THE HOMECOMING
Alex Drescher
The date started out great. Candles, unobtrusive music, a three-course dinner prepared right at the table by a professional Michelin-starred chef, and finally, red rose petals scattered from the dining table to the lavishly furnished bedroom.
By the time they got there, the chef was gone, of course, but she didn’t know then that it would have been better if he’d stayed.
In fact, she hadn’t even suspected it later, after they’d moved, as part of the artful foreplay, into a light marble-tiled bathroom with a tub so spacious it would be a sin if they didn’t both end up in it.
They did, and it was still great.
She hadn’t even realized when foreplay became lovemaking, but she wasn’t complaining. It, too, was very imaginative and ultimately more than satisfying.
Only then he’d shoved her head under the water and held her there with a force she wouldn’t have expected from him.
And it was at that exact moment that she would have appreciated the chef’s presence.
She tried to kick him, to rip his hands off her neck and get her head above the surface. Desperately, she clutched at the edges of the tub, but its smooth walls were slipping under her increasingly clumsy fingers.
Eventually, she stopped trying.
* * *
Candles and unobtrusive music remained, as well as the perfectly set table with Meissen porcelain, gold cutlery and crystal wine service. Candle flames reflected off the surface of the perfectly cut decanter, illuminating its deep red contents.
She popped the last piece of toast into her mouth and, careful not to wipe the bright red lipstick from her lips, dabbed them dry with a napkin.
Then she turned to the waiting chef. “Steak tartare from cerebellum and georgiadis medulla, my dear Herbert, you know how to surprise. So delicate, so sinful . . . ”
The chef in question was flushed. “Even a dilettante can make a good dish with fresh ingredients, my lady,” he replied.
“Oh, no,” she disagreed with a smile. “Your skills are unmatched. Who would have guessed how much a fading orgasm would affect the taste? All that dopamine, it’s like pouring the finest French champagne through a brain.”
She turned to the other late-dinner attendee. “And of course, my thanks to you, Sebastien. After all, you’re the one who prepared that girl so well for a slaughter. Good thing you have no problem mating with humans. What was once frowned upon is now very useful. Who was it, anyway?”
He decided not to respond to her condescension. Herbert had really outdone himself, so why spoil his evening?
It wasn’t just the sex that flooded their food with hormones tonight. Herbert had insisted on serving the woman only fresh seafood and lightly cooked freshwater fish before drowning, along with the seaweed so adored by macrobiotics, blanched in twenty-year-old port wine.
If Herbert was right, the other courses, like the starter, would be unforgettable.
“A young healthy female of the human species,” he replied just before she could interpret his silence as impoliteness. “She practiced a healthy lifestyle—regular sleep, sports, no drugs, alcohol or cigarettes.”
She was about to say something, but was interrupted by the arrival of Herbert serving another course.
“Lungs,” he uttered in a tone as if no further description were necessary, but then added: “The drowning was done in a bath of rosemary and bergamot, with a subtle hint of thirty-year-old Orkney single malt whisky.”
“Interesting choice of bath ingredients,” she remarked amusedly to Sebastien.
“For you, only the best,” he replied.
She bit into them eagerly, and they were exactly as she’d hoped. Fresh, young and full of water absorbed during the drowning process. As fragile as a young girl’s soul, yet as full of flavor as a grown woman’s body.
She delicately wiped her mouth, stained with bright red blood, and clapped enthusiastically as Herbert placed a plate in front of her, adorned with oysters and seaweed stained with fresh salmon blood, a barely three-inch piece of pale flesh looming in the center.
“An unexpected highlight of the evening I had not hoped for,” said Herbert with trembling voice, “a human fetus, no more than ten weeks old, topped with a thimbleful of blood from its mother’s pericardium, flavored with fifty-year-old Madeira Terrantez.”
Although she was entranced by the delicacy offered, she nevertheless asked cautiously: “Will anyone miss her?”
Sebastien grinned. “She lived alone and lost her job a month ago. No one will miss her, and I’ll take care of her remains.”
“That’s good,” she replied, taking a discreet bite of the offered delicacy.
When she finished, she gestured the chef away and glanced at Sebastien. “It’s time to proceed with the mating.”
Sebastien immediately began to undress.
* * *
Having friends in the city incinerator plant is an incredible advantage. Especially if you bring in anything other than monsters falling under the B016 form whose discreet disposal is in the state’s interest.
I was unloading crates of foil-wrapped bodies from the van when the night shift boss arrived. “Howdy, Felix,” I greeted him and handed him the delivery paper.
He pocketed it without looking at it and asked me: “What have you brought me?”
“Our brave government—with regard to the energy crisis—has decided to resume coal mining in Ostrava. And what a surprise, no one realized that the abandoned mines could be inhabited by permoniks. So when they sent in the technicians, all that returned were gnawed bones. And so the minister’s underlings came to the boss with an offer that couldn’t be refused.”
“How many have you got?” he asked me.
“One hundred and thirty-two. I only cleaned the CSM mine, but the next batch of those little buggers will be brought to you by the people who were in charge of clearing out Darkov and Paskov.”
“Then we should ask Brussels for an extra supply of gas, ha, ha, ha,” Felix laughed.
Then his eyes flicked to the three much larger packages I hadn’t yet unloaded from the van. “What about these?”
“Wrong time, wrong place.”
“And the papers?”
Sometimes you just need to get rid of something that doesn’t fit any government-approved form. I handed Felix three five-thousand-crowns bills.
When the money changed hands, I helped him load the bodies onto the cart and then we moved to his office.
Felix fell on the armchair that had been brought in for burning years ago and pulled a flask and two glasses from under his desk. Good thing alcohol disinfects because they hadn’t seen water in a long time. But his slivovitz was first-rate with such a high-octane number, even Russian fighter jets could fly on it.
“Busy?” I commented on the stacks of papers that covered his desk.
Felix smirked. “We buy indulgences from the Union for burning waste, and we pay the state an income tax, a special environmental tax, and an even more special war tax. There’s plenty of work, but a lot less money to pay for it.”
When I shook my head, he reached into his pocket and pulled out my bills.
“If we had no side income, we’d starve to death. It’s disgusting. All the foreign-language mafias here have a flat rate for eliminating inconvenient witnesses. I get paid by a dozen sects whose image would be damaged by evidence of their bloody rituals, and by gnomes who settle scores in a way that would shame businessmen from the nineties.”
Felix slowly rose from his chair and walked out of the office. When he returned, he was carrying a black plastic bag. “And now this arrived here,” he said, tossing it at my feet.
“A new client,” he added, taking ten dull but undeniably gold coins from his pocket.
“Yeah, old Spanish doubloons. Smell them,” he urged me.
I did, wrinkling my nose in surprise. “Sea mud?”
He nodded. “Exactly.”
I opened the bag and promptly threw up in it.
“Shit,” I groaned, wiping my mouth with a sleeve.
Felix pointed to a wet spot in one corner of his office. “That’s where I threw it. Welcome to the club. A young girl was cooked and eaten, and her poorly gnawed bones were brought here by that son of a bitch.”
“I’ll give you thirty grand if you leave me that bag and describe the bastard who brought it,” I offered.
He didn’t refuse.
* * *
“I’m not a pathologist,” Martin informed me as I made my way to the third basement floor—where he had his kingdom—upon returning to the headquarters.
Although the boss is known for his thriftiness, it didn’t show here. All the secret services of the world would have no scruples about invoking World War III for Martin’s equipment.
He had everything, including a cluster of powerful computers linked by a high-speed network, things that had only been whispered about in the editorial offices of professional journals, and artifacts we’d captured on our expeditions.
For me, it’s all Greek, but no other department of Fantom produces such damn effective toys.
It does have one downside, though, and that’s Martin. Despite his undeniable genius, and even if you follow the unwritten rules, such as not making eye contact and not using the imperative mood, he’s as hard to handle as a whale washed up on a beach.
