Night at the Museum - A Bubba the Monster Hunter Novella

by John G. Hartness

  “That’s where I’d start, but it might be better to catch them in the act,” came the nasally voice in my ear.

  “Then pull their mask off like an old Scooby-Doo episode?” I asked.

  “Yeah, you can be the meddling kid, except huge!” Skeeter agreed. I laughed and went back to join Joe and Becca.

  Or I tried to, at least. I thought I headed back in the direction I came from, but I ended up turned around and started wandering through what looked like a bamboo forest. I crossed a wooden footbridge, and halfway across, I looked up and there was dude in full armor standing in front of me.

  He was a little dude, especially compared my six-and-a-half-foot height and three hundred pounds and change. But the sword he held looked wicked sharp, and the second he looked up at me, he flashed that thing around his head in a series of complicated slashes and whirls that left me dizzy just looking at him. He stepped onto the bridge and started walking across.

  “Hey buddy,” I said. He stopped and looked at me. He wore one of those masks that attached to the front of his helmet, with a Chinese dragon for a face. He didn’t speak, just stared at me through those deep black holes in the mask.

  “This bridge ain’t built for two, pal. You wanna scoot back a little bit to let me through?” I made a shooing motion with my hands, but he didn’t move. Instead, he put his sword out in front of himself and making like it was a broom, “swept” me backwards.

  “So that’s how it’s gonna be, huh?” I asked. I drew my kukri and grinned. “Good. It’s been a few days since I got to hit something, and with all that armor you’re wrapped in, I don’t see a whole lot of reason to pull my punches.”

  Apparently neither did he, because without a word, he sprang at me, sword flashing in the dim light of the museum. He got some air, too, clearing a solid fifteen feet of ground in one leap. If I’d been expecting a normal man, he would have caught me completely off-guard and wrecked my face. But I know that in my life, the odds of me fighting a human are less than the odds of me winning the lottery. And I don’t even buy lottery tickets.

  So I got a good judge of his leap and took one huge step forward, putting my shoulder right about the spot where he wanted to be landing. Samurai Slim hit me like a ton of bricks, but I was ready for him. I planted my feet and twisted to the left as he came down, and he flopped into the artificial stream under the bridge, armor and all. I dumped him on his back quicker than Jenny Newell after my junior prom. He wriggled around in the shallow water like a turtle for a few seconds while I stood looking down on him and laughing, but then he turned to smoke and vanished.

  “Now that ain’t fair…” I said, then pain exploded in the lower part of my abdomen, and I almost blew chunks over the bridge rail into the little fake river. As it was, I went high enough up on my tiptoes to almost take a header over the handrail before I grabbed onto the railing with one hand and my balls with the other. My kukri clattered to the wooden bridge, completely forgotten as my testicles swelled up to four times their normally impressive size, and I saw all the colors of the rainbow flash in front of my eyelids as I screwed my lids shut to keep my nuts from flying out through my eye sockets.

  I collapsed to the bridge, pressing my face into the wood trying to find an inch of my body that wasn’t completely occupied with my genitals. That’s hard enough under normal circumstances, but in the minutes after a man is kicked so hard in his nuts that he seriously contemplates castration, because it would hurt less, there was exactly zero chance of me thinking of anything other than my exploded nutsack.

  I lay there on my side gasping for breath and very conscientiously not puking, and eventually my vision cleared. When I could see through the tears, which was much like driving through a North Georgia July thunderstorm as far as visibility was concerned, I saw a pair of red boots standing shoulder-width apart about eighteen inches from my nose. I rolled over a little farther, and those red boots were attached to the same red devil armor that my opponent for bridge supremacy was wearing before he found himself half-buried in mud and silt.

  Looking farther up, I saw the grinning devil face had vanished right before my eyes. His shoulders were shaking with laughter as he leaned on his sword and watched me writhe in pain. My shoulders were shaking, too, but it was more from abject agony than amusement. That changed a little as the tips of my flailing right fingers brushed the hilt of one of my discarded kukri. I wrapped my fist around the hilt of the big curved knife and brought it down overhand onto the bridge of the laughing jackass’s foot, burying the tip through the arch of his right foot and about two inches deep into the wooden bridge.

