crawl up on the horse-sized animals, playing with what to them were basically family pets. Pets with jaws that could snap a deer in half, but pets nonetheless. Skippy returned to Gretchen and they knocked their tusks together in what was probably the orcish equivalent of a kiss. I started the car. Finally Trip broke away from the sights and got in.
We drove down the lane. The raucous music died away as the distance increased. We did not speak. Trip stared out the window in silence. The Mercedes bumped and scraped as we bottomed out. It would take a pretty dedicated explorer to bother with this back road and now I could see that that was by design. It was a strange and secret community, but obviously one built upon strong family bonds of love. My spirits were lifted from my brief visit to Skippy's people.
Finally Holly spoke. 'Well, Trip. Satisfied now?'
'Huh?'
'Remember when we met the elves?'
He did not answer. But none of us could forget his disappointment on that day.
'Remember when you said that since there was so much secret evil, there had to be some sort of secret good to balance it out?'
'Yeah,' he answered slowly. I could not see him in the darkened car, but from his voice I could tell he was smiling. 'I guess there is… I guess there really is.'
'See, I told you so,' Holly said in smug satisfaction.
We assembled in the meeting room. Harbinger was preparing to brief us. We would be taking off within the next half hour. It was 4:00 a.m. Every available Hunter was assembled, including the untested Newbies, all of Harbinger's team, Dorcas and the senior Shackleford. The conference room was crowded. Every other member of MHI in the country was currently en route.
I sat down at the conference table next to Milo. He grinned when he saw me. The man was always in a good mood.
'So did you get to meet Skippy's people?'
'Orcs,' I answered. 'That was pretty cool.'
'Yeah, they're good folks. Homo-Ogrillion. We were hired to go into Uzbekistan and eradicate them. Turned out that they weren't so evil after all, so we brought them all home. I'm glad we did.'
Harbinger called the briefing to order. It took a few moments for the group to quiet down. Apparently word of the attack and all the gory details had spread quickly. Julie was sitting next to her grandfather, and his burned face was drawn into a tight grimace of pain and anger. I could not imagine how the man felt. Even if you had distanced yourself from a child who committed horrible crimes, he was still your child. And now he had lost that son.
Harbinger cut right to the chase. 'Everybody knows about what's going on, and you've already heard about what happened earlier tonight. One former Hunter is dead. One current Hunter is missing. Turns out that one of our own is a Master vampire in the service of the Cursed One. We have a deal with the Feds. One team is going to go with them to Natchy Bottom to deal with the main bad guys. Every available Hunter is on the way. As they arrive, the rest of us will break into groups and handle the following undead outbreaks.' He pointed at the map of the Southeast that had been taped to the wall. It was dotted with red tacks.
'Auburn, Gadsden, and Forestdale, Alabama; Columbus, Georgia; Pulaski, Tennessee; and Pensacola, Florida. Those are all confirmed vampires or wights. Boone's team just cleared out some new creations in Atlanta. I felt bad calling them up since some of his men are still hurting from the freighter, but they rose to the occasion. And we have unconfirmed reports in Florence, Tupelo, Dothan, Fayetteville, Russellville and Demopolis, though those might just be regular missing persons, but I wouldn't bet on it.'
He paused long enough to take a drag off his cigarette. I had not seen him smoke indoors around the other Hunters before, but I was guessing that he was under more stress than normal.
'As other teams arrive they will be diverted to those trouble spots. This is our turf, so local law enforcement knows us and is helping out. National Guard, same thing. Mostly they can be used as perimeter security, but if you think you can trust them, press them into service as well. We don't have time to screw around, so if you find where the vamps are sleeping, just blow it straight to hell. We don't have time to stake and chop and all that. If they're in a mine, collapse it. If they're in a building, burn it down. If you need to, borrow a tank from the National Guard. If they're inside something that you can't justify blowing up, then do what you have to do.'
'How many threats are we talking about?' Sam asked.
'Potentially hundreds.' There was some murmuring and swearing at that, from everybody except the untested Newbies who had not yet seen a real undead. 'We always thought that vampires were limited in the number of new creations they could make. That was always our theory on how come they didn't just bite everybody and overrun us. Looks like we were wrong, at least when it comes to Masters. We're looking at a few different threats here, so let me break it down. Somehow the CO is able to bring people back as wights. Then we have two kinds of vamps, the regular new creations, where somebody is just killed and comes back as one, and apparently a stronger, smarter type, made by biting the victim, and then giving them some of the Master vampire's own blood and power.'
'Like Darne?' I asked. The former French Hunter had been amazingly fast and seemed to be in full control of his faculties, unlike the more animalistic creatures that had been the other vampires.
'Most likely. So we're talking about some serious bad asses. Plus we know that he can animate gargoyles as well, though there have not been any sightings of those since the ones that Pitt and Julie killed. Nobody knows how long it takes to create one of those, or even how many he brought over to start with.'
'What do we have?' Milo asked.
'Counting us and the Newbies, we have about twelve teams of Hunters. Six people in the hospital or on medical leave. Seventy total personnel available,' Julie answered.
'Seventy-one,' her grandfather said from the head of the table. He pulled a well-oiled S amp;W 1917 from under his sweater and put it on the table with a clunk. 'I ain't sitting this one out.'
'But, Grandpa…' Julie said.
'Whoever thought I would get to live this long anyway, kid? This old man is looking for a fight. These bastards killed my boy, even if he was a crazy son of a bitch himself. Monsters don't get to kill a Shackleford and get away with it. It sets bad precedent.'
'Seventy-two,' Dorcas added, her grandmotherly looks not quite matching the steel in her voice. 'Try to stop me, you'll be tasting my plastic foot. I can still run a machine gun with the best of them.'
'We help,' said a gravelly voice from the doorway. I had not heard Skippy approach. 'Ten warriors… Five who heal… Ride to battle… Slay many foes.'
'Skippy, you don't have to. Your people are so few in number as it is,' Harbinger said.
'Harb Anger deny us… honor… of battle?' Skippy asked. His voice sounded extra distorted through his flight helmet's face shield.
'No. Of course not.' The Director bowed his head. 'My clan thanks you for your brave warriors.'
'Eighty-seven total staff then,' Julie said. 'Against probably double that number of powerful undead and who knows what, spread from one corner of the South to the other.'
Eighty-eight, said the voice of the Old Man in my head. I wished he would stop doing that. It freaked me out. I may have a weird job, but that doesn't mean that I liked hearing voices in my head.
'Who's going to Natchy Bottom?' Sam asked.
'Feds are going to be the ones doing all of the fighting, and we can let them be the muscle. So we'll just take the Hind. Skippy flies of course, and one can ride co-pilot. Then we can fit eight plus gear.'
'I'm going,' Julie said.
'No. You're injured, and I need you here to coordinate the arriving teams.'
'Bullshit,' she snapped. 'This is personal.'
'I know, and that's why you ain't going,' Harbinger stated.
'Wrong. I'm on that helicopter or you can have my resignation right now, and I'll drive up there myself.' Julie stood up from the table. 'Don't push me, Earl. She's going to be there, and she isn't going to rest until she gets me too.'
Harbinger slowly nodded, his cigarette dangling from his lips. 'Fine,' he said. 'Julie, Sam, Milo, so my whole team. Pitt, he knows the bad guys better than anybody. That leaves four volunteers. Keep in mind, this is probably going to be real dangerous. Most likely all seven of the Masters plus whatever powers that the Cursed One himself
