Jack Dalton, Monster Hunter, The Complete Serial Series (1-10): The History of the Magical Division

by T S Paul

  “White Pine County Road #5.” There was a sign and an arrow pointing toward possible salvation, Belmont Mill.

  Rumble, kachunk, kachunk, rumble, bump!

  The dry and dusty county road seemed to be making it worse! Having second thoughts about this side trip, I almost turned around, but then I saw the beginnings of civilization, a town in the desert.

  In a cloud of dust, I rolled into town, parking in front of what appeared to be a boarding house and diner. Belmont Mill was an actual mill. I could see a four-story building up the hill with assorted mining equipment in use. Steam from a pair of smokestacks shot into the sky not too far away. A few small houses and shops were scattered about with no sense of city planning.

  Saying a small prayer to a new-found God, I shut off the engine and climbed out.

  “You get lost?” a big burly man asked as he and three others stepped out of the diner.

  “Engine trouble. I saw the sign for town and took a chance. Is there anyone available to look at it and is there a phone I can use?” I replied to them.

  The first man glanced at the others before speaking. “We’ve got a small garage for the mine. I can have our guy take a look if you like. It’s quite the ways to the next biggest town.”

  “That would be dandy,” I replied. “Is there a phone too?”

  Maggie’s boarding house had a phone, as well as a spare room I could use. A very talkative sort, Maggie seemed like she didn’t see very many new folks here in town. She wouldn’t shut up about the town and how they came to be here.

  From what I’d been able to decipher, the town was built in 1925 when both silver and lead had been discovered here. Most of the residents dated from that time period with the exception of a few dozen of the miners. They’d come as refugees from the Demon incursion. Something similar had occurred all over the Southwest. People just looking for a place to go that was safe. But now the moneymaking part of the mine was petering out. More lead than silver.

  “Can’t they try digging in other spots?” I asked her, remembering my last assignment and the mines there.

  “They tried that. Bunch of times. Disaster it was,” Maggie replied as she put new sheets on my bed.

  “Cave-ins?” I asked her.

  Maggie gave me a sharp look and shook her head. “Not my business. Ask about it if you want. Them’s not my problem.”

  As the small woman scurried out of the room, I looked around. Bed, water basin, and dresser took up the whole room. A window looked out over the town, but it was nailed shut. Curious. It must get as hot as a furnace in here in the summer.

  “Your phone?” I asked Maggie. The woman frowned but pointed down the hall from where I stood.

  To say that Anastasia was mad at me would be the understatement of the year. But she understood my reasoning for driving instead of flying. In the year or so we’d been working together, she’d barely told me any of her story. I’d thought that Vampires all had resources all over the world they could use, but somehow she was exempt from all that. Not to worry though. just as soon as my van was fixed, I’d be back on the road.

  “Two days?” I looked at the grease-covered man in surprise.

  Arlen, the town’s only mechanic, nodded. “Drive shaft section. I’ve got nothing here that fits right. I could jerry-rig it, but you might find yourself in a worse situation than this. Lots of desert out there.”

  “Fine. Whatever. I’ll wait it out. Thanks, Arlen.” One thing I’d learned out on the road by myself was to not unnecessarily piss off the locals. At least not this early in the game. Maybe I could get caught up on my paperwork.

  Maggie only nodded when I told her I’d need the room longer. Money from out-of-towners was apparently rare here.

  “Anything to do in this town, Maggie?” I asked her.

  Barely looking up, the mousey little woman busied herself with cleaning the front room. “We gets the random prospector here and there. Them don’t like it though, don’t stay long.”

  Listening to the words she was speaking I caught something. “Maggie, you mentioned them before. Who is them?”

  Maggie’s hands shook as she stopped wiping the table in front of her. “Them don’t like to be bothered.”

  “Them who?” I asked her again.

  Looking up at the ceiling, Maggie muttered something I didn’t quite catch. Something about night. Giving me a frightened look, she ran from the room.

