Monster Hunter Memoir: Saints

by Larry Correia

  BOOK TWO

  City of the Dead

  CHAPTER 14

  For the year while the suit was ongoing, I was out of the loop on Monster Hunting. Hoodoo Squad lost another Hunter while I was gone, medically retired. Norbert left as well but not for those reasons. You see, he had all the usual demons of having grown up in the ghetto and had a hard time getting away from them. That’s a long way of saying that with PUFF money rolling in, he got seriously into drugs. Started with painkillers after a major injury and those were his stock for a while, to the point where it got noticeable, then heroin to feed the opiate jones and cocaine to pick him up for hunting.

  Then he got busted distributing and that was that. He got a last check and please don’t bother to reapply.

  Drugs are one of those things nobody really talks about in hunting but they probably take out as many Hunters as vampires. You get beat up and are on the injured list for a while and the nice doctor gives you lots of painkillers to reduce the hurt. And boy, yeah, they feel good. And, yeah, they are addictive as shit. I was never really drawn to them. They’re nice when I hurt but I like the way my brain works and don’t like it being fuzzy. But the physical addiction was something I had to learn to manage. I’d just wean myself off them. Some guys couldn’t do that. Some guys get addicted to tranquilizers to try to deal with the fear. And the last thing you want when you’re hunting is some guy who’s going “Whoa, dude, chill out. Vampires is no big thing!”

  Norbert was one of those who couldn’t kick the habit. Timmy in Seattle had the same problem although that wasn’t why he quit.

  Me, the only thing I’m addicted to is hunting and the whole time the suit was ongoing that was a nonstarter. Fortunately, I didn’t need the money. I had savings and investments, and despite the cost of the house and Remi, pretty good savings.

  New Orleans was relatively calm. There had been no more kifo eruptions. So even though there was a giant monster hidden somewhere beneath the city, it was being quiet. Maybe Glenn and Agent Robinson had been good enough sacrifices to last a while, or maybe it had gotten tired of having all its pseudopods burned off and had gone back to sleep. Franklin assured me he’d call if there were any new developments, and in the meantime MHI would keep trying to figure out how to track down the mava.

  Because of the mutual “do not contact” orders, for the first time in a long time I had MCB off my ass. Which felt good, but left me with too much time on my hands.

  So I mostly closed the house and moved. To Oxford. And I brought Remi.

  It wasn’t to hunt monsters, though. I had other addictions I could feed in the meantime. Growing up, I’d been careful to get straight C’s my entire school career because I hated my mother who was an academic. I’d also refused to properly play the violin, which she’d insisted I study from about the age of five. Problem being, I was both a natural academic and a natural musician. I loved both. I had to be very stubborn to throw both over. I don’t know how many times I was in the middle of a beautiful concerto when I realized my mom had come home and had to switch to horrible squeaks and squeals to cover up.

  Now I had time, I could indulge in both. So I moved to England at least part of the time.

  Part of the time because of taxes. If you live in England full time, even as an American citizen, you’re responsible for a good bit of an English tax burden. And English taxes are insane. I don’t know how anyone gets anything done there. Given my current issues with government in general, and lack of income other than return on investments, I wasn’t big about paying taxes. If MCB really did cut me off from Monster Hunting permanently, assuming they let me live and didn’t gin up some fake charges to put me in prison, I was probably going to find a tax haven to settle down. Or maybe take my skills overseas.

  MI4 had never had an issue with me beyond what the MCB had given them, so I was free to enter England again. Oxford was glad to have me and my tuition money back. The house I rented was nice. Nice enough at a certain level I wished I could just settle there. Two-story brick townhome. One of the nicer ones in the Oxford area. Beautiful back yard. You really can’t grow grass anywhere else the way you can grow it in England. Okay, Seattle and Portland, but for the same reason: lots of rain.

  My day for the first few months was pretty routine. I’d get up predawn, stretch, work out, go for a run. Then after some katas, generally in the back yard, I’d head in to the university. It was a lot like being back in Seattle. I missed the Monster Hunting but was more than happy to have a chance to just get back to studying them.

