“All right, so we know it ain’t Elvis, we know it’s a shapeshifter, and we know the party started in Shreveport, and we know that there’s three South Carolina Highway Patrol cars on my ass for the last three miles and they’re starting to look pissed. So I’m gonna keep rolling while you two figure out the deal with the local po-po. Sound good?” I grinned at Amy, flipped Skeeter the bird, and switched the center console over to Outlaw Country. I swear, XM radio and Mojo Nixon are the only good things about having a truck smarter than most of my third-grade class.
*****
Amy did her thing with the “I’m from the government, I’m here to help,” and the state troopers suddenly found themselves called to something way more interesting than a big-ass truck rolling down I-85 at about 95. It took us a good twelve hours to get from the Greenville-Spartanburg airport to the outskirts of Shreveport, where the first bank robbery took place. We woulda made it a lot faster, except Atlanta happened. There’s a rule of travel in the South—if you’re going to Hell, you’re gonna change planes in Atlanta. And no matter what time you drive through Atlanta, it’s rush hour and there’s a wreck on I-285. We didn’t have to change planes, but after two hours to get around the city that Coke built, I damn sure wished I could fly.
We pulled into a Courtyard parking lot about 1:30 AM local time, which meant I had half an hour to get checked in and find a convenience store before they stopped selling beer at two. I told Amy where I was going and she mumbled something about a shower and seeing me in the morning as she closed the door to her room. I had tried to convince her that there was only one room left and all it had was one bed, but since there were three cars in the parking lot, she wasn’t buying it. I didn’t mind too much, since either Uncle Joe or Uncle Sam was picking up the tab. I Froggered my way across six lanes of traffic to get to a 7-11, bought myself a twelve-pack of Bud Light in hopes of watching my girlish figure, and headed back to my room.
I stopped cold when I saw a figure standing next to my truck. He was tall, not as tall as me but over six foot, and thin. He’d been skinny when he was a kid, but age and turning into a goddamn werewolf had put some pounds on him. His hair was long and pulled back into a ponytail, but where I wore a beard that I thought made me look distinguished and Skeeter said made me look like a Duck Dynasty reject, he was clean-shaven. He had my sword slung across his back, with the hilt poking out over his right shoulder for an easy draw. A pair of matched .45 pistols hung on his hips, and I felt pretty damned unarmed with only my Judge revolver in a paddle holster at the back of my belt and a couple pair of brass knuckles in my back jeans pockets.
“Jason,” I said as I got close enough to be heard without yelling over the roar of traffic.
“Bobby.” There were only a handful of people who ever called me Bobby and lived. My mama, Granny, Pop, and Jason were about it. Even Grandpappy always called me Bubba. Or Shithead, but that was when he was feeling generous.
“We gonna fight?” I asked. I was pretty tired from twelve hours on the road, and I was at a serious disadvantage weapons-wise, but if my psycho little brother wanted to throw down, I was ready—any place, any time.
“Not unless you got your heart set on it. And it didn’t go so well for you last time, so I thought we might be able to talk instead. Give me a beer?” He reached over to his left and dropped the tailgate on my truck. I came around the side and sat next to him, putting the twelve-pack between us. Most days I wanted to kill him, and I figured that was what it would come to eventually, but he was still my brother, and if there was a chance to talk him out of trying to take over the world and setting himself up as the second coming of Jesus Christ for Monsters, I decided to take it. I handed him a beer, and he drained it, pitching the empty can into the bed of the truck like we used to back in high school. I handed him another and sucked one flat myself.
I popped the top on my second as he pitched his into the bed and grabbed a third. “Go easy, there Speed Racer, I didn’t buy but twelve.”
“We can get more, jackass,” he replied.
“Store closes in ten minutes, peckerwood.” We fell back into the relaxed profanity brothers have in the South.
“Bubba, I’m a friggin’ super villain, you think I give a shit if the store’s open or not? Now drink up!” He laughed and sucked the sides flat on another can.
