“You also have a relentless desire to prove yourself since you had one hundred percent negative reinforcement as a child,” Doctor Nelson said. “Which manifests itself in obsessive attention to training and preparation, augmented by your time in the Marines and your foster father the former Marine. Which are all good things. Assuming some other team lead doesn’t shanghai you, you’re hired. We need a head-banger who can, how did Ray put it? ‘Nail a rat’s balls at a hundred yards on full auto.’”
“He exaggerates, Doctor,” I said, trying not to grin. “Semi-auto, maybe.”
“What’s this I hear about a modified Uzi…?”
Not the sort of academics I grew up with. Mostly. Doctors Nelson did have the tendency to lecture and were a bit more “squishy liberal” than most of MHI. But mostly that was due to their real caring for people, especially survivors. They were always furious at the way that MCB treated survivors of supernatural events.
On the other hand, they could also talk about guns and killing monsters all day long and a couple of their bloodier stories they told with positive relish.
March 28th, 1985, I packed my bags, said a fond farewell to the MHI compound (which had started to be roasting, I was glad to be getting out of Bama) and headed for Louisville. I had “stuff” there I wanted to pick up and it might be a while, or never, before I saw the Brentwoods again.
But I was now a full-fledged Monster Hunter, proudly wearing my flaming warthog patch. It was a good day.
CHAPTER 6
The Brentwoods were, thank God, comfortable with my cover story. I’d told them that I’d gotten a job offer from a security firm that handled Federal security “issues” and that the rest was classified. The offer contingent on getting back into good enough shape to pass the training program. So when I visited they didn’t ask many questions. I told them about some of the friends I’d made, Milo mostly, and some of the funnier stories that didn’t involve monster related issues. I really wanted to tell them the truth but two things held me back. The first was that they’d think I was crazy. The second was that, if they got over that, they’d think I was crazy to do the job.
Mrs. Brentwood sensed that the job carried risks. As sort of my adopted mom she wasn’t really happy about that especially given how she’d almost lost me in Beirut. On the other hand, as WWII generation and the wife of a Marine she also knew about sacrifice.
So she buttonholed me as I was doing dishes after dinner.
“Chad,” she said, laying her hand on my arm. “Just tell me that what you’re doing is important.”
“Ma’am,” I replied. “It’s more important than anything I’d ever have done as a Marine. There’s issues that need fixing and my company fixes those issues. And, yes, you might have to attend my funeral. I’m sorry about that. But it is really something important enough to put my life on the line. Other than that…” I shrugged.
“I’ll have to trust you on that,” she said, giving me a hug. “We’ll miss you. Again.”
“You’ll find some other kid who needs a real home,” I replied, smiling. “There’s plenty of us out there.”
I’d gotten a U-Haul hitch attached to Honeybear and it was necessary for all the “stuff” the Brentwoods had been holding for me. Civilian clothes, my uniforms (which with the exception of the dress blues were perfectly useful for monster hunting), guns, blades, books, the custom MHI armor, it all added up. I put a good lock on it and hoped it wouldn’t get broken into on my trip.
I ignored my mother completely. Any lingering doubts about that were put to rest in Bethesda. On the other hand…
I cordially detested my dad for all the reasons any decent human being would. On the other hand, any trip down that particular memory lane was pretty much bound to involve hot coeds. I’d more than once knocked off one of my father’s hangers-around. It was worth stopping by Kansas on my way to Seattle.
“So you went from being a Marine babykiller to being in some top-secret clandestine babykiller group,” Dad said when I trotted out the cover story. But he said it with a grin. Over the years Dad’s full-on liberal hard-on for violence and the military had mellowed. I think he even sort of respected me for being a Marine, which was bizarre. “From a bombing to black helicopters. Your mother must love that.”
“I haven’t spoken to Mom since she came to visit me in the hospital. So I dunno.”
“Your mother actually bothered to visit you in the hospital?” he said, surprised. “Wasn’t there some subcommittee meeting she had to chair or protest march or something?”
I told him the story. When I got to the part about telling her I’d been promoted to “babykiller first class” he burst out laughing.
