Monster Vice Read online

  Monster Vice

  George P. Saunders

  © 2011

  Published by George P. Saunders. Copyright 2011 by George P. Saunders. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used, reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage or retrieval system, without the written permission of the publisher, except where permitted by law, or in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  CHAPTER 1

  At the moment, I’m not fixated on sex.

  Unusual for me, because even though I don’t do a lot of Hokey-Pokey-Roll-Roll In-The-Whiskered-Bunny-Fun-Hole at present, I’m always much immersed in the pursuit of The Ejaculation Behind The Curtain. There’s a reason why … but I’ll get to that later.

  For now, though, I enjoy briefly what is here and now, tangible and tasty. A walk in Echo Park, and yummy treats in hand.

  I’m a cop with a cop’s appetites, no denying it, no sir. The Hostess Twinkies I hold in my mitts are twin rolls of golden magic, laced with hydrogenised vegetable oil, and enough Red Dye No. 5 to kill your basic lab rat. I am cognizant of these carcinogenic facts, yet I chomp down on Twinkie Number 1 and chew happily — realizing that this will be the highlight of my night.

  Name is Dick Pitts, Special Agent to Task Force Monster Vice, Los Angeles Police Department. My shift begins in half an hour. I’m ahead of schedule, and contemplate stopping off at Nicky’s Bar for a quick nip. I walk the park in my down-time like this sometimes just to see if there is something evil that needs killing. My hobby, my pass-time. My métier.

  And then she appears. From behind a tree, a succubus, young, teeth like razors, perfect tits, and piercing black eyes. She is virtually naked, and I cannot ignore the shaved mons between her legs. Nor the bat-like wings flapping that stick out from her back. She smiles.

  “Wanna fuck, handsome?

  I sigh, and take out my Beretta.

  “Always wanna fuck,” I say. “Just not you, sweetheart.”

  I pull the trigger, and the demon-chick’s head blows apart.

  Ho-hum. This stuff happens a lot. Strolls in the parks, semen-hungry succubae, various other low-life predators of the supernatural. Routine, really. Same ol’, same ol’. Yawn.

  I continue walking, enjoying the night air, scarfing down the last twinkie.

  My cell suddenly rings. I reach for it, and flip open the speaker.

  “Pitts here,” I mumble.

  “Dick, it’s Bill,” my brother says in a strange voice I have not heard before.

  “You okay, bro?” I ask.

  “Gotta see you. Right now.”

  I check my watch. My brother’s house, annexed to his church, is only a few blocks away. Very do-able. “Sure, I’ll be right over --”

  “No, not the house. Please,” he says, his voice raspy, gravelly, tired. “The park. Okay?”

  “Bill, you don’t sound good.”

  “I’m not good, that’s why. You have a gun?”

  The question takes me momentarily off guard. “Of course,” I answer.

  “Good. See you in a few.” He hangs up.

  And I am now worried.

  ***

  My brother Bill always tells me: “Take stock of your life, Dick — know when to walk away from a losing proposition.” My brother is an Episcopalian minister, a walking-talking advertisement for good sense and moderation in all things. I love him for that, yet I know that he can afford to be moderate — I cannot.

  He doesn’t do what I do for a living.

  And sometimes walking away from a losing proposition isn’t an option. Running, maybe. But walking? Rarely.

  Walking away gets you killed faster.

  Still, I think of his benign adage as I move down the cracked sidewalk that comprises Alvarado Street and Northrop. I suddenly step in something hot and yielding. I look down in disgust and with familiar horror - perennial constants in my chosen career.

  Werewolf shit. Not good.

  The wolf droppings, fresh and still steaming on cool asphalt, tell me that I’m seconds away from either a good clean Kill — or a tail-tangle with evil I may not survive. The stench is foul. It assaults my senses full force. I lift my foot and stare down at the intestinal residue of my sworn enemy, the Lycker (a werewolf slang term we in Monster Vice use for the beast’s Greek etymological origins re Lycanthropy). The fecal mass glows green in the moonlight, steam rising off something that I can determine is part of an undigested human toe. This sucker has already fed tonight, which means I will be attacked for different reasons other than hunger. The smell gets worse. My stomach does the Funky Chicken and I almost bring back dinner, a questionable mix of Carl’s Junior (The Five Dollar Burger) and day-old Tai, followed hard upon, of course, by the Twinkies. I quell the imminent rise of bile in my throat, and try to remember the most basic mathematical constant in differential calculus or the Latin term for female orgasm.

