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

by John G. Hartness

  “No, Bubba. Not today.”

  “Skeet?” I said after a pause.

  “Bubba, if you say you love me, I am going to sign you up for every gay dating site in the state of Georgia. You’ll have bears hunting you down from miles away.”

  “Then I’ll just say I’ll see you in a couple hours.”

  “Take a Vicodin for that collarbone. It’s gonna need to be set when you get home.”

  I did just that, chased it with three beers, and passed out before we got half an hour outside of Memphis.

  THE END

  High on that Mountain

  A Bubba the Monster Hunter Short Story

  By John G. Hartness

  I was sitting on my back deck, looking out over the purple and red sunset across the Georgia mountains, enjoying the company of one gorgeous federal agent and the taste of a beer that has been sitting in a mountain creek long enough to be almost too cold but not quite. It was a Saturday afternoon in August, which meant that it was hot everywhere but on top of my mountain and that I was off the clock. Without SEC football to occupy my afternoon, Agent Amy and I were kinda at loose ends as to how to best occupy our time. I had a few suggestions, but those were currently being put off until an undetermined “later.” At least she was smiling when she shot me down.

  Then it happened. It happens almost every time I get a little peace and quiet, and every time Amy and I get any hint of alone time. My cell phone rang. I didn’t even look at the display—it was Skeeter. It was always Skeeter, and no matter how much I liked my best friend and technical guru, there were a certain number of special moments I didn’t want to share with him. I didn’t let it spoil my mood; I just reached into my pocket, pulled out my phone, and flung it off into the woods. The satisfying crash and tinkle of electronic pieces through the trees told me I had scored a direct hit on one of the loblolly pines that surrounded the house.

  It took Skeeter all of half a minute to call the house phone, but that didn’t do him any good. I ripped the last house phone out of the wall months ago and never bothered to replace it. The only time I need a landline is winter, and that’s only for the one or two times a year that I get snowed in. And I don’t really care about it then, but sometimes Skeeter worries if he can’t get ahold of me, and I feel bad when he gets all bundled up like Ralphie from A Christmas Story and drives over in his VW Beetle to check on me. I do think he’s got the only four-wheel drive Beetle in existence, though. So calling the landline didn’t do him no good, either, on account of there not being anything to receive the call.

  Then Amy’s phone rang. She pulled it out and turned it so that I could see “Skeeter” on the display. I reached under my chair and drew the Colt 1911 pistol I kept hidden in a holster on the bottom of the chair.

  “You have a forty-five hidden on your back deck?” Amy asked.

  “You don’t?” I replied. “Pull!”

  She stared at me for a second, then understanding spread across her face and she flung her phone into the air in a graceful arc. RuPaul’s “You Better Work” blared out across the mountains from the tiny speaker as the phone whirled from her hand. I tracked it with my pistol for a second or two, waiting until it hit the top of its curve and started to descend. Then I squeezed the trigger on my Colt twice, hitting with the first and blowing the phone to bits. RuPaul cut off in mid-sashay and scattered circuits and microchips all over the forest. I felt bad about that for a few seconds, then blamed it on Skeeter in my mind, so I felt better.

  “You know those are expensive, right?” Amy asked, wiping tears of laughter from the corners of her eyes.

  “Yours belonged to the government, right? They can afford another one.”

  “Yours didn’t,” she pointed out.

  “Mine belonged to the Holy Roman Catholic Church, maybe the only organization better equipped to spend money than the U.S. Government.” I propped my feet up on the rail and leaned back. “You might as well sit back down. It’ll take him ten or fifteen minutes to get here from his place.”

  It was only about five minutes later when I heard a motorcycle rolling up the drive. “Shit,” I said, getting to my feet and sweeping most of the beer bottles into the recycling bin. Since Amy started coming around, I found out all sorts of stuff I never knew about living in the new world. Like that red plastic tub the trash men left by the curb one day? That’s for recyclable stuff, not just to separate the porn from the rest of the trash. My trash collectors have all seemed real disappointed since I figured that out.

  “What’s wrong? That sounds like Joe’s bike,” Amy asked.

