Night at the Museum - A Bubba the Monster Hunter Novella

by John G. Hartness

  We passed through the Black Forest exhibit, then came to another locked door, this one leading into what Becca had called her coup de grace, the demon summoning room, complete with creepy-ass altar. I wasn’t really looking forward to spending any time in this joint, but let’s face it—bad guys aren’t that original, and monsters are even less so. If Becca was still in the museum, she was behind this door.

  “You got a plan?” I asked Joe.

  He shook his head. “Isn’t this the part where you laugh at plans and do whatever you want anyway?”

  “Yeah, but I thought maybe we’d try something different this time.”

  “Like what?” Joe asked.

  “Maybe you kick the door down and get the crap knocked out of you, then I come in and kill everything that’s not nailed down?”

  “That plan sucks, Bubba.”

  “Now you know why I don’t do plans,” I said, then I got a running start and blew through the locked door like it was the Duke O-line at my junior year homecoming football game. The home of the Blue Devils is known for a lot of things, but football is pretty far down the list. The door splintered just like their tackle’s ribcage, and I burst into a scene straight out of a nightmare. It took everything I had not to turn around and head right back out the shattered door, but I figured there wasn’t anybody better equipped for a hundred miles to deal with the shitshow in front of me, so I took a deep breath and got ready to do some serious killing.

  My first target was the skinny bastard that I’d bumped into earlier, Professor Pokey. The skinny little assclown was standing at the head of Becca’s oh-so-carefully constructed to be accurate altar, holding what looked like a pretty damn accurate knife high in the air.

  “Put it down, asshole,” I said, drawing Bertha and pointing the giant pistol at his skinny bird chest.

  “Go to hell, redneck!” he shouted, and his voice made Skeeter sound like a baritone, it was so high and thready.

  “I’m in a museum, ain’t that bad enough for somebody like me?” I asked, and pulled back the hammer. I didn’t need to—the action of the pistol is fine if I just pull the trigger—but there’s a certain sound a pistol makes when you cock it that sometimes can convince a bad guy to give up if he’s only moderately insane.

  This was not that time. The look that the mad scientist turned to me was crazier than a shithouse rat. His eyes were rolling around in his head like marbles, and sweat poured off him like a madam in Sunday School. He went up on tiptoes to get even more power behind his stroke and brought the knife down at Becca’s chest as I brought the pistol up to point at his. I didn’t hesitate, didn’t even think about it. I pulled the trigger and blew the son of a bitch six feet backwards.

  Bertha sounded like a cannon in the tiny space, and the smell of gunfire laid heavy over the stink of incense, candles, and a couple of bowls of entrails placed at the points of a crudely drawn pentagram. I motioned for Joe to stand back until I could get a good look at what we had going on in there, a little voice in the back of my head screaming at me that I had just shot a human, for God’s sake, not a monster, and what the hell were we going to do about it? I didn’t have an answer for the little voice in my head, and I sure didn’t have an answer for Skeeter, who was screaming questions in my ear at about the speed of a NASCAR driver on a beer run. I reached up and took the Bluetooth out of my ear, then dropped it to the floor and stepped on it.

  “There,” I said. “Now Skeeter’s out of this. Joe, you stay back there so you’re clear, too.” I kept walking the room, blowing out candles and turning over bowls of blood and other things that I couldn’t, and didn’t want to, identify.

  “Clear of what?” Joe asked from the threshold. He had enough training and experience to stay out of a room when I told him to, because too often the magical backlash of the crap we dealt with could be deadly.

  “Clear of whatever’s gonna happen to me for killing that nut bar,” I said. “I think I can get off without doing any time because he was one hundred percent gonna kill Becca, but there’s gonna be a lot of questions. You probably want to get the Church’s lawyer down here pretty fast.”

  “Could we untie me first?” Becca asked from the altar.

  “Oh shit, Becca, I’m sorry,” I said, stepping over the lines of the pentagram and holstering Bertha. I flipped out my Kershaw pocketknife and cut the ropes holding her feet, then freed her wrists. She reached up to a cut on her shoulder and wiped away a thin line of blood left from when Professor Apeshit dropped his knife, then sat up.

