Monster Hunter Guardian (ARC)

by Larry Correia

  Mr. Trash Bags was wide awake now, as he fearfully warned, “Bad thing. Bad thing come consume Cuddle Bunny.”

  The handle turned…very slowly. Something pushed against the door.

  I fired two fast rounds through the wood, chest-high.

  The door stopped moving, but I didn’t hear a body fall. Instead, I heard him out there, breathing, wet and heavy. The silver bullets had hit him, but all they’d made him do was hesitate.

  “What are you, Ducharm?”

  There was a strange sniggering laugh, like he had air leaks in his vocal apparatus or something, but the smug and pleased with himself still came through loud and clear. “For one, not Ducharm. That fool has been dead for years. He thought he could reach out to me, to negotiate, as if I was some lesser being. However, he had influence and contacts, so I absorbed his mind, ate his bones, and still wear his skin. Ironically, he became a far more effective lobbyist that way.”

  As he’d been talking, I’d been tracking his voice, and when I was pretty sure I knew where his mouth was, I fired a round through the wall.

  “Ouch. Such rudeness. Please, Mrs. Shackleford. I’m much harder to kill than that. Now come out here, and we’ll discuss terms. I’m not an unreasonable beast, and I can even negotiate to let you have a chance at your son. In return, you leave me alone and don’t tell anyone what and where I am.”

  Sure… “While you continue eating five children a year.”

  “Five. Ah. Forgive me for that. At the time I was still trying to make nice. Those are only the ones that are tracked. And I make sure that no more are tracked. But they are all bad children. It is my duty and my obligation to eat bad children. That’s why I was created, I think, almost as soon as humans appeared.”

  He might actually be telling the truth. Every culture talked about monsters born or summoned by fears of its children. Thankfully, those types of creature are rare because they are usually hard to put down. This was no longer about questioning him, it was about survival.

  I knelt down behind the princess bed and shrugged out of my backpack. There had been two grenade pouches on my armor. I’d already used the incendiary, but I still had the frag. Mr. Trash Bags was there when I unzipped it, watching me with several eyeballs.

  “Flee, Cuddle Bunny. On your pathetic leg limbs, flee.”

  I smooshed him out of the way and retrieved the grenade.

  “My offer was time-sensitive, Mrs. Shackleford. I’m afraid my children are awake and wish to play. It’s too late for you now.”

  There was another noise from the hall, like the skidding of dog claws across the hardwood. The door exploded open. I swung my gun over the top of the bed, and the light hit what looked like a hallway full of fat boxer puppies, but only if boxer puppies were three feet tall, with no fur, and human faces with big pointy teeth poking out of their open, loose, droopy mouths.

  The light seemed to temporarily disorient them. I started shooting. Blue guts and blood splattered on the pink wallpaper. The first one let out a half-human, half-canine yelp. But there were so many of them, and they came flooding into the room, trying to surround me.

  The instant my sights landed on a dog thing, I blasted it, and then switched to the next. Only they weren’t just coming in from the ground level, they were clinging to the walls and climbing across the ceiling.

  A silver hollowpoint splashed blue brains across the chandelier. The monster fell and smacked against the floor. My slide locked back. The spare .45 mags were in the bag so I dropped my gun on the bed and went for the Walther on my belt. The flashlight beam bounced wildly across the bed as I backed toward the corner, shooting again.

  One of them had crawled under the bed. I felt a pain across my ankle as it clawed me. I stomped the too-human fingers, but in that moment of distraction, one of the ones on the wall launched itself. They weren’t very big, maybe fifty pounds, but getting hit in the chest with fifty pounds of furious, biting, clawing dog-child will still knock you back.

  I crashed against the dresser, scattering porcelain ballerinas and antique music boxes, but I didn’t go down. Instead I held the monster back by a handful of neck fat, while I jammed the Walther into its ribs and fired. Blue blood splattered my glasses.

  The one that had clawed me was scrambling out from beneath the sheets. It was about to reach me, but then a tiny black blob leapt from my backpack onto its head. “Consume!”

