I Kill Monsters: Fury (Book 1)

by Tony Monchinski

  “You ever realize how tightly packed the inside of a human body must be?” Boone was wondering aloud, standing above a blood pool.

  “There’s twenty-eight feet of intestines in the human body,” offered Foley.

  Boone reached out to touch the string of intestine hung across the room, thought better of it, put his hand back down.

  “You know who’s missing here?” he asked Gossitch and Johnny Spasso.

  The latter raised an eyebrow.

  “At least one other girl,” explained Boone. “Set up like this? They’re going to have more than the girl on screen. And Stephanie Swallows? She was no fluffer. Girl’s only been in the industry, what, two years?”

  “Who else?” asked Spasso.

  “Swallows had a boyfriend,” said Boone. “Duffy or something. He’d of been here.”

  “He’d of been here?” asked Gossitch. “To watch his girl suck off a bunch of mugs?”

  “Some guys get off on it,” said the kid. “Some guys say its just business. Make a living ‘managing’ their girls. Suitcase pimps.”

  “What I don’t get,” said Spasso, “is what’s up with the feathers?”

  “The feathers?” asked Gossitch. Spasso pointed to the wreckage in the center of the room and Gossitch and Boone looked. Sure enough, there were several loose feathers among the blood.

  “Maybe they were fuckin’ an ostrich?” Boone half joked.

  “I seen ostrich feathers.” Gossitch crouched down to study the feathers. They were black and large and the barbs coming off the rachis were crimson-black. “And these don’t look like ostrich feathers.”

  “I seen this fat chick fuck a horse once, on video.” Boone told them. “Fuckin’ thing came for like a full minute. Shoulda seen it hose her down.”

  “Those don’t look like any feathers I’ve ever seen,” concluded Gossitch. “Hey, Gritz. See if you got a guy named Duffy or whatever with a record on him. He might be here…”

  “If he was, he didn’t leave his wallet,” offered the detective.

  “He wouldn’t have,” added Boone. He had taken a knee and was looking at a feather outlined in chalk, thinking of a story he had heard about the Italian porn star Cicciolina, that her first film she had fucked a horse. He didn’t know if it was true. She’d gone on to serve in government somewhere, maybe Italy.

  There was a cigarette butt circled off next to the feather. Thin and brown. Looked like a Moore, Boone thought.

  “Somethin’ bad about this.” Johnny Spasso thought out loud. “Very similar to a couple of others happened in the last week. You heard about them?”

  “Yeah, I did,” affirmed Gossitch. “Were those guys with the family?”

  “They were. That guy they fished parts of out of the river? He was involved in this. Executive producer or some bullshit title.”

  “Well, we’ll see what turns up in the next couple of days.”

  “Dickie sends his thanks, Frank.” Johnny said. “For you coming out here and all.”

  “You give Dickie my best. It’s been too long. Listen, Johnny, we’re going to be at Xerxes tonight. Anything comes up, you can find us there, okay?”

  “Sounds good.”

  “Come on kid, let’s go.” Gossitch turned and left the loft, Boone following him. As he walked past Lynch, the officer glared at him.

  “See you later, Bad Lieutenant.”

  22.

  9:25 P.M.

  The night had come, and with it, the hunger. Always the hunger, mused the dark Lord Rainford, always the night.

  He walked the dark streets of his adopted city, the air humid and the pavement damp. When groups of people passed he kept to the shadows, merging with the gloom. If they saw him they would see a person not unlike themselves, older than most perhaps, but age indeterminate. He would be nondescript in his dark clothes and black, soft-soled shoes. Yet, they would not detect him unless he so wished it.

  Not that he feared any human or group of humans. Far from it. Even at his advanced age and with the certitude of his decline hanging over him like the sword of Damocles, he was more than a match for every human being he might encounter.

