He chuckled a little and ducked his head, like he was admitting he'd been stupid to try and play the priest card with a guy less than ten years younger than himself. "I reckon I am at that. Sorry for your loss. Is there anything I can do to help?"
"You got a line on silver bullets, padre?" Eyebrows all around the kitchen reached for lavender-rinsed hairlines. All the women in the kitchens knew what my family did, but it wasn't something you talked about. It was kinda like moonshinin'. Everybody knew who did it, but nobody talked about it.
"Not today, but let me get back to you on that. How about some holy water and crosses?"
"Werewolves, padres. Not vampires. Wolfsbane, silver, or decapitation. Nothing else works."
"I'll see what I can do about silver bullets, then. Until then, would you like a drink?" He held up a mason jar full of amber liquid with a couple of fat peaches floating in it, and I reached into the cupboard for a couple of glasses.
"Let's take this out on the porch so as not to offend the ladies." We settled into a couple of ladder-back rocking chairs, the kind that come installed on every porch in the South, and passed the jar back and forth a couple of times before Joe started talking.
"Skeeter filled me in on what happened. I'm sorry."
"Thanks, Father. I appreciate that. I appreciate the liquor more. It's gonna be a helluva lot more useful than sympathy the next few nights."
"Are you going after them?" Then Skeeter hadn't told him everything. I liked that about Skeeter, he didn't feel the need to tell everybody every single part of everybody's business. Probably had something to do with growing up the only homosexual in his grade in school. He learned to keep some stuff close to the vest early in life. More folks could take that example, if you ask me.
"Yeah."
"Tonight?"
"Got to. Only waiting on Skeeter 'cause I know I need backup."
"Why tonight? Other than just being pissed, that is." I didn't know priests used words like 'pissed.' Maybe he made an exception for friends of the family.
"They took my girl." I took a long slash out of the jar, hoping that would end the conversation.
It didn't. Joe, being a man of the cloth, asked the right question. The one question I'd been driving myself batshit crazy trying not to think about for the last two hours. "How do you know she's still alive?"
"I don't. But Pop was a badass son of a bitch before he got all furry. I figure he's a sadistic evil son of a bitch now, and he knows that it would hurt me more to let me get close, then kill her while I watched. That means she's still alive, and will be 'til I get there."
"That also means he's waiting for you. And that you probably don't have a snowball's chance in hell of getting out alive."
"If I let impossible stop me, padre, I'd never get anything done." I took another drink and passed the jar back to him.
"Well, Skeeter should be here in about an hour. Why don't you go take a shower? Use Ivory soap, it's got less perfumes and crap in it, and get the blood-stink off of you before we go. I'll deal with the ladies and see if I can't dig up some silver ammunition from your dad's room. I assume there's a spare shotgun or two somewhere around here?"
I stared at him for a long minute before I decided he was serious. When I did, all I said was "You should probably leave the collar in the truck. It'll shine like a bullseye in the woods." Then I went inside and got cleaned up. He was right, the less perfumey crap I had on me, the better. Good thing it was a house full of redneck men. We were never much for the smell-good stuff like colognes or aftershave. And me, well since I hadn't shaved in the better part of six months, I didn't own any aftershave. I remembered about the church ladies just in time to wrap a towel around my waist before I went into my room to get ready, I didn't want to scare anybody. At least, not anybody human.
I tied my hair back in a ponytail and slapped a black do-rag on top of it. A plain black t-shirt, black cotton/poly BDUs and my black combat boots made me look like the biggest damn ninja in the world. I slipped the shoulder holster on over my t-shirt, and I slid the black dress shirt back on over the gun. Everybody out there knew I was strapped, but I didn't feel the need to rub it in their faces. I picked up my favorite backup gun, a Taurus Judge five-shot revolver loaded with 410 shotgun shells. I had custom buckshot rounds make for the gun with silver shot, and figured it would ruin a werewolf's day if it got within twenty feet of me. Outside of twenty feet I had the Desert Eagle, and I don't care what kind of magic you got going on, a fifty-caliber round is going to blow body parts off you. I slid the Judge into a paddle holster at the small of my back and strapped a black matte finish KA-Bar onto my belt. A pair of brass knuckles in one pocket and a SOG dagger shoved into the top of my boot and I was ready to go.
