Age of Heroes (6 page)

It was pure baloney.

There
were
monsters.

And Chase had dedicated himself to eradicating each and every one of them.

Often his investigations turned up nothing whatsoever; the cryptids were genuinely bogus, just local folklore or tourist board flim-flam. Still, he got an episode out of it, airtime filled, no harm done.

Then there were the occasions when he happened upon a real cryptid. Something outside the standard taxonomy. Something anomalous. A throwback to a bygone age.

And he would destroy it.

T
HIS WAS ONE
of those occasions.

His prey was a chupacabra.

For two weeks, Chase had gone to great lengths to disprove the existence of the legendary “goat-sucker”, which had first been spotted in Puerto Rico in the mid-1990s before cropping up elsewhere in the world. A rash of recent sightings by villagers living on the periphery of El Yunque had drawn the
Monster Hunter
team to the region. A couple of goats had turned up dead, their throats torn out, which seemed to put the matter beyond doubt. A chupacabra was once again at large, slaughtering livestock in its trademark fashion. The wounds were large and ragged, so it was impossible to judge whether or not vampirism had taken place, but the goats’ bodies were sufficiently bloodless that it seemed likely.

Chase had got Joey to shoot footage of a feral dog wandering between houses in one village. Through deft editing and use of commentary, it could be implied that the dog, or another like it, was responsible for the goat deaths. It helped that the animal was stricken with mange. Traditionally a chupacabra was hairless, with spikes on head and back. When people as far afield as Maine and Russia thought they had seen one, what they had in fact seen was a disease-ridden hound with patches of spiky, clumpy fur.

Then, for Chase, it had simply been a case of misdirection, keeping his crew keyed up and jumpy in the rainforest after dark, while artfully avoiding places where they stood any real chance of running into the chupacabra.

The three of them – Joey, Ahmed, Mary-Anne – were presently on their way back to Burbank, to start piecing the show together in an editing suite. Chase had elected to stay on in Puerto Rico for another day or so, to “soak up the culture,” he had said. No sooner were they off to the airport, however, than he was back up in El Yunque.

Hunting.

The rainforest, this morning, was all water. Mist hung, streams burbled, leaves dripped. The tree canopy blocked out the sun, but the heat was still tremendous. The air was burning soup. Chase, soaked with sweat, trod through the green, mountainous terrain, stepping over vast rosewood and teak roots and brushing aside giant ferns. A frog screeched shrilly – a five-centimetre-long
coqui
, as loud as it was tiny. A macaw cawed. Hummingbirds shimmered.

Chase could not allow himself to be distracted. There was only one animal he was interested in right now. The rest were just background noise.

The chupacabra’s lair was close; just over the next ridge. Chase slowed his progress. Every footstep counted. Every movement must be steady and careful. Stealth was all.

He climbed the incline, placing his feet with precision in the thick loam, toe to heel, so that he wouldn’t slip.

He recalled a time. The first time. His first ever monster. He remembered how he had journeyed to her home, an abandoned Hittite temple beyond the river Okeanos, which was reputed to be the source of all of Earth’s fresh water, in the region that would come to be known as Mesopotamia. He remembered how he had approached her and her two sisters backwards, guiding himself by the reflection in his shield. He remembered how he had lopped off her snake-haired head with a sickle and stuffed it in a carrying bag, for later use, never once catching its grey, baleful gaze.

Every hunt thereafter had had its moments, its own risks, its own challenges.

But none would ever be quite as terrifying and exhilarating as that first, his victory over the Gorgon Medusa. It had been the moment when he realised his destiny, when he finally understood why he had been born and what he was meant to do with his life. When he stopped being just the bastard son of a god – Zeus, who had impregnated his mother Danae in the form of a shower of gold – and became Perseus, slayer of monsters.

H
E MISSED THAT
sickle. It had been the ideal weapon. A gift from Hermes, its adamantine blade never needed sharpening. Its heft was just right, perfectly balanced in his hand. It cut almost without effort, finding no resistance in the thickest of hide or the densest of bone. He had surrendered it to Odysseus as part of the divine weapons amnesty, the covenant made among the demigods some five centuries BCE. Not a day went by when he didn’t regret that decision, even though it had been for the common good.

