Monster Hunter Nemesis (35 page)

CHAPTER 16

Battenberg, Landgraviate of Hesse-Darmstadt,

Holy Roman Empire, 1740

He could hear the soldiers stealthily moving around outside the barn. Occasionally he caught glimpses of them through the knotholes and gaps. They were attempting to sneak up on him. They were good, but they weren’t that good. If it hadn’t been raining, they probably would have set the barn on fire to flush him out. As it was, it was either risk a direct confrontation, or wait him out. Either way worked for him. He wasn’t in a hurry. He had nothing better to do, so he went back to sharpening his sword and waiting for the next batch of heroic humans to try to slay him.

This batch had been chasing him for weeks. They were remarkably dedicated. Franks didn’t mind the running and the fighting and the hiding. It kept him occupied until the next otherworldly invader turned up and needed to be dispatched.

Being a hideous monster, and having dealt with humans for several years now, he expected many different methods of attack, but a polite knock on the door was not one of them. Curious, he took up his sword, leapt down from the loft, and went to the door.

It took a moment to find the words. He had not spoken to anyone in a long time. “What do you want?” he growled.

“I come to parley.” The human on the other side shouted through the wood. “I wish to speak with the monster of Castle Frankenstein.”

He was not used to that. Most of his interactions with humanity consisted of them running at the sight of him, or the braver ones shooting at him. “Leave me be.”

“I have been told that you can reason as a man, so let us speak as men, face to face, under a flag of truce. As long as you do not attempt to harm me, my men shall not fire the cannons they have aimed at this place.”

He hadn’t known they’d brought cannons. He opened the barn door to tower over the seemingly fearless mortal on the side. “What do you want?”

“My, you certainly are ugly in person, but not nearly so hideous as the legends make you out to be. I am Lieutenant Colonel Kugler.” He removed his hat and bowed. “What shall I call you?”

“I have no name.”

“I thought as much, but saying monster over and over grows tiresome. Since my men have taken to calling you Franks, in honor of the location you were built, I shall call you that as well.”

He shrugged. “Fine.”

“Very well,
Franks
. I have come to offer you a proposal.”

“I won’t surrender. We fight, you die.”

The man laughed. He must have been touched by madness. “Not that kind of proposal, my gigantic terrifying friend. You must understand, I have not chased you across half the empire out of any sort of noble ideal. I am no Secret Guard, and even those fanatics have tired of testing you, and have declared that you must have a place in the Almighty’s plan. My men are simply here because we have been paid a large sum by the Landgrave to remove you from this county. It is no different than being paid to kill Russians on behalf of the Swedes or to stomp on the Jacobites for the British.”

He did not understand the humans’ use of money, because he simply took what he needed to survive, but it seemed to work for them. “You fight for . . . coin?”

“Yes. And I must say, despite campaigning in many different lands, from Italy to the Spanish Netherlands, I have never had to work so hard as to fight you. So I said to myself, Karl, why should I squander so much effort to fight this beast who only wishes to be left alone, when I can simply hire him to work for me instead.”

“Huh?”

“You like to fight, don’t you, Franks?”

He nodded.

“From my observations, it seems you especially like to seek out the beasts of Satan’s horde to destroy them. Yes?”

“That is my mission.”

“Excellent. There is gold, fame, and goodwill to be earned in such endeavors, but you have already depopulated this part of Europe of all its vilest beasts and witches. Now you have nothing to do but hide from people like me. Why limit yourself to the darkest confines of the empire, when you can travel the world as part of my regiment instead? Think of the interesting things you could kill! You kill the monsters you would kill anyway, I get paid for it. You seem to enjoy battle, so in between your dispatching of whatever monsters we find, you can fight for me. As part of my regiment, you would be free from the petty harassment by the local authorities. We would claim you as one of our own. To the world you would be considered a monster no longer, but merely another soldier. You would have food, shelter, clothing, and an endless supply of gunpowder, and all I would ask in return is something that you would do regardless.”

