“Yeah, y’will...”
BIO
Author, editor, and freelancer Josh Vogt has been published in dozens of genre markets with work ranging from flash fiction to short stories to novels that cover fantasy, science fiction, horror, humor, pulp, and more. He also writes for a wide variety of RPG developers such Paizo, Modiphius, and Privateer Press.
His debut fantasy novel, Forge of Ashes, adds to the RPG Pathfinder Tales tie-in line. His urban fantasy series, The Cleaners, is published by Story Strong Press and includes Enter the Janitor, The Maids of Wrath, The Dustpan Cometh, and Fellowship of the Squeegee. Other works include Solar Singularity from WordFire Press and the Fate's Fangs tie-in novel. A Compton Crook Award and Scribes Award finalist, he's a member of SFWA as well as the International Association of Media Tie-In Writers.
LINKS
Author Website: http://jrvogt.com/about-me/
Amazon Author Page: https://www.amazon.com/Josh-Vogt/e/B00LY71M0A
Twitter: https://twitter.com/JRVogt
Monsters
Jim Butcher
My secretary opened the door, leaned in, and said something.
I kicked my feet off my desk, wiped the drool off my chin, rubbed at my sleepy eyes and said, “What?”
“I said we’ve got a customer,” Viti said. She was of average height, blandly attractive, and her body was vibrating with tension. “He’s dangerous.”
“You think everyone’s dangerous.”
“I think everyone’s treacherous,” she corrected me. “This man could kill you.”
I tilted my head to one side and narrowed my eyes. “Oh?”
She nodded. “I don’t know who he is. But he’s a bad one, Grey.”
I rubbed at my chin and straightened my clothes a bit. “Well. Show him in.”
“You’re sure?”
“Try not to kill him unless I specifically ask you to.”
Viti gave me an offended glance, which I felt unwarranted, pressed her lips together, and went back out. I watched her go appreciatively. Viti and I are strictly business, but the woman is in shape.
Plus, I’m never sure when she’ll try to kill me again.
It’s complicated.
I went and got myself a fresh cup of coffee from the Keurig. It wasn’t good for the environment, but neither was raising food. Or breathing. If humanity wanted to raise the difficulty on the survival game they were playing, that was their business. I’d be fine either way.
My name is Goodman Grey, and I am a professional monster.
The man who entered my office radiated danger. Medium height, medium build, excellent suit, absolutely amazing haircut. His posture said ex-military. The very faint scent of gun oil said he was armed. We’d never spoken, but I knew who he was.
If you were a bad person in Chicago, you knew who Gentleman John Marcone was.
“No thugs?” I asked, without turning away from my coffee prep. “No revenant bodyguards? No Valkyrie girl Friday?”
Marcone swept his eyes around the office and said, “I’m told your secretary is heavily armed and fidgety.” He’d expected to be recognized. Well, maybe that wasn’t unreasonable for the Baron of Chicago, the lord of its underworld.
“Exaggerations,” I said broadly. “She’s a kitten.”
Marcone showed me his teeth. “Oh.”
I waved him at the chair in front of my desk. He nodded and sat.
“Coffee?”
“Thank you, no.”
I plopped back down in my seat, blew on the cup and regarded him through rising steam. “What brings you to Monster LLC?”
“Business,” he said. “What do you know of a certain criminal organization originating in Los Angeles?”
“Eighteen?” I asked, “Or thirteen?”
“Does it matter?”
I shrugged.
“They’re large, organized, well-funded and extremely dangerous,” Marcone said.
“Business partners?” I asked.
I saw his teeth again. “It is occasionally necessary for us to interact.”
“And there’s a problem?”
“They broke my rule.”
I sipped my coffee and regarded him for a moment. “No kids?”
“No kids,” he replied, nodding.
“So how come they don’t wind up rotting in a shipping container on a slow train back to LA or wherever.”
That made him tilt his head and regard me closely. “Standard business practices aren’t appropriate.”
“How come?”
“Because children are involved,” he said. “They’ve brought half a dozen of them into the country illegally. Their intention is to establish a brothel.”
“Huh,” I said, and sipped more coffee. “And?”
“If I act directly, I’d find myself at odds with their greater organization.”
“Scared, huh?”
“Not particularly. But I do not wish to be distracted. And sending the Einherjaren after them would be… inappropriate.”
“Like swatting flies with an elephant gun,” I said.
“Just so. But, if they failed to heed my warnings about the unknown and unknowable dangers in that part of town…” He gave a very Gallic shrug.
“Uh uh,” I said. “So, you want a discrete contractor? Or a discreet one.”
“Both.”
“Why me?” I asked.
He spread his hands. “There’s another person I could go to. But even if he believed me and agreed to the job, he would complicate it unbearably. We’d be at war with Canada within the week. Somehow.”
“Heh,” I said. “Yeah.”
“I need a professional. You come highly recommended.”
“I don’t like politics,” I said.
“I’m not here to establish a relationship. There’s a mess. I need someone to clean it up.”
“Why me?”
