“You can’t do that, Bubba.” Joe said. He reached out and put a hand on my shoulder. “No one is responsible for Jason’s action but Jason.”
“I know, but I can’t help thinking if she’d stayed, how different everything would have been.”
I heard Amy’s whispered “Oh no” over the comm and nodded, even though she couldn’t see me.
“Yeah, babe. Templeton is her maiden name. Legally, I reckon she’s still Leila Brabham, and technically, even though she walked out on us almost twenty years ago, she’s still my mother.”
The next thing I remember I was sitting in the cab of the truck talking to Amy over the video comm Skeeter had installed in the dash. “I was sixteen and a truckload of trouble when she walked out. Pop was hunting on a contract for the government, and the last thing he told me before he got in his pickup truck and rolled down the mountain to find and dispatch a pack of were-gators that were making life difficult down in some nameless Alabama swamp was that I was “the man of the house” while he was gone. I think what he wanted was for me to make sure the firewood was split and that there was gas in my car before I parked it at night. What I thought that meant was that I didn’t have to listen to nothing Mama said, because I was too big and too full of myself for anybody to talk to. I was the star offensive and defensive lineman for my high school football team, and I had worked all summer saving up for a ’65 mustang in jet black. I was hot shit on a stick and nobody could tell me any different, including my mother.
I never knew how my parents met, it must have been somewhere out when Pop was hunting, because Mama wasn’t mountain people by any stretch. She was a lot more town than she was country, and I woulda swore she’d never eaten a tomato off the vine before coming to marry my Pop and live in his house. She tried her best to put some kind of culture into me and Jason, and for a while it worked. On Jason, at least. I was always too wild, too big, too hairy, too crazy to be tamed.
It all came to a head while Pop was out of town. Jason came home from school, grabbed his .22 and went out looking for some squirrel. I liked that idea, since we hadn’t had a good squirrel stew in months. Mama objected, on account of Jason not having done his homework yet, and he told her that he since he was going into the family business, the only thing he needed to study was what to kill with silver and what to kill with cold iron. Then he flung the screen door open and stomped down off the porch into the yard. She looked at me like she wanted my help, and all I did was shrug and tell her he was right.
When he came back, she was gone. I sat on the steps with a six-pack of Bud waiting on him, and that was the first time me and Jason drank beer together. I told him how she cried because he didn’t respect her, then she yelled at me and cried because I didn’t respect her, then she hollered about Pop and how she didn’t respect herself. I thought then that she was gonna be all right, because usually when somebody gets a good gut-aching cry on, they don’t feel up to much driving, but she proved me wrong. She packed most of her clothes in a suitcase, threw it in the back seat of an old Chevy Caprice Classic we had, and drove off down the mountain.
I sat on the porch and held my little brother while he cried for his mama, and I held him every night for a week when the dreams came and he ran screaming into my room in the middle of the night. Eventually Pop came home, and by that time me and Jason had figured out the beginning of how to live without her, and Pop had pretty much been living without her ever since he went back out hunting, so it was the three of us until I went off to school. I pretty much got over her leaving by screwing my way through a couple of sororities my freshman year of college, but that kind of therapy just wasn’t in Jason. I reckon he never did get over her leaving, and now he’s brought her here to show her what he’s made of himself.”
“There’s no way this ends well, Bubba,” Amy said.
“We knew that going in,” I replied.
“But this is so much worse. It’s so much more personal…maybe you oughta just leave it alone. Let my team handle it. They’ve trained for something like this, and they can—“
“They can what, Amy?” I cut her off. “They can nuke Athens back to the stone age? Because that’s what it’s gonna take to beat Jason and an army of monsters. This only goes down one of two ways. Either we take care of business from thirty thousand feet with a couple of smart bombs, or we get up close and personal and end this, once and for all. I know which way my vote’s going. What about yours?”
“I’m with you, babe. Whatever you decide, I’m with you. You know the players, and you’ve been in the game a lot longer, so whatever play you call, I’ll run it. I just wanted you to know there was another option.”
“I appreciate it. I can’t tell you how much,” I said.
