“Come closer and I kill her like you killed your father, pup.”
“Let her go and I’ll show you what that feels like, bitch.”
She dropped Amy to her side and stepped forward. “Your brother sends me with a message. You must bow or destroy all you love. Just like you murdered your father, you’ll kill everyone you care about if you oppose him. He is the Messiah, and he has come to deliver us from the darkness to dominion over you pitiful humans.
“Never.” Barry’s voice was strong and clear. “We will stand with Bubba and we will never allow this murderer you call Messiah to prevail.”
“It matters not what you wish, Sheeran-kor, half your tribe is already dead,” The wolf replied with an evil glint in her eyes.
“What do you mean?” Barry’s head turned from side to side, looking from one Sasquatch to another, but several refused to meet their new leader’s eye. I took that as a bad sign.
“Skeeter, do you have any idea what’s going on?” I asked under my voice.
“Not a clue.”
“I have the shot,” Joe’s whisper came into my ear, reminding me that I had a sniper on the ridge.
“Green light,” I said.
“Green light,” Joe repeated, but the wolf must have heard us, because she snatched Amy off the ground and held her up as a shield before Joe got off a shot.
The wolf-woman grinned at me again, and all I could do was stand there. “Maybe I shouldn’t snap her neck. Maybe I should gut her, like my mate did to you. Where did the sword go in?” She traced her claws down the front of Amy’s tactical vest and I knew the Kevlar would stop a bullet but wouldn’t do crap against claws or a knife.
“Why don’t you fight somebody your own size, hairball?” I said, stepping forward. I held my hands out to my sides, palms up. “I’m still empty-handed, why don’t you try me. My candy-assed brother couldn’t put me down. Maybe you can. Maybe then you get to play Messiah instead of just being his errand-bitch.” Her eyes tightened at the corners and I knew I hit a nerve.
I did what I do when I find a sore spot—I poked at it some more. “Sucks, doesn’t it? He’s off who-knows-where, doing who-knows-what with God only knows who, while you’re here spreading the good word. Like a good puppy.”
“I spread much, much more than just my word here, fool. Why don’t I take a little nibble out of your mate here and she can see just how much more.” She leaned in and licked the side of Amy’s neck. I like a little girl-on-girl as much as any other red-blooded hillbilly, but it loses a lot of its luster when one of the girls has more body hair than me.
“Oh shit balls, Bubba,” Skeeter’s whisper came into my ear like he was standing next to me. “You gotta get the hell out of there before sunset.”
“Why?” I tried to mutter without moving my mouth, but the wolf’s ear’s pricked up and I knew she heard me.
“She turned the Sasquatch. She spread the lycanthropy virus to the tribe. And tonight is the first night of the full moon. They’ll be completely out of control. You have . . .” I could almost hear the math happening right through my earpiece. “Two and a half hours to be very, very far away from those bigfeet. Bigfoots. Whatever the shit you call ‘em, you gotta be gone before they turn.”
“As strong as they are normally, I don’t wanna think what a were-bigfoot could do. But there’s still the little problem of the werewolf holding my girlfriend by the neck.”
“Yeah, that’s a thing. Sorry, buddy. I got nothing.” I looked up at Joe, who shook his head slightly. So I did the only thing I could think of. I drew Bertha from her holster, set her on the ground, stepped forward, and knelt down a few feet in front of the big wolf.
“What are you doing?” she demanded, giving Amy a shake for punctuation.
“I’m doing just like you asked. I’m surrendering. You wanted me to kneel. I’m kneeling. You wanted me to lay down my arms, there’s my gun. Now let my girl go.” I didn’t look up, counting on Joe to yell if she came at me. I don’t know what I thought I’d do about it. I was six feet away from a half-shifted werewolf that could turn my guts into jump ropes in about three seconds. I just knelt there, keeping my eyes closed in an effort to make my ears a hair sharper. I had the beginnings of a plan tickling around in the back of my head, but just as usual when I started trying to make plans, it all went straight to crap.
“What is this stench of dog?” I heard Barry say behind me, and my heart fell a little further towards the bottoms of my Doc Martens. Yeah, I still wear Docs. Some things never go out of style, and ass-kicking boots are on the list.
