I Kill Monsters: Fury (Book 1)

by Tony Monchinski

  Boone wound his way through the factory unmolested. Darkened rooms, rust, and stairwells were all he found. The red laser tracked about. Stairwells to the upper floors were barred and looked like they hadn’t been opened in years.

  He turned the corner in a hallway and immediately felt a presence down the hall. Something was there and he thought he knew what.

  “I’m here you fuckers!” he roared.

  The hall ahead remained empty.

  “Ready or not,” he muttered, “here I come…”

  Boone walked down the hallway, the Colt SMG taut on its sling, blood dripping from its silver tipped bayonet. The Smith & Wesson filled one hand. The darkened windows lining the left side of the passage glowed faintly as the sun outside rose.

  Boone punched out the windows with the butt of the .529, the feint sunlight immediately filling the corridor. He looked down at himself. He was covered with blood. Some of his own, yes, but mostly theirs. He smiled, anticipating more.

  As he moved down the hall the presence grew stronger. Sunlight filled the corridor behind him. Ahead a single doorway beckoned.

  Boone put his back against the wall and inched his way to the door, careful not to make any noise. He thought he could hear them breathing.

  He crouched down and leaned his head in the door as he pushed it open with his palm, jerking his body back as a dozen submachine guns opened fire at once, bullets splintering the wooden frame of the door and breaking the window in the hallway opposite. They’d expected him to walk into the room and had been aiming chest and waist high.

  Boone holstered the Smith & Wesson and reached down to his belt, retrieving the grenade Hamilton had given him in the car. He yanked the pin out with his teeth, which hurt a lot more than he had expected, let the handle fly and counted to three before he pitched the orb into the blackened room.

  The flash-bang grenade exploded with a blinding burst of light and a deafening boom. Boone rolled into the room after it, low to the ground, surveying the scene as he came up to a crouched position, already firing the SMG on full auto.

  There were roughly twenty men and women ringing a gaping hole in the floor. Most of them had dropped their submachine guns and were clutching their eyes and ears, temporarily blinded and deafened. A few had managed to hold onto their weapons and fired them blindly and wildly towards the door.

  Boone strafed the Colt and strafed back and forth, 9mm rounds punching through the slaves and vampires, blood geysering from human torsos, knocking all from their feet like bowling pins. A few were pitched back through the hole in the floor to whatever lay below.

  The bolt on the Commando locked open on an empty chamber.

  Boone drew the dagger from his left boot and moved in on the mostly inert forms, only a few of which still moved. Someone groaned. In the flickering of the bracketed torches, he dispatched each with multiple thrusts of the five-inch blade.

  He relished the kill.

  “No, wait—” one of them begged, gutshot. Boone did not hesitate. He stabbed the man a dozen times in the neck and chest. Boone was breathing heavily when he noted that the man’s dead eyes were fixed on him, glazed over. He sat back, wiping his blade on the man’s pant leg.

  The door behind him creaked as it slowly inched shut.

  Boone returned the knife to his boot and retrieved the Commando. He dumped the magazine and inserted a fresh one, racking the bolt and chambering a fresh round.

  The red laser beam preceded him to the lip of the hole in the floor. Boone stood there and looked down on three coffins. The coffins were recessed two feet lower than the rest of the room. A few bodies lay crumpled about them.

  Boone showed his teeth, lowered the barrel of the SMG, and fired half a magazine into the coffin on the left, leaving a ragged line of bullet holes up and down it. He shifted the barrel and laser beam and strafed the casket on the right until the magazine emptied. Boone dropped the magazine and slammed home a fresh one.

  “Fuck yeah.” He slung the Commando around his back and drew a stake. Boone stepped into the depression and approached the coffin on the left. He had never woken a sleeping vampire. He’d heard they were easily taken in the daytime, but he imagined they were awake and ready to spring from their sleep chambers.

  He hoped so. It wouldn’t be as much fun, staking them without a fight.

  Boone raised the stake over his head, reached down with his free hand and flipped the lid off the first coffin.

