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  “Seems reasonable,” Mr. Durand agreed.

  Mrs. Durand pointed toward the ceiling. “Is that a skylight?”

  “It’s actually one of the two original roof escape hatches, but it does function nicely as a skylight, doesn’t it?” KC replied.

  Mr. Durand noticed a ladder hanging on the wall beside the door. “This what you use to get up there?”

  Mack nodded and demonstrated how the ladder hooked into rings mounted on the ceiling and secured to the bed beneath. “There’s a wood deck right above us, and with the ladder secured like this, I can use this as a cupola to fire at anything attacking Busster. There’s another hatch up front that we can use this ladder on, too.”

  Mr. Durand glanced at his watch. “It’s near sunset. We’d best be getting in the house, Leann.”

  “Will you two be alright out here?” Mrs. Durand asked.

  “Yes, ma’am. If we go into bunker mode we can hold off a small army of zombies,” KC assured her.

  “Which we’ve done before,” Mack added.

  “Well, I hope you got plenty of sleep last night ‘cause you’ll be losing sleep tonight,” Mr. Durand sighed.

  “I don’t need much sleep,” Mack shrugged.

  “And I don’t actually sleep at all,” KC admitted.

  The Durands gave one another questioning looks, but didn’t bother to seek clarification on the issue. They made their good-byes and hustled back into their house behind solid oak doors and heavy deadbolt locks.

  Chapter Three

  Lewisburg, West Virginia

  Tuesday, October 30, 2018

  THE SCREAMS STARTED an hour or so after full dark. At first, the calls were far off in the distance. By midnight the screams, mixed with snarls and growls, were coming from just beyond the farm proper. Mr. Durand owned several acres where he’d planted cash crops of soybeans and corn, but the center of the farm was the compound surrounding the Durand farmhouse. The house faced the dirt road that led down to the paved county road, which was how they got to Lewisburg. Behind the house was the farmyard where Busster was parked. To one side of the house was a storage shed, then a chicken coop, a fenced-in vegetable garden, a fenced-in paddock for their small flock of goats, and the barn rounded out the buildings that composed the center of the Durand farm.

  The edge of the forest was barely more than a yard from the perimeter of the farm compound. At first, the trees were thin, mixed with low brush, scraggly weeds, but the forest quickly thickened into a pristine wilderness. Mr. Durand’s fields were carved out of the forest, one across the road from the house, two flanking either side and one behind with a clear view of the Green River. However, only the field across the road could be seen from the house. The others were cut off from view by the forest. Mr. Durand had said that he’d stopped using his back field for fear of the monster and accessed the flanking fields via the dirt road instead of using the trails through the woods.

  The farmhouse’s bedrooms were on the upper floor with the master bedroom on the back corner closest to the barn. The monster’s visits were frequent yet at irregular intervals. Mr. Durand had kept a record of the visits and their intensity on his calendar, which Mrs. Durand had shown to KC while waiting for Mack to return. Most nights, the monster made a racket that prevented them from sleeping. During the middle of the week, the monster was bold enough to come into their yard, let itself be seen as it howled and screamed. Nights of the full moon were the worst. That was when it killed their pets or livestock. The monster would leave the mutilated carcasses where the Durands would see them.

  Mr. Durand had tried shooting the monster on several occasions, but for some reason, he always felt like he’d missed. He didn’t understand that because he was a Marine, even if retired from service. He’d felt that the use of buckshot and a wide choke pattern would have compensated for any deterioration in his skills, but even then, he’d missed. At least, he assumed he was missing. A few times he’d been dead sure he’d been on target, but the monster was unfazed.

  The stench was the worst thing, though, about their encounters with the monster. The screams and howls could be ignored, drowned out with earplugs and sleeping pills or a fifth of Jim Beam, but that smell could wake the dead. The scent wasn’t quite the same as the sickly sweet smell of a skunk, yet it had the same nostril hair singeing quality to it. The odor resembled the mildewy quality of a week-old dirty dishcloth combined with the rotting rank of garbage mixed with feces. That now-familiar stench had woken the Durands from a fitful slumber. Mrs. Durand had run to their bathroom to retch in the toilet. They’d learned that they had to hide from the smell to avoid it.

