
“It’ll burn right through the body and into the next subbasement,” Phil said. “And probably start one hell of a fire down here.”
“We’ll drag the pieces up to the top,” Doctor Nelson said. “Separately. Louis and Chad on the gear. Brad and I will tote and help Phil back upstairs.”
“I can keep going,” Phil said. “It’s only a flesh wound.”
I’d pulled the hand off my gear and now kicked it to keep it from reconnecting to the body.
“Doctor, with due respect, carrying the torso all that way will take more than two of you,” I said. “I don’t think trolls will futz with a flamethrower.”
“We’ll all go.”
We did carry the flamethrower back but left some of the satchel charges with some booby traps. If the trolls messed with those they’d probably do our work for us.
Phil stayed up top on Doctor Nelson’s insistence. We found a metal trash barrel the local bums had been using to stay warm, and dumped our troll parts in it. That kept the MCB happy.
The problem with all of us going back up was that trolls might have infiltrated back up to the first level. We did a quick sweep, didn’t find anything, and headed down again.
With the exception of the one troll, we didn’t find anything on the next level down. That left the lowest level.
Before we went down we changed batteries in all our flashlights, got a drink of water and generally prepared. We still didn’t know how many trolls we were dealing with or how big and nasty they might be.
The third level down was a shambles. Not only doors but walls had been knocked down. Debris was strewn everywhere and stuff had been piled all over the place. There was stationery, some of it dating back to the 1950s, boxes of pens, broken chairs, ancient typewriters and every other accoutrement of office life. It looked like an office-supply warehouse scrap yard.
As we swept towards the northwest corner we started to hear the rumbling sounds of trolls and their constant bickering. It was in trollish, which none of us spoke, but bickering was bickering.
“Gurgle mugga robomp!” “Bluck glog, glog, gloga, mop!” “BURRA, BURRA, MOP!”
There were at least three voices coming from behind a door marked “Personnel.” When whatever corporation owned this building terminated someone, they were apparently serious.
We’d passed out Phil’s satchel charges and I took my hand off my weapon long enough to tap mine and look at the good doctor. She shook her head and pointed to a pile of paper. If we used fire this place was going up like a napalm strike and we were fifty feet away from the stairs through a maze.
I let the Uzi retract, quietly drew Mo No Ken and kicked in the door.
“Good morning, ladies,” I said. “My name is Chad and I’m here representing the Billy Goats Gruff Monster Hunting Corporation.”
I needn’t have bothered with the door. They came through the freaking walls.
Five minutes later I was lying against a wall coughing blood. My right humerus was broken, again, along with some ribs, the forearm was torn open to the bone, I was missing two teeth, had a slash mark across my cheek that was going to leave one hell of a scar and my armor looked like it had been put through a blender. Even my Kevlar helmet had deep score marks in it. All four of us were at least injured but I’d taken the brunt.
Trolls really don’t like billy goat jokes. And the one upstairs had been the baby.
On the other hand, bits and pieces of troll were scattered in every direction. A few of them were steaming. We’d gotten to the point of throwing some thermite grenades towards the end.
“You guys are going to have to tote this time,” I grunted.
“You had to make a billy goat joke, didn’t you?” Brad said, stumbling over to me.
“I think I’ve learned my lesson on that one.”
Pro-tip: Even with a +3 Sword of Sharpness, taking on trolls hand-to-hand is a losing proposition. And never, ever, make billy goat jokes. You will rue the day.
CHAPTER 10
The humerus turned out to be a major problem.
Like my femur, it had been shattered in the bombing. The actual break there was at the upper end of the humerus, just below the tuberculum majus, the bulbous bit on the top. It had been put back together with lots of screws and a plate.
When the troll hit me and broke the bone, again, it was lower. But the torsional forces rebroke the original break and splintered it up to the tuberculum majus. What I had on the upper bit of my humerus was, at this point, more pulp than bone.
