Grits, Guns & Glory - Bubba the Monster Hunter Season 2

by John G. Hartness

  After about three days, I was ready to climb every wall in the joint. Or I would have if I’d had any strength left. The doc came back in and took out the last of my stitches, remarking on how quickly I was healing. I was just happy to not have to piss in a bottle anymore, and being able to make it to the crapper on my own was a pretty major upgrade. The downside was getting all the tubes and pumps taken out of me meant that I got downgraded from the morphine pump to a couple of Vicodin every four hours. I’m a big dude, and there’s enough blood in my alcohol stream most days to get me by, but it takes more than two little white pills to keep the ouchies away. So I was pretty uncomfortable, and bored, and the only thing saving me from completely going out of my skull was football on TV.

  The rest of the hospital was saved from my boredom by the airing of the college football National Championship game. Some less enlightened people refer to this as the SEC Championship and have some silly idea that the BCS Championship a couple days after New Years has anything to do with determining the best team in college football. I know better.

  So I was laid up in the bed watching Nick Saban’s Crimson Tide whoop up on my beloved Georgia Bulldogs. I’d played in the SEC Championship game ten years ago, and it made my knee twinge remembering the hit that took me out of football forever. But I cussed at the TV just like back in the day when I would watch the games with Jase and Pop and Grandpappy, and I woulda thrown beer cans at the set like we did at the old Zenith in the living room, except all I had was ginger ale and the nurses kinda frowned on my throwing cans around the room. I learned after they started shaving parts of me that didn’t need to be shaved that it was best not to misbehave around the nurses. Especially when Ethel, a 300-pounder with shoulders like a linebacker and face like a pitbull’s ass, told me she’d order me an enema every six hours if I didn’t stop throwing trash around my room.

  The game had just finished up, and I watched Saban take a bath in Gatorade on his way to beat up on the Notre Dame Fighting Irish in that other National Championship game, when in walked a vision of absolute perfection. She wasn’t just a hot nurse, she was the absolute damn stereotypical definition of hot nurses. She was about 5’ 7” with dark brown hair tied up in a bun with just a few wisps of hair trying to cut loose and show you what kind of a wild woman she could be. She had a waist the size of my wrist, hips that swooped out in the kind of curves that get put on road warning signs, and boobs like perfect half cantaloupes, round and firm and high on her chest. I just wanted to thump ‘em to see if they were ripe. She had kinda half-Asian features, with a complexion that you couldn’t really figure out where it came from. And I didn’t care. She wore an old-school nurse’s uniform. No baggy scrubs and Crocs for this hottie, oh hell no. She wore a white miniskirt that stopped just high enough that I could see the tops of her lace stockings, and a top that unbuttoned enough for me to see deep into the valley of the shadow of heaven itself.

  Her name tag said Eisheth, and I figured the poor bastard in the ID office was too tongue-tied to type “Elizabeth.” I woulda been, too. She didn’t walk so much as she slid around the side of the bed, letting her fingers drift along my leg and arm as she did so. I couldn’t take my eyes off her, and Little Bubba was starting to show his interest, too.

  “How are you today, Mr. Brabham?” she purred.

  I looked up into her half-lidded eyes and somehow managed to stutter, “F-f-fine. As a matter of fact, I’m feeling much better now, thanks.”

  “I just bet you are. And I bet I can make you feel even better.” She leaned down to kiss me on the forehead, and the world started to fade into a pinkish-grey haze. I didn’t care what she was going to do to make me feel better, but I was really looking forward to it.

  Then I heard the door open, the lights flipped on bright in my face, and I threw an arm up to shield me from the startling fluorescents. I moved my arm and saw Nurse Ethel looming over me, grinning like a prison guard with a truckload of new fish. “Glad to see me, Bubba?” She grinned down at my erection, and I felt Little Bubba shrink so fast you’d have thought he was a tape measure rolling back up.

  “Where’d the other nurse go? The hot one?” I asked, my voice thick with sleep. Apparently sometime between hot Nurse Elizabeth kissing me on the head and heinous Nurse Ethel coming in, I’d dozed off. Damn Vicodin might be stronger than I thought.

