Night at the Museum - A Bubba the Monster Hunter Novella

by John G. Hartness

  “But we’re pretty sure it ain’t good,” I said.

  “Oh, it definitely isn’t good,” Joe said. “The pieces I could decipher were parts of a summoning ritual for a fairly nasty demon.”

  “Is there any other kind?” I asked. I knocked back the last of my beer and motioned our waiter over. He brought the check, then got some clean plasticware for Joe’s dessert doggie box. “Gimme a bite of that before you wrap it up and forget about it.” I loaded up my fork with cheesecake, strawberries and syrup and had it almost to my mouth when my cell rang.

  “Shit,” I said, taking a quick bite to remind myself of what I wasn’t going to get to eat while I was killing whatever that phone call was about. I pulled out my phone, but it was a number I didn’t know. I pushed the green button and brought it to my ear.

  “Hello?” I said.

  “Bubba? Oh thank God! He’s here, Bubba. I was staying to finish up some signage in the zombie exhibit, just in case they changed their mind about the exhibit, but I heard something out there, and when I went to look, it…it was horrible! It chased me into the exhibit, and now I can hear it. It’s coming.” She dropped her voice to a whisper so the thing wouldn’t hear her, but then there were sounds of a scuffle, and her phone clattered to the floor. I heard screams through the phone’s speaker, and I stood up.

  “Let’s go. Becca’s in trouble.” Joe never asked questions, just threw three Franklins down on the table to cover dinner and started for the valet stand. I grabbed my keys from the startled kid in the red vest, and we drove over the curb and peeled rubber out onto I-Drive. I whipped a U-turn the first chance I got and pointed the nose of the truck back toward the museum. Tourists and Canadians were laying on their horns all around me, but I was the biggest, meanest dude on the road, driving the biggest, meanest truck, so I didn’t care about the opinions of a CPA in a Prius. He could lead, follow, or end up like the Guest of Honor at a monster truck show.

  “What’s going on?” Joe asked, fighting with his seatbelt. I never wore mine, but Joe had faith in different places than me. He put a lot of faith in God and the Bible, but next to none in my driving.

  “I don’t know,” I replied, taking the corner into the museum parking lot on two wheels. “She called, said she needed help, then I heard screams. Skeeter?” I said, pushing a Bluetooth button in the dash.

  “Yeah, Bubba? What you need? I got the call on Becca.”

  “I need the museum alarm to go away,” I said.

  “I don’t know, Bubba. That sounds illegal…” Skeeter couldn’t hold it together and broke up laughing. “Sorry, I couldn’t even say that shit with a straight face. Gimme a second.”

  “You got thirty,” I said. I parked the truck and hopped out. Joe did the same, and we both popped the back doors and flipped up the seats to get at the weapons underneath. I went light, grabbing Bertha in a shoulder holster, Great-Grandpappy Beauregard’s sword, and the silver-spiked ceastus Agent Amy gave me for Christmas. I slipped the leather-and-steel gauntlets on and flexed my fists I felt the stitches in my handstart to give, and knew I’d had a glove full of blood after the second punch. It felt kind like having five-pound bags of sugar tied to my wrists, only these bags of sugar were studded with one- to two-inch spikes along the back of the hand and the knuckles. Sturdy wrist wraps and bracing in the gloves let me hit harder than ever before, and with those things on, I felt like I could bash right through the wall if Skeeter didn’t get the alarm down.

  Which, of course, he did. “Alarm’s taken care of,” Skeeter’s voice rang in my head. I looked across at Joe, who had a bandolier of shotgun shells slung across his chest and a .45 in a shoulder rig under his left arm. He held a Mossberg 12-gauge with a pistol grip and a flashlight strapped to the barrel. I grabbed a light of my own and a couple of chemical glow sticks, jammed them into a pocket, and closed the truck door. I heard Joe do the same, and we turned to the back door of the museum. The little guard room was empty now, and I took a good look at the door, something I hadn’t bothered to do the first time through it. Typical hollow metal door, perfectly capable of keeping out all but the most insistent of criminals. And me.