  A group of rambunctious white teenagers came down the street he was on. Ranford blended into the gloom at the side of a building. The boys were young and stupid and somewhere they shouldn’t have been, but in their youth and ignorance they mistook tom-foolery for bravery and risk as reward in itself. By the way they carried on and the clothes they wore, he judged them children of privilege. Rainford momentarily considered snatching one from the bunch and draining the child before his friends but decided against it.

  He hid in the dark until the teens had passed, and then he resumed his hunt.

  The earth had turned and hid one side from its star, much as the people who lived on its surface hid. Rainford knew they concealed their true motivations and intentions from everyone else, including their families and friends. They hid their own morality from themselves. They had evolved a consciousness capable of allowing them to grasp the full import of their existence, but they chose to employ that consciousness to mask the gravity of their situations. To evade responsibility.

  Rainford knew this because he had been one of them once.

  He had laughed and cried, loved and longed, much as they. He had known thirst and hunger, privation and want. Unlike many others, he had been fortunate enough to enjoy, for a brief moment in time, the satisfaction of those needs. But knowing himself satisfied, he had not grown complacent. Indeed, he had considered himself extremely fortunate. He had begged his master to turn him, though his master had refused.

  His master was a being of rectitude, one that did not dodge responsibility but saw a task carried through to the end. Rainford had been impressed by that as a child. As a vampire with ages to contemplate and an existence of his own to sustain, he had been astounded. His master had been more humane that the humans themselves.

  That there were others like his master. But alas, there were not.

  A siren wailed past in the distant night and Rainford knew the humans hunted one of their own.

  For over three hundred years he had watched them kill each other when they were not killing his. As a majority of the humans banished his kind to myth, they devised new and more efficient ways of destroying each other. What was the horror of drawing and quartering to Hiroshima? Where was the humanity of the guillotine next to their lethal injections?

  The humans fooled themselves that they stood for values they could cite but never understand, much less begin to live up to. Rainford detested their deeds but above all he hated the ways in which they lied to themselves.

  Unfortunately, in Rainford’s estimation, the children of the night were not much better.

  He walked the broad avenues, well lit with artificial light. Even this late the Asian markets were open for business, hawking their wares. There were customers galore.

  The younger generations of vampire had given themselves over to a nihilism that denied all. They had misread Nietzsche, much as the Nazis had. Fritz had been no friend of nihilism. In fact, he had been its foe. Rainford knew this because he had known the man.

  Yes, Nietzsche had perceived—correctly thought the dark Lord—the absence of moral universals, let alone imperatives. True, he had perceived the despair this could engender. He had warned that if one stared long enough into the abyss, the abyss would stare back into you.

  But his had ultimately been an optimistic message, a moral lost on Kreshnik and others like it. All Fritz had asked was that one accept responsibility for her actions and the consequences of these actions, that one embrace the concept of responsibility in history.

  And that, Rainford had long ago realized, was the problem with human beings and his own. Each evaded responsibility. They carried on as though they thought their decisions and actions did not carry consequences. Or that any consequences were none of their concern.

  Rainford turned off the street crowded with people and stalls and ent
ered a series of winding alleys.

  He detested the Albanian and its ilk. Its fawning harlots and mindless sycophants who lived to serve. They looked to Kreshnik as a deity because he was learning to walk in the sun, because his cruelty was unmatched.

  Kreshnik. It meant knight.

  Rainford did not understand the thing at all. What code did this creature live by, except that of naked avarice and unquenchable mayhem? The spectacle and excess of this morning with the girl, for example. Its slave. He had tried to get her attention, to distract her with his gaze. To make her last moments peaceful ones at least. Kreshnik did not do this. The thought would never have crossed the creature’s mind, nor that of any of its followers.

  Rainford detested them all. But he was one, alone, and they were many. They augured the future.

  This concerned him.

  He turned a corner and the man he saw appeared homeless. He looked like he was sleeping off a drunk. Rainford slipped into the shadows and waited, watching.