That did sound better than hiding in caves and barns and stealing pigs from villagers.

“Think of it this way, Franks. If you stay outside of mankind, then eventually someone like me will destroy you. If you are part of my regiment, you will be seen by them as a man, nothing more.”

“What is this . . . regiment?”

“They call us many things, but for you we would be your new family, if you are willing to abide by our terms and regulations, of course.”

He had killed just about everything worth killing in this part of the world, and knew absolutely nothing of the lands beyond. He shrugged.

“Excellent, Franks! Welcome to the Hessians!”

* * *

Franks pulled his stolen car over just after crossing the Virginia state line. He got out and limped into the tall grass. MHI’s orc did fantastic work, even better than the MCB’s resident surgeons, but it still took time to get new limbs working correctly. If there had been any other drivers on the road they might have found the sight odd, a giant man in a black suit standing out in the weeds for no apparent reason, but the reason he was on this particular road was precisely because of the lack of other drivers.

The suit, shirt, and tie were parting gifts from MHI. He didn’t know who’d left them in the Body Shack, but they had been neatly hung up and waiting for him. Even having lost some body mass from the fight and replacement parts, the suit
almost
fit correctly. There had been a note that said it had belonged to one of the Hunters they had lost in Vegas. That was good. Franks had not wanted to go into the fight of his life wearing Owen Pitt’s borrowed sweat pants.

He held out his open palm with the St. Hubert’s Key he had taken from MHI in it. It grated on his new skin as it turned, pointing toward the north. The pull was very strong. A human would only be able to tell that there was a gathering of angry demons in one place, but the Fallen had a very long time to get to know each other, and one spirit in particular stood out from the others. That one had to be Kurst.

Franks should have listened to the imp informant he’d shaken down off the coast of California. He’d done a cursory sweep after returning to duty back then, but had not picked up anything of note. Perhaps it was because the greater demon’s body hadn’t been fully formed yet, or maybe whatever process Stricken had used to grow the bodies had shielded them from Franks’ search. Perhaps, since he had been using a holy relic, the Creator had a sense for the dramatic and simply preferred their final showdown to happen this way. Franks didn’t know, and he didn’t really care. All that mattered was ending this once and for all.

When he returned to the road, a motorcycle had stopped behind his stolen car. Gutterres was waiting for him. He saw what Franks had in his hand. “A St. Hubert’s Key? Is that what you went to Alabama for? I could have saved you a whole lot of time, not to mention a whole lot of getting your arms ripped off by a werewolf, if I’d known that beforehand . . . I guess the Lord really does work in mysterious ways.”

He had no patience for people he liked, not that there were many of those, and even less for people he didn’t give a shit about. He felt like slugging the Hunter in the mouth, but Franks needed all the help he could get. “Kurst is that way.”

“I’ve given those rally point coordinates to my people. They’ll be there in a few hours. What about yours?”

Franks shrugged. For all he knew Jefferson was on his way to a country without extradition.

“If I trusted you more, I’d ditch you and be there in half the time.” Gutterres patted the Ducati’s fuel tank like it was a loyal horse. “You need to get yourself a better set of wheels, Franks.”

Franks knew how to ride a bike, but he’d needed room for his case, and if Gutterres kept annoying him, he’d need the trunk space to hide a body. He climbed back into his car.

“And I thought they were exaggerating when they said you weren’t much for talking. What are you going to do if—”

Franks closed the door in his face, put the car in gear, and drove away. He made sure to give it too much gas so the tires would spin and pelt the Hunter with gravel. In his rearview mirror he saw Gutterres give him a remarkably rude hand gesture for a holy warrior.

He was right though, sticking to back roads made for a much longer trip, but truthfully, Franks needed the time to get his repaired body in order by forcing down another dose of the Elixir every hour. The new parts were assimilating quickly, but he was not operating at peak efficiency. His new arms had not been properly conditioned. His new bones had not had time to harden. Much of him was still held together with thread, wire, and staples. He was on his way to face one of the strongest demons to ever escape from Hell, wearing a body that was a perfectly tuned, high tech vessel designed for war, while Franks doubted if he’d be able to bench-press even a mere seven hundred pounds without blowing something out.

