Monster Hunter Siege-eARC Read online

  I about fell off the porch. He had one eye. Not like one eye, missing the other, sort of thing, but one great big eye right in the middle of his lumpy misshapen face.

  “You’re a cyclops,” Julie stated calmly.

  But despite being a fearsome monster of myth and legend, he was just kind of standing there, grinning stupidly. The cyclops was a big fellow, portly, but only about as tall as I was. In a typical illustration they’d be wearing a fur loin cloth and carrying a tree for a club. This one was wearing a fuzzy blue bathrobe, sweat pants, and bright green Crocs.

  “And your biggest fan! Oh man, I can’t believe this!” He actually clapped his hands together with glee. “Yay!”

  Across the street, cookie girl had caught up with us. She’d rightly figured I had the look of a mark who would purchase my body weight in Samoas if given the opportunity. When she saw the cyclops she screamed, dropped her Thin Mints, and ran for her life.

  “Whoops! I’m not supposed to be seen by the neighbors without my disguise. I could lose my exemption.” The cyclops had great big buck teeth. “Oh well. Come in. Come in!”

  Julie and I exchanged glances. Cyclops were supposed to be these rare, badass giants, carrying off heroes to dark caves to be devoured. He was just so goofy looking that I hadn’t even been tempted to reach for my gun. I had no idea how long ago it had been since a cyclops had caused trouble, nor did I know the last time a Hunter had collected PUFF on one. Decades? The scholarly types had figured them for extinct.

  Julie shrugged. What the hell? Why not? She entered the home. I sighed, then followed.

  Other than the large number of comic book posters stuck on the walls, the interior of his house was utterly normal. He had a scraggly beard, but it only seemed to be growing out of his neck. Judging by the orange dust all over him, and the bag on the couch, he’d been eating Cheetos. The TV was paused on some anime.

  Once we were inside he closed the door and locked it behind him.

  “This is such an honor. I’m Poly, Welcome to Albuquerque.”

  “It is a pleasure to meet you, Pauly.”

  “No, Poly. It’s short for Polyphemus. Sorry. I’m totally geeking out. Julie Shackleford is in my house.”

  “I’ve never met a cyclops before,” Julie said with the utmost politeness.

  “Aren’t you supposed to be gigantic?” I asked, but Julie immediately gave me a look like don’t mess this up. Don’t blame me. I was just wondering if maybe we’d found a midget cyclops.

  “Us being giants is a hateful inaccurate stereotype that exists because the ancient Greeks were racist. And super short. It’s all relative.” He turned back to Julie. I swear the cyclops was going full on fan boy. He was damned near giddy. “I’ve never met anyone from MHI before, let alone a legend. Do you know Milo Anderson? Oh my gosh…You totally know Milo Anderson!” He looked me over with his huge gelatinous eyeball. “And you’re Owen Pitt.”

  “That’s me.”

  He shrugged. “That’s cool I guess.”

  Ouch.

  “If you don’t mind me asking, how do you know about us, Poly?”

  “Remote viewing and MCB reports mostly but you’re way prettier in person.” The cyclops gulped. He began to blush. “I’m sorry. That probably sounded rude.”

  “That’s fine,” Julie said quickly. I was about to interject no, it isn’t, but she continued. “Remote viewing, you do that for the MCB?”

  “Mostly. I like when they ask me to look at stuff you were involved in. It’s better than Netflix.” You’re the best.”

  Julie nodded. That was awkward. “Thanks.”

  “They captured me, but Agent Myers got me a provisional PUFF exemption because I can see some things humans can’t. They pay me to look at pictures and tell them stuff. It’s a sweet deal. It sure beats living in a cave and stealing goats. And I get to help the heroes!” He sounded really proud as he began to lumber down the hallway. “Come on. I’ll show you.”

  One side of the hall was filled with movie posters. The other side was action figures, still in the packaging. I’d have to introduce this guy to Trip. They’d get along great. Probably start a weekly game night.

  “What do you mean by help the heroes?” Julie asked.

