Monster Hunter International (20 page)

"Well, he's foreign. Weird customs, you know, a bit antisocial."

"Right. Nice to meet you, Mister…?

The pilot grumbled something guttural and incomprehensible. It sounded like gibberish to me. I looked to my boss.

"It means Skull Crushing Battle Hand of Fury in his language. We call him Skippy." Harbinger seemed to be enjoying himself. "Saves on time that way."

"I was told he came with the chopper?"

"Kind of. It's a long story. I met him in Uzbekistan. His tribe came from there. MHI is kind of his tribe now. He has himself a little place just outside the compound. Skip here is one hell of a pilot, however, and keeps this bird running great too."

"You have great taste in music, Skippy," I told him slowly. "One of the bands you played, CPKM. My brother plays guitar for them."

"You… are… blood of… Mosh Pitt?" The pilot's voice was very deep, and he seemed to struggle with the unfamiliar words.

"Yes. He's my little brother. I can probably get you some backstage passes when his tour comes through town. I think they're playing Birmingham in September."

He dropped to his knees. I stepped back in surprise. Skippy prostrated himself on the ground and bowed until his balaclava was touching the asphalt. He said something else in his strange language.

"Skip, please, you're making a scene," Harbinger said as he grabbed the pilot's arm and stood him up. The airport manager was watching us through his trailer's mini blinds, and another pilot, putting fuel in his Cessna, stared at us strangely.

"Sorry, Harb Anger… I not know… that big scarface Hunter… how you say… Grzystilikz?"

"What? Royalty? Oh hell no."

"Huh?"

"He thinks you're from a royal family. Uh, equivalent to a great war chief or something like that." He shrugged. "I've never seen Skippy bow to anybody before."

"Wow. Uzbekistan really appreciates their heavy metal. No, Skippy, I'm not royalty. This is America. And I'll still get us some VIP passes, okay?"

"Great honor… great honor on my tribe." The gravel voiced pilot seemed positively giddy.

"All right, let's get in the air. We're burning daylight." Harbinger tossed his duffel bag into the crew compartment. Skippy bowed a final time, not quite as deeply as before, and then he ran for the pilot's compartment. From the horrible noise he made, I think he was trying to sing the chorus from "Hold the Pig Steady." I work with the strangest people.

We spent the next hour flying over the coast around St. Catherine's Island and then to the east of Sapelo Island. We were not having much luck. There were lots of places where a little boat could be landed, and there were a lot of boats in the area as well. But none of the spots we flew over matched the little patch of sand from my dreams.

"It's possible that the boat washed back out to sea. Weather report says the tides have been pretty low the last few days, but you never know."

"I hope not," I replied. Skippy was blasting my brother's CD loud enough to be heard over the rotor. He had one heck of a good sound system installed in this thing. Harbinger kept cringing every time the music got particularly good. There is just no accounting for taste.

"We can either head toward Brunswick or Savannah next. I would guess Brunswick, since it's smaller," Harbinger shouted over the noise, pointing at the map. "They're probably staying away from population centers."

I shook my head in the negative. "In my dream there were a lot of lights nearby. From overhead it was pretty big. I say Savannah."

"Okay, then." He keyed the intercom button. "Skippy, take us north, hug the coast. Stay low. If the ATC hails us, let me know."

"ATC?"

"Air Traffic Control. They have a real airport. Everybody else is shafting us with fines, I don't want to piss off the FAA."

"Does he even have an actual pilot's license?"

"Beats me."

"You can't fly without a license."

"Sure you can… just not officially." He shrugged and went back to looking out the window. And before I worked here, I thought that I had a bad problem with authority. I fit right into this gang of misfits.

The area was beautiful from a hundred feet and a hundred miles an hour. Homes would appear between the dark green trees, only to quickly vanish as we soared past. Miles flashed by, lots of little boats and little beaches, but not the one that we were looking for.

"Ossabaw Island," Harbinger announced.

It was difficult to tell in the daylight. Everything looked different after dark. We flew over the nature preserve, and then turned inland, back toward the intercoastal waterway. There were lots of boats in the area. Most of them appeared to be for shrimping. The chopper ate up ground fast, and we flew low over a historic fort and recreation area, but I still had not seen anything that looked right. More homes began to appear as we neared Savannah.

"Whoa. Have Skippy flip a U-turn."

Harbinger gave the order, and our pilot pulled a maneuver that left me dizzy. I searched again for the spot that had just flashed by. It was a small patch of sand, with deep swampy forest surrounding it.

"Bingo." I pointed at the small white boat. It was still grounded on the sand. "This is it."

The Hind circled the area. There was a single home set back into the trees a few hundred feet from the landing spot. It was a nice home, two stories with an attached garage, a red-shingled roof and a big chimney. It was a gorgeous piece of property. The nearest homes were a considerable distance away.

"Are you sure?"

"Yeah. Damn sure. I can feel it in my bones."

My boss nodded and punched the intercom, cutting off a good drum solo. "Skippy, can you get us down on that beach?"

We approached the boat cautiously. The Hind tore away, heading farther out to sea to hover and wait. It was broad daylight, but after my experience with the wights, I knew that didn't mean squat. I held Jerry Robert's FAL carbine at the low ready. Earl nonchalantly cradled his Thompson.

"They ain't here."

"How do you know?" I asked.

"I can smell vampires," he answered. "Plus birds are singing in the trees. If your ten-foot winged things were here, I don't think there would be birds singing or squirrels playing."

"How do you know? Maybe they really like squirrels?" I kept my weapon pointed toward the boat. Sure enough, it read Antoine-Henri. It was empty.

"More of that slime," Harbinger pointed out. "Same stuff from the shipping container. Your Cursed One was here. Boogery thing, ain't he? I hate monsters that leak all over the place."