“I know you’re not a pathologist,” I agreed, adding a bit of psycho-sugar. “But no one can analyze these remains as quickly and flawlessly as you can. I need to find out her name and who did this to her, so why go to a blacksmith when I can go to, why not say it, a supersmith.”
Martin, who was busily fiddling with some device that was likely to explode or implode and take at least half the block to hell with it, grinned. “Sugarcoating and a mention of the lack of time. All that’s missing is guilt-tripping.”
“If you don’t help me, that bastard will murder someone else.”
“And there it is. Thanks,” he replied.
“You’re welcome,” I said, reaching into my pocket and pulling out a small, copper-wire-covered device I’d taken from the permoniks who’d founded a new civilization in the abandoned tunnels of the CSM mine.
“How about a bribe?” I asked.
“Corruption is bad, of course,” he began, staring at the thing in my palm. “But it’s also effective,” he added. “That’s a nice little thing. Will you give it to me?”
I pointed to the black plastic bag I’d placed on his examination table. “Sure, but . . . ”
“Sure, sure, there’s always a but,” he snapped at me, holding his hand out, palm up. “I’ll identify the victim in ten minutes.”
* * *
“It’s ugly here,” Petra said when she arrived at Martin’s lab.
“Dark and musty,” added Alexandra, who had been pulled out of a meeting with representatives of the Hyundai factory in Nošovice who had a problem with a hu li fox, a demonic version of the kitsune that had been set upon them by their Chinese competitors.
“I reject the request to paint this place in pastel colors immediately,” the boss responded, sprawled contentedly on a wheeled office chair he’d dragged over from a nearby desk.
This guy is a legend in the industry, and as the head of a Hunter company, he’s personally participated in missions, even though he could be lying on a beach in the Caribbean.
When the communists disappeared in the dustbin of history, he reinstated Fantom and Hunters went from underground to a market economy, with all the pros and cons that entailed. He averted twelve attempts to abolish Fantom by decisions of the government or ministers bribed by competitors. He uses petitions from monster rights activists to insulate his house and he supposedly put a stop to activists gluing themselves to the road in front of the headquarters by starting to drive a tank to work.
It is thanks to him that the status quo exists—the state, through the secret European fund TEFLON, pays us bounties for the monsters we hunt, but it also collects taxes from us and buries us in secret decrees, regulations and measures that regulate everything from ecology to maintaining the diversity of the harmless monster population to gender equality in our teams.
In fact, monsters are in the same situation as the public awareness of their existence—both are strictly regulated. The former is handled by us, and the latter by agents of the State Regulatory Service, compared to whom KGB agents look like amateur hacks. Witnesses to monster attacks are intimidated or bribed, and when that doesn’t work, there is social discrediting and public execution on social media.
And Fantom grows, gets stronger and, most importantly, makes money. We are the leader in the industry, a company with equipment rivaling the armies of smaller countries, and our boss spends his days in meetings with bowing politicians from Brussels and Prague.
Petra, our archivist, gives them presentations with lots of cute kittens to lift their mood and Alexandra crushes them with hard data and disgusted looks. So the entire Fantom board was in this hastily called meeting, plus little old me.
Yes, I am Hunter, but until a year ago I was a clerk at the Job Centre. Two things changed my life—the first was the feeling that it wasn’t the job for me, and the second was a striga who came to claim housing benefits without bothering to maintain her human form.
So I guess it’s clear that I’m pretty low on the Fantom food chain.
Fortunately, it was Martin and the results of the analysis that brought us here. They may have made fun of me, but they didn’t dare look him in the eye. As far as I know, there was a noonwraith who did just that 20 years ago, and none of us want to end up like her.
Martin pointed to the remains lying on the examination table.
“This was a woman, twenty, twenty-five years old at most, of Indo-European ethnicity. Well, more European than Indian, since she was a natural blonde. Given what’s left of her, that’s about all I can tell you about her. And now the interesting part . . . ”
He grabbed a remote from the table and displayed detailed pictures of bones, diagrams and black and white columns of detected DNA on the monitors lining the walls of the lab.
“Note the dents on the large bones. Here and here,” he said, using his laser pointer, its red dot gradually coming to rest on shallow grooves in the femur and humerus.
“It looked like the work of a cannibal,” Martin continued his explanation, “until I found this,” he announced, parking the red dot on an image made up of a bunch of black rectangles representing nucleic bases.
“What are we looking at?” boss asked.
“Inhuman DNA,” Martin replied.
“And what does it belong to?” snapped Alexandra impatiently, but the boss immediately gave her a withering look, because you never raise your voice at Martin.
“And what does it belong to?” she repeated in a whisper, rolling her eyes.
Martin tapped the keyboard with one finger and the answer appeared on the monitor directly in front of them.
“A vodnik? You’re kidding,” Petra breathed. “There aren’t any left in the Czech Republic.”
“Maybe some arrived here with refugees, like the ifrits did,” the boss said thoughtfully. “Or something made them migrate. What do we have in the archives?”
Petra cleared her throat. This was her moment and she decided to seize it. “There are several species confined to Europe. However, they show significant differences in physical structure and intelligence. The Baltic anchutka looks like a small, toeless, fingerless devil. The Russian bolotyanik has frog-like eyes and bulbous fingers, and the ocheretyanik, for a change, has a strikingly large belly, a bald head and goose legs. Humanoid features and the ability to blend in with the human population are found in the Slovenian voden or the Norwegian nix. Of course, also in the Czech hastrman, but the last one was caught by K. J. Erben[7] in the summer of 1851 and TEFLON lists them as extinct. We also know of the Tatra Mountains subspecies, which was supposedly covered with moss, but the last one was killed by partisans in the 1940s. Supposedly it tasted like carp.”
“Fine,” said Alexandra. “So which one is it?”
Martin shrugged. “The sample taken from the victim’s body wasn’t very good. Based on comparing the DNA profile with the profiles from the comparison samples, there’s a partial match to a voden, a nix, and a hastrman.”
“Well, that will be interesting,” Petra said thoughtfully, her fingers running over the screen of her mobile phone with the bravura of a piano virtuoso. “The reward for an introduced vodnik is seven hundred thousand. Eight times that for a female, because vodniks usually breed through water elementals, like a water lady or rusalka, or human girls.”
“And how much for a hastrman?” I asked her.
She grinned. “They’re extinct, so I have to base it on the last price list for them from the days of the Austria-Hungary.” She paused for a moment. “Well, after converting from the Austrian gulden, and taking into account inflation and other considerations, the reward for him would jump like a baby goat crossed with a rocket to somewhere near twenty-two million euros.”
“You should have started with that rocket goat,” the boss snapped. “The problem is that all of our teams are fulfilling contracts, and if we call them off, we’ll expose ourselves to contractual penalties, which I’d hate to do. These are established customers and I don’t want to throw money away on outsourcing either.”
“Then assign it to me,” Alexandra offered.
“You’re the financial director,” he objected. “You are negotiating with new clients, pulling money from old ones, keeping track of inventory, arguing with suppliers, handling employee complaints, signing off on their vacations . . . ”
“You used to do that, so I’m sure you can do it again for a few days,” she replied.
“But, what if . . . ”
“I said you can handle it!” she yelled. “I’m taking a break. I keep dealing with idiots who are so stupid they don’t even know they’re idiots. I need to go hunting or my head is going to explode like an overripe watermelon!”
Knowing that a woman’s “I need” was a whole order of magnitude more intense than a generic “I want,” the boss gave in.
“All right,” he told her, “but don’t think you’re returning to hunting. Think of it as, ahem, I really hate that word, a vacation. You’ll hunt for a few days, and then it’s right back in the office with you. I’m not checking those stacks of reports for you!”
* * *
“I hope you didn’t drag me here just for the fun,” Alexandra growled as she joined me in the car.
