Monster Hunter International

Then our door opened. Earl Harbinger and Sam Haven were standing in the hall, both were suited up in full armor, bristling with ammunition and weapons.

"What's the racket?" Harbinger asked.

"Just a bad dream," I answered.

The Director of Operations frowned at me. He had felt the strange sensation as well. "Both of you. Grab your stuff. Get over to the armory and get suited up. We have a mission. Consider the weekend cancelled," Harbinger ordered, as he slung an ancient Thompson submachine gun over his shoulder.

"We have a ship to catch," grunted Sam, while twirling the ends of his mighty mustache. "Think of this as a field trip."

Chapter 7

The small boat rolled on the harsh waves, leaving me with a slightly nauseous and uncomfortable feeling. I held onto the guardrail until my knuckles were white, or at least I'm sure they would have been if I could have seen them through my gloves. I had been uncomfortable since the coast had disappeared. The ocean stretched as far as my eye could see. The sun had risen shortly before we launched, and now cast a golden light over the blue surface. I'm sure that if I wasn't mentally preparing myself to go into battle I might have found it a stunning sight. I had never really been out to sea before, other than brief trips on tourist boats off the California coast. I'm sure some of my father's islander ancestors would have scoffed at that.

There were ten of us Hunters on the small boat, the Brilliant Mistake, which Harbinger had hired to transport us to our target. I did not take the name of the boat as a good omen, but once the captain had been given a large wad of cash, he had assured us that the name was in reference to a favorite song and not to any flaw in his boat's design or crew. I still did not like it either way. It was a rusty, old, creaky thing, but it had been available, and even better, the crew didn't look like the type that talked too much.

We had assembled before midnight at the compound, burdened with all manner of equipment and weaponry. Most of us had been loaded into MHI's cargo plane, an old but serviceable former U.S. Mail carrier. It did not look like much, but it got the job done, and it could haul a ton of gear. Then we had flown first to a small airstrip outside of Atlanta, where we had picked up another team of Hunters, before arriving at our final destination, another small airport on the Georgia coast. The rest had taken the slower, but necessary for this mission, helicopter and rendezvoused with us there while Harbinger was securing us a boat. The team leaders had spent the flight memorizing diagrams e-mailed to us from a French shipyard.

In Georgia we had broken into two groups. The larger group boarded the Brilliant Mistake under cover of darkness and the smaller group took the helicopter. The plan was for the airborne unit to fly over our target to scope it out, and then to drop some of the Hunters onto the ship. That unit would secure a rope ladder for the rest of us to climb up, while the helicopter provided covering fire if necessary. Both vehicles would stay nearby in case we needed a quick escape route.

It sounded simple enough. My job was to do exactly what the smart people told me, and carry lots of extra ammunition.

Trip stood beside me at the railing. Unlike yours truly, he did not appear to be feeling seasick at all, but rather seemed to be enjoying himself. He was descended from Jamaican fishermen, so he must have been more in touch with his ancestors' seafaring genes than I was. I had told him about my dream.

"I still have nightmares. I think most of us do," he told me. I knew that some of the zombies that he had been forced to dispatch had been some of his friends and former students. Something like that is bound to weigh heavy on a man's mind. "Something weird was in the air last night."

"But I heard the instructors' meeting about us. I knew about this mission before they came to get us. Explain that."

He shrugged. "You know how it is when you wake up confused. Your brain chemistry's all screwed up. Your unconscious mind just fills in the blanks as needed. We found out about this right after your dream. Seems like the logical thing to me."

"Seems to me that if you want to be logical, you sure did go into the wrong line of work."

He ignored that. "And six master vampires working together? That isn't supposed to happen either."

"Seven," I corrected him. I couldn't forget about the one in the boat, the sharp-faced one that had so enraged and terrified the Old Man.

"Either way. That has never happened. They're too powerful, and too territorial. According to Harbinger there probably aren't that many Masters in the whole world. Besides, how could you tell they were so powerful? All of them look the same." That much was true. From what we had been taught all vampires looked pretty much human, unless you caught them feeding.

"I don't know how I knew. I just did. And there were huge winged monsters, but I didn't get a good look at them. But the other thing, the thing in the boat. That was the scariest. I mean it was the worst thing I've ever seen." I nervously checked my Remington 870 for the twentieth time. It was still there.

"Quit worrying about your dream, man. We've got real stuff to worry about. Let's put our game faces on." He slugged me in the arm, hard. Damn football players.

Sam Haven had us gather at the rear of the boat for a briefing, away from the ears of the crew, who I was positive were already really curious what the ten strangers in body armor and carrying guns were doing on their boat. Lucky for us, fifteen thousand dollars in cash for one day of work was considered good enough money to put up with all manner of weirdness. Of course it was half up front, the other half after they picked us up. Since we were the waterborne team, Harbinger had placed our former Navy man in charge. Thus Sam was even louder than normal. He and Milo were on the boat with us, and the rest of their team was in the chopper. One of the Newbies, Chuck Mead, a former Army Ranger, was up there as well. He knew how to rappel and that was a handy skill to have for this mission.

"Listen up, folks. Here's the deal." Sam began to brief us as he methodically unloaded, checked each round and reloaded his rifle. The rear of the boat smelled like fish. "A few hours ago we were contacted by the French corporation that owns the freighter. It was destined for the USA carrying an extremely valuable cargo. The freighter lost contact a week ago in the Atlantic. The last transmissions indicated some sort of supernatural problem."

"What did they say?" asked one of the Hunters out of Atlanta, whom I had not met.

"Unknown. Mostly gibberish. They did say monsters, but they didn't say what kinds. But this was an experienced crew so it is doubtful if they did something stupid." Sam's personal weapon was a very strange choice. It was a Marlin.45-70 lever action carbine. Very slow to reload. Low capacity. Slow rate of fire. But as he had pointed out while boarding, the 450-grain hard-cast bullets he was shooting could go through a buffalo longways. That was no small comfort, just in case the freighter had been taken over by militant evil bison.

"What's the ship's name?" someone asked.

Sam shrugged. "Something French. Hell if I know."

"Why did they contact us? The frogs hate hiring American Hunters." That was from the man named Boone. He was the leader of the other team, and from what I had seen so far, he was a serious professional. According to what I had heard on the trip, he had recently gotten off of active duty with the Army Special Forces in Afghanistan, and had been eager to get back into hunting when the company reopened. Boone was a lean and good-natured guy, and his team was ready to follow his lead into anything. I took that as a good sign. He had a stubby Russian Krinkov slung from his chest, and apparently his team's logo was a mini-lop bunny armed with a switchblade.

"We weren't their first choice. The day after they lost contact a French team was dispatched to intercept. They flew out to the freighter, and their last transmission indicated that they'd landed and were starting to clear the ship. They haven't been heard from since."

"Well, that's great," Boone said.

"Wait, it gets better," Milo Anderson interjected. "Jean Darné was the leader of the French team."

Several of the experienced Hunters began to mutter. Boone swore.

"Who is this Dar Nay guy? And why is that bad?" I asked.

"He was the best that they had. Probably the best team lead in Europe. You know they didn't do anything sloppy. Whatever is on that boat is serious," said one of the experienced Hunters, a South African immigrant named Priest.

"So we're going in hard and fast." Sam worked the lever on his Marlin and chambered a round. "Since we don't know what's on that freighter we're coming ready for anything. Everybody is armed with something that shoots silver, even if it is just your handgun. We have every specialty round for the shotguns that we can think of. Big fifties. RPGs, flamethrowers, thermite, C4, and I even have a chainsaw around here somewhere. The Hind will stay airborne and provide covering fire if we need to bail out."

"Mission parameters?" Boone asked.

"Don't hurt the cargo. Cargo is boxed in the hold. Apparently it's priceless art or some shit. So no bullet holes or fire in the hold. Rest of the ship is open game. If we can save any crew or the French Hunters, do it. Don't sink the ship."

"What's the contract worth?" Boone again.

"Julie negotiated it, so of course it's a good deal. We got a million up front. If the cargo is unharmed then MHI gets another 3.5 mil. The more the cargo is damaged, the less we get. If we sink the ship then we don't get nothing. So let's not sink the ship."

We continued to cover details. There had been thirty crew, a ten-man security detail for the cargo, and a dozen French Hunters. So if we were dealing with an undead infestation we were looking at over fifty potential hostiles, not including whatever started the infection to begin with. The Hunters hazarded guesses about what we could face on the ship, including weird, but not unheard of things like Saughafin, fish-men, or just a plain old giant killer mollusk. As we continued toward our target we tried to iron out details and figure out any potential problems. Luckily for us, radar indicated that the freighter had stopped moving last night, so it must have dropped anchor. At least it would not be steaming toward land any longer, but it also raised the question what exactly had dropped the anchor.

"The freighter was headed for points northward. Two days ago, it turned south and has been paralleling the coast. GPS transponder is still working, so we know right where she is," Sam told us over a spread-out blueprint of the ship. "When we pull alongside, just try not to fall off the ladder. The fall probably won't kill you, but we ain't got time to screw around fishing you out."

Finally we could see the freighter. It was a massive gray construction, with superstructure rising high into the air. It was a beautiful summer morning, but I could not help but feel an ominous shiver when I looked at the otherwise-normal-looking ship. I knew from the briefing that the mammoth ship was just under 600 feet long and displaced over 15,000 tons. Sam had assured us that the ship was not as big as it appeared, since most of the interior was open cargo space, but it was still going to be a beast to search.

Suddenly there was a massive roar as the bulbous helicopter flew low over us and charged the freighter. Wind and salt spray buffeted those of us at the railings. A figure manning a door gun waved at us as they passed. "Show offs!" Milo yelled and waved back.

MHI's helicopter was a surplus MI-24 Hind. Harbinger had picked it up for next to nothing after the collapse of communism. It was possibly the ugliest thing ever designed, but it was considered a flying tank for a reason. Utilitarian in comfort, it was nonetheless reliable and versatile. It was missing its missiles and rocket pods because the Feds would not allow it in the country that way. Instead the pylons had been replaced with storage compartments for gear and extra fuel. It was big enough to carry eight of us, and could carry enough weight and had enough fuel that the entire team could be evacuated on it if necessary, provided we did not mind hanging off of the wing pylons. It was fast, but it lacked maneuverability at low speeds.

In its original communist paint job it had been a strange enough sight that the company had avoided using the Hind during daylight hours over populated areas. A few flights had resulted in calls to the authorities that Red Dawn was happening for real. To combat this, Harbinger had ordered the chopper painted white and red, so now it was usually mistaken for a med-evac or search-and-rescue helicopter instead. They had, however, taken the liberty of painting a huge pair of sharp-toothed jaws around the cockpit. That was a nice touch.

The chopper swept quickly over the freighter, banked hard, and made another pass. It slowed until it was hovering and then lazily rotated over the center of the ship. Sam Haven stood nearby, listening intently into his earpiece. All of us were on the same radio net and could listen along. We had been warned to stay off of the radio unless absolutely necessary, except to check in every five minutes once we were onboard.

Julie Shackleford's voice crackled over the radio. She had been the waving door gunner.

"This is Julie. I see no movement. Deck looks clear. No bodies. No signs of damage. French chopper is still on the pad." We were a small enough group that we just used our names on our secure radio net.

"Chopper One. This is Boat One. Can you see into the bridge? Over." Except for Sam, of course. He did not get to be in charge very often, and was not going to waste his chance to use correct radio jargon.

The Hind gradually changed position until it was directly in front of the superstructure. Julie leaned out the door, secured only by bungee cords clipped to her harness. She mounted her rifle and used the scope to scan the windows.

"Negative, Sam. We have a ghost ship."

"Roger that," the big cowboy radioed back. He nudged Milo in the ribs and gave him a Copenhagen-colored grin. "Did you know my middle name was Roger?"

"Yes, Sam, I know," Milo responded. Great guy, but a little bit of Sam went a long ways.

Harbinger's voice came over the radio next. "Let's do it. Front of the ship is clear. We're going to rope down and set up a perimeter. We'll send down the ladder. Front, left-hand side."

"Chopper One, this is Boat One. It's the prow, damn it. Left is port. The front of the ship is fore and the back is aft. Over," Sam responded in consternation.

"Roger that. Front, left-hand side. Ladder is going to come down near the anchor chain. If nothing comes out to attack us we will throw down a second ladder. Signal us when you're in position," Harbinger radioed back.

"Damn Army pus-nuts."

"Navy dumb-shit," Boone said as he flipped Sam the bird. The cowboy grinned and spit a huge gob of chew on the deck.

Directions were given to the captain and the Brilliant Mistakemotored into position. Orange bumpers were thrown over the side to protect us from the much larger vessel. Luckily for us the ocean was relatively calm, or at least that is what they told me. I was having a hard time standing up without holding onto something. The deck was slick and the steel-gray wall approaching us was intimidating as hell. I was not looking forward to climbing a wet ladder while wearing forty pounds of gear, but it could be a lot worse. The freighter could be moving. The waves could be higher. Sam had told us that before they had a helicopter, they used to board ships by actually climbing up the anchor chain.

"Chopper One, this is Boat One. We will be in position in one minute. Over."

"Roger that. We're heading down."

From the boat we could not see the five Hunters in the Hind as they rappelled to the deck. Gradually our boat bumped its way into position. We waited breathlessly. Nothing could be heard above our own engine, the roar of the chopper beating gravity into submission, and the crashing of waves.

Our only indication of success was when a chain ladder came hurtling toward us, rattling violently as it unrolled down the freighter's hull. Sam lunged forward, grabbed it, and gave it a mighty tug. Nodding in satisfaction, he turned to us and stabbed his finger upward. Milo led the way; he was the best climber of the bunch, since he free climbed mountains for fun. The smaller man grabbed onto the chains and pulled himself up effortlessly. With his long red beard, and bristling with firearms and knives, he reminded me of a pirate. A very mellow pirate, but a pirate nonetheless. Sam went next. Though burly and not as graceful as his predecessor, he had the most experience at this kind of thing, and was still remarkably fast. A second ladder came crashing down, and Boone's team started to clamber up them as well. The Newbies were to go last. Except for Holly Newcastle. She had been given support duty. That meant that she needed to stay on the Brilliant Mistake and send up any of the special gear that ended up being needed that was still on the boat. We would send down a cord and she would tie it to the necessary equipment. She got to stay where it was the safest, and she did not like it one bit. In fact, she had been royally insulted.

"This sucks," she said as I waited my turn at the ladder. I was extremely nervous, but I tried not to let it show.

"It's an important job. Somebody has to do it," I replied. "We don't know what's on this thing, and we can't haul all of this with us. Who knows what might come in handy."

"Blow me, Z," she retorted.

"I'm gonna have to take a rain check on that one. Thanks, though." Conversation was good. Conversation kept me from thinking about what I was going to have to do in about thirty seconds.

"You know what I mean. I should be up there with you guys. I can handle this."

"I know you can. Don't worry. You'll get your chance. Hey, me, Trip and Lee are just guarding the escape route. That isn't very heroic."

"Don't matter. We still get paid!" Trip shouted over the noise. It was his turn. Lee was already halfway up the first ladder. My friend let out a mighty rebel yell-"Yee Haw!"-and started climbing. It was strange to hear a black man shout a Confederate battle cry. Hey, whatever worked.

It was my turn. Lee was almost over the bow. It looked to be at least a twenty-five-foot climb. Dangling from the side of a ship. On a slippery metal ladder. Hanging over the open ocean. Fun. I checked to make sure my 12 gauge was securely slung and that all of the pouches on my load bearing gear were still closed. It was go time.

As I hit the ladder I realized that at that moment I was well and truly beginning my career as a professional Monster Hunter. I was prepared. I had recovered from my previous injuries, and I had been working out harder than I had in years. I was in excellent physical shape. I was scared and nervous, but I was actually looking forward to this. This is it.

I had been the last one up the ladder because I was the heaviest, probably the strongest too, but I had to pull a lot more weight than the others. There is a reason you don't see very many big, muscle-bound guys as mountain climbers. The ladder was as bad as I feared, and it was difficult to get my big boots on top of the narrow rungs without twisting them. A sudden wave crashed against the freighter and splashed cold salt water on my face. I spat it out and kept going. By the time I was halfway up I could feel the muscles in my biceps and calves burning. I passed a small porthole, but it had been blacked out from the inside. I focused on the gray painted hull inches from my face and pulled myself up as fast as I could. Radio banter had started above me as the teams moved into position. They were waiting for me and I wasn't going to let them down.

A huge painted letter A gradually appeared as I made my way up the hull. I froze, blinked hard, gasped, and had to catch myself as I almost fell off the ladder into the waiting ocean below. Stenciled in black block letters directly in front of my face was the name of the ship.

Antoine-Henri.

"Holy shit!" I exclaimed.

I had not been able to see it from the angle of our approach, and when we had been directly under the letters, I had been too preoccupied to notice. It was the same name that had been printed on the little boat of evil in my dream.

Trying not to panic, I keyed my mike. "This is Pitt. I need to talk to Harbinger, right now!"

"Pitt. What's wrong?" crackled the response in my ear.

"We have to get off this ship, fast."

"Why? Say again."

"There are seven Master vampires onboard, some giant flying monsters, and a super-evil armored thing. Or at least there were. I think they might have gone ashore last night."

"How do you know that?" said an amused voice. Grant Jefferson.

"I dreamed it last night. I saw them." I knew that everyone was listening to me.

Somebody laughed at me over the radio net.

"He's panicking on the ladder. Big dummy. Told you guys. Pitt, go sit in the boat," Grant ordered.

"Grant, you stupid son of a bitch, shut up and listen. I saw the name of the ship in my dream. The monsters came ashore in a lifeboat with the name Antoine-Henri painted on it."

The radio net was silent. I hung from the ladder. Twenty feet below, Holly stared up at me incredulously. Five feet above, the Hunters were assembled and either scoffing at me, or hopefully, pondering what I had to say. The stenciled letters on the ghost ship taunted me.

Finally Harbinger's voice came back on. "Pitt, get your ass up here."

I climbed the rest of the way as fast as I could, clambered over the railing and slipped and sprawled onto the gray-painted deck. I leapt to my feet and looked for Harbinger. The Hunters had spread out, using whatever cover was available, and had secured the front of the ship. The Hind roared overhead, tearing at us with wind.

"What's going on?" Harbinger asked. He held a Tommy gun in his hands and there was murder in his eyes. He angrily glared at the chopper and made a whirling motion with his finger. Julie was still in the door, she gave him a thumbs-up, shouted something at the pilot and the chopper backed off enough that we could converse.

