Grits, Guns & Glory - Bubba the Monster Hunter Season 2

by John G. Hartness

  “It’s okay,” I said. “I understand being scared. I just drove my truck into a walking boulder, remember? I got scared covered. But right now we need information before this thing comes back and really hurts one of you guys. Now think about it, is there anybody you might give a hard time to at school? Somebody on the Academic Bowl team that you guys tease and might have taken it wrong?”

  Skeeter’s voice came in over my headset. “Or somebody that you bullied until he was scared to go to school? Somebody that’s so filled with self-loathing that he can’t stand to look in the mirror?”

  I reached up and turned off the earpiece. I knew Skeeter was right, but this was quickly turning into high school politics, which was never Skeeter’s strong suit. I reached down and helped the other kid, Mark, onto the bench. “Well?” I asked.

  The boys looked at each other, then shook their heads.

  “You can’t think of anyone you’ve made fun of that might have taken it harder than you intended?” I’m sure they intended it to be as hard as it was, but I was equally sure they wouldn’t own up to it.

  “Jacob Lloyd,” Mark said, half under his breath.

  “Who?” I asked, more because I didn’t hear him than because I didn’t understand him. Being in huge car crashes sometimes does bad things to my hearing. And my equilibrium, and my temper, and my back.

  “Oh, come on, Marky Mark, the King of Kike wouldn’t have the stones to do anything as stupid as messing with us, man! He’s the biggest chickenshit in school!” Steve hopped up, standing on the bench and waving his hands around like a stupid rich white kid parodying a rapper. I reached one arm out and pushed him backwards off the bench back into the flowerbed.

  “Shut up, dickwit,” I said. “Who’s Jacob Lloyd, Mark?”

  “He’s this kid—”

  “He’s a lo-ser!” Steve cut in again. He even put the little pause in loser to accent the two syllables. I was thinking more and more that I should have just let the rock monster break him a little bit.

  “Mark?” I sat down on the bench next to the kid, giving me the additional benefit of keeping Steve in arm’s reach. I’ve seen kids that were in more need of slapping, but not often.

  “Why do you think it’s one of the Nerd Bowl kids?” He didn’t look up, just sat staring at his hands.

  “Because the monster wrecked all the athletic trophies but not the academic ones. Kinda makes sense, doesn’t it?”

  “Yeah.”

  “So what about Jacob Lloyd?”

  “We tease him a bit.”

  “A bit?”

  He sat there for a long moment, then said, “A lot. We pretty much wrecked his life last year.”

  “Oh bullshit!” Steve popped back up out of the bushes. “All we did was fuck with the little pussy a little bit. We didn’t do nothing to him we didn’t do to anybody else. And if you push me down again old man, I’m gonna fuck you up.” That last bit was directed at me.

  I didn’t bother to get up, I just flicked out a punch that caught Steve right in his sack of precious little Steve-jewels. He crumpled to his knees, and I grabbed his hair. “You might want to pick your battles, Steve-o. This is not the dog you want to try and run with.” Then I slapped him across the face, hard. I didn’t punch him, just laid him out with an open-handed slap that spun him around back into the azaleas.

  “What did you do to Jacob, Mark?” I kept my voice even as I watched his face. He genuinely looked like he might have some remorse for ruining the kid’s high school life, and I thought this one might be worth saving.

  “We videotaped him in the showers after gym class and then Eric cut it into one of the sex ed videos they showed to all the health classes. It was pretty embarrassing, I guess, I mean…you could see his dick and everything.”

  “And I’m guessing Jacob isn’t exactly a big buff guy that walks around showing off his body?” I asked.

  “Yeah, not so much, man. Jake’s a skinny little dude. He ran out of health class listening to everybody laugh at him. He hasn’t been back for a week. I heard…”

  “You heard what?” I knew what he was going to say, but I wanted him to say the words.

  “I heard he tried to kill himself. Like, took a bunch of pills or something.” A single tear rolled down the side of Mark’s face. “I felt bad, you know? Like, Jake was my friend when we were little. He helped me with algebra last year and wouldn’t even let my mom pay him for it. He said it’s what friends do, like we were still buds.”

