Monster Hunter Memoirs: Grunge - eARC (14 page)

The troll’s momentum carried it towards me so I stepped to the side and let it go past then cut downward into the back of its right leg, taking out the tendons. As its damaged leg went out from under it, it dropped its head down to me height and I took it off with one more swipe of the sword.

Unfortunately, all the various bits were still twitching and moving. The body was trying trollfully to writhe its way to the head to reattach, the arm on the floor was flopping towards the body and both the missing limbs were regrowing as I watched. Then the one finger walking up my armor got to my throat and started strangling me. I pulled it off and tossed it down the corridor.

“He seemed a little gruff,” I said as Louis helped Doctor Nelson to her feet. She was favoring her right arm which had taken the majority of the impact.

“They really don’t like billy-goat jokes, Chad,” Brad said. He was working on Phil’s injuries. The troll’s long talons had slashed his chest but the cuts looked superficial. His armor was in tatters, though.

“I noticed,” I said, wiping down Mo No Ken. “But he really didn’t seem all that tough.”

“That was a little one,” Doctor Nelson said. “And we’re still going to have to burn it.”

I pulled out a thermite grenade with my left hand and held it up.

“It’ll burn right through the body and into the next subbasement,” Phil said. “And probably start one hell of a fire down here.”

“We’ll drag the pieces up to the top,” Doctor Nelson said. “Separately. Louis and Chad on the gear. Brad and I will tote and help Phil back upstairs.”

“I can keep going,” Phil said. “It’s only a flesh wound.”

I’d pulled the hand off my gear and now kicked it to keep it from reconnecting to the body.

“Doctor, with due respect, carrying the torso all that way will take more than two of you,” I said. “I don’t think trolls will futz with a flamethrower.”

“We’ll all go.”

We did carry the flamethrower back but left some of the satchel charges with some booby traps. If the trolls messed with those they’d probably do our work for us.

Phil stayed up top on Doctor Nelson’s insistence. We found a metal trash barrel the local bums had been using to stay warm, and dumped our troll parts in it. That kept the MCB happy.

The problem with all of us going back up was that trolls might have infiltrated back up to the first level. We did a quick sweep, didn’t find anything, and headed down again.

With the exception of the one troll, we didn’t find anything on the next level down. That left the lowest level.

Before we went down we changed batteries in all our flashlights, got a drink of water and generally prepared. We still didn’t know how many trolls we were dealing with or how big and nasty they might be.

The third level down was a shambles. Not only doors but walls had been knocked down. Debris was strewn everywhere and stuff had been piled all over the place. There was stationery, some of it dating back to the 1950s, boxes of pens, broken chairs, ancient typewriters and every other accoutrement of office life. It looked like an office-supply warehouse scrap yard.

As we swept towards the northwest corner we started to hear the rumbling sounds of trolls and their constant bickering. It was in trollish, which none of us spoke, but bickering was bickering.

“Gurgle mugga robomp!” “Bluck glog, glog, gloga, mop!” “BURRA, BURRA, MOP!”

There were at least three voices coming from behind a door marked “Personnel.” When whatever corporation owned this building terminated someone, they were apparently serious.

We’d passed out Phil’s satchel charges and I took my hand off my weapon long enough to tap mine and look at the good doctor. She shook her head and pointed to a pile of paper. If we used fire this place was going up like a napalm strike and we were fifty feet away from the stairs through a maze.

I let the Uzi retract, quietly drew Mo No Ken and kicked in the door.

“Good morning, ladies,” I said. “My name is Chad and I’m here representing the Billy Goats Gruff Monster Hunting Corporation.”

I needn’t have bothered with the door. They came through the freaking
walls
.

Five minutes later I was lying against a wall coughing blood. My right humerus was broken, again, along with some ribs, the forearm was torn open to the bone, I was missing two teeth, had a slash mark across my cheek that was going to leave one hell of a scar and my armor looked like it had been put through a blender. Even my Kevlar helmet had deep score marks in it. All four of us were at least injured but I’d taken the brunt.

Trolls
really
don’t like billy goat jokes. And the one upstairs had been the baby.

