Scattered, Smothered and Chunked - Bubba the Monster Hunter Season 1

by John G. Hartness

  "Troll, meet Bertha. Bertha, meet the green SOB that just killed my truck." I even managed to grin a little as I put ten rounds right in the X-ring that made up the troll's face. It went down in a thunder of green flesh, red blood and bad attitude, and I blew the smoke off Bertha's barrel.

  Then it sat up, just like waking up from a nap.

  "Hey Skeeter?"

  "Yeah, Bubba?"

  "Remember when I asked if there was anything important I needed to know about trolls?" I asked.

  "Yeah?"

  "That woulda been a good time to mention that regular bullets won't kill one!" I popped the empty magazine out of Bertha and fumbled around under my arm for a magic-killer clip. I kept a few loaded with alternating cold iron and silver rounds, figuring if one type of ammo doesn't hurt a particular monster, the other will. And I haven't met anything yet that really enjoys getting shot.

  Unfortunately loading on the run is not my best skill, and running from a pissed-off troll was high on my priority list right then, so I was having a little bit of trouble when out of nowhere a shot like a cannon rang out. I dove onto my belly in the parking lot, finally stopping long enough to get a fresh magazine into Bertha. It didn't help that I was still seeing double from getting my bell rung by the troll earlier.

  When the thunder of the gunshot died down, I noticed that it was strangely quiet. Not the spooky "something's about to knock the shit out of me quiet" like before the troll knocked the shit out of me, but more like a "what the hell just happened" kind of quiet. I sat up and looked around, and the troll was laying flat on its back a good ten feet away from me, a hole the size of my thumb above its right eye. I walked over and poked the troll, but it was deader than Chairman Mao. And I know Mao's dead, I met the Hunter that took his ass out. I kicked the troll in the shoulder, and when its head rolled to one side I saw that the back of the thing's skull was gone. Something had blown half a troll's head off, and I needed to know what that something was.

  I turned around, looking all up and down the street for a shooter, and finally saw a curtain twitch over the diner. I pointed to the window, and Darlin' leaned out, waving the biggest damn rifle I'd ever seen.

  "I always knew Daddy's elephant gun would come in handy." She hollered.

  "What the hell kinda ammo you got in that thing?" I hollered back.

  "Silver. Everybody knows you can't just shoot trolls with regular bullets." Of course. Everybody knew that. Everybody except the damn Monster Hunter and his damn backup. I cussed a little more under my breath and stomped back to the front of the store. I picked up my Saiga and checked the action. It looked none the worse for wear, which was more than I could say for my truck, my pride, or my jaw.

  "Let's try this again, shall we?" I asked the air, and turned back to the company store to kill as many goblins as I could draw down on. I'd started the day with a bad attitude, and so far Ford, West Virginia had done absolutely nothing to make me feel better. Maybe a whole lot of bloodshed, mayhem and if I was lucky a couple of explosions could change that. The double-barreled shotgun poked out from the front door again, and I just laughed.

  "You call that a shotgun?" I yelled in my best Crocodile Dundee impression. "This is a shotgun!" I pulled the trigger on the Saiga ten times and watched the front of the company store disintegrate. Ten shells of double-ought buckshot flying at you will make you rethink a lot of life choices, no matter if you're man, goblin or troll. The little bugger holding the double-barrel either decided to run like hell back to the mine, or I blew it to little green bits, because that shotgun dropped to the porch and lay still amidst the shattered glass, shredded blinds and demolished discount signs.

  I stepped through the doors, glass crunching under my size sixteen combat boots. I smelled burned hot dogs, spilled beer and gunpowder - not my favorite combination. Under it all was a slimy smell, the kind of nasty, clinging odor that old sewage treatment plants and burned out slaughterhouses get. You don't want to know how I came to recognize those smells. Most of a goblin was lying just inside the front door, so that answered the question about the one holding the shotgun. The hail of shotgun pellets had cut him almost in half and smeared greenish-black blood into a slick puddle that looked like it had way more blood than would fit inside such a small body.