  He let out a howl that I’m pretty sure rattled the roofing tiles all over the museum and bent almost double clutching at his foot. I met his face coming down with a fist as I stood up, and the combined momentum of his skull and my cantaloupe-sized right hand converged on the nose of his grinning devil mask with a thunderous crack. The mask shattered all over the bridge, my knuckles split all the way to the bone from the impact, and his head snapped back hard enough to reverse his entire forward motion into a backflop onto the wooden bridge. His head hit the boards with an almost hollow-sounding thunk, and he lay completely still.

  I thought for a second that I’d killed him, until I looked into his helmet and found nobody home.

  “What the literal shit,” I muttered. “Skeeter!” I hollered at the air.

  “What happened, Bubba? I lost comm for the last few minutes,” Skeeter’s voice came right into my ear, which most days was like wearing a functional dentist’s drill for an earring.

  “Yeah, apparently Japanese ghost armor makes our technology shit the bed. And in case you were wondering, Japanese ghost armor hits like a goddamn Mack truck. I swear to God he kicked my balls up into the bottom of my lungs,” I wheezed. I picked up my kukri and re-sheathed them, then picked up the now empty helmet and sword. “I wonder if this shit was expensive,” I mused.

  “Just at a quick glimpse, I’d say it was probably crazy expensive. That style of sword didn’t come into being until the fourteenth century, but they were prized for their sharpness and durability. And a complete set of armor like that would be worth millions. Until it ran afoul of you, of course.”

  “He started it,” I protested. “I was just walking across the bridge.”

  “And you didn’t yield to the samurai, did you?” Skeeter asked.

  “Yield? What, like go back and let him just walk across when I was almost halfway done? Hell no, I didn’t do that.”

  “Then the ghost of the samurai was honor-bound to battle you in single combat.”

  “Was he honor-bound to try and castrate me, too?” I asked, still rubbing my sore junk.

  “I think that might be the least of our problems here, Bubba,” Skeeter replied.

  “Says the guy who, thanks to me, hasn’t been hit in the balls since middle school,” I grumbled. “But what’s the other problem?”

  “The fact that you just fought a suit of haunted armor in a museum that we thought wasn’t haunted.”

  “Shit,” I said. “I reckon we’re in the right place after all.”

  *****

  “And that’s how it went down.” I finished relaying the story to Becca and her boss, the Museum’s Executive Director, Ms. Harrell. Ms. Harrell was a pinched-face woman who looked like she had fun once, but got over it quick. She wore a dark pantsuit with no jewelry, no adornment of any type, with long brown hair and pretty much no makeup. She had quick green eyes that missed nothing, and a tendency to point out exactly how stupid something sounded to her in no uncertain terms. She’d already made it clear to me and Joe that Becca overstepped in calling us in, that there was nothing supernatural at all in her museum, and if there was, she still wouldn’t believe it.

  “So you expect me to believe that a six-hundred-year-old suit of armor came to life and dueled you, kicked you in the testicles, and then fell prey to your superior wit and strength?” Harrell asked.

  “You wann
a see my balls?” I asked, reaching for my zipper. “I’m pretty sure the swelling hasn’t gone down yet.” She opened her mouth to speak, and I held up a hand. “I’m sorry. That was uncalled for. But yes, your six-hundred-year old suit of armor came to life, kicked me in the balls, and I broke its face with my fist. Then it fell down and didn’t get back up.”

  “But that’s not the real problem,” Joe added.

  “Tell that to my nuts,” I said, but I kept my voice so low that it sounded like I was clearing my throat. At least that was the intent, anyway. Becca was sitting next to me and might have gotten a little more uncensored version of things than I’d planned.

  “And what do you see as the problem, Dr. MacIntyre? Surely the destruction of a three-million-dollar artifact is an insurmountable problem?” Ms. Harrell sat back in her chair, arms crossed against her chest.”

