Supernatural_Bobby Singer's Guide to Hunting

by David Reed

  At the hatch to Tamuro’s office, we paused. Something was moving inside. For a second I wondered if it could be Tamuro himself, if somehow he had survived whatever ordeal had befallen the rest of the ship. Whoever it was, they were hidden behind Tamuro’s desk, squirming around too much to really be hiding, but hidden from view nonetheless. Pistol raised, I moved around the desk until I got a good look at the man—it was Yoshiro. He hadn’t been taken, he’d simply given up fighting and started drinking instead. I asked him what the hell he was doing in the skipper’s office, and he held up a bottle of booze. Tamuro’s personal stash, and since he was no longer gonna need it . . .

  I helped Yoshiro to his feet, asked him what had happened since we last saw each other (besides him getting sloppy drunk), but before he could answer, his eyes went wide and he fainted. I turned to see what he’d been looking at—Keiko. He’d taken one look at her and collapsed. Now that—that was odd.

  Pieces were starting to fit together for me, but I didn’t have the whole puzzle. I asked Keiko to look through Tamuro’s books for any references to Ondines while I tried to revive Yoshiro. As she searched, I replayed the last few hours in my mind. In the mess hall, the guy had shouted that I wasn’t one of them, meaning the crew. What if he hadn’t been talking to me? What if he’d meant Keiko? I went back a little further, back to my first meeting with her—no one else had been in the mess, they’d all reported for duty already that morning. The next time I saw her, I’d gone in early and left before anyone else got to breakfast to avoid an incident. Then I’d seen her after hours, again by myself. She’d come to my cell twice, both times by herself. I’d never been in the same room with her and another soul at the same time. Maybe she wasn’t a member of Nishigo Maru’s crew at all. When the sailor in the hallway and Yoshiro saw her, they both flipped out, as if they recognized her—maybe from when she attacked them? And then there was the lore about mermaids—I’d heard the old fisherman’s tales, knew that mermaids were always described as female, at least the ones that came to the surface. There was only one woman on the entire ship, and she was standing right in front of me.

  Could Keiko be an Ondine? Could the solution be that simple? What that possibility didn’t explain was how she came to be on the ship, and how I found myself in another messed-up situation like this so immediately after the demon possessed Karen. It also didn’t explain how people were disappearing while Keiko was with me—was there more than one Ondine onboard? Was it still possible that there was a rational explanation for everything that’d happened?

  I had a choice to make, and none of the options were great:

  • Confront Keiko. Ask her flat-out what she was, if she was responsible for the disappearances. The downside of that was it’d require losing any advantage I had—as far as I could tell, she didn’t know that I suspected her, and that’s a powerful card to have in your hand. I also didn’t know the full Ondine lore—was there a specific method to killing them? I’d learned from Karen that some things can’t be killed in the ways you’d think, and I had no reason to think that a simple bullet to the head would drop one.

  • Play dumb. Keep investigating, try to get more information from her. If she was an Ondine and if she’d actually killed all those people, there must have been some reason she didn’t kill me (yet). Who knows, maybe she just liked me. Or maybe she had some other purpose in mind for me, and I was walking right into a trap.

  • Try to lose her. The ship was big, dark, and mostly empty. On the top deck there were hundreds of cargo containers, any one of which could make for an effective hiding spot if I could get to them without being spotted. Wasn’t a very manly solution, but it might be the one that kept me alive the longest. This one also fell apart when I thought about the Ondine lore—from the little Rufus told me, it was clear that some of these critters seem custom-built for hunting humans, with senses of smell and vision that are an order of magnitude better than ours. Ondines could very well be one of those critters, and running would only show Keiko that I knew what was up.

  • Shoot first, ask questions never. The most brazen option. John or Dean Winchester mighta gone in that direction, but I didn’t want to take the risk of killing an old woman without knowing for sure she was the killer.

  So what did I do? I waited for Keiko to search the books. If she was the Ondine, she certainly wouldn’t give me any intel on how to kill her or her buddies—and if I could actually revive Yoshiro, maybe I could get some answers out of him before he passed out again.

