“Dammit,” Elmo said, hacking at the sprouting greens with his machete. “This is probably swallowing our LZ, too!”
“We’ll deal with that when we evacuate our target,” Carl said. “Now, where is he?”
In the midst of the happy, chanting group, Bobbie spotted their quarry. Randy Barlow was a big man, with thick, wavy red hair that he wore in a long braid down his back, like his hero Willie Nelson. He wore only a pair of much-patched blue jeans. His pale skin had been scorched red by the sun, but he didn’t seem to care. He was singing and blowing flames like it was the most ordinary thing in the world.
“Down there, Cap,” she said.
“He’s your priority, Hubert,” Carl said. “The rest of you, two teams, five and fifteen. One moves those civilians out of the way and gets them back to the landing strip. As soon as they’re clear, team two takes out that giant. When the monster’s down, we call for evacuation. And look out for those pods! Got it? Three, two, one, go!”
Prodding Shina and Appleseed ahead of her, Bobbie stumbled down the slope with team one. The whole valley smelled overpoweringly of plants, compost and fireborne halitosis. Bobbie coughed, trying to clear the miasma out of her throat.
“See the humans! They have given their minds over to the giant!” Shina’s squeaky voice was full of scorn.
“Shut up,” Bobbie gritted. “Keep between me and the monster. I have to get Barlow out of there.”
“He’s all right,” Appleseed said cheerfully. “See! He’s doing the dance of life!”
Bobbie edged her way into the circle of dancing hippies. A couple of bare-breasted women joined hands around her and pranced like they were playing London Bridge. Their pupils were pinpoints, probably from the fumes in the air. She took their wrists and tried to pull them apart. They shrieked in fury and shot flames at her. Shina grabbed her by the back of her armored vest and lifted her out of the literal line of fire. The women’s faces softened into idiotic bliss, and they danced away.
“There,” Shina said. “Do not let yourself be trapped again.”
He sounded so smug Bobbie wanted to put a salt plug in his big fluffy tail. Instead, she searched the circle for her quarry.
Barlow frolicked at the feet of Mr. Natural, looking happy and carefree. The monster itself seemed pretty benign. In fact, Bobbie felt a kind of peaceful vibe in its presence. The closer she got to it, the more relaxed she felt.
Why run? she thought. Why not just dance with the others? Her gun was so heavy. A man with long black hair and sharp cheekbones like her maternal grandfather’s reached out a hand to her. Why shouldn’t she dance with him? She started to put the rifle down. Something heavy hit her in the back. Her temper flaring, she spun to level the gun at her attacker.
“That’s twice I have saved your life!” Shina said, tapping one massive foot on the ground. “And are you grateful? No!”
Bobbie glowered at him, but he was right. She had to tap the well of anger she carried to keep from becoming one of the hippie freaks in the circle.
Concentrating, she homed in on Barlow. He tried to take her hands, but she evaded them and hooked her hand through his arm. He smelled to high heaven, and his clothes were filthy and greasy.
“Come on, sir,” she said. “We’ve got to get you home.”
All of a sudden, the beatific expression changed, and his mouth dropped open like a nutcracker’s. Bobbie ducked sideways as flames shot out of the folk singer’s jaws. Her helmet kept her from getting roasted.
All around her, team one was having the same problem with their targets. The hippies wouldn’t go quietly. They were fighting and flaming their would-be rescuers all over the valley. But Lutefisk had had one success with Appleseed. Bobbie needed to break Mr. Natural’s hold over Barlow. As filthy and disgusting as he looked, he was still a human being. As he belted out another stream of fire, she rammed herself up against his chest, hooked a heel behind his foot, and tripped him to the ground. They both fell with a thud.
Fire shot into the air like the top of a volcano. Bobbie held on tightly as he struggled. In a moment, Barlow went limp and started to sob like a baby.
“Come on. You’re okay,” she said, stroking his face.
“Where am I?” he asked. “It was all so beautiful!” He looked up over her shoulder. The giant had stopped swaying and seemed to be listening. It hummed louder than she had heard it before. “What’s that?”