  “Ma’am, if you’d seen half the shit we’ve dealt with, you’d understand that a little wanton property destruction in the name of saving the world from big nasties is a small price to pay.” I decided to chime in, mostly because I was getting irritated with this lady. I saved her museum from a pissed off ghost in a suit of armor, at great personal suffering, and she not only wasn’t thanking us, she was kinda chewing us out for it. That shit wasn’t going to stand, especially since I was gonna need stitches to get my hand to quit bleeding and at least a case of beer to get my nuts to stop throbbing.

  “And if you had to deal with the people I have to deal with, you would understand that no matter what stupid story you’ve cooked up to excuse your ramble through my museum, the fact remains that I have a multi-million-dollar suit of antique Japanese armor that’s now only good for some fanboy to wear to ComiCon and pretend that he might someday touch a girl. Now if you gentlemen will excuse me, I have an exhibit to redesign, a subscriber base to mollify, and an associate curator to terminate, not necessarily in that order.” She motioned for us to leave, but extended a bony finger to Becca.

  “Doctor Knowles, a moment please.” I gave Becca what I hoped was a reassuring pat on the shoulder, but with the day I was having, I probably broke her collarbone. Me and Joe headed out of the office and started walking to the truck, taking about as much time as we could justify.

  “You think Cruella in there is gonna shitcan Becca?” I asked.

  “I don’t know,” Joe replied. “She was pretty pissed. I guess that suit of armor was really expensive.”

  “Yeah, I heard. Three million dollars. Shit, Joe, I didn’t think it was worth that kind of money, or I would have tried not to break it too much. Hell, as it is the only thing that’s really beat to shit is the mask. They could super-glue that back together, and it’d be just about good as new. But she wouldn’t let me get a word in edgewise, so I couldn’t even tell her that. Oh, shit, sorry, dude.” That last bit wasn’t to Joe. It was to this real skinny fellow that stepped in front of me, not looking where he was going. That didn’t end real well for him, as he kinda bounced off my belly and flopped to the floor right on his ass.

  I managed to keep from laughing, and I did reach down to try and help him up, but he wasn’t having none of that. He twisted around on the floor like a dog covered up in fire ants and finally clambered up to his feet.

  “Don’t touch me, you filthy barbarian!” He got as much up in my face as a skinny bastard that’s at least a foot shorter than me could manage and poked me in the chest with one really long, skeletal finger.

  I don’t like being poked. I don’t really like being touched that much, unless it’s people I like. It comes from always being the biggest kid in school. The one that people always stared at, always thought was stupid, and always picked the fights with, knowing that I’d get in way more trouble than a normal-sized kid because I’d hurt somebody and “should know better.”

  I don’t know better anymore, and I was in a bad damn mood. My hand hurt like a sonofabitch, and I’d just had some ivory tower intellectual asshole treat me like a moron, and here was another overeducated douchecanoe who couldn’t change his own tire with two jacks and a AAA card, and he was poking me. Because the little bastard hadn’t stopped. He was poking me in the chest again and again, going on about how I should watch where I was going, and how he had very important work to do, and how could he get anything done with giant lummoxes like me around.

  I reached out with my left hand, the one that wasn’t currently dripping blood on the carpet, and wrapped it almost completely around his face. I covered his mouth and nose with my hand, leaving just enough space between my fingers for him to breathe, but not enough for him to be comfortable, or speak, or bite me.

  I leaned down and stared right in his bugged out little green eyes. “Don’t poke people,” I said. “It’s not nice. And just because what you’ve got going on feels important, it doesn’t mean that other people don’t have important shit happening, too. You got me?” He nodded, his head bobbing like the Virgin Mary Pop used to have stuck to the dashboard of his pickup truck when he worked for the Church. He wasn’t blasphemous—that was Pop’s idea of paying tribute.

  I let the wriggly little bastard go, and he ran away into the bowels of the museum. “Can we leave?” I asked Joe.

  “We’d better, before you kill somebody. Let’s get that hand stitched up and get some food in us.”

  “I know a great little steak place just about a half mile from here,” I said, and my mouth started to water like I was a Russian lab dog or something.

