I Kill Monsters

by Dennis Liggio

  "I'm not even sure what you're talking about," I said.

  "It's fine, it's fine," he said. "You've caught me in a rare mood. It all fell into place earlier. I got it! I have them! So I'm feeling magnanimous and for some reason you crack me up. So what do you think of monsters?"

  I looked over to Mikkel, but he was no help. I turned back to Paulie and just shrugged. "I don't know. They're good at Halloween?"

  Paulie didn't laugh, he just puffed on his cigarette. "But I hear you've seen one."

  I must have looked uncomfortable in my seat, but I said nothing.

  "Didn't you see one when your Mom died?" His voice was serious but he seemed more interested in looking at the cigarette he pulled out of his mouth.

  My pulse raced and my hands clenched. I began to rise from my chair to... I don't know, punch him or something. But Mikkel anticipated my movement and pressed his hand down on my shoulder.

  "What do you think you saw that night?" said Paulie.

  "A murdering bastard," I said through gritted teeth.

  Paulie smirked. "You're not wrong. But did you think he was human?"

  I stared at him, but gave no answer. My lips were tight.

  "How about this? Do you accept the possibility that he might have been something else?" said Paulie. "Something with, oh, say teeth?"

  Those circular rows of teeth flashed through my mind. My pulse raced, feeling the panic and terror I did at the moment I saw that round jaw.

  "Yes," I said.

  "Good! That makes things easier!" said Paulie. He spun in his chair, sticking his cigarette back in his mouth. He opened up a file folder and pulled out an 8x10 glossy photo. He handed it to me. "Check this out."

  I flinched when I first looked at it. It was a black and white photo of a dead man, the black blood on his skin and floor very obvious. The man laid on a white tile floor. Someone had cut his cheek open. I saw familiar rows of circular teeth. He didn't have a jaw that opened up and down. He had a mouth that dilated and constricted.

  "Familiar, isn't it?" said Paulie.

  "Yes," I said, a little stunned.

  "We call them revenants," said Paulie. "Probably the nastiest of all the things I've dealt with. You two are lucky you're not dead."

  "We didn't do too well," I said while Mikkel unconsciously touched the small bandage on the side of his head. "What are they?"

  "They are a problem, even to experienced hunters," said Paulie. "We don't know exactly what they are or where they come from more than any of the others. But how they act? Think vampires. Real vampires. Bloodthirsty alpha predators. They drink blood and are at the top of the food chain. They're really smart too. So they're an opponent that's as smart as you, quicker than you, stronger than you. They're a careless hunter's death."

  "Vampires?" I said incredulously.

  "It's just a name," said Paulie. "You should use revenant. Less associations. People will take you seriously with that name. Maybe. People are not going to take you seriously if you're talking about monsters, to be honest."

  "And yet, here were are," I said.

  "Here we are, yes," said Paulie. "But you wanted to know. You're in my home."

  "Yeah, but I'm starting to believe you," I said, uneasily.

  Paulie smiled. "This is just where the rabbit hole starts, my young friend."

  As I mentioned, Paulie wasn't our mentor. He didn't train us. He gave us information, but that's all. We were only so grateful. If anything, we resented him. He gave us enough information to know what was out there and what really killed our mother. But he didn't give us any help or training. He didn't give us the means to go out and stop it. We could now see evidence of monster attacks in newspapers, but we were still the two kids who couldn't stop the revenant in our home.

  He even refused to hunt the revenant that killed Mom. Despite how friendly I may be with Paulie at times, part of me will never forgive him for that. He didn't even try and then give up after a lack of clues. He flat out refused. We discovered that while Paulie knew a lot about monsters, he hunted them far less frequently than you might have guessed. He tracked and planned, he studied autopsies and theorized, he traced migrations and newspaper reports, but he didn't often go out to hunt. He killed them only if they were a serious risk and the danger to him was minimal.

  I guess what I'm saying is that Paulie was a coward.