I grabbed his wrist as he reached for his fourth beer. “Yeah, well, Lex Luthor, I don’t want to try running across that highway half-drunk, and if anybody gets to kill you tonight, it’s me, so slow down. You ain’t got nothin’ to prove.”
“I’ve always got somethin’ to prove.” He said it low, but I heard it, and knew it to be true. Jason had always been compared to me, and always came up short. Not as tall, not as strong, not as athletic—all that made for a rough time when he was just a couple years younger than me and all the teachers and coaches always remembered what I’d done. But he’d been smarter, craftier, and with a head for numbers like nobody’d ever seen. Too bad that don’t count for shit in the backwoods of North Georgia.
We sat there for a while, just drinking beer and looking at the stars. After the last beer was tossed over my shoulder into the bed of the truck, Jason took a deep breath. I held mine, knowing that the time had come for whatever had brought him here. We were about to get into some serious shit, either talking or fighting, and I didn’t know which one.
“You killed Megan.” It wasn’t a question.
“I ended her, yeah. But you killed Megan when you turned her, you son of a bitch.”
He laughed, a dry little bark of a laugh. “No pun intended, right? I’m not gonna fight you tonight, Bubba, but Megan is one you’re going to pay for.”
“You got a lot more than her on your list to answer for, Jason. But she was our blood. She wasn’t close kin, but she was kin. And that’s one you’ll answer for.”
“Kin? You ignorant redneck, she was more than kin, she was my mate! She was my other half! She was my life you fucking giant idiot, and you killed her! You took her away just like you took everything else from me!” He was crying, and yelling, and starting to shift. I saw his shoulders start to bulk up and hair start to come out on his arms and face. He started to grow, and I knew it was about to be on.
“Jason, chill. We said we weren’t going to do this tonight.”
“I changed my mind.”
“Look, I’m sorry about Megan. I didn’t know. I didn’t know she was your . . . woman, or wife, or mate, or whatever you want to call her. I’m sorry for that. I know how bad that hurts.” I looked him straight in the eyes and let him remember. I let him remember a blonde girl, a bloody shoe, and the day he took the woman I loved away from me. He stood there, halfway between panting and sobbing, just staring into my eyes for a long minute or two, then he let out his breath in a long, raggedy exhale.
“You got a flask in that truck?” he asked after he sat back down on the tailgate.
I reached down into my sock and pulled one out. “Nope. I never leave it in the truck.” I passed it to him, and he knocked off about half of it in one long pull. Damn werewolf metabolisms. If I did that, I’d be dead. Nonetheless, I tried my best when he handed the flask back to me. No way was I gonna sit on my tailgate and be shown up by my little brother.
“What happened, Jason? How did you get this far down the road?”
“What, you mean the whole Messiah thing?”
“Yeah, dumbass, I mean the whole Messiah thing. I want to know how my little brother went from monster hunter to monster Messiah.”
“I wanted to be the Alpha. I found a pack, and I wanted to be the Alpha. But I couldn’t beat the Alpha they had, so I had to come up with a good reason to cheat and kill him when he wasn’t looking. They bought it and made me Alpha. Then another pack moved in, and I killed their Alpha and took their pack, and they started to believe it. And after a while other monsters started talking about this Messiah of wolves, and they started coming for me ‘cause they didn’t want nobody to be ove
r them. But by then I had like half a dozen packs following me, so I killed everything that came at me. Then the monsters started following me and asking when we were taking out the humans, and one thing led to another, and now we’re at war.”
“So you didn’t want any of this?” I shook my head, trying to make it all make sense.
“I wanted the first pack. I wanted to be in charge. I wanted to never be told what to do again. And the only way that was going to happen was for me to kill anything that got in front of me. You don’t get it, Bubba! You’ve never been the second-string. You’ve never had anybody tell you what to do. You’ve always done what you wanted and got what you wanted, and now it’s my turn! Finally, it’s gonna be Jason’s turn, and anybody that don’t like it can burn!” He jumped off the tailgate, flung his empty beer can into the air, drew Grandpappy’s sword, and sliced it into three pieces before it hit the ground.
