Monster Hunter Memoirs: Sinners - eARC

by John Ringo

  Yeah. Your bathroom is the most dangerous place in the world. Sure.

  By the way, Mister Lewis whose son turned into a loup garou? He wasn’t a hero who tried to hold the line and save his wife and daughter from a werewolf. He had gone nuts over dinner being burned and killed his whole family. That was the official story. Keep that in mind the next time you see “father kills whole family then commits suicide.”

  But back to the point. When I was still in emergency a young intern had come in with a clipboard. Before he could even open his mouth I said: “Socmob. Sierra Golf Kilo. Oscar oscar November.”

  “You’ve done this before,” he said, grinning and writing it down.

  What did I just say?

  SOCMOB.

  “Seriously, Doc, I was just Standing on the Corner, Minding My Own Business.”

  That was and is the most common opening for “I got into a fight.” It is never the fault of the person who is injured. They were just Standing on the Corner Minding their Own Business. SOCMOB.

  Who had attacked me?

  “Some Guy wif a Knife.” SGK.

  Where did this guy come from? Were you confronting him?

  “Out of Nowhere.” Oscar, oscar, november. OON.

  That’s what the doctors write down.

  Individual: SOCMOB.

  Assailant: SG or SGW or SGF (some guy with a gun) or, often, SGs. (Some guys.)

  Where did they come from? OON.

  SOCMOB, SGK, OON.

  Q&A done.

  Emergency doctors say that the most dangerous places in the world are street corners, not bathrooms, and the worst possible things you can do to cause assault with bodily harm are:

  Stand on a corner, minding your own business.

  Be walking home from prayer service, especially if you are carrying a Bible.

  Be sitting on your own front porch. Again, holding a Bible is a sure sign you’re about to get beat up or shot.

  And Some Guy is an elite ninja assassin that travels the world harming perfectly innocent people for no good reason. Out of nowhere. Then disappears. Like it’s magic. MCB needs to put Some Guy on the PUFF list and the ///MCB most wanted///.

  I love emergency room personnel. They’re the only group on earth more cynical than hunters.

  But back to the vampire in the morgue.

  I hadn’t been in the New Orleans General Morgue yet but I was impressed. Compared to Seattle, they had it down. The hanger room was behind a heavily sealed door with a fancy new electronic keypad. No zombies, vampires or other forms of undead were getting out of there. It was like a bank vault.

  “What if you accidentally get stuck in there?” I asked the morgue attendant.

  That, by the way, New Orleans or anywhere, is not a job I’d ever take. Or funeral home attendant. Just saying.

  “There’s a call button and a phone,” he said, dyspeptically. His name was Phillip Wohlrab. He was a dead ringer for Dave the daytime coroner’s assistant. Short, chubby, very pale. Thinning hair and he had to be not more than twenty-two. He reminded me of a molerat.

  The vampire was clearly hissing at us from behind two inches of armored glass. You couldn’t hear her but she was clearly hissing. When people woke up as vampires they were usually confused and insane. Being tangled up and dangling from a bunch of straps probably didn’t help.

  “Any chance this could wait til daylight?” I asked, looking at my watch.

  She hit the armored glass so hard it broke her hand. Then again. Because it just regenerated back to normal.

  He pointed to the stack of bodies that were piling up in the room.

  “Day shift will shit a brick,” he said. “And we’ve got more coming in from Greenwood. I hate having to reprocess the already buried.”

  I probably should have called for help, but last I heard, everybody else was busy too. I worked my right arm for a second and drew Mo No Ken with my left. It was set up for a right draw and it was a harder reach but once out, eh. I’m fairly ambidextrous.

  “Yeah, sure,” I said with a sigh.

  He tapped the keypad and started to swing the heavy door open. He needn’t have bothered. It nearly crushed him against the wall.