“I’ve got a lot on my plate. Right now we’re evaluating satellite images taken across the entire visible and invisible spectrum. Reservoirs, lakes, rivers, even swimming pools behind houses. Martin’s supercomputer’s using so much electricity that we got a call from the power plant asking if we’re trying to create a new Frankenstein’s monster. We’ve paid a fortune for all the CCTV footage around the incinerator plant, and we’re trying to identify the car that brought in that unfortunate woman, and besides that I’m getting more people on the team, arranging insurance policies for them, and signing off on stacks of stockpile orders for gear and equipment.”
I waited for her to finish, then pointed to the house I was standing by. “Simona Stránská, the girl I found in the incinerator plant, arrived here a week ago. She was working at the City Hall, but she got fired because her work position was cancelled, and she broke up with her boyfriend a month ago. That’s why no one missed her. She created a profile on a dating site and went on three dates, each time with the same guy. I got her phone number and checked her movements. It didn’t cost me as much as satellite images, but I know that on the last date she went here and then her cell phone turned off or was turned off.”
Alexandra stared at me, apparently running out of words for the first time in her life.
Great, I could go on. “I’ve done a little snooping around the house and had a few friends watch it,” I said, pointing through the glass at a homeless man sitting on a bench, holding a bag with a bottle of rum in his hand. Then I pointed to a cop walking a little further on, chowing down on a hot dog. “That’s Franta, he works the beat here,” I added, waving at him.
He noticed us and waved back with a smile.
“So I know that house belongs to a German company with Caribbean owners. They bought it three years ago and just finished the renovations this year. According to the company that did them, the owner ordered a really big pool built in the basement. No fancy modern stuff, just natural materials—stone, sand, reeds and water lilies here and there. The workers thought the contractor must have been eco-crazy, but he was paying in cash, so they kept their opinions to themselves.”
“How did you find all this out?” she blurted out.
“Professional deformation. Don’t you know what I used to do?”
It took her a moment, but then she remembered.
I’d been paid to uncover benefit fraud, and she’d been the leader of the Hunter team that, after I’d uncovered too much, had hidden me from the State Regulatory Service agents in a safe place until all the formalities were completed. I reckon if they hadn’t done that, I’d have ended up like poor Simona.
“You know . . . I . . . ,” she began, but then regained her composure and continued in the same factual manner she always does, “ . . . I have a position on the team. It’d be nice if you . . . the hell . . . I’d be happy if you took it.”
“That’s good,” I replied with a smirk, “because I was just about to tell you that Simona’s boyfriend is still in the house.”
* * *
“I hope you’re satisfied?” Sebastien asked her.
“The water is at a pleasant temperature,” she replied, running her hands over the surface of the pool in satisfaction, “and the decoration really evokes that I am somewhere in South Bohemia. Everybody praises that region.”
“We’ll go back one day,” he said. “Times are changing. If the local nobility can come back from exile, so can we.”
She nodded, then arched her back with a groan. Her belly already resembled half of a very large ball that some modern artist had glued to her otherwise slender body. “They are kicking, brats,” she said. “I hope you won’t quote me.”
“I wouldn’t dare,” he replied, dipping the washcloth into a bowl of cold water and beginning to wipe her neck and shoulders.
“That feels good,” she responded. “Please continue.”
“I’ve contacted several politicians,” he informed her. “Discreetly, of course, but they have given their tentative approval, under financially favorable conditions, of our intention to resettle Czechia.”
“Czechia, what a stupid word, isn’t it?”
“Czechs are like that,” he replied, amused. “In any case, when the time comes, we’ll move this brood into natural environment away from humans. I mean, humans will be there, which will be a necessity given their appetite, but they won’t be disturbed in the early tadpole stages. And because we’ll also protect them from natural predators, they’ll have the perfect conditions for growth.”
“And when they grow to a more intelligent stage . . . ,” she began.
“ . . . we’ll come for them and they’ll get the best education possible,” he added for her.
She smiled at him and let him kiss her on the cheek.
Then he caressed her pregnant body with a cold washcloth for a long, long time, and she enjoyed it.
* * *
“We have no cover,” I tried to argue. “Maybe we should . . . ”
She silenced me with a firm wave of her hand. But I hadn’t expected anything else. She didn’t dwell on plans and she didn’t believe in PowerPoint presentations. She was able to shout potential clients down, and when she had meetings at the Ministry of the Interior, officials would fake illness or cause themselves work-related injuries and then run off to get treatment.
“Okay,” I said, reaching across the seats in the back and pulling close a sports bag that couldn’t be heavier if I were smuggling gold bars.
The zipper rattled discontentedly, and the bowels of the bag revealed the nightmare of all pacifists. In addition to a bunch of loaded magazines, I had a nicely folded CZ BREN 2 5.56×45 8” carbine, several Glock 36 in .45 ACP, a Benelli M3 tactical shotgun, and two UTON II assault knives that Mikov had specially modified—blades forged under a full moon and hardened in goblin blood, and a couple of Martin’s gadgets in the handle. What the customer wants is what the customer gets.
And just to be sure, I also put in . . .
“Oh, my God, an MP5. What an antique. Where’d you dig it up?” Alexandra said when she came across the submachine gun in question.
“It’s my favorite toy,” I replied, offended. “It has an EOTECH EXPS3 collimator, a tuned trigger, and composite ammunition mixed with silver alloy and white oak sawdust, dipped in mistletoe broth and blessed by the Bishop of Ostrava-Opava.”
“Great, if you’re planning to close a hellgate,” she said, returning the submachine gun to the bag and grabbing one Glock and a knife. “Listen, no collateral damage! Anyone who isn’t a monster or a servant is a civilian, and therefore a potential voter. Do you have anything less lethal?”
With a smirk, I handed her the other bag from the back seat. This one was considerably lighter.
She eagerly began to rummage through its contents.
“Tasers, pepper sprays, bottles of holy water, holy mistletoe, stun guns, electric batons,” she commented on her findings. “And look, an infrared heater. We could use that to dry him. He could die . . . And what kind of rope is this?”
“I had it made by Erben’s notes. It’s made of bast fiber and has the hair of drowned girls woven into it. They say it works like a silver chain on a werewolf.”
She handed it to me with a grin.
I stashed it in my thigh pocket and retrieved a UTON II and my 9mm Luger submachine gun from the bag. No matter how much Alexandra may turn up her nose at it, I have nothing but praise for it.
I definitely had less trouble slipping it under my jacket than attaching the knife to my belt. Damned Christmas sweets!
After a moment’s thought, I also took the taser and immediately felt like a Hunter with a human face.
“Let’s go!” she shouted, then kicked the door open.
* * *
The screeching of the alarm could not go unnoticed.
Sebastien grabbed a robe from the lounger and handed it to her to hide her nakedness.
“We have uninvited guests,” he announced. “They’re armed, so we’d better move you. You can get to the underground parking lot on the next street. I have an escape vehicle there with everything you need.”
“What about our plan?”
He tried to smile. “The plan still stands. The intruders will be taken care of by a hired security company and you’ll move to the hatchery. No need to worry, everything is ready there and Herbert will see to your comfort until I arrive.”
“And you?”
He stroked her. “I’ll join you as soon as I’ve sorted things out. I don’t intend to miss our first clutch.”
She stroked him, too. “Please try to survive. I’m afraid when our spawn hit puberty, I will climb the walls.”
“So will everyone, my dear,” he assured her, “but don’t worry, I’ll be there with you.”
While she, accompanied by the chef, ran off to the basement, he headed in the opposite direction.
* * *
As soon as we walked through the door, three men armed with telescopic batons rushed at us. They were classic brawlers of the kind offered by security agencies—sculpted musculature visible even over a jacket, shaved heads, surprisingly small compared to the rest of their bodies, and they were determined to play us hard.
But sometimes determination isn’t enough.