  That’s when it all went completely and utterly to shit.

  In sitting up on the altar, Becca used her right hand to steady herself on the stone. The same right hand that had a little blood on it from the cut on her shoulder. The cut made by the sacrificial blade in the middle of whatever summoning ceremony Doctor Crazyass had started. So she put the blood of the sacrifice, released by the charmed blade in the midst of the proper ceremony, onto the altar, the gateway to Where the Bad Things Are. The second her hand touched the altar, the blood completed the spell, and the altar began to glow with clichéd but still scary as hell red light. I picked Becca up, threw her over my shoulder, and jumped back over the lines of the pentagram on my way out.

  I put her down just in front of the door and looked up at Joe. “Keep her clear. I don’t know what that asshole was summoning, but it’s on the way through right now.”

  The altar split down the middle with a resounding crack and a pair of skeletal arms reached up from the glowing interior far past where human arms should have stopped. What pulled itself out of the glowing crimson portal was obscenely female, with pendulous breasts sagging almost to its knees and long hair hanging past its shoulders, but it was just as obviously not human as it was an obvious mockery of femininity. Its skin was cracked and blackened, like it had just pulled itself from a fire, and gray slime oozed through the cracks. It fixed a pair of yellow eyes on me, and when it grinned, I almost threw up. Only the memory of exactly how much that steak cost kept it down as I looked at a forked tongue licking over a double row of pointed teeth.

  “You rang, humansssss?” it said, those teeth splitting its face into a terrible grin. Its voice was like fingernails down a chalkboard and the screams of pigs being slaughtered, all set to a Rob Zombie soundtrack. It sounded like every terrible thing that had ever happened, rolled up into one nasty voice.

  “Nah, nobody called for a bucket full of ugly. You can go home,” I said, hoping like hell my voice wasn’t shaking as bad as my knees were. I was pretty sure I hadn’t pissed myself, but it wasn’t for lack of absolute terror. This thing was a whole different league than anything I’d ever faced, and I knew in my gut that I couldn’t beat it. My only hope was that in hopping in and out of that magical circle, I hadn’t broken any of the lines, and whatever spell Doctor Dumbass cast to summon this thing could hold it until either sunrise or Joe could perform an exorcism or banishment or something.

  “I ammmmm home, now, human. I am hommmmmmme, and I ammmm hunnnngggrrryyyyy.”

  “Well, too bad I left the Corn Nuts at home. You’ll just have to settle for a couple of ounces of lead wrapped in holy water,” I said as I drew Bertha, ejected the normal rounds that were in her, and slammed home a magazine full of blessed bullets. I squeezed off three quick rounds and caught the demon in the center of its chest with each one.

  Let’s be clear. The Desert Eagle is one of the most powerful pistols ever created. It is not intended to do anything except wreak havoc on whatever you point it at. It is not a target practice pistol. It is not a trick shot pistol. It is four and a half pounds of death and destruction in a beautifully constructed package, and that’s before you put the bullets in it. Getting shot by a Desert Eagle is nothing a human being gets up from. Even with a bulletproof vest, a chest shot from a fifty caliber bullet is like getting hit in the chest with a sledgehammer by a very strong, very angry, very large man. So I laid three good sledgehammer strokes into this monster’s chest. The ki
nd of damage that would have blown most vampires into four or five pieces, left a werewolf lying in the dirt wondering where his legs went, and given a troll serious second thoughts about remaining in the same zip code as me.

  This demon laughed at me. It plucked the bullets from its hide, dropped them onto the floor, and laughed at me. That’s when things got bad.

  Then I noticed something I hadn’t seen before. When I shot Professor Demonsbuddy, he flew backward for several feet before hitting the ground. But then he slammed into a wall and bounced forward to lie, and in very short order die, on his stomach. With his left hand stretched out across the boundary of the summoning circle, thus breaking the magical barrier that kept the demon locked away from the world.

  I hate magic. I said that, right?

  Chapter 12

  I did what any reasonable person would do when faced with a seven-foot tall demon in a small space. I drew my sword and ran right at it. And she (it? Hell, I don’t know, I’m pretty sure it was a “she”) did what any self-respecting seven-foot tall demon would do when faced with a six-and-a-half-foot tall idiot with a sword. She reared back with one big fist and knocked the piss out of me. She backhanded me across my face without even a grunt’s worth of effort and spun me around almost out of my boots.