  I reared back with a foot and planted one size sixteen right beside the lock. Metal bent and snapped, and the door bent outward enough for me to pull it the rest of the way open. The hallway beyond the door was empty and dark. I reached over and flipped the light switch. Nothing.

  “Skeeter, we got no lights,” I said into the comm.

  “Yeah, looks like something has knocked out power to that whole side of town, including the convention center across the street.”

  “That shouldn’t even be possible,” I said. “All them big-ass hotels have to have generators, and I know damn well nobody would spend that kind of money on a convention center without backup power.”

  “Most days I’d agree with you, but something has everything north of The Magic Kingdom darker than an elephant’s butthole, Bubba, and every first responder in the city is busting ass trying to keep Yankees and snowbirds from killing themselves at stoplights.”

  “So there ain’t no backup, is what you’re saying.”

  “There ain’t even gonna be an ambulance if you screw this up. So try not to screw it up. And I can’t do a whole lot for you because without power, I’m as blind as you are. No building plans, no security cameras, nothing.”

  “We’re on our own,” I said to Joe. “Alright then, Skeet. We’ll try not to get dead, you see if you can remote into something and get some lights back on in here.”

  “Will do,” Skeeter said, then clicked off. I pulled a flashlight out of a pocket and clicked it on.

  “No lights coming?” Joe asked.

  “No lights, no backup, no medivac,” I confirmed.

  “Well, then let’s not need those things,” Joe said, pointing his shotgun down the darkened hall in front of us. He started down the hall, and I followed. I let him take point because it was pretty easy for me to shoot over and around him, and there wasn’t enough room between me and the walls for him to shoot past me without putting a lot of buckshot in a lot of uncomfortable places.

  We made our way down the deserted hallway and into the main body of the museum without encountering another living soul. We walked side by side through the halls until we finally came to Becca’s pride and joy. A sign over the door proclaimed “Here be monsters,” so I figured it was where we needed to be. I pushed into the exhibit, and an even deeper darkness reached out and swallowed us up.

  Chapter 9

  If I thought it was dark in the rest of the museum, the monster exhibit was a damn black hole. Situated in the main gallery of the museum, there wasn’t a wall anywhere in the exhibit that touched the outdoors, and the few skylights scattered throughout the rooms were blacked out with thick black fabric and plywood.

  “Give her a call,” I said.

  “Huh?” Joe just stared at me.

  “Joe, call the girl. It ain’t normal that we can’t hear anything out of her. It’s not like this place is that damn big. If she’s still in the building, she should have heard us crashing around like a pair of drunken rhinoceroses. So call her, and let’s figure out from the sound of her phone ringing just where she is and what’s messing with her.”

  “Good idea,” Joe said.

  “I know,” I replied. “I said it.”

  Joe rolled his eyes and dialed the phone. Almost immediately, I heard Justin Timberlake’s “Sexyback” blaring from a nearby phone. I looked over at Joe, who shrugged.

  “We were young,” he said simply. “And ringtones were kind of a new thing.”

  I forgot all about Joe’s continued poor musical choices almost as quickly as I realized the ringing was close. “Follow me, and try not to shoot me too much,” I said to Joe.

  “I’ll think about it,” he said.

  We pushed farther into the darkness, our flashlights narrow beams pushing back a couple of feet of darkness at a time, and that just barely. This wasn’t norma
l dark—this blackness was palpable, fighting back against our LED flashlights like a formless, angry thing defending its territory. I looked behind us, but the blackness enveloped us so completely that I couldn’t even see the red EXIT signs that I knew were hanging over every door.

  “Call her again,” I said after we’d walked some twenty feet into the exhibit. We should have been right about where her phone was, but I couldn’t see my feet, much less Becca or anything that might have ahold of her. A couple seconds later, the dulcet tones of Justin Timberlake blared through the silent room, and I saw a flash of light out of the corner of my eye. I turned and ran to it, before the ring cut off and it was swallowed by the darkness again. I stood over the phone, shining my flashlight all over the floor, the walls, and the ceiling.

  “Nothing,” I reported.

