I Kill Monsters

by Dennis Liggio

"Hey, you wanted to do the barn alone, if I recall. Now you have help. So suck it up and open the doors."

  I sighed and let the shotgun dangle from one hand. The barn doors were not falling off, like I would expect at this farmhouse. It was weird that the barn looked so decrepit, but the corpse of the man in the house didn't look that old. There had been a chain lock on the barn handles, but that had been broken off. I grabbed the handle tentatively. I looked back to Mikkel, who nodded, his rifle raised. Then I pulled it open.

  As the heavy door finally pulled away, a red mist billowed out of the doorway. It was acrid, toxic, and immediately settled into my lungs. It was almost like a rich cinnamon, if you could imagine a cinnamon that burned your lungs like ammonia. I stumbled away from the doorway in a fit of coughing. I even fell to my knees on the ground. Luckily, as soon as I was back in open air, my lungs filled with clear air and I quickly recovered. I pulled myself back to my feet, trying to clean the last of the red ick out of my lungs.

  "Holy shit..." I heard Mikkel say, the words stretched out in awestruck disbelief.

  I turned back to the door, then practically jumped, stumbling away from them and raising my shotgun. I nearly fired but then stopped, probably for the same reason as Mikkel.

  The back side of the barn door was covered with Spiders. There was not more than a foot of space that wasn't covered by them and their legs. The door was a mass of their insectoid bodies and spread out legs clinging to the massive wooden door. Normally, that would make me either run and terror or open up firing. But they weren't moving. They were simply clinging to the door as if asleep. The red mist billowed past them and out into the open air.

  "What's going on?" I said.

  "I have no idea," said Mikkel. "Seriously, this is fucked up. I've never seen it before. And I can't decide if this is a good or a bad thing. I mean, good that they're not trying to kill us. That's a huge plus. But... I have no idea what this means."

  I shook my head in disbelief. I wondered if I should try shooting them anyway. Just in case.

  "What is that red fog?" asked Mikkel.

  "I don't know," I said. "It made me cough up a lung though. I hope it's not poison."

  "It's probably poison," said Mikkel.

  "Very funny," I said.

  "No, seriously," he said, a certain gravity in his voice. "What if it's like some sort of Spider poison? Like, what if that red stuff is why they're not moving? Like fumigation or something."

  This was a particularly chilling thought. "Oh great, I'm going to die of Spider poison."

  "Don't stress too much," said Mikkel. "Cigarettes and whiskey are still probably going to kill you first."

  That at least gave me a nervous chuckle, a strained laugh that helped me ignore my inevitable mortality. I looked at the red fog. It dissipated pretty quickly as it exited the barn, but it stayed very thick in the barn. It should have been thinning out with the barn doors open. We could see the mist exiting. Unless...

  "I think..." I began, still trying to put the thought together. "I think whatever is making the red fog is still creating it."

  "What?" said Mikkel. "What would still be going? Hasn't this place been dead a while?"

  I shook my head. Something was bothering me, but I hadn't quite figured out what. I had no answer yet.

  I lifted my shirt collar up above my nose, creating a makeshift filter. With my flashlight in hand I slowly began to walk into the barn.

  "Are you crazy?" said Mikkel.

  "I have an idea," came my muffled voice.

  "Are you an idiot?" I heard him say behind me, but it wasn't very loud.

  The red fog stung my eyes, but I still was able to see a short distance in front of me, everything was just rosy and misty. There were Spiders inside. That made me freeze, my pulse pounding in my ears, but after a few seconds, I realized they were the same as the ones on the door - unmoving. As I pushed farther in to the back of the barn, I finally saw what I theorized was there. I had found the hive.

  These Spiders built hives somewhat like a combination of wasps and ants. They built large domes of a reddish orange material that was like resin or terracotta. The initial hive got built and then was enlarged over time. Some of the additions included the paralyzed bodies of their victims which were slowly eaten over time by members of the hive and I guess their crawling young. As I mentioned, not a good way to go.

