Monster Hunter Vendetta (12 page)

"When people from the government tell me they're just here to help, I get nervous. You're supposed to blend in, right? We've got a giant Newbie class going on now, the compound's crowded, and always having four of you walking in formation around me looking like a bunch of storm troopers isn't going to help."

Archer spoke. "So what do you expect us to do? Just sit back and wait for the Condition to murder you?" Archer was tall, but unlike most of the overly buffed MCB, he was skinny. The average Fed made your average Hunter look pretty dumpy. But Archer was thin, with an angular nose, and a large Adam's apple. He had one of those haircuts that worked if you were a Marine, but otherwise just made you look kind of silly, with the buzzed sides, and the perfectly straight flattop, so symmetrical that it had to have been done with surveying gear.

"Look, Pitt, we don't want to be here any more than you want us to be," Herzog said. She was the first female MCB agent I had met, all of five feet tall, and built like a bulldog, complete with jowls. She also had the worst attitude. "We all know this is a bullshit assignment, and I don't know what we did to piss Myers off to get stuck doing this scut work, no offense, sir," she nodded at Franks, who stopped chewing long enough to grunt an affirmation. "We should be out killing monsters, and taking down the Condition the old-fashioned way. Beating the ever-livin' hell out of everyone in it until somebody squeals where the bosses are, and then putting a bullet in the brain of every last one of the squid-worshipping fanatics. We kneecap enough of these assholes and cut off enough thumbs, somebody will talk. They always do. We need to be out there putting the fear of God into these freaks, not babysitting
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you."

Torres had mentioned Border Patrol at the airstrip. Archer had an 82nd Airborne tat on his forearm. All the MCB types apparently started out in regular government jobs, so I had to know. "Herzog, who were you with before being recruited by the Monster Control Bureau?"

"Internal Revenue Service."

God help us. "Oh
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well
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okay then." That made sense. I had a sneaking suspicion that she had once audited my old job. Somebody from the IRS had actually taken the time to draw frowny faces in red ink on a depreciation schedule that I had filled out. She seemed like the type. "Look, personally I agree. I would much rather have you out there doing your thing, cutting thumbs off and whatnot, and not following me around. Like this, you're going to stick out. This just isn't going to work."

"The only Hunters who know who we really are are Harbinger and his immediate people," Torres suggested to Franks. "We can blend in with the new recruits. Nobody, including the Condition's spy, will ever even know we're on site unless Owen needs us."

"You three, maybe
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but everybody knows of Franks," I pointed out. I didn't add that his reputation for brutality had an almost urban legend quality to it in Monster Hunting circles. "He'll have to go, I don't know, live in the forest or something."

Torres was undeterred. "Okay, then the cover story can be that Agent Franks is a liaison, assigned here to build camaraderie between private sector and governmental Hunters." The man was just chock full of helpful suggestions, though I still liked my live-in-the-forest idea better. Franks nodded slowly, as if the idea of him being an ambassador of goodwill made any sense whatsoever. "We stay out of your way, we're still accomplishing our mission, everybody's happy."

"Everybody saw your great big airplane land today."

"Nobody was close except for your friends. We can say it was for Agent Franks. The rest of us are late additions to the class."

I bit my lip. Torres had a point. "That'll work, but there's one more thing."

"Oh, I'm sorry, is putting our lives on the line to protect you from the forces of evil inconvenient?" Herzog asked, just oozing sympathy.

"Yeah, it is." I had no patience for this nonsense. I didn't ask for their help. "Inside this, the main building, you're not allowed past the first floor. When I'm working here at the compound, my room is upstairs. Upstairs is off limits. The basement is off limits." Really, I didn't care, but I knew that MHI had a lot of things stashed around here that they really didn't want the government to know about. Hell, I still didn't now what was in half of the basement. Plus it was one more way for me to be a pain in the ass to Franks' Goon Squad. I can't help it. I really do have an antiauthoritarian streak.

"That's not going to make our mission any easier," Torres suggested gently.

"You want to blend in with the Newbies? They aren't allowed past the first floor either until they've graduated training. Deal with it."