  Mikkel didn't appreciate my assessment, but we knew we could usually find Paulie hiding at home pouring over information rather than out on a hunt. He also was moody. I had first met Paulie in a good mood, but he had fearful paranoid moods as well. At these times he wouldn't even allow Mikkel in his apartment, only conversing through the partly open door, the chain still held in place. Paulie was at least unreliable - Mikkel agreed with that.

  Mikkel and I swore we wouldn't be like Paulie. We wouldn't hide while people were dying. If people needed help, we were going to help them. And we had a war to fight. We were going to kill the revenant with the spiderweb scar. And to do that, we needed to train. We needed to hone ourselves into perfect weapons. We needed to become the instruments to avenge our mother.

  We weren't ready when we first started killing monsters. We had intended to avenge our mother first before anything else. But we didn't find that revenant in the first year. Other than his appearance, we had little to go on. We had to wait for him to show up again.

  But then people in South Egan started showing up dead. The cops didn't care. This wasn't the normal violence: bites and claws were shrugged off by law enforcement as animal attacks. But we knew the truth. And we knew that we had to take matters into our own hands to protect the neighborhood, to help the people we grew up with and knew our whole lives.

  The first time... well, it was hard. I'm not going to claim otherwise. We had no clue what we were doing when we tracked them. We made stupid mistakes and the fight was probably the toughest of our whole lives. It was just two ghouls and they had already been wounded - we had tracked them by their blood trail. But we were so out of our depth, so inexperienced, so barely trained that we nearly died taking them down.

  But we survived. And then we kept doing it. Experience teaches more than any knowledge. We got better and better. We refined our methods. We got better weapons, better tools. Our scars and bruises taught us what not to do and when to be cautious. We learned to kill monsters and do it well.

  By the time that revenant surfaced again, we were ready. Or at least we thought we were. I had set an internet alert for any mention of a spiderweb scar or a white scar on a forehead. I got a hit on a New Avalon website that reviewed clubs. There was a user review of the dance club Reckless Abandon in Midtown where someone mentioned "the creepy guy with the scar that looked like a spider's web or something". I tried emailing the girl who posted it, but there was no response. It was at least something to work with.

  With no deaths in Midtown reported recently, that was all we had to go on. We headed down there to look for clues. We found none, but we decided to take pictures of the area at night to see if we got anything. Lem came along to help us out. Paulie claimed he'd try to hack the traffic cameras to get anything, but we didn't expect him to get anywhere with it.

  We spent the weekend taking photos, not going into the club to enjoy ourselves, and looking like creepy stalkers to most of the clubgoers. On Monday we had thousands of digital pictures to go through. Over the course of one very long day, Mikkel and I went through all the photos very carefully. By the end of the day it felt like our eyes were bleeding.

  But we found him.

  It was in a wide of a shot of the club. I saw a figure standing at the lip of the alley. The build looked right, but it didn't have any details of his face. I cross referenced the time with other photos we took around then and found him in another. Mikkel had gotten four hot girls to drunkenly pause for him. I guess he was trying to keep it interesting. But in the back left I could see the same man. And I could see the white web of his scar.

  Mikkel and I ha
d a quick drink at our success, then headed down to the club. It was Monday night, so the club was relatively quiet. But we didn't care about the club, only the alley. The alley went to the back of that club as well as a nearby restaurant, bar, and a now-closed bakery. We knew from Paulie that revenants hunted at night and slept in dark places. While they could get apartments, most liked to sleep underground and hunt in the nearby area. So our amateur guess is that we were looking for train or sewer entrances.

  There were five different sewer entrances in that network of alleys. That also assumed he hadn't come from a few blocks away. We had something, but we still had too many variables. What we did have was dumb luck.

  "This is bullshit," I said with frustration. "We've come this far, but we're still no better off. Total bullshit. What if he has already fled the city again?"

  Mikkel merely shook his head, not wanting to say anything to encourage more of my pessimism.