Then he turned to me, sword in hand and nostrils flaring. “This was a mistake. I shoulda known you wouldn’t understand anything about it. You’ve always been the favorite, the golden boy. I just thought I could get you to see my side of things for once. I guess I was wrong.”
“Yeah, you’re wrong if you think I’m gonna understand how you got from feeling like Mommy didn’t love you enough to killing entire bands of peaceful creatures.” I stood up, slowly, but I figured I needed to be on my feet if he was gonna start doing anything serious with that sword.
“What, your precious Sasquatch? Those peaceful creatures deserved it! They killed three of my wolves for moving through their territory, and then wouldn’t kneel to me as their rightful ruler. So yeah, I killed a bunch of ‘em and turned a bunch more. And now the ones that are left know that if they mess with me, they’re gonna get hurt.” His eyes were dancing around like a meth cook at a cop convention, and the tip of Grandpappy’s sword wavered in the moonlight.
“Jason, chill out, man. We can work this out. We can step it all down and get things back to where they used to be —”
“Don’t you understand, Bubba, I don’t want things like they used to be. I like it like this. I like being the boss, the one everybody’s scared of. I don’t want to go back. And now that you killed Megan, there ain’t no going back for neither one of us.” He stepped back, giving himself plenty of room to swing his sword.
I took a couple of steps sideways, making sure I had room to duck and hopefully get out of the way before he shoved three feet of steel through my guts again. “So that’s it, little brother? We gonna do this now after all?”
“I guess we are. I wanted you to leave me alone, hoped once you understood what started this whole mess, you’d back off a little, but I guess you’re still fighting Pop’s fight, trying to be the damn good guy.”
“Don’t talk about Pop to me.”
“Why not? You killed him.” He grinned at me, and I saw red for a second before I realized the little bastard was baiting me.
“Just like Megan, dumbass. I ended him, but you killed him when you turned him. I did what we do—kill things that go bump in the night. Now I reckon it’s your turn.” I reached back and slid my hands into my brass knuckles. It wasn’t much, but maybe the metal would give me a tiny edge. I made a mental note to get some of those things made in silver. With spikes. And maybe a flamethrower built in. Or hell, just to get a flame-thrower.
Jason growled, crouched and leveled Grandpappy’s sword at me, then yelped and grabbed the back of his thigh. He spun around, looking up at the front of the hotel. Four stories up, a sliding glass door was open, and I saw the cylindrical barrel of a rifle with a flash suppressor poking out from the curtains. A tiny red dot lit up above the suppressor, and then a glowing red dot appeared on the ground in front of Jason. I watched with a smile as Amy walked that laser dot across the asphalt and settled it right on Jason’s crotch.
“I’d think about running, little brother. That’s a highly trained federal agent holding a Remington 700 with a laser sight loaded with silver-tipped full metal jacket rounds aimed right at your balls. I don’t think you’d be much of an Alpha if she turned you into a little bitch, now would you?”
Jason snarled back at me, some mindless growl from deep in his throat, then blurred into wolf form and hauled ass off into the night. I looked up at the hotel, gave Amy a thumbs-up, and grabbed what was left of my twelve-pack. I made it to the door of my room before Skeeter called me, but just as I pressed the receive button on my Bluetooth, Amy’s door opened. She stepped out into the hall wearing a tattered University of Michigan t-shirt and a pair of shorts that were short enough to have fit her about right in kindergarten.
“I’ll tell you all about it in the morning, Skeeter,” I said, then pushed the disconnect button and carried my beer into my favorite government agent’s room. She looked good enough that I didn’t even mention the goddamn Michigan shirt, just made a mental note to buy her some sleepwear from a college with a decent football team.
*****
“How do you think he found you?” Amy asked as I set down a plate swimming with maple syrup. I had about fourteen pancakes stacked high on that plate, with a generous dollop of butter between every one and enough maple syrup to bankroll all Vermont’s highway repairs for three years poured over the whole mess. It was my third plate of the morning, and the manager of the Shoney’s in Shreveport was seriously reconsidering his All You Can Eat Breakfast Bar. I figured I had maybe one more plate before I got cut off. It wouldn’t be the first time a waitress at an all you can eat restaurant had informed me that I had already eaten all I could eat, and all three small countries could eat besides, and I should get the hell out of her establishment. But before that happened, I was gonna eat me some dam flapjacks.
