Contents
Special Thanks
Title
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Appearances
About the Author
Also by John G. Hartness
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Acknowledgements
A very heartfelt thanks to Melissa Gilbert of Clicking Keys for her all her help.
Moon over Bourbon Street
A Bubba the Monster Hunter
Novella
By John G. Hartness
Falstaff Books
Charlotte, NC
Chapter 1
We were walking down Bourbon Street when my phone rang. I looked around. Everybody I thought had my number was walking next to me or near enough. After healing up from my little brother’s attempted Apocalypse, we’d hit the road to New Orleans without leaving word with anybody where we were heading. So I was wading through a sea of inebriated humanity with Amy, Skeeter, and Uncle Father Joe, staring at boobs and drinking beer when Katy Perry starts singing “Roar” out of my right butt cheek. Now I like Katy Perry as much as any red-blooded man with a love for breasts and pop music, but I did not expect to hear her voice emanating from my nether regions.
I looked at Skeeter. “You reprogrammed my ringtones again, didn’t you?”
He tried to look innocent, but he was three Hurricanes into the night, and that was a lot of alcohol for his skinny ass, so all he really did was smirk and giggle. I pulled the phone out of my pocket and dropped it into a nearby storm drain.
“Aren’t you going to look and see who it is?” Amy asked.
I looked down at the gorgeous federal agent walking with my arm on her shoulders. “Nope. Ain’t nobody I want to talk to that can’t reach out and poke me if they want to say something.”
“Nobody?” she asked.
“Amy, my daddy’s dead, my brother’s dead, I ain’t got nothing to say to the woman that birthed me, and Uncle Erskine can’t see to dial the phone no more. So nope, ain’t nobody I want to talk to outside of y’all tonight.”
“Awwww, ain’t that sweeeeeet. The big stupid one loves everybody!” The voice came from the sidewalk right in front of me. I looked down at four college kids, athletes from the look of them, blocking my path and generally making a nuisance out of themselves.
“Son,” I started, but Amy took my arm and moved me along the sidewalk.
“No point,” she said. “If you don’t kill it, it won’t ever shut up, and if you kill it, you’ll probably go to jail.”
“Only probably?” I asked.
“Well, your girlfriend does work for the government, so no telling what kind of strings she can pull for you. But let’s try not to find out, okay?”
“Okay,” I said, pulled her a little tighter, and we all moved across the street away from the JV asshole team. I was mentally patting myself on the back for my improved impulse control when Skeeter’s phone rang.
“Is that your daddy, Skeet?” I asked.
“No, it’s—” I didn’t let him finish, or answer. I just took the phone out of his hand and threw it high into the air. It made a beautiful arc, catching the last rays of the setting sun as it flew ten, twenty, thirty, forty feet into the air over the French Quarter, then came crashing down onto the roof of a bar without a discernible name. I heard the tinny strains of RuPaul fade into nothing as we kept walking.
“You don’t change your ringtone near as often as you change Bubba’s,” Uncle Father Joe said, right before Handel’s Messiah chorus blared from his shirt pocket. I snatched the phone out before he could even move his hand, much less put down the yard of beer he was drinking, to answer. The display said, “Archbishop,” but the area code was New York, so I figured the caller couldn’t be too important. I took the battery out of the phone, threw it down an alley we were passing, and shoved the phone in the cleavage of a girl working a pole outside of Big Daddy’s Topless & Bottomless.
Joe looked at me and just sputtered for a second, like Sylvester the cat in a priest’s collar. “Bu-bu-bu…y-y-you sh-sh-sh-sh-shoved—ow!”
I might have thumped him on top of his head to get him to quit stuttering.
“You shoved my phone in that woman’s breasts!”
“That’s right.”
“Why would you do something like that?!?”
“I was out of dollar bills.” Seemed like a perfectly reasonable response to me. Joe didn’t seem to agree, but he also didn’t look like he wanted to pick a fight over it, either.
“Did you at least see who was calling?”
“Yeah, I looked. It didn’t say ‘Vatican,’ or ‘Pope,’ or even ‘Jesus.’ Just said ‘Archbishop,’ so I dumped it.”
Joe’s face took on a peculiar green shade, and he whirled around to bury his head in a nearby trashcan. “Skeeter, hold his beer,” I said. Skeeter jumped to like a pro, keeping Joe’s priorities straight and his beer safe. I stood there watching for a minute until I realized Amy wasn’t standing next to me anymore. I found her leaning up against a building, cell phone pressed to her ear. She was nodding and generally not paying me any attention, so I walked over to her. She gave me the “hold on” finger, and I nodded. Then I leaned against the building next to her. After the third “uh-huh, yessir,” in a row, I reached down and pinched her on the ass. When she jumped, I snatched the phone out of her hand, said, “Vacation, bye!” into the device, and dropped it into the beer of a passing tourist.