  By which I mean to say, I search in panic for a mental distraction — anything, anything at all to replace the visual reminder of the unholy excrement now glued to my over worn Reeboks.

  I lumber off the concrete, and onto the green grass, covered in a glowing veneer of evening dew. I try to focus on the positive. I breathe and look around the immediate vicinity. My brother has not yet arrived. I pray that he is running late, no matter what the nature of his personal emergency.

  I was not expecting a Lycker confrontation.

  I continue to scan the night. The good news is that Echo Park appears deserted this evening. No bums, perverts, same-sex jerkers, or homeless vagabonds haunt the usual spots. We are alone.

  Myself and the werewolf, that is.

  Mental sound bytes suddenly loom in my mind from past conversations with my brother.

  “You should surround yourself with beauty, Dick,” Bill would advise on our Sunday beer outings together. “Don’t embrace the Ugly — embrace the Divine. It’s all around you, if you look carefully.”

  On those lovely afternoons, I drink more beer and shrug, nodding in acquiescence, as if my nod meant to say: well, yeah, you’re right, I guess, kind of ... except I just killed something last night that had four legs, six eyes and perchloric acid for urine. Just another day at the office.

  I of course don’t “go there” with my minister brother, Bill. He wouldn’t understand. No, sir, he wouldn’t understand one little bit.

  Another growl. Translated: You’re about to die horribly, Dick.

  My weapon of choice for this evening is a Beretta 92F Nine Millimeter, with a magazine capacity of fifteen shots. If the wolf gets the jump on me, and I fire too late, it wouldn’t matter if I were Captain Kirk loaded with an arsenal of radioactive fart-photon torpedoes. I’d be a human finger sandwich for the Lycker. Worse still, within the hour, I’d start sprouting fur and a nasty overbite, along with an insatiable peckish taste for human flesh. Such are the vagaries and downsides to being bitten by a werewolf in modern day Los Angeles.

  Something growls again. Something, my ass — I know exactly what snarls in the dark.

  It.

  The Thing.

  A Creature Of The Night. I refer to it simply as The Target, but such a definition in and of itself is almost laughingly inadequate. What lies in wait, just ahead, shouldn’t even exist.

  The target has spotted me, and lurks just a hundred yards ahead in within a reticular wall of hedges. I could, of course, begin firing blindly, hoping, praying for a bulls-eye, a miracle if I get a direct hit to the heart or brain — the only surefire way to terminate a full-on charging lycanthropic wet dream with a bad, bad attitude. Experience and pragmatism, however, urge me to restrain myself. It doesn’t help of course that
I am trembling with terror. Even after so many years, so many encounters, I’m a big scared baby when it comes to this kind of thing.

  This kind of thing, of course, is what I arguably do to bring home the bacon. Chase Monsters, that is. At one point we thought it couldn’t get any worse than 9/11. Wrong, kids. It did.

  “You were so good with women’s clothing and design,” Bill constantly reminds me on our Sunday get-togethers. “Soft knits, tweeds, a sense of color. You had such a gift. What happened?”

  When I was very young, you see, I wanted to be a dress designer. It’s what our father did, with great success. He was the King of Women’s’ Fashions. Arnie’s Dress Shop Just Around The Corner. That’s what it was called. Truly. And I had a talent for style, color and accessorizing.

  This was all very early in my life, you see — before I discovered what I was really great at: whacking bad guys ... and then much later ... whacking monsters.

  “Should have followed your real calling,” Bill still tells me every Sunday. “What is it you do now?”

  “I’m a cop,” I always reply amiably. Bill knows I’m a cop, but that’s his favorite rhetorical question: What is it you do now?

  “That’s right,” he says, as if perhaps he’s just remembered the last verse to a lost poem by Keats. “Some kind of violent crime division.”