  The creature began to roll around, screaming and clawing at its face, before it tried to get away, running for the hall. I went back to shooting the others, so I only caught what happened out of the corner of my eye. I know what I saw but to this day I don’t believe it: Mr. Trash Bags ate the thing. I don’t even understand how because he was a fraction of the size of the evil hellhound, but he crunched right through its skull.

  And as fast as it started, Marchand’s children were lying dead or twitching in blue puddles. Somehow I’d dropped nearly a dozen of them. I was breathing hard and had lost track of how many rounds I’d fired.

  Then a vast shape materialized directly behind me. “Disappointing.”

  I tried to turn, but Marchand shoved me hard. And when I say hard, I mean I left the ground, crossed the room, and bounced off the wall. My back shattered a mirror. I think I might have broken a rib.

  Dazed, I lay in a pile of broken glass as the world spun. Something gigantic lumbered in front of the flashlight beam. It was as big as a gorilla and sort of the same shape as the “pups” but it was walking on two legs, and its face was, horribly, that of Vincente Ducharm. He’d shed the robe, revealing a body made out of pustules and fat rolls, and was walking toward me, on feet that looked like giant pink hands.

  I didn’t think I’d lost consciousness—not even for a brief moment—but Mr. Trash Bags had climbed onto my chest, several eyes telescoping near mine, several mouths open and screaming “Doom. Run. Doom.” He made himself thin and long, and wrapped himself around my arm, like a very stylish avant-garde bracelet. “Flee. Flee now!”

  I’d lost hold of the Walther, but it had landed only a foot away in a puddle of blue. I rolled through the glass, cutting myself in the process, scooped it up, and started shooting. I’d emptied most of the mag already, but there were still a few rounds left. I hit Marchand right in the temple, but it was like hitting putty. While his children had exploded all over the place, this one just showed a blue hole for a moment, then the hole re-formed, he shook his head, and it was perfect again. He laughed. God, I hated that laugh.

  “You should try to run,” he said greedily. “It’s more fun when they try to run.”

  Everyone runs away and lives to fight another day, but Hunters don’t like running from monsters. We run at them.

  I let out some sort of incoherent battle cry as I got up and launched myself at him.

  Marchand had to be over triple my weight. My actions seemed to amuse him greatly, until the big shard of glass I’d picked up got rammed into his pendulous belly. I’d cut the shit out of my left hand, but it was worth it to see the look on his face. He’d felt that.

  But then he grabbed me by the neck, lifted me off my feet, and tossed me again. Luckily the bed broke my fall. I bounced off the mattress hard enough to break the frame, but at least I was still in one piece. Impacting the floor still knocked the hell out of me. I wound up on my hands and knees next to the backpack where I’d started. Everything was blurry, but it was from getting my glasses knocked off, not repeatedly banging my head on the wall.

  “You killed my whole litter, but you will find I am far more difficult to harm.” There was a sucking noise as he pulled the chunk of glass out of his fat. It broke into smaller pieces when he dropped it on the floor. “They were just juveniles, young and innocent.”

  Yeah, no, I’d seen those teeth. And his children? I shuddered to think of that thing reproducing. “Little bastards deserved it,” I croaked.

  “I could say the same thing about the missing baby who brought you here.” His voice was back to soundin
g like human Ducharm: educated, pleasant, slightly accented, a man of the world complaining of a slight problem in social relations. “You wouldn’t take any of my nice drinks, which could have put an end to this impasse with no unpleasantness.”

  The monster lifted the bed and flipped it out of the way. As I struggled to my feet, he stomped over to finish me off.

  “This will be such a pleasure,” and even though that was spoken in the Ducharm voice, he wasn’t inviting me to tea. He reached for me, but I dodged to the side and launched a snap kick at what would be a vital spot in a male human. I didn’t expect the same result, which was good, because I didn’t get it. Instead, I got an oof as though I’d kicked its breathing apparatus.

  I was so angry I went after the son of a bitch with my bare hands.

  My husband is a slab of a man whose preferred form of cardio is eroding knuckle holes through leather punching bags. He might have had a chance here. I’m fairly tough, but the laws of physics didn’t give a shit about my feelings.

