by John Ringo
I walked over. Okay, I limped over.
“You see what happened?” I asked.
“Heard it,” the man said. “Just crashing and screaming. I came out to check on it. Lights had gone out in most of the house. I flashed a light in. Just tore up. Johnsons were gone. I called the police. Sheriff’s deputy come by said they’d get to it when they could.”
“Been a tough night, sir,” I said.
“Can tell, son,” he said. “You need a Coke or something? Sweet tea?”
“Sweet tea would be much appreciated, sir,” I said.
“And one for me,” Shelbye said. She was cradling her M14.
“Sure will, miss,” the man said. He looked at the house for a moment. “Nothin’s come out. Nothing gone in. What the hell did it?”
“That’s what we’re here to find out, sir,” I said.
We had to get out the Halligan tool and axe to get the door open. Then I entered cautiously, Uzi held in my left and at the ready.
There was nothing to see. The front room had been torn to shreds. There was a large pile of dirt and broken concrete on the floor of the living room and some blood splatter on the walls. There was some sort of weird mucous or ichor all over the room. It smelled like shit I’ll tell you that.
“What the hell?” I said as Shelbye followed me in.
“One of these,” she said, shaking her head.
“One of whats?”
“We don’t know. We call it a basement boogie. Called it in to Cazador and they don’t know. We get one from time to time. Houses. Cemeteries. One office. Daytime, night time. Never been surviving witnesses. Best we can guess is shoggoth or a grinder but there’s never a reason someone would sick a shoggoth on the victims and grinders don’t like a water table like we got in New Orleans. Generally, just regular folk. They just up and disappear into those holes far as we can tell.”
“The hole’s not big enough for a shoggoth.”
“That’s what Trevor said,” Shelbye said. “Most of the stuff he’s heard of that digs up from under ground, don’t like a bunch of wet and ain’t nothin’ but water down there.”
“Ever try to dig out the hole?”
“You think?” she replied. “They go deep. We’ve tried drilling them and we lose the line. They just up and disappear.”
I was really starting to hate New Orleans. And “we don’t know” in this business is a very bad line. It’s the things that you don’t know what tend to be the biggest problem.
Definitely turned out to be the case in New Orleans. Those little holes turned out to be the manifestation of a very big problem. But it took us some time to figure that out.
We left the house to whoever wanted it. God knows I wasn’t going to be buying it.
* * *
It was two PM the last day of the full moon. One more night and this insanity would be over. Hopefully.
Ben Carter was in the hospital having received a major head wound from some sort of big imp. Trevor was still in his soft cast but out plugging bad things right and left at range. My arm was starting to swell from the exertion and I was about delirious. More members of MHI had arrived from Texas and Georgia to backfill, and Trevor had put them to work.
We’d had more loup garou, another vampire, more zombies and a ghoul outbreak.
I kept having to stop to sharpen Mo No Ken.
And now I had a call that Alvin and Shelbye were in the shit with “something really damned big.” Trevor was on scene and it was all hands.
The incident was occurring near the corner of Oleander and Monroe in Holly Grove. What was still called, by locals, The American Quarter versus the French Quarter.
I never figured out what the other two quarters were.
When I got near, I started to pick up radio transmissions from the team.
“We need a Pig for this thing,” Trevor radioed. “Fall back. Fall back!”
He wasn’t referring to something that goes “Oink, oink.” The Pig is a nickname for an M-60 machine gun. They needed belt fed.
NOPD had a ten block perimeter set up and were evacuating people from the edges. This was serious.
“Trev, Hand,” I radioed. I was coming in from Leonidas Street, which I thought was pretty cool in my sleep-deprivation and pain-induced stupor. “Bring it down Oleander if you can. Lead it towards Leonidas.”
“Roger,” Trevor radioed. “Alvin! Load up! We are didi-mao!”
“Can I get a description of the entity?” I radioed, parking my car sideways on Oleander.
“Probably a flesh golem but it’s fucking huge. We’re loading up. Hopefully it will follow.”
