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

by John G. Hartness

  It was about another half a minute before the biggest damn Bigfoot I’d ever seen came storming out of that cave, carrying what I thought was a club the size of a small pine tree, until I realized that it was a small pine tree. He swung that thing like he was the real Big Papi and I was a little round ball, and would have taken my head off if I wasn’t quicker than the average bear. Or human, for that matter. I ducked, rolled, and came up with Bertha leveled at the face of what I could only assume was Clag’tin.

  “I reckon you’re the HBIC?”

  “What?” He growled.

  “Head Bigfoot In Charge? Are you Clag’tin?” I asked. Monsters, they have no sense of humor.

  “I am Clag’tin. What are you? You smell like human, but you move strong, like Sasquatch.”

  “I reckon that’s a compliment. I’m Bubba. I shoot monsters. You’re next on the list. Wanna run away now and save me a couple bucks in ammo? There’s a recession, you know.”

  “I know you. You are human that pitiful Brar’kan battled. He bested you, and he is weak. I will kill you and feed your kidneys to my children.”

  “I ain’t done with my kidneys yet, bub, so why don’t we talk about this for a minute, then I’ll beat your head in.”

  “No talk, just fight.” He threw his sapling to one side and stepped towards me, arms out to crush me in a giant bear hug. Or Bigfoot hug, if we’re gonna be all specific about it.

  “I claim challenge,” I said, never moving. He stopped so fast you woulda thought he was in a cartoon and just got hit with Daffy Duck’s Freeze Ray. His eyes went wide, then he laughed, right in my face. And there are not very many things more disgusting than Sasquatch breath, lemme tell you. Watching goblins fornicate will do it, and pretty much any episode of a reality show featuring a Kardashian, but that’s about it.

  “You claim challenge? You challenge Clag’tin for leadership of my tribe? In combat?” He kept laughing, so it took a lot longer to get that out than it should have, but finally he wiped his eyes and said, “I accept!”

  Clag’tin turned to the cave mouth and bellowed, “Challenge has been brought! Clag’tin must kill the human Bub’ba to remain Sheeran-kor!” He laughed again and pointed to me as a dozen or so Sasquatch came out of the cave and made a big circle around us.

  Barry came out of the trees and walked over to me, shaking his head sadly. “Do you have any idea what you have done?”

  “Yeah, I’ve challenged this asshole for the right to be the chief. Now I shoot him a couple of times, he falls down, and I give you the badge. Then I go home.” I was feeling pretty good about myself and my plan. I’d even thought past the first punching part, which was kind of a new thing for me.

  “Bubba,” Skeeter said from my ear. “You are the most impressive example of human stupidity I have ever seen outside the Darwin Awards.”

  “What’s wrong with my plan?” I asked Barry and Skeeter.

  “You issued the challenge to Clag’tin?” Barry asked.

  “Yeah, you saw me. You were standing right over yonder when I did it,” I said.

  “Then he gets to choose the weapons.”

  “So what? I’m pretty good with all kinds of weapons. As long as he doesn’t pick eight-foot saplings, I think I’m okay.”

  Clag’tin laughed again, and I was really starting to dislike that sound. “Then Clag’tin choose unarmed combat! We fight barehanded, human! We fight barehanded to the death! Now come, let my coward cousin Brar’kan watch as I rip you limb from limb.”

  I looked from Barry to where Clag’tin stood butt-naked in a circle of his people, literally salivating at the idea of getting his hands on me. “Well,” I said, “I didn’t see that one coming.”

  “So much of your life can be encapsulated in that sentence, Bubba.” Skeeter’s voice came through far too loud and clear for the moment. “Now what are you going to do?”

  “Well, I ain’t gonna strip naked and wrestle a Sasquatch, that’s for damn sure.” But I did shrug out of my jacket, shoulder holster, and kukri sheaths. Then I peeled off my t-shirt and added the rest of my daggers and brass knuckles to the growing pile of weapons lying useless in the dirt beside my feet. When I was bare to the waist, I stepped forward into the circle of bigfeet (bigfoots?) and rolled my head from side to side. My neck made some scary popping noises left over from college football, and I looked across the bare patch of dirt at Clag’tin.

