I watched my pistol clatter to the street as I clutched the wiper, thinking the entire time that I was proud of American engineering that could build windshield wipers robust enough to hold me onto the hood of a car. I was also thinking fuck, there went my gun, and my balls really hurt. The ghoul floored the accelerator, and I slid a few inches up the windshield, just enough to dislodge the wedged hood ornament.
A crack rang out, and I felt the car buck underneath me. “Amy, are you shooting at the car while I’m laying on the hood?” I asked. I was pretty calm, I thought, given the situation.
“Yeah, keep your head down.”
I ducked my head down and buried my chin into my sternum.
Another crack from overhead and the windshield spiderwebbed underneath me. The car swerved back and forth wildly across the lines before running up onto the sidewalk and slamming into a parked green Tacoma. Momentum did what momentum does, and I slid off the front of the car with enough force to snap the hood ornament right off with my testicles. I clawed my way up to my knees and peered over the hood of the limo. The ghoul driver was slumped forward with his head on the steering wheel causing the horn to blare right in my left ear. Between that and the hood ornament lodged halfway up my rectum, I was pretty damn pissed.
“Amy?” I asked into the comm.
“Yeah, Bubba?”
“You got eyes on the funeral director?”
“Yeah, but the truck slammed forward when you hit it and the radiator must have blown. I can’t get a good shot through the steam.”
I was about to tell her that I didn’t care if she could shoot him, I just needed her to tell me where he was when I learned his location the hard way — by him finding me. A pair of hands wrapped around my throat from behind, and I felt myself lifted from the ground. The undertaker spun me around and, just like his wrestling namesake, chokeslammed me onto the hood of the car. I felt things pop loose in my ribcage that I was pretty sure were supposed to stay unpopped, and whole new dimensions of pain sprang into being all over my body. The only benefit to having a super-ghoul slam me almost through the engine block of a Lincoln was that he dislodged the hood ornament from my ass.
I lay there thinking of new curse words and mostly just groaning when I felt sharp teeth dig into my left thigh. I looked down at the lewdly placed ghoul and did the only thing that came to mind — I punched him in the side of the head. He popped loose with a slurping sound and looked up at me, grinning.
“You taste good, fat boy. I’ll enjoy this,” the ghoul said, then bent his head back to my leg, teeth bared.
I caught him in the temple with my right knee, and we rolled off the hood of the car onto the street with me atop the scrawny ghoul. I wedged an arm under his throat to keep him off me and said, “Amy, a little help anytime!”
“Got my own problems, Bubba,” was her only reply. I chanced a look back to the roof of the church and saw Amy standing on the ridgeline of the building with a man in a dark suit. Shit, there are more of them, I thought.
My attention snapped back to the problem at hand when he tossed me a good six feet off him. I clicked my comm. “Skeeter, why didn’t you tell me ghouls had super-strength?”
“Bubba, can we just assume that everything in the magical world is super-strong? Except for faeries, everything you’ve ever fought can whoop your ass in a fair fight. That’s why —”
“Yeah, we don’t fight fair. I know the drill. Got it.” I got to my feet just about a half-second before the undertaker got to me, so I was in the perfect position to catch him with a shoulder in the gut and pick him up. I spun to my left and charged, slamming the ghoul spine-first into a parked Escalade. Metal screeched, glass shattered and pieces of overpriced plastic exploded all over the sidewalk, but the bastard kept scrabbling for my throat and flinging ghoul-spit all over the place. I’ve fought some nasty monsters in my time, but there’s a special kind of gross when you know the thing slobbering all over your face ate part of a running back for breakfast.
I managed to wriggle one arm free and start punching the ghoul in the side of the head. He started to slow down with the biting after the fourth good shot to the temple, and after six, his eyes rolled back and he sagged in my grip. I stepped back, and he slumped to the ground, all rag-doll limp. I looked up at the church and saw that Amy was getting the worst of it with her ghoul, so I sprinted in her direction. Good thing for everybody involved the sprint was less than fifty yards, or I would have been even slower getting there than I was. I got to the low point in the roof where Amy climbed up, then realized that a downspout that held Amy’s weight with no trouble was not going to be a very good idea as an access point for me.