  He’d imagined his friends were dead…the phone calls, the message…Bowie’s words, the knowledge of what the blood suckers were capable of and what they’d be looking to do to him and his crew…

  But facing the mutilated body of a man he’d been joking around with two nights before, that was something else entirely. Boone looked down into the coffin in which Madison lay. His throat was punctured and he’d been bled out, his eyes staring up at Boone from a pale face.

  Boone stared down at him for several moments.

  He stepped around the middle coffin—afraid because he thought he knew who was in it—to the casket on the right. He reached down for the lid and before he pried it open he raised the stake again, though not as high as the first time. His arm was shaking.

  Boone opened the coffin.

  There was only a head in the coffin. One eye was closed. The other was missing, the socket raw and empty. The skin around the mouth had been cut off, revealing gum and teeth.

  He recognized Bowie from what was left of his face and his haircut.

  They’d cut his ears off too.

  “Fuck…”

  Boone rested his elbows on the edge of the coffin in which his friend Bowie’s head lay, placing his own head in his hands and breathing deeply.

  He had the feeling that he was being watched again, from somewhere further back in the dark recesses of the room, beyond the torches. He hadn’t noticed it, but the door to the room had closed.

  “Did they tell you…” Boone called out to the gloom. “Did they tell you what I’m going to do to you?” His voice was subdued compared to before, but no less intent on purpose.

  He stood.

  “I’m going to kill you.” Boone promised the dark. “I’m going to kill each and every one of you. I’m going to hunt down your children…I’m going to poison your slaves…”

  He stepped over to the center and final coffin.

  Gossitch.

  “I’m going to fuck your mothers and sisters.”

  He raised the stake and then lowered it, wiping a tear from his cheek.

  “You fuckers,” he called out into the dark, reaching down to the coffin, whispering to himself again, “You fuckers—”

  Before Boone could open it, Kreshnik burst from the casket. Its clawed hand slashed out and across Boone’s stomach, opening him up. Boone stumbled back, clutching at his midsection, the pain unreal.

  Kreshnik rose to its full height and stepped from the coffin. Boone tripped on the floor of the room behind him and fell on his back, holding the stake ahead of him, attempting to ward off the beast that stood there looming over him.

  Hands clapped somewhere in the dark.

  “Bravo, Boone, bravo.” A figure stepped through the gloom.

  Boone looked down at his stomach. His insides were bulging from his midsection between his fingers and he pushed them back in. He scrambled back on his elbows and feet, his eyes on the Albanian and the thing in the dark.

  “Well done, Boone.” The dark Lord Rainford came into the torchlight. “But why the precipitous departure? Our soiree is just commencing.”

  The Albanian stepped forward as Boone jerked himself back, past the crumpled bodies of the men and women and vampires he had killed, towards the hallway and the light. Kreshnik stepped up, out of the pit and gazed down on Boone.

  “Your friend—Bowie was it?” asked Rainford. “He died well. A dignified passage for what it’s worth. Not so well, the other…”

  Boone scowled and managed to roll onto his side, ignoring Kreshn
ik as the Albanian took one step after another, closing the space between them. He grasped his midsection tighter and pulled himself along the floor with one arm, using his legs to propel himself. His feet scampered and slipped on the blood he left behind.

  “I remember…” announced Rainford, his voice closer. “I remember when I was human. I remember how hard your kind will...fight…will struggle, to survive, even when survival is improbable…”

  Boone focused on the light framing the door to the hall.

  “…even when it is impossible.”

  With a jerk, Boone was pulled back towards the pit. Kreshnik had taken his boot in a gloved hand and dragged him back through his own blood. Boone groaned and swiped at the Albanian weakly with the stake, but the vampire had already let go of his foot.

  “No,” Rainford commanded the Albanian. “Wait.”

  Boone resumed his struggle, clawing his way towards the door. The pain in his stomach was outrageous.

  A gust of wind blew the door open and it stayed that way, the light from the hall falling on Boone.

