Behind me I heard the distinctive schlacking sound of a shotgun. “Move and die.”
I glanced around. It was the greasy-haired, acned barkeep, who kinda looked like a meth dealer.
“We need outta here,” Ben warned.
“Flaming fun on the way,” Laden added, too casual.
I figured that meant they had called in an airstrike on the bar.
“You ain’t going nowhere,” Greasy said.
I was still holding the kids. Greasy was too close to miss and too far away to jump before he fired. Yeah. Murphy’s Law. “Easy there,” I said.
“You killed Collette.”
“You were banging the werewolf chick?” Ben said. “Damn stupid.”
Greasy turned the weapon on him. I leaped away. Laden shot, a three-tap. Greasy fell.
“Now!” Laden shouted. Ben picked up Nomad, Laden the weapons, and we raced away. Overhead, something roared. The ground shook. The air thundered. The U-Haul exploded outward. Heat like a furnace blasted me. I glanced back.
The bar and the U-Haul were gone. The bikers wheeled and roared away.
A helo landed. Medics took over Nomad and the kids.
It’s over. I closed my eyes and remembered to breathe.
In the aftermath, Ben slipped a business card into my palm with the words, “For a good time call…”
I chuckled and checked to see that he had given me his number. I said, “I’ll send you the pics. The bitch is mine.”
“Pleasure doing business with you, Yellowrock. ‘Have Stakes Will Travel.’” My motto. MHI had been keeping tabs on me since they fished me, naked and bleeding, out of the Tennessee River. Interesting.
Before law enforcement showed up and started asking questions, I puttered away from the melee, happy that I had parked far away from the Pig-It-Your-Way. Bitsa and I tootled through Asheville. I called the Dohertys with my promised update, then checked my balance at an ATM. My account had been credited with three kills so far. A good start. Satisfied, I took the road south.
Sometimes, I loved my job.
The US government has a long history of drafting people—and things—into its war against unearthly forces. From what I’ve heard, it is a tough gig. —A.L.
Mr. Natural
Jody Lynn Nye
Bobbie Hubert swung the machete with a practiced hand for the thirtieth or fortieth time; she’d lost count. A swathe of huge, lush green vines fell at her feet, and she stepped over it. While the other soldiers of Detachment Lutefisk carried on hacking at the unnatural growth, she stopped to wipe her sweating and sticky face with the back of her glove. The combat nurse’s ochre canvas trousers and khaki uniform shirt stuck to her body under her black cloth-covered armor, and her braid of brown hair under her black helmet was a wet rattail down her back. Green sap covered their uniforms, ran down their faces and glued their machetes into their gloves. The Huey helicopter that had dropped them in the clearing lifted off behind them, blasting them with gusts of chlorophyll-scented air.
“God, I’m going to dehydrate!” she said. “It’s like being back in ’Nam!”
Ex-Army Captain Carl Pipkin stepped up beside her to yank down a massive, writhing vine. The big-shouldered blond man stomped on it with his heavy, steel-toed boot. The remains shuddered and went limp.
“Wrong color. This don’t look like ’Nam. My mother had a garden every year from the time I can remember. This is the right green for a springtime pea shoot, but it’s a million times bigger than it ought to be.”
A winding tendril from a nearby vine reached for his neck. He hacked it off with a practiced blow and beckoned for Bobbie to follow. The rest of the company kept on slicing away at the undergrowth to clear the roadway to a forty-yard diameter. Under their feet was paved tarmacadam with a white stripe down the middle. According to their briefing, the road and most of the surrounding countryside had been completely grown over in the last four days, an instant jungle in the Le Sueur valley of Minnesota. Check, check and double-check on the jungle. They needed to get it cleared wide enough to create a landing zone from which to bring the hostages out—providing the poor SOBs were still alive.
The vast, fertile countryside around Blue Earth was famous as a growing area for a giant vegetable-producing corporation. Bobbie and most of the others from Detachment Lutefisk lived about thirty miles east in the Twin Cities and their suburbs. She felt another frisson go down her neck. This was the first time they’d been called out on a monster hunt so close to home.