"I had a dream last night. I saw you guys talking about this mission. You were picking which Newbies to go. Then I saw a lifeboat land on a little beach by a swamp; the boat had the name Antoine-Henri on it. There were seven Master vampires on board, and some sort of dark evil cloaked thing that was wearing armor. They were taking orders from it. Then it saw us and some winged demon-looking things attacked. I woke up after that."

The Director of Operations studied me carefully. I could not tell what he was thinking. Several of the other Hunters were glancing nervously our way. This episode was costing them valuable daylight. Finally he keyed his neck mike.

"Julie, do another pass around the ship. Check for missing lifeboats."

"Got it, Earl," crackled in my ear. The Hind took off in a burst of speed, nose suddenly down as it headed toward the rear of the freighter. He kept watching me. I readied my 870 and studied the deck. We had thirteen Hunters armed to the teeth, and Julie with a sniper rifle overhead. I did not feel safe at all. Sam and Grant detached themselves from the perimeter and trotted over to join us.

"What the hell is going on?" Grant demanded. His black armor was still polished bright, and somehow not dirtied from the rappel down. His personal weapon was an extremely expensive, customized, suppressed Knights SR25.308 carbine. "We don't have time for this nonsense, Harbinger. Send him back to the boat. Pitt can't handle it and he's freaking out."

"Shut up, Grant," I snapped.

Harbinger held up his hand, cutting us both off. Julie had come back on the radio.

"I don't think there were any lifeboats mounted. Looks like they have inflatable rafts for that." Her voice was distorted with static.

My spirits sank. Grant laughed at me. Harbinger frowned. Sam spit a glob of chew overboard. I suddenly felt very stupid. Maybe it had just been some weird fluke coincidence of my subconscious.

Not a chance.

"You saw me. In your meeting last night. You at least sensed me somehow. I thought something, and it surprised you. I was in the corner of the conference room," I told Harbinger desperately. "Then I was gone, and that's when the monsters landed. When the big one touched the ground, that's when everybody got that weird feeling."

As I have said before, Harbinger was not a man that I would want to play poker with. He did not normally display his emotions, but right now they were as easy to read as the name on the side of this cursed ship. His jaw dropped open, and his eyes widened. That had shocked him.

"How in the hell-"

He was interrupted midsentence as Julie came back on the radio.

"Earl. I take back what I said. Looks like they had a motor launch or something. There is a pulley system rigged near the end of the ship. Looks like it was used to lower or haul something out of the water. It's empty and the cables are dragging in the water, I repeat it is empty and the cables are in the water. There was a boat of some kind, but it is gone."

"Thanks, Julie. Keep your eyes peeled," he responded, took his hand away, thought better of it, and then keyed his mike again. "Boone, get over here. We need to have a little meeting."

Sam clutched his.45-70 warily. "No way, Earl. Seven Masters? That don't sound right. They don't work together. At least they never have."

"Are you guys crazy? The Newbie is full of it. He needs-"

"Grant. Get back on the perimeter," Harbinger stated flatly.

"But I-"

"Go," the Director snapped. Grant angrily complied.

Boone joined us with a worried look. Harbinger gave him a quick rundown. Julie had told me that Harbinger was much older than he looked, but right now he appeared to have aged a decade right in front of us. Boone looked at all of us as if we were crazy.

"So are you supposed to be like a psychic or something?"

"Not that I know of. I'm an accountant."

"We've seen weirder things, Boone," stated Harbinger. "Remember, flexible minds."

"No shit. But this is weird even for us," Boone replied. Then turning towards me, he asked, "All right, big guy, how did you know they were Masters?"

"I don't know. I could just tell. But they worked together, like a military unit."

"Come on, Earl. That's impossible. If vamps worked together, they could have taken over the world by now. It's been twenty years since there was a confirmed report of a Master."

"Closer to thirty. I know. I'm the one that killed it," Harbinger answered. "But Pitt is right on one thing. Something surprised me last night. I couldn't see anything, but there was something in the conference room with us. How else could he have known that?"

The four of us jumped when the radio sprang to life.

"This is Priest. You lot aren't going to believe this, but I've got signs of life. Somebody must have heard us arrive."

"What?" Boone responded.

"Listen, I'm going to put my mike on it. I'm getting this through a duct."

Every Hunter on the ship strained to hear. It was a series of seemingly random clicks, repeated over and over. I did not immediately recognize it. Sam picked it up first.

"Morse code," he translated. "SOS… T R A P P E D space E N G I N E R O O M space D A R N E space SOS."

"Priest, send a message back," Harbinger ordered.

"No can do, chief. Don't know Morse code."

"On it, Earl," Sam responded and hurried off in that direction.

Harbinger got back on the radio. "Okay, folks. Mission parameters have changed. This is now a rescue." He released the mike. "Boone, gather your men. Let's clear this ship!"

"Won't be the first time Americans have saved the French," the Special Forces vet shouted over his shoulder as he ran to rejoin his team.

I waited for my boss to address me. I could not tell what he was thinking.

"Pitt."

"Yes, sir?"

"Cut the 'sir' crap. Can you think of anything else from that dream of yours that might help?"

"Not really. If the dream is right, then the really bad dudes have disembarked. So do you believe me then?"

He did not answer my question directly. Instead he got back on the radio.

"Holly, send up every stake we have. We need to kill us some vampires."

"So is that a yes?" I asked again.

"Come on… We're burning daylight. Nobody's ever killed a Master in the dark."

Chapter 8

Vampires are one of the most dangerous forms of undead-brutal, swift, and smart. No Hunter in the world takes one on lightly. They vary greatly in ability, with the weakest being only super dangerous, while Masters are virtually unstoppable, perfect killing machines. Unluckily for us, anyone who is killed while being fed upon by a vampire could rise as one the next few nights, so we were potentially looking at fifty enraged bloodsuckers on the freighter. Luckily for us, newly created vampires tend to be confused and disoriented. The longer the creature exists, and the more blood that it has fed on, the greater its power would become.

Once again, literature and the movies got the story partially correct. Vampires are creatures of the night. Indirect sunlight can burn them. Direct sunlight will kill them. Their cells can regenerate almost instantly, but a stake through the heart will paralyze their advanced circulatory systems, and shut them down long enough to take their heads off. Even in our line of work there are not too many things that could survive getting their brain housings severed. Holy symbols like crosses and blessed water occasionally have an effect, but are dependent upon the personal faith of the user. Most Hunters opt for violence over faith; we're kind of like soccer fans that way.

I took small comfort from that fact as I hauled a case of fragmentation grenades up from the Brilliant Mistake. They could be destroyed, and we had the means to do it. I grunted as I set the heavy case down on the deck, unclamped the cable, and threw it back over the side. Holly waited below for our next request. Trip and Lee stood nearby, scanning for any threats. We were the security detail. Julie was in the Hind, still on over watch, and the ten other Hunters had broken into two raid teams and were making their way gradually toward the engine room.

"This is Harbinger. Still haven't seen anything."

"Boone's team. All clear. Stay frosty."

We had sent a coded message down the duct. The French Hunter tapped back that most of his team had been taken out by vampires, and they had sealed themselves in a compartment, were out of ammo, and were hiding.

"Newbie team. All clear on top." I cradled my Remington and watched the deck. Nothing was moving except for the French flag flapping in the breeze. Since we were standing in broad daylight, and worried about creatures that burst into flame when they got too much sun, there was not a lot for the Newbie team to do other than keep a sharp eye on nothing. The Hind circled lazily above.

"How come Chuck got to go inside, and we're stuck out here?" Albert Lee complained. He was a small-statured man of Asian descent. He had been a librarian once upon a time, before a colony of giant mutant spiders had taken up residence in his archives and started sucking the fluids out of his clientele. Unlike your average librarian, however, he had put himself through college on the GI Bill, and had been a demolitions specialist in the Marine Corps. His giant spider problem had met a fiery end, thanks to diesel fuel and ammonium nitrate fertilizer. Sadly, the library had burned down as well. He was sharp, and unlike many of the Newbies had already known which end of the gun was the dangerous one. I was glad that Harbinger had picked him to come along.

"Chuck has more CQB training," I answered. CQB stood for close quarters battle, and Mead had a lot more experience in it from his Ranger days than the rest of the Newbies. Lee just shook his head and we went back to waiting. Time passed slowly except for the occasional radio check-ins. The two assault teams were converging on the engine room from separate corridors.

"This is Harbinger. Galley's clear. Buckets of blood on the floor. There was a struggle here."

"This is Boone. We're above the boilers. More blood. Lots of shell casings. This must be where the French bought it."

"This is Julie. Deck is clear."

"Newbie team. All clear on top," I said again.

"This is the 'support' team. I've got stupid sailors trying to hit on me and this damn boat smells like fish guts," Holly reported.

I checked my weapons again. The 870 had an 18-inch barrel and a two-shot mag extension, giving me seven total shots in the gun. It was a personal favorite of mine. I had owned this particular unit since I was fifteen. I had replaced the fore end with a Surefire high intensity flashlight, mounted a glow in the dark XS bead sight on the rib, attached a side saddle that held an extra six shells, and added a nylon butt cuff that held six more. My load-bearing gear was heavily laden with extra shells: silver buckshot, silver slugs, flechettes, armor-piercing quadrangle shot, internally suppressed buckshot, Milo's special magnum breaching charges, and even a couple of Penguin tear gas rounds. I had strapped on everything but the kitchen sink, and I'm sure that they had a specialty round for that as well.

My handgun was also an old friend. At MHI, Hunters are able to customize their kits to suit them, and any handgun is allowed as long as it is a.45 that is reliable with our special silver bullets. My pistol was a Kimber/BUL polymer-framed double stack 1911 that I had been shooting in three-gun matches for years. The fat magazines held 14 rounds of.45, and I had six extras on my belt. I had customized it with huge tritium Ashley Express sights, that gave up a little precision for a whole lot of speed, which suited me just fine. I had over 10,000 rounds through that pistol, and I had won more than a few trophies with it.

There were several grenades on my webbing, a few sharpened stakes, and other miscellaneous tools. The enormous knife strapped to my chest completed my ensemble. Being a big guy, I had taken one of the biggest knives in the armory. Milo had said that it was a kukri from Nepal, the weapon of choice of the renowned Gurkha troops. It was curved deadly steel, with a fat heavy end designed for maximum chopping power. The version I had strapped on was called a ganga ram, and it was longer than my forearm. If I had to chop any heads off, I wasn't going to screw around. Most of us were wearing the lightweight hockey helmets, as the big ones were too bulky for the close quarters of the ship.

I was as ready as I could be. I felt like I had in the minutes before a big money fight. Every one of us had been training hard, both physically and mentally. The Newbie team was ready to rumble. The others were armed with Heckler & Koch.45 subguns. I wasn't particularly impressed with the guns, and thought the whole German engineering thing was really overrated, but Milo had gotten a good deal on a couple dozen, so they were passed out to most of the Newbies until they were proficient enough to pick their own gear.

The radio crackled again. The deeper the teams moved into the bowels of the ship, the greater the distortion. We were using top-of-the-line communications equipment, but there was only so much that radio waves could do through layers of steel plate.

"Boone here. We have movement ahead. Five yards from the engine room."

"This is Harbinger. Movement ahead."

"Shit. They're behind us too."

"Incoming. They're coming through the grates."

"Under the floor. Coming through the floor." Gunfire erupted in the background.

"Ambush! It's an ambush!"

The radio cut out. I couldn't hear a thing. The three of us on deck stared at each other in confusion.

"Earl, come in Earl. Boone. Anybody hear me?" Julie asked over the radio from the circling helicopter. She sounded worried.

I looked up to see her holding her hand to her neck, sniper rifle dangling from its straps. She was shouting something at the pilot, then she looked at me, and quickly snapped her rifle to her shoulder.

"Newbie team. You have incoming!" she shouted over the radio as she fired right past my head.

The supersonic crack could be felt in my eyeballs and eardrums as the bullet whizzed by, mere inches from my helmet. I spun in time to see a hideous undead face fall away from the ship's railing, an extra hole in its gray forehead. Gore-stained men in rags were coming up over the sides, and charging with fast loping gaits, directly toward us.

No time for emotion. Training kicked in.

Without any conscious thought I raised the shotgun, flicked off the safety and caressed the trigger. I slammed a creature to the deck with a load of double-aught to the chest. Before it had even fallen, I had pumped and fired at the next creature in line, tearing off its jaw in a spray of black ooze. It kept coming, arms outstretched and clawed hands grasping for me. I cranked off two more rapid shots and it stumbled and fell over the railing. The chunk-chunk-chunk sound of suppressed subguns opened up as Trip and Lee fired their H&K UMP.45s.

Grabbing shells from my vest I rapid-fire shoved them into the loading port as I searched for more targets. The ashen undead were pouring over the sides of the ship, and spilling out around us in a confused mass. I fired at them as fast as I could, the gun an extension of my will. I put twelve silver pellets through the brain cage of a creature closing on Lee, and dropped a slug through the chest cavity of another charging Trip. I felt a cold wet splash as the head of an undead that had appeared behind me was vaporized by a.308 round from Julie's rifle.

"Close ranks. Get back to back! Back to back!" I shouted at my team. Somehow in the confusion they heard and ran toward me, all of us firing simultaneously in different directions. Some of the monsters that had been put down were already standing up again. I punt-kicked one as I passed, a move that would have broken every rib and probably killed a human. All it did was send the creature to its feet faster. It opened its maw in a soundless roar and lunged. I stuck the 870's muzzle under its sternum at near-contact distance and blew a softball-sized hole out its back. It stumbled away momentarily, but then changed its mind and kept coming. I crushed its skull with the butt of my gun, and kicked its legs out from under it.

Lee screamed in pain as a bone claw struck him in the leg, and he collapsed to the ground. Trip stitched the monster through the face, grabbed Lee by the drag handle on the back of his armor, and pulled him to safety. I emptied my shotgun into the throng of undead, trying to take head shots, and then dropped it when it clicked empty. My tac sling kept it from hitting the ground. I instantly transitioned to my Kimber, centered the sights on the closest target and started firing. Bits of meat and bone flew from the creatures' heads as the bullets struck home.

The three of us clustered together, shooting and reloading wildly. Lee lay prone on his stomach, firing his UMP upwards. More bullets cracked past us as Julie fired into the crowd. The slide of my 1911 locked back empty just as a creature was almost on me. My hand flashed toward a new magazine in a speed reload, but Trip was suddenly past me and took the monster's arm off at the shoulder with his hatchet. With its remaining arm the creature brutally swatted Trip to the deck. I slammed the fresh mag home, dropped the slide and shot it through both eye sockets.

Lee was reloading, struggling to get a magazine out of his chest pockets while lying on them, his legs paralyzed beneath him. Trip wasn't moving.

There were only two creatures still up, but they were coming our way fast. One was wearing what used to be a sailor's uniform, and the other was wearing some sort of security coverall. Their eyes glowed red, and their teeth were broken and black. Sharpened bones appeared through the torn ends of their hands. I hammered two quick rounds into the first creature's head, and it spilled forward onto the deck.

I shot the former sailor in the face. Its claws slashed out toward me as I threw myself down in an attempt to avoid them. My back hit the deck, sliding through the spilled fluids, firing upward into the creature still relentlessly pursuing me. Its neck erupted in a spray of black as Julie nailed it, temporarily slowing the monster. I pulled the massive ganga ram from my chest and swung at the creature's legs. The big knife tore through the monster's knee, severing the limb. It fell beside me and I cleaved the top half of its skull off, spilling pink brains and black fluid onto the painted deck.

The front of the ship was littered with steaming gray bodies. Some of them were still moving, and a few were already starting to rise. I raised the huge knife over my head and shouted in rage. I hacked wildly at anything that twitched, spraying fluids and meat with every swing. Lee struggled to his feet shakily and shot.45 caliber holes in anything that looked suspicious. The Hind dropped altitude, and roared over the side of the ship.

"Owen! The undead are coming out the portholes. They're crawling up the sides of the ship. Holly needs help."

Shit. I slammed the still sticky knife back into its sheath, holstered my pistol, retrieved my shotgun and started loading it with slugs as I ran toward the chain ladders. Julie was dangling from the Hind, firing at the side of the ship below me. A ricochet sparked upwards and struck my body armor. Ignoring the painful but not dangerous hit, I leaned across the railing to look down at the deck of the Brilliant Mistake. Holly was firing her UMP at the monsters dangling unnaturally from the slick steel hull. They were crawling along it somehow, in violation of gravity and common sense, heading directly toward her. There were at least five of them, and they were soaking up bullets without much effect.

I put the bead on a creature directly below me. It was an awkward angle, and I had to lean over so far that I was afraid I was going to end up in the ocean. I stroked the trigger and put an ounce of silver through the first undead's shoulder blades. Arms limp, it slipped from the hull and fell into the waves. I pumped the action and took aim on the next target.

Then a cold feeling surged through my body, starting in the center of my back, and spreading out into my limbs, so very cold it burned. My legs went numb, and buckled beneath me. My 870 slipped from my grasp and dangled on its sling. I was jerked around like a rag doll. An undead sailor held me by the straps of my armor. Its touch had caused instant paralysis. I looked into its clear, blood-red eyes as it opened its mouth impossibly wide, black razor teeth glistening. I tried to move, but all I could manage was a weak flopping of my arms, twitching the muscles of my face, and a small tingle of my fingers. I was about to die.

Suddenly the top of the creature's head opened up like a cantaloupe stuffed with firecrackers. Julie had fired right past my limp body. The bullet actually grazed my helmet. It was perhaps the best shot I had ever seen. The creature fell, lifeless claws trailing away from me. I could see Trip and Lee heading my way, trying to reach me before my limp body went over the rail. Trip dived recklessly over the near headless undead, arms outstretched like I was the winning end zone pass.

He did not quite make it.

I fell the thirty feet into the ocean soundlessly. Not because I was too brave to scream, believe me. I was screaming on the inside, but my throat was too frozen to make any sound. I hit the waves with a huge splash. Immediately the weight of my armor and weapons dragged me down. My limbs floated numbly around me. I was at least able to close my mouth, but water started to rush relentlessly down my nose. I tried to move. I willed my arms to move. Nothing was happening. I tried to struggle. I raged soundlessly at my helplessness as I spiraled into the depths.