The combat knife he used these days was a decent implement, no question. A Kizlyar Voron-3, the preferred hand weapon of Russia’s Spetsnaz special forces. Fixed-blade. Damask steel. Textured grip. Blood groove. It killed, and killed well.

But it wasn’t his sickle.

At last he crested the ridge. Below, in a shallow valley, grew a massive mahogany. Its trunk was split at the base; within this fissure the chupacabra had made its nest. The hollow conical space was the size of a tepee. Nice, cosy and dry.

The beast was waiting for him in there. For all his precaution, it would have heard him coming, scented him. Had Chase simply gone stomping towards it, making no effort to be furtive, it would have bolted. That was how it avoided the tour parties and foraging villagers that strayed onto its home turf. The moment it caught wind of them crashing through the forest, it ran away, returning once they had gone.

With this hunter, the chupacabra sensed that its only chance was concealing itself. Biding its time. Lurking in the darkness of its lair until an opportunity came.

An opportunity to attack.

Chase understood the creature. He understood its desperation. It knew there was no point in fleeing, not from him. Hope of survival lay in sudden, overwhelming force. Do or die. Kill or be killed.

And so it went.

The chupacabra charged. At breakneck speed, it launched itself from the fissure.

It was as ugly as a nightmare. A metre high from paws to haunches, hunched, leathery, brown-grey like a bat, with a stubby muzzle and wide-spaced, tar-black eyes. It snarled as it ran, exposing primary fangs as thick as fingers and a host of splayed secondary fangs like needles, all glistening with slobber. Its claws kicked up sprays of leaf mould. Its spikes were raised, like bristling hackles. Its expression was a concentrated, ferocious scowl.

Chase planted his feet, knife at the ready, braced to meet it.

When it was within striking distance, the chupacabra sprang.

Chase, lightning-quick, ducked.

The beast sailed over his head, but it landed solidly and spun round with barely a pause. Snarling still, it rushed him again. Chase side-stepped and slashed. The chupacabra evaded the knife thrust, twisting like an eel, so that he nicked its flank rather than ripping open its belly. It yipped in pain but was instantly back on the offensive. It wasn’t just operating on fight-or-flight adrenaline now; it was affronted, angry.

Jaws wide, fangs bared, it scuttled in low. Its target was the soft parts, the stomach, the genitals. A crippling bite.

Chase skipped backwards, away, knife to the fore. The chupacabra halted, then feinted. Chase stood his ground. The beast feinted again. He stayed stock still. The chupacabra was trying to learn about him. It wanted to see which way he tended to go when threatened, left or right. Then it could exploit that when it attacked for proper.

Smart little fucker.

A third feint, but Chase sprang a surprise by lunging straight at it. The chupacabra, caught on the hop, felt a powerful hand grab it by the scruff of the neck. Next thing it knew, its head was being pressed into the forest floor. The knife was poised, point downward, above its eye.

It fought back, writhing, legs flailing. A claw raked Chase’s knee.

Son of a bitch!

He recoiled instinctively, letting go of the chupacabra, which in a flash righted itself. Chase had had the upper hand, a perfect kill position. A lucky swipe of the paw had cost him that. Once more, he and the creature were on an equal footing.

The cut in his knee wasn’t deep, but it hurt and hindered movement. The chupacabra went on the attack with renewed ferocity, a rapacious glint in its eye. It had drawn blood, something it never expected to. Perhaps this predator was not as unbeatable as it had first thought.

What followed was a flurry of close-quarter violence. The chupacabra dived, gnawed, danced, leapt. Chase fended, grappled, swerved, retaliated. Together, face to face, they swung about in rough circles. Everything outside of their fight ceased to matter. Monster and demigod vied with all their might for supremacy. Both knew that the struggle would end only when one of them was dead or incapacitated. Both were determined not to be that one.

It was a battle of attrition. Soon the chupacabra was riddled with stab wounds, some of them long scratches, a few penetrating. Chase had lost a chunk of meat from his left forearm and had a couple of lacerating bites on his legs. Blood glistened in the murky green rainforest light. The leaves of various flowering bromeliads around them were spattered with it.