  I dragged Yoshiro hastily into the attached bathroom. It wasn’t quite big enough for two people, but I could use the sink to splash water on his face. Without smelling salts, I was pretty much relying on my ability to slap and splash Yoshiro awake. I’m not a doctor, see, and had no idea if there was a better way to go about it. The upside was that I got to take out a little of my aggression on the bastard while he was unconscious. Three minutes of slapping later, he was up, groggily looking around the bathroom and talking gibberish in Japanese. I made sure he couldn’t see or hear Keiko searching in the next room, positioning him so that the hatch was blocking his view. I caught Keiko sneaking a few glances at him as she searched the bookshelves, but she made no move to keep Yoshiro from talking.

  Once he was lucid enough to recognize me, I asked him what had happened. He told me that he thought he’d seen a monster in the room with us. Scaly, dripping wet, with a tail like a fish, teeth like a shark. He told me that he must have had too much to drink, and that it wasn’t the first time he’d seen something like that after he’d had too fun of a night. That he’d seen them swimming in the ocean a few times, but nobody else could ever see them, and he always realized how stupid it seemed as soon as he sobered up. I told him to rest, stay lying down while I went to get help. Moving over to where Keiko was searching, I found her looking through an ancient text. Must have been at least two hundred years old. She had the book flipped to this page:

  It was an Ondine, and pretty much matched what Yoshiro said he had seen. I looked Keiko in the eye, searching for any hint that she could be the very monster I was hunting. Her eyes blinked, then she nodded, as if she knew exactly what I was thinking.

  “It’s you,” I said.

  “Yes,” she answered, softly, so Yoshiro couldn’t hear. “I tried to tell you, that night in my quarters. But you weren’t ready to see my true face.”

  “Why are you doing this?” I asked.

  Every monster has a reason to do what they do, that’s something you’ll learn quick when hunting. Maybe they’re hungry, maybe they’re trying to right some injustice, maybe they get some kind of sick amusement out of it. But it’s never boredom. Keiko, she was no different. She had a family to support. She was the matriarch of an Ondine clan, and they were starving. Humans had poisoned their habitats, fished their territories to extinction. The Ondine population had been dwindling for decades, and they blamed us for it.

  But why this ship? Why now? Because of me. I’d thrown that damn hex bag overboard, might as well have thrown a giant bag of Ondine catnip into the water. Here’s your next lesson—just cause something’s magic don’t mean it only does one thing. The same mix of odds and ends that Rufus intended to keep demons away drew the Ondines straight to me. And now that they found us, they weren’t going to leave until their whole family was well fed.

  It was pretty shocking for her to just come out and admit it, and her candor made one thing abundantly clear—she wasn’t afraid of me. She knew that I couldn’t stop her from what she was doing, so there was no harm in telling me about it.

  I was only half right about her reason for not killing me, though—Ondines, as I learned from Keiko, can read human emotions. They’re incredibly empathetic creatures, and can literally feel our feelings. When Keiko met me, she sensed my sorrow and . . . I don’t know, musta felt sorry for me. What I know now is that Ondine women (who are generally the ones who come to the surface, though the men do come up on hunting expeditions) abhor men with
cheating hearts. Ondine males are emphatically loyal and monogamous. The idea that someone would betray their beloved is infuriating to an Ondine. Most of the Nishigo Maru crew fit that bill, after spending long years away from their wives and girlfriends. I was the exact opposite. My wife had died and it ruined me. Every second I struggled to even go on, much less chase the next piece of tail that I ran into. To an Ondine woman, I was the perfect man.

  That didn’t do me any damn good, though. She was still gonna throw the rest of the crew off the boat and let her school of mermen tear them to shreds. I told her that I couldn’t let her, but she made things clear—I couldn’t stop them. Even if I killed her, there were others already onboard, and I’d never be able to pick them out from the rest of the crew.

