Monster Hunter Bloodlines

by Larry Correia

  Which was when the dogs came seemingly out of nowhere to attack the crowd. Jaws clamped onto the throat of the man with the empty pistol and dragged him down, gurgling. The other bit a biker on the arm, which was unfortunately holding one of those goofy Taurus Judge shotgun pistols, and when he spasmodically jerked the trigger, he accidentally shot another biker in the leg.

  As the thing with the sword waded into the crowd, the fog seemed to follow, billowing outward, filling the space. It swung and removed a man’s arm. Then spun and took off another man’s foot. That was one sharp sword! Somebody smashed a chair over the monster’s head, but it simply turned and ran him through the guts, then yanked the sword out in a red spray.

  “The prey is escaping,” the monster told its dogs. “Get her.”

  Since I was lying on the sticky floor, I had to sit up to see the stage. Sonya had seemed really cocky earlier, but from the surprised look on her current face, she hadn’t been expecting anything like this.

  The dogs let go of the men they’d been mauling and bounded across the room directly toward Sonya. One leapt onto the bar and ran down it. I fired at that one, nailing it in the ass and spinning it around in a blue flash. The dog flew off the bar, crashed into the wall of bottles, and shattered a lot of glass.

  The other dog jumped at the stage but crashed against the chain-link fence. The fence was meant to keep the band from getting pelted with trash on open mic night, it really wasn’t intended to stop a really pissed off demon dog, and it began tearing it down immediately. Only Gutterres came from behind and slashed it with some manner of edged weapon. The dog’s neck split open, leaking light, and then the whole beast disintegrated.

  Sonya bolted from the stage.

  Gutterres went after her.

  “Wait!” I got to my feet. “Shit!”

  The monster with the sword came at me, looking like a hellish version of Solomon Kane, and I had to scramble backwards to retain my head. My back hit the bar. It swung downward, and I barely had time to get out of the way before it planted the glowing blade deep into the wood. I drove my pistol into its armpit and fired. It grabbed my wrist with one gloved hand and slammed my knuckles against the wood hard enough to leave a dent. I lost control of my gun and the STI went sliding across the bar.

  The bartender with the mohawk had ducked down when the dog had gone flying past. She stood up now, having retrieved a sawed-off double-barrel shotgun from under the bar. From only a foot away, she blasted the monster right in its nasty wire face.

  The pilgrim hat went flying. The thing collapsed in a shower of sparks and the black matter turned to fog.

  The dog I’d shot was still in one piece though, and it collided with the bartender, jaws snapping for her face, but all it got was a mouthful of wooden stock. It tore the shotgun away, but better the gun than her throat.

  I slid over the bar, grabbed two handfuls of icy fur, and slung the dog hard into the wall. The mirror I’d been using to spy on Gutterres shattered. The dog popped right back up, but I grabbed a whiskey bottle and smashed it over its head. The first hit made a meaty clunk that deformed its head. The next broke the bottle and cut my hand. It didn’t even leave me a convenient stabby bit like in the movies.

  The bartender was crawling away. Her shotgun was lying in the broken glass. The dog was getting back up, so I scooped up her weapon and turned, just in time to jam the twin barrels into its open mouth. “Choke on this.” I gave it the second barrel and blasted fiery magic dog goo all over the wall. The now headless thing dissolved through the floor.

  Glancing back toward the stage, I saw that Sonya and Gutterres were gone. The room had filled with the weird fog and a lot of wounded, dismembered, and freaked-out people. Sadly, but expectedly, the blue light had coalesced in the center of the dance floor and the fog had begun to spin around it again. Evil hat guy was coming back.

  I picked up my pistol but kept the shotgun too, because you should never turn down a free shotgun. I thumbed the lever and popped the action open. The two spent shells auto-ejected. “More ammo?” I asked the bartender.

  She pointed one shaking hand at a cardboard box beneath the counter. I reached in and grabbed two rounds of double aught, dropped them in, and closed the action . . . but since the monsters were still re-forming, I spent that valuable time shoving the rest of the shells into my pockets. Since I was on my own, I’d probably need everything I could get my hands on because the other professional Hunter was nowhere to be seen. Thanks for the backup, Gutterres.