Just then there was a knock at the window. It was Hank, holding a flyer on neon green paper. I rolled down the window and he stuck it in my hand. “I think this is where it’s all going down,” he said, a little out of breath.
“You okay there, buddy?” I asked.
“I just walked six blocks in Athens in August. I haven’t walked anywhere in probably six years, Bubba. So yeah, I’m a little bit the worse for wear. But I got us this.” He handed me the flyer. “BONFIRE” was acrosss the top, right above the words “In the Magic Courtyard (parking lot C)” with directions and some squiggles about the Dawgs and their opponent, but the important that hit me was the picture. It was a huge bonfire, with wolves and humans dancing around it, and being burned at the stake was a woman, just into her late fifties, with long dark hair and frightened eyes. Jason must have drafted some hellacious artists into his little army, because there was no mistaking my mother’s face. Even after all these years, I recognized her instantly. The first woman I ever loved, the first woman ever to break my heart, and the root of all this pain and suffering.
I read the flyer, then crumpled I up and threw it into the floorboards of the truck. “Tomorrow at midnight. That’s when it goes down.” I said for the benefit of Amy and Skeeter listening in on their electronics.
“So what do we do until then? Try to hunt Jason down and his band of monsters before they can start their party?” Skeeter asked.
“No,” I said. “I’m gonna engage in a time-honored University of Georgia tradition. It’s something we Bulldogs do the nights before the home opener every year. It’s a ritual passed down from seniors to underclassmen for generations, and I’m gonna do my part to uphold it.”
“What are you going to do?” Amy’s voice had a worried tone to it, like she knew she wasn’t going to like the answer. She probably wasn’t.
“I’m going back to the bars downtown and I’m getting stupid drunk. I’ve gotta fight and maybe kill my little brother tomorrow night, but there’s nothing anywhere that says I have to be sober tonight.”
“Be careful,” Amy said. “Remember, you’re not as young as you used to be.”
“What’s the worst that could happen?” I asked. “After all, I’m with a priest and a soccer dad. How much trouble could we get into?”
“When you asked me how much trouble you could get into,” Amy said with a sigh as the guard took the handcuffs off and handed me and envelope containing my personal effects. “I thought you meant it as a rhetorical device, not a personal challenge.”
“I might have been working through some issues last night,” I grumbled.
“And what, if anything, do the two of you have to say for yourselves?” She turned on Father Joe and Hank, who looked pretty good for guys who had just spent the night in a drunk tank, probably for the first time in their lives. Hank had hardly any blood left on his face from his broken nose, and Joe looked just like normal, only a little more wrinkled and with bloody knuckles. I probably looked like I’d taken a header through a plate-glass window onto a sidewalk, but that’s because I had.
“We plead the Fifth,” Joe said. Amy opened her mouth to light into him, but he waved her off. “I am bound not only by the laws of the confessional but also by the Guy Code t
o never speak to any female of what took place last night, particularly not the wife, ex-wife, girlfriend or mother of any of the participants.”
“The sanctity of the confessional does not extend to bar fights,” Amy protested.
“Well it damn well should, as many Irish Catholics as I’ve ministered to,” Joe rebutted.
“What am I going to do with you?” Amy asked.
“Pick up my impounded truck, drive us home, let us sleep for six hours, and then help us start in interspecies war that may destroy the very fabric of humanity. That’s my suggestion, anyway,” I said.
“But can we stop at Denny’s on the way? I could totally go for a Grand Slam right now,” Hank chimed in. I high-fived him, and Amy gave me one of those looks that said “Men” like it was a curse word.
An hour later we walked back into Hank’s house with our bellies full and our hangovers pushed to the side. “What’s it look like, Skeet?” I asked as I sat down behind Skeeter and the wall of computer monitors he had set up on the dining room table.
He clicked his mouse a few times and opened up a satellite view of the bonfire site. It was a parking lot just east of the stadium, and an empty area had been cordoned off in the center. I saw a pile of wood with a 4 x 4 post sticking out of the center, and a few people milling around the site. No hint of Jason in the satellite image, and everything looked basically normal, just a big bonfire setup for the opening game of the season.
“What’s our approach look like?” I asked.