“That’s been holding you hostage for weeks,” Bobbie said. Barlow shook his head.
“Hostage? No! He’s beautiful. He loves us. He cares about us…Oh, God, he’s going to eat us!” Barlow threw her off and frantically scrabbled toward the slope. Bobbie fell heavily to the earth. She turned just in time to see a hand formed of gigantic green branches reaching toward her. She rolled out of its way. The fingers fumbled over the ground, trying to close on her.
“Help me!” she called.
The only ones close enough to hear her were three of the hippies. At the sound of her voice their faces contorted into gorgon masks. They closed in, spewing fire at her. Behind them, Bobbie saw Fred leveling his M16 at their backs, ready to kill them to save her.
“No, don’t hurt them!” she shouted. “They’re still human!”
The massive hand scraped toward her, dislodging rocks and gravel on the sodden riverbank. Bobbie managed to stay away from it, but a fire-breathing woman in a fringe-lined suede minidress wasn’t so lucky. The branches closed around her and lifted her high into the air. She sang a trill of joy that turned into screams as it brought her up above its mouth and dropped her in. Her cries were immediately silenced. Bobbie almost threw up in horror.
Most of the hippies were too busy dancing to notice, but a few of them were looking up when it happened. Their pupils widened, and they froze.
“That could happen to you!” Bobbie yelled. “Come with me! We have to get away!”
Some of them dithered, but at least a couple snapped out of their trance. They stood blinking in confusion.
“Get out!” she shouted. “Save yourselves! Hurry!”
Fred and Elmo ran over and urged them up the hill toward the fast-closing corridor in the mass of vines.
Bobbie was glad to see them escaping. She picked herself up to follow, but she heard more sinister rustling noises behind her. Her voice had drawn the attention of the giant. It came out of the water, hands and even some of its long green hair reaching for her. She tried to climb up onto the shallow bank, but the grass was slippery. She kept falling back.
“Come on, lady!” Appleseed appeared above her on the bank. He grabbed a stone and threw it at the giant. “Bug off, man! She’s trying to help Stonesinger!”
“Yeah!” said a black man with a tan vest just barely fastened around a massive barrel chest. He came running down the grassy bank and took Bobbie’s arm. “She’s good! She wouldn’t harm you!” He dragged her over the rise and onto the slope. Bobbie banged both knees and one elbow on the way up. Appleseed threw more stones. The giant raised its arms to protect the face on its trunk.
With the giant’s attention distracted, one hippie after another started waking up from the trance it had put them into. One by one, they stopped breathing fire at the soldiers. Some of them ran away, but others came to form a chain to get Bobbie up the hillside with her heavy pack. Barlow was at the top.
“Are you okay, ma’am?” he asked. “I dunno what was going on with that thing, but you snapped me out of it!”
“We have to get out of here now,” Bobbie said, urging him toward the narrowing path. “There are more men up there who will take it out, but we have to get clear. We’re going to evacuate you.”
“You heard the lady,” Barlow shouted to his friends. “This isn’t the Eden we made! Come on!”
“Stonesinger, I ain’t going nowhere with the establishment!” a woman in ragged blue jeans protested.
“Lena, they’re here to help,” Appleseed said, gesturing to her. “Come on. We don’t have to believe
in their politics.”
“Well, all right,” Lena said, but she looked doubtful.
They all began to run, with team one behind them, firing their rifles and grenade launchers.
As it lost more and more followers, the giant began to collapse in on itself, screeching like a scalded cat. The pleasant humming turned into a fierce whistle that made Bobbie clap her hands over her ears. It stumbled up the hill after them.
The hippies fled, pulling Bobbie along with them, helping her whenever her heavy boots caught on a root or a rock.
Bobbie was astonished. These weren’t the selfish antiestablishment loafers that she had come to loathe. They were as concerned with her safety as she was with theirs! As Barlow gave her an arm to help her, they heard a ripping noise like boards being torn by saws. Fred pointed.
“The pods! They’re hatching!”