“I don’t know if I’d say hopefully,” Alvin replied on the radio.
I got out and sort of distantly noted it was raining. Just a light rain but the fact that it wasn’t until I stepped out that I noticed was sort of weird. I was really tired.
I went to the trunk, opened it up and started rummaging. All the way at the back was a large, green, hardcase. Getting it out with the arm was a pain but I managed. I opened it up, pulled out the Barrett M82A1, flipped down the bipod legs, loaded a magazine and carried it over to the driver’s side. Then I hefted it up, painfully, onto the roof. I’d used this shooting position before. Previously I had glued little rubber booties on the end of the bipod legs to keep them from scratching Honeybear’s roof. I ran the charging handle—used my right arm for that, wince again—and went back to the trunk to do more rummaging.
I saw Trevor’s big Coronado come around the turn backwards. Shelbye was leaning out the window, firing with her M14 at something.
Then it came around the corner. Futhermucker.
Flesh golems are normally stitched together humans, like Frankenstein. This was a stitched together…at the time I didn’t know what. Later we figured out it had bull legs, a silver back gorilla’s body and a bull’s head, plus some extra stuff for filling. I thought maybe really outsized minotaur at the time, only the necromancer who’d enchanted it either got ahold of Babe the Big Blue Ox and King Kong or somehow managed to get the whole thing to expand. It was huge.
I prefer the big things I understand. Strange shadows in a dark cemetery? Thousands of poisonous spiders? Gnomes? Those piss me off. I like the big stuff. There should be more really big monsters in the world. Out in the open on a street at midday in a light rain where everyone home had locked their doors and hidden in closets til the bellowing big thing got taken care of by hoodoo squad.
Coroner was going to have to bring the big truck for this thing. And lots of plastic bags. At least when I got through with it.
Trevor’s battered blue Coronado came backing up next to me and I waved with my left hand.
“I hope you’ve got an idea,” he yelled.
I reached waaaay in the back again and pulled out a Light Antitank Weapon.
“You keep LAWs in your trunk?” Trevor said.
“Don’t you?” I asked, handing him one. I pulled out another for myself. “Extend that for me, will you?” I asked, waving my injured right arm.
The flesh golem was charging towards us, bellowing in rage. They had hit it a bunch, and chunks were hanging off, but it was still coming.
I fiddled with the LAW for a few seconds and figure out it was easier to fire right than left despite the injury.
“You gonna, you know, shoot?” Alvin asked.
“Getting there,” I said, putting the LAW on my shoulder. “One Gigantor Stew coming up.”
I waited til it was about seventy-five meters away, adjusted the angle and let go.
The Light Antitank Weapon hit it in its massive belly and it mostly disappeared in a cloud of flame.
“Wooo-hooo!” Shelbye yelled from the passenger side window.
Trevor had extended the second one. Sure enough, it was getting up. He hit it again.
The thing was still trying to get up. It was mostly blown in half but it was a game one.
I walked over to the Barrett, got a good cheek weld, leftie, and
fired at its head. It dropped. Struggling back up. Second round through an eye. Struggling back up. Lost the other eye. Hey, I’m a Marine. Shelbye might have been our designated marksman but Lee Harvey Oswald showed what Marine marksmanship is made of.
A few rounds later it lay down and was a good monster.
Just to be sure, I got on the hood of the Coronado and we drove up cautiously. I hoped it wasn’t getting back up. I was out of LAW rockets and we had used up our C4 on the vampire bunker.
It wasn’t moving. It wasn’t struggling. It wasn’t breathing but some monsters like this don’t. There was a lot of blood on the ground and guts everywhere.
“That’s my trophy, Shelbye!”
“I’ll get my boy to do it up right,” she yelled back.
That thing’s head has looked great up on my living room wall ever since. I just call it Babe.
CHAPTER 12
Veteran of the Psychic Wars
The third night of the full moon was, for New Orleans, uneventful. We only had two calls and no more casualties.
