“I hope not. I didn’t bring my flamethrower.” Milo quickly turned to the sheriff to explain, as if he was embarrassed to be caught without a flamethrower handy. “Rush job. No charter available so we flew commercial. The TSA hates flamethrowers in checked baggage. Actually, long story, but I’m the reason for that rule!”
I looked around. There was a clump of the nasty thistles just across the highway. Most of the prickly things were about four or five feet tall, a couple of feet wide, and chock full of scratchy unpleasantness. The tops were covered in those same bulbous purple flowers. Turning slowly, I realized there were patches of the thistle in every gully and ravine around us.
“They’re camouflage.”
Ed had quit smelling the ground, had wandered over to a patch of thistles about a hundred yards away, and politely raised his hand. I realized that I didn’t know how long he’d been standing there waiting to get called on, but Ed didn’t like butting into human conversations. I walked over to see what he was looking at. The dirt by the fruit stand was packed so hard that there hadn’t been any tracks, but down here the ground was sandier and softer. Ed had found a trail.
The imprint could have been mistaken for a bare, human footprint. It was much smaller than my size fifteen boot. Except the toes ended in sharp points, and there might have been a hook or spur of some kind on the heel.
“Good work, Ed.”
The orc just nodded, then pointed up the ravine. It had gone thataway.
“Any chance you know what this thing is?”
Ed just shook his head in the negative. Then he walked a few feet into the grass and thistle. It raised a cloud of insects. It was so dry that everything just crumpled to dust as he hit it. It made my nose itch.
“Smell…” He didn’t talk much, so when he did, it was probably important. “Little human.” He mumbled something in Orcish. “Girl child.” Ed bent over and picked something up. It was hard to tell, but from his reaction, I think it shook him a bit. He held up his find.
It was a baby doll, new and clean enough that it hadn’t been out in the weather for long.
“Girl drop.” Ed growled. “Monster…carry girl away.”
The creature had taken a kid.
This had just turned into a rescue mission.
* * *
We searched the surrounding hills from morning until the middle of the night. The sheriff offered to bring in the volunteer search and rescue posse, but until we knew what we were dealing with, that might have just given the creature more victims. But we did accept the offer of dogs. Except like Ed’s sensitive snout, they didn’t have any luck tracking the creature by smell either. Ed said that the creature smelled like “dust under sun” which wasn’t particularly helpful.
Lee and Holly joined us. There had been two witnesses to the earlier attacks, but they weren’t much use. The MCB had already given them the intimidation speech to shut them up, so they’d been hesitant to talk at all. It sucks that we’re on the same side, but the MCB’s stupid regulations hinder us from doing our job in a timely manner, which just leads to more witnesses for them to intimidate, which makes their mission harder, but that’s how the system—nominally—works.
However, Holly was persistent and charming—or possibly threatening, I didn’t ask—enough that the witnesses told her what they saw. But they hadn’t gotten good looks. All we got from them was that it was humanoid, around six feet tall, green and yellow in color, and really fast. Now, fast is a relative descriptor, and considering everyone on my team had dealt with vampires, we were a little jaded when it came to the concept of fast movers, but both locals insisted that it was at least track-star-on-steroids speed. And that was when it had been seen leaving the scene, with a belly full of innocent victim, so presumably a little bit on the sluggish side.
We had visited a bunch of houses in the vicinity. There were a few, little, clean and respectable farms, but most of them were poor or run-down, lots of single-wide trailers, even one dude who lived in an old school bus, that sort of thing. Nobody had seen anything. Nobody knew anything. A couple of places no one answered the door. For those I was under the distinct impression that if someone was home they were probably cooking meth, and we weren’t getting paid to get shot at. It was that kind of neighborhood.
We had reserved hotel rooms in town, but I decided we would set up camp in the hills near the fruit stand in the hopes that it would come and attack us during the night. That way we could just kill the thing and get it over with. Sometimes making yourself a target is just part of the job.