  Was she gonna let me live? Figuring that out was pretty high on my list of priorities, but she didn’t give me a straight answer. Only thing she said: “I wouldn’t let you drown.”

  As I watched, she went to the bathroom and found Yoshiro. He let out a muffled scream, then fell silent. I just sat there, stupefied. Like I couldn’t move my own legs (a feeling that I’d get a lot more familiar with later in life). A second later, she dragged Yoshiro’s unconscious body out of the bathroom, towards the hatch.

  “Follow me. I’ll take you to the others.”

  If anyone ever tells you that, don’t do it. Just don’t. It never works out.

  That being said, of course I followed her. I didn’t know what else to do. Before I went, I tore the Ondine drawing out of the book, stuffed it in my pocket. There was some text in Japanese beneath it, but at the time I couldn’t read it, so who knows what I was thinking. Better to have it than leave it, I guess. I also made the impulsive decision to open Tamuro’s desk drawer, where I found the keys to my Chevelle. Since he had already been taken underwater to be chomped by the Little Mermaid, I figured he didn’t need them.

  Keiko took me towards the top deck, dragging Yoshiro the whole way. I had a dozen opportunities to try to take her down, didn’t act on one of them. It was my first test as a hunter, and I was failing miserably. Fear combined with the logical realization that I had no idea how to kill her combined to produce inaction. In the back of my head, a voice was screaming she’s gonna kill him. She’s gonna throw him to the (metaphorical) sharks. My pistol was shoved into my belt, ready and waiting, but I couldn’t bring myself to use it.

  Maybe if Keiko had been a man, I would have felt differently about it, I don’t know. I tried to tell myself that it didn’t matter, that a human is a human, but there’s something about shooting a grandma that takes the gusto out of my trigger finger.

  When we got to the deck at a little past midnight, several other crew members were already there, tied up, waiting to be thrown overboard. There were gags in their mouths, but I could hear them trying to scream when they saw Keiko. It was then that it really struck me—the old lady in front of me was a monster. Appearances can be very deceiving, and I had to get over that quickly, or all of those men would die.

  “What are you going to do to me?” I asked.

  She turned to me, smiled. “Same as we did to Tamuro-San,” she replied. “He’s a good man.”

  “Was a good man,” I corrected.

  She shook her head, pointed to the rolling ocean below us.

  I looked over the railing and into the sea, where black waves crashed against the motionless hull of Nishigo Maru. In the water were several figures—at first I thought they were dolphins, but as I looked closer, they were clearly men. Men with tails. Ondines. He was hard to make out, but I recognized Tamuro’s face among them. Waiting for their supper.

  Here’s another lesson about monster MO: they’re always trying to turn you. It’s never good enough to just live out your life as a monster, you have to make other people join you. Vamps, werewolves, a bunch more, all the same way. Bastards. Ariel might be a good-looking broad, but I had no intention of eating kelp for breakfast, lunch, and dinner the rest of my life.

  Tamuro had been turned, and apparently I was next. That was my cue to start fighting back. My new problem was that there were other Ondines on the ship, but they weren’t on the deck where Keiko was expecting them. Even if I killed Keiko, I’d never be able to recognize the others, and they’d be a lot less friendly to me once I killed their matriarch. Either way, I still had to make my move before she started tossing guys in the drink.

  Keiko dragged Yoshiro to the railing, hoisted him above it with far more strength than you’d expect from a lady her age (or even a man my age), and I fired. Two shots, right in her back. She teetered forward, looked like she might collapse, then hurled Yoshiro into the water. He hit with a splash and was immediately set upon by the Ondines. When Keiko turned around to face me, it wasn’t rage on her face, it was sadness. Regret. Like she was bummed out that she was gonna have to kill me.

  Needless to say, the bullets didn’t kill her, but they did get her attention. Instead of tossing the sailors into the briny deep, she came after me. I ducked through an open hatch and tried to get as much distance as I could from her, but within a few seconds I heard the clank-clank-clank of shoes on steel deck plating.