  “I don’t know that I would say that.” Joe’s voice was more of a croak, and I spun around, tracking Bertha and my flashlight to the sound.

  “Please put that away.” The thing that held Joe looked mostly normal, except for being even taller than me and skinnier than Skeeter. And Asian, which made the whole super-tall thing seem even weirder.

  I holstered Bertha, then said, “Okay, the gun’s away, now let my friend go.”

  “I don’t think so,” the guy said, then bent his head toward Joe’s neck. I watched as a pair of fangs extended from the tall dude’s mouth and stretched to several inches in length. Tall Guy bent down, I guess to pierce the carotid, but got a rude awakening as soon as his teeth touched Joe’s skin.

  The vampire’s teeth actually started to sizzle, and he jerked his head back with a shriek that sounded like a million teenage girls at a One Direction concert. He flung Joe away from him, and I intercepted my flying friend before he crashed into a big glass display case off to my left. Of course, that meant that I crashed into the glass display and showered myself with tiny bits of safety glass and a couple of, no doubt, priceless parchments.

  Joe was lying on the floor, struggling to get to his feet, and making strange wheezing sounds. I crawled over to him. “You all right, Joe? You didn’t break nothing when you crashed into me, did you?”

  “N-n-no, I’m good,” he said, and it was then that I realized he was laughing.

  “Are you laughing?” I asked.

  “Oh my God, yes,” Joe said. “That was the best idea in the world, Bubba. I’ll try to remember to paint my neck with holy water every time I think I might be going into a vampire fight. Did you see the look on his face? Oh Lord, that was hilarious.” Joe rolled to one knee, still laughing, then he went quiet as he looked around. “Where is it?”

  “I don’t know. It bit you, screamed, then ran off. Part of me wants to believe that it ran all the way back to Ancient Japan to soak its teeth in the blood of its ancestors, but the rest of me is waiting for him to—” I never did find out what I was waiting for because all of a sudden there was an iron cable wrapped around my throat lifting me off my feet. I kicked and thrashed, but this thing was strong. I finally got Bertha loose and put four rounds in a semicircle behind me, the Desert Eagle unleashing thunder and fire throughout the pitch black room. The thing holding me let out an oof, and I dropped to the floor. I landed on my feet and kept dropping, bending my knees and tucking into a forward roll to get some separation from the giant bloodsucking bastard behind me.

  I came up to one knee and spun around just as Joe cut loose with his Mossberg. The unexpected roar on the twelve-gauge startled me, and I collapsed right onto my ass, which ended up saving a big part of my scalp. Between Joe’s low-flying buckshot and the slashing arms of the vampire, something was trying to take my head off. I maneuvered around so I was at least out of Joe’s line of fire and took half a second to get a better look at the monster.

  This might have been the ugliest damn vampire I’d ever seen in my whole life. Like I said, it was easily seven feet tall if it was an inch. And maybe two hundred pounds of gaunt, yellowed skin stretched taut across high cheekbones and a forehead high and slanted back like a bicycle ramp. Its face was narrow, like the old Nosferatu movies, and dominated by four needlelike teeth. Its arms were preternaturally long and tapered to fingers twice the length of human digits. This thing had started out human, but years and a steady diet of human blood had erased any hint of that heritage from its black eyes.

  It turned to me and blurred into movement almost faster than I could follow. But not quite. I drew Bertha and stuck the barrel in the general vicinity of where I expected him to stop and pulled the trigger twice. The first shot went wild, but the second caught it in the shoulder like a sledgehammer mated with a stick of dynamite. The hole going in was the size of two fingers, but the hole coming out was about the size of a good cherry pie. The vampire flew backward about three feet, landed flat on its back, bounced once, then popped back up to its feet like its ass was spring-loaded.

  “Well, shit,” I said. “Can’t it be easy just once?”

  The vampire grinned at me, those front fangs going everywhere like a parody of bad orthodontics, and said something in a language I didn’t understand.

