Monster Hunter Memoirs: Sinners - eARC

by John Ringo

  Pro-tip: Always try to fight shamblers on broken ground or where there are frequent obstacles. They can get up to a fair speed on a flat and in a direct line. Any change of direction or height messes with them. Avoid fighting them on flats, where they can get a good run-up or where you can get easily swarmed. Always check six and never assume one is permanently down.

  Being up on the tombs might also give me a chance to see what had taken Greg before it could close.

  I stowed the goggles, because it is hard enough to walk when you can’t see your feet, let alone do what I was about to. I jumped down to the next one story, onto a sarcophagus, and back up on a one story tomb. And I was off.

  I was carrying a lot of weight in gear, ammo, and weapons. I’d been going hard pretty much all day and jumping from tomb to tomb was, to say the least, tiring. But it kept me up and away from any unseen shamblers. From time to time I had to get down to ground level since there were roads between the groups of tombs. A few saw me, and I would just pause, aim, and shoot them in the head. In the Marines you’re taught to conserve ammo. One shot one kill. In this case I was pretty sure I was going to need it.

  I stopped about half way down the length of the drive when I could see the body trail terminate about fifty meters from my position. I was at the intersection of two broadways, roads not walkways, called Jasmine Avenue and Metairie Road. I took out some of my partially expended magazines and refilled them from my assault ruck. I was beat, I was out of wind and I was hot as hell. I also was about to meet whoever had killed my team mate.

  “Greg, this is Alvin, come in, over.”

  “Alvin,” I said, quietly. “Iron Hand. Greg’s down. Turned. Cleared. Necro on site. Has his radio, so listening.”

  “Roger,” Alvin said.

  “Ah, another Hunter come to join my children,” the necro radioed. “Come. My children shall feast on your flesh as the Dark Loas feast upon your soul.”

  I tried an idea and switched to Spanish.

  “Hey, friend. Go to the road where I killed the vampire in the strip mall. Come in from that way. He is near Live Oak and that road. You understand?”

  “Yeah, I understand,” he radioed back in Spanish. “Okay. Give me five minutes.”

  I took a big drink of wine from my canteen, took a whiz since there weren’t any shamblers around, ghosted back a couple of tombs, crossed Jasmine fast and soft, then back up on tombs. I was back to being the hunter.

  I moved soft from tomb to tomb, searching for the necro SOB and whatever he was using for a heavy hitter. Finally, I spotted him. He was, in fact, at the corner of Live Oak and Metairie. Up on a tomb. And he was looking right at me.

  “Come to me, my friend,” the man boomed. He was big, fat, and as far as I could tell, black, but he’d painted his face to look like a skull. He was wearing a top-hat and tails. What was with that idiotic look this night? “My spells are more powerful. Tonight, the Dark Loas bring me the greatest of gifts! I have sacrificed to them and they are come!”

  That was when I noticed the body on the top of the tomb. It wasn’t rising because its heart had been ripped out.

  “Oh, you did not,” I said, lifting the Uzi. Human sacrifice never ended well.

  The bullets bounced in every direction. Warded. Shit.

  The necromancer started to chant in a deep, guttural tongue, raised the wet blade of his knife to the moon and cried aloud. He was answered by a loud roar as something came over the tombs.

  * * *

  I think that it’s the case with most experienced hunters that we have things we prefer and things we don’t prefer. And I think most of us like big shit that succumbs to sufficient firepower. I know that’s what I like. Big shit like that shelob that you just keep hitting it with more and more firepower until it dies. The one reason to join MCB for me isn’t the importance of their jobs. It’s that they can call in a fucking arc-lite strike when they need one. They can bring in a battleship or B-52s. Cluster bombs!

  I’d like that kind of power. Not the killing and intimidating witnesses power. There’ve been times I really wanted to bring in a full-on broadside from the USS Iowa, you know?

  What most of us don’t like is shit that is partially incorporeal, mostly magic, and doesn’t want to die.

  The moon was a silver glimmering outline behind fleeting clouds as the giant shadowy monster came to eat my soul. It was a black nightmare of webs and teeth. I wasn’t sure what the hell it had once been but it didn’t seem to mind .45. And it was fast. Shit it was fast.