  “Agent Myers and his guys. They’re super nice. Well, except for Franks. Obviously. He’s kind of a dick. I was locked up in this prison with all sorts of awful monsters and these other guys were doing experiments on my brain. They weren’t nice at all. Even threatened to pluck my eye out. Can you believe it? But after that big rift in Alabama a couple years ago, Agent Myers thought I could help, so he snuck me out of the prison in the middle of the night. I’ve been here ever since.”

  “Why did he do that?”

  “Because us cyclops can see things humans can’t. That’s why there aren’t many of us left. Once humans figured that out they started stealing us. Most of us aren’t helpful and nice like me, so humans just suck their eyeball out to make into drugs to give other humans to try and get our powers. It never works good. When they try to see far away human eyes are too wimpy and start squirting blood.”

  “Gross.” And here I’d always thought all those supposed Cold War remote viewing conspiracy theories were nonsense. We stopped, closed door on one side, bathroom on the other. The sink was covered in tubes of acne cream. “What kind of things can you see?”

  “Like they’ll tell me there’s a rift, and I can see into the other side a little. Or something will happen, and they’ll take pictures of it from a satellite, and then Agent Myers will have me look at the pictures and tell them all the things they can’t see. Like spirits and ghosts, or what the people in the picture were saying at the time.”

  “You can see conversations. In the past?”

  “Sometimes. He gets super happy when I do that. Agent Myers or one of his friends check in on me once in a while, but I’m not allowed to talk to anybody else from the government. Agent Myers said I could get in a lot of trouble if I do that.”

  This all sounded like it wasn’t the government hiding him, but he was being hidden from the government. Had Myers stolen Poly from STFU? Judging by our humble surroundings, I had a sneaky feeling this was one of Myers’ off the books operations. The poor cyclops didn’t even know that his benefactor was dead.

  “Are you allowed to leave?” I asked.

  “Nope.” Poly pulled up one leg of his sweat pants to display an ankle monitor. “I can go in the back yard or as far as the mail box, but only if I wear my disguise. No outside world past the mail box for me…But I can talk to you guys, right? I mean, you’re Julie Friggin’ Shackleford, for Zeus’ sake!”

  “Absolutely,” Julie agreed, and she was so nice she probably felt guilty for taking advantage of Myers’ captive cyclops nerd.

  Poly opened the door. There was a drawing table in the middle of the room. Every wall was covered in maps, from floor to ceiling, most of them the regular, printed folding kind, but then there were others that appeared to have been drawn by hand. Those maps were almost childlike in their simplicity, with cartoon terrain features, and place names with rough letters that looked drawn rather than written.

  “Sorry. I don’t draw good.” Poly held up his fingers and wiggled them. They looked like fat sausages. “I can’t see everything that comes through the holes in the world, but I see some, and when I see them early enough, that makes Myers really happy. Humans think two eyes is good, but your eyes suck. Depth perception isn’t all that. Two eyes, but only one world. Cyclops have one eye, but we can see two worlds at the same time. It’s flipped. You can only see what’s in front of you. It gets blurry but us cyclops can see things far away, through walls, on the other side of the world, even sometimes, through time if we look hard enough.” Poly turned to me and grinned. His front teeth were way too big, like a beaver. “I can tell you know what seeing through time is like, huh, Owen Pitt?”

  “Yeah, a little.”

  Julie took out her phone and started taking pictur
es of the maps. Poly didn’t seem to mind. I spotted a map of Las Vegas on top of the nearest pile and walked over to it. A circle had been drawn around the Last Dragon.

  “Agent Myers asked me to focus extra hard there, to make sure nothing else bad was sneaking through.”

  Next to it was one of the hand drawn maps. “Last Dragon” had been scribbled on that page next to a big black X. It took me a moment to realize that map wasn’t of any place on Earth. The terrain features were meaningless scribbles. The place names were gibberish. “Julie, check this out.”

  “That’s when it went into the bad place where nightmares come from,” Poly said. “It’s one of the between worlds. You’ve both been there, so you know. I don’t like looking there at all. It is sad and scary and everything that lives there is mean and hungry. You were lucky to get away.”

  This was what we’d come for. “Not all of us got out. We left some friends behind. Can you tell what happened to them?”

  The cyclops nodded vigorously. It made his double chins jiggle. “Some got stuck but some died. That left seven.”

