“Were you recruited by Monster Hunter International shortly after this incident?”
“No. We all got debriefed by some asshole from the government. Monster Control Bureau, actually, but we didn’t know that at the time. We were told it was classified and that any mention of the incident would land us in prison.”
“How did you come to be recruited by MHI, then?”
“The zombie attack wasn’t my last encounter with weird things. I was on a road trip after getting home and…the darkness found me again.”
“Someday you need to tell me that story,” Barb said.
“Someday.” The winged, batlike thing I’d encountered on a lonely stretch of highway, holed up in a rest stop, used some form of psychic manipulation to lure unsuspecting motorists into its lair. It still gave me nightmares. It didn’t just get a look into my mind; I got a look into its, and the cruel malice of the thing shook me to my core. I didn’t like talking about it. “But yeah, that second incident got me a job offer. The first one was hushed up. I don’t even think I’m supposed to be talking about it now, but fuck ’em. Barb here stayed in the Air Force. I went back to Reserve duty after getting home.”
“Are you still in the military?” Cheng asked.
“No, I left the Reserves a couple years ago. Barb just separated. Got sick of the bullshit, just like me.”
Barb shrugged. “So what are we up against here? When Coop called me for this, I figured it was zombies again. Is it zombies again?”
“It would seem not,” Cheng said. “You’ll get a full briefing when we get in. I trust it won’t be anything you can’t handle. Monster Hunter International has a very good reputation, and you worked for them for several years.”
“I’m freelance now,” I said and left it at that.
Cheng actually smiled. “All the better. More money for you.” He pointed ahead to a lonely, rocky mountain in the distance. “That is our destination.”
The sun was sinking toward the western horizon as we arrived at the mine site at the base of a lonely mountain. The China Metallurgical Group Corporation had a sprawling complex in the shadow of that rocky peak, an entire town built to house hundreds of Chinese workers and engineers. The grunt work was done by Afghans from the nearby villages, but few of them were in evidence at the boomtown.
Barb and I found ourselves sitting alone in a conference room, wondering when Cheng was going to get back with our briefing. We’d seen no sign of him for over fifteen minutes and were getting sick of waiting. One wall of the conference room had a flat screen TV, thankfully muted, that was showing the news from China.
“How are things with Amber?” he asked, after a long silence. “You haven’t said one word about her on this whole trip. You guys okay?”
I took a deep breath. “She moved back in with her mom a couple months back. We’re still, you know, married, but I don’t hear from her much. I expect to have divorce papers waiting for me when I get home.”
“Shit, dude, I’m sorry. I guess…well, you guys got married kind of on a whim. You’d known her for what—a week? It was Vegas. It probably wasn’t going to work out.”
Barb didn’t know what Amber and I had gone through together. We weren’t supposed to talk about the incident at the Last Dragon Hotel in Las Vegas, even though the MCB hardly managed to contain that mess. She was younger than me by a few years, a UNLV student who worked at Hooters part-time.
“It’s my fault,” I said glumly. “The company…Monster Hunter International…had me assigned in Seattle. After the, uh, mess in Vegas, I was supposed to go back. Amber didn’t want to pack up and move. She was in her third year of nursing school. I requested a transfer to the Vegas branch. They said no, so I quit.”
Quitting MHI was one of the hardest things I’d ever done. Even more so than the military, I’d considered those Hunters to be my brothers. Being honest, I hated Seattle, and my team leader, Esmeralda Paxton, wasn’t my favorite person (the feeling is mutual, I’m sure), but monster hunting is the best job in the world.
“What happened, then?”
“You have no idea how hard it is to go from monster hunting to working a day job. I found work doing range clearance at Nellis. Decent money, nice and safe, and I was home every night. I guess I wasn’t happy, though, and Amber could tell. We started to fight a lot. She said I wasn’t the same person. She said I shouldn’t have quit my job, and I told her I quit it for her, and she got mad at me for throwing it in her face.”
“Ouch.”