  I searched the rest of the store, but came up empty. There was plenty of evidence of goblins - coolers with their contents scattered all over the floor, everything on the candy aisle consumed with extreme prejudice, and every single trucker cap yanked off its rack and smeared with vile fluids that I really didn't want to think too much about. Lots of nasty, but no goblins.

  "There's nothing here, Skeeter." I whispered.

  "Then why are you whispering?" asked the voice in my ear.

  "Because just because I don't see anything doesn't mean there ain't really nothing here, asshole!"

  "Then why didn't you say you didn't see nothin' instead of saying there wasn't nothin' there? That's downright misleading."

  "You might be my best friend and my only sidekick, Skeeter, but that does not mean you are not also a royal pain in my ass."

  "I do my best."

  "Well do your best to hack me the floorplan of this damn store and tell me if there's a back room or something where these little bastards might be hiding!"

  "Boy, aren't you the testy one?" I heard the click and hum as Skeeter hung up on me.

  I wandered through the store, poking at the shelves and trying to find someplace that a horde of goblins could be hiding. It was a scene right out of a horror movie, complete with the flickering fluorescents and spilled pools of ketchup all over the floor. All I needed was for a cat to come jumping out at me from a shelf. And for it not to be bright friggin' daylight. That might be handy, too.

  "I found it!" Skeeter's voice clicked back in my ear.

  "Found what, Skeeter?"

  "There's a panel behind the counter that opens up into the storeroom. I bet they're all back there. Unless..."

  "Unless what, Skeeter?" The last time Skeeter got me with an "unless" I ended up waiting three weeks for my eyebrows to grow back.

  "Unless they went up into the crawlspace above the drop ceiling." Which of course they did. And of course goblins either have super-hearing and were listening in on our conversation, or they were stupid little bastards and put too many goblins in too small a space and the drop ceiling gave way at just that moment and dumped half a dozen goblins down on top of me and all around the condiment and bear repellant aisle.

  "Skeeter, would you take offense if I told you to never speak to me again?" I asked, trying to draw a bead on the squirming mass of green skin and pointy ears that had landed in the aisle in front of me. I cut loose with a couple of shots but then had to drop the shotgun to wipe the goblin blood out of my eyes. I cleared the green-black goop from my eyes just in time to see a goblin pick up the Saiga and turn it around in its hands. The shotgun was almost as big as the goblin, and by the time the critter had figured out where the trigger was, the barrel was wedged underneath its chin. The goblin pulled the trigger, the Saiga roared, the pellets cut through its scrawny neck like a fat man through a dessert buffet, and the goblin's head flew about six feet before colliding with another beastie and sending the new monster sprawling.

  I managed to keep from laughing, mostly because there were still five or six goblins trying to eat my legs. I drew Bertha and turned in a slow circle, blowing a goblin to smithereens with every pull of the trigger. Finally I spun back around and sighted on the goblin trying to get out from under the severed head of the first goblin. I chuckled to myself again and shot straight through the first goblin's head, splattering a mixture of goblin brains and blood all across the Klondike Bar cooler. I kissed Bertha right on her chromed rear sight and reloaded her, then tucked her away in my shoulder rig.

  I picked up my Saiga, checked the magazine and saw that I still had close to twenty shells. I slung the strap over one arm and clicked the headset. "Now, Skeeter, what were you tr
ying to tell me about a storeroom?"

  "There's a sliding panel behind the counter that opens up into a storage room about ten feet by eight feet. That's enough room to hold a bunch of goblins."

  "If they're smart enough to get it open."

  "True enough. There's nothing on the plans about the locking mechanism, so you'll probably have to poke around for a while to find it."

  "Or it might be the button beside the cash register that says 'Storage.'" I said, having made my way over behind the counter.

  "Nobody would be stupid enough to build a secret room and then put the button out in the open where any idiot could find it, Bubba." Skeeter said.

