I Kill Monsters

by Dennis Liggio

  In a herculean feat of strength, I finally leaned forward and pulled myself free of the snake's grip. I reached down and grabbed the machete. I let out a triumphant roar.

  But now there was a new problem. The snake was trying to beat a hasty retreat. I noticed its length sliding off me and beginning to slither down the drain.

  "Oh no you don't!" I shouted. There was no way I was letting this one get away after beating myself against the walls.

  With my left hand I grabbed at its length that was close to the tub drain. Normally snakes aren't slippery like some people expect. They're actually more leathery. But when a snake has been travelling through the drainage system for a low income apartment building, it gets slippery to the touch and frankly pretty gross. So even with my hand around it, the snake was slipping through my grasp down the drain. I was just slowing it down.

  I had a split second to make a decision. Do I drop the machete so I could use both hands to try to pull the snake back up out of the drain, or do I hack wildly at the still available part of the snake, hoping to actually hit its writhing body and do some serious damage? It was an easy decision. I didn't feel like pulling a snake out of a drain and I wasn't going to miss the chance to be proactive about hacking something to death.

  Cursing, I slash my machete at any part of the snake I could see. What followed was a succession of loud hits in the tub and against the tiles. Many of the tiles not already broken by my previous thrashing were now broken. But finally I managed to hit the damn snake. Blood splashed on my face. I kept hacking. Blood gushed all over as I cleaved the machete down on any inch of snake I could.

  Finally the creature stopped moving at all.

  I was left in silence. I was gasping for breath and covered in blood. I was crouched in the tub, one hand still on the snake's body at the drain and the other holding a machete dripping with the unpleasant ichor of diced snake. I kept breathing, trying to slow my heart rate and come out of adrenaline and shock.

  I heard a small voice from across the room. "Szandor! Are you there?"

  I pulled my body forward and reached a dripping arm towards my phone on the rug. Staining the pink rug with drops of blood, I grabbed the phone. Mikkel hadn't hung up.

  "I'm here," I said, still out of breath.

  "Good!" he said. "After all that, I wasn't sure if you were going to answer the phone or the creature was."

  "Very funny," I said.

  "Hey, I'm always glad when you win, brother," he said. "I need someone to have my back. So what was it?"

  "Plumber's Snake," I said, reaching in my jacket pocket for my cigarettes. I paused for a second wondering if I could smoke in Mrs. Ferguson's bathroom. Then I looked around at the broken tiles, the room covered in blood, and the snake carcass in the tub and figured it wouldn't matter anymore. I lit up.

  "Plumber's Snake? Shit, it's been a while since we saw one of those," said Mikkel.

  We'd tangled with Plumber's Snakes exactly twice before this. They are notably stealthy beasts, as you might guess from the fact this one was slithering through the drains. Plumber's Snake is obviously not its formal cryptozoological name. I'm not sure if it has one. I once asked Paulie about it, but other than the death worms of the Gobi, he hadn't heard anything remotely close to it. So we kept our initial off-the-cuff name of Plumber's Snake.

  We named it that because they are very long, but unlike most snakes, they don't get thick when they get longer. So you might have a twenty foot snake that still has the diameter to slither through a narrow pipe, or in this case, aging apartment plumbing. I can't remember which one of us had the idea, but we notice the similarity to the tool plumbers have, which is also a long cord used for removing blockages from drains. The name stuck and we haven't found anything better. Plumber's Snake. It fits.

  "Well, it's dead now," I said. "This bathroom is fucked and I'm covered in blood. It's half sticking out of the drain. I'm going to need that backup now."

  "Shit, come on, man," he said. "Vanessa's..."

  "You did just listen to my entire struggle with the fucking thing, didn't you?"

  "Yeah..."

  "So get over here. I need the van," I said.

  Twenty minutes later Mikkel showed up with our cleanup bag and a change of clothes for me.

