Monster Hunter Memoirs: Sinners - eARC

by John Ringo

  Guy appears to be in his thirties. Sort of biker looking. Long hair, beard, hairy, heavy-set, bunch of heavy rings on his fingers which creates a sort of brass knuckle effect in a fight. No real indications, though, that’s he’s a loup garou. Wearing all his clothes and stuff. I’d add description of his face but…wasn’t much left of his head. And was leaking from a lot of holes. A lot.

  According to witnesses, Earl simply gunned him down in cold blood.

  So…what the hell happened? Took forever to drag it out of Earl.

  He’s in the bar, looking for one of, any of, the loup garou that had been intentionally biting people off-moon and this one walks in. Earl knows he’s a werewolf right off. Guy spots Earl. Walks over and bows up on Earl.

  Earl explains there are rules about being werewolf, at least in the Alpha’s territory. Which he was in. No messing with humans. Don’t piss off the Alpha. He’d violated both.

  This guy suggests that Earl shove it and wants to fight. Makes a challenge.

  Earl suggests they take it outside.

  The guy says let’s throw down right here.

  “So I said ‘Okay, if that’s how you want it,’” Earl tells us. “And I pulled and shot him with all six cylinders. Reloaded. Put those in his head. Amazing how fast that clears a bar.”

  Cold, man. Really cold.

  For reasons that may be obvious to you or may not, this apparently surprised the hell out of the guy. He was expecting Earl to, you know, take him on physically.

  I’d gotten some skinny on stuff by then so I asked Earl why he’d done it that way.

  “I’ve seen more punks like him than all the bad werewolf movies ever made. He violated rule one and two. Wasn’t going to waste my time.”

  The body, of course, tested positive for lycanthropy.

  You do not bow up on Earl Harbinger. Certainly not if you’re a loup garou.

  Later, it happens again. Slightly different. Earl walks into a club over in Lower Ninth, walks up to one of the club’s regulars and just guns the guy down. In that case, other guns were pulled. Earl holds up his hands, identifies himself as being with Hoodoo Squad and calmly suggests they call the police.

  We had a lot fewer problems with new loup garou after that. It was just amazing.

  * * *

  But something happened between those two events. It was before Earl found the second loup garou. I might as well finish the story I started this memoir with.

  October and the weather was finally starting to cool off. At least it had. Then it got blazing hot again, what up north would be called an Indian Summer and down in the Big Easy was just called “hot enough for you?”

  That night, you could feel the tension in the air. The feel that there was a front on the way and it was going to be big one. The feel that the temperature was going to break and break hard in a wall of thunder.

  If you’ll remember, I had rolled up on a single werewolf call, which had turned into a two werewolf call. And after I’d gotten injured killing those two, a pack of ghouls had crawled out of the ground to eat the corpses. Which it turned out really pissed off the third werewolf.

  So there I was, limping back from calling the coroner, around the corner to see a pile of ghouls devouring the loup garou I’d just killed. A blast of wind hit as the storm reached the cemetery. The heavens opened up and water poured from the sky.

  The ghouls turned, hissing at my lights, and got up from their meal.

  More were closing in among the tombs. Their outline was revealed as lightning pounded the Big Easy like Thor’s hammer.

  I was wounded, alone, stuck in a thunderstorm and surrounded by hungry ghouls. Then another freaking loup garou, barely audible over the howling wind, thunder and pouring rain, bayed its challenge to the moon…

  I’ve been dead. Dying doesn’t really trouble me. Various ways of dying are my fear. Dying slowly in agony dissolved by spider venom while doctors try very hard and fail to save me. Having my soul ripped from my body. Being sacrificed. Ending up crippled, especially if I lose the use of my dick.

  Screaming my way to death as the ghouls pile on and feast.

  But there are times, for me, when I honestly long for a glorious death. When all the fear slips away. When I truly enter that zen state that is the point of all the martial arts crap. When the world focuses to a mind, a hand and a blade.

  Okay, and a white phosphorus grenade.

