ALSO BY RICHARD LANGRIDGE
Dan and Frankie Series
Dan and Frankie Save the World
Dan and Frankie and the End of Everything
Non-fiction
How to Not Die (According to Movies)
WE
HUNT
THE
NIGHT
(Tales From The Supernatural Frontline)
By
Richard Langridge
Imperium #1
WE HUNT THE NIGHT
(TALES FROM THE SUPERNATURAL FRONTLINE)
Copyright © 2017 Richard Langridge.
All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
First edition November 2017
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination, or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
ASIN: B075HDTNBJ
http://www.richardlangridgeauthor.com/
For Vicky, for continuing to put up with me, even though I probably don’t deserve it.
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CONTENTS
FOREWORD
PROLOGUE
PART 1 FOUR DAYS LATER
FOUR DAYS EARLIER
FOUR DAYS LATER. AGAIN
NOT IN KANSAS ANYMORE
PART 2 DOWN THE RABBIT HOLE
THE THING IN THE SUBWAY
A MOUSE AMONG CATS
NOTHING AS IT SEEMS
PART 3 VOGEL IS A JERK, AND OTHER BAD NEWS
VOGEL IS STILL A JERK. ALSO, MONSTERS
OTHER THINGS AND STUFF
DID YOU ENJOY THIS BOOK?
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
BOOK 2 SNEAK PEEK!
FOREWORD
Dear Reader,
It’s a funny thing, writing a book. You spend months—sometimes even years—writing it, becoming so engrossed in the lives of your characters that they start to feel almost real. They leap out at you from the page and draw you in, even when you don’t intend them to. And it was no different with this book.
During the year it took me to put this book together, I found myself thoroughly enjoying this funny little world of mine, all the characters and their odd quirks—as I hope you will, too.
But no more stalling; there are monsters to be hunted, aren’t there?
So come—set your phasers to stun and your disbelief to suspend mode, cause things are about to kick off.
—Rich
Summer 2017
PROLOGUE
“The dreams which reveal the supernatural are promises and messages that God sends us directly: they are nothing but His angels, His ministering spirits, who usually appear when we are in a great predicament.”
—Paracelsus
“I love lamp.”
—Brick Tamland
PART 1
FOUR DAYS LATER
‘I can’t believe you did this,’ said the voice.
Jake blinked open his eyes. The world was dark. His face felt hot.
‘Me? You’re the one who brought him here,’ said another voice. Male. Whiny. Not unlike Jake’s own. ‘Don’t put this on me. This is all your doing.’
Jake tried to move, but couldn’t. He was sitting in a chair, his hands bound to the armrests with what felt like cable ties. He became aware of something on his head—what he intuited from the way it clung to his face and neck to be a bag. It smelled like sweat and sadness.
‘And you say it came for him at his apartment?’ Whiny Voice went on. He scoffed. ‘Why? And while we’re on the subject, how come we didn’t hear about it? You get any notification of a Breach recently? Cause I sure as hell didn’t.’
Jake listened to the voices argue with the stringent attention of the recently conscious. His head felt swimmy and faraway, like those times when you’re drunk and the ground keeps trying to run away from you. There was a pain above his left eyebrow, like he’d taken a fall at some point and gone down hard. Funny; he didn’t remember falling down recently. Didn’t remember anything at all, in fact. For no reason he could think of, he wondered if he was dead.
‘A-am I d-dead?’ he said.
The voices stopped arguing.
There was the sudden rustle of fabric, a sensation of movement about his head.
And then—
Brightness. Too bright. Like a million tiny needles, jabbing at the milky and delicate whites of his eyes. It was the brightest light he had ever seen, so bright he could barely look at it. There was something otherworldly about it.
Jake gasped.
I’m dead. I knew it. Oh dear sweet baby Jesus in heaven, I’m—
His eyes adjusted.
He was in a room. Small. Bare white walls, like something you’d expect to find in a hospital, or the dentist perhaps. There was a table in front of him, upon which a single file lay, its contents spilling out of it like it had been tossed down with some force. A light like the ones cops and gangsters were always using on TV to interrogate unsuspecting civilians stood just beside it, radiating harsh glare.
Jake had never been to heaven before, so had no frame of reference, but he was pretty sure—wherever he was—this wasn’t it.
Just as he was thinking this, a face descended in front of him. It was the face of a man. Short, salt-and-pepper hair. Maybe late forties, early fifties. Deep creases lined his forehead, like the guy liked to frown a lot, and there was a smell about him that was equal parts cigarettes and coffee. Except for the enormous gun on his hip, he could have been a teacher. A really scary teacher.