  I pushed the button labeled "storage" and a panel behind me slid open to reveal the hidden storage room. The room was lined with shelves holding the redneck holy trinity - liquor, ammunition and cigarettes. It was like a hillbilly's wet dream tucked away behind the cash register, the porn magazines and the 5-hour energy display. And right in the middle of the whole mess was a wiry old man in overalls and a pair of work boots, holding a baseball bat and smoking a cheap cigar.

  "You ain't a goblin." The old man said, checking his swing before he knocked me loopy.

  "Glad to hear it." I replied. "I assume you been here a while?"

  "Yeah, ever since I was dumbass enough to go out back yonder and see what all the noise was last night. Turns out all the noise was them damn little green buggers running around coming up out of the elevator shaft. There must have been a dozen of them running around back there, and they came at me like I was a honeycomb laying on an anthill. I hightailed it back here and hid until either the sheriff came in and cleared them out again, or they busted in and ate me."

  "Well, I guess I'm what's behind Door #3, Grandpa. Why don't you haul ass outta here while I go downstairs and see what kind of mischief I can get into?"

  "Ain't gone be nothin' down there to shoot, all the goblins is up here." The old man said.

  "Where? I couldn't see any sign of 'em while I was headed this way."

  "Well, I don't rightly know how many of 'em came up, but it sounded like a passel of critters crawled through here last night. And there ain't but one building in Ford big enough to hold a bunch of goblins."

  The old man looked up at me and we spoke in unison. "The church."

  I turned around and stomped out the front door.

  "Okay, Skeeter. Here's the deal. We got a church slap full of goblins, and they've managed to train at least one attack troll. I don't know if they've got more trolls or not, I don't know how many of them are in the church, and I don't know if there's more of them underground. Did I miss anything?"

  "I think that pretty much covers it, Bubba. What's your plan?"

  "I thought at first that I'd go in there and shoot the shit out of the goblins, but at this point I think it might be better to blow the whole building up and then go down into a deep hole and blow it up, too."

  "You cannot blow up a church, Bubba! We work for the church, we do not destroy them!" Skeeter sounded downright indignant. I had no idea he was so pious.

  "It's a Methodist church, Skeeter. Does that help?"

  "Well why didn't you say so? We're Catholic, blow it up." I knew he was still pissed about that Vacation Bible School incident when we were fourteen. I told him Krazy Glue wouldn't come out of his Afro, but he had to try.

  "Do you know if there are any more trolls around?" I asked.

  "I didn't know about the first one. I've never heard of goblins being able to control a troll before. Hell, I've never heard of anything being able to control a troll."

  "That waitress controlled the hell out of it with that elephant gun." I said as I tried to get to my gun case in the crushed back seat of my truck. It was no use; the body of my truck was too crumpled after the encounter with the troll for me to get to any of my weapons.

  "Well, Skeeter, I can't get to any of my gear, so I'm stuck with Plan A. No blowing up churches for us today." I headed down the street for the church, keeping an eye peeled for goblins in the bell tower. All I needed to make this day perfect was a little green sniper to shoot me in the nuts or some crap like that.

  The church was a typical white clapboard structure with big double doors leading into a small vestibule, then two aisles going down the sides of the sanctuary. The front doors were wide open, and the vestibule was clear. The doors leading into the sanctuary itself were locked, and they seemed to be barricaded with something. I was just about to start shooting when a thought occurred to me.

  "Hey Skeeter?" I whispered.

  "Yeah?"

  "Why are you whispering?" I asked.

  "I don't know. I guess since you whispered I figured I should too."

  "Okay. But that ain't what I wanted to know."

  "God, I hope not. So?"

  "So what?"

  "What do you want, Bubba?"

  "Oh yeah. Sorry, got distracted. Can goblins speak? Not just Goblin, but can they speak English?"

  "If they've heard enough, yeah. Their heads are the right shape to form human words."

  "Good to know." I stepped forward and banged on the doors with the butt of my shotgun. I pounded four times, waited a second, and then pounded again.

  "Who is it?" A scratchy and somehow still sibilant voice called from the other side of the door.

  "Urg. Let me in." I said in my lowest, most gravelly hopefully troll-sounding voice.

