CHAPTER 11
Radar Rider
There’s a smell. Any experienced Hunter learns it quick.
I talked one time to an old European Hunter who had been in World War II and had been one of the supernatural specialists called in to assess the Nazi concentration camps. He said it was the same smell. The smell of concentrated, starving humanity in desperation.
It was the smell of a vampire feeding pit. That same smell.
Ben and Shelbye had been chasing a werewolf in Elmwood when they’d smelled it. They broke off from the pursuit to identify the particular warehouse it was coming from. Then they tracked down the loup-garou and made their PUFF.
It was just past dawn. I’d already been up for twenty-four hours. I was beat to shit, my arm was in ribbons, my gear was in ribbons.
Trevor had rolled out when we were down to four. He still couldn’t move much but he could shoot and communicate and he was a serious monster killer. He was working much like Shelbye, taking the sniper position. After the night we’d had, Trevor had called Ray for reinforcements. Hunters were on their way, but that would take time.
When we met up at the warehouse, we’d agreed to break down to three teams: Shelbye and myself; Trevor and Ben; and Alvin, as the least-injured close combat specialist, would be the monster position, pardon the pun.
But we’d all meet at the warehouse. Which, naturally, was locked.
“It’s been on long-term lease,” the real estate agent said, “and the locks have been changed. They’re not supposed to change the locks. What do you think is in there?”
He wasn’t from around here. He’d been in contact with the FBI and gotten clearance but was looking askance at the heavily armed “federal contract security officers” that wanted into the building.
“They’re suspected of smuggling counterfeit Teddy Ruxpins,” Trevor said. “Very serious charge. We’ll take care of opening it up.”
I had entry tools in my trunk. So did Ben, Alvin and Trevor. I just watched, ate, and drank sweet tea.
I’d stopped by a Waffle House and picked up a few bacon and egg sandwiches. I needed the calories.
The door was duly opened and Alvin took point. I had the number two position, then Ben, Shelbye and Trevor limping along behind.
The warehouse had once been used as a cold storage facility for meat. In the center was a separate concrete building that was the cold storage. It had a big, hermetically sealed door on it. Heavy steel.
To the side was a shipping container. One of those big metal containers they stack on ships. The smell was coming from that.
There were six people in the container. Two of them were already dead. I managed those with Alvin’s assistance.
We called in SIU and medical to evacuate the survivors, then checked out the cold storage building. That was certainly where our vampire was hiding. The heavy door was locked from the inside and, shall we say, resistant to entry tools. The walls and ceiling were heavy concrete. We’d spend all day chipping through.
“If we could get some C4 into the cracks, we could blow the door off,” Trevor said, rubbing his chin as he regarded it. “But there’s not a crack.”
“Got a cousin with a ’cetylene torch,” Shelbye suggested.
The hinges were recessed. Getting into what was essentially a vault was going to take time. Jonathan had been our explosives expert. Trevor was former SF and no slouch. But this was difficult. We couldn’t just wait to see if anything came out at nightfall, because we were all exhausted, and who knew what was going to happen on the second night of the full moon.
“I’ve got this,” I said. “I’m going to need a few things.”
“Ce qui want?” Lieutenant Salvage said. He was one of three lieutenants with Orleans Parish Special Investigations Unit. Short, stocky Cajun. When he got tired, and he was already there, his accent got thicker and thicker, then he’d start breaking into Cajun patois French.
I thought for a moment, regarding the storage locker.
“A lift just to get up and down,” I said, pointing at the arm. I had it in a sling at the moment. “A ladder. A box of lawn and leaf bags. A hose long enough to reach the middle of that roof from the nearest outlet. And…fifty boxes, at least, of corn starch. Better make it a hundred to be on the safe side.”
“Okay,” Salvage said, making notes with a quizzical expression on his face.
“That should do it. I’ve got the rest in my car.”
We walked out and I went to my trunk and started rummaging. After a moment I came up with four green-cloth shoulder bags.
“Claymores?” Shelbye said.
“Nah,” I said. “But the bags are handy.”
Inside, I set the bags down on the floor, well separated, and dumped one out. It contained two blocks of C4 plastic explosive and a roll of detonation cord.
“You keep C4 and det cord in your trunk?” Shelbye asked.
“Sure,” I said. “Don’t you?”
