Carrion Scourge_Plague Of Monsters Read online

  CARRION SCOURGE

  PLAGUE OF MONSTERS

  JONAH BUCK

  www.severedpress.com

  Copyright 2018 by JONAH BUCK

  For Frank, Don, Phoebe, and Billie

  It was a miracle of rare device,

  A sunny pleasure-dome with caves of ice!

  A damsel with a dulcimer

  In a vision once I saw:

  It was an Abyssinian maid

  And on her dulcimer she played,

  Singing of Mount Abora.

  Could I revive within me

  Her symphony and song,

  To such a deep delight ’twould win me,

  That with music loud and long,

  I would build that dome in air,

  That sunny dome! those caves of ice!

  And all who heard should see them there,

  And all should cry, Beware! Beware!

  His flashing eyes, his floating hair!

  Weave a circle round him thrice,

  And close your eyes with holy dread

  For he on honey-dew hath fed,

  And drunk the milk of Paradise.

  -Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Kubla Khan

  ONE

  BUTTS MCGEE & THE SQUIRES

  September 2, 1926

  A large crate of animal heads sat in the corner of the office. “Make an offer. Buy two, get one free,” read a sign taped to the rim of the crate. The heads were all mounted and stuffed, ready to be placed on someone’s wall. There were a couple of antelopes, a wildebeest, a medium-sized Nile crocodile, and a lion with a chipped fang. A layer of dust had settled on the animals’ glass eyes.

  They were some of the remnants of Denise’s old business, a big game hunting and safari expedition office that she used to run with her father. The times had changed, though. Her father had disappeared on a trip through the Namib Desert a few years ago, and Denise didn’t offer sport hunting expeditions anymore. The preserved trophy heads, which had once decorated the walls of the office as a sign of her experience and skill in the field, were now relegated to the crate in the corner.

  Even if she didn’t hire out for safaris anymore, that didn’t mean Denise wasn’t still involved in the hunting business, though. A life of thrills. Excitement. Danger around every corner.

  Or something.

  “Go fish,” Cornelia van Rensburg said.

  “Crap,” Denise said, drawing a card from the pile on her desk. It was a three. She didn’t need any threes.

  Cornelia had her prosthetic leg propped up on the desk. The artificial leg was the same kind that a lot of former soldiers had, people who had been blasted out of a trench by a mortar shell or had their legs cut out from under them by machine gun fire in a dash across no man’s land. The leg attached just above where Cornelia’s knee would have been. She walked with a bit of a hitch, but she managed to get around pretty well.

  “Got any threes?” Cornelia asked.

  “Crap,” Denise said again. She tossed her newly acquired card across the desk, and Cornelia added it to her hand.

  “That’s right. Come to Mama.”

  Denise DeMarco was one half of DeMarco & van Rensburg Specialty Hunting Services. Cornelia was the other.

  Denise grew up at her father’s side, hunting the veldt and living in tents under the baking African sun. She knew how to track creatures through almost any kind of terrain, and she was a damn good shot. The animals with their heads in the crate could attest to that. She spoke English and Afrikaans, and her Zulu and Xhosa skills were passable enough that she could communicate with just about anyone she met in the bush.

  Denise surveyed the creased cards in front of her. “Got any…eights?”

  “Nope. Go fish.”

  She sighed and drew another card. This was the third round of cards they’d played today. Cornelia had already won the first two.

  Just another day in the life of a professional monster hunter.

  DeMarco & van Rensburg Specialty Hunting Services sounded a lot less crazy than “monster hunters for hire.” When Denise had come up with the name, she’d hoped that the slightly obfuscated name would help keep cranks out of her office. Mostly, no one at all came into their office.

  They’d been open for less than a year, and they’d only been hired twice. Both cases were for big cats that had discovered a taste for human flesh and become man-eaters. Neither instance was quite what Denise had in mind when she opened her new business.

  When she’d been a normal big game hunter, she’d heard plenty of rumors. Creatures that swept down on isolated farms under the cover of darkness. Things living among ancient ruins that were best left undisturbed. Isolated valleys and caves where evolution had gone awry. She never put much stock in those stories. That was up until a couple of particularly unpleasant incidents, though. Now, she knew there really were a few dark and unexplored corners of the earth, and sometimes that darkness tried to crawl out to the rest of the map.

  Denise’s eyes drifted over to the half-finished library book on the edge of her desk. It was full of stately manor houses, handsome suitors, crass interlopers, and heaving alabaster bosoms. It was absolute dreck, but it was starting to sound pretty good compared to somehow getting card-sharked in a game of go fish yet again.

  Her gaze drifted from the book up to the opposite wall. A large picture hung across from her desk. Unlike the mounted animal heads in the crate, it was one of the few decorations she’d decided to keep when she got out of the big game hunting business. The blown-up black and white photo showed Theodore Roosevelt, the former American president, with a big grin on his face and a rifle in his hands as he stood in front of a downed rhino. Another man with a matching grin stood next to the ex-president. That was Cedric DeMarco, Denise’s father.