  This hive was fairly large due to the room to expand in the barn. It loomed in front of me, twenty feet tall and fifteen feet wide, some half constructed tubes leading off it. There were Spiders perched on it, but like all of them in the barn, they were paralyzed.

  In the center of the barn the red fog was thickest and completely opaque to my burning and unshielded eyes. And the smoke was moving. It definitely was spilling out of something. I moved toward it.

  Unfortunately, that was the wrong move. As much as my shirt worked somewhat as a basic air filter so far, it could not keep out the thicker smoke. I started coughing hard. I stumbled back toward the entrance, trying to get to fresh air as hacking coughs went through me.

  Suddenly I felt something on my shoulders. I freaked out that a Spider was on me and thrashed, my shirt pulling off my nose, causing me to breathe deeply of the red fog. I coughed even harder and my head throbbed. I fell into a full on cinnamon poison coma. I was dazed as I felt myself dragged along the ground.

  The next thing I remembered was laying on the ground looking at the night sky. As I turned my head, something dark moved between me and the night sky, right over my face. At first I thought it was a monster, or a robot, or... or just Mikkel's gas mask. He peered down at me and nodded once he saw me move. I relaxed and focused on my breathing.

  Mikkel tossed my own gas mask onto my stomach, and then sat down cross legged next to me. He lifted his own mask up onto the top of his head and idly looked toward the house, where there was more gunfire.

  "You've seriously got a death wish, Szandor," he said. "You could have taken the two minutes to get a real mask. Seriously, sometimes you're so reckless it's like you want to die young."

  "Fortune favors the bold?" I said weakly, coughing again.

  "Yet you are often the first to balk at danger when someone else suggests it," he said.

  "Maybe I'm just naturally contrary," I suggested with a weak smile.

  "Maybe? Maybe?" Mikkel laughed. "Brother, there is no maybe about it."

  I simply shrugged. Being half poisoned because of my own stupidity is not when I want to be reflecting on my personality issues[39]. We heard gunfire from the house again. We both turned to look at it.

  "Do you think they...?" I said.

  "Nah, they're fine," said Mikkel. "They're tough. If they needed help, they'd get us on the walkies."

  Coincidentally, our walkie-talkie buzzed to life. "Mikkel, is he okay?" It was Paulie.

  Mikkel had briefly mentioned his concern about my life to Paulie when he had run back to the van. "Yeah, he seems to be generally alive," said my brother.

  "Confirmed, be careful."

  "Generally alive?" I asked, then started coughing again.

  "It seemed an appropriate assessment," said Mikkel.

  I took a few deep breaths and confirmed I could hold air in my lungs without coughing. I pulled on my gas mask. Let's do this, I said through it.

  Mikkel nodded and pulled on his gas mask. We walked into the red fog.

  Visibility was poor from both the smoke and the mask lenses, but I had the advantage of not coughing to death. Mikkel took a minute to appreciate the inactive hive and the walls covered with motionless Spiders. But we were both more interested in the creeping fog from the center of the room.

  Mikkel gently grabbed at the source of the smoke. He was holding something in his hand that was slowly leaking the fog. I stepped toward him to see what it was, but I promptly tripped over something right in front of me and fell to the ground.

  I was lucky that gas masks and smoke hid both my embarrassment and probably Mikkel's la
ughter. I was sprawled across something that wasn't the ground. I looked down, trying to peer through the smoke. Then I realized it was a body. A human body. It wasn't part of the hive, it was a body just laying on the ground. And I was stretched out on top of it. I found myself quickly getting back to my feet and feeling like I needed a shower. Then again, I would probably need a thousand showers after the red fog.

  Crouching down, I looked down at the corpse, then up at Mikkel, who was still holding the smoking item. The body was dressed up in a very familiar way. Black gas mask, black body armor, black boots. It was very clearly one of the same commandos who raided my apartment and broke up the ghoul gathering. What were they doing here?

  I heard a grunt from Mikkel and looked over to him. He was moving the object in his hand, which disrupted the smoke leaking out of it for a moment, allowing us to see it. It was a professional looking canister with what looked like a clear mechanism for opening the hole where the gas was coming out. Then Mikkel pointed down at the black suited body. The commando had a bandolier of about half a dozen of these canisters.

