Matt Archer: Monster Hunter (Matt Archer #1) (2 page)

Then bit my own tongue trying to
hold back a scream.

The creature was misshapen, with a
huge head, pointy ears and narrow snout, and it had to be at least eight feet
tall. Teeth like tusks protruded from its lower jaw. It had brown fur like a
grizzly’s and its paws looked like a bear’s too, except bigger, with those
brutal, velociraptor claws. If that wasn’t weird enough, the thing’s arms and
legs were long, like a man’s. It was like some mad scientist threw a bunch of
DNA into a blender and
this
is what came out.

What the heck could it be? Was it
some kind of alien? A scientific experiment gone horribly wrong? Did we have a
Dr. Frankenstein living in Billings? Seriously, the creature looked like a
resurrected Wookiee made from spare parts.

Utterly creeped out, I pulled the
knife out of the beast’s back and dropped it on the ground. My hands had blood
on them, dark stains glistening in the moonlight, and now that I wasn’t
fighting for my life, I shivered, half-freezing and clueless about what to do
next.

Someone groaned outside.

I scrambled out of the tent,
fighting my way free of the shredded nylon to find Mike. He lay crumpled in a
heap just past the fire ring. Shallow claw marks had ripped through his flannel
shirt, but not his undershirt or skin, and his forehead had only a small gash
at the hairline. We’d been lucky.

“Uncle Mike, wake up!” I shook
him. Fear thudded in my chest at a random thought. What if there were more
creatures out here? “Come on, wake up!”

Mike groaned again and rolled onto
his side. “I’ll take a quad Venti Latte.”

I shook him again, hoping his brains
hadn’t been scrambled by that punch to the head. He blinked, looked around,
then sat up and grabbed my arm in a vice grip. “Where is it, Matt? Did it hurt
you? How’d you get away?”

“It’s dead, in what’s left of the
tent.” I swallowed hard, realizing what I’d just said. “I killed it.”

Mike didn’t freak out; he didn’t
even act surprised. “How?”

“I found a knife in your bag,” I
said. “I-I stabbed it.”

And with that, I jumped up and ran
to the bushes to throw up. Oh, my God…I killed something. I’d never killed
anything, except flies, and those don’t count. Holy crap, what was happening
out here? What were those things? I heaved again, unable to stop my mind from
replaying the scene over and over and over.

When I was done puking, Mike put
his hands on my shoulders and steered me toward the Jeep. “Get in; we’re
leaving. Be right back.”

I climbed into my seat, staring
straight ahead, seeing nothing but the underside of the beast and my hand
thrusting the knife into its gut. Flashes of light danced in front of my eyes
and I broke out in a cold sweat. Having never fainted, I wasn’t sure if I was
about to or not. Either way, better safe than sorry, so I put my head between
my knees. I caught a whiff of the creature—its smell was all over my
clothes—and I had to pop the door and barf again.

Mike ran to the Jeep and got in.
All he had was our backpacks, his GPS and the white-handled knife.

“What about the tent and our
gear?” I croaked while wiping puke off my chin with a trembling hand.

“We don’t need anything else, and
we’ve got to get out of here. I rolled the carcass down a ravine and threw some
dead brush on top of it.” He slammed the Jeep in reverse and laid tread,
peeling out from the parking slot. “Hopefully no one will find it before...”

“Before what?” I asked.

Mike shook his head. He drove a
few miles, not saying anything, then pulled over at a rest stop. By then, black
spots were dancing in front of my eyes again and my skull felt too heavy for my
neck. When he parked, Mike reached over and slapped me pretty hard. My head hit
the headrest and I brought my hand up to my cheek in a daze.

“Matt! Stay with me. We’ve got a
lot to cover and I need you to focus,” he said. He blew out a harsh breath. “I
can’t believe the knife let you wield it.”

I blinked fast to clear my vision,
not understanding a word he said. “What?”

“You remember when I went on that
short mission last year?”

Mike’s voice had a steeliness to
it. Freaked out or not, I was pretty sure I wouldn’t like where this was
headed. I gulped and cleared my throat; my mouth tasted all skanky. It was all
I could do to keep from throwing up again, so I just nodded in answer.

“I got sent to South America—to
Peru—on a highly classified mission,” he said. “People started disappearing and
the local government asked the U.S. to send some specialists down there to
check it out. What we found was pretty surprising.”

How this had anything to do with
giant beasts in the woods of Montana was beyond me. “What did you find?”

Uncle Mike clamped his hands to
the steering wheel. “Turns out monsters are real.”

“If a monster falls in the forest
and someone hears it, does that make it real?” I asked, my voice trembling.

“Bad joke, Chief.”