I heard a shouted “Shit!” from above me, and looked up to see Amy clinging to the edge of the roof by her fingertips.
“Drop, I’ll catch you!” I yelled.
“You’ll miss!”
“I’ll catch you, I swear! I’ve got great hands for a d-lineman! All my coaches said so. Now jump!”
Amy looked down at me, looked up at the ghoul reaching for her wrist, swung her legs to get a little more momentum, then dropped. She flew backwards about a foot off the three-story roof of the church, flattening out and spreading her arms to give me as big a target as possible. I stepped up, looked up, stepped about a foot to one side, and braced myself to catch my falling girlfriend.
I missed. She landed flat on her back in the holly bushes that ringed the church, crashing through the prickly bushes with a scream of pain and fury the likes of which I haven’t heard since that unfortunate spring break incident with the harpy and the wet t-shirt contest.
“Bubba!” she shrieked. I grabbed her outstretched arm and pulled her out of the bushes, adding to her truly impressive collection of scratches and rips in her clothing. I didn’t mind the torn clothing so much, but I did feel bad about the bleeding. I set her down in the grass, and she immediately started beating the hell out of me.
“I told you you were gonna miss! I knew you couldn’t catch me and you were just gonna let me fall to my death!”
“Ow! Quit it! I knew you weren’t gonna die, so I didn’t have to catch you. But I do have to do something about him.”
“Him who?”
“Him him.” I pointed behind her, then shoved her to one side and launched myself at the onrushing ghoul. Amy landed in the bushes again, getting me another solid cussing, and I speared the ghoul like he was an ACC quarterback. He folded up like an origami swan, and I ran full-tilt into a two-foot diameter oak tree. It was nice hearing bones crunch that didn’t belong to me for a change, and when I backed up, the ghoul fell to one side, dead. I stomped its head flat just to be sure, then went to pull Amy out of the bushes again.
“Don’t touch me,” came a small voice from the greenery. I’d heard that tone before, and I decided it would be a good time to check up on the sheriff. And to make sure that Amy didn’t have a sniper rifle when she was able to stand up again. I picked up the Remington from where it lay in the grass and walked back around to the front of the church.
“Skeeter, let me know when she decides not to kill me. And maybe remind her that I’m really nice to her most days and hardly ever dump her in thorn bushes,” I said.
“You know I’m still on comm, right?” Amy’s voice cut through, and the temperature dropped about eighteen degrees.
“I know, I just figured you weren’t speaking to me until the bleeding stopped, so I — oh shitballs.”
“What?” Amy and Skeeter asked simultaneously. Then Skeeter dialed in the video feed he had linked to my belt buckle, and I heard him say, “Oh shit is right.”
The funeral director ghoul wasn’t quite as dead as I thought he was, and he apparently recovered quicker than I expected, or he’d been playing possum, or something. He was standing over the eviscerated body of the Presbyterian preacher and holding the semi-catatonic mother by her hair. His whole face was stained red, and he broke into a huge grin when he saw me. His grin faded as I raised the Remin
gton to my shoulder, centered his face in the scope, and squeezed the trigger.
Click. There is no sound more mournful in the world than that of an empty firearm. Not even the crumple of the last can in a twelve-pack can match that of a hammer clicking on an empty chamber when you really, really need to shoot something. Nothing that deep went through my head at that moment. I just muttered “shitballs” under my breath and threw the gun aside. I started running across the church lawn, marking the third time in twenty-four hours that I’d run after something that had neither boobs nor beer. I think that was some kind of really depressing record for me.
The undertaker saw me running at him and grinned again. He came at me like a really angry gazelle, all long legs and arms, with a side order of really pointy teeth. We crashed together amidst the headstones and manicured grass, and he went high as I went low. That never goes well for the skinny guy going high, ask any wide receiver. I caught him around the knees and drove my shoulder into the ground. I heard a loud pop beside my ear as his knee dislocated, then felt an explosion of pain in my shoulder as he bit into my trapezius. Hot blood poured down my shoulder and my right arm started to go numb. I stood up and slammed the ghoul spine-first into a headstone.
