Abomination also had a grenade launcher I could lob out to three hundred, but Milo would probably tell me the death hippo had taken hostages or something. I saw where this was going. “Okay, I’m assuming your wildly convoluted object lesson is to try and tell me that my regular gun doesn’t have enough range for this mission. You could have just said that.”
Milo stared at me blankly through his small round glasses. “But wildly convoluted is my teaching style.” He turned around and started jingle-walking away. “Come on. We’re wasting valuable range time.”
“You probably only need one bell. Not a whole symphony.”
“Everybody else here thinks they’re too cool to wear them, so I had the whole case left for myself. We’ll see who’s laughing when they get eaten by bears—completely flavorless because they’re unseasoned by pepper spray—while I remain musically magnificent.”
Milo stopped at the armory long enough to pick up a soft case and a range bag, then he had me grab a case of .308 and a sack full of magazines. The caliber made sense, since that was MHI’s standard rifle round. It wasn’t the flattest shooting cartridge ever, but it was common, and had a decent amount of thump to it. I started loading mags while we walked to the range.
One nice thing about Earl owning a mountain is that you don’t have to skimp on a rifle range. It went basically forever. The guys had set out dozens of steel targets out to a thousand yards. Milo dumped all his stuff on a picnic table and started unzipping the case, but then he paused for dramatic effect.
“Originally I ordered this for me, but odds are I’m not the one who is going to be wandering through a nightmare hellscape by myself. I figured you need something that could be precise at long range, but still handy and quick handling for anything up close, and it has to run no matter what. People think I’m the company’s mechanical genius, but a machine without art has no soul. It’s true for cars, guns, bicycles, watches, net cannons, whatever. My philosophy is there are two ways to properly customize a machine, a Perazzi shotgun is like a Bentley, classy and elegant, pretty. On the other hand this is more like a super car, the art comes from the performance.”
“Enough with the philosophical rambling. You’re killing me, dude.” It was like being a little kid taunted by birthday presents you couldn’t unwrap. “Show me already.”
Milo finished unzipping the case.
It was an AR-10 style rifle with a suppressor and a big honking scope on it, and it was finished in a distressed bronze color, which was kind of unique. “Ooooooh. Pretty.”
“I know, right? It started as a JP Enterprises LRP-07. They invited me to Minnesota to check out their factory. Cool guys. They make the best of the best. I couldn’t make a rifle nicer than this.”
I picked it up. It was one solid chunk of gun, built like a tank.
“Eighteen-inch supermatch, air-gauged, button-rifled, cryo-treated barrel.” When Milo began listing off weapon stats he was the only person in the company who could go more hard core riot nerd weaponspeak than me. “Low-mass operating system, high-pressure bolt, silent capture spring. MHI logo, obviously. See that thing inside the handguard wrapped around the barrel? That’s a thermal dissipator…It has a radiator, Owen. A radiator.”
“I see that. How does it shoot?”
“I’ve tested it. If you can see it, you can put a bullet through it. This baby shoots better than you are capable of shooting it. You’re good, but you’re not that good.”
“Ouch…” But I wasn’t the precision shooter in the family. “Could Julie live up to it?”
“Probably.” Milo shrugged. “Which is why I ordered her one just like it, only in 260 Creedmoor so it shoots flatter. My wife has that one. Shawna is going to give it to her at the baby shower.”
Monster Hunter families tended to give useful baby shower gifts. What mom wants diapers when she could have a new sniper rifle? Regular people are so lame in comparison.
“The can is a SilencerCo Omega. It is silly quiet and less than a pound.”
“Those death hippos will never hear me coming.”
“Never underestimate my hypothetical death hippos, but no flash, no blast, you’ll be a lot harder to spot. Side charging, since it is going to have a silencer on it, you won’t get carbon gas squirting up your nose.”
“I hate that,” I agreed. Shoot a thousand rounds through suppressed AR-10 rifles in an afternoon, when you blow your nose the Kleenex turns black. I worked the bolt. It was so smooth it was like somebody had stuck a warm stick of butter between two sheets of glass. I shouldered the rifle and pointed it down range. The trigger had a roller around it so that your trigger finger always moved to the same consistent position. Milo had thought of everything. When I pulled it the trigger broke so light and clean that it was damned near telepathic.
“Now look through the scope. It’s a US Optics.”
I did. The thousand yard target suddenly seemed a whole lot closer. “This isn’t a scope. This is the Hubble on a gun.”
“Twenty five power. You ever have one of those moments where you found yourself thinking I wish I had a little more magnification? Not anymore you won’t. It’s adjustable all the way down to five power. Horus reticle, I’ll have to teach you how to use that, but it’s a really nifty system. This scope is so tough that even Sam Haven wouldn’t have been able to break one easily.”
“He’d take that as a challenge you know.” But Milo was right. I could probably take this scope out of the Warne one piece mount and hammer nails with it. Milo had also mounted angled iron sights too, so all I had to do was tilt it at a slight angle and I could aim down them instead, three gun competition style. “And these are for if I do go all gorilla luggage commercial and break my scope?”
