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CHAPTER 26

I’m Alright


“I think I’m starting to like it here,” Milo said, taking another bite of donut.

Mormons won’t consume anything containing alcohol or tobacco. But don’t ask them about refined sugar. Boy could eat more donuts than an entire SWAT.

The sun was rising over Lake Pontchartrain. There was another loup-garou running around somewhere. There’d been a vampire attack that we’d missed and we were going to have to track down the vamps. There was something else going on in some place.

I really didn’t care. I was munching on a breakfast burrito and there were four more in the greasy sack from Germaine’s.

Monster hunting builds up an appetite.

“It grows on you,” I said, taking another bite of burrito. I’d asked for extra jalapeno. That was probably a mistake. I was going to pay for it, for sure. “Like mold.”

The phone rang.

“I’m eating,” I said, without asking who it was.

“Got that,” Ray said. “When you are done eating, head to New Orleans Country Club. We missed a couple last night. The zombies from Metairie Cemetery got out and are wandering around the golf course. We’re getting complaints. It’s interfering with tee time.”

* * *

“Try to hit them in the head, Milo,” I shouted out the window, rocking my weight from side to side.

You can drive a car on golf cart paths. You can even get up a fair turn of speed. I hadn’t been too sure about the occasional bridge and whether it could take the weight of Honeybear—especially with everything that was in the trunk—but they handled us fine.

I’d let Milo do the shooting this time. I mean, it wasn’t like he was a good shot or anything, but I was tired and he was still fuming over the mole rat. And that way I could stay in the air conditioning. We had the windows rolled down but any little bit of cool helped.

So he was up on the much mangled roof of Honeybear with his M16, trying to pot shamblers that were wandering around the New Orleans Country Club. Currently the object of his attention was a probably African-American male—it was hard to tell with the advanced decay—in a very nice if faded suit wandering near the water hazard. The shambler was missing an arm and didn’t seem to have any clear goal in mind.

“I would shoot if you’d stop rocking the car!” Milo yelled.

“No idea what you’re talking about,” I yelled back, rocking from side to side and trying not to laugh.

Obviously, MCB had closed the place, but there was still a foursome of golfers watching from the nearest tee. Since they hadn’t been run off, that meant they were read in on the supernatural somehow, and probably connected enough that MCB had to be polite to them. More than likely judges or politicians. They didn’t seem perturbed by a few zombies, but they were clearly impatient to continue their game. One of them was already doing practice swings.

They change it every so often, but in 1987 the Monster Control Bureau had two different ranking systems for monster-related events. One was on the basis of the threat to citizens and national security. That was a color-based ranking system ranging from green, one monster, couple of victims, no big deal, to Extinction Level event, which was, obviously, bad.

The sobek, even though it hadn’t managed to kill anyone, was classed as a Yellow event. If it had managed to climb out of the canal, lots of people might have died.

The second was based on how hard it would be to cover up. When a few homeless people saw a vampire, no big deal. Class One event. Everybody knew homeless people were crazy and it was just a few of them. Godzilla attacking the Democratic National Convention on camera live would be a Class Five.

In any other town, zombies in broad daylight on a major golf course used by high rollers and Very Important People—who could not easily be dismissed or defamed—was considered a big damned deal, probably a Yellow Three. In New Orleans, Agent Higgins just ran off the know-nothings, shut the gate, and put up a CLOSED FOR MAINTENANCE sign, while his boss, Castro, drove a golf cart over and schmoozed with the foursome from the donor class. Castro waved when he left. I doubted they’d even bother writing up anything in the Truth for this one. It was like Class Beige Negative One here.

There was another shot.

“Dang it!” Milo yelled. “Quit rocking the car!”

“Don’t know what you’re talking about,” I yelled, but I quit rocking the car. “Have you considered getting your eyes checked? Take a comfortable breath. Slow trigger squeeze. The shot should come as a surprise…”

There was another shot. The shambler dropped.

“There you go!” I yelled. “Before you know it, you’ll be almost to the level of Marine marksmanship!”

“Just find me the next one,” Milo said. I could tell he was grumbling.

As we pulled away, the guy with the driver let fly.

I will never get the allure of golf.

* * *

I’d gotten a map of the course at the pro shack and marked where all the zombies had fallen, but when we went back with coroner, the one at the water hazard was missing.

“I swear there was one right here,” I said, looking around. You could see the trace of brains on the ground. “Right damned here!”

“No zombie, no receipt,” Dave said.

“The brains are all over the ground,” I said, casting around. Milo had hit it square in the head. Finally.

“Excuse me, you there in the armor!”

I’d heard the golf cart coming up behind me but ignored it.

“Yes, sir?” I asked politely, turning around.

The speaker was a gentlemen in his sixties, distinguished, well-dressed, with iron gray hair and blue eyes.

“If you’re looking for human remains, young man, you may have your work cut out for you,” he said. “A gator took it.”

“Oh, son of a bitch,” Dave said, shaking his head. “Not that again.”

“Any idea where this gator went, sir?” I asked.