I drew a long, ragged breath and
ran my hands over my head until my fingers slid into sticky spots in my hair. I
shuddered and wiped my palms on my pants. “So, if monsters are real, why’d you
get weird about the knife? Seems like we have bigger problems than the fact I
used whatever was handy to kill it.”

Uncle Mike stared intently out the
windshield. “Let’s go back to my apartment. I feel exposed out here, like we’re
being watched. I’ll tell you more when we get there.”

I glanced around the woods
surrounding the rest stop. The darkness seemed absolute. Not even the
streetlights could penetrate it. “Yeah. Good idea.”

Mike pulled onto the highway.
Instead of going to the suburbs, he took me to downtown Billings, where his
loft was. His two-story apartment was all open except for the bathroom, with
bare ceiling joists and a stained-concrete floor—a real guy’s place. What I
loved most about it was that his bedroom was on a wooden-floored platform
upstairs with rails around it, like he had a giant, floating bunk bed. Tonight,
though, the dark corners gave me a chill and I wished I was more surrounded by
walls.

“Why don’t you get cleaned up.
I’ll make some hot chocolate or something. Don’t think either of us is planning
to sleep any time soon,” Mike said, shoving me gently toward the bathroom.

I locked the door behind me and
leaned against it, taking some time to breathe before I got in the shower. I’d
killed something. With a knife. I stabbed it in the gut, gotten splattered with
its blood, then stabbed it some more like I’d been sky-high on meth. What had
gotten into me? I never even shot at birds with my BB gun, for God’s sake.

I felt myself starting to lose it, so I turned on the
shower, willing myself to forget. But when I pulled my shirt over my head, the
smell of monster filled the air and I hurled again. Hard to believe there was
anything left in my stomach.

Mental note: no more tacos for
lunch. Ever.

While I waited for the water to
get hot, I brushed the dust out of my hair, which had turned the brown a dirty
gray. Then there were the glistening patches of slippery goo. My jeans were
streaked and stained with similar stuff and weird patches the color of dark
mustard coated my hands.

It was monster-blood. And it
wasn’t red.

Startled, I caught my eyes in the
mirror. They were full of horror and something else, a hardness, like Uncle
Mike’s eyes. They were still blue, though. After everything that had happened,
I kinda thought they might’ve turned green. I stepped back from the mirror and
almost fell into the bathtub.

That shocked me back into my
senses. Freaking wouldn’t help. Time to get a grip before I hurt myself.

I stripped off the rest my
clothes, thinking about throwing them out the window to get rid of the stink,
but I wasn’t sure how I’d explain the missing outfit to Mom. Instead, I took a
trash bag out of the cabinet and stuffed everything in. It didn’t help. Even
after double-bagging everything, the odor still seeped through, so I gave it
up.

Once in the shower, I scrubbed my
hands raw, feeling like the blood would never come off. Tears ran down my face,
but I pretended it was just the shower water. Monster-killers don’t cry.

“Chief, you okay in there?” Mike
said, sounding worried. “I have hot chocolate. Why don’t you come on out?”

I dried off and dressed in clean
sweats from my backpack. Finding no other way to delay what I was about to
hear, I opened the door, heading for the two-person dining table at the far
side of the loft. Mike had changed clothes, too, and he must’ve cleaned up at
the kitchen sink because his hair was wet. It had grown out since his last
deployment, curling up a little in the back. Too long for the Army…he’d have to
buzz it down soon. That thought didn’t improve my mood.

I took my seat across from Mike
and snorted a laugh. “Nice
G.I. Joe
Band-Aids, man.”

Mike touched his forehead. “I
don’t have any grown-up Band-Aids. I bought these for you when you were nine,
remember?”

“You haven’t bought Band-Aids in
five years?” I rolled my eyes. “Uncle Mike, you need a girlfriend or a wife.
Then you’d have real Band-Aids and more in the fridge than skim milk and beer
and limes.”

“Given the type of life I lead,
girlfriends lose patience with me real quick. Kinda hard to get married if you
can’t keep a girlfriend.” He pushed a ceramic mug filled with hot chocolate
over to me. “Drink half of that. Then, we’ll talk.”

He must have heard the same
nonsense Mom had about warm milk being soothing. I took a few sips to satisfy
Mike, wishing I had marshmallows because it tasted bland, then set the mug
down. I was still completely wired, though; the cup hit the wooden tabletop
with a smash and I sloshed hot chocolate all over my hand.

I mopped up the spill, hoping he
didn’t see how my hands were shaking. “Maybe you should talk now.”

He rubbed his eyes, looking really
tired. He needed a shave and, for the first time, I could see flecks of gray in
his beard. It had never occurred to me that Mike might be getting older.

“So, last fall I went on that
mission,” he said. “We were sent to investigate disappearances from villages
lining the edge of the rainforest. After asking around, we got a similar story
from all of them. Something was creeping out of the jungle at night and
snatching people from their beds. They never found any remains—the victims
vanished.”