  Reaching up with his arm, he planted his elbow and pushed off with his feet, pulling himself a couple of feet each time. He looked up through the door to the light in the shattered window of the hallway.

  “This refusal to die,” pondered Rainford, “even when all other options have been surrendered…I suppose that is one factor that separates your kind from mine. But you’ve little in common with the rest of your own, isn’t that so, Boone? As I have little with mine. Perhaps in this, we have some common ground…”

  He ignored the vampire’s words, clawing his way into the hall, into the light. Holding his stomach tight, he rolled on his side until he came to rest against the passage wall. He glanced up but the window seemed so far away.

  Boone was shaking. There was a blood trail on the floor, disappearing into the room. Too much blood.

  “So then…” Rainford spoke from the dark, unseen. “You are he…the one my people whisper of with dread and loathing. You laid low here before me…”

  Boone gulped. He was sweating profusely. He felt a cool breeze as a wind whipped up the dust and rust from the floor. His flannel shirt jacket rolled down the hall and draped over his inert form. And then the wind was gone.

  He was vaguely aware that the thing in the dark was speaking to him, but he was slipping into and out of consciousness, only catching some of what it said.

  “…Oh, how the mighty have fallen…”

  Gossitch. Boone shook his head. I’m sorry.

  “…I implore you, do not die before sunrise…grasp you stomach and hold its contents within…a terrible wound, indeed, but when I think of the devastation you and your ‘friends’ have inflicted on my own people…well, let us sit here and talk and contemplate finitude together, yes?”

  Boone looked from the door and the menace that lurked there to the light above…Jennifer…Greg and Jill…

  …you and I are separated by more than this mote of daylight…

  The voice from the dark and the voice in his head…Boone could not distinguish between them. The only thing that was real was the pain, the electric agony that exploded from his core and coursed its way through his entirety…

  …but, if what you call ‘immortality’ has granted me one insight, it is this…

  Boone heard his breathes as if they were someone else’s…shallow and weak…He closed his eyes and opened them and he was on a beach, mountains of bleached bone under and around him, a crimson sun hemorrhaging in the sky…

  …though the day is long, the day must pass, as inevitably it shall, as inevitably all must do, and with its passage comes the night…always the night…

  Boone opened his eyes and looked at the stake planted in the floor, point down. A hand was wrapped around the stake, anchoring it to the ground. The hand was attached to an arm and the arm was attached to his body…

  …the glorious, damned night…

  Boone looked down on a hallway in which a man lay. The man was holding himself close under a blood-stained flannel shirt jacket. The man lay in light. In the dark there were things that meant the man harm.

  …so lay there now and listen, and I will relate to you an account of a warrior the likes you have never known, the likes I doubt I will ever see again…in this way we shall pass the time together, shall we not? And then will come the night...

  The sun bled onto a beach littered with the crumpled and misshapen corpses of thousands fallen in battle. Waves crashed on the sand and a gull screamed.

  …my master was a cruel and terrible lord…

  50.

  The Master’s Tale

  In my three hundred and twenty six years, I have witnessed first hand the small acts of transcendence and the bitter sting of ignominy that have come to define the human species. I have seen the admirable, discerned the exceptionable, and known the good. Likewise, I have beheld the vile, experienced firsthand the deleterious, and shared, on many occasion, in the sins of the iniquitous.

  In my mind, three acts of humanity resound. Engels was an atheist through and through, yet when his Lizzie lay dying, he himself went to the parsonage, procuring a pastor who came at once and joined them in matrimony. Lizzie Burns died contented, a happy woman.

  In the Piazzo Carlo Alberto, a second Friedrich—those of us who knew him well called him Fritz—espied a master whipping his horse. Fritz interposed himself between the master and the subject of his flagellation, embracing the equine’s neck. Whereupon he promptly collapsed. Nietzsche would spend the next decade—the last of his life—in his sister Elisabeth’s attic, gripped by lunacy. I knew him there. I have no idea what became of the horse.