Surrounding the river valley, acres upon acres of pea pods the size of human beings began to split open. From the green sacs, killer peas by the dozen bounded out and began to attack the fleeing people. Bobbie brought her rifle around, potting one huge green sphere after another. Fred and the others loosed off covering fire, backing up the slope. The peas bounded after them. They landed on Fred. He bellowed in pain. Only Shina’s kicks knocked them back. Blood spurted from Fred’s shoulder. He’d been gashed right through his armor. Bobbie ran to support him, with Appleseed on the other side.
“Hold on, Fred,” she pleaded, pressing her hand into the wound to try and stop the bleeding. Warm red seeped over her knuckles and into her sleeve.
“I’m sorry, man,” Barlow said over and over again. “I’m really sorry.”
“Head toward the LZ!” Elmo yelled. “We’ll be right behind you!”
As they plunged into the undergrowth, mortar shells blasted past them. Carl and team two began the destruction of the valley. Their machine-gun fire raked the peas, making them explode in bursts of green goo. The giant staggered as it took heavy fire.
“No, don’t kill it!” Barlow pleaded with the captain. “It’s a natural creature!”
“It’s you or it, buddy,” Carl said, with an unsympathetic glare. “Get out of here so we can save your miserable lives! I’m calling in the air strike and evac helos. How many locals?”
“Nineteen,” Elmo said. Carl barked an order into the big black walkie-talkie radio. Team one herded the hippies in the direction of the rescue coordinates.
Team two filled the air with machine-gun fire and grenades. Two of the men hauled the 3.5 inch M28-1 bazooka forward and loaded a rocket into it.
They could hear the giant only yards behind them. Bobbie glanced back. To her horror, it stepped right over the weapons, stomping one of the gunners into the ground. Carl and the others began firing on it. It let out a shriek that rose into the stratosphere and began laying about itself with all of its limbs. Bobbie could tell it was getting weaker, as more of its human acolytes woke up and smelled the coffee. At thirty feet tall, it was still big enough to cause problems.
It wailed in hunger as it threshed knee-high through the mass of vines, raking up yards of jungle with every step. Dwight Johansen leaped into its way with a bazooka on his shoulder. Pete Jenkins loaded in a round. It blasted into the giant’s trunk, knocking a burning hole in it. It still kept coming.
“You just made it mad!” Elmo shouted. “Dwight, look out!”
Johansen leaped sideways into the undergrowth as the branch-fingers reached for him. Unfortunately, one of the hippies was close enough to catch. He yelled for help as the giant scooped him up and deposited him in its maw.
“All organic,” Fred quipped.
“You’re sick,” Bobbie said. Hot tears burned their way down her cheeks. The man who died had helped her up when she fell.
The roar of helicopter engines was as welcome as a lullaby as the Huey gunships came in from the east. Bobbie waved an arm, hoping they could see her through the jungle. No such luck. The pilots took one look at the not-so-jolly green giant lurching toward them and veered off, coming back around with their miniguns roaring. It stood at bay, swinging at the streams of bullets as if they were mosquitoes. Bobbie held her breath. The thing had fast reflexes. It almost got one of the birds as it came around again. The black craft lifted just in time. The giant threshed after it, heading straight for the crowd of screaming hippies. Bobbie and team one crouched over them, weapons out, hoping they wouldn’t be hit by friendly fire from team two.
From the forest, white phosphorous mortar shells burst on the tree-being’s body, the explosions setting some of it ablaze. It bellowed in fury, but fire didn’t weaken it—it strengthened it. It grew new leaves and shoots with every new canister that hit.
“Stop!” Shina shouted, bounding into the midst of the firefight. “You are making this harder! Kill it but do not use fire!”
“We can’t!” Bobbie said. “We weakened it, but it’s not enough. It’s going to kill us!”
The enormous rabbit clicked his tongue. “And I must rescue you yet again. Oh, well.” He squeezed his eyes and mouth shut and clenched his paws. Bobbie watched in amazement as the eight-foot rabbit became ten feet tall, then twelve, then sixteen. He opened his eyes and grinned down at the nurse.