  He was huge. I mean, “sasquatch” kinda implies a big mother, but this dude was big even for a Bigfoot. It was like Chewbacca mated with the Ultimate Warrior and out came something that was half Tasmanian Devil and half grizzly bear. And all pissed off.

  “We fight without clothes, stupid man,” my furry opponent yelled across the ring.

  “Unless you got a mouse in your pocket, I don’t see no ‘we’ over there. Cause I’m keeping my damn britches and shoes on. You might be used to running bare-assed through the woods, but I ain’t giving you another advantage just because I as brought up civilized.”

  “To use the loosest possible definition of civilization,” Skeeter muttered. I snatched the Bluetooth out of my ear and tossed it back to land next to my shirt. I didn’t need the distraction of Skeeter’s commentary while I was trying to keep from getting absolutely friggin’ destroyed.

  Clag’tin must have decided that enough talking was definitely enough ‘cause he lowered his head and charged me. He was like something out of the legends, and not the ones about unicorns and butterflies, either. I sidestepped him pretty easily and gave him a swift kick in the upper thigh as he ran past. He let out a yelp and turned on me a whole lot faster than I expected, and I barely ducked under his big looping left paw. I dodged to the left as his other fist came swinging up past my ear in an uppercut that would have broken my jaw if it had landed, and I found myself on one knee right in front of his waist.

  It wasn’t my proudest moment in a fight, but I’ve always said if you can’t win clean, then fight dirty. So I lashed out with my right fist and nailed the Sasquatch right in his ginormous balls. I hit him as hard as I could right in the jewels, and I think I felt one squish under my fist. All the breath went out of Clag’tin, and he dropped to both knees in a huge puff of dust. I stood up, teed off on his head like Adam Vinateri in the fourth quarter, and kicked the nasty bastard in the jaw as hard as I could.

  I heard a snap as Clag’tin’s jaw broke, and he actually flew all the way back to his feet before collapsing flat on his back, looking up at the stars cross-eyed. I turned and mugged for the crowd for a few long seconds, holding my hands above my head and jumping up and down until I caught sight of Barry gesticulating wildly in the back of the crowd of Sasquatch. After a second or two, I got over being proud of telling him apart from the other Bigfoots and stopped celebrating.

  “What’s the matter, Barry? You act like . . . he ain’t out, is he?” Barry shook his head right about the same time a sledgehammer hit me between the shoulder blades. I splayed out face-first in the dirt and then immediately tried to cover up as more boulders started bouncing off my back, ribs, and shoulders. I rolled over, trying to keep my face covered, and realized that all those huge rocks were Clag’tin’s fists, and all I’d done by breaking his jaw was made him made. He straddled me in a full mount, moving right towards a picture-perfect ground and pound except there was no ref to save my ass if he knocked me out, there was no padded ring, we weren’t getting paid, there were no TV cameras, and he was four-hundred pound naked Sasquatch straddling my waist. There were so many things wrong with my situation that I couldn’t even begin to list them all.

  After about ten seconds of getting the ever-loving shit pounded out of me, I decided to play dead. It wasn’t much of a ploy, since I could barely hold my arms up and more, I was pretty sure at least three ribs were broken, and it felt like I had another concussion. Clag’tin saw my guard drop a little and took the bait. He sat up on his knees a little to get better leverage and reared back for a killing blow right between my eyes.

&nb
sp; That’s when I did something I never thought I’d do in all my days. I grabbed Clag’tin’s shlong. And pulled. I yanked on that Sasquatch wiener like it was the last lifeline on the Titanic. I pulled that ding-a-ling like I was Quasimodo ringing every damn bell in Notre Dame. I tweaked that twanger like I was in a tug-of-war against Hulk Hogan, Andre the Giant, and half a dozen elephants. It was the most uncomfortable thing I’d ever felt, and I’ve been stabbed, burned, beat by a troll, and kissed by Mary Sue Jenkins under the bleachers at a middle school football game. His woolybat was thick and rubbery, like all those nature shows say boa constrictors feel, but with more hair on it. And when I latched on to that johnson and pulled with every ounce of my remaining strength, Clag’tin’s eyes bugged out like a wolf in a Tex Avery cartoon. He tried to stand up and back away from me, but I was latched on like a lamprey and all he did by standing was to pull me to my feet, and there’s no way having three hundred and fifty pounds of bleeding redneck dangling from your wangdoodle feels good.