  I was born in Transcarpathian Ruthenia, on the southern slopes of the Carpathian Mountains. There was an old woman in my village who claimed she could divine the future. Maleva was not of my people. She was Roma and had settled among us long before my birth. Because she was a gypsy, she was never fully trusted by my people. But she was respected, for she was feared. For Maleva, it was said, consorted with the spirit world. She herself had numerous tales of daemon and creatures fantastic, and though there were doubters and detractors who scoffed when her name was mentioned, my brothers and sisters and I accorded Maleva a certain level of esteem.

  Her only companion the entire time I knew her was a small nameless mutt she kept tied up most nights outside her cottage. My little sister, Sasha, my dushka, was fond of that flea-bitten dog and would often stop to pet it when we passed on the road. At night, when the moon was full, as we lay the five of us together in our home, if we listened, over the sounds of my father’s snoring, we could hear, at a distance, Maleva’s little dog barking intermittently.

  It was said of Maleva that she could foresee events that had yet to transpire. For Maleva, as she told us herself, the future was inchoate, indeterminate. I remember wondering—as a boy—did this mean the future had not yet been written? I had no answer to that query then, nor, incidentally, do I today. Fritz tried. He tried with his notion of the eternal recurrence, holding that since matter was finite but time infinite, all that was had been and would be again. There were many facets of Fritz’s philosophy that attracted me, but I must admit this was not one.

  I was too young at that time to harbor a cynicism that would have me question Maleva’s purported ability, to notice that her imperfect reading of events to come was a perfect cover for what could have been fabrications meant to gull, to entertain. Maleva’s perception of the future, as she held it, was similar to our discernment of the past. Does anyone remember every little detail of what went before? And do they recall it vividly? I daresay, no. We remember specific episodes and emotions. And these are remembered in part and not in whole, with some resonating more so than others. Of what we educe from days past, some is misperceived by the lens of time. Much is misapprehended through experiences written since, experiences subtly yet irrevocably stamped upon the past.

  When one starts looking for causes, for whys
, one finds multiple paths and threads. Each of these is dialectically enmeshed with innumerable others, inextricably intertwined. Engels was keen to this. No one factor, alone, seems capable of explaining the phenomena under study, whatever the nature of said phenomena. This, I came to realize, is how the woman Maleva could see into the future, how she viewed that future. If she could actually see into that future. And though Maleva would speak of times and events to be, I was always struck with the futility of predicting that tomorrow. She always warned us of the swamp.

  Who then could have foreseen that third act of humanity which impressed me so greatly, an act of which I will speak in due time? Who then could have foreseen the convergence of paths that led to this, our own convocation?

  I was born to a poor peasant family on the Pannonia Plain in the seventeenth century. The people of my village were no better or worse than others, before or after them. Perhaps they were somewhat more ignorant and parochial than their contemporaries. I did not know. My master was ahead of his time, yet he would not live to see the time he was ahead of. And here I get ahead of myself. Forgive me.

  When my father and mother were betrothed, the Roma Maleva predicted they would have five children. My mother bore eleven, which seemed to give lie to Maleva’s divination, but only eight of us survived infancy. Of those eight, only five lived through childhood. Maleva, it would seem, had been correct. I was the second youngest. My mother did not survive the birth of my little sister. I remember the women of our village, assisting in the birth, I remember them weeping. My father, as I recall, shed no tears. He loved my mother, but he was inured to a life of hardship. My little sister, the one whose life owed itself to the life of my mother, was christened Sasha Mikhailovna.

  Both father and mother felt affection for us, I believe, though their expressions of this affection were stunted. Their lives were harsh and short. They were mere appendages to the land. My earliest memories are of the land. From a basket, I watched my parents and siblings work it. I was swaddled on my mother’s back as she seeded it. By four years of age I was working it myself, doing what little chores I could. By six I was bringing in the crops with my parents. By eight I was working nearly as hard as any man or woman in my village, alongside my father and brothers and sisters. Mother had passed by then, and Sasha watched us from the basket.