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

by John G. Hartness

  The hallway was just like a normal two-story house, scene for slaughter in so many slasher flicks. There was a small bathroom to the right of the stairs, and three bedrooms arranged around the left-hand hallway. One of these would be the master bedroom, with its own bath, and the other two would be the kids’ rooms. The one on the left had pictures of motorcycles and rock bands with more makeup than KISS, but the one at the end of the hall was unadorned. Just a simple brass nameplate announcing it as Kayleigh’s room.

  I could tell from thirty feet away that Kayleigh’s room had some seriously evil shit in it. I rolled my head and cracked my knuckles, then opened up my Second Sight to get a good look at the evil in the magical spectrum.

  I slammed my Sight shut almost as quickly as it came into focus, shaking my head to clear the images from my mind. But there is no Visine for the mind’s eye, and I was stuck with that shit forever. Whatever was on the other side of that door wasn’t human, was powerful as shit, and was really hungry. It was also in a really good mood, which disturbed the fuck out of me. There’s nothing worse than a happy demon, at least as far as the humans around it are concerned.

  “Mr. Garda?” I yelled down the stairs.

  “Yes?” his voice came back. I might have heard ice cubes jingle in a glass. Good—if this was as bad as I thought it was, he was going to need to get seriously drunk.

  “Who else is home?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, who else is in the building? Is your wife here? Your son?” I left off the “jackass,” but it was pretty well implied.

  “No, they’re gone. My wife is out of town on business for two weeks, and my son has been staying at a friend’s house since Kayleigh got sick. It’s just you, me and Kayleigh.” And whatever has got its claws wrapped around Kayleigh’s soul.

  “That’s good. You might want to make yourself scarce for a little while.” Please don’t ask a lot of fucking questions.

  “Why?”

  Shit. “Because what I’m dealing with up here is pretty dangerous, and I don’t want you to get hurt.” And I don’t want this fucker to have another vessel to jump to if your daughter suddenly becomes uninhabitable.

  “I don’t think I can—”

  “Would you please just get the fuck out so I can quit worrying about your fat ass and save your daughter?” I yelled. Maybe a little direct, but I really didn’t want to have to fight this thing more than once. I heard a clatter of footsteps and then the front door slammed shut. Nice. I didn’t believe he’d actually leave. Maybe that panicked edge in my voice was useful after all.

  I turned back to the door. “Just you and me, now, buddy. So why don’t you come out of the girl and let’s handle this like men?”

  The voice that answered rang through my head like a dentist’s drill, piercing and ululating. “I can’t come out. Not yet. But when I do you’ll see that I’m nothing like a man.”

  Then it laughed, and in that laugh were the screams of millennia of tormented souls, all shrieking together to make one terrible sound.

  “Then I guess I have to come in,” I said, and strode to the door. I lifted a size 11 Doc Marten and kicked the door just beside the lock. The jamb splintered, the door flew in, and my worst nightmares were realized.

  “Oh fuck me,” were the only words that came to mind as I looked at the picture before me. Geiger couldn’t have imagined a sense of greater torment. Hieronymus Bosch had nothing on the cruel artist that created the image before me. I didn’t throw up, but only because I learned years ago never to have breakfast before an exorcism. You puke on a couple of nuns and that gets drilled into you pretty fast.

  The thing in the bed used to be a pretty little girl. I knew this because I’d seen enough pictures of her around the living room and on the walls going up the stairs to figure it out. There wasn’t anything pretty about what was in front of me. It still kinda looked like a little girl, if that little girl’s face was stretched into new positions from screaming for the last two days, if that little girl’s pajamas were covered in piss, shit, sweat, blood and pus, if that little girl’s matted hair was stringy with vomit and other bodily fluids. If that little girl, who probably stood around five-two and weighed maybe a hundred ten pounds last week looked like she was about to give birth to a goddamn baby elephant.

  The demon hadn’t possessed Kayleigh Garda. It had impregnated her. And it was about to deliver Hell on earth.

  I staggered back from the shock and the stench and raised my Bible in front of my face. The thing laughed. I realized that I wasn’t talking to Kayleigh, or the demon that possessed her—I’d been talking to her soon-to-be-born half-demon child this whole time. Kayleigh was gone, dead from the inside as the demon consumed her body and soul. And in a couple of hours, it was going to burst free of Mommy and move on to eating anything and anyone it could find. I backed slowly out of the room, then turned and ran down the stairs, almost tripping over an Xbox controller in my mad dash to the front door. I took several deep breaths, then stepped out onto the porch where Kayleigh’s dad stood chain-smoking Camels. I guess he hadn’t really left after all.

  I walked over to him and leaned on the porch rail.

  “Well?” he said after a moment’s silence.

  “It’s worse than I thought.”

  “How bad is that?” His voice went up a little on the end, like he was fighting off panic. I didn’t blame him. I was a little, too, and it wasn’t my little girl up there. Of course, I did have to live in this dimension, so demons running loose sounded like a terrible idea to me.

  “Your daughter is dead. I’m very sorry.”

  “But I heard her, she was talking just a minute ago!” He spun around to rush back inside, but I grabbed his arm right above the elbow.

  “That wasn’t her. That was the demon. It was using her vocal chords.” Please don’t make me explain.

  “What? That’s stupid. It was Kayleigh. She’s up there, and she’s in trouble, and you’re too chickenshit to help.” He pulled against my grip, but got nowhere. I’m a lot stronger than I should be for my size.

  “Demons don’t have voices like you and I do. If they’re possessing someone, they can control their body completely, use their voice perfectly. You’d never know it wasn’t Kayleigh if it didn’t want you to. But this thing, it won’t have to use Kayleigh’s voice for long.”

