She was right, but Zack shrugged.
“We are here for you,” Maddie added, smiling at me in the low light of the parking garage. “We won’t let anything bad happen.”
“Thanks, guys,” I said. It was good to have friends that cared about me. Growing up, always seeing the concept of friendship on the movie screens and TV shows, I never thought I’d have friends of my own. True friends. High school sucked and college was out of the question. I knew I’d carry that stigma of having a famous father within BEAST’s organization and it would make making friends tougher, but somehow I did it.
Screw you, low self-esteem.
“Val’s a quack anyway,” Zack said, hitting the elevator button.
When it opened, there stood—not very high—a robed goblin. The goblins were the little helpers who kept NOD and all of BEAST running. They came from somewhere overseas, like the Scandinavian forests or something like that. There, they were the targets of much larger trolls, who often used them as target practice for their Troll Olympics—think the regular Olympics but replace people with supernatural creatures obsessed with living under bridges. So it was kind of a godsend that the goblins agreed to come work for BEAST. Free of charge.
“We have a dead vamp in the back,” Zack said.
He handed the keys to the goblin. It was an ugly thing with wispy gray hair, a bumpy face, and too-big eyes. It ripped Zack’s keys from his hand and pressed a comm button on the elevator’s panels. It croaked some nonsense I knew would bring about five more goblins to the parking deck, and then it waddled off towards Zack’s car. They’d dispose of the body properly, which meant they’d burn it and dance around it in a ritual I can’t even begin to explain.
Life at BEAST was weird.
The elevator doors closed and we went down.
In the lobby, Lola, our night receptionist, saw me and blushed. I blushed, too. She was a little older than me, came from a long line of monster hunters but didn’t like hunting herself. To appease her parents, she took a job manning the phones and booking appointments. She was cute, and I liked her. Though not just because she was cute.
Zack made a kissing sound and elbowed me in the ribs.
“Hi, Lola,” I said.
She glanced at me, our eyes met, then she looked down at the appointment book in front of her. “Hi, Abe. Um, Octavius is waiting for you three right now.”
“Thanks, Lola,” I said. My voice cracked. When it came to women, I was a regular Rico Suave—that is to say if Rico Suave was as smooth as a strip of sandpaper.
She smiled, her face blazing red, a hand twirling around her blonde hair, and said, “You’re welcome.”
We went on, hearing laughter as we got closer. Octavius’s office was nice and clean. As we entered the doorway, the source of the laughter stared at us from a bell jar.
“Hey, Chip,” Maddie said.
“Maddie! Looking quite foxy!” Chip responded. When he spoke, a little black gunk oozed out from the corner of his mouth. It was quite gross, but it was something you got used to. I mean, Chip was the decapitated head of a zombie after all. I couldn’t blame him for it.
“You’re looking pretty good yourself, Chip,” Maddie said. She was just being polite. Chip didn’t look very good, not really. He looked how you’d expect a rotting corpse to look.
“Here, have seats, you three. There’s much to discuss,” Octavius said. He was a tall man, skinny, pale, but he knew his stuff. Sometimes I thought he looked more like a monster than a monster hunter himself, kind of like Count Orlok from Nosferatu. But it wasn’t a fluke that he’d gotten this job as the head of NOD. Back in the day, he worked with my father. Together they kicked major monster ass. This is I knew from the diary and papers my father had left behind, as well as the stories Storm and Octavius would tell me about those glory days. To say I looked up to Octavius, both literally and figuratively was an understatement.
Now he went around his desk, absentmindedly patting the bell jar, which was sticky and smeared with God-knew-what. Chip turned his head up and smiled a gruesome smile, his rotten teeth full of crawling maggots.
I sat on the left, pulling a chair up to the two accent chairs that were already in front of Octavius’s desk.
Octavius asked us for the rundown on what happened at Lover’s Pass. Thankfully, Zack and Maddie did all the talking.
A good speaker, I was not. I was kind of like Yoda without all the cool wisdom.
“Sounds like you had quite a night,” Octavius said, grinning.
“Way better than mine, at least,” Chip added.