"You look like you're planning on storming the Death Star, Bubba." I turned around and Skeeter was standing in the doorway to my bedroom. He looked up at me with tears standing in his eyes, and I hugged him. We cried on each other for a couple of minutes until I got tired of him getting saltwater all over my shirt.
I gently pushed him away and said "Homo."
"Yeah," he replied. "But what's your excuse, you blubbering pansy?" We laughed, and I felt the pain in my chest lift, just a little. I had lost a lot in the past twenty-four hours, but not everything. Damn close, but not quite everything.
"I'm sorry about Grandpappy. I loved that old bastard, too." Skeeter said as we walked through the house back to the front porch. A couple of the church ladies looked shocked at Skeeter's language, but he'd been pissing off church ladies ever since he was Mary in the church Christmas pageant in eighth grade, so he didn't give two shits.
"I know you did, Skeeter. And he loved you, too. He loved you just like Jase and me." It was true, too. Most of Skeeter's family stopped speaking to him once they realized he was really gay and wasn't just going through a phase. His mama and Uncle Father Joe were pretty much the only exceptions. Skeeter took to spending holidays at my house because we didn't care who he wanted to sleep with. In our house, he was just another guy that wasn't getting any action, we didn't care where the lack of action was coming from.
Uncle Father Joe was waiting for us with a row of shotguns and rifles leaning against the porch railing. He handed Skeeter a Glock 17 in a holster as we walked out. Skeeter checked the chamber and strapped it on just like he'd done it a thousand times. Which he had. He'd been shooting at my house since we were old enough not to shoot our big toes off, so the boy knew his way around a gun. I grabbed Jase's Mossberg and handed Pop's hunting shotgun to Skeeter. His eyes went wide at first when he saw which gun I was handing him, then he nodded. Pop's Remington didn't carry as much ammo as Jase's, but it had a longer barrel for a tighter pattern at distance. I was planning on being the one to get up close and personal with the wolves, so I wanted Skeeter and Uncle Father Joe to have the more accurate ranged guns. Joe had a lever-action .30-.30 in his hands that I'd never seen before, and I raised an eyebrow at him.
"Just because I'm a man of the cloth doesn't mean I can't appreciate a fine firearm, Bubba. This is a Winchester 1894, the gun that won the west. I always wanted one of these when I was growing up watching those old Saturday afternoon Westerns with my father, and now I've got one."
"I hope nostalgia don't get you killed, padre." I said, looking at the rifle and the immaculately groomed man holding it. He looked like the kind of fella that had "people" for things, even though I knew Joe grew up just a few hills over. I hoped finding religion that came with incense hadn't made him soft.
He must have read my mind, or my face, because he stood up a little straighter and said "Don't worry about me, Bubba. I can still shoot a buzzard off a shitwagon at two hundred yards."
I laughed a little at how uncomfortable he looked saying "shitwagon," like a kid trying to learn how to cuss. "Fair enough, padre. Fair enough. I reckon we got about an hour until dark, so we should get rolling now. If there's just Pop, he'll have set up boobytraps all around the joint, and we don't want to figure
that out in the dark. If he's got more dogs with him, they'll have a big advantage on us once the sun goes down. He'll have made the trail easy to follow. He wants me to find him. So y'all split off about twenty yards to either side of me, and maybe we'll keep some element of surprise. Just try not to shoot each other. Or me."
They nodded, and we headed off into the woods behind my house. No matter what the song said, there was no way we were getting home before dark. Real dark.
Chapter 11
I'll give Pop credit for one thing: when he decided he wanted to leave a trail in the woods, he didn't screw around. Just about the time I lost the trail left by Brittany's shoe, he dropped the other one in the middle of the woods. I got to it and looked around, then saw a black Georgia Bulldogs baseball cap hanging from a tree branch about fifty yards ahead of me. He led us on like that, dropping a piece of Britt's clothing here, breaking a branch there, until the woods opened up onto a wide creek. Jase and I spent many a summer afternoon catching crawdads and minnows in that creek, splashing in the cool, clear water and skipping rocks across the shallows. The creek was a good twenty feet wide, but only a couple feet deep at most. Pop stood right out in the middle of it on a big flat rock worn smooth by the river over hundreds of years.