“Now you see why I am honored by the Ojibwa people,” he said.
With one leap, he bounded into the giant’s path.
The tree-being windmilled to a halt. It was surprised, but only for a moment. It let out a trilling hum, trying to bring the michabo under its spell. For answer, Shina leaped into the air and scissor-kicked it with his huge feet. It staggered backward, then let out a horrifying roar. The hippies at Bobbie’s knee wailed in fear. She wished she could cover them with a solid armored dome.
Shina leaped up again and again, kicking at the giant. It retreated a yard or so with every blow, but the rabbit spirit could not seem to knock it over.
“It is rooted deeply in the earth!” he cried. “Destroy the base!”
“What?” the radio in Fred’s pouch crackled to life. “What’s he saying?”
Bobbie grabbed it and pushed the toggle. “He’s saying, knock the ground out from under it.”
The helicopters must have gotten the word, because all three swung around and came in high. They fired high-explosive rockets into the undergrowth, blowing it into a massive green cloud. Shina and the giant disappeared. All Bobbie could hear was whistling and shrieking and Shina’s war cries and yelps of pain.
Within a few minutes, silence fell. The remains of the jungle settled around them into a three-foot-deep mass of chopped salad. A green haze still hung in the air.
“Well, it’s too bad,” Appleseed said, his expression rueful. “It was paradise while it lasted. I’m gonna miss those six-foot carrots.”
“We’d better get moving,” Bobbie said, reaching for her machete. “Let’s get out to the county road. Someone will pick us up there.”
“I can lead us,” Randy Barlow said. The mud had dried on his reddened skin. “Sorry about your rabbit friend. I’ll write a song about him and Mr. Natural. Holding back on the rabbit part, of course.”
“Why?” Shina asked, appearing through the cloud. He had shrunk down to his normal size. In his paw was a long stick covered with ivy leaves which he munched on happily. The mist began to clear. Here and there an enormous branch, one or another of the giant’s limbs stuck up. “Am I not wonderful enough to be honored in song as I am, without Mr. Natural?”
“You’re all right!” Bobbie cried, beaming at him in relief.
“Of course,” the michabo said, twitching his nose at her. “I am the superior fighter. I am far better than any of you puny humans. I knew you would have to use my strength. You are not fast enough or clever enough to deal with a real threat.”
Bobbie groaned. She couldn’t take it any longer. She took the pistol off her left hip and plugged the rabbit spirit one in his two-foot-wide fluffy tail.
“Ow! You’re a healer! Why did you do that?” Shina bellowed, hop
ping around and batting at the burned spot in his fur.
“Because you’re also more insufferable than any human,” Bobbie said. “I had to. It was the natural thing to do.”
All of us got our start in this business somehow. Sometimes you blunder into your first monster, and other times Hunters are born into it. And in rare cases, both. —A.L.
Sons of the Father
Quincy J. Allen
“Mom’s gonna kick the shit out of us if she finds out,” Kyle Schaeffer hollered over the grumbling dirt bikes.
He and his brother were in the middle of breaking the only Law laid down by their mother from when they were toddlers: never go to the Goblin Hills. No reason was ever offered, only the titanium-clad warning.
The telltale shadows of goblins reached out to them across the Utah desert. A jagged pattern of dusty arroyos spread out before them, pale sandstone layered with ruddy streaks and dark shadows. Kyle lifted his goggles, settling them over the brim of his helmet.
Jared, eldest of the twins by a couple of minutes, twisted the throttle, the scream of his motor echoing across the hills. As the engine settled into a grumble, he turned with a mischievous grin. “Mom can’t kick the shit out of us anymore.”
Kyle raised a dubious eyebrow.
“Not both of us at the same time, anyway.” Jared chuckled, but the doubt in his voice carried the simple truth that their mother probably still had a few tricks up her sleeve. She was that sneaky…and that good. “And besides,” he carried on with more bravado, “we turn eighteen tomorrow. She’d never kick our asses on our birthday.”
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