At least I was encouraged by the fact that he hesitated for a moment before saying, “Pretty Julie, good Julie, put down the gun.”
Bubbles of warm happiness shot through me, and my fingers tried to open to release the gun, but I clamped my other hand on it and said, “No.”
I took aim and shot. The shot went wide. I could see the leaves of the tree it went through. I worked the action, wishing I’d gotten something better than a stupid Semmerling, and shot again.
He looked confused. His mind control would have worked if, all the time, in the back of my mind, I hadn’t had an image of Mr. Trash Bags going wild and telling me to be careful. “Ah, well,” Kyle said and somehow his smile managed to be both attractive and repulsive at once. I could see in it the echo of my classmate’s smile, but he seemed to have too many teeth and there was all that saliva, and then I realized his eyes had no white, but were yellow, and there was a vertical pupil. I was sure his eyes had been normal and dark before. He reached out and his hand made contact with the corsage.
Without dropping the gun, I realized there was something to the corsage. It was making me stupid and bubbly. I didn’t need bubbly. I didn’t know what Kyle was, but I didn’t think golden bubbles of champagne happiness were the right reaction to something with bat wings. Even if that was just my stupid eyes acting up.
With one hand I tore at the corsage. I think I expected it to resist me, but it didn’t. It was more like when I grabbed at it to pull it off, I felt like I was a terrible person and hurting someone or something. I didn’t care. I tore it off, threw it at Kyle or at whatever Kyle really was, and he dodged it. And then I realized he had talons, and he was stretching a long-clawed hand for me. “Come on, my dear,” he said. “I’ll carry you inside.”
While he was dodging it, I jumped further away, reached into my purselet and got my glasses. I hate it when Mom is right.
With my glasses on I looked up and almost dropped the gun. Kyle was a monstrosity with snake eyes, this long sinuous body, a tail that ended in a pointy thing, and wings…and were those horns?
He spoke through too large teeth, in this wet slurpy voice, as drool dripped down his chin, “You’ll love what I’ll do to you.”
That was when I shot him. This time with glasses. And I knew I aimed right. The shot went into him like nothing. The bullet didn’t even slow down. I heard it hit a window; at least, I heard glass break and shatter. I hoped whoever was in the house or in the mirror wasn’t coming out.
I worked the slide again, shot again, and then repeated. He drooled and slurped and went into full raving demon mode—what was with demons and bragging about how long they’d been alive and how many people they’d killed?—and I was out of ammo. I backed away, and he pushed towards me. I didn’t know why he wasn’t jumping me, but it looked like he was trying to do something—perhaps command me mentally?—and I simply wasn’t obeying. His face looked like he was both concentrating and very puzzled. In my mind, Mr. Trash Bags jumped up down screaming “BAD PLEASURE EATER WANTS TO EAT CUDDLE BUNNY. NO BAD. CUDDLE BUNNY, SHE’S MADE OF STARS.”
I was sweating, but I felt really cold. I didn’t know exactly where I was, but I knew these houses had huge lots. My only hope was to make it to the closest house. I wasn’t prepared to fight a creature like this on my own. Dad would know what to do. If I got Dad, he’d kill Kyle’s ass, and his family’s too.
“Come on, Julie,” he said. He was making his voice all seductive and stuff. “Sweet, sweet Julie.”
I thought I could glimpse lights of the next house, behind and kind of to the left of the Armistead place. If I just ran forward, towards the house, but not towards the door, it would surprise Kyle enough that he wouldn’t take off after me immediately. And once I was in the middle of those newly planted trees, I could dodge to the right, hit the lawn area, and keep running till I got to the neighbor’s house.
It was worth a try, though I had a feeling I had a snowball’s chance in hell.
But I ran for the track team, and frankly, running is one of those things my family approved of. Sure, we hunted monsters, but sometimes the monsters turned the tables and sometimes what saves you is being able to run really fast. One of the first things my family had taught me was that there was no shame in running away, because if you were dead, you couldn’t fight the monster.