  The blow came out of nowhere and knocked me off the tomb I was occupying and into one on the far side of the walkway. I managed to slap-fall the sideways impact and my helmet saved my head, but I was going to feel it in the morning.

  The thing came over the tombs and blotted out the moon as my Uzi went click. I decided it was pointless to shift to 1911 and drew Mo No Ken as I rolled away from its descending bulk.

  I came back up to my feet and slashed as the nightmare thing approached. The blade went through the inky darkness as if it wasn’t there. There was a slight sizzle from the consecrated oil it was coated in but nothing really useful. A massive claw appeared out of nowhere and ripped into my right arm. The straps for my Uzi parted and the weapon dropped. Mo No Ken went flying.

  I thought the wound was minor, until there was a sudden spurt from my brachial vein.

  Bullets did nothing. My sword did nothing. That left only fire as an option. It was right on me and I was bleeding like a stuck pig.

  I backpedaled and it let me, making this strange whispering giggle noise that had to be a taunt. It crawled slowly forward, a black shadow amongst the shadows. I pulled out a thermite grenade, yanked the pin, and tossed. Then I clamped a hand on my bleeding arm and ran like the devil was chasing me.

  When the light flared I turned around. The nightmare thing was gone. I held one hand up to shield my eyes from the fire, but there was nothing there.

  Then it slammed into me from atop one of the tombs.

  Those massive claws ripped into me again, shredding my assault ruck and armor. I reached around, pulled out a canteen and splashed it backwards.

  There was a keening wail, a hissing sound and then the sound of fast wings. It was gone again.

  I rolled over and propped myself on one of the tombs. I keyed my radio. First aid could wait.

  “Some sort of black shadow demon,” I said in Spanish. “Fast, powerful, claws. Likes to come in from the side or above. Holy water seems to work. No effect guns. Fire possibly, but too fast to tell.”

  The radio clicked twice. I started fixing my arm.

  In a situation like that, I don’t fuck around. I mashed on a bandage. Then I pulled out a partial roll of rigger tape and taped that puppy down hard. The bleeding was at least reduced.

  “It just flew back this way. I got a look. I think that’s an Agaran.”

  I didn’t know what an Agaran was, but Alvin knew what we were fighting, he might know the answer to my very important question. “How do we kill it?”

  I got up and made my way back to my scattered weapons. I got Mo No Ken sheathed and picked up my Uzi. No major issues but it wasn’t very much use in this situation. I reloaded anyway. Shamblers.

  “Fire and light I think. Or kill whoever called it up.”

  “The summoner’s the fat guy in the face paint. He’s warded against bullets. Can you take him?” I sure hoped that asshole with Greg’s radio didn’t speak Spanish.

  “Shelbye’s here. We’re on it.”

  “You cannot defeat me, mortals,” the necromancer radioed. Still in English. He sounded annoyed, so he probably couldn’t understand us. “I have the blessing of the Dark Loas! Never before have they granted me such power!”

  I spotted the Agaran, it had collected along the ground, a rolling puddle of black. The holy water must have really hurt it.

  Then I threw another thermite grenade right at it.

  The thing let out another unearthly wail. This time I
managed to follow what happened. The flash revealing something that looked like a terrestrial squid, then it hopped away out of the light. It seemed to have shrunk.

  Only I was going to run out of grenades, holy water, and blood pressure, long before it ran out of shadows. It was slinking around the tombs, trying to flank me.

  “I see the necromancer. Is that ward impenetrable?”

  “I don’t know. From what I’ve read, that sort of magic will stop anything fast or living.”

  “What about thrown?”

  Fire in the hole.

  The necromancer never saw the frag grenade coming.

  Pro-tip: For everything there is a season. A time for swords, a time for holy water, and a time for small bundles of explosives wrapped in notched wire.

  Knowing what season it is, is the essence of hunting.

  * * *

  There were twenty six zombies in the cemetery, including poor Greg, and one Agaran which had melted into an oily puddle. We had a hard time finding that in the PUFF lists but the bounty was nice, higher than a shoggoth. Plus a bonus for the necromancer who’d raised all of them. The way you get paid on them is based on how much havoc they’d caused.