His head flopped back and cracked into the polished granite with a sound like a wet cantaloupe falling from a great height. His grip loosened on my neck and head, and I was able to get a little separation. I stepped back as he got to his feet, his head lolling on his neck and his eyes rolling in opposite directions.
“Ready to quit?” I asked. “Promise to leave town and never eat living people again and I won’t kill you.”
“Screw you, human. The Messiah has come, and he promises that our time is coming. Soon we won’t have to live in the shadows any longer. Soon we will be the hunted, and you humans will be what you always should have been — the prey.”
My blood ran cold at the mention of The Messiah, an evangelical leader of monsters that was planning some kind of beastie revolution. He also happened to be my kid brother-turned-werewolf, Jason. I looked in the ghoul’s eyes and saw the hunger there. This guy was never going back into the closet. Between Jason’s proselytizing and the taste of fresh meat, he was well and truly off the deep end.
“Fine, then. Let’s end this shit.” I took one step forward, then dropped to one knee as three shots rang out in quick succession. The ghoul dropped face-first into the grass, and I looked up to see Sheriff McGraw standing over him, Glock in hand.
I walked over to the sheriff and put a hand on his gun, slowly lowering his frozen arm. “That was good shooting, Sheriff. Might have saved my life.”
“I never killed nobody before. Never even had to draw my weapon in fifteen years of law enforcement.” His eyes were a little wild, and I led him over to a headstone and helped him sit down. I stepped around and grabbed his chin, making him look me in the eye.
“You’ve still never killed anybody, Sheriff. You shot a monster. That was not a person, no matter what he looked like most days. He was a bloodthirsty monster who’s been digging up dead people and eating their bodies. He was trying to kill me, and you put him down just like you would a rabid dog.” I kept my voice low and even, and held his eyes with mine to whole time so he could hear the truth in my words.
“That’s good, Bubba, keep him focused on the fact that these things weren’t people,” Amy said over the comm. The sheriff made no sign of hearing her, so I figured he lost his earpiece in the fight.
“He buried my daddy and my uncle Joseph. I shook his hand at every funeral in Telford for nigh on ten years.” His voice started to get that far-away sound again, so I grabbed his chin again.
“He was a monster, and he was going to kill a lot of people. If a bear goes bad and comes down the mountain into town, what do you do?” When he didn’t answer, I repeated the question. “What. Do. You. Do?”
“I shoot it. I put it down to protect the town,” he said, and I thought I saw a little bit of life come back into his eyes.
“That’s what you did today. You put down a wild creature that threatened your town. You protected, and you served. You did your job, and these people will see tomorrow because of it.”
He started to nod, then froze. His face crumpled up and I thought he might puke on me for a minute. “Do you think he ate my daddy? Do you think he ate my Uncle Joe?”
“Do not tell him the truth,” Amy said in my ear. There was no way in hell I was gonna tell this man on the edge of a breakdown that yeah, it was pretty likely that the ghouls ate part of his father. That was a little much for anybody to take.
“No. I’m sure he didn’t. Ghouls usually like living flesh and only resort to eating the dead as a last result.” It was a complete lie — ghouls would rather eat a dead thing than a live thing any day, but I was kinda counting on the sheriff not having much of an occult library in the mountains of Tennessee. And I figured there were some questions he didn’t want to dig too deep for the answers to anyway.
I walked the sheriff back to his car, and Amy met me there. He looked at the two of us, then around at the carnage in the cemetery. There were half a dozen dead ghouls in various states of disassembly, at least ten dead funeral-goers, including both of the guest of honor’s parents and the Presbyterian preacher. Folding chairs were scattered everywhere, the casket was lying open on its side, and the limo was crashed into a couple of mourners’ cars. It looked like either a monster attack or a frat party.