  By this point, the assorted tough guys had realized that this was not normal, and most of them were beating feet, except for the unlucky few who’d just lost their feet. On the bright side, everybody running away meant there would be fewer people for it to massacre.

  The monster rose to its full height. It had even regained its hat, and worse, had two fresh hounds with him.

  “You must be the Drekavac,” I said.

  “A title, rather than my true name.” It seemed content to stop slashing people for a moment to talk. “You are a Hunter. We have no quarrel. Once a pact has been broken, it is my obligation to punish the transgressors.” The thing had an ominous voice, as bone-chilling as its clinging fog. “Leave in peace, or fight and die.”

  For me, Plan A when dealing with monsters was kill it. But since this one just kept coming back to life, I’d try Plan B. Diplomacy. “Wait a minute. Stricken won the auction. He’s the contract holder. He asked me to take care of the problem for him. So your work here is done. You can float on back to the scary hat store.”

  “You have your contract. I have mine. They are not the same. She must be judged.” The Drekavac looked toward the stage. “Except our thief has fled. Good. I enjoy a challenge.”

  Which was when the bouncer came back into the room, except now the big man was carrying an old-school, M60 belt-fed machine gun that had been stashed in back. The bouncer hadn’t fled. He had been gathering hardware.

  “Get the fuck outta my bar, devil man!”

  I hit the deck as the machine gun opened up and hosed down the monsters with hot lead. The bouncer bellowed as he raked the muzzle back and forth, machine gun in one hand, belt in the other, Rambo style. The Drekavac exploded. The monster dogs exploded. The floor around them exploded. The wall behind them exploded. I stuck my fingers in my ears as he kept on hammering the place with what was probably an extremely illegal Vietnam War bring-back. The fog moved like a living thing, rolling out the front door and into the parking lot. A hundred rounds and ten very loud seconds later, the bouncer shouted, “And stay out!”

  Through the broken window and Swiss cheese wall I saw two bullet bikes fleeing the parking lot. The first had a female rider, the second, a male. That had to be Sonya and Gutterres. They took off fast, cutting through the mist.

  Only it appeared the monster had a method of transportation as well, and it had re-formed ready to ride, because all of a sudden there was a terrible, gurgling roar, followed by a terrible, ear-splitting screech as a giant shadow flew down the road after Sonya.

  I went after them.

  CHAPTER 8

  The parking lot was nuts. There were several wounded, and people were trying to help them, mostly with improvised tourniquets from the look of things. The rest were running for their cars or hopping on bikes to get away. Anybody who had an outstanding warrant was fleeing before the cops get organized, and from the look of things, that was nearly half of them.

  I couldn’t stick around, but I could still help out a little. When I reached my vehicle, I grabbed the med bag and threw it to one of the helpers who looked like they actually had a clue about first aid. “Here. It’s got real TQs and bandages in it.” Then I got in the company truck, put the borrowed sawed-off on the seat next to me, and drove off in the direction Sonya, Gutterres, and the Drekavac had gone. They were already out of sight, but I put the hammer down and hoped for the best.

  Every MHI team draws from the same fleet of company vehicles. I’d taken the last
thing in Boone’s garage, which had been a Ford pickup truck. Though it had a big engine, it was a tall, four-wheel drive, with a winch and a snorkel on it, so this wasn’t exactly a speedy vehicle. I was downright lumbering compared to the bullet bikes they’d been on. I had no idea what the hell the Drekavac was driving, but it had sounded like it had a friggin’ jet engine, so it probably wasn’t exactly slow. I suppose I could have stolen one of the bikes at the bar, but let’s be honest, if I hadn’t gotten shot by the owner in the process, I was a pretty mediocre motorcyclist, and would have ended up in a ditch in short order anyway.

  It was a dark, moonless night, and we were heading farther away from the city, on a country road with thick trees all around. If they turned off, I’d have no way of knowing. Except, it appeared there was a stark line of icy fog hanging about a foot above the road, and since it was summer, there was no way that was natural. So I followed the Drekavac’s trail.

