Monster Hunter Memoirs: Grunge - eARC (17 page)

There was a whistle and Arata’s head rolled across the floor. There was a massive spray of arterial blood as he sprawled in an ungainly heap.

“There are areas of concern,” I said, flicking Mo No Ken to clear it. “Your area of concern is taking money from businesses for no good reason. Smacking around whores. Offering loans to the desperate for interest that will make them your slaves. We do not care about those. Those are minor issues. Our area of concern is preventing the likes of this,” I held up the head of the Jorogumo, “from spreading across the earth like the lava of Mount Fuji.

“This,” I said, shaking the head so hard remaining ichor splattered on my suit, “was an insult to
my
clan. To bring this
here
? To kill with it on
our
territory? No. However, this insult was made not by the Fathers of the Land of the Rising Son but by this worthless one,” I said, toeing Arata’s corpse. “The insult is expiated.”

“The Fathers may disagree,” Oshiro said.

“Then they can
bring it
,” I said in English. “We’re better armed, better trained and if you
really
want to get busy we can bring the
entire
God-damned MHI down on your heads. Your organization fucking used the supernatural to commit a crime. That puts you all on the PUFF list and means
every single member
has a price on his head.

“The last motherfucking group the yakuza want to piss off is Monster Hunter International. My boss said your Fathers have worked with him before. They’ll know. Agama-kai has already pissed us off once. Don’t double down.”

I dropped the head of the spider-woman on the body of the dead yakuza boss, picked up his head by the hair and walked out.

We needed something for the PUFF confirm.

CHAPTER 12

One thing I haven’t covered, so far, is vampires. I liked a lot of “stuff” about working in Seattle. But like the movie later said: “The one thing I can’t stomach is all the damn vampires.”

Forget Santa Clara (where I worked, briefly, later), Seattle is one of the vampire capitals of the world. It’s the weather, isn’t it? If the cloud and rain cover is thick enough, a really strong vampire can be out briefly during the day.

They also can pass better. You see someone deathly pale in Mexico City or Phoenix and you’re immediate thought, if you’re a hunter, is “Vampire.” In Seattle it’s “Goth” or, hell, “Long Term Resident.”

Next to Microtel, vampires were our number one call-out. They should rename it Fang City.

I’ve got to back up on vamp details to explain the general consonant of how they turned up in Seattle so frequently.

The PUFF table listed, then, four categories of vamps. Now it’s five and since I had a hand in that I’ll go with the five set. The five categories, now, are Standard, Higher, Major, Greater and Master. The addition was “Major.” And this chapter is about why.

Standard vampires are those turned by lower level vampires by “bite, die, turn” who are very “new.” Basically they’re angry, hungry, usually confused, psychotic, strong fast zombies.

Higher vamps have gotten past the zombie stage. They’re not much tougher, but they’re thinking more clearly, like what they were like when they were still alive, but with an evil predatory twist. Higher can be downright clever. Both of these kinds are fairly easy to kill during local daylight. They’re usually asleep during the day, they can be roused, but at best they act like someone on sleeping pills or who just cannot wake up without the first cup of coffee.

Major are stronger and faster than Higher vampires but the main difference is that they tend to be alert during the day. They cannot handle even weak daylight, as Greater and Master vampires can, but they are, trust me, a right handful underground during the day. These are clever enough that they generally got some daylight guardians of some sort. They also begin to have the ability to use telepathy and hypnotic dominance of humans and other sentient and non sentient beings.

Greater vampires are immensely strong and fast, like blurringly fast and throw you half a football field strong. They can walk in daytime as long as they are not in direct sunlight. That will still set them on fire. They can take a bit of low-albedo reflected sunlight but generally have to stay in heavy shadow. They’re old enough they’ve generally developed a strong resistance to pain and can drink holy water if they have to. It still causes a hissing and burning reaction.

The higher they get, the more they seem to abuse the laws of physics. How do vampires get stronger? Nobody really knows. Most Hunters guess it is a matter of age, or the stronger the creator, the stronger the creation. Personally, I agree with the scholars at Oxford, and think it must be a matter of how much blood they’ve drank and lives they’ve consumed. One professor estimated that to reach Master level, they’d have to have killed about fifty thousand people.

Fifty. Thousand. People.

Now Masters are slaughter machines. Fortunately, they’re super rare. And I’m glad.

Masters have been reported to have a huge number of abilities. Like werewolves they transform, although it’s almost instantaneous. More like dropping an illusion. They can take the form of a bat demon like being. Bi-pedal with massive talons on hands and feet. Thin but supremely strong, flip a tank, and so fast that the “sound of a thousand bats” thing is any clothing rippling in the wind as they move. You can’t see them when they move according to the reports.

