“I go beat Gerald’s ass and hurt his feelings about this watch. He can’t have it.”
“I told you that, boy. Are you sure you’re kin to me? You don’t seem smart enough.” The old woman laughed as she turned to go into the house. A few minutes later, she came out of the back of the house with her boots on. I gaped at her as she marched right past me and started out the door.
“Where the hell do you think you’re going?” I asked as I grabbed her arm gently and spun her around back into the room.
“I’m going with you, where do you think I’m going?”
“I don’t think you’re going anywhere. I still want you to go to Skeeter’s with Joe and wait for word that those werewolves won’t be bothering you again.”
“I thought we’d done settled this. If you think I ain’t going with you on this scrap, then you got another think coming, boy. What, you think just because I’m old I can’t put a load of silver shot in some mutt’s hind end? Shit, boy, I was shooting big nasties before you were born, and I learned to fight dirty from your Great-Grandpappy himself. So let’s go.”
“I can’t take you with me, Aunt Marion. It’s gonna be dangerous, and I can’t split my attention between the monsters and making sure you don’t get hurt.” I was standing in the doorway now, blocking the spry old woman’s exit.
“Do you think I can’t take of myself?” she asked me, her jaw set at a belligerent angle.
“I’m sure you can handle yourself fine most days, but this ain’t most days. These are real werewolves, and once they know we have the watch, they’ll do anything they can to get it.”
“Then you need all the help you can get,” Marion said. She glared up at me for a minute, then her chin started to quiver. “Please, Robbie. Let me go with you. I know I’m an old woman, and I know I can’t shoot as straight as I used to, or move as quiet, or even make it through a fight by myself. But this is my damn watch and my damn house those dogs tried to come into. So I deserve a little respect in this matter. Let me help you catch them.” Aunt Marion stood there looking up at me, then went on.
“Those young bastards ignored me, Robbie! I shot at ‘em, and they ignored me like I was just so much background noise. I can’t stand that, and that’s what my life’s about now—being ignored. Let me matter, son. Just one more time.”
I looked down in her eyes, and that’s when I saw it. Behind the crows’ feet, behind the lines on her face cut so deep you could lose a finger in there, I saw an echo of the woman she’d been thirty or forty years before. Slight but tough, she wore her auburn hair short to keep it out of the way of her shooting. She was a spitfire, a legit Monster Hunter, but those days were long gone. Now she was an old woman fighting Father Time and asking me to give her one last chance to die gloriously. I closed my eyes and offered up a quick prayer to whoever protects fools and sinners. “Fine, you can come with me. But you do what I say, the instant I say it, understand?”
“Done. Now let’s go whoop some ass!” She let out a holler and ducked under my arm and out the door. I shook my head and followed her, adding “World’s Oldest Sidekick” to my list of strange adventures.
*****
It was the darkest part of the night when we rolled up on the McFadden place. It was laid out a lot like our old home place, but everything looked just a little bit different, just a tiny bit cleaner and newer. The McFaddens had always had a little bit of money, while my folks were usually one step away from dirt farming. Hunting down monsters was spiritually satisfying but didn’t pay for shit, and it wasn’t until Joe and I came to an agreement that any of us managed to live in anything resembling comfort.
I pulled the truck right up to the front porch and got out, slamming my door and not giving a shit about noise. Anything with even human hearing knew Joe’s motorcycle was coming half a mile away, so there was no point in trying to be subtle. Besides, I suck at subtle.
There was a pack of wolves lounging around the porch in a mix of human and lupine shapes and mix of levels of dress. I’ve learned through the years that when you grow a coat of fur at will, you don’t care a whole lot about clothes, but judging from the gasp when she stepped off the running board of the truck, Aunt Marion hadn’t been around a whole bunch of naked werewolves before. I gave about half a second’s thought to her purer instincts, then decided it was her idea to come along, so the sight of a random pecker or two wouldn’t kill her.
