I Kill Monsters

by Dennis Liggio

  "I just feel like I was being stalked," she said. "It feels like it's about me. But maybe it's not a ghoul."

  "That's possible, I guess," I said. "Or it could be something else that's a lot like them. I'll admit, there's still a lot we don't know."

  "But not knowing anything does make it hard to hunt," said Mikkel. "We'll have to follow you when you go out at night."

  "Oh no," she said, shaking her head, "I'm not going out at night. I will be here at home until I'm safe."

  "That makes it harder, since we don't know where to look for it," said Mikkel.

  "I'll pay whatever I need to for you guys to kill it," said Jessica.

  "We will totally take your money, however," said Mikkel with a smile.

  "We will," I said, "but it's going to be a challenge if you're not out after dark." I paused and turned to my brother. "Well, that decides it. I guess you're going to have to suck it up and go out wearing her clothes."

  Even recovering from tears, Jessica snorted in a laugh. Mikkel simply said, "Fuck you, man. If anything, you're closer to her size than me."

  "In all seriousness," I said to Jessica, "if you're not going out at night, our options are limited. We can follow you during the day, but we'll have less luck."

  "Right now all I do is go to work and come home," she said. "I send out for lunch and I have groceries delivered here. After Tessa's... I am not taking any risks."

  "We'll make sure one of us is following you in the morning and one in the evening," I said, pulling out my pad and pen. "And we'll see what we can do the rest of the time. Where do you work?"

  "I work for Minerva Technics in the Clark Building, Midtown," she said.

  Mikkel whistled in appreciation. The MT logo for Minerva Technics was all over town in advertisements. Big M, little T. No wonder she was pulling in the big bucks.

  "Not that far of a trip," I said. "We'll see what we get with that. How long ago was... uh... how long ago was the incident at the club?"

  "Two days ago," she said.

  I nodded, writing that down. "The police tape will be gone, but I doubt we're going to find anything. We'll check it out anyway." I looked to Mikkel and he nodded. "Is there anything else you can tell us that you think we might need to know?"

  She shook her head. "Nothing I can think of."

  "If you think of more, you let us know," I said putting away my pad and pen.

  "Now, there is one more thing," said Mikkel, "and that's the matter of negotiating our fee..."

  "So what do you think?" I asked Mikkel once we were in the van heading over to the club.

  "Eh, I'm pretty sure she's lying to us," he said.

  "What are you talking about?" I said. "She's clearly scared and needs our help."

  "But I still think she's lying."

  "Why? Everything was plausible. What did she say that was bullshit?"

  Mikkel shook his head. "Little brother, I know you don't do as well with the girls as I do, but after a while, you get a good sense - a radar. She's lying to us. I just know it."

  "Maybe she just wasn't giving you signals that she wanted to fuck, and that threw off your whole 'radar'."

  "No need to be so hostile! It's just a feeling, Szandor, and you asked me what I thought so I said it." He shrugged. "But ultimately, who cares? She's paying us a daily retainer. I mean, fuck, I was so shocked that she went for the daily retainer even after you said it was going to be hard to find anything else. I mean, fucking rich people, yeah? They're awesome! We need to help out more rich people!"

  I laughed. "It is good we're getting paid daily, but I do want to kill whatever's stalking her."

  "I'm still not sure about that," said Mikkel. "She might just be paranoid or have a human stalker. Then she connected it to a random act. Maybe her friend wasn't even at the club and they got accosted by ghouls elsewhere. She could just be playing into that with her paranoia."

  I didn't like the idea of calling bullshit on a client and unlike Mikkel, I didn't think she was lying, but I admitted Mikkel still had a point. She never saw anything. Her friend's death might have been unrelated. However, it was very weird that it happened when her friend wore her clothes. Could that really have just been coincidental?

  "But if ghouls killed Tessa and her boyfriend[11] not at the club," I said, "how did their bodies get near the club? And why weren't they fully eaten? We know ghouls finish their meals unless disturbed and tend to hide the remnants for later."