  “You mean it’s going to let her go?” I hate it when they hope for the best.

  “I mean it’s almost through with her. It’s killed her and has devoured almost everything it can. When it’s finished, it will leave Kayleigh and come out here looking for another meal. If that happens, it will be almost unstoppable, because it will have one foot in our world and one foot in Hell. Usually demons can’t stay in this world past sunrise, but not this one. It won’t be bound by normal demonic rules, and it will be very, very hungry. I need to destroy it while it’s still in your daughter.”

  I watched him process as much of that as he could, and thought he got pretty far for a mundane, but I could almost see the moment when hope made him go stupid again. “But you can save her, right?”

  Yep, every friggin’ time. Sometimes I think we should have left Hope locked in Pandora’s box. It causes as much trouble as it fixes. “No. She’s dead. Her heart is still beating, but Kayleigh is dead. The demon inside her has eaten her soul. All that’s left up there is a meat suit that a demon is wearing with a face that kind of looks like Kayleigh’s, but not really very much. And if I don’t get up there, and send this thing back to Hell before it delivers, we’re going to all be in a lot of deep shit.”

  I saw the realization cross his face a second or two after I said the word “deliver.” “Deliver? You mean my Kayleigh is pregnant with a demon? But, she’s only fifteen! She wears a promise ring! This can’t happen! We had the talk, we agreed that she should wait… She doesn’t even date.” He collapsed into a chair on the porch and I just stood there, staring at him. The man wasn’t the least bit s
urprised that his daughter was possessed by a soul-eating demon from Hell, but the mere thought of his precious little girl bumping uglies with some senior in the back of daddy’s Lexus reduced him to tears. People and their fucking priorities.

  I went back inside, but not before popping out to the trunk of my Honda for a few extra goodies. I sealed the door behind me both mystically and physically. Mystically with a spell of warding designed to provide a non-lethal shock to humans trying to get in, but a lethal shot of balefire to anything from any of the lower realms. Angels could come and go with no problem, although I wasn’t expecting anyone from the upper reaches to come join my party. Physically I wedged a chair under the door.

  A few strides and a lot more deep breaths found me outside the bedroom again. I so did not want to do this. But it’s my job. This was why they paid me the little bucks.

  I raised my foot to kick the door in again when a soft voice called from within. “Come in, John Abraham Quincy Holmwood Harker. We’ve been waiting for you.”

  For information on appearances, signings, autographed copies, etc. please visit

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  Copyright 2015 by John G. Hartness

  Grits, Guns & Glory by John G. Hartness is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

  About the Author

  John G. Hartness is a teller of tales, a righter of wrong, defender of ladies’ virtues, and some people call him Maurice, for he speaks of the pompatus of love. He is also the author of EPIC-Award-winning The Black Knight Chronicles from Bell Bridge Books, a comedic urban fantasy series that answers the eternal question “Why aren’t there more fat vampires?” He is also the creator of the comic horror Bubba the Monster Hunter series, and the creator and co-editor of the Big Bad series of horror anthologies from Dark Oak Press and Media. 2015 has seen John launch a new dark fantasy series featuring Quncy Harker, Demon Hunter.

  In his copious free time John enjoys long walks on the beach, rescuing kittens from trees and recording new episodes of his ridiculous podcast Literate Liquors, where he pairs book reviews and alcoholic drinks in new and ludicrous ways. John is also a contributor to the Magical Words group blog. An avid Magic: the Gathering player, John is strong in his nerd-fu and has sometimes been referred to as “the Kevin Smith of Charlotte, NC.” And not just for his girth.

  Website – http://johnhartness.com

  Podcast - http://literateliquors.libsyn.com/

  Patreon – http://www.patreon.com/johnhartness

  Facebook – http://www.facebook.com/johnghartness

  Magical Words – http://magicalwords.net

  Twitter - @johnhartness

  Also by John G. Hartness

  Bubba the Monster Hunter Short Stories

  Voodoo Children

  Ballet of Blood

  Ho-Ho-Homicide

  Tassels of Terror

  Monsters Beware - Bubba the Monster Hunter Vol. 1

  Cat Scratch Fever

  Love Stinks

  Hall & Goats

  Footloose

  Monsters Mashed - Bubba the Monster Hunter Vol. 2

  Sixteen Tons

  Family Tradition - A Bubba the Monster Hunter Prequel

  Final Countdown

  Monsters Everywhere - Bubba the Monster Hunter Vol. 3

  Scattered, Smothered and Chunked - The Complete Bubba the Monster Hunter Season 1

  UnHoly Night - A Skeeter the Monster Hunter Short Story

  Love Hurts

  Dead Man’s Hand

  She’s Got Legs

  Dead Man’s Party - Bubba the Monster Hunter Vol. 4

  Fire on the Mountain - A Beauregard the Monster Hunter Story

  Howl

  Double Trouble

  The Black Knight Chronicles

  Volume 1 - Hard Day’s Knight

  Volume 2 - Back in Black

  Volume 3 - Knight Moves

  The Black Knight Chronicles Omnibus Edition

  Volume 4 - Paint it Black

  Movie Knight - A Black Knight Short Story

  Black Magic Woman - A Black Knight Short Story

  Gone Daddy Gone - A Black Knight Short Story

  Knight UnLife - Collected Black Knight Shorts

  Co-Edited with Emily Lavin Leverett

  The Big Bad: An Anthology of Evil

  Other Work

  Headshot

  Balance - Tales of Alternate Reality

  Genesis - Return to Eden Book 1

  The Chosen

  Returning the Favor and other slices of life

  Red Dirt Boy

  The Christmas Lights