Larry Correia - Monster Hunter Alpha

He even sounded like he was from Alabama, nothing overt, but the accent was there. Heather kept her tone firm. “Yes, you were. Are there any drugs or weapons in the vehicle you need to inform me about?”

“Negative, ma’am.”

“License and proof of insurance, please. Did you even see that Stop sign you just ran?”

The man sighed. “No, ma’am.” His hat had a green happy face with horns on it. Probably some Alabama sports team she’d never heard of, but the only sport she ever watched was hockey, and she doubted very much that Alabama had hockey. After a moment of rummaging through the center console, he passed over the paperwork and his license. “I suppose I was a bit distracted.”

“Well, Mr.”-she glanced at the license-“Harbinger, you need to slow it down and pay more attention.” Thanksgiving had only been a couple of days ago. People were still eating leftover turkey. Since she knew just about everyone in the county, she probably knew whom he’d been visiting. “What brings you to Copper Lake?”

He had a real strange look on his face when he responded. “I’m passin’ through. Never seen this part of the country before.”

“Uh-huh…Wait here.” Heather returned to her car to run the stupid tourist’s license.

“Damn it,” Earl muttered to himself after the lady cop sauntered off. He’d been driving around, sniffing the air, trying to pick up a trail. The falling snow was damping the multiple scents, plus the wolfsbane in his pockets wasn’t making it any easier to get a fix. He’d let himself get distracted.

But one thing was for sure… He watched the cop in his mirror. She was certainly human, but she had the smell of werewolves on her. One was stronger but unfamiliar, but the other…She’d been near Nikolai earlier. It was really faint, but it was there. He hadn’t touched her-it would have been stronger then-but he’d been close recently. The scent brought back memories. It felt like there should have been a flood of memories, but because of Rocky, it was only a trickle and a sense of absence, loss, and a burning desire to tear Nikolai’s throat out.

He watched the cop car in the mirror until snow covered the glass. Not a bad-looking woman as far as he could tell with her so bundled up against the cold. He did have to chuckle at the stupid question about if there were any drugs or guns in the vehicle. Were criminals dumb enough to actually answer that truthfully? Earl had brought plenty of both. Out of view under the camper shell he had enough weapons to overthrow a Third-World nation and narcotics sufficient to knock out an elephant. The tranquilizers were in case he was out around the full moon and couldn’t make it into the time-locked steel cage that took up half the truck’s bed. Neither option was as nice as his cell back at the compound, but the portable cage beat the hangover from the sedatives.

The cop came back a minute later and handed over his license and a yellow carbon copy that read violation in big black letters across the top. “So much for getting off with a warning.”

Her uniform coat was a giant puffy green monstrosity with an embroidered yellow badge. A black knit cap hid her hair, and her cheeks were rosy from the cold. She was already coated in falling snow. “I only cited you for the stop sign. You’re lucky you caught me in a good mood. I can throw the speeding on there too if you want. Twenty over is a pretty hefty fine,” she stated flatly. The cop had fine features, a nose that was a little too big to be perfect, green eyes, and the hair that had strayed out from under the cap was a dark red. He decided that she could be pretty if she actually smiled, but she didn’t strike him as the smiling type. Human scents always told a story. She wore the smell of workaholic stress, was healthy despite a lack of sleep, lived alone, had a dog, and had eaten Oreos and Diet Mountain Dew for dinner.

Asking where she’d bumped into a former KGB assassin was out of the question. Nikolai could be masquerading as anyone. By most standards, Nikolai spoke better English than Earl did. “You get many strangers in these parts?” he asked.

“Not usually, until it’s good snowmobile weather, but lately we seem to be swimming in them.”

“Really…What for?” Where did you meet him?

But apparently she wasn’t the small-town type that liked to gossip about strangers. The cop just shrugged. “Just slow it down. You’d better be more careful. Your behavior could hurt somebody.”

That was the general idea. But he just nodded politely. Knowing where she’d met his enemy could be a real advantage, so he tried one last time before she had a chance to walk away. “What do you say I buy you some dinner and you tell me more about your lovely town?”

She paused, incredulous. “You realize that never works, right?” Then the deputy surprised him with the barest hint of a wry smile. “And you’re not my type. Good night, sir.”

“Type?” Earl muttered to himself after she was gone. “Hell, girl. I ain’t your species…” Earl stuck the new ticket in the center console with the others. Owen got mad when he didn’t save his receipts. Brushing the snow off the mirror, he watched her walk back to the cop car. At least she made those uniform pants look good. Must work out a lot. He waited for her to drive away and even waved as she went by before putting it in gear and heading back to the main street.

The last hour had been spent getting a feel for the area, but now he was starving, and Earl wasn’t inclined to hunt down his nemesis on an empty stomach. Plus, he wanted to talk to more of the residents. There were definitely strange things going down in Copper Lake. The presence of multiple werewolves suggested that Nikolai was up to something unexpected.

The Russian had always been like Earl, a loner. It wasn’t like him to run with a pack. Task-force intelligence had believed that Nikolai had gone so far as to refuse to create others of his kind for his controllers. Stalin had been the last leader that Nikolai had held enough respect for to bow to that command. Not that having fewer werewolves was a particular loss for the Soviet war machine, since the vast majority of them turned out just as dangerous to friend as to foe.

Kirk Conover had always felt that Nikolai had avoided creating others because he liked being special, being the only werewolf that the KGB could count on. Earl had known it was because Nikolai simply hadn’t wanted the competition. It had been a long time since the USSR had collapsed and Nikolai had gone missing, but Earl had just assumed that some things wouldn’t have changed. It smelled like he had been mistaken.

There was an open-late diner down the road a short distance from the hospital. It looked like it had been around for a while, the kind of small-town place where crusty old locals would sit and smoke and talk to whoever was willing to listen about anything that was new or out of place. It was exactly the kind of establishment where a Hunter could grab a cold beer and a hot steak, shoot the bull, leave a huge tip, and get some intel on what was actually going on. In other words, it was Earl’s kind of place.

Which was probably why the sight of the Suburban with the government plates in the parking lot immediately made him mad. Earl swore to himself as he parked the MHI truck behind the black vehicle. It might have been from some innocuous federal agency, but the number of extra antennas and dark window tint in a town teeming with werewolves just screamed Monster Control Bureau. “Well, ain’t that my luck?”

If the Feds were here because they knew about Nikolai, they’d surely screw it up. The Russian would go to ground and disappear for another decade. Earl took his time deciding on a course of action. He could get back on the road and drive around looking for werewolves or he could go inside and try to listen in on the Feds. Odds were that it wouldn’t be anyone who’d recognize him, and if that were the case, he might actually be able to overhear something useful from them. His sense of hearing was better than a normal man’s, so it was worth a shot.