The hunters monster hunt.., p.1
THE HUNTERS: MONSTER HUNTING 101, page 1
THE HUNTERS:
MONSTER HUNTING 101
Richard A. Bamberg
Text Copyright © 2015 Richard A Bamberg
All Rights Reserved
Published in the United States of America
This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition, including this condition, being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author No werewolves were harmed in the writing of this novel.
Cover art by RAVVEN (www.ravven.com)
ISBN-13: 978-0692572955 (Verdandi Press)
ISBN-10: 0692572953
9876543210:
DEDICATION
This novel, like all of them, is dedicated to my friends and family.
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CONTENTS
Chapter 1 – Crawling Back to You
Chapter 2 – Once Bitten
Chapter 3 – Monster Hunting 101
Chapter 4 – No Spooning
Chapter 5 – A Patient Man
Chapter 6 – Leather and Lace
Chapter 7 – Cabin in the Woods
Chapter 8 – Uninvited Guests
Chapter 9 – Moonset
Chapter 10 – A Bolt Thrown Home
Chapter 11 – Moonrise
Chapter 12 – New Work
Chapter 13 – Old Flame
Chapter 14 – Specter
Chapter 15 – Flashback
Chapter 16 – Planning Session
Chapter 17 – Sex and Bracelets
Chapter 18 – Exorcism
Chapter 19 – Trinity Tattoo
Chapter 20 – Lion’s Den
Chapter 21 – Dinner Guests
Chapter 22 – The Change
Chapter 23 – Rings and Bracelets
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
With grateful thanks to Rene’, Robert, Del, and DeAnna.
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Chapter 1 – Crawling Back to You
Have you ever made a decision that you knew would come back to haunt you? Yeah? Well, me too and tonight was certainly going to be one of those. I was driving down a misbegotten excuse for a gravel road on a muggy Alabama night in late May with the radio blaring. Overhead, a full moon cast a pale glow that lit the road ahead farther than the reach of my truck’s high beams. My taillights cast a ruddy glow on the clouds of dust spinning out behind my Dodge Ram and gravel pinged off the undercarriage with a staccato beat.
The satellite station switched songs and Daughtry’s “Crawling Back to You” blared from multiple speakers in the cab. How apropos, I thought, and then I slammed my fist against the steering wheel and shook my head. That was not what I was doing. Sure Gail Drexler was an old flame, but I wasn’t crawling back to her. Uh-uh, nope, not crawling, I was doing better than fifty on a road that was unsafe at forty.
A little less than an hour had passed since Gail’s call. Six years ago, she disappeared from my life and tonight she called—with no fanfare, no preamble—and said she needed my help. Sure, she was an old flame and we’d parted on excellent terms. A smile crept across my face at the thought. The last time I’d seen her had been the night before I enlisted in the Army. She had made sure I’d never forget that night or her.
When she called, I tried to put her off. I was studying for the last final of my sophomore year at the University of Alabama-Huntsville. The exam was important, more important than running out in the middle of the night to meet an old girlfriend. Okay, I hadn’t actually said that to her, but that’s what my head kept telling me. I said I could meet her after the exam, but she was insistent. Tomorrow would be too late; she had to see me now, tonight. Okay, I said, figuring I could meet her, move a piece of furniture or fix a leaking pipe and still be back in time to finish studying before catching a few hours’ sleep.
Then she asked me to meet her at Sardis and hung up.
I had stared at my phone’s display for a full minute. Sardis was nearly forty miles from my apartment in Huntsville. I called up her number and rang her back, but the call went straight to voicemail. I should have asked how she got my number, but she probably reached my parents, they had had the same number for at least thirty years.
Back when my Grandparents were children, Sardis had a fair-sized congregation. It was hardly a church anymore. They still had annual homecomings and an occasional revival, but the remainder of the year, the church, and its one-hundred-and-eighty-year-old cemetery were alone except for the groundskeeper. He didn’t show up except when the weeds needed whacking.
I jammed on the brakes and took a left onto another nameless gravel road. The truck shuddered across washboard ruts until I thought a tooth filling was coming loose. The rear end fishtailed, but I had learned to drive on these roads and this was nothing new. I pressed down on the accelerator until all four wheels bit in and powered out of the skid. My rear wheels dug into the soft, weed-choked gravel at the edge of the ditch, but then the truck straightened out. Daughtry got tired of singing “Crawling Back to You” and in the pause there was just the rumble of the Dodge’s Hemi and the gravel pinging off the skid plates.
My pickup bounced onto the wood planks of an old bridge. I glanced upstream toward a beaver dam that had been there for almost as long as the bridge. The moon reflected brightly from its waters. Something large and furry ran across the dam, something much larger than a beaver, a coyote maybe. The truck’s tires lost traction again as I hit the gravel on the far side of the bridge. I snapped my eyes back ahead and again fought to stay out of the ditch.
I eased off the gas and slowed to a more sane speed. Sardis was only a couple more miles and there was no sense in risking a wreck just to save a minute or two.
