The Monster Hunter Files - eARC
Page 28
* * *
“Remember, O most glorious Virgin Mary,” I prayed, reciting the Memorare on my knees with Gutterres at my side, “that never was it known that anyone who fled to thy protection, implored thy help, or sought thy intercession was left unaided. Inspired with this confidence, I fly to thee, O Virgin of virgins, my Mother; to thee do I come; before thee I stand, sinful and sorrowful. O Mother of the Word Incarnate, despise not my petitions, but in thy mercy hear me and answer me. Amen.”
“Amen,” Gutterres echoed. We stood, embraced, then with our prayer still fresh on my lips, we drove in faith, hoping to be led to the evil before us.
Due to the Gift, I’m drawn to the supernatural. This happens regardless of where I travel. I have been led to vampires, sandmen, giant spiders, revenants, and all other manner of creatures from this world and from others. I’ve used this spiritual compass to guide me to lost children, to taken women, and to hiding men. Usually it’s just a tingle that tells me I’m close, and it becomes stronger as I get closer to the source.
The instant we crossed into San Carlos, I knew we were in the right place. This time I didn’t have a tingle. It was more like lightning coursing through my blood—no…through my bones. I could feel them humming inside me. I’d never felt it this way before. I lifted my hands and turned them over and back again thinking that perhaps I would be able to see them vibrating.
At the first intersection in the town, Gutterres looked at me with a cocked eyebrow.
“Try right,” I said.
He turned the wheel and we headed north. Gradually the humming in my bones lessened, and I directed Gutterres to turn around. We proceeded like this for half an hour before Gutterres suddenly sat up slightly straighter.
“We’re getting close,” he said. The Knight of the Secret Guard was full of surprises. One of these days he and I were going to have a talk. Until then, I was content knowing he was on my side.
I’d never felt the presence of the otherworldly like I had at this moment. Whatever this power or entity was, it was calling to me. Gutterres was right: we were very close.
“Let’s go on foot from here,” I suggested.
He pulled to the side of the road at the base of a small hill lined on either side with huge homes. The sky was growing lighter with the approaching dawn, and with it, I could feel the already stifling heat becoming worse with the gulf breeze doing nothing to help. We exited our rental car and again geared up for whatever supernatural power was pulling us towards it. I put on my vest again, belted on my sword, and slung my rifle over my shoulders. The extra mags I could carry were all reloaded, and I strapped an extra pair of long knives to my thighs. A wise man once told me that a man can never have too many knives.
We headed up the hill, drawn by the power. We both instinctively knew which way to go at this point. After a few minutes of walking, we found ourselves at the very top of the neighborhood hill facing a massive home that had been painted orange. It was a standard three-story home where the top floor was the entry and the other floors descending down the hill it stood upon. With its white shutters and ceramic, pleated roof, the home looked like most of the others surrounding it.
But we both knew this was the one.
Even as we stood unmoving in front of the home, I could feel that the power inside was growing. I was done waiting. I was done sneaking. I shouldered my rifle and nodded for Gutterres to breach the front.
Gutterres pulled a flash-bang from a pouch on his vest, pulled the pin, then kicked in the front door and tossed the grenade inside. We waited two seconds for the detonation, then rushed inside.
Three men and a woman writhed on the floor. They wore the dark, generic robes of cultists. I hated cultists. I sighted and put three rounds each into the woman and one of the men. Gutterres took the others. From the hallway off of the main entry room, more cultists began streaming in. They stacked up perfectly for us, and our overlapping fire tore through them like paper targets. Blood hit the walls in rapid bursts. As they fell, I could see a stairwell behind them.
I led the way, Gutterres covering my back. There were two doors on the right side of the hallway, and we kicked them open in turn, laying waste to the cultists inside that were apparently waking up from all the gunfire. I dropped my first expended mag and slammed home a fresh one.
We pushed down the stairs to the second of three floors. Here all semblance of a normal home left. The floors and walls were cracked and completely barren of decoration except for strange symbols painted on every surface. Just looking at them hurt my eyes.
“Fedele, these…these are…” Gutterres looked on in revulsion.
“Symbols of a cult dedicated to the Old Ones,” I finished for him.
“This is bad.”
“Very,” I agreed.
At that moment, there was a faint tremble in the floor beneath our feet. We exchanged worried glances.
“Still think walking into an obvious trap was a good idea?” Gutterres asked.
I spotted another set of descending stairs on the opposite side of the room and pointed to them. “We need to get down there, now!”
I sprinted to their top, my Gift-enhanced muscles taking me there in a heartbeat. I risked a quick glance over my shoulder and found Gutterres just a few steps behind. Good. I had to trust that however he was supernaturally endowed as a Knight, he would be able to keep up. I could feel in my bones—almost a resonance—that we were running out of time until something horrible would happen.
Not bothering to run down the steps, I planted my left hand on the rail and vaulted over and down. Most men would have broken ankles and legs. Those men are weak.
I hit the bottom of the stairs and rushed forward, finger pulling the trigger on my rifle as cultists rose from murky candlelight. Spraying blood was illuminated in my muzzle flashes. A second rifle—Gutterres’—joined the music of my own, as we massacred men and women cultists alike.