  I got out my phone. “Call Earl Harbinger.” But there was still no service. That had to be interference from the monster because we were only half an hour outside of a major metro area. I’d seen certain unnatural beings mess with things like phones or radio reception before. As the needle on the speedometer climbed, I kept trying other members of my team, but kept getting nothing. I was on my own.

  They have a pathological hatred of straight roads in the South, so I maxed out at about a hundred before having to stomp on the brakes going into a sudden corner. I made it through without flipping the 4x4 though, but that near miss reminded me to put my seat belt on.

  There was no oncoming traffic, but there were multiple sets of headlights off to the side, crashed at weird angles. The monster had been running everyone off the road. Whatever the Drekavac was riding was causing people to swerve out of the way, and here that meant hitting a tree or driving off into the bushes. Some of the occupants had gotten out and were staring, baffled, in the direction I was going.

  What the hell was I chasing?

  The fog was getting thicker. I was catching up.

  There was a blue glow ahead. From the smoke and dust hanging in the air, it looked like one of the bikes had crashed. The thing chasing them had stopped, and the Drekavac had dismounted in order to approach on foot.

  I squinted, trying to tell what I was looking at.

  It was hard to explain but imagine giving a mad taxidermist the carcass of a giant black horse and ordering him to stretch that over a bunch of bones put together by a maniac with no spatial awareness. Stitch it together with wire, add spikes and then set it on fire. Then make the fire blue, with ghosts and shit dancing in it because, why not? Shoot for the stars. It didn’t even have hooves. The thing just seemed to hover on a cloud of fog. And worst of all, the Drekavac’s vehicle—for lack of a better term—appeared to be . . . alive? Because as I rapidly closed the distance, it turned its head to look at me, and the eyes were like blinding headlights.

  But before my eyeballs got blasted, I caught a quick glimpse of Sonya, lying there next to her wiped-out bike, and the Drekavac closing on her, sword in hand.

  So I aimed for where I thought the Drekavac would be and floored it.

  SLAM!

  The monster went up over the hood, cracked my windshield, and went flipping over the roof. I saw fiery bits of monster raining down in my rearview mirror as I hit the brakes.

  The truck came to a lurching halt. Thankfully, Boone kept up on his regularly scheduled vehicle maintenance, and the brakes worked great, because I stopped only a few feet from driving down a really steep hill.

  The Drekavac had been splattered everywhere, but I’d already seen that wouldn’t last long. I saw Sonya in my side mirror. She was staggering to her feet. Judging by how trashed her bike was, she’d wrecked hard, so was either lucky to be in one piece, or her inhuman toughness had saved her life. Since her bike’s rear tire was twisted and glowing blue, it must have gotten blasted with some sort of Drekavac magic. I threw open the door and shouted, “Sonya! Come on!”

  She pulled her badly scraped helmet off and tossed it in the grass, revealing that she was still wearing the same rocker face that she had at the bar. “Who are you?”

  I pointed at where the fog was glowing and swirling as the monster came back to life behind my truck. “Does that really matter right now?”

  “Nope.” She ran to the passenger side door and hopped in. “Go, go, go!”

  “Where’s Gutterres?” I barely knew the guy, but I wasn’t about to leave a fellow Hunter behind.

  “He tried to protect me, but glowing angry dude blasted him off the cliff with a fireball. He’s dead. Like we’re going to be unless you drive, moron! Drive!”

  And to accentuate that, the Drekavac’s horse thing came from seemingly out of nowhere and shattered her window with its skull. I stupidly hadn’t expected it to act on its own. Sonya cried out as it tried to bite her with its big blunt teeth.

  I snatched up the sawed-off. “Duck.” Thankfully she had the sense to listen, and I blew a gaping hole through the horse’s head. A shorty 12-gauge is really loud inside a truck cab. There was a terrible screeching noise as the monster horse fell over. I threw the truck in reverse and drove backwards, fast. There was a thump thump as the tires smashed the remains of the Drekavac, then I was back on the road. I put it in drive and accelerated.