  “And then you shit on him in front of the whole school?” I didn’t raise my voice, just laid it out there.

  “Yeah. I did.” He still didn’t look at me, but I could tell from the way he held his shoulders that he was just barely keeping it together.

  “That little pussy couldn’t take it, so he oughta kill himself.” Steve stood up. “I’m fucking tired of hearing about how we gotta be cool to all the nerds and retards at that stupid school, man. This is our time! We’re the fucking kings of that place and we oughta be able to do whatever we want!”

  This time I stood up, and I did punch him. I caught the smart-assed little kid with an uppercut that picked him up and dropped him on his ass a good three feet away. Then I stepped over the bench and went after him. He scrambled back on his ass and hands, looking around for help, but there was no help in sight.

  “Get up,” I said, my voice barely over a growl.

  “Dude, I’m sorry, I was just messing with you!” Steve was frantic now, backed up against the outside wall of the hospital with nowhere to go.

  “Get up, or I’ll pick you up. Then I’ll put you on your ass again. I’m gonna repeat the process until you know what it feels like to be helpless, to have somebody stronger than you make your life a living hell. Then I’m gonna strip you butt naked and make you run home to your mama and daddy and let them see what a little bitch you are. I’m going to make you feel the pain you’ve given to other people all this time, and I’m going to make sure you remember it until the day you die.”

  “Stop it, Bubba.” Skeeter’s voice came through my earpiece.

  “I turned that off for a reason,” I growled.

  “And I turned it back on so I could talk to you. You know I’ve got the override to all your tech. Now back off the little shit, he’s not worth it.”

  “He’s worth it. He drove a classmate to try and kill himself; he deserves everything I could do to him.”

  “Yeah, but you don’t deserve what will happen to you.” Skeeter’s voice was calm, and it was taking the edge off my fury.

  “What are you talking about? I beat people up all the time.”

  “Adult people and monsters. This kid is sixteen, Bubba. He’s stupid, but he’s young. You can’t just beat him until he breaks. It’s against the law and against what we do.”

  “He’s a monster. He’s vicious and stupid and bloodthirsty and deserves to be beaten to a pulp.”

  “No, he’s not. He’s ignorant, blind and foolish, and deserves a chance to change. He’s you, Bubba, and he deserves the same chance you got.”

  I took an involuntary step back as the memories hit me—jamming Jerry Dallesandro into a locker in the girl’s locker room wearing nothing but his jockstrap; leaving love notes from the head cheerleader in the locker of the captain of the math team, then watching as he brought a dozen roses to her lunch table on Valentine’s Day; TP’ing Renee Wallace’s house every Friday night for a month and writing lies about her sexual habits in her driveway with spray paint. Skeeter was right, I’d done every bit as bad and more before I met him and decided to be a different person.

  “Fuck me,” I murmured.

  “No thanks, I don’t go for white dudes,” Skeeter said in my earpiece. “He’s an asshole, yeah. But maybe he can see the asshole he’s been and change. You did.”

  Skeeter was telling the truth. I did change, the day I walked up to the front entrance of the school and three of my football buddies were trying to figure out how to run Skeeter’s under
wear up the flagpole with him still wearing them. I told them to stop, that Skeeter was helping me with math, but they wouldn’t stop. A couple of black eyes and one dislocated jaw later, they stopped. Skeeter asked me why I helped him, but I never told him the truth. The fact of it was, when I saw Skeeter fighting back against three guys twice his size, I admired him. Those three football players were gonna kick his ass and do whatever they wanted to do to him, but Skeeter was never gonna lay down and give in. I saw that fire in him, and it made me want to be like that. I didn’t save Skeeter to help him; I saved Skeeter that day to help me.

  “Boy, let me tell you one thing.” I looked Steve in the eye. “The shit you do in high school follows you the rest of your life. You can choose right now to be the kind of person who makes people want to kill themselves, or you can be the kind of person who makes people’s lives better. You gotta make that choice, but I promise you one thing—you choose wrong, and I’ll be back.”