  Denise was in the picture, too. She was a gawky teenage girl in pigtails holding an elephant gun almost as long as she was tall. She was grinning too as she stood next to the slain animal.

  “Got any aces?” Cornelia asked.

  Denise had two aces, and she was about to tell Cornelia exactly where she could stick them when there was a knock on the door. Denise put her cards down and looked up. Cornelia pulled her leg off the table and let it rest on the ground.

  The door opened, and two people stepped inside. The man wore a suit that looked like something a particularly stern London financier might enjoy, and his spectacles glinted in the sunlight. The second person was a black woman with her hair tied back.

  The man glanced around the office for a second before his eyes settled on Denise and Cornelia. “Would I be correct in assuming that you two are Ms. DeMarco and Ms. van Rensburg?”

  South Africa had a lot of different accents floating around, but the man in their doorway spoke with an English accent. That meant he might be here on a vacation or a business trip. Somewhat less likely was the possibility that he had recently moved down from the foggy, smoky heart of the empire to sunnier and warmer climes. He didn’t really look like one of the colonial administrators London sometimes dispatched.

  “That’s us,” Denise said. That accent made her immediately suspicious about what their visitor wanted. Sometimes, she still got potential clients who wanted to be taken out on sporting expeditions. A lot of them were visiting Europeans or Americans. Most of the locals had written her off as an occasionally useful nut some time ago. She wasn’t interested in being hired out on some new big game expedition, though. Those days were over.

  “Good. I have a job you might be interested in,” the man said, not bothering with any sort of opening pleasantries.

  Denise looked the man over again. He stood very straight, and his hair had been combed in such a way that it looked like he w
as trying to punish it for something. There was a decent chance that he was ex-military.

  First thing was first. “What sort of job?”

  “It should be a relatively simple matter. It’s something I understand the two of you are qualified for. We’d like someone to evaluate a situation for us.”

  Well, the man in the suit had passed the first test. He hadn’t said he wanted to hire them to go traipsing across the landscape and take potshots at some of the local wildlife. That meant she wouldn’t have to turn him right back out the door. She also noticed that his answer was spectacularly vague.

  “Perhaps some introductions are in order,” Denise said.

  “Not required. I’ve read reports on both of you. I’m familiar with your work.”

  Denise made a face that could castrate a bull from twenty paces. She didn’t like being jerked around.

  “Allow me to rephrase that. We like to know who we’re working with. Tell us who you are, or get out of our office.” She pulled a pen and notepad out of her desk to take down and cross check any information he gave her.

  “I see. We’re with the St. George’s Squires.”

  “Never heard of them,” Cornelia said as Denise scribbled St. George’s Squires down in her notebook.

  “You some sort of charity group or something?” Denise asked.

  “No, not precisely. Our interests are aligned with the public good, though. I trust you’re both familiar with the story of St. George?”

  “Patron saint of England. Killed a dragon. Yeah. That guy.”

  “Yes. The classic version of the story says that a dragon terrorized a small kingdom, and it could only be appeased if the people offered up a regular sacrifice to the beast. They chose young women by lots, and one day the king’s own daughter was selected to be staked out for the dragon. Saint George happened upon the woman while she was tied up and awaiting her fate. The princess tried to warm him away, but he refused. When the dragon appeared, he successfully killed the creature and returned the princess to the city.”

  “Ducky for her. I’m guessing you’re not St. George, though. And neither is she.” Denise gestured toward the black woman, who hadn’t said a word yet. “I’d still like to know who you are before we conduct any business. We like to check records.”

  “You won’t find any records about me,” the man said.

  “I’m just going to write down ‘Butts McGee’ as a placeholder, then.” Denise’s pen scratched across her notepad.

  The man’s jaw tightened almost imperceptibly. He pulled an envelope out of his suit jacket and peeled it open. Denise had been hoping that needling him a bit would give her more information, but her visitor was made of sterner stuff.

  “Let me lay down the parameters of what you’d be doing. If you don’t like the sound of the job, we will leave and find someone else. This need not be a difficult process.”

  “The floor is yours, Butts.”

  “There are essentially only two things you must agree to.” Butts McGee brushed past the placeholder name Denise had given him. He was either unflappable, or he really wanted something. Both could be trouble.

  “The first condition is simple but non-negotiable. You’ll have to take Metrodora with you on your expedition.” Butts gestured to the woman standing next to him.

  “We don’t really need any additional porters,” Denise said.

  “She’s not a porter. She’s an expert on regional mythology and biological abnormalities. We’ve been cultivating her for years. She’ll be the eyes and ears of our organization on the expedition.”

  “I, uh, sorry,” Denise said to the woman, suddenly feeling like a gigantic ass. “It’s just with the way things are…I assumed…you know.”

  South African society was heavily segregated. Much of the urban black population lived in shanty towns around the edges of the cities and needed special permits or work orders to enter the white sections. The state had set aside a number of black “homelands” on small, mostly worthless lands to shunt the rest of the black population out of more economically valuable areas. Because the homelands were nominally nations, they also stripped the black population of full South African citizenship.