  “It is Joe’s bike, which means Skeeter called Joe when he couldn’t get ahold of me. Which means it’s something important, not just some new tech thing Skeeter wanted to mess with.” I opened the sliding glass door and went into the house. I grabbed my shoulder rig off the back of a dining room chair and strapped it on. I checked Bertha and saw she was loaded with regular ammo, with one in the pipe. My spare magazines were loaded with silver and cold iron. I used to carry some phosphorous rounds, but an unfortunate incident with a roadside fireworks stand forced my move into less incendiary rounds. I walked through the den, gearing up as I went. My Buck hunting knife went on my right hip. My Judge revolver loader with four-ten shotgun shells full of blessed silver and Holy Water-imbued rock salt went into a pancake holster at the small of my back.

  “You expecting trouble?” Amy asked from where she stood by the sliding glass door. She looked like something out of a movie—a good movie, not the stupid action flicks I usually watch. The orange sunset made her hair look like something on fire, and the silhouette of her in the doorway made me want to pick her up and carry her away to somewhere people still believed monsters were just stories and that humans were the worst monsters out there.

  “Nah, I thought I’d roll kinda light on this one.” I wasn’t kidding. Just two guns and one knife was pretty light for me.

  Joe didn’t bother knocking, and the look on his face made me rethink my position on heavy artillery. He ran up onto my front porch, flung open the door, and paused when he saw me standing in the den.

  “What are you doing here?” he asked.

  “I live here, Joe. What are you doing here?” I couldn’t resist.

  “You didn’t answer your phone.”

  “I didn’t feel like killing anything today, so I shot the phone.”

  “You should have answered the phone,” Joe said, and the look in is eyes told me it was serious.

  “Well, you’re here now, so why don’t you just tell me what’s up?”

  “It’s Aunt Marion,” Joe said. Aunt Marion was actually my great-aunt, who lived up on the hill.

  “What about her?”

  “She called 911 a little while ago and said that a pack of wild dogs was surrounding her house and tearing up her vegetable garden. Sheriff Alston was gonna send a couple guys up there, but I convinced him to let us handle it.”

  “How’d you hear about it? Alston got you on speed dial all of a sudden?”

  “No, Miss Marion called Skeeter when you wouldn’t answer the phone, then Skeeter called me, and I called the Sheriff to keep him from having to replace deputies.”

  Shit. Now I really felt like an asshole. If anything happened to that old lady because I was screwing around, I’d never forgive myself. Or more like I’d never forgive Jason because there was no question in my mind who was responsible for the “pack of dogs” surrounding my aunt’s house.

  I was out the door and halfway down the steps when I realized that I’d left my keys on the counter. I gave a little shrug and hopped onto Joe’s motorcycle. His helmet was sitting on the seat, but I tossed it into a flowerbed and kicked gravel up in an arc as I cranked the cycle to life and sped off down the driveway to Aunt Marion’s house.

  *****

  Aunt Marion lived almost at the top of the mountain, way back at the last pole in the power and phone line. She didn’t even have a phone until the 1980s when the county rolle
d out 911 service, and she told them folks in no uncertain terms that she was an old lady that had been paying taxes in this county for all her adult life and there was no way in hell that she wasn’t going to get the same level of emergency, fire, and medical care as them newcomers down in the valley. There was a crew on the mountain running wire the next week.

  Other than the telephone/power pole off to the side of the house and the wires running into the building, the place was unchanged from when Great-Grandpappy Beauregard and Aunt Octavia lived there back at the turn of the century. The twentieth century, that is. The house was your basic one-story log and mud construction with a big porch running all across the front and down one side. An old Chevy C-100 pickup circa 1955 sat in the front yard with a three-legged cat sitting on the roof of the cab and a greying basset hound asleep on the ground under the back wheels. I slid the bike a little sideways parking next to the truck, and the cat hissed at me and jumped down into the truck bed to get away from the dust I kicked up. I ignored it. I’ve always hated that cat.

  I drew Bertha and slammed home a magazine of silver bullets as I hopped off the bike and started off to the right-hand side of the porch, keeping the gun down low and ducking a little to keep my head below the line of the windows. “It’s me, Aunt Marion, don’t shoot!” I hollered.