The light was dwindling above. I did not know if that was because I was putting some serious distance against the surface, or because my brain was running out of oxygen. The water was cold, but my body felt colder still. Lights began to pop behind my eyes as water expanded into my lungs. I knew that soon they would lock up in desperation, and I was screwed.

What were the undead that paralyzed you at their touch? We had discussed them in class… There had been a picture of Julie fighting one. Wights. Wights could paralyze you. How long did it last though? Lee had gotten up pretty quick, and Trip was moving around when I slipped over the edge. A minute? Maybe two? Unfortunately I didn't have a minute or two. My depth was increasing, and I was starting to panic from lack of air. Terror without the outlet of movement is a real bummer. I kept trying to move, willing myself to respond with all my might. My fingers wiggled slightly. Not enough.

It had been fun while it lasted.

Then I stopped. The Old Man from my dream was in front of me. I could see him clearly in the dark water. He was perfectly dry as fish swam past his bony shoulders. He shook his head sadly.

"Boy, we have to stop meeting like this."

He reached out with his heavy cane and stabbed the emergency button on my armored harness. The CO2 canister erupted with bubbles, instantly inflating the shoulder portion of the armor, and giving me positive buoyancy. I started to rise.

"Up you go now. Your friends need help. You not very good at this. No more getting dead!"

As my armor carried me toward the surface in a cloud of bubbles, I could sense the feeling returning to my body. It was an awful, tingly pain. Combined with the screaming, air-starved agony in my chest and the explosive pain in my head, it was horrible. My legs began to kick and my arms began to tear at the hard water, forcing myself ever faster toward the light and a breath of precious, precious air.

My head broke the surface. I somehow gasped and filled my mostly liquid-distended lungs, and simultaneously violently vomited salt water. That hurt. Immediately one of the fishermen started to wildly strike me in the helmet with a pole.

"Kill it! Kill it!" one of them shouted.

I tried to swat the pole away, but my limbs were still regaining their strength. "Stop it! I'm human, you idiots," I croaked as they tried their best to shove me back underwater.

"He's on our side. Quit hitting him, damn it!" I heard Holly order. "Pull him in."

I did my best to grab the end of the pole and I was dragged to the Brilliant Mistake. Rough hands grabbed me by my harness and pulled me aboard, soaked, shaking, gasping and still vomiting. There was sudden movement in the waves as one of the wights broke the surface and did a savage impersonation of dog-paddling toward our boat.

"You can whack that one," I gurgled, as my numb fingers tried to grasp my still-secured shotgun.

"I've got it. Fire in the hole!" Holly shouted. I heard a plopping splash, and a few seconds later a thunderous roar as the frag grenade detonated. The ocean erupted. Water and miscellaneous undead bits rained down on the little boat.

"That's the last of them," Holly reported. "Are you okay?"

I rolled onto my side and retched and coughed horribly. My chest was racked with spasms of pain and I was seeing double.

"Yeah, I'm cool," I gasped.

"Sure, you're the picture of health. Come on, Z." She tried to help me up, but I was far too heavy to budge. I struggled to my knees as she pulled at the drag handles on my armor. There was a large scorch mark on the hull of the Antoine-Henri, with a small jagged crater torn through the metal in the center. She saw me looking at the hole in puzzlement.

"What? You thought you guys were going to leave me down here with all of the cool stuff and I wasn't going to use any of it?" She pointed at the spent RPG launcher lying on the deck. Next to it was the headless body of a still-twitching wight. She had pinned it to the wooden deck with a boathook.

"They need help up top," I said as she helped me to my feet. I had to stop and vomit once again. It still hurt but it was getting easier. That one had contained my dinner from the evening before. Nachos.

"I'll go. You stay here. The captain is casting off. They're going to get the hell away from this demon boat, and I can't say I blame them. They'll pull back and wait for our signal in case any more of those things come squirting out the portholes."

"I'm going," I stated.

"You almost drowned," she pleaded.

"And I didn't even get any mouth to mouth. We're wasting time." I grabbed onto the ladder as the Brilliant Mistake’s engine turned over with a cough and ejected a cloud of diesel smoke. Holly shook her head in consternation and grabbed the second ladder. We started climbing as the little boat pulled away. If I had thought that it was hard the first time, doing it after almost drowning was infinitely more difficult. My boots and armor were soaked, and had seemingly tripled in damp weight like giant Cordura sponges. Holly easily outpaced me-her lighter weight and excellent muscle tone surely helped-and she went over the top first. Trip and Lee were waiting for me, and helped drag my carcass the last few feet.

"Ugh," I grunted as I fell onto the deck for the second time. "I hate that stupid ladder."

"It's easier than upside-down pole dancing, you sissy," Holly stated as she unslung her UMP. Surveying the deck, I could see that my companions had been busy while I had taken a little swim. Every wight had been hastily chopped into its component bits. Some gray arms were still pulling themselves along, and a few severed heads were glaring and gnashing their teeth. The Hind was still circling above us. Surprisingly, my radio still worked.

"I popped a couple climbing up the other side. I think we're clear," Julie's voice said. "No response from the assault element. I'm coming down."

The chopper stopped directly above us, a rope was thrown out the side, and Julie unclipped herself from her bungee cords. She expertly fast-roped down, dropping swiftly to the deck. As soon as her boots hit the surface she was heading our way, helmeted head pointed down to avoid the harsh blast of the rotors. The Hind immediately gained altitude and banked hard and away.

"He can stay for another twenty minutes, tops, then he needs to refuel," she shouted as she approached. "Is everybody okay?"

"Good to go," Holly stated. The rest of us nodded.

I suddenly dry-heaved and went to my knees coughing and choking. Once it passed, I shakily lumbered back up. "Just peachy," I said giving a big cheesy grin and a thumbs-up.

"Good. We're going in," Julie ordered. She dropped the partially expended magazine from her accurized M14, and replaced it with a full one. "Assault team has been out of contact for a few minutes. They probably need help. Let's move out."

She trotted toward the entrance to the belly of the beast. The rest of us followed obediently. It had been felt that the Newbie team had not been ready for the brutal close quarters battle that was monster hunting in a claustrophobic ship's interior. That didn't matter now. We were the cavalry and we were coming to the rescue. At least Julie knew what she was doing.

"Take grenades. But be careful how you use them. We're going to be inside a steel tube. Back pressure from an explosion can kill. Don't hose shots. Everything ricochets down here. Watch your muzzle and be aware of where the rest of your team is. No flames. The ship is metal, but everything onboard can burn, and a ship fire is bad news. If anything moves, and it isn't human, shoot it. Questions?"

Nobody said anything. We stopped in front of the massive metal door. Julie grabbed Holly by the straps of her armor and looked her in the eyes. "It's going to be dark in there, Holly. Just like the hole. Are you going to be okay? You don't have to do this if you aren't ready."

"I'm fine. I hate vampires. Let's kill these assholes," she replied angrily. Julie nodded and smiled. I had no idea what that was about.

"We're going to move fast. We're not going to stack at each entrance. We're not going to do a full clearing. Keep moving. Watch above you. Watch floor grates. Lee, you bring up the rear, watch behind us. I'm on point, then Pitt, Trip, and Newcastle. Got it?"

"Let me take point," I suggested.

"Why?"

"I've got the shotgun. You've got a sniper rifle with a scope on it. Plus I'm expendable. If you're in front and you die, then the rest of us are screwed." I wasn't being chivalrous. For conversational distance a shotgun beat the pants off of a long rifle with a magnifying optic.

She thought about it for a moment, then nodded. "Pitt on point, then me. Any questions?" It probably made more sense to put one of the other three with the suppressed subguns next in line, but I did not think Julie was real confident in their shooting abilities at that point.

We were quiet, each of us preparing ourselves in our own way to enter the dark. Trip was obviously mumbling a prayer. Lee had his eyes closed and appeared to be doing controlled breathing. Holly was wearing an evil predatory grin. I made sure my shotgun and pistol were fully loaded and my magazines and knife were in place. At least my quick dip in the ocean had cleaned most of the wight juices off of me. The rest of the Newbie team was coated in them.

Julie slapped me on the back of my soggy armor.

"Go."

The first floor we covered was still lit with fluorescent lights, but by the time we hit the stairs for the next level down, we were forced to switch to our helmet-mounted night vision monoculars. Something had systematically smashed every light. Glass crunched under our boots as we quickly made our way through the narrow steel corridors. I had a pair of lights on my shotgun, one a super-bright white light, and the second cast a brilliant beam that was invisible to the human eye, but lit up the whole world in green through my monocular. The rest of the team was similarly equipped with infrared lights on their guns as well. Since we were fighting undead, the thermal-imaging gear had been left on deck. It was not very useful against things that were already room temperature.

We swiftly passed through what had been the galley. I kept the shotgun at the low ready, elbows tucked down to keep from banging them on the walls. Meals lay half eaten and rotting on the tables. The walls were splashed with a thick fluid that was indeterminate through night vision, but my gut told me that it had once been bright arterial spray. I bumped into a wine bottle with my foot and sent it spinning under one of the tables. The doors were basically watertight hatches, and I had to carefully step over a steep sealing lip on the base of each portal as I passed. So far all of the hatches had been open.

The crash of gunfire echoed through the corridors and ductwork. That was a good sign that our friends were still alive. My small team quickened its pace. According to the blueprints we'd studied on the way to the ship, we needed to go down one more flight of stairs, through some quarters, down a long corridor, and then we would be right on top of the engine room. We all flinched as an explosive whump vibrated the whole freighter and rattled the utensils in the galley.

"Bomb?" Trip asked.

"Hard to tell," Julie answered.

"I hope we don't sink," Lee grunted.

Our boots rattled on the metal stairs as we double-timed it to the next level. The time for stealth had passed. I turned the corner into the crew quarters, light probing ahead, shotgun butt ground tightly into my shoulder pocket. The long narrow room was filled with double bunks. Pornography had been crudely taped to the walls, and it looked strange in the glowing green light. Blankets and trash were strewn everywhere. It was a veritable warren of hiding places. Jerking my fist up, I signaled the team to freeze. I had sensed something.

Julie drew against me, her rifle at the ready. I could hear her breathing. There was a clank as another member of our team tripped on the doorway. Something was in the room with us. I could feel it.

Nothing happened.

The group continued to shine our invisible lights around the room. I could not put my finger on what I was feeling, but something was waiting for us.

Julie must have felt the same thing. "Everybody, NVGs off. Go to white light," she commanded.

I flipped my monocular back and complied, pushing the button that activated the 120-lumen Surefire light on the forearm of my 870. Brilliant, scalding light suddenly filled the room from five waving points.

A night vision monocular has some advantages over a similar pair of goggles that cover both eyes, but it also has its disadvantages. On the plus side, with the single lens, one pupil will be fully dilated for natural human night vision, and the other eye will be looking at an already bright green world. The human brain, being the amazing thing that it is, superimposes both lighted and unlighted images together. You get electronically enhanced vision, with one eye still able to see as well as any human could in the dark if the device gets lost. With two-lens goggles, you have better night vision capability, but if your device goes out, you're pretty much screwed until your eyes adjust to the dark. Great as our monoculars are, there's a disadvantage inherent to them as well. When you suddenly flip on bright lights, one of your eyes is immediately blinded.

So the five of us were down to one sort of functioning eye and one dazzled eye when the Surefires kicked in. That was probably why the image of the vampire crawling down the ceiling toward us was extra surreal. As I had been told, it did in fact look like a normal person. This one looked like a regular sailor. Pale and defying gravity, but human.

I reacted a fraction of a second before the rest of the team. In that moment I was able to pump two silver slugs through the vampire's chest and pelvis. The concussion of the shotgun was deafening in the confined space, but nothing compared to the sonic crack of Julie's M14. Her bullet clipped the vampire through the shoulder. The creature dropped to the floor, and both of us hit it again on the way down. The rest of the team did not have a clear shot through us.

The vampire screamed inhumanly as Julie and I simultaneously dropped to our knees. The three Newbies behind us opened fire over our heads. The suppressed weapons shuddered as.45 bullets stitched the creature, with plenty of other bullets missing and hitting the walls and bunks. It shook and staggered, but kept coming. Impact holes puckered in the monster's pale skin, only to instantly close. I emptied the rest of my slugs in a continuous burst, nailing the monster from the crotch to the forehead, the last shot snapping the vampire's head back violently.

I dropped the smoking Remington, drew my handgun, and fired two shots before I was swatted aside. My body armor cushioned the blow, but I was hurled through the air and slammed into the steel wall. Pain surged through my ribs and I lost my pistol on impact. Julie dropped down and rolled under a nearby bunk, narrowly avoiding the vampire's foot as it smashed an indentation into the metal floor. Illumination from five different flashlights pointing in strange directions created a hellish and confusing scene.

The rest of my team emptied their subguns into the creature as it closed on them. Holly and Trip started to reload and Lee drew his knife and swung wildly. The vampire moved so quickly that it was hard to visually track. It side-stepped the blow, grabbed Lee by his arm and tossed him across the room. I heard the smaller man skid roughly across the floor. The vampire was distracted from Trip and Holly as heavy.308 bullets struck it in the feet and legs.

Julie's cover was torn away as the sailor thing grabbed the bunk and ripped it from the wall, easily breaking the heavy bolts. It reached for her but I got there first. I swung my ganga ram with all of the fury that I possessed. Somehow it sensed me in midswing, and started to move. I had been aiming for its neck, but instead my blade sunk deep into its shoulder, breaking the collarbone and grinding out against the top of the monster's ribs. Black fluid sprayed everywhere like a pierced hydraulic cylinder.

Spinning away, the creature ripped my blade from my grasp. The vampire flew backwards, and stuck to the wall like a spider. Screeching in anger, it reached up, grasped the hilt of the massive Nepalese blade and drug it out of its back. The noise of steel scrapping on bone was sickening. The blade dropped to the floor with a clatter. I heard the near simultaneous dropping of bolts as Trip and Holly got their UMPs back in action. Julie was reloading. Lee wasn't moving. I reached for a specialty 12 gauge round, dropped it into the open chamber of my 870, and ran the pump forward.

The wound was already sealing. It hissed something obviously profane in French.

"Parley-vous this, mother-fucker."

It leapt at me, launching itself like a demon frog missile. I brought the shotgun up and pulled the trigger as the muzzle contacted the vampire's chest.

A regular breaching round is used by police to safely break the locks or hinges on heavy doors during raids, which fragments without endangering any bystanders. The 3-inch magnum 12 gauge sintered magnesium/tungsten breaching charge that I had just fired had been designed for blowing through hinges suitable for bank vaults. Milo had told me that, during testing, this special breacher had put a basketball-sized hole through a side of beef.

The recoil was amazing, even by my standards. The noise was going to leave all of us with ringing ears for a week. The vampire's torso exploded in a black mist.

The creature's momentum carried it into me, we both crashed to the floor, rolling and thrashing. Entrails were spilling everywhere. Its legs were kicking on the ground, but its top half kept fighting. I pushed it off as it clawed at me and rolled away. Trip and Holly responded by pouring two full magazines of.45 caliber silver into the thrashing monstrosity, riddling it with holes. As soon as they ran dry, Julie charged the torso. She placed one heavy boot on the creature's neck, raised a sharpened stake high over her head and, with a cry, slammed it through the evil black heart.

A fountain of black ooze shot into the air and the hideous shrieks pierced us to the bone. Julie was splattered, but undaunted. The vampire was twitching, but could barely move. She held her hand out. "Big knife."

Grabbing my ganga ram from the floor I limped over. I handed it over hilt first. The knife was huge, but she was a strong woman. She swung it back with one hand like she was clearing brush with a machete, then struck. There was a thud and the screaming finally stopped. The head rolled free. She kicked it in disgust.

"Reload. There's more where that came from. Lee, you still with us?" Julie said. She wiped the knife blade on her leg and handed it back over, mouthing the word "thanks." She looked deadly serious covered in vampire gore and illuminated by powerful flashlights.

"I'm okay. Ow, damn," Lee said as Trip helped him to his feet. He sounded weak and raspy. "I think I broke a rib."

"Take it easy for a sec. Holly, cover the other doorway. Keep it on white light. Our vision is shot, and the lights disorient them."

"That was disoriented?" Trip asked.

I speed-reloaded the shotgun. I did not dare load any more breaching rounds since they were useless past contact distance. "Anybody see my pistol?"

Lee handed it to me, scuffed, but undamaged. I changed magazines and reholstered. The bunk I was leaning against had a picture of a sailor's wife and kids standing in front of the Eiffel Tower. I shined my light on the vampire's body. The flesh was slowly bubbling and melting into a tarlike substance, leaving only sticky bones. The eyeless skull appeared to be watching me.

"So that's a Master vampire. They aren't so tough," I said.

Julie surprised us all by laughing. It was a genuine sound of merriment, and was totally out of place in the splattered crew quarters. She paused in cleaning the slime off her prescription goggles long enough to look at all of us poor befuddled Newbies. She shook her head and smiled.

"That was just a baby." All of the Newbies had some choice words at that. Holly swore so creatively that it was almost poetry. "Masters can move so fast you can't hardly see them. They can eat a stack of Bibles and wash it down with a lit Molotov cocktail. This guy was probably turned in the last week. Abnormally quick regeneration, but the more powerful the creator, the stronger the creation. Whatever started this mess was one bad son of a gun. It would have to be to create those wights to serve as daylight guardians too."

Satisfied that she could see again, Julie pointed toward Holly and the passage to the engine room. "Owen on point again. Trip, stay by Lee and help him if he needs it. Holly, you bring up the rear. If we come across more vamps, stop, then throw in some grenades first. All right, let's move."

I took my place at the door, light stabbing ahead, searching for targets. Julie took the second position. She spoke softly in my ear.

"Parley-vous, mother effer?"

"It sounded good at the time," I shrugged. "Hey, if we don't die in the next few minutes, are you doing anything for dinner tonight?"

She thumped me in the shoulder to indicate that it was time to move out. I took that as a no. I moved quickly, the light from the flashlights behind threw my hulking shadow down the hall. I had pulled something in my leg in the struggle with the vampire. My head and chest ached from my earlier adventure in the water. My stomach and throat hurt from all of the heaving. My nerves tingled with adrenaline and terror-induced endorphins. I was still seeing purple ghosts in one semi-blinded eye, and I was covered in vampire juices. I was having a great time and had never felt more alive.

Finally a voice came over the radio. It was Harbinger.

"Lights coming near the engine room. Who is it?"

"Hold your fire. It's me and the Newbie team," Julie answered.

