We’ve fought these things a couple times since, but this was our first encounter. They’re sort of man-shaped, but mostly buglike, with shells like crabs, claws and teeth that can shred a man to the bone in a flash. They’re colorful bastards, bright orange, and red, purples. Too many eyes, too many joints, all so damned alien that the sight of them shakes even the hardest Hunter in battle.
And a horde of them came swarming out.
This was sudden violence. We weren’t ready to fight, nobody was geared up, most of us were drunk, and then out of nowhere we were waist-deep in unexpected razor-sharp insect monsters, tearing us to pieces.
It only took a heartbeat or two, but God bless MHI, we reacted.
Guns came out. Tables were flipped for cover. Wounded and innocents were dragged out of the way. And my people went to town.
The hole just kept pumping out monsters like a chest wound leaking blood. I was killing things and shouting orders in between. Hunters ran for their cars and came back with heavier weapons. Those barely made a dent. All around, our people were dying.
Of all the memories that son of a bitch, Rocky, could rip from my mind, oh why did he have to leave this one so perfectly clear?
Before I say something about how Chad died, there’s one brief shining moment that shows exactly how that man lived.
Ray the Younger got ripped limb from limb. His sister Julie, just a young woman then, she jumped in swinging a table leg, clubbing down monsters, refusing to abandon her dead brother’s side, screaming like a berserker. The Shackleford kids had turned out to support their dad, and he’d condemned them to hell. Julie was surrounded. She was going to die and I couldn’t get there in time. But thank God, Iron Hand did.
When the Shackleford kids were little, they’d taken a liking to him, and he was so protective of them they had even called him Uncle Chad. Well, he earned that title that night. He’d already run his pistol dry. Most of us had by then. But he’d pulled out that damaged sword and gone in swinging, throwing himself right into the middle of the demons and hacking through shells and into arms and legs. He shoved Julie away from her brother and steered her out of there, cutting down monsters the whole way.
To this day, I’ve never really talked to Julie much about that night. I don’t know if she even knows it was Uncle Chad who saved her life.
By a miracle, we got organized. We held that ground, that dance floor turned into a killing field. We established choke points, locked down the halls, and then had to deal with monsters clawing their way through the floors and ceiling. I can’t say how we knew, instinct maybe, just being human in the face of something so not, but however we got it, all of us had the understanding that there was no retreat. It was hold now or lose forever.
We found out why when something pushed against the rift.
The floor lifted like a bubble. A different reality mingled with our own. I can’t really explain what it was we saw through that hole. The thing beneath New Orleans had been one of their babies. This was a father. Of those of us who lived, some who saw through to the other side quit, a couple went crazy and wound up at Appleton. Yet that thing, that God-awful cursed thing, unless we did something, it was coming through.
Only for a brief instant, across a room full of demons, I saw that Ray Shackleford was still inside the rift. Ray was the key. He’d started this. My only hope was that pulling him out would end it.
Many of you know the story that I somehow made it into the gate, and into the other dimension, grabbed Ray, dragged him out, and that closed it.
This is about the somehow.
Problem being, I couldn’t get through. There was just too much distance and too many demons between us. I needed to get to the other side before it was too late. I needed somebody to punch through, to create a gap I could use. But looking at that wall of claws and spines, whoever I sent was as good as dead.
I spotted Chad, holding back monsters with a bent sword. His girlfriend was hiding behind him, wounded, with a spine piercing her side, but she’d be fine. It’s tough to put down her kind.
I walked up and said, “Iron Hand. Make me a hole.”
He understood. When hell had come to town, when there wasn’t anyone else we could depend upon, I knew he was the one person who could and would make that hole. Without fear. Without hesitation. Even Milo or Sam might have hesitated.
Not Iron Hand.
With that damaged katana, he stopped trying to hold the line, and like the Marine he was to the core, he charged the enemy. He knew he was going to die, horribly, painfully. He didn’t let that worry him. He laid into those demons like there was no tomorrow, hacking them down faster than they could kill him.
He got cut, stabbed, bit, but he just kept going. I’m wondering now, at the end, with the blood loss and the poison and the pain…during that did he realize and know that this was what he had been sent back to the world of the living for?
It was his perfect warrior moment. Maybe there was something to all that soul-of-the-sword stuff of his after all.
Chad kept cutting and moving. It was just the two of us in a sea of monsters. I followed in his wake, smashing down anything that got close, until the portal was near enough for me to make my move. We had to climb over piles of corpses. A claw ripped out one of Chad’s eyes. Another sliced through his abdomen and spilled his guts, but Chad still kept fighting. He was covered in blood, human red and demonic orange. He lost a hand, but kept using his sword with the other. Then Mo No Ken broke over the head of a demon. In a flash, they were all over him, biting and tearing.
And Chad turned to me as the monsters sliced his flesh to ribbons and tore him into to pieces…and he smiled.
Because he was on the way back to his precious Green Lands.
So as Chad traveled to one world, I leapt through the gate into another.
I will never write of the horrors I saw on the other side.
* * *
There was still a whole lot of killing to do. While it seemed like an eternity to me there, only a minute or two passed on Earth. When I came out of the hole, carrying Ray, the spell was broken. The gate slammed shut behind us. The room returned to normal, except now it was torn apart, covered in bodies, and the resort was burning down around us.
If you are reading this, you know the rest. We evacuated. MCB rolled in and dropped the hammer on us. The place burned for days with an unnatural hellfire, but if we hadn’t stopped that breach, it would be the whole world burning.
One last thing I remember, as I was there on the beach, counting bodies to the rising sun, I noticed the address on the front gate of the resort for the first time.
57 Gulf View.
Like I said before, good call, Saint Pete.
Iron Hand was one of the toughest Hunters it has ever been my honor to have known. Oliver Chadwick Gardenier would go in against overwhelming odds, the nastiest, toughest, scariest supernatural creatures on the face of the planet and rip them a new asshole.
Assei died a hero to the core.
And his daughter is pretty badass, too.
Earl Harbinger
Monster Hunter International
Cazador, Alabama
Monster Hunter Memoir: Saints Page 30