  “Seven are still alive?” Julie gave me an incredulous look.

  “They sure are, Julie Shackleford. The door is closed, so I can’t see clear no more. But human lives glow. Embers Agent Myers called them. Humans in a bad place are sparks in the dark. So I know seven good guys remain.”

  I believed him. It was like a punch to the gut. There were survivors. But we couldn’t help them. That was almost worse. “Can you see how they’re doing? Did they find a place to hide? Are they safe?”

  “Sorry.” The cyclops shrugged his meaty shoulders. “It’s like windows. Open I can see fine. When the blinds are closed I can see the light coming through, but I can’t see what they’re doing. Next time they open up I’ll be able to see probably.”

  Julie was staring at the map of the nightmare realm. “What the hell do we do now?”

  Myers had sprung this cyclops to keep an eye on rifts. It was worth a shot. “Next time they open…Poly, do you know any other ways into the Nightmare Realm?”

  He shook his head in the negative. That made the jelly of his great big eye slosh. It made me a little nauseous to look at. “I can’t watch the whole world at once. That would be silly. I can only see places when I look at them hard, and Agent Myers calls and tells me where to look. I guess there’s tiny ones all the time, where the little nightmare thingies pop out, but nothing you could squeeze a human through. Though come to think of it there’s…No. Never mind.”

  “What is it, Poly?” Julie gently coaxed.

  “There’s one place that opens every year when the stars line up right, but it is too scary, even for Julie Shackleford and MHI. If you go there you would all die. And that would be super sad.”

  I started to say something, but Julie shook her head. Right. Diplomacy. I was too impatient and pushy, but I wasn’t too proud to admit it. I had a sneaky feeling that if I was the one interrogating Poly we wouldn’t have even made it this far.

  “It’s fine, Poly. We’ll be careful.”

  “I don’t have many friends. All the other cyclops have gone away. Agent Myers is my friend but he’s so busy he doesn’t visit much. You could be my friend, Julie Shackleford. But if you go there, you’ll die, and we can’t be friends if you’re dead.”

  He was wrong there. I had a bunch of friends who were dead.

  “Just because you tell us about it doesn’t mean we’ll do anything dangerous with that knowledge. We just want to understand.” Julie was very patient. She was going to be a great mom. “It’s very important to us. Please?”

  “Okay.” Poly was clearly agitated. “Come on. I’ll show you Agent Myers’ Big Secret Project.” He wandered from the office back into the hall. “He said if I did a good enough job watching for this one special bad guy he’d put me in a cosplay disguise and take me to DragonCon. I want to be in the parade.”

  The other bedroom was set up similar to the first, only even more cluttered if that was possible. One entire wall was taken up by a big map of the world. Maybe it was because there were a bunch of push pins stuck all over it that it reminded me of the map we had started putting together in a casino hotel room, based upon odd cases and rumors from the world’s monster hunters, all involving an unknown underground menace.

  Julie realized the same thing. “It’s like Earl’s mobilization map for all the underground anomalies…All the ones we know about are flagged on here. Only there’s a lot more locations on this one than on ours.”

  “Things come crawling out of the dirt. They’ve been getting busier. Every week Agent Myers calls and gives me a new place to watch and I tell him if I saw anything. There are so many now I can’t hardly keep up looking at them. Agent Myers tries not to act scared when he visits, but I can tell he’s afraid.”

  It was color coded. The yellow pins seemed to correspond with the various sinkholes and tunnels that had opened up, leaving out of the way rural villages entirely depopulated. There was a yellow pin in the ocean where the Chinese navy had blown up an underwater city. There was a black pin at DeSoya Caverns and another one in New Zealand where we’d fought the Arbmunep. There were also green and white pins all over, and one big red thumbtack near the top.

  “Green is for Fey. They’re weird and tricky. Black is for Old Ones. They hurt my eye. Agent Myers says for me never to look at their side because I’ll go crazy. White is for stuff Agent Myers wasn’t sure about.”

  “Yellow?”

  “Agent Myers doesn’t know much about them, just that’s the same symbol shows up. Wherever it is, I can’t see around it very good. They belong to a very bad thing that got woke up when time got broken.”