  Denise thought it was an ugly system. But she was so used to it that it was easy to make assumptions. There weren’t a lot of non-whites involved in anything but subsistence farming and menial labor. For the first time in the conversation, she was on the back foot, and she felt like a git.

  “It’s alright,” Metrodora said, speaking for the first time since she’d walked into the office. She didn’t show any more emotion than her colleague.

  Cornelia looked at Denise. She obviously found the pair a little puzzling as well. Despite their weirdness, they didn’t strike Denise as cranks. They weren’t like the folks who sometimes walked into here and tried to convince her that their neighbor was Dracula. They seemed deadly serious about all this.

  “So, what’s this second condition you were talking about?” Denise asked, eager to shuffle right to the next topic.

  “The British Empire is a very large place. The sun never sets on it, as they say. We have some need for new affiliates in some of the more far-flung corners.”

  “Is the ‘we’ in this case St. George’s Squires? Not the government itself?”

  “That is correct.”

  “Maybe you better spell out exactly what your organization does.”

  “We aren’t so different from you. We’re a collection of experts interested in tracking, studying, and sometimes eliminating biological anomalies. St. George’s Squires was founded by people very much like yourselves. The main difference is, with a certain amount of government patronage, we’ve grown into a fairly significant operation, with branches in every section of the Empire.”

  “So, you’re saying that you’re basically monster hunters, too?” Cornelia asked.

  “Neither of us are personally, no,” Metrodora said. “I’m working on a research project.”

  “And I’m merely a facilitator,” Butts said. “We require people such as yourselves for some of the more, shall we say, direct involvement. If you accept the offer we’re about to make you, we’d like to make you affiliates of the organization.”

  “You won’t even give us your name. That doesn’t exactly inspire the trust it would take for us to want to join your organization.”

  “You wouldn’t be joining. You would be independent contractors. It would mean you’d periodically have the opportunity take work offers from us. It is my understanding that your establishment here could do with more such offers.”

  “Our establishment is doing just fine, thank you very much.”

  “You’ve taken two jobs, both involving lions that started preying on people. One of the jobs was on behalf of a black village in the north. Due to a lack of capital, they mostly paid you in crops. Corn, I believe.”

  That wasn’t readily available information. Evidently, St George’s Squires had access to her DeMarco & van Rensburg Specialty Hunting Services’ tax data. Their visitor had simultaneously called her bluff and intentionally tipped his hand a bit. He told them enough to let them know he had some pull in the government and also tell them that he knew they could use the work. It was a subtle way of pointing out that he was someone powerful, someone who was best not trifled with.

  But if Denise was really good at anything, it was trifling.

  “Alright, Butts. We’re not committing to anything yet. We don’t necessarily know if you’re somebody we’d be interested in selling gum to, let alone working as some sort of affiliate with your organization. Tell us what you want done, though.”

  “I’m curious, too,” Cornelia said. “As far as I knew, we were the only game in town when it came to the monster business. Now you’re telling us that you’ve got a whole organization set up. What’s this all about?”

  The man pulled a couple of photographs out. He laid them down on the desk in front of Denise and Cornelia.

  The black a
nd white photos were a lot more black than white. One of them was almost completely black, with only a couple of little pinpricks to break the darkness up.

  Denise squinted at the first picture and realized that there was actually a little more going on in it. In the center, she could see a sort of blot. There was a darker shape amid the main blackness, but she couldn’t really define its contours very well. The picture simply wasn’t detailed enough to give much of an indication what she was looking at or why she was looking at it.

  The second picture wasn’t a whole lot better. She couldn’t see the larger black blob anymore. Instead, it had been replaced with a narrow white streak that she initially assumed was a scratch in the film or some other photographic flaw.

  Then she realized what the white streak was. It was a falling star, a meteor burning up as it fell through the atmosphere. The scattered white specks making up the rest of the picture were stars. Both photographs were pictures of the night sky.

  But if that white streak was a comet, what in the hell was that black blob in the night sky? Denise laid a finger on the first picture and tapped the weird black shape.

  “What is that?”

  “We don’t know.”

  “You’re not saying you want us to go after…whatever that is?” Cornelia said. “You’d be better off calling the army and asking them to send their planes up after it. We’re not pilots. I can’t even tell how high up that thing is from the pictures. A plane might not even be able to fly up that high.”

  “We’re not asking you to go after that. These photographs were taken from an observatory in Australia. We think it might be an asteroid that flew past our atmosphere, but we honestly don’t know. The main mass continued on its way without any further incident, as far as we can tell. We’re more interested in the portion that seems to have broken off. We were able to track it, and we’re fairly certain that it landed in some territory administered by France.” Butts pointed toward the little white streak in the second photograph.

  Denise stared at the photos for a couple more seconds. “Okay, you’ve officially lost me. So this thing landed in France. I’m not seeing the issue.”