I threw my knife at him, not expecting it to do anything, and even though I turned right away, I could verify that, yep, like the bullets, it just went through him. Right through his heart. He laughed. He clearly had been watching slasher movies. It was that sort of laugh.
I heard it behind me as I ran. I made it to the newly planted trees. Then I heard the sound of leathery wings and Kyle was there, landing between the trees, just a foot from me, “Come on, Julie, you can’t resist my seductive charms. You’re just a little mortal girl. What do you know against someone with centuries of experience? Come on, surrender. I won’t hurt you. And you’ll like it. Ah, your high schools are such fertile hunting grounds for someone with my experience.”
That was when I tried to back up and tripped. I fell next to one of the newly planted trees, and Kyle grinned. He reached over and touched just my ankle, making crazy bubbles of golden happiness burst all through me. Seduction. I remembered there was some demon or other—incubus—whose main power was to seduce you…before eating your willpower and life force.
I read a lot of mythology—one of the things my classmates thought was weird, but it was a tool of the trade.
He was running his hands lightly along my ankle, “Come on, Julie. Give in.”
And even though he had leathery wings and snake eyes, I wanted to obey. Only Mr. Trash Bags was still screaming in my head, and my hand found a metal stake nearby, cool, hard, and sharp. I yanked on it and it came up easily. Really easily. I kicked up and away with my foot. Kyle staggered back. For a moment my mind was clear.
Perhaps what I’d been doing wrong was not the weapons I was using but where I was stabbing whatever it was that Kyle was just didn’t work. Nor did the bullets. And I’d been aiming for the heart.
You stabbed vampires through the heart. There was a reason for this, since the heart was the connecting center that processed the blood they lived on. For an incubus…incubi lived on sex, sexual attraction, sexual seduction, and everything related to sex.
It took me maybe a second to think through this. I brought the spike up and aimed at his groin. There was…it looked like there was a skeleton hand grasping the stake, the part that had been in the ground. I didn’t know whose it was and I didn’t care. I shook the bones off. “I need this more than you do,” I said as I aimed the spike at the center of what would be an incubus’ glamour, right between the legs. This is when Kyle decided to jump on top of me, aided by his little bat wings. I guess if he’d got on top of me, I was cooked.
As it was, I had to reaim and thrust. And then as he fell, gravity did the work and pushed the stake all the way in.
There was a scream, and black blood poured out, and he was on top of me, covering me. He felt cold and limp. It was sort of like being covered in stinking garbage. He did stink, too, like he’d rotted instantly. I crawled from beneath him, gagging and trying not to throw up.
Behind me, the house exploded in screams, too. I ran for the neighbors. I had to call my parents. I just had to.
* * *
“I think he was trying to kidnap you,” my mother said, as I sat sipping hot chocolate, after a bath had gotten me rid of all the demon blood. I could still smell a little demon stink, and Mom said the dress was done for and had put it in the trash. “To use you as a pawn against us. You know, leave me and my family alone or your daughter gets it.”
“But why would he need a pawn?” I asked.
“Because he and his family fed on the life force of young girls. Virgins. You know, the demon thing. So far, they’d been hunting them in the city and bringing them here. All those trees had bodies buried under them. I suppose they thought sooner
or later we’d find out and do something about it. They wanted to have a hostage, so they could continue doing it.”
“It doesn’t explain everything,” I said. It particularly didn’t explain Mr. Trash Bags’ warnings, after all this time. Not that I’d told Mom about them, because one thing was the supernatural and the other just a dumb nonexistent imaginary friend. I still wondered how he knew.
“No,” my mother said. “We might never know why they chose here and now to manifest. And, frankly, why a centuries-old creature would want to attend high school and stalk young girls is not clear. Seems incredibly stupid, even if they feed on virgins. As I said, we might never know. Or we might find out. Sometimes I hate when we find out.”
I did, too. But for a moment, for just a moment, I thought that while the evening hadn’t turned out as I hoped, it had in a way been exciting. Very exciting.
