The door closed behind Mosher. “Sir, look at yourself. We’ve got more important things to worry about. People are dying out there!”
This was not an insurmountable problem. Special Agent Douglas Stark of the Monster Control Bureau was a professional. He would get his Dr. Pepper. Failure was not an option. Stark leaned his SCAR rifle in the corner. Studying the machine, he formulated a plan of attack. Drawing his thick SOG knife, he jammed the point in by the lock and began forcing it in, using it as a pry-bar. They’d just blame the property damage on the werewolves. Stark chuckled at his cleverness.
“Agent Stark? Stark! Are you kidding me?” Exasperated, Mosher slammed his fists down on a table. The noise barely distracted Stark from his important task. “What are we going to do?” A gloved hand landed on Stark’s broad shoulder and spun him around. “Look at me, damn it-”
Stark lost it. He slammed his armored forearm into Mosher’s chest and drove him back across the break room. Mosher crashed haphazardly into the wall. Stark pressed his elbow against Mosher’s throat and the combat knife against his cheek. Mosher’s face turned red as he struggled for air.
There are two distinctly different reports at the end of the mission. In the first, a group of SEALs is ambushed in a rescue attempt, until only two remain, a chief and a new officer on his very first assignment. The officer spends the night hiding in a laundry hamper while the chief goes on a one-man suicide mission to save as many hostages as possible from the amphibian servants of an elder god. Except, that lone warrior didn’t like it when the responding MCB cleanup team unnecessarily torched the uninfected survivors. He caused quite a fuss. That makes the first narrative difficult for official channels to swallow.
“You listen to me, dipshit. I’m not going out there. I’m not getting eggs laid in me.” Stark pushed the knife just enough to break the skin. “And you’re not going out there, either. We stick together. Those are the orders. You hear me, Haven. No eggs!”
On the other hand, story two says that the SEAL team defeated the Deep Ones, but lost most of their men in the process. Afterward, an MCB cleanup team responded in a professional capacity, following regulations to the letter. One of the surviving SEALs acted in a very irrational manner and made unsubstantiated allegations that the MCB killed some uninfected survivors, probably due to post-traumatic stress.
Forcibly retire one. Recruit the other to the MCB. “I won.” Stark smiled broadly. “And I’ll win again, because only the survivors get to file the reports.”
It took Stark a second to realize that it wasn’t Sam Haven he was holding against the wall, they weren’t on a cruise ship, and he couldn’t smell fish. He was strangling Monster Control Bureau Special Agent Gaige Mosher, in a crap town filled with werewolves, and the cold thing pressed against his ear was Mosher’s 10mm Glock 20. Mosher managed to hiss. “Let. Me. Go. Asshole.”
Stark removed his elbow, withdrew the knife, and stepped back. Mosher lifted his pistol in one hand and kept it on Stark. “Easy, Gaige. That’s insubordination.” Stark carefully lowered the knife to his side. “Come on now-”
“Stay back,” Mosher ordered. He put one hand on the doorknob. “You’ve gone insane. I can’t believe this. You’ve cracked under stress.”
Stark laughed. “That’s absurd. I was just messing with you. We’ll work through this together.”
“Bullshit! I’m done with you, Stark. If this is how the MCB works, I’m done with it, too!” Mosher was furious. “I’m done sitting around with my thumb up my ass while people are dying. You chicken-shit, I can’t believe you. We’ve got guns. We’ve got training. We’re supposed to be the heroes. Not janitors. Our duty is to protect this country from monsters.”
He’d be damned if he was going to get yelled at by some corn-fed Iowa junior jar-head. “Don’t you dare lecture me on duty, boy. I was-”
“You’re a bureaucrat. You’re a lazy, washed-up, good-for-nothing hack. You push papers, go to meetings, sign the reports, but you’ve forgotten what the job was!”
“This is the end of your career.”
“Career? You’re still thinking about that? I’m talking about our job. Our job is to be heroes. That’s what I signed up for. Ass-kicking, monster-killing heroes. You can sit here and dick around with your pop machine, I’m going to go do my job.” Careful to keep the Glock on Stark, Mosher opened the door. “See you around, Agent Stark.”
Stark’s eyes flashed to what was standing in the doorway. “Oh shit.”
Mosher frowned. “I’m not falling for that.”
The charred, blackened, twisted form that had been Deputy Joe Buckley rose behind Mosher. The werewolf’s hair had been burned off, exposing thick muscles that cracked and bled as he moved. Ruined lips parted in a snarl of jagged teeth, dripping a slurry of bloody ash. Mosher heard the sound and turned, armor creaking. The agent and the werewolf stood nose to nose.
And then Joe Buckley bit Mosher on the face.
Stark blinked as blood splattered him. Mosher screamed and kicked as Buckley dragged him into the hall. There was a series of loud bangs as Mosher ineffectually fired his pistol. Stark hurried and kicked the door shut, but not before he saw that all of his neatly stacked corpses in the hallway were getting up.
“You suck at this,” Lins told Horst.
“Screw you,” Horst muttered, lacking the energy to argue. Plus, it was taking all his attention to maneuver the Escalade without getting stuck.
“No, really, man. You need to go back to whatever it was you did before, because you’re a really lousy monster hunter.”
They’d gotten lost again. Sure, it was a really small town, but Harbinger had knocked him senseless, maybe even given him a minor concussion, which was making it hard to concentrate, and everything looked the same when it was covered in snow. This was what the stupid GPS was for, but according to it their car was in the middle of a giant blue field.
There was a terrible moan from the back of the Caddy. Horst cringed, wishing she’d just hurry up and die or something. Jo Ann sounded really bad. He hadn’t checked on her for a while, since the last time he’d looked she’d been so puffy and slimy. She probably should’ve died already, but she was hanging on for some reason, being a pain in the ass.
“What if she mutates into one of those giant pelican robots?” Lins asked, risking a glance over his shoulder. The side of his head was swollen and purple from Harbinger’s beating.
“Well, we don’t know what those even are. I figure she’ll either die, or maybe they can fix her. So if she does… mutate…then we collect the PUFF on her, I guess.”
Lins stared at him. “Now that’s some cold shit right there.”
Horst had lost one employee, murdered another, and had another one poisoned. It had been a really tough night. Right then, he’d have collected PUFF on his own mother. “There’s the hospital.”
“Maybe we should just dump her and get out of here,” Lins suggested.
“Who’s cold now?”
“She’s not my girlfriend.”
“Trust me, Larry,” Horst said. His only surviving employee snorted. “There’s a method to my madness.”
“Oh, what’s your brilliant plan now? We’re down to what, two guns? How much silver we got left? Your million-dollar werewolf isn’t even a werewolf. What’re we gonna do now, smart guy?”
Horst smiled. “Remember how I told you it smelled like burned hair when I went in there earlier? That’s because they’d burned a werewolf upstairs. We know Harbinger’s busy, so he probably hasn’t collected it. All that PUFF money, just sitting there…”