  I left Shelbye and Alvin to cover the Coroners on cleanup and took myself to my favorite all night doc-in-the-box to get my brachial vein sewn up.

  CHAPTER 10

  Doctor My Eyes

  The cute doctor took one look under the bandages and said “Uh, uh.” I insisted I needed it working tonight and vascular surgery was not her gig. She also warned me I might not be able to get it fixed. Certainly not at 3AM on a full moon.

  Shortly before dawn I walked out of Memorial Hospital. A little woozy, maybe, but ready to roll. Or close enough for day two of the full moon. And I’d picked up a PUFF.

  Wait. What?

  Lots of people in New Orleans knew about hoodoo squad, because we were the thin green line between hoodoo and them or their families and friends. The drug dealers and innumerable burglars, muggers and other low-lifes of New Orleans treated us like we were royalty. How do you think doctors and nurses felt?

  When I got to the emergency room they were waiting for me. The security guard was real polite and deferential about all the guns.

  “You really can’t keep them, sir,” he said. “It’s not just that it makes the doctors and nurses nervous. Sometimes there’s drug reactions and stuff.”

  “Got that,” I said. “I agree, even. But how far do you want me to be from my weapons in the event somebody turns into a loup garou in reception?” The way my night had been going it wouldn’t have surprised me.

  We compromised. They got stacked in the room. Just in case.

  The emergency room was over-flowing. Standing room only.

  I never even sat down. Not because I was one of the standing only, but because I never even went to intake. I went straight to one of the curtained alcoves. I heard some muttering.

  “Why’s he so special?”

  “Hoodoo squad.”

  “Oh.”

  That was the locals. The few tourists that said anything were told to shut their stupid tourist yap.

  I got out of the top of my gear and got the wound looked at right away by a nurse.

  “That’s a bad cut,” she said. “Normally we’d stitch the outside. Veins heal.”

  “I need to be going. I need the vein. Tonight.”

  “I’ll get the doctor.”

  The doctor was the attending, not an intern. He looked at it and shook his head. “To get you up and going I’ll need to call in a vascular surgeon. And it won’t be one hundred percent.”

  “I just need some mobility, Doctor.” I put it in the formal You’re an MD doctor tone. “We’re down to four people.”

  “I heard about Mister Baldwin,” the doctor said, holding the vein closed with a hemostat. “Who else?”

  Jonathan’s test had come back positive. He was officially a werewolf. I was told later that Agent Higgins had done the honors. I’d have done the same.

  “Greg Wise, Doctor,” I said.

  “Oh, not Greg!” the nurse said. “I liked Greg.”

  “Sorry, miss. He’s gone.”

  “I’ll put up his cup,” she said with a sniffle.

  Hoodoo squad really did have their own coffee mugs in the emergency room. I didn’t have one, yet. I had one the next time I got carried in.

  And when one of us would buy the farm, they’d put them up on a special shelf. It was like the memorial wall at the MHI compound. They showed it to me one time. It was sobering.

  “I’ll call Doctor Einstat,” the doctor said. “It may be some time.”

  “Understood.”

  Some time turned out to be about twenty minutes. Doctor Einstat, wearing scrubs, was still blinking sleep from his eyes but looked sharp enough he could repair an artery in his sleep.

  “I came out on the full moon for you, young man,” Doctor Einstat said, examining the wound. “You’d better be worth it.”

  “Doing the best I can, Doctor. Any chance you can get me up and going at thirty percent on the arm. Tonight?”

  “Might be able to do better than thirty,” Einstat said. “You’ll need surgery, you understand.”

  “Any chance on a local? I really don’t have time for recovery from general.”

  “Light general,” he said. “Valium drip. And you look like you could use a unit of blood…”

  It’s amazing how much better you feel after a unit of whole blood. Vampires have a point.

  I got an alcohol sponge bath from an old nurse’s aide who had clearly been around the hoodoo block a time or two.

  “I heard Mister Wise has gone to the Green Lands,” the nurse’s aide said, continuing to sponge off all the various crap I’d gotten on myself. “A terrible business.”