I hadn’t managed to have a normal date, but I’d managed to bag my own monster, and Dad thought there would be a nice bounty on it, given the damage the incubus had done.
Okay, so kissing—I thought of what Kyle had really looked like and gagged—was out, as was dancing. But maybe someday I would find a nice boy who would like to kill monsters alongside my family.
Until then, I could do without the normal. I was a Monster Hunter…born to the trade…and I belonged.
I’m not ashamed to admit Special Agent Franks scares the hell out of me. —A.L.
Hitler’s Dog
Jonathan Maberry
-1-
Drancy Internment Camp
Northeastern France
October 31, 1941
Noah Karoutchi knew that he was walking to his death. No one who had been taken to the commandant’s office had ever come back. Karoutchi had seen other inmates loading bodies onto the back of a flatbed truck and two of those corpses had been in the same bunkhouse with him. Both had been summoned to the office. The math was simple.
It was also there to be read on the faces of the soldiers at the front door and stationed outside of the commandant’s office. Their eyes were dead and promised as much; their mouths wore cruel little smiles. If sympathy had ever lived in such men, it had been hunted down and killed, leaving only husks that moved and spoke and pretended to be human, but which were not. Maybe it was true that everyone in Drancy was already dead in one way or another. The guards and their officers were dead in their souls; the inmates walked and worked, toiled and suffered in a plant that was no doubt their tomb. Death had come to France beneath the crooked black cross of the Nazi machine and it was killing everything.
It was killing the Jews most of all.
Karoutchi knew it and when his family had been rounded up on August 20 of that year, he could feel some of his own life force wither, crack off and fall dead to the ground. When they separated him from his two daughters, his son-in-law, and the little one, Jacob, not even a year old…more of Karoutchi had perished.
Now he was going to see the Angel of Death himself, the camp commandant, SS Hauptsturmführer Theodor Dannecker, the very man who had organized the roundups of French Jews.
Karoutchi was flanked by another pair of smirking soldiers, and they handled him roughly, shoving him where they wanted him to go, slapping him for not knowing the way, making obscene comments about Jews in general and Karoutchi’s daughters in particular. Karoutchi tried to block out their words, tried not to believe the appalling things they said about what had been happening to his girls since they came to the camp. He tried, but hope was as dead here as life itself here in what was surely Sheol—hell, or something as close to it as anyone could possibly imagine.
“Stop here,” snapped one of the guards and emphasized the command with a hard elbow in Karoutchi’s chest. It staggered him and Karoutchi the scientist nearly fell. His body was wasted and weak from small rations and endless hard labor, however the second guard caught his arm and steadied him roughly.
They stood before the closed door of Dannecker’s office, under the eyes of the soldiers posted there.
“Wait,” said one of the sentries, directing that single word to the two escorting soldiers. Then the door opened and an old man dressed in a heavy tweed suit beckoned them in.
“No,” said the old man, “the Jew only. The rest of you wait out here.”
The soldiers hesitated and then nodded. They shoved Karoutchi forward but not before one of them leaned close and whispered in his ear. “Behave yourself or I will feed your grandson to the pigs.”
Karoutchi nearly cried out but the soldiers thrust him into the room. The man in tweed stepped aside to allow the prisoner to enter and then closed the door.
The office was elegant, dark, paneled in hardwood and hung with expensive paintings that Karoutchi was sure belonged to museums or private collections before the fall of Paris. There were two men in the room. One was Dannecker, who sat scowling behind a massive desk. The other was the old bearded man who had opened the door. He was extravagantly bearded, wore wire-framed spectacles and looked amused. Intelligence sparkled in his eyes.
“Sit down,” said the man, indicating a chair that had been placed before the commandant’s desk.
Karoutchi did not move, fearing a trick or trap, but the bearded man insisted and pushed him gently toward the chair. The prisoner lowered himself carefully and perched on the edge. The man in tweed sat on the edge of the commandant’s desk.
“Your name is Karoutchi?” asked the bearded man.
“Yes, sir.”