* * *
It only got down to about eighty degrees that night, so our camp didn’t get a fire. Milo was a little disappointed, because that man was always looking for an excuse to make s’mores. We set watches, and most of us turned in.
I was too uncomfortable and spun-up to sleep, so I used Google Earth on my tablet, trying to figure out, if I was a monster who had kidnapped a child, where would I be hiding? There weren’t any caves or mine shafts close. We’d hit all the houses the sheriff had known about, but there were a few things on the maps that looked suspicious, like abandoned shacks, rusted-out cars, that sort of thing. So I flagged those. Only for all I knew the critter just slept out under the stars. We were in the desert and it probably needed water to live, but we’d already hit everything bigger than a puddle in a ten-mile circle. But then again, maybe it just drank blood, and that little kid was the equivalent to a canteen. Sometimes the supernatural scoffed at our knowledge of biology.
Lee limped over to join me. I was sitting on the dirt, resting my back against a truck tire which was still uncomfortably warm. He tossed me a water bottle from the cooler. I absently caught it. With a sigh, Lee sank down against the other tire, leg brace creaking. He saw what I was looking at.
“I hate to say it, Z, but we might not be able to save this one in time.”
“Yeah, I know. We’re still going to try though.”
“Damned right we are.” He popped the top on a can of beer. “Eating people is one thing. Eating children offends me.”
“Tomorrow we’ll break into teams of two and hit all these spots. After that we’ll work outward in case this thing can cover more ground that we expect. Any luck on your end?”
“Maybe. I’ve found two times in the last thirty years where heat waves correspond to a higher than average number of people vanishing during the summer. Could be our monster, or it could just be people getting lost and dying of dehydration. But no specific monster legends—American, Mexican, or Indian—seem to match up. There used to be a weirdo separatist hippy cult out here, sun worshippers believe it or not, kept to themselves mostly, but the locals think they all moved away years ago. Maybe they played with some black magic and summoned something? I’ve left a message with the county clerk to see what parcels they used to own.”
“It’s worth a look.”
“It’s a crap shoot.” Lee took a long drink. “I just don’t even know how much I don’t know.”
I put down the tablet and rubbed my face. It was covered in grit and sweat. “Don’t beat yourself up. You’ve been doing good work.”
“It’s a work in progress. I’m collecting every monster story I can, from us, from other companies, Feds…when they’ll talk. Every scrap, tall tale, and sea story, and I’m going to put them all together so eventually guys like us can know what the hell we’re doing. Eventually we’re going to have books of these, ready to go, like a Hunter’s guide of how to smoke anything.”
“Sounds great, Al.”
“Sadly, today is not that day.”
* * *
I didn’t like breaking up the team, especially when we didn’t know what our monster’s capabilities were, but we needed to cover more ground. Flying solo was a great way to get killed, so I settled on teams of two hunters. The sheriff loaned each team a single deputy to act as an escort and to keep us from getting lost. Ed and Milo were on four-wheelers looking for more signs in the hills near the fruit stand
. Trip and Holly would take everything I’d flagged to the north, and Lee and I would take all the flags to the south. We were supposed to check in periodically via radio. Though surprisingly, I was getting decent cell phone coverage out here, too.
It had been a fruitless few hours. We were driving up a steep dirt road toward one of the parcels of land that had been owned by the weirdo church Lee had looked up. Our cop escort was behind us in his 4x4. On both sides of the road were patches of thistles, dying and crinkly, their purple flowers fading.
There was the possibility that this case could be a total bust. If the monster only came out once a decade for a heat wave and the worst was past, it could go back to doing whatever it normally did, and we’d never know. Not every monster hunt ended in a big PUFF bounty and victory party. Sometimes people died, Hunters spun our wheels, and the bad things got away.
I really hoped this wasn’t going to be one of those.
Lee was driving. “I couldn’t find anybody who knew much about these people. They lived off the grid, kept to themselves, that sort of thing. Basically they were creepy introverts, and everybody in town assumed they spent their time doing drugs and dancing naked in the sun.”
“Great way to get skin cancer.”
“They were dedicated. Supposedly they worshipped the sun.”