  “Monster Vice,” I remind him … as I always do.

  I usually take a sip of beer and wait for this bonding moment between brothers to pass. Bill doesn’t mean to, but he gets under my skin every time he pursues this line of conversation.

  “I can’t see it,” he says sincerely. “I’ve watched you through the years, and still can’t believe you’ve chosen this line of work.”

  Fair enough, I think. Neither can I.

  “Well, remember ... it’s never too late to quit,” he’d advise, as he has done so for these past fifteen years. “Sooner or later, it all turns into a losing proposition.”

  We usually laugh. It’s a running joke.

  Quit. Get back into clothes and tweeds. Imagine.

  Ha, ha, ha.

  Another growl. A rustle of leaves, the smell of damp fur, and then I see it. The eyes. Green laser-like beacons of pure hate stare at me through the darkness. The mouth to which the eyes belong opens, and the glow of ebony white fangs, emblazoned in a glowing red drool, is clearly delineated against the black of night. I have an uncontrollable urge to lose my bladder just about now, followed by the fight or flight response of my species — the one designed to save life and limb when faced with immediate peril. But I am a creature of duty. I have trained hard for this kind of work, and my rational mind wins the wrestling match with the Panic Drive to get the hell out of here, now, and be right quick about it because I’m about to be something’s dinner. I bring my weapon up, pointed at the picture of hell ahead of me, and take aim.

  The eyes suddenly vanish, as do the teeth. The growls echo off into an eerie silence, and I am again faced with nothing more than the still of night. Which by the way, chills my bones to the marrow. The wolf has decided to play a waiting game. It’s in stalk-mode now, and I put my chances of coming out of this un-munched at about one in ten. Crappy odds to be sure, and I again entertain the notion of running like a broke-dick schoolboy out of this park.

  Right about now, I think: Perhaps I have been doing this for too long. Perhaps it is time to retire after all, move out to the country, kick back, get married, get a life. I’ve been a cop now for almost two decades, a Special Field Inspector for Monster Vice as of 27 months ago. The old days of Homicide work are over. What I do now, on almost every level, defies description and strains credulity. You’re curious, so go ahead and ask. Go ahead. Just try. You would probably begin quite politely:

  Hey, Dick, how was your day?

  And I’d reply just as cordially: Not bad. Thanks for asking. Let’s see, for starters, killed a few vampires, slew a few dragons, whacked a few wolves. The corpse of a nineteen-year-old automobile crash victim began to scuttle about on shorn legs in the County Morgue, had to brain it and dissolve it in a corrosive acid solution, then bury it in hallowed ground. Oh, there was the exorcism over at Disneyland; one of the rides was haunted by a flesh-eating thing from hell. Broke for lunch around two pm, and I’d rather not talk about the rest of the afternoon. ‘Nother day, another dollar. The usual.

  There’d be an awkward silence, before you found your tongue.

  Uh ... well, great. Don’t overdo it, Dick. All work and no play, you know ... Ha, ha, ha.

  Maybe we’d have a group hug, shoot the shit for another microsecond, then you’d run off giggling, thinking: guy’s a loon. And you might be right.

  How was your day?

  Don’t ask.

  Even so, get that question from people all the time. And though everyone knows about the current pandemic horror sweeping across Planet Earth, what I do seems to the Average Joe as being ... unreal. I don’t blame anyone. The question is natural, though the answer is somewhat not.

  Because what I do, by necessity, is unreal.

  I take out my ever-ready flask of good old American Jack Daniels and suck down a toke of liquid courage. You might say this is rash, unprofessional, unwise, given the fact that I’m facing a supernatural nightmare with one-inch fangs. Sure, it could conceivably slow my response time, attenuate vital reflexes, put my life in mortal peril where precious seconds might mean the difference between my survival or my potential for becoming human Hamburger Helper. I might concede that you have a point. But I’ve been doing this for awhile, and sometimes the only way I get through this kind of thing, is to fortify myself with a buzz. Okay, it numbs the senses a bit, dulls the judgment, but at this stage of the game, it doesn’t matter. I’m either going to kill this furry piece of fuckery with one shot (one shot being all I will get), or I join the ranks of The Evil Dead.