  “Good work, Jack. Scare the landlady on your first night,” I muttered to myself. Something sure scared her though.

  I sat in the corner of the small diner and began digging into my paperwork. I filled out all the stuff the FBI required of Agents. I swear that Washington must float on a sea of paper, as much as everyone has to fill out. It was almost a blessing it was just me in the Division.

  The sound of a steam whistle going off forced me to check the time, four o’clock. Quitting time at the mine, I assumed. Several dusty, dirty, and mud-covered men stumbled into the small diner. Bellying up to what served as a bar around here, the men began sucking down beer and liquor shots. Out of habit I half-listened to them as they talked. So much information is available during people’s unguarded speech.

  “...no sign in the new tunnel…”

  “Rafe… too bad about him but more money…”

  “I’m out as soon as I get my stake…”

  “... them. I can barely sleep through it without…”

  The conversations around me went on for several minutes until they noticed me sitting there. “Stranger…”

  Looking up from my paperwork, I gave the men a nod with a smile. It was returned with frowns and outright anger. I shrugged and went back to work. The forms wouldn’t fill themselves out.

  There was a blast of the whistle again, and the men at the bar couldn’t get out of there fast enough. Almost as one they threw money down and left. Maggie stepped out from behind the counter and started locking large metal shutters over the windows. I’d missed them as I sat down, but now that I was looking, they were obvious. Half sliding out of my booth, I asked if she needed help.

  Holding up a hand she replied, “I can manage.”

  The shutters covered the windows and door completely. They resembled blast curtains I’d seen in books about the 1914 war in Europe. Why someplace like this would need them added to my questions about this town.

  “Anything I can get you, Mr. Dalton,” Maggie asked me.

  “It’s Agent, actually,” I replied to her.

  “Agent…” Maggie looked at me questionably.

  “Of the FBI. I’m a government Agent, Maggie.” I explained. The concept of the FBI seemed to go right over her head.

  The short woman cocked her head and just stared for a moment. Shaking herself slightly, she started talking again. “Okay. Never met someone like that before. Place is closed up for the night. Time for them. Stay inside tonight, ya’hear?”

  Them again. I only nodded. Maggie glanced back at me numerous times as she scurried away. I could hear the sound of a door slamming shut as she turned the corner. She lived in the basement.

  I knew very little of what went bump in the night in the Southwest part of the United States. Them. It could mean a lot of things. There’d been a movie when I was younger about gigantic Demon ants out in the desert. It was called Them.

  There was only one verified instance of Demons surviving the great hunt in and around Conception after the Gate closed, and that was in Death Valley. A small group of Indians had adopted a group of Imps and were worshiping them. The Imps had eaten half the tribe by the time the military arrived. That was just a couple of years ago. It was believed they were the last remnant of the Horde. This town was beyond the range of any of those instances.

  The creaking of the stairs and my own footsteps were all I could hear as I went up to my room. Peering out my lone window, I could see the town was totally blacked out. Whatever or whomever Them was, I couldn’t see.

  Morning brought more questions than
answers. As before, a sharp whistle blew at sunup. I’d heard many strange noises in the night, but with all the doors and windows shut, they weren’t enough for me to climb out of bed and peek. They could be kids playing. I didn’t see all that much to do around here.

  Eddie Gord, the mine’s foreman, confronted me as I was eating breakfast.

  “You really an FBI Agent?” he asked. “I read the side of your van.”

  I nodded, but continued to eat. “Sure am.”

  “You know anything about strange critters?” he asked me.

  Pushing my plate away, I focused on the short rotund man. He resembled Curly from the Three Stooges films. “What sort of animals are we talking about?”

  “Lizards, about this long.” Gord held out his hands a few feet apart.

  I relaxed with a deep sigh of relief. So not Demons.

  “And they fly,” Gord added.

  “Flying lizards. Really?” I gave the man an incredulous look. “Like dragons?”

  “No. I see you don’t believe me, just like the others.” Gord turned to leave.