“God, I wish I could have seen her face.”
We were drinking some very good single malt scotch and he took a deep gulp. He’d started to develop the red nose of a heavy drinker and the formerly tone body was starting to get a bit rotund.
“It wasn’t worth it. There weren’t just military doctors and nurses. There were other parents visiting. That really hurt them at a time they didn’t need to be hurt. Just like Mom. I seriously would have killed her with my bare hands if I hadn’t been in traction.”
“I’ve never told you this,” he said, uncomfortably. “But…I was really proud of you when you joined the Marines. I wish you’d put that unquestionably fine mind to work more but…that took guts. More guts than anyone in the rest of your family. Including me.”
“You look into the abyss and the abyss looks back,” I said, shrugging. “Then you punch the abyss in the face.”
“I love you, son,” he said when he got done laughing. “You’re the only one in the family that’s worth a shit. When I heard about the bomb going off…That really ripped my heart out. I was going to visit but…In retrospect, I’m glad I didn’t. I could imagine what their reaction would be to your liberal academic dad turning up after that.”
“All’s well that ends well,” I said. “And to again quote the German: What doesn’t kill us…”
“When you said you were dropping by I made some calls,” he replied. “There’s a couple of cheerleaders who seriously cannot tell the difference between Can and Kant. And if they can’t get at least a C they’re going to lose their cheerleading scholarship. One of them’s a huge fan of Marines…”
My dad’s a philandering, using, man-whore. But sometimes I’ve just got to love him.
* * *
Seattle’s MHI office was actually in an industrial park in Renton. It was convenient to SeaTac and near I-5 for when we had to head to points outside the Seattle area. Which was most of the time.
I’d gotten a hotel, found a secure, conditioned, storage locker for my stuff and generally gotten my feet on the ground, including a recon of the objective to ensure I knew where it was, before I checked in. The office was attached to a small warehouse and the only sign it was the headquarters of a premier monster hunting organization was a small sign that just read: MHI in letters about six inches high. Discreet thy name is monster hunting. There were also several security cameras covering the parking lot and front door.
The front door was a steel security door with a buzzer and one of the new push-button combination locks. Since nobody had given me the combination, I buzzed the door at 0900, the appointed time and the appointed place. Uniform was jeans, T-shirt and water-proof windbreaker both to conceal the 1911 and for the drizzle.
“I take it you’re Chad,” a woman’s voice said from the speaker. “Come on in.”
There was a receptionist’s desk inside the door with a couple of chairs for visitors but no receptionist and no visitors. Just another code locked door and a fair amount of dust. That door buzzed as I reached it and I noted the not terribly discreet cameras covering the entry.
Inside was a hallway and the other Doctor Nelson. Blonde and slender, Doctor Joan Nelson, PhD, Psy, looked like anything but a Monster Hunter. In fact, she looked a good bit like one of the cheerleaders that had made my stay in
Kansas so pleasant, if quite a bit older. I reminded myself that a, she was my team lead and b, I didn’t come on to married women. Despite that, my greeting was perhaps a touch too warm.
“Why Doctor Nelson,” I said, taking her hand, “what a pleasure it is to make your acquaintance.”
“You really are a lounge-lizard, aren’t you,” she said, laughing and shaking her head.
“I’m sorry,” I replied, throwing my hands out. “Put me around a beautiful woman and I go automatically into mode!”
“I’ll forgive you for the compliment. Most of the team is out checking out a report of a werewolf. Turned out it was just a bear attack but the local authorities called us in just in case. They’re on their way back. Let me show you around in the meantime, but keep your hands to yourself.”
“I always take no for an answer,” I said, definitely. “I just prefer yes. And I really don’t go for married women. That’s a line I try very hard not to cross. I’m still an outrageous flirt.”
“Well, you won’t be crossing it with me, young man,” Doctor Nelson said. “I know your type. That’s not an insult, it’s just I’m fairly well insulated against it. But feel free to flirt all you’d like. It’s a nice endorphin stimulator.”
