Jabberwock Jack (3 page)

"Remember what tomorrow is," I warned with a frown. "So get as drunk as you need to." Then I watched as Astrid brought him a shot of Aquavit with a smile. "Just remember the rule."

"You too," he said, as Brigit brought me my own shot. I had seen that smile on girls before. I usually liked it. Here it just made me sweat. I decided that I would need to be a very careful drunk tonight.

The morning found me tangled up in a sleeping bag inside our tent. When I felt a body next to me, I worried that I had been the one to break our rule. My mind went in two directions. First I wondered which of Tor's beautiful daughters I had gone to bed with and how proud of myself I should be. The second direction was berating myself for not even following my own rule after giving my brother shit about it.

It took only a second of full wakefulness for me to recognize a familiar snore coming from the body. I relaxed. It was just my brother. He only snores like that when he's gotten really drunk and has fallen asleep in a strange position. Since he's spent long stretches on my couch, I had heard that snore too often.

As my gaze fell upon my brother, I noticed in the dim light that there was another form beyond him. Great, we still fucked up. Sure, it was my brother who had broken the rule and I could give him shit about it until the end of time, but we had still done something bad and our relationship with Tor was going to get real awkward. I wondered if we could just quickly get into our van Dukes of Hazard style and speed off without saying anything.

However, there was something strange about the other body in the tent. It didn't look like any of Tor's daughters, not with that hair. I strained my eyes to adjust to the light. Was that... was that a tail? I leaned forward over Szandor's sleeping body. I was greeted by a slobbering tongue. I pulled my head back and wiped my face. Definitely not one of Tor's daughters. Just one of the dogs that had come in during the night to snuggle with Szandor. I relaxed. Neither of us had fucked up.

More memory of the night before came back. I remember Tor going to bed early to wake with the dawn and do hunter things. I remember Brigit hanging on my every word while I resisted my typical flirting game plan. Szandor and Astrid surprisingly hit things off. I remember looking across the campfire and attempting to use nonexistent psychic powers to remind him to keep everything platonic. I also remember Elsa pouting a lot, due to Astrid taking up Szandor's time. I
think
that Szandor got up on the hood of the pickup truck and sung songs for a bit, drunkenly dancing along as the girls clapped. I
may
have joined him. It's still unclear.

I pulled myself to a sitting position and crawled out of the tent. The chipper voices of Tor's daughters greeting me in unison was a little too much for my head. I lit up a cigarette and was soon given a cup of coffee. I don't know who was my benefactor, I just recall it was just thrust into my hand. My brother soon came out of the tent, his hair messy and covered in dog slobber. He sat down next to me on a log and started sipping a cup of coffee as he stared into space. It was about two minutes before he looked in his hand.

"Wait. Where did I get coffee?" he asked. The girls laughed.

Those darling Nordic angels made us breakfast since we were too hungover to do anything else. With greasy food in our stomachs, our mood began to improve. The girls went off to do various cleanup from the feast the night before, while Szandor and I sat in front of the smoking embers of the fire trying to focus our brains. Szandor complained he was out of his hangover cure. Probably half an hour later I was feeling well enough to stand up.

"Good timing!" said Tor. His good mood was like bright sunlight and I almost wanted to shield my eyes. "I'd love to have you two stay and help, but you are going back to Avalon, yes?"

"Yeah, sometime today," I said. I looked over to Szandor for agreement, but it didn't matter. He wasn't the one who was driving. I could load him in the back of the van half unconscious if I needed to.

Tor nodded appraisingly and rubbed his beard. "So... I think now is a good time for you to go."

I cocked my head, my thoughts coming slow. "Are... are you kicking us out?"

Tor laughed. "No, no! It's just that I am about to start skinning the Troll. It's downwind, but you still get the smell over here, yes? The girls are used to it, but you two... after all the drinking..."

You're worried about us puking all over your campsite
, I realized. Well, they could clean that up, but he was concerned about us getting sick. A fair point, really.