  Mr. Durand had his Remington shotgun with him in the room. Every night they brought the shotgun and the CAR-15 into the bedroom with them as a precaution. He stood at the window that looked down into the back yard where he could make out the top of the monster hunters’ bus. The back third of the room did have a wooden deck, and the forward third held an array of four solar panels. The rear roof hatch was open, and Mr. Durand could see KC and Mack crouched atop the deck peering out into the night. They were still dressed in the same clothes from earlier in the day. KC had her blue rifle, and Mack was carrying some kind of scoped bolt-action rifle. Both of them appeared to be sniffing the air. The farmer was impressed that neither of them were gagging because he’d had a year and a half to sort of get used to the smell, and he still gagged.

  Mack lifted his rifle to his shoulder. Mr. Durand watched. The monster was almost predictable in that it appeared among the trees between the barn and the goat paddock. He’d described it to people as looking like Bigfoot for a reason.

  The monster was humanoid with the same proportions as a man but writ large. It stood eight feet tall if it was an inch. The body was covered in thick brown hair everywhere but the hands, feet, and face. The hands and feet looked more human than not, ten fingers and ten toes, but those fingers and toes were tipped with what could only be described as claws. The face wasn’t human, yet it also wasn’t quite ape-like or even similar to something like that of a Neanderthal or other primitive human. Instead, the nose and upper lip blended together like a short snout or muzzle. The eyes seemed more human than animal even though they had a reddish inner glow.

  Mack lowered his rifle, working the bolt to eject three large rifle rounds, which he caught and pocketed even as he worked the bolt in an impressive display of manual dexterity. Those three rounds were replaced with three other rounds from a different pocket. Then, he had the rifle back up to his shoulder again. Even as he did so, KC was aiming her rifle at the creature, too. Mr. Durand guessed that this meant the monster wasn’t a Sasquatch.

  The monster boldly strode into the farmyard and howled a challenge at the duo atop the bus. Mack promptly shot the monster dead center of its chest. With amazing speed and deftness, the hunter worked the bolt on the rifle placing two more rounds within the same one-inch circle. KC stood up, pointing her rifle at the creature even as Mack put his rifle down, drew his big revolver and dropped down off the side of the bus.

  Mr. Durand gasped. That was a good twelve feet of drop, but less than a second later Mack strode into view as if he’d simply jumped down from the porch. He raised the revolver as he walked toward the monster. The creature had stumbled back several feet from where it had first stopped to make its challenge. As he approached it, Mack began squeezing the trigger. He put another two or three shots into the creature’s chest before switching his aim up to the head. Two neat holes appeared in the monster’s forehead.

  Mack stopped and regarded the monster from mere feet away. The monster stumbled back, but didn’t fall. It seemed dazed, confused even. Mack tilted his head to one side before slowly backing away from the creature. Even as he stepped away, he continued to place rounds into the monster’s chest and forehead. Mr. Durand was certain he counted eight shots and was quite curious just what kind of revolver that was.

  KC began to add fire to Mack’s. Her AR556 was a civilian semi-automat
ic, but the pace she set squeezing the trigger made it sound like a machine gun. At a certain distance away, Mack stopped firing and holstered his revolver. Then, he began shucking his clothes off. Mr. Durand was shocked. He could see Mack’s breath, so he knew it was cold, but he could also see the man stripping out of his clothes in the middle of a fight.

  Mack was naked in a second. Mr. Durand’s eyes bulged at the sight as the naked man now charged forward again, but a naked man didn’t slam into the monster. No, another monster had taken Mack’s place. Rather, Mack was the new monster, shedding his human form for something else.

  Like the creature, Mack’s new form was a fur-covered humanoid, yet Mack’s fur was pure, brilliant white, and his eyes glowed golden. Claws tipped his fingers and toes, but his head wasn’t human at all. It was canine with a long snout filled with teeth, and a tail had grown from the tip of his spine. Mr. Durand stumbled back from the window as he realized that Mack MacDuff was a... werewolf!

