The Chronicles of a Vampire Hunter (Book 1): Red Ashes

by Justin A. Moore

  Red Ashes

  The Chronicles of a Vampire Hunter

  By J. A. Moore

  Copyright © Justin A. Moore, 2013

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, except for the inclusion of brief quotations in review, without permission in writing from the author/publisher.

  Dedication

  This book is dedicated to my mom, because she deserves it.

  Thank you, everyone who helped me on this little endeavor. You know who you are. Some of you don’t speak to me anymore, and some of you are fans of this book already, but you’re all the same in my heart. Loved.

  Special thanks to Becky and Brandi Ratliff, for helping me realize that self-publishing is viable in this modern era, and Claudia and Catriona from Phatpuppy Art and Fontdiva for the wonderful cover.

  PROLOGUE

  Think back to some of your first memories before your parents told you Santa wasn't real, and the tooth fairy was a serious threat to your youthful privacy. A fairy that flies into your room and steals teeth, leaving you a tattered dollar bill in exchange for one of your precious chompers? Truly frightening, some of the stuff parents tell their kids. They say we believed such nonsense because we were innocent and didn't have knowledge of how the world really worked.

  The truth is that when you were a kid you saw the world for what it was. You believed in fairies because you may have seen them playing under a tree or dancing in the moonlight. You believed in ghosts because shadows took on a life of their own when you went to bed, and you could swear that something lived in your closet. As a child, the line between fantasy and reality didn't exist, and fairy tales read like history instead of fiction.

  Sometimes you felt like something was under your bed, breathing. Claws scratched at your window at night. On weekends when the folks let you stay up, the back yard looked strange and hostile, like something might be waiting for you in the darkness right outside the sliding glass door. And occasionally, when you started to fall asleep, you could swear you felt a light breath on your neck before drifting off. Parents would later tell you that it was all your imagination or a dream, and as kids we would believe them. Why would they lie to you, after all?

  That is, unless you didn't have parents of any kind. I was born with a twin sister back in '85. I never met her; I didn't even know her name, to be honest. When I was old enough, I was told my parents had died in a wild animal attack when I was three. I did just enough research to find out that by the time they found the bodies that they were only identifiable by dental records. My sister and I were separated and placed in foster care within a few months after my parents disappeared, and I never really could find out anything else about her or my parents. Besides, what would I have said if I had?

  Now look, I'm not trying to get you to feel sorry for me or anything like that. I'm just trying to give you some background so that you know why I do what I do, and why I did what I did. I wasn't much for foster care; to me it always felt like the folks who took me in were too desperate for children, too eager to force their values upon me. When I was growing up, I never had anyone tell me the monster under the bed wasn't real. The closet today is still just as scary as it was back then. When I was sixteen, most people were more worried about terrorist attacks than they were about ghosts and ghouls, but not I. I like to think that such perception was based not on ignorance, but on insight.

  When I look back, I think I was more angry than scared. Once you hear enough bumps in the night, you just wish they'd shut up and let you get some sleep. Eventually the orphanage was so desperate to get rid of me that they allowed me to join the Marine Corps at seventeen. This, of course, was an outstanding way to get acquainted with the rest of humanity, since I never developed a relationship of any kind that lasted more than a month. I decided to be a career marine at about a year in, because really, what the hell else did I know?

  I loved the Corps. I still do, as a matter of fact. Being a marine brought me together with people who didn't care how I was raised, or rather not raised. Being a marine gave me goals and focus that turned my life around. For four years, I hadn't heard those bumps in the night. I hadn't seen anything most people would consider unusual—or if I had, I’d ignored it in much the same way that most of you do. In 2009 I was a platoon sergeant stationed in Afghanistan. War is hell; doesn't matter where it's at or what kind it is, or even what it's for. I always thought I would never see anything worse than what I saw there on the faces of the men and women I fought next to. I was so very, very wrong.

  My name is John Magnus, and this is the story of how I became a vampire hunter.