Jefferson, Archer, and Strayhorn had better have come through for him or else this was going to be a very short and messy operation.

Hours later he reached the rally point. He’d picked an old country church in a wooded, rural area in central Virginia. There was a small stone monument on the side of the road in remembrance of a Revolutionary War battle. That particular battle was a minor footnote in history, but it had been a pivotal moment for Franks.

Franks spotted six black MCB vehicles parked in the clearing behind the boarded-up building, including one of the large armored trucks used by the Strike Team. So either his agents had performed better than expected, or the MCB were here to arrest him, but realistically, if this was an elaborate takedown he would have expected more of them, as well as air support. He turned onto the dirt road, drove past the posted snipers and spotters, and pulled in behind the armored truck.

At least a dozen armed men in full armor and tactical gear were in view, and he didn’t know how many others were in the trees or how many guns they had sighted on him. An MCB agent’s salary was on the standard GS federal employee scale, and Franks was worth a quarter billion dead, so he hoped that they all remembered that MCB employees were not allowed to collect PUFF. He looked in the rearview mirror and was not surprised to see that Gutterres had continued along the main road and not turned off after him. The Hunter might have talked a big game about his Lord working in mysterious ways, but he wasn’t stupid enough to follow Franks in until he saw whether the MCB riddled him with bullets or not.

There were a lot of apprehensive agents watching him as he got out of the car. Jefferson intercepted him first and hissed, “Before you say anything, this is all Myers’ plan.”

Franks raised an eyebrow.

“To prove Stricken has committed treason. Just roll with it.”

Whatever works
. . . Franks followed Jefferson toward the armored truck. He recognized most of these men and women. Some agents met Franks’ gaze and gave him confident nods, like they’d always known he was innocent. Others looked at their boots as he passed. Those were the ones who’d thought he might have been guilty. They were probably here now because of their trust in Myers. Franks didn’t care what any of them had thought before, he was more worried about a potential third category, as in the ones that didn’t care about guilt or innocence, but who would just follow orders, no matter how stupid they might be.

It did not immediately dawn on him that that thought might have been a little hypocritical.

Archer was in the back of the armored truck, working on a computer. The shaved-headed, muscular, grizzled-looking warrior next to him was Special Agent Cueto, one of the Strike Team trigger-pullers who’d worked his way up to unit commander. He was one of the handful of humans Franks actually liked a small bit. “Afternoon, Franks. I suppose I should be placing you in custody now.”

“Don’t.”

“Believe me, I’d rather not. You care to explain what the fuck I’m doing out here?”

“Hang on.” Franks took out the St. Hubert’s Key. It spun rapidly in his hand until it was pointing northeast. The agents made no comment. They’d all seen that sort of oddness before. “Archer. Note the direction.” They were close enough now that Franks could estimate the distance based upon the strength of the pull. “See whatever is approximately seventy clicks that way.”

“What’s the deal, Franks?”

Franks glanced around the crowd of curious, potentially dangerous, federal gunmen. “Walk with me,” he told their commander.

They moved away from the truck and curious ears. “What the fuck happened to your face? Is your cheek held on with a staple gun? What did that to you?”

“Werewolf.” Franks had worked with this man before, and even died with him in Natchy Bottom. Cueto had been recruited from the Army, and had been one of Myers’ oldest friends and confidants. If Jefferson had persuaded him, then they were set. If Cueto was unconvinced, then the Strike Team would kill them all. “Have you been briefed?”

“Barely. They told me that Stricken created some supersoldiers, but they’ve been possessed by devils straight out of Hell.”

“Yes.” He was glad Cueto’s men were here, but he didn’t like that they had shared the real dangers of Project Nemesis. It wouldn’t take too much of a leap for the government to figure out that Franks was one too.