  “Let go of me!” Clag’tin screamed, and his breath of a million dead things and no Crest almost made my beard fall out. But I gave his gherkin a quick jerk upward, and he slammed his mouth shut and stood up on tippytoes trying to relieve some of the tension. I scrambled to my feet, never letting go of his hairy hammer.

  “Now let’s talk about this,” I said, trying very hard to only look in his eyes and ignore what was in my hand. “We’ve got two options here. One is you surrender and declare me the Sheeran-kor (I was probably proud of myself out of all proportion for remembering what the hell the Bigfoot word for “Bossman” was) or we go with Option Number Two.”

  “What is Option Number Two?” Clag’tin asked, although the words were muffled on account of his broken jaw and the fact that his voice was pitched a full two octaves higher than normal thanks to me yanking his eleventh finger sideways anytime he looked at me wrong.

  “I don’t think you’d like Option Number Two. Option Number Two is I yank your little shaggy savage here right off by the roots and turn it into a walking stick like they do bull’s peckers at that big-ass flea market in South Carolina. Then I leave you to bleed to death dickless and disgraced in Lower Damn Alabamastan. And nobody wants to die in the shithole suburbs of Mobile, Alabama.”

  Clag’tin moved in close to me, and I tightened my grip on his abominable snowmanhood. He winced but knelt in front of me. At least he tried to kneel, but I was still holding his one-eyed wrinklebeast, so that put a little hitch in his giddy up. Anyhow, he knelt down as best he could and mumbled something.

  “What? I couldn’t hear you,” I said. I dropped his pecker and knelt down, hoping it wasn’t all a ruse just get me to drop his dingus so he could kill me.

  “I surrender,” he muttered again. His voice back to its normal range and only marred by his broken jaw. “Clag’tin surrender. Bub’ba is new Sheeran-kor.” I raised my hands in victory, and Barry came over to give me a huge bear hug, lifting me clean off my feet in his enthusiasm. I usually would have made some smart-assed and half-homophobic joke about gay monsters, but since I was the one with more than a handful of brown bushy behemoth not two minutes before, I let it go. This time.

  I walked back over to my clothes with Barry and waved him down so I could whisper in his ear. “Challenge me,” I said.

  “What?” he asked, whispering back.

  “Challenge me. I don’t want to run your tribe, and your pop’s dead, so you gotta do it. But to do it, you gotta kick my ass.”

  “No way, I saw what you did to Clag’tin’s Little Foot, no way do I want to fight you!”

  “I had to win that one, he wanted to kill me. I don’t want to be your chief, so you’ll win this one. And you won’t kill me, I promise.”

  “And you won’t rip my dick off?”

  “I promise not to go anywhere near your sascrotch. I have had more than my fill of yeti penis for one day,” I said, pulling on my t-shirt and putting my Bluetooth back in my ear.

  “Boy did I come in at the wrong point in that conversation!” Skeeter’s voice echoed through my ear, and I laughed ’til I almost puked.

  “I challenge Bub’ba for right of Sheeran-kor!” Barry bellowed. I jumped a little, since I was right next to him, and Skeeter squeaked in my ear in surprise.

  “Bubba, are you gonna fight another Bigfoot? Because if you are, can we get a videotape this time? I’m pretty sure that TV show with Bob Saget woulda paid us ten grand for a tape of your last ass-whoopin’.”

  “Shut up, Skeeter. I know I’m gonna lose this time.”

  “So what else is new? You lost last time, remember?”

  I ignored him. So far, everything was going right according to plan. Admittedly, the plan never involved me performing an impromptu trouser snake handling in the backwoods of Alabama, but shit happens. “As you issued the challenge, I set the weapons and terms of our duel. We fight barehanded to first blood!”

  The crowd didn’t like this very much, since the last match had been to the death and it’s bad booking to set up the card so your matches don’t escalate, but since I wasn’t writing Wrestlemania, I didn’t much give a damn. I looked over at Barry, and he was staring at me wide-eyed, with a huge grin on his hairy face.

