"Well then, we got a case."
"I'm on a case. I gotta go kill my daddy. Again. Before he takes over the world or some other crazy megalomaniac werewolf shit."
"I mean a new case. And this one's close. And when did you learn words like megalomaniac?" Skeeter asked.
"I went to college, Skeeter. I woulda graduated, too, if I hadn't blown out my knee playing football."
"I remember. I was there. You drank a lot after that game."
"I'm a big dude. I drink a lot. It happens. What's this new case and why should I go after it instead of finding Pop and putting a half-dozen silver bullets in his face?"
"Well, first off, we don't know where your daddy is. And we do know where to find this goblin infestation. Like I said, it's close to where you are, probably less than two hours the way you drive. And it's goblins. They've surfaced in a mining town just outside of Beckley, West Virginia, and you know what that means."
"They've come through to the surface?" Skeeter was right; I knew exactly what a surface goblin infestation meant - lots of the little bastards, and lots of fire and explosives to get rid of 'em. Sounded like my kind of therapy. "Fine, Skeeter. Let's go fry us up some goblins."
*****
It took me a little more than two hours to get to Beckley, and another half hour to get to Ford, a little nothing town just a dozen miles west of Beckley. It took so long because it looked like very damn car in that chunk of West By God Virginia was trying to get out of Beckley and Ford, and that much traffic on little windy-assed mountain roads slowed everything to a crawl. I pulled onto the main drag of Ford, named Ford Street in some fit of originality, and parked in front of the one business that seemed to be doing any kind of business, the Ford Diner. It was about three in the afternoon, so I thought my chances of finding a drink in the buckle of the Bible Belt in the middle of the afternoon were pretty slim. And if I can't drink or consort with women of lax moral standing, I might as well find a good piece of lemon meringue pie. That's a truth of life, y'all, you just better write that shit down.
The woman behind the counter looked old enough to have been my mama, and twice as big. She had hips that I swear looked like two English Bulldogs fighting under a six-man pup tent. I thought that spoke well to the quality of the pie, so I sat down at the counter and waited for the inevitable greeting.
"What can I get you, sweetie?" There it was. The true sign that I was in a hash house in the South - the "sweetie." Sometimes you'd get a "honey" instead, but the second you walk in the door of a diner in the South, you're guaranteed a term of endearment from a women so tough she don't bother to take the cigar out of her mouth before she tells the state trooper to kiss her ass. It's one of the reasons I stay in the South. That, and Cheerwine.
"What kind of pie you got, darlin'?" I didn't bother to look at her nametag. Her name was Darlin' and mine, as far as she was concerned, was Sweetie.
"I got apple, cherry cobbler and lemon meringue. You want tea or Coke?" She didn't have to ask, even as far north as West Virginia they weren't heathen enough to serve unsweetened iced tea.
"Tea, and lemon meringue, if you don't mind."
"Here you go, sweetie." She said as she set a glass of sweet tea in front of me, a lemon wedge carefully perched on the rim of the glass. The pie came a moment later, a slice the size of my head with whipped cream piled high on a meringue base. My mouth started to water even before I put the fork in it. Then a memory came crashing down and my vision wavered.
I was sitting at a counter just like this one, but it was way earlier in the morning. I was probably twelve, and my brother Jason was sitting next to me with our dad at the end of the bar next to Jason. Dawn had just broken, and we had finished up a big hunt. We'd been up all night clearing a nest of vampires in Mississippi and stopped in a little diner just like this one for breakfast. The woman that brought Dad his coffee was whip-thin with one black tooth in the front of her strangely pretty smile. Her dishwater hair was trying its damnedest to escape the bun she kept fiddling with, and she kept straightening her apron every time she refilled Dad's coffee. She set a heaping plate of bacon and eggs in front of my dad and the same thing in front of Jason, but to me she brought a slice of lemon meringue pie, nice and cold from the icebox, with a couple of drops of condensation on the store-made meringue. Jason giggled at me for eating pie for breakfast, but Dad stopped him.