I smiled again at the thought of seeing Gail. She had been different from the other girls in my small town. She was smart but didn’t like to show it in class. She was tough and while she didn’t go out of her way to start anything; she had gotten into her share of trouble. Maybe that was what had appealed to me, the bad-girl image that had followed her to Greenbow. Rumors flew about her theorized expulsion from her old school or maybe she’d gotten pregnant and her folks had left town rather than tolerating the critical glares of the other churchgoers. That kind of thing hadn’t bothered me. Granted, I was a horny teenager, but none of the rumors worried me and I had asked her out almost immediately. She was my junior by a year or so, but she had been the teacher in our relationship. She’d been my first and we had some good times together before I left for the Army a month after graduation.
She had gotten me into the occasional bit of trouble and Mom and Dad had been dead-set against me seeing her after the second incident, but Gail was what I had wanted, no matter what the trouble. Our last few months together were spent slipping out and having our dates either out of town, Huntsville was only thirty miles up the road or in the back seat of my car.
After I’d finished basic training and then Ranger school at Fort Benning, I’d returned home on leave to find Gail’s house was occupied by people I didn’t know. I asked around and found out her folks had moved out of town and nobody had heard from any of them since they left. I tried to locate her a few times without luck. I’d been pissed with her for years, but eventually concluded she was just one of those romances that come in and out of your life. Then, this evening, she called up out of nowhere and insisted, no, she’d practically begged me to meet her at Sardis. I had to wonder what sort of trouble she gotten into this time. That had been less than an hour ago and now; I was going see her for the first time in six years. I wondered if she was still the same.
I topped a rise and in the distance could see the steeple of Sardis. The old church sat atop a hill at an intersection of two gravel roads. Moonlight reflected off its tall, narrow windows and the steeply pitched metal roof. The vertical wood siding was white, but weathered and would need a good scraping and a new coat of paint soon. The church sat on flat stones rather than a true foundation. I didn’t know the real age of the church, but I was pretty sure it had been here the last time some of the states decided they couldn’t stay in the Union.
A van sat half in half out of the shadow of an enormous pin oak that was nearly as old as the church.
I felt a smile creep back onto my face. The hell with the final; I could study in the morning. If Gail were nearly as friendly as I remembered, I wouldn’t get any sleep tonight anyway.
Approaching the church’s drive, I slowed to reduce the cloud of dust following me. My headlights illuminated the side of the Chevy van. It had seen better days. There was rust around the wheel wells and the paint was patchy at best. At second look, the van was old with dual side doors that swung outwards. Did Chevy still make those? My headlights swept across the van’s windshield as I braked to a stop a dozen yards from the van.
I put the Dodge’s transmission in park and sat still, waiting for the dust to settle. I didn’t see Gail.
I turned off the engine, thumbed both side windows down, and listened. Other than my pinging engine, the night was quiet. That was a little odd considering you could usually hear crickets and tree frogs anywhere in Alabama in the summer months. The air held the smell of dust and I snee zed. I left the keys in the ignition, opened the driver’s door, and stepped out onto the running board. Looking over the top of the crew cab, I scanned the area, unsuccessfully, for Gail.
Four large pecan trees graced the rear of the church’s property. Weathered wooden tables ran between the trees. In my youth, the tables had been used for pot-luck dinners during homecoming and revivals. Once my younger brother had been playing on the tables after a revival and fell, hitting his head on an exposed root and spurting blood all over the place. It had taken six stitches to close the wound. I’d caught hell for it because as the older brother, I was supposed to keep an eye on my sibling.
“Gail?” I called loud enough for her to hear me even if she was inside the church. She didn’t answer.
I stepped down. The gravel crunched underfoot as I walked around to the opposite side of my truck. I called again, “Gail!”
Nothing. A light breeze shook the leaves of the oak and from somewhere the scent of jasmine reached me.
I reached through the passenger window and popped open the glove box. The box’s interior illuminated and light reflected off blued steel. I lifted the Beretta Storm .40 S&W out of its holster and shoved it into my back right pocket. Then I removed the small box that held my Peltor TEP-100 digital earplugs. I opened the case and turned both earplugs to normal mode before draping the fishing line lanyard behind my neck and inserting the plugs.
“Well, Hoss, I wondered if you were smart enough to come armed.”
I flinched but turned slowly to see Gail leaning against the oak. No one but Gail had ever called me Hoss and she had never explained why she used the nickname. Hearing it gave me a little thrill. I tried not to smile. The moon was bright enough that even in the shade of the tree’s massive crown I could see that Gail looked pretty much as I remembered her. Still trim with a damn near perfect figure. Her dark hair, nearly black except in bright light, looked short. She was dressed in jeans, a long sleeve flannel blouse—excessively warm for a May evening in Alabama—and hiking boots that rose to mid-calf. The blouse was unbuttoned and the pale skin of her belly practically glowed in the moonlight.
I glanced to either side once more before stepping toward her. I stopped, still in full moonlight and waited for her to come to me. After a moment, she pushed herself away from the trunk and approached me with a confident stride.
“It’s been a long time, Gail. Are you alone?”