Even though they had the advantage in height and weight, we had speed, tight space and Alexandra on our side.
Because of the first two reasons, I couldn’t get involved in the fight properly. On the other hand, I was able to enjoy the bright blue glare of the stun gun Alexandra thrust under the first guy’s chin.
She hadn’t waited to see how he’d handle a two million volt hit, and she was already on the second one. She first threw the depleted stun gun in his face, then ducked under the baton he’d tried to hit her with.
He never got to a second blow. She kicked him expertly in the knee, and when he collapsed to the ground with a painful cry, she cancelled his dentist’s card with her heel.
And then it was my turn—the third security guard’s eyes bulged with shock, but that didn’t stop him from dropping the baton and reaching under his jacket.
Of course, there was a chance that he would pull out bread and salt to give us the traditional Czech welcome, but it wasn’t very high.
I pointed the taser at him and pulled the trigger. It clicked, the fast unwinding wires rattled, and two electrodes stabbed into his chest.
Whatever he wanted to pull out from under his jacket, that plan failed, as did his efforts to maintain control over his own body.
He was twitching convulsively in a very nice way, but I missed the lighting effects that Alexandra’s stun gun was producing. The only effect was a rapidly spreading stain on his pants.
“We should cuff them,” I suggested.
“Let’s keep going!” she yelled, running deeper into the house.
There was a large two-story hall with staircases leading up on either side, and between them was a spacious entrance to what looked like an Art Nouveau dining room, with oil paintings in massive gilded frames hanging on the walls. Not modern, but romantic Victorian landscapes with sunsets, lakes and rivers.
I would have appreciated the owner’s taste if his employees hadn’t started shooting at me.
A long burst from a submachine gun bit into the wooden door frames and wall, and the individual shots from several pistols mingled with its clatter.
Running, I slid to the floor and missed an artfully made sideboard, which was blown to pieces by a crude shot.
A loud click-clack let me know that the owner of the pumping shotgun had reloaded, and as confirmation another load of splinters showered behind my collar.
Continuing to slide with inertia, I pointed the MP5 in the direction the buckshot was coming from and squeezed the trigger.
The submachine gun barked and a flood of brass shells erupted from its ejection port. An antique my ass, I thought to myself at Alexandra’s address. A submachine gun set on a burst isn’t one of the most accurate weapons, but when you shoot blind, it’s like buying multiple raffle tickets.
A pained cry told me one of them was the winning one.
“Fire in the hole!” Alexandra yelled at that moment, and a small metal egg with a pink stripe flew past my head.
Pink?!
I immediately rolled as far away as I could.
The grenade exploded just as I pressed my hands to my ears to keep the pressure wave from blowing the stirrup and anvil out of them.
It’s hard to describe what followed, but our company grenades are what the military ones want to be when they grow up.
The beautifully equipped mess hall was instantly transformed into an Ostrava pub on payday. The original oil paintings burned before they could hit the floor, and even the long dark wood dining table looked like something they’d put under Jan Hus before they burned him at the stake.
I slowly stood up to find four bodies lying on the other side of the dining room, transformed by the explosion into a big pathological puzzle.
“Clear self-defense,” Alexandra commented.
* * *
A grenade blast knocked Sebastien to the ground. Apart from a few cuts and ringing in his ears, nothing else happened.
Unlike those he rushed to help.
Lifting himself up from the ground in a daze, he saw their torn bodies and his mind immediately began to flit between his anger at the money wasted on incompetent security with his desire to offer himself a bite of that tempting smelling buffet.
Such a waste, he thought, and his thoughts immediately turned to the house.
When he moved here from Hamburg, he was determined to succeed. The first returnee in nearly two centuries, despite the fearful whispers that spread among the exiles.
Then he met Herbert, who lived in the ponds around Třeboň in Southern Bohemia, and learned from him that typical Czech ability not to stand out. If they were lucky, they ate a drowner, and if they had to hunt, they were careful not to let their hunting expeditions show up too much in the police statistics through an increase in drowned or missing persons, which might draw unwelcome attention to them.
But now it was useless to worry about further secrecy. If he wanted to see his brood hatch, he had to act.
* * *
When that guy lunged at us, Alexandra and I became heroes in slow motion. He was like a lightning.
It was clear he wasn’t human, so we were in the right place. But the question was whether we were also on the right side of the gun.
Reacting to someone ten times faster than you is just impossible.
While I was trying to shove a new magazine into the MP5, he hit me like a battering ram and sent me to the opposite side of the room.
The impact with a wall knocked the wind out of me, but I still managed to replace the magazine, rack the slide, and point the gun where I thought that bastard would be.
Only he wasn’t there. It took me a moment to realize, through black spots in front of my eyes, that he was with Alexandra, and that it didn’t look good.
She was trying to keep him off her body and doing a kung-fu ethno-dance accompanied by shooting and knife slashing, but that bastard was just too fast.
I really wanted to know what kind of vodnik K. J. Erben was fighting back then. After all, he was a skilled Hunter—he killed a noonwraith, a revenant, the ghost of a mad mother rising from the grave and harassing a couple of kids and a vodnik, and he wrote poems about it. So why didn’t he mention the vodnik’s speed in the hunting diary Petra found in the National Museum’s depository? His vodnik was probably old, obese, or suicidal.
Alexandra fired five shots in three seconds, but didn’t hit him. She was equally unsuccessful with the knife. She sliced the air around her again and again, and the vodnik was darting around her so fast he looked like a blur.
Then she fired for the sixth time, the slide of her gun remaining vulgarly open, and I couldn’t shoot because she was standing in my line of sight.
I shifted position, but before I could pull the trigger and send that son of a bitch to hell, several flash bangs exploded in the room, turning us into completely incapacitated rag dolls.
Then a SWAT team burst into the room, dressed in as many layers of Kevlar as if they were expecting an attack from Godzilla’s husband. One of the pseudo-commandos flipped me onto my stomach and, with a skill you only get after a thousand tries, handcuffed me.
I raised my head above the charred pile of the Persian rug and watched as another pacified Alexandra in the same manner and the other three tended to the vodnik.
But unlike us, they had wrapped him with a rope from bast fibers. The big plus was that it made him scream like a soul in purgatory.
“Dagger one, clear!” came the call.
“Dagger two and three . . . clear. We got ’em, sir,” someone else barked, and then the man who haunts small children, inconvenient witnesses, and newbie Hunters came into my field of vision—Kurt Gromsky, head of the State Regulatory Service.
There’s no situation in which I could meet his eyes and say that I was glad to see him. For one, he only has one eye because he lost the other one, along with half his face and most of his hair, when he fought a basilisk, and for another, because he screwed us over once.
By us, I mean Fantom, of course, because he was in charge of one of our teams until four years ago. When that basilisk messed him up, he refused to let himself be reassigned, had a fierce argument with our boss, and then slammed the door behind him in a big style.
At first he tried to get a job with rival companies, who also turned him down because of his handicap, but he got it in his head that it was the boss’s long fingers that were to blame and joined the State Regulatory Service, where of course he soon won his spurs.
“Some law-abiding citizen reported a break-in and shooting,” he told us. “We were in the neighborhood, so we rushed to help the valiant police officers of the local department, and who does my eye see—the all-powerful financial director and her eternal underling, Artur Klega, beaten by some civilian.”
“Some civilian?” I grunted derisively. “That’s why you’ve wrapped him in bast? How do you know he’s a vodnik?”
“We were bugged,” Alexandra answered for Gromsky.
“As if we could do that without a warrant,” agent Gromsky responded, adding snidely: “And I object to the past tense.”
To my surprise, Alexandra laughed. “You got the invoice for the permoniks, so the minister ordered you to whip us into submission, huh?”
Gromsky nodded. “When we found out that Fantom was on the lookout for a hastrman, the highest places decided we should stop it because you want to milk the state, even though people have to wear two sweaters now to save public finances and the government party voters even wear three.”