  Standing abruptly, I cried out, “Wait! Are these the creatures people call Them?”

  Gord looked back at me nodding. “They are a pestilence upon the Earth here. But no one wants to believe us.”

  I sat down and gestured to the chair in front of me. “Sit and tell me about it. Please.”

  The heavyset foreman sat down. Looking bashfully at the floor, the man cleared his throat. “I’ve tried to tell people. Corporate doesn’t care as long as we keep sending them silver, but the mine’s petering out. The governor blew me off, as did the Nevada National Guard. We’re too far out of the way for people to care about.”

  I gestured for him to continue.

  “It started a year or so ago. The mine started to dry up, so we did some exploratory digs. Two out of five showed promise, and the bosses in Vegas gave orders to shift operations to them. At first, everything was great. Silver output was a bit higher than the original Belmont mine. We normally get a high concentration of lead, zinc, and silver from the mines around here. Some even yield a tiny bit of gold, but not these here. The amount of work to extract it is too costly, anyway. So we dug deeper and started blasting,” Gord explained as he picked his nose. It made me squirm a bit watching his dusty hands repeatedly reach for his nose. “As expected, we started getting high concentrations of lead, but then we hit a silver vein and followed it. Over and over we blasted the rock, until most of the hilltop was in ruin. The mining engineer Belmont hired suggested we strip mine instead of blast, but the boys in Vegas said no. We kept at it as ordered.”

  “And,” I asked him.

  Gord sighed and slumped his shoulders. “And we broke into a cave complex at a hundred feet down. Caves are pretty common in Nevada, so we didn’t think anything of it at first. We sent a guy down to check for obvious minerals, but he claimed he didn’t see anything. So we continued with the blasting. Opened the hole up really big. We’d left a security guard onsite overnight. Nothing to steal out here, but we didn’t want anyone poking around too much. Come morning, there was no sign of the man. At first we thought he’d run off or got drunk. It happens out here. A couple of local kids found him a day later out in the desert, stripped to the bone. Dead.”

  “Coyotes,” I asked.

  “No. They don’t kill like this. The sheriff thought he wandered off and vultures took care of him. It was a mystery, until it happened again. Another watchman, this time one of the guys in charge of the generators. All we found was a bloody shirt and a foot,” Gord explained, his eyes crusty from last night’s sleep. “It was a boot with a foot inside. Once again, they wrote it off as an accident. Mine equipment is dangerous, after all.”

  I frowned at him. No sign of a body was bad. “What about the lack of a body?”

  “We lost a guy a few years ago? Got stuck in the grinder. All we found was a finger and some blood, and not all that much of it. This is a dangerous business. But both of these new deaths were when everything was off!” Gord looked down at the table for a moment. “Weird stuff began to happen. There were some unexplained break-ins. Stuff like baskets and sheets being stolen from houses with open windows or doors. We’re such a small town, we know everyone here. Then pets started disappearing. If you walk out into the fields around here, you won’t find a single mouse or rabbit. Even birds are rare.”

  “Lizards?” I asked him. Mentally I’d started a checklist. If it was Demons, they’d have ravaged the town by now.

  “Right. Mothers were keeping their kids in after dusk, but adults still had to work. One of our shift crews got stuck at the mine late and paid for it in blood.” Gord caught my eyes and held them. “As they left the new mine, a swarm of...things came pouring out of it. We’d blown up the entrance to the caves and instead of mining down, we’d gone both left and right. The flying lizards hit my guys like a freight train, biting and clawing them. Unable to fight, my guys ran for it.”

  Grimacing, Gord continued, “Nobody died, but too many were hurt. About half walked off the job the next morning. Miners are a dime a dozen out here, as are the dangers. What is up there, though, is something else. Corporate doesn’t care. I’ve kept the mine hours from dawn to dusk, but as the days grow shorter and we dig deeper, the men…they’re scared. Scared for their families and their lives. You might have noticed, we board up the town at night.”