“Pretty much these days,” she said. “Yes, it has been a long time, but you can wipe that silly grin off your face, I didn’t call you out here just to try out the back seat of your truck.”
I chuckled but dropped the smile I hadn’t realized I had. “That’s too bad, but then I didn’t think you did. You sounded desperate for me to come tonight. I assume you’ve gotten yourself into a fix you can’t get out of without help. So what’s the problem?”
Gail stopped, still in shadows. She turned toward the cemetery and hesitated. After a moment, she turned back to me. “We’ve got a few minutes. Are you any good with that handgun?”
“Of course, I didn’t spend four years in the Army peeling potatoes,” I said.
“Good, cause as I remember it you couldn’t hit the broadside of a barn.”
I had to laugh, same ol’ Gail. “Just because you beat me on one dove hunt doesn’t mean I wasn’t pretty good.”
Then Gail laughed, too. “Yeah, that was a fun day. So, how’ve you been, Jesse?”
I gave a slight twist of my head. “Seriously? You practically beg me to meet you at a deserted church in the middle of the night and you want to know how I’ve been? What’s going on, Gail, why the drama?”
She stepped out of the oak’s shadow, moved close. The four inches difference in our heights didn’t allow us to stand entirely eye-to-eye, but close enough. Without thought, my hands rose to slide beneath her unbuttoned shirt and I clasped her bare waist beneath the dark material of her sports bra. She rose on tiptoes and kissed me lightly on the lips. The kiss was brief and she stepped back out of my hands before speaking. “Thanks for coming, Jesse. You’re right. I do need help.”
I stepped closer and gripped her shoulders lightly. Holding her at arm’s length, I studied her. My first guess about her hair had been wrong; she hadn’t cut it short. She had her thick dark hair tied up in a bun. Her right sleeve was rolled up to above her elbow and a bandage covered her forearm. There were dark spots on the white gauze, a sure sign of a fresh, seeping wound. At her left hip hung a long sheath, almost long enough for a machete and beneath her blouse, I could see a big bore autoloader peeking around her right side on a belt holster.
My eyes came back to her hazel ones. “What happened to your arm and why the weapons?”
“I’ll need the weapons and the arm is part of why I called you.” She pulled out of my hands and started walking away across the gravel parking lot. I followed. My longer strides kept me up with her, but she was moving too fast just to be ambling along. She was headed somewhere in a hurry.
“Are you going to tell me about it or are we going to play twenty questions?” I asked.
“I’ll tell you,” she said, but kept walking and didn’t elaborate.
“When?”
We crossed under the branches of one of the pecan trees and soon reached the cemetery. A weathered wrought-iron fence, a remnant of more prosperous times for Sardis, surrounded it. Gail stopped at the gate and held up a hand. I stopped beside her and we stared out across a grassy graveyard populated with more older tombstones than newer ones. “Listen,” she said softly.
I followed her gaze. I didn’t see anything worth noting, much less worth driving out here in the middle of the night.
I kept my voice as low as hers. “I don’t hear anything. Am I supposed to see a ghost? Is that it?”
“Shhhh,” Gail hissed and placed a hand on her pistol.
Somewhere in the dark, I heard scratching. It sounded almost like digging but not like with a shovel, no, it was more like a dog digging a hole. I felt a chill of premonition stand the hairs on my nape at attention. Moving slowly, I slid the Beretta out of my back pocket. With hushed tones, I said, “What is that?”
“A ghoul.”
“Say what?” I asked, figuring I must have misheard her.
“Come on, quiet now,” Gail said and stepped through the already open gate.
I hesitated, frowned, shook my head, and then hurried after her. She moved fast, darting from one headstone to another, always low, always alert. I mimicked her movements and a surge of adrenaline coursed through me. It was just like Afghanistan, following a teammate from cover to cover, always watching your mate’s back, always making sure that nothing popped out of cover to strike them from behind. Two tours had given me a knack for combat movement, something I was unlikely to forget and could never unlearn.
Gail dropped into a crouch in the short grass behind a large tombstone and froze. I copied her action, dropping to one knee within an arm’s reach of her. I swept the graveyard for a threat, but I didn’t follow my eyes with my weapon, that would mean movement and movement revealed positions. I had scanned nearly the entire half of the cemetery and the adjoining woods that were my responsibility—everything to Gail’s right—when I spotted movement almost straight ahead. I leaned closer to Gail. “Movement at your twelve o’clock. Want to help me out here? What are we hunting?”
“I told you, ghoul,” Gail said and followed my gaze toward the movement I’d spotted just inside the tree line. “Yep, that’s it. It usually makes a snack out of the recently dead, but if it catches live prey, it’s not above killing.”
Gail had often played practical jokes on me, but dragging me out in the dead of night for one seemed a little beyond her. “I’m going to pretend you didn’t just say ghoul. Now, what are we here for?”
“Tonight, we’re hunting ghoul,” Gail whispered back. “They’re not too difficult. They can’t be killed by just gunfire, but removing their head will do the trick. First, we have to incapacitate it. I have the big knife so I’m going to need you to put enough lead into it to take it down until I can finish it. Think you can do that, Jesse Weaver?”