“Be ready, Joe,” I whispered into my Bluetooth.
“Standing by.” His reply came in as more breath than sound, and I knew he was in his zen shooter place. I just needed to give him an inch to put a bullet in and we could solve part of this problem. But Barry had brought a whole new set of problems to the table.
“What’s wrong, coward? Does your mate smell different? Better, maybe? More . . . alive?”
“You turned my mate?” I heard Barry’s voice and knew that we were about to have an eight-foot hairy problem. Then I heard Clag’tin and a few other Sasquatch around the circle start to growl and realized I had a whole forest full of eight-foot hairy problems.
“Skeeter, I don’t think they’re keeping to that whole sundown timetable,” I muttered.
“Well, I don’t think magical creatures are an exact friggin’ science, Bubba. Just blow something up and get the hell outta there!” Skeeter’s voice was shrill, the fear seeping into every word. I knew the feeling. This was about to get bloody.
Barry let out a bellow like a cross between a lion challenging for territory and Marlon Brando screaming for Stella. I heard the wolf let out a little chuckle and then looked up in time to see her toss Amy to the ground, us mere humans forgotten in the thrill of her new fight. I aimed to make that a mistake she wouldn’t live to regret. My right hand yanked a small cylinder off my belt and I flung it upwards at the wolf’s face at the same time that I shoved off hard with my right foot and threw myself sideways.
I yelled “flash-bang!” at the top of my lungs, buried my face in the dirt, and clapped both hands over my ears as the grenade exploded in a spectacular cacophony of sound and light right in front of the she-wolf’s face. My ears rang through my hands, and the world was full of sparkles even with my eyes averted, so it was no surprise to see the wolf-bitch on her knees holding her head when I got myself together enough to roll over and come up on one knee. I’d thrown myself near enough to Bertha to grab the Desert Eagle and train it on the wolf, but she was too busy writhing in pain and clawing at her eyes to pose an immediate threat.
Unfortunately, the explosion had scared the crap out of the Sasquatch, too, and the ones that had started to turn had the process jump-started by the adrenaline. So now instead of facing one psychotic werewolf that wanted my liver for lunch, I was facing seven brand-new super-sized werewolves who just wanted lunch. And weren’t going to be too particular what they ate, including me, Amy, Barry or their fellow bigfeet.
Amy got to her feet and pulled a machete from a sheath across her back. A bigfoot-wolf stalked her in four-footed form, but it got no further and six feet from her when its head exploded in a red mist.
“One down,” Joe’s voice came from my headset. I’d forgotten about my air support in the explosion, but his voice had never sounded so good.
“Nice shot, Joe. A few more like that and I might even come to Sunday service,” I said.
“Just keep them tied up down there and I can end this quick. Silver or no silver, even werewolves can’t function without a brain stem.”
“Somehow Bubba manages, though,” Skeeter’s voice came through the ringing in my ears. “You wanna warn a fellow next time? You almost blew all my audio equipment with that thing.”
“Quit your bitchin’, worst thing that could happen is you’d have to watch porn with the sound off,” I grumbled.
“But then I’d miss all the dialog
ue. How would I follow the storyline?” he protested.
“You’re like that one dude in America that actually reads Playboy for the articles. Now shut up, I gotta go kill a dog.” I struggled to my feet, my balance still a little off from the flash-bang, holstered Bertha, and pulled the pair of silver kukri from my back. I headed toward the she-wolf, but stopped when I saw her and Barry going at it hammer and tongs. I’d fought Barry one, but his heart wasn’t in it, and he only kinda whooped my ass. But this time he was pissed, and he laid into that wolf-chick with everything he had and then some. Punches, claws, and kicks flew almost vampire-fast, and I knew I didn’t have anything to add to that fight.
Besides, I had a damn nine-foot tall half-shifted were-sasquatch in my face. Clag’tin had apparently been first in line to the lycanthropy buffet, and he figured out pretty quick how to stop his shift while he was still bipedal and unfortunately, able to communicate.
“Now we see who is alpha, human.” I hate it when monsters use “human” like it’s some kind of insult. I’m no more ashamed of being human than I am ashamed of being a redneck. It’s just who I am. I’m a little insulted by being called fat, but not much ‘cause that one’s pretty much true, too. I just don’t like being reminded of it all the time.
