I hadn’t been inside a comic store in years, ever since I found out about them and saw what they could do, what they really were, costumed super-heroes never held the same fascination for me.
“Your guys used to burn stores like mine down,” Lev said from behind his long glass counter. He glanced up from the comic he was reading and peered at me over his John Lennon glasses with an expression of guarded disdain. “Don’t suppose you were ever part of that?”
I shook my head; I’d never participated in any comic book store torching. It was like blowing up a social security office because you hated Capitol Hill. And even though I had no proof that our leader was responsible for the so-called “Funny Book Bombings,” it seemed like something he’d do.
A guy can resort to a lot of things when he finds out his daughter is a monster and has to kill her. I think her name was Jenny.
I looked at Lev and couldn’t stem the tide of sincere admiration washing over me. He’d been spared a similar fate because he often shared intel with us. This was my first time meeting him.
“I heard about the church.” He finished reading his comic and set it gently on a piece of clear plastic on his counter. “I thought y’all were all killed.”
I shrugged and he seemed to take that as enough of a response to silence any follow-up questions. I wasn’t sure how to go about obtaining Lev’s help. I had no money and nothing else to offer him of material worth. Hell, I couldn’t even promise to protect him if the freaks decided to knock down his door one day.
Lev smiled, revealing shockingly perfect white teeth. “I think you’ve been through enough to deserve a freebie,” he said.
When you receive proof through the actions of others that the Lord is in your corner, it’s hard to fight the smile tugging at the corners of your mouth. Lev launched into his tale a moment later. I stood, riveted, caught between wanting to ask questions and knowing he needed to get it out with no interruptions. Once he’d finished, I remained silent for a full minute, mulling over what he’d told me and fighting off the revulsion threatening to overtake me.
“Seriously?” I said.
Lev nodded, expression grave. “I shit thee not, and my sources are high-quality. Not all of them like what’s going on.”
I brushed that last part off; we’d been taught to be wary of freak sympathizers like Lev. There were Nazis who weren’t sadistic, but they still raised their arms and said, “Seig Heil.”
“Thanks, Lev.” I wasn’t sure what I was going to do with this new information, but it was burning a hole in my head and I knew I had to act soon.
Lev chewed the inside of his cheek, studying me with a dispassionate gaze. “Planning on building a new team?”
I smiled. “You interested?”
Lev shook his head. “I’m a live and let live kinda guy.”
I walked to the door and opened it, pausing a moment to turn back and look at him. “They only let you live until they decide to stop.” I left the store without as much as a backward glance.
That night I found an abandoned house on an empty street with nothing to see but grass and a couple trees. I broke out the back window and crawled inside for a night’s sleep. It didn’t come easily, however, as Lev’s talk rotated around my brain, a beeping satellite bearing bad news and preparing to crash to Earth.
Were they consolidating their power? All former intelligence had indicated they were disconnected, uninterested in forming organizations and movements. What had changed?
According to Lev, mutated sub-human menaces were migrating all across North America, converging on this state.
Even the team at its peak would have been hard-pressed to do anything about a gathering of super-powered foes. Jesus, to think all our work had been for nothing…
I curled up on the floor, grateful when the furnace came on a few moments later. Tomorrow I would hunt and make one of them tell me what was going on. It was all I knew how to do.
The monster that looked like a young man of Mediterranean descent was able to fire bolts of electricity from his fingertips and, in some cases, disrupt electronic equipment. He must have thought himself difficult to hurt, but wearing a rubber suit kept me safe from his powers. The real bitch was luring him onto a rooftop so I could knock his ass over and into a swimming pool.
By the time I got to him, he was screaming and throwing off sparks like a Fourth of July trinket.
“What do you want?” he yelled.
“Information,” I said.
He stopped squirming and frowned in my direction. “What about?”
His tone of voice confirmed he knew something important. “When will they be here?”
The creature looked away, a tiny smile tugging at the corners of his mouth. “How do you know they’re not already here?”
I raised my 9mm. “You’ve got about twenty seconds to cut the coy shit.”
His facial expression changed as he realized I was serious; with the water negating his powers, he was just another smart-ass in a pool of water with a gun to his head. It made me briefly wonder just how inhuman these things were. Take away their powers and they looked and acted as human as anybody else.
“It’s a migration,” he said. All around him, the water bubbled and boiled. “Everybody who can make the trip is coming, like those Islams and that Mecca place.”
I took a couple steps forward and recoiled a bit from the heat being thrown off by the pool. “Is it because of the two broads?”
The creature’s face took on a serene, worshipful look. “The Mother and the Daughter.”
“That’s original,” I said.
Sparks flew around the creature, forming webs of electricity that only lasted a moment or two before dispersing. And the water in the pool became a roiling cauldron of extreme heat. I watched the creature’s skin turn bright red.
“Tell me why they’re coming so I can save you.”
He laughed. “I’m already saved.”
Bolts of misdirected electricity filled my vision. The twin sensations of burning flesh and bleach filled and stung my nostrils. Stray bolts leapt from the water, landing mere inches from my feet. I stumbled back, falling over a lawn chair and landing hard on my ass and the concrete. At the center of the maelstrom, the laughing creature erupted into horrified screaming and incoherent words. There was one final flash of bluish-white light, and then darkness.