Why am I not in a nice hospital somewhere shaking down thermometers, instead of pruning a road? Bobbie asked herself. But the question had more than one answer, all of them definitive, as far as she was concerned. One: Doctors were assholes who treated nurses, even army nurses, even nurses with decades more experience than they had like ignoramuses. Two: Patients in the hospitals might be nice, normal human beings, or they might be antiwar protesters who felt smug about spitting in the faces of returning servicemen and support staff, most of whom had no goddamned choice about going to Vietnam in the first place. Three: MCB paid a whole hell of a lot better than hospitals or even private care facilities. And God knew they paid head and shoulders above the Veterans Administration for staff. All she had to do was risk her life every time she went out into the field.
And four: They basically had no choice. They all had had to join MCB. It was better than any of the alternatives, and it gave them someone to talk to about their shared experiences.
She felt a chill every time she thought of that first time. The 72nd Mobile Army Surgical Hospital had just been moved into the Da Krong Valley in mid-1972, a stretch of overgrown jungle not unlike the place she was ripping into. The unit was a lot closer to the action than it had been before, meaning that the army unit that ought to have been backing up the marines on the front line was split, half helping to keep the Viet Cong from overrunning the camp and slaughtering the patients and medical staff. One bright moonlit night, she’d been on her way back from the latrines when a company of them burst into the camp. At their head was a saffron-robed monk with a shaved head. This was no peaceful Buddhist. His hands were flying around like he was trying to swat a million bugs. Light lanced out from his fingers, and it fed into a spiky man-shaped thing that grew larger with every bolt. She had been the one to raise the alarm. And somehow they had managed to kill the demon by treating it like a lightning hazard in the camp, something they had had experience with. The monk had gotten away.
But the real problems started when they were cleaning up, mourning over the messy deaths of several of the medics and the support troops in the literal firefight. A company of MCB agents came out of the jungle, prepared to deal with anyone in the MASH who had seen the demon. They’d been so surprised that the servicemen on the ground had disposed of the monster, they had called off the air strike that would have taken out any surviving witnesses to the demon’s appearance. Instead, they offered the few remaining soldiers and Bobbie jobs in the Bureau after their terms of service were over.
At first, Bobbie had turned them down. Then, when they arrived home, she had to deal with the long-haired draft dodgers who spat at them in the streets of St. Paul. She and all the vets suffered mistreatment from all quarters for going to a war they never supported. She had started a job at St. Paul General, then quit after a month. She made the call, as had most of her unit.
The truth was, most of them really liked monster hunting, partly because they never got over the adrenaline rush of being in the war zone. They hated civilian life. They’d been treated badly by the general population, neglected by the government, but they had each other. And someone to shoot at.
All but her, of course. Bobbie’s job description was to stay alive and help the team and any rescuees stay alive, too. If those rescuees weren’t too freaked out by their experience, or if they had seen too much of the reported demon, meaning Captain Pipkin was going to have to make a decision on whether to save them or bring them in for hypnosis, or…triage t
hem. Her heart sank. She hated it when civilians got into the mess. Worry made her hack faster.
“Incoming!” shouted Dwight Johansen. The balding former sergeant from Duluth dropped his machete and dragged his M16 around. “Here comes another bunch!” He fired off a fusillade of shots at the little round green demons bounding over the top of the hedge.
Bobbie crouched down and pulled her own M16 off her shoulder just in time.
Except for their size, the weird little creatures looked like gigantic green peas, nearly perfect spheres except for a sharp little beak. On a pea, that was the sprouting edge. These monsters used it to gouge and tear. Poor Helton, laid out on the ground near the perimeter waiting for a body bag, had his gut split open. Bobbie put a round into a pea bouncing toward her. It spurted thick green goo like a pimple bursting. Bobbie had to fight down her gorge. She looked back over her shoulder.
“Shina! Don’t just stand there! Do something! This ought to be easy for you!”