“I would come up with some snappy comeback, but truth is I’m just tired of your ass. Joe, green light.” I waited for the shot, but nothing happened. “Green light!” I said a little louder, and maybe a little more panicked.
“A little busy up here, Bubba.”
I looked up to the ridge. “Shit.”
“That’s a pretty accurate assessment, I’d say,” Joe replied over the comm link. One of the were-squatches was circling the bottom of a tree that held one very nervous Catholic priest-slash-sniper. Joe fired off an occasional round from his .45 down of the dogfoot, but his aim sucked through branches and one-handed while clinging to a tree, so he didn’t do much more than keep the beast occupied.
“I’ll get up there as quick as I can,” I promised, hoping that I’d be in one piece when I made it there. I turned back to Clag’tin just soon enough to duck his first punch, a looping roundhouse that would have probably crushed my skull if it had landed. But it didn’t, and I dug a long slash along his ribs with one kukri as I spun out of the way.
This was not my usual fight. This time I was the little guy, trying to stay out of the way long enough to land a killing blow. I was more used to being the big dude swinging haymakers, but I tried to adapt real fast. Clag’tin came back with an uppercut that I was supposed to stick my face right into because that’s where my face woulda gone if I’d ducked and spun left, opposite his punch. Instead I ducked and spun right, away from the uppercut and scored his rights with my left, backhanded. I continued my spin all the way down to one knee and flashed both kukri up and across in big diagonals, aiming for the femoral arteries in the Sasquatch’s legs. He skittered back and I pressed the offensive, coming off my knee in a hard upward slice across his gut. He sucked his gut in and swung both clawed hands at my face, but I ducked forward instead of drawing back. This put my right-handed kukri in a perfect spot to slice his left quad right off the kneecap. So I did. The silver bit deep and the big muscle of his tree-trunk thigh parted like butter. I was inside his guard then, and the only thing left to do was finish it. I straightened up, my right shoulder bulling his arms up and outward, and buried my left-handed kukri in his belly. I cut up along his torso and across with one blade, punched the other in a throat-opening strike across his throat, and the big monster collapsed in a pile of blood and entrails, bleeding out into the dirt in a matter of seconds.
I heard a snarl behind me and turned, adrenaline still pushing me at top speed, to catch another wolfsquatch darting in for my hamstring. They learn wolf behavior pretty damn quick, I thought, but it didn’t matter. I caught it on the side of the neck with one kukri and almost decapitated the beast. It dropped to the red-soaked mud and didn’t move again.
I looked around the clearing until I found Amy, her back to a big oak tree and two wolves stalking her. She kept them at bay with her machete and reflexes, leaving bloody noses and muzzles whenever one got too close, but I could see the machete starting to droop in her hand and knew the next two or three seconds were all we had. I dropped one kukri and drew Bertha, putting a .50 round in the back of one weresquatch’s head from thirty feet. It blew up like a watermelon at a Gallagher show, and when the other wolf-foot turned to see what made the mess, I put one in its ear with similar results.
“Thanks,” Amy said, pulling her MP5 around and aiming it at my head. I dove for the turf and she sent a three-round burst right where I’d been standing. A huge weight crashed down onto my back, and I scrambled to get back to my feet before whatever it was ate my spleen. I shouldn’t have worried. I shoved the dead weresquatch off me and saw the tight grouping of three rounds in its face. Amy didn’t play. Three 9mm hollow points with silver nitrate in the tips made a mess out of the front of the wolf-foot’s face, and I didn’t want to think about what they did to the back of its head.
I crossed the clearing to where Amy stood, her Remington braced against a leaning tree. She put her eye to the scope, let out a slow breath, and squeezed the trigger. The wolf at the base of Joe’s tree jumped slightly, then fell over and didn’t move again. The crack of the rifle cut through the sounds of the struggle like even Bertha’s bark hadn’t managed to do, and everything in the clearing turned to stare at us for just a second.
