"You can, um… my name is… Owen. My friends call me Z. Because of my middle name. It starts with a Z. Or whatever works for you. Come in. Please!" Well, so much for smooth.
She smiled and held out her hand. "Julie Shackleford, pleased to meet you." Her grip was strong, with surprisingly callused, working hands. Her handshake sent the message that she was no wimp. Had I found the perfect woman?
Her eyes widened when she saw my face. The scar. It was healing nicely, but I knew that it was still grisly. Once the swelling went down I was left with a massive red strip that evenly halved my forehead, split the bridge of my many times broken nose and ended up on my cheek. It was brutal.
She looked away. "I'm sorry, I didn't mean to stare." She had a small hint of a Southern accent.
"It's no big deal. Just a scratch. Think of it as Harry Potter on steroids," I said, trying to make her feel comfortable. "Come in, grab a seat. You need anything to drink?"
"No thank you," Julie said. Julie… Such a pretty name.
"I'll take a beer," Harbinger growled.
"Sorry, no beer," almost adding that I didn't drink, but not wanting to look like a wuss. The truth was after spending so much time working around drunks, I never touched the stuff.
Harbinger just grunted in disappointment. They both sat down on my thrift store couch. It took me a minute to get my crutch repositioned so that I could move gingerly to a chair. It's hard to impress a pretty girl when you're a big clumsy oaf balancing on a stupid padded aluminum stick. I flopped down and dropped the crutch.
"Feeling better?" Harbinger asked.
"Much. Doctors say I'm healing fast. I got my cast off, and I can start doing upper body exercise again as long as I'm really careful not to push too hard."
"You lift?"
"A little bit," I answered. In truth, before the Incident I had been pushing just over a 400-pound bench press. I didn't look it, but that was the disadvantage of being both tall and stocky. Because of the injuries on my chest and the amount of time off, I knew that it was going to take a while to get up to that weight again.
"Careful you don't hurt yourself. You got banged up good. In fact I've never seen anybody take on a werewolf like that and live. Not without some good silver weapons at least, but tangling hand to hand, that's crazy. You were lucky." He talked about werewolves like it was a common and everyday item of no special interest. Like a normal person would refer to a vacuum cleaner or a toaster.
"Mr. Pitt… Sorry… Owen," Julie started, "what we're about to say may sound a little weird, but after your recent experience you of all people will understand that we're not crazy. Earl and I represent a company called Monster Hunter International."
"Okay. I'm listening." Julie could tell me that she was from the moons of Jupiter and I would give her my full attention. Less weird than that? Piece of cake.
"MHI is a private organization, and we handle monster-related problems. I guess you could say that we are in fact Monster Hunters."
"Sounds reasonable." I smiled. It didn't sound reasonable at all. It sounded wacky as all get out, but if I told a shrink about my Huffman experience I would be in a padded cell inside of fifteen minutes. So I listened.
"As you now are aware, monsters are very real. They're out there, and are a serious threat to the world. Our company specializes in neutralizing monster threats," she said.
"Good money in that?" I asked jokingly.
Harbinger reached inside his jacket, pulled out a plain envelope and tossed it to me. I caught it.
"What's this?"
"There's a federal bounty paid on undesirable unnaturals. It's called the PUFF," Harbinger stated.
"Puff?"
"Perpetual Unearthly Forces Fund," Julie answered. "Teddy Roosevelt started it when he was president. PUFF is a tool for controlling monster populations. It's a big source of income for MHI. We make the rest in contracts set up with various municipalities, organizations, and private individuals with monster problems."
"Go ahead and open it," Harbinger suggested. "The Feds weren't going to tell you about it, but you killed a newly blooded adult werewolf by yourself. That makes you the sole recipient of any bounty for that particular creature. I took the liberty of doing the paperwork for you. I didn't think you would mind."
Inside the envelope was an ordinary-looking check. Sure enough it was from the Department of the Treasury, with PUFF stamped in green ink under their insignia. It was made out to one Owen Zastava Pitt in the amount of $50,000.
I think that the noise I made could best be described as a squeak, only less manly. This could not be real. My job, which I had been fired from so recently, had paid less than that in a year. "You have got to be freaking kidding me!" Fixing Julie with an incredulous look, I did my best to raise a single eyebrow.
"Nope," Julie laughed. She had a beautiful sounding laugh. "That check is totally legit. The bounties change depending on the severity of the monster populations, and the number of human casualties. In this case lycanthrope attacks are at an all-time high, and this particular specimen had already taken a few victims the night before. Now if he had been older, or had eaten more people, then you would be looking at a bigger bounty."
"So you're telling me that the government gives people money for killing werewolves?" I was prepared to take her word for it, but I was definitely going to limp down to the bank and try to deposit this thing as soon as they left.
"Yes, and other types of unnaturals."
"Others? So what else is out there?"
She shrugged. "Lots of things, but I don't want to get too far off of the subject. If you don't agree to our offer then anything I tell you can never be shared with the general public, or the government will arrange for you to have a chainsaw accident or something equally bad, and I'm not kidding about that one bit. They have a strict policy of keeping all of this secret. So before I tell you what else is out there, let me ask you if-"
I cut her off. "Zombies? Are there really zombies?"
"Owen, please, I need to…"
"Yes, there are zombies. A whole bunch of different kinds. Slow ones, fast ones. Nasty bastards," Harbinger said.
"Vampires?"
"Oh yeah. And let me tell you, they ain't the nice charming debonair kind of thing you see on TV, those suckers are meaner than hell. Trust me on this one; pop culture makes them all intellectual and sexy, there ain't nothing sexy about getting your carotid artery ripped out. There're actually a mess of different kinds of undead."
Julie sighed as she gave up on her pitch. I was going to find out what exactly was real, and Harbinger was more than willing to talk. He seemed to be enjoying himself, and also getting a kick out of Julie's discomfort.
"Bigfoot, the Yeti?"
"Yep, but no bounties because they ain't really a problem."
"Chupacabras?"
"Goat suckers. They'll tear you up."
"Giant mutant animals?"
"Sure, but the Japanese have cornered that market."
"Sea monsters?"
"Yes, but only bounties on the evil kind."
"Wow, no kidding? Space aliens?"
"No intelligent little green men, if that's what you're thinking of. If those are out there we haven't ever dealt with them."
"Ghosts?"
"We have a strict policy: we only hunt things that have physical bodies. No physical body, no contract, and no way to collect a bounty either. We stick with things that are flesh and blood, or at least bone, exoskeleton, or slime."
We continued on like that for a few minutes, with me thinking of every creature from every horror movie I had ever seen, and Harbinger letting me know if it was real or not. Every answer he gave was in total seriousness. If he was making any of this crazy monster stuff up, I sure would hate to play a game of poker against him.