  “You think you can sssssstop meeeee, humannnn?” She drew back a hand tipped with needle-like claws and slashed it at my guts.

  “I don’t know, but I’m gonna try,” I said, with maybe a grunt of my own from blocking her disemboweling stroke with my blade. I held onto the sword, but it wasn’t without effort. I ducked under her other hand as it swept out to take my eyes, and stabbed upward with my sword, hoping to land a lucky shot and nail her in her softer underbelly. Except her underbelly wasn’t even the least little bit soft. My sword skittered across her flesh, and I followed the line of the thrust, bringing me way closer to her torso than I ever wanted to be. I dropped the sword as the demon reached out and pulled me close.

  She crushed me to her chest, slamming my face into one gray-skinned breast. Every bad experience I’d ever had with a boob came back to me, from seeing my mom changing when I was eight, to finding out in the back row of the Mountain View Drive-In Movie Theatre that Julie Anne Margraves had three nipples. I know the third nipple thing isn’t a real big deal, but I was sixteen and had no warning. I just found it while exploring under Julie Anne’s shirt in the middle of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and was a little freaked out over the whole experience. The demon’s cracked gray skin raked my cheek and her arm pressed into my back, threatening to break a rib. I could almost feel the thing’s other arm raising to the sky for a killing stroke, and I scrabbled frantically at the back of my jeans for my Judge revolver. I yanked the pistol free of the paddle holster in my pants and jammed it into the demon’s thigh, the only part of the monster I could reach. I squeezed the trigger again and again until all five rounds were spent, and I’d fired three .410 shotgun shells full of silver shot and a pair of .45 long rounds doused in holy water into the hell-bitch’s leg.

  She let go of me and shoved me back a few feet. I tossed the empty pistol off to one side and rolled my shoulders as I stared at the demon. She stood there grinning at me, a tiny line of black ichor running down her leg the only hint that I’d even scratched her.

  “Ouch,” she said, in that voice that let me know in no uncertain terms that she wasn’t the least bit injured by my popgun, but was just insulted enough to make my death hurt for a very long time. Oh well, I knew when I signed up for it that this gig had a shit retirement plan. I jammed my hands into the caestus hanging from my belt and raised my spiked fists. The demon grinned again and raised her hands.

  “Joe, get Becca out of here. I don’t know how long I can hold this thing off,” I said. Then the demon grinned, and for the first time since she crawled out of the shattered altar, I noticed the tail that arced several feet over her head and ended in a scorpion’s stinger.

  “Scratch that,” I said. “Get Becca out of here fast ‘cause I ain’t gonna be able to hold this thing off more than a few seconds.” The tail flicked out, and I knocked it away. The demon lashed out with one hand, and I blocked with an iron-clad fist. She drew back both clawed hands, and I took in a deep breath as she lunged, both claws and tail all coming straight at me, full speed. I stepped inside her stroke, spun around, and grabbed her tail with both hands. I took a battering from her forearms, but she missed with all the claws, so I called that a win and yanked on her tail with every ounce of strength I had. I whirled around inches from the demon’s body, holding her tail in both hands, and shoved it into her midsection until the stinger popped out the other side.

  “Take that, hellbitch,” I said as the demon’s eyes went wide. She stood frozen for a half a second, then she just laughed. The stinger slid out of her torso without any apparent effort or pain, the tail clipping me on the jaw as it went past. I hit one knee and was trying to regain my footing when a giant demon fist caught me right on the point of my chin. That uppercut stood me up perfectly straight onto my tippy toes, then my eyes crossed, and I fell straight back like an overweight redwood. I crashed to the floor and stared up at the ceiling, wondering when I had fallen, and why I couldn’t get up. I was lying there, working out the physics of my situation, when the demon loomed into my vision. She stabbed straight down at my chest, and my last thoughts on Earth were “Amy is gonna be pissed.”