  WHEN THEY’D ARRIVED earlier, Mack had taken a deep breath to sample the local scents. He’d had to take a second breath to confirm what he’d smelled in the first. Instead of the musk of a skunk ape or a grassman, he’d detected a different scent. It was still the musk of a large hominid, but not really one he was familiar with. The second breath had confirmed that there was more than one hominid of that variety in the area.

  After dark, he and KC had gotten up onto their roof deck to wait for the hominid to show itself. The creature’s calls were unfamiliar, too. Not until it was close enough to the farm for its odor to permeate the air did Mack realize something about the scent.

  “You smell that?” he asked softly as he shouldered his Ruger Hawkeye Alaskan. The weapon was a big game rifle chambered in .416 Ruger, a round meant to take down Kodiak bears and Cape Buffalo in a single shot or two. The bullet was so massive that only three rounds could be loaded into the integral magazine. The Vortex Viper PST Gen II scope mounted on top was a 1-6x24 magnification designed to assist a hunting guide in the rapid acquisition of a target, especially at close range. He’d felt like it was the perfect gun for dealing with an aggressive hominid that was likely half the size of a grizzly bear.

  KC sniffed the air. Though her senses weren’t as keen as his, they were certainly sharper than a human’s. “Yeah. It’s...” She sniffed again. “It kinda smells like undeath, but... I don’t know... different.”

  Mack quickly unloaded the three Hornady DGS rounds from the Hawkeye. The DGS, or Dangerous Game Solid, was a jacketed lead slug with impressive penetration and phenomenal energy transference. The vast majority of cryptids that he hunted were as susceptible to high velocity lead poisoning as any other animal, but undead weren’t.

  Lower order undead could be put down with a head or heart shot, even with lead bullets. Higher orders of undead had to be shot in the head and the heart within seconds in order to go down. The highest levels of undead, though, required that not only the heart and the brain be destroyed but the material used had to be something with supernatural qualities, usually silver.

  The three .416 rounds that Mack thumbed into the Hawkeye held hand loaded silver slugs. Despite the Lone Ranger’s claims to the contrary, silver was not as good as lead when it came to mass and accuracy and had a shorter effective range. He’d heard that the Program was experimenting with an alchemical round that could mimic lead, silver, gold, and brimstone all at the same time, but Mack didn’t have those kind of resources. Instead, he’d taken a box of Hornady DGX (Dangerous Game eXpanding) hollow points and filled the hollows with silver.

  The Ruger Super GP100 under his left arm was likewise loaded with silver-tipped hollow points. That was the reason why he carried two pistols. The FN-Herstal FNX45 he carried on his right hip was his go-to sidearm, a high capacity .45 ACP that was more than adequate to deal with most dangers, mundane or paranormal. However, the .357 Magnum revolver, loaded with silver-tipped rounds, gave him an option for dealing with things that weren’t overly bothered by lead poisoning.

  “Not a Bigfoot,” KC declared when the creature strode out into their view and spread its arms wide and screamed a threat challenge at them.

  Mack didn’t hesitate. Based on the scent of undeath alone, he chose to open fire. Three .416 silver rounds in the center of the chest should be more than enough to destroy any undead’s heart.

  “Cover me,” he grunted as he set his Hawkeye aside and jumped down from Busster’s roof.

  He did leave two boot sole-shaped impressions in the ground where he landed, but that didn’t slow him down as he unlimbered his Ruger revolver. The Super GP100 was designed as a competition gun, the combining of a GP100 with Ruger’s other premiere double-action revolver, the Redhawk. The accuracy of the pistol was impressive, and the fact that they’d engineered the cylinder to hold eight rounds instead of six was icing on the cake as far as Mack was concerned.

  The monster was still standing, swaying like it wanted to fall, and had stumbled back several steps. Mack double tapped it in the chest again just in case the undead was already healing its heart back up. Then, he put two rounds into the creature’s forehead. It didn’t topple over or drop like a marionette with its strings cut or any of the other things that a human-shaped creature will do when it’s shot to death. Instead, it was stumbling back drunkenly. Mack noticed that the original three entry wounds were already closed. He realized that he was going to have to do this the old fashioned way, and he needed a minute.

