Monster Hunter Bloodlines

by Larry Correia

  Sonya rolled smoothly into the back seat. My bigger guns were on the floor. I could hear her unzipping the top case. That would be my shotgun, Abomination. It had a short enough barrel it wouldn’t be too awful for her to maneuver back there.

  “Okay. Got one. Now what?”

  I checked the mirror. Ghost horse was within fifty yards and closing. “Shoot him!”

  “Uh . . . ” There were some metallic noises as she ineffectually fiddled with various things. “How?”

  “Expert my ass. See the big lever on the right side? That’s the safety. Flip it down.”

  “Got it . . . ” She must have yanked on the trigger. “Nothing’s happening!”

  “You’ve got to chamber a round.”

  “I’ve not seen one of these before, okay?”

  “It’s a Kalashnikov! Third world goat herders use these!”

  “Quit yelling at me. Jeez!”

  Twenty yards. And objects in the rearview mirror are closer than they appear. “Pull back the charging handle all the way and let it go. That’s the handle that sticks out the right side.” The familiar noise told me that she’d just successfully loaded it. “Now—”

  There was a thunderous roar as Sonya yanked the trigger. Unfortunately, the combination of my rushed instructions and her gun illiteracy meant that she had flipped Abomination’s selector from safe to full-auto, and a full-auto 12-gauge loaded with magnum buckshot, you really need to hang on and know what you’re doing. Which Sonya clearly didn’t, because she blew out the rear window, shot the tail gate, launched about fifty bucks’ worth of silver down the road, and then blew a hole in the truck’s roof in one burst.

  “What the shit, Sonya?” My ears were ringing and none of those had been anywhere near the Drekavac.

  “It’s empty.”

  I leave a short five-round mag in Abomination when it’s in the case. The bigger mags were all too long to fit and still zip it shut, but I kept a ton of those on hand. “Pockets on the side of the case.” Then I saw a road sign warning me that there was a twenty-five mile an hour curve. I was going a hundred. “Hang on!” I hit the brakes on the way in. The truck managed to keep two whole tires on the road, but Sonya bounced off the back of my seat.

  We made it around that turn at close to triple the recommended speed, but the Drekavac was right behind us, and we were deep in his fog bank. My headlights could only illuminate a few feet ahead, so I had no choice but to slow down.

  All I could see of the Drekavac was its black silhouette in a blue halo, sitting tall in the saddle, using both hands to control its mount. Except then he reached down and pulled a weapon from a scabbard. From my vantage point it appeared to be shaped like an old-timey blunderbuss with a big bell end.

  “Stay down.” I swerved hard.

  There was a brilliant flash as a crackling ball of lightning burned down the side of my truck. It zipped past, hit a tree, and blew it into splinters.

  “What the hell was that?” My passenger-side mirror was gone. The paint had caught on fire.

  “That’s what he blasted the Catholic dude with.”

  In one smooth movement, I grabbed the sawed-off shotgun with my right hand, turned back, craning my neck to see, pointed it out the broken back window, and nailed ghost horse. It let out a terrible metallic wail and pulled hard to the side.

  “That’s how you do it.” I’d been aiming for the rider, but Sonya didn’t need to know that. I broke open the shotgun, fished two more shells from my pocket, and dropped them in, which was a lot harder than it sounds while steering a speeding truck.

  “I think I’ve got it reloaded,” Sonya said as she sat up. “There’s another trigger on the front of this—”

  “Don’t touch that. You’ll blow us up. That’s the grenade launcher.”

  “Who puts a grenade launcher on a shotgun?”

  “A genius.” That had been Milo’s handiwork. When I checked my mirror, ghost horse had corrected, and was gaining again. But worse, glowing fog was swirling in the bed of the pickup. “Look out!”

  One of the demon hounds appeared in the truck’s bed, and immediately started climbing in through the back window, snapping at Sonya. She shrieked but grabbed it by the ear and forced its head away. The girl had to be incredibly strong to shove that beast around like that, but she couldn’t maneuver Abomination into it. “Bad dog!”