  “What was that? I’m sorry, I only speak English, Redneck, and Whoop-Ass.” I brought Bertha back to bear on the monster, tracking him one-handed and squeezing off a quick five rounds. The recoil on a Desert Eagle makes it almost impossible to hit anything when you’re shooting one-handed, but I really needed to slip my left into the ceastus hanging from my belt. I aimed at the beastie’s knees, hoping the recoil would kick the barrel up and I’d land a lucky shot on its center mass.

  I’ve done a lot of things in my life, but getting a lucky shot on an ancient Asian vampire in the pitch black with a hand cannon like Bertha is not anything I’ve ever managed. I kept to my streak and missed every shot, but the muzzle flash gave me enough light to see the onrushing creature. I slammed Bertha back into her holster and got my hand back up between the monster’s face and my neck just in time.

  He was close enough I could almost count his fillings, if he’d had any. His breath smelled like something crawled up out of the grave, rolled around in a sewer, then went swimming in sulfur. To say it made my eyes water was a helluva understatement. I pushed against its throat with my right arm while I bashed it in the side of the head again and again with my silver-clad left fist. Every blow rocked the creature, and after four or five shots, I felt another impact slam into the thing and looked past it to see Joe slam his shotgun into the vampire’s spine. The beastie let go of me and turned its attention to Joe, which gave me the distance I needed.

  I took one step back, yanked Great-Grandpappy’s sword from the sheath over my shoulder, and ran that three-foot steel blade right through the middle of the vampire’s heart. It dropped to its knees, then fell forward, sliding off my blade as it collapsed to the ground.

  “Is that going to kill it?” Joe asked. “I know sometimes—”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Sometimes you gotta cut the head off before it—what the shit?” I grabbed Joe and yanked him out of the way as the weirdest damn thing I ever saw came flying at him.

  You know, I’ve fought nekkid Bigfoots, gotten drunk with rakshasas, set fairies on fire with hairspray, gone bar-hopping with a half-snakeman, and beat the shit out of a dude who changed his form to look like Elvis Presley, so when I say it was the weirdest damn thing I ever saw, that bar’s set pretty high. But when a vampire reached up with its hands, pulled its head off its shoulders and threw it at Joe, that took the cake and the whole damn bakery besides.

  The vampire head flew past Joe, then spun around in mid-air and came back at us. It had those damn crooked-ass fangs chopping like some kind of demented Pac-Man, so I nudged Joe out of the way and set myself up right in the path of the critter. It got close. I sidestepped about two feet and swung the family sword like a Louisville Slugger. The blade caught the vampire’s face right about its nose, and thousand-year-old vampire brains splattered all over me, Joe, and every artifact in the exhibit.

  “If that woman wa
s pissed about me wrecking her suit of armor, I can’t wait to hear what she’s gonna have to say about me getting brains all over her freshly-painted walls. Hey Joe?”

  “Yeah, Bubba?” Joe asked from the floor about ten feet away. I might have shoved him a little harder than I thought.

  “Is the rest of that vampire still over there?

  “No, but there’s a puddle of really smelly yellow stuff on the floor in roughly the shape of the vampire, and these rags in the puddle look kinda like the clothes it was wearing, so I’m pretty sure you killed it.”

  “I woulda thought that before it threw its head at me, but you’re probably right. Quit laying around, we gotta find your girlfriend,” I said, reaching down to help him extricate himself from the display cases that he fell into.

  “There are so many things wrong with that sentence I don’t even know where to start,” Joe said, brushing himself off and reacquiring his shotgun. “What next?” he asked.

  “If I remember right, it’s the rakshasa and djinn part of the exhibit, which I hope we don’t have to fight our way through.”

  “Why’s that?” Joe asked. “I thought you had fought rakshasa before.”

  “I have, but they’re a lot like fighting cats, and you know how cats cheat.”

  Chapter 10

  The rakshasa room was clear, and I wasn’t stupid enough to even brush a sleeve against any of the jars, bottles, or flasks in the djinn display. Djinn are powerful, old, smart, devious, conniving, and any other unpleasant adjective you could think of. I didn’t want to fight one on my best day, with Amy right beside me, and every weapon I could think of in arms’ reach. I sure as hell didn’t want to fight one in the half-dark of the museum while I still needed to find Becca and keep Joe safe.