  Mikkel unhooked the bandolier while I continued to search the body. I wasn't actually very comfortable with going through the pockets of a dead guy, so I kept it to a minimum. I did not take off his gas mask. I didn't want to know what he looked like, I didn't want to see his dead face. Not the lifeless expression of a man. I didn't find a wallet, but I found what looked like some sort of badge and access card. I couldn't see it well in the fog.

  With a nod, we exited the barn. We pulled up our gas masks where we were outside in the safe air.

  "What the hell is going on?" I said.

  "I'm not sure, but I've gotten some good loot out of it." Mikkel let the bandolier drop and also threw down one of those fancy shock rifles he must have found next to the corpse.

  "You took those from a corpse," I said.

  "He wasn't using them anymore!" he said incredulously. Then: "Besides, I saw you grab something out of his pockets."

  "I was looking for clues."

  "Well, then these are two very big clues," said Mikkel, sitting down next to the bandolier and rifle. He picked up the shock rifle. "I look forward to figuring out how this sexy clue works."

  I shook my head. I looked down at the badge. It was both a badge and access card; I knew that because it looked like the one for my job. It had a picture of the dead man, causing me to involuntarily frown. I didn't want to know what he looked like. He looked to be maybe thirty. He had a smile that was unreadable, like the Mona Lisa. Maybe it was the smile of awkwardness that we had just looted his badge off his corpse. The card said his name was Rick Molina. He worked in the Security Division. But even more surprising was the logo on the badge. It was a MT. Big M, little T. He worked for Minerva Technics.

  The same company that Jessica worked for.

  "That's not good..." I said.

  "What is?" said Mikkel, practically hugging the shock rifle like it was a present on Christmas morning.

  I showed him the ID.

  "Minerva Technics? Fuck."

  "So I'm thinking that -" I started.

  " - That the commandos who raided your apartment were also Minerva Technics? Fuck. Yes. They have the same uniform."

  "So Jessica was kidnapped... by her own company." I had originally started that sentence as a question but by the end it was more an admission of the obvious.

  "Fuck, we are in over our heads," said Mikkel.

  Reluctantly, I nodded.

  Behind us we heard more gunfire. A few simultaneous bursts from the Steyrs and some shouting.

  "Are they not done yet?" said Mikkel.

  "Well, they are fighting for their lives, and we lucked out with someone else doing our work for us."

  Mikkel nodded. "So we're still on the hook to contribute." He then looked down to the bandolier. "Time to try out our new toys."

  Our original plan was to throw the red fog canister in through a broken window. But then we noticed that as run down as the farm house was, there were no broken windows. None of the shooting we had heard broke any of the windows. We thought that maybe the canister could be thrown through a window, breaking it, but then we worried than the canister might not be heavy enough to break the window. It might bounce off the window and get lost. And Mikkel was not about to waste one of his precious toys.

  We had tried getting any of Dixie's team on the walkie, but got nothing.

  "I haven't heard anything from them since they went in," came Paulie's voice on the walkie.

  We walked back over to the vehicles. Paulie was still laying flat on the top of the Pork Chop Express, peering through the scope.

  "Do you think something happened to them?" asked Mikkel.

  "I've not been able to raise them on the walkie," said Paulie, "but I've heard guns from the house and I've seen movement in the windows. I think they're active, just the walkies aren't working."

  "What, is the house covered in a thick coat of lead paint?" I said.

  "I think the important facts are they are still alive, status unknown, and we can't contact them," said Mikkel.

  That's when we decided on chucking a red fog grenade inside the house. Since that wasn't viable, we looked for another plan. Something more effective. Something that involved me doing something completely asinine while at great risk to myself. No, that last one wasn't one of our criteria, it's just how things shook out.

  We ended up with the plan of me running through the house like a fucking idiot while holding one of those canisters that had been activated. I'm not sure how I agreed to that except that I was probably dizzy from lingering red fog fumes and not making good judgments. Also I lost the coin toss.

