“Roy was excommunicated for falling in love with his work,” Joe said.
A lightbulb went off for me, and from the way Amy’s head snapped up, it did for her, too. She paused in checking her weapon, a H&K MP-5 submachine gun, and asked, “So that woman in there, she’s the reason Roy was fired from the church?”
“If I get fired for a woman, I hope she’s at least that pretty,” I muttered.
“She is,” Amy said. I blushed and nodded at her, and she gave me a grin that let me know she was almost joking.
“Yeah, Roy and his Hunter ran across her out west somewhere, and she glamoured the crap out of the Hunter. I don’t know if she was going to kill him or what, but apparently when Roy got there, the Hunter was tied to a spit over a huge fire. He shot the fairy, she kicked the crap out of him for it, and eventually they got tired of trying to murder one another and started talking.”
“Turns out the whole fight was a misunderstanding. Seems Darryl, the Hunter, had come upon Tanara while she was taking a bath and made a lewd suggestion or two. She took offense and beat his ass.”
“I don’t blame her,” Amy said. “Some of these Hunters need some sense beaten into them every once in a while. Or every day.”
I didn’t take the bait. I thought I was doing real good by ignoring that obvious shot at my behavior and proving the lack of truth in her words by not responding. That’s what I was telling myself, instead of admitting I didn’t have anything sufficiently smart-assed to say in response.
“Anyway,” Joe continued. “Roy talked Tanara into not having broiled redneck for dinner, and they started living together. The Church takes a dim view of priests breaking their vows of celibacy, so they kicked him out.”
“Three or four times a day,” Roy said from the porch. We all turned around, with varying degrees of embarrassment at him finding us listening to him.
“What was that, Roy?” I asked.
“They didn’t like me breaking my vow of celibacy three or four times a day,” Roy said with a grin. “Of course, they never met Tanny. If they had, they’d understand.”
I didn’t high-five the crotchety old fart. I really didn’t. But I damn sure wanted to. Instead, I looked at Mama, who had come out onto the porch with Roy and Tanara. “You ready to go?” I asked.
“I am. Are all of you prepared?” Everybody nodded, then Mama turned to Tanara. “Thank you for your hospitality. I hope you remain well and that no harm comes to your home or family.”
“And yours as well,” Tanara replied. The two women inclined their heads formally, and Mama came down the steps to where I waited. “Robbie, did I see a Mossberg twelve-gauge in your truck earlier?”
“You did,” I said. “You want it?”
“I believe it might prove useful.” I opened the back door of the truck and opened the gun case built under the back seat. I pulled out the shotgun and handed it to her, along with a bandolier of shells.
“The ones with blue paint are cold iron shot,” I said. She shuddered at the mention of the deadly fairy-killing metal. “The white ones are holy water, the reds are mixed with white phosphorous, and the one with silver paint…well, I reckon you can figure that one out.”
She loaded the Mossberg with alternating phosphorous and silver rounds, then slung it over her shoulder. “Let’s go,” she said.
“You heard the lady,” I said with a slam of the truck door. “Let’s go find the door to Fairyland and get my sister home safe!”
Seven hours later, I was a lot less chipper about the whole idea. Seven hours later, we were ass-deep in wilderness, gathered around a campfire and being real thankful that it wasn’t cold out since we didn’t bring cold weather gear. Even living on top of a mountain, I still live in Georgia, so I don’t own what normal people would consider cold weather gear.
I reached into my backpack and pulled out a quart jar of moonshine. Mama looked at me, then sighed.
“You are absolutely your father’s son, aren’t you?” she said, shaking your head.
“As long as old man Peabody still makes apple pie, I’m not going on a road trip without a jar in the truck somewhere.” I took a long pull of the sweet white liquor and passed the jar to Joe. He took a good, long pull and passed it along. Sobriety was not a vow the Church made him take when he slapped on that collar.
The jar made it to Mama, and she dipped two fingers into the liquid, flicking it into the fire. It blazed up a little at the splash, and she smiled up at the sky. “For the ones we’ve lost,” she said, and took a long sip.
