Larry Correia - Monster Hunter Alpha

Nikolai’s strange voice roared, his hands curling into fists, teeth visible, every vein in his neck standing out, as he fought… something. “You have no room to talk!” The first Nikolai shouted. “You killed her! She was innocent, defenseless!”

“I’ve killed a mess of folks. You’re gonna need to be more specific.”

“Lila!” Nikolai was enraged. Bloody spit flew from his lips. “You murdered her. You murdered my wife.”

Earl paused, scowling. “I’m drawing a blank.”

Nikolai screamed as he leapt.

“I told you we’d have a good fight,” the Alpha said. The witch glowered at him, then went back to watching the battle. She didn’t like being proven wrong.

He was pleased to see that he’d made the right choice. Harbinger and Petrov were both unbelievably fearsome while still in human form. He could only imagine what they would do in their purified state. Certainly, he could defeat either of them in a challenge, but he was beyond such things. No slave to the old ways, he would set his own path, forge a new way for all of their kind. Harbinger’s foolish rules dictated that they were only men, nothing better, just different, and that they needed to live in humanity’s bloated shadow. On the other hand, at least Petrov understood that they were superior beings, super predators, but even then, he was content to remain a mere tool for human ideologies and lacked the imagination to do what needed to be done. Petrov had a slave’s mentality. Neither of them had the vision necessary to lead their kind into the future.

His superior senses told him that many humans were coming out of their homes. They’d heard Petrov’s explosion. Some of them had realized that they were under attack and were spreading the word. The streets were coming alive. His children were confused. The magical storm had reached an unbelievable intensity. But none of that mattered. The important thing was which of the mighty werewolves below would be the one whose soul would power his ascension.

It was a perfect struggle. Nature had selected these two as the ultimate predators in their sphere. One would die. One would live to feed his hunger. Which would fuel his metamorphosis? The excitement was unbearable.

The witch pointed at the street below with her flesh hand. “We have visitors.”

A black SUV was sliding into the parking lot of the Value Sense. The driver was clueless in the snow, and they gently collided with a light pole. The doors opened and five heavily armed humans got out. “MCB?” he asked. There should have been no way that they could have arrived through the storm. In fact, they wouldn’t even know about the slaughter of Copper Lake until morning.

“Worse,” the witch muttered. “Hunters.” She held a very special hatred for monster hunters.

“Harbinger’s men?” That seemed odd. His intelligence had said that Harbinger surely would have come alone. He would never involve his human pack in werewolf business.

“No…not even close. I’d know if they were. MHI has a certain… swagger. Nothing would make me happier than the arrival of MHI,” the witch grumbled as she extricated herself from the thick snow of the roof. “Enjoy your show. I’ll handle these intruders.” She made a clicking noise, and one of her diggers stepped forward, ready to serve. Eight feet of armored monstrosity bowed before its witch. This time she pointed with her artificial hand. The steel gauntlet seemed disproportionately large sticking out from the sleeve of her fur coat. “Destroy those humans.”

The massive digger leapt from the roof and fell silently to the ground two stories below. The Alpha nodded approvingly. The unnatural things were nothing if not efficient. It would eradicate those vermin. His attention returned to the grocery just as an ear-splitting howl rose into the night. The main event had just begun. “Beautiful.”

“Look what you did to my Caddy!” Horst shuffled through the three feet of freshly accumulated snow to where the Escalade’s front bumper was crunched into the light pole. It actually didn’t look too bad, but Lins had screwed up. Sure, it was hard to drive through slush, but that was no excuse for scratching his ride. “Is that a dent? That’s a dent. That’s coming out of your pay, moron.”

Lins was livid as he got out. “Screw you, Ryan. What do you expect in a blizzard?”

“Shoulda let me drive,” Jo Ann said. “I’m at least-”

The sound that cut her off pierced all of the Briarwood team to their cores. It started as the cry of a man, filled with anger and pain, only impossibly loud, but as it went on the cry changed, becoming deeper, fiercer, seeming to linger far after any mortal lungs would have run out of breath, until it slowly mutated into a full-on animal howl. A primal, terrible cry, instinctively more terrifying than anything that could ever emanate from a natural creature. The storm had frozen Horst’s skin, but that howl froze his blood.

The staff of Briarwood Eradication Services was actually quiet for once. Horst looked to his employees. Every one of them except for Loco was staring back at him with wide eyes. Their big man just grunted and went back to pulling his machine-gun out of the Caddy, probably too dumb to be scared.

“I think I just pissed myself,” Kelley said.

Jo Ann turned toward the grocery store. “What the hell was that?”

That was an actual monster. The other things they’d run into were nothing compared to that. The fear ran deep. It wasn’t any sort of conscious, logical thought. It was deeper, coming from the lowest part of his brain, warning him that they needed to get away before that awful thing consumed them all. Horst forced himself to speak, and tried to sound as confident as possible. “That’s the sound of money, baby.”

Then there was a second howl, even louder than the first, and somehow Horst instinctively knew that this was a different werewolf. Lins jumped. “There’s two of them? You didn’t say nothing about two of them!”

They were chickening out. “Shut up!” he shouted. “Everybody shut your stupid mouths.”

“This isn’t nothing like those zombies we killed,” Kelley exclaimed. “I’m outta here.”

Jo Ann and Lins were babbling, too, as the three of them started getting back in the Caddy. His dreams were falling apart right in front of his eyes. His people were scared senseless. None of them were cowards, but they hadn’t been expecting this. That howl was just wrong, and the answering one was even worse. He understood now that Stark had been telling the truth. This wasn’t a normal werewolf; that thing in there was ancient, and therefore worth a huge PUFF bounty. They couldn’t back out now. There was a reason the government had to pay such stupidly large bounties for this level of creature, because no sane person would willingly go looking for one.

Somehow, Horst found his courage. He was the leader of an elite company of monster hunters. If he walked away, it would be like all those stuck-up MHI chumps would be laughing at him. Ryan Horst had vowed that he was never going to be a nobody again.

He needed to do something quick. He thought back to his brief time with MHI. What would they have done? Those bozos were always motivated. What would Earl Harbinger have done? He would have gotten his crew fired up. I can do that. Horst reached into his coat, unsnapped his shoulder holster, and drew his FN 5.7 pistol. He hoisted it into the air and yanked the trigger.

The sudden bang got their attention. Horst realized how stupid that had been as soon as he’d done it, because the insides of his right ear suddenly felt like someone had hit it with a hammer. “Listen up!” he bellowed at the top of his lungs, waving his gun toward the giant hole in the grocery store. “This is what you signed up for. Pull yourselves together, damn it. Each one of those hairy bastards in there is worth at least fifty large. Fifty large! We came all this way to kill these things. We got guns. We got silver bullets. What do they got? Teeth? Shit. They got nothing! I am not going home until I got one of these bastards as a rug. You hear me? We’re Briarwood, and we’ve come up here to show these animals who’s boss.”