Trevor had called and said to meet at Maurice’s at 10AM. All I wanted to know was when I could have some actual rest. I’d caught a few minute’s sleep the day before, I think, and a cat-nap that night. Napping in a car in a park where you’d just cleared of zombies wasn’t exactly restful.
But he was insistent and told me not to bother to derig. I finished up with the coroner and got in my car, trying to remember where Maurice’s was.
When I walked in…
Picture if you will. An open-air bar off a street I shall not name at the edge of the French Quarter. Dark wood, dark interior, long bar on the left wall. The entrance is on the right.
Sitting at the bar is a group of individuals. At least half of them are sporting bandages. There are guns, knives and clubs on the bar and floor. All of them are in stinking tactical gear, most of them covered in blood and various juices and ichor.
All except two women have shaved heads. Helmets line the bar. Beside the helmets are shots of bourbon. The barmaid, same brunette, cannot pour fast enough.
“Hey, Chad,” Trevor said. “Food’s about up. You met Salvage. Tremaine and Carter,” he said, gesturing to two Parish Lieutenants in tac gear. Tremaine was the other female besides Shelbye. Hard-faced brunette in her forties with a scar that ran across her cheek and nose. “You know the MCB cats.”
“Hey,” I said, sitting down painfully. I pulled off my helmet and laid it on the bar with the rest.
“Since you’re here,” Trevor said, picking up his drink.
“Absent companions,” I said, raising the shot. I downed it.
“Absent companions,” the group chorused.
The bourbon chicken was outstanding. I’d have eaten the asshole out of a pig at that point. This was heaven.
“So you survived your first full moon in New Orleans,” said Special Agent in Charge Castro. He sat down next to me. “Congratulations.”
“What the fuck is going on here?”
“That, I truthfully do not know yet. Call it an outbreak? An epidemic? Beats me.” He tipped his glass toward my teammates. “Regardless, thank you for your timely efforts, the truth remains contained for one more day.”
“Cheers?”
Castro gave me a hard look. “You coherent enough for the real, no shit, behind the scenes explanation of the MCB’s First Reason?”
“I wouldn’t call myself coherent, but go,” I said, spooning up my second plate of bourbon chicken.
“Magic, of any kind, requires a few things,” Castro said. “First, knowing you can. After that, basically, materials, time, money, and the ability to learn more about it.”
“The benefits are obvious,” Agent Higgins said. “With magic you get stuff that you otherwise couldn’t.”
“The downside is there’s always side effects,” Trevor threw in. “When you get enough houdoun, bad things just start happening.”
“And the more that people get into it, the more crazy they tend to get,” Castro said. “Often serious necromancers start off with high-minded intentions and then go off the rails. Some of the strongest wizards MCB has dealt with started off as pure minded as Albert Schweitzer. But that’s not the real secret. To understand the importance of the First Reason, you have to understand history and economics. Do I need to go over the changes in lifestyle brought about by the industrial revolution?”
“Not really,” I said.
“It was the combination of the printing press and the industrial revolution that changed the equation when it came to magic,” Castro continued. “Prior to that the Roman Empire had the highest per capita income of any civilization in history. Well, except the Carthaginians which they wiped out. But even then, only a fraction of the population were readers, most were hard scrabble farmers or slaves, without the printing press information was limited, everything had to be slowly hand-copied, and less than five percent of the population had what is currently a middle-class lifestyle. Roman emperors had about the same lifestyle as, and less available capital than, an upper middle class American.”
“Hmm…” I said, thinking about it. “So Gutenberg comes along and suddenly information is everywhere. And then the capital changes with the industrial revolution starts to create actual leisure classes which had not existed prior to it. Where before everyone was living hand-to-mouth and dog eat dog, there were suddenly lots of smart people with time on their hands, no real security issues and access to knowledge.”