  I turned away, stepped out of the flowerbed and walked back to my truck. It wasn’t going anywhere with a smashed fender, quarter panel, cracked axle and more other damage than I could guess at. I saw a puddle under what used to be the radiator and let out a sigh.

  “Mark, where’s your car?” I asked the kid.

  “Don’t sweat it, Bubba. Your ride’s almost there,” Skeeter said in my ear. I looked around and saw a black Suburban pulling into the hospital parking lot, followed by a wrecker and a step-side cargo van. All black, of course, even the rollback. They pulled up in front of the hospital, and an agent in tactical gear got out of the Suburban.

  He stepped forward and held out his hand. “Agent Smith, sir. I’ll be your driver. Do you need anything out of your truck?”

  “Yeah,” I said, and walked around to the passenger side. I skinned off my jacket, tie and dress shirt, throwing on a shoulder holster with Bertha in it over my t-shirt. I grabbed my Carharrt jacket, slipped my caeastus in the pockets in case I had to go toe to toe with a rock monster, and tossed a few tools in the back before I got in the Suburban. I paused for a second, then stuck my head out the window.

  “Mark, get in here,” I yelled.

  He looked at me, then pointed at himself.

  “Yeah, you, jackass. This is partly your mess, come help me clean it up.”

  He nodded, stood and half-jogged to the back of the Suburban. “Do I get a gun?” he asked as he closed the door. Kids.

  “Why do I have to come?” Mark asked from the back seat. “I mean, I know what I did was wrong and all, but he sent that thing to kill us!”

  “Did you see what my grenade did to that rock monster?” I asked.

  “Yeah, nothing.”

  “Do you think for a second that you could stop that thing from killing you?”

  “No.” His voice shook enough to put an extra syllable in there.

  “So if whoever sent that thing after you wanted to kill you, don’t you think you’d be dead?”

  Mark sat there thinking as the suburbs of Memphis rolled by. After a couple of stoplights and a right turn into a neighborhood of modest ranch houses and manicured lawns, he said, “Yeah, I guess so. So what did he want? He put Eric in the hospital. The doctor says he might never be able to play ball again. He’s probably gonna lose his scholarship, maybe not even be able to go to college. Is that what Jake wants?”

  “To ruin your life? Maybe make you feel some of what he feels every day? Probably. There’s a lot of shit in this world that it’s worse to live with than it is to die from. Maybe he’s decided he wants to live, but he wants y’all to be miserable with him.”

  “So why am I here again?”

  “So that if he does want to kill you, I can get it over with quick and be home for supper.” I kept it deadpan and watched the kid’s face in the mirror built into my sun visor. I saw Agent Smith snicker in my peripheral vision, but he pulled it in quick.

  “What!” Mark started reaching for the door handle and looking around for some other way to get out when he found it locked.

  “Calm down, kid. I’m not going to let him kill you. I didn’t ruin a perfectly good truck just to let you die an hour later. You said y’all used to be friends, right?”

  Mark calmed down a little, but his eyes kept darting from side to side like he really wanted an exit. He should have thought of that before he got in a black SUV with a couple of mysterious government agents, even if one of them looked more like an extra from Sons of Anarchy than a fed. “Yeah, we were buds back in middle school. I was even on the quiz team with him before I got tall and made the baseball team.”

  “And got cool and forgot about all your friends.”

  “Yeah, that too.”

  “Then maybe you can apologize and he’ll believe it. Something tells me your friend Steve back there might have a credibility problem.”

  He thought about that for a second, then chuckled. “Yeah, nobody will ever believe that Steve’s changed. He’s a douche to the bone.”

  “Then why do you hang out with him?” I asked. That’s never made sense to me, why kids follow these assholes.

  “He hits a mile, is a wicked centerfielder, and has a brother old enough to buy us beer. He’s a dick, but he’s useful.”

  I let out a sigh of the ex-athlete and said, “Some things just never change, do they?”

  “We’re here, sir,” Smith said, pulling up to the sidewalk in front of a two-story white colonial with a small front porch. There was a Volvo station wagon in the driveway, parked right up against the garage door. It looked like the picture of middle-class suburbia, with a gabled roof, a couple of white columns holding up the porch roof, and a red bike chained to a post by the front door.