She handed me back the jar, and asked, “Are we camping here tonight, then?”
“We might as well,” Amy said. “This clearing is on high ground, so we’re good if an unexpected rain comes up, and we’ve got a stream right here for running water. We’re not likely to find a better spot before sunset.”
“You ain’t wrong,” Skeeter said, unzipping his backpack and pulling out a ball of string.
“What’s that, Skeeter?” Joe asked.
“You ain’t never been camping with me, have you?” Skeeter said.
“No, but I don’t think that’s a tent.”
“Not even close,” Skeeter said. “This is how me and Bubba have camped ever since tenth grade.” He dug around in the bottom of his bag until he found a pair of carabiners, then unrolled the ball of string on the ground between two trees. He wrapped one end of the long rope around a tree trunk, over a couple of low-hanging branches, and secured it with the carabiner. Then he did the same thing with the other end, spread the strands apart, and sat down in his very portable, very collapsible, pretty darn comfortable, nylon hammock.
Skeeter swung back and forth a couple of times, kicking his feet like a little kid on the playground. “This is living. All I got to do is wrap up in my sleeping bag, and it’s like I’m lying on air. Because I am.”
“That looks better than this ground mat I brought along, but I guess I’ll live,” Joe said, a little crestfallen at the comfort Skeeter was obviously enjoying.
“You know I wouldn’t do that to you, Joe,” Skeeter said. “There’s two more in my bag. I brought one for Mrs. Brabham, too.”
“You may call me Ygraine, Skeeter.”
“No, ma’am, that wouldn’t be respectful,” Skeeter demurred. “But I appreciate it.”
Mama smiled at him. “I haven’t been Mrs. Brabham for a long time. I have missed it.”
I turned away from them, digging through my own pack for the pair of hammocks I had stowed there, and rigged up sleeping arrangements for me and Amy while she went down to the creek and filled up a couple of jugs of water for everyone. A couple of purification tabs later, and we didn’t have to worry about anybody contracting a bad case of the trots off anything that might have crept into the water.
“I’ll take first watch,” I said. “I ain’t even close to sleepy.”
“I’ll stay up with you,” said Joe. “We should watch in pairs since we have enough people.”
“Fair enough, Padre,” I agreed. I took up a post with my back to a big elm poplar tree, putting the fire behind me so I’d be in shadow and anything coming toward me would be illuminated.
Everybody turned in not too long after that, and I settled in to keep an eye out for bears and cougars, way more likely to cause trouble in the hills of Tennessee than my usual prey. Nothing showed up, and about four hours later, Mama came over and sat down next to me with her Mossberg across her lap.
“Are we okay, Robbie?” she asked. “You still haven’t really talked to me about all this, not one-on-one.”
“I haven’t really had a lot of time to figure everything out, Mama,” I said, letting out a long breath and watching it cloud up in the cool air. It was still warm enough for just a sleeping bag, but the temperature had certainly dropped as night went along.
“I understand that,” she said. “It’s a lot to take in.”
“Hell, part of me was convinced that seeing you back in Athens was a hallucination,” I sai
d. “There was so much going on, what with Jason being crazy and wanting to kill me and all, I just kinda put you out of my mind most of the time.”
“I don’t blame you. But you understand now why I had to go, at least?”
“Yeah, I understand. I reckon. But what I don’t understand is why you didn’t feel like you could talk to me, or to Pop, or even Jason about it. You could have told us what you are.”
“Could I?” she asked. I turned and looked at her, but she looked me right in the eye. “Could you honestly say that twenty-two years ago you were as accepting of other species as you are now? And your father? I daresay he never got over that particular blind spot.”
“Well, he kinda got over hating lycanthropes, on account of turning into one,” I joked. Neither of us laughed. Pop’s death was still fresh to her, only learning about it the day before, and that brought it back for me. I thought for a second and then nodded, not that she could see it. “You’re right. He never would have been okay with it. He would have called you a liar and a monster, or worse. And that would have made me and Jase think less of you, and that wouldn’t have been no good neither.”
“Your grammar has gotten atrocious since I’ve been away,” Mama said.