“The bounties come from TEFLON, not the state budget,” I argued.
“The government is looking for reserves,” he replied, “and since the Minister of the Interior is eyeing the PM’s seat, he’ll be happy to use a billion earmarked for monster bounties for fireworks, sandwiches and steamer parties.”
“Let me go,” grunted the vodnik. “I’ll give you a lot of money. I’m rich . . . and I know where others like me are . . . ”
I’m sure he would have continued, but at that moment our UTON knife plunged up to the hilt into his throat.
As the vodnik collapsed to the floor with a grunt, agent Gromsky looked at Alexandra, who had somehow managed to free herself from her cuffs.
Then, with a sigh, he said, “Who missed that knife? Forget your Christmas bonuses, idiots.”
* * *
“So, to summarize it,” said JUDr. Krahujec, PhD, LLM, MBA, glancing around at the gathered people, then briefly studying his notes and continuing, “we have a breach of contract with the Fantom company and two cases of illegal restraint. Am I forgetting something?”
“Illegal wiretapping by a government-funded institution,” our boss suggested.
“Oh yes, the illegal wiretapping,” the former minister of three governments, honorary president of the Czech Bar Association and senior partner of the renowned law firm Krahujec, Felon and Scottfree nodded, “I’d almost forgotten about that.” But his voice proved that he was well aware of it.
“We’re not conducting a proceeding here in which you can represent anyone,” Agent Gromsky objected.
In retrospect, I can’t remember if it was our boss or Dr. Krahujec who started laughing first.
Kurt Gromsky looked at Alexandra and me and figured it out.
“Uncuff them, damn it,” he barked at the agents who were chaperoning us in full combat gear. “And go away,” he added.
When it happened, he sighed wearily. “All right, this one didn’t go well. Let’s all calm down. You forget about the alleged wiretaps, and I’ll cover up that your financial director eliminated an innocent civilian.”
“An innocent civilian?” the boss shot back. “He was a hastrman.”
“Unfortunately, it’s an allegation without a shred of evidence.”
Our boss put his cell phone on the table and sent it toward the agent with his index finger. The latter looked incredulously at the text displayed on the screen.
“What’s that?”
“The result of a DNA analysis,” the boss replied. “And it’s got a message from Martin attached. Yeah, down there, it starts by addressing you . . . ”
“Asshole,” Gromsky read it. “Nice, but I don’t buy it. You didn’t have a chance to get a sample from that creature.”
“So the civilian has already become a creature,” the boss commented with a sly smile.
“That knife!” Agent Gromsky gasped suddenly. “Shit on my tits.”
“With pleasure,” I said.
“Shut your face!” Gromsky snapped, turning to our boss, “Martin built a DNA scanner into it?”
“Yeah,” the boss nodded. “The request for a payment of the twenty-two million euros should be in your mail. He was officially an extinct Czech hastrman. Congratulations.”
There was a ping of an incoming message.
“That’ll be it,” the boss commented sardonically.
Agent Gromsky collapsed in his chair, his face hidden in his hands.
“I guess you can go now,” Dr. Krahujec said.
“Thank you,” our boss told him. “Send me the invoice.”
“That won’t be necessary,” Dr. Krahujec replied. “I still owe you for disposing of that witch those sharp-elbowed young hawks who are running for the Bar Association sent after me . . . ”
The boss shook his head. “That was just a friendly favor.”
“Then this was an equally friendly favor on my part,” the lawyer replied.
* * *
“I . . . can’t . . . stand it, Herbert,” she moaned, her hands cupping her big belly. “You have to . . . stop!”
He looked up from the steering wheel he was struggling with and tried to reassure her, “We’ll be there soon, my lady. If the little ones take after Sebastien, they’re going to be real hungry. There are bags of chilled blood in the minibar. It should help.”
“What about . . . Sebastien?” she groaned.
“Don’t worry, he’ll be fine. I’m sure they were just some robbers. He’ll join us when he’s done with them.”
“I have a . . . bad . . . feeling . . . ”
“Take the blood,” he ordered her, and to her surprise, she obeyed him. “Stress seems to have hastened their growth,” he added.
His knowledge surprised her. In the expat community she came from, the circumstances of how the roaches did it had to be explained to her by other females.
At the time, she had found the whole thing of joined cloacas extremely distasteful, but she had remembered that, among other things, pregnancy could actually be shortened by feeling threatened.
She finished her third bag of blood, burped discreetly, and wiped her lips on a batiste handkerchief.
The erratic movement of the tadpoles in her womb ceased and she realized they had fallen asleep. She sensed the images of blood, fighting and killing each other and knew they were happy dreams.
“They’ll want out soon,” Herbert said.
“Sebastien claimed you have a hatchery ready for me.”
He nodded. “We picked a great place where we don’t have to worry about being discovered. There will be no leaving the tadpoles to natural selection this time. Even if there are a thousand in your brood, we have enough carcasses for them to feast on until they are able to come ashore.”
“Carcasses?” she repeated, astonished.
“Yes, in various stages of decomposition. We were thinking of the milk teeth of the little tadpoles,” he added.
“You are full of surprises,” she replied. “Sebastien is held in high esteem among the exiles, but if they had known the care with which he had made preparations, they might have sent a much higher ranking female than myself to mate with him. And as for you, if you ever carve out your own territory on the Rio Ebro, our elite will be delighted with you as well.”
He couldn’t help but grin.
“There’s a third Michelin star waiting for me in a restaurant I’m going to open in Prague,” he replied. “Then I’m going to make a lot of tadpoles with some local human girl. They can’t be lured by red ribbons anymore, but when they see the latest iPhone floating on the river . . . ”
* * *
Martin’s TCV, or Tactical Command Vehicle, cost his boss tens of millions. He entered the payment order believing that he would get it back one day, and happy that he didn’t have to explain to Martin why he wouldn’t give him the money.
The Volvo FH16 truck, with 750 stallions neighing under its hood, was pulling a specially modified trailer festooned with satellite dishes, quadcopter drone ejection ports, and a dozen Generation IV solar panels so powerful that the Chinese government wouldn’t hesitate to offer the boss Hong Kong and its adjacent land for them.
Since Martin also liked his comforts, the trailer’s interior wasn’t just a bunch of monitors, holoprojectors, and all sorts of other gadgets. It also had a very comfortable couch, a plasma screen for movie nights, and a refrigerator filled with ham baguettes and cans of Master Mind energy drink.
“Do you have beer?” I asked.
He was currently occupied with a program analyzing all the available camera footage, so he just pointed to a plastic box next to the couch.
“Be my guest,” he said, and was back to full attention on what he’d managed to download without the owners’ knowledge.
“There they are,” he finally said triumphantly, and a shot of a black SUV pulling out of the underground garage gate appeared on one of the monitors.
I recognized the garage; it was in the neighborhood of the hastrman’s house.
Suddenly, the image changed. This time it was a camera mounted on some kind of toll gate. A black SUV came around the bend, drove through the gate and disappeared from view.
The image changed again, to footage taken by cameras located in a small village. The black SUV slowed down before the intersection and then pulled off the main road with its blinker flashing brightly.
“Is that water on the horizon?” the boss asked.
Without saying a word, Martin displayed a map on the second monitor, and with a flick of his sensor glove, he traced a red line around the blue blob of a reservoir.
“I don’t believe it,” Alexandra gasped when she realized what she was looking at. “Is that the Žermanice Reservoir?”
A table appeared on the third monitor instead of an answer.
“I checked the police databases and these are the missing persons for the last ten years,” Martin informed us. “As you can see, there’s been an increase in the last five years. Not significant, they were cautious and they always focused on non-resident fishermen or vacationers.”
“Great, so we know where they’ve been going,” the boss said. “Now all you have to do is tell us where they are now.”