“Hey!” Amy and the tourist said at the same time. “That’s my phone/beer!” They kept on shouting at me in unison. I was pretty impressed, until the tourist turned out to be one of the college kids from earlier, and he decided that would be the right time to throw a punch. He nailed me pretty good on the jaw and clipped his buddy’s shoulder in the process. His buddy’s beer went flying, and he turned to see the cause of all the ruckus.
All of a sudden I had four college-aged jocks and one very pissed off government agent glaring at me in the middle of downtown New Orleans. I knew which one I was more afraid of, but the jocks didn’t seem to understand the severity of the situation. I turned to address the most serious threat first—always important in times of extreme danger.
“Amy, I’m sorry, but you know he ain’t gonna fire you, and you’re the one that said—”
The punk who punched me cut off my brilliant repetition of Amy’s reasons we needed a vacation. “Look, you old fuck, you owe me a beer!”
I turned and looked down at him. He had the look of a rugby player, a little under six feet, squat build, thick chest, nose that’s been broken enough times to have its own identity, and a rugby shirt. His buddies all looked pretty tough, too, for kids who’ve never gone ten rounds with a werewolf or had to punch Bigfoot in
the dick to survive. In contrast, I had a gorgeous woman who looked like a blonde Angie Harmon on my arm, a black gay tech super genius who weighed a buck-fifty soaking wet, and a forty-year old man in a priest’s collar. I wouldn’t have been afraid of us, either, if I wasn’t the size of an average door and had more tattoos than the crew of a Navy destroyer. As it was, I decided that in the name of vacation, I’d give the kid one more shot to keep all his blood on the inside of his body.
“Junior, I don’t reckon you realize this yet, but I’ve done give you two strikes for free. I moved on instead of beating your ass when you got in my way the first time. Then I didn’t break your arm when you punched me because I’m on vacation and going to jail wasn’t in my plans for tonight. But if you don’t shut the hell up and get out of my face right the hell now, I’m going to hurt you. Then I’m going to hurt you some more. Then, if you ain’t done being stupid, I’m going to move on to the ‘hurt you very much’ part of my evening. Now what’s the plan, little man? We gonna move on with our drinking, or am I gonna have to beat your ass for you?”
One of his buddies, the oldest one by the looks of it, grabbed Dumbass’s arm. “Come on, Cody. We don’t need to get in a fight out here on the street.”
“You’re right,” Dumbass agreed. “I’m going down this alley. If you want me to leave you alone, come back here and do something about it.” With that, he turned and walked off down an alley between two bars.
I watched him go, then looked at his friend. “So you’re the smart one, huh?”
“I’ve seen eyes like that in the sandbox, sir. You’ve been in the shit once or twice.”
“Good call, soldier. I’m going to let your friend go down that alley, and I got no need to follow him. I ain’t got shit to prove.”
“Yes, sir. I didn’t much like the idea of getting my ass kicked on his account tonight, anyway.” I held out a hand to young soldier, and we shook, sharing that look that men have when they’ve, as he put it, “been in the shit once or twice.”
I took one step back toward The Famous Door, one of my favorite music clubs in the Quarter, when Skeeter grabbed my arm.
“I think we’ve got a problem, Bubba,” Skeeter said, pointing down the alley.
I looked to where he was pointing and said, “Shit. Amy, call the local office. Tell ‘em you’re on the clock.”
“I can’t. You killed my phone.”
I looked at the soldier. “What’s your name, kid?”
“Davis, sir.”
“Davis, my very attractive government secret agent girlfriend needs to borrow your phone to call a branch of the government that doesn’t exist and tell them that we’re going into that alley to beat the shit out of something that isn’t real, so if they hear about us getting arrested, they can come make sure we were never here. Got that?”
“I was Marine Force Recon, sir. Sounds like every weekday to me.” Force Recon? Hell, I might not have been able to whoop his ass after all. “Sir?” he went on. “What’s down that alley? I don’t see anything.”
“That’s the problem, son. It’s a straight alley and a dead end. Where’s your friend?” I asked.
“Son of a…” He started toward the shadows, but I put a hand on his chest. His friends were looking distinctly uneasy at our conversation.
“No,” I said. “Leave this one to the pros. Take your boys, go to Pat O’s, we’ll send your buddy along when we get him back.”
“Will you? Get him back, I mean.”
Joe stepped forward. I let him. This part was more his bailiwick anyhow, the whole dealing with worried people thing. I was usually what people were worried about. “We’ll find your friend. What was his name? Cody?” The boy nodded. “We’ll find Cody, and whatever is in that alley, we’ll take care of it. This is what we do.”
Amy hung up and handed the phone back to Davis. “There’ve been reports of a vampire hunting the Quarter the past few nights, but the local office has nothing to confirm.”
“I’m pretty sure we’re about to give them confirmation,” I said. “Who’s packing?” I pulled a Glock 19 from an ankle holster. “I’ve only got lead, no silver.”
“I’ve got silver,” Amy said, checking the chamber of her Sig Sauer.
“I didn’t bring anything,” Skeeter said.