When none were left standing, I fired single shots into the heads of any that moved. God doesn’t have mercy for sinners like these, and I do my best to follow His example.
My rifle went dry again, and I realized I’d gone through four mags in the firefight already. I didn’t have many more. I pushed a fresh one into place. Ahead was a closed door with a sickly, guttering yellowish-orange light leaking out from the space under it.
Gutterres, God bless him, stalked forward, holy anger filling him. In two steps he was at a full sprint, and he collided with the door, tearing it off its hinges. I was right behind him. We both pulled up short at the sight greeting us.
The room was long, and both ends were lined with beds upon which rested sleeping forms. I assumed they were the abducted people we had been looking for. A long tube snaked from the back of the head of each individual. My eyes followed the tube from the nearest…
…all the way into a huge portal at the opposite end of the room from which the yellowish-orange light was pulsing.
The cultists had opened a portal into the realm of the Old Ones.
Next to the portal stood a man in robes blacker than midnight. He turned to face us, a small smile on his lips. I recognized the face, though it was impossible. It was the face I saw in my memories of the day in which the monk had turned me into what I am today.
“Hello, my child,” he said to me. “I am so happy to see you. I was assured that you would be assigned to investigate these ‘abductions.’ How pleased I am to see some of my efforts paying off.”
I couldn’t speak. This man was dead. How could he have survived all these centuries?
“Who is this man, Fedele?”
“Fedele?” The monk looked at me with a smile. “Is that the name you chose for yourself after I made you? I approve. Now, I’d love to stay and converse with the both of you, but I must take my leave. I’ve been ordered to have you killed, Fedele. My masters typically don’t care about humanity at all, as you are less than parasites to them. But for some reason they want you dead.” He winked at me. “I suppose maybe th
ey see too much of themselves in you.”
Without another word, he stepped through the portal. As I made to follow him, the abductees in the beds began to move. It looked like what we’d experienced in the cathedral, but their motions were more violent. I looked at the sleeping form closest to me—a woman in her early twenties—and saw her skin rippling. Her face contorted in absolute agony, and her back arched until only her head and heels were on the bed. Then she fell back to the bed, absolutely still.
I took a step closer to examine her, shouldering my rifle.
Her body exploded in a shower of blood and flesh.
All around Gutterres and me, the bodies of the abducted ripped apart in violent geysers of gore. When finally I could see around the carnage, in place of the human bodies were pulsing masses of eyes, flesh, bone, and writhing tentacles. The tubes that had been attached to the heads of the people were still connected to the monstrosities, and now I could see in the pulsing light that the tubes were translucent and fleshy, like umbilical cords.
The question that frightened me more than the things about to kill us was: what were these things connected to?
Gutterres opened up on the nearest monster, the deafening sound of gunfire slapping me back into action. I fired my Templar as fast as I could pull the trigger, punching holes into three of the nearest monsters. At this range, accuracy was a formality, and black ichor spurted from the wounds without doing anything to slow the creatures down.
A tentacle lashed out and wrapped around my leg, then yanked my feet out from under me. I hit the ground hard, and as the tendril tightened around my leg, I felt multiple sharp pains as something pierced my skin. I fired into the seething mass of eyes until my mag ran dry, then reached back and pulled my sword free.
I hacked at the tentacle, severing it. The severed stump flailed in the air, spraying more dark ichor in black arcs around the room. The lifeless piece wrapped around my leg fell away revealing the sharp barbs that had stabbed into me. I got to my feet, looked around, and saw Gutterres with a two-foot-long kukri chopping into the monster nearest to him. One of the things enveloped his hand in a tentacle, pulling him backwards.
I spun in a quick circle, slicing pieces from half a dozen attacking tendrils to give myself a moment of freedom. I unsheathed one of the knives strapped to my thigh and hurled it into the creature closest to Gutterres’ left hand. He pulled the blade free, turned, and yanked it through the tentacle imprisoning his hand.
I dove past one of the monsters just as its face split open into a wet maw of bones and teeth, and brought my sword up and through the umbilical connecting it to whatever was through the portal. From beyond the pulsing glow came a deep, maddening roar of pain.
A monster launched itself at me only to have its movement arrested by the thudding of my knife being thrown back towards me. I lifted a boot and kicked the knife as hard as I could, driving the blade and hilt all the way into the round mass of eye-ridden flesh. It shivered and collapsed. I cut the umbilical from it, eliciting another roar from the portal. This time the portal itself seemed to jitter and stutter.
“Cut the cords!” I yelled.
As I turned to cut another attacking tentacle, Gutterres nimbly danced around another monster and chopped down into the cord snaking from it. I yanked my other knife free and threw it, pinning a tentacle to the wall that was making for his neck from behind. Gutterres spun, pulled the knife free, and threw it back my way, severing the umbilical of one of the monsters before hacking at another one that had paused when the thing beyond the portal shrieked.