  A moment later we were clear of the fog and getting away. I took a deep breath and concentrated on not wrapping us around a telephone pole.

  “I recognize you. You’re one of those dopes who chased me earlier. You’re the slower, uglier one.”

  Only comparatively. It wasn’t my fault Trip was a fairly good-looking dude who could also run really fast. “Yeah, you’ve been a pain in my ass all day.”

  Then Sonya surprised me by pulling a little pistol out of her pocket and pointing it at my head. “Who are you? Talk or else!”

  It’s hard enough to speed on a windy country road in the dark without the added distraction of potentially catching a .380 in the dome. “Put that away, kid. I don’t have time for your drama.” I was still holding the shotgun, and it was still generally pointed in her direction, so I turned it a bit and thumped her in the stomach with the muzzle to accentuate my point. “If I wanted to hurt you, I could’ve cut you in half already.” Then I slowly removed my hand from the shotgun and left it sitting on the center console to show I meant her no harm. Plus, I really needed both hands to drive this fast. “See? Now put that thing down before you shoot me by accident and kill us both.”

  I risked a glance at her and realized that despite being able to change her face, she really couldn’t hide her emotions that well. In the dim lights from the dash, I could see that her lip was quivering and her eyes were watering. She actually was scared. Good, because so was I. She slowly lowered the tiny pistol. “Okay. But only because I want to.”

  “My name’s Owen Pitt. I’m friends with Earl Harbinger.”

  “You know Harbinger? You’re MHI?” That seemed to surprise her.

  “I bet you wish you hadn’t run from us now, huh?”

  “Are you kidding? Earl’s cheap. The Catholics just paid me two million bucks for that rock.”

  “No shit?” Robbing monsters really was lucrative.

  “Well, it was one million, but they’re pretty desperate, so I made them a counteroffer. Speaking of which”—Sonya got out her cellphone—“I need to check my bank account and see if they wired the money yet.”

  “Now? You’ve got other problems.”

  Sonya scowled at her phone. “No signal? Lame.”

  “Listen, the Catholics aren’t the only desperate ones. MHI really needs that rock. There’s an evil chaos god who wants to destroy the whole world, and that Ward might be the only thing that we can stop him with.”

  “Sounds like a personal problem.”

  There was a Y in the road. I went right. The Drekavac was out of sight. If we were lucky maybe I could shake him.

  “Where’s the Ward now?” I demanded.<
br />
  “So you can swipe it?” She barked a sardonic laugh at me. “It’s somewhere safe. I’m not telling you.”

  “Then I should pull over and you can get out and walk home.”

  “You wouldn’t leave me at the mercy of that thing. I know MHI is a bunch of goody two-shoes.”

  I started slowing down.

  “Whoa . . . Hey. What are you doing?”

  “Letting you out. Maybe that glowing pirate can give you a lift.” I braked. “He seems nice. Or you can tell me where the stone is.”

  “But the Secret Guard already paid me a bunch of money for it!”

  “Pay them back.” But then I saw two blue lights in my rearview mirror, growing rapidly. Tough talk aside, I couldn’t actually leave her to get murdered by the spectral terminator. “Shit.”

  As I sped up, Sonya smugly said, “Called it.” But then she turned around and looked out the back window, to see the rolling wall of doom fog closing fast. “You’d better step on it.”

  “I am.” But from the way those lights were gaining on us, ghost horse was rocket powered. “How’s he tracking you?”

  “I have no idea.”

  Oncoming cars zipped past, but then they careened wildly out of control as the Drekavac’s ride struck them. He was coming down the middle lane and catching up fast. The only thing that seemed to briefly slow him down was actually killing him, and even that only seemed to help for about thirty seconds. “Can you shoot?”

  “Duh. I’m an expert. Better than you probably. Didn’t Earl tell you who my dad was?”

  “So shooting ability is genetically inherited now? Spare me the cocky bullshit, you friggin’ orphan.”

  “I’ve got a mom.”

  “And she seems nice. You should call her more often. She’s worried about you. There’s some gun cases in the back seat. Do me a favor and pop this guy.”