He leaned back in his chair, steepled his fingers, and looked at me over them. “Because I’d rather not have dead children on the evening news. Bad for business.”
I exhaled and eyed my coffee. “Kids, huh.”
“I am told such things are within your idiom.”
“You know my price?”
“I assumed it was a joke.”
I looked at him with a flat gaze.
Marcone tilted his head and said, “My mistake.” He reached into his pocket and withdrew a single silver dollar. He put it flat on my desk.
“Why one dollar?” he asked me.
“Got to pay the Rent, like everyone else,” I said.
“To whom, may I ask?”
“You may ask,” I said. “Where?”
He took a business card out of his breast pocket. There was only a phone number on one side. There was an address written in a terse, neat hand on the other. “Call this number when you’re done.” He rose and turned to go, then paused. “Perhaps you and your secretary should lower your voices somewhat when discussing potential murder. It might be off-putting to some clientele.”
“Honesty is the best policy,” I said.
“I concur,” he said. “If this deal goes south, I will make your life an affliction.”
“Fair,” I said, “If you’re lying to me, I’ll come for you. Right through your Einherjaren. Right past your Valkyrie.”
This time when he showed me his teeth, he was smiling. “Excellent. Good day, Mister Grey.”
Viti drove me to the address on the card in her Volvo at 4 AM the next morning. It was, she assured me, the car with the highest safety ratings ever recorded. It was spotlessly clean. Viti was religious about maintaining equipment.
“You’d have thought it would be in a rougher neighborhood,” she said.
We were stopped in a neighborhood in Wrigleyville, at a house that looked like other houses. Hell. There were angels standing guard around another house not unlike this one not three blocks away.
I wondered if the angels could see what was happening to the kids from there.
T
hat’s the thing about angels. They don’t take contract work. Sometimes monsters do.
“It’s tougher to get that elite business clientele to venture into bad neighborhoods,” I said. “And people get sort of upset about operations like this if they’re discovered. Even other criminals. So, it’s only the rich clients who can put up enough money to make it worth the risk.”
“Ah. I had assumed a different business model,” Viti said. “With a larger but poorer client base.”
“Poor people have to make their own fun,” I said, studying the house. There were elegant security bars over the windows. Not unheard of, in this part of town. But not everyone had all the shades pulled all the way closed, either.
“Security door in front,” she said. “Assume the back one will be reinforced as well. There are a number of fisheye cameras around the exterior of the house.” She took up an electronic tablet and a stylus that wouldn’t leave fingerprints on the screen, and tapped the device to life. “It’s a wireless system.”
“Place like that will have cameras in the rooms, too,” I said. “Get me whatever you can. Be nice if I knew how many bad guys are in there and which walls are safe to go through.”
“I killed every member of my graduating class,” Viti said absently, tapping away. “I once watched you torture a man to death.”
“You did it to survive,” I said. “I did that because the bastard had earned it. What’s your point?”
“Are we not bad guys?”
“We are not bad guys,” I said.
“In what way does that not make us ‘bad guys,’” Viti asked. “Explain it again.”
“If it helps,” I said, “think of us as worse guys.”
She lifted her head from the tablet, drummed her stylus against the edge and frowned at me. “In what way?”
“Meeting those guys in a dark alley would be bad,” I said. “Running into someone like you or me would be worse.”
“This is a moral framework that I have not encountered before,” she said. “Dark Alley Theory. The implicit extension of such a theory is that anyone in the alley who is not some measure of bad is of necessity a victim.”
“Nothing theoretical about that,” I said. “Tell me how many victims are inside. Assume the children aren’t hostile and will not need to be targeted.”
Viti frowned. “Unwise.”
I sighed. “Just do it, please.”
“You are too trusting, Grey,” she said. She went to work with half a dozen different software tools on her tablet. I’m not really into computers, if they aren’t video game systems. Those I can manage fine. But Viti probably knew enough about computer security countermeasures to get her tossed into a number of cold, dark holes around the world, purely on principle.
“My God, they’re using storebought,” she said. “Who buys their security at Best Buy?”
“Show me.”
Viti turned over the tablet to me and reached into a compartment in the driver-side door, her lips twisting with distaste. I took the tablet in hand and studied a black and white video feed. It was in surprisingly high resolution. Naturally, they’d want to invest in getting good pictures of their clients. It would make them easy to control.
I flicked through the array of feeds from the different cameras, which were scattered throughout the house as well. There wasn’t much happening there that wasn’t going to be recorded, and there was no reason to think that the bozos in the house were the only ones receiving the data.
“Little bit tricky,” I said. “Can’t just walk in there and take the kids unless I want to fight a one-man war with the whole organization.”
Viti stared at me for an extra-long beat before asking, “Do you?”
“Ugh,” I said. “It would take forever, and someone else would just step into their shoes a minute later. I’m a contractor, not a crusader. The job is these particular kids.”
I could see them, on the screen. Four of the kids were in bed. Two of them were sitting at a table in the house’s kitchen, looking exhausted, eating a sleepy breakfast. Some of the clients must come in before work hours. They were all maybe eleven or twelve.