“Yeah. So I started looking for freelance hunter jobs. I…look, people don’t usually quit MHI. It’s a family-owned company. Tight-knit bunch. I couldn’t go begging for my job back, so I looked at the market. Paranormal Tactical out of L.A. is hiring, but fuck those guys. Also, I kind of got into a fistfight with their lawyer.”
“You got into a fight?”
“He was a UFC fighter, I guess. I held my own.” Okay, that was a lie, I got my ass kicked, but Barb didn’t need to know that.
Before I could say anything else, Cheng walked in, followed by two other Chinese. One was a middle-aged man in a plain, tan suit. The other was a very attractive woman, probably mid-thirties, in a tight-fitting business suit. Her skirt was a little short and her heels were a little high for typical office attire. Cheng was still dressed in an olive green shirt and tan cargo pants.
“I apologize for making you wait, gentlemen,” he said. “This is Mr. Wu and Ms. Liu, with the China Metallurgical Group.”
Wu and Liu. Hilarious.
“Thank you for coming, Mr. Cooper,” Ms. Liu said in heavily accented English. “You as well, Mr. Barbarino.” She pronounced Barb’s name as BAR-bree-no.
“I hope you can help,” Mr. Wu said. “Production has all but stopped due to the…the…creatures.”
“Tell me everything,” I said, taking out a notepad and pen, and Wu started to tell his story. Like dwarves, it seemed the China Metallurgical Group had delved too greedily, and too deep, because they stirred up some shit that was now terrorizing the locals. I was shown a cell phone picture of a creature that looked feminine and humanoid, but hideous. Its skin was gray and its eyes were shiny and red.
“Our security personnel managed to wound this one,” Wu said. “We thought it dead, but when we came back later to recover the body it was gone.”
“You didn’t use silver-core ammunition,” I said. “They heal quickly unless you use silver.”
Wu nodded and continued. After the creatures appeared, the Afghan miners refused to work. A local militia had showed up to try to protect the villages in the area from the things that came in the night, with limited success.
“These…things…seem to prey mostly on women and children. Several pregnant women in the surrounding villages were attacked, viciously. They have claws and fangs like steel. They…” Cheng paused, tapping on the screen of his iPad briefly. “Well, see for yourself.”
“Holy shit,” Barb said, looking at the gory mess on display.
My stomach turned. “Jesus Christ, is that…is that what I think it is?”
“I’m afraid so,” Cheng said. “They rip the fetuses out of the wombs of mothers. They have also carried off children. Have you ever seen anything like this?”
Barb looked at me, wide-eyed. “Yeah, have you?”
I frowned. “No, but give me a second.” I retrieved my laptop from my pack and pulled up the monster encyclopedia on there, glad I didn’t erase it like I was technically, legally required to do when I quit MHI. I typed and clicked for a few moments, then turned the laptop around so the others could see. “I think this is what we’re dealing with.”
Ms. Liu turned white. Mr. Wu started to sweat. “What is that…that thing?”
“It’s called an Al. They’ve been reported in Afghanistan, Iran, and as far west as Armenia for centuries. There are several variations on the legend, and as with most monsters, none of the legends quite get the facts right. The Persian legend, for example, says that the Al
have hog- or piglike features, including fur and tusks, but that isn’t the case. What is true is that they attack women, especially pregnant women, and prey on children.”
Ms. Liu looked horrified. “But why?”
I shrugged. “Who the hell knows? I don’t pretend to understand the why of any of this. One legend has it that God created the Al as Adam’s first consort, but he couldn’t deal with her inhuman drama or whatever, and they’ve hated human women ever since.”
“That’s preposterous,” Wu said.
“And yet here we are, talking about monsters that attack women and eat babies. So, what now?”
Wu and Liu looked at each other nervously. Cheng said something to them in Mandarin, then looked at me. “Please forgive my compatriots. This is, you must understand, a touchy subject. Officially, the Communist Party of China denies that the supernatural or paranormal exists. Discussion of such things is, you might say, strongly discouraged.”
“I’m guessing that’s why I’m here and not a Chinese hunter team?”