  More rustles. More growls hiss my ways. Pretty standard stuff so far from the Lycker. I feel emboldened, revitalized, a Shit-Kicking Soldier For All Things Right, Good and True. The Jack warms up my belly, and I am filled with a desire for hand-to-paw combat.

  “You’re not a spring chicken anymore,” Bill told me last Sunday. “The kind of work you do — it’s for younger cats.” My brother, though one year my junior, and a Man of the Cloth, occasionally commutes into the language of Black Panther Gangstah’ when he wants to make a point.

  I took offense at the age thing.

  Something moves. A shadow?

  Oh, shit, what’s that blur of motion --

  Whoa, that hurt, and now I’m a topsy-turvy fun-ball flying through space. Clearly, the wolf has charged and hit me hard, though it is an atypical attack, as I am still airborne, proving to those who might doubt the obvious, that Man in some instances was born to fly. I hit the ground hard, rolling, rolling, rolling, just keep that doggy rolling — and yes, praise the lord ... let there be pain. I see stars, and they are in stellar meltdown just behind my eyeballs. I taste blood, my own, and also feel dampness near by knee. I am prone on the ground, and see that my pant leg is torn, the result of a substantial impact with concrete — but amazingly, I am not bitten or mauled.

  He’s playing with me.

  Playing with the food.

  This pisses me off. I’m on my feet, the buzz from Jack instantly obliterated, my gun firing blindly into the night. My erratic attack is not fear-motivated, but rather a responsive ire to being toyed with. I think with a false sense of courage: Yo, Wolf! You shitting slab of fur who mocks me with a rhino-like bump in the butt that sends me flying — you will taste my fury, know my wrath, beg for mercy! Y’hear? Your days of Slobber and Slaughter are finished.

  He’s toast, I continue my inward, self-fortifying litany of coaching enthusiasm. Yeah. Right on. Dead meat. Wolf-burger. I’ll get him --

  — that is if he doesn’t get me first.

  “Do unto others as they do unto you,” my brother often would repeat scripture to me in my most depressed moments. Bill worries ab
out me, that I drink too much, that I’m prone to moments of almost clinical apathy. “I see violence in your heart, brother. Violence and hatred. No wonder you feel so down.”

  I asked Bill once what he thought of the monster epidemic swarming over the planet.

  “It’s the Devil making his last play for Planet Earth,” he said easily. “The monsters are just locusts. Nothing serious in terms of what is really coming.”

  Nothing serious, he says.

  Right.

  Like what the Vatican said about the Nazis back in 1933. Just a passing phase.

  Something hits me once again. Hard. Pain radiates from my lower back to the top of my head, and I again defy gravity. At this rate, I’ll have more flying miles to my name than Lindbergh. I am in the air so long, I wonder if there’s a flight attendant on her way to bring me a frosty adult beverage -- something, anything, to help me wile away the comfy hours at a cruising altitude of just under ten feet.

  Oh, but the magic ends abruptly, because I am again in contact with Mother Earth. This time there is blood seeping into my eyes and I realize that my head has connected rather lovingly, if not jarringly, with the bark of some innocent tree.

  This has, I feel, gone on long enough.

  My dancing partner, Mr. I-Couldn’t-Be-Hairier-And-More- Hideous-Than-You-Could-Possibly-Imagine, growls once more into the otherwise beneficent night. Though I literally see red, and my head spins wildly, I can now visualize the werewolf loping toward me at nine o’clock. He thinks he’s got me off-balance, and obviously, with this near-frontal attack, the drooling motherfucker has lost a sense of fun for the game. He wants to end it quickly now, grab a quick bite, then move on to another victim — SOP for your basic werewolf.

  While I am considerably far from up to par, I have the heart of an old soldier, and training of decades deeply ingrained in every muscle, every neuron of my being. My gun comes up, a sluggish move that is accompanied with waves of pain through my shoulder, and a cascading inner surf of nausea. I do not have time to aim, nor time to pray, yet some inner voice calls out for help to the great Unknown.