“Or if the death hippo sneaks up on you.”
“Those treacherous bastards.” I was grinning. I loved this. It was even making me a little nostalgic because me and Milo geeking out over guns was one of my fondest memories from when I’d been a newbie. Some people don’t get appreciating your weapons, but those people have probably lived really sheltered lives. “So why is it bronze?”
“Cerakote actually, but even a Ferrari needs a nice paint job.”
“Groovy. So what did you name it?”
“The Cazador.”
That was pretty badass. Oh yeah…I was gonna kill me some monsters with this.
* * *
People don’t call in the middle of the night unless something bad has happened. I’ve learned to dread calls like that. The sat phone started beeping around two in the morning. By the time I woke up and found it in the dark, I knew something had gone horribly wrong.
“It’s Pitt.”
“Owen,” it was Julie. From that one word I could tell she was upset, and she was the kind of woman who rarely got emotionally dramatic. Something terrible must have happened back home.
I sat up. A sick knot formed in my stomach. “Are you and the baby okay?”
“We’re fine. It’s—”
“My dad?”
“No. He’s hanging on…”
Okay. I took a deep breath. Anything else I could handle.
“Listen, I just heard from Poly again. He was really freaked out.”
There were no good reasons for the cyclops to be contacting her. “What’s wrong?”
“One of the sparks went out.”
That terrible realization took a moment to sink in. “Oh no…No, no.”
By this point the other Hunters bunking in my shipping container were waking up too. It was pitch-black, but I could hear the cots creaking and the rustle of sleeping bags. Normally they’d be telling me to shut up, to go back to sleep, but it must have been clear in my voice this was serious.
“Last time Poly looked, there were seven lives, now there are only six left.”
“Have him look again.”
“I did. I’m sorry, Hon. We’ve lost one. Whoever it was, they’re gone.”
We talked for few more seconds. There were no other d
etails. Numb, I ended the call.
CHAPTER 12
Though Krasnov was a loud mouth, who was exceedingly likely to screw us over at the first opportunity, he seemed to be feeding us reliable intel. We had up to date reports from the Russian military base on Severny Island, and all of KMCG’s case files for every monster encounter they’d ever had there.
Everything we got painted an interesting picture. The further south you were on the island, the safer it was. The closer you got to the ruins, the more likely you were to never be seen again. Bodies were rarely found. Usually when someone went missing the official story was simple, blame it on the weather, or say they slipped and fell down a hole or into the ocean. As rugged and unforgiving as the terrain was, that was entirely plausible.
The army was supposed to regularly patrol the region around the ruins. When they found a monster above ground, they were supposed to pop it if they could, or file a report and call in the contracted specialists, meaning Krasnov and Comrades. There were monitoring stations around the island, and if the supernatural activity got too hot, they were supposed to sound the alarm.
However, the truth of the matter was that outpost was an ass end of nowhere type assignment. The current government considered the region a blight, and messing with it was a resource suck, so they ignored it. Really motivated types didn’t get those kinds of assignments. Watching ice melt and refreeze was an assignment best left to your bums, malcontents, and soldiers generally too incompetent to trust around other humans. The reports were always the same, there’s nothing to see here, and some villagers fell down a hole.
When the army did accidentally send a go-getter, sometimes they’d get uppity, think they could actually handle their official mission, and take out a patrol to tackle the ruins themselves. If that officer didn’t get fragged by his non-suicidal men on the way, those patrols into the ruins inevitably ended badly. Krasnov had found us four reports like that over the last twenty years. Two patrols had disappeared entirely, one had half come back delirious and gibbering mad, and the last had a few soldiers return, but they had either committed suicide or drank themselves to death soon afterward.
Lovely.
The military there were an early warning system for supernatural activity around a dangerous hotspot. In reality there was basically a No Go zone around the ruins, and the unlucky bastards assigned there stayed in their observation posts until their time was served. The soldiers thought the place was haunted, and kept their heads down accordingly. If anything really nasty crawled out of the ruins, they called Krasnov, who was happy to collect the bounty. Only none of his guys were ever brave or stupid enough to venture into the actual ruins themselves. So if that monster then crawled back in, they let it go. But knowing Krasnov, they probably still claimed the bounty, and they’d just say the body fell down a hole, as things tended to do on the island.
The weird part was the types of monster they’d found there, and that included basically everything. It was a mish mash, and it made no geographical sense. There were the usual suspects, and things you’d expect from regional folklore, but sometimes they’d find oddballs that had no business being in that part of the world. Most of these were sightings we couldn’t confirm, but over the years KMCG had identified creatures that were supposedly only found in Africa, like an asanbosam, or a South American ewaipanoma.
And even odder, the observation posts occasionally told stories of monsters fighting each other. Not that they wanted to get close enough to confirm, but there seemed to be a turf war going on around the ruins. Black blob creatures that sounded like shoggoths throwing down with ghostly riders in the sky, that kind of thing. So it was either like Poly had said, and the factions were warring against each other, or a lot of vodka had been consumed before those reports had been made.