  “You wouldn’t answer your phone, Robbie!” she yelled back from a window by the front door. Unless Aunt Marion had renovated recently, which I found highly unlikely, that window was in the front room right by a coat rack. I bet she was tracking my every move with Uncle Billy’s old twelve-gauge.

  “I’m sorry about that, Aunt Marion. Now put the shotgun down, I’m coming up on the porch.”

  “Any dogs out there?”

  I looked around. The only things in the yard were me and that damn cat. “Nope, no dogs out here. I reckon you ran ‘em off.”

  “I reckon I sure as hell did. I put a load of silver birdshot in one o’ them bitches and you shoulda heard the yellin’. You’da thought I was killing her.”

  “Probably felt like it. Birdshot ain’t no joke, Aunt Marion.” I opened the door and stepped inside. I pulled the door closed behind me and shot the deadbolt home. It probably wouldn’t stop a werewolf, but it did go three inches into a metal frame, so it wasn’t bad as far as doors go.

  “Birdshot hell, Robbie. You and I both know it was the silver that furry bitch couldn’t stand.” Aunt Marion stood up and shuffled over to give me a hug. She was a wizened little woman, less than five and a half feet tall in her prime. I’d be surprised if she topped five feet now. Her face had that run of lines that looked like some kind of woodcarving, and her hair flew around her head in an unruly lavender-tinged halo. I hugged her gently, feeling the shoulder blades sticking out from her back under my hands. Marion Octavia McFadden was pushing ninety, and I was always scared hugging her, ever since middle school when I broke a dude’s hand giving him a high-five.

  She shuffled into the living room and sat down in her old wooden rocker. She leaned the shotgun against a heavy oak end table with cigarette burns in the finish and picked up a cup of tea. “I was having my evening tea when those damn mutts started sniffing around. I bet it’s done gone cold.” She took a sip. “I was right. Here, Robbie, go heat this in microwave for me.”

  I never even argued, just stood up and walked to the kitchen, put the teacup in the microwave for ten seconds, then brought it back. I sat in an overstuffed armchair that looked like it had lost one too many fights with Marion’s crazy cat. Marion sipped her tea for a long minute until I cleared my throat.

  “What do you want, Robbie? Do you want some tea of your own? I’m sorry, you’ll have to fix it yourself. I wasn’t expecting company, so I only made the one cup. Besides, I’m almost out of whiskey, and I don’t feel like sharing.” I probably forgot to mention that Aunt Marion only ever drinks coffee or tea with a solid slug of whiskey in it.

  “No ma’am, I was just hoping you could tell me more about the dogs that attacked you this afternoon?”

  “Don’t you mean werewolves, Robbie?”

  I didn’t respond, just sat there gaping at her. In all my life, Aunt Marion had never given much indication that she knew what was going on when the menfolk of the family went out hunting for days at a time. I know I never said anything to her, and Pop didn’t, and Grandpappy sure as hell didn’t. He was so closemouthed he once went a month without speaking a complete sentence.

  “Close your mouth, Robbie. I’ve always known our big family ‘secret.’ Good lord, son, look at who my mother was! She was with Beauregard when he first started out hunting, so there was no keeping anything from her, and I was an inquisitive child, so there no keeping anything from me. She decided to be totally honest with me as soon as she found me sharpening my own stakes at the age of seven. I even used to ride with Daddy and your grandfather when we were children. Sometimes Octavia would come along with us, although she was already an old woman in those days. Not old like I am now, but old enough.”

  “So you know,” I said. “Then you know who’s behind it.” Jason, my younger brother, was building an army of supernatural creatures to forcibly pull the rest of the things that go bump in the night out into the light. I don’t know why he couldn’t see that the fight was unwinnable for him. Human beings breed at the drop of a hat. Weres and other supernatural creatures mate for life and breed once if they’re extremely lucky. The sheer numbers of it doesn’t work for the boy, but math was never his strong suit.

  “Yes, I know it’s your jackass little brother. But what did he want from me? Why is he harassing an old woman? Shouldn’t he be down the mountain beating your ass again?” Aunt Marion reminded me oh-so-gently of the last time Jason and I tangled, when he took my own sword and stabbed me right through my sizable gut with it.