On the other hand, bits and pieces of troll were scattered in every direction. A few of them were steaming. We’d gotten to the point of throwing some thermite grenades towards the end.

“You guys are going to have to tote this time,” I grunted.

“You had to make a billy goat joke, didn’t you?” Brad said, stumbling over to me.

“I think I’ve learned my lesson on that one.”

Pro-tip: Even with a +3 Sword of Sharpness, taking on trolls hand-to-hand is a losing proposition. And never, ever, make billy goat jokes. You will rue the day.

CHAPTER 10

The humerus turned out to be a major problem.

Like my femur, it had been shattered in the bombing. The actual break there was at the upper end of the humerus, just below the tuberculum majus, the bulbous bit on the top. It had been put back together with lots of screws and a plate.

When the troll hit me and broke the bone, again, it was lower. But the torsional forces rebroke the original break and splintered it up to the tuberculum majus. What I had on the upper bit of my humerus was, at this point, more pulp than bone.

The doctors in Spokane gave me most of that when they patched me up. There were lots of X-rays and serious big-words that they thought I wouldn’t understand. Doctors in Seattle confirmed it and stroked their chins as to what to do about it. I insisted that I needed a working arm to do my job. They weren’t too sure how to accomplish that.

Finally I asked about complete replacement. That took some more chin stroking but in the end that was the conclusion. Most of it my insurance wouldn’t cover but the PUFF bounty on six trolls was just sitting there.

Two weeks after the fight in Spokane I went into the University of Washington Medical Center at 0600. I woke up at 1627 in recovery with a titanium carbide artificial bone that went from my shoulder (part of which had been replaced) to my elbow (most of which had been replaced).

Two weeks later I was out of the soft cast and it was back to physical therapy all over again.

There were things I really liked about the University District. I’ve discussed them. And there was a fair turn-over of people so in general my philandering ways didn’t come back to haunt me. Seattle is a big place but the UD is more like a small town in a big place. And that has its complications.

This leads up to the point that when I went into the physical therapy center and was introduced to my therapist…I’d met her before. Briefly. She was one of those ladies who was fortunately a heavy sleeper. Unfortunately, she now knew my name, address, phone number and had my recently repaired arm in her pretty little hands.

“So,” she said, flexing my recently rebuilt arm. “Your name’s really Oliver.”

“No,” I said, wincing. “It’s Oliver Chadwick Gardenier. I hate all of it but I go by Chad.”

“And I take it you’re not really a stock broker. I mean, when I saw the scars I’d wondered about that.”

“I’m not really a stockbroker. I really was a Marine. I really was in the Beirut Bombing. What I do now is classified.”

“And I can believe as much or as little of that as I’d like,” she said, straightening out my arm to the point of…

“I think that’s far enough,” I gasped. Oh, this was
not
going to be good.

“But here I get to decide what’s
enough
,” she said, maliciously. “The phone number you gave me was for a Korean grocery.”

“Sorry,” I gasped. Oh, the pain!

“There is no company called Heimlich, Heimlich and Purge.”

“Sorry!” I whimpered.

“And I lost nearly four hundred dollars on that ‘hot stock tip’ you gave me.”

“How was I to know pet rocks would go out of style!” This was God’s punishment on me. I knew it was. Hot pokers would be preferable.

“Seriously, Chad,” she said, frowning and letting up on the pressure. “You seemed like a nice guy.”

“Seriously,” I sneaked a look at her nametag. “Brenda. Those X-rays you saw are the result of what I
really
do for a living. These fresh cuts on my face? Those stitches on my arm? That’s what I look like after a more or less normal day at the office. So, yeah, I’m a dog. I’m a lousy lounge-lizard who picks up nice girls, has some fun and then hopefully never sees them again. ’Cause the last thing I want to do is drag some poor woman into this life. Okay? So it’s love ’em and leave ’em. Because that way, if you don’t even know who I really am or where I really live or what I really do, you don’t feel constrained to attend my funeral. Which will be closed casket or probably just an urn with my ashes in it to cry over.

“So, sorry about sneaking out on you in the morning and leaving your door unlocked. It was, trust me, for the best. You want the money back? I’m good for the money. But what you don’t want to do is get involved with somebody in my line of work.”