Sitting in a rocking chair on the porch was what I assumed to be Jason’s latest bitch, a tall good-looking were with long black hair hanging loose down over one breast. She wore a pair of cutoff jean shorts, cut almost high enough to see her grooming habits, a scowl, and nothing else. She stood up as I approached the porch, moving in that liquid way that wolves have, like there’s an extra joint to their hips or something. She flowed down the steps and stood in front of the house, arms crossed over her chest.
“Good, you brought our talisman. Now we don’t have to go digging up the old woman’s bone garden anymore.”
“You set foot or paw on my property again, I’ll blow it off,” Marion said from where she stopped next to me. She aimed the shotgun at the wolf and I pushed the barrel down with one hand.
“I’m here to give y’all a chance to go home alive. You leave now and tell my idiot brother to stop all this nonsense and nobody has to die tonight.” I drew Bertha from my shoulder holster and pulled the hammer back. I always rolled with one in the pipe, so once I flicked the safety off, it was party time.
“What if we want somebody to die tonight? Somebody else, that is.” A burly he-wolf stepped down off the porch and gestured to a pile of clothes and bloody meat lying in the dirt next to the steps. If I squinted just right, I could almost make it out as human remains. I reckon that’s Gerald McFadden. Oh well, you lie down with dogs, sometimes you don’t get up with fleas. Sometimes you don’t get up at all.
“What if we want a couple of somebodies to die tonight? What then, big man? What you gonna do then?” The wolf continued playing the Alpha and stepped up into my personal space. I pegged him as a middle of the pack runner trying to make some bones with the boss’s old lady, maybe even make a play for her while Jason wasn’t around. He didn’t really worry me much, but the growls starting to percolate from the other six or seven wolves around the house were a little bit of a concern.
“You care about this asshole?” I asked the woman.
“You care what I care about?” she asked me.
“I figure if you ain’t Jason’s bitch, you’re at least the Alpha female, and that’s some status. So if you like him, he gets one pass for getting this close.”
“And if I don’t?”
“Give the word.”
The wolf who stepped up on me, who I named Dipshit in my head, picked that time to make a grievous tactical error—he got his masculinity hurt. In a wolf pack, there’s an Alpha, then there’s his bitch. Wolves usually mate for life, and I’d killed Jason’s bitch some months back, so I didn’t know if this woman was really his mate or just filling the role of his Alpha female. Either way, she had a lot more status in the pack than some random male, no matter how big or brave or stupid he was. Well, this particular male was big and brave and stupid, which is a dangerous combination. He decided to open his mouth at just the wrong time.
“You talk to me, boy. I don’t need no bitch to fight my battles for me. I’m a man. Better than that, I’m a goddamn were, and you got something to say about me, you say it to me, not to some bitch who just happens to be warming the bed of my Alpha.”
I looked past him to the woman, who turned her back on him and walked back up the steps and sat back in the wooden rocking chair. That answers that.
“You want me to talk to you?” I looked down into Dipshit’s eyes. They were brown, shot through with the normal were-yellow, but also tinged with red. He was drunk or high, or both. Didn’t matter, weres metabolized so fast he’d be stone sober in another five minutes. I planned on him being dead by then.
I never did find out what I was a piece of, since that’s the moment I pressed Bertha’s barrel to his forehead and pulled the trigger. A silver hollow point with a wax tip over a holy water reservoir spat out of the barrel of the big fifty-caliber pistol and turned his head into a grotesque soup bowl in half a second. His eyes never even registered that he was dead; he just dropped to the dirt with that same stupid look on his face. One down, seven to go.
I stepped across Dipshit’s dead body and raised my fist to the heavens. “This is Bertha. She is a Desert Eagle fifty-caliber pistol loaded with silver bullets. If you think for a second that I won’t put one of these bullets in each and every one of your dumb asses, then I direct your attention to Dipshit here, who also thought he was invincible.” I waved with my free hand at the corpse lying in the dirt emitting all sorts of foul smells and sounds as its muscles went through the final relaxation.
