Monster Hunter Vendetta
[Monster Hunter 02]
By
Larry Correia
Chapter 1
"When monsters have nightmares, they're dreaming about us."
-MHI Company Handbook
It was less than a year ago that the illusion shattered and I got my welcome to the real world. Up until that point I considered myself perfectly average, living a normal life, with a regular career. That all changed the night my accounting supervisor turned into a werewolf and tried to eat me. Now there are basically two ways to deal with such a problem. Most people confronted with something so hideously impossible tend to curl up into the fetal position and die. On the other hand, those of us destined to become Monster Hunters simply take care of business. He almost ended my life but I tossed him out a fourteenth-story window. He died, I didn't. That makes me the winner.
After that initial encounter I was approached with a job offer. Apparently survivors like me aren't that common, and as a result killing a monster is a real résumé builder. I was recruited by Monster Hunter International, the premier eradication company in the business. We protect mankind from the unnatural forces that come crawling out from our darkest nightmares, and in return, we get paid the big bucks.
It wasn't that long after I started my new job that MHI came up against an unfathomable evil from the past. It took everything we had to survive, but in the end, the Cursed One was defeated and I literally saved the world.
I was employee of the month.
The biggest chupacabra in the pack was only four feet tall, but what they lacked in mass, they made up for in sheer ferocity. Being unable to get to their dinner was making them even surlier than usual. The peasant girl had been futilely tinkering with the engine of her broken-down Chevy Vega when the first chupacabra had come sniffing onto the jungle road. Her screams at seeing the little demon-lizard-insect thing hop down the dirt lane like a demented miniature kangaroo had driven it into a frenzy, and she had barely managed to dive into the car ahead of its snapping jaws. Her continued cries from behind the locked doors of the old rust bucket had attracted the rest of the pack, and now there were a dozen of the creatures clambering on the car.
Chupacabras do not normally attack people. The puncture tubes that jut from their mouths could pierce a human skull like a screwdriver through a milk jug, but instinctively they stick to preying on small animals. Once a chupacabra pack has tasted human blood, however, they absolutely will not stop, and killings become more and more frequent. From what I have seen in this business, people must be either extremely tasty, or addictive, like monster crack.
The creatures were scratching and clawing at the car's windows and roof. The girl just kept on screaming. She had a remarkably good set of lungs for this kind of thing, which is why we'd picked her. Her cries spurred the monsters on, and they all began to shriek as well, echoing across the dark jungle canopy for miles.
The four-footer jumping up and down on the hood of the Vega was pissed. It had to be the pack's alpha male, and it couldn't figure out why the glass wasn't breaking. I watched it carefully through the night-vision monocular.
"I think he suspects something," Trip Jones whispered.
I nodded. They might be clever for creatures with brains the size of tangerines, but the goat-suckers had never run into bulletproof glass before. Finally the alpha hopped off the car and scurried over to the side of the road. I almost keyed my radio, but he hesitated there, looking for something, and came up with a rock. He crawled back on the hood, raised the rock, and started banging away at the windshield. The others cheered and hooted him on.
"Hey, I didn't know suckers knew how to use tools," Milo Anderson said over the radio. He was positioned on the other side of the road. All of us were wearing ghillie suits over our body armor and had been lying in the underbrush being eaten by insects for hours. The foul-smelling grease that we had rubbed on ourselves earlier to hide our smell from the chupacabras' sensitive noses also served as seasoning for the region's bugs.
My radio crackled. "We'll have to update the database," Julie Shackleford replied, the roar of the chopper's engine could be heard behind her. "Tool use…That's fascinating."
Apparently our fake peasant, Holly Newcastle, didn't think it was nearly as fascinating from her position as bait in the front seat of the Vega. The theatrical screaming stopped for a moment. "Uh, guys…" The rest of us could hear the glass cracking in the background. "Guys?"
We had three members of Monster Hunter International hiding in the brush, one in the decoy car, two more on the rapidly approaching attack helicopter, carefully positioned claymores along the roadside, piles of guns, thousands of rounds of ammo, state of the art night-vision and thermal-imaging equipment, a lot of attitude, and a general dislike of evil beasties.
I keyed my microphone.
"Execute."
My name is Owen Zastava Pitt and I kill monsters for a living.
"This is Harbinger," the familiar voice said through the phone, sounding a little groggy. I must have woken him. "What time is it?"
"It's almost midnight here," I answered, which meant that it was like one or two in the morning in Alabama. I was never very good at remembering time zones.
There was a brief pause. "So somebody's either got eaten, or you completed the contract."
"Mission accomplished, chief. Julie's dropping the evidence off at the mayor's office and arranging the funds transfer." The evidence consisted of a burlap sack full of severed chupacabra heads. "It was a big pack. Smoked them all."
"Nice." This had been a lucrative job. The Mexican resort depended on tourism, so when people started getting their organs liquefied and drained, it was bad for business, especially since it was happening during their busy season. It was spring break, after all. "Everybody okay?"
"They're good." Loud music drifted in through the open window of my hotel room. There was a wild party going on around the Olympic-sized pool, populated mostly by American college students engaged in all manner of drunken debauchery. "Looking forward to payday I bet."
"Rush jobs always pay well. How'd the team do?" Earl asked. I knew what he really wanted to ask was how his team did without him. The timing of the mission had just not worked out, as there were very few places that were safe for him during the full moon.
"They were awesome. It was beautiful." Exploding chupacabras were not what most people would find artistic, but I knew Earl would understand. He was after all, the Director of Operations for a company whose mission statement actually read: Evil looms. Cowboy up. Kill it. Get paid.
"Wish I could've been there, but you know how it is. Good work, Z."
That comment made me swell with pride. My boss wasn't known for giving compliments. This had been the first operation that I had been allowed to plan entirely, and it had been a success. Well, I had the very experienced Julie and Milo there to make sure I didn't screw it up, but I had still done pretty damn good. "Thanks, Earl. See you tomorrow."
" 'Night, kid. Tell Julie I love her, and next time, call me in the morning."
I tossed the sat-phone on the bed next to my body armor and weapons. I still needed to clean my guns before I packed them up for the return flight. It had been humid out in the forest, and rust was my enemy. But right now I didn't feel like doing the work, I just wanted to gloat. Picking up my heavy Kevlar suit, I paused to brush some chupacabra juice off the patch stuck on the arm. It was a little green Happy Face with devil horns. Just a simple logo, but for me it represented a lot of hard work. It was MHI's unofficial logo, and the only Hunters who got to wear it were the ones chosen for Harbinger's personal team. I grinned and dropped the armor back on the bed. I'd earned that patch a few times over.