“You work for the mob or something?” she asked.

“I’m a contractor that derives his income mostly from the Federal Government. So, no. And I’ll repeat ‘classified’ as in ‘secret.’ Which is as honest as you’re going to get from me.”

Four hundred bucks was not the most I’ve ever paid for booty but it was totally worth it.

* * *

There’d been some question about whether I could return to duty or have to retire. I’d pointed out to the Doctors Nelson that I’d shrugged off the Beirut Bombing to become a Hunter. They took the point. Medical retirements were probably the most common way people left MHI. The company was kind enough to leave me on base salary, no bonuses obviously, during my surgery, convalescence and retraining period. It took four long months for me to get back to reasonable shape for monster hunting. I still wasn’t one hundred percent but I was getting there.

Since I was out of action for a while, again, and the company was still keeping me on salary waiting to see if I could fully recover, I took a vacation.

Pro-tip: Be careful about how hardcore you are about recovery and getting back on the line. All the good hunters want to get back to killing monsters and making money. Much of the stuff that we do is fairly mundane, for monster hunting, and you can get complacent about that. But occasionally you run into an operation or an action, right out the blue, that pushes you up to the point where really it should have involved Force Recon or Delta or something. Don’t think you can just wrap the fucker and shake it off.

Stay in shape, stay in focus and when you’re injured, work to get back to top form before you hit the front-line. The distance between life and death in this work is usually measured in millimeters and microseconds. One pulled muscle can mean the end of your career and we take enough casualties as it is.

That’s a way of saying plan to take most of your vacations while you’re in physical therapy or still popping pain killers.

Wanda, the cute little physical therapist, had some vacation coming up. Pointing out this was not an intro to my life, I asked her if she’d ever been to England. She hadn’t and was more than willing to go with me, doubling as my ongoing physical terrorist. Doctors Nelson had friend with the Van Helsing Institute and they were more than happy to welcome a visiting injured American hunter.

Doctor William Rigby, vice chairman of the Van Helsing Institute, was a wild-haired, bushy-eyebrowed, standard English academic, one each. Just like the Doctors Nelson were perfect examples of the American psychological industry. He looked a bit like a short, wiry, version of Albert Einstein without the nose. He was still covered in shrapnel from his time as a Marine Commando and Special Operations Executive member in World War II and chain smoked Galois cigarettes, a habit he’d picked up in France while working with the Maquis. He had, in the intervening years, been everywhere and killed everything. Now he was semi-retired and managed the day to day operations of the various Van Helsing facilities including their archives which were, let me tell you, extensive.

Van Helsing did some stuff that I frankly thought was smarter than MHI. For one thing they had a visiting scholarship program with Oxford that was supported by the British Government. They had the same cantankerous relationship with BSS and MI4 as the US hunters but they had a much better relationship with supernatural affiliated academics. Not all of them were monster rights advocates.

Doctor Rigby provided a nice young, female, tour guide to keep Wanda occupied during the day while I dug into their archives and eventually some of the secure vaults at Oxford. What a freaking treasure trove. Oxford had been studying monsters since before the split in 1209. According to the “official” histories, Oxford and Cambridge separated due to “disputes with townsfolk.”

The true story was that some of the academics had delved a bit too deep into trying to use various unearthly powers. This caused a major break-out of demons, similar to what had happened in Microtel. The pro-demon faction, if you will, was driven out while the anti-monster faction helped the local clerics run down and destroy the demonic infestation. Thereafter one of Oxford’s cares, later made secret, was to “make This world of God’s Creation safe from the Unseen and unholy.” The pro-demon faction founded Cambridge University which was why the British pro-monster advocates still infest the place.

I started to put some things together about then. Growing up, my mother would always talk Oxford down and frequently went to events at Cambridge.

Hmmm…

Bottom line, Oxford’s secure vaults held a lot of monster lore. Much of it was collected from all over the world during the colonial period and if there had been a monster outbreak, anywhere, any time, there was probably a paper by The Royal Society for the Study of the Supernatural about it.