  I took one from my vest, pulled the pin and tossed at the cluster that had been feeding. Ghouls don’t like fire. They jumped away from it and it took their minds, momentarily, off of fresh meat. Then I took Mo No Ken in a two handed grip and went to work.

  The injury to my leg was a distant issue. A variable to consider like the pouring rain making my sword’s grip slippery in my gloved hands. I would be slightly less agile than normal. The wet ground. The bloody mud that eventually started to suck at my boots.

  The tombs were tight, here. There was no wall or brother at my back and damned little maneuvering room to crash through and attack at an angle. There were ghouls before me and ghouls behind. I had them right where I wanted them.

  I knew this was not the battle where the Lord planned for me to die. This was no grand finale. This was just another skirmish in a war that would only end with the Final Battle. This might not be my destiny, but if I fell here, He’d find somebody else to be destiny boy. I did not care. It was time for battle.

  There was barely room to swing Mo No Ken as I turned back and forth, slashing and hacking at the undead, the rain pouring down my face and the battle illuminated by continuous sheets of lightning blasting the firmament. Lightning struck a nearby tomb, the bolt so close you could hear the pop beforehand then the massive CRACK as it hit. The lightning flashed from tomb to tomb, so bright for a moment I thought I was in a strobe-filled club.

  I did a side-kick left, slamming a ghoul in the stomach while thrusting right, one handed, into the eye of one on the other side. Spin back and Mo No Ken swept up then down, slicing the kicked ghoul from shoulder to stomach, out the right side, cutting the ghoul in half. Spin, sweep back up and another was sliced from groin to shoulder and literally fell in two, adding to the writhing pile of undead on that side. They were still slithering forward, grasping at my boots, snaggle fanged maws chewing at my shin plates…

  Then the loup garou arrived.

  Most of the ghouls were to my right where the body of the last loup garou had been mostly consumed. That was, coincidentally, the direction it arrived from.

  Ghouls will generally run from a serious fight. They smelled the blood and sensed the injury. They didn’t have enough sense to realize that even wounded I was the more dangerous predator.

  But they recognized loup garou. Suddenly, the “heavy” side was just trying to get away and to my left they were running. Not from me. From the werewolf.

  Couldn’t have that.

  I slashed off the ghouls that were holding my boots and gave chase. I wasn’t finishing them off, you pretty much have to burn them, but a ghoul on the ground with no legs I could deal with later.

  They’re fast and agile but they weren’t fast and agile enough. Some jumped up on the tombs and made it off into the darkness to safety. But not many. A couple that tried that ended up cut in half. Most I left crawling on their arms in my wake. They weren’t getting anywhere fast that way.

  But I could tell from the sound that the battle with the loup garou was almost over.

  Now the pain hit. My leg was on fire. I was weak and trembling in the rain as the loup garou slunk forward. I was the last remaining prey in sight that wasn’t running away and it wasn’t going to stop until all the prey was down and easy to feed on.

  Loup garou are like that. They say that wolves aren’t that way but they do the same thing. All predators do. Get a wolf around vulnerable prey and they’ll kill everything in sight then go back and eat. Lions and tigers and bears, oh, my.

  “Thanks for the assist,” I said as the werewolf slunk t
hrough the rain towards me. It was low, growling, ready to leap. It had been wounded by the ghouls, bitten, and scratched, but unlike me, its wounds were already healing. “I don’t suppose you’d like to reconsider? I could use your sort of back-up on a regular basis.”

  I can be fairly persuasive. Apparently, I wasn’t persuasive enough. The loup garou leapt.

  Mo No Ken slashed one last time as I stepped aside.

  My savior was dying.

  Turned out to be a middle aged white lady. Looked like she would have been more comfortable in church. Actually, looked a bit like a “Bertha Better Than You” type.

  “Go to God, madam,” I said, turning Mo No Ken against the downpour to clean it. “I’m sure you’re forgiven all your sins.”

  So that completes the story I began with. If I was basing this book on the format of my previous memoir, that would be the way I’d end it.

  But I’ve overlooked one very important New Orleans tradition, and the day when hoodoo squad met its match: Mardi Gras. The day the dinner table turned.