  I leaned back and shot the dog right between the shoulder blades. It ruptured, spraying fire all over the truck. Thankfully, the blue fire burned cold rather than hot, because that would have been awkward. This way we’d just have frostbite instead of third-degree burns.

  The Drekavac was right behind us, and it was aiming the blunderbuss again. “Hold on.” I hit the brakes.

  The monster fired. The lightning ball danced across the truck, burned a hole in the passenger seat, blew out the front window and rolled down the hood. But my sudden stop meant that ghost horse smashed right into my back bumper.

  It must have weighed a lot more than it looked, because the impact shoved the truck sideways. We went spinning around, tires squealing, glass flying, right off the road. The horse was pulverized. The Drekavac was thrown violently from the saddle. I tried to steer out of the spin but the nose of the truck dropped suddenly as we crossed the edge of the road, and then we were going sharply downhill. A single thought went through my mind as we started sliding through the underbrush. This is going to hurt.

  I stood on the brake pedal but it didn’t matter. We might as well have been riding a sled. We shot down, crashing through branches, and just kept going. I nearly bit my tongue off as we bounced off a boulder. It was a miracle we didn’t flip. Then the front end clipped a big tree trunk, hard enough to bounce the whole vehicle into the air. My air bag deployed and smacked the snot out of me.

  We were stopped. I was dizzy. It took me a few seconds to bring myself back to reality. Everything ached. We were sitting at a really weird angle. That was because the driver’s side was partially submerged in a stream. I shook my head and safety glass fell out of my hair.

  “Sonya? Are you alive?”

  “You suck.” She sounded muffled because she was lying on the floor, partially squished beneath my seat.

  “You can thank me for rescuing you later.” I looked around. I had no idea where we were, other than forest. Thankfully, my door still opened. When I unbuckled my seat belt, I slid into the stream and got soaked up to my knees. I splashed over to the back door and opened it. “Come on. We’ve got to go.”

  The unnatural fog was slowly rolling down the hill after us.

  CHAPTER 9

  Sonya crawled out of the truck and landed in the stream. “Ooof.”

  “Can you walk?”

  “Of course I can walk.” She swatted my offered hand away and got to her feet.

  “Hopefully better than you can shoot.”

  She looked up the trail of destruction and saw that we had ended up probably two hundred yards from the road. “Way to go, jackass.”

  I grabbed my go bag, tore it open, and pulled out my vest. There was no time to fully armor up, but I wanted the pouches full of mags and grenades on my body. I threw it over my shoulders. I’d buckle everything up on the move. Then I took Abomination in one hand and the bag in the other and started walking. “There’s another shotgun on the front seat if you want it.” At least the borrowed one had fewer levers to confuse her.

  “That’s it? We’re just going to hike through the woods until it catches us?”

  Strangely enough, I actually had a lot of prior experience at evading monsters on foot through the wilderness. And Georgia was much nicer than the Nightmare Realm. I didn’t know how the Drekavac had found her. I didn’t know if it could track us. Maybe we could shake it. Maybe not. But we had to try. I set out, double time.

  Sonya grabbed the sawed-off and followed.

  I waded down the stream. I didn’t know if his hell hounds had noses like normal dogs, but if they did, maybe this would throw them off
our scent. Once we were on the other shore, we ran along the stream’s edge for about a quarter mile. I knew we needed to turn off. This path was too obvious. The temperature had returned to the normal, muggy, summer heat. I could no longer see the fog. However, losing that pale illumination meant that I couldn’t see shit. I stopped to get my bearings.

  “This would be a lot easier if you hadn’t wrecked your truck,” Sonya whispered.

  “What’s your excuse? He caught you when you were on a bullet bike.”

  “I didn’t know he could shoot fireballs.”

  The darkness made it really difficult to move, and the woods here were thick. I had multiple flashlights but turning one on would make us a huge target. I also had my night vision goggles in the bag, but I only had the one pair. “Can you see in the dark?”

  “Why would you think I could see in the dark?”

  “That seems like a reasonable thing for a half-human shapeshifter to be able to do. If you’ve got other abilities, now isn’t the time to be coy about them.”