The academics there were quite polite to a visiting American hunter who had been injured fighting trolls. Polite and just a tad condescending. Then I started to correct some of their literature on Japanese monsters I’d been studying as well as delving into some of the, many, monster language books they had. I have a pretty much eidetic memory, even after all the bangs to the head, so the first thing I did was dig into Trollish—Trul-ska’ technically—to translate what the trolls had been arguing about when we found them. Naturally it was an argument about how to prepare the humans they’d caught wandering in their territory for tea. By some immersion in Trul-ska’ with one of the Doctors of Linguistics I was pretty much fluent in a week. It wasn’t a tough language consisting of a total of about nine hundred words, many of which were situationally adjustable.

I was offered a scholarship on the spot.

Before I left, once my arm was starting to work properly, I wrote up a formal paper on the Blue Screen demons and Microtel’s ongoing issues with them as an example of Ekaratai, as they termed them, and the warning that as the computer industry advanced this would be an ongoing problem that given the power of computers would probably worsen.

There’s a reason I still use a typewriter besides being an old fogey. I deal with enough crazy ass shit in my life. I don’t need a demon crawling out of my screen.

The scholars had divided the supernatural up into various classifications, or factions. First you had your angels and devils, in the religious sense obviously, because even the staunchest atheist had to admit there was something out there, and sometimes it even helped us. Hello. The religious scholars chalked these groups up to a Creator, and the opposition to his plan as the Fallen. Beyond that it all degenerated into arguments, like any topic involving religion.

Then there was another faction of ancient beings known as the Old Ones, which was a vast and diverse bunch of things, most of them really nasty and, as far as we could tell, in conflict with each other. They ranged in size from killable to godlike. Some said they were the remnant of a separate plan that the Creator had dropped, as well, a mistake. Others thought they were truly alien. All those academics agreed that the Old Ones were bad news.

There were references in the papers to something called “reality stones” or “ward stones” that could turn away or even destroy the greater Old Ones. I never had the time, then, to track those down. Some of these devices were created by Sir Isaac Newton. The British were understandably proud of that. But researches later had always proved fruitless despite more or less having his complete design. Something was simply missing. He might have left out a key ingredient, he was a bit of an ass that way according to some contemporary reports, or something universal might have changed since his time. Others had been created by earlier alchemists going back to the Greeks and Romans at least. Many of those had been expended over the years. It was believed that the Antikythera Device—which I had to look up—was an early ward stone despite being completely different in appearance and manner to those of Isaac Newton. Certain relics of the early Christians had been proven to have similar powers at least in the hands of a believer.

Our best guess was that it was the Old Ones, or at least one faction, who provided the powers that raised undead. Ward stones were sovereign against undead as was “the Power of The Lord Our God” wielded by a “truly Holy Believer” of any faith. One of the Royal Society papers detailed an eye witness account of a Hindu Mystic using the power of Brahma to drive back a vampire and “return three Wights of Great Power to their Eternal Rest.”

One group the Institute had collected a lot of information on was the Fey and I think I found that part the most fascinating of all. The Fey were found in various forms throughout the world and it was more or less a catch-all for anything otherworldly, but not related to the Old Ones. Fey ranged from Buddhist garuda “demons” to Grand Fey like Faerie Queens and Baba-yaga, all with a complex social structure and a caste system. They were mysterious, powerful, and much of the Institute’s information was basically educated guesswork. They believed Fey be exiles from another universe, although the ones who did occasionally communicate with us insisted they were here before humans. But then again, Fey were notorious for being lying tricksters. Aspects of their magic indicated that they might be from an alternate reality where physics was slightly different than this reality’s. Or, possibly, they had a better handle on quantum physics. I read papers and got into discussions on both sides.

Bottom line, the Fey didn’t seem interested in taking over our world so much as messing with it and trying, in general, to avoid direct conflict with the dominant sentient life-form: Humans. Fey lived in and around humans in various guises, including cast off races who had long ago been their servants. It was widely believed that elves and orcs fell in that category, and maybe even gnomes, though now they had mostly resorted to lives of crime. Then there were the powerful Grand Fey Courts, some of which overlapped semi-openly with human royalty and nobility at odd times in history. One Faerie Queen in Austria had maintained a continuous Court in Vienna in the days of Johann Strauss, who she had boosted to prominence after he won a Harper’s Challenge.