  “What hot one, beefsteak? You think you can’t handle all the lovin’ Ethel’s got for you?” She grabbed her pendulous boobs and gave them a shake. “You’re right, hillbilly, I’m more woman than you can deal with.”

  “That’s right, I need a lot less of a woman than you. A lot less. So where is she?”

  “Where’s who?”

  “Nurse Elizabeth. She was right here.”

  “Bubba, there ain’t no Nurse Elizabeth on this floor. Only Elizabeth I know works in pediatrics.”

  “Well she was right here.”

  “Whatever. Well she ain’t here now, so roll over.” She started to wedge her hands underneath me, but I held on to the rails with both hands.

  “You can take my temperature the boring way, lady. It’ll get you the same results, I promise.” She scowled, but handed me the thermometer. I put it in my mouth, grateful for the excuse not to talk for a minute while I tried to figure out how I’d fallen asleep on Nurse Hotpants. It didn’t make sense to me. I’ve fallen asleep a lot of weird places and been blackout drunk in even more, but I’ve never zonked out on a sexy brunette before. Or blonde. Or redhead, for that matter.

  Ethel finally finished up taking my vitals and left. I watched some more TV, but I kept looking at the door every few seconds hoping my dream girl would come back. I drifted off after an hour of fruitless door-watching and dreamed happy dreams of nurses and sponge baths.

  It felt like I’d only been asleep a couple of minutes when a ruckus out in the hall jolted me awake. It sounded a lot like a bar fight, or a Lynyrd Skynyrd concert, or an average Thursday night in my life, so I figured something bad was going on. I heaved myself out of bed and groaned a little as I reached for my pants. I got mostly dressed, by which I mean I put on a pair of jeans under my hospital gown. My jeans were the ones I’d had on when I was carried in, so they were a little crusty from blood and muddy from the creek, but I still had a pair of brass knuckles in one back pocket and a Buck folding hunter in the other. I stuck my head out the door and came nose-to-nose with a burly security guy. He was almost my size, and usually I would have laughed at the thought of him securing anything against me, but I was still weak as a kitten, so when he shook his head at me and shoved my door closed, there wasn’t crap I could do about it.

  About a half hour later, Ethel came in and flipped on the lights. Her eyes were red and puffy and she had a look on her face like somebody’d shot her dog, or she missed out on the free breakfast buffet.

  “What’s wrong, Ethel?” I tried to seem like I gave a damn and wasn’t just being a nosy bastard.

  “I lost a patient. I can’t really talk about it.”

  “Sorry to hear that. Was it sudden?”

  “I said I can’t really talk about it.” She shot me a look that would have killed an ordinary man. Of course, being run through with a samurai sword probably would have killed an ordinary man, too. So I kept on going.

  “I just thought it might help.” I put on my best “I’m being nice but I still don’t want to sleep with you” face.

  It worked. “It was that nice Mr. Ross from across the hall. He came in for a routine gallbladder and just coded. It was so strange. There was nothing wrong with his heart at all.”

  “That is weird. Did something happen during surgery that could have caused it?”

  “That’s what’s strange. He hadn’t even had surgery yet. It was scheduled for this morning.”

  “And his heart just gave out?” This was sounding less and less like something I could shoot. I was pretty disappointed, to be honest. I’d hoped it would be a cool haunted hospital and I could earn a little Nurse
Elizabeth lovin’ by banishing whatever was haunting the joint. Now it sounded like just another victim of the cheeseburger.

  “Yeah, just poof! And he’s gone. Just like Joey Porter last month. Came in here perfectly healthy to get his appendix out and rolled out two days later cold as they come.” Ethel whimpered and cried her way through checking my temperature and blood pressure, but I stopped paying attention. Two healthy dudes dropping dead in one hospital in one month sounded like the kinda thing I was back to interested in.

  A few minutes later, I had Ethel out the door and was on the phone to Skeeter. He picked up after a bunch of rings, a couple of straight-to-voicemails, and about seven text messages.

  “Do you have any idea what time it is, Bubba?”

  “No. What time is it?” I really didn’t have any idea, except that it was probably pretty late. Or early. One of those.