“Somewhere in the water hazard,” he said as he drove off. “Good luck.”

“Well, shit,” I said. “What do we do now?”

“Gotta get the gator out of the water hazard,” Dave said, shrugging. “Cut it open, see if there’s a body in there.”

“So…how do you catch a gator, again?” I asked.

* * *

I had already come to the conclusion that there were three answers to any question along the lines of how do I/we get something done in New Orleans?

1. Ask Remi to make arrangements.

2. Call Madam Courtney.

3. Shelbye had a cousin.

These even fell into three broad categories of the gumbo that was New Orleans but that’s a big digression. Simply put, of those three, which would you choose to get a gator out of a water hazard?

You guessed it: Shelbye had a cousin.

More like some sort of third cousin, tenth removed or an uncle or something. The guy was about a hundred, short, his head far too large for his body, bow-legged, walked with a stoop and his arms out and seemed to have been inexpertly carved from teak by some alien race that had heard of primates, had them described certainly, but never actually seen one. I was relatively certain they’d used some sort of nonprimate monkey as a basis. His face was probably based on a proboscis monkey and his body on…lemurs? Possibly? He was another one of those characters in New Orleans I wanted to check if they were PUFF-applicable.

“Ooh, gator eatin’ zombie nouveau!” he exclaimed in the same accent Tremaine used when he was really tired. Cajun so thick you couldn’t cut it with Mo No Ken. “Être pas bonne!”

He then said something in what Cajuns thought was French. It sounded disappointed. Even when they used close-to-French words, Cajun accent was just as thick in French.

“Lost that,” I said. “Something about a donkey?”

“Buyers won’t take them if they’ve eaten humans or human remains,” Shelbye translated. “What he actually said was ‘You get more dick from a donkey.’”

“Ah,” I said. “Well, how much to get it out?”

“Oool, two hunnert?” he asked.

“Done,” I said. “How long?”

“Long’n it take,” the possibly human said with a shrug.

“Rock, paper, scissors?” I asked Shelbye, holding out a fist hopefully.

“Oh, no,” she said. “Your kill. You gotta stick around. I ain’t sittin’ here for one damn shambler.”

I didn’t want to stick around for one damned shambler, either. Full moon was prime hunting season even by day. There were things to kill and money to be made. Girls to save. The last place I wanted to be was stuck on a golf course waiting for Methuselah to fish a gator out of a pond.

“What if I need a translator?” I asked.

“When Cousin Badouin gets it out, pay him two hundred dollars,” Shelbye said, walking away.

Cousin Badouin walked to his green pickup truck, slowly and arthritically, and rummaged for a bit before pulling out a weighted treble hook attached to a long line. A bit more rummaging and he came up with a long-barreled pistol that looked like a .22. Then he slowly and arthritically walked back. I swear it took him five minutes just to make the round trip.

When he got back to the water, he squatted down and appeared to go to sleep. He seemed to just be napping in the sun with the hook dangling in his hand.

“Need any help?” I asked.

He answered in what I took to be the negative.

I’m a really good linguist. You need a lot of exposure to Cajun to understand it. One of the reasons is it is a closed metaphorical dialect. What’s that mean?

There are closed metaphorical dialects in English. Take the Deep South. One of those places where you want to paddle faster if you hear banjoes. If you go into a corner station and ask the owner for directions, the answer might be: “Don’t take a hound dog to know the weather.”

What this actually means is “You should probably buy a map, Yankee.”

Unless you understand the metaphors, the colloquialisms in other words, you may be able to cut through the accent, you may be able to understand the words, but the metaphors are only understood by a closed set.

What does the term “being bus-left” mean? What is a “spare tire” besides the obvious?

You more or less have to guess based on the context. And you are entirely unable to communicate on your own terms, fully, because you do not have the necessary metaphors to relate.

This was my issue with Cajun the entire time I was in the area. Even if I could cut through the thick accent to understand the mixture of French and English, the metaphors were only fully understood if you were raised in the culture.

At one point when I was recuperating, I dug into the anthropology and linguistic texts on Cajun and came to the conclusion that the anthropologists and linguists who were Cajun—there are Cajuns who go to college—were incapable of explaining it and those who were from outside were incapable of understanding it. So that was no use.

Or as a Cajun would say: “Raccoon dans un arbre n’est pas le souper.”

More or less.

I went back to Honeybear in a less than good mood.

“This wouldn’t have happened if you weren’t rocking the car,” Milo said in a superior tone.

“I wasn’t rocking the car,” I said. “You just can’t shoot.”

“You were rocking the car,” Milo said, getting angry.

“Was not,” I said.

“Were too!”

“Not!”

“Were!”

I shoved him. Lightly. With my elbow. He shoved back. Harder. We shoved back and forth for a while then both started laughing.

“See!” I said. “That’s rocking the car.”

“How long’s it going to take?” Milo asked.

“No idea. And rocking the car was funny.”

“See!” he said. “You were rocking the car!”