He had Brittany, and she was still alive. He'd ripped her shirt to shreds, and both her shoes were gone, so she was on her knees in the creek in just a sports bra and her jeans. Her eyes rolled around in her head, trying to find something safe to focus on and failing. She struggled against his grip, but Pop was too strong for her even before he turned half-wolf like he was now. He was taller, which was good thing for him. He'd always been sensitive about his height, but now he was close to my six and a half feet tall. His arms and chest rippled with muscle under the grey-black fur, and he had one huge hand wrapped tight in Brittany's blonde ponytail. She slapped at his arm, but he didn't even look at her.
His eyes were locked on me from the second I stepped out of the woods. "Hello, boy!" He yelled. "I found your bitch. Smells good." He yanked Britt up by her ponytail to dangle from his outstretched arm. She reached over her head to grab his wrist, taking some of the weight off her hair, and he buried his face in her stomach. I watched his chest expand as he took a big sniff, then licked her stomach.
I didn't even know I'd drawn Jase's pistol until it went off in my hand. Pop staggered back, red blood fountaining from his side where the huge slug went through. He grinned at me, a nasty smile full of hate and fangs, and I watched the bleeding slow from a spurt to a trickle, to a stop as his magical nature rejected the damage from the Desert Eagle. So much for the power of superior technology.
Pop stuck a finger in the blood on his side and painted a smiley face on Britt's stomach with it. Then he looked back at me. "Tell your faggot friend and the preacher-man to go home. This is between you and me, boy."
I didn't ask how he knew. I didn't care. I just looked from side to side in the woods and said "You heard him. Go wait for me back at the house. I'll be back in an hour, or I won't be back. If I don't come back, thank Mrs. Jones for the casseroles for me. If I do, have more of that moonshine waiting." I didn't wait to see if they did as they were told, I just shoved the pistol back in the holster and started walking out into the stream. I drew the KA-BAR as I walked, and Pop grinned at me.
"That don't look like silver, boy. Ain't you learned your lesson yet?"
"I'm not that smart, Pop. Ain't that what you always told me? Besides, I figure if I cut your black heart out, it'll at least hurt a bit." He threw Britt at me as I charged, and I went down on one knee to catch her. She clung to me like the last survivor off the Titanic, and it broke my heart to let her go.
I kept one eye on my psychotic half-wolfed-out father as I set her down on a rock in the stream. "Can you run?"
"No. I sprained my ankle when he dragged me through the woods."
"Then sit here. Put your ankle in the water. The cold will knock the swelling down in case you have to run."
"I told you, Bubba. I can't run. My ankle is jacked up."
"You'd be surprised what you can do when you don't get a choice." Then I stood up to do one of those things.
Pop stood where he had been the whole time, high and dry on the big rock Jase and I used to play King of the Hill on. I stepped onto the edge and said "It doesn't have to be like this, Pop."
"There's predators, and there's prey, boy. Time for you to figure out which one you are."
"I know what I am, Pop. Looks like you're the one doing the forgetting."
"I ain't forgot nothing, boy. I just figured out who I really am. I'm the goddamn king of the hill! I'm the man gonna bring together every monster in Georgia, and we're gonna rule this state. Then we're gonna rule this country. And all those weak little pukes with their shiny cars and their 401(k)s and their suburban shitholes are gonna be nothing but food for me and mine. For yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I shall fear no evil, for I am the baddest son of a bitch in the valley!" With that last bit of blasphemy, Pop charged at me. I took off toward him, and we met in the middle of the stream with a huge spray of water and a collision that shook me down to my bones. Pop's center of gravity was lower than mine, and he ducked, sticking a shoulder in my gut and flipping me over his back. I countered by throwing my weight even further forward, pushing the flip to land on my feet. I lashed out backward with the KA-BAR, feeling the blade grind in my hand as it bit deep and skittered across Pop's ribs.