Yeah. I didn’t see any reason to complicate this particular contract with survivors.
They had one guy watching the monitors, one guy at the front, another at the back, and another watching the kids. There were automatic weapons in evidence inside. They seemed to like Uzis. They were wearing business clothes, to a man, but all the tattoos and the style of their haircuts put any doubts I might have had about their identity to rest.
I passed the tablet back to Viti. She had already withdrawn a wipe from the packet in the door, and she scrubbed the tablet’s surface religiously before taking up her stylus again. She tapped away for a moment and said, “There’s a transformer I can subtract a hundred feet away. That should take down the power.”
“They’ll have a generator,” I said.
“Even one that kicks in immediately will force their computers to reboot,” she said. “You’ll have a window.”
“If they’re connected to the rest of the organization, someone will know when the power goes out,” I said. “They’ll send people here.”
Viti’s face brightened slightly. “Do you think they’re that skilled?”
“If Baron Marcone wants to be indirect, I’d say there’s good hope of it.”
Viti lowered the tablet and peered around the street. “Nice firing lines.”
“I don’t want any collateral damage,” I said. “People live here.”
“Oh. Yes. People.” Viti frowned at the houses around us, as if they were the problem. “I keep forgetting them.”
“Can you get me a good clear image of one of them?” I asked.
She went to work on the tablet, and after a moment got me a good three quarters view of the gangster at the back door. She mucked with the image for a moment to bring out the bone structure of the guy’s face a little better, and then held the image up.
I studied it hard for a second, fixing it in mind. Memorizing details and retaining them long enough to use them was an old habit.
“Okay,” I said. “Take me to the end of the block. I’ll walk in. You hit the transformer. Then stay out here, stay low, and watch my back.” I opened the glove box, took out a slender plastic case, hit the power button on an earbud and slid it in, even as I passed the case to Viti. She got her own earbud and put it in. They smelled sterile. Viti cleaned them before and after each use. We ran a quick check and were ready to go.
She drove the Volvo to the end of the block and dropped me off, and I started down the darkened sidewalks under the shadows of the trees. I’d worn slacks and a business shirt, because they blended into the city landscape as well as anything, and as I walked, I thought about the face of the clown at the back door.
Then, with the effort of a task long practiced, I pushed the bones of my face into position and altered the shape of my mouth, nose, and eyes, until I looked enough like him to pass at first glance. I couldn’t have gotten any more exact without a lot more imagery, or some of his blood, but it would be close enough to make his mother look a second time before she noticed.
Oh, didn’t I mention? I’m a shapeshifter. It’s kind of my thing. When I told Marcone I could get to him through his security, I wasn’t kidding around.
When I was ten feet from the edge of the house’s property line, there was a coughing sound and a loud clack—followed instantly by a rather spectacular crackling and snarling and a flare of blue-white light that threw the rooftops of the Wrigleyville houses into stark relief.
Then the lights went out.
And I walked right up to the front door and knocked.
I heard the guard at the front door start up out of his chair. The place had been soundproofed, but I’m not human. I heard him rack a round into the chamber of an Uzi and stand.
“Who the fuck is that?” he said, in Spanish, if it matters.
“It’s me, man, let me in,” I answ
ered in the same tongue, with as little inflection as possible.
The door opened partially, inward, and a flashlight glared in my face. I held up empty hands and said, “What the hell?”
The guard hesitated. “How the hell did you get around he—”
I didn’t wait for him to finish asking. The minute I was sure his mind was on something other than aiming the gun and maybe squeezing the trigger, I slammed the door with one knee.
I’m not human. My muscle doesn’t work like human muscle. I’ve made sure of that. I’m not Hercules or anything, but if you aren’t a professional strongman of some kind, you don’t want to arm wrestle me. You’ll lose a hand.
The steel security door was particularly heavy on its hinges. It hit him like a small truck and he fell back.
I was in position before his back hit the floor, driving the edge of my hand down onto his larynx. I crushed his throat flat to his spine, batted the Uzi out of his stunned hands and kept moving without stopping or looking back, while his body forgot how to breathe.
I dilated my eyes to considerably past normal human maximums, and the dim ambient light from the city outside changed the utter darkness to deep shadow and vague outlines. I moved silently and saw the light on the rear guard’s gun coming from the back of the house, reflecting off the walls from rooms away.
I slipped into what proved to be a hall bathroom and waited. I could hear the rough breathing from the guard whose face I hard borrowed, the thud of his shoes on the floor, the scent of his cheap body spray. I could also hear the dead man as his body went through the process. He was making harsh gurgling sounds, and his heels drummed feebly on the floor.
The second guard came close enough to the bathroom door that I was able to reach out and snatch the Uzi out of his hands. I flung it away from him and through a section of drywall.
He was fast and good. He had a knife out before I came through the doorway and hit him, overbearing him. He drove it repeatedly into my ribs, half a dozen times in three seconds. While he did that, I jammed my left hand over his mouth, swatted his flailing left arm away with my right, and slammed a hammer-fisted blow into his temple.
Parallel Worlds- the Heroes Within Page 39