  Turns out, Ondines aren’t as great at hunting as I feared they’d be. After I slipped into the radar control room on C Deck, I heard Keiko walk past the hatch and continue down the hall. For a few minutes, I was safe.

  I used the time to think of a strategy. How would I identify the Ondines, and then how would I gank them? Listing off all the dumb ideas I had would be a waste of my time and yours, not to mention the paper this is printed on. The eureka moment came when I found myself wishing I had some Kentucky whiskey to settle my nerves—and I remembered what Yoshiro had said. That he’d see things—creatures—swimming in the water on their cross-Pacific route when he was drunk. And that, when he saw Keiko’s face, he saw the face of a monster, not an old lady.

  Everybody knows that the legends of mermaids began when a bunch of drunken sailors saw manatees and dolphins in the ocean and, being lecherous and overworked, thought they looked an awful lot like women with fish-parts (sexy women with fish-parts). What if, and this was a big if, they weren’t hallucinating because they were drunk? What if they were seeing the truth because they were drunk? There are creatures out there, like wraiths, that can only be seen in their true forms through a mirror. You see ’em walking down the street, they look like a normal human. See their reflection and it’s a hideous, snarling beast. What if Ondines were the same way, but you had to be drunk to see them for what they really are?

  I’d been close to drunk with Keiko a few nights prior, but was able to hold myself together. That musta been what she meant when she said, “I tried to tell you, that night in my quarters. But you weren’t ready to see my true face.” I needed to get really, really drunk.

  Under normal circumstances, that would sound like the best hunt ever. But this was my first hunt, and getting plastered seemed like it could only make my job harder (this was before I realized that whiskey is a hunter’s best friend in all circumstances).

  Assuming I found some booze and was able to track the Ondines down, there was still the matter of killing them. Bullets didn’t seem to do squat against them. I had an idea about that as well—they were basically fish, right? Fish that could flop around on land for a bit, but they were creatures of the sea, natively. Take a fish out of water for long enough, they’ll suffocate. All I had to do was trap the Ondines somewhere where they couldn’t get free or have access to water, and keep them there until they dried out. It was only a theory, but it was the only theory I had.

  Finding booze on a freighter is surprisingly simple. The very first crew quarters I stumbled upon was amply stocked, and fifteen minutes later I was drunk as a skunk. I stumbled into the hallway, ready to shoot anything with gills. A few minutes later, I ran into a member of the crew—the first test of my theory. The guy’s face was swimming around in my blurred vision, but he remained human. He screamed some crap at me in Japanese, b
ut I was too drunk to catch any of it, so I moved on with my life.

  Then I saw him. A male Ondine, and boy was my theory correct. His body seemed mostly human, but his image was wavering, coming in and out of focus, parts of his skin morphing into scales and fins while other parts stayed human. I was so intrigued by his appearance that it took me a second to start shooting.

  Again, the bullets didn’t have much effect, but they did piss him off, and that was all I really needed. The merman chased me up the stairwell onto the top deck of the ship, where the night wind was whipping the waves into huge swells. Water crashed onto the deck as I threaded my way through the massive steel cargo containers. Each one was forty-eight feet long, eight feet high and eight feet wide. The value of all the cargo on Nishigo Maru must have been in the millions of dollars, but I couldn’t be bothered to think about that.

  With the Ondine following close behind me, I ducked into one of the cargo containers. On my first day aboard the ship, I’d toured the top deck, noticed that a few of the containers had their steel doors sitting open and had some of their contents removed. I suspected at the time that Yoshiro or one of the other officers had let the crew pilfer through the containers as a sort of bounty, since in the grand scheme of things, a few missing electronics wasn’t a big deal compared to the value of the hundreds of containers.

  When the Ondine found me in the container, I was ready. Before the bastard knew what was happening, I’d knocked him on his ass (and I was drunk off my ass, remember, so it was doubly impressive) and swung the steel door shut, trapping him (and a crapload of Walkmen, probably) in the container. One down, at least one more to go.