Monster Hunter Bloodlines - eARC by Larry Correia (read a book .txt) 📕

cheerful, and I hadn’t needed to hide from her either. Only a tiny minority of people know about the world of professional monster hunting, but as soon as Bonnie saw the patch on my vest, she had brightened right up and said, “Oh, it’s Monster Hunter Incorporated. You boys come in and rest up.” It shouldn’t come as too much of a surprise that she knew who we were, because if anyone was going to know monsters are real, it’s someone who works the night shift at a hole-in-the-wall stop and rob just outside Atlanta. She asked me if that nice man from South Africa was still around because she hadn’t seen him for a few years—he used to get his morning coffee and doughnut here—but I had to tell her that Priest had transferred to our Colorado office.

Bonnie was genuinely upset however, not because of the monster shooting lightning bolts—those things happened—but because that nice young girl had stolen the car keys from her purse and taken Bonnie’s Hyundai Sonata. And it was nearly paid off! I talked her into not calling the police and reporting it stolen by promising Bonnie that we’d get her car back ASAP.

I got ahold of Earl and he was sending someone to pick me up. My colleagues had already found the wrecked truck. Earl had used his nose to follow my trail. When I had called, he had been in the clearing where I’d lost my bag. It might take a few minutes for them to get here though. It turned out the reason we hadn’t seen very many cars driving by was that a crazy thick fog wall had formed around the area as the Drekavac had grown more powerful, and there had been several car accidents which were now blocking the nearby roads. It was a real mess.

After I got that straightened out, I needed to tend to the dog bite. To disinfect you need pretty strong alcohol, but all Bonnie had for sale was beer and wine. Probably a legal thing. “You got anything stronger?”

“Oh, hon, of course I do.” Then she pulled something out from under the counter. “Personal stash. Help yourself.”

I took it, and nothing screams quality like vodka in a plastic bottle.

Bonnie called after me, “Don’t bleed all over in there. I just cleaned it!”

The wound wasn’t too deep. Pouring the alcohol over it hurt more than getting bit, but I dealt with it as good as I could with what I had on hand. There were lots of monsters with infectious bites, like zombies or lycanthropes. I had no idea about ghost dogs, but one perk about being Chosen was that I was apparently immune to that sort of thing, so I wouldn’t be turning into anything. However, I was still human and could get a nasty infection as easily as the next guy, so hopefully a hundred proof would kill any germs that got in there. Then I washed the sink because it’s rude to leave blood all over the bathroom. When I returned to the main room, Gutterres was still there. Bonnie was grilling him about what had been outside her store throwing lightning bolts and what was in that cooler, and he was being vague but also trying to reassure her that it wasn’t anything she would ever have to worry about again.

Gutterres appeared to be in a sullen mood. Which was understandable. He was about as beat-up as I was and was holding a towel full of ice from the soda machine against the burn on his neck. In addition to getting swatted across the forest, his organization was out a bunch of money he was probably accountable for, and Sonya wasn’t answering his calls.

“Leaving me stuck under a tree was a dick move.” I sat next to him at the end of the little lunch counter. Then I slid the half empty bottle of Popov in front of him.

“Sorry about that.” He took a swig of the vodka and grimaced.

Bonnie got two hot dogs off the roller, stuck them in buns, and dropped them in front of us. “On the house, boys.”

“Thank you, ma’am,” Gutterres said. Then he grumpily went about eating his plain hotdog as Bonnie went back to work.

I squirted ketchup all over mine. I’ve got the constitution of an ox and a gut that can digest anything so I actually kind of like gas station hot dogs, and this one hadn’t been on the roller long enough to turn to jerky, so it wasn’t bad. Gutterres drank more of the vodka. For a moment, we were just two tired Monster Hunters who’d had a hard day at work.

Gutterres spoke in a way that would let him blend in anywhere in America, but there was just enough of a rough edge to it that suggested English wasn’t his first language, and something else that made me think he’d not learned it here. “Where are you from?”

“I grew up in Macao.”

“Huh. Neat.” I’d kind of expected him to say Rome.

“You?”

“Military brat. We moved a lot. So how do you know Sonya?”

“She reached out to us last year. She said that her father was of the faith and had been a holy warrior chosen by God.” Gutterres chuckled at that.

I’d skimmed those memoirs. “Wasn’t he?”

“He certainly believed he was. Was he really? How should I know? Sonya was interested in following in his footsteps. She approached us, told us of her abilities, and then asked to join our order.”

So much for Sonya’s mom trying to keep her sheltered from this line of work. “And you hired her?”

“Of course not. We shot her down. Politely, but firmly.”

“Ouch.” In the extremely brief time I’d known her, she hadn’t exactly struck me as the humble type. “How come?”

“You don’t apply to my order. My order observes, and then approaches the rare person it deems worthy. Some of us were raised from birth for this work, and even then there are years of training and