Monster Hunter International

Chapter 10

Harbinger summoned me to the cargo bay. There were only a handful of us left on the freighter. The Hind had taken the most injured of the Hunters, and the Brilliant Mistake had been signaled to return to pick up a few more men and our gear. Surprisingly, the little boat's crew had stayed nearby to help us. Harbinger gave them an extra $20,000 for their trouble and the admonition to never talk about this unless they wanted the government to pay them a very unpleasant visit. He must have been feeling generous due to the big haul. The Director also gave them business cards, along with instructions to contact us if they ever heard of any more monster problems. Since we could not advertise, much of our business came in the form of referrals. Representatives of the French shipping corporation were already en route to retrieve their valuable cargo. The remainder of our fee was to be wired to us upon receipt. The Hind was to return for its last pickup shortly.

I limped painfully down the stairs into the vast central bay. Each bootfall echoed hollowly through the cavernous room. I had been paralyzed, drowned, beaten, shot with my own gun, partially paralyzed and choked, and I was hungry, tired and saddened by the loss of some of my favorite guns. If anybody should have been put on that chopper it was me. However, it seemed that Harbinger wanted to speak privately first. That was not a good sign. Even Grant had been sent back to land to get his nose and teeth checked.

Earl Harbinger, Sam Haven, Milo Anderson and Julie Shackleford stood before a giant orange container, the heavy-duty kind that could be picked up through the opening in the deck by a giant dock crane and set onto a semitrailer or train. The sheet-metal double doors were hanging open, and the four experienced Hunters were gathered at the opening.

"Hey," I said as I approached, not that they did not hear me coming, but I couldn't think of what else to say. None of the four looked up. Julie had her arms folded and she appeared rather cross. Harbinger pointed inside the container.

"What do you make of this, Pitt?" He shined a flashlight into the interior. There were seven wooden crates inside. Each was long enough and deep enough to easily hold a person. I ducked my head as I entered, pulling out my own flashlight to get a closer look. The air tasted stale. The lids for the crates had been set aside, and the interiors seemed to be filled with nothing but dirt. I ran my hands through one; it was a thick black loam. Another was white particulate sand, and yet another looked almost like Alabama red clay.

"Coffins," I said. "For the seven Masters in my dream."

"Yep," Harbinger said. "And I'm willing to bet that the dirt is soil from their native lands."

"What does that mean?" Julie asked. "I know I've heard about that in the folk tales, but we've never seen evidence of vampires actually needing to sleep in soil from their homeland."

"Beats me. But this is really a weird bunch. I've never seen anything like this before, and I've never even heard or read about anything like this either."

"We don't know for sure that they are really Masters, Earl," Sam said. "We haven't actually seen any of them yet."

"The stronger the creator, the greater the creation. Some of those sailors we killed were way too powerful to be that young, but they were. Plus creating wights as daylight guardians? Darne was as powerful as a hundred-year-old bloodsucker, and he has to have been turned in the last week. Whoever turned him was one bad dude. So there is at least one Master in this gang. I would bet on it," Harbinger replied.

"So how did you beat Darne anyway?" I asked. The other Hunters glanced at their team leader, curious to hear his response.

"Later. It isn't important right now."

"He was a good guy when he was human," Sam said. "Losing him is a damn shame."

"People change when they are turned. It doesn't matter what they were like before. No matter how good they were, when they turn, they come back as pure evil…" Julie trailed off, and then changed the subject. "We probably need to alert the Feds. Seven high-level vamps on U.S. soil? They would shut us down in a second if they found out that we knew and didn't tell them."

"I hate Feds." Milo spoke for the first time. Sam spit on the floor.

"Me too. But they need to mobilize. They're somewhere in Georgia, and heading who knows where. I'll call Myers," Harbinger told them with a look like he had just bit into something sour. "They probably won't believe us though. Hell, I don't believe what I'm saying."

I looked in the other coffins. Thicker sand, rich topsoil, alkali dirt, and finally broken shale and gravel. I noticed something as I shined my light in the back corner.

"You guys seen this?"

"What?" Harbinger asked as he entered and came up next to me. I squatted and pointed at the ground. Something had dissolved all of the paint in the corner. A dark substance coated the floor. I sure as heck wasn't going to touch it. It felt unnatural from where I stood, and I had a visceral feeling that it was some sort of secretions from the cloaked and armored monstrosity from my dream. Harbinger knelt and studied it. "Ichor. Looks like snot from somebody with real bad allergies. Let's take a sample."