“Now I know my brother sent you here looking for something, and I have it.” I held Uncle Billy’s watch high so the gold glinted in the little slivers of cold moonlight that made it through the trees. “If you want it, you’re gonna have to kill an old woman, a priest, and the meanest son of a bitch you’ve ever met. If any of y’all wants to run now, I’d suggest it. I won’t even shoot you in the back. But if you’re still here when I count three, I’m gonna start killing things. And when I start, I ain’t gonna stop until there ain’t nothing alive in this yard but that mangy blue tick hound dog and my people. Do I make myself clear?”
“Crystal,” the wolf-woman said, standing up and dropping her shorts to the porch. Magic flowed over her and she shifted into a half-human, half-wolf transitional beast with muscles to make Arnold jealous in his prime and claws that looked designed by God himself to rip the guts out of a man and scatter them across a mountaintop.
“One,” I counted. I held Bertha high, ignoring the half-transformed werewolf ten feet in front of me. Nothing moved on the mountain. Even the cicadas were still, like that second before the first big lightning bolt strikes the ground and half an inch of rain comes down in ten minutes.
“Two.” One young wolf near the end of the porch hopped up and ran for the woods. She looked like she’d just had a litter, so I didn’t blame her. Six to go.
“Three.” I didn’t let the echo of the word fade, just brought Bertha down and put two in the chest of a charging were. Five. I heard Aunt Marion’s twelve-gauge bark beside me and saw a fully transformed wolf go down sideways off to my right. Four. Uncle Father Joe jumped into the bed of the truck with a bolt-action Winchester 700 and put a .308 round through the eye of a half-shifted were coming at him over on my left side. Three.
That was all the easy ones, though. I didn’t have any time to spare for Joe or Marion because the Alpha bitch was on me, and in her transitional state, she was seven feet of muscle, claws, and fangs. She dropped a shoulder as she came at me, and Bertha flew out of my hand while my breath flew out of my lungs. I sprawled backward across the front yard, little bits of gravel digging into my ass as the bitch and I scrabbled backwards and rolled over a couple of times trying to find an advantage. The smell of her fur filled my nose, and I got one elbow under myself and flipped us over, shoving one knee into her gut and getting a little separation. I came up to my knees and one hand as she spun around to face me.
Claws filled my vision as I jerked my head back, barely saving my eyesight. A line of pain flashed across my face, and I felt blood bloom from the bridge of my nose where she tagged me. Another paw came down at my face, but I made sure my face was somewhere else. I reached behind me to the waistband of my jeans and pulled my Judge revolver. I brought the pistol to bear on her chest, but she lashed out with a foot and kicked me in the chest before I could squeeze the trigger. I heard a BOOM from behind my head and felt the warm spray of blood splash across the back of my neck. I spared a glance behind me and saw the were that was going after Marion fall to the dust, half his face turned to hamburger by the shotgun blast. I guess that leaves two.
I turned my attention back to the were-bitch that was trying to rip my face off, but she was gone. I spun around, the Judge out in front of me tracking my every move. Joe was tussling in the back of the truck with a were in human form, and he seemed to be doing okay. Just to be sure, I spun the barrel in the Judge, selected a forty-five long pistol round, and put a silver bullet between the were’s shoulder blades. He staggered, dropped to his knees, and toppled out of the truck. Joe gave me a shaky nod, then I saw his eyes go wide as they looked past my left shoulder. Oh shit, Aunt Marion.
I spun around, only to have my worst instincts confirmed. The Alpha had Aunt Marion’s neck in one hand and her shotgun in the other. She tossed the shotgun to the ground and held Marion up, her feet barely touching the ground, as she shifted back into human form. Her human form would have been a lot more pleasant to look at if she weren’t spattered with blood and dirt and scratches from rolling around in the yard with me, but it was still kinda distracting having a naked woman hold your great-aunt by the neck and threaten her.
“Give me the watch or I’ll snap her neck like a twig,” the wolf-woman said.
“Don’t give the bitch the time of day, Robbie,” Aunt Marion said, thrashing in the were’s grip.
“Hold still, old woman, or I’ll kill you and take the watch myself,” the were said. She gave Aunt Marion a shake, and I saw the pain in the old woman’s eyes. She was tough old bird, but she was north of eighty, and even mountain people only have so much steel in their spine. Another rough shake and a whimper escaped Aunt Marion’s lips.