“Most of the people who were messing with it would have been serfs or slaves or living in mud huts. You’d have one witch doctor with almost no access to materials or knowledge except what was passed down by word of mouth for dozens of villages. Now, there’s one on every corner with access to anything they can afford and there’s these things called books. Need the bone of a saint? People can get that. Vampire blood? Do you have the money? How powerful a vampire? It’s a fricking nightmare. All sane nations have agreed to suppress public knowledge of the supernatural. Soviets, Chinese, Indians, everybody is on board.”
Castro paused to get another drink, apparently this was a pet topic of his.
“One of the benefits to, say, communism is the combination of poverty and tyranny makes it tough for most people to play with magic. In the industrialized western world, we can’t do that. For the believers, we contain or control. For the nonbelievers, we can suppress, disinform, and debase the very idea that magic and monsters exists.”
“The idea that the supernatural is real is a joke. It’s hokey. Who believes in monsters?” I nodded. This was finally making sense. “And thus not eliminate but at least reduce the number of people who try to raise zombies to go kill their vice principal.”
“Exactly. You’re a bright guy,” Castro said. “Not to mention open up portals to the Old Ones. Some people say we don’t think we should engage in suppression. I’ve heard arguments based on the Second Amendment. People can be trusted with houdoun, it’s just another weapon. Despite the term gun nut, guns don’t actually have the direct effect of causing psychosis. Most magic does. Certainly all the necromancy associated with the Old Ones does. The more you study it, the crazier you become. And the proof? New Orleans.”
“It doesn’t explain all the fucking loup garou,” I said. “That was insane!”
“No, that’s a werewolf on a mission,” Higgins said. The former Marine took another shot. “There’s a couple of asshole loup garou in this town who know they’re cursed, and spreading it around to be dicks. They must hole up during the full moon to avoid detection. But during the month they go out and get into fights and bite people. When I find them, and I will find them, they are not going to enjoy the experience. MCB has a special place for werewolves like that. A place where doctors…experiment. It’s amazing how much you can cut on one of those things in the name of science.”
“So that is the reason for the First Reason,” Castro said. “That’s the reason we have to threaten people, defame, kill them to kee
p this from becoming commonplace. And we’ll keep on doing that until hell freezes over, the second coming, or God Himself tells us not to. Because as much as we hate our job, the alternative is worse.”
“And we are very good at covering it up,” Higgins said.
“Best way to lie is to tell the truth badly,” I quoted.
“Uh huh…By the way, Chad, because you’re so clever and now you get it…” Castro stood up to leave, and put some money on the bar. His manner went from friendly to grim rather quickly. “At the airport, did you think it was cute when you shot that werewolf right next to that plane in front of those passengers? Did it amuse you?”
“Hey, I—”
“Those weren’t hicks in the swamp or superstitious poor folks in the ghetto. Those were upstanding tax payers with jobs, relatives, and contacts who will run their mouths off…Don’t worry. I convinced most of those passengers it was just a wild animal. But there was this one guy, turned out he was a bit of an animal lover, zoology degree or something. He knew better. Him, I had to lean on. The usual threats, you know, ruination, death. I’m a pretty good judge of character. Kind of meek, nerdy, I figured he would shut up. But minutes after I left his house, he was calling a reporter, trying to spill the beans.”
“Hey, Castro, man,” Trevor started. “It’s been a rough few days. Go home, get some sleep.”
“Naw, it’s cool, Trev. Chad should know. I just came from our animal lover’s house. I don’t like to farm this kind of thing out to my agents if I don’t have to. They’ve been through enough as it is. They don’t need any more bad karma.”
“Thanks, boss,” said Higgins.
I felt sick.
“He was a nice guy, no enemies, no criminal activity, looks suspicious if you just shoot ’em. No history of drug abuse so an OD was out of the question. No depression or suicidal tendencies…So he slipped in the shower and broke his neck. An avoidable tragedy, but you know the bathroom is the most dangerous part of the house.” Special Agent in Charge Castro patted me on the shoulder, leaned in close, and whispered in my ear. “That one is on you, buddy.”