The answer was a picture of a house and a couple getting out of an equally black SUV. The man’s image wasn’t sharp enough, but the woman’s was better because her bulging, pregnant belly occupied a few hundred pixels.
“Increase the contrast,” Petra ordered Martin.
The boss gave her a quizzical look. “What’s going on?”
“That woman,” she uttered while furiously flipping through some bound manuscript.
It took me a moment to realize it was J. K. Erben’s hunting journal.
“Yes, here it is—look at the striking paleness of her skin,” she told us. “Also the asthenic build and the dull hair, probably of a greenish hue.”
She paused for a moment, then continued triumphantly, “This is a female vodnik in a high stage of pregnancy.”
“And what will she give birth to? Little vodniks? Roes?” Alexandra interrupted.
“Tadpoles,” she replied. “Small and frighteningly voracious. If they release them into that reservoir, even suicidal people will be afraid to go in for the next few years.”
I reached for another beer and gave Martin a conspiratorial wink in an unguarded moment. “Maybe you’ll get a chance to try one of your inventions.”
He didn’t answer, but it was obvious he was intrigued by my remark.
“I only have two questions,” the boss spoke up. “How many of these tadpoles will they release and how much are we getting for them?”
Petra grinned contentedly.
Surprisingly enough, the boss was satisfied with that much.
* * *
“It’s much worse than that,” said the chief analyst, placing several sheets of text densely interspersed with tables and graphs in front of Kurt Gromsky.
“I doubt it could get any worse,” Gromsky muttered as he pulled the sheets closer. After reading the first page, he realized he had been wrong.
“How relevant is that data?”
“It’s from two equally official sources,” the head of the analytical department replied. “Unfortunately, I should say . . . ”
They stared at each other across the table in silence for a moment.
Gromsky regained the gift of speech first: “Here, Southern Bohemia. Twenty years ago, the number of missing persons in the vicinity of water bodies suddenly began to increase, and held at an essentially constant level until five years ago. Then the situation reverted to twenty years ago, and we can see the same increase here,” he said, jabbing his finger at the chart on the third sheet.
“That’s North Moravia,” the analyst offered.
“Just because I have only one eye doesn’t mean I’m blind,” agent Gromsky snapped at him. “It’s just that this missing persons count only refers to one place.”
The chief analyst leaned over the table, studied the chart in question for a moment, and then he nodded. “Žermanice Reservoir.”
Kurt Gromsky picked up the papers, tapped them against the tabletop to line them up, and shoved them into a leather bag, which he promptly locked and coded.
“The Minister of the Interior needs to see this.”
The chief analyst gave him a questioning look. “With all due respect, sir, people from Fantom have already got that vodnik.”
Kurt Gromsky grinned, his disfigured face taking on such a frightening appearance that the analyst unconsciously pulled away. “That vodnik, Sebastien Worms by passport, a citizen of the Federal Republic of Germany, moved to the Czech Republic five years ago when his company won a competition to revitalize the Ostrava coal lagoons. Until then, he had been moving around Europe. Thank goodness for social networks . . . Which means he can’t be responsible for those missing in Southern Bohemia.”
“He has a partner,” the analyst replied in understanding.
“And they’ll probably be in the Žermanice Reservoir. It is too large for our organization; I will need a police task force and a bunch of cops from the districts to surround that reservoir so not a mouse escapes.”
“I’ll send in the drones to do a full scan. I’ll probably be able to get my hands on some spy satellite data as well. Maybe I can get something out of it.”
Kurt Gromsky nodded. “Focus on the area where Fantom got Worms. I have a hunch . . . ”
* * *
Žermanice Reservoir is a paradise for fishermen and recreationists who don’t mind sharing the toilet with a hundred other like-minded people on vacation. Some stay in bungalows, others live in tents. But all of them indiscriminately occupy the benches in front of every pub that has decided to tap beer and spill liquor, and since it was Friday, the vast majority of the visitors to the reservoir was not afraid of alcohol.
The same thing that usually makes our job easier did just the opposite here, and we were a welcome distraction for dozens of drunks who would have otherwise been minding their own business. Or more precisely, Martin’s TCV was—they accompanied the launch of each drone with enthusiastic shouts, and when the last one left the recharge bed, they started chanting, “One more . . . one more!”
“If you don’t jump, you’re not Czech!”[2] Alexandra said into the microphone, her voice carrying to all corners of the world.
“It’s working,” she said in surprise as we saw, through the tinted glass of the trailer, dozens of people jumping so enthusiastically that beer was splashing out of their cups.
“Never underestimate the power of crowds and alcohol,” our boss said. “What’s the situation?” asked Martin.
The latter looked up from the command console and shook his head. “The reservoir is clear. No underwater structures like water castles.”
“Mentioned in Erben’s journal,” Petra promptly answered the unspoken question.
“So nothing interesting?”
“Well, I found three cars with a dead body either behind the wheel or in the trunk, and a couple of suspicious looking barrels.”
The boss shook his head understandingly. “Check the bounties posted, if it’s worth reporting. Money doesn’t grow on trees.”
“It will one day,” Martin muttered absently, writing something down on a piece of paper.
“So they’re still in the house,” I said, “and since we have a confirmed sighting of at least one monster, we don’t have to wait for a search warrant.”
“Exactly,” Alexandra said, pulling a Glock from her thigh holster and giving the slide a sharp jerk.
* * *
Since I saw the pictures from the drone, calling the hacienda a house was pure understatement on my part.
It didn’t look big just because it was buried in the trees. But it had two floors, and according to the plans Martin had salvaged from the archives, it had at least as many floors underground. Twelve rooms, two bathrooms, a huge living room, and a pool or fallout shelter in the basement.
Normally, we’d raid something like that with at least two teams with a third one waiting as backup.
We were like the fingers on the hand of a careless woodsman.
At least we managed to convince the boss to come with us as number three. It cost Alexandra a short speech and me a promise to let him blast the door lock with his 12/76 caliber Remington 870 Express shotgun. But if we hadn’t intervened, he’d have been scrambling for the lead like he was back in the wild nineties, driving rival Russian Hunters out of the country.
We were just about to attack when a pair of helicopters whizzed overhead. They circled over the reservoir for a while, and then divers started jumping out.
“Police maneuvers?” Alexandra asked our boss.
“I don’t know of any,” he replied. “This is related to us.”
“They’re trying to steal our bounty!” Petra yelled from the TCV doorway. “It’s like Time Square on all the frequencies. Gromsky’s got more than a hundred cops at his disposal. He must have shown the Minister of the Interior that file he has on the Prime Minister.”
“That wouldn’t make him act like that, he’s only a quarter orc,” Alexandra argued disapprovingly. “There are worse cases in the government . . . ”
“Whatever,” the boss cut off her musings. “They’re after our bounty!”
Just as he finished, he pointed the shotgun at the designer fittings of the front door and blasted them in all directions. “Let’s go! Let’s go! Let’s go!” he yelled, and even though the original plan was different, he ran in first.
* * *
“No, no, no,” she screamed as Herbert dragged her through the corridors of the house. “I . . . I have to . . . It’s . . . time.”
“Time maybe, but not the place,” he told her, forcing her to continue on down the stairs to the basement. They passed the magnificent pool Sebastien had so carefully prepared for her brood, and the other two, where the bodies of several drowners were already at the bottom, waiting for her kids to be safely fed upon in their earliest days.
“Here! Stop . . . I have to,” she tried to protest.
“No, my lady,” he told her firmly. “They found us. Believe me, we must go on. Sebastien and I have thought of everything. Your offspring will be taken care of. We are nearly there, please come.”
She followed him stumblingly until they reached another pool, much smaller compared to the previous ones.
The water in it was murky and smelled like fish.
“What’s that?”
“A way to safety,” he replied. “It leads to the backup feeding station at the bottom of the reservoir.”