"Stop where you are. There's a mess of hostiles about thirty feet from your position through the door on your left. We're at the end of the hall on the other side of that. Why ain't you up top?"

It was good to hear Harbinger's voice. I pointed my shotgun at the indicated compartment. Anything that came through that portal was going to get a snout full of buckshot.

"We lost radio contact after you got ambushed. The deck got swarmed with wights. We killed them, but the boat crew wasn't going to stick around, and the Hind was low on fuel. The Newbies did good, only minor injuries. We decided to come find you guys. I thought for a minute we had lost you, Earl," Julie answered.

"Nope. But Boone lost a man. Roberts got swarmed in the ambush. We have some others wounded, but nothing critical. It was bad. There had to be at least twenty vamps. And they rigged the lights to blow when they attacked." His voice sounded tired and ragged.

"That doesn't sound right. Undead don't coordinate," she said.

"These do. It was planned. We killed most of them, and the rest are holed up in that engine compartment. There are at least five."

"Fire?" Julie asked, sounding hopeful.

"Negative. Fuel storage is through there. Same with explosives. We set anything off in that room and we're swimming home. Plus the room that Darné and his men are locked in is on the other side of where the vamps are."

"Plan?" she asked.

"I haven't figured that out yet. We can go in shooting. But if we do we might hit a steam line and cook us all, or we might hit the boiler and blow a hole in the bottom of the ship. Either way we're running out of time. We got another coded message from the French Hunters. The vamps are trying to break into their compartment-wait a second."

I did not turn to look. I kept my muzzle on the door. We had a great position. Both groups of Hunters could fire with impunity into the doorway, and the angles were such that the chances of ricocheting a shot into the other team were virtually nil. Trip and Holly both squeezed around me so that they would have a shot as well. The injured Lee watched our backs and Julie stayed on the radio. The walls and floor vibrated slightly from the powerful engine nearby. The air smelled of diesel and rubber and rust and the faint copper smell of blood.

While we waited for Harbinger to get back to us, I could not help but ask, "Did any of you guys know Roberts?"

"He was the tall, skinny, blond guy on the boat," Trip said. "Seemed like a good guy."

"He was a great guy. Brave. A little crazy, but he was a dang good Hunter," Julie told us. "Roberts has been with us since we restarted. First batch of Newbies we had. He'll be missed. I think he had an ex-wife and some kids in St. Louis."

Harbinger's voice crackled in my ear piece. "Sam says that he found something on the schematics. We're directly under the main cargo bay. There's an escape hatch there that leads into that engine compartment. Sam says that we can put somebody through it, and they can pierce a steam pipe in the vamp's room, and then close the hatch before they get cooked. The steam will fry the undead, or at least flush them into the corridor where we can blast them."

"Won't that kill the Frenchmen also?" Julie asked.

"Sam doesn't think so. Might raise the temperature a little, but judging from the schematics they should be fine. I'm sending Sam, Grant and Mead up to do it."

"What about Boone's team?"

"My team's a little occupied, Jules," Boone replied over the net. "Your uncle Earl neglected to mention that we have at least two more of the bloodsuckers pinned down by the shafts. One of them is the son of a whore that bit Roberts."

"Roger that." She released her mike. "Wait for the cookout."

"I could place some claymores down the hall. Give them a surprise when they come running out," Lee offered helpfully. Just like a former demo guy, always looking to blow something up.

"No, we're too enclosed."

She was probably right. But judging by the number of projectiles these things could soak up, I sure was not looking forward to five of them heading our way at the same time. There had been an FN MAG machine gun brought on board from the Brilliant Mistake. I had left it behind since it was so long and unwieldy inside the tight confines of the ship. However, 200 rounds of belt-fed.308 full auto firepower would have been great right about then.

"I've got some smaller stuff. It should do the trick with minimal damage to us, but it'll turn anything that comes through that door into hamburger." For emphasis, Lee patted a pouch that was clipped to his webbing. "I'm hurting pretty bad, so I don't think I could throw it far enough, but one of you guys could probably land it right outside that hatch. It's radio detonated."

Julie thought about it for a moment and then nodded at Trip. Lee unclipped the pouch, opened it, made a few adjustments, zipped it back up and handed it over. Trip gently bounced it in his hands a few times to test the weight, then he underhanded it with perfect accuracy, landing it on our side, just in front of the targeted hatch.

"Good throw," Holly said.

"I helped coach the girl's softball team too. Slow pitch." All of us gave him funny looks. "It was a small school," he added defensively.

Time passed. Harbinger informed us that the captive French were sending more messages. The vampires were slowly battering their way in looking for fresh blood. Sam checked in to tell us that the three of them were almost in position. Boone's team was down to four, and two of them were injured, and they had problems of their own. Harbinger and Milo were in position, but since there were only two of them they were in for trouble if all of the vampires headed their way. We were spread awfully thin. It was going to be tight.

"This is Sam. We're in place. Main cargo bay appears empty. But there's a mess of Conex containers up here, it's hard to tell. We're gonna pop the hatch. You should know if this works. Over."

"Go get them, Cowboy," Julie whispered under her breath, while tightening the grip on her M14. We were positioned so that anything stepping into the hall was going to get a big surprise. A bit of high explosives and four of us that were able to provide direct fire. Julie and I were even pretty decent shots. Who was I kidding, I was pretty good, but from what I had seen up on the deck, she was amazing. I glanced surreptitiously her way. Her brown eyes were focused through the lens of her ACOG scope. Her gloved finger was resting easily just alongside the trigger guard. She was leaning against the steel hull to steady herself. Her features were strong, and somehow she was still attractive in her relatively unflattering green body armor despite the scratches and slime all over her face. Julie Shackleford was the girl of my dreams.

In the distance the sound of banging metal could be heard and then a rapid series of gunshots and another clang of metal on metal. Trip was prone on the floor, so he felt the vibration first. "Here we go!" he shouted.

A metallic screeching tore at our ears, as a wall of white vapor poured out of the open hatchway. The noise was a bastardized version of the world's greatest and most terrifying teapot. Even from where we were, the temperature rose dramatically as the scalding mist began to fill the hallway. Just under the onslaught of noise could be heard other equally inhuman screams, this time from the engine compartment's resident vampires.

Something moved in the hatchway. First one, then two, and finally a third vampire stumbled into the corridor. The steam was boiling their fluids and peeling their flesh far faster than they could regenerate. One of them turned malevolently toward us with blind, molten eye sockets and screamed.

"Hit it, Lee!" Julie shouted. Our demolitionist librarian complied and compressed the clacker in his gloved fist.

The small charge detonated. The explosion was more of a muted thump than the expected fireball. In the open, Lee's little bomb might not have been very impressive, but in the narrow metal space, the energy of the C4 tore through the undead. Their bones were smashed into powder and their bodies were disseminated into their component materials. We were thirty feet away but we were still peppered with a fine mist of vampire.

Two more creatures spilled from the hatchway, just having missed the bomb. One moved in our direction, the other turned toward Harbinger and Milo. Six weapons opened fire. The creature heading our way was blind, burned, and torn. Some of its internal organs had expanded under the intense, wet heat, and the creature appeared lopsided and ungainly. Our bullets tore into it, rupturing through fluids and tissues, breaking bones, and spilling the vampire's unnatural life onto the floor. It fell to its knees under our onslaught, dragging itself inexorably toward us. One scalded claw was torn completely off by my last round of buckshot, and it still somehow continued trying to pull itself on its one functioning limb.

It fell silent as we ran our guns dry. My ears were partially protected by the high quality earpieces, but even with that my head swam from the barrage in the tight echoing chamber. No gunfire could be heard from the other Hunters' position.

"Earl. Come in, Earl. Are you okay?" Julie dropped her spent M14 mag, and inserted another, letting the bolt fly forward to chamber another round. "Can you hear us?"

"Got it. Our vamp is down."

"We're coming around the corner to finish ours. Hold your fire."

"Roger that."

The vampire was torn asunder, but already it was beginning to heal. This time Trip and Holly did the honors while I covered them. Holly put her boot down on the creature's spine, and slammed a stake through its back with a vengeance. This vampire was too damaged to scream. Trip grimaced as he pulled out his hatchet. I suppose that the correct term was tomahawk for the Vietnam-era weapon that he had picked out of the armory. My friend raised the little ax and brought it down swiftly. The vampire had been shot through the neck so many times that it did not take much effort. The tomahawk slipped through with enough force to raise sparks on the floor. Immediately the tissue began to dissolve and drip through the grating, leaving only a black, damaged skeleton with abnormally long teeth.

The noise of the escaping steam died off as the ship's emergency systems took over, shutting down the boilers, and locking down specific valves. The white mist in the hall slowly dissipated. The temperature had risen at least twenty degrees, and I could feel the sweat rolling down my body.

"Julie, that should be all of these. When it cools down enough, get in there and rescue Darné and his men. Milo and I are going to help Boone."

"Roger that, Earl."

The Newbie squad waited patiently. Lee was hurting bad, and Trip was doing his best to help the smaller man walk.

"Are you going to make it?" Julie asked him softly. "We grab the French and we head back up top. We should be almost about out of undead."

"I'm just having a hard time breathing is all," he grunted.

"Whatever doesn't kill us, only makes us stronger," Trip stated solemnly.

"Remember that when I'm kicking your ass later," Lee laughed, and then grimaced in pain.

The vampires that had fallen prey to Lee's bomb were reduced to pulp and bones. There was not even enough left to put a stake through. As I entered the engine compartment, the intense heat made my head swim. The air was thick with damp, hot vapor. A bit of residual steam hissed from the giant ruptured pipe that Sam had shot. Water dripped from everything. It was as if it was raining from the ceiling. The room was like a sauna, only worse, as all of the exposed metal pipes and fittings were hot enough to burn us. I could feel the heat of the floor through my boot soles. I took another swig from my Camelbak. The room was lit by red emergency lights. I turned off my flashlight to retain my batteries. Overhead, water dripped from the ladder and the hatch that led to the main cargo bay.

I paused in front of the heavy metal door that held the French survivors. I tried the wheel. My gloves provided enough protection to touch the metal, but not for long. It was stuck. I pounded on the door. The fist falls echoed loudly.

"Anybody know Morse code?" I asked. Everybody shook their heads in the negative. Not a whole lot of former Eagle Scouts on my team. Julie shoved past me and struck the butt of her rifle against the door. Dum-du-du-dum-dum. Shave and a haircut.

We waited a few seconds. Dum-dum. Came the response. Two bits. The wheel began to turn. I sighed in relief and tried in vain to wipe the sweat and moisture from my face. I could hardly wait to get out of this sauna. The door opened.

The famous French hunter Jean Darné stood before us, tall and imposing in his black body armor that differed only slightly from our own. He was a legend. Considered one of the greatest Hunters the Europeans had, he had hunted more monsters in more places than probably anybody but Earl Harbinger. His team was well respected, and he was considered by many to be the best of the best.

He was also currently dead. As were the four other members of his team standing to his side.

"We have been waiting for you," the vampire said.

Chapter 9

None of us moved. The vampire and his four wights stood separated from the Hunters only by one narrow doorway. Julie and I were closest. For some reason the vampire did not move. The wights made chewing motions and stood tensed, ready to pounce. Their red eyes studied us hungrily. They were all wearing the same black body armor. Darné smiled at us, showing off his elongated incisors. He absently rapped his knuckles on the metal hatchway. S-O-S.

"Well, if it is not little Julie Shackleford. My, how you have grown up," Darné said. "You are the image of your mother, an absolutely lovely woman. What a pleasure."

"The pleasure is all yours, Jean," she answered. She shifted her rifle slightly. The two of us were blocking the doorway. The undead were close enough to smell. I did not think I could move fast enough to get away. It would only take a single touch from one of those wights to end up paralyzed.

"Now, now, little girl. Do not try anything hasty. The only thing holding back my 'men' is my will. They are bonded to me. If I lose concentration for an instant your team is doomed." He would have been a very handsome man when he was alive, suave and distinguished with just a touch of gray at his temples and in his thin moustache; his English was impeccable. I'm sure he could have been quite the charmer except for the whole evil vampire thing and the four undead pit-bull equivalents standing beside him.

"So why didn't you make your move? You could have just charged us immediately and taken us by surprise." I could tell Julie was stalling for time. But I wasn't sure what exactly she was hoping for.

"Americans have no flair for the dramatic. You are almost as bad as the Germans. No romance in your souls. Always straightforward." He snapped his long fingers. "I want to make a deal."

"We don't deal with vampires," she stated flatly.

"But you have made deals with monsters before. The truth of that is undeniable. I want to make a deal with you. I will let you live, and I will give you important information, in exchange for safe passage from this ship after sunset."

"Except the monsters that we have made deals with don't leave a trail of bodies wherever they go. I can't do that to the world," Julie spoke softly. One of my teammates moved slowly behind me.

"So naïve, girl. Your father would be ashamed. He was such a practical man. He would make a deal with the devil for the right cause. Order your man to stop what he is doing or I release these wights. You don't want to try to toss a grenade in here. There are thousands of gallons of fuel and vapor in these pipes. You would kill your whole team and the others as well."

Julie shook her head. "No explosives. Okay, Jean. Let's talk. But leave my parents out of it."

"Fair enough." The movement behind me stopped. The vampire continued, "Your team will go to the bridge, pull up the anchor and set course for the mainland. Then you will leave this ship."

"How do you know we won't walk out of here and just sink the ship?" Julie asked.

"Because I will keep you as a hostage. Your uncle is running this operation. He will do anything to protect you. I will let you go free when we run aground."

Julie laughed coldly. "And I'm supposed to believe you? You would bite me as soon as the helicopter lifted off. Screw you, Jean."

"Now, young one, please, I did not choose this path, but I am a survivor. I just want to live."

"If you can call that living."

"Do not be so quick to judge. You of all people must wonder about this life. It is marvelous. I fought the darkness for so many years. I did not know what I was missing. I can see everything, Julie. I can feel your pulse from here. I can feel the world. The heartbeat of the very world. It is ecstasy." The vampire was beginning to wax poetic. I had to try something.

"Hey, Jean," I interrupted. "The girl's hardheaded. I'm willing to talk business."

"Your standards are slipping. When did MHI start hiring gorillas?" the vampire asked wryly, glancing in my direction. His red eyes bored into me.

"Owen? What are you doing?"

"Shut up," I snapped at her. "I don't want to die here. You can keep the girl. I'll go up and pull up the anchor and point this barge at Florida. Old man Earl isn't going to want anything to happen to this chick. We will leave."

"A sensible one. You must be new, yes?"

"Yeah, I'm just a mercenary. I'm just in this for the money," I lied. Moisture dripped onto my helmet and rolled hotly down my spine.

"Ahh, good." The vampire steepled his fingers.

"Now you said you had some valuable information. Just what are we talking about, Frenchy? Valuable means something that I can use." I had no idea if vampires were good judges of character.

"I can tell you about the six old ones, and their leader. They are on your country's soil now."

"And what about the Cursed One?" I ordered.

The four wights shrieked in chorus. Darné cringed.

"How do you know of Lord Machado?" The vampire hissed the name.

"Me and him are old pals. Now if you want the girl, I want to know what he's here for."

"Very well then. But it is your doom. Lord Machado has the artifact. He will take it to a Place of Power and he will use it. You cannot stop him. No mortal can stop him."

"Look, Jean, I don't want to stop him. I just want to make sure I end up on the winning team. Know what I mean?"

The vampire smiled. "I can help you then. You do not want to be on the wrong side when Lord Machado rules. Do we have a deal?"

Julie interrupted angrily. "Owen? What the hell are you thinking? No deals with vampires; he'll kill me as soon as you walk out the door."

"Shut up, bitch!" I snarled. I move very fast for a big man. In the next second, I dropped my shotgun, letting the sling catch it. I lifted my right hand as if I was going to backhand her. Julie's eyes widened in shocked surprise. The vampire's eyes followed my uplifted hand, as my left hand lifted a grenade off of my webbing. I brought my hands together smoothly. Instead of throwing my fist, I stuck my finger through the safety pin and pulled. The sound of the pin landing on the steaming floor was exceedingly loud.

"Run, Julie. Run now." I held the live grenade up next to my face. The only thing keeping the grenade from exploding was the thin spring-loaded metal spoon that I was holding down with one finger. If I relaxed my grip the fuse would ignite. Five seconds later it would explode, and possibly ignite the engine room in a massive explosion. Julie did not say anything. She nodded and then retreated. The rest of the team followed quickly. I shouted one final instruction: "Get ready to abandon ship!"

"You idiot!" the vampire roared. The wights hissed and thrashed in unison. "You will destroy us all!"

"Better my way than yours, you snail-eating bastard." I started slowly backing away. The wights exploded from the room and spread out in a skirmish line, snapping and clawing at the air. Jean Darné stepped through the portal and strode forward. In the residual steam and in the red emergency lights he looked like the traditional versions of the devil. So this must be hell.

"Give me the grenade," he ordered. Darné locked his eyes on mine. Shivers ran down my spine, though the room temperature was running around a hundred and thirty degrees.

"Oh, I'll give it to you all right."

"I compel you. Hand me the grenade, safely." The red eyes bored into mine. The words repeated themselves in my conscious mind, and burrowed into my subconscious like tendrils. I felt myself starting to comply. The wights began to inch closer. My vision began to darken.

"NO!" I shouted, shaking my head wildly. The wights shrank back.

"You have a strong will, ape man, but it won't do you any good. Give me that grenade. You do not want to die."

"Neither do you! Stay back!" I waved the grenade in front of me. A pound of high explosives was my holy symbol.

"Maybe I should just take it. I am greater than you can understand. The greater the creator, the greater the creation. My creator was the greatest of them all." Darné's devil visage continued to advance.

"If you think you're fast enough, come and get it." I backed into something solid, the escape ladder leading to the cargo bay, forty feet of iron rungs standing in the middle of the crowded room between me and safety. I knew that Darné would never let me make it to the corridor.

"You are not leaving me with any choice, human," the vampire hissed. He stopped, less than ten feet away. His wights stopped alongside of him, two on each side. There was about a yard between each of the creatures. An image of black steel plates popped unbidden into my mind.

It had to be fate.

I kept my left arm extended with the grenade. I reached down with my right and grasped the stock of my shotgun. I had fired this gun hundreds and thousands of times, practiced until my fingers had bled and my shoulder formed thick recoil calluses. My father, the ruthless perfectionist, had driven me hard when it came to shooting, because he sensed that I had a gift and would not settle for anything less than perfection in his sons. The wood was worn smooth under my glove. The Remington glistened darkly with moisture from the steam. I brought the butt into contact with my shoulder. My life came down to this instant. I needed to beat my record.