  “Crap.”

  “Don’t blame yourself,” Julie told me. “If you hadn’t used the artifact, then Lord Machado would have won and we’d all be doomed anyway.”

  “Still…”

  “The different color pins don’t like each other,” Poly said. “They fight the good guys, but they fight each other too.”

  I knew our fate was intertwined with the various warring cosmic factions, I’d just never seen it so laid out and color coded for my convenience before. “What makes these places special?”

  “These are where worlds rub against each other and the borders get fuzzy. Sometimes monsters come through there.”

  “There’s that many?” Julie was a little taken back. “I mean, we know it happens, but still…That’s insane.”

  There were a cluster of different color pins stuck in Natchy Bottom. That I could believe.

  “Humans call them places of power,” Poly offered helpfully. “Black magic is stronger there.”

  “We’re passingly familiar with the concept,” I muttered. “What about this big red guy?”

  “That’s the one that made Agent Myers the most scared. I’m supposed to look at it every single day to see if stuff is happening there. Sometimes there are things on top. But I think the scary part is what’s beneath.”

  “What’s beneath there, Poly?” Julie asked as she took a picture of the big map.

  “The end of the world I think.” Water began pouring out of his big squishy eye. I realized Poly had started crying. He sniffed. “A city of monsters. A very bad thing lives there, maybe the baddest thing of all, come to ruin everything. Agent Myers thinks the bad thing is there for now, but if he leaves I’m supposed to call right away. He’s the one that’s been making the yellow pins show up, to test the good guys, so he can learn how to beat the heroes. Agent Myers is very afraid of him, and he’s the bravest human I know.”

  Julie touched him gently on the shoulder. “It’s going to be okay.” That seemed to calm him down. “What can you tell us about the bad thing?”

  “Not much. He’s hard to look at. It’s like he’s in more than one place at a time, and more than one time in one place. Though I think he’s mostly stayed there since he woke up. But he has lots of almost as bad things working for him, and they come and go all
over the place, spying or making trouble.”

  Either the cyclops really was a childlike innocent, or he was the best actor ever, but if Myers had taken the risk of stealing and hiding him from Unicorn, that meant his remote viewing thing was legit.

  “This scary place that opens to the nightmare world, it’s there, isn’t it?”

  Hesitant, Poly lifted one sausage finger to point, but then paused. “Promise you won’t go there?”

  “I won’t lie to you. I can’t make that promise, Poly,” Julie said. “But we’ll do our best, and we’ll try to be safe. Heroes have to do dangerous things sometimes to help others. That’s what makes us the good guys.”

  “I knew you would be as brave as Agent Myers.” And then, sure enough, Poly the Cyclops pointed at the big red pin. “It’s in the City of Monsters.”

  It was way up north, on a large island off the coast of Russia. I read the name. “Son of a bitch.” My hands closed into fists. My lips twisted into an unconscious snarl. My reaction must have startled Poly, because he took a nervous step back.

  “What’s wrong, Owen?”

  “That’s where they killed my dad.”

  * * *

  Something big happened while Julie and I were on our way to the airport. I’d not checked the news recently, but I could tell by the way all of the other travelers had gathered around the TV screens in a hushed silence that it was bad news, unfolding live.

  I limped to the back of the crowd, not close enough to hear the announcer, but I could read the scroll along the bottom of the screen. India. Death toll unknown, but it was in the hundreds.

  “What happened?” I asked the nearest waiting passenger.

  “They think a chemical plant caught fire,” she said. “The poison gas burned a whole town. That’s so sad.”

  The video showed terrified crowds of people running for their lives. Fires raged out of control in the background as buildings collapsed.

  “It’s probably just an accident,” Julie whispered.

  “I hope so.” Which was a terrible thing to say, but there it was. When you worked in this business it was really easy to get paranoid that every single tragedy you saw on the news was just a cover story to explain away the existence of monsters. In reality plenty of regular, normal bad things happened every day. We could have gotten hit by a truck on the way here. Or our plane could crash on takeoff, and that was just rotten luck. No monsters necessary. And sometimes towns just catch on fire and rapidly burn to the ground without the forces of evil holding the match.