A Day in the Unlife
A Slayer of Evil (Prices Negotiable) Story
By
Andrew E. Moczulski
Copyright 2012, Andrew E. Moczulski
*****
Your support and respect for the property of this author is appreciated.
This book is a work of fiction and any resemblance to persons, living or dead, or places, events or locales is purely coincidental. The characters are productions of the author’s imagination and used fictitiously.
"I would like coffee with fifteen sugars, please," I said cheerfully. "Also toast."
The waitress, who might have had a hearing problem, I don't know, blinked a few times. "Fifteen...?"
"Fifteen," I said, nodding my confirmation. "I like sugar. It's sweet. And also toast!"
"Fift-"
"Coffee and toast, yes. All of the sugar," I confirmed.
This is why I hate small-town diners. The customer is supposed to be always right, dammit, but they never remember that.
The woman shrugged. I get that a lot.
"Oh, hey! If you see a person who looks deeply haunted and jumpy, he's probably here to talk to me," I said. I had never seen my current client, but they tended to be haunted and jumpy. Career risk of being Eric Margrave: Professional Monster Hunter. Pretty much anyone who is hiring me (And I get more than you'd expect.) is hiring me because something nasty has them scared out of their mind. It's like most of these people had never seen a hideous flesh-eating death creature before, honestly.
… Okay, yes, they hadn't, and I should be glad they hadn't because it kept me in business. Shut up. I don't need your help to realize I'm a jerk, I figured it out years ago.
Anyway.
My current job had me waiting for a client in a little cafe in a little truck stop off of a big interstate highway in a big state it was running through. The big state was Texas. I don't know why I didn't just say that before and... look, never mind, you know me, I ramble. The point was: Cafe. Truck stop. Texas interstate. The service was lousy and the name was uninspired, ('Ron's'? Just 'Ron's'? Seriously?) but if nothing else the coffee smelled decent. More importantly, my current client knew where it was and so did my GPS, so it was as good a place as any to meet. I'd offered to meet him at his home, but he had been very adamant about staying away from there.
God, I hoped his house wasn't haunted. I'd had my fill of ghosts recently, thank you very much.
The bell over the door dinged a little ding. A very slender, skittish-looking man with black hair and big, haunted green eyes entered Ron's. He looked pale, with huge bags under his eyes, as though he had not slept in days due to the extreme fear that chased him every moment of every day, denying him even the tiniest respite.
I smiled cheerfully and waved him over. Yup, that was the look of my typical clients, all right. Didn't even need to get out the photo he'd e-mailed me. That look of sunken horror was better than a driver's license and fingerprint kit.
The client sat down across the table from me, eyes still nervously glancing from side to side as if he thought a monster was gonna pop out of the kitchen and charge him. Please, I'd been here twenty minutes and my coffee hadn't even come out of the kitchen yet. The most threatening thing he was going to find in here was the waitress, not that he would listen to me if I told him that.
Besides, on the off-chance that something nasty did come calling, I had a gun under the table, and three knives in my coat, and a second gun in an ankle holster, and the ring on my finger could be twisted just so to reveal a poison injector, and the water bottle next to my chair was holy water, and I knew how to use the salt shaker on the table to seriously ruin a wizard's day.
What? It pays to be ready for anything, you know.
The man... no, more of a boy... sighed. "I... nobody else I've talked to will believe me. They... they say you do a lot of strange jobs, handle problems nobody else will. And... look, this is going to sound insane, but I swear, I'm serious."
"I charge two hundred dollars an hour for standard jobs, with extra hazard fee for if I get roughed up. Two-fifty for non-standard monsters, y'know... fairies and shit... three hundred for ichor-covered slimy tentacle beasts and such. I have a full list in my briefcase if you want. Oh, and under no circumstances do I do demons," I said.
"... ... ... What?"
"No demons," I replied. "Also, no dragons, no demon-dragons, no liches, no dragon-liches, no demon-dragon-liches, and especially no sort of sentient bread."
"... ... ... What?"
They always react like to the sentient bread. It's just painfully easy to spot someone who didn't have to live through the Great Bakermancy Uprising of '97. So many baguettes...
I shivered. "But other than that? Anything's negotiable. And I do accept ludicrously large bonuses, just so you know. If you had a ludicrously large bonus you wanted to give me on top of my original fee. Just throwing that out there.”
“... Maybe you will believe me,” he said.
“I'm a believing sort of person,” I agreed.
“Um... right. Well. My name is Ben Hawthorn. I'm from... from Lucas Falls, it's a little place about two hours drive west of here... small town, highways don't even bother with it.”
“And what is trying to eat Lucas Falls lately, Benjy?” I asked cheerfully, assuming that something was eating Lucas Falls; generally speaking, they didn't come to me unless something was eating something. The Grizzly Waitress showed up with my coffee, and I immediately poured some more sugar into it. I was pretty sure she hadn't put fifteen in like I asked, and hadn't done so just to be mean. I also put strawberry jam on my toast, not because of anything she did though. I just love jam.