  I really love Oxford. The food sucks but there’s an energy and it’s always possible to get into a good intelligent conversation. At least if you can avoid politics, which I tried to do assiduously. And there’s more information about monsters, if you know where to look, than any other place on earth. I suppose MCB and MI4 might have more. But not much.

  Oh, and there’s another great thing about Oxford. Girls. Damn the girls are cute. English women seem to really go downhill at a certain point—I think it’s English food that does it—but in their twenties they’re very nice. And extremely open-minded in many cases.

  I showed up slightly late in the semester, still pretty banged up from the beatdown by Franks. My main faculty advisor for the master’s was Dr. Madrigal Henderson. Dr. Maggie was in her sixties, former VHI member and knew, I swear to God, just about everything there was about any monster they had ever encountered. Since my reference was Rigby, Dr. Maggie’s old boss at VHI, I had no issues getting in.

  She taught the master’s level discussion on “Incorporeal Entities and mythological beings.” The class was small. Fifteen people started, ten finished. There were no tests. It was just part of what you needed for a master’s in mythology from Oxford. If you couldn’t cut the mustard, that became clear in your orals.

  Oxford had been the preeminent center for studying the supernatural since at least the thirteenth century. Getting into those particular programs required personal introductions or references from people in the know. Basically they had to be read in somehow before they could even apply. It is a very small, very elite group of students. It turned out I was the only professional Hunter in the class.

  I walked in early and sat towards the back. I didn’t want to kick anyone out of a seat. There were two people in the room when I walked in, male and female. Slowly, more students trickled in. A few looked a bit worse for wear from carousing. One of them looked at me puzzled—I was clearly in his seat—then took another. Dr. Henderson walked in shortly before class was supposed to begin and started without preamble.

  “We have an addition to the class as most of you might have noticed.” Dr. Henderson was a short woman, in her sixties, but looked as if she still pumped lots of iron on a daily basis. “Mr. Gardenier is from America. He is working toward a doctorate in linguistics. For those of you who have studied the American Sasquatch, you might recognize the name as the author of the current dictionary as well as North American Gnoll and its relationship to Teutonic Gnoll. Mr. Gardenier?”

  “Pleasure to meet you all. Since first names are usually acceptable at Oxford, please call me Chad.”

  “We continue with the discussion of the sociology of the Montserrat jumbees…”

  I hadn’t even known there was such a thing as sociology for ghosts. Or that one way to get ghosts to leave an area was to help them fulfill whatever need kept them bound to this plane. MHI rarely worked with ghosts since you couldn’t get a PUFF on one. There were specialty courses in just incorporeal creatures. There were guest lectures by people as diverse as Malay witch doctors and British supernatural coroners. There was so much information thrown at you at Oxford on monsters it was like being in a rainstorm.

  I loved every minute of it.

  Most of the class was focused on the academic side. When the word got around that I was a Hunter, some of them were less than thrilled. Even though most Oxford grads had no problem with eradication, there was still an undertone of “these
are fascinating creatures, mankind shouldn’t be hell-bent on wiping them all out.”

  * * *

  There was a regular gathering at the Harcourt Arms in Jericho. It was away from the student roistering areas and the tourists so you could have a conversation about monsters without throwing too many people off. I liked it because it was about as traditional as you got and when the weather was good, rarely, you could sit out back in the beer garden. This day the weather was good. Cold, but after two and a half years in New Orleans, cold felt good.

  “There are fewer and fewer monsters to be found around the world,” Guillermo Knight said. “Should we really be killing them all off?”

  “Is that a devil’s advocate position?” I asked, taking a sip of ale. The other nice thing about the Harcourt Arms was they stayed to traditional ales and had a fair selection. The interior ran to dark wood and big fireplaces and traditional English beer and food. I liked all of that except the “food” part. Fortunately, I’d brought Remi and he’d brought ingredients.