The michabo gave her a dirty look. The eight-foot, brown-furred rabbit spirit, revered by local Native Americans, didn’t want to be there, since he already had his PUFF exemption, but the bureau must have had enough pull to haul him up out of his burrow for this mission. Bobbie reached for the pistol at her left hip. The hollowpoints loaded in it had their tips filled with salt blessed by a local Ojibwa chief, which she was assured by MCB would keep the unruly demon in line, and take him out if he decided to team up with the monster in the valley. On her right hip was a pistol loaded with cartridges that had the bullets filled with acid blessed by a bishop with magical abilities back in the Twin Cities. That had been an effective weapon against some demons they’d faced. She had to be careful not to get the two confused, but either would have given Shina a serious psychic burn.
“Lightning and thunder curse you, Bobbie Hubert!” Shina snarled, showing a couple of front incisors the size of kitchen tiles.
He leaped into the air, intercepting two of the green peas. With his powerful paws, he smashed them together into paste and went for another pair. Fragments of vegetation sprayed the whole company. Corporal Tom Worth blasted at another pod’s worth that tried to land on the men chopping at the crazy undergrowth.
“Hubert!” the captain barked. “See if you can find anybody!”
Bobbie glanced around. The report had said that the commune where Randy Barlow lived was at these coordinates. It took a while to spot the hand-hewn timbers of the cottages under the mass of creepers. The door of one shack stood ajar. With her rifle leveled to protect against the peas, she and a couple of the ex-noncoms, Fred Loftus and Elmo Blanchard, edged through the undergrowth and pushed the creaking portal aside.
“Hello?” she called. “Anyone in there?”
A narrow shadow toward the rear of the one-room hut rose. A white man with a long, thin face decorated with a long, shaggy brown beard and waist-length hair parted in the middle stared blankly at them. He wore jeans and a chambray work shirt with a long suede vest over it. His face had a patina of grime as if being close to the earth meant smearing it on himself.
“Dammit to hell,” Fred said. “Hippies!”
“Shut up,” Bobbie said. “We’ve got to get him out of here, too. Excuse me, sir, do you know Randy Barlow?”
The man worked his jaw as if he was going to spit at them. Bobbie growled low under her breath. Not again! Then he opened his mouth, shooting a gout of flame toward them. She and the soldiers jumped out of the way just in time.
“That’s new,” she said.
“Easy, fellah! Stand down!” Fred shouted, leveling his M16 at the skinny man.
The hippie bellowed out something incoherent and scrambled for the door, hands outstretched. Bobbie jumped out of his way. Fred and Elmo grabbed for his arms. With surprising strength, the hippie threw them off and shoved Elmo into a rickety wall. Fred, who had been trained in karate, twisted the man’s wrist and flattened him on the ground. The hippie collapsed on the bare earth, sobbing. Smoke curled from his lips. When he looked up at them again, there seemed to be some intelligence behind his eyes.
“Sir, do you know where you are?” Bobbie asked.
“Home,” the man said. “Commune. Oh, God, you’ve got guns! Don’t kill it!”
“We’re here to protect you,” Elmo said, his big dark face sincere. “What’s ‘it’?”
“The earth spirit, man!” The hippie’s face filled with wonder. “The one who made this place burgeon like the Garden of Eden!”
“We’re looking for Randy Barlow,” Bobbie said. “His parents are worried about him.”
“Stonesinger?” The hippie frowned and wrinkled his forehead, as though having a couple of men in armor sitting on his back was no big deal. Fred handcuffed him behind his back and hauled him to his feet. “Last I saw him, he was down by the brook. What’s today?”
“Tuesday,” Bobbie said. “Take us to the brook.”
“God, it’s all so beautiful, isn’t it?” the man said, ducking under a tomato vine thicker than Bobbie’s wrist. She shoved greenery out of her face. She couldn’t figure out how the hippie, who called himself Appleseed, could tell where he was going. Their compasses were going haywire. The only direction they could see for any distance was up. They threshed blindly in Appleseed’s wake. He seemed too out of it to be leading them into a trap, but monsters were cunning. They had enough to deal with from the vines, which kept trying to catch them, but left Appleseed alone. Maybe they thought he was one of them.
“On a smaller scale,” Carl said dryly. He held up a fist. The group halted, weapons at the ready. Carl touched his ear. Everyone listened, but they didn’t have to strain to hear. Loud humming, like a million bees, issued from beyond the wall of greenery. Appleseed started humming in response. Fred flicked him in the arm.
“Wake up!”