“Duh,” I said. “I was waiting for you to get down on the ground in exasperation. Then when you were going to get in, I was going to drive away and make you chase the car for a while.”

“You…jerk,” Milo said, laughing. “I don’t know why I like you.”

“Same reason I like you,” I said. “I have an actual asshole of a brother and you lost all of yours. We both gotta find family where we can.”

“Point,” Milo said.

I rolled up the window and cranked the AC.

“I am going to get some shut-eye,” I said, sliding the seat back. By then I’d taken off my armor and gear and was just in the Kevlar and cotton combat suit. “Wake me up if Methuselah catches anything.”

I was having a nightmare about spiders when Milo shoved me and started shouting.

“Werewolf!” he shouted. “Loup-garou! Get out of the car!”

I’d kept my .45 on just in case and hit the door in an instant, totally awake. Then hit the ground on my face as my boots caught on something.

“What the fuck?” I yelled, rolling over and trying to get to my feet again. And down. And up…and down. And I finally looked at what my feet were caught on.

My freaking bootlaces were tied together.

“You son of a bitch!” I shouted. “Milo!”

Milo was on the other side of the car laughing so hard he was choking. He’d had the good sense to cower behind one of the tires so I couldn’t get a shot at his ankles, the coward!

“That’s for rocking the car, jerk!”

I tried to come up with an acceptable insult and gave up. I started untying my boots. He’d knotted them thoroughly. “Okay, okay. Even?”

“Even,” Milo yelled.

“Hoooweeee!” Cousin Badouin shouted. “Ooooh! Eeets a beeg one!”

Methuselah, the teak proto-human, had caught something.

He was hooting and caroling as he dragged the gator up towards the bank. I had enough knowledge of gator hunting by then to know that on the bank was the worst possible place to have a gator. They had a very powerful tail in addition to their bite. Nobody in their right mind wanted to try to kill a gator on the bank.

I’d forgotten this was one of Shelbye’s cousins. That put the question of “right mind” in perspective.

Sure enough, he had the gator caught on the tail with that treble hook. And, sure enough, he was dragging the damned thing up on the bank.

He yelled something at me in pseudo French. He had both hands on the line so he couldn’t gesture. But I got the impression from head movements he wanted help.

I ran over, glad I had managed to get my bootlaces undone, and he pulled the line towards me.

“Vigoureux!” he shouted. At least I was pretty sure that was what he was saying. “Vigoureux!”

I decided he wanted me to hold onto the line. And pull vigorously?

I grabbed the line and pulled vigorously. The alligator pulled back even more vigorously and I was nearly on my face again.

“Vigoureux!” Cousin Badouin shouted again, dancing around like, well, a proto-human design based on various forms of nonprimate monkeys. He’d drawn his single-action .22 and was waving it in the air. I noted in passing that, surprisingly enough, he had his finger off the trigger.

I kept pulling vigorously, dragging the recalcitrant gator onto the bank. Based upon the gabbling from Methuselah, I was now proceeding as desired.

As soon as the gator’s head was in the shallows, Methuselah made a leap like a vampire and landed on the gator’s back. The gator then became extremely vigorous. Then I stepped on one of my bootlaces.

I had gotten them untied. I hadn’t gotten around to tying them again.

I was on my back with an angry gator on the other end of the line and an angry Methuselah on its back.

How do I keep getting myself into these situations?

Milo was no help whatsoever. He was laughing too hard.

I managed to keep pulling vigoureux, pushing along on the ground.

Methuselah finally managed to get into position and capped the gator in the back of the head with a .22. The gator thrashed a couple more times and was still.

“Laissez les bons temps rouler,” I said, letting go of the line and rolling over on my back. “C’était plus amusant que de manger des araignées.”

“Les araignées sont bonnes frites!” Cousin Badouin argued. “Bon! Tres bon!”

“What the heck are you saying?” Milo the cunning linguist asked.

“I was just explaining that you were my retarded cousin,” I said, standing up. “Now we gotta try to get—”

Something hit me hard in the head. As I passed out, I distantly heard a male voice shout:

“Fore!”

* * *

I sat in the car, windows rolled up, AC on full blast, “Twilight Zone” playing, surrounded by the smell of decaying blood from the damned loup-garou that had bled all down my roof and all over my interior, drinking a Budweiser and holding an icepack on my head while I let Milo deal with Dave. From what I could see without turning my head much—the fall had wrenched my neck—there were bits and pieces being extracted from the belly of the gator.

Milo had duly paid Cousin Badouin who had presumably left satisfied. I don’t know. I was comatic by Titleist. SOGCMOB, TGB, CBT.

“I got a receipt for one shambler,” Milo said as he got in the car. “How’s the head?”

I just looked at him balefully then removed the icepack for a second.

“Ooh,” Milo said. “Nice goose egg! You can see the little dimples! That’s gotta hurt.”

“Thanks for your concern,” I said, putting Honeybear in gear.

“It was hard to tell, but I think Cousin Badouin said seeing you get whacked in the noggin made his day.”


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