"You boys did good, just like real Hunters out there last night. And when you come off a hunt, you deserve to eat anything you want, at least for the first meal back. That reminds us why we do this - so we can have things like bacon."
"And pie!" I chimed in.
"That's right, Robert. And pie. Now dig in, boys. We've got a long drive ahead of us and you two have school tomorrow."
I snapped back to the present to find Darlin' staring at me from the end of the counter. I looked down at the pie and saw that I'd bent my fork into a "U" shape without knowing it. I gripped the cheap metal and bent the offending silverware back into something resembling its normal shape and ate my pie. When I finished, I waved Darlin' over. She leaned on the counter and gave me the kind of friendly grin you only get from women used to putting up with a lot of crap from men: waitresses, strippers, nuns, you know.
"What can I do you for, sweetie?" She asked with a smile. She also slid my bill across the counter to me.
"I heard there might be something strange going on at one of the local mines. You know anything about that?" I put a twenty down to cover my pie and sweet tea, but mostly to pay for the information.
"You mean the goblins?" My face must have showed my surprise, because Darlin' let loose with a laugh that made her bosom shake like a pair of custard pies on a roller coaster.
"Yeah, I mean the goblins. How did you know they were goblins?" I spluttered.
"Sweetie, you look like you might know something about something, if you know what I mean." She reached across the counter and ran a finger along the crucifix around my neck, then down to the ankh that I wore just beneath it. Then she tapped the protective rune tattoos that decorated my right forearm. "Now just because we're back here in hill country don't mean we don't know about things that go bump in the night. Matter of fact, most of us mountain folk are a lot more in touch with the old ways than your city slickers. So if you think we can live around a mountain all our lives and not know what a goblin looks like when it crawls out of a hole, you've got another think coming."
"I stand corrected. Sorry about that. In my line of work I don't run into too many people that even believe in me, much less what I have to hunt."
"I can see where that would lead one to be cautious. Now are you freelance, or do work for the government?" She said government like it was a cuss word, and I remembered that it wasn't too long ago that people ran a lot of moonshine out of these hills.
"Neither one, ma'am. I'm the officially sanctioned Monster Hunter of the Southeastern United States under the auspices of the Holy Roman Catholic Church."
"You're Catholic?" That got me a look almost as suspicious as saying I was from the government.
"I was raised Presbyterian, but I did have to convert to take the job." I didn't mention the other ceremonies involved in my recruitment. I didn't think Darlin' wanted to know.
"Fair enough. Well, it seems like the boys up at the Henderson mine broke through into a big underground cavern last week. That kinda thing happens every once in a while, but this one looked like something had been in there, and recently."
"How do you mean?" I asked.
"Well, there were fires banked for one thing, and some bones laying around from where things had been eaten. The boys got out of there lickety-split, but they didn't block the entrance up behind them. That was their second mistake."
"What was their first mistake?"
"Going in there in the first damn place. They left their scent all over the place, and that let the goblins follow them out of the cave and all the way back up through the mine to the surface."
"That's pretty much true, but the elevator comes up in this covered area right out behind the company store. So as soon as the critters figured out how to work the elevator--"
"They were in the company store." I finished.
"Yup. Right up in there with all kinds of food, ammo, tools. Everything a critter needs to make mischief."
"So the boys got out of there, but the goblins followed them up, took over the company store and started causing trouble."
"Yeah, that's one way of puttin' it. Another way of puttin' it would be that as soon as the sun went down every stray cat, dog and animal under a hundred pounds within five miles of the mine disappeared. That was two nights ago. Last night they started trying to get into houses."
"Once they start gettin' bold there's no stopping 'em."
"I figure if you didn't think you could stop 'em you wouldn't be sitting here with that hand-cannon strapped under your arm." She pointed to the bulge under my jacket.
I reached into my shoulder holster and drew out my .50 Desert Eagle and laid it on the counter. "This is Bertha. She helps me take care of problems."