As if by mutual consent, the combatants parted. Exhausted, panting, they eyed each other across a metre of clear ground. The earth between them had been churned up by their feet, as though a small localised hurricane had struck. Loam-dwelling insects, disturbed, exposed, crawled to find shelter.

“Enough,” said Chase. “You know as well as I do what the outcome’s going to be. Let’s get this over with.”

The chupacabra growled in response, saying in its bestial language much the same as he had.

It pawed the ground. Chase tensed, muscles quivering.

Now!

They hurtled at each other simultaneously.

There was a jet of blood, a shriek of pain.

They had passed each other, and Chase crouched, down on one knee, knife held backhand, while the chupacabra stood, head bent, very still. They stayed in this tableau, back to back, for four, five, six seconds...

Then Chase turned his head, and the chupacabra did the same.

They shared a look: plangent, fatalistic, resigned.

The blade of the Voron-3 was coated in blood and little shreds of flesh.

The chupacabra let out what sounded like a sigh, as if it had needed to see the knife to confirm what its body was already telling it.

Then, all at once, its innards tumbled from its unsealed abdomen in a huge, wet, yellow-and-purple clump.

A heartbeat later – a last heartbeat – the creature keeled over, utterly dead.

C
HASE SANK TO
a squat, elbows on thighs, and for quite a long time just stared at the deceased cryptid. The stink of its eviscerated bowels was pungent, almost nauseating, but he was too tired even to think of moving away. He studied the corpse, every hideous inch of it, from pugnacious muzzle to skinny tail tip.

He felt, as he often did in the aftermath of a slaying, both elated and sombre. He wanted to whoop. He wanted to weep.

In the end, sore in a dozen places, clothing tattered and torn, he stirred himself. He rose stiffly and stood over the chupacabra, bowed his head, and offered up a small prayer.

“Zeus, father, this beast’s death I dedicate to you, for your glory, and to you, Hermes and Athena, who guided and aided me in a time of need. My triumph is yours. Hear me on Olympus and know that you are respected and honoured.”

Finishing, he waited. The rainforest echoed with liquid sounds. There was nothing else. No reply. No sign. Not a hint of divine acknowledgement. Silence, only, from the gods.

No great change there, then. Ever since the Age of Heroes passed, the gods had been conspicuous by their absence. They had withdrawn from the Earth, no longer involving themselves in the lives of men. No more intervention. No more interference. Nothing but lofty indifference. They had relinquished all responsibilities and duties. Their secession had been absolute, even to the point of ignoring their own half-human offspring.

Chase shook his head, grin lopsided.

Then, with his knife, he commenced hacking out a shallow grave for the chupacabra.

T
WENTY-FOUR HOURS LATER
, he was aboard a Copa Airlines Boeing 737 travelling from San Juan to Panama City, where he would catch a connecting flight to Buenos Aires and from there a third plane down to Malvinas Argentinas Airport at Ushuaia. He had patched up his wounds with bandages, gauze and antiseptic ointment, given himself a tetanus shot, and bought some super-effective painkillers from a pharmacy. A high dose of codeine and a couple of rum and Cokes from the drinks trolley were making him feel very happy indeed, as far above his aches and pains as the airliner was above the Caribbean.

His thoughts were now fixed firmly on Aeneas, a.k.a. Anthony Peregrine. While hunting the chupacabra, he had not allowed himself to give head-space to anything except finding and killing the creature. Able to relax at last, cushioned in a first-class seat, buzzing on booze and pills, he wondered what he would find when he got to Patagonia.

As Theo had said, Aeneas couldn’t be dead. It wasn’t possible. But if this was him making the transition from one identity to another, ending a life that had outworn its usefulness and embarking on a brand new one, then why was he doing it so publicly, so traceably? Did he reckon, just because he was faking his death in a remote little city at the ass-end of the world, he was more likely to get away with it? Was he hoping some hillbilly Argentinian coroner was simply going to rubber-stamp the cadaver and not perform a proper inquest? Was that the plan? Did he think no one would consult dental records, cross-check with international databases, and do whatever else due diligence required, and spot discrepancies? You couldn’t expect to pull off a trick like that, not in the interconnected, information-rich twenty-first century, where every fact about every person was only a mouse click away.