  “Sorry. I didn’t inherit that gene. I can’t see any better than a regular human.”

  “I’ve got night vision goggles, so stick close and follow me.” I reached into the bag and found one of my rechargeable Surefires and handed it to her. “Take this. But don’t turn it on unless you absolutely have to if we get separated.” Then I gave her the last of the loose shotgun shells from my pocket. “You should be able to figure that one out.”

  I fished out my PVS-14 night vision setup and strapped it around my head. I much preferred using this mounted to my helmet, because worn on my head I had to cinch it brain-squeezingly tight to keep it from flopping around. Still, it beat tripping and impaling myself on a sharp branch. I turned the goggles on and the murky woods became perfectly visible in pixilated green. No matter how many times I used these things, that moment was always James Bond supercool. “Let’s go.”

  Once we got away from the stream and beneath the trees, there was zero light, but I was fine. It takes a while to get used to walking with such a narrow view that you can’t really see your feet, but I had a lot of practice. Sonya kept one hand on the drag strap on the back of my vest. She had to be totally blind right now.

  We kept moving, but there was no sign of the Drekavac. Maybe rear-ending the truck had actually killed it once and for all. That would be nice. Which meant it was unlikely. Monster Hunters never expect nice things to happen to us. If you expect the worst, you’re often pleasantly surprised when some things don’t suck. With no sign of our pursuer, I crouched next to a tree, to watch and listen.

  “What’s going on?” Sonya whispered.

  “Shhh.”

  That warning lasted about twenty seconds, before she went, “What do you see?”

  “I don’t see anything. I’m trying to listen to the woods.”

  “What do you hear?”

  “You. Because you won’t shut up.”

  “Oh.” She was really good in her element, but Sonya wasn’t striking me as the outdoorsy type. I glanced back at her. Everybody looks unnatural in night vision, but the difference was plain. Ditching us through the urban crowds earlier, she had been on top of the world. Out here, squatting in the dark, being hunted by a scary unkillable monster, she was a bundle of nerves. And she kept turning her head, waiting for something to pop out and kill her.

  I couldn’t see the Drekavac’s glow or its fog, but the woods were too still. A night like this there should have been a lot more noises. Warm summer night in a Southern forest, there’s always insects chirping and frogs croaking and general animal noises. Except it was eerie silent. The effect wasn’t as pronounced as when the Drekavac had arrived at the bar, but I could still sense it. That thing was out there, searching.

  Since it was hot again, maybe that meant the supernatural interference was gone. But when I got out my phone to check, there was still no signal. Either the monster was still close, or his weird energy field had permanently fried my phone. There was a GPS tracker on the truck and on my armor. I didn’t know if those would still be working, but if they were, my friends would be coming after us.

  “Why are you helping me?”

  I sighed. “It’s my job.”

  “I’m not paying you.”

  “Holy shit, kid, how mercenary do you think we are?”

  “Don’t act like you’re not in this for the money. I know how Hunters work. I know what I’ve got. You want the Ward. You’ll have to outbid the Church boys. They’re up to two million. Do I hear three?”

  “What’s your I didn’t leave you to get chopped up by a Drekavac discount?”

  But then Sonya twitched and looked straight up. She’d seen something. I glanced up to see what had caught her attention. The bird was super bright on night vision, far too bright to be natural. And sure enough, when I flipped up the goggles out of the way, I could see that was because the bird was glowing with that same ghostly light as the fog.

  The Drekavac didn’t just have hunting dogs and a mutant horse—he had a falcon.

  “Don’t move,” Sonya whispered. “I heard birds can’t see you if you don’t move.”

  She was probably thinking of the tyrannosaurus in Jurassic Park, but what the hell. It was worth a shot. We held perfectly still as it circled high above us, then it let out an unearthly shriek, banked hard, and began flying back toward where we’d wrecked. Apparently, Sonya’s Wild Kingdom hot take about magic-bird vision had been incorrect.

  Just like Skippy and Milo had tracked Sonya across Atlanta, the Drekavac had done the same thing to us. This was just the low-tech, supernatural version. Low-tech problems require low-tech solutions, so I shouldered Abomination, led the falcon just a bit, and pulled the trigger. There was a flash followed by a rain of blue-fire feathers.