  “Green lands is a good description,” I said. “Been there briefly once. So green.”

  “We all go to the Green Lands someday, son,” she said. “If we do not fall to the Shadow.”

  “Working on it,” I said.

  A few minutes later they wheeled me out, still in my stinking, ichor-covered armored pants and wheeled me upstairs into a small surgical suite. An anesthesiologist came in, hooked a valium drip into my IV and I sort of drifted off.

  I really like valium drips. I hope heaven has valium drips.

  I woke up a while later in recovery. My arm had a heavy set of sutures on it. Much heavier than normal. About every millimeter. Also a very strong clear bandage encircled my right bicep. Which was comfortably numb.

  “You’re going to have to favor it,” a young doctor said. “I know you have to be mobile and have some use, but you’re going to have to favor it.”

  “Tell Doctor Einstat thank you,” I said. “Can I get up?”

  “I wouldn’t recommend it, but that’s up to you,” the doctor said. “I’ve got to go.”

  A pretty nurse’s aide helped me to my feet. My gear was right there in the recovery room. It was torn to shreds, literally. My tactical vest was ribbons. I realized I’d left some magazines back in the cemetery. God knew what else.

  All I wanted was to lie back down. Whole blood or no, I was exhausted.

  Death is lighter than a feather, duty is heavier than mountains.

  I started getting it back on.

  While I was getting dressed in my stinking combat suit, with the help of the nurse’s aide, the same security guard came in and cleared his throat hesitantly.

  “We’ve got a situation downstairs,” he said.

  * * *

  Her name was Sylvia Parks.

  Despite the awful necessity of what MCB does, awful is an accurate description. As the Doctors Nelson insist, victims need care and understanding to overcome their experiences. MCB sort of makes that impossible in the main. If you run into the supernatural and go to a counselor talking about werewolves or vampires or the boogie man, they get the nice young men in the clean white coats.

  Sylvia had been a capt
ive of vampires. Are there worse things, supernaturally? Yes. Is being a vampire captive bad on toast? Yes.

  She’d been physically rescued but her mind was pretty well gone. She couldn’t restrain herself. She had to talk about it. A county counselor had recommended her for admission. Because everyone knows vampires aren’t real.

  She spent months in a psych ward until she was convincing enough about no longer believing in vampires to get discharged. She got into drugs to help with the nightmares. She slid down the ladder into prostitution and wound up in New Orleans as a down-and-out street-walker.

  She’d been found in a cheap motel room, dead from heroin OD. Just another statistic.

  She was taken to the hospital, pronounced DOA in the ER and shipped downstairs to the morgue for processing. No ID and not from around here. As a Jane Doe she was left in the morgue until identified or they gave up, usually ninety days. Where she hung on a hanger until she woke up.

  Uh, hanger?

  Yeah. Forget what you see in TV shows like Quincy. There are roll-out trays in most morgues but they’re for bodies which are undergoing advanced autopsy requirements where the MEs are going back to them multiple times.

  Most big city morgues have a large cooler where bodies are on shelves, sometimes stretching up twenty feet. Those generally have some rotation system. But even that takes up a lot of space.

  The morgue downstairs in the main hospital in New Orleans at the time had a hanger system. Bodies which were sufficiently together were held with a strap, like what they use to lift people up in a helo in rescues, wrapped in plastic and hung up on a pulley system. Very space saving and efficient. Which was, clearly, necessary.

  I don’t think New Orleans in 1987 had, officially, the highest death rate from murder in the nation. But remember the MCB. Most supernatural deaths were recorded as something else. In fact, when I was in the emergency room an intern came for the question and answer period.

  Every emergency entry had to have a reason for injury for statistical purposes. Federal law. I later ran into some people in the federal government who compile those statistics and hated the MCB for throwing them off. You might run across the statistic that the most dangerous place in the world is your own kitchen or bathroom? That’s because MCB’s most common form of death when there’s a supernatural event at a house is “Died due to electrocution in bathtub/slipping in shower” or “died due to slipping while replacing kitchen fixture.” Fire imp in the house? “Kitchen fire started by frying oil.” Every agent gets the suggestion in training and uses it assiduously.