“I feel safer already,” I said with a grin. My best friend since middle school gave me the finger.
“I have holy water-tipper hollow points,” Joe said, holding up a little Ruger LC9 with a fixed laser.
“Okay, I’ll take point. Joe, you’re in the middle. Amy, you’ve got the rear,” I said. “Skeeter, stay near the mouth of the alley and keep a line open to the local field office.”
“You threw my phone away,” Skeeter protested.
“Use your spare,” I replied.
“How did you know I have a spare?”
“You didn’t cry when I broke the other one, and I know if you go more than twenty minutes without checking Facebook, your eye starts to twitch. Now let’s go hunt a bad thing.” I turned and headed down the alley with my Glock in front of me and a bad feeling in the pit of my stomach.
Chapter 2
We got about thirty feet down the alley before there was any hint of bad things happening. I kept my eyes to the ground, scanning for clues and counting on Joe to watch the rooftops and windows. Our first clue that something was out of order was the flip-flop on the ground. All the chumps that hassled me had worn the universal uniform of the Southern Douchebag—striped dress shirt rolled up to the elbow, khakis or khaki shorts, college baseball caps, and Rainbow brand flip-flops. And here was a Rainbow flip-flop laying in the alley at the base of a wall. I looked up and saw nothing, but a flicker of movement a little to my left caught my eye.
“I got an open window, third floor,” I said, pointing up for Joe to see.
“I think your drainpipe-shimmying days are behind you, Bubba. How do you think you’re getting up there?” Joe asked.
“He’s not,” Amy said from behind him. “I am.”
I saw her holster her pistol and take off her belt. She started to unbraid the paracord belt and put one end of the line between her teeth. She stepped into my hand, and I put everything I had into the most important caber toss of my life. I flung her upward and outward, aiming for the wall across the narrow alley. My girlfriend flew up and landed perfectly with both feet on the second-floor windowsill across the alley, then used her momentum to spring off the narrow ledge upward and back across the alley to catch the open window with her fingertips. There was a heart-pounding moment as she scrabbled for a grip, but then one foot found purchase and she hauled her cute butt up and into the open window.
I looked at Joe, held my hands out, and said, “You next.”
His eyes got saucer-sized, and I almost peed my pants laughing at him. “I’m kidding, Joe,” I said, trying to keep my voice low. “She’ll drop the paracord in a sec and you can climb up.” Sure enough, right as the words came out of my mouth, a narrow line of black rope descended from the window to dangle in front of Joe’s face. He wiped his hands on his pants, white-knuckled the thin line, and scampered up faster than I expected for a man whose daily exercise most days is hunting the right Bible verse.
Once Joe vanished through the window, I took a wrap around one fist with the paracord and hauled my gigantic butt up three stories and heaved my sweating carcass through the window into an empty apartment. I sat on the floor for a second rubbing the blood back into my fingers and catching my breath.
“There’s nothing here,” I said. Or panted, really. I’m not what anybody in their right mind would call a small guy, and climbing up the side of that building like old-school Batman was pretty rough. They call that stuff 550 cord for a reason. Good thing I only weigh 350.
“I wouldn’t say nothing, Bubba,” Amy whispered from across the room. I looked at the floor where she had her flashlight pointed and saw a still-wet drop of red on the floor.
“Whatever grabbed that
idiot doesn’t have much of a lead on us,” I said, heaving myself to my feet and drawing my pistol again. “Let’s play follow the blood spatter.”
The drops led us to a room three doors down and across the hall, where a bloody handprint on the doorjamb gave the surprise away. Joe and Amy took up positions on either side of the door, and I stood square in front of it. We weren’t going to bother with announcing ourselves. I figured the guns would do a good enough job of letting everyone know we had arrived. I lifted my right foot and rammed it into the door just beside the deadbolt. The door behaved as you would expect a door to when a giant man slams a size sixteen combat boot into it. It splintered at the lock, two hinges popped off, the top part of the doorjamb came clattering down, and a semicircle of drywall and plaster stove in beside the doorknob. I gave the beleaguered door a shove and it gave up the ghost, falling completely out of its frame and crashing to the floor.
Also on the floor was one skinny vampire with greasy blond hair and a velour frock coat. The vampire/Robert Smith cosplayer writhed on the ground clutching his head. I leaned down and said, “You were looking through the peephole when I kicked the door, weren’t you?”
He glared up at me with his one good eye and snarled. His fangs dropped and I put three rounds from my Glock through his forehead. He fell to the floor, true-dead. “Look on the bright side,” I said. “Now your head doesn’t hurt anymore.”
I held up my gun and spread my focus to the room. “I’m looking for a human. One of you idiots snatched him out of the alley a few minutes ago. His friends want him back.”
“Why should we care what a bunch of humans want?” A short vampire with thinning hair walked up to me and bumped me with his chest.
“Did you just chest-bump me, Mighty Mouse?” I looked down at the top of his head, honestly baffled.
He stepped back a couple of feet and looked up. “What did you call me, human?”
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