  In the intervening time I had smoked a slow victory cigarette and then had opened the door to explain to Mrs. Ferguson what had happened. She was shocked, horrified, and finally angry at the state of her bathroom, but it's not like she could complain that I was a fraud. There was quite clearly a big and bloody snake carcass in her bathtub. It even had the green-gray scales she had described.

  She shut her mouth in frustration and settled for yelling at me for smoking in her apartment. I conceded that point and put out the cigarette. She also demanded I get back in the tub until Mikkel showed up, so I wouldn't drip blood on anything. Anything else.

  While she was clearly mad at me despite the life-or-death conflict I had in her pink bathroom on her behalf, she was quite friendly when Mikkel showed up. Of course the guy who cleans up is the hero, not the one who practically bathed in snake blood making her home safe for her and her cats.

  Remember earlier when I said I wasn't at all interested in pulling the snake out of the drain? Turns out I ended up having to do that anyway. We needed to get the rest of its length out of the drain so Mrs. Ferguson could actually use the drain. And since I was already covered in snake blood, it made sense for me to get back in the tub and do it. I wasn't happy, since pulling a snake out of a drain isn't easy work. I didn't want to yank too hard for fear it might just sever at some point, leaving a length of snake in the pipes. So it was a slow laborious pulling when my muscles already ached from slamming into tile walls.

  Once we had pulled out the entire snake, we stuffed it into a giant plastic bag we had on hand for this situation. We began hosing down all the blood in the tub, relying on the fact that we had a now-cleared drain. Finally Mikkel asked me to strip naked so he could hose me down. I gave him a withering look.

  "Don't worry, I'm a doctor," he quipped.

  "No, you're not," I said, reluctantly peeling my clothes off.

  "No, but I am your brother and I've seen you naked enough that I've suppressed my need to laugh," he said.

  "Fuck off," I said.

  He turned on the shower and grabbed the shower head, which Mrs. Ferguson luckily had on a long cord. He began hosing me down. It was ice cold.

  "F-f-fuck you! Turn on the heat!"

  Mikkel laughed, but he finally turned on the heat. I began to wonder what was so great about family.

  Once I was hosed down, we did the laborious work of scrubbing and bleaching all the blood we couldn't hose down in the tub. Even with masks, we were soon pretty high from bleach fumes. When that was all done, we stuffed those in plastic bags and I finally could get dressed in clean street clothes.

  I carried the bags down to the van while Mikkel stood around to debrief Mrs. Ferguson. I was too tired to care. I wanted to just get home and crawl into bed. Soon Mikkel came down to help. Together we heaved the snake remains into the van and we closed it up. He patted me on the back and then we got inside. He drove while I practically dozed in the passenger seat, looking forward to sleep and waking up with some severe bruises.

  We didn't get paid.

  This is our life.

  Problems

  As you have seen, even when things are going how they should, there's blood, violence, and the unexpected. It isn't pretty, but we can do it; we're used to it. But like any job, there are times when things don't go as they are supposed to. There are times when there are nothing but complications. There are times when you realize that even your best efforts mean you're sitting down at the table to feast on a big old shit sandwich, and there's nothing you can do about it.

  The Ingstrom job was like that. Shit packed into a huge sandwich.

  If you live in New Avalon, you might know that Mikkel and I have a website. The nuts and bolts are
handled by our friend Vincent, but Mikkel and I keep the content up to date. We've tried to make it the definitive Need To Know on New Avalon monsters, since no one else has setup as comprehensive a website yet. Think of it as the handbook for New Avalon's darker side. We try to keep the focus practical. We answer the questions you actually need to know: if you get bitten by a zombie, what should you do[2]? If there's a ghoul nest in your area, what can you do[3]? What the fuck is a revenant[4]? After the adventure I recounted to you, I think I might need to update the page for Plumber's Snakes.

  In addition to the database of monsters, we have blogs that we don't update often enough. We both feel like the website shouldn't be about us. It's to help people who have no idea what they're dealing with. Any person who doesn't die or doesn't have to get help because of the information they find on the website is a win in our book. But in the case the website info doesn't solve your problems, you can contact us.