“I . . . have to . . . ,” she squealed, her body twisting in spasm. “They . . . already . . . ”
“Yes,” he nodded, “they . . . already . . . ”
She was surprised when he stroked her hair in a fatherly manner, and then again when he opened her stomach with a single slash of the knife drawn from beneath his jacket.
She screamed in pain and tried to pull away from him, but he held her too tightly.
“There’s no other way,” he whispered in her ear as a stream of offspring rushed from her bowels into the murky waters of the pool.
“The survival of the species is everything,” he added when she stopped struggling and let herself be laid on the floor like a puppet.
Herbert put down the knife and plunged his palm into her bowels.
When he took it out again, his bloody palm held a small, shuffling tadpole that couldn’t keep up with its more agile brethren.
It was then that he smiled for the first time; slowly dipping his hand into the pool and watching that tiny creature furiously flick its arrow-like tail in an attempt to swim as far away from him as possible.
“That’s right, just run, little one,” he whispered.
* * *
“Only ten divers for the whole reservoir?” agent Gromsky growled, glancing at the pale police captain who had the misfortune of being in charge.
“You can thank budget cuts for that,” the captain replied. “We’ve only got enough diesel to get us here and back, and the only thing I’ve managed to get a hold of are a couple of obsolete sonars that escaped the stock sales. My men are loading them into boats and will cruise the reservoir until they find something.”
Kurt Gromsky sighed. “I’ll add two agents to each boat, armed to fight monsters.”
Within moments, the whine of engines was heard over the water and eight yellow boats with a dozen passengers headed toward the divers waiting in the middle of the dam.
“When they find something, and I don’t mean if, but when,” Gromsky announced to the captain, “you will inform me immediately. I will not tolerate failure. I want patrols on all entry points to the reservoir. Have them report if they encounter any Hunters, especially from Fantom. They must be delayed as long as possible.”
The captain cleared his throat nervously and, his eyes darting from side to side as if he were looking for someone to help, said, “That’s pointless.”
“What?”
“About an hour and a half ago, a truck and a trailer with a bunch of satellite dishes and other junk on the roof drove by. It had Fantom’s logo on it.”
“That’s their command vehicle,” Gromsky snapped. “It’s got enough electronics in it to give your technicians wet dreams till next Christmas. Do we know where it went and who was in it?”
“No and no,” the captain replied laconically.
“Shit,” Gromsky swore. “We’ve got to find those vodniks first.”
* * *
A thousand tadpoles rushed out of the mouth of the tunnel, and a school of bream that got in their way was gnawed to the bone in a second.
It was hardly an appetizer from their point of view, so the wild, unexpectedly born and hungry tadpoles set off in search of more food.
They were not picky, as long as there was enough to eat.
Then they noticed the divers and the yellow things heading their way.
* * *
“You’ll never get me!” came from behind the open door we had run to, the declaration accompanied by several shots.
The bullets missed us harmlessly, but even so, we ended up kneeling just in case, our heads bowed as if in prayer. In this case, for a long life on Earth.
The boss fired first, and after two more shots, all that was left of the door was a pile of splinters.
The dark shadow that hid behind them retreated in a flash.
But not fast enough, because Alexandra managed to fire a shot at him and there was a pained yelp.
“After him!” I yelled, and was the first to go on the offensive.
I flew through the doorway, ran through two rooms in succession, dodged the corpse of the woman I’d seen in the pictures taken by the drone, her belly brutally sliced open, and tripped over a three feet tall wall that, as it eventually turned out, was the edge of some kind of pool.
I fell headfirst into water so murky that even the water company would be embarrassed to take money for it, thanking my training for forcing me to rip the Velcro fasteners of my ballistic vest without thinking and pull out my UTON knife from the holster on my thigh.
At that precise moment, the attack came. Even though I had a decent amount of training, and I don’t mean some online course on the internet, I had a hard time defending myself.
I took three devastating blows to the chest, which left me with air bubbles coming out of me like burst bagpipes, and then that bastard tried to rip the tailpiece out of my neck.
Fortunately, I’ve seen enough Chinese kung-fu movies to know what to do.
Fighting underwater has one undeniable advantage—on land, opponents circle around each other and hit each other with insults that include their parents’ sexual habits and information about how often their grave will be pissed on. But with a mouth full of water, no such thing is possible.
So we fought in comfortable silence. It would have been nice if I could say that a punch followed a punch or that an attempted choking was followed by another attempted choking, except that I had a dagger in my right hand and clapping isn’t the only thing you can’t do with only one hand.
So I at least tried to stab that son of a bitch. You don’t want to know how many attempts I made. There was a little blood in the water, so I must have hit the mark a couple of times, but it wasn’t anything I’d consider a success.
After two minutes of struggling, I realized something was wrong—we were underwater and he, unlike me, didn’t need to breathe.
A minute later he knocked the knife out of my hand.
They say that in the last moment people’s lives flash before their eyes. As it would have been quite boring for me, all I could think was: Shit, shit, shit!
But instead of a plethora of memories, a tunnel with a light at the end, and smiling ancestors with “Welcome!” signs, I achieved enlightenment—I reached into my thigh pocket and pulled out the forgotten bast rope.
When the vodnik jumped at me, I managed to wrap it around his neck.
He instantly froze as a statue. To his own detriment, because I immediately started tightening the noose.
The effects of a bast rope with drowned virgin hair on a vodnik were truly comparable to a silver chain on a werewolf.
First the vodnik’s eyes popped out of their sockets, then his tongue out of his mouth, and finally the contents of his bowels out of his guts. And then his head fell off.
I probably would have celebrated the victory if something hadn’t bitten me at that moment. It was a three-inch-long bastard with a tail and a mouth full of small, sharp teeth.
I instinctively swung at it and hit it with the frayed end of the rope. It had the same effect as if I’d sent a couple of thousand volts into it, and the little bugger instantly turned belly up.
When I surfaced, leaning on the edge of the pool, I started shouting at the top of my lungs, “Everybody over here! We’re in deep shit!”
* * *
When Kurt Gromsky saw the water around the divers and boats begin to boil, as if some camper had thrown a gigantic immersion cooker into it, they wouldn’t have drawn a single drop of a blood out of him even if they had cut very deep.
The divers were thrashing about like they were hit by Saint Vitus’ dance, but there was no holiness in it as the water around them was rapidly turning red with blood.
Then whatever was eating the divers began to destroy the police rafts, which one by one lost air, sinking, and the desperate screams of their crews mingled with the screams of the dying divers.
Watching it was like getting a voucher for a visit to Dante’s Inferno.
Right about then, I finally ran up to him. I would have made it sooner, but my boss was running at my heels and I didn’t dare increase my lead too much.
He had a very sour look on his face. He didn’t like my idea of talking to Gromsky, nor my statement that I had a plan. Fortunately, Martin took my side, and you really don’t want to argue with him.
“Those are baby vodniks,” I informed Gromsky.
“They’re tadpoles and there could be a thousand of them,” Petra joined in. “The size of the brood varies according to the quality of the female.”
“And . . . male,” the boss grunted breathlessly.
“Erben didn’t write about that,” Petra objected.
“We don’t have time to argue,” I pointed out. Given my position in the corporate food chain, it was pretty daring, but there was no time for consideration.
Surprisingly though, I got many a nod. Except, of course, from Petra, whom I interrupted.
“We need to get all the people out of the water immediately,” I continued.
“A little late,” agent Gromsky said, staring at the bodies still floating on the surface, quivering under a staccato of bites.
“The vacationers, I mean,” I replied. “If they get to them, you won’t be able to hide it even if you blackmail the head of Czech News Agency.”
“Those tadpoles,” Petra echoed, “are going to be even more voracious. Until . . . ”
“Until what?” asked Gromsky.
“Until they come out of the water. Then they’ll be not only voracious, but inventive too.”
“We must, er, you must stop them,” Gromsky sputtered.