  The newly awakened female vamp was all hunger, strength and fury. Not much in the way of brains. Then again, that also described genius vampire Tedd Roberts, and he had been a vampire for a months. Since she was trapped in the straps, and I didn’t have a clean shot at her head, I just started slicing at limbs until I could get a good angle at her neck. It was more like hedge trimming than regular monster hunting.

  “Now I’m supposed to clean this up?” Wohlrab said. There was vampire ichor all over the morgue and the body was starting to deliquesce.

  “I just make the mess,” I said, reaching for my cloth to clean Mo No Ken. That hurt. This was going to suck. “Besides,” I said, pointing to the arm. “I’m injured.”

  “Always excuses,” Wohlrab said with a sigh. “You’re worse than day shift.”

  “Don’t you have a janitor or something?”

  * * *

  As I was walking out of the emergency room, Agent Marine came marching in. He was in full tactical rig-out, including helmet with FBI in big white letters on the front, and followed by a very confused looking junior agent in the same gear.

  He was probably there to do the honors for some poor schlub who’d gotten bit or to intimidate some out-of-town witnesses.

  “Hey, Bob,” I said, half waving.

  “Hey, Chad,” he said, walking past. “Sorry about Jonathan.”

  “What?”

  He stopped. “You didn’t hear?” He looked around to make sure none of patients were close enough to eavesdrop. “Doctors found a bite. Lycanthropy test immediately came back positive. I ran a couple strips to be sure.”

  “Shit.”

  “Baldwin was a good guy. I made it painless. That’s all I could do.”

  “Thanks.”

  Bob nodded, then went back to work. The MCB agents were the only people having a busier night than we were.

  In Seattle MCB turned up for every damned incident and read us the riot act most of the time. In New Orleans, under Castro’s leadership at least, they just waved and met us at Maurice’s for drinks. I ended up having them over for grill-outs and vice versa. When the time came MCB and MHI fought shoulder to shoulder to save Mardi Gras and died in a single pile.

  I think the relationship in New Orleans is something that needs to be fostered. I get where the Nelsons and Shacklefords are coming from but…

  Never mind. Enough preaching. Back to the monsters.

  CHAPTER 11

  Radar Rider

  There’s a smell. Any experienced hunter learns it quick.

  I talked one time to an old European hunter who had been in World War Two and had been one of the supernatural specialists called in to assess the Nazi concentration camps. He said it was the same smell. The smell of concentrated, starving humanity in desperation.

  It was the smell of a vampire feeding pit. That same smell.

  Ben and Shelbye had been chasing a werewolf in Elmwood when they’d smelled it. They broke off from the pursuit to identify the particular warehouse it was coming from. Then they tracked down the loup garou and made their PUFF.

  It was just past dawn. I’d already been up for twenty-four hours. I was beat to shit, my arm was in ribbons, my gear was in ribbons.

  Trevor had rolled out when we were down to four. He still couldn’t move much but he could shoot and communicate and he was a serious monster killer. He was working much like Shelbye, taking the sniper position. After the night we’d had, Trevor had called Ray for reinforcements. Hunters were on their way, but that would take time.

  When we met up at the warehouse, we’d agreed to break down to three teams. Shelbye and myself, Trevor and Ben and Alvin, as the least injured close combat specialist, would be the monster position, pardon the pun.

  But we’d all met at the warehouse. Which, naturally,
was locked.

  “It’s been on long-term lease,” the real estate agent said. “And the locks have been changed. They’re not supposed to change the locks. What do you think is in there?”

  He wasn’t from around here. He’d been in contact with the FBI and gotten clearance but was looking askance at the heavily armed “Federal contract security officers” that wanted into the building.

  “They’re suspected of smuggling counterfeit Teddy Ruxpins,” Trevor said. “Very serious charge. We’ll take care of opening it up.”

  I had entry tools in my trunk. So did Ben, Alvin and Trevor. I just watched, ate and drank sweet tea.

  I’d stopped by a Waffle House and picked up a few bacon and egg sandwiches. I needed the calories.