  "Seriously, what fucking shit is -" I started, but then felt myself yanked backward and a hand clamped over my mouth. I began to struggle, but then realized it was Mikkel, who put a finger in front of his mouth to quiet me. I looked at him wide-eyed but relaxed my body. Then with the same finger he pointed down the alley to the area behind the restaurant, Le Marche's.

  The restaurant was closed by this point, their staff long gone. But we saw a man walk around the corner. He looked left and right, but it didn't look like he saw us. Mikkel had pulled me almost completely around a corner and a dumpster probably otherwise hid our forms.

  The man was about the right build for our mother's killer. The clothes were different and he was wearing a hat, but he moved like that monster. Our doubts were settled when he titled his head, perhaps to check something on top of a building or the position of the moon. The moonlight glinted off his eyes and it told us everything we needed to know. Dark eyes that drained all light, eyes that were alien and inhuman. He was a revenant.

  We hadn't seen the spiderweb scars, but that didn't matter. We knew he was a revenant, he was in the same area - we were positive we had our guy.

  While we were stunned in confirmation, the revenant lifted a manhole cover up with ease, and slipped down it. I was just starting to move when the cover slid back into place.

  "We've got him! Let's go!" I said with excitement.

  "No," said Mikkel.

  I turned back to my brother. "No? He's right there! We have him!"

  "No," said Mikkel. "Have you forgotten everything we learned about hunting monsters? If we go now, we'll lose him. We'll spook him and he'll run. Or worse..."

  "Worse?" I said.

  "Revenant," he said. "Haven't you heard how dangerous they are from Paulie? We need to be very careful. Both to catch him and not to end up dead."

  "Paulie exaggerates," I said.

  "Does he? We've never fought a revenant. Just when Mom died, and that doesn't count. We weren't trained."

  "But we can do this!" I said. "We've fought ghouls, zombies, two rogue Spiders... no revenants or trolls, but we kick ass. We can do this!"

  Mikkel shook his head. "No, not now. We can't just run him down expecting to win. We need every advantage we can get. Tomorrow at the earliest."

  "Tomorrow? He could leave the city before then!"

  "Then we catch him when he comes back," said Mikkel. He ran his hand through the hair he was growing long to cover the scar from that revenant. He always had a reminder of that fight. "Let's be really honest. We're not sure if we're ready for this. We want to be ready, but we might not be. The risks are high. If we try to kill him and fail, he may run and never come back to Avalon. I don't want to take that chance. I also don't want either of us killed. I want him dead, but we need to make sure the risk is worth it."

  "He killed our mother," I said icily. "It's worth the risk."

  "Not if one of us dies doing it," I said. "Look, Szandor, since Mom died, we're all we got. I don't want to lose you. It's not worth avenging Mom if I lose you in this process."

  I wanted to lash out, to make sure he understood my cold anger, to tell him to fuck his sentimentalism, that the revenant needed to die... but I couldn't. A look at him showed the sadness on his face and how much he was right. I had only one family member left, the one who had been there for me my whole life. And I was his only family. I wanted so badly to kill the revenant. But I wouldn't throw away my relationship with my brother over that.

  I turned away from Mikkel and let out a deep breath. "We'll do it your way," I said. "We'll prepare. But we will get this fucker."

  "Oh yes, we will, my brother, we will."

  It was at noon of not the next day but the day after that we climbed down the sewer entrance. I hadn't liked waiting an extra day, but it was worth it for the plan. Assuming it worked. I held our normal flashlight. Mikkel switched on the UV flashlight and shined it on the ground.

  "Jackpot," he said with a smile.

  After seeing the revenant enter the sewers, we hadn't gone home to sleep, we had gone straight over to Paulie's. He was still up, even though it was the middle of the night, since he had been taking amphetamines. He claimed they helped him think and kept him alert, but I think it was an addiction issue. That seems to be something all monster hunters face at some time in their career.

  We got his brain dump on everything he knew about hunting revenants. We had heard it all before, but we wanted it fresh in our minds. We also got his ideas on how to track this particular revenant to find his lair. Besides a few pointers, most of it was useless, especially since Paulie was talking a mile a minute, barely pausing between sentences. We settled for borrowing some specific gear before going on our way.