  CHAPTER 28

  Street Life

  So there we were in Mardi Gras. People had warned me that if I thought a full moon was insane in New Orleans “just wait.” They weren’t kidding.

  Of course, since our crazy monster activity had died down considerably, we were hoping it would be the normal kind of crazy, not the blood soaked massacre kind.

  The parades and celebrations had been going on since before the Sugar Bowl. They just got more and more frantic and raucous as the month went by. Hoodoo? Didn’t nothing stop the Mardi Gras krewes from turning out. So we were all on station waiting for something bad to happen.

  All the parades and second lines and celebrations were just a warm-up for the Fat Tuesday parade. That one shut down the whole damned city. Every hotel from Bourbon to Baton Rouge was booked solid. Every street was packed with tourists and locals. And on every corner you could buy everything from a ten dollar bag of heroin to a ten year old.

  Ever try to respond to a supernatural outbreak when there are ten thousand drunken assholes in your way?

  I’d say the worst part was I was missing the party but honestly I was just as glad to not be attending. It was fucking insane. No, the worst part, seriously, was taking thirty minutes to go two blocks only to find that the sighted vampire had already drunk a tourist and was long gone.

  A week before the SRT had arrived. Oh, what fun, what fun. Because Mardi Gras was such a big national event, and there had been such a suspicious spike in monster activity over the last year, MCB headquarters had dispatched their elite Special Response Team to keep an eye on things. SRT were the ones who could call in the battleships and B-52s, which meant they out ranked everybody.

  So while SRT was in town, Special Agent in Charge Castro was temporarily in charge of dick. MCB wasn’t going to be lenient or understanding about anything.

  With most of this giant crowd being made up of law abiding citizens—happily ignorant of the supernatural—who would go home and tell all their friends about anything weird they saw—Hoodoo Squad had been told to be discreet. No driving around with sirens wailing and purple lights flashing. It meant I couldn’t carry my Uzi or wear my body armor in public, and the indignity of slinging Mo No Ken over my shoulder in a plastic map case.

  Higgins had introduced me to a few of the MCB agents who would be stationed here for Mardi Gras. Unlike our locals, most of them had been stuck up jerks who wouldn’t give us the time of day. I was told Franks was in town too. I had first met him after my initial encounter with shamblers. I got the impression that most of the MCB were a little frightened of him.

  The day before Agent Marine stopped by Maurice’s. He had been given a rookie junior MCB agent fresh out of their academy to be his temporary gopher. I was surprised to discover that it was someone I knew.

  It was Dwayne Myers. He had been with MHI for a few years, and had even been on Earl’s team. Good reputation, had been tight with Ray. Like me, he had even rated having the little Shackleford kids call him uncle. I had heard he had quit after his best friend Marty Hood had gotten killed in a training accident, but I hadn’t known that he’d joined the MCB. There wasn’t traditionally a lot of crossover between our organizations.

  I tried to talk to him, but Dwayne wasn’t feeling talkative, looked like he didn’t want to be there, and was basically being an asshole to everyone, but I bought him a drink anyway. Melisent poured us shots.

  “Absent companions.” I drank. He didn’t.

  “I’m on duty.”

  “Higgins doesn’t seem to care.” I pointed my chin at Agent Marine, who was being his usual self. “I heard about Hood’s accident. Sorry, man.”

  Dwayne gave me an angry look. “So that’s what Earl is calling it? An accident?”

  “Why? Was it something else?”

  “I don’t know.” He stubbed out his cigarette in an ashtray. “I don’t want to talk about it.”

  “So why the job change, Dwayne? I know it can’t be because the government pays better.”

  From down the bar, Higgins laughed.

  “You really want to know, Chad? MHI is a bunch of damned cowboys, pushing too hard, and getting good men killed in the process. They’re not by the book. They don’t even have a book. You’re a smart guy. Get out of MHI while you still can.” And then he got up and walked out of Maurice’s, his shot untouched.

  “That rookie needs to learn to relax,” Agent Higgins said as came over and finished Dwayne’s drink. “Wound tight like that, he’ll never last long in the MCB.”