"I hope you brought a lot of ammunition. And maybe Bertha's twin sister." She looked at the big pistol dubiously, like Bertha wasn't impressive enough on her own.
"I've got enough ammo in my truck to invade Ohio, if anybody'd want to. And I might have a surprise or two in there, too." She grinned at my Ohio joke and poured me a Styrofoam cup full of sweet tea and put a to-go lid on it.
"Then here's one for the road, sweetie. You keep your head down in there. And try not to shoot off your foot."
"Sounds like good advice, darlin'. I'll be back tomorrow morning for more pie." I got up, put Bertha back in her holster, and walked out to my truck.
I slid behind the wheel and tapped the button on the side of my Bluetooth earpiece. "You get all that, Skeeter?"
"Yep. Sounds like we've got a real-deal goblin infestation, and a population that knows what they're dealing with. I don't know if that's a good thing or a bad thing for you."
"I don't either, but I'm pretty sure it means that I won't get any crap for carrying a bunch of guns through town."
"Well, that's one good thing. But here's a bad thing to go right along with it - you're going underground."
"I know that, Skeeter. That's kinda the definition of 'mine.' It's pretty much gotta be underground."
"Yeah, and that pretty much means I can't talk to you until you get back up to the surface. Unless somebody has built a cell tower in the coal mine, which I doubt."
"Yeah, they look pretty up-to-date around here, but not I don't know anyplace in West Virginia that's that damn progressive."
"So once you get to the elevator, you're pretty much on your own. I'll be with you up to that point, but that's where I get off the roller coaster."
"Fair enough. Then let's get to shooting while the shootin's good." I put the truck in gear and cruised down the mostly deserted streets of the little mining town. Where most days there would be a steady stream of men carrying lunch pails to the mouth of the mine, today I was the only thing headed in that direction. People were out, for sure. They were loading everything they could carry into their cars or strapping it to the tops of their minivans. They stopped to watch as I drove by, the combination of an unfamiliar vehicle and some dumbass driving right into the mouth of danger pulling every eye in my direction. I was used to it, though. When you're 6' 4" and weigh well north of three hundred pounds, "stealthy" is not a word that people use to describe you. I waved at a few folks as I drove by, then pulled up in front of the company store.
It was a no-nonsense cinderblock building with "Ford Mining Company" in faded blue letters over the double front doors. The shades had been pulled down over all the windows, and a "Closed" sign hung in the door. There were no lights on indoors, but I could see movement behind the blinds and the occasional flicker of a green toe or finger around a window.
"All right, Skeeter. Is there anything I need to know about goblins that I don't already know?"
"Well, Bubba, I don't know what you know about goblins, so I can't tell you what you don't know if I don't know what you already know."
I sat there for a minute trying to untangle Skeeter's sentence, then gave up. "I know they're about three feet tall, maybe sixty pounds, with sharp teeth and claws on their feet and hands. I know they eat anything that moves slow enough to catch, and they swarm like hyenas if something's injured."
"Yeah, including a goblin. They're cannibals, and they know that almost everything is bigger and meaner than they are, so if one of them is hurt, they'll eat their own wounded rather than fight for a meal."
"Are they smart enough to use a can opener?"
"Why?"
"There's a lot of food in the company store. If they recognize it, there's most likely a lot more of them coming up the tunnel right now."
"Goblins are smart little buggers, Bubba. Don't underestimate them. They look stupid, but so do you."
"Hey!"
"Well it's true, and they aren't any stupider than you are. They know how to use tools, and weapons. They figured out the elevator pretty quickly, and have been known to use human weapons in other infestations."
I didn't like the sound of that. "Do you mean--" I saw a barrel poke out between the two front doors and ducked behind the dash just in time to watch my windshield explode inward in a rain of glass and lead pellets.
"Yup," Skeeter said in my ear. "They can use guns. I don't think they understand aiming, but they can load simple guns."