  “I saw that, even helped Maggie close up last night,” I explained, mentioning the nailed-shut windows as well.

  “Yeah. The lizards come out at night. They’ve gotten bolder the past few weeks,” Gord explained.

  I licked my lips. This was starting to sound like my sort of thing. A monster hunt of some kind. Right up my alley. “How so?”

  “At first? They would only hit the windows and doors out of what seemed an accident. But a week or so ago, they chased Hannah over at the general store into her shop. She’d stepped out for just a moment to enjoy the night air and they were on her like bees to honey. Only her slamming the door saved her life. Now they’re pounding on the doors and windows at all hours of the night trying to break in. People are scared to send their children to school. When we realized it was getting this bad, I called the state police, the National Guard, and the governor’s office. Nothing. No one in this state wants to hear the words ‘Demon’ or ‘Paranormal monster’. There are enough accusations made as it is,” Gord explained.

  Nodding, I agreed with him. “If those Indians hadn’t captured those Imps… Have you killed or captured any of these lizards?”

  The foreman shook his head. “We had one dead one, but it dissolved right before our eyes a day later. Damnedest thing I’ve ever seen. Since then, most are afraid to go outside to look.”

  “So no pictures then?” I asked. Hunting ghostlike creatures was going to be hard to do. Justifying it to Anastasia would be harder. Nervously, I ran my fingers through my military style crew cut. “I guess I’ll have to try and catch one, then.”

  “Catch one? You and what army?”

  An army of one, apparently. Not many volunteers were to be had in town. Once again, I was proving that monster hunters are both crazy and solo.

  I spent a few hours in the mechanic’s shop preparing my gear before the hunt. The foreman had reported that the last time anyone had direct contact with the beasties, they’d been bitten and torn up. Since I like my health, I thought I’d make some armor.

  “You want to do what?” Arlen exclaimed. He didn’t have any issues with using his gear. As the mining company’s primary repairman, Arlen had some unusual stuff.

  “I want to make some armor. Maggie was kind enough to give me a couple of weeks’ worth of old cans. I’d like to use your welding rig and make something to cover my arms and legs. Once that’s done, I’ve got a couple of tin pot army helmets in the van. If we can weld a grate or basket over one, my face would be covered too,” I explained. It did sound a bit crazy. Like a three stooges skit.

  “Do
n’t use the welding rig, I’ve got one of those new-fangled acetylene torches over in the corner. It burns hotter and will do the job way faster. What about your body? That uniform of yours won’t do the job,” Arlen pointed out.

  I smiled. Talking gear was something guys like to do. “Chainmail. I’ve got a gambeson for under and some fitted leather armor for over. It’s a long story, but I took on a couple of critters on the east coast that almost killed me. I smiled remembering my time at the Academy…a colleague of mine hooked me up with a group that makes period pieces for museums. This will be the first time I’ve used them. For defense I’ve got my sidearms and my Chicago Piano.”

  Arlen looked up from the box of cans and things. “Piano?”

  Laughing, I reached behind the file cabinet on the passenger’s side and pulled out a violin case. Popping it open, I displayed the Thompson submachine gun inside. “The FBI had this in storage. I’m told it was seized from Dillianger’s gang.”

  The mechanic stepped over and started poking at the gun. It was a really nice weapon. One side of the case held the actual gun, the other side a stock, drum, and stick magazine. I only had two drums for the gun but if one hundred rounds of .45 ACP didn’t kill these things, then I was in big time trouble.

  Arlen blew out a breath and laughed. “Mister, you’re crazy. But I’ll help you if you like.”

  The finished product was ugly. Really ugly. Up close I looked like a shopping ad for every grocery store in America. Tomato and bean cans lined my arms with flexible ducting at the joints. Large #10 cans made up my new leg armor. In a perfect world we would’ve painted the cans, but I didn’t have that kind of time. Add in my chainmail and girdle and I felt like the tin man on his way to Oz.