"Oh yeah," I said. "I completely understand. We'll get going. Szandor, take apart the tent!"

"Fuck you," he said groggily. He didn't move at all. I hauled his ass up and we gathered our gear.

A short while later after saying our goodbyes and separating the dogs from Szandor, we were in the van pulling out of the woods and onto a real road. It felt like a long time since we had seen asphalt or civilization. I don't think either of us had ever even slept in a tent before this, much less been out of New Avalon for more than a few days. It was good to be heading home, even if that meant the start of an even bigger job.

We were in our van which I had dubbed the Pork Chop Express. It was brown with a red A-Team stripe. What can I say? I like old movies and TV shows.

The van is pretty essential to our life as monster hunters. It carries our weapons, our equipment, and our cleanup supplies. It's carrying a lot of homemade weaponry, lethal objects donated to us or bought via the internet. Much of the van's contents are legally questionable. I don't think we have anything outright illegal, but any cop that searched our van would probably wonder if we're serial killers. Because of that, I drive the van very conservatively, especially outside of our home city of New Avalon.

So it was about two hours home. Szandor leaned against the passenger side window, his face smushed up against the glass. He was conscious enough to answer me when I said things, but he was mostly out of it. I was silent. It began to rain again on the way home, the day time sky becoming gray. I played a few Weezer albums on our way. With Szandor out of it, my only companion was Lola Mandragora, the hula girl I have glued to the dash. She's not good conversation, but her slowly gyrating hips always fit the music. As we were driving slow on unfamiliar roads in the rain to get home after a long trip away, she was gyrating slowly, well-matched to Weezer's
Island in the Sun
.

I had a long time to think on that drive. The first half of it I thought about the past. For all my talk, I wasn't in as carefree a mood as I always had been. Something was weighing on my mind. Something was wrong. I fully admit that something had been wrong for a long time, but I was not facing it. I had made a mistake in the past and I hadn't addressed it. I let her go. And then I threw myself into a succession of relationships, hoping to ignore the facts. For a while I could ignore it, but lately my relationships were shorter and shorter as it became apparent much more quickly each time they were all wrong. I'm not one to complain or put my problems in front of others. But in that lonely car ride back to Avalon, my brother groggy and the music familiar, it was just my thoughts and me. And my thoughts decided it was time to think about everything that was wrong. My thoughts were assholes.

Eventually it was too much and I pushed my mind away from it. I started thinking about the future. Szandor and I were both curious about what lay ahead. We had been lured with the promises of a hunt unlike any other. We had stayed up and talked about it more than a few times in our tent during training. We were excited and nervous.

We didn't just decide to get troll hunting training. Oh, Tor had been offering for a while, but that's not what made us take it. No, something big was brewing, something our friends Meat and Paulie kept hinting out. But others had concerns with our abilities, since we were young and self trained. Tor was to be an arbiter for our skill. He didn't know it, he was just training us. But others had decided if Tor was confident in our ability to kill trolls, then we had proven ourselves. That's why we took the trip up to the wilds and learned to squat in the mud to kill a type of monster we'd probably never see in the city.

Assuming we were offered the chance, our next prey was going to be something unlike anything almost any hunter went after. It was a once in a lifetime monster that many had given their own lives and lifetimes trying to kill. We already had a theory what it was, because Szandor and I had accidentally run across it and lived. My brother and I were the first hunters to see this creature in many years.

We had somehow survived an encounter with Jabberwock Jack.

Jawbreaker

I'd like to say that we saw Jabberwock Jack on a regular job, but it wasn't one of our typical assignments. For once, we weren't killing monsters. This job wasn't even about monsters. We were there for insurance - in case monsters did show up - but even more surprisingly, we were hired for our knowledge. This was an escort job.

If you read Szandor's story, you heard about how we saw a strange armor made of Avalon Brass deep in the train tunnels beneath New Avalon. Ghouls seemed to be worshipping it, something that was unheard of and sort of insane, and then things got crazier. The important part is that we saw the armor, took a picture, and then posted it to our website... mostly because something like that is too weird to not share with people, even if we didn't have any idea what the armor was.