Trevor understood what I was going to do. “You’re going to need a lot more explosives than that. I’ll send Alvin back to base to see what Jonathan had stashed.”
“Help me roll this out, Shelbye.”
Rolling out a cigar of C4 with one arm stitched up on the bicep was a challenge, but Shelbye made quick work of it. While we were working, a guy turned up with the cherry picker and an extending ladder. A cherry picker, for those who don’t know, is sort of a rolling, pneumatic scaffold/elevator.
I’m not sure he knew what we were working with. If he did, he was the most unflappable guy I’ve ever met. He just delivered the cherry picker and left.
About twenty minutes later a Sheriff’s deputy showed up with a bunch of bags from A&P. He did know what we were working with.
“Holy shit! Is that C4? I’m out of here,” he said, walking away quickly.
Alvin got back with a bunch more C4. We took all the stuff to the roof of the cold storage with the cherry picker and got to work.
First I taped the cigars of C4 to my emergency stash of det cord with rigger tape. Then I laid it down in a circle on the roof. The circle was large enough to get the extending ladder down into the room below—barely. I made a mental note to carry around more det cord. I extended the last bit of det cord out from the circle, then we got to work on the tamping.
“Lay out the trash bags around the circle to overlap,” I said, waving my arm. “Please.”
Shelbye got out the bags and laid them down.
“Okay,” I said, considering the situation. There were seven bags laid down. “Ten boxes of corn starch in each bag.”
She duly poured ten boxes of corn starch in all of the bags.
“Now we need the hose.”
The bags were partially filled with water, the tops tied and a second bag was put around the outside.
“Okay, I’m going to ask,” Shelbye said as she was filling the bags.
“If we just blow the C4, all the force will go up,” I said. “We need something holding it down. It’s called tamping. Usually, that’s sand bags. You can use bodies if you have them. But getting sandbags filled and brought up here would take more time and effort. Water is incompressible, but with that much force, it will only remain incompressible for an instant, not long enough for the full force of the cutting charge to cut through the concrete. When mixed with corn starch, however, it forms a non-Newtonian liquid under pressure. The corn starch acts as a quantum binding agent just long enough to hold the material in place. Voila. Instant sandbag. You get some of the rigidity of sand and the combined mass of the corn starch, not much, and the water, a lot.”
“That’s sort of…” she said then stopped.
“I got a perfect F in high school physics,” I said. “Have you ever taken a multiple choice test where you didn’t study and weren’t sure of the answers?”
“Yeah,” Shelbye said. “I wasn’t all that much on schooling.”
“Ever get every single answer wrong?” I asked.
“No,” she said. “Even if you pick C as the answer on all of them, you get something.”
“I got every single answer wrong in physics,” I said. “Every single one. Not one correct answer for an entire semester.”
“Why?” she asked.
“I was taking chemistry,” I said. “I really liked the teacher. He told me I had to get an A or I couldn’t come over to his house anymore. So I got every single answer right. But I’d set out to make a perfect C average. So I had to get every single answer wrong in physics.”
“That is just plum crazy,” she said.
“I really like physics,” I said.
Finally, she had the bags filled and in place over the charges. I had her go down to the floor while I hooked up the detonation sequence.
I always prefer to use chemical detonation. It’s just way safer than electrical. But in this case, I didn’t have enough det cord. I resolved to find someplace in the trunk for a decent-sized roll in the future. In the meantime I had to go electrical.
“Turn off your radios,” I yelled. “And go tell the cops to turn theirs off!”
Electric blasting caps work by way of exploding bridge wire. When sufficient current goes through—like a 9-volt battery—the EBW has enough resistance that it heats up and pops. That little pop is enough to initiate the blasting cap. In turn, the cap has enough pop to initiate the main charge. But the caps themselves have two little wires coming out of them, and the theory was that stray EMR—like from a radio—could potentially cause an initiation.
I waited until she got back to hook up the detonator. I crimped it to the C4 then attached the leads to a long wire spool from a claymore with wire caps. I’d already run the wire over the roof and down to the floor of the warehouse.
“I sort of need the cherry picker,” I said.
When I was down on the ground again, I hooked up a claymore clacker and put in some earplugs.
“Fire in the hole!”
Alvin had brought back a lot of explosives, and we’d used extra since we were cutting through the anticipated rebar. (Yes, I’d thought of the rebar.) The thump was still fairly muted. We were showered with watery corn starch and there was a CRASH as the blown-out circle of concrete hit the floor inside the storage facility.