  I stepped forward and put my hands up in a low guard, easy enough for a critter of Barry’s size to reach over and pop me in the nose. Which is exactly what he did. He tossed a big, looping right hand that caught me right on the tip of my shnozz. My poor nose got broke so many times in college it’s a miracle I can breathe today. Between football and football parties, seemed there was always somebody wanting to smash my sniffer flat, and most of them succeeded. Of course, I’d already stole their beer or their woman to get them that pissed off, so I had my fun, too.

  But the problem with a nose that’s been broke more times than the speed limit—it’s hard to get it to bleed. So he nailed me pretty good, and I heard the familiar snap that told me I was gonna have to set it again or allergy season was just gonna get worse. But there was no blood. I ran my fist across my nose three or four times, and nothing. Finally, I lowered my head and charged Barry, wrapping my arms around his waist and uselessly pummeling his body and sides.

  “What are you doing?” he asked me. Barry just kinda stood there while I whaled on him, having not had the benefit of Sunday afternoon WCW broadcasts throughout his childhood to teach him how to sell a punch.

  “Hit me in the mouth,” I muttered.

  “What? I couldn’t hear you.” Barry bent down to get a better listen to me, and I looked up just as his giant hairy forehead came crashing down on my lips. So I wasn’t sure if he head butted my face, or if I just kissed his forehead real aggressively, but either way, he split my upper lip and blood starting dripping down into my beard. Mission friggin’ accomplished.

  I backed up, waving him off and spitting blood onto the ground. I wanted to make sure everyone around could see the blood, see the evidence that Barry had drawn first blood. “He wins!” I yelled, wincing a little at my busted lip.

  Barry raised his hands to the sky and bellowed like a cross between a horny rhinoceros (do not ask how I know what that sounds like) and an orgasmic hellhound (and you really don’t want to know how I know what that sounds like). A female Sasquatch and a little girl Sasquatch ran out from the back of crowd and hugged Barry like he was Rocky at the end of the first movie. Or the second one. Whatever movie where he won the fight, I don’t remember which it was. There was some general rejoicing around the camp, and Clag’tin got to his feet and stomped over to Barry. I cleared my throat, and the former Sheeran-kor froze in his tracks, his hands instinctively going to cover his fine furry friend. When he saw that I wasn’t going to start anything, he relaxed and extended a hand to Barry.

  Barry looked at the hand for a second, obviously weighing the choice of peace in the tribe versus shaking the hand of dude that just had his junk in his mitts. Being much more diplomatic than me, Barry shook his hand. Clag’tin then took Barry’s han
d and raised it high over both their heads. The cheering of the crowd swelled to a fever pitch, and I finished getting dressed again.

  I pressed the button on my Bluetooth and said, “Win another one for the good guys. Come on down and meet me back at the truck.” I looked up on the ridge over the cave mouth and saw Uncle Father Joe stand up, fold the bipod down on his Remington 700, and turn to head down the trail. I turned to where Amy should have been doing the same thing and saw nothing.

  “Amy?” I called into the headset.

  Nothing.

  “Joe, you got eyes on Amy?” I asked.

  “Negative. I haven’t seen her since she settled into her blind. Why?”

  “She didn’t respond to my call,” I said. “Skeeter, what does her GPS show?”

  “She’s still close, unless she’s left her phone somewhere. I’m accurate to about twenty meters, and it looks like she’s right on top of you. But her dot ain’t moved in half an hour or so.”

  “I’m on my way,” Joe said, and I saw him start to move to Amy’s sniper nest. It’s not that I didn’t have faith in my ability to beat Clag’tin, I just thought that a pair of snipers might be good insurance. Looked like my snipers needed insurance more than I did.

  “Her pack is here, and so is her rifle,” Joe said. I looked up and he stepped to the edge of the overhang with a black backpack and another Remington in his hands.

  “Are you looking for this?” A voice came from behind me, and I knew that I wasn’t going to like whatever I saw when I turned around. I hate it when I’m right.

  I turned around and standing there with Amy’s neck in one giant paw was the biggest bitch werewolf I’d ever seen. I recognized her instantly as Jason’s right-hand woman, or wolf, or bitch, or whatever. She was seven feet of bad news, and she had my girlfriend by the neck. I took one step and she lifted Amy off her feet. I froze and the she-wolf grinned at me, her tongue lolling out to one side in that way a dog’ll do when their human does something particularly stupid or amusing.