There were no visible tracks in the sand. Any sign left by the creatures had been obliterated by wind or surf. The forest was alive with noise and light. Not at all like the night in my dream. It was good to have the final piece of physical evidence washed up here at my feet. This proved that I was not crazy. Well, maybe not that I wasn't crazy since I was standing on a beach with a battle rifle talking about vampires, but at least not certifiable.

"Let's check the house," he said.

"What if somebody's home?" I raised my rifle to accentuate my point. I had a bag of spare magazines slung over my lime green T-shirt. We did look a little odd.

"There's nobody home."

"How do you know?" The house was half a football field away through the trees.

"I don't hear anything. I don't see any lights. It's hotter than hell and the air conditioner isn't running. If they can afford that house, they can afford to run the air conditioner." I had no idea how he could tell that from this distance. From all of my years of being around loud guns and louder rock music, I could barely hear our conversation. "I want to see why this place is special. They turned that ship a couple hundred miles off course to land here, and I want to know why."

There was a small path through the thick vegetation. I tried to move silently over the packed earth, without much luck. I'm not built for stealth. Harbinger moved like a ghost. He held up his hand for us to stop. He quietly pointed at a spot on the house's roof. There had been some damage to the shingles in a few spots, and one of the corners had been broken cleanly, with the rain gutter dangling into the yard. Something heavy had landed on that roof, a few heavy things actually.

The back door was ajar. A muddy pair of boots had been set aside, as well as a fishing pole and a small plastic tackle box. A welcome mat was slightly askew on the porch.

Harbinger entered first. The door creaked on its hinges as he opened it fully. I had never done anything like this before. It was like a scene out of a bad cop movie, except we were private citizens. We were merely breaking and entering.

I leaned in close and cupped my hand over my mouth. "Are you sure nobody is home?"

"Hello! Anybody home?" he shouted. We waited. There was no response. "Happy?"

"I guess."

The back door entered into the kitchen. The interior was uncomfortably warm. My suspicion had been right; this was the home of an affluent person. All of the appliances were top-of-the-line stainless steel, and the counters were made of real marble. There were dried mud footprints on the otherwise spotless floor, several pairs of them.

The living room was much the same. The fine furniture could have been found in any upper-middle-class home in the country. There were dirty footprints running across the thick carpeting, and running up and back down the wide staircase. Huge polished bookcases lined the walls, filled with thousands of books. Most of them appeared to be history books: Ancient American archeology, Meso-American art, mound builders, Native American religion. There were stacks of magazines and scholarly periodicals, Archeology, the Smithsonian, BYU FARMS newsletter. All of them were addressed to their subscriber, Dr. Jonas Turley. I noticed that many of the books had his name on the spine. The doctor was a prolific writer.

We proceeded to the next floor. I began to touch the banister and my companion stopped me. "Don't leave fingerprints." I nodded. We had not been upstairs yet, but already we both knew that this was shortly going to be considered a crime scene by the local authorities. No need for complications.

The door to the master bedroom had been smashed into kindling. As I stepped through the wreckage, my nose was assaulted by the smell of decay and small biting flies buzzed around my head. We had found the Turleys. Tissues break down rapidly in the warm humidity of coastal Georgia.

"Do we need to cut their heads off?" I asked hesitantly. The old couple had been savaged and torn. Blood had coagulated and dried on the sheets. I tried to sound confident to the more experienced Hunter, but desecrating the bodies of old folks in their own bedroom was a lot more wrenching than doing it to a creature that had just tried to take my life.

"No. They're dead. Really dead. They ain't coming back. The vamps didn't bite them, they beat them to death. I wonder why?"

"Maybe they didn't want him coming back. Why this guy? What makes him so special?"

"I don't know. Search the place. Look for papers. Journals. A diary. Find his computer. Anything." The doctor's office had been ransacked. Pieces of ancient North and South American art had been pulled from the walls and smashed. The computer had been pulverized. Papers and books were strewn everywhere. In the far corner a small wall safe had been ripped from the studs, and the door had been torn open. The contents, a stack of fifty-dollar bills and an old.38 special, had not been disturbed.

"This is going to take hours. There's got to be thousands of pages of notes here."

"We don't have hours. We've got company." Harbinger craned his head back and closed his eyes. "Helicopters. Lots of them. Low and fast… Feds. Damn it." He must have had freakishly good hearing. I could not hear anything other than the creaking of the floorboards. "We don't have time to meet with the Hind. No need for Skippy to get dragged into this." He pulled a radio out of his pocket and clicked the transmit button three times. The response came back with two clicks in the affirmative. Our chopper was heading back to the airport.

By the time that we reached the living room even I could hear the drumming of the multiple helicopters. There were at least four UH-60 Blackhawks, and two Apache gunships to provide cover. They surrounded the Turley home and multiple teams of black-clad men rappelled to the ground.

"Wow. Isn't this a bit of overkill?"

"That there is your tax dollars at work. Best throw your guns down in case one of the storm troopers has an itchy trigger finger." He placed his Thompson and his snub-nosed 625 on the loveseat. I carefully put Roberts' FAL and Smith on the couch. We both stepped to the center of the room, away from anything that could be considered dangerous. Harbinger placed his hands on top of his head. That seemed like a good idea so I copied him.

"Should we open the door for them?"

"Nah. The Feds are going to blow it open anyway. Best close your eyes and stick your thumbs in your ears. Open your mouth a little, that will equalize the pressure. This is gonna hurt."

I had no idea what he was talking about, but they proved to be good instructions. Almost simultaneously half of the windows in the house shattered into tinkling glass as flash-bang grenades were tossed in. The concussions were horrendous, the noise was amazing, and I was dazzled even through my closed eyes. Harbinger was laughing.