A PERMUTED PRESS book
Published at Smashwords
ISBN (Trade Paperback): 978-1-61868-367-0
ISBN (eBook): 978-1-61868-366-3
I Kill Monsters: Fury copyright © 2014
by Tony Monchinski
All Rights Reserved.
Cover art by RavenKult: George Cotronis
This book is a work of fiction. People, places, events, and situations are the product of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or historical events, is purely coincidental.
No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author and publisher.
For my uncle, Raymond Joseph Lynch
“…don’t imagine that everything you know is everything there is to know”
– Emmanuela
Table of Contents
*
Wednesday 26 August 1998
1. 4:25 A.M.
2. 5:03 A.M.
3. 5:04 A.M.
4. 5:05 A.M.
5. 5:08 A.M.
6. 5:10 A.M.
7. 5:19 A.M.
8. 6:03 A.M.
9. 6:25 A.M.
10. 7:15 A.M.
11. 7:50 A.M.
12. 9:15 A.M.
13. 10:01 A.M.
14. 10:12 A.M.
15. 10:20 A.M.
16. 10:45 A.M.
17. 11:59 A.M.
18. 1:30 P.M.
19. 2:45 P.M.
20. 3:07 P.M.
21. 5:20 P.M.
22. 9:25 P.M.
23. 10:15 P.M.
24. 10:23 P.M.
Thursday 27 August 1998
25. 2:45 A.M.
26. 2:51 A.M.
27. 2:55 A.M.
28. 2:56 A.M.
29. 3:10 A.M.
30. 3:47 A.M.
31. 4:12 A.M.
32. 12:15 P.M.
33. 3:12 P.M.
34. 5:45 P.M.
35. 7:00 P.M.
36. 10:45 P.M.
37. 11:34 P.M.
38. 11:51 P.M.
Friday 28 August 1998
39. 12:47 A.M.
40. 1:01 A.M.
41. 1:05 A.M.
42. 1:12 A.M.
43. 1:15 A.M.
44. 1:22 A.M.
45. 1:27 A.M.
46. 1:35 A.M.
47. 2:10 A.M.
48. 2:30 A.M.
49. 4:51 A.M.
The Master’s Tale
Time Indeterminate
Tuesday 8 September 1998
51. 5:12 P.M.
Wednesday 9 September 1998
52. 7:34 P.M.
53. 7:45 P.M.
54. 8:15 P.M.
Thursday 9 September 1998
55. 7:05 A.M.
About the Author
*
So then, you are he, the one my people whisper of with dread and loathing. You laid low here before me…Forgive me, if you would, my merriment. If only you had known how my people feared you. They spoke your name like a terrible secret, and now…to see you here, like this…
…Oh, how the mighty have fallen…but they always do, do they not?
…I implore you, do not die before the sun sets…grasp you stomach and hold its contents within…a terrible wound, indeed, but when I think of the devastation you and your ‘friends’ have inflicted on my own kind…well, let us sit here and talk and contemplate finitude together, yes?
…you and I are separated by more than this mote of sunlight…it is true what the legend holds, that my kind cannot venture forth in the light of day…but, if what you call ‘immortality’ has granted me one insight, it is this—that though the day is long, the day must pass, as inevitably it shall, as invariably all do, and with its passage comes the night…always the night…the glorious, damned night. And then I will up and cross this space between us, and I will introduce myself in—how shall I say?—a more proper fashion, one appropriate to our situation.…
…you’ve lost a great deal of blood, and yet, you refuse to die. Your obstinacy is admirable--and yet, by your willfulness you arrived here, did you not?
…another thing this ‘life’ has taught me, there is that which is worse than non-existence…you knew you were walking into a trap, and yet you came…and here you are…which means you possess an over-inflated sense of self potency. Are you truly that headstrong, that rash?