“I don’t know. I don’t think he’s tracking the truck somehow. It’s new since the last time we ran into him. He could be tapping Skeeter’s phone, but that don’t seem like his style.”
“Not to mention a goddamn technological impossibility,” came the chirpy and indignant voice in my ear. “And how the hell are you gonna eat all them pancakes? You gone be big as the side of a barn you keep that up.”
“It takes a lot of fuel to run this big machine, Skeeter, so you just piss off about my eating habits.” I might have been feeling a little sensitive since I found out Duluth Trading Company pants weren’t available in my waist size. Those were my favorite pants, and now I was gonna have to find a new place to buy pants or lose weight. This was a funeral meal for my belly, kinda.
“None of that makes sense, though,” I continued. “I think he was tracking me somehow, but it probably wasn’t real high-tech.”
“Magic?” Amy asked. She was sipping on coffee. She had eaten a bagel with light cream cheese, a couple of scrambled eggs and some bacon. Her entire meal all fit on one plate. I don’t understand skinny people.
“What kind of magic? I mean, Jason’s a werewolf, but he ain’t a magician, far as I know,” I said around a mouthful of syrupy goodness.
“Could the sword have something to do with it?” Skeeter asked in my ear. I froze, then almost choked on my pancakes as a bunch of things clicked together all at once. The weird test results in the hospital. Me healing from what should have been a fatal wound faster than anybody had a right to. Me feeling stronger when I fought the Sasquatch. Jason finding me without scent or technology.
“That’s gotta be it,” I said. “Somehow when he stabbed me with that sword, it bonded with me, and now Jason can feel my presence.” That was kinda creepy. I didn’t like my little brother that much before he swore to kill me, but thinking that he could track me across thousands of miles on account of a magic sword made me downright uncomfortable.
I changed the subject. “Where’s our first stop today?” I’d let Skeeter and Amy plan all the detectivin’ while I drove yesterday, figuring that my contribution to this part of things would be to drive around and beat up anything that needed punching.
“We’re going to the First Bank of Louisiana, Shreveport.
It’s about three miles away, and it’s where the first robbery took place. Hopefully someone there can give us some clues,” Amy said.
“Are we talking to the FBI or the local police?” I figured not, since neither organization was really cut out to hunt down a shapeshifter, but I wasn’t sure how far Amy’s governmental cooperation programming had gone.
Not that far, it turned out. “Nah, they’re not really suited to this kind of thing. They’ll keep pursuing it from the mundane angle, and we’ll come at it as though the crimes were committed by a shapeshifter.”
“But we know they were, right?” I asked.
“We don’t know anything until we catch the guy. Until then we just think this is the deal,” Amy replied.
“But f we catch up to skinny Elvis robbing a bank somewhere, we know it’s our guy.”
“Right.”
“Because Elvis’ whereabouts are well-documented.”
“Right.”
“And you’re not going to tell me anything else.”
“Right.”
“Dammit.”
“Right.”
“Sometimes I think you’re an obnoxious bitch.”
“Sometimes you’re right, but it happens a lot less often than you think it does.” Amy smiled at me, slid out of our booth and headed for the door. I dropped a five on the table and headed to the counter to pay.
The waitress that rang us up looked at me kinda funny when I walked up to the register, then said, “This is covered, sir.”
I cocked my head to one side. “What do you mean?”
“I mean somebody already paid for your breakfast.” She pointed over at an empty table. “He was sitting right over there. Young guy, thin, tall, longish hair.” I looked at Amy. There was only one person it could have been—Jason. But we’d both scouted the restaurant when we first got there, and it was clean. What the hell was going on? Was Jason developing new abilities?
Grits, Guns & Glory - Bubba the Monster Hunter Season 2 Page 16