  Mikkel nodded. "There's a lot that doesn't make sense here, Szandor. We have a daily retainer, but I think she's going to stop paying us before we get anywhere. She'll probably stop before we get a chance to kill anything that gets us our kill bonus. Also, we have a kill bonus now. She's actually going to give us even more money for killing something. Rich people are awesome!"

  As expected, the alley outside Wonderwall, the dance club Tessa and her boyfriend[12] went to was a bust. Mikkel slipped a ten to the employee that saw us in the alley to give us a few minutes to check the place out without any interruption. We saw the remnants of the police tape, but otherwise it was an unremarkable alley. It looked like any other you'd expect out behind a bar, club, or restaurant - we both have worked in similar places. Big dumpster that smelled of alcohol from all the broken beer bottles, check. Random puddles of what we hoped was water or alcohol, check. Dried vomit near the walls, check. Possible blood stains, check - well, not what we'd expect at most, but it helped us locate where the bodies were supposedly found.

  Blood stains are not really something you fake. Somebody bled at that spot. Assuming it was Tessa, that means either she was attacked there and bled all over, or her already bleeding body rested there. We knew some recent crime had been committed there or else one of the club's bar backs had a hell of a bloody nose from picking too much.

  I went over to Mikkel. He was crouched by a manhole cover.

  "They could have come up here," he said. "Easy access."

  I nodded and stared at the manhole cover as Mikkel walked off with his phone. Ghouls liked the sewers, so if they were going to come up out of it, manhole covers were a no brainer. But it didn't answer why. If you're a subterranean dweller who survives mostly on bodies and the occasional live victim, why travel to a loud and densely packed area? Why grab at two struggling victims in a very particular location? Why not find something easier and closer to your usual routine? Vagrants, homeless people, and lone drunks were lower hanging fruit if they were willing to hit the surface for prey.

  My thoughts were interrupted by the sound of Mikkel getting a text; his text notification was "Are you talkin' to me?" from the film Taxi Driver. As I watched him read it, he broke out in a huge gin. "It's two for one day!" he said gleefully, pointing his phone at me, though I had no way to read the message at this distance.

  "What?" I said. I pulled out my phone and checked to see if I had any new texts or emails.

  "Just got a message from Lem," he said. "We have more work tonight! We get to kill some zombies!"

  The Kids Aren't Alright

  There's one other type of request we get. It still falls in the category of monster hunting, but it's not protecting people and it's not saving people. It doesn't usually come through the website, instead it's typically old friends who contact us. It's an uncomfortable thing for them to tell us about and its heartbreaking to hear, so often it's through an intermediary.

  We call those jobs Resting in Peace[13].

  We try damn hard to save people when we can. But we're just two guys and we don't have psychic powers to know where monsters are. People are going to die sometimes, often before we even get involved. It's horrible, but it's true. Many creatures will devour their victims, such as ghouls and sewer gators. But not everything does. Sometimes it would have been better to be devoured completely, such as with Spiders. But that's especially true with zombies.

  Typically, we consider zombies low priority. Good to kill when we can, but they're not as big a threat as other beasties. People have
overestimated their threat due to misunderstanding of the zombie bite. Zombie infection is not nearly as bad as you'd see in movies, and I've seen some crazy zombie movies at Mikkel's apartment. If bites were as bad as movies, I'm pretty sure New Avalon would have been overrun, as well as large chunks of the continental US. Yes, there is a contagion connected to their bite and it can both kill people and create zombies.

  But it's not that bad.

  First off, some people are immune to it. They're flat out immune to whatever the infection is. The zombie virus never takes hold. Of course, they still have an infected bite wound - dude, you should probably get that looked at.

  So let's say you're not immune. You didn't luck out in the zombie survival advantages lottery. You're bitten, but relax, you're not lost yet. The actual zombie infection takes about a week to kill you, which should be plenty of time to get treated. Also, even if you die before that, you might not need to worry about a terrible undeath where your body walks the earth in endless hunger. If you get bitten and die a few minutes later, you're not going to be a zombie[14]. It takes time for the infection to take hold. You won't be a zombie unless you die at least twenty-four hours after the bite. So unless you find yourself trapped post-bite or handcuffed to a sewer great by a now-dead police officer, you're going to see a doctor during that week. You will - the bite hurts and it smells like the worst thing ever. You can't ignore that wound.