…where were we? Ah yes, you must forgive me…is that your real name? Is it? You won’t say. You choose not? Or you cannot? Well, I do not think I would be much in the mood for conversation either if I lay disemboweled. So I shall speak, and you will listen…
…and I will talk until the end of this day, and then perhaps we will explore together the sounds a man can make in the dark of the night…so do not die now, I beseech you. Do not perish, as you yourself have destroyed all those around us…a mighty warrior you may be, and though I detest your essence, I cannot but respect your skill. To do otherwise would be to refute the irrefutable…
…so lie there now and listen, and I will relate to you an account of a warrior the likes of whom you have never known, the likes of whom I doubt I will ever see again…in this way we shall pass the time together, shall we not? And then will come the night, for the night always comes…
…my master was a cruel and terrible lord…
Wednesday
26 August 1998
1.
4:25 A.M.
The rain fell in torrents from the grey-clouded skies, pounding the hood of the K-car. The bleached-out burgundy hood had withstood more than a thousand days under the merciless sun. The car was parked on the corner of a blighted Bronx neighborhood, blocks of derelict, boarded-up three- and five-story buildings looming over the street. One block over the towers of the projects, cold and concrete, rose up to the clouds.
There were three men in the vehicle and they had been there for some time. If anyone had been stupid enough to approach the Reliant through the downpour they would have seen two light-skinned men and a black man inside. Their faces were inhospitable, all business. Their hard looks alone would have been enough to send away anyone too nosy for their own good.
It wasn’t an unusual site in this neighborhood, a carful of men looking like they didn’t belong. People from other boroughs and states visited here every night for the drugs and women. The rain had sent the whores indoors hours earlier and their johns stayed away.
Only one building on the desolate block showed any signs of activity: a bodega down the street, on the corner opposite the car. The blinking Christmas lights on the deli were out of place and out of season, an incongruous beacon in a part of the city the economic upswing had forgotten. A penumbra of light from the overhead sign cast its arc on the sidewalk out front. Beyond the light a homeless man lay huddled in his raggedy clothes and coat, sodden cardboard boxes draped over his inert form.
More inconspicuous than the 24-hour stand-alone bodega or the car with its rough-and-tumble looking inhabitants was the mobile blood van parked across from the store. A converted recreational vehicle, its windows were shaded even on this ray-less morning. Placards on its sides and rear identified the vehicle as a Red Crescent collection unit. A line of people waited outside the van, resigned in their queue, most without umbrellas. They were the homeless and the addicted, working girls, those down on their luck and bereft of hope, shivering in the wet and damp.
Periodically a door near the rear of the RV would open and one of those on line would stumble up to disappear inside, while a door near the front end disgorged another anonymous form into the rain. The people staggering away from the van clutched fistfuls of cash
as they turned their heads down from the rain, stepping through the puddles that had filled the potholes in the street. Most of these bee-lined it straight across the street to the garish lights of the bodega. The line at the rear of the vehicle was a row that never diminished, stragglers attaching themselves to it in their ones and twos. There were always more people, few of them speaking to one another, some of them incoherent from alcohol, smack, and crack.
All of them waited their turn to trade red for green.
Inside the K-car the three men sat and watched, biding their time. Empty foam coffee cups and cigarette butts littered the interior.
“You see that guy they pulled out of the river last week?” Gossitch’s voice was like gravel from years of smoking. He had a big, crooked nose that looked like it had been broken a few times in all his years. Grizzled and older than the other two, he spoke to no one in particular. It was the first time any of the men had spoken in some time. There was gray in Gossitch’s short, curly hair. He was drumming the fingers of one hand on the steering wheel.
“Yeah, that was some fucked-up shit.” They called the tall, lean black man Santa-Anna. He had run with Gossitch years back. Santa Anna was a guy no one other than Gossitch or Bowie could vouch for, and both Gossitch and Bowie had vouched for him. For everyone else in his crew save one, Gossitch’s word was enough.
“The newspapers said it might take some time to identify him.”