  “No.” Knight was tall with a distinctly academic sort of look. Always head-in-the-clouds sort. Nice guy, smart, but I don’t think he’d ever had a tough day in his life. “I’m no monster lover like those profs at Cambridge, but humans are extinguishing thousands of species a day. Is it really necessary to make the supernatural extinct as well?”

  “I’m the new guy.” I really didn’t want to get into it. “Anyone?”

  “The passenger pigeon didn’t rip people’s throats out,” Melanie Williams said.

  I’d already had my eye on Melanie. Short, blonde, fairly good-looking. But I’d also noticed various twitch reactions. I’d dealt with too many survivor females with so many trip wires you were constantly walking through a minefield.

  “Tigers rip people’s throats out and would you have all of them disappear?” Knight replied.

  “Tigers don’t reproduce off of the human population,” Johnson Kearney said. Johnson was short, dark-haired, and half-Irish with all the hotness the land of Eire tended to breed. He’d never had a monster encounter but he was hell-bent on removing every last stain from God’s Earth. “Vampires have five billion people and increasing to feed on and grow their own population.”

  “Trust me. They’re hardly endangered,” I said.

  “What about the yeti?” Knight asked.

  “Yeti forms aren’t PUFF-applicable where I’m from. They’re being wiped out by reduction in habitat and poaching. And if a Hunter team finds poachers of yeti or sasquatch? Well, there’s more than one reason we always carry a shovel.”

  “Are you saying sometimes Monster Hunters kill humans?” Knight asked, aghast.

  I thought about my brother dying from a disembowelment. My face must have given away the answer.

  “Oh…”

  “I’ve killed necromancers, and once blew my best friend’s head off to keep him from slowly dying of spider toxin. Killing humans? I don’t lose sleep. But as to your primary contention: There probably are some supernatural entities which are endangered. I could even see putting certain types in zoos. But I flat guarantee you there’s a gnome close enough I could hit it from here with a rock. The supernatural is anything but endangered. It has always lived in constant contact with humans, and humans are anything but endangered. Specific species may be endangered. The supernatural is anything but.”

  “There are fewer Fey,” Knight argued.

  “Because they’re extremely dangerous. The only reason they’re not at open war with us is that they know they’ll lose. Then they really would be extinct. I know MCB wants to extinguish them. And there are even more Fey creatures than you’d think. Most keep a low profile, especially the ones who belong to courts.”

  “There aren’t any Fey courts left in the world!” Knight snapped.

  “Where the hell did you get that?” I asked. “I know of one. Hell, I’ve bound one.”

  “You bound a Fey court?”

  “Eh.” I shrugged. “I’m pretty good with a violin. I made a contract with a Fey queen and a Fey princess.”

  “That I have a hard time believing,” Knight said.

  “I’m not going to call a fucking Fey princess just to prove it. Besides, the one princess I know is a total ditz.”

  “You know a fairy princess?” Kearney said.

  “Princess Ashain Vohola Sasasha Shallala. Total airhead. Mostly. She’s a pretty shrewd businesswoman as it turns out. She—I am not joking—invented Valley Speak. Like totally. Runs a club in Seattle now. Has a small court of hangers-on Fey and a larger court of hangers-on humans. I don’t think the humans know she’s Fey.”

  “You’re serious,” Knight said.

  “Like, totally…” Damn it. Just thinking about Shallala and I end up using Valspeak. “Fey magic is, like, totally pernicious. And til you’ve seen a royal one without their glamour you don’t know for ugly. There ain’t no ugly like Fey-ugly. Take it back, Old One ugly is uglier than Fey-ugly but only just.”

  “And next he’ll be telling us he’s met a Great Old One,” Knight said caustically.

  “Never met a ‘great’ one. Those can destroy your sanity just by proximity, but we’ve got a constant problem with something they created and left beneath New Orleans. It’s this big underground entity that sprouts up pseudopods, like gray-green shoggoths. Really nasty. One of the things I’m trying to do while I’m here is figure out a way to find the actual creature.”

  “Maybe we can help. What is it called?” Melanie asked.