He howled in pain, a literal wolf howl, then whirled around with razor-sharp claws flashing at my throat. I leaned back almost parallel to the ground like a bad Matrix ripoff, but he sliced nothing but air. I came back up swinging hard, and planted my fist right on the tip of his nose. He was still working his half-wolf form, so his nose was longer than normal, and I heard a solid crunch as I landed a punch with all my weight behind it. Pop yelped and staggered back, shaking his furry head to clear it. Blood streamed from one nostril, and he glared at me as he wiped it off with the back of his hand.
"I'll kill you for that you insolent shit."
"What were you trying to kill me for before that?" I stepped forward and launched a side kick at his head. Pop had never paid much attention to my training with Jase, so the kickboxing moves caught him off guard. He recovered quickly, ducking under my foot and ripping at my groin with his claws. I danced out of the way, letting my kick spin me all the way over and throwing a back elbow at Pop's head. He ducked the elbow, but I was still coming around and caught him with an uppercut that made his eyes roll back in his head. I pressed the advantage, throwing a knee into his gut, then grabbing his ears and ramming his face down into the path of another knee lift. I heard another crunch as I broke his nose for the second time in five minutes, but he was healing faster than I was hurting him.
He planted his feet and shoved me off, getting just a few seconds to breathe, but it was enough. He shook his head once, twice, then those feral eyes locked on me and he sprang. Almost all wolf now, with hardly any trace of humanity left in him, he barreled into me and carried us both down into the ice-cold stream. I landed hard, my breath whooshing out of me, and I felt/heard a sharp crack in my side. A stab of pain when I tried to catch my breath confirmed the broken rib, and I struggled to throw the wolf off me. He wasn't giving up so easily, shifting partway back and wrapping both hands around my throat, pressing my face as deep into the creek as the shallow water would allow. There wasn't enough water to really drown me, but every time I turned my face to the side to try and struggle free, I got another noseful of icy water.
Pop squeezed, and I felt little runners of blood start to trickle out of my neck where his claws broke the skin. My sight started to dim as he held the choke for long seconds. I beat on his sides and shoulders, to no effect. I was pinned and couldn't get enough leverage for a good punch, and all he had to do was hold on. My arms sagged into the water, and the cold gave me a jolt back to consciousness. I wrapped the fingers of my right hand around
a baseball-sized chunk of rock worn smooth rom hundreds of years and millions of gallons of water passing over its surface, then bucked upward with all my remaining strength. Pop dislodged from my throat for half a second, but it was enough to give me a clear shot. I swung the rock up in a smooth arc to crash into his temple, and watched his eyes roll back in his head.
Pop's grip slackened, and I wedged my forearms inside the choke and broke his grip apart. He scrambled off me, blinking rapidly trying to get his eyes to uncross while I rolled over to my hands and knees and got my head out of the freezing water. He was back on me in a flash, springing across the ten feet between us in one great big leap that bowled me back over onto my side.
This time I knew what was coming and kept the roll going, adding my momentum to his to carry me all the way over to end up on top of him. I looked down at him in the water and knew I wouldn't be able to keep him down long enough to choke him out. He was too strong, and his claws too sharp, for that shit. I straddled his chest and rained punches down on him, but after a few seconds I knew I would tire out before I did any real damage to him. He just lay there, looking up at me with a wolfish grin and waiting for me to punch myself out.
So I did the only thing I could think of. I reached behind my back, drew the Judge revolver I had clipped to the back of my waistband, and put a shell full of silver buckshot straight into his chest. Pop's eyes went wide, then he convulsed once, his head rolled to the side, and he went still. I stayed where I was for a minute, sitting in the cold stream and letting Pop's lifeblood run out around my legs. His eyes fluttered once, then closed as the last rattle of air went out of him. I stood up, staggered back over to where Brittany sat, and collapsed on the rock beside her.
"Are you okay?" She asked.
"No." I said.
"Is he . . . "
"Yeah."
"I'm sorry."
"Me too. I'm sorry he hurt you."
"I'll get better." She stood up, then reached down for me. I took her hand, let her help me to my feet, then slipped on a moss-covered rock and fell back down in the water, right on my big ass. I shook my head and looked up, expecting to see Britt laughing at me like she always did when I did something stupid. Instead she was looking down with wide eyes at a red stain blossoming across her shirt.
Scattered, Smothered and Chunked - Bubba the Monster Hunter Season 1 Page 29