Gossitch stroked his stubbly chin and made a mental note to shave as soon as he had a few minutes to do so, after this job was done and behind them. He wore a white gold band on the ring finger of his hand on the wheel. There had been a wife once.
“Want to know why?” he asked. Neither Santa Anna in the passenger seat next to him nor the hulking kid in the back replied, so he told them. “Whoever did him in did him nasty. Took off his arms, legs. Ripped his jaw off, all his uppers too.”
Santa Anna whistled. “Dismembered him and removed his jaw? Day-em.”
“Dismembered makes it sound clinical, like they sawed him up neat in some guy’s bath tub somewhere,” Gossitch corrected. “That ain’t what happened. This guy’s limbs were torn off. His choppers too.”
“How they know he was a man? Genitals?”
“No, whoever done him took those off too…”
Santa Anna pursed his lips and exhaled.
“…they gendered him on account of his flat hairy chest.”
“Could have been a Mexican broad,” Santa Anna joked. He thought it funny for a number of reasons, not least of which being he was back out on the streets now, hooked back in with his old crew chief, and they were already on a job earning. A job they were calling him Santa Anna on; Santa Anna the old Mexican general and all.
The young guy in the backseat, the man they called Boone, noted the way the black man called Santa Anna pronounced Mexican. Made the Mex sound like Mess. Messican. Sounded ignorant, thought Boone. Sounded, to the hulking young man in the back of the car, like a typical street nigger.
Santa Anna had been locked away long enough that what he thought was funny wasn’t what the other men necessarily thought was, and he knew it. These men, hard men like himself, they weren’t laughing. “Who’d want to do that to another human being?” he asked. He’d walked out of prison and onto the bus from upstate less than two weeks prior. Inside he’d seen and heard of some fucked up shit, from gang fights and shankings to crooked hacks and outright assassinations. Vamps had been inside too…that fucking thing, Enfermo. He’d promised himself he wouldn’t think about that thing.
But he’d never heard of anyone getting their arms and legs tore off.
“Bloodsuckers would do that to a human being.” Boone watched the van down the block intently through a pair of binoculars.
Santa Anna didn’t know what to make of the kid. He was younger than the rest of their crew, maybe in his mid-twenties. He seemed tight with the old man but kept eye-fucking Santa Anna. The kid was big as a house, all diesel and shit. Santa Anna figured Boone was trying for some pack dominance thing, or maybe all the ‘roids in his system were fucking with his psyche. Whatever. Santa Anna would live with him because he was part of Gossitch’s crew, but if the kid wanted to throw down, Santa Anna wouldn’t hesitate. Not for a second.
“Nah, vamps don’t operate like that,” Gossitch dismissed the comment. He was still drumming his fingers on the wheel. “Sure, they’ll kill you, might even torture you some first if they think you got it coming to you. But they prefer to lay low, stay out of the limelight. That’s why we’re able to do what we do. You know that kid.”
“I get the impression Boone here don’t care much for the undead.”
“Boone don’t like too many people, period.” Gossitch put fire to a Marlboro. “Ain’t that right kid?”
Boone made a noise that sounded like hurn. He continued staring out the windshield at the blood collection unit down the street.
“So how they identifying that body from the river then?” Santa Anna asked. He shifted the Ithaca Model 37 M pump shotgun from its place on his lap to between his legs, the twenty-inch barrel resting against the passenger side dash. For him to be found in a car with the shotgun and two other men packing fully automatic weapons was enough for the cops to drag his ass back to prison. Probably for good this time, too.
But Santa Anna didn’t sweat it. Gossitch had planned this job, which meant they weren’t likely to see any of the boys in blue. The Law tended to ignore this musty armpit of the city even when they weren’t paid to do so. Gossitch had it all under control.
“Gritz says DNA testing,” said the old man.
“Ain’t that something,” Santa Anna nodded. It wasn’t a question. Gritz was one of Gossitch’s contacts in the NYPD.