“Something like that,” Mr. Wu said. “Political considerations. We are…if I may be forthcoming, we are trying to handle this in-house. If production is halted much longer, I’ll have no choice but to call back to China for help, and there might be…well, I’d like to avoid that.”
“I imagine so.”
“Our miners seem to have opened a nest deep beneath the earth, where these things may be coming from. The ground here is full of natural cave systems, and it is not known how deep or widespread they are.”
“If they can travel underground in caves and dig their way out, that would explain how they’re sneaking up on these villages,” Barb said.
Now he was thinking. I’d make a monster hunter of him yet. “I think you’re onto something.”
Cheng nodded. “Agreed. One report said the creatures climbed out of a well in a village several kilometers from here. They only come in the dark of night, and can reportedly move quite swiftly over open terrain. We need you two to find their nest and kill them.”
“Well, we’ll do our best, but that will be a challenge with just two guys.”
“You’ll have the assistance of our security personnel.”
“That’s good,” I said, “but the hard part will be finding the nest.”
“We suspect it’s in one of the caves that connects to our south tunnel,” Cheng said. “It was during the expansion of this tunnel that the creatures first appeared.”
“Wait,” Barb said, looking confused. “You think they were just hiding underground for however long until this mining operation found them? How could they survive down there? Where did they come from?”
“You need to understand…” I trailed off, looking at everyone in the room. “You all need to understand. We are dealing with unearthly forces. They spawn and multiply in dark places. They come from other… realities, other dimensions, whatever you want to call it. Someplace else. They’re not beholden to the laws of nature, and they are not a product of natural evolution. They’re not like wild animals; they are malevolent. They are evil. They seek out people to hunt and kill, and for all that we’ve learned about them we don’t really understand their motivations aside from the fact that they seem to enjoy it. You’ll go crazy trying to wrap your brain around this stuff. Don’t overthink it. All that matters is that they’re mortal, and they can be killed. They feel fear, too, and we’re going to show these things what it’s like to be hunted.” I looked up at Cheng. “I’ll need a little bit of time to get a plan together. I need maps of the mine tunnels, too.”
“We have used seismic refraction and other techniques to map out the cave systems to some extent,” Wu injected.
“Good, I can use those too. Cheng, I’ll come up with a plan with my partner here, and when I’m ready, I’ll brief the security guys that are going with us. Can you be there to translate? Do they speak English?”
“I will be there, Mr. Cooper,” Cheng said. “I’m going with you as well. I have been assigned to protect you. That assignment doesn’t end when you go underground.”
“Okay then, you’ll want to stay for this. Were they able to get the equipment I requested?”
“Most of it, yes,” Cheng assured me. “Including the flamethrower. The silver-cored ammunition was the most difficult item to acquire, I’m told.”
My own gear had been flown to Afghanistan with me. Being on an officially-sanctioned international hunting job made getting certain things through customs more feasible than it would have otherwise been, even if it did entail an ungodly amount of paperwork. Getting the necessary approval from the MCB, the State Department, Customs and the ATF had taken months. “Good. Have a sit-down and let’s get started.”
* * *
If you’ve never been underground, you’ve never experienced true darkness. The mine tunnels, cool and slightly damp, offered no natural light. They were lined with electric lighting for the workers, but in areas that light didn’t reach, the darkness was foreboding. Oppressive. Abyssmal in a way you never experience aboveground.
It wasn’t just the natural unease that comes from being in a deep, dark place. After you hunt monsters for a while, you begin to get a feel for the places they like to lurk in. It’s a combination of experience, subconscious cues, and gut instinct that helps keep you alive. An experienced explosive ordnance disposal technician gets a similar sense for improvised explosive devices and areas where they might be placed.
Long story short, this tunnel was giving me the professional heebie-jeebies. The air was musty, but beyond the natural smells of earth and stone I caught a whiff of something fouler. Just a hint, then it was gone.
The other members of my ersatz monster hunting crew seemed to share the sense of danger as well. Cheng, dressed in fatigues, armor, and sporting a Chinese clone of an M4 carbine equipped with a bright weapon light, seemed calm but on alert. The four Chinese security contractors with him were decidedly out of their element. Three of them were equipped with weapons similar to Cheng’s, and the fourth had a flamethrower with a backpack-mounted fuel tank.