  The door was duly opened and Alvin took point. I had the number two position, then Ben, Shelbye and Trevor limping along behind.

  The warehouse had once been used as a cold storage facility for meat. In the center was a separate concrete building that was the cold storage. It had a big, hermetically sealed, door on it. Heavy steel.

  To the side was a shipping container. One of those big, metal, containers they stack on ships. The smell was coming from that.

  There were six people in the container. Two of them were already dead. I managed those with Alvin’s assistance.

  We called in SIU and medical to evacuate them, then checked out the cold storage building. That was certainly where our vampire was hiding. The heavy door was locked from the inside and, shall we say, resistant to entry tools. The walls and ceiling were heavy concrete. We’d spend all day chipping through.

  “If we could get some C4 into the cracks we could blow the door off,” Trevor said, rubbing his chin as he regarded it. “But there’s not a crack.”

  “Got a cousin with a ’cetylene torch,” Shelbye suggested.

  The hinges were recessed. Getting into what was essentially a vault was going to take time. Jonathan had been our explosives expert. Trevor was former SF and no slouch. But this was difficult. We couldn’t just leave it here to wait and see if anything came out at nightfall, because we were all exhausted, and who knew what was going to happen on the second night of the full moon.

  “I’ve got this,” I said. “I’m going to need a few things.”

  “Ce qui want?” Lieutenant Salvage said. He was one of three lieutenants with Orleans Parish Special Investigations Unit. Short, stocky Cajun. When he got tired, and he was already there, his accent got thicker and thicker then he’d start breaking into Cajun patois French.

  I thought about it for a moment regarding the storage locker.

  “A lift just to get up and down,” I said, pointing at the arm. I had it in a sling at the moment. “A ladder. A box of lawn and leaf bags. A hose long enough to reach the middle of that roof from the nearest outlet. And…fifty boxes, at least, of corn starch. Better make it a hundred to be on the safe side.”

  “Okay,” Salvage said, making notes with a quizzical expression on his face.

  “That should do it. I’ve got the rest in my car.”

  We walked out and I went to my trunk and started rummaging. After a moment I came up with four green cloth shoulder bags.

  “Claymores?” Shelbye said.

  “Nah,” I said. “But the bags are handy.”

  Inside I set the bags down on the floor, well separated, and dumped one out. It contained two blocks of C4 plastic explosive and a roll of detonation cord.

  “You keep C4 and det cord in your trunk?” Shelbye asked.

  “Sure,” I said. “Don’t you?”

  Trevor understood what I was going to do. “You’re going to need a lot more explosives than that. I’ll send Alvin back to base to see what Jonathan had stashed.”

  “Help me roll this out, Shelbye.”

  Rolling out a cigar of C4 with one arm stitched up on the bicep was a challenge but Shelbye made quick work of it. While we were working a guy turned up with the cherry-picker and an extending ladder. A cherry picker, for those who don’t know, is sort of a rolling, pneumatic scaffold/elevator.

  I’m not sure he knew what we were working with. If he did, he was the most unflappable guy I’ve ever met. He just delivered the cherry picker and left.

  About twenty minutes later a Sheriff’s deputy showed up with a bunch of bags from A&P. He did know what we were working with.

  “Holy shit! Is that C4? I’m out of here,” he said, walking away quickly.

  Alvin got back with a bunch more C4. We took all the stuff to the roof of the cold storage with the cherry picker and got to work.

  First I taped the cigars of C4 to my emergency stash of det cord with rigger tape. Then I laid it down in a circle on the roof. The circle was large enough to get the extending ladder down into the room below. Barely. I made a mental note to carry around more det cord. I extended the last bit of det cord out from the circle then we got to work on the tamping.

  “Lay out the trash bags around the circle to overlap,” I said, waving my arm. “Please.”

  Shelbye got out the bags and laid them down.

  “Okay,” I said, considering the situation. There were seven bags laid down. “Ten boxes of corn starch in each bag.”