  I'll admit that we kind of hid the page to contact us for help. Oh, you can find it if you look hard, but we didn't want to make it obvious or easy. If you find it, you just see a basic contact form and a paraphrase Mikkel stole from one of his favorite shows.

  If you have a problem and if no one else can help and you can find us, maybe you can hire the Nowak brothers.

  Yes, I know. It's melodramatic. It's kitschy. It's ripped off from a show Mikkel has a strange affection for. But as he pointed out, if someone can't deal with that, they're going to have trouble dealing with us. We're not the only monster hunters in town, but we're probably the most irreverent and disrespectful.

  Why do we hide the page? To try to filter out all the shitty emails. We still get a bunch of crap even with it semi-hidden. For example, we get emails with obviously fake stories. Luckily, we can spot those pretty easily because of our experience - those fakers clearly don't know anything. We also get a lot of hate mail. It's expected that there would be some people who think we're full of shit; not everyone is going to accept the existence of monsters. But for some reason these people feel the need to spend their time hammering out a very long rant of why we're full of shit and horrible human beings. Those tirades are easily deleted. We also occasionally get a journalist wanting to do a story on us (okay, one time).

  We're really looking for people who need help, people who are just like we were when we needed help back before we started doing this. And we'll help for free if we have to, because everyone deserves help. However, we also would like to get paid if it's at all possible. The supplies for monster killing don't come cheap[5]. Our rates are fair and scale depending on the part of town. We generally waive the fee for members of our old neighborhood, South Egan. Though we're out of place in the ritzier neighborhoods, their checks are very good, so we're always willing to leave our comfort zone to get bills paid.

  At the start of the Ingstrom job, I was sitting in a favorite South Egan pub, Twin Eagles, checking website messages on my phone after a day of work. Though we consider monster hunting our primary job, whether it will actually cover our expenses varies from month to month - some months we have some good paying jobs, some months it's all charity cases and empty bank accounts. Honestly, it's more often the latter. This is why Mikkel and I both have part time jobs. Believe it or not, Mikkel is an on-call sanitation worker. Yup, a garbage man. He's not on their regular roster, though. If someone calls in sick, they call Mikkel and get him to take the shift, since the trash business must go on. He's like a substitute teacher for garbage. But, as I found out, sanitation workers get paid really well, so doing it even part time isn't a bad gig at all.

  What do I do? I'm ashamed to say I work part time at a call center. It sucks, I hate it. Even as a part timer, they keep threatening to fire me if I call in sick again. Despite their warning, I keep calling in sick a few times a month because monsters are more important (and my job sucks). They haven't fired me yet. I know turnover rate at their shitty call center is too high and the current management knows that training a replacement for me is a greater cost than suffering my sick days... for now at least. Someday I'm going to get bounced out of there. But for now, the pay is nice when I actually show up and there's no dress code. So even with my tattoos, piercings, and my punk style I can keep my job.

  Since it's a call center job and assholes call me all day, I often want to unwind at the pub - yes, I know it's wasting more money when things may be tight, but when you are unwilling to spend a few bucks to enjoy a pint with friends, you need to reexamine your life choices[6]. This time I was back in the old neighborhood to see a friend, Dickie Dubois. Dickie and I used to have a punk band, Death Comes For the Brave. I loved being their vocalist, but unfortunately, I wasn't being fair to the band. I had to cancel out too many practices due to monster-related activity. After a long talk, Dickie and I both decided it was for the best to end the band than to try and work around my first love. Hunting monsters is slightly like being a superhero in that you have to cancel on everything else in your life so that you can go and risk your life doing something no one else wants to do. Man, I miss that band. I've seen Dickie's new band, Avalon X, a few times and I think they have a great sound. I just wish it was me up there behind the mic.