  At least those would have been my last thoughts if those claws had hit me. Because they were definitely intended to rip out my heart, and that’s not on the list of things that I can get over. Fortunately for me, the claws never touched my chest. After several seconds of not being dead, or being dead hurting a lot more than it had any right to, I opened my eyes.

  “Sonofabitch,” I whispered. There was indeed a demon’s claw hovering a couple of inches from my torso. And a few inches past that, at the demon’s wrist, was a hand in a long-sleeved black dress shirt. The hand glowed with a white light that was almost painful to look at, but I forced myself to follow the hand up the arm to the shoulder, and then over to…Joe’s face?

  “Joe?” I just said his name, but there were about fifteen questions in that one word.

  He looked down at me, and his eyes glowed with a pure white light. “You should probably move, Bubba,” he said, but it wasn’t entirely his voice. I mean, it was Joe’s voice, but it was more than that, too. There was a power behind his voice, and a weight to it, and I couldn’t exactly put my finger on it, but there was definitely something else in there with my friend. I pulled myself out from under the grasped hand of the priest and the demon, and scooted on my butt back over to the wall. I tried to stand, but the room was still spinning way too much from the demon’s punch, and I was still trying not to puke up my dinner, so I just sat there.

  I sat there and watched my very normal-sized priest friend, all six foot and two-hundred or two-hundred-twenty pounds of him, wrestle the demon’s hand up to hold it between them. The demon just stared for the first few seconds, but then she began to pull and thrash against Joe’s grip. I saw smoke start to seep out from between Joe’s fingers, and the demon started to fight harder to get away. She swung out with her other hand and bashed Joe in the shoulder, but he didn’t flinch.

  Now I’m a big dude, and I’ve taken some epic punches in my day, but standing still while a demon whales on me is not in my skill set. But at least today, it was in Joe’s. The more smoke billowed out from his fingers, the more blows the demon rained down on his head and shoulder. And Joe never flinched. It was like he didn’t even notice the punches, until one caught him right on the point of his jaw. That shot turned his head to the side, at least. He still didn’t let go of the demon, just cracked his head from side to side, then flicked out his left hand and caught the demon’s other wrist.

  She let out a shriek that left no doubt as to her origins, because anything that can make that noise is definitely straight from Hell. Her scream was the stuff of nightmares,
mixing banshee shrieks with ear-splitting yips and yells, high ululating cries that rang through the little room in deafening waves.

  “Stop.”

  With one word, Joe silenced the demon. He didn’t raise his voice, didn’t threaten or cajole. He just said “stop,” and the monster quit screaming. The silence was almost worse than the shrieking because under the hiss of the air conditioning you could hear the slight sizzle of the demon’s burning flesh.

  “Sit.” Joe spoke again, and released the demon. I scurried backward and sat on the edge of the altar.

  “Whaaaaatttt arrrrree you, morrrrrtttttallll?”

  “I am more than I seem, demon, but I speak with the authority you’ve always recognized,” Joe replied. “You have a choice, beast. Choose swiftly, and choose wisely.”

  “A choice?” it rasped.

  “Since the beginning, Fallen One, there has always been choice. Do you choose to return to Hell, or do you choose to die here?” Super-Joe never raised his voice, never moved to threaten, never even touched the demon. He just stood there, his eyes glowing with an unbearable white light.

  “I’ll go home, angel. But not until I’ve sssssated my hunger, and nevvvvverrrrr without a fight!”

  And with that, it was on. The demon literally ripped its own arms off to get away from Joe, planting a foot in the center of his chest and jerking its body backward, leaving Joe holding a pair of five-foot-long arms tipped with brutal claws. He raised an eyebrow and tossed the left-hand arm aside, then gripped the remaining arm like a Louisville Slugger and used it to parry the tail strikes the demon was throwing. That chitinous appendage flashed up, down, and sideways, but every time it lashed out, Joe knocked it aside with the demon’s own severed arm.

  But the literal bitch from hell was just stalling, just killing time until she could grow a new pair of arms to add to the mix. Soon Joe dropped the severed arm and was moving faster than my eye could follow, swatting aside tail jabs and claw slashes like he was a divine Chuck Norris, which may or may not be redundant, depending on your views on Chuck Norris.