“Hold on, now!” I shouted. “Gimme a second to think.”
“There’s nothing to think about, and no time to give, meatball,” the Alpha said. “You give me that watch right now, or I break your Aunt Marion into a couple of different pieces.”
I stood there, trying to figure out if she was bluffing, but everything in me said she wasn’t. I pulled the golden pocket watch out of my jeans and held it up by the chain. “Fine, fine. Here you go. Take the damn thing, just stop hurting her.”
“Throw it here,” she said, a smile spreading across her cold features. Her green eyes sparkled with glee and she held out her free hand. I tossed the watch across the yard and she caught it one-handed. She held it up to catch what little light there was and let go of Aunt Marion’s neck. The old woman sagged to her feet, then stood up ramrod straight to her full five foot three inches as she slapped the were right full in the face.
The Alpha’s eyes went wide, then narrowed in fury as she half-transformed her right hand into a set of razor-sharp claws, which she then used to rip Aunt Marion’s throat out and toss it into the dust. The old woman sagged to the dust and gravel of the front yard, her lifeblood spilling out faster than I thought a person could bleed. I ran to her, but the light was already fading from her eyes.
“She hit me,” the were said, her eyes registering shock at her instinctive actions.
“Not like I’m going to,” I said, standing up and getting nose to nose with her.
“I don’t think so, human,” she said, then shoved me backward. I fell onto my butt, and by the time I scrambled to my feet, she had transformed into a wolf and dashed off into the woods, the pocket watch in her teeth.
I turned to Aunt Marion, lying in the yard in a puddle of her own blood. I knelt by her head and picked up her body. There was a wry smile on her face, and I knew that fiery old woman had gone out on her own terms. I held it close to my chest as the last of her life spilled out onto the ground, and when I looked up, Joe was standing there over the both of us.
“You want me to say anything over her?” Joe asked.
“You don’t need to,” I replied. “She was a godly woman. Kept to the Bible and lived a good life. If her ticket ain’t already punched to Heaven, then ain’t nobody going Upstairs.” I laid her body back down and pulled off the tatters of my t-shir
t to cover her face.
“We might need some of Amy’s government connections to keep there from being an autopsy, though,” I said after I pressed the Bluetooth headset transmitter in my ear.
“I’ll take care of it, Bubba,” Amy’s voice came through the headset. “And Bubba?” she said.
“Yeah?”
“I’m sorry.”
“Me too,” I said. “One more thing Jason has to answer for.”
“And now he’s got your Great-Grandpappy’s watch, and he can control the dead,” Amy said.
“Well, funny thing about that,” I said, reaching into my pocket and pulling out a much older, much more battered pocket watch. “They took the watch Pop gave me when I graduated high school. I kept the one Great-Aunt Octavia walked out of that coalmine with. It won’t let me control dead people any more than it would let Jason, but it does make the veil a lot thinner, so I can talk to people a lot easier.”
“So now what?” Joe asked.
“Now we find my brother. He’s got his army assembled, and whatever he’s been planning, he’s ready to pull the trigger. He never would have come after family if there was another way, so we’re coming up on the endgame.”
“Why wouldn’t he mess with family early?” Amy asked. “You know, get the opposition out of the way.”
“Because he knows that family’s my only religion, and once he crosses that line again, it’s for the last time. No, whatever he’s been planning, it’s almost time. We just gotta figure out what and were.”
“And how to stop him,” Joe said.
“Yeah, how to stop him and his army of weres, vampires, sasquatch, and other baddies,” Skeeter’s voice came into my ear.
“We’re gonna be outnumbered, underpowered, and have no real idea what we’re up against until we get right into the middle of the shit,” I said. “This would be a good time to remember vacation plans in Guam.”
“Outnumber, outgunned, and no time for prep?” Amy said through the Bluetooth. “Must be Tuesday. Let’s do this.”
Grits, Guns & Glory - Bubba the Monster Hunter Season 2 Page 32