"Catch!" I tossed the grenade to Darné. The spoon released with a metallic sproing, igniting the fuse. The vampire moved as a blur to snatch the grenade out of the air. The wights mindlessly tracked the moving object. For me, time ceased. The gun and I were one seamless melding of man and machine. The safety was released as my finger knowingly sought the trigger. The muzzle rose perfectly. The trigger was pulled. The sear released. The hammer fell. The firing pin struck the primer. The powder burned.

I was bringing the muzzle onto the second wight's head before the buckshot struck the first. Fire. Work the action. Repeat. Five shots. Faster than I had ever gone before. The fusillade was a continuous roar without pause. I did not miss any of the five undead craniums.

Dropping the shotgun onto its sling, I grabbed the ladder and started to climb as fast as I humanly could. I did not wait to watch for results. I heard thuds as some of the wights fell to their backs, or collapsed to their knees.

Darné had been a Monster Hunter for longer than I had been alive. He knew what to do with live ordnance in a bad place. He had caught, and then immediately launched the grenade with a pitch that would have made any major league pitcher proud, right through the doorway and into the corridor. He did that even as my silver buckshot pellets penetrated his skull.

The grenade hit the corridor wall and rolled away, now belching orange signal smoke. It was a harmless smoke grenade.

Darné screamed as the silver burned him. "Kill him! KILL HIM!"

Two of the wights shrugged off their shattered skulls and damaged brain tissues, leapt to their feet and charged. The first began to climb after me as the second jumped onto one of the engines and began to climb up the metal surface like a spider. One wight had its eyes put out and stumbled blindly for the ladder, searching for me by smell. The last had its spinal cord severed and was flopping wildly as random impulses fired from its undead brain. I climbed as fast as I could, legs pumping, arms grasping and pulling with all of the desperate strength I could muster. The wights were far faster.

I was halfway up the ladder when the first wight clawed at my boot. Grabbing the shotgun, I fired a single round straight down between my feet. The creature's hand exploded on impact and it fell toward the ground. The blind wight quickly took its place, scurrying after me. The wall crawler matched my pace, and launched itself at the ladder. There was barely time to swing around to the other side as it crashed into the slick steel bars. I dangled over the floor as it wildly tore at me. One paralyzing touch and I was dead. I swung the shotgun like a club, smashing the wight in the face. It tore my weapon away, ripping through the sling as it fell to the deck. I slipped on a wet rung, and then forced myself to start climbing again.

Darné caught my Remington in one hand. He expertly pumped the weapon, aimed it at me and fired. The buckshot slammed into my armored chest, knocking me back. I grunted in pain, but the silver pellets stopped against the woven Kevlar. My gloves slipped on the wet steel, and I toppled backwards in flailing panic. My knee wrenched painfully as I crashed upside-down into the ladder. I hung suspended, my boot wedged under one rung, and my knee bent over the top of another, like an insane trapeze artist. The blood rushed to my head, and I watched as Darné pumped the shotgun, aimed it right between my eyes and pulled the trigger.

Nothing. The click was the loudest sound in the world. That had been my seven shots.

The blind wight surged upwards, sensing my warm blood. Still facing down, I swung my fist and shattered its undead face. The creature was knocked aside and fell. Instantly my hand went numb, and coldness rippled up my arm. I grunted as I did an upside-down sit-up, grabbed the rung above me with my left hand, and pulled. My right arm hanging limply and my knee throbbing in pain, I kept pulling myself along; push up one rung, lean in, reach up for the next one, repeat. My shotgun shattered as it ricocheted spectacularly off of the rail next to my head. Darné had a good arm.

"That was my favorite gun!" I bellowed as I kept inching nearer to the hatch. I now had a wight on the ladder below, rapidly gaining, and two more scaling the wall to pounce on me. The hatch was still ten feet away.

"You should have taken my offer," the vampire roared.

He jumped impossibly high and landed on the ladder directly below me. The metal shook under the impact. Hot water droplets flew off and struck me in the face. Three wights and a vampire in striking distance in the next few seconds. I just kept climbing because that was my only option. I was pretty much screwed.

Then the hatch opened, directly above my head. It was my savior.

It was Grant Jefferson.

"Grant! Help me!" I screamed, clawing my way toward him.

His eyes grew wide as he saw the undead creatures swarming upwards. He started to hold out his hand to me, and then he apparently decided that he did not have time before the creatures would be on him as well. I could see the fear register on his face as he did the math. They were too close. Grant stood in his polished black body armor, bristling with useful weaponry, and said two words: "Sorry, Pitt." He looked right at me as he slammed the hatch.

"Arrgghhhh!" I shouted unintelligibly. Darné laughed below. I stuck one of my legs through the ladder to lock myself into position as well as possible. I reached across my body and drew my pistol with my left hand, sighted on the closest wight spider-crawling upward, and shot it in the head four times before it slipped from the wall and fell thirty-five feet onto its back with a bone-jarring crunch. The other wall crawler leapt, and I just barely had time to align the front sight on the monster before impact, firing a silver slug through the monster's brain. The wight's momentum carried it forward where it struck one of my legs. It fell away screaming in rage. Darné easily avoided the falling undead, but the blind wight underneath was not so lucky. The two monsters collided and fell the rest of the way to the hard metal floor. This time they did not rise. My now-numb leg buckled, and I only barely held on.

Now it was just me and Darné. He flew up the ladder. I fired the remaining ten rounds as fast as I could pull the trigger. I hit him repeatedly but with almost no effect. I dropped the pistol, and he swatted it out of the air. I watched hopelessly as it flew into multiple pieces. I grasped wildly for my knife, but it was too late. He was beside me on the ladder.

His clawed hand clamped around my throat like an iron vise, choking off my air. A bullet hole in his forehead closed and squeezed out a mushroomed.45 slug like some disastrous pimple. I learned a few things right then. Vampires did not breathe, and I was in fact still afraid of dying. I was surprised that I was thinking about Julie. I just hoped that she made it.

"Tell me just one thing, you poor brave idiot," the vampire ordered as he shook me. "How did you know about Lord Machado? How?"

"I went to France once," I gasped.

"And what does that have to do with anything?" Darné asked, fangs extending as he prepared to feed on me. I wondered if I had the strength to break free long enough to fall to my death. It beat the alternative.

"My family went there to see where one of my grandpas was buried. He died on Utah Beach."

"How touching. Now, if you tell me how you learned about Lord Machado, I'll make your death painless."

"I learned that the people in the countryside were pretty nice. But the people in Paris were a bunch of stuck-up, self-righteous pricks. I'm guessing you're from Paris."

"Idiot." Darné's jaw distended as his mouth opened like an anaconda about to eat a goat.

"Darné!" a voice shouted from below. It was Earl Harbinger. He strode into the engine room through the swirling orange smoke.

The vampire's mouth slowly closed. "Hello, Earl. It has been a while."

"Come down here and face me. You know you're not going to get out of here alive. MHI controls the whole freighter. Your goons are all staked. It's over."

"I have your man as a hostage. Let me go, or I kill him," the vampire hissed.

"You know the rules. You helped write them. Let him go and come down here and fight me. You know you've wanted to prove something for a long time. Let's go. Either way you're going to die. At least this way you get the satisfaction of seeing if I am as good as they say."

"And what if I just kill this piece of merde?" He squeezed so hard that the vertebrae in my neck popped. I cringed in pain, and involuntary tears rolled from my eyes.

"Then I'll have my men at the hatch above you throw down buckets of holy water. I'll just stake you while you're laying on the ground and sizzling. Or even better, I'll tie you up and drag you into the sun. You've seen it. You know how much that has to hurt. I swear that if you kill that Hunter then I'll drag you out of here and nail you to the superstructure and watch you burn. I figure you can probably go a while before you finally quit kicking." Harbinger unbuckled his armor straps and set his weapon harness on the deck. "Just you and me, Darné. One last go-round."

"How do I know you don't have ten Hunters waiting in the hall?"

"You don't. But you know my reputation."

"I do. Fine, Earl. Let us see who the best Hunter really is." The vampire released me and I dropped, barely managing to grab a rail. Darné let go and fell swiftly to the floor, landing as if it was nothing.

The two combatants squared off in the red light and steam. I watched in amazement as Harbinger began to circle. He was just a normal man, maybe two thirds of my weight, and in training he had never given any indication of having any sort of special fighting skills. On the other hand, I had just watched Darné perform several superhuman feats and smash my pistol into bits with his bare hands. This did not look good for Harbinger.

The hatch creaked open above me. Strong hands reached through and grasped the handles of my armor. The smell of Copenhagen told me that it was Sam Haven. He hung upside-down through the hatch and scanned the room. He saw Harbinger and Darné preparing to fight.

"Oh hell. We've got to get out of here!" Sam blurted. He tugged on me and grunted. "Help me, you hare-lipped derelict! You're too damn heavy."

"What about Harbinger?" I asked in a panic.

"Don't worry about Earl. He'll be fine. You don't want to be around him when he gets into one of his moods. Now move, damn it!" I struggled up the ladder with Sam pulling me. More hands grasped my arms and helped. Chuck Mead was there as well. The two burly men pulled me into the cargo bay. Sam threw the hatch down and spun the wheel to seal it behind us.

The cargo bay was much cooler. The steel of the floor was cold under my face. I lay there for a minute, panting, as the feeling painfully returned to my arm and leg. I could not understand what had just happened. Earl Harbinger had just given up his life for mine. I was sure that Darné was tearing him to pieces as we sat here uselessly. I gradually pulled myself to a sitting position, my back resting against a sheet-metal shipping container, my stomach clenched in agony, and my knee twinged as I moved it.

"We have to help him."

"Trust me, Pitt. Earl's fine. Too late to do nothing now anyways. Let's get up to the weather deck."

"What's a weather deck?" Mead asked with a blank stare. The big Ranger was splattered with blood, and there appeared to be claw marks on his M249 Squad Automatic Weapon.

"Fricking army. The top. The top part of the ship. The part that can see sky."

"Oh, okay. Sunlight would be good."

"I'm unarmed. Darné broke my guns," I stated as Mead pulled me up.

"And that's a sorry state to be in. Here. Take this thing. The French guys don't need it no more." Sam handed me a French FAMAS bullpup assault rifle. It was a slightly unwieldy and strange-looking weapon, but it would have to do. "The crew, security team and Hunters have all been accounted for. We should be clear, but you never make no assumptions in this business. Let's get."

As we made our way out of the cargo bay, I could not help but ask, "Where is Grant?"

Sam scowled, his handlebar mustache scrunching in consternation; he finally spit a nasty clump of chew and shrugged. "Reckon I don't know. Probably in the light."

"He left me to die," I said hotly.

"Yep. I figured as much. Some folks are brave when others are watching them, but it is harder to be brave when there ain't no witnesses. Grant's never flaked on us before. He probably figured you were dead anyway, no use getting killed for no reason. I reckon that Earl will want to talk with him about that."

"Yeah. Me too." I cracked my knuckles. I had murder in my heart and it must have been obvious to Sam. He just smiled.

"Just don't kill him. We're short-handed as it is," the former SEAL pointed out. "Plus then Julie would probably shoot you, and you don't want to mess with her." Sam pointedly went back to his radio traffic, warning the others that we were coming out. I could not listen along. Somewhere along the line my radio had been broken.

The daylight was beautiful. The breeze was cool and refreshing. I was surprised at how low the sun was on the horizon. We had been in the dark bowels of the ship forever. It felt good to be alive. Almost all of the Hunters were milling around on the deck. Boone's team was somber near the sheet-draped body of their lost man. My team was there. Holly and Trip rushed to me, hugging me and slapping me on my back. Lee was lying on some blankets, his shirt off and thick bandages encircling his chest. He shouted my name and clapped. Julie was there as well. She quit giving orders long enough to run over and grab me by my armor.

"I'm sorry we couldn't come back for you. There were more of them in the corridor waiting for us. We got jumped. I'm sorry. How did you make it?" She looked really happy to see me. The feeling was mutual.

"Earl saved me. I think he's dead."

"Nope. I just talked to him on the radio. He is on his way up and he has Darné's skull as a souvenir."

"How?" I asked in surprise. My spirit lifted upon hearing that bit of news.

"Like I said. Earl is the best Hunter alive. Don't worry about it. I'm just glad you're okay. I thought for sure that you were dead…" She paused. "That was really brave. Stupid, but brave. Thank you."

I blushed. "No big deal."

She patted my arm. "I've got to go inspect the cargo and make sure nothing is damaged before I contact the clients. You stay here and get some food and something to drink. You look like crap."

She signaled for a few of the others to go with her. Nobody was going to go anywhere alone on this tub. I watched her walk away. Even coated in dried vampire juices, she was the prettiest girl I had ever known. Trip interrupted my reverie by handing me a Gatorade and a power bar. I scarfed them down as he gave me the blow by blow of their last vampire encounter. I sat on a crate of grenades and listened to my friends. What it all came down to was this: it did not matter what high tech gear we had, or what weapons, or even what training. It came down to the friends that stood by our side, and our will to fight for them. It felt really good to be alive right then, I would stand with these people any day, and I knew that they would stand by me.

I started to tell them about my close encounter with Darné when I heard a voice. I stopped instantly, leaving the others regarding me curiously. Lumbering to my feet, I limped with resolute purpose in the direction of that voice. That smarmy, prideful, movie-star voice. I bent my head from side to side and cracked my neck and back, an old habit that I had picked up in my bouncing days. I used to do that before beating down rowdy drunks.

"Hey, Grant," I said cooly as I approached him.

"Pitt. I'm glad you made it. Look, I'm really sorry, but-"

I cut him off. I was closing distance. I did not want him to run because I didn't think I could catch him.

"Grant. You left me to die."

"Wait just a second." He lifted his hands defensively. "It isn't like that. They would have gotten me too. If I left that hatch open, we would both be dead."

I tried to look nonviolent. That is difficult when you are a hulking, scar-faced brute of a man. I kept slowly closing distance. The Hunters from Boone's team that had been speaking with him sensed serious trouble and backed away.

"You left me behind." I was directly in front of him now.

The railing was to his back and he had nowhere to go. He must have sensed what was coming because he tried to duck. It did not work. I felt great satisfaction as his nose broke with an audible crunch under my meaty fist. His legs buckled and he started to fall.

I grabbed him by his neck guard and jerked him around until he was facing me. Blood was streaming down his face. He tried to perform an aikido wrist lock to break my grasp, but I was far too strong and angry to fall for that. I slammed him backwards into the railing.

"Do you know how to swim?" I asked coldly.

"Pitt, it wasn't my fault, please wait…" he begged. I punched him solidly again, this time in the mouth, smashing his lips and cracking a few teeth. My cup was not exactly overflowing with mercy.

"I said: Do. You. Know. How. To. Swim?"

"No, please. I'm sorry."

"You had best be a quick learner then," I said as I lifted him off of his feet, and heaved him over the railing.

I stepped away, not even bothering to watch him hit the water. That had felt really good. I was not worried about him drowning. In a moment of unusual kindness that surprised even me, I had hit the button to activate the emergency flotation device on his harness before tossing him. I can be a jerk, but I'm no monster.

Boone moved in front of me. He did not look happy. All of the other Hunters had come running to see what the commotion was about. From the looks on their faces I was guessing that they had seen Grant take his plunge.

"What the hell was that?" he demanded.

"He left me for dead back there. He left me in a room with a vampire and some wights. He slammed the door in my face, and he apologized before he did it. Son of a bitch is lucky I didn't just shoot him in the head."

The former SF man studied me. He signaled one of his men. "Throw Jefferson a rope."

"He isn't going to drown. I turned on his CO2 before I tossed him over."

"I'm not worried about him drowning, fucktard. I'm worried that all of the wight meat in the water has riled up the sharks and they're going to chew on his pompous ass."

Crap. I hadn't thought about sharks. Oh well. I went back to my Gatorade.

The sun was setting over the bow of the Antoine-Henri. The fourteen surviving members of the MHI teams were gathered on the deck in a rough semicircle, illuminated in our ragged exhaustion by the fading golden rays. Grant Jefferson had been safely retrieved from the water and was standing as far away from me as was possible, with a giant, white cotton swab shoved into each nostril. Harbinger had not been happy, and had promised to talk to both of us later. I was not looking forward to that, and I just hoped that it did not end up with me being terminated.

Julie had cataloged all of the valuable cargo. None of the artwork had been lost. The others had found her excitedly browsing through an open cargo container filled with priceless art. Not being a connoisseur of painting, all of the French artwork looked like bunches of colored dots to me. She had not been very happy when she had heard about what I did to her boyfriend. The look she gave me had been oddly similar to the one that she had given that first vampire before she had shafted it through the heart.

All of the crew and French Hunters had been accounted for. Tissue samples had been taken from each individual creature to be sent to the PUFF offices for confirmation and to begin the bounty paperwork. Between the huge PUFF reward and the fulfillment of the French contract, it had been a very lucrative day.

But it had its price.

The body of Jeremiah Roberts had been laid upon an unzipped body bag on the cold steel deck. His neck guard had been torn away, and unlike the neat little puncture holes that most people seem to imagine for vampire bites, the Hunter's throat was missing a massive chunk of flesh, leaving a hole from his trachea to his spine. Boone's team stood the closest to the body. This was their business. The rest of us were mere watchers. The man they called Priest said a few words. As it turned out, they called him that because he had been one once upon a time. This was a Hunter's funeral, and it was as sacred as any service inside a church.

"He was the bravest amongst us. So fearless that regular people would think he was crazy, but not us. We understood him and loved him for it. Jerry was afraid of no man or beast on Earth or from Hell. I am alive because of him. Our whole team is alive because of him. He is here because he took the brunt of the attack to protect the rest of us. And today was not the first time he did that, just the time that his luck ran out. We are taught, Greater love has no man than this that he lays down his life for his friends. My friend. Our friend. May you rest in peace. Until we meet again in the better place. Amen."

"Amen," chorused the group as one.

Boone stepped forward. His face was streaked where tears had run through the grime on his cheeks. He looked somberly down at his fallen teammate, and then he slowly knelt at his side. The warrior gently touched his friend for the last time.

"I'm sorry I failed you, Jerry. I'll be seeing you around."