"Myers warned us that you'd be difficult," Archer said, raising his voice slightly. "So that's how it's going to be then. Who the hell are you to—"

I raised my hand and cut him off. "You want to go upstairs, get a warrant. Otherwise, shut it, Buzz Cut. We all know why you're here, and that's to capture some assassins. You couldn't care less what happens to me. So worst-case scenario, I get killed, then you can mop up and your boss is happy. This whole damn thing is his fault anyway, and I don't have to have you all crowding my personal space." That seemed to really piss off Herzog and Archer. Torres looked like it hurt his feelings that I would question his honest intentions. He was almost like a governmental version of Trip.

Surprisingly enough, Franks didn't argue, he just kept chewing, taking the time to savor the Wonder Bread and bologna. Finally he swallowed and wiped his mouth with the back of one massive hand. "Whatever
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It's your funeral." He glanced across his team and nonchalantly ordered, "It's settled. Hang back until someone tries to kidnap Pitt. Interrogate the survivors."

Somehow that didn't give me a real good feeling.

The file on the Sanctified Church of the Temporary Mortal Condition was fat with color photos, weird intel, and disturbing reports. I had spent the last three hours poring over the notes, and the more I read, the more worried I got. It had grown dark outside and stuffy inside the second-floor conference room.

"Man, what a bunch of jerks," Milo Anderson said as he leaned back in his chair, holding a sheet of paper in front of his bushy red beard, eyes darting back and forth behind thick round glasses as he read through the list of the various atrocities. "I never knew there were this many ways to sacrifice a virgin!"

"Better watch out, Trip," Holly muttered under her breath as she flipped through the pages, her shoes up on the conference table, absently chewing a pencil between her teeth. "They're coming to get you."

Trip studiously ignored her and kept on reading factoids about the people who wanted to bundle me up and ship me across the universe to be devoured by a giant mollusk. Harbinger had said that he was going to bring in the people he trusted, and apparently, that was pretty much everybody who would normally be here anyway, which wasn't exactly surprising. When you spend this much time risking life and limb with people, they aren't just coworkers, they're family. And apparently, having one of that family personally threatened gets taken pretty damn seriously.

"So which of y'all's got a plan on how we kill all these folks on here?" Dorcas asked, holding up the list of the suspected cultists. She slurped noisily from her coffee mug. Normally our senior-citizen receptionist wouldn't be in a team planning meeting, but she had taken an almost grandmotherly liking to me over the last year. Either that or she was just itching to shoot somebody.

"We're Monster Hunter International, not Doofus Hunter International," Julie said soothingly. "We're not interested in these chumps. Most of them probably don't even know what they're involved in. Besides, knowing the government, their intel is probably wrong on half these names anyway. Sorry, Dorcas."

"Tempting though
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." Holly said, glancing at the list. "I hate that guy's movies."

"Terrible actor," Trip agreed.

Albert Lee was the last to arrive. He limped into the room carrying a stack of books hastily gathered from the archives under one arm and balancing his cane in the other. Lee had worked as our archivist ever since his leg had been severely injured at DeSoya Caverns. Though mighty handy on demolitions, his real calling was in research. He put the heavy books down and then thumped me hard on the back. "Good to see you made it home, man," he said with a grin.

I shook his offered hand. "Good to be home, Al."

"Wait 'til you see what I found. Dude, you are so screwed," he said as he sat down next to me, his metal leg brace creaking audibly. I felt bad whenever it seemed to cause him discomfort, which was often. I had been serving as his team leader when he had taken that hit and I still held myself responsible. Realistically, there was nothing that I could have done differently, but that's still how I felt. Lee, a tough former Marine, had never uttered a single word about it, except to joke about how it had finally given him an excuse to buy a badass sword cane.

The room was relatively full. Earl Harbinger, Julie Shackleford, Milo Anderson, Trip Jones, and Holly Newcastle were normal fixtures, as they made up the backbone of my team. In addition, Skippy, our pilot, and leader of our orc contingent, was standing quietly at the back of the room, still wearing his hood and goggles, unwilling to take a seat at the table, even among his friends. It wasn't that Skippy was unsociable, it was just that being around humans was always painfully awkward for him. And compared to most of his people, he was the life of the party.