  “I don’t damn know, you dumbass sasquatch! Now please tell me you did not just wake me up to ask me what time it is when you have a perfectly good clock right there on your cell phone.”

  I took a minute to look at the phone before I answered. “It’s 4:30 in the morning. And that’s not why I called. I need you to do some research. People are dying here, and I think we need to do something about it.”

  “Bubba,” Skeeter spoke very slowly, like when you’re talking to a little kid or somebody that’s not too bright. He uses that tone with me a lot. “Did you notice exactly where you are?”

  “Yeah, Skeeter. I’m in a hospital.”

  “Do you know what happens in a hospital?”

  “Yeah, I know what happens in a hospital. People get operated on and sick people come here to get better.”

  “Do you know what is in the basement of a hospital? That’s right—the morgue! Because sometimes that whole ‘getting better’ thing doesn’t work out so good. And when that happens, people die. Bubba, you are probably laying in the home to the greatest number of fatalities in the Atlanta Metro area.”

  “Except for the Georgia Tech football stadium. ‘Cause all their dreams died the day they joined the ACC.”

  “That’s funny, but not relevant, Bubba. The point is, you’re in a hospital. People die in hospitals. Some of them go there expressly for that reason. So the idea of people dying in a hospital does not impress me.”

  “Not even when they’re healthy people in for routine surgeries that suddenly drop dead of heart attacks?”

  “When heart attacks kill over half a million people every year, then no! Not even then. I’m hanging up now. I just spent the evening caroling with a bunch of old white Baptist people, and you know that makes me break out in hives. And tomorrow I have to go chase down some dumbass unemployed choir director that might just be playing Frankenstein all over Georgia. I told you I hooked your iPad up to my network, so do your own damn research. Hell, if I can’t find out anything on my guy, I’m probably gonna be callin’ you.” There was a click, then nothing as Skeeter hung up on me.

  I couldn’t get back to sleep, so I pulled out Skeeter’s iPad and started poking around on the internet. Contrary to popular belief, I had used a computer for more than surfing porn before, so it didn’t take me too long to find what I was looking for. Over the past year, my hospital had a very slightly above average number of deaths, about one every week. That wasn’t enough to set my Spidey-sense tingling, it was the consistency. It only made sense that some hospitals would have a clump of dead guys one week, and a lot less or even none the next. My hospital never had a week without at least one corpse turning up. So I took a look at those weeks that only had one dead guy in ‘em, and that’s when I started to get worried. Turns out that almost every week that there was only one death in the building, it was always a guy between twenty-five and forty-five. And every week for a year, without a single exception, some dude not too far off from my age checked into the hospital and didn’t check out.

  Then I really couldn’t sleep. Finally morning came and I figured it wasn’t too early to call in my other reinforcements. Plus I figured if he was still feeling guilty about me getting stabbed on his account, he wouldn’t argue too much about bringing a ton of artillery into a hospital.

  I was wrong.

  “Bubba, there is no way I am carrying a Mossberg 500 shotgun into a hospital. They have rules specifically against carrying guns into those places, and a tactical shotgun isn’t exactly inconspicuous.”

  “Look, Uncle Father Joe, I wouldn’t ask if it wasn’t important. You know that.”

  “No, I don’t. For all I know they’ve got you so hopped up on Oxy that you don’t know what you’re saying.”

  “You know there ain’t enough hillbilly heroin in Georgia to get me that high. I’m a big dude with a helluva metabolism. Now I’m pretty sure there’s something in here killing otherwise healthy men, and I can’t exactly kill it with a bedpan, now can I?”

  “I don’t know, Bubba. Is it a silver bedpan?”

  “Father you better stick to the prayin’ and leave the comedy to them that’s better suited to it. Now are you gonna bring me some hardware or not?”

  I heard a heavy sigh and what sounded like a muttered prayer for patience over the line. “I’ll be there in an hour.”

  It was more like two hours, but my shopping list was pretty extensive, so I cut Uncle Father Joe some slack. Skeeter’s adopted uncle, Joe, was our liaison to the Holy Roman Catholic Church, who employed me and Skeeter on a lot of our monster-hunting exploits. Not the ones involving my brother, those were strictly pro bono.