  Finally we slept. Then we returned to the alley with what we borrowed from Paulie. As much as I'd like to run after the revenant like a lunatic, using my rage and adrenaline to fuel me, I conceded that was a poor plan. We already knew this revenant was faster than us so he could always outrun us. We needed to catch him unaware while he slept, like in the old vampire hunter films. But how to track him back to his lair? This was our main problem and why revenants survived so long.

  This is also why knowing Paulie benefited us. He had the finest in paranoid conspiracy nut technology. Paulie probably had nearly as great security concerns as a revenants, but of course their perspectives were very different. In case Paulie ever thought someone was coming to his door when he wasn't around, he had the perfect thing. And it's that which we used.

  We had sprinkled a powder all around the manhole cover, the rungs of the ladder, and the ground right below the ladder. This was a powder that was mostly invisible to the naked eye and adhered to skin and shoes easily. If the revenant moved through there, he would get this powder on his boots. This powder was highly visible on the UV spectrum. So the revenant would track that powder wherever he went. It wasn't perfect, but it was our best plan. The sewer tunnels were a maze. Just knowing which direction he went would be a huge help.

  So we were overjoyed when Mikkel turned on the UV flashlight and scanned the floor with it. There it was: a breadcrumb trail of UV lights heading off into the darkness.

  We grinned at each other and then began following the trail, making sure to keep our noise to the minimum. Paulie didn't know how deeply revenants slept. While monster hunters have been known to sneak up on them sleeping, sometimes they woke up before the hunters could kill them. We kept our conversation low and tried not to trip over anything.

  While the UV trail was a good idea at first, the farther we got from the ladder the more sparse the particles became. We nearly lost the trail in a few places, but we managed to find it again within a few minutes. We were very lucky that the revenant was adverse to stepping in sewage as we were, or the sewage would have covered all the dust on his feet.

  Mikkel suggested we look out for sewer gators, and I didn't know to laugh or take him seriously. We had always heard around New Avalon that there were gators in the sewers. Having recently learned that zombies and ghouls were in the sewers, gators
seemed plausible. But we hadn't seen any. We saw some floating objects that could have been, but we had yet to see anything to make us believe gators roamed the sewers. But we still mentioned the idea to each other, usually as a joke.

  The trail finally lead us to a door on a side corridor. The New Avalon sewers and train tunnels were full of these small maintenance rooms. Intended for administration, rest, and resupply, they typically contained a small cot, a desk, shelves of materials, and a radio. But once the sewers became more dangerous, they stopped being used by city workers. Now they were mystery surprise boxes for underground explorers. When we open them up, we never know what's inside. Trapped zombies, ghoul nest, lots of rats? All good and dangerous possibilities. We had even started using some as caches for equipment, especially for some of the locations deep down. I was glad we had those caches, because sometimes the sewer and train tunnels seemed an endless maze... which is possibly what Roger Carmichael intended.

  This door was dirty and uncared for, covered with grime. In front of it was a pile of refuse - murky paper, crushed cardboard boxes, and general crap. We'd have to step through it to open the door, but it looked soft enough. It also appeared, from the way it was piled up, that the door opened outward and pushed the pile of trash each time. So I didn't think much of it, other than it would get my already dirty boots even dirtier. I stepped forward.

  "Stop!" said Mikkel. He was clutching the scar on his head. "I have a bad feeling."

  "Crap," I said, pausing midstep. Over our rookie year of hunting, we discovered that Mikkel has a unique ability. Sometimes his scar throbbed and he got a sinking feeling in his stomach. At first he had thought he might be sick or it was just a flare up of the old wound. It wasn't until this happened half a dozen times that we connected the dots. Whenever he gets this feeling, something bad is either about to happen, or will happen if we don't change what we're doing. I keep suggesting he call it his Spidey Sense, but this is one of the few times he has refused to use a pop culture name. I think the pain is more intense than he lets on, so there's no mirth in the subject for him.