  In an earlier time, in the days immediately after he had been turned, there had been greater optimism, hope. Or perhaps that had just been the distorted perceptions of an eastern European peasant boy faced with the slaughter of his family and his own impending doom. Rainford had been naïve enough to think his master had saved him, had delivered him from death by transforming him.

  The man slept on a slab of cardboard which kept him above the moist pavement. Though the sounds of the city at night were clear, no other human being traversed this passage.

  The dark Lord had embraced his change, had willingly accepted the training that it required.

  Moving closer, his soft-soled shoes making little if any noise, Rainford considered the man asleep before him. This man was someone’s son, perhaps some child’s father. In this man’s person resided the collective hopes and dreams of who knew how many, as well, conceivably, as the anger and disappointment of untold others.

  Rainford realized that the attrition rate among the young of his kind was enormous. More vampires died then succeeded in assimilating to the lifestyle. He himself had turned many, but only a few of these had survived. Humans and other creatures had pursued them relentlessly. Vampires had had to learn to live among humans, among a race who despised and hunted them when they were not denying their existence. They went from their diurnal habits to rising at night and fleeing the dawn.

  They had had to learn to hunt and feed without drawing attention to themselves. Many failed in the task and perished from malnourishment. Others, Rainford knew, had comprehended their predicament after longing for it and, overwhelmed, ended themselves, stepping into the sun, driving wooden stakes through their own chests, ingesting silver.

  Rainford knelt down over the sleeping man and studied him. He looked like one who had led a tempestuous life. His skin was wrinkled and his clothes unkempt, stained. The man had spent a great deal of time in the heat of the day since his last shave or bath.

  One could not be turned into a vampire against one’s will. But had those who actively longed for the transformation considered the ramifications of their new existence? Rainford knew that the peasant boy he had been, had not. That child lacked the mental apparatus to conceive the endless days and the fleeting nights. That little boy, who had known periods of starvation on the land, had no idea what hunger could mean.

  The hunger.

  Rainford smelled the blood coursing through the man’s veins and arteries, feeding his organs. The man had long poisoned himself with liquor, but this was nothing to a vampire.

  The hunger was a drive which overshadowed all others. A thirst that would ever return.

  The men who had robbed them this morning, one of them had been disguised as a vagrant. Those men would be dealt with, harshly.

  Boone.

  The man was a nuisance. A gnat. Rainford understood the price of doing business, the business of surviving unseen, of sharing an inhospitable landscape with others. Loss of materials was tolerated, even expected. However, as with Kreshnik, there was no need for the viciousness. Slashing the girl’s face, for instance. Exposing Shane to the sun.

  That had crossed a line. It demanded redress.

  The man before Rainford opened his drunken eyes and stared up at the vampire.

  The dark Lord leaned closer and enfolded him with his gaze, disarming the man, drawing him in. The man stared into the abyss, and found that the abyss stared back. Lost in Rainford’s stare, he did not feel the teeth sink into his neck.

  Even at Rainford’s age, the urge to feed was powerful. But the taste had lost its magic. Though the feeding had long ago become a utilitarian task, the necessity that drove it was no less real.

  The man beneath him did not put up a fight. He had looked into the dark Lord’s eyes and been put at peace, a tranquility he had probably never known. This was Rainford’s gift to the man, his final moments.

  The taking was neat and clean, the kill quick and efficient. Unlike the scene in the warehouse this morning. As Rainford sat back on his haunches, unfolding the handkerchief he carried, the thought of it still bothered him.

  In his nights, the dark Lord had dined on princes and paupers, the famous and unknown. Always, he had chosen his prey with care, caring to remain hidden, caring not to draw attention to himself. Unlike Kreshnik, who killed indiscriminately and on a whim. Unlike the actions of this man Boone, a man whose name Rainford had heard more than once in the last year or two.

  A name heard once too often.

  He dabbed at his lips with the handkerchief.