“That’s some hard-core, old-school religion right there.” And I had once nearly been sacrificed to an ancient squid god, so that was saying something. As we crested the top of the hill, the road dumped us out on a flat spot. It was covered in tall yellow grass and lone thistles standing like sentinels. There was a burned-out wreck of an old barn ahead, but surprisingly there was an RV—which still looked mobile—parked next to it. That hadn’t been on my satellite view.
“An out-of-the-way spot like this, what’s your bet?” Lee asked. “Campers, coyotes, or cultists?”
The RV was an old beater, rusty, dusty, but the tires were still inflated. We parked a hundred yards away and waited for our escort to catch up. It was better to let the local authorities deal with people. We were just contractors.
The deputy parked his truck next to ours. His name was Campos. Young guy, but seemed level-headed and professional. Like Lee, he’d been a Marine, so they had bonded. I didn’t know how much the sheriff had told him about us and why we were here, but he was fired up about our search for the missing kid.
Campos rolled down his window. “Squatters?”
“Beats me. We need to search those ruins for any sign of demonic summoning, but human beings are your jurisdiction, Deputy.”
“Don’t worry,” Lee added helpfully. “If that RV from Breaking Bad is giving you any creepy vibes, I’ve got a machine gun in here I can cover you with.”
“Wildlife, consultants my ass,” Campos muttered as he got out of his truck.
“Your boss said the exact same thing yesterday morning.” I got out, too. Because we were mostly wandering around and talking to people, I was just wearing jeans, a T-shirt, a pair of sunglasses, and two concealed handguns. It was kind of impolite to show up on somebody’s doorstep wearing body armor, not to mention it was too friggin’ hot. Though judging by those claw marks, if we ran into our monster I would probably regret that decision.
Campos walked up the lane. I followed about twenty feet back. Lee, having volunteered to cover us—which actually meant staying in the air conditioning—remained with our rental. The sun was beating down on my head and I was kicking myself for not bringing a hat. It was stupid hot. Sure, our home base in Alabama this time of year was like breathing through a wet sock that had been pulled out of the dryer too early, but this gritty, dusty, no oxygen, standing-in-an-oven feeling, was somehow worse. As we got closer, I could see that the RV had New Mexico plates.
Campos went up to the steps, stood a bit off to the side, and knocked on the camper’s door. It made a hollow metallic rattle.
I kept looking around. There were thistle plants all around us, a few solitary but most in clumps. There was no wind. The plants were still except for the insects buzzing through the stickers. The grass was deep enough that you could hide a lion in it.
The hair on my arms was standing up.
One of the curtains moved in the old RV’s side window. Campos saw it, too. He knocked again. “Sheriff’s department.”
And then one of the solitary thistles moved.
I pulled my .45, but the deputy was between us. I didn’t get too good of a look right then—humanoid, but wrapped in spines and prickly leaves—because it leapt at Campos in a flash, tackling the deputy, sweeping him from his feet. The two of them crashed in a cloud of dust.
They were thrashing and rolling. Claws were flying. The monster wasn’t making any noise. Campos was screaming. Walking forward, I punched my gun outward, focusing on the front sight, monster blurry behind it, but had to wait an agonizing second so I wouldn’t plug the deputy. An arm raised to strike, it lifted its body…and for just an instant I had a clear shot.
The bullet smacked into the monster’s head in a puff of dust. It lurched back. I nailed it twice more before it rolled off.
The door of the RV flew open. I shifted focus, but the woman leaping from the doorway was human. There was no time to see what she was doing, because the monster was moving again. I swung the STI over and opened fire.
It was on its belly, face down, arms and legs splayed wide, claws black as obsidian ripping through the dirt, and it scuttled forward like a crab. I kept blasting. Dust and dried fragments of leaves flew from it.
You can go through fifteen rounds really fast when you’re motivated. The slide locked back empty. As I reached for a new magazine, it lifted its head, displaying an all-too-human face, only with black holes for eyes. It opened its mouth, and inside was nothing but a circle of black spines. It let out an unholy shriek.