I got shown around the offices and warehouse. The warehouse contained not only the armory, including the team crew-served weapons, but a small but well-packed explosives bunker as well as a machine-tools for gun-smithing.
“We don’t have an in-house gun-smith at this time,” Joan said. “I understand it’s one of your gifts.”
“One of them,” I said, looking at the shop. It wasn’t even up to Mr. Brentwood’s level. “Any chance I can build on this? I’ll get the stuff out of my own PUFF money assuming we’ve got the work.”
“Feel free,” she said. “If it’s staying here, the company will buy it if it’s within budget. We haven’t been using that budget lately because, well, there wasn’t anyone to use it. If you can, go for it.”
“Anything that needs doing now?”
“We just sent the guns that needed repair out to our usual shop,” Joan said. “Maybe later.”
About that time there was a honk from outside and after a check of the security cameras I got to open the door for the team vans and meet most of the rest of the team. They were a decidedly mixed bunch.
Besides the Doctors Nelson there was an assistant team lead, Bradford Todd.
Brad was a tall, lanky, Oklahoman in his early thirties with long brown hair, a neatly trimmed goatee and two gold teeth. Slow of speech and fairly reticent at the best of times, he just got more calm the worse things got. Not that he was slow in combat. He could rumble with the best of them. His back-story involved a shaman in a land dispute with his family. Shaman lost.
Timmy Burgess was the newest guy on the team after me. He was from California and sported the whole “California Surfer Dude” thing. Long brown hair he usually kept in a braid, fluffy beard, he always was wearing a Hawaiian shirt and cargo shorts in all but the coldest weather. He’d run into some sort of sea monster at a beach party and managed to torch it with a home-made Molotov cocktail.
We lost Timmy later, but that’s another story.
Louis Wagner was a rarity in the Northwest: he was black. The Northwest, at least at that time, had something like less than one percent African American population. He hailed from Chicago and still had that Chicago accent. A colony of giant centipedes had ended up breeding in an office building where he was the night janitor. Fortunately, he knew two things: centipedes don’t care for pure ammonia and where to get a bunch. His main comment was that “hunting pays a lot better than being a janitor.”
Louis generally teamed up with Phillip Jimenez. Phil didn’t look particularly Hispanic. He had paler skin than I do and that’s saying something. A former Army engineer, he’d gotten out and gotten a job with a construction company. While digging out a trench he’d hit what turned out to be a long-buried vampire’s coffin. Unfortunately it was at night. Fortunately, he realized what it was without hesitating and cut it in half with the blade.
His specialty on the team was all our explosives stuff. I made a mental note right there and then to make friends. I like explosives as much as guns just hadn’t had nearly as much experience with them at that point.
Jesse Mason was from Colorado. He’d grown up hunting and was our primary long-range shooter and tracker. His preferred weapon was a 700 BDL in .30-06. I noted that I had a Garand in storage as well as my own BDL on which I’d done some tooling. We agreed we needed to check things out on a range. I could tell there was going to be some competiveness there. That was cool. I knew he’d smoke me at long range. I’d wait till we encountered monsters to demonstrate at short.
The general way we rolled was we’d keep our basic gear at our homes or, if it was secure, in our car trunk. Those days we had a pager, big clunky thing, and one of the then very new car phones. Unfortunately, the range on the car phone was more or less “Greater Seattle Area.” Get outside that and you lost coverage. Coverage was better on the pager but not much. When there was a call-out, we got a page. Unless we were definitely “off” we were on call 24/7. Mostly we got two days off a week when it wasn’t busy. But if a team got called, you had to go on-call even if it was your day off. So you figured you were more or less always on-call.
If there wasn’t a big rush or if it was something planned in advance we’d meet up at the office and load into the team vans. But I was warned that I’d probably be using my own car for a lot of calls. No biggie; one benefit of Honeybear was a big trunk.
Jesse got detailed to show me where to get a car phone. He road in his car, I rode in mine.