“Ignore him when he talks like a moron, Mother,” Amy said from the shadows. “He knows better, he’s just lazy.”
“Always has been, dear.”
“You don’t mind if I call you Mother, do you? Ygraine seems too casual, and Mrs. Brabham seems too formal.”
“You may certainly call me Mother, dear. It seems to fit me, I think.”
“Well, if you two are gonna sit out here and talk about my grammar, I reckon I’ll just drag my ignorant behind to bed,” I said, standing up and walking toward my hammock. I gave Amy a kiss and threw a couple more pieces of wood on the fire, then settled in to sleep, with the low hum of the two most important women in my life talking in the shadows.
10
“Great God Almighty, Bubba, you have got to do something about that snoring!” Being awakened by Skeeter bitching is not on the top ten list of my favorite ways to wake up. The only reason I didn’t kill him with my bare hands is I had to pee too bad to run him down.
I rolled out of the hammock into a standing position, then pushed my way through some underbrush to find a quiet place to take a leak. I finished my business, then turned to see a giant fist filling my field of vision. I had just enough time to turn my head a little, so I took the punch on my cheekbone instead of flush on the nose, but it was still enough to knock me flat on my ass, right in the puddle of pee I’d just created. Now I was pissed, in more ways than one.
I looked up and saw a giant muscled beast standing over me, its shoulders shaking like it was laughing. Then I heard the huff-huff coming from it, and I knew it was laughing. At me. At me, knocked on my ass in a puddle of piss. This was not the kind of morning I had in mind when I rolled out of my hammock.
I sprang to my feet and charged the thing, lowering a shoulder to ram right into its stone-gray stomach. Its very hard, unyielding, and fur-covered stomach. I hit the thing at a dead run, but it didn’t even budge an inch. It just slammed an elbow down between my shoulder blades and sent me to the ground again. At least this time I wasn’t lying in pee.
I rolled over, and the thing was just standing there chuckling at me again. It looked down, its yellow eyes almost buried in the folds of its face, and grinned. Well, I couldn’t really tell if it was grinning or just snarling like it was going to eat me. All I knew was that I could see a lot more teeth than just the two curved tusks protruding from its lower jaw, and it looked like it was still laughing at me.
But this wasn’t the first time I’d tangled with a critter way bigger and stronger than me. It also wasn’t the first time one of those critters had knocked me flat to the ground without even breaking a sweat. And it sure as hell wasn’t the first time I’d had to come up with some way to level the playing field against a monster bigger, meaner, and tougher than me.
So, I got up on one knee and punched that gray bastard right in the balls. I swung an uppercut into its jewel sack with everything I had, and I swear I thought I felt something rupture under my knuckles. The creature stopped smiling as it tried real hard to keep its eyes from popping out of its skull, and it dropped to its knees just inches in front of me. It wobbled there, clutching its crotch, eyes wide and mouth open in a silent “o” of absolute agony, so I decided to put something hard in its mouth.
I rested the barrel of my Judge revolver on the teeth between those curved mini-tusks and cocked the hammer. “You so much as blink wrong, and I will send double-ought buckshot crashing right through the back of your skull, do you understand me?”
The thing started to speak, but I held up a hand. “Blink once for yes. Do you understand me?”
Blink.
“Good. Now we’re going to go back to my camp, real slow. I’m not going to take this gun out of your mouth, and if you try anything stupid, I will decorate the forest with your brains. Are we clear?”
Blink.
“Excellent,” I said. Then I looked around and realized I had no way to get back to camp because I couldn’t get up without taking the gun out of the monster’s mouth. Then it couldn’t stand up with my pistol in its mouth, and we sure as shit couldn’t walk through the woods that way.
“Stand up,” I said, taking the gun out of its mouth and clambering to my feet as quick as I could. I managed it a lot faster than my granite-faced friend, but that’s probably because nobody had played Whack-A-Mole with my marble bag lately. He got up, and I pointed the gun at his dick.
“You think your shit hurts now?” I said, waving the gun. “Just imagine what happens if you piss me off. Now let’s go.”