There was a chain of impacts as Lee ripped off a burst from his rifle. The first was low, spitting up dust and gravel, the next couple slapped right into the creature, and the last was high, the ricochet making a buzzing noise as it continued down the road. One of those rifle rounds punched a hole through its cheek in a spray of black sap.
I dropped the slide and shot it fourteen more times. Lee kept on shooting, too.
By the time the dust cleared, there was a broken, riddled, oozing husk of a thing lying there. It wasn’t moving, so I went to the wounded deputy.
“Oh man! Oh man!” Campos’ cheek had been sliced open. His uniform shirt was hanging in tatters and the vest beneath was shredded. Everything that had touched the creature had been scratched. That was a lot of damage inflicted in the span of a heartbeat. There was blood running into the sand, but I couldn’t tell where it was coming from. “Oh man!”
“Hang on.” I ripped open the Velcro strap on his vest and pulled it aside. One of the claws had gotten through. I couldn’t tell how deep the laceration down his torso was, but it was bad. I wiped away the blood, saw red muscle through the hole, swore, and then used his vest to put direct pressure on it. “Lee! Grab the med kit!”
The other Hunter had driven the truck up closer, climbed out, and was covering the downed monster with his short-barreled AR-10.
“Hold on. It’s not dead yet.”
I realized that the monster was still twitching. Shit.
Only Lee had already retrieved something else from the truck. There was a hissing pop as the incendiary grenade went off right next to the creature. The prickly leaves it was wrapped in were so dry that they instantly ignited. With a wumpf, the whole thing went up. The intense heat caused the monster to blacken and curl into a fetal ball. That ought to do it.
Lee grabbed the medical bag from the truck and hobbled over. “Did you see the runner?”
There was no sign of the lady who’d bailed from the RV. “What about her?”
“She was carrying a little kid.”
* * *
Campos was all fucked up. We were out in the middle of nowhere. Waiting for an ambulance meant he might bl
eed to death. So we’d gotten the bleeding under control as best as we could, then I carried him to the police truck. Lee put the hammer down, and the two of them were headed for the hospital.
I radioed for help, paused long enough to grab my vest and Abomination from the SUV, and then I’d gone after the kid.
At first I’d hoped that the runner was human, just some regular person minding her own business, when some dudes had started shooting a crazy thistle monster outside her RV, who had grabbed her child and fled in terror…but a hundred yards up the ravine I found the shredded remains of an abandoned sundress, and a fresh footprint in the sand with toes that were way too pointy.
So it was a shapeshifter. Whatever these things were, they looked like people. Or maybe they were people, but turned into something else. Now that I had a second to think about what I’d seen, I wasn’t so sure that it had been wearing plants as camouflage, so much as they had been growing from its body. It was hard to tell though, since it had all happened so fast. Even if I’d had time, I couldn’t have examined the body, since it was still sending up a cloud of oily black smoke below. There was nothing on the tables for this monster, so I would have to request a government PUFF adjuster to figure out the bounty.
Or somebody else would, if this one killed me. Or if I had a heart attack or died of heatstroke up here.
I was breathing hard. The air was too thin. Every shifting, gravel-crunching, rock-slipping, uphill footfall was sending up more dust and dried pollen, which just made it even harder to breathe. My chest hurt from the exertion. I was covered in sweat. Running as fast as I could, I got out of the gully, but stayed parallel to it, hoping that if I stuck to higher ground I might spot my target.
The problem was that there were thistles everywhere. It could be hiding and waiting for me. These things were ambush predators, and I was blundering along after one without a clue. One of the first things we learned in Newbie training was that solo hunting was dangerous. Avoid it whenever possible. Like Earl said, no matter how tough you were, you can only look in one direction at a time. Even if we hadn’t needed to evacuate Campos, with Lee’s bum leg there was no way he could have made it up this rocky mountainside. The smart thing would have been to wait for Trip and Holly. But I wasn’t feeling smart, I was feeling stubborn.
The Monster Hunter Files - eARC Page 2