I had to avert my eyes because of what I knew was coming next. I was not the only one. The sound of Boone's fighting knife being drawn from its sheath seemed to go on forever. Roberts had been bitten by a vampire. It had to be done.

When Boone was finished the rest of his team helped him to his feet. He cleaned his knife on a rag. Priest zipped up the rubber bag, and the Hunter's funeral was over.

Chapter 10

Harbinger summoned me to the cargo bay. There were only a handful of us left on the freighter. The Hind had taken the most injured of the Hunters, and the Brilliant Mistake had been signaled to return to pick up a few more men and our gear. Surprisingly, the little boat's crew had stayed nearby to help us. Harbinger gave them an extra $20,000 for their trouble and the admonition to never talk about this unless they wanted the government to pay them a very unpleasant visit. He must have been feeling generous due to the big haul. The Director also gave them business cards, along with instructions to contact us if they ever heard of any more monster problems. Since we could not advertise, much of our business came in the form of referrals. Representatives of the French shipping corporation were already en route to retrieve their valuable cargo. The remainder of our fee was to be wired to us upon receipt. The Hind was to return for its last pickup shortly.

I limped painfully down the stairs into the vast central bay. Each boot fall echoed hollowly through the cavernous room. I had been paralyzed, drowned, beaten, shot with my own gun, partially paralyzed and choked, and I was hungry, tired and saddened by the loss of some of my favorite guns. If anybody should have been put on that chopper it was me. However, it seemed that Harbinger wanted to speak privately first. That was not a good sign. Even Grant had been sent back to land to get his nose and teeth checked.

Earl Harbinger, Sam Haven, Milo Anderson and Julie Shackleford stood before a giant orange container, the heavy-duty kind that could be picked up through the opening in the deck by a giant dock crane and set onto a semitrailer or train. The sheet-metal double doors were hanging open, and the four experienced Hunters were gathered at the opening.

"Hey," I said as I approached, not that they did not hear me coming, but I couldn't think of what else to say. None of the four looked up. Julie had her arms folded and she appeared rather cross. Harbinger pointed inside the container.

"What do you make of this, Pitt?" He shined a flashlight into the interior. There were seven wooden crates inside. Each was long enough and deep enough to easily hold a person. I ducked my head as I entered, pulling out my own flashlight to get a closer look. The air tasted stale. The lids for the crates had been set aside, and the interiors seemed to be filled with nothing but dirt. I ran my hands through one; it was a thick black loam. Another was white particulate sand, and yet another looked almost like Alabama red clay.

"Coffins," I said. "For the seven Masters in my dream."

"Yep," Harbinger said. "And I'm willing to bet that the dirt is soil from their native lands."

"What does that mean?" Julie asked. "I know I've heard about that in the folk tales, but we've never seen evidence of vampires actually needing to sleep in soil from their homeland."

"Beats me. But this is really a weird bunch. I've never seen anything like this before, and I've never even heard or read about anything like this either."

"We don't know for sure that they are really Masters, Earl," Sam said. "We haven't actually seen any of them yet."

"The stronger the creator, the greater the creation. Some of those sailors we killed were way too powerful to be that young, but they were. Plus creating wights as daylight guardians? Darné was as powerful as a hundred-year-old bloodsucker, and he has to have been turned in the last week. Whoever turned him was one bad dude. So there is at least one Master in this gang. I would bet on it," Harbinger replied.

"So how did you beat Darné anyway?" I asked. The other Hunters glanced at their team leader, curious to hear his response.

"Later. It isn't important right now."

"He was a good guy when he was human," Sam said. "Losing him is a damn shame."

"People change when they are turned. It doesn't matter what they were like before. No matter how good they were, when they turn, they come back as pure evil…" Julie trailed off, and then changed the subject. "We probably need to alert the Feds. Seven high-level vamps on U.S. soil? They would shut us down in a second if they found out that we knew and didn't tell them."

"I hate Feds." Milo spoke for the first time. Sam spit on the floor.

"Me too. But they need to mobilize. They're somewhere in Georgia, and heading who knows where. I'll call Myers," Harbinger told them with a look like he had just bit into something sour. "They probably won't believe us though. Hell, I don't believe what I'm saying."

I looked in the other coffins. Thicker sand, rich topsoil, alkali dirt, and finally broken shale and gravel. I noticed something as I shined my light in the back corner.

"You guys seen this?"

"What?" Harbinger asked as he entered and came up next to me. I squatted and pointed at the ground. Something had dissolved all of the paint in the corner. A dark substance coated the floor. I sure as heck wasn't going to touch it. It felt unnatural from where I stood, and I had a visceral feeling that it was some sort of secretions from the cloaked and armored monstrosity from my dream. Harbinger knelt and studied it. "Ichor. Looks like snot from somebody with real bad allergies. Let's take a sample."

I breathed a little easier once I was out of the claustrophobic box.

"But wait, there's more," Sam stated. "I saw this earlier when we were getting set to blow the steam pipe. Check this shit out."

He took us to another shipping container. This one appeared normal until we circled it and saw what was on the other side. The steel walls had been pierced and peeled back from the inside. I touched one of the edges. The steel was a quarter-inch thick, and the reinforced tubing around the edges had been easily bent.

"Wow," Milo said, stroking his beard absently, "no sign of explosion or cutting torch, or anything like that. Something just punched its way through. Isn't that special?"

"Yeah, it just fricking warms my heart," Sam said. "Why can't we ever fight cute, helpless monsters? Like the ones on Sesame Street?"

"The big things from my dream," I said. "They could have done this. They had to be at least ten feet tall. And they could fly, they had huge wingspans. They were ugly, and they had horns and big teeth and claws. That was about all I saw because I was just moving too fast."

The four Hunters surrounded me.

"Now start from the beginning and tell us the whole story about this dream," Harbinger ordered.

"So that's why you brought me down here. I thought you were going to yell at me for beating up Grant," I replied cheerfully. Julie folded her arms and glared.

Harbinger shook his head. "Oh, don't worry, I'll get to that. But business first. From the beginning, tell us every single detail you can think of. Even things that you might not think are important."

"We might as well get comfortable. This is going to take a while." I told the whole story. Starting with my initial dream in the hospital. I tried to convey the weirdness of it, and probably failed. I went into as much detail as I could about the next dream. I did not, however, tell them about seeing the Old Man when I had been underwater. I was still not sure if that had actually happened, or if it had been a panicked trick of my oxygen-starved brain. When I was finished the others began to drill me with questions, only some of which I could answer.

"The head vampire called the Old Man, Bar Eeka?"

"As near as I could tell. Something like that."

"Could he be a wraith? Maybe a revenant even?" Julie asked. "No wait, those have bodies. How about a shade?"

"Beats me."

"There is a possibility," Harbinger stated. "I've heard some weird stories since I've been doing this kind of thing. He could be a ghost, and he could have hooked up with you while you were dead on the operating table. You might have actually met him on the other side and brought him back. Now he's using you somehow. Problem is, we don't know jack about ghosts, so how do we figure out why he's trying to help you?"

"Be sure to ask him that the next time you see him," Milo told me.

"Except I only see him when I'm dead, or about to come close to death," I added sardonically.

"That will be convenient for you then. You're a Monster Hunter now. Plenty of good opportunities to die all of the time!"

The ocean rushed by below. The interior of the Hind was very loud, and that was not helped by the fact that our pilot felt the need to blare heavy metal through the intercom. Excellent selection though. Disturbed, Slip Knot, Rob Zombie, and even the latest single by my brother's band. I figured I would have to let the pilot know that I knew Cabbage Point Killing Machine's guitarist once we landed. I had not met the pilot yet, and all that I had been told about him was when Milo had jokingly said that he had been included in the purchase of the chopper. I had no idea what that was supposed to mean. All that I had seen so far had been the back of his helmeted head.

I had never ridden in a helicopter before, and it was kind of exciting, loud and with painful vibrations, but still fun. Almost like a roller coaster ride with the added advantage that it could shear a bolt and kill you in a matter of seconds.

We were sitting in the cramped crew compartment. The Hind had originally been used to move Russian infantry, though this particular specimen had been tweaked and customized extensively by MHI. It was still tight, but I was given to understand that it was downright plush compared to what it had once been.

Almost all of the other Hunters had immediately gone to sleep. They understood the basic principle of sleep when you can because you don't know when you are going to get to do it again. I couldn't do it, so I passed the time by picking silver buckshot pellets out of my armor. I made a mental note to add Milo Anderson to my Christmas card list.

I held up one of the silver pellets, now deformed from the impact, and studied it, deep in thought. I had almost died today. Now that the adrenaline had left my system, I found my exhausted brain once again pondering just what the hell I was doing, and truthfully, I didn't have an answer.

Julie's head was rolled to the side and she was snoring. She had hardly spoken to me since she had found out about my little altercation with Grant. I was not about to apologize. He had left me to get eaten, and I did not like that one bit.

Harbinger opened his eyes. He had been awake. He checked to make sure Julie was out, and then unbuckled his seatbelt and moved next to me, flopping solidly into the uncomfortable chair. He turned and shouted in my ear.

"I wanted to talk to you about Grant."

"Okay," I shouted back.

"I know about what happened."

"He left me behind to save his own skin."

"I know," he yelled. It was hard to have a conversation by shouting. "Grant says that he didn't think he could save you… That you would both have been killed."

Perhaps. I did not respond, not knowing what to say, and not wanting to admit that Grant very well might have been right, and honestly not really knowing what I would have done if our situations had been reversed.

"Don't ever let something like that happen again. I'm the boss. I take care of discipline. You undermined my authority."

"That's it? You aren't mad at me for hitting him?"

"Oh, if I was mad, you'd be swimming home."

"Serious?" I asked.

Earl sighed and rubbed his face.

"What are you going to do with him?" I asked.

"Huh?"

"What are you going to do with Grant?" I said, turning up the volume.

"I don't know yet. Maybe Grant's right, and he would've died keeping that door open, and I don't believe in committing suicide to prove a point."

"Sam said something about it being easier to be brave when others are watching you. Maybe Grant isn't so tough when there aren't any witnesses," I insisted.

"Yeah, Sam's a regular philosopher," Earl responded. "You can face some really scary shit, and be just fine, as long as you're doing it for your team." He grew suddenly serious, and I had to look away from those cold eyes. "Either way, it ain't none of your business now. Don't ever do something like that again. Hunters can't lose control. Got that? You never lose control. Do you have a problem with that?"

"No, sir."

We sat in silence for a few minutes, listening to the rotors beat the air, and some amazing guitar playing by my brother. From the expression on Harbinger's face, I don't think that he cared for metal. I refrained from banging my head in deference to his tender sensibilities.

"What about Julie?" I asked.

"What about her?"

"Does she believe that Grant abandoned me?"

"None of my business. She's a grown-up." The look he gave me told me to shut it. He quickly changed the subject. "Let me ask you this, Pitt. You've been with us for a few months. You've gone on exactly one mission. Could you leave now and go back to your spreadsheets and your tax forms?"

I did not answer. Did Earl know how much I was doubting the path that I was on? He was the experienced one, maybe he could see what I could not.

"Well, you'll probably need to."

My heart sank. So this was it. Was he going to let me go because of my rash actions? If he felt he could not trust me then I would be out. Did he think that I was too hotheaded and impulsive to be a member of the team?

"I got a letter yesterday. The IRS is going to audit us. I'm gonna need your help; our books are a mess. Once we handle this little vampire problem, of course."

I grinned. That I could handle.

"I can deal with the IRS. They're a little easier than vampires. Not much, but a little."

"Will sunlight banish them?"

"Maybe. I haven't tried that before."

"That's just the tip of the iceberg though. OSHA is crawling all over us for-I kid you not-workplace safety violations. As if there is anything safe about what we do at all. The EPA is angry about some of the pollution we have caused by burning certain kinds of monsters. Fish and Wildlife wants to fine us for killing a giant mutant Tennessee River catfish because it was endangered. Sure it had just crawled up on land and eaten some teenagers, but it was still an endangered species. We're in trouble with the BATF for some missing compliance paperwork for the machine guns and explosives-paperwork which they lost. And Immigration is investigating us for employing some illegal aliens."

"Are we?"

"Sure, but who doesn't? Do you think you just put an ad in the paper for people who can fly Russian attack helicopters?"

"Why are the Feds hammering us?"

"We've pissed a lot of people off in Washington. Our company was shut down for a long time. PUFF was only reactivated by the slimmest of margins. There are a lot of bureaucrats who are itching for us to fail. They're making it damn near impossible to get our jobs done."

"So what are we going to do?"

Harbinger grinned savagely. "From the amount of money we made on this job, I'm going to buy me some congressmen, maybe even a senator."

I was shocked. "Are you talking about bribery?"

"Why? Does that offend you?" he asked.

"Oh hell no. I'm a libertarian at heart. Screw 'em."

Chapter 11

That night I dreamed again. But it was not about my apparent friend, the Old Man with the poor English. Nor was it about the Cursed One and his gang of abominations. This was something different.

A lone mountain rose out of a bleak, dead forest. The side of the peak had been torn asunder in some sort of huge explosion. Trees had been shattered, stripped of their bark, or bent to the earth. Rock was charred and broken, the very foundations of the mountain had been cracked, and the face of the mighty peak had collapsed in an avalanche.

Amongst the shale and gravel was a low spot where the rubble had settled into what had once been a natural cavern or perhaps an underground structure. In the deepest depression, small bits of gravel and dust began to stir as something pushed against them from underneath, gradually and laboriously moving the weight of the earth above. Finally a dirt-encrusted hand thrust its way into the air, followed by a massively muscled arm. The torn and bloodied fingers clenched into an angry fist.

It was covered in black, swirling tattoos.

I woke up the next morning, groggy, sore, and cranky. We were staying at the bug-infested Radio City Motor Lodge in some little Georgia town that made Cazador look like a thriving metropolis. It had been the closest lodging to the dirt strip that passed for the local airport. It is hard to sleep when roaches keep skittering across your body. My understanding is that since roaches can't shift into reverse, if one of them crawls into your ear canal it can get really nasty and potentially kill you. Sleep on that.

The injured Hunters had been dispersed to seek medical care. The cargo plane had dropped off Boone's two injured men at their home city of Atlanta. Roberts' body had gone with them. The plane had then continued west, delivering Albert Lee and his fractured rib back to Alabama. Grant Jefferson had flown the plane. He had been sent back to the compound supposedly to take over and continue the Newbies' training. I figured that I probably needed some medical care as well, but Harbinger wanted to keep me around because of my dreams, and also possibly because he worried that I might murder Grant once I was left unsupervised.

So that left ten of us in coastal Georgia. Eleven if you counted our mysterious helicopter pilot, who had apparently slept in the chopper. I still had not seen the man without his face-shielding helmet, and he never seemed to speak. The experienced Hunters seemed used to the odd behavior and did not even bother to remark upon it.

There had only been three available rooms. The ladies had taken the nicest one, meaning that the toilet worked, and there weren't as many unidentifiable spots on the walls. I had bunked with Trip, Mead and Milo. Taking pity on me because of the beating I had received, they gave me one of the twin beds. Milo had seniority so he got the other. Trip had won a game of rock, paper, scissors (of course Chuck went rock) to get the couch. Mead got to sleep on the carpet with the mystery stains.

We gathered in Harbinger's room not long after dawn. A large map of Georgia had been purchased and was stuck to the wall with someone's throwing knives. Julie and Boone both had powerful laptops open and running. Boxes of our gear and munitions had been hastily piled into the corners. We had hired a flatbed to move it from the docks to here.

The group was sitting around in their shorts and T-shirts, all except for the Newbie squad who had not known to bring any clothing other than our armor. Holly had borrowed some clothing from Julie. Trip and Chuck had stolen some from somebody else. Since I was the only 4XL I stood in the corner wearing my boxer shorts and a towel for modesty. I had hosed the undead juices off of my armor. The suit was still drying in the shower.

"Pitt. This is an informal meeting. You shouldn't dress up so much," Sam told me. At least he didn't try to steal my towel and flick me with it. I could tell he was tempted.

"Okay, everybody. Here's the situation," Harbinger began, a cigarette dangling unlit from his lips. "We have seven very powerful vampires, possibly Masters, that landed somewhere near here, along with some other monsters of unknown type. They must have arrived sometime in the last three days. If they launched as soon as the freighter turned south down the coast they would have arrived near Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, though my gut feeling's that they didn't do that. The ship dropped anchor off this coast for a reason. If they came straight to shore they would've landed in this area east of us." He put his finger on a spot of coastline. There were a lot of islands, peninsulas and inlets under that fingertip.

"If they started moving as soon as they landed, then they could be almost anywhere. They could still be on foot, or they could have secured some transportation. If they're in a vehicle then they could be in Florida, Alabama, or South Carolina by now."

"Vampires can drive?" Chuck asked blankly.

"Yes, Mead. Vampires can drive. Just not during the daylight. If they secured a truck with a trailer, it would give them a place to sleep during the daylight hours too."

"What if they split up?" Milo asked.

"They won't," I answered. Nine heads swiveled in my direction. I tried to cover myself with the towel as best as I could. I was a little self-conscious, especially with all of the thick red scar tissue on my chest and back. "They're like a protective detail. The Cursed One is their principal. They're guarding him. Wherever he goes, they go."

"Yeah, about that. I've been meaning to ask, how do we know you aren't just bloody nuts?" Priest asked. "No offense intended."

"None taken. To be honest, I don't know. But the seven coffins is a pretty good indicator."

"Fair enough," he answered.

"What about this Cursed One? Do we have anything on record about that?" Milo asked.

"Negative. I can't find anything. Lots of things with curses, but not that match this one. Nothing comes up in a search, and nothing under Lord Machado. No entries about anything wearing a suit of armor either. I've got a bunch of folks hitting the books back at the compound looking for something. There might be something in the old archives that hasn't been scanned in yet." MHI kept meticulous records of all known monster encounters, and also drew upon a massive library of information gathered from around the world. The stuff that we dealt with did not just pop up during a Google search.

"Maybe if we had a better description it might help," Julie said coldly. She was still pretty mad at me.

"Sorry, I was incorporeal at the time."

"Machado is a Portagee last name. It means ax. Like the kind that an executioner would use," Sam told us. His useful information was a bit of a surprise. His teammates regarded him strangely. The cowboy spent a lot more time busting heads than he did studying monster history. "What? I had a master chief with that last name. He thought the ax thing was pretty cool."

