Fright Squad Read online

  Fright Squad

  #1

  Flint Maxwell

  Copyright © 2018 by Flint Maxwell

  Cover Design © 2018 by Carmen Rodriguez

  All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except as permitted by U.S. copyright law. For permissions email: [email protected]

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  The author greatly appreciates you taking the time to read his work.

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  For my family

  Friends. They really know how to knock you off your pedestal, don’t they?

  Robert McCammon, Boy’s Life

  1

  Welcome to the Freakshow

  I am a monster hunter.

  My name is Abraham Crowley. Until pretty recently, I was a part of BEAST—which stands for the Bureau of Everyday Abomination Slayers and Trappers. Mostly everyone at BEAST is a monster hunter, too.

  Secret monster hunter.

  I know, I just blew your mind.

  You’re probably asking why are there monster hunters if monsters aren’t real?

  To which I’ll answer with: Allow me to blow your mind further.

  Monsters are real. Yes. As real as you and me and the sky above.

  That thing in your closet watching you every night while you’re sleeping? That’s not your imagination. The unholy growling you can sometimes hear in the woods? That’s not a bear or any other animal. That demented clown you see through the sewer grates offering you a balloon? Well, that’s probably just a homeless guy who’s lost his mind. Still, better not get too close. You know…just in case.

  My point is: Monsters. Are. Real. And without BEAST, this world would probably suck a lot more than it already does for the average joe.

  Let me be honest with you. I’m not the best monster hunter out there. That title belongs to someone else but I get by. Should I admit that I get by in a profession that often comes down to life or death? Probably not, but, you know, honesty.

  A year ago, I was in the Academy, working my way up. As certain circumstances dictated, I was fast tracked to a low-level position in the Northeastern Ohio Division of BEAST (NOD). I’m twenty years old. This was almost unheard of. Like I said, certain circumstances helped me out. The biggest of those being my bloodