by John Ringo
The mole rat stopped for a moment, pointed its snout at the sky and let out a weird, high, squeaky cry. It was bizarre coming from such a massive beast.
It’s hard to write “monster sounds” but it was something like:
“DOC! DOC, DOC, DOC, DOOOOC!”
I got out Bertha the Barrett and loaded up a magazine. I got out both LAWs as well and put them in the front seat. Just in case.
“You drive. Drive up parallel to it.” I sat on the hood. “If the first shot doesn’t do it, we take off and stay at range. If that don’t work, speed up, we get away, unpack the LAWs and finish it off.”
I had the little rubber bipod booties for when I had to shoot across the roof, but then I actually looked at Honeybear’s roof. The loup garou had done a number on it. I loved that car. I’d rebuilt her so many times all by myself. It was just a shame. The impact of the werewolf had driven the top in two inches and it was scratched to shit. We were way past booties.
“Why am I driving and you’re shooting?”
“Well,” I said. “First of all, I won the marksmanship competition with the frogs.”
“Just because you cheated and got a helicopter. That’s not a real shooting competition. That’s a ‘who has the best contacts’ competition.”
“Second, ’cause this is my Bertha and your Barrett is in the van. Now shut up and drive, Smurfette.”
“I’m armed you know,” Milo said. But he got in the car.
“Also,” I said, yelling. “’Cause would you trust my driving with you on the hood?”
“No!”
I held up a hand as we came parallel to the gargantuan beast. The real question was where to shoot it. I was sort of familiar with rat anatomy courtesy of a perfect C in Biology. The heart should be right behind the shoulder.
The molerat had gotten its head into the house and was pushing through the wall with the aforementioned shoulder. The inhabitants were not enjoying the experience. I heard a blast from a shotgun but that was pissing in the wind. It was past time to take the shot.
Then I made a mistake.
Pro-tip: You can fire most big powerful rifles from any of several positions. Prone is most people’s preference. Off-hand, standing, works if you’ve got the upper body strength. You can even do it kneeling. I’ve tried it.
Seated, the recoil is going to rock you back. Especially when you are seated on a waxed metal car hood.
It made the most sense for what we were planning. I’d just never actually tried it with a Barrett before. The problem is traverse. When you fire an M82 you are going back. I’m not a big guy. Someone with arms like Trevor can shoot a .50 offhand and barely move. When I fire it off-hand I have to lean into it. Then I ride it back about four or six inches. Very fun and very effective.
It turns out you don’t have that distance, and keep your balance, when you’re in seated position on the edge of a slippery car hood.
I fired and found myself rolling backwards trying to control 35 pounds of steel that had just aggressively shoved me over the side.
I ended up on the ground on the street. I’d managed to hold onto Bertha and even protect the scope. But at the cost of a bloody nose and my dignity.
Off-hand, yes. Kneeling, maybe. Prone, definitely. Sitting, never.
I’d say end pro-tip but there’s a second one.
Pro-tip: If you’ve ever hunted, say, deer, you may have noticed that heart shots, even perfect ones, rarely kill immediately. If you’re smart, when you know you’ve nailed a critter and it takes off you just let it run and wait a minutes. That way it goes a little ways, stops to see what hurt it, and drops dead. If you chase it will keep going on adrenaline for a long way.
Humans can even survive getting shot in the heart for a bit if they are accustomed to violence and pumped up. Emergency personnel call gang-bangers “human cockroaches” for a reason and long-term professional monster hunters get the same way. After a while it gets harder and harder to kill us because we’ve been nearly killed so many times our bodies get used to trauma and adjust. Just like animals. Ditto professional soldiers in a long-term war. And I’m of the personal opinion that having some alcohol in your system helps. Just from watching who does and does not survive severe trauma.
Whether the mole rat was drunk as a loon, or just very robust, or regenerated, was, at that point, unknown. What was known was that it could hear, could figure out that loud noise and sudden pain were probably connected and did not drop right away from a heart shot.
“Get on the car!” Milo yelled. “Get on! Get on!”
I was sort of dizzy from getting kicked off the hood by a Bertha. I got up and looked to see what all the excitement was about.
The mole rat was running at us faster than anything that big should be able to run. I mean it was getting bigger and bigger and bigger as I watched.
Adrenaline is an amazing drug. One moment I was standing up, shaking my head, wishing I could maybe, you know, go home and take a long shower, maybe a nap…The next instant I was up on the hood, lying on my back on the windshield and pulling out Bertha’s bipod.
Adrenaline is amazing stuff. Don’t even know how I got there.
For once, Milo did not drive like a little old lady. Honeybear peeled out in a cloud of blue smoke and burning rubber smell and the chase was on!
Oh, that mole rat was pissed! Damned near hit us as we peeled out then turned faster than it should have been able to and followed the smell of burned rubber and the roaring sound of a Delta 88 at full rev.
“DOC! DOOOOOC!” it was squealing. I didn’t speak molerat but I think that meant “I’m going to kill you and eat your bones! Buwahahahah!”
“Slow down We’re losing it!”
“Good!” Milo shouted. But he slowed down. Because he was coming to a stop sign. And if you’re a little old lady, you STOP AT STOP SIGNS.
As I lined up the shot I noticed something. We were at the corner of Fern and Birch.
“You’re driving the wrong way on a one-way street!”
BOOM! Another fifty cal round right through the chest. It kept running. I was starting to think this thing regenerated.
Milo was carefully checking both ways for traffic as I lined up the next shot. Either this one had better work or Milo had better, you know, go or we were about to be mole rat chow.
Problem being there was another car in the intersection.
A minivan.
We just sat there. I looked over my shoulder and could see the lady in the mini-van signaling for Milo to go through.
I suspect Milo was signaling frantically for her to go through. If we went first she’d be in the intersection when the mole rat arrived and it would probably eat her and her soccer spawn.
She was probably thinking she wanted crazy people with guns as far away as possible and not realizing there was a reason I was firing over the back of the car. This was Louisiana. People do that sort of thing for fun.
I fired off the rest of my magazine, rapid aimed fire, then leaned back to pull out another mag from my vest. I knew no matter how fast I went, I wasn’t going to stop the mole rat before it got to us and did one hell of a lot of damage to Honeybear. Not to mention, well, eat us.
Milo bailed out of the driver’s side with a LAW. But it takes a few seconds to pull the pins, get it up on your shoulder…I really should have had it extended.
The mole rat reached Honeybear and bit my fucking trunk! Its massive upper teeth went right through my trunk lid! The bastard!
Fortunately, it was concentrated on killing the big metal thing that had hurt it. Honeybear shook back and forth and I heard my bumper give way.
I got a mag seated and aimed right between its beady pink eyes. Boom!
Brains splattered out of its tiny bullet head. Who knew a molerat even had brains?
But that got it. It dropped, its head still attached to Honeybear’s trunk lid. My car settled on its leaf-springs with an unpleasant metallic noise. Grinnng.
Fucking moler
ats!
I heard a squeal of tires as the minivan peeled out of the intersection and drove away as fast as mommy could manage.
I didn’t even know you could peel one of those out. Learn something new every day.
* * *
The tow-truck was the sort usually used to tow semi-trailers. It had a flat-bed trailer attached on back.
A chain had been gotten around the mole rat’s neck and it was being dragged onto the trailer by one big-ass crane. It had not deliquesced. Shelbye was going to be ecstatic.
The teeth were still embedded in my trunk lid. We’d cut them off with a borrowed axe to get the head off Honeybear’s rear end. Which was absolutely trashed. Fucking mole rats.
“You know Shelbye’s going to want it,” I said, taking the yellow slip from Tim.
“As long as Doctor Henry gets invited to the fais do-do,” Tim said.
“I think you can bring the whole department,” I said. “And SIU. MCB. Them Cajuns gonna be eating right for a month.”