“How the hell am I gonna explain this?” the sheriff asked.
“Gas leak,” Amy and I said in unison.
“What?”
“There was a gas leak at the funeral home, and it mixed with the embalming chemicals to induce a psychotic fugue state on anyone in the vicinity. The entire staff was affected, but the explosion at the funeral home purged any remaining dangerous chemicals from the area,” Amy said without missing a beat.
I stared at her, my mouth hanging open. “What?” she said. “This isn’t my first ghoul attack. And we have protocols for dealing with this kind of thing.”
“But there hasn’t been any explosion at the funeral home,” the sheriff said.
“Yeah,” Amy said, “about that…” A fireball erupted from over the trees a couple of blocks behind the church, and we all turned just in time to see a black helicopter rise up past the smoke.
Amy turned and looked up at me, all tattered clothes and bloody pinpricks from being dropped in a holly bush not once, but twice, by her adoring boyfriend. “So, Bubba . . . Can I get a ride home?”
“Have you forgiven me for dropping you in the bushes?”
“I’ll forgive you almost as soon as you take me back to that hotel and let me get a shower.”
“Deal.” I turned to the sheriff. “Sheriff McGraw.” I stuck out my hand.
The giant stood up and shook my hand, then shook Amy’s. “I’m sorry I doubted y’all. I reckon there are stranger things on heaven and earth and all that.”
“I hope you never have to find out about any more of them, Sheriff,” I said.
“I do, too. But if you ever need backup, son, you don’t hesitate to call. I’d be honored to stand beside y’all again.”
I thought about Jason and the hell he was trying his damndest to raise, and I shook the sheriff’s hand again. “Sheriff, if I ever need a good man in a fight, I know who to call.” Then I helped Amy into the truck and we rolled out of Tennessee.
THE END
Stone Cold Crazy
A Bubba the Monster Hunter Short Story
By John G. Hartness
The phone rang. I ignored it. It rang again, and I pushed the button to send Uncle Father Joe to voicemail. It rang again, and I pushed the button again. I stared at the phone where it lay on the railing to my back deck and said, “I can play this game all night.”
It rang again. Apparently I was weaker than I thought, because this time I answered. “Sure, come on over, Joe. I’ve got another steak I can throw on the grill.”
“It’s over thirty. That’s grilling’ weather. Besides, if you stand close enough to the Weber you stay warm,” I said.
“Tell him he’s an idiot!” My girlfriend, the thin-blooded Agent Amy Hall, shouted from the other side of the sliding glass door. She loved a good steak as much as anybody and approved the idea of me grillin’ as long as it didn’t involve her being anywhere cooler than sixty degrees. So she was making a salad. I didn’t know what that was for—as far as I knew, Skeeter wasn’t coming over.
“She says you’re an idiot, Padre. What did you do?” I said.
“I think she means you’re an idiot for grilling outdoors when it’s forty degrees outside,” Joe replied with a chuckle. I knew Amy would never call Joe an idiot. For one thing, he was a smart dude with the pieces of paper to prove it. For another, she had a lot of respect for men of the cloth and wouldn’t insult one unless he really deserved it.
“You could be right, Joe. Now since I reckon you didn’t call to talk about my IQ, or my steaks, what’s up?”
“You’ve got a case.”
“Not today. Today I’ve got a pair of New York strips been marinatin’ for about thirty-six hours in my special bourbon sauce, and in about ten minutes they’re gonna be on a plate next to a baked tater the size of my fist covered in enough butter to stop a lesser man’s heart just from looking at it. And after I eat my steak and my tater, and drink about fourteen beers along with it, I’m gonna put a scary movie on the TV, settle down on the couch with my girlfriend, and reap all the benefits of the parts that make her jump and snuggle up on me. I can have a case tomorrow.” I could almost see my night swirling around the drain even as I described it to Joe. When the supernatural nasties come out of the shadows, I usually don’t get to decide when I kick their asses.
Grits, Guns & Glory - Bubba the Monster Hunter Season 2 Page 25