  So that was me, bursting into the house with a smoking canister, waving it around to try to maximize its smoke coverage and also to ward off any Spiders from dropping down from the ceiling onto my fucking head. I was like the worst exterminator ever. Most fumigations in history have not been so idiotic. I felt like a combination of a kamikaze, Blackbeard, and a frantic Olympic torch holder.

  Luckily, the rooms I ran through seemed pretty clear. Or rather, they had been cleared. There were many, many bullet holes, much of the furniture had been destroyed, blue ichor had splashed all over the walls, and there were lots of dismembered Spider legs, but there were no living Spiders. Dixie's team had at least been thorough.

  My big concern was trying to keep from bursting through a door and getting shot by Dixie, Meat, or Delilah. They didn't know I was running through the house like an idiot. They especially might not know it was me in the gas mask and red fog grenade. To offset this, I was shouting at the top of my lungs, but my voice was heavily muffled by the gas mask, which I think more went toward the impression that I was a crazy person in a gas mask that they didn't know[40].

  First I ran through the front door and upstairs, since Paulie had mentioned seeing someone in the upper windows. That area was cleared, so I ran through the downstairs. That was also clear, but I didn't see any of them. I could still hear the occasional sound of guns, but from below me. That left the cellar.

  With any type of monster killing, if you are in a house and you have a choice of where to engage monsters, you don't want the cellar. It's enclosed, dark, cluttered, damp, poorly lit, and typically has one exit. If you are engaging monsters that have the home field advantage, you don't want the cellar. If you are engaging Spiders, which can crawl on the walls and ceiling, attack in groups, and typically jump at you with paralytic bites, you really don't want the cellar. So even holding a billowing canister of red fog that I knew would disable the Spiders, I was leery about going into the cellar.

  Unfortunately, there was no other option. I was committed to this crazy person fumigator act. So with a muffled yell, I burst through the cellar door and began running down the concrete steps, smoking canister held high like I was carrying the Olympic Torch of Spider Killing.

  I had guessed correctly, because Dixie's team was in the cellar. Surrounded on
all sides by Spiders, they were making a desperate stand. Meat was down to just semi-automatic pistols, his shots aimed carefully. Dixie and Delilah were on the ground. Delilah seemed wounded or paralyzed by Spider bites. Her body was cradled in Dixie's arms, while Dixie herself was firing with Delilah's P90. It looked pretty epic, just coming into the cellar to see that scene. I would watch that movie.

  Nobody fired at me as I came rushing down the stairs. They barely even looked, which to me was a testament to how desperate their stand was. When you don't even look at the crazy guy in the gas mask with a smoking object as he bursts through the door and runs down the steps, you are clearly trying very hard to stay alive against your current opponent.

  When I hit the bottom of the stairs, I tossed the fog canister into the center of the room. As the canister hit the ground, it immediately erupted with more red smoke than when I held it. They looked at the canister and then me in confusion. Meat raised his pistol toward me tentatively, but did not fire. As the fog billowed through the room, Spiders began to stop moving, some falling over in midstep. There was a look of confused yet cautious delight that showed on Dixie's face before the smoke reached her. Coughing followed and even Meat fell to the ground.

  "Clear, in the cellar!" I shouted into the walkie, my voice still muffled by the mask.

  Nothing.

  I realized that there was no reception in the cellar. I ran up the stairs and outside. "Clear, in the cellar!"

  "What?" said Paulie.

  "Clear, in the cellar!" I shouted again desperately, willing him to understand me over the mask muffle.

  "What?"

  I didn't have time to keep making him understand. I rushed down the stairs and grabbed at Delilah. She was on top of Dixie and also possibly wounded. The kevlar made her heavier, but I managed to get her over my shoulder. As I started to climb the stairs, Mikkel, also wearing a gas mask, moved past me to grab one of the others. I knew I could count on my brother to understand something I said while wearing a gas mask.

  I carried Delilah up and as gently as I could put her down on the ground outside the farmhouse. A moment later, Mikkel laid Dixie down on the ground. She immediately began coughing.