I sat back up, then looked back at the door and ducked again. The gun barked again, and another shower of lead flew into the cab of my truck and blew out the back glass. "You mean like a double-barreled shotgun?"
"Yeah," Skeeter confirmed. "I don't think they could figure out the mechanics of a pump, but as long as they got the shells in the right way, a double-barrel shouldn't be a problem."
"Good to know." I muttered, sliding out of the truck and opening the driver's and back door for cover. "Next time we run across a monster that can use guns, let me know about it before I park twenty feet away from the little bastards in broad daylight!"
"I'll make a note." Skeeter said. Then I heard him mumble to himself like he was writing. "Bubba is still stupid, explain every little tiny detail to him. Okay, I got it on a Post-It."
"And screw you, too, pal." I said, flipping up the back seat and digging into the gun cabinet set into the floor of the truck. I grabbed my Saiga semi-automatic twelve-gauge and a 30-round drum, then strapped a Bowie knife to each thigh. I slid half a dozen extra magazines for Bertha into my shoulder rig and my back pockets, and looked around the truck to see what else I had that might make an impression. I stuck a pair of white phosphorous flares into my belt and looked at my Granddaddy's sword. I slung the sword over my shoulder, chambered a shell into the Saiga, and stepped out from behind the doors of the truck.
Into a deserted street. No more little green bastards running around in the store, no more families packing up to get out of town, nothing. It was like I'd ducked behind the door in 2012, and come out sometime after the friggin' zombie apocalypse. And I've already beat that back a couple of times, so I'm not sweating zombies for a while. I looked around, trying to figure out where they'd all gone, then decided I didn't really give a shit and started towards the front of the store.
I made it almost to the door before it hit me. I wish I meant that I had some great realization about where the goblins were hiding and did something really smart, but y'all have met me, so you know better. When I say it hit me, I meant "it" knocked the shit out of me. And the "it" in question was nine feet of green ugliness that did not have a part in the Avengers movie. It came down off the roof right in front of me and caught me with an uppercut that would have taken my head clean off if I hadn't seen
it coming and just went limp, like they tell you to do in a car wreck.
Only most car wrecks don't happen on your face. I flew backwards like I'd been hit by a bus and landed right on the hood of my truck. My poor F-250 decided she'd finally had enough, and the front end sagged a good eight inches as both front axles snapped and the tires just fell right off into the dirt. I lay there for a second looking at the pretty stars until I finally came to my senses enough to hear Skeeter screaming in my ear.
"MOVE!" I looked up and the troll was flying through the air at me like the world's ugliest professional wrestler getting ready to drop an atomic elbow right through my chest. I rolled to one side and the monster drove the engine of my poor dead pickup about eighteen inches into the gravel parking lot. I kept rolling off the truck, trying to get to my feet while the monster yanked its fists free of the ruined hood of my ruined truck.
I finally got my head straightened out enough to pull the trigger on my Saiga, and that's when I realized that I'd dropped my shotgun somewhere in midair. I still had my sword, though. Great, I thought. I drop the gun and keep the toothpick to fight the Jolly Green Friggin' Giant. I love my life.
"Skeeter?" I asked the air, hoping my headset was still on.
"Yeah, Bubba. You still alive? That thing just smashed the camera I had installed in your truck."
"That's 'cause the sonofabitch just smashed the whole damn truck. Now what do I need to know about trolls? Do they really regenerate?"
"Too much Dungeons & Dragons, Bubba. Trolls do not regenerate."
"Good to know. And Skeeter?"
"Yeah?"
"Never mention Dungeons & Dragons again." There were some pretty ugly junior high memories tangled up with lunchtime role-playing games, and there wasn't enough liquor and therapy in the world to tackle that shit.
I ran around the back end of the truck, putting some distance between myself and the troll that was jumping off the hood of the truck at me. I flung a Bowie knife at its head, but it batted the blade aside like it was a mosquito. Then I stopped, squared my shoulders, and drew Bertha.
Scattered, Smothered and Chunked - Bubba the Monster Hunter Season 1 Page 20