  *****

  CHAPTER ONE

  Scrambled eggs poured from a carton, cat-turd sausage that probably had a higher percentage of tire rubber than meat, and hash browns that did their damnedest to absorb every drop of cooking oil on the griddle. Oh, half a tall bottle of hot sauce. No bacon today, but the toaster worked. I mixed the eggs with the hash browns and cut the sausage with my fork, scooping half the chaos that was breakfast onto a piece of toast, folding it in half so it didn't drip onto my uniform. God knew I'd have formation after chow and Gunny Samson would have my ass if I was half a breath late.

  “Morning, Sergeant.” Corporal Kelly sat down next to me. Aron Kelly was a member of my security team. He was a tall kid who had trouble shaving over the pitted skin that belied his school years of severe acne. Blonde hair, butchered horribly by squadmate-turned-amateur barber, but it was better than what most people had out here. He was a good enough guy, and never got lippy like some of the younger marines who fell straight out of the shock of boot camp into trying their hardest to pretend that this was high school. Marines who pulled that shit either adapted after getting written up, or didn't last long in my division.

  Kelly shook a liberal dose of hot sauce from the bottle before grabbing the ketchup bottle and accidentally squeezing a much more liberal dose of it on his breakfast. He sighed and mixed it together before taking a bite.

  “Morning, Kelly. How're your quals coming along?” I asked him as I ate the rest of my makeshift breakfast sandwich and started shoveling more egg-slop onto a second piece of toast.

  “Pretty rough Sergeant, I keep getting sent outside the wire, and don't have a whole lot of time to study,” he responded in a mockingly mournful tone around a mouthful of ketchup-soaked sausage. “I dunno, I figure if maybe they didn't send me out for every little thing then maybe I'd have more of an opportunity to work on qualifications.” He shot me a questioning look, bordering dangerously close to sad puppy eyes. I snorted and swallowed a mouthful of coffee.

  “Sure, I bet that's why you're so good at Call of Duty. Maybe you should spend a little less time at the rec center, devil dog,” I gave him a stern look as he started to sputter another excuse. “Look, I'm sure you didn't sit here to discuss why you don't seem to want to get advanced. What's up, man?”

  Kelly smiled weakly and shook his head as he carefully ate another bite of his breakfast. “I dunno, I just, I guess I'm just having nightmares. Probably just nerves. Saw a buddy take a shot to the liver a few days ago.” His look turned sour as he tried to swallow the bite he was chewing.

  “Adams?” I asked, wondering if he was talking about the same marine I was imagining. Adams had taken an AK shot just below the ribs when he took off his armor while out on a wrecker team. He got careless, and he paid the price for it. Knowing that didn’t make it any easier to bear, though.

  “Yeah. He bled out so goddamned fast, man. He was gone before we could even call for help.” He croaked out the last few words as if his throat
was clogged with sawdust, and he coughed to get a chance to look away.

  It was a pretty common complaint, really. A lot of the guys out here, especially on their first tour, had seen a lot of shit that they never thought they would see. Almost all of them put it aside when the chips were down and lead was flying, and pretty early on most people lost that completely rational fear and seemed numb to combat. It was as if it would become second nature to do their job in a hail of bullets.

  “You're on your second tour, right?” I asked.

  “Yeah, second.”

  “Not your first buddy to die, is it?”

  “Buddy? Hell, he was just some guy. He wasn’t in our security team or anything, but it just happened so fast and I saw all of it. One second, here’s this guy laughing and doing some work, hooking up a truck, bitching about how hot he was, and two seconds later he’s on the ground with half his blood on the outside and the rest of us are returning fire on the dirty fuck that shot him.” Kelly smiled again and shrugged, but the smile didn’t come close to touching his eyes. I knew what he was talking about; it was that feeling that at any second there could be a bullet lodged in you just as easily.