* * *
Recipe for giant mole rat jambalaya.
1. Catch one giant mole rat.
2. Dice fine.
3. Make jambalaya.
CHAPTER 26
I’m Alright
“I think I’m starting to like it here,” Milo said, taking another bite of donut.
Mormons won’t consume anything containing alcohol or tobacco. But don’t ask them about refined sugar. Boy could eat more donuts than an entire SWAT.
The sun was rising over Lake Pontchartrain. There was another loup garou running around somewhere. There’d been a vampire attack that we’d missed and we were going to have to track down the vamps. There was something else going on in some place.
I really didn’t care. I was munching on a breakfast burrito and there were four more in the greasy sack from Germaine’s.
Monster hunting builds up an appetite.
“It grows on you,” I said, taking another bite of burrito. I’d asked for extra jalapeno. That was probably a mistake. I was going to pay for it, for sure. “Like mold.”
The phone rang.
“I’m eating,” I said, without asking who it was.
“Got that,” Ray said. “When you are done eating, head to New Orleans Country Club. We missed a couple last night. The zombies from Metairie Cemetery got out and are wandering around the golf course. We’re getting complaints. It’s interfering with tee time.”
* * *
“Try to hit them in the head, Milo,” I shouted out the window, rocking my weight from side to side.
You can drive a car on golf cart paths. You can even get up a fair turn of speed. I hadn’t been too sure about the occasional bridge and whether it could take the weight of Honeybear. Especially with everything that was in the trunk. But they handled us fine.
I’d let Milo do the shooting this time. I mean, it wasn’t like he was a good shot or anything, but I was tired and he was still fuming over the mole rat. And that way I could stay in the air conditioning. We had the windows rolled down but any little bit of cool helped.
So he was up on the much mangled roof of Honeybear with his M16, trying to pot shamblers that were wandering around the New Orleans Country Club. Currently the object of his attention was a probably African-American male—it was hard to tell with the advanced decay—in a very nice if faded suit wandering near the water hazard. He was missing an arm and didn’t seem to have any clear goal in mind.
“I would if you’d stop rocking the car!” Milo yelled.
“No idea what you’re talking about,” I yelled back, rocking from side to side and trying not to laugh.
Obviously, MCB had closed the place, but there was still a foursome of golfers watching from the nearest tee. Since they hadn’t been run off, that meant they were read in on the supernatural somehow, and probably connected enough that MCB had to be polite to them. More than likely judges or politicians. They didn’t seem perturbed by a few zombies, but they were clearly impatient to continue their game. One of them was already doing practice swings.
They change it every so often, but in 1987 the Monster Control Bureau had two different ranking systems for monster related events. One was on the basis of the threat to citizens and national security. That was a color based ranking system ranging from green, one monster, couple of victims, no big deal, to Extinction Level Event. Which was, obviously, bad.
The sobek, even though it hadn’t managed to kill anyone, was classed as a yellow event. If it had managed to climb out of the canal lots of people might have died.
The second was based on how hard it would be to cover up. When a few homeless people saw a vampire, no big deal. Class One Event. Everybody knew homeless people were crazy and it was just a few of them. Godzilla attacking the Democratic National Convention on camera live would be a five.
In any other town zombies in broad daylight on a major golf course used by high rollers and Very Important People—who could not easily be dismissed or defamed—was considered a big damned deal, probably a yellow three. In New Orleans, Agent Higgins just ran off the know nothings, shut the gate, and put up a closed sign for maintenance sign, while his boss, Castro, drove a golf cart over and schmoozed with the foursome from the donor class. Castro waved when he left. I doubted they’d even bother writing up anything in the Truth for this one. It was like Class Beige Negative One here.
There was another shot.
“Dang it!” Milo yelled. “Quit rocking the car!”
“Don’t know what you’re talking about,” I yelled, but I quit rocking the car. “Have you considered getting your eyes checked? Take a comfortable breath. Slow trigger squeeze. The shot should come as a surprise…”
There was another shot. The shambler dropped.