  They would find this man Boone through his friends. The wheels were already in motion. The creature that called itself Enfermo was involved. Enfermo. Like Rainford, a child of the night. Like the Albanian, another detestable creature. But a creature, like all others, with its uses.

  Kreshnik.

  The creature was especially perturbed the past fortnight. Its countrymen on the Continent were fleeing Kosovo in droves. The Serbs were attempting to squelch Albanian independence. Kreshnik wanted to return, to go back and taste Slavic blood.

  When this Boone was found, Rainford decided he would let Kreshnik indulge its revenge, satisfy its pride. Perhaps then the Albanian would leave the city and return to its home. The dark Lord knew Kreshnik was marshalling its strength, that one day soon the Albanian would make a stand against the dark Lord himself. Its infernal mother, no doubt, goading it along. This man Boone could be the oblation that would propitiate the Albanian and send it on its way.

  It would not end well for this man called Boone, and in getting to him, it would not end well for his friends. So be it. Again, the price of their business.

  Rainford dragged the limp body deeper into the shadows, covering it with the refuse strewn about the alley.

  When he was young and human and vampires constituted nothing more than mere myth and legend, Rainford had longed to be like them. He had ascribed to them a romanticism that bore no semblance to the reality. He had misunderstood their natures, what their lives entailed.

  With his lack of sophistication, he had believed the stories of their immortality.

  The dark Lord stood and walked off into the next alley and as he did so he considered.

  Why immortality? Why, for that matter, fame, which was just another means towards the realization of immortality? Did the one striving for fame fully grasp that which he sought?

  The living, breathing being, in his time and place is known by a finite number of fellow travelers. Rainford had been a peasant boy unknown outside his village. The historical figure, he had long ago concluded, is just that, an abstraction.

  So he had read of the architect Brunelleschi what the historian Vasari had deemed to write, that the Florentine’s desire for glory led him to accept the commission to vault the cupola in Florence. Brunelleschi had agreed, even when the magistrates questioned his ability to erect it lacking a framework.

  A lesser man, Giorgio Vasari implied, would have been put off by the demands of the judges
, insulted. Not Filippo. Instead, for him, what price glory? A temporary capitulation to satisfy those who controlled the purse strings. A compromise the Florentine deemed ultimately acceptable.

  But what of the man himself? Rainford had read of him, had looked upon the marble bust of the artist in the Santa Maria del Fiore, had stared up in wonder at the cupola. What of the man who was born in the fourteenth century and died in the forty sixth year of the fifteenth, the man whose friendship and adventures with Donatello were once well known to a literate audience?

  That man, Rainford knew, was dead and gone, a memory, a historical fragment, nothing more. And yet so much more than the nameless, faceless billions history offered up in the perpetuation of that species.

  And yet the man had been here, on this Earth, as it turned. He had breathed the air breathed by countless others. Now he was gone, thought Rainford, and the air of this night passed by without him.

  Could any man ever be assured of his own immortality, if even in history books? And were not even these but empty promises?

  His hunger fulfilled for the time being, Rainford stepped out of the alley and onto the street.

  23.

  10:15 P.M.

  Boone walked past the line that stretched around the corner and cut in front of a well-dressed couple who were getting out of a limousine. He had changed his flannel to one with sleeves but still wore camo shorts that hung below his knees and his work boots.

  They called the bouncer behind the velvet rope Big Mike. He looked like a black Father Mark. Big Mike eyed Boone’s apparel and scoffed.

  “Normally…” Big Mike’s voice was a baritone. “I don’t let your type in this kind of establishment.”

  “And normally,” he shot back. “I don’t let your type live.”

  Boone knew what Big Mike and his cousin were and why they had to have jobs they could work at night.

  The bouncer grudgingly unhooked the velvet rope and let Boone enter.

  “Fuck you very much.” Boone spat and Big Mike had to stifle a hiss less he bared his fangs.