  “You scared?” I asked, knowing he would say he wasn’t. I had a whole speech planned out for the guys who came up to me pretending not to be afraid of dying.

  “Fuck yes, I’m scared. Isn’t everybody? Aren’t you?”

  Oops. I wasn’t expecting that. So much for being the fearless leader.

  “Sometimes. Most of the time.” I answered, scratching my neck and finishing my sandwich. Kelly just nodded and I saw his shoulders hunch up a bit. Tension wasn’t a good response to fear, but it was something I could try to remedy.

  “Fear's good if you use it right,” I said with clichéd gravitas. “It’ll keep you on your toes. People who get careless end up losing legs and friends, if they don't end up dying like Adams. Keep that fear close, but don't let it rule over you. Keep your fuckin’ Kevlar on.”

  Kelly nodded and I could feel the tension start to flow out of him. It was nice to get my good deed quota filled first thing in the morning. I stood and took my tray to the scullery, pausing only to give Kelly an awkward pat on the shoulder as it to transmit via osmosis that everything would be alright. He turned his head and favored me with a nigh-mocking smile indicating my failure, so I tapped my wrist where a watch would go and that sent him tearing into his breakfast with renewed vigor. I chuckled to myself as I left the mess and emerged into the early morning gloom.

  The ground sucked at my boots as I finished tugging on my poncho. A mist of rain had been falling for the last two days and mixing with the dust to form deep, thick mud while the weather threatened that it would be getting worse. The mud out there could be deep enough to bog down all travel in many places. I sighed and guessed at the time, deciding that I had about ten minutes until formation. I walked through the muck to my office, scraping my boots as best I could before entering. Waiting for me inside of my office was Captain Jason Repnack, the filthiest and most despicable officer I had ever met. This guy was so out of regs that it was nothing less than amazing that he was still in the Corps. He was one of those rare, fat marine officers who somehow, despite everything, managed to maintain his commission. I was grateful that he had, at least, not been promoted past captain. He hooked a radio back onto his belt and gave me a grin that I can only describe as “green.”

  “Captain, I didn't expect to see you here so early in the morning.” I greeted him, countering his grin with the most obnoxiously fake smile I knew how to make.

  “Ha-ha, Magnus. I was just about to radio for you. We just got a bit of message traffic over the BFT network. Apparently some guys were about twelve hours outside the wire trying to pull a truck out of the mud, and they may have come under fire from unknown hostiles. We lost all communication about two hours ago with them, everything stopped before they even reached the fuckin’ vehicle they were supposed to pull out. Don't really know what happened, maybe a flash flood. We're sending your team out with a wrecker crew to pick 'em up. We'll send an extra truck with you just in case you can't pull out all the vic's and need to give those marines a ride. I've sent Morris with the details to look for you; she'll probably show up at muster instead.”

  I ground my teeth as his sour breath wafted over me, trying to focus on his words and not on his uniform as his gut threatened to pop the buttons one by one.

  “Roger that sir, we'll make it happen.”

  Captain Repnack smirked and sat on my desk, the joints groaned loudly in protest.

  “Yeah, I called the wreckers first,” he said. “They’ll be mustering with you, too. Corporal Stephens, and some lance. There's gonna be a whole team out there, plus another wrecker, plus the guys they were going after, plus potential hostiles. To make matters better for you, the weather is about to get a lot worse.”

  I tried not to look too concerned for my slowly sagging desk. “You know I love a challenge, sir. We'll be out in half an hour.”

  Captain Repnack gave me a dismissive wave as I grabbed my clipboard off the wall and left my office to see my marines falling in line with their ponchos.

  *****

  Rain hammered the roof of the MRAP as it slowly made its way through the mud. The rain had set us back most of the day, and I felt for the young gunner manning the turret, his first day on the job. Kelly was driving as I looked out as far as I could with my binoculars. Grey rain met dark brown dust and brought visibility down to maybe half a mile. We'd left almost eleven hours ago, so I knew we'd be getting close soon even with the delays we’d suffered. I got on the horn and called the lead vehicle.