Octavius ignored this and went on. “You three handled it all very well. I’m quite proud of you.”
“Thank you, sir,” we all mumbled.
“Oh,” I said, “did you tell him about the worms?”
Zack and Maddie didn’t.
“Worms?” Octavius inquired.
“Yeah, these little colored worms wiggled out of the she-vamp’s eyeballs,” I said.
Octavius gave a little shudder. For the first time, I’d seen him show uncertainty. That properly alarmed me. Octavius was the kind of guy that would laugh in the face of uncertainty.
“Sir?” I asked.
“Hmm,” he mused, bringing a finger to his sharp chin. “I’ll have to take a look, that is if the specimen has not been properly cremated yet.” Then softly to himself: “I’m sure it’s nothing.”
An awkward silence fell over us, one Octavius certainly didn’t take as awkward at all. He was impervious to such feelings.
“Get your thumb out of your ass!” Chip shouted from the bell jar. In the process, one of his ears detached from his rotting face, hung by a thread of dark skin.
“Oh, my,” Octavius said, “you’re right.” He stood straighter, the usual stoicism coming over him and went on: “As you know, Pam and Max are in Pennsylvania helping put the recent Bigfoot sighting under wraps. And the Bateman twins are down in Cincinnati working with the Southern Division. I’m pretty shorthanded here.”
“Whatever you need, boss,” Zack said, leaning forward in his chair with a smile on his face and his hands folded in his lap like a teacher’s pet. Maddie and I rolled our eyes at him.
“Suck up,” Chip muttered. When Zack glared at him, the double-reanimated zombie smiled wide. If you saw that smile, you’d understand why we called him Chip. As with any zombie, once they’re turned, they forget pretty much any semblance of their old life, including their names. And Chip didn’t remember much, either. Sometimes, he said he had feelings of his old life, images, random smells, as if he were suffering from a constant stroke. He was once a black dude, though his skin had rotten mostly off, and now he was mostly red and gray-ish. To me, he sounded like a New Yawker with a Brooklyn way of saying things. I liked to give him a backstory whenever I saw him. Tonight when I wasn’t thinking of tentacles or eye-worms, I was thinking about Chip flying down to Haiti to help after that terrible earthquake struck there in 2010, where he eventually pissed off a local witchdoctor. The rest was history. Practically wrote itself.
I was thinking about this as Octavius pulled a file out of his desk, set it down with a thud, and said, “A lycanthrope has just escaped Northington Springs.”
I hated lycanthropes—commonly known as werewolves. This might’ve had to do with the werewolf orgy we’d cleaned up on our last job before tonight. But that wasn’t the only reason. If I could relate them to anything in the normal world, I’d have to say they reminded me of the jocks you’d find in any high school or the frat boys from any college. Big, stupid, hairy, smelly, and always a little mean. Especially when the full moon was coming around. These days, though, evolution allowed the worst of them the ability to transform whenever they wanted. Some of them just stayed werewolves for the hell of it. That was okay with BEAST as long as they didn’t hurt anyone. The problem was that they usually did.
Or they excreted their juices on a McDonald’s bathroom floor… Yeah.
“Who is it?” Maddie asked.
The suspense seemed like it was killing her. I wondered if she had the picture of her mother’s new Golden Retriever puppy in mind.
“Name’s Buddy Wolverton. You’ve probably heard of him,” Octavius said. He looked at us, waiting for our inevitable upheaval.
That was another thing about werewolves: They almost always had dog names.
Maddie and I didn’t do anything. Zack, on the other hand, shot up from his chair. “Buddy Wolverton? The Buddy Wolverton?” he said. “The werewolf who’d broken into that hospital and ate all those people about six months ago?”
I was glad Zack had remained calm about this…
“That’s the one,” Octavius answered, motioning Zack to sit back down. “He was due for execution next week. He decided that would have to wait.”
Zack, realizing his outburst was just a little disrespectful, sat down and apologized.
I won’t lie, fear was starting to consume me like Buddy Wolverton consumed a nursery full of newborns. Fear was normal and I was trying the honesty thing, remember? I’d only been at this job for a year. Now I was expected to hunt down a killer werewolf?