“That is not a French name. Or a Jewish one.”
“I was born in Morocco.”
“But you are a Jew, yes?”
Karoutchi cleared his throat and mumbled that he was.
“You are also a scientist?” asked the man. “A specialist in bacteria and related fields of research.”
“I was,” said Karoutchi. “I am unable to continue my work.”
He tried very hard not to make his words sound as caustic as he wanted. It would surely earn him a beating.
“Do you know who I am?” asked the bearded man.
Karoutchi shook his head.
“Speak up.”
“No…I mean, no, sir. I have never met you before.”
“Perhaps you have read one of my papers,” said the man. “I co-authored it with my colleague Rudolf Otto Neumann. The Atlas und Grundriss der Bakteriologie und Lehrbuch der Speziellen Bakteriologischen Diagnostik? Ah, I see you have heard of it, as I thought you might. You are also a noted bacteriologist, Herr Karoutchi. I have read all of your papers, including the unpublished one you were writing at the time of your arrest.”
“I…I don’t understand,” said Karoutchi. “The Atlas was written by Neumann and Lehmann, and Dr. Lehmann is dead. He died in January of last year.”
The bearded man smiled and spread his hands. “Do I look dead?”
“But…I…”
Lehmann chuckled. “I have allowed my public persona to perish,” he said, “for the sake of convenience, expedience and security.”
Karoutchi said nothing.
“Because we are colleagues, Herr Doktor Karoutchi, I will be frank with you,” said Lehmann. “You know that the world is changing. Even a Jew who has no history of political involvement must have read the writing on the wall. The Third Reich has risen and we are in the process of creating a new world order. A better one. A cleaner one.”
Karoutchi said nothing.
“You have probably heard the rumors of what happens to those elements of society that have been deemed antithetical to this world order. Gypsies, homosexuals, Jews…Have you heard those rumors, Herr Doktor? Have you heard the talk about extermination camps? About firing squads and gas chambers and incinerators?”
A tear broke from the corner of Karoutchi’s eye and rolled down his dirty cheek.
“Yes,” said Lehmann, “I see that you have. Well, let me tell you, my friend, the rumors, as ghastly at they are, speak only a fragment of the truth.”
Karoutchi stiffened
and stared at the bearded scientist in abject horror.
“We hold this world in our hand,” said Lehmann, “and we will shape it like clay. We will mold it into something new and wonderful. And in that new world there will be no place for the impure.”
“God…” the word escaped Karoutchi’s lips before he could stop it.
“God is on our side,” said Lehmann. “Read your own Torah for proof. He is a vicious, murderous, unstoppable killer and everything God does is to remove the stains from the fabric of the world. Or…that is the propaganda shouted by my friends in the party. Purification is the rallying cry.” Lehmann turned and spat onto the bearskin rug. Dannecker began to rise, opened his mouth to cry out in protest, but he stopped himself. Instead, the commandant cut a wary, frightened look at the old scientist and sat back down. Lehmann slowly wiped his mouth with the pads of his thumb and forefinger. “I am not a political person, Herr Doktor. Like you, I am a scientist. Like you, I have family about whom I care deeply. Like you, I have knowledge and skills that make me—my life—more useful to the Reich than my death would ever be. I even gave them my death because it was more important for me to continue to be alive, even if in secret. Do you understand?”
Karoutchi stared, unable to speak.
“Then let me explain,” said Lehmann. “Having read your papers I know that you are a very talented scientist. Ahead of your time in many ways. Your research into galvanic regeneration of tissues in order to reverse necrosis is astounding work. Had this inconvenient war not interrupted you, I have no doubt that you would have gone on to become one of history’s greatest biologists, on a par with Pasteur, Mendel, Jenner, and, of course, Antoine van Leeuwenhoek. I, too, have had some successes, though sadly most of my greatest work cannot and will never be published. That is a side effect of my involvement in a very secret cabal of top researchers. We are making history every day, Herr Doktor. Every single day.”
The Monster Hunter Files - eARC Page 33