The doctors in Spokane gave me most of that when they patched me up. There were lots of X-rays and serious big-words that they thought I wouldn’t understand. Doctors in Seattle confirmed it and stroked their chins as to what to do about it. I insisted that I needed a working arm to do my job. They weren’t too sure how to accomplish that.
Finally I asked about complete replacement. That took some more chin stroking but in the end that was the conclusion. Most of it my insurance wouldn’t cover but the PUFF bounty on six trolls was just sitting there.
Two weeks after the fight in Spokane I went into the University of Washington Medical Center at 0600. I woke up at 1627 in recovery with a titanium carbide artificial bone that went from my shoulder (part of which had been replaced) to my elbow (most of which had been replaced).
Two weeks later I was out of the soft cast and it was back to physical therapy all over again.
There were things I really liked about the University District. I’ve discussed them. And there was a fair turn-over of people so in general my philandering ways didn’t come back to haunt me. Seattle is a big place but the UD is more like a small town in a big place. And that has its complications.
This leads up to the point that when I went into the physical therapy center and was introduced to my therapist…I’d met her before. Briefly. She was one of those ladies who was fortunately a heavy sleeper. Unfortunately, she now knew my name, address, phone number and had my recently repaired arm in her pretty little hands.
“So,” she said, flexing my recently rebuilt arm. “Your name’s really Oliver.”
“No,” I said, wincing. “It’s Oliver Chadwick Gardenier. I hate all of it but I go by Chad.”
“And I take it you’re not really a stock broker. I mean, when I saw the scars I’d wondered about that.”
“I’m not really a stockbroker. I really was a Marine. I really was in the Beirut Bombing. What I do now is classified.”
“And I can believe as much or as little of that as I’d like,” she said, straightening out my arm to the point of…
“I think that’s far enough,” I gasped. Oh, this was not going to be good.
“But here I get to decide what’s enough,” she said, maliciously. “The phone number you gave me was for a Korean grocery.”
“Sorry,” I gasped. Oh, the pain!
“There is no company called Heimlich, Heimlich and Purge.”
“Sorry!” I whimpered.
“And I lost nearly four hundred dollars on that ‘hot stock tip’ you gave me.”
“How was I to know pet rocks would go out of style!” This was God’s punishment on me. I knew it was. Hot pokers would be pref
erable.
“Seriously, Chad,” she said, frowning and letting up on the pressure. “You seemed like a nice guy.”
“Seriously,” I sneaked a look at her nametag. “Brenda. Those X-rays you saw are the result of what I really do for a living. These fresh cuts on my face? Those stitches on my arm? That’s what I look like after a more or less normal day at the office. So, yeah, I’m a dog. I’m a lousy lounge-lizard who picks up nice girls, has some fun and then hopefully never sees them again. ’Cause the last thing I want to do is drag some poor woman into this life. Okay? So it’s love ’em and leave ’em. Because that way, if you don’t even know who I really am or where I really live or what I really do, you don’t feel constrained to attend my funeral. Which will be closed casket or probably just an urn with my ashes in it to cry over.
“So, sorry about sneaking out on you in the morning and leaving your door unlocked. It was, trust me, for the best. You want the money back? I’m good for the money. But what you don’t want to do is get involved with somebody in my line of work.”
“You work for the mob or something?” she asked.
“I’m a contractor that derives his income mostly from the Federal Government. So, no. And I’ll repeat ‘classified’ as in ‘secret.’ Which is as honest as you’re going to get from me.”
Four hundred bucks was not the most I’ve ever paid for booty but it was totally worth it.
* * *
There’d been some question about whether I could return to duty or have to retire. I’d pointed out to the Doctors Nelson that I’d shrugged off the Beirut Bombing to become a Hunter. They took the point. Medical retirements were probably the most common way people left MHI. The company was kind enough to leave me on base salary, no bonuses obviously, during my surgery, convalescence and retraining period. It took four long months for me to get back to reasonable shape for monster hunting. I still wasn’t one hundred percent but I was getting there.
Since I was out of action for a while, again, and the company was still keeping me on salary waiting to see if I could fully recover, I took a vacation.
Grunge (ARC) Page 14