But that was what I wanted, right?
I thought so.
Max and Pam had been doing it for fifteen years, and the Bateman twins had been in the game practically since birth, so, like, forty years. Plus there were handfuls of other qualified agents who could do this job. Not for a trio of lowly patrolmen who’d just slain their first vampire.
Octavius must’ve seen this on our faces because he said, “My hands are tied. This is in the Northeastern Division’s jurisdiction, my jurisdiction, and with my best agents elsewhere, I can’t just fold and pass it on to another division. How would that make me look?”
“Stupid,” Chip answered. “Like normal.”
Octavius rapped his knuckles against the glass like an overzealous child might do to a fish tank. Chip’s wild eyes rolled around in his head.
“Hey! Cut it out!” the zombie said.
Octavius ignored him. He was good at that. Then he folded his hands and stared at us. I didn’t know what to say, or if I should say anything at all.
I scratched my head just so I would have something to do other than sit there like a dummy.
“Well?” Octavius asked.
Maddie looked at me and then at Zack. Zack shrugged.
“I’ll pay you overtime, of course,” Octavius said. “Besides, you may not even come upon Buddy Wolverton. He may be halfway to Mexico now.”
“Sold,” Zack said instantly.
Maddie elbowed him.
“What?” He shrugged. “He said overtime, Maddie. I could finally buy that motorcycle!”
“You could buy that motorcycle if you didn’t spend all your paychecks on designer sunglasses,” she said.
“I gotta look good. You know that.”
I leaned forward and waved this little side conversation away. “While they argue,” I said, “I’d like to hear more.”
If I was going into battle, I would need all the intel available on my enemy.
“Ah,” Octavius said, smiling, “smart like your father, Abe.”
“Thank you, sir,” I said. That was nice. A compliment of the highest order.
“Take a look at the file for yourself,” he said.
Zack leaned over and took it from my hands. “Ah, Abe can’t read. Give it here.”
Now Maddie was crowding over and trying for a better look at the file, then I joined the party. Yeah, real saviors of the universe we were.
He opened the file. There was a picture of Buddy Wolverton.
Other pictures in the file showed Buddy’s latest victims. A couple of disemboweled Northington Springs’ guards with their entrails hanging out from their sliced-open midsections, a cab driver without a head, his disconnected arms still clutching the steering wheel, like the cab driver really must’ve had some place to be despite being, you know, dead. The next picture, however, showed the rest of the cab driver, who had mostly been splattered on the back windshield. Jesus Christ. What a night. Vamps and werewolves.
“Ew,” Zack said. “Yuck.”
“Yes, as you can see Buddy Wolverton is very dangerous. One of the most dangerous werewolves this side of the Mississippi,” Octavius continued. He reached in his drawer again and took out a pack of cigarettes. He lit one up with a match, then shook the flame out.
“You know I hate it when you smoke,” Chip said. The head leaned backward and gave Octavius his best stink eye—that said, it was pretty good. “That secondhand smoke isn’t good for my lungs!”
“You don’t have lungs!” Octavius snapped back.
“Well, I don’t like the smell of it!” Chip retorted.
Did his sense of smell even work? I wondered.
Octavius leaned forward, lifted the bell jar up a crack and blew a cloud of smoke inside it. “That’ll keep him busy for a while,” he said.
Chip burst out in a coughing fit. Through the choking hacks, he yelled, “You asshole!”
We ignored this. It seemed the right thing to do at the time. The zombie rights movement hadn’t picked up much steam yet, nor would it ever. Probably.
I moved on to another photo, expecting a gruesome scene, but was instead greeted with a picture of a human man, smiling. He looked normal, exactly how you’d expect someone who didn’t belong in a case file of Ohio’s most notorious werewolf. Except here he was.
“Who is this?” I asked.
Octavius took a break from laughing at Chip fighting through the trapped cigarette smoke and looked at where my finger was pointing.
“Ah, that’s one of Buddy’s old pack mates,” he answered.