“No bones? No nothing?”

“Nothing. Not a trace,” Mike said.
“We set observation posts at three villages. We had night-vision goggles,
heat-sensing cameras, the works. We were also armed to the teeth. No way was
this thing getting past us.”

“So what’d you find?” I asked.

“A nightmare,” Mike said. “This
giant lizard came stalking out of the jungle, walking upright on its back legs.
The creature was nine feet tall from snout to feet, and its tail was another
four feet long—it looked like an alligator from Mars. The guys I was with? We’d
all seen things that would make a normal person pass out. When that thing
showed up, two of them ran screaming.”

The thing was terrifying enough to
send two soldiers in the Special Forces running? “What happened to them?”

Mike shook his head fast, like he
was trying to shake the memory from his brain. “The monster grabbed one. We
blasted that lizard with everything we had, but it didn’t do any good. Bullets
bounced right of its hide, and Seranto disappeared, just like the rest. We
didn’t find anything but his helmet and his boots.”

“Oh.” My voice had changed when I
was twelve, but you wouldn’t have known it by how high I squeaked.

“We got pictures of the creature,
though. The scientists at the Pentagon interviewed us, but no one had any clue
what it was. So on the third day, we decided to scorch part of the jungle;
that’s how terrified we were. No one likes to see rainforest go up in smoke,
but we were coming unglued. While we planned where to have the bombs dropped, a
medicine man from one of the local tribes came to us.” Mike smiled. “Shocker—he
spoke English.”

“Was he mad you were going to burn
down the forest?”

“He was kind of peeved, yes, but
that’s not why he came,” Mike said. “He knew about the lizard. He called it a
monster and said he could help us.”

A strange thrill ran down my back.
“The knife…”

“Yes, Matt, the knife. That knife
is special. The medicine man made five of them, and told us they had powerful
magic,” he said. “Most of us thought it was a crock until we picked one up. I’m
sure you know what I mean.”

I looked down at the fist clenched
in my lap. “It vibrated in my hand. And the handle turned green when I stabbed
the monster.”

“Well, there’s more,” Mike said.
“It doesn’t always do that. The knife selects who can wield it. Some of the
guys on my team couldn’t feel anything. When I picked it up, my entire arm
buzzed and the handle turned bright blue. After that I could hack a tree branch
in half with just one swing of the blade. The knives only reacted to three
other guys on my team, so the medicine man gave them to us. He said we’d need
them because ‘dark creatures’ would invade all corners of the earth. He kept
the last one, to protect his people.”

I had a bad feeling about what I’d
hear, but I had to ask anyway. “What’s up with the knives, then? I get that
they’re magic, but why?”

“I can’t tell you anything else.
The knives’ origin and workmanship is classified,” Mike said. “I probably
shouldn’t have told you this much, but given the circumstances....Look, let me
talk to my superior officer. I have to call him to apprise him of the situation
here, schedule disposal of the monster’s body. I’ll ask if I can get you
clearance. Since you killed one, there are things you ought to know, but I’m
not the one to tell you. Not yet.”

Great. I blew out an annoyed
breath before asking, “Did you kill the Gator-thing?”

“Yeah. The three of us with knives
hid in the brush, waiting at various points near the tree line. It happened to
come out on my end. I jumped the creature from behind and put the knife in its
neck. I had to slit its throat before it dropped.” Mike’s forehead was creased.
“I take the knife everywhere. Better to have it and not need it, right?”

“But why didn’t you have it
tonight? It was right there in the tent!” I said.

“The thing was creeping around
outside, so I felt around for the knife, trying to be quiet, and caught hold of
the sheath. When I got outside, I realized I’d grabbed my hunting knife
instead,” Mike said. His face turned red. “By then, the monster had spotted me,
so I had to fight with what I had. I was trying to distract it, to keep it from
finding you.”

“But it would have killed you!”

“Better me than you, Matt.”

Mike’s voice sounded hoarse and
thick. I looked away and slurped down the rest of my cocoa, gross or not,
because I sure didn’t want to watch a grown man cry. After a minute he wiped
his eyes, then got the knife out of his backpack. He put it on the table and
pulled it from its leather sheath.

Nothing happened.

Mike laid the knife flat against
his palm, like he was weighing it in his hand. Without looking at me, he put it
back on the table.

“Pick it up, Matt.”

Picking up that knife was the last
damn thing I wanted to do, but one look at Uncle Mike’s face told me to get on
with it. I reached out and wrapped my fingers around the bone handle. It glowed
blue, then buzzed in my hand.

“What does this mean?” I
whispered. I knew already, but hearing it from someone else would make it real.

Mike gave me a steady look. “It
means the knife belongs to you now.”