Post by J. Russell on Jul 23, 2015 23:09:37 GMT -5
Clyde Johnson cursed when the phone-line went silent. The old, white-haired man had splotched skin tanned and weather-beaten by seventy-two years of life, and he had been talking to a hysterical George Gardner about Seraphs calling in from the Detroit area about dozens, which quickly became hundreds, of monster-sightings that moved towards the Detroit A-1 Vacuum Co. headquarters. The disguise as A-1 Vacuum Co. was not meant for the monsters since they easily knew their hunters, but it worked to keep traveling “salesmen” from garnering the suspicion of the law. Now, it appeared that the hunters had become the hunted.
“Shit,” Clyde cursed as the dial tone returned on the payphone. “Shit, shit, shit,” he repeated as he shoved the handset back on the receiver and ran back to his beaten Buick Grand National from the 1980s. The engine shook to life and whirred as the turbocharger drew in air, and Clyde threw the transmission into gear as he revved the engine.
As the car sped through the city, dodging potholes along the dark streets and the unoccupied, dilapidated suburbs, Clyde remembered how he had been on vacation – if any sane human being could call a trip to the upper peninsula of Michigan a vacation – with his ex-wife, children, and grandchildren. He'd just gotten in town when all Hell and violence broke out. Clyde thought it was gang-warfare like some of the worst decades in the city's history, but after he found the body of Charles Roth at the usual bar, he knew something was horribly wrong.
If one thing can be said about Clyde Johnson Johnson, whose middle name is the same as the last, it's that he's a survivor. All the tips and tricks he learned in the army, mostly in Vietnam over fifty years before, kept him alive. That night, he did something that went against his gut instincts. His instinctual response was to run south until he hit St. Louis and the safety of the Seraphim national headquarters, but his logic told him to run straight to the Detroit A-1 headquarters.
Why?
Because the Seraphs were either standing over the bodies of monsters, or they were already dead, and Clyde needed to go there to get his weapons back.
The glass window to the store that stood above the actual headquarters lie smashed on the pavement in the suburbs. Inside the store, similar disarray had appliances strewn all across the floor, broken into pieces, or bent at weird angles while blood rolled silently down the walls where it splattered minutes before. Clyde held his breath as he peered inside, and he saw a pair of ghouls bent over Janey's corpse; she'd just been the cashier. Another look at the ghouls, gallu, jinn, zombies, or whatever someone calls those human-inhuman monsters, wasn't required to know what they were doing. Clyde tried not to listen to the wet, smacking noises coming from the feasting beasts as he snuck around the building and slipped in through a side door that was left ajar in the chaos. The blood on the handle didn't frighten the seasoned monster hunter as he proceeded inside.
There wasn't a living soul inside the hallway Clyde entered, and the dark stairwell at the end of the hallway reinforced the lifeless state. Only the distant sounds of a police siren and the vile things eating nearby disturbed the stillness. Anyone in a similar situation would have a hard time mustering the willpower to take steps down those stairs without any idea about what was down in the darkness, and Clyde had a hard time mustering that willpower without a weapon. Instead of leaving, he took a slow breath and advanced calmly down the stairwell.
Order disappeared after the right angles of the stairs gave way to the flat, cluttered floor of the basement. Similar to the scene upstairs, forms lay bent and broken from wall to wall, but they weren't the remains of appliances. A few of the shapes were broken desks, shelves, and other office fixtures, but a majority of the things on the floor were more human, more broken, and more bloody. Nothing moved. Clyde knew that didn't mean something wasn't lurking in the shadows along the edges of the macabre room. He took quiet steps across the room, stepped through puddles of blood, and opened the door to the armory.
Any advocate for gun, knife, and weapon control would have cringed at the sight of swords and guns in neat racks lining the room and the tubs of ammunition underneath the workshop benches. It was a familiar sight to Clyde and any other Seraph since the job of hunting monsters wasn't a pleasant or peaceful affair. No one had gotten into the room, so the attack must have been sudden enough that the Seraphs only had the weapons on them, and that meant Clyde could grab something much heavier than his fists to fight off the monsters. As he saw it, if there were ghouls, the vampires and lupines couldn't be far behind.
Contrary to popular belief, ghouls, vampires, and even the werewolves were not magical beings – magic existed as more than superstition, but a lot of people believe in it and don't – instead, the monsters that Clyde Johnson would face off with were products of natural selection. Homo sapiens sapien was human and Homo sapiens hirudina was vampire. It was the speed and agility of the natural hunters that Clyde worried about. If Homo sapiens lupinus showed up, it would only make matters worse. Both of them were tough, but they were only mortal.