“I have a plan,” I echoed, “and all I need are a few cows and five minutes with Martin.”
* * *
While no plan survives contact with the enemy, mine went down the tubes a lot sooner.
“You can’t throw cows in the water because that would be animal cruelty.”
“Just dead ones,” I suggested.
“They produce methane, so you’d buy two giraffes for the price of one, and besides, there are only pigs slaughtered in slaughterhouses within a two-hundred-kilometer radius.”
“Then let’s throw pigs there. Dead, so it’s not a cruelty.”
“We won’t get any,” I was immediately enlightened. “Oktoberfest is coming up, and since the green vegans are in power in Germany, Bavarian sausages have to be made with Czech meat.”
If our boss hadn’t pulled out his cell phone, my plan would have ended up where the sun doesn’t shine and the doctor only looks when he has to.
* * *
Conversation with the person whom our boss called “Papa Nguyen” lasted exactly one minute, and after another thirty, a rickety V3S truck arrived with two barrels full of bloody remains that would be refused even in a rendering plant, and a laughing Vietnamese man sitting behind the wheel asked me in perfect Ostravan dialect: “Whayer tuh, boss?”
With the help of agents, we moved the barrels onto a ferryboat, which Gromsky had commandeered for a change.
Unlike the rubber rafts, which the tadpoles had easily chewed through, it was fiberglass, and besides the barrels it could also hold the little me, Alexandra and Gromsky.
That was important, because I wouldn’t touch that bloody slop for all the money in the world.
* * *
“You know,” Alexandra grunted as she poured another stinking portion into the water, “it reminds me of a scene from Jaws.”
“I’d hate to . . . end up like . . . that captain,” Gromsky swore, suppressing the urge to vomit.
The bloodstain had already spread nicely from us. It was enough for the little bastards to notice . . .
“I’ve got them on sonar,” came Martin’s voice on the earpiece. “They’re heading your way.”
“They’re here,” I yelled.
Alexandra dropped the scoop and picked up a flamethrower from the floor of the ferryboat. It was a useful toy for fighting in confined spaces, but if the water-dwelling tadpoles wanted to imitate flying fish, you’d be hard pressed to find a more suitable weapon.
Suddenly, a dark blur appeared. The flock circled us and then headed off to see if there might be bigger chunks of meat than what we had offered them.
The ferryboat rocked several times, and the tapping on its walls sounded like a death toll.
Then the first enthusiastic tadpoles jumped above the surface.
“Eat flames!” Alexandra yelled, letting her flamethrower roar.
A tongue of fire licked the edge of the boat and the smell of grilled mackerel filled the air.
“I’d like a snack,” agent Gromsky commented as he used his Kevlar helmet to beat the tadpoles escaping the flames at the bottom of the ferry.
As the rower, I was a spectator, but even so, the events drew me into the action more than was healthy. The ferryboat was no longer rocking, it was shaking under the incessant attacks of the hungry spawn, and in several places cracks were beginning to run down the thick layer of fiberglass.
A batch of flames was now alternately licking port and starboard sides, and the smell of roasting fish was turning into an annoying stench.
Suddenly, the ferryboat rocked so much that we almost fell out of it.
“Martin!” I yelled. “If you’ve been waiting for the right moment, it’s now!”
“The edge of the knot is still too far from you,” came his, for my taste, too uninvolved reply in my earphones.
“Eat this!” I shouted, grabbing the edge of one of the barrels and tipping it over into the water.
The bloodstain on the surface darkened and immediately afterwards stirred with the frenetic activity of hungry tadpoles.
“For God’s sake, just start it already!” I yelled, tearing a tadpole that had arrived for the tasting off my forearm.
The whirring of the incoming drones seemed like heavenly music. Immediately afterwards, small cylinders were released from beneath their wings, and bluish discharges erupted from them as they hit the surface.
* * *
“Mr. Gromsky informed me that there were some problems,” the Minister of the Interior said, fidgeting in his designer chair. “Surely we can find some reasonable solution.”
“I’m sure we will,” the boss nodded and placed a fascicle as thick as my thigh in front of him.
“We’ve got a thousand sixty-two confirmed tadpoles. I suggest you read the analysis of Professor Čmela from Charles University and Professors Zweig and Hermann from the University of Heidelberg. There is no doubt that the species is the Czech hastrman.”
The Minister skimmed through the documents. “That is possible, but the sum is ridiculous,” he said, and then added: “We paid you for the adults. So how about, since tadpoles were never listed on the price list, we settle this by reimbursing the cost of catching them plus some bonus. Maybe I could get you into the honors list and the President will give you some state decoration,” he added for the boss.
“Sounds tempting,” the boss admitted, “except we drove an aspen stake through the Chancellor’s heart during the last purge of the Prague Castle. So I don’t think the President will oblige you.”
“The government agrees with me,” replied the Minister. “We simply won’t pay you that sum.”
The boss was about to object, but was stopped by Alexandra walking up to the Minister, who unconsciously pulled away from her.
Placing two business cards on the table in front of him, Alexandra said with a smile: “We’ll let our lawyers handle this. As you can see, one of them is your party colleague and the other was in charge of your doctoral studies. So we’ll meet at the secret chamber of the Supreme Administrative Court. I’m sure it’ll be a nice pastime for them . . . ”
It reassured me of why I had voted for him—we were already at the elevator and he was still cursing.
“It’s going to drag on for years,” the boss complained.
“No problem for us,” Alexandra said cheekily. “Results just came in. The ripped up female from the house by the reservoir came from the Rio Ebro region of Spain. According to Petra, there should be a colony of exiled hastrman there. The bounty for the tadpoles will be pocket change compared them. So I suggest a full company holiday.”
The boss laughed. “In a warm climate and with the prospect of drawing rewards directly from the Brussels fund for elimination of supernatural creatures? Who could resist . . . ”
2) One of the most popular slogans used to encourage Czech sports fans.
7) Karel Jaromír Erben (1811–1870)—One of the most important Czech poets and folklorists of the 19th century. His best known work is Kytice (A Bouquet of Folk Legends), a collection of dark ballads with many horror elements, and all of his hunting achievements mentioned in this short story are based on this book. In 2000, Kytice was made into a movie called Wild Flowers.
ALEX DRESCHER (* 1972)
A native of the harsh Ostrava region, writing under a pen name, who has a law degree and is putting his hard-earned knowledge to good use serving the state in hope of a solid retirement pension. At the same time, as an avid fan of Jiří Kulhánek’s work and of Czech action fiction in general, he is a prime example of the fact that fantasy knows no boundaries, same as hard action. Alex started writing fantasy in high school and completed his first novel in college, but it wasn’t until a trio of novels collectively titled The Perfect Deal (Dokonalý obchod, Leonardo 2007) that he made his debut in a compelling combination of fantasy and action, featuring royal prosecutor Klopp Yggredd who investigates the most difficult crimes for his king, often involving magic and the supernatural.
The author subsequently used this original hero in a pair of other books—What Goes Around (S čím kdo zachází, Leonardo 2008) and There Are No Other Ways (Není jiných cest, Leonardo 2010)—before plunging headlong into the turbulent waters of modern action fiction. First, with a pair of novels in the Permeation series—The Journeyman (Tovaryš, Leonardo, 2010) and One of Nine (Jeden z devíti, Leonardo 2012), where the world of science meets the world of magic. They were followed by another pair of novels from same world, Lights in the Darkness (Světla v temnotách, FANTOM Print, 2017), which was published as a sequel on the author’s website prior to the print version, and finally with the similarly conceived Creators of Worlds (Tvůrci světů, FANTOM Print, 2019). In each of these stories, the author offers a brisk, action-packed adventure that doesn’t lack suspense, hyperbole, or black humor and clever punchlines. It’s just a shame that, due to too much work, this up-and-coming author hasn’t been publishing in recent years. But the MHF anthology was too tempting not to take this chance.