  “Victor one, convoy commander, you see anything up ahead?” I gave them a minute to respond, knowing that their visibility was just as awful as mine.

  “Convoy commander, victor one, I don't see anything yet, but we should be getting close sergeant.”

  “Roger that, keep your eyes open folks,” I said. “I know it's raining but we're assuming there're bad guys out here. Mind the sunlight as well, but don't turn on your lights yet. Let's try not to telegraph our presence.”

  I sighed and looked outside with my binoculars for a moment before setting them down and checking the BFT laptop—sort of a bulky GPS and chat wrapped into a single unit. The nearest friendly fix was supposed to be about half a mile ahead, about half a mile from the rest. Something about that didn't sit right with me at all, for a couple reasons. First of all, marines don't run away. Second of all, insurgents don't chase, they wait and ambush. Interrupting my train of thought with all the mind-shattering force of a mental sledgehammer was a gravelly voice befitting some kind of horrible creature made of granite and cigarette butts.

  “Fuckin' towelheads.” Lance corporal Cristie Morris was the platoons favorite (and only) sexy, foul-mouthed, man-voiced female. She was also the Captain's favorite, and it was no secret why. Unfortunately for him, she still had integrity and pride enough to resist his “tempting” advances.

  “Now, now, we're trying to win hearts and minds here. You're gonna have to get over your prejudices Morris.” I mockingly chided her.

  “All due respect, sergeant, but fuck that. I can't stand these stinkin' fucks. Kelly gets hit on by them more than I do though, god bless.”

  Kelly laughed and looked over, fluttering his eyelashes. “That's because I'm so much prettier than you.”

  Morris pinched one of his pock-marked cheeks and gave him a wink. “That's so cute! I'm sure one of your hadji boyfriends will knock you up and send you state-side any day now.”

  Kelly reached back and punched her on her flak, making a soft “thud.” The exchange of blows that followed made Kelly swerve, and so I broke them up and pointed my hand with all five fingers right at Kelly's face.

  “Hey devil dog, mind the wheel. I don't need you taking time off work to go flirting.” I warned him with what was unlikely to be my sternest glare.

  Kelly snorted and pretended to focus on driving. “
Sorry sergeant, don't give me the knife hand, alright? I'll give you all my money, there's no need for violence!”

  Morris leaned forward again and made kissing noises completely uncharacteristic of her gruff voice. “Oh c'mon, I was just trying to bring him back to our team. Do you want the terrorists to win?”

  I flipped my hand around so that my middle finger pressed lightly against her nose and gave her my best fake-intimidating-growl.

  “And you stop picking on my driver. Why don't you flirt with the gunner?”

  She raised her hands in surrender and sat back in her seat. “Jeez, alright fine boss-man.”

  I chuckled and raised my binoculars back to my face as I heard a shout of surprise from above as Morris tugged playfully on the gunner's pants. Did I say she had integrity? Tons of it, yes indeed. It was nice to let them play around for a minute or two every hour or so to relieve the tedium. They paid better attention the rest of the time that way.

  The radio hissed for a split second and I recognized the driver of the leading vehicle come through. “Convoy commander, vic one. We have visual on an MRAP about half a klick ahead. I don't see any movement, but I can't verify with all this weather.”

  I got on the radio and responded as various worst-case scenarios ran through my mind. “All vehicles this is convoy commander, we have a possible friendly ahead, keep your eyes peeled,” I said as I reached back and thumped Morris on her helmet. “I don't see a flood rushing through here or anything, so let's assume hostile action. Slow is smooth, folks. Vic one set the pace, let's get up there.”

  The last few hundred feet seemed to draw on as inch after inch of mud passed outside the window. The rain, almost as if it had been cued, began to lessen and was no more than a mist as we pulled up to the MRAP we were supposed to rescue. The lead vehicle came back over the radio.