“You can tell them they can turn their radios back on.”
There had been two vampires in the cold storage room. The circle of concrete had landed on the head of one and that took care of that. The explosion pulverized the other. I just needed to take its head off before it could regenerate.
I told Shelbye to be ready with the ladder, tossed in a flash-bang, drew Mo No Ken left-handed and dropped through the hole. My arm might have been injured but there was nothing wrong with my legs.
* * *
It was noon on the second day of the full moon. The call had come in the previous night. A short check by an SIU sergeant had determined that it looked like it was all over and nothing had come out. So we waited until we had time to check it out.
The house at 4030 Eagle Street was single-story with the usual heavily barred windows and doors. Right next to it was a bright pink house with an American flag flying proudly. When we pulled up there was crime scene tape across the front of the house and the elderly neighbor was out on his porch with a shotgun.
I walked over. Okay, I limped over.
“You see what happened?” I asked.
“Heard it,” the man said. “Just crashing and screaming. I came out to check on it. Lights had gone out in most of the house. I flashed a light in. Just tore up. Johnsons were gone. I called the police. Sheriff’s deputy come by, said they’d get to it when they could.”
“Been a tough night, sir,” I said.
“Can tell, son,” he said. “You need a Coke or something? Sweet tea?”
“Sweet tea would be much appreciated, sir,” I said.
“And one for me,” Shelbye said. She was cradling her M14.
“Sure will, miss,” the man said. He looked at the house for a moment. “Nothing’s come out. Nothing gone in. What the hell did it?”
“That’s what we’re here to find out, sir,” I said.
We had to get out the Halligan tool and ax to get the door open. Then I entered cautiously, Uzi held in my left and at the ready.
There was nothing to see. The front room had been torn to shreds. There was a large pile of dirt and broken concrete on the floor of the living room and some blood splatter on the walls. There was some sort of weird mucous or ichor all over the room. It smelled like shit, I’ll tell you that.
“What the hell?” I said as Shelbye followed me in.
“One of these,” she said, shaking her head.
“One of whats?”
“We don’t know. We call it a basement boogie. Called it in to Cazador and they don’t know. We get one from time to time. Houses. Cemeteries. One office. Daytime, nighttime. Never been surviving witnesses. Best we can guess is shoggoth or a grinder, but there’s never a reason someone would sick a shoggoth on the victims, and grinders don’t like a water table like we got in New Orleans. Generally, just regular folk. They just up and disappear into those holes far as we can tell.”
“The hole’s not big enough for a shoggoth.”
“That’s what Trevor said,” Shelbye said. “Most of the stuff he’s heard of that digs up from underground, don’t like a bunch of wet and ain’t nothin’ but water down there.”
“Ever try to dig out the hole?”
“You think?” she replied. “They go deep. We’ve tried drilling them and we lose the line. They just up and disappear.”
I was really starting to hate New Orleans. And “we don’t know” in this business is a very bad line. It’s the things you don’t know that tend to be the biggest problem.
Definitely turned out to be the case in New Orleans. Those little holes turned out to be the manifestation of a very big problem. But it took us some time to figure that out.
We left the house to whoever wanted it. God knows I wasn’t going to be buying it.
* * *
It was 2 P.M. the last day of the full moon. One more night and this insanity would be over. Hopefully.
Ben Carter was in the hospital having received a major head wound from some sort of big imp. Trevor was still in his soft cast but out plugging bad things right and left at range. My arm was starting to swell from the exertion and I was about delirious. More members of MHI had arrived from Texas and Georgia to backfill, and Trevor had put them to work.
We’d had more loup-garou, another vampire, more zombies and a ghoul outbreak.
I kept having to stop to sharpen Mo No Ken.
And now I had a call that Alvin and Shelbye were in the shit with “something really damned big.” Trevor was on scene and it was all hands.
The incident was occurring near the corner of Oleander and Monroe in Holly Grove—what was still called, by locals, the American Quarter versus the French Quarter.
I never figured out what the other two quarters were.
When I got near, I started to pick up radio transmissions from the team.
“We need a Pig for this thing,” Trevor radioed. “Fall back. Fall back!”
He wasn’t referring to something that goes “Oink, oink.” The Pig is a nickname for an M-60 machine gun. They needed belt-fed.