“Oh, yeah!” Appleseed said, blinking. “Just got caught up in it, man. Don’t you dig it?”
“What the hell are you and Randy doing here?” Bobbie asked.
“We work for the growers,” Appleseed said. “We got done with the planting a few weeks ago. They pay us for picking all season long. It keeps us closer to Mother Nature than you robots who live in the city.”
“Watch it, pal,” Elmo snarled. “I ain’t nobody’s robot.”
“Not trying to ruin your vibes, man,” Appleseed said pleasantly.
“What does Randy Barlow need to pick vegetables?” Bobbie asked. “His folk records sell millions of copies!”
“He doesn’t need that green when he’s got this, man,” Appleseed said.
Bobbie knew what the others were thinking. If their target had the rest of the commune under its spell, maybe all of Minnesota was in danger.
“How come another monster moved in here?” Elmo asked. “What happened to the Jolly Green Giant?”
“He’s a myth,” the hippie said. “We’ve been chanting, trying to get him to manifest, but this guy turned up instead. He’s green, too. Plants just leap up out of the ground for him. We worship him, man. We’ve got so much to learn from his wisdom!”
“Don’t tell me you’re growing those peas we saw back there!” Carl exclaimed.
“Peas, carrots, string beans, potatoes—everything!” Appleseed confirmed, his face a mask of bliss.
Bobbie blanched. All of them had done the readings on the Green Men of Europe. It was the brass’s guess that this creature was probably related, a demon that gained its power from living things.
Even if they couldn’t see far, they were moving steadily downhill. Under the humming, the trickle of running water came through. Even louder was the sound of chewing. Bobbie spun on her heel to catch Shina hunkered down over a mass of sprouting shoots, munching away.
“Hey! Later!”
“But I’m hungry,” Shina complained, opening his big, dark brown eyes and pasting his tall ears back over his skull to look pathetic.
“Are you sure this stuff is safe for you to eat?” Bobbie asked.
“Wh
at do you care whether a demon gets food poisoning or not?” Fred asked.
“Because I do,” Bobbie said, stung. “Some of the stuff they put on crops is worse than Agent Orange.”
“Hey, we use only organic pesticides and fertilizers!” Appleseed protested. “Mr. Natural wouldn’t have it any other way. We care about the land. You baby-killers don’t get it.”
Bobbie grabbed him by the collar of his filthy shirt.
“We were exposed to that stuff, freak. We do get it, more than you ever will.”
Appleseed recoiled a little.
“It’s cool, ma’am. Our crops are healthy. Come on. You’ll see. Mr. Natural is going to revolutionize organic farming. The future is green, baby!”
The humming got louder the deeper in they went. Tomatoes as big as her head hung among frilled leaves longer than her torso. Asparagus half the height of telephone poles poked up through the undergrowth. Bobbie felt as though she was in the Vietnam jungle, but a lot weirder. She hated having been scared all the time. None of their other MCB missions had made her feel like she was back there again, and she resented the hell out of it.
Carl called a halt again…and beckoned. Lutefisk edged up carefully to take a look.
“Holy flaming shit,” Fred whispered. “So that’s Mr. Natural.”
Bobbie pushed aside the greenery…and gawked.
They had found the source of the humming, all right. In the middle of the fast-moving stream that Appleseed had mentioned, it looked like a tree was growing. The monster stretched green-festooned limbs and hair up to the sky. It swayed from side to side as if it could hear music. On the gigantic trunk at its center was a face with glowing green eyes and a wide, moss-fringed maw. It did look like the living spirit of Nature. If it hadn’t taken over a chunk of the state of Minnesota and engendered killer peas, Bobbie might even have thought it was beautiful.
Around it, dancing and bowing on the banks and right in the water with it were dozens of long-haired men and women. Mud covered most of their bodies, making it difficult to see if they were wearing clothes or not. Bobbie felt disgust. They were abasing themselves before an unnatural creature. Didn’t they have any sense or self-respect? Once in a while, they’d breathe fire on the giant. Instead of hurting it, the flames made the huge creature sprout more leaves. And when it burgeoned, the foliage around it got thicker and taller. Other hippies tended to the enormous plants, digging around pods nearly as large as they were.
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