“Sure is.”
The rain pounded on the hood of the car.
After awhile Gossitch ground out his umpteenth cigarette and brought up his own pair of Zeiss binoculars. The line of people outside the blood unit wasn’t getting any shorter. He’d been around long enough not to buy into that whole there-but-for-the-grace-of-whoever-whatever bullshit. Gossitch didn’t feel particularly bad for the men and women lined up out there, a bunch of derelicts, drunks, and chicken heads, girls who would leave their two-year olds at home alone and go down on you in an alley for a fin, just to segue right back to the pipe.
No one had held a gun up to their heads and forced any of them to smoke rock or get knocked up when they were thirteen. They were human and they had made choices, and some of those choices had been bad choices, choices that had damned their lives. The sad ones had come to realize their past mistakes and how they were forced to live with them. The vast majority, the idiots, still didn’t get it. And now they stood here on this strangely chilly yet muggy summer morning as the rain refused to let up, standing and waiting to donate their blood for enough of a purse to afford themselves whatever poison they put into their bodies.
Rock. Smack. Heroin. Booze. It all answered the same hunger, thought Gossitch. Like his Marlboros.
He refocused his glass and saw that the homeless guy was still in his box a few buildings down from the bodega.
“Goose, put on the radio or something,” Boone requested from the backseat.
The kid was restless. The guy was a man of action, Gossitch knew, albeit often irrational, extremely violent action with little thought to the consequences. Especially where vamps and their ilk were concerned. Soon enough for that.
Gossitch turned the key in the ignition and the radio came on. He wasn’t worried about draining the battery. The car wasn’t theirs.
Some guy was rapping.
“What’s this noise?” asked Santa Anna.
“Gangsta Khan,” answered Boone. “He’s big on the east coast.”
“Never heard of him.” Santa Anna had done his time out in the Midwest and upstate. Federal. “When I went away guys on top of the game were EPMD, Big Daddy Kane, Erik B, and Rakim. What’s this bullshit? This nigga call that a hook?
Freddy Foxx rapped for like five minutes without a break on The Master.”
“Method Man tears shit up for the same on his song, no hook, no break."
“Method Man. That’s some bullshit there.” Santa Anna shook his head. “Put on ninety-two three, would ya Frank?”
“Give me a break,” Gossitch exhaled a trail of smoke from a new smoke. “I can’t listen to that crap since they switched to modern rock.”
“Okay. One-oh-four three then.”
On the radio, Dave Herman was introducing a Smashing Pumpkins song.
“What’s this modern rock bullshit anyway?” asked Santa Anna. “I go away and I come back and fucking Seattle has taken over rock and roll?”
“They call it alternative or somethin’,” said Gossitch dismissively. “Grunge.”
“Shit won’t last.”
“That’s what they said about rap,” offered Boone.
“Those guys look like their balls smell.”
Three songs and a commercial break later, Marcy Playground were singing about a girl in platform double suede. Like disco lemonade.
Gossitch changed the station to CBS-FM. “Hot town, summer in the city,” the Lovin’ Spoonful sang, “back of my neck getting dirty and gritty.” Gossitch thought it appropriate, given the weather.
“Po-pos,” muttered Santa Anna. A police car was coming down the block form their east.
Gossitch stowed his binoculars under the front seat and felt for the keys in the ignition. Santa Anna reached over and killed the radio. In the back Boone slunk lower, his hands disappearing in the flannel of the jacket shirt he wore. The kid ignored the Colt SMG on the seat next to him.
If push came to shove they’d haul ass out of there. Gossitch wasn’t going to throw down with the law. His connections inside knew what he and his crew were about and they generally left him and his guys to do what they did. He suspected the men in the RV had their connections behind the blue wall too, which would help explain why in their three hours out here this was the first cruiser they’d seen.
I Kill Monsters: Fury (Book 1) Page 1