I breathed a little easier once I was out of the claustrophobic box.

"But wait, there's more," Sam stated. "I saw this earlier when we were getting set to blow the steam pipe. Check this shit out."

He took us to another shipping container. This one appeared normal until we circled it and saw what was on the other side. The steel walls had been pierced and peeled back from the inside. I touched one of the edges. The steel was a quarter-inch thick, and the reinforced tubing around the edges had been easily bent.

"Wow," Milo said, stroking his beard absently, "no sign of explosion or cutting torch, or anything like that. Something just punched its way through. Isn't that special?"

"Yeah, it just fricking warms my heart," Sam said. "Why can't we ever fight cute, helpless monsters? Like the ones on Sesame Street?"

"The big things from my dream," I said. "They could have done this. They had to be at least ten feet tall. And they could fly, they had huge wingspans. They were ugly, and they had horns and big teeth and claws. That was about all I saw because I was just moving too fast."

The four Hunters surrounded me.

"Now start from the beginning and tell us the whole story about this dream," Harbinger ordered.

"So that's why you brought me down here. I thought you were going to yell at me for beating up Grant," I replied cheerfully. Julie folded her arms and glared.

Harbinger shook his head. "Oh, don't worry, I'll get to that. But business first. From the beginning, tell us every single detail you can think of. Even things that you might not think are important."

"We might as well get comfortable. This is going to take a while." I told the whole story. Starting with my initial dream in the hospital. I tried to convey the weirdness of it, and probably failed. I went into as much detail as I could about the next dream. I did not, however, tell them about seeing the Old Man when I had been underwater. I was still not sure if that had actually happened, or if it had been a panicked trick of my oxygen-starved brain. When I was finished the others began to drill me with questions, only some of which I could answer.

"The head vampire called the Old Man, Bar Eeka?"

"As near as I could tell. Something like that."

"Could he be a wraith? Maybe a revenant even?" Julie asked. "No wait, those have bodies. How about a shade?"

"Beats me."

"There is a possibility," Harbinger stated. "I've heard some weird stories since I've been doing this kind of thing. He could be a ghost, and he could have hooked up with you while you were dead on the operating table. You might have actually met him on the other side and brought him back. Now he's using you somehow. Problem is, we don't know jack about ghosts, so how do we figure out why he's trying to help you?"

"Be sure to ask him that the next time you see him," Milo told me.

"Except I only see him when I'm dead, or about to come close to death," I added sardonically.

"That will be convenient for you then. You're a Monster Hunter now. Plenty of good opportunities to die all of the time!"

The ocean rushed by below. The interior of the Hind was very loud, and that was not helped by the fact that our pilot felt the need to blare heavy metal through the intercom. Excellent selection though. Disturbed, Slip Knot, Rob Zombie, and even the latest single by my brother's band. I figured I would have to let the pilot know that I knew Cabbage Point Killing Machine's guitarist once we landed. I had not met the pilot yet, and all that I had been told about him was when Milo had jokingly said that he had been included in the purchase of the chopper. I had no idea what that was supposed to mean. All that I had seen so far had been the back of his helmeted head.

I had never ridden in a helicopter before, and it was kind of exciting, loud and with painful vibrations, but still fun. Almost like a roller coaster ride with the added advantage that it could shear a bolt and kill you in a matter of seconds.

We were sitting in the cramped crew compartment. The Hind had originally been used to move Russian infantry, though this particular specimen had been tweaked and customized extensively by MHI. It was still tight, but I was given to understand that it was downright plush compared to what it had once been.

Almost all of the other Hunters had immediately gone to sleep. They understood the basic principle of sleep when you can because you don't know when you are going to get to do it again. I couldn't do it, so I passed the time by picking silver buckshot pellets out of my armor. I made a mental note to add Milo Anderson to my Christmas card list.

I held up one of the silver pellets, now deformed from the impact, and studied it, deep in thought. I had almost died today. Now that the adrenaline had left my system, I found my exhausted brain once again pondering just what the hell I was doing, and truthfully, I didn't have an answer.