NOPD had a ten-block perimeter set up and were evacuating people from the edges. This was serious.
“Trev, Hand,” I radioed. I was coming in from Leonidas Street, which I thought was pretty cool in my sleep-deprivation and pain-induced stupor. “Bring it down Oleander if you can. Lead it towards Leonidas.”
“Roger,” Trevor radioed. “Alvin! Load up! We are didi mao!”
“Can I get a description of the entity?” I radioed, parking my car sideways on Oleander.
“Probably a flesh golem but it’s fucking huge. We’re loading up. Hopefully it will follow.”
“I don’t know if I’d say hopefully,” Alvin replied on the radio.
I got out and sort of distantly noted it was raining. Just a light rain but the fact that it wasn’t until I stepped out that I noticed was sort of weird. I was really tired.
I went to the trunk, opened it up and started rummaging. All the way at the back was a large green hardcase. Getting it out with the arm was a pain but I managed. I opened it up, pulled out the Barrett M82A1, flipped down the bipod legs, loaded a magazine and carried it over to the driver’s side. Then I hefted it up, painfully, onto the roof. I’d used this shooting position before. Previously I had glued little rubber booties on the end of the bipod legs to keep them from scratching Honeybear’s roof. I ran the charging handle—used my right arm for that, winced again—and went back to the trunk to do more rummaging.
I saw Trevor’s big Coronado come around the turn backwards. Shelbye was leaning out the window, firing with her M14 at something.
Then it came around the corner. Futhermucker.
Flesh golems are normally stitched-together humans, like Frankenstein. This was a stitched-together…at the time I didn’t know what. Later we figured out it had bull legs, a silverback gorilla’s body and a bull’s head, plus some extra stuff for filling. I thought maybe a really outsized minotaur at the time, only the necromancer who’d enchanted it either got ahold of Babe the Big Blue Ox and King Kong or somehow managed to get the whole thing to expand. It was huge.
I prefer the big things I understand. Strange shadows in a dark cemetery? Thousands of poisonous spiders? Gnomes? Those piss me off. I like the big stuff. There should be more really big monsters in the world. Out in the open on a street at midday in a light rain where everyone home had locked their doors and hidden in closets till the bellowing big thing got taken care of by Hoodoo Squad.
Coroner was going to have to bring the big truck for this thing. And lots of plastic bags. At least when I got through with it.
Trevor’s battered blue Coronado came backing up next to me and I waved with my left hand.
“I hope you’ve got an idea,” he yelled.
I reached waaaay in the back again and pulled out a light antitank weapon.
“You keep LAWs in your trunk?” Trevor said.
“Don’t you?” I asked, handing him one. I pulled out another for myself. “Extend that for me, will you?” I asked, waving my injured right arm.
The flesh golem was charging towards us, bellowing in rage. They had hit it a bunch, and chunks were hanging off, but it was still coming.
I fiddled with the LAW for a few seconds and figured out it was easier to fire right than left despite the injury.
“You gonna, you know, shoot?” Alvin asked.
“Getting there,” I said, putting the LAW on my shoulder. “One Gigantor Stew coming up.”
I waited till it was about seventy-five meters away, adjusted the angle and let go.
The light antitank weapon hit it in its massive belly and it mostly disappeared in a cloud of flame.
“Wooo-hooo!” Shelbye yelled from the passenger side window.
Trevor had extended the second one. Sure enough, it was getting up. He hit it again.
The thing was still trying to get up. It was mostly blown in half but it was a game one.
I walked over to the Barrett, got a good cheek weld, leftie, and fired at its head. It dropped. Struggling back up. Second round through an eye. Struggling back up. Lost the other eye. Hey, I’m a Marine. Shelbye might have been our designated marksman but Lee Harvey Oswald showed what Marine marksmanship is made of.
A few rounds later it lay down and was a good monster.
Just to be sure, I got on the hood of the Coronado and we drove up cautiously. I hoped it wasn’t getting back up. I was out of LAW rockets and we had used up our C4 on the vampire bunker.
It wasn’t moving. It wasn’t struggling. It wasn’t breathing but some monsters like this don’t. There was a lot of blood on the ground and guts everywhere.
“That’s my trophy, Shelbye!”
“I’ll get my boy to do it up right,” she yelled back.
That thing’s head has looked great up on my living room wall ever since. I just call it Babe.