Slowly, I managed to get to my feet and make my way out of the area. Things hadn’t gone the way I’d hoped, but I had my answer.
The creatures were coming because they thought salvation awaited them in the guise of the Mother and the Daughter, also known as the former wife and child of the man who’d led our crusade against these things.
“How do you know they’re not already here?”
Those words performed acrobatics inside my brain, playing and replaying so often they caused a mild headache. Sometimes, when I sat alone in my motel room, I imagined hordes of freaks with powers storming the cities and towns of America, taking what they wanted, doing what they wanted, with few to oppose them. It was the nightmare scenario our founder had always hinted at, and now I was the only left who might actually live to see it happen.
I found myself wishing for powers of my own and felt ashamed and dirty when I did. Was it possible to hate someone or something so much that you wanted to become just like them? God forgive me, but I thought it was. How convenient would it be to obtain powers and kill all those freakish fucks before taking my own life once the deed was done?
I pushed those thoughts from my mind; it wasn’t possible. I had to work with the tools God and several decades of munitions advancements had given me. My faith had never been stronger, but I still found it hard to believe I could make a difference all by myself.
I hadn’t expected to ever see Lev again, so when he came knocking on my motel room door, I was understandably suspicious. I one-eyed him through the peephole and asked him what he wanted and how he’d found me. His answers were unexpected.<
br />
“It’s about the Mother and the Daughter,” he said in a stage whisper. “They sent me here.”
I opened the door a crack with my left hand, the right currently occupied with my 9mm. Lev looked scared, as if he’d seen things nobody should see. His face was covered in sweat, his breaths coming in short, rapid bursts. He looked every second of his age.
Lev shrugged, glancing around. “Let me in and I’ll tell you what they told me.”
A quick glance over both of Lev’s shoulders revealed no hostiles either accompanying or following him. But without my infrared goggles, I couldn’t be sure one of those invisible bastards wasn’t hovering in the area. Deciding I had no choice, I widened the door and let him in. He waited until I’d closed it and engaged the lock before speaking.
“They sent me here to see if you would talk to them.”
“Sure, just let me grab one more pistol.”
Lev shook his head furiously. “You’re not getting it, man. What they have planned…there’s no stopping it…everything’s about to change!” He waved his hands back and forth as he spoke, moving from one foot to the other. “Holy shit, don’t you see?”
I stared at him.
“Maybe you could have stopped them back when your team was killed, but now? It’s been too long!”
Leaning against the door, I watched Lev until he calmed down and started making sense.
“They’ve been breeding,” Lev said.
I felt my mouth turn up. “With each other?”
Lev’s jaw dropped. “What? No! Contrary to what you were told, they’re still people. Jesus, Norman.”
I decided not to argue that point and asked him what he meant by breeding. He told me they had someone with the right DNA to create a super-race, one that was superior to the one currently at large.
“Why would they tell you this?” I asked.
“Because the person they’re breeding with wants to see you.”
Lev took me to the place he claimed the Mother and the Daughter were currently hiding out. It was a Northern Michigan cabin, or “cottage” as Michiganders referred to it. It had seen better days, judging by the scorch marks on the walls and the loose-hanging front door and broken windows. Even the ground beneath us was burnt and littered with debris. Nobody in their right mind would hide out in a place like this for any length of time…
It was perfect.
“We have to be quiet,” Lev said.
Lev held up a finger to his mouth and led me inside the dark, musty structure. Whoever had previously occupied the place had treated it like a second home. There were still pictures on the walls, most of which were charred, but a couple were still basically intact. I leaned forward to look at one featuring a woman and teenage girl smiling pretty for the camera. The girl looked innocent enough, probably no more than fifteen, but the mother, while quite a looker, had a dark cast to her eyes that made it difficult to stare, and just as hard to look away.
I assumed they were the Mother and the Daughter, but what about a Father? Was he still in the picture?
“This way,” Lev said. “Hurry.”
I followed him; this was my one and only chance to confront the two bitches responsible for the coming storm.
“Down here,” Lev said.
I paused; these places didn’t tend to have basements. Where was he taking me?
As if reading my mind, Lev grunted and told me we were headed into a root cellar. Glad I’d brought along a flashlight, I aimed the beam toward the back of my guide’s head and kept a distance of three or four feet while following him in.
The stench was beyond rank, filling our nostrils with the smells of death and mold. I swooned, a sudden headache centered inside my sinuses throbbing with each step I took. I knew this was bad. My old team would have lobbed a half dozen grenades down here and called it a night. But being the only hunter left had changed my perspective. Now killing them wasn’t as important as getting to the bottom of the mystery.
The moist ground beneath my feet gave a couple times, causing me to stumble sideways and into the dirt walls. Lev seemed unperturbed, however, shuffling along as if he’d been down here more times than he could count.
Maybe he had.
I raised the pistol in my right hand and told him he’d walked far enough. I told him to turn around and keep his hands in the air.