We managed a weird kind of shuffle through the woods back to camp, with the monster walking sideways and me getting smacked in the face with a shit ton of branches because I kept watching the monster’s crotch instead of watching where I was going.
We stepped into the clearing, and the low hum of conversation halted the second folks got a look at us.
“Robbie, what the hell are you doing with that ogre?” Mama asked.
“Bubba, why does it smell like pee all of a sudden?” Skeeter asked almost simultaneously.
“This is an ogre?” I asked Mama. “Shut up,” I said to Skeeter.
“That is indeed an ogre. But what is wrong with it? Is there something wrong with its face?”
I looked at its face and couldn’t see anything wrong with it. But I didn’t know what an ogre was supposed to look like. This one looked like somebody took the Gray Hulk, gave it tusks like an Arkansas Razorback, put it in a pair of cutoff overalls and the biggest damn pair of Birkenstocks I’d ever seen, and then set it loose to wander around in the woods for a couple years. Birkenstocks? What the hell kind of monster can afford overpriced flip-flops? My life is weird some days.
“I don’t know about its face, but there’s something wrong with its balls. As in I punched it in them. But I’m fine, thanks for asking.”
“Of course you are,” Mama said. “Ogres are peaceful creatures. I don’t know why you felt the need to strike one in the first place.”
“Thank you, my lady. I am Gr’kang’thun’xanlaxitan. But most species with malformed mouths such as yours choose to call me Greg.” His speech sounded a lot like somebody grinding rocks together in his mouth, but I could understand him pretty well.
“I am Ygraine, Daughter of Winter. This is my son, Robert, and his friends Amy, Skeeter, and Joe. We are pleased to meet you and offer sincerest apologies for any misunderstandings that arose upon our initial contact.”
I turned to the big gray bastard, who cocked his head at me. “I’m pretty sure there ain’t no misunderstanding when a damn eight-foot gargoyle sucker-punches the shit out of you.” I wasn’t quite ready to forgive and forget, no matter how peaceable Mama said this granite-faced shithead was.
The ogre looked at me, cocking his hea
d to one side and then the other like a curious bulldog. “I am sorry I hit you, human. But you were urinating on my rosemary.”
“Who’s Rosemary? I didn’t see anybody.”
“My herb garden. Rosemary is an herb.” He turned to Mama. “Are all the humans in this world stupid? I have encountered few of their kind, and they have not been impressive overall.”
“Not all of them, but my son is exceptional in many ways,” she said, her lips pursed in that disapproving way that only mothers can really manage.
“I’m going to pretend that I’m either too stupid to be insulted, or that you aren’t insulting me, and let’s just move on the part where we beat this monster’s ass and clear the path to the tree with the portal in it.”
“Portal?” the ogre said. “What portal are you talking about?”
“We have to get to Fairyland, and the word we got was that there’s a portal in a big-ass oak tree back here, but we’d probably have to kill you to get to it,” I said. “Sorry about that, but we’re kinda on a mission.”
“That asshole Roy sent you, didn’t he?” The ogre’s face went a little red, and I started to think that maybe telling the giant monster my entire plan wasn’t the best move I could have made.
“We talked with Roy, yes,” Joe said, stepping forward, his empty hands held in front of him to make him look totally non-threatening. I don’t know what universe a two-hundred-pound human is going to look threatening to a four-hundred-pound ogre with fists the size of Honeybaked hams, but I’m sure the gesture was appreciated. “Do you have a problem with him? Is that why he told us you were dangerous?”
“I am dangerous…to Roy. That douchecanoe trapped me here when he and his idiot wife destroyed the portal.” The ogre leaned on a nearby tree, which creaked in terror under the strain.
“Douchecanoe?” Mama repeated. “I don’t think I’m familiar with that term.”
“It means butthole,” I said, trying to keep my language clean, or at least clean-ish around my mother. I knew it was gonna be a losing battle, but I thought she might appreciate the thought. “I ain’t quite sure how the Jolly Gray Giant here heard it, but whatever.”
Into the Mystic - A Bubba the Monster Hunter Novella Page 6