  I punched Marchand over and over in the eye, but my fist just bounced off his rubbery flesh. Ponderously, he swung at me, but I ducked under that and kneed him in his gut. Blue juices squirted out the glass hole, but I might as well have been kneeing a tractor tire, he was so solid. Then he connected, and it knocked the air right out of me. I hit the ground, flat on my back, gasping.

  My bounce across the bed had landed my .45 on the ground, pointing back toward me. It was blinding, being in that beam, but there was one oblong black shadow between me and the light, shaped just like a hand grenade. I reached out and snagged it.

  Marchand lifted one foot-hand to stomp my guts out. I yanked the pin. At least I’d take him with me. Except that was when Mr. Trash Bags started attacking the side of his head. Imagine crazy miniature shoggoth tentacles, beating like whips. I’d not even realized he’d jumped off my arm.

  I think it was surprise that did it, but Marchand reared back, batting at his head, and I saw my chance. I kicked with everything I had for his one planted knee. Marchand bellowed and fell forward. I rolled like a lumberjack trying to dodge a tree.

  He belly flopped on the grenade.

  If I suddenly ran for cover, he might realize what was happening and do another vanishing act. I couldn’t give him a chance to get away, so I jumped onto his back and clung to those greasy fat rolls for dear life, gritting my teeth and hoping that his huge bulk would be sufficient to save me from the blast.

  The grenade went off.

  Pinned beneath over four hundred pounds of rubbery, supernatural blubber, the grenade made a terrible world-consuming whump. The blast lifted him straight off the ground. I wound up a few feet away, ears ringing.

  And then it started raining. Squishy, fleshy blue bits dropped from the ceiling. A hand grenade produces a ton of smoke in a confined space and I began to cough. I started checking myself. By a miracle I hadn’t blown off any of my limbs—but then a terrible pain snuck through my shock. Marchand’s body hadn’t stopped all the shrapnel. The blood that was coming through the side of my sweater wasn’t blue. It was red. I pressed my hand to the wound. Then I realized there was another gaping hole in my thigh.

  When it stopped raining monster goo, I tried to take stock of the situation. My flashlight was still working. I picked up my empty gun and shined it at where Marchand had been. There was a star-shaped explosion pattern that had torn the shit out of the nice hardwood. As for my host, he was in pieces. The biggest one was the back half of his torso which, apparently, I’d ridden across the room like a rodeo bull. His ribs had gotten launched so hard that some of them were embedded in the wall. There was so much blue that it looked like someone had run the Smurf village through a wood chipper.

  It wouldn’t be the first time a monster had reassembled itself from near-molecular pieces, but the shreds of this one seemed to be just that—shreds.

  Then one of the blue flesh chunks moved. I glared at it, trying to figure out how I was possibly going to be able to fight anymore, when an eyestalk lifted and Mr. Trash Bags declared, “Bad thing all gone.”

  Master of understatement that Mr. Trash Bags. Then the blob oozed over to me, helpfully dragging my glasses. A little tentacle hoisted them up so I could reach them. “Cuddle Bunny hurt?”

  “I blew myself up.”

  “Mammal blood should stay on inside,” he told me helpfully.

  Chapter 13

  There was a ton of blood coming from my leg wound. That probably meant that my femoral artery had been hit and, if so, I’d be dead in minutes. My head was swimming. I wanted to throw up. I was afraid, but not for me. I was scared for Ray because he was counting on his mom.

  Focus, Julie. I swear I heard that in Grandpa’s voice.

  I crawled through the blue remains of Marchand and his brood, got the backpack, found the med kit inside and got out the SOF-T tourniquet. I popped off the rubber bands, got the loop over my foot, and pulled it up my leg. I can’t even explain how much moving it hurt. When the loop was past the wound, I started cranking the handle. If it hurt before, this was a whole new level of pain.

  Once I got it cranked as tight as I could, I locked the handle in place with the triangle… Yeah, these things are awesome. People who think they’ll be able to improvise a tourniquet out of household items on the fly are really lucky they don’t have to actually test their bullshit shoelace method.

  Okay. That was one problem temporarily handled, but I was still screwed up, in so much pain I could barely think, and bleeding from a hole in my side. The neighbors might have heard the gunfire or the explosions, but it was raining hard, and I had a feeling this basement had been soundproofed so the neighbors wouldn’t hear children getting eaten.