  He began backpedaling to give himself some room. A double-tap to the chest was followed by a double tap to the head, and the Ruger was empty. He put the revolver back in its holster out of habit. As he began shucking off his coat and boots, KC opened fire from Busster’s roof. Mack didn’t load their 5.56s with silver since that slug was really too small for him to do much with it anyway. Still, their preferred load was Federal’s 62 grain full metal jacketed steel core penetrator. Steel being refined iron was toxic to Fae creatures, but it seemed to have little effect on this particular monster as KC peppered its face and torso with high-velocity rounds.

  Mack’s clothes came off quickly. He was experienced at stripping rapidly. Otherwise, he’d go through clothes faster than their operating budget would allow. Normally, if he knew he’d need to shapeshift, Mack would wear cheap, easily replaceable thrift store tee shirts and sweat or track pants, going barefoot or wearing quickly discarded flip-flops. The shift from one form to another tended to shred clothing either from the way the body reformed itself or from the castoff heat energy of transforming ectoplasm into mass or mass into ectoplasm. Either way, this was one of Mack’s good outfits, and he’d rather it get dirty on the ground than torn up in a change.

  As KC’s rifle bolt clicked back in the open and locked position, Mack charged forward, naked as the day he’d been born. Within two strides he’d completely transformed. Werewolves, like their werebear and werecat cousins, were almost unique among shapeshifters in that they had three different forms. The vast majority of therianthropes, animal shapeshifters, had their human form and their animal form. Werewolves, werebears, and werecats had a third form, a hybrid of human and animal referred to as their battle form.

  Not only did the battle form merge the best aspects of human and animal shapes, but it also combined both forms’ masses together. The result was for Mack was a wolf-like humanoid standing nearly eight feet tall and massing some 400 pounds. He had the teeth, the powerful bite, hard claws tipping fingers that could still grasp and manipulate tools, the keen senses of both man and animal, magically heightened, and human intelligence and cunning combined with a wolf’s ferocity and predatory instincts.

  The monster’s wounds from the silver bullets were already healed, and the wounds KC had inflicted had healed almost as soon as they had occurred. Still, the creature’s red eyes widened when it saw the snow white werewolf suddenly in front of it. The monster struck with its right hand, fingers splayed, claws set to rake. Mack was a Marine, trained in the USMC’s Marine Corps Marti
al Arts Program, MCMAP. The mixed martial art was designed to deal with other human beings attacking a Marine with a variety of weapons, but Mack had found that MCMAP with a few adaptations worked well for him in his hybrid form.

  He ducked under the monster’s sweeping arm, stepped to his left, and raised his own right hand to catch the monster’s backswing. Mack gave the monster enough of a push before it could start its backswing to spin it partially around. He grabbed onto both shoulders of the monster and lifted himself up, spreading his jaws wide and snapping down on the back of the monster’s neck.

  Mack ratcheted his jaws, driving his teeth further into the monster’s neck. Then, he heard an audible snap as he wrenched his head back and forth, like a terrier with a rat trapped in its jaws. The monster dropped to its knees as the severing of its upper spine blocked further signals from the brain to the body. Mack let go of the monster’s shoulders, placing his clawed hands on the head and chin of his opponent. With a might twist, he ripped the monster’s head right off its neck.

  He immediately released the neck and tossed the head aside, spitting black ichor out of his mouth. Oh, how he loathed that taste! His work wasn’t done yet. Mack caught the body before it could fall all the way to the ground and flipped it over onto its back. He raised his right hand back and stabbed forward with stiffened fingers, like a knife-hand strike from Karate, but instead of a bludgeoning strike with the side of his hand, his claw-tipped fingers penetrated the monster’s chest to one side of the sternum. His thumb claw penetrated on the other side, which allowed him to get a grip on that particular bone and rip it free of the attached ribs on either side. Mack tossed the bone and flesh aside to reach back into the open he’d made. After a few tugs, the monster’s heart ripped free of the chest cavity.