No one is immortal.
Clyde pulled a modern version of a Browning Automatic Rifle (BAR) from the rack and a sawed-off M79 “thumper” grenade launcher from another before weighing himself down with two bandoliers. Before he left, Clyde pulled one of the Seraph's swords from the bin by the door as an after-thought. If anything, he wanted to stay as far away from these monsters as possible, but they liked to get up close and personal. The sword was a hold-over of the bronze-age origins of the Seraphim and the iron-age origins under King David, but it was not bronze – the elegant weapon started at a fine point and slowly formed a broad-leaf shape that had a bulge in the center for a good thirty inches before meeting the antennae hilt – the steel shone as Clyde tucked it in the scabbard hanging on one of the bandoliers.
After he opened the door, Clyde knew he should search for survivors, but it required going deeper into the basement against all his survival instincts. In the silence, he turned on the flashlight hanging from the rifle, slammed a magazine into the BAR, and loudly cocked it. If the monsters didn't know Clyde was here before that, he knew they knew then since all hell seemed to disturb the night. Howls, hisses, and growling came from the stairwell Clyde came down, and similar, equally recognizable sounds came from the other end of the room, deeper in the complex.
“Give an ol' man a break,” Clyde mumbled in reply as the first of the ghouls came from the door at the end of the dead hall. At first, the man-like thing raised its blood-stained hands past its blood-soaked mouth to block the light Clyde shined in its frenzied eyes, but then it ran forward at the Seraph. The man didn't flinch as he squeezed the trigger and put the monster out of its misery, but another took its place in the doorway, and there were more coming behind it.
Quickly, the muzzle-flashes, the gunshots, and the shrieking overloaded the senses of both Clyde and his quarry, but he dispatched the ghouls easily. Ghouls weren't as resilient as some other things out to kill the Seraphs that night.
A shape moved from the shadows by the stairwell as Clyde reloaded the rifle. By the time he turned to face it, the wolf-like being was already in mid-jump to bite him. Instinct saved Clyde this time by forcing him to pull the trigger and hold it down until the thing in front of him stopped moving. It took forty rounds of ammunition from the forty-five round magazine to put the beast down. “Bad dog,” Clyde growled at the slain, female werewolf. “Bitch,” he added a second later. It wouldn't be getting back up from the bullets riddling its chest. All the legends about silver being required to kill a werewolf came from myths about silver being magical and the fact that lead bullets were too soft to get through the layers of overlapping skin and muscle these beings had, but steel-cored, full metal jacketed bullets seemed to work just fine.
It was after he took a deep breath that Clyde saw the monster in command flanked by the two ghouls from upstairs. The bloodsuckers always used their speed, agility, and intellect to support their arguments for holding power. Before Clyde could pull the trigger, the tall, black-haired vampire (in a suit that reminded Clyde of a corporate executive) waved his arm, and the ghouls ran forward. With a quick burst, the rifle clicked empty and fell to the floor as Clyde backpedaled from the single, bleeding ghoul still stumbling forward. He pulled out the grenade launcher and cursed as he realized it would kill him too. He swore it wouldn't come to that.
The useless weapon from before, the sword only important enough for an afterthought, found its way into Clyde's free hand, and he ran at the ghoul to finish it off. The beast hardly struggled. It was only after the beast collapsed to the floor, which left the old man standing with a sword in one hand and the grenade launcher in the other, that the vampire spoke, “Do you remember me, Sergeant Johnson?”
“Forgive me if I don't recall. I haven't been in the gutter in a long time,” Clyde replied.
“Remember Westmoreland's staff in '66?” The monster asked.
“YOU,” Clyde yelled in recognition. “YOU were in on it all along. You monsters.” The war in Vietnam was long, bloody, and it ate lives, but what went on behind the public eye was just as bad. Monsters were fighting on both sides. Some were natural, and some were man-made, but Clyde remained hopeful that it was just a mistake on the part of the government he fought for.
Instead, the monster standing before him made Clyde wonder whether or not the government was responsible for the massacre of the Seraphs. Tom, the man in charge nationally, would not like this information. The monster didn't move as Clyde raised the grenade launcher.
“You'll kill us both,” the vampire pointed out.
“Maybe,” Clyde responded as the weapon clicked.