  Joe knocked softly on my door and came in, looking around like the guiltiest man in Gwinnett County, not just some priest smuggling guns into a hospital.

  “I’m not really comfortable with this, Bubba,” he said as he set a black duffel bag on the foot of my bed.

  “Me neither, Padre. I mean, we’e known each other all my life and I’m still not sure I trust you in here with me in this sexy gown.” I mooned Joe and he flipped me off. It was a cheap Catholic priest joke, but it broke the ice and got him to quit thinking about committing a few firearms violations just by being in the room with me.

  I yanked out a pair of clean boxers, jeans, and boots and skinned out of the hospital gown. I pulled a XXXL Colt Cabana t-shirt out of the bag and grinned at Joe. “You bring me a pro wrestling t-shirt?”

  “Hey, there was a sale at welovecolt dot com on size super-fatass. And with your tendency to get perforated, I decided to stock up.”

  “Fair enough.” I went back to digging into the bag and pulled out a silver-edged kukri with a foot-long blade. I threaded it onto my belt then clipped on a holster for a nasty-looking black Beretta 9mm. It was a fine gun, a thoroughly effective firearm, but it wasn’t what I was looking for.

  “Where’s Bertha?”

  Joe didn’t look at me for a minute, then he took a deep breath and set his shoulders. “I didn’t bring her.”

  “Why not?” My voice was very low and very calm. Joe knew exactly how pissed that meant I was.

  “You’re in a hospital. You need to be a little more discreet. Or as discreet as possible for someone of your size. And attitude. So I thought giving you a gun that could punch through an engine block might be a bad idea. Those magazines are loaded with blessed silver hollow-points and cold iron. They’re color-coded. Now I have to get back to the church. I’ve got a wedding to perform this afternoon.”

  He turned to go but stopped at the sound of my voice. “It wasn’t your fault, Joe. Jase was coming after me no matter what. He just used you as an excuse. If it hadn’t been you, it coulda been anybody I care about.”

  “But it was me. I’m supposed to be the smart one, Bubba. And I fell right into his trap, and almost got you killed.”

  “Almost don’t count ‘cept in horseshoes and hand grenades. We’re here talking about it, so we’re good. Right?”

  “You want to find out how good, you reach back into that bag. Now try not to get dead.” I could hear the grin in his voice as he walked out
the door.

  I did what he said and reached back into the sack, feeling my fingertips brush against a familiar soft cloth. I pulled a small bag out of the bottom of the duffel and grinned as I read the words Crown Royal across a familiar expanse of purple. Joe had really come through. Guns and booze. All I needed for a real party was a pig in a pit and maybe something to set on fire.

  I didn’t have crap to do the rest of the day except sleep, annoy the nurses, and plan for my evening’s escapades, so that’s what I did. Along with mixing a healthy dose of Crown into my Coke over the course of the afternoon, that is. The liquor burned all the way down and settled around my bellybutton in a nice, slow burn. I watched more crappy daytime TV, then some crappy primetime TV, then it was finally dark enough to go hunting. I got dressed as best I could and loaded up with the rinky-dink Beretta Joe had brought me. He had a point about Bertha’s size and power, and maybe I shouldn’t be running around a hospital with something that could punch through multiple walls and probably a couple of floors of a building. But she was my gun, and that’s the kind of relationship another dude ought never mess with. It’s in the Guy Code, right under the part about not crossing the streams and how to select the appropriate public urinal when faced with multiple choices.

  But I loaded the Beretta up with blessed silver bullets and stuck the paddle holster at the small of my back. Contrary to popular television shows, carrying a random firearm stuck in the back of your belt is a bad idea. And we won’t go into why it’s an even worse idea to carry one in the front of your belt. I try not to carry without a holster if I can help it, and Joe had hooked me up. I made it about five steps down the hallway when I realized I might not be quite as healed as I expected. I was winded like I’d run the stairs back at Sanford Stadium about six times, and sweat was pouring down my face. I saw an abandoned walker stashed off to one side of the hallway, so I grabbed it. I ain’t proud, but I am stubborn. I was going after this thing, if there was a thing, and nothing like a hole in my gut was going to stop me.