  Except for the fifteen-foot animated pile of rocks standing in front of the attic window, it could have been a picture off Leave It to Beaver. The monster at the hospital had been almost identical to the one in the video—eight or nine feet tall with a boulder for a head and nothing holding it together but magic. This one was a lot more cohesive, and a lot bigger. Its head, made of what looked like a huge chunk of asphalt, was level with the attic window, and there was concrete or some kind of filler holding its joints together.

  “Yeah, I think this is the place,” I said, opening the door and sliding out. I walked around to the back of the SUV and opened the tailgate. I pulled out the twenty-pound sledgehammer I’d brought from my truck and started toward the monster.

  “What should I do?” Mark asked.

  “Try to talk to Jake, and try not to get stomped. I think this thing’s sex organs are in its feet.”

  “Huh?” the teenager asked.

  “He steps on you, you’re fucked,” I said.

  I got to the center of the lawn and yelled out, “JACOB!”

  The attic window slid open and a skinny kid with curly brown hair stepped out and sat on the monster’s shoulder. “What do you want?”

  “I want you to stop calling up rock monsters and beating up people.” I figured, since he asked, maybe I could just ask nicely.

  “It’s a golem, you moron. I’m Jewish.”

  “I don’t know what those things have to do with each other,” I said honestly. The longer I kept him talking, the less likely he was to sic his monster on me, so I wanted the full-on bad guy soliloquy.

  “Golems are magical constructs that we Jews create to do things for us, to protect us, to work for us—”

  “To beat up children?” I cut in.

  “They aren’t children!” Jacob yelled down at me. “They’re assholes and they made it so I can’t ever go back to that school. Everybody there saw that video! They all saw me…” I saw his face go hard. Uh-oh. “Destroy him!” Jacob shouted and pointed at me. He hopped off the thing’s shoulder and back in his window, and I hefted the sledge, looking for a weak point in the two-story tower of rock.

  “Skeeter, please tell me you got something useful out of that,” I said as the golem started my way.

  “Well, I haven’t got a whole lot of ex
perience with Jewish mythology, but it looks like there should be a stone with a Hebrew symbol carved into it.”

  “That’s great, Skeet. This thing’s bigger than a city bus and has about a gajillion rocks in it. How am I supposed to find the right one?”

  “It should be close to the head,” Skeeter offered.

  “Great. Too bad I’m uncomfortably close to its feet.” And fists, I thought as one basketball-sized hand came crashing to the ground where I had stood only seconds before. I swung the sledge at the thing’s wrist and shattered a few stones, but more simply flowed up from the ground to fill in.

  “Skeeter, this thing regenerates,” I said, dancing back from another ground-shaking blow.

  “Yeah, that’s a problem. Try to stay out of its way until I think of something.”

  “Does ‘knocking the kid unconscious’ count as thinking of something?”

  “Yeah, but I don’t know if that’ll work.”

  “It’s all I got,” I said and ran between the golem’s legs for the front door. I resisted the urge for a nutshot as I passed through, figuring that it wouldn’t have much impact on the magically constructed rock monster. But old habits die hard. I hit the front door at a dead run, leading with the sledge. It splintered into a shower of wood and glass, and I was inside the kid’s house. I looked back out the front door and saw the golem flatten the Suburban with two mighty stomps. Mark and Agent Smith bolted in opposite directions, Smith emptying his Glock into the golem to draw its attention, and Mark hauling ass for the front door.

  I waved him in like a third base coach telling him to go for home, and he jumped through the broken frame of the door a few seconds before the golem stopped right outside the house.

  “Are we safe here?” Mark asked.

  “I don’t know. It depends on how many of those things your friend has made, and if any of them are small enough to be inside. I don’t know if I could handle one my size or not.”

  “Well here’s your chance to find out.” Jacob’s voice came from the stairs, but the whoosh of air I felt came from behind me, so I just dropped to one knee. A fist passed over my head and I spun around to see a much smaller golem in the living room.