“What are you doing?” he asked.
“It’s called an epiphany.” I aimed the light for his eyes. “That’s one helluva disguise.”
Lev frowned. “Look, we don’t have much time…”
I held up my hand to silence him. The slightest misstep and I would fire, regardless of the possibility of causing a cave-in. “They’re not here, are they?”
Lev blinked, “Yes.”
I felt the corners of my mouth being tugged into a humorless smile.
Lev sputtered a nervous laugh. “Norman, I don’t know why you’re acting all paranoid, but the Breeder is here and he wants to see you.”
I stared at him, into him, for a long moment before telling him to take me there; I’d come this far. No point in turning back now. I still had God’s grace.
We didn’t walk much further before Lev stopped and stood off to the left, gazing back at me expectantly. Slowly, I aimed the light down at the ground and ran it along a lump of something.
“You…came.”
I jumped; that hadn’t been Lev’s voice. “Who’s there? Answer me or I’ll shoot.”
“Don’t…Please.”
I glanced at Lev, his expression difficult to read in the dark. He seemed to be nodding toward the heap on the floor, and, against my better judgment, I crouched next to it and brought up the light.
“Oh, Jesus,” I said. “Oh, merciful Jesus.”
“Hello…Norman,” the remnant of humanity managed. “Been…a while.”
I sat on the floor of the root cellar for a long time, staring at the withered heap on the ground. In the far corner, next to Lev’s feet, I saw a pile of empty cans of Ensure, the probiotic fluid they gave people with digestive problems. This seemed to be his only food source and apparently no one had bothered to clean him up for some time, considering the smell coming from the ground around him. Had he been left here to rot or was this all they needed from him?
“I can’t believe this,” I said. “I can’t fucking believe they did this to you.”
“Burned…my tongue,” the heap replied. “Didn’t…need…it.”
“Jesus,” I said, looking at Lev. “You knew about this?”
Lev stared away from us and said nothing. The heap rolled over, crying out from the pain such a basic thing caused, and took a few gasps before again attempting to speak. I wanted to go to him, to help, but I was too repulsed.
“Lev…only one that…helps,” he said. “Such a…good…boy.”
I looked at Lev again. “He’s older than you.”
The heap coughed or laughed or both, it was hard to tell. Before my eyes, Lev ceased to be Lev and became a small child with large eyes and pale skin. He looked like an alien trying to look like a human and I wondered if this was the future of the human race.
“How many of them are there?” I asked.
The heap shuffled about. “Many.”
The heap that had once been the leader of my not-so-merry band of monster hunters and the little boy who’d pretended to be a grown man told me the story and I listened because what else was there left to do?
They told me how my former leader had been tricked into attacking that church and that his benefactor had turned out to be his supposedly dead wife. He’d thought her killed by his daughter, the one with the ability to turn into living flame. How could he have known his wife could heal herself and that his kill shot had missed his daughter by mere inches? Their plan, to create a group of vengeance-driven monster hunters that would wipe out the potential competition, came to a head that day in the church when the oppositional movement was effectively wiped out.
My leader
wound up prisoner of the monster that would soon become known as the Mother and the Daughter.
“Our combined DNA can give birth to the new human race,” his wife had said.
And then, to demonstrate exactly what was required of him, his so-called daughter had burned out most of his tongue.
“But the two of you couldn’t have conceived that many kids. It’s only been…”
The boy who’d pretended to be Lev stepped forward. “Accelerated growth.”
I cocked my head to the side. “Like cloning?”
Below me, the heap instructed its offspring to help me understand.
“One child is all it takes,” the boy said. “She can make things grow faster.”
“Oh, boy,” I said. “What else can she do?”
“I think that’s enough.”
I whirled on the new arrival with the deep, rumbling voice, surprised to see a young woman standing there. The Daughter; it had to be.
“I couldn’t agree more,” I said. “Look what you’ve done to your father.”
The young woman chuckled. “I’ve made him the father of the future. What can you do for him that’s better than that?”
I smiled as she caught the gleam in my eye a mere instant before I swung back around and fired two bullets into the heap’s head.
“Well, that wasn’t very nice,” the young woman said. “Still, Daddy’s seed wasn’t what it used to be.” She shot a curt glance at the boy in the corner. “With this last one, we should have enough anyway.”
I frowned, aiming the flashlight at her and, for the first time, noticing the bump. She laughed, assuring me it had all been artificial insemination.
“Yeah, that makes it less disgusting,” I said.
She laughed again. “Obviously he brought you here because he wanted you to die. Now you’re going to join him.”
I moved back as she became fire, hot, red and raging. Her features were impossible to see anymore, having become obscured by the flame that resided within her. The area grew warmer, the air stiller. She didn’t need to hurl bolts of fire at me; soon I would suffocate. Behind me, the boy, her brother or son or both, coughed and wheezed as well. His powers were no help in this situation. I fell to my knees, clutching my chest, vision blurry, limbs weakening. I tried raising my hand to fire and wondered if the bullet would make it through all that intense heat.
Use Enough Gun (Legends of the Monster Hunter Book 3) Page 18