  Chapter 8

  “I hate getting fired,” I said around a mouthful of mashed potatoes. Between the Darvocet the doc-in-a-box gave me after he put twenty-seven stitches in my right hand, the four Stellas I started my meal with, and the first filet mignon settling in my belly while I waited on my half-impressed, half-terrified waiter to bring me another one, I was feeling pretty righteous. I usually start with a medium steak, just to make sure that it’ll be hot. Too many places think medium rare means cold as shit, and I ain’t in for a cold piece of meat. I deal with enough of those at work.

  We were at Charley’s, one of the top ten steakhouses in the country, and to my mind the only damn redeemable quality in Orlando. Charley’s is an old-school steakhouse, the kind where you walk in and there’s a giant damn flaming pit with steaks scattered around it. The kind of place where they bring you a cut of meat to the table to show you what your steak looks like before it’s cooked. The filet is about the size of my fist, which is to say almost the size of a normal human’s head, and it is as tender a cut of meat as I’ve had in my life. Joe got the same thing, only he got asparagus with his. I reckon he thought he might need a toothpick or something. He’d polished off half a bottle of a pretty solid Coppola blended red, but I stuck to beer.

  “It makes me feel like I done something wrong,” I continued. Joe just nodded. “And I didn’t do anything wrong. I mean, sure I busted up a couple million dollars’ worth of armor, but that only goes to prove that there’s something out of the ordinary going on in that place.” I waved my fork over the table, maybe a little enthusiastically, so Joe grabbed my arm and brought it back into our airspace.

  “I know, Bubba,” he agreed. “I hate that we were tossed out right when we were getting close to some answers.”

  “Well, I don’t know about all that,” I said. “I didn’t even know what questions we were supposed to be asking, but I do know that if there’s an empty suit of antique armor whooping your ass, then something hinky is going on.”

  “I was able to get a little more specific information,” Joe said. He pulled out his phone, swiped a couple times, tapped the screen, swiped again, and handed it to me. I looked at it for a second, then picked it up, fully expecting somebody to jump out of the bushes and tell me to do the Hokey Pokey. The screen was full of pictures of squiggles. I turned it sideways, and the squiggles rotated, but stayed squiggles. I turned the phone around a few times, but no matter what I did, it was still just a bunch of writing in a language I couldn’t read.

  “Wha
t’s this, Padre?” I asked, handing the phone back to him. Just then, the waiter came in with my second steak and some more mashed potatoes, and I dug in while Joe talked.

  “These appear to be recent writings, but in a very ancient language,” Joe said.

  I swallowed a piece of the best steak I’d had since the last time I’d been here, and said, “Yeah, but doesn’t that make sense? It’s a new exhibit, but Becca would have researched old shit to make it all look right, wouldn’t she?”

  “Yes, but she wouldn’t have found this in any of her research. At least, not unless she has some contacts with real magical connections. This is written in a variant of ancient Aramaic that’s only been seen a few times throughout history, and the last time was on the tablets that Moses brought down from Mount Horeb.”

  “Sinai,” I corrected, then gawked at Joe for getting that one wrong.

  “Horeb,” he repeated. “Don’t ask. I can’t explain unless you become a Jesuit priest and go through a couple of doctoral programs in ancient religious history. But the real Ten Commandments came down Mount Horeb, not Sinai.”

  “Shit,” I said. “Next thing you’ll tell me that Jesus wasn’t a white dude with blue eyes and blondish-brown hair.”

  Joe narrowed his eyes at me for a second, but I figured he wasn’t going to punch me right in the middle of a couple-hundred-dollar dinner, especially since his dessert just arrived, a slice of cheesecake tall enough to get its own gimmick in little people’s wrasslin’ back in the day. Joe took a deep breath, then let it out slow while I watched him count to ten in his head. English, French, German, Spanish, Russian—they all rolled across his eyes before he could look at me without wanting to punch me. I just sat there, laughing as close to silently as I could manage.

  “Regardless of the origin of the tablets, this language is far older than anything Becca should have access to, so I think there’s no coincidence that someone is inscribing ancient Aramaic rituals into the exhibit here, to what end we don’t know.”