A second that turned out to be too long for Barry. His attention wavered from the she-wolf for just an eye blink, but it was all she needed. They were in close combat, and Barry was a lover, not a fighter. She ripped his throat out with one swipe of her claws, and his eyes went wide for a second in surprise and pain. Then they went blank, and he toppled over backwards. Dead in seconds. No music, no slow-motion long shots, no wire fights. Just a surprised look on his face and then his blood fountaining down his fur.
I froze. It had been a long time since I watched somebody I liked get killed in front of me, and it wasn’t something I planned on ever seeing again. And I liked Barry. He was a little pretentious for a monster who ran around with his oversized wiener in the breeze all the time, but all in all, he was pretty cool dude. And in the span of three heartbeats, that bitch killed my friend. I let out a holler that froze everything in the clearing again, and I charged her.
But she had other plans and charged us at the same time. I drew up and pulled my kukri, wanting this to be personal, but she just lowered a shoulder and knocked me sideways. I’ve been hit by a few pickup trucks in my day, the product of some stupid high school pranks a whole lot of Budweiser, but that wolf at a dead run knocked me flat on my ass. I rolled to my feet pretty quick and spun around to give chase, but she was almost on Amy at that point. Amy had dropped her Remington and was just standing there, arms out like she expected to judo her way through this scrap. At that point I truly expected to bury two friends that afternoon.
I forgot how much smarter Amy is than me.
When she got to about six feet away, the big wolf-woman dove at Amy, claws out in front of her face ready for disembowelment. Amy threw herself onto her back and covered her face as the she-wolf went at her hammer and tongs. She shredded Amy’s Kevlar vest in seconds, and I expected to get covered in a splash of gore as the wolf ripped her guts out into the dirt. Instead, I saw the wolf rear back and scream in frustration, revealing a layer of metal under Amy’s tactical vest.
“Yeah, chain mail’s a real bitch, ain’t it, bitch?” Amy said. Then she reached for the sling around her shoulder and emptied a thirty-round clip from her MP5 into the wolf. Red blood stitched across the monster’s torso and up her face, and the beast fell off Amy backwards and scurried back the way she came. Bad news for her was that put her heading right for me, and my silver-edged kukri left a deep cut across one shoulder and sent the wolf spinning back in the opposite direction. I sliced through a hamstring and heard a satisfying howl
of pain. The wolf went to one knee, and I tossed the kukri in my left hand to Amy. We were under some trees near the edge of the clearing, so Joe had no shot and we had to do things the old-fashioned way. We worked hard at staying out of reach of those razor-sharp claws as we ducked in for one long bleeding cut after another. It took several strikes and almost a full minute of fighting, but we finally got her laid out on her back in the middle of the clearing.
She looked up at the sky as I stood over her, a strange smile across her lips. “Go ahead, Monster Hunter. Kill me like you kill everything you care about.”
“I might kill everything I care about eventually, but I’m killing your furry ass today.” I pulled the tactical tomahawk from my back, raised it high, and brought it down on her throat, severing the head with one clean stroke. I didn’t use a silver blade, but like Joe said, if you ain’t got a brain stem, you ain’t getting better from that. She shifted back to human form as she died, and I stood up, staggering back in shock as I recognized Megan Wyatt, a third cousin of mine and Jason’s that we went to high school with. She’d always followed Jason around like a puppy dog, talking about how cute he was and how smart, basically blowing sunshine up his ass. I guess he remembered her, and when he turned, he came home to recruit. I looked at her long dark hair and remembered the shy girl she’d been in school. One more thing my asshole brother had to answer for.
“Joe, what’s the situation? Are we clear?” I said into the Bluetooth.
“Seems to be good. There’s one wolf still active, but she’s not attacking. I have the shot if you make the call,” came the answer.
I looked around, and saw the wolf he was talking about. She was pacing back and forth at Barry’s body, licking his face and whimpering. I realized with a shock that this was his mate, the whole reason we’d come back here in the first place. Now Barry was dead, and she was turned into a werewolf, and there were a whole lot more dead Sasquatch than there were live ones left in the tribe, and it all felt a little useless. I walked over to where Barry laid, his blood making the dirt under his body a thick reddish-brown mud, and sat down on a big rock next to him. The wolf looked up at me, her eyes brimming, and she sat on the other side of Barry’s body, waiting.
Grits, Guns & Glory - Bubba the Monster Hunter Season 2 Page 14