  If you're dumb or haven't bothered to look anything up, when you show up at your doctor or the clinic, you're going to tell them some crazy person bit you and the bite hurts. They're not going to believe you when you say zombie, you're going to be uncomfortable saying it, and ultimately it'll be distilled down to "I got bitten." The doctor will nod their head knowingly and gravely, as you sit there confused. Next you'll get about a dozen painful shots in the stomach because they think you've caught rabies. Luckily for you, that actually works and will cure the zombie infection, albeit painfully. We don't know why this works, but we're glad it does.

  Now if you're instead smart, or at least remembered to look on the internet about your newly acquired festering bite wound before hitting up the clinic, you'll find a few websites full of helpful information about New Avalon zombies. I know because we run one of them. Armed with knowledge or at least the phrasing we have provided, you will show up at the clinic and announce that the suspiciously bite-like gash on your arm or leg was actually caused by rotted wood splinters. They may look at you strangely for a moment, since the shape of the wound looks nothing like wood splinters. However, the infection symptoms look very similar to sporotrichosis, a wood splinter related condition. So either the doctor is going to believe you or has surreptitiously treated zombie bite cases before (more common at a New Avalon street clinic, which is what I recommend). You'll get an oral antifungal which will treat the infection. Is the zombie infection actually fungal? We have no idea. I leave that to medical professionals to determine. We can only tell you what works.

  Unfortunately, not everyone is so lucky. For whatever reason, some never get treatment. I still don't know how they ignore the pain. Maybe they died right after that first twenty-four hours. Who knows? But a new zombie was created. If we come across them, we'll kill them.

  For us, they're just another zombie. We didn't know them. But those people had family and friends. Those family and friends may know that their loved one is a mindless undead biting machine, stumbling around sewers looking for the flesh of the living. They are not cool with that. They want to bring rest to their loved one. So they call us to allow them to Rest in Peace.

  We give rest to the dead. If there's a known location or clues to whereabouts, we find their lost loved one's zombified corpse and we destroy it. We can't always burn the corpse, but we can make sure that the zombie's brain is destroyed and that that body is no longer walking, no longer biting. You'd be surprised at the closure this brings their loved ones. I know if Mikkel ever became one of them, I wouldn't rest until I had taken down his zombie. I can understand what it does for others. It's kind of like revenge, and revenge has always been a motivation I understood.

  Mikkel's late night message from Lem was this sort of job. Since we were done for the night on the Ingstrom job, we jumped into the van and rode across town. We were both used to being up most of the night, fueled only by coffee and cigarettes[15]. We arrived back in South Egan to meet out friend Lem.

  Lem was one of Mikkel's friends growing up and he knew very what we do. We met him in the lobby of a New Avalon apartment building. Lem had long dirty blonde hair, somewhat frizzy, and was wearing a Slayer shirt. Next to him was a teenage boy with tears in his eyes. The teen was very pale and thin... almost too pale.

  Lem hugged Mikkel and shook my hand.

  "Whatcha got, Lem?" said Mikkel.

  "Bullshit," said Lem. "Fucked up bullshit." He turned to glare at the teen, who flinched under Lem's glance.

  Mikkel cocked his head. "What's going on?"

  "It's about my cousin Nate," said Lem. I instantly got the feeling that the teen next to him was not Nate.

  "You said on the phone it was zombies..." said Mikkel, trailing off.

  Lem nodded glumly. "Exactly. His mother called me, saying she hadn't seen him in nearly two weeks. She was used to him being gone for a few days, but a week? That had her worried. So I make some calls. Turns out Nate had been into some bad shit. Drugs - and not the good ones. Him and some others from the neighborhood turned the disused basement the landlord never did shit with into a drug den."