  She duly poured ten boxes of corn starch in all of the bags.

  “Now we need the hose.”

  The bags were partially filled with water, the tops tied and a second bag was put around the outside.

  “Okay, I’m going to ask,” Shelbye said as she was filling the bags.

  “If we just blow the C4, all the force will go up,” I said. “We need something holding it down. It’s called tamping. Usually, that’s sand bags. You can use bodies if you have them. But getting sandbags filled and brought up here would take more time and effort. Water is incompressible but with that much force it will only remain incompressible for an instant, not long enough for the full force of the cutting charge to cut through the concrete. When mixed with corn starch, however, it forms a non-Newtonian liquid under pressure. The corn starch acts as a quantum binding agent just long enough to hold the material in place. Voila. Instant sand bag. You get some of the rigidity of sand and the combined mass of the corn starch, not much, and the water, a lot.”

  “That’s sort of…” she said then stopped.

  “I got a perfect F in high school physics,” I said. “Have you ever taken a multiple choice test where you didn’t study and weren’t sure of the answers?”

  “Yeah,” Shelbye said. “I wasn’t all that much on schooling.”

  “Ever get every single answer wrong?” I asked.

  “No,” she said. “Even if you pick C as the answer on all of them you get something.”

  “I got every single answer wrong in Physics,” I said. “Every single one. Not one correct answer for an entire semester.”

  “Why?” she asked.

  “I was taking Chemistry,” I said. “I really liked the teacher. He told me I had to get an A or I couldn’t come over to his house anymore. So I got every single answer right. But I’d set out to make a perfect C average. So I had to get every single answer wrong in Physics.”

  “That is just plum crazy,” she said.

  “I really like physics,” I said.

  Finally, she had the bags filled and in place over the charges. I had her go down to the floor while I hooked up the detonation sequence.

  I always prefer to use chemical detonation. It’s just way safer than electrical. But in this case, I didn’t have enough det cord. I resolved to find some place in the trunk for a decent sized roll in the future. In the meantime I had to go electrical.

  “Turn off your radios,” I yelled. “And go tell the cops to turn theirs off!”

  Electric blasting caps work by way of exploding bridge wire. When sufficient current goes through—like a nine volt battery—the EBW has enough resistance that it heats up and pops. That little pop is enough to initiate the blasting cap. In turn, the cap has enough pop to initiate the main charge. But the ca
ps themselves have two little wires coming out of them, and the theory was that stray EMR—like from a radio—could potentially cause an initiation.

  I waited until she got back to hook up the detonator. I crimped it to the C4 then attached the leads to a long wire spool from a claymore with wire caps. I’d already run the wire over the roof and down to the floor of the warehouse.

  “I sort of need the cherry picker,” I said.

  When I was down on the ground again, I hooked up a claymore clacker and put in some earplugs.

  “Fire in the hole!”

  Alvin had brought back a lot of explosives, and we’d used extra since we were cutting through the anticipated rebar. (Yes, I’d thought of the rebar.) The thump was still fairly muted. We were showered with watery corn starch and there was a CRASH as the blown out circle of concrete hit the floor inside the storage facility.

  “You can tell them they can turn their radios back on.”

  There had been two vampires in the cold storage room. The circle of concrete had landed on the head of one and that took care of that. The explosion pulverized the other. I just needed to take its head off before it could regenerate.

  I told Shelbye to be ready with the ladder, tossed in a flash-bang, drew Mo No Ken left handed and dropped through the hole. My arm might have been injured but there was nothing wrong with my legs.

  * * *

  It was noon on the second day of the full moon. The call had come in the previous night. A short check by an SIU sergeant had determined that it looked like it was all over and nothing had come out. So we waited until we had time to check it out.

  The house at 4030 Eagle Street was single story with the usual heavily barred windows and doors. Right next to it was a bright pink house with an American flag flying proudly. When we pulled up there was crime scene tape across the front of the house and the elderly neighbor was out on his porch with a shotgun.