Authors: A. Lee Martinez
Monster
Copyright © 2009 by A. Lee Martinez
All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher.
Orbit
Hachette Book Group
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First eBook Edition: May 2009
Orbit is an imprint of Hachette Book Group. The Orbit name and logo are trademarks of Little, Brown Book Group Limited.
The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.
ISBN: 978-0-316-07195-6
Contents
By A. Lee Martinez
Gil’s All Fright Diner
In the Company of Ogres
A Nameless Witch
The Automatic Detective
Too Many Curses
Monster
Six books. It never stops being weird. How the hell did I get here? Damned if I know. There are a lot of people who deserve to be thanked, but I hate long dedications / acknowledgments. You didn’t buy this book to read about me. So I’ll skip the long list of thank-yous and just get on with it. If you’re not on this list, feel free to use a pen and add a line for yourself. I don’t mind. Really.
To Mom and the many fine writers of the DFW Writers’ Workshop. I may be smart, talented, incredibly cool, and surprisingly humble, but I still couldn’t have done this without you.
To the people who keep paying good money to read my books. You keep shelling out the cash, I’ll keep writing ’em.
And to Henchman 24. You will be missed.
The thing was big and white and hairy, and it was eating all the ice cream in the walk-in freezer. Four dozen chewed-up empty cartons testified that it had already devoured half of the inventory and it wasn’t full yet.
From the safety of the doorway, Judy watched it stuff an entire carton of Choc-O-Chiptastic Fudge into its mouth with a slurp. The creature turned its head slightly and sniffed. It had vaguely human features, except its face was blue and its nostrils and mouth impossibly huge. It fixed a cobalt eye on her and snorted.
Judy beat a hasty retreat and walked to the produce aisle, where Dave was stocking lettuce.
“I thought I asked you to stock the ice cream,” he said. “No need,” she said. “Yeti is eating it all.”
He raised his head. “What?”
“Maybe not all of it,” she said. “Doesn’t seem to like the vanilla.”
“What?”
Dave wasn’t the brightest of guys, and the staffing shortage at the Food Plus Mart and the extra hours he’d been putting in had taken their toll. The poor guy got maybe three hours of sleep a night, nine dollars an hour, and two days of paid vacation a year, but it was all worth it to work in the glamorous world of supermarket management, she assumed.
“It’s a yeti,” she said. “Big hairy thing. Belongs in the Himalayas. Except it’s in your freezer, and it’s eating the ice cream.”
“What?”
She sighed. “Just go look for yourself, Dave. I’ll handle the lettuce.”
Dave trudged toward the freezer and returned. “There’s a yeti in the freezer,” he observed. “Mmm-hmm.”
Dave joined her in piling on lettuce. They moved on to bananas, then grapes. He checked the freezer again.
“Is it still there?” she asked. “Yeah. Now it’s eating the frozen chicken dinners.” He rubbed his fat chin. “What should we do?”
“Don’t ask me,” she said. “You’re the manager.”
Dave scratched his head. He was obviously having trouble forming a coherent thought. Judy took pity on him.
“Isn’t there a book of emergency phone numbers, Dave?”
“Yeah.” He yawned. “But I don’t think it has anything about yetis in it.”
“Have you checked?”
“Uh, no.”
“It’s in the office, right?” she asked.
He nodded. “Oh, Christ, Dave. Just give me the keys to the office already.”
On the way to the office, she passed the freezer. The yeti was making a mess, and she’d probably be the one who’d have to clean it up. She didn’t mind. She needed the overtime.
The emergency phone number book was a spiral notebook with a picture of a happy snowman on its cover. She sat in the creaky chair, propped her feet on the desk, and thumbed through the book. It wasn’t arranged in any particular order, but she wasn’t in a hurry. Fifteen minutes later, she decided on the only possibly appropriate number, picked up the phone, and dialed.
The Animal Control line was automated. A pre-recorded voice informed her of the hours of normal operation, and she was unsurprised to discover that three in the morning wasn’t among them. She almost hung up, but it was a choice between listening to a recording or starting on the canned goods aisle, so it really wasn’t any choice at all.
After two minutes of interminable droning that Judy only half listened to, the voice instructed, “If this is an emergency, please press one now.”
She did.
The phone started ringing. She counted twenty-five before she distracted herself with an impromptu drum solo using the desktop, a pen, and a pencil. She was just settling into her beat when someone answered the other line.
“Animal Control Services. Please state the nature of your emergency.”
“Yeah, uh, I know this is going to sound kind of weird, but we’ve got, uh, like a yeti or something, I guess, in our store.” She winced. She should’ve just said they had a big rabid dog. They might’ve believed her then. “I know how that sounds, but this is not a prank, I swear.”