“It started two weeks ago,” Ben said. “There were these strange attacks in the next town over... people getting mauled by some kind of animal. There were... God, at first it wasn't so bad, but every day it seemed there was another attack, then another two, three, four...”
“I actually don't need the long version, man,” I tried to interrupt. But no good, sadly; once they got to a certain point in their dramatic speech, it was too late to stop them. He was on an all-out monologue now, and he wasn't gonna stop talking until he got to the 'big reveal'. “By the fourth day, we lost all contact with them. No phones, no mail, nothing. A few of the guys drove over and... and they didn't come back,” his hands were shaking as he gripped his coffee. If he started to cry, I was gonna have to bite the inside of my cheek to keep from rolling my eyes.
Be cool, Eric. Remember, normal people don't handle this stuff well, I thought. And it was true; we couldn't all be as dashing and cool and totally sane as me.
“We weren't sure what to do. We didn't want to risk going to look again, but we just had to do something, and... and the local sheriff had been part of the group that didn't come back,” he continued. “Small towns, way out in the country, you're on your own more often than you like to think about. A lot of the families in town left, went to stay with relatives until things calmed down, or just plain left, abandoned their homes. The rest of us started... well, I know it sounds silly, but fortifying. Raising barricades on the road to Hawk's Hallow, that sort of thing.”
I blinked. “Sounds like fairly common sense to me. Something weird was happening, you put up a wall to keep it out. Fuck, I would have recommended barbed wire and sniper perches be set up. Who knows what might be coming? Can't be too careful.”
“... Heh. Thanks. That... well, that actually makes me feel better,” Ben said.
It does? I thought. I hadn't been trying to make him feel better, but I guess it was cool that I had. He seemed like an okay guy. A bit prone to drama, maybe, but nobody's
perfect and he was under a lot of stress.
“We just wanted to protect our homes. That's all. There was talk about heading in to Dallas, going to the police there, if no word came back within the next day or two. And that's when... when they came.”
“Zombies, right?” I asked.
“They... I know how crazy it sounds. Nobody else believed us; the police, the army, nobody. We should have made something up, shouldn't have told them the truth, but I swear to God, the dead were walking, rising from their gr- wait, what?” he asked as my words pierced the haze around his brain. “Did you just say what I think you...?”
“Well, you just... kind of described the usual pattern of zombie attacks,” I said. “It starts small, a few people taken at night. Usually blamed on animals. But then those 'animals' keep taking more and more, and former victims break out of the morgue to join the game again, only they're playing for the other team this time. So I mean... yeah, I guess it's not the only thing that does that, but zombies are my first guess.”
Ben stared, his mouth opening and closing randomly. I seem to have that effect on people pretty commonly, I've found. Must be my sparkling personality. Still, letting him gape all day seemed rude, so I cleared my throat. “Um...so, was it zombies? I like being right about things, so if it was, it would be cool to know.”
“I... well, I... yes. Yes, I...” he said, his expression somewhere between joy and panic. “God, you actually believe me? Nobody has believed me, not one person. Even I didn't believe me half the time, it was so... so insane, that...”
“Insane? Nah, zombies aren't insane. Zombies are part of the standard package,” I said cheerfully. “That's like the opposite of insane. That's like... standard. The usual. Zombies are to me what... I dunno, flipping burgers is to a guy who works at McDonald's. Now, if you were asking me to flip burgers, that would be weird. It seems like you could probably manage that yourself, and my rates would be really exorbitant for something so simple. But asking me to kill zombies and save your town from being overrun? That's a fairly average day at the office. That, I can pull off, and I'd say that two hundred dollars an hour is like, cheap if what you're paying for is the ability to not have the risen dead gnawing on your flesh.”
Ben just blinked a few times. Good kid, but not too bright.
“You... are asking me to kill zombies and save your town from being overrun for you, right?” I asked, just to be sure. “I wouldn't want to start killing them and find out you weren't gonna pay me for it.”
“Y-yes.” Ben said. “You... you can do that?”
"Well, depends. I need the tools, and what tools I need depends on where your zombie issues came from. Do you have like... a mysterious corporation near your town experimenting with bioweapons? Something went horribly wrong in one of the labs, and now the dead are walking, propelled from their graves by industrial quality chemicals and the greed of man?"
"... I don't think so..." Henry said.
"Dammit! Nobody ever does," I said. I'd been wanting to run into a corporation like that for years, but it seriously never comes up. You would be shocked how few real companies engage in random self-destructive monster research that logically cannot possibly bring in any kind of profit if you stop to think about it for even a second. Most of 'em just do normal fraud and stuff.