  Mikkel sighed and shook his head. "Some things never change in South Egan, eh? But I'm guessing you didn't call us about the drugs."

  Lem shook his head. "If it were just that, I could handle it and my cousin. No, the basement just helped create the problem. It was their place to shoot up, get high, or whatever they wanted in peace. It got known enough that it wasn't just people in Nate's circle. There was a lot of come and go, so nobody noticed if someone just laid down for a bunch of hours. Nobody cared. They were just all laying around, nobody getting too involved with the others."

  "Fuck, someone came in with a bite, didn't they?" I said.

  Lem nodded with a grimace. "Yeah."

  The kid next to him started bawling.

  A sudden fit of anger hit Lem, and he grabbed the kid by the back of his shirt and pushed him forward. "This piece of shit was the only survivor."

  I looked the kid over again. I noticed the needle marks on his arms. No wonder he was pale and thin. He kept his eyes downcast. Tears flowed from his eyes, but his bawling had been temporarily silenced by Lem's push.

  "What's your name, kid?" said Mikkel.

  "Kenny, Kenny Strims," said the kid.

  "I found this piece of shit hiding in his bedroom at his mom's apartment," said Lem through gritted teeth. "He hadn't been out of his room in days. I had to drag his ass out to find out where Nate was. He had been hiding in his room and hadn't told anyone what happened."

  "What did happen?" I asked.

  Lem gave Kenny another push on his back to prompt him.

  "We didn't... we just didn't know," said Kenny. "I didn't know the guy, but we had no reason to care, y'know? People came and went. Everyone was cool. It was just a place to ride it all out, y'know?"

  "Yeah, yeah, we're familiar with the concept," I said.

  Kenny nodded with a frown. "So this guy just gets up. We didn't think much of it. I had come down and was getting ready to leave anyway. But then Zack screams. We turn, and this guy is just biting his shoulder. I was mostly sober, so I freak, but everyone else is still high and movin' real slow. So he bites someone else. His eyes are strange and blood was dribbling down his chin. That's when I realized he was a zombie." He finally turned to make eye contact with us. "I had heard about what you guys do in the neighborhood, so I knew it had to be a zombie."

  "Being our biggest fan isn't going to earn you any points," said Mikkel sourly.

  "I still knew it was a zombie," said Kenny. "And it
... uh... it freaked me the fuck out. I was scared. I didn't know what to do. So I ran out of there as soon as I could."

  "And tell them what else you did," said Lem.

  "I - I barred the door, so that they couldn't get me," said Kenny.

  "And what didn't you do?" prompted Lem, his voice showing his barely constrained anger.

  Kenny hung his head. "I didn't tell anyone about it."

  Mikkel and I both sighed in exasperation.

  "How long has it been, kid?" said Mikkel.

  "Uh, about a week," said Kenny.

  Mikkel rolled his eyes and then turned to curse in the corner, probably doing his best to not yell at the kid. I lacked that tact.

  "You know that you got all of your friends killed," I said, the words coming out in a frustrated growl as I couldn't completely control my anger. "They're dead now. Zombies. Do you understand? You did that."

  Kenny's pale face nodded up and down, fresh tears flowing down his face.

  I looked up to Lem. His jaw was clenched, his eyes hard. He was doing his best to hold back his anger. I found out later than Kenny was eighteen, so not legally a kid anymore and not too much younger than me. Considering all that happened, nobody would have blamed Lem if Kenny had an "accidental" collision with Lem's fist or elbow. Hell, I wanted to smack the kid, and it wasn't even my cousin who got left behind.

  "Do we need him for anything else?" I said to Lem.

  Lem shook his head.

  "Kid, get the fuck out of here," I said. "If you stay around any longer, you're going to get hurt. Get it? And if I ever find out you did anything to get someone hurt again, we'll find you. And you won't like it when we do. Get it? Now get the fuck out of here!"

  By the end of my speech, the control I had over my voice had faltered and I barked out the last of it in an angry rage. The kid bolted as if I had fired a starting pistol. I shook my head as Mikkel rejoined us from the corner of the room he sequestered himself in.