"We're listening to the local police bands. If we're lucky somebody will see something and call it in; if we're unlucky, somebody is going to end up as lunch. So we are also listening for any missing persons reports. This is Boone's turf so he's trying to contact some of the locals who might be first in line for information."

"First in line?" Holly queried.

"Cops, coroners, reporters. In this case, I'm going to contact hookers, pimps, and drug dealers. Also some backwoods hillfolk that I've dealt with before. When vampires feed, they will usually go after the underbelly of society. They keep off the radar that way."

"How often do they need to feed?" Trip asked.

"Unknown. The usual low-level vamps that we deal with seem to do it every chance they get, with probably a minimum of about once a month. I know that the Feds have captured a few in the past and done testing on them, even starved a few, but they don't share that kind of info with us," Julie said.

"Speaking of the Feds, I had to call them," Harbinger said sadly. He paused during the inevitable cursing long enough to light his cigarette and take a long drag. "Didn't have much choice. We're still short-handed. We have to face the fact that we might not be able to tackle all of them, especially if they're roaming together."

"What did they say?" Milo asked.

"Nothing basically. They said thanks for the tip. That was it. I think they thought I was nuts."

"We can handle them, Earl. We don't need no Feds," Sam said.

"Maybe if we catch them while they're sleeping and toss in a couple hundred pounds of C4. Facing them while they're awake? No way." There was some murmuring at that. We were a testosterone-charged, confident, well-trained team. "No offense, but I'm the only person here who has actually killed a Master. I'm one of the only people alive who has even seen one. And I was just lucky. Trust me on this one. We're good, but we ain't that good. If we find them, we wait until they hole up, and then we blow it to hell with bombs or napalm or something. Face to face, no thanks."

"Who else can we call in?" Boone asked.

Julie played with her laptop for a minute. "Closest other Hunters are Hurley's team out of Miami, but they're on a case in the Bahamas."

"Lucky bastards," Sam grunted.

"Nope, they're tracking a luska." She shuddered.

"Oh, never mind," he said quickly. I did not know what a luska was, but if Sam or Julie did not want to mess with one, neither did I.

"After that the only other MHI personnel in the south are Boone's guys, and then the Newbies and a few others at the compound. I don't think we want to call up Grandpa or Dorcas. Going out from there we have two teams in the northeast, both on cases right now in New York and Baltimore. Next closest after that is Phillips, who's currently dealing with some devil monkeys in St. Paul. Only five other teams left, and they're out west or out of the country. Every single team is working a case."

"We need to speed up the training process," Milo suggested.

"I know, I know. But it doesn't do any good to train them fast if they just get killed on their first mission. Julie, send every team a message. Give them a brief summary about what we're probably facing and tell them that if we beep them, they need to drop whatever they're doing and get here as quick as they possibly can. This case takes precedence over anything."

"Because of the danger to people?" asked Trip, always looking out for the little guy, being the team's resident good Samaritan and idealist.

"No, because the bounty on a Master vampire is fricking huge," Sam said.

"How huge are we talking about?" asked Holly. We had been told that our next bimonthly check would probably hover around $20,000 for our cut of the action from the Antoine-Henri. I couldn't wait to see what the year-end bonus looked like.

"Like we could buy Idaho kind of money."

"Back to business. Here's the plan. We break up into groups. One group stays here at base, monitors communications and checks all of the gear. Boone will take a group and start hitting up his sources."

"Priest can take a group also, he knows the same people I do. We can cover more ground that way. Some of these folks are not the kind of people that you can just get on the phone."

"Good. Final group takes the chopper. I'll head up and down the coastline looking for that little boat or where it might have possibly landed. Pitt comes with me and we will see if we can't identify anything from his dream."

"Uh… what do we do about cars?" Mead asked.

"Head into town. Buy some from the locals. Let Milo do it. He's our best scrounger. We have two suitcases full of money, so try to get something nice." And I had wondered why we had IRS troubles. We threw cash around like the Cali cartel.

"Oh, and somebody, for the love of all that is holy, buy Pitt a pair of pants."

The Hind sat on the broken tarmac, looking like a squat and angry amphibian. I jumped out of the back of the pickup, and just barely had time to grab my gear before the truck roared off and sprayed me with gravel and dust. Milo was having entirely too much fun with the jacked up 4x4 that he had just bought off of a local named, and I'm not making this up, Cooter. There were even naked lady silhouettes on the mud flaps, and a little sticker of Calvin peeing on a Ford symbol in the back window. Harbinger and I headed toward the chopper.

We were wearing normal clothing, concealing only handguns, with our more serious gear shoved into the duffel bags that both of us were lugging. The pistol that I had under my shirt had belonged to Roberts. It was a big, stainless steel, Smith & Wesson 4506. Not my style, but it was available, and he was not using it anymore. It sure beat being unarmed. Milo had picked me up some regular clothes at the nearest country store. The only shirt they had in my size was lime green and was emblazoned with the deep philosophy of "No Fat Chicks."

Our pilot was waiting for us. I finally got to see him without his helmet. Unfortunately he was wearing a black balaclava and tinted goggles. Harbinger waved as we approached. The pilot waved back.

"So what's the deal with the pilot?"

"What do you mean?"

"I mean, it's already eighty degrees out here and he's wearing a ski mask."

"Oh. He's just shy is all."

We stopped in front of the chopper. I held out my hand and introduced myself. The pilot tilted his head to the side and studied my hand. I gradually lowered it, and finally put it my pocket, slightly embarrassed.

"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.

The black-suited Feds came crashing through the door, piled on top of each other, each one taking a section of room and covering it. They began to scream commands at us. I went to my knees, and kept my hands on my head. It didn't matter because somebody moved behind me, kicked me in the back with a heavy boot, forced me down, and ground my face into the carpet. My arms were jerked behind me and I was placed in handcuffs. They really cranked them on tight, biting the steel deep into my wrists. The boot was placed back on my spine, and I had no doubt that the trooper's muzzle was aimed at my head.

I stayed there, with my face shoved into the carpet, while the Feds secured the home. They entered each room by tossing in more distraction devices, clomping around, and then shouting "Clear." After a few minutes the noise died down a bit, and the radio chatter started up. A slightly scuffed, black leather wingtip stopped inches from my nose.

"Hello again, Earl. And if it isn't Owen Pitt, CPA. I warned you not to fall in with this crowd."

"Hey, Myers. How's it hanging?" I mumbled through my mouth full of high quality rug fibers. He barked an order and my arms were yanked in a vain attempt to get me up. The Fed doing the pulling couldn't dead-lift me, and I wasn't feeling particularly cooperative. Another one grasped me, and with a grunt they jerked me to my feet. I was about ten inches taller than my old friend that I had dubbed the Professor. Agent Franks stood behind him, now in his black body armor and carrying a brand new FN F2000 with grenade launcher. The stone-cold killer looked far more comfortable in his combat gear than he had been dressed up at the hospital. Myers was still in a cheap suit.

"Franks. What's up, my brother? Kill anybody interesting lately?"

"Tons."

"Good for you," I said cheerfully.

The muscular Fed read the message on my lime green attire. "Nice shirt."

"We're not doing anything illegal, Myers. We called and let you guys in on this case as soon as we knew how big it was. We're totally in our rights." Harbinger had a thin smear of blood next to his lip. Apparently one of the Feds had felt the need to help him to the ground.

"You are at a crime scene related to that case and you haven't bothered to call. That could be construed as withholding information concerning a monster menace," Myers stated in a smug and condescending manner, "which is very illegal."

"We just got here. We were meaning to call. My cell phone wasn't getting a signal," he lied.

"I bet. So tell me how exactly did you find this place?"

"We flew down the coast until we spotted the motor launch missing from the freighter. The same launch I told your people about last night."

"So you just happened to fly around until you found it? And you just picked it out of the ten thousand other boats around here."

"Pretty much."

"I'm supposed to believe that?"

"Come on, Myers. How else do you think we found this place? Do you think we have visions or magic dreams or something? Okay, I give up. You got me. We called the psychic friends network, they gave us the coordinates." My boss certainly turned into a smart-ass when dealing with federal agents.

"So what are you guys doing here?" I asked.

Myers started to answer and then caught himself. "None of your damn business."

"You got our call last night about the seven vampires and the Cursed One, and within a few hours you end up right here. That has got to be an amazing coincidence."

"Yes. Pretty amazing coincidence, Mr. Pitt."

"Ironic," Franks said, patting his Belgian assault rifle tenderly.

"Yeah, silly me. Never mind I said anything."

Myers' phone rang. He still had that annoying ring tone of "Take Me Out to the Ballgame." "This is Agent Myers…" He listened for a minute, then he covered the receiver and spoke to us. "Earl, get your crew and take them home. This is no longer your affair. If I see a single Monster Hunter poking around Georgia I'll shut you down so fast your head will spin."

"I've got Hunters that live in Atlanta, Myers."

"Well, they better not be doing anything involving this case. At all. Period. I want you and your freak show back in Alabama immediately. You're lucky you caught me in a good mood. I don't want to hear about you doing anything with these seven vampires, or anything related to them. This case and everything pertaining to it is a federal matter. Got that?"

"Understood. Mind if we call a cab or something?"

"Get them out of my sight." He went back to his phone call.

We were shoved rudely out the front door. Franks stopped us on the porch long enough to undo our handcuffs. I rubbed my tender wrists. My boss leaned in close and whispered a single word.

"Stall."

I raised a single eyebrow incredulously. What the heck was I supposed to do? Talk about the weather?

"Hey, Franks?"

"What, Pitt?"

"What about our guns?"

"They're evidence."

"Evidence of what?" I had the urge to punch the morose man in the snout. He was one ripped son of a gun, he even had big veins bulging in his forehead and neck, so at least I would get a good fight out of it. Except the other forty Feds would probably shoot me. Scratch that stalling plan.

"Crime."

"What crime?"

He shrugged.

"Dude, that FAL and that 4506 belonged to the Hunter that got killed yesterday. Have a little heart. Give them back and I'll deliver them to his sons. Give them something to remember their dad by."

"No."

"Why not?" I knew that there was no way that was going to happen. The Smith was legal, but the full-auto FAL had to be the property of MHI, because it would be too illegal to own without the special paperwork and permissions. Stupid laws.

"Evidence."

"Listen, you monosyllabic moron. Let me spell this out. You can't just go around confiscating private property. There's a fourth amendment. Maybe you heard of it?"

"Did you just call me a moron?" That was possibly the longest sentence I had ever heard from him.

"Yeah, I did. I'm using my right to free speech to call you a moron. That falls under one of those other amendments."

Franks handed his FN to one of the other Feds. He tapped his radio. "This is Franks. Are there any cameras or witnesses in the immediate area? Over." He listened for a moment and then smiled.

He hit me harder than I have ever been hit before. His fist was like lightning, striking deep into my gut. The air exploded out of my lungs in a rush. I have fought in dozens of brawls and underground fights, and won most of them. I've been hit by bikers, construction workers, crack heads, karate experts, and semiprofessional boxers, and just yesterday I had been hit by a vampire. Franks must be dropping some serious 'roids, because none of the others held a candle to him.

I fell off of the porch and landed in the flowerbed. I jumped up, and turned to face him just in time to catch a hammer blow to the side of my head. I tripped backwards over the small white fence and landed on my back. Some of the other Feds stepped forward to give me a little stick time, but Franks just held his hand up to dismiss them. This was his gig.

He waited patiently for me to stand up. I dropped into a fighting stance, legs bent, arms up, hands open and loose. The pain was displaced by my anger. I was ready. "Come get some."

"Okay."

Franks moved faster than I thought possible. I blocked his first two punches, and narrowly ducked under the third. His dark face was emotionless, and his eyes were unblinking. I threw a fast jab and then a hook. He dodged them easily, and then kicked me in the chest. I was rocked backwards in shock. He followed with a spin kick, again hitting me in the stomach. I grunted as my abdominal muscles absorbed the blow.

I'm extremely fast for my size, unbelievably fast. I threw a flurry of punches, and then followed with elbow and knee strikes as the range closed. I did not manage to hit him once. Franks swatted my blows aside with bone-jarring force. He dodged under my elbow, blocked the knee, and then head-butted me in the face.

With eyes watering I dove for his waist. I had been a wrestler. If I could take him to the ground I would have a chance. He pushed off against my shoulders, avoiding my trap, and broke some of my teeth with a hook. He followed that by kicking me in the sternum. Good thing I'm padded with muscle or that one would have killed me.

"Enough!" Myers shrieked.

Franks instantly stopped. He was not even breathing hard. I was panting and bleeding. I spit a blob of blood and half of a molar on the ground. The Feds that had been watching moved aside to let Agent Myers through.

"Striking a federal agent? This is a new low even for your thugs, Earl."

"He didn't hit me. Too slow," Franks stated.

"I'll try harder next time," I gasped.

"Look forward to it."

"Get off this property now before I have you arrested," Myers ordered. Harbinger put his arm over my shoulders and led me away. We walked down the driveway, more like my boss walked and I weaved. My head was throbbing, my eyes were watering, my nose and lips were bleeding, my chest and stomach burned in pain, and I felt at least two broken teeth with my tongue. I had not gotten my ass handed to me in a one-on-one fight like that since I was fifteen.

He waited until we were well away from the helicopters and perimeter of armed guards before speaking. "Good stall. Not exactly the tactic I would have used, but letting Franks beat you up was great."

"I didn't let him."

"Good job anyway." He pulled a handkerchief out of his pocket and handed it to me. I held it tightly under my nose.

"So what was the purpose of that little exercise?" I asked. "What was I stalling for?"

"I was trying to listen in on Myers' phone call. He was standing right in the living room."

"Do you have superpowers or something?"

"Nope. I just have good senses," he smiled. "And I know how to pay attention."

"So did you hear anything?"

He was quiet for a long moment as we crunched our way down the long gravel lane. "Not really. He was talking way too softly. And there were helicopters overhead."

"So I took a beating for nothing?"

"Pretty much. But it was entertaining."

We called for help and Milo retrieved us an hour later with the jacked-up Chevy. We drove south in silence. Our mission was at a dead end. The Feds were running us off. Harbinger was in a bad mood as we stopped for gas in a small town. Milo apologized, but apparently the newly purchased truck got about three miles to the gallon.

Back at the Radio City Motor Lodge, the rest of the Hunters were not particularly thrilled either. The ten of us were gathered in our improvised command center, sweltering in the humidity. I passed the time by flicking pennies at the roaches scurrying up the walls. A few of the bugs were big enough that they shrugged off the impacts and one particularly impressive specimen even latched onto the coin and kept it.

"This is bullshit!" Sam said as he kicked a hole in the sheetrock.

"If we took all of them down it would be the biggest PUFF bounty in history," Boone added. "Seven high-level bloodsuckers, and we would be set for life."

"Myers doesn't bluff. We're on thin ice as it is." Julie was the voice of reason. "We have to go home."

"I don't like it at all, people, but we ain't got much choice. We're leaving. Boone and Priest can head back to Atlanta. You can take whatever gear that don't fit in the Hind."

"I'm short handed, Earl. I'm down a man, and it's going to be a while before the other guys are healed up," he said.

"You guys earned the vacation. Spend some time with your families. Get some rest. We won't send any missions your way until your team is up and running. As for short-handed, you want some Newbies? I think we can consider these graduated from basic training."

The Atlanta team leader critically studied Chuck, Holly, Trip and me. It reminded me of when we used to pick teams in grade school. I sucked my stomach in and tried to look tough. He looked each of us in the eye individually, and nodded in satisfaction.

"Earl. I would be honored to have any of them. From what I understand each one of them did good on that freighter, and that was some hairy shit. If they can keep it together through that, they'll be just fine. I've been running with only five men, and five is a pretty small team to start with. I would take them all if you would let me." I took that as quite the compliment.

"I can't spare them. I'm going to need to spread them around. I've got other short-handed teams, and we need to put together a new team based in the intermountain west. Sam's gonna lead that one."

Sam quit angrily putting holes in the walls long enough to stammer something in surprise. I believe that he used the F word as noun, verb and adjective all in the same sentence.

"Team Haven?" he said. "No way."

"We need another team. You're the best man for the job. Congratulations," Harbinger said. The former SEAL slowly sat on one of the beds in shock. Milo patted him on the back. The rest of us voiced our congratulations. "We'll work out the logistics and the details when we get back to the compound. I've got to spread around my experienced people."

"Good for you, Sam. You'll do fine. As good as any Navy guys can be expected at least. So who do I get?" Boone said.

"I could send you Grant," Harbinger suggested.

"Only if you give me Pitt too. Grant would end up at the bottom of the Chattahoochee within a week. I could deal with that," Boone said. He grimaced as Julie slugged him hard in the arm.

"Roberts was a gunman. You need a gunman. You get Mead. I watched him shoot that SAW on that freighter and he was hell on wheels. He'll do you proud."

"Aw, shucks," said our big simple Ranger.

"Chuck, say hello to your new boss. Don't screw up."

"Yes, sir!" he shouted. Boone shook his hand, welcoming him aboard.

"Okay. Now for the rest of us, here's the deal. We're leaving, but we ain't quitting this case. We keep working our sources. We put out the word to every team, every informant, and every sewer-dwelling mutant out there. As soon as these things show up on the radar we're going to nail them. I'll call in every single Hunter in the country if necessary. Feds be damned. We started this and we're gonna finish it."

"So if we do track them down and destroy them, how do we keep from losing our charter?" Milo asked. "I mean, if we get them, won't the Feds just shut us down for nosing in on their case?"

"Not if we just 'blunder' into the seven while we're working on something else."

"Groovy."

We were dropped off at the little airport. The sun was gradually setting over the Georgia countryside and mosquitoes and little evil gnats swarmed over our bodies. The Hind was prepped, and we made our way toward it, carrying duffel bags and heavy cases. The airport manager sat in a lawn chair in front of his little rusted trailer, an old gray dog curled at his feet. He waved at us lazily.

I was at the rear of the group, lugging a heavy wooden crate filled with all manner of controlled destruction. The big guy always gets to carry the heavy stuff. Julie broke away from the others and stopped in my path.

"Owen, we need to talk for a second."

"Sure," I grunted as I set the crate on the ground.

"First off, I appreciate all of the hard work that you have done. And I really appreciate you risking your life to save me and the others. That was very brave."

"Look Julie, I'm sorry, but-" She cut me off.

"But what you did with Grant was over the line."

"You can stick up for your boyfriend all you want, but he left me behind. He left me to get killed by Darné." My cheeks flushed hotly in sudden anger. I wasn't about to be told that what I had done was wrong.