Julie's head was rolled to the side and she was snoring. She had hardly spoken to me since she had found out about my little altercation with Grant. I was not about to apologize. He had left me to get eaten, and I did not like that one bit.

Harbinger opened his eyes. He had been awake. He checked to make sure Julie was out, and then unbuckled his seatbelt and moved next to me, flopping solidly into the uncomfortable chair. He turned and shouted in my ear.

"I wanted to talk to you about Grant."

"Okay," I shouted back.

"I know about what happened."

"He left me behind to save his own skin."

"I know," he yelled. It was hard to have a conversation by shouting. "Grant says that he didn't think he could save you… That you would both have been killed."

Perhaps. I did not respond, not knowing what to say, and not wanting to admit that Grant very well might have been right, and honestly not really knowing what I would have done if our situations had been reversed.

"Don't ever let something like that happen again. I'm the boss. I take care of discipline. You undermined my authority."

"That's it? You aren't mad at me for hitting him?"

"Oh, if I was mad, you'd be swimming home."

"Serious?" I asked.

Earl sighed and rubbed his face.

"What are you going to do with him?" I asked.

"Huh?"

"What are you going to do with Grant?" I said, turning up the volume.

"I don't know yet. Maybe Grant's right, and he would've died keeping that door open, and I don't believe in committing suicide to prove a point."

"Sam said something about it being easier to be brave when others are watching you. Maybe Grant isn't so tough when there aren't any witnesses," I insisted.

"Yeah, Sam's a regular philosopher," Earl responded. "You can face some really scary shit, and be just fine, as long as you're doing it for your team." He grew suddenly serious, and I had to look away from those cold eyes. "Either way, it ain't none of your business now. Don't ever do something like that again. Hunters can't lose control. Got that? You never lose control. Do you have a problem with that?"

"No, sir."

We sat in silence for a few minutes, listening to the rotors beat the air, and some amazing guitar playing by my brother. From the expression on Harbinger's face, I don't think that he cared for metal. I refrained from banging my head in deference to his tender sensibilities.

"What about Julie?" I asked.

"What about her?"

"Does she believe that Grant abandoned me?"

"None of my business. She's a grown-up." The look he gave me told me to shut it. He quickly changed the subject. "Let me ask you this, Pitt. You've been with us for a few months. You've gone on exactly one mission. Could you leave now and go back to your spreadsheets and your tax forms?"

I did not answer. Did Earl know how much I was doubting the path that I was on? He was the experienced one, maybe he could see what I could not.

"Well, you'll probably need to."

My heart sank. So this was it. Was he going to let me go because of my rash actions? If he felt he could not trust me then I would be out. Did he think that I was too hotheaded and impulsive to be a member of the team?

"I got a letter yesterday. The IRS is going to audit us. I'm gonna need your help; our books are a mess. Once we handle this little vampire problem, of course."

I grinned. That I could handle.

"I can deal with the IRS. They're a little easier than vampires. Not much, but a little."

"Will sunlight banish them?"

"Maybe. I haven't tried that before."

"That's just the tip of the iceberg though. OSHA is crawling all over us for-I kid you not-workplace safety violations. As if there is anything safe about what we do at all. The EPA is angry about some of the pollution we have caused by burning certain kinds of monsters. Fish and Wildlife wants to fine us for killing a giant mutant Tennessee River catfish because it was endangered. Sure it had just crawled up on land and eaten some teenagers, but it was still an endangered species. We're in trouble with the BATF for some missing compliance paperwork for the machine guns and explosives-paperwork which they lost. And Immigration is investigating us for employing some illegal aliens."

"Are we?"

"Sure, but who doesn't? Do you think you just put an ad in the paper for people who can fly Russian attack helicopters?"

"Why are the Feds hammering us?"

"We've pissed a lot of people off in Washington. Our company was shut down for a long time. PUFF was only reactivated by the slimmest of margins. There are a lot of bureaucrats who are itching for us to fail. They're making it damn near impossible to get our jobs done."

"So what are we going to do?"

Harbinger grinned savagely. "From the amount of money we made on this job, I'm going to buy me some congressmen, maybe even a senator."

I was shocked. "Are you talking about bribery?"

"Why? Does that offend you?" he asked.

"Oh hell no. I'm a libertarian at heart. Screw 'em."