"Okay, second option. Were the zombies eating your town raised as servitors of the Undead God, Xanoroth the Night Bringer?" I asked. You'd be surprised how often that one pops up.
"... I... how would I know if they were...?"
"Well, they're a bit faster than your average zombie, tend to be a bit more red in the eyes," I said. "But I think the biggest hint is that they would be wandering along proclaiming the glory of the Undead God, Xanoroth the Night Bringer, in an endless moaning chant."
Ben sat in what looked like very uncomfortable silence.
"That's the trait that usually gives 'em away, I find."
Ben fiddled with his napkin and very carefully did not look at me.
"Kind of a big sign. Really quite hard to miss, what with the thousands of zombies walking along chanting. Dead giveaway, if you'll pardon the expression. So, are they..."
"They don't do that."
"Oh, why didn't you say that?" I asked. "Well, then. I guess it's theoretically possible something's going on here that I haven't seen before, but the odds are against that, so in my professional opinion, you got yourself a pretty basic necromancer situation. Evil wizard, raising the dead to serve as his personal killer zombie army. Probably thinks he's clever starting out in the sticks where nobody will stop him, and probably not pondering the question of how he thinks a bunch of shambling, rotting things that have no weapons and can't even run are going to deal with a trained military force the second he gets near civilization.”
"... What?"
"Seriously, kid, you need to stop being so surprised by everything. C'mon, zombies are trying to eat your home! Stop being so easily shocked," I said. "Anyway: Necromancer. I can deal with a necromancer, no problem. Necromancers are old hat. Better for you, they are still in the standard package, so I'm gonna be charging the standard rates. I'll provide my own supplies, no worries there... though if you could point me to some local stores, I'd appreciate it. Oh, and if, at the end of the job, you don't pay, I will put the zombies back where I found them."
"Are... are you serious?"
I rolled my eyes. "No! Jeez, kid, I'm not a wizard! You think I can raise a zombie army? Learn to pick up on when I'm joking. I'm totally not going to raise the zombies again if you don't pay my fees. Honestly! You are too easy, kid."
"Oh... ha, ha. Right... of course, I'm just a little nervous, so..."
"I absolutely will kill you, though," I said. I wasn't smiling this time.
"Ha... ha?"
Wow, Ben really did have no ability to read the mood, did he? I was gonna have to spell this one out for him. "Not joking, man. I have a reputation to uphold. Can't let the community know that any old brat from out in the middle of nowhere... no offense... can screw me over, right? So if I don't get my payment, I have to come back and collect a very unpleasant kill fee. Nothing personal.”
Ben just stared. I think I broke him.
“Oh, relax! It's not like I'm gonna walk up to you the second I finish the last zombie, demand my fee in cash, and then shoot you. That is really bad for repeat business, and I have the bottom line to consider,” I said. “I take cash, sure, but check and credit card is also totally acceptable. Anything but PayPal, really, I don't trust that place. Very shifty. And if you're a bit short, there are several very reasonable payment plans, too, and I'm very forgiving on interest rates. I'll get you the paperwork if you want?”
“Um... thanks?”
“Hey, here's a thought: you said a bunch of people abandoned their homes? Probably some very profitable looting to be done there, if you find yourself short on funds. Hint, hint?”
Ben just made a kind of a weak gurgling sound. Yeah, I definitely broke him.
“Haha! I'm just joking, Ben! I would never suggest you loot the homes of your friends and neighbors,” I said cheerfully. Then, in a whisper, I said, “Unless you need the money for my fee, in which case you loot them. Loot the crap out of them. Because you will pay me back for this, you got it?”
The gurgling sound became a kind of squeak.
“All right! I'm glad we got this talk out of the way, but hey, I have your town to save. It is now time for me for me to gather,” I said, with what I was pretty sure was an air of drama and mystery that just made my image work flawlessly, “the secret and mystical tools of the zombie hunter.”
I would need twenty yards of piano wire, some fireworks, a gallon of water, a quarter pound of table salt, and maybe something to eat since it was like a two hour drive. I had the piano wire in a spool in the back of my van; I always bring some with me, in case of piano wire emergencies. Firew
orks were not that hard to get a hold of if you knew where to look; this was Texas, after all. If you needed something that exploded, this was the state to look for it in, and God bless them for it. Something illegal would be best, they made more noise, but I would take what I could quickly find. I was on the clock, and the customer would only tolerate so much time stretching, so whatever boom I could get was the boom I would use.
For the rest of it, I would probably have to find a Wal-Mart or something. Thank God for GPS, I have no idea how the freelance monster hunter had ever functioned without it. Maps were just such a pain if you didn't have anyone in the car with you to read them off. Having to pull off the side of the road every time you need to look up your next turn was so very last century, and besides the GPS voice made me feel happy. She was so nice.
I wondered if Ron's had dessert to go? That coffee had actually been pretty damn good for such a little place, and I could do with some peach pie.