If you ever have to face a Master Vamp, my suggestion is calling in a B-52 strike.

I’m totally serious.

But with that out of the way I can talk about Seattle and vampires.

From what we know, smart vampires, higher and above, get along even less well with each other than humans. A very powerful vampire can generally dominate weaker ones by force of personality. It appears two vamps of similar ability are always looking at each other as a potential lunch if nothing else. They can, apparently, still fall into something resembling love. So you can have pairs that are lovers. Het, homo, bi, whatever. And, yes, they do still have sex apparently although they cannot produce offspring. But, generally, they don’t get along real well and are very territorial and controlling.

So you’re a newbie vampire who has been turned by some vamp in, say, New York, and you’ve drunk enough souls you’re getting your headspace and timing back. Suddenly you’re working for the ultimate toxic boss. If you step out of line, you’re liable to get drunk by your boss for your troubles. You think about it and decide to take off. You want someplace that’s got food and preferably not a lot of sunlight…

And you move to Seattle. Which seems
perfect
.

There you set about starting your own little coven of vampires and you’re not going to make the same mistakes as that asshole in New York. You’re going to do it
right
…

Every few months some homeless would start disappearing somewhere in our region. Tacoma, Greater Seattle, etcetera. And we’d be on another vampire hunt. And about half the leaders would have a New Jersey accent, I swear. It was like the NYC area was churning the damned things out. I later found out there was a reason for that.

Most of you have probably been on at least one vamp hunt. The vampires usually have a clutch of human captives they’re feeding on, generally kept in a pit or a locked room, always in total darkness since they vamps see fine in that. Pretty unpleasant is an understatement. Always remember to bring rope and if it’s not too far of a walk some sort of ladder as well as the usual forced entry tools like a Halligan and axe. (Generally referred to as “irons.”)

They’re generally somewhere below-ground. If you’ve got homeless missing in a particular area, look in basements of abandoned factories, disused subway tunnel areas, that sort of thing. Generally best to do that during daylight hours ’cause you never know what level of vampire the master or mistress is going to be.

This gets to my main vampire story the pro-tip of which I’ve just covered.

Pro-tip: Just because you’re dealing with a vampire that seems like it has to be a newbie, it might not be. Even old vampires make mistakes. Especially if love is involved.

We were missing students from the UD. Male and female but mostly female. There must be a serial killer on the loose! It wasn’t just UD. Women and some men, all college age, had gone missing from the general area. Mostly they’d been at bars and met someone and left to go, you know, hang out, talk about Heidegger…Photos of them indicated they were all white or Asian and notably all were fairly attractive.

Serial Killer in the University District!

It was something we’d seen before. New vampires who had just gotten their sentience back tend to get all into the Vampire Mystique. They were powerful immortals! Human chicks loved to have their blood sucked! The worst were the occasional former nerds who suddenly had a taste of power and dominance. They were strong! They were powerful! They were immortal!

Just ’cause you don’t senesce doesn’t make you immortal. Having your head cut off is still going to kill you.

Smart vampires are careful and feed only on people nobody notices or cares about. IE: bums, runaways. They don’t live in big palaces. (Saw that later in Eastern Europe after the Fall.) They stay on the edges and feed on the edges. Because there are a lot more of us than them and we are very good at killing them.

We looked at this one and made a snap decision that turned out to be wr—wron—incorrect.

“New sentient vamp,” Louis said, looking at the request sheet from the King County Sheriff’s office.

“Early higher,” Phil said. “Probably a nerd. Look at the pictures of the victims. He’s practically picking them on whether they’ve got modeling and pageant background.”

“There any empty mansions with a basement in the area?” Brad asked.

“Not that I know of,” I said. “We could ask a real estate agent.”

So Louis and I put on our best clothes and engaged a high-end real estate agent. I had just sold a successful start-up in Portland that used an advanced algorithm to speed up daemon translation processing based on “my PhD in Coptic linguistics” and was “semi-retired.” My scars were due to a “BASE Jumping accident.” I wore tailored polo-shirts and kakis. Louis was my “partner” wearing a tailored suit. I never knew Louis was such a fashion horse. He looked like a member of Jesse Jackson’s entourage. We practically held hands.

There weren’t many high end mansions available near the University. I “just loved the energy of an intellectual district,” true. The agent was probably wondering why we were so jumpy every time we checked out the basement. The basements were important for “Louis’ wine collection.” Louis was a wine connoisseur. Also, I was surprised, true. He had picked up a sommelier certificate from the French Wine Institute while recovering one time. “Contract sommelier” is a great cover if for no other reason than most people don’t know what it is but it’s French so it must be sophisticated.