“Please hold.”
Judy waited for the click and dial tone to replace the steady buzz in the earpiece. It didn’t come. The clock on the wall ticked off the seconds. Maybe they were tracing the call right now and dispatching a squad car to arrest her. Or at the very least, give her a stern talking-to. Well, let them. When the cops got here, she’d just show them the yeti and it would become their problem.
“Cryptobiological Containment and Rescue Services. Can I have your name, please?” The woman sounded supremely disinterested.
Judy hesitated, but she figured it didn’t make much difference at this point. “Judy Hines.”
“And you believe you have a yeti in your freezer—is that correct?”
The words were beginning to lose their absurdity. “Yes, I think so,” she said, though she wasn’t as certain as she had been five minutes before.
“Can you describe it?”
“It’s big and white and eating all the ice cream,” she said. “What flavor?”
“What?”
“What flavor does it seem to prefer? Yetis generally go for rocky road. Now wendigos, on the other hand, prefer strawberry in my experience.”
“What’s a wendigo?” Judy asked. “Like a yeti, except meaner.”
Judy considered that this woman might be screwing with her. If Judy were working a lonely job in the middle of the night and got a crank caller, she’d probably do the same.
“It didn’t seem to like vanilla.” There was an awkward pause. “I am not making this up.”
“Just stay out of its way. We’ve dispatched an agent. He should be there in fifteen minutes.”
“I didn’t tell you the address.”
“We trace the emergency calls.” The operator hung up. Satisfied she’d done her job, she went to the front of the store. She shouted, “They’re sending a guy, so I’ll go wait for him and take a smoke break while I’m at it, Dave!” There was no indication he’d heard her, but he’d figure it out.
The night was cool, and she wished she’d thought to grab her sweater. It wasn’t cold enough to bother going back. She sat on the coin-operated rocket, lit a cig, and waited.
She wondered about the yeti. It didn’t make much sense for a mythical monster from the Himalayas to be in the Food Plus Mart freezer. She hoped the guy the city sent would know how to handle this. She doubted that pole with the loop of rope would be up to the task.
A white van pulled into the parking lot. The plain black stenciled letters on its side read monster’s cryptobiological rescue. The vehicle rolled lazily into a parking spot in the middle of the lot, though there were plenty of closer spaces available. A man in cargo pants and a T-shirt stepped out of it. The dim lot lighting kept him an indistinct blur as, whistling the theme to
Star Trek
, he went to the back of his van and retrieved something. He didn’t look like much, and as he walked closer, he looked like even less. He was tall and lanky, with a narrow face. His hair and skin were blue. The hair was a tangled mess and could’ve passed reasonably for seaweed. He carried a baseball bat over his shoulder.
She didn’t comment on his blueness. Like the inexplicable appearance of the yeti, it didn’t seem odd. Like encountering an elephant at the beach or meeting an Aborigine at the mall. She wouldn’t expect it, but she wouldn’t classify it as bizarre as much as unexpected. Her lack of a strong reaction struck her as stranger than anything else. But Judy made an art out of indifference, so she just chalked it up to not caring.
“Are you the guy?” she asked. “The guy the city sent?”
“I’m the guy. Are you the one who called?”
She nodded. “Let’s have a look, then.”
Judy stabbed out her cigarette. “I don’t think that baseball bat is going to do much against this thing.”
“Lady, I don’t recall asking you what you thought. How about I leave the delicate art of stacking canned goods in decorative pyramids to you, and you leave the yeti wrangling to me?” He snorted. “That is, if it even is a yeti.”
He gestured toward the door and smiled thinly. “After you.” Judy flicked her cig into the ash can and led him to the freezer.
The yeti was still there. It’d done away with most of the inventory and was content to just sit on its big hairy ass and digest its meal.
“Yup. Yeti,” said the guy.
“Told you.”
“Good for you.”
“How the hell did a yeti get in our freezer?” she asked. “Tibetans make a pretty penny selling the young ones as pets. Then they grow up, and the next thing you know, some asshole drives them to a strange part of town and unloads them.”
Judy frowned. “That stinks.”
“What are you going to do? People are shit.”
This was a philosophy that Judy shared, so she didn’t argue. It did stimulate some empathy for the yeti, though, looking very much like a big fluffy teddy bear except for the claws and teeth.
“You aren’t going to hurt it, are you?”
“I’m paid to bring them in alive.” He pinned the bat under his arm and pulled out a small book from his back pocket. He flipped through the pages, nodded to himself, and with a marker drew a few strange marks along the bat.
“What are you doing?” she asked.