  Except the bird must have had some sort of telepathic connection to its master and didn’t need to make it back to report. There was a horrible, echoing shriek back the way we’d came. It was a sound of delight. Then the hounds began barking.

  “We’ve got to move!” The time for slow and stealthy was over. I flipped up my goggles and turned on the tac light I had mounted on Abomination, which was a scalding thousand lumens bright. It turned the night into day as we ran for it.

  It was easy to forget just how supernaturally athletic Sonya was, until she easily got ahead of me. Then she turned on the light I gave her and quickly left me behind, running effortlessly, leaping over logs and ducking beneath branches fast as a deer. We made it less than a quarter mile before I had to shout after her.

  “Hold up. We need to stick together so we can cover each other.”

  She stopped, way ahead, perched on top of a rock, turned back and called, “You know that old joke about how if you’re chased by a bear, you don’t need to outrun the bear, just your slowest friend? It’s like that. Sorry.”

  I thought about demonstrating my favorite version of that bear joke by shooting her in the knee, but instead I said, “Go ahead then. You’ve got a handful of shotgun shells left and a pocket pistol, while he’s got two dogs, a horse, a bird, a death ray, and keeps coming back to life. So I’m sure it’ll work out splendidly for you.”

  “It always does.” But Sonya hesitated, torn, but the sound of barking must have convinced her I was right. “Fine, but try to keep up.”

  “Except you’re going the wrong way.” I pointed the direction I thought the road would be. If I did have reinforcements coming, they’d find us faster by the road than blundering deeper into the woods.

  We kept running, and Sonya’s light stayed ahead of me, only at least now she was stopping to let me catch up once in a while. Thankfully, the underbrush wasn’t too horribly dense here, so I only tripped half a dozen times. From the noise, the dogs were getting closer, and every time I crossed a gap without trees, I could see that damned glowing bird had re-formed and was above us again. Only it had learned its lesson and was flying high enough that it would be really hard to blast out of the sky again.<
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  I was going as fast as I could, sweating, my face and arms continually scratched by thorns, yet the hunting dogs were getting closer. Then I realized that there was only one animal barking behind us. The other had gone silent. Instinct told me the quiet one was circling ahead while the loud one herded us toward it.

  “Sonya! Wait!” Except she had gotten too far ahead of me again and didn’t hear me that time. Her light kept bouncing away. I’d tried to warn her to stay close, and now she was going to get eaten by a demon dog. “Damn it.”

  Behind me was a new noise, and it was a sound that brought back memories of running from the Fey. The thunder of hooves. When the Drekavac’s horse had re-formed, it must have lost the high-speed ghost hover and come back in a more terrain-appropriate form. It turned out the Drekavac liked to make a lot of noise, because it let out a sound that sounded like a higher pitched wolf’s howl. It was a frightening noise because you could feel the savage joy of the hunt in it, like the monster wanted its prey to know it was having a good time.

  I shined my light back the way I’d come from and, sure enough, the fog was getting closer. I assumed the thickest part represented where the monster was coming from, and there was really only one spot here wide enough to ride a horse through.

  “Okay, you want to play, you son of a bitch?” I dropped my pack and pulled out the experimental device Milo had given me. “Let’s play.”

  Milo didn’t have an official name for his new, nasty little smart mine yet. He was still trying to think of a cool acronym featuring the words Explosive, Quick Deploy, Area, and Denial. The rest of us just called them Milo’s spider mines on account of all the legs. I stuck the bottom spikes into the packed trail dirt, aimed it where I thought the Drekavac would have to ride through, pulled the safety pin, hit the arm button, and then ran like hell to get away from the evil little machine before it went nuts.

  Thirty seconds after I pushed the big red button, the IR targeting lasers turned on. They served the same purpose as trip wires, only there were eight of them, instantly. And as an added bonus, if our monster didn’t set it off, the lasers were on a timer, so it would go inert fast, hopefully before some innocent hiker tripped over our unexploded ordnance. Milo was considerate like that.