No vamps in mansions, though. And kids were still disappearing.

That sent us back to our usual tramping around in sewers and abandoned factories and warehouses.

I preferred the mansions.

Brad was the expert, there. Over the ten years he’d been on the Seattle team he’d gathered a base of knowledge so good on abandoned commercial real estate he really needed to just retire and go into that field. Another pro-tip: spend some time working in the commercial real estate field during recovery periods. You’re going to need to know every abandoned shit-hole in your territory.

And where Jesse was the designated tracker when we hit the woods, Brad was the one that could find the scuff mark that said “Monster” in all the other crap in an abandoned factory.

Seattle had been building for a long time. And like most cities in earthquake and flood zones (most of them) had been built on destruction. You would not believe how many old homes, factories and warehouses there were
under
the current homes, factories and warehouses.

But no matter how we looked, we could not find this bastard. And kids just kept disappearing.

Finally, I broached the subject of gnolls.

“We’ve got some,” Doctor Joan said, her nose wrinkling. “We leave them alone, they leave us alone.”

“They’re harmless,” Phil said. “What do you want with gnolls?”

“Van Helsing sometimes uses them for CIs in London,” I said. “Have you ever talked to them?”

“They don’t or won’t speak English,” Doctor Lucius said. “We’ve run into them but, as Joan said, we just leave them alone and vice versa.”

“Anybody got any contacts with the local trash company?”

Nobody did. Neither did Paulding.

Snyder did, though. And when I called he admitted that he owed me a favor. Michael Oshiro was, apparently, while a serious bad person, easier to work around than Inoue. Inoue had been bringing in loads of heroin and expanding that market. Oshiro was just providing not pushing. Overall, better with Oshiro. And while he didn’t have specifics, he’d heard that a “gaijin had sent Inoue’s remains to the Fathers” in Japan as a message. So Seattle and even FBI OrgCrime liked me.

Very odd.

He put me in touch with a friend in the garbage business. Which was how I found myself sitting outside a rainwater outlet, by an immense pile of garbage, in the dark, wearing my gas mask, at around midnight on a rainy night. Not that there were many clear ones in Seattle.

The guy from the garbage company had been hesitant at first. They didn’t want to get in trouble for illegal dumping. But he acceded to my request.

“Why from the fish market?” he asked.

“I need it as nasty and stinky as possible,” I said. “Preferably the oldest and stinkiest garbage they’ve got.”

“It’s pretty nasty when it’s fresh. But okay.”

I sat still. I knew the gnolls knew I was there. But that huge, beautiful, pile of stinky, rotting, nasty, fish was just too tempting. Finally one, then another, then another, then a mass of the little creatures came creeping out of the outlet, all of them chittering in their high, guttural language.

What they looked like was…variable. They literally covered themselves in various sorts of debris as camouflage. Many a sewer worker has walked right past a gnoll and never seen them. They just look like another pile of garbage. A few, clearing blockages, have accidentally pushed one and gotten the shock of their life when the pile of garbage stands up and runs away.

Their basic body is a thin humanoid with a fairly human face. Bit like a ghoul’s, somewhat twisted and deformed. Possibly more like an australopithecus. But you rarely can get a good look for all the junk hanging on them. They don’t wear clothes but the garbage pretty much covers everything up.

I just sat there and listened, comparing the language to the ones I’d studied in England. I was surprised that it was a variant of German gnoll as opposed to English. I hadn’t studied that as carefully. It took me a while to get some basic vowels and nouns. And I couldn’t for the life of me remember the German gnoll for vampires.

The gnolls were diving into the garbage with relish, the pile covered in them.

“Stinky fish!” was the main comment. One word. Basically “Urgkh!” in a high, excited tone.

“Herring!” a special favorite, especially rotten. “Ghlackt!” Choked up from the back of your throat like clearing a loogie. Sort of like Hebrew or Arabic “Ch.” “Lach-hayim!” That sort of “ch.” I finally got “Suck,” basically the noise itself, “sluckt.” And blood. “Thchut!” So I sort of had “blood-suck.” “Find.” Need. Love or at least “good.”

It took a few hours and I was nowhere near fluent. But the sun was going to be coming up, soon, and the garbage pile was quickly dwindling.

“Need help, I,” I said in broken gnoll.

The gnolls all froze then several scuttled back into the sewer.

“Friend am. Talk, speak, King. Good, good, talk.”