  * * *

  It was just after sundown, and I was pushing my way through the drunken mob with a new guy named Caleb Warren. New to New Orleans, but not new to MHI. He was a big, blond, Minnesota farm boy from hardy Viking stock. Ray had talked him into transferring here from our team in California.

  We were responding to a vamp call right by the freaking Place D’Armes hotel. For those of you who don’t know it, it’s right on one of the busiest streets in New Orleans and right at the height of tourist season on freaking Fat Tuesday. And this vamp throat bites a tourist right in front of God and everybody. Most of the other tourists thought it was street theater or something. The hotel shut its security doors up tight and screamed for help.

  Caleb and I were over on Orleans Street when we got the call. Couple of blocks. Vamps right on the street was a “Go Now” from SIU. We were pretty much matched in terms of getting through the crowds. Caleb had more mass and longer legs and could bull through the tourists. I had agility and could slither through, but it was easier to follow the big guy. Nice to have a plow.

  We forced our way across Saint Anne Street to the sidewalk on the Place D’Armes side and slowed down. We could see the victim down. Someone, a tourist I’m pretty sure, was doing CPR.

  Uh, lady, if you do manage to get him back you are in for the last shock of your life.

  Not really, it usually takes a few days for them to wake up, plenty of time to get them embalmed. That’s one of the reasons people started embalming. Keeps the number of surprise vampires down.

  As we approached, a young kid in a hoodie walking towards us, turned around, and started running. Then he jumped up onto a second story balcony at 635, then up to another second on the corner building of Royal, and up to the third, then up to the roof. Fast. Not humanly fast. Supernaturally fast.

  We’d found our vamp.

  Now, when he went to the second story, the chase was on. Normally, a vamp easily can outrun a human, but I was going to run this fucker down. One vamp? I was Iron Hand, baby. I wasn’t even going to bother with “stake.” I was going right to “chop.”

  A lot of the buildings in the Quarter are flat roofed. And I have always been agile.

  “Boost,” I yelled to Caleb, running up to under the balcony.

  “Trevor said stick together!”

  “Boost!”

  “You’ve got to be…” Caleb said then shrugged and stuck his hand
s down, interlocked.

  A second later I was up on that second floor balcony. By then the vamp was disappearing over the roof-top.

  Screw that. I burst through the glass French doors into a party for the upper-crust.

  “Hoodoo Squad,” I said, politely. “Sorry about the door. Vamp on the roof. Where’s your roof access?”

  “This way, young man.”

  Their gentleman was another older fellow like Remi. As the party resumed he politely but rapidly led me to the ladder to the roof. I could partially hear, partially construct, the conversation as I left. The owners of the condominium had out of town guests visiting for Mardi Gras.

  “What was that about? You just let him barge into your home? Shouldn’t we call someone?”

  “Hoodoo squad, cher. It’s a New Orleans thing. Don’t trouble yourself. Henri will clean up the glass when he comes back. More cabernet?”

  “It’s a New Orleans thing” explains everything to out-of-towners.

  “Please apologize to your patrons and their guests,” I said as I climbed up the ladder.

  “We do understand, sir,” the gentleman said.

  The vamp had run from the roof he’d climbed and onto the one I was on. But by the time I was up on it, he’d back tracked onto the roof of Place d’Armes and headed in the general direction of the corner of Chartres and Dumaine.

  I, of course, gave chase. The weather, for once, wasn’t blazing hot, and up on the roofs I could make good time, unlike in the street.

  “Hand, where are you?” Caleb radioed.

  “Headed towards Chartres and Dumaine,” I said, sort of panting but not gasping. It had been a pretty decent run so far.

  The fang headed over a few more roofs, jumped into the air in a tremendous leap and disappeared.

  He was getting away. I ran faster, leaping across the few openings and up onto the edge of the roof he’d flown off of. I looked down. Alley. Dumpster. Top closed. No time to think. I hit it in a roll and then off and onto the ground, landing on my feet.

  The vampire was waiting for me.

  Correction, all the vampires were waiting for me.