  “I don’t know, Aunt Marion. Did he say anything?”

  “I don’t think he was here. It looked like another wolf was in charge. It was a big mottled grey thing. Looked mean as hell.”

  “And they came as wolves? They didn’t travel as people and shift when you wouldn’t give them what they wanted?”

  “No, you dumbass, ain’t you been listening? They never told me nothing about what they wanted, just showed up on all fours and started scratching at the doors.” Aunt Marion’s tea wasn’t working fast enough to calm her nerves.

  I stood up and headed for the door.

  “Where you going?” Marion asked from her chair. I heard just the slightest tinkle of rattling china and knew that no matter how tough she was, the old bird was scared now that the adrenaline was wearing off.

  “I’m gonna go see if they left a clue, or a message, or anything that would tell us why they were after you. Don’t worry, Aunt Marion. I won’t let anything come after you again.” I looked at her, this tough mountain woman now a shrunken husk, sitting in her rocking chair with a quilt on her legs because the circulation in her feet was gone, a teacup half full of whiskey rattling on the saucer, and I hoped I was telling the truth.

  I walked out on the porch and flicked on my Bluetooth earpiece. “You there, Skeet?” I said to the air.

  “Yeah, we’re here,” Skeeter’s reply came in my ear.

  “We?” I asked.

  “Joe and I are here with Skeeter.” Amy’s voice came across like she was sitting right next to me. Which I wished she was, of course, but it was a lot safer for her and Uncle Father Joe to be holed up in Skeeter’s Fortress of Nerditude. Jason hadn’t managed to get in there after him last time, and we’d beefed up security since then.

  “Good, that means y’all are safe. What do we know, Skeeter?” I slipped on a pair of specially rigged shooting glasses with a tiny camera and transmitter in the frame, so everybody could see what I was seeing. Which right now was a whole bunch of nothing.

  “We don’t know shit, Bubba. We got no video of them coming up the road, no sensors in the woods have been tripped, we’ve heard nothing unusual out of any of our contacts in the superna
tural world. Nothing.”

  “They didn’t come up the road,” I said. “Aunt Marion says they were full-on wolf the whole time they were here. So they came through the woods. But nobody gave us a heads up?”

  “No, and none of my tech shows anything, either.”

  “That means—”

  “Either that somebody found our moles and killed them and found our tech and disabled it, or they got exceptionally lucky.” Skeeter cut me off.

  “Nobody’s that lucky,” Amy said, and I could see her chewing on a thumbnail, her brow furrowed in a way that’s almost cute, or it would be except for the fact that when she comes out of her pensive pose, it’s usually guns blazing.

  “I found something,” I said, more to direct their attention to the screen than because I thought they’d miss it. I hopped off the porch over to the right side of the house and stepped over a low picket fence that was smashed flat to the grass. This patch of ground had been surrounded by that two-foot white picket fence my whole life, and to see those white stakes muddy and scattered pissed me off as much as Jason running three feet of steel through my gut. I mean, I was still pretty pissed about the stabbing, but wrecking Aunt Marion’s fence and defacing the family plot was something else entirely.

  “What is that, Bubba? It looks like . . .” Amy’s voice trailed off.

  “We’re up in the mountains, darlin’, it’s exactly what you think it is—a graveyard. This is where a couple generations of my family are buried. Back when it was too hard to come off the mountain in winter, or when we were on the outs with one church or another, this is the family burial plot.” It was maybe thirty yards on a side, not a very big plot, but Marion kept it real nice. She mowed and either used a weed eater or, more likely, got down on her hands and knees and pulled the weeds around the headstones.

  I saw Great-Grandpappy Beauregard’s stone, with his wife Vera next to him and their oldest son Richard. Grandpappy was buried down in the Baptist cemetery, like most of our people had been for the last fifty years or so, but there were a few graves in this little patch stretching back to Great-Great-Uncle Dargin, who fought for the Yankees in the War of Northern Aggression, what a fair number of people on this mountain still call the Civil War. I was a little surprised when I found his stone there, but Pop explained it best. He looked at Uncle Dargin’s stone, shook his head and said, “You can’t choose your family, son.”