“There you go!” I yelled. “Before you know it, you’ll be almost to the level of Marine marksmanship!”
“Just find me the next one,” Milo said. I could tell he was grumbling.
As we pulled away, the guy with the driver let fly.
I will never get the allure of golf.
* * *
I’d gotten a map of the course at the pro-shack and marked where all the zombies had fallen, but when we went back with coroner the one at the water hazard was missing.
“I swear there was one right here,” I said, looking around. You could see the trace of brains on the ground. “Right damned here!”
“No zombie, no receipt,” Dave said.
“The brains are all over the ground,” I said, casting around. Milo had hit it square in the head. Finally.
“Excuse me, you there in the armor!”
I’d heard the golf cart coming up behind me but ignored it.
“Yes, sir?” I asked, politely, turning around.
The speaker was a gentlemen in his sixties, distinguished, well dressed, with iron gray hair and blue eyes.
“If you’re looking for human remains, young man, you may have your work cut out for you,” he said. “A gator took it.”
“Oh, son of a bitch,” Dave said, shaking his head. “Not that again.”
“Any idea where this gator went, sir?” I asked.
“Somewhere in the water hazard,” he said as he drove off. “Good luck.”
“Well, shit,” I said. “What do we do now?”
“Gotta get the gator out of the water hazard,” Dave said, shrugging. “Cut it open, see if there’s a body in there.”
“So…How do you catch a gator, again?” I asked.
* * *
I had already come to the conclusion that there were three answers to any question along the lines of how do I/we get something done in New Orleans?
1. Ask Remi to make arrangements.
2. Call Madame Courtney.
3. Shelbye had a cousin.
These even fell into three broad categories of the gumbo that was New Orleans but that’s a big digression. Simply put, of those three which would you choose to get a gator out of a water hazard?
You
guessed it, Shelbye had a cousin.
More like some sort of third cousin tenth removed or an uncle or something. The guy was about a hundred, short, his head far too large for his body, bow-legged, walked with a stoop and his arms out and seemed to have been inexpertly carved from teak by some alien race that had heard of primates, had them described certainly, but never actually seen one. I was relatively certain they’d used some sort of non-primate monkey as a basis. His face was probably based on proboscis monkey and his body on…Lemurs? Possibly? He was another one of those characters in New Orleans I wanted to check if they were PUFF applicable.
“Ooh, gator eatin’ zombie nouveau!” he exclaimed in the same accent Tremaine used when he was really tired. Cajun so thick you couldn’t cut it with Mo No Ken. “Être pas bonne!”
He then said something in what Cajuns thought was French. It sounded disappointed. Even when they used close to French words, Cajun accent was just as thick in French.
“Lost that,” I said. “Something about a donkey?”
“Buyers won’t take them if they’ve eaten humans or human remains,” Shelbye translated. “What he actually said was ‘You get more dick from a donkey.’”
“Ah,” I said. “Well, how much to get it out?”
“Oool, two hunnert?” he asked.
“Done,” I said. “How long?”
“Long’n it take,” the possibly human said with a shrug.
“Rock, paper, scissors?” I asked Shelbye, holding out a fist hopefully.
“Oh, no,” she said. “Your kill. You gotta stick around. I ain’t sittin’ here for one damn shambler.”
I didn’t want to stick around for one damned shambler, either. Full moon was prime hunting season even by day. There were things to kill and money to be made. Girls to save. The last place I wanted to be was stuck on a golf course waiting for Methuselah to fish a gator out of a pond.
“What if I need a translator?” I asked.
“When Cousin Badouin gets it out, pay him two hundred dollars,” Shelbye said, walking away.
Cousin Badouin walked to his green pick-up truck, slowly and arthritically, and rummaged for a bit before pulling out a weighted treble hook attached to a long line. A bit more rummaging and he came up with a long barreled pistol that looked like a .22. Then he slowly and arthritically walked back. I swear it took him five minutes just to make the round trip.