“We’ve got plenty of clear entrances, but the sightlines suck for us. It’s basically a clear field of view for fifty yards in every direction. There are sniper positions available at the top of the stadium, but I get a feeling Jason wants this to be a little more up close and personal.”
“Yeah, that’s my guess, too. I can’t imagine he would go to all this trouble to get me up there just to put a bullet in my head from half a mile away. He could have done that a hundred times in the past year. He wants to look me in the eye when we finish this.”
“And so do you,” Skeeter said. I looked at my best friend. His brows were knit, and his allergies must have been acting up, because there was a lot of moisture in his eyes. He just looked at me for a long moment, then cleared his throat. “We’re really going to finish this, right?”
“One way or another, Skeet. This ends tonight. All the running around, all the bullshit—it’s over after tonight.”
“And we might be, too.”
“Could happen,” I nodded. “If we knew the outcome, wouldn’t be no point in playing the game, would there?” I gave him my best lopsided grin and stood up from the table.
“Don’t get dead, Bubba. I need somebody to look after.”
“I ain’t ready to die yet, Skeeter. I don’t think Heaven’s ready for me, and I’m pretty sure Hell’s scared I’d take over.” I bumped fists with my best friend and went into the spare bedroom where I got horizontal for a few hours.
It was full dark by the time I woke up and I could feel somebody else in the room with me. I didn’t move for a second, just lay still facedown on the mattress enjoying the feel of Amy lightly rubbing her hand across my back.
“I know you’re awake,” she said. “Your breathing changed a minute ago and you went all tense for a second. Then you figured out it was me and relaxed again.”
“And I want to stay relaxed, so I figured I’d just pretend to be asleep a little longer.”
“So we don’t have to talk about it?” Amy asked.
“Talk about what?”
“Talk about what’s coming. Talk about what might happen. Talk about the fact that your psychotic brother has kidnapped your long-lost mother and plans to kill her and you tonight in some crazed plan to take over all the supernatural beings in the Southeastern United States.”
“Yeah, I’m good not talking about that,” I mumbled, face still down in the pillow.
“I’m not.” There was a finality to her voice that I couldn’t avoid.
I rolled over and sat up, leaning against the wall in Hank’s spare bedroom. The wood paneling pressed into my bare back, and I adjusted the pillow behind me. “Okay, let’s talk,” I said. “My brother wants to kill me. That’s pretty screwed up. He’s also a werewolf, which makes it a lot easier for him to succeed with the whole killing me thing, but I’m no slouch in the killing department myself, so I put our chances there at about fifty-fifty. I don’t know how much backup he’s bringing, or what kind of critters he’s using, so that probably puts us at sixty-forty. So there’s a decent chance I won’t get out of this whole, or at all. I don’t want that to be the deal, but it is. I hope I don’t leave you alone after tonight, but this is on the list of things I’ve got to do.”
“I know, and I’m fine with all that. But the elephant in the room isn’t Jason, it’s your mother. What are you going to do about her?”
“I’ll be honest with you, I don’t know. There’s a bunch of feelings all tied up in that, and I can’t really deal with most of them right now. So I’m just pretending that she’s nobody I know, just an innocent bystander that I need to get out of trouble before the bad things get her. Anything else will have to wait until morning to deal with.”
“If there’s a morning,” Amy said.
“Well, if I ain’t around to see it, we’re gonna need your men in black helicopters to come in guns blazing. Because no matter what happens, we can’t have Jason and his bunch of monsters running loose all over Georgia. So whatever calls you need to make—“
“Already done,” she said.
“Fair enough. We got anything else we need to talk about?” I asked. I sat up and pulled on a black t-shirt.
“I’ve just got one more thing to say…”
I put a finger on her lips like I saw some skinny kid do in a chick flick on HBO. “Don’t bother. I love you, too.” Then I leaned in and kissed her like it was the last chance I’d ever get. Because for all I knew, it was.