The only other active Hunter present was someone I only knew in passing, and had never personally worked with, other than briefly last year when all of MHI was gathered for DeSoya Caverns. Her name was Esmeralda Paxton, Seattle team lead, and she was the one who had drawn the duty of training this Newbie class. Paxton was probably only a little over five feet tall, in her early forties, with auburn hair tied up in a bun, and wearing wire-rimmed glasses. She had on a folksy patchwork vest, a fashion that really didn't seem to fit in with all the hardened killers. She looked more likely to bake up a plate of chocolate-chip cookies than to stake a vampire, but Earl trusted her enough to lead a team in one of the most active parts of the country, and Julie's very own younger brother had been assigned to her care, so apparently she was a lot more dangerous than her motherly looks indicated. She had not spoken much yet, but continued to study the material intently.

Raymond Shackleford the Third, semi-retired super Hunter, whom Julie referred to as Grandpa, and the rest of us normally just called Boss, was sitting at his customary seat at the head of the table. He had aged quite a bit during the time I had known him. His white hair was getting wispier, the scarred side of his face around his eye patch was beginning to droop, and I was sad to notice that his nagging cough had gotten worse since we had left for Mexico. He was more of a symbolic leader. Earl Harbinger, real name Raymond Shackleford the Second, ran the day-to-day operations of the company, but there was no way that the Boss was going to sit out on a death threat against one of his Hunters. Missing his right hand, he banged his stainless-steel hook on the table to get everyone's attention.

He cleared his throat. "All right, people. What's the consensus?"

"Z's hosed," Trip suggested.

"Thank you, Mr. Jones. All in favor?"

The entire table said "Aye," then laughed at my expense. "Thanks, guys," I muttered. Julie patted my hand under the table.

"All right, enough of that tomfoolery," the Boss ordered. "Threat assessment?"

"Very bad, sir," Lee hoisted the first book. "Nobody knows who this necromancer is. I've been reading up on them today, and that title can be used for anybody who dabbles in death magic, animating the dead, all the way up to some really bad men who've done some terrible things."

"What kind of terrible?"

"Pretty much anything you can think of. The last MHI case I can find involving one was in Haiti, 1978. There was a high body count on that one," Lee replied.

"I remember that," the Boss said. "That was the man who had all those doppelgangers working for him, replaced all the city authorities, and then held himself a big old massacre." We'd learned a bit about doppelgangers in training, but hadn't spent much time on them since nobody had seen one for decades. They were perfect mimics, and historically, the mysterious creatures had caused all sorts of trouble. "Good thing we haven't had to deal with those cursed shapeshifters since."

"No, you're thinking of Cuba in '53," Harbinger corrected his son. "Haiti was the one where the necromancer sewed all those bodies together into that giant flesh golem."

"My memory ain't what it used to be," the Boss replied simply. I noted that Harbinger looked a little sad at that. It had to be difficult to see your loved ones age a decade for every one of yours.

"Either way you get the point. This could be potentially really ugly. Historically they've raised the dead, invented totally new kinds of undead, opened portals to other dimensions, that kind of thing," Lee said. "And I'm assuming it gets worse." Our archivist pulled on a pair of surgical gloves before opening the largest, dustiest, and oldest book. The cover was bound in ornate leather and the pages were hand-inked on yellowed parchment. Lee was very careful, almost delicate, in order to not damage the ancient tome. "The Feds' notes mentioned that the Condition has a pet shoggoth, so I figured I would see what one of those could do
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." The drawing was of a horrible, bulbous, lumpy, asymmetrical thing, with far too many mouths and eyes. I was really hoping that the artist had been exaggerating. "There are passing references to them in different places. This one is in Arabic, but it had the most info on them."

"Nasty
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What's it do?" Holly asked.

The Boss and Harbinger exchanged a quick glance. The Boss spoke first. "They're a pain in the rear, is what they are. My brother Leroy and I fought one once, right here in Cazador. It moved into the forest years back. Stinky, messy beast, started eating townsfolk and livestock. I tried to kill it, but it got away."