  "Who's Urg?" The goblin on the other side of the door asked.

  "Troll, dumbass. Now let me in. I killed the big human. You want any?" I tried to make my voice sound like something that would eat a human, namely me.

  "Trolls can't talk, now who is this?" I then realized that I had missed one crucial bit of information when researching this idea with Skeeter. I put the shotgun to the door right about where the voice was coming from, and pulled the trigger. Door bits blew inward and were quickly covered with goblin bits, along with bits of pew upholstery from the impromptu barricade that my shells blew straight to toothpicks. After a couple of shots there wasn't much left of the door or the barricade, so I stepped back and kicked the remainder of the mess in on one little goblin standing in the aisle looking up at me like he didn't know whether to wind his ass or scratch his watch. I shot him in the face and he didn't have to worry about it anymore.

  I turned left to the other door and cut loose four rounds of the shotgun on the goblins guarding that entrance. They flew all over the place, kinda like a lizard in a microwave. I looked towards the front of the church, and my blood started to boil a little. The goblins had broken into the communion wine and were drunk as skunks all over the sanctuary, jumping on pews, swinging from chandeliers and generally making an unholy mess of things. But the part that got me was the there was a goblin on the pulpit eating the Bible. Now it was a Methodist church, and I've got my own views on religion that sometimes differ from that of my employer, but it's never cool to see a monster that lives in a mine eating anybody's holy book. So I slung the shotgun around on its strap, drew Bertha, and blew the goblin's head off with two quick shots.

  "Consider your ass smited." I said as the headless body fell backwards off the pulpit.

  "I think the word is smitten." Skeeter said in my ear.

  "Yeah, but that sounds like I'm telling it to be in love with me. I think I'll stick with smited."

  "Smited it is, Bubba."

  I shot six more goblins scattered around the sanctuary, but didn't see anything like the concentration of monsters I was expecting. Until I got halfway down the aisle to the front, that is. That's when the two dozen goblins in the balcony all jumped down and swarmed my ass at once. I cut down the first couple with the shotgun, but it didn't take them long to get three of the little bastards on one arm and I couldn't bring the shotgun around anymore. Then I clicked empty with Bertha, and I started to have problems.

  I dropped the Saiga and shook the goblins off my arm, trying to get back up the aisle and give myself the vestibule to fight in. T
here were too many goblins between me and the back doors, so I kicked my way through a few critters in front of me and made my way to the front of the church. Nothing got in my way as I mounted the platform and turned to face the massed goblins, and I should have known that was a problem. I had twenty goblins crowding the front of the platform, but none of them were trying to get to me. Then I found out why - another eight or nine were hiding in the choir loft behind the pulpit, so they jumped me all at once and drove me down into the teeming mass of three-foot green monsters with pointy teeth and a helluva herd instinct.

  They grabbed my ears, my arms, my legs and anything else they could find purchase on and started biting. I struggled and fought, trying to throw them off me to no avail. I tried to bite back, but their thick rubbery skin was too tough for me to do any real damage, and besides, goblins taste nasty. I was just about to apologize to Skeeter for being such a lousy friend when the goblin on my neck disappeared. Then another one flew off like it had been kicked by a mule, and another, and another. Each vanishing goblin was accompanied by a boom, so I figured somebody was shooting them, but I couldn't see who because I was still covered in angry goblins. After two or three more shots I was able to stand up, punch the goblin trying to eat my left shoulder until it fell off me, and turn to see who had just saved my ass.

  I've been more surprised in my life than when I saw Agent Amy Hall standing in the door of the church blowing goblins away with her Sig Sauer 9mm, but none of those surprises were near as pleasant. She was dressed for killing, in a black slacks, her hair tied back in a no-BS ponytail, and a white dress shirt that made her look like the hot addition to the Men In Black team. The way hot addition.

  "Agent Amy. Good to see you." I said, stomping the face of a goblin flat into the carpet while I reloaded Bertha.

  "Bubba. I thought you might need a hand."

  "How did you know where to find me?" I asked, pushing the button on my Bluetooth headset.