  “Mava paṇauvaā, but that just means ‘worm mother’ in Gujarati.” I gave the other students the rundown of what I knew. “And, Guillermo, these things seriously need to be endangered.”

  “I’m not sure I’d argue for the continuance of an Old One entity,” Knight admitted. “Certainly not a major one. You are a Hunter; shouldn’t you be back there dealing with it?”

  “The rest of the company is looking for it. I’ve currently got some legal issues back home. I’m letting my lawyers handle it. Until the MCB settles my lawsuit, I’m stuck.”

  “Can anyone win a suit with the US Monster Control Bureau?” Kearney asked. “Aren’t they more or less untouchable?”

  “So far. In the meantime, I like it here. I was rather frowned upon at one point by MI4. Since then, they went to the bother of looking into the whole thing, and now it’s MCB who has frosty relations with them. I’m not a fair-haired boy to MI4 but they’re not on my ass. However, on the original discussion…I don’t personally believe, from my own experience and from knowledge of the field in general, that the supernatural is in any way endangered. Is humanity as a whole endangered by it? Will it wipe us out? A Great Old One breaks through? Yes. The Fey are probably a nonthreat in terms of extinction of the human race, as long as we keep them in check and the same goes for all the supernatural. If we don’t control epidemiological monsters like vampires, loup-garou and zombies, then we’re going to find ourselves in a full-up apocalypse. And from a purely human perspective, keeping them in check to protect human life is important. Which I’d really like to get back to doing.”

  “I can hear it in your voice,” Melanie said. “You enjoy it, don’t you?”

  “Enjoy is probably the wrong word. I’m on a mission from God. Literally. I’m addicted to it. Not to the money, although the money is good, but to the mission. There ain’t nothin’ like standing on the dead body of some massive monster you’ve just killed. The feeling can’t really be described.”

  “Do you think you’ll be able to go back?” Kearney asked.

  “Depends on how the suit winds up,” I said. “In the meantime, being able to append ‘Doctor’ to my name helps with persuading politicians who have never seen a monster that I know what I’m talking about. And if I can’t? Have you heard any of the rumors from Eastern Europe? There’s always a need for Hunters somewhere.”

  CHAPTER 15

  I was sort of surprised, mid-semester, when I was put in as a substitute instructor in Intro
duction to Mythology. This freshman course was three days a week and designed for anyone who wanted an elective—it was not aimed at the read-in. It was one of Professor Henderson’s classes. I was one of three teacher’s assistants but after my first week, Professor Henderson just gave me the lecture notes and had me conduct. For Oxford, it was one of the easier electives. I mean, the main reading was stuff like Bulfinch’s Mythology and Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces and Frazer’s The Golden Bough. This wasn’t anything, in my opinion, related to Monster Hunting.

  I was wrong. It is absolutely true that you learn more from teaching a class than from taking one. It was even fun. I’d give the lecture, based on the assigned reading, ask some questions, then take questions and answers. The students were all bright, most of them were not much younger than I was, and while there were plenty of dullards who were just taking an elective to fill a requirement, most were interested in mythology. I eventually was able to pick out a few who’d had supernatural encounters. There were, also, a few who would just believe in anything.

  The really funny part, for me, was the two days spent on “sexual entities in mythology.” That ranged from Zeus, one screwing motherfucker of a god, to things like Orang Mynyak. As someone with actual experience, I discussed it, but I tried not to say too much.

  “Zoovnuj Txeeg Txivneej.” I wrote the phonetic spelling on the board then adding the Hmong. “The Vietnamese Forest Man. Similar enough in many respects to the original satyr, They’re about three feet tall. Purple skin. Pot-bellied. Batlike face with a pig’s snout and tusks. They were referred to as ‘Big Dick Nine’ by American forces who en— by American forces in Vietnam who were aware of the myth. They’re rapey little bastards.”

  This occasioned a certain amount of laughter from the class. I’d drawn a cartoon while I was talking. I thought it was a pretty accurate representation.

  After the laughter died down a young woman near the back held up her hand. “How would you know that?”