What we had really been hoping for was the report about Nikolai Petrov’s expedition to the City of Monsters. We still didn’t know what actually lived in there. That was the last time human beings had ventured deep into the city and lived to tell about, but it had been a long time ago. It had been an old school KGB mission, so secret that the top levels of their current government thought it was a myth. Krasnov had tried his sources, but gotten shot down. The report existed only as legend.
The day we got the Petrov Report changed everything at Camp Frostbite.
* * *
It was early in the afternoon, and we were in a planning meeting. There were a handful of us sitting on tree trunks and lawn chairs in front of a shipping container. Everyone except for me represented a different company’s contingent. So I mostly kept my mouth shut and took notes. Less than half of the companies kicking in volunteers were represented, but that was because the rest of the leaders were off running errands. The operation had kind of snowballed. Shortly we would be moving a thousand men, hundreds of tons of equipment, a tribe of Orcs, a handful of trailer park elves, and a partridge in a pear tree.
Not a moment too soon, because as it had warmed up the mosquitos had started coming out in force. Camp Frostbite had turned into Camp Blood Cloud.
There had been a lot to talk about. Cooper had left MHI and taken a freelance gig where he’d run across another underground city. Earl had hired him back, and we had reviewed his report to see if there were any similarities with our city. Then the leaders had taken a call from Boone about the shoreline near the target. KMCG had gotten a contract—one of the soldiers at an observation post had turned into a vampire—so it had been a good excuse for us to send some of our scouts along with them to get a firsthand view ourselves. Boone had taken everybody we had with military training in amphibious landings. We needed a base camp on the island anyway, so Earl’s idea had been to just park one on the beach.
“I know that Royal Marine from Van Helsing thinks it’s doable, and Boone says the beach is perfect, but it’s kind of nuts.” Mayorga’s voice face was on the laptop screen. The laptop had been set on a stump. She had bloodshot eyes, a cigarette dangling from her lip, and a big cup of coffee and a full ash tray in front of her. She was in an office, but the view out the window behind her revealed a ship yard. “This might not work.”
“You were Navy. Figure it out,” Earl ordered.
“I spent most of my time on aircraft carriers. We don’t routinely drive those up the beach, Earl. Admirals get bitchy about that.” She sighed as somebody behind her began yelling. “Hold your horses, dickhead!” she shouted at whoever was off screen, then she turned back. “They’re putting a rush job on the mods. This isn’t going to be cheap.”
“We know. Do your best.”
“Is Pitt there?”
“Hey, May.”
“One damned word about me going over my budget and I’ll cram that spreadsheet up your ass. Mayorga out.” The picture went black.
“She seems professional,” Klaus Lindemann suggested politely.
“Maria is a perpetually angry woman, but she’s persistent and remarkably good at what she does,” Earl told him.
“Ah.” Klaus nodded noncommittally. “That is nice.”
I could tell the leader of Grimm Berlin thought MHI were cowboys. I was still glad they’d decided to join the mission, especially since they had gotten their asses kicked when they’d gone after the Franks bounty. There was no shame in losing to Franks. I’d argued against us taking that job offer, and not out of any love for the giant sullen mutant. The Germans were still damned good at what they did. Depending on who you asked, many would say they were the best in the business. Of course, we here at MHI disagreed, but we were polite about it…Mostly.
“Trust me, Klaus. Americans know a thing or two about taking a beach. You can ask your grandpa.”
Lindemann just smiled and shook his head. But since everyone else had a laugh at his expense, Klaus turned to Pierre Darne, leader of our French contingent. “Or we could ask Pierre’s grandmother. I’m sure she warmly greeted many American men upon their arrival.”
“I doubt that. Mamie was even less friendly tha
n our lady who is boat shopping.” Darne was one of those perpetually charming types, who greeted everything—from mom jokes to monsters—with a smile. He was the youngest of the leaders, but his company was like MHI—a family business—and he’d taken over when his father had been lost on the Antoine Henri. Earl had been the one who had taken him out, but there were no hard feelings. Darne counted that as a mercy killing. The real death had come when his father had been turned into a vampire. He and Julie had talked it over once. They had a lot in common that way. “A minute with her and they would have swum back across the channel.”
Well, at least our leadership was getting along. As they went back to ribbing each other, I noticed there was another call coming in over the satellite. It was an unknown contact. “Hey, Earl, mystery call. We got anybody else scheduled to check in?”
“Not that I can think of. Maybe something’s happening back home.”
I flipped the laptop around and played with it for a moment, trying to figure out how the program worked. Melvin said it was supposed to be encrypted, but it was a pain in the ass to get it to work right. Another window opened. I recognized the man on the other side of the camera instantly, with that smug skeletal albino face smiling at me from beneath his creepy orange sunglasses.
“Owen Z. Pitt,” Stricken said. “I figured you would be there. I hope you’re enjoying Alaska. How’s Hakuna Matata, or however you pronounce your pop’s name.”
“You son of a bitch.”
That was about the nicest thing I could say about Stricken. Pond scum looked down on the former leader of Special Task Force Unicorn. He was an all-around conniving, evil, manipulative dirt bag.
“How’d you know where we are?”
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