‘Mr. Fisher,’ he said. He gave a curt nod. ‘Glad you could finally join us.’ He straightened and shrugged off his suit jacket before beginning to roll up his sleeves with what looked to Jake to be deliberate slowness. Jake noticed suddenly how big his hands were.
He swallowed. ‘Listen. I think there’s been some kind of mistake...’
‘No kidding.’
‘Seriously. I don’t know who you people are, or what you want, but I have rights. You can’t just… arrest me. I have—’
Big Hands kneeled, his face now mere inches from Jake’s own. ‘There seems to be some confusion here, so allow me to clear things up. You are not under arrest. I am not a cop, and this is not a police station. Where you are isn’t important. What’s important right now is that you tell me exactly why you had an unregistered X-0193 in your apartment. Because if you don’t tell me—and tell me now—I’ll be forced to extract the information via other methods. And believe me when I tell you that is something you do not want. Now look at my face, tell me if I’m being serious.’
Jake looked into his cool gray eyes. ‘But I—’
What happened next was little more than a blur. One moment he was staring
up at Big Hands, trying to process exactly what it was the guy had just said. The next he was lying on his back, an impossibly large gun in his face. From his vantage point looking up at it from the floor, the barrel looked very big.
‘All right. You want to do it the hard way?’ said Big Hands. ‘That’s fine—we can do hard.’ He thumbed back the hammer.
From behind him, Whiny Voice cleared his throat. ‘Uh, Coleman, you sure you want to be doing that? I mean, he is—’
‘Shut it, Avery. There’s something fishy going on here. And whatever it is, I’d bet my left nut this punk’s a part of it.’ He turned back to Jake, eyes all blazing and furious. ‘Now talk—what was it doing in your apartment?’
‘I… I don’t remember.’
‘Think—why?’
‘I’m telling you, I don’t—!’
He was going to say he didn’t remember, but paused when images began to surface suddenly in his mind. Vague, nothing-images, like watching a flicker-pad movie, only through frosted glass. He recalled sulfur and dark hair. A glistening of drool-covered teeth. All useless to him.
He shook his head. ‘But I—’
And then, just like that, he did remember.
With the force of a grade three tsunami, it all came flooding back.
Jake blinked.
Uh-oh.
FOUR DAYS EARLIER
It had started the way all bad days do—with the angry, indignant blare of an alarm clock.
Still trailing last night’s dream, Jake Fisher shot up in bed. He fumbled for the clock. 11:28am. He groaned. He was late—again. Jeremy would have his ass.
He swung his feet out of bed and rubbed sleep from his eyes. He looked for his jeans. Gone. Somebody had apparently crept into his apartment last night and stolen his jeans while he slept. Those animals.
He thought it over.
No. Wait. That didn’t make any sense. People didn’t steal jeans. This was America. They stole cars and phones and oil and stuff. But then if nobody had stolen them, where the heck were they?
Summoning all of his mental energy, Jake pushed himself out of bed, then proceeded to stumble around half-blind looking for them for another twenty minutes, stubbing his toe on anything and everything before eventually finding them sprawled under his bed, where he had presumably kicked them during last night’s fevered rush for sleep.
He held them out in front of him, recoiling slightly at the funky smell.
Eh. Good enough.
It was his usual morning routine. He would wake, fumble around for a while until some semblance of reality returned, then force himself into the kitchen, where he would then set about devouring anything he hadn’t been able to finish the night before (usually, but not exclusively, pizza). Sometimes if he was feeling particularly extravagant, he would add a little milk to the process, dip last-night’s leftovers into the glass and thoroughly soak it through before shoveling it, still dripping, into his mouth—not that that he felt any special compulsion to do so, or anything, but a balanced diet was important.
This morning, however, all he had was leftover microwave lasagna, and—balanced diet aside—there was just no way he was putting that into his stomach at this time of the morning (not least of which because it was already several days old). He settled for coffee instead.
Then, after one last visit to the bathroom, he began the process of ferrying his aching and likely still-half-asleep body to work—which would have been a difficult enough task on its own, had Jake owned a car. Unfortunately for Jake, cars cost money, so instead he hopped on his bike and pedaled like the devil were chasing him, or like he was just really, really late.
After twenty minutes of furious leg-thrusting, he finally arrived.
Jake’s work was a little hole-in-the-wall joint on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, imaginatively called Pete’s Pizzas. As the name suggested, Pete’s sold pizzas. All pizzas, of any and every variety, so long as they were Italian in origin, and you weren’t offended by cheese.
It was one of several Pete’s Pizzas spread out along the country, in what could have been considered a blossoming franchise chain—not that Jake really cared much about this last; he just needed to pay the rent.