Half an hour later we were loaded in my truck and headed to the stadium. Joe was in the passenger seat, with Hank in the back seat. They were both packing twelve-gauge Benelli shotguns, with Colt 1911 pistols on their hips. I had Bertha in my shoulder rig, with my Saiga semi-auto shotgun in the back seat by Hank. I had a pair of kukri strapped to my back and the custom-made caestus Amy gave me for Christmas hanging from my belt. Traffic was surprisingly light until we got just outside the stadium gates, then it started to back up. Apparently Jason had passed out a lot more flyers than just the one Hank found, because there were a lot of cars pulling into the lot and dumping Bulldogs fans out to get drunk and rowdy before the big game.
I pulled the truck into an empty spot a little further away from the festivities than most people chose to park, and opened the back door. Hank slid out and handed me a long black leather duster. I slid it on, effectively hiding my knives and Bertha, and clipped the Saiga to my belt so it hung out of sight as well. The three of us looked like rejects from Tombstone or a Motley Crüe video walking through the parking lot in the August swelter wearing head to toe black leather and flack jackets, but I wasn’t going into this fight without every advantage I could muster.
I pressed my earpiece. “Skeeter, you got us?”
“I got you five by five, audio and video. I’ve hacked the security cameras in the parking lot so I can see everything that’s going on. Looks like Jason is waiting on you. So far it’s been all about crushing Georgia Southern and standard football bullshit.”
“Then let’s get this party started. Amy, you ready?”
“I’m in position,” she came in loud and clear. “I hope this works.”
“That makes two of us,” I said.
The crowd parted like the Red Sea as we approached, leaving a ten-foot alley that led up to the pile of wood. Standing on a platform tied to the pole was a woman I never thought I’d see again, my mother. Her dark hair hung limp across her face, plastered across her cheeks with sweat. Her skin was pale, with beads of sweat
dampening her forehead, and her eyes were out of focus. I couldn’t tell from the distance whether she was drugged or if Jason had beaten her senseless. It didn’t matter. I had a war to stop, and the opposing general was standing next to the bonfire with a Zippo in his hand.
“Bubba,” Jason said to me as I approached. “That was a nice trick last week, switching pocket watches on me. I’ll have to give you credit for that one, that was pretty smart. Don’t matter though. I’ve got plenty of friends even without ruling the dead.” He paused for a second and something changed in his eyes. It was almost like he was my little brother again. “You know it don’t have to go down like this.”
“I know,” I replied. “So why don’t you put that lighter in your pocket, untie that woman and go home. Disband your little freak parade, tell everybody the party’s over, and we’ll call it square.”
Jason’s eyes bulged out, and the psycho was back. “Square? We’ll never be square, Bubba. You killed my mate. You murdered Megan in cold blood, you son of a bitch!”
“My memory of it is a little different, bro. My recollection involves her tying to rip my throat out. And besides, who sent her into a fight she couldn’t win, Jason? Who threw her in the deep end when she wasn’t ready? You want to look at who killed your bitch, little brother, you better look in the mirror.”
He lunged at me, but got control of himself. He looked around the assembled crowd, probably a third non-human, and grinned. “How are you gonna fight me, Bubba? I’ve got an army here! I’ve got vampires, ghouls, weres, witches and warlocks, sasquatch and humans. And they’re all gunning for you. What have you got? You’ve got a priest and a snake-man? All the bullets in the world aren’t gonna be enough to save you, unless you brought an army I don’t see.”
“That’s your cue,” I said into my earpiece, and the night erupted in thunder. Forty motorcycles roared to life on the edge of the parking lot and rolled toward us, complete with a West Virginia biker on each and every one. Overhead, a sound like thunder came from every direction and spotlights illuminated the field from a squadron of blacked-out helicopters. Ropes dropped from the choppers and a dozen black-clad body-armored agents of DEMON fast-roped to the ground to stand behind me. Agent Amy Hall dropped her rappelling helmet to the asphalt with a clatter and shook her blonde ponytail free as she loosened her MP5 in its sling and stood next to me. Two dozen black forms flowed over the top of the bleachers and sprinted for where we stood, the clan of Florida vampires I’d met a couple years ago standing side by side with Charleston, West Virginia’s dirtiest biker gang to form a perimeter between Jason’s supernatural allies and the drunken civilians littering the parking lot.
Grits, Guns & Glory - Bubba the Monster Hunter Season 2 Page 35