"I know. That wasn't right, but Earl will deal with it. Not you."

"Wait a second. You're mad because I stepped outside my authority, and not because I punched out your boyfriend?" I was confused.

"And you threw him into shark-infested waters, don't forget the shark part. Your temper will get you killed in this job. It only takes one stupid decision to get you or your team killed. You need to keep the emotions in check."

"Like you," I said pointedly.

"I guess." There was a long and uncomfortable pause. "Look, I just… I don't want you to get hurt. You seem to do that a lot already." She lightly touched my bruised and swollen face. Her fingertips were surprisingly gentle. "Damn. Franks really did give you a beating."

"I am sorry. I'm not sorry about hitting Grant or even the swimming with sharks part, but I'm really sorry about… you know. I don't want you mad at me." I took a deep breath. "I felt like I betrayed you, and that's what I'm sorry for."

"I'm fine, but I've got one request. Stay out of my business. What happens between me and Grant is between me and Grant. Not you, not Earl, not Milo, or Sam or anybody else who feels the need to harass me about it. I know how you guys see him, but I know him better than that. I'm sure he had a reason for what he did."

"Are you going to dump him?" I asked, suddenly hopeful. "Because he panicked and left me behind?"

"What did I just say?"

"Stay out of your business?"

"Right." She must have realized that her fingers were still on my cheek as she reflexively snatched them away. She lowered her voice to just barely over a whisper. "Owen, look… I know that… well, I know how you feel, and I-

"Brother of War Chief!" Skippy rumbled as he interrupted her. He was still covered from head to foot, the mirrored visor of his flight helmet was down, showing only my reflection. I was a little perturbed. Skip, you have lousy timing.

The pilot fell to his knees and bowed again, until his helmet hit the ground. "Hind is… she ready to fly… Noble One." His voice sounded like rocks being poured into a cement mixer. He sprang quickly to his feet.

"Noble One… no carry… he no carry." He made that horrible noise that represented his real name as he grabbed the handles of the heavy crate and bucked it up onto his knees. He clucked when I tried to take it from him. "Skip carry… Bring honor to tribe."

The black-garbed pilot waddled with the heavy load toward the waiting chopper. Julie's brown eyes were wide behind her glasses. I shrugged. It didn't make a lick of sense to me either.

"Noble One? What the hell? He's not your own personal porter, Owen," she said as she turned and stalked away. The moment was gone.

I took one last look at the sunset, swatted a mosquito, muttered something suitably profane, and followed Skippy, who was once again trying in vain to sing. It sounded particularly horrible when he tried to grumble-hum the sounds of the instruments.

"Hold pig steady… dum dum dum… ra ra ra… yeah. Pig. Pig! PIG!"

Chapter 12

That night I slept in my comfortable and familiar bed at the MHI compound. The barracks were clean and roach free. I passed out within minutes of getting home.

My dreams were confusing. I saw an enormous cargo plane take off from an airfield somewhere far in the bleak north. It was a giant, unfamiliar, four-engined monstrosity, bellowing smoke and noise. Inside, the plane was packed with boxes, cargo and even some recently butchered livestock. A man stood near the rear door of the huge cargo plane. He did not need to hold onto anything, despite the uneven vibrations and turbulence, and I knew that he would stand the entire long trip. Unmoving, arms folded, legs wide, thick fur cloak covering most of his features, black eyes staring unceasingly in the direction of his destination.

His face was a mass of black tattoos, giving the illusion of a leering skull. In my dream the ink on his skin moved.

I got back from Montgomery in time to catch most of the meeting. The dentist had fixed my two broken teeth. Half of my face was numb and tingly with Novocain and I could not help but poke at my cheeks to feel the weird pressure. They were using the conference room from my dream. All of the experienced Hunters were there, including Raymond Shackleford III himself. The few Newbies, who it had been felt were ready for action, were sitting around the huge wooden table. Holly Newcastle smiled and gave me a little wink as I tried to sneak in. I sat as far away from Grant as I could. Grant and his nose bandage studiously ignored me.

Julie was speaking. She stood at the head of the table to give her briefing. "Dr. Jonas Turley was considered one of the premier experts on the religion, art and history of the ancient civilizations of this continent. He wrote over twenty books on those subjects, and has done research and been a major part of archeological digs from Alaska to Argentina. I got to hear him speak once at in Birmingham. The man knew his stuff."

"So why did the bad guys go directly to his house and beat him and his wife to death? They tore apart all of his possessions looking for something, something important. I've got an idea as to what." She let slip a brief moment of pride as she made us wait for the answer. "While Pitt was bluffing that he was going to blow up the Antoine-Henri, Darné said that this Lord Machado had some sort of artifact and that he was going to take it to a Place of Power to use it. Dr. Turley had done a lot of research concerning ancient religious sites. His last book was about that very subject, and the word in the academic community was that his next paper was going to be an exhaustive catalog of sites and what their importance was. My theory is that the bad guys went to his house for information. They are looking for a particular place, this 'Place of Power,' so they can use their artifact."

"What does this artifact do?" the senior Shackleford asked.

"I'm the historian; ask the psychic." She pointed at me.

"I'm no psychic. I just have a strange old Jewish man that visits me in my dreams and takes me on wild and crazy adventures-hey, that sounds like a children's book."

"What does the artifact do?" repeated the head boss patiently.

"I don't really know. But I was told that the evil comes. The Cursed One will bring it. We stop it if we can, if not time will die."

"Time will die?"

"That's what the Old Man told me. I saw a storm coming. It brought Armageddon with it."

"I see. That would probably be bad. Carry on, Jules," Mr. Shackleford ordered.

Julie continued, "We need to figure out what this Place of Power is. Then we can get there first and set a trap."

"For seven Master vamps? How are we going to pull that off?" Sam asked. "We got any nuclear weapons stashed?"

"Well, actually-ouch!" Milo started to speak and Harbinger painfully kicked him under the table. Whoa. I had no idea what we had stashed in the basement, but I wasn't even willing to consider that. I forcefully banished the thought of Milo Anderson armed with a thermonuclear weapon out of my brain.

"We will think of something, but right now we need to gather information. We need to find out where Turley's places are, and which one is the right one. We need to keep an ear out for any sign of these monsters, and we need to keep searching the archives until we find out who Lord Machado is and what this artifact does."

"No luck with the search yet," Albert Lee told us. In the last few days he had become our unofficial librarian. "There are a lot of books down there, and no offense, but your cataloging system absolutely sucks."

"And a lot of the archives got burned in '95," Sam said.

"About '95? When do we get to hear the story?" I asked.

Harbinger shook his head. "We'll get to it, but later."

"There is one person who knows all the stories in the archives better than anybody," Milo suggested. "We could go ask him. If anybody would know who Lord Machado is, it would be him."

The experienced Hunters gave each other incredulous looks. Milo's suggestion went over like a lead balloon.

"No way," Harbinger ordered with some force.

"I forbid it," Mr. Shackleford said.

"Milo, don't be stupid," Julie snapped. She visibly paled at whatever the red-bearded man was suggesting. I had never seen anything shake her like that before.

"But if this artifact is really going to end time or blow up the world or whatever, don't you think it is worth the risk?" Milo argued. "This isn't just a normal case. We're talking about some serious stuff. He's mad at all of us, but he would talk to Julie."

"But I don't want her to talk to him. He's dangerous," Harbinger stated flatly.

"Earl, he's still her dad. He wouldn't try to hurt her."

"I've got ninety-seven dead Hunters that say otherwise. End of discussion, Milo. Don't bring it up again."

Milo leaned back in his chair and rested his palms on the table. "Fine. Forget I said anything. Just don't blame me when the world blows up." The conference room was uncomfortably silent. Julie just stared at her hands. And I had thought that my family had problems.

"We do have other options." Harbinger broke the silence. "We can talk to Turley's colleagues. See if any of them know anything about a Place of Power. He had to confide in somebody. We'll need to be discreet though, or the Feds will find out. When I called and told them about the seven vampires, they knew right where to go."

"They could have tracked us there," I said. "The Hind does stick out a bit."

"Possibly, but I don't want to assume that. Even if they did, they're probably in the same boat we are and they will be interviewing the same people. Word gets back to Myers and we're screwed."

"We could knock Pitt out, and see if he has any more dreams," Grant offered.

"Or I could try to divine the future with your entrails. I hear that works with chickens," I replied. He glared at me. Julie shook her head in resignation. I had never promised to play nice.

"There are some other sources we can go to though. There are others out there who are more in touch with… uh, I guess you would say the magical world and all of this Place of Power mumbo jumbo. Or if Lord Machado is evil enough, they may even be able to sense his location," Milo suggested. "We could pay a visit to the Elf Queen."

"Not a bad idea. If we bring a good enough offering she may speak to us," Julie said.

"Whoa. Back up. Wait just a minute. Are you trying to tell me there are really elves?" Trip said.

"Yes, Trip. There are elves," she told him. I refrained from asking if they lived in a magic tree and made delicious cookies.

"Like as in J.R.R. Tolkien elves?" Trip asked again. His eyes lit up in wonderment like a kid who still believed in Santa on Christmas morning.

"Old JR was quite the character. He learned from a few British Hunters who knew their stuff. Always hanging around them and picking their brains about languages and whatnot," the senior Shackleford wheezed. "He did tend to romanticize things a bit in his writing, however."

"I can't believe it," Trip told us. "It's just that this whole time all I've learned about is horrible ugly things. Evil things and dead things that hurt people. I mean I understand that our job is to fight them, so we have to know them, but I didn't know that there were good and magical things too. This is great!"

"Son, just remember. Old JR did tend to exaggerate to spin a good yarn. Real life ain't always like the books or the movies," Mr. Shackleford warned. He glanced at his antique watch. "We got time. Sounds like somebody is taking a trip to the Enchanted Forest. Go with them if you must, Mr. Jones. Milo, it was your idea so you're in charge. Take Pitt too, I reckon he's the psychic."

The Hind set down in Booneville, Mississippi, a few hours later. Our target was actually closer to the town of Corinth, but Skippy refused to land any closer to the Enchanted Forest than we had to. He did not share his reasons, and Milo Anderson, who was leading our little expedition, did not feel the need to argue about it. Luckily for us there was a place in town to rent a car. Sadly, the only available choice was a Ford Escort station wagon. The air conditioning wheezed, hissed and died before we had gone five miles heading north on 45.

"Now when we get to the Enchanted Forest, don't speak unless spoken to. And try not to stare at them. They find that insulting."

"Because they're so beautiful?" Trip asked.

"Uh… probably something like that." Milo was driving. I was in the passenger seat, knees crushed uncomfortably into my chest. Spacious interior leg room my ass. Trip and Holly were in the backseat. When it came to monster research or interviewing Dr. Turley's associates, most of the Newbie squad was pretty useless at the compound. Lee was having a great time exploring and organizing dusty books and journals back at the archives. He had found his niche. As for the rest of us, we were still working on that. I decided that the hole in my gums was done bleeding and I spit the wad of gauze out the window. The Novocain had worn off and my face hurt.

Milo continued speaking, stroking his beard absently. Today he had removed the beads and was going with just a simple braid. He had dressed up for the occasion with a purple paisley shirt and green pants. "Let me do the talking. Etiquette is very important to their people. If they ask a question, answer it, but don't try to make small talk. They can be very touchy and secretive."

"I bet it's because they're so ancient and wise," Trip said. Holly put her finger in her mouth and made a gagging noise.

"Hey, laugh all you want, but I grew up poor in backwoods Florida, with an immigrant, single mom. I'm the only person in my family who learned to read, and that was only because of comic books at first, and then fantasy novels and an active imagination. I got addicted to them when I was a kid and read like crazy. I must have read thousands of them. So I've been reading about elves and that kind of thing for twenty plus years. I can't help it if I'm excited."

"You were a geek," she said.

"Well, I guess."

"I bet you played Dungeons and Dragons in a friend's garage."

"Well, yeah."

"Nerd."

"Hey now," Trip protested.

"Since you were such a nerd, how did you manage to get so buff?"

"Well, one day I learned that I could run really fast with a football, paid for college."

"Still a nerd at heart though, aren't you? Oooh magic elves." She actually mimicked him rather well. "Happy fairy magic wonderland."

"Holly! Quit picking on the nerd!" I shouted.

"You should talk, spreadsheet boy."

"You kids, don't make me stop this car!" Milo said as he turned on the radio and cranked the volume as high as it would go. The channel was Spanish language love songs, but it succeeded in finally drowning us all out. The miles flashed by. Deep green trees and farms, cows and goats, interspersed with patches where out-of-control kudzu vines had managed to kill off all of the native vegetation. Kudzu was the real monster of the South. The open windows only served to circulate the hot damp air. Sweat rings formed in my armpits and spread down my chest, quickly soaking through my dress shirt.

We stopped at a Piggly Wiggly in Corinth. Milo did not explain what we were doing. We three Newbies bought sodas and tried to stay in the air conditioning as long as possible. Milo purchased a shopping cart full of supplies and loaded them in the back of the station wagon while a large fan distracted the rest of us. He had to honk the horn to get our attention.

Milo drank a Sprite while we headed out of Corinth. He pointed out a spot on the map. "Here is the Enchanted Forest. The locals pretty much know to leave it alone. Now for future reference, this area over here is known as Natchy Bottom. Do not ever go there. MHI has had a few cases in the Bottoms over the last hundred years. There are some places on Earth that you just shouldn't mess with, some out west, a couple in Maine, one in the New Jersey pine barrens, places that are just pure evil. That is one of them. That place is just plain bad. The people that live out there are pretty strange and keep to themselves. Heck, they didn't get electricity until the late '90s. There is some crazy stuff back in those woods that you just don't want to mess with." He did not elaborate further.

We took a series of turns, heading deeper and deeper in the hills. The few scattered houses we passed became shoddier and older as we went. The last few houses we saw were so dilapidated that it was surprising that anyone was able to live in them, but lights were on, and dogs roamed the trash-filled yards. The woods grew thicker, older and darker. It rained briefly out of the clear hot sky. The rain was warm, and quickly passed, serving only to increase the already brutal humidity.

Finally we stopped in front of a small sign. It read enchanted forest in big letters, and trailer park in smaller letters underneath.

"Probably a trick to keep outsiders away," Trip told us. Milo sneezed loudly as he had an allergy attack. The Escort's tires crunched over pea gravel as we entered the Enchanted Forest.

It looked like a trailer park to me, and a rundown one at that. The trailers were rusty and old. Cardboard served as windows in places. Garbage and beer cans were strewn everywhere. Milo swerved around what appeared to be a pile of used disposable diapers. There were a few old cars, but it had been a long time since they had been mobile. Most of them were up on jacks or cinder blocks, tires long since rotted away. There was no life to be seen other than a couple of mangy dogs trying to stay in the shade. I could hear the sound of televisions through some of the open doors. Somewhere a baby cried.

Milo stopped the car in front of a double-wide trailer with a no-longer-used giant satellite dish rusting in front. A rudimentary porch had been built out of scrap lumber. A recliner and a big faded couch were on the porch, and a fat, greasy dog was sleeping on the cushions. We exited our little vehicle. Heavy black flies landed on us to check if we were edible.

"Wha chu want?" a voice shouted from inside.

"We bring gifts," Milo replied.

"I didn't order no free Bible off o' the TV, so git," the voice replied.

"We are here to speak with the Elf Queen."

It was quiet except for the sound of a professional wrestling match blaring on the TV. Trip looked hopeful. Holly adjusted her pistol under her shirt. She still wasn't used to packing heat, and she kept touching it nervously. Finally the owner of the voice appeared in the doorway.

He was tall and very skinny, wearing a stained wife-beater tank top and a puffy trucker hat. His blond hair was long and stringy. His fingertips were stained yellow from nicotine, and his teeth were crooked when he smiled. His features were fine, and sharply pointed ears stuck out from under his mullet. "Well, if it ain't some Hunters. Come to see the Queen. Well, she be busy, so git, 'fore I sic the dogs on ya." He pointed at the fat dog on the couch. It regarded us sullenly, but it must have decided that it was too hot to growl.

"We have brought gifts," Milo said casually. He opened the back of the little station wagon. The trailer park elf regarded us with suspicion in his beady blue eyes before he stepped off the porch and looked at our purchases from the Piggly Wiggly. He whistled when he saw the contents. Milo had bought several cases of Budweiser and ten cartons of Marlboro lights.

"I'se go get her. See if she wants to speak at chu." He grabbed a carton of cigarettes, stuffed it under his tank top, and headed for the trailer. We could hear him yelling from the yard. "Rondel! You'se got company."

Trip's face had fallen a bit, but he still looked hopeful. "It's all just a trick to keep away outsiders," he assured himself.

"Dude, he looks like Kid Rock with Mr. Spock ears," Holly whispered. "He sure ain't no Orlando Bloom."

The elf returned. He was unnaturally graceful and long limbed, but other than that and the ears, he made a convincing redneck. "The Queen will be out in a sec. Y'all have a seat," he said, pointing at the couch. The dog didn't move. It had gone back to sleep.

"Git offa there. We's got guests." He kicked the dog with his bare foot. It woke up, stood, and urinated all over the cushion. He kicked it again and it scurried off of the porch, tail between its legs. "Sorrys 'bout that," he said as he flipped the couch cushion over so we could sit on the dry side.

Milo gestured for us to sit. I reluctantly sat on the old couch, so as not to offend the elves, but leaned forward as much as possible to keep a minimal amount of contact between my pants and who knows what. Trip, who was a mild germaphobe, did not look so good.

"I think I'll guard the car," Holly stated. Milo shook his head sternly, and after a moments hesitation she sat next to me. Our elf host excused himself and went back into the doublewide. Milo, being the experienced and wise Hunter that he was, sat on the steps. He sneezed violently.

"Well, this is a little different than what I expected," I said cheerfully.

"It's got to be a diversion," Trip whispered.

"The elf keeps staring at my chest," Holly said coldly.

A few humid minutes passed. A bright blue electric bug zapper noisily executed some mystery critters. I noticed a few sets of eyes checking us out through cracks in various trailers' mini blinds. Our host returned. He passed by us, crunched across the gravel in his dirty bare feet, opened the back of the Escort and started unloading beer and cigarettes. He grabbed a few cases and took them into the house.

"Queen Ilrondelia will be out in a sec. Y'all want a beer?" That was a mighty generous offer considering that we had just paid for it.