  I could call for an ambulance, but then the cops would just arrest me in the hospital, and by the time this got worked out, Ray would be lost forever. No. I had to handle this on my own.

  Lights and a sink would be a huge help. So I pulled myself up the wall and screamed when I put weight on my leg. That caused Mr. Trash Bags to start fretting, but I could barely hear him over the buzzing in my ears.

  I limped down the hall, found the breaker box, turned the lights back on, and then found the bathroom. It was as nicely done as the rest of this place. Ducharm’s tile guy did excellent work. It’s weird what goes through your mind at a time like this. All I needed to do now was stop the bleeding from multiple shrapnel wounds before I lost too much blood pressure and passed out. I turned the sink on and took a deep breath.

  “Mr. Trash Bags, would you guard the door in case there’s any more of them, please?”

  I gritted my teeth and peeled my shirt off, examined the abdominal wound in the mirror, and realized I was totally screwed. It wasn’t a laceration. It was a puncture wound and the chunk of shrapnel was still inside me, which raised the question: what had it hit? It was far enough to the side that it could have hit a kidney. If that was the case, I wouldn’t be able to stop internal bleeding. Was I better off trying to get it out or leave it in?

  I needed to decide fast because I wasn’t going to be awake for much longer.

  But my decision was made for me when that jagged chunk of metal fell out and hit the porcelain sink with a clatter.

  Then the wound was simply gone. The flesh was sealed. I rubbed my hands across my skin, smearing the blood. Sure enough, there was a black circle, big around as a quarter, dark as night, where the hole had been.

  “Well… Huh.”

  It was another Guardian’s mark. I turned so that my front was facing the mirror. I could see the three long, black vertical lines running down my belly. I’d had those for a while now, since they’d replaced the claw marks the last time the Guardian’s power had saved my life. They seemed a bit bigger. Then I lifted my hair and checked my neck where the original mark was.

  It was obviously growing. I watched as the mark went from a line to forming several new edges, like the crest of a wave or the edge of a serrated knife, and then it stopped. />
  I pulled my hand away in fear. Then I remembered my leg, and the throbbing awful pain above it because I’d cut off all my circulation. I undid the tourniquet handle and slowly relaxed it. Electricity shot through my leg as blood began to flow again. No blood came spurting out though, so I undid my belt and dropped my pants.

  Sure enough, there was another black line across my thigh.

  I checked the palm of my hand, where I’d cut it with the glass. It looked like a perfectly normal injury, no magical black lines. The other cuts, bruises, and scrapes on my body hadn’t changed either. I guess the Guardian’s magic only activated for potentially fatal injuries.

  It had saved my life again. But each time, there was a little less of me. I was a little less human, and a little more something else. I didn’t know what it meant, or where it would lead, but probably every cosmic power that knew about this thing kept calling it a curse for a reason.

  The other two times it had saved my life, I’d cried afterward, wondering about the mysterious cost I’d have to pay… But not today. Today I had to save my baby.

  I put my fingers against the now longer, angrier-looking mark on my neck. It was still hot to the touch. “Let’s do this.”

  * * *

  After I showered off the blood and blue slime, I changed into the last of my stolen clothing. I kept the artifact close at hand the whole time. Mr. Trash Bags hadn’t seen any more monsters, and the cops hadn’t kicked down the door—the neighbors must have not heard the explosion—so I had time to search the place and plan my next move.

  Inside the downstairs fireplace, I found ash and bones. Little bones. I wasn’t going to look any closer and see if some of those rounded rocks were baby skulls. There are things you can know but don’t need to see, because if you see it, it will never, ever, ever leave you alone.

  In my circuit of the house, I discovered the master bedroom wasn’t arranged for humans and looked like a cross between a kennel and an animal’s den at the zoo. In addition to the pink room, there was another decorated in blue and outfitted with a large TV and game system. There were discarded toys and clothing from several decades in the closet…and fingernail scratches on the inner door. I had no doubt these rooms had housed many victims who’d never left this house alive. Perhaps the rooms were the equivalent to those aquariums in seafood restaurants, where lobsters are kept in a semblance of their native environment until they can be eaten at their freshest.