“Wait a second,” Zack said, “that guy’s a werewolf?”
“One of the worst, yes,” Octavius answered, speaking as if he were talking of such trivial matters as the weather forecast. “His name is Lucky.”
“Geez,” I said. “They really take the dog name thing seriously, huh?”
All Octavius could do was shrug in reply. “Anyway, Lucky turned Buddy over to BEAST.”
“Yeah,” Maddie said, “in exchange for a lighter sentence. I remember that.”
Maddie was always keeping up on the happenings in the supernatural community. I was glad at least one third of us was.
“While Buddy got the death sentence,” I said.
Octavius nodded. “Now he’s out for revenge… Or so we think. My connect tells me they higher-ups at BEAST are watching Lucky like a hawk, but you know them. They’re trying to watch damn near everything with only two eyes.” He paused and his face went serious. “I think you should start with Lucky. His next anticipated location is in the file. Not far from here.”
“We get Wolverton, we’ll be legends!” Zack said.
“And…we’ll save a bunch of people. You know…the important stuff,” Maddie said.
“Right, right.” Zack turned back to the picture.
Octavius took a drag from his cigarette and asked: “So?”
I looked at Maddie and Zack. They nodded. I nodded. “We’re in,” I answered, looking back to Octavius.
“Good. Let’s take a trip downstairs and we’ll get you set up for surveillance.” Octavius stood up and as he did, he took the bell jar off of Chip. The smoke drifted out and the zombie continued coughing.
“If I had a middle finger you’d be seeing it, man!” Chip said.
Octavius gave him a wink in return.
Out of the office we went.
We turned left at the T-junction. A few goblins ran past us, like they were playing a game of tag. Octavius just chuckled. He liked them.
We passed the evidence room, filled to the ceiling with things confiscated in various supernatural raids and shootouts. Things like witches’ brooms, cauldrons, ghosts in a can, sealed sarcophaguses, petrified swamp creatures’ eggs—that sort of stuff. It smelled like death in there. It was a place I avoided. On the walls of the corridors were paintings, portraits of past department heads. The l
ast person in charge was named Sylvia Blackfoot and she was a legend in her own right. I passed her picture and it seemed that her eyes followed me, never leaving my own. I flexed muscles, stifling a shudder. I was fairly new to the world of monster hunting and supernatural slaying so it always seemed surreal, like I was the star of my own creature feature, one of the old black and white Universal Pictures I’d pop into my straight-from-the-90s VHS player to help me fall asleep.
Then we went through a door after Octavius scanned his badge. It opened with a beep, a green light. The hinges creaked and reminded me of the groaning of an opening coffin.
Inside, however, wasn’t like a coffin at all. It was brightly lit, almost blinding compared to the relative darkness of the rest of the quarters. The armory had been the newest renovation to the place, overseen by Octavius himself.
Imagine the part in the James Bond flicks where Q gears Bond up for one of his spectacular missions. It was a little like that, just not as epic.
We were certainly no James Bonds.
On the walls, locked away behind cages, were pretty much anything one needed to kill a supernatural beast. You had your stakes, your silver bullets, your flamethrowers, your crucifixes, holy water, cloves of garlic, hag stones. Name it, and Earl “Storm” Wallace had it. He was the weapons master, the field trainer, and a man after my own heart with his odd obsession with Wild West movies. Not to mention his endless stories of the past—some of which featured my good old dad kicking names and taking ass. Whenever I was around and had free time, I’d come in and listen until Storm talked himself hoarse.
He was cleaning a heavy pistol with an attached scope when we entered. Looking up, a big smile cracked his old face.
“Abe!” he shouted. “Been awhile, pard.”
I smiled back, raised finger-guns at him, and made shooting noises.
Pew-pew-pew!
I can’t imagine how stupid I must’ve looked, but oh well, he was a friend.
“Abraham, Madilyn, and Zackary here are to search for a werewolf this evening, Mr. Wallace,” Octavius said.
Storm’s bushy gray eyebrows rose on his wrinkled forehead. “Ooh, that there’s a barnburner.”
Fright Squad Page 4