The Radio Shack on 167 was our designated electronics store. While they did the install on the car phone, Jesse and I grabbed an early lunch. He suggested a nearby sushi place. Not knowing what sushi was I agreed. You’d think with all the time I spent doing Kendo and what with learning Japanese, I’d have known what sushi was. But in the early eighties in Kentucky, nobody, and I mean nobody, ate raw fish. All I knew was it was a Japanese restaurant.
“So, where you staying?” he asked. The restaurant had some tables but mostly it was a bar.
“Right now I’m in a residence hotel by the airport,” I said, reading the menu. “Wait, this is raw fish?”
“I thought you were all into Japanese stuff,” Jesse said, grinning at my discomfort.
“Kendo, sure,” I said. I didn’t tell him I spoke it. “But you don’t find this sort of stuff in Kentucky. Or Lejeune for that matter.”
“Welcome to Seattle,” he said, still grinning. He did the order in really broken Japanese.
“With friend murder tuna tire,” was what he said. “Ox foot much please.”
“What is ‘ox foot’?” I asked. In English. I held my hand up for the server to wait.
“Ox foot? What do you mean?”
I repeated what he’d said, verbatim.
“I said lots of wasabi.”
“My unintelligible friend meant to say ‘Lots of wasabi,’” I said in fluent Japanese. “My own humble experience does not include sushi or its accompaniments. What would you suggest, sir?”
“Ah, you speak Japanese?” the server said. “But you do not know sushi?”
“I am from a land-locked area. No sushi on the menu. I am looking forward to trying it. Do you know where I can find a good udon? I very much like udon.”
“We do good udon. You want udon?”
“Yes, please. And I will try the yellowfin tuna roll. Is this a good roll?”
“The yellowfin is very fresh. Very good. But for you, you try the tataki.”
“I am your servant in this.”
“You speak Japanese,” Jesse said as the server left.
“Japanese, German, Spanish, sort of a long list. Aramaic…”
“I thought you were all Oorah, Marine! Bang head!” Jesse said. “Oorah! Oorah! Gung Ho!”
“I am. And I speak nine
languages and read about four more. My parents are liberal academics and were anti-war protesters. I inherited the IQ but rebelled by becoming everything they, or at least my mom, hates. They were all about ‘be yourself’ and ‘follow your own path’ unless it meant owning guns and being a babykiller. Mom’s description. My dad turns out to be okay with it except he’d like me to get a PhD at some point. Not going to happen. I’d rather use my brains to kill monsters. I also play a very mean violin.”
“I guess that sort of makes sense,” Jesse said.
“You’re not academic background, are you?”
“Country boy. Born and raised in a little town called Yuma, population thirty-five hundred. Down on the plains, not the mountains. Everybody thinks Colorado’s nothing but mountains. Most of it looks more like Kansas.”
“I drove through that bit on the way up here. Does look like west Kansas that’s for sure. What the hell kind of supernatural event did you run into out there?”
“Werewolf,” he said. “I was hunting with my dad. Thought we were looking at the world’s biggest wolf. Would have been a really nice trophy. Did not like it when Dad put a .30-06 round through it long-ways. Also didn’t seem to faze it. We nailed it maybe a dozen times before it was on us. Dad didn’t make it. I ended up braining it with my rifle and in desperation I managed to cut its head off. That stopped it.”
“Sorry to hear about your dad.”
“It was five years ago,” Jesse said, shrugging. “I’m over it.”
“Right.”
“Okay, let’s just say I do this for some reason other than the pay,” Jesse said, frowning. “You?”
“Truly weird story. I had a…vision, something, when I was in the rubble of the barracks…”
“Rubble of the barracks?”
“You didn’t get that I’m one of the survivors of the bombing of the Marine barracks in Beirut?”
“That had not been passed on, no,” Jesse said. “Really?”
“Really and truly. But I had a meeting with someone who might or might not have been Saint Peter. I got the option of going to heaven or going back. God had something he wanted me to do so I took the duty option. There was also this cryptic ‘There shall be a sign’ prophecy. After I got out of rehab, during which I was always looking for the sign, I was driving back to Kentucky when, well, I saw the sign.”
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