  Dickie had gone for another round while I checked our website messages. I'm a little obsessed. Mikkel complains that all I do is check the fucking mail. I tell him that we need to get paid. But I admit, it's not just the money, I also like the job. For a kid who grew up without a dad in South Egan, getting to kill monsters makes me feel special. It is also great for getting out aggression, of which I have much.

  As I refreshed the website mailbox, there was a message. I grinned as I pulled up the email. That's how I first learned of Jessica Ingstrom.

  She said she needed help. She said that she believed someone or something was trying to kill her. At first I wondered if it was another job out of our area of expertise. If someone was stalking her, we would feel bad for her, but that job is not for us. We aren't bodyguards and we aren't detectives. We tell them that the police are better at helping them and that we hope everything works out. We kill monsters, not people.

  However, as I skimmed the email, I saw a keyword and stopped. She said bitten.

  In the monster hunting business[7] there are a few words that get our attention. Bitten is one of those words, but so are devoured, venom, claws, mauled, screech, and teeth. Likewise we pay attention to fun phrases like, "I couldn't believe it", "it just wouldn't die", "it ate my pet", and the ever popular, "you're going to think I'm crazy..." If I scan over an email and don't see those, odds are is it's going to be job for someone else, maybe two brothers with a lifelong dedication to stopping domestic violence or going up against the mob.

  But still, a bite? That's good stuff. I like biters more than many other types of creatures. Not that I like getting bitten, but typically any monster that's going to start by biting you isn't going to shoot a gun at you, use scything claws, or emit a toxic musk. It's going to want to get up close in range of an axe or crowbar that I can hit it with. I like that much better than having to take cover. It's not like we usually carry guns.

  I read Jessica's email again, taking it slower this time. I frowned. It wasn't just a bite. Someone got killed. This just became much more serious.

  She wanted to meet ASAP. I responded back to Jessica saying we could meet with her that night. Then I called Mikkel to let him know about the job. He was free and could come by with the van to pick me up. If neither of us were on a job, he had the van. It was supposed to be both of ours, but somehow it had become his whenever we weren't working. I liked to throw that in his face when we argued, but honestly it wasn't a huge deal to me. Parking in New Avalon can be a major pain in the ass and I appreciated hardly ever dealing with it.

  By the time Dickie came back with our drinks, I already had my game face on.

  "Is it Super Fightin' Nowak Brothers Go Time?" he said, sliding into the booth.

  "I'm afraid so," I said. "I hate to bail on you, but -"
>
  "- but I'm used to it," said Dickie. "No, no, I'm not saying it passive aggressively. I've made my peace with the Nowak sensibilities. Since you're not messing up a gig or band practice, I can be much more magnanimous about it. I know you gotta do what you gotta do."

  "I didn't realize it sounded so jerk-like and John Wayne-ish at the same time," I said glumly.

  Dickie slapped me on the back. "You gotta take the good with the bad. Now you still have a little bit before Mikkel shows up and I have a pint that's still cold. Drink up and let's toast life being better than it used to be."

  Dickie grew up like us. For all his own punk rage, I knew he was glad for the changes in his life. He didn't have to steal or scam to make rent, he got to play guitar in his band at least once a week, and he could afford to have a beer with a friend when he wanted to. I still knew he made barely any money, but he always exalted in the fact that for his low success, he wasn't at the bottom of the barrel anymore. I clinked his glass and took a long drink of my beer. I was glad that a pint with a good friend always tasted so much better.

  I got an email from Jessica saying she could meet immediately. She typed out her address.

  "Wellington?" I said incredulously.

  "Wellington?" echoed Dickie. "Damn, you guys are attracting some better clients."

  My phone buzzed with a bar chord as I got a text from Mikkel. Out front.

  "Gotta go," I said, chugging the rest of my beer.

  "I hope you don't get killed."

  "I hope so too," I said.

  I walked outside and found the van easily. It was a dark brown with a red A-Team stripe. Mikkel nicknamed it the Pork Chop Express but I still mostly just called it the van.

  I slid into the passenger side seat. I rattled off the address.

  "Wellington? We're moving on up," he said with a nod.