Barb and I were kitted out, too. I’d had us both fitted for new purpose-designed monster hunting armor vests. They didn’t provide the level of coverage that MHI’s suits did, but were lighter, offered you better mobility, and most importantly, were a lot cheaper. They were made of a combination of flexible ballistic and stab-resistant materials, protecting you from claws, teeth, blades, and gunfire. In front and back were hard plates that would stop a .30-06 round, spears, knives, or just about anything else some unholy beastie might come at you with. Over the armor we wore load-bearing vests covered in magazine pouches, first aid stuff, you name it.
We had both brought our personal weapons with us. I scrounged up a few boxes of silver-cored .45 for Barb’s 1911, and I had plenty of the MHI-issue .308 stashed away for my SR-762 rifle. Barb had some kind of high-end custom AR carbine. Both of our weapons were equipped with Aimpoints and bright lights. Our packs were both loaded with explosives, a mix of military-grade Semtex and good old-fashioned TNT, provided by our hosts. They had been a little hesitant to provide it, fearing we’d cause the mine to cave in or something, but I wanted every possible tool in my toolbox.
We were in a huge, semicircular main tunnel, reinforced with wood and steel and bathed in amber lighting. It was easily big enough to drive a five-ton truck down. We were probably almost a mile below the surface now, and the tunnel was still angling downward slightly. Down its center ran narrow-gauge railroad tracks, presumably to haul ore out to the lifts that made the long climb to the surface. The tunnel ended abruptly about fifty meters ahead of us. A truck-sized contraption on steel tracks was parked at the very end. As we came to a halt, the contractors fanned out to provide security from both directions of the tunnel.
“That is the borer,” Cheng observed. “This is where they ceased operations on this tunnel. It was after those things were discovered.”
“There’s nothing here,” Barb
said.
“There wouldn’t be,” I pointed out. “I can almost guarantee they know we’re here. They can hear us breathing and smell us a mile away. They wouldn’t hang around in a well-lit area like this. They’ll be waiting in some dark corner. Keep your eyes open, and don’t forget to look up. Some tunnel-dwelling critters like to drop down on unsuspecting marks from above.”
Barb nodded his understanding. “Where do we go from here?”
Cheng studied the screen of a tablet computer for a few moments. He looked up and pointed. “That way. There is a side tunnel, and an exploratory shaft, that extend off to our right for about a hundred meters. This tunnel ends where the miners found the cave system. They were attacked and fled.”
“Just how many of these things are there?” Barb asked.
“We don’t know,” Cheng admitted.
“Super,” I muttered. “Let’s go then.” I paused as I came to the mouth of the side tunnel. It was smaller, just big enough for three men to walk down abreast, but was pitch-black. “Cheng, what happened to the lights?”
“I don’t know. The last report said that the lights were still…” He fell silent. “Did you hear that?” I had. It was a scratching sound, like claws on stone, coming from the darkened tunnel. Cheng, Barb and I brought our weapons up simultaneously, flooding the tunnel with bright white light.
There were three of them. They scuttled up the tunnel at us on all fours, but froze when the light hit them. Red eyes shined back at us. Their skin was gray and leathery. Black, matted, ropelike hair hung from their heads, accentuating their vaguely feminine features. Each had an unnaturally wide jaw, hanging open in a ghastly smile, filled with pointed teeth. Their hands and feet were tipped with long yellow claws.
Cheng swore in English, which I thought was odd. One of his security contractors screamed. I brought my rifle to my shoulder and opened fire on the closest one. Heavy, silver-cored .308 slugs tore through her. Black ichor splashed on the tunnel walls as she screeched a death rattle. Barb and Cheng opened fire an instant later, their smaller 5.56mm weapons adding to the head-rattling sound of gunfire in the tunnel. Barb fired upward; one of the Al had been crawling up the ceiling like some kind of enormous bug. It shrieked and dropped to the floor as it died. The last one was hit several times, but stood up on its legs and bolted into the darkness.
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