This eventually lead to an email that came in via the website. Some weird guy named Dane Monday wanted to hire us to take him and his sidekick down to see the armor. Normally we're just around to help people and kill monsters, but occasionally we take other work. Since we were the only ones who knew where the armor actually was and this guy was willing to pay just for us to lead him to the place it was and make sure him and his associate didn't die, it made sense to take the job. It seemed like easy money.

The money was actually good, though we didn't get it immediately. Instead of a fee, this guy said he could give us something better. It was a weird gadget that he said was "like a police scanner, but better." We were dubious at first. It didn't look like any police scanner I knew; we couldn't even figure out how it worked. Clueless, we took it to our friend Paulie, who knows far more than us about surveillance gear and police scanners. He looked at the device with curiosity for a few minutes, plugged it into one of his computers, then clicked away for another minute. I was watching him idly, so I saw the exact moment his eyes suddenly bugged out.

"I'll give you five thousand dollars cash for this right now," said Paulie, his face still shocked.

"What?" said Szandor with surprise.

"Deal," I said. I quickly shook Paulie's hand before he could change his mind.

On the way out, Szandor suggested we might have gotten more, but I responded that we shouldn't fleece our friends. I also reminded him that five thousand dollars was considerably more than we thought we could get. As it was, it meant neither of us really had to work for month or two. Considering Szandor still hadn't gotten another job after getting fired, that was particularly appealing. Just the week before this he had stopped sleeping on my couch and gotten a small apartment based on the odd jobs he was doing. I didn't want his money to dry up and for him to land back on my couch. It was also this money which allowed us to head up to see Tor and get trained. And ultimately it allowed us the time to join the hunt for Jabberwock Jack. So all in all, this escort job was very profitable, even if it was far more dangerous than expected.

We led Dane Monday down into the depths of New Avalon. As I said, he was a strange guy. He loved to talk and drink coffee - he had even brought some down into the tunnels. He had a travel mug of coffee on his belt like some might have a gun in a holster. He slurped his coffee periodically for most of the first hour and then when it was gone he acted disappointed that he hadn't had the foresight to bring more.

I couldn't tell if he was brave or insane. We recounted the ghoul ritual and how there could possibly be a few dozen man-eating creatures in the area, as well as the normal Avalon underground compliment of zombies and beasties, but he was completely unconcerned. He wasn't even surprised! Instead, he ignored any mention of monsters and was just extremely excited to see the armor and find out what it was. I wondered first if he was just crazy. As he talked, I got the feeling he knew a lot of things about a variety of subjects, so I began to think he was just some mad scientist who wasn't very practical or conscious of the world. Whether this was true or not, we just knew we needed to get him to the armor and keep him and his assistant alive.

His assistant was a woman about our age named Abby Connors. Redheaded and pretty, she displayed the appropriate unease I expected for an underground expedition into monster territory. Unfortunately for her, Szandor kept trying to hit on her. He kept failing to pick up on the Not Interested vibe, a one whose vintage I recognized as the I Have A Boyfriend variety. She also seemed to have a great interest in documenting the expedition because she carried a camera with her. After this trip, I mentioned her to Paulie, who not only recognized her name, but was impressed that we had met her. Supposedly she had a Youtube channel or something popular with conspiracy theorists and Avalon truthers.

Since they were civilians, we gave them the whole preamble about danger right before we went down into the tunnel system. I should have known something was up when they shared a look with each other and smiled. "We're not worried about danger," said Dane. They even had their own gas masks. We clipped LED lights on them - basically a small disc of light that provided short range light, enough at least for your personal space. We all also carried flashlights. Dane and Abby didn't carry weapons - that was the exclusive realm of my brother and I. Szandor had one of his beloved lead pipes and a crowbar in his pack. I carried my katana, a few flares, and a combat knife. We were ready for the typical residents of the underground - zombies, ghouls, maybe some snakes.