Large glass front. A caricature anthropomorphic pizza slice on the side, holding a piece of itself up to its mouth that, once you’d made the connection, was impossible not to think of as self-cannibalism.
The sound of surging traffic loud in his ears, he hopped off his bike and walked it around back to the kitchen, where he was both unsurprised and disheartened to find Jeremy standing propped against the open door, waiting for him.
‘You’re late,’ said Jeremy as Jake approached, in his usual derisory tone. He took a drag on the cigarette propped between his middle and index fingers and blew. ‘Again.’
Jeremy was a tall guy, skinny, with greased-back hair and a face like that of those signs you occasionally see along the roadside that people have for some reason decided to use for target practice. By which he had holes. In his face. They weren’t real holes, of course. More like craters. Supposedly, he’d had real bad acne as a kid, leaving his face speckled with terrible and unsightly pockmarks. He was also the Shift Supervisor. That meant it was his job to ensure Jake and his fellow underlings were at work ready to serve the customers at the start of the day. But because Jake very rarely made it to work on time, he and Jeremy had always had friction—something Jake would have felt responsible for, had he really not done so in any way whatsoever.
‘Morning, Jeremy,’ he said, propping his bike against the wall. ‘You’re looking especially ravishing this morning.’
If Jeremy found him at all funny, he didn’t show it. ‘What is it this time?’ he said. ‘Stomach flu? Food poisoning? Alien abduction?’
‘Yes.’
‘Yes—to what? All three? Must’ve been some night.’
‘Yes.’
Jeremy narrowed his eyelids. ‘You’re just saying “yes” to everything again, aren’t you?’
Jake snorted. Jeremy hated it when he did that.
‘Jake?’
‘Y—’
‘Will you stop?! You know, you can crack wise all you want, but sooner or later you’re going to have to start taking responsibility. You think life is a game. But it’s not. It’s serious, Jake. Life is serious.’
Jake blinked. Even for Jeremy, this was unusually harsh. But then, he guessed the guy kind of had a point. Jake was always late. Maybe it was time to make a change, start taking responsibility.
‘Oui,’ he said.
‘Goddamnit, you’re lucky I can’t fire you,’ said Jeremy. ‘But you can bet your ass I’m going to be writing you up. Let’s see if you find it so funny when you’re—hey, are you listening?’
Jake wasn’t. He was looking down at his phone, which, to his utter surprise and disgust, had just started ringing.
It was from a number he didn’t recognize—which, in and of itself, wasn’t that odd. Jake never got phone calls, partly, because he had no friends, but also because… well, just because. Hell, not even the sales people called him.
He glanced up.
Jeremy was glaring at him.
He blinked. ‘Huh?’
Jeremy groaned a curse and stalked back inside, the kitchen door promptly swinging shut behind him.
Jake returned his attention to his phone.
He thought about not answering it.
Then he raised it to his head. ‘Hello…?’
‘Mr. Fisher?’
A sudden tightening in his gut. Jake knew conversations that started by addressing a party by their last name rarely meant good news—and, as would turn out, he was correct. ‘Yeah?’
‘My name is Curtis Faraday. I’m the estate lawyer for your grandmother—a Miss Stella Meunier?’
‘Grandma Stella?’ said Jake. He frowned. His brain suddenly felt like pudding. Christ, this was not the start to the day he’d been hoping for. ‘I’m sorry—what did you say this was about?’
‘Knew—what?’
‘Your grandmother passed away five nights ago.’
*
They met at a restaurant across town; a dainty, posh little joint, of whose name Jake couldn’t pronounce, and that he’d only managed to find because of the enormous sign it’d held over its awning, so unbelievably huge you could have seen it from California.
It was the kind of place people with money went when they weren’t out sailing their yachts or driving their flash cars or whatever, and had he been given the option to choose their place of meeting, this was most certainly not the place he would have chosen—and not just because he wouldn’t have been able to afford to do so.
Unfortunately, inside of the restaurant was no less intimidating. For starters, everyone seemed way better dressed than he was (not that that took much doing, or anything—but still), and there was an undeniable air of privilege about the place that, once registered, was impossible not to think about.
There was a brief, awkward moment with the greeter, who, after looking down his nose at Jake for the better part of five minutes, eventually stepped aside when a man in what looked to be his late forties suddenly appeared beside him.
‘It’s okay, Louis—he’s with me.’
He was an average-sized man. Well-groomed, with the crisp, golden skin of the frequently holidayed. A posture like he spent a lot of time in the gym doing bodyweight exercises. His suit looked like money and happiness.
Faraday thrust out his hand. ‘Mr. Fisher. Pleasure to make your acquaintance. Do please come this way.’
We Hunt the Night: (Tales from the Supernatural Frontline) (Imperium Book 1) Page 1