Tentacles lashed at me, opening long gashes across my arms and legs. One hit me across the forehead and blood poured into my eyes. I moved on instinct, dodging and cutting with my sword. When I could, I grabbed the knife and would stab into the monsters before throwing it back to Gutterres who would do the same. He looked in worse shape than I, and his movements were becoming slower as fatigue gripped him.
I cut another cord, then another. I saw Gutterres pull a grenade from his vest, pull the pin with his teeth and throw it like a baseball into the open maw of a monster ahead of us by the portal. The mouth closed on reflex, then the grenade detonated showering us with more bits of bone and streams of ichor. Still more monsters came. They took an astonishing amount of abuse before dying. The only thing keeping us alive was supernatural speed and toughness.
With every cord cut, the portal guttered more and more, becoming unstable.
There was another roar of pain and unfathomable anger, and then a massive tentacle, bigger around than our rental car, pushed through the portal.
I grabbed the knife from the face of a nearby monster and threw it at the massive, questing tentacle. It hit point first, but bounced off harmlessly. Gutterres cut another cord, then another before one of the creatures landed a blow to the back of his head that sent him crashing to the blood-and-gore-covered floor, unconscious.
I grabbed a severed tentacle and hurled it at one of the things before it could devour Gutterres, giving me the moment I needed to get close and cut through it from top to bottom with a two-handed slash.
One more umbilical cut. Then one more.
The creatures with their cords removed were now dropping to the floor, twitching. The portal flickered and its edge cut a deep gash into the side of the massive tentacle that was now reaching for me, only a few feet away. I stood over Gutterres’ limp form and cut into another spawn of the Old Ones while keeping the tentacles away.
With one more umbilical cut, the thing reaching through the portal shrieked louder than ever before, and it seemed my head would burst from the sound. The portal shook violently, then with a whoosh, it collapsed, severing the remaining umbilicals. The massive tentacle fell to the floor with an impact like a miniature earthquake.
The other monsters opened their own maws and screamed with inhuman sounds before dropping. Without the umbilical cords, their flesh began melting away until nothing was left but piles of bone.
I looked at those piles of bone and felt something break inside me.
My consciousness was thrown back into the past and I lay there again on the cold, stone floor. The hawk-nosed monk knelt over me, knife in hand. He motioned to the pile of bones behind him and one of his assistants cut a sliver from one. Those bones. I’d always thought them holy. I’d always thought my creation was somehow ordained by God.
The vision of the past collided with the present. The images of those piles of bones meshed and became one. Now I understood the monk’s last words. I suppose maybe they see too much of themselves in you.
I wasn’t made from the bones of a saint, but from the bones of a minion of the Old Ones.
I bent over and retched.
* * *
“I’ve known for a while now,” Gutterres said as we watched the charnel house burn. “The Vatican monitors you like we do Franks.”
“You should have told me,” I said, trying not to think how very similar Franks and I really were…and failing.
“Probably. And then what? What would you have done?”
“I don’t know, Gutterres. For the first time in centuries, I just don’t know what to do.” I glanced sidelong at my friend. “To think I called this a ‘Gift’ all this time.”
“Isn’t it, though?” When he saw my questioning expression he continued, “A gift isn’t what was intended by the giver, but what is done with it by the receiver. Every child knows this, Fedele. Give it time, you’ll figure it out. And I’ll help.”
“You have enough going on with the Secret Guard. You have a house to put in order.”
“Indeed. And I will cast the guilty out like Christ did with the moneylenders in the temple…only with more violence and guns. I could use your help.”
“You want my help? I’m literally an unholy monster. A very, very bad one.”
“I’ll make you a deal,” he said and held out a hand. “You help me with this, and I will help you hunt down that monk. I have faith in you, Fedele.”
“Deal.”
Chad Gardenier was a well-known Hunter in the Eighties and Nineties, and he wrote detailed memoirs about his experiences. The first two have already been released. This is an excerpt from his third volume, which will be titled Monster Hunter Memoirs: Saints. —A.L.
The Case of the Ghastly Spectre
John Ringo
“Is sir in?” Remi asked.
It was winter in England. Most people hate English winters. After two years in New Orleans, I loved the rain and the cold. But it wasn’t weather to leave people on the doorstep. On the other hand…
“Depends on who is calling upon sir,” I said, turning over some notes I’d found regarding the second Dutch expedition to destroy the Indonesian mava. They were internal memos of the Dutch colonial administration. I had to wonder how Oxford came up with them. I’d also had to learn Dutch but, eh, Dutch, Deutsch, whatever.
“They would not vouchsafe their identities, sir, but I would tend to surmise members of Her Majesty’s government,” Remi replied. “Some version of MCB would be most likely, sir.”
“MI4,” I said with a sigh. “Please tell me they made it as far as the parlor and are not on the stoop.”
“I rather considered sending them to the servants’ entrance, sir.” He’d had to nurse me back to health after the beat-down and wasn’t favoring government entities at the moment.
“Show them in, Remi. We’re playing nice with these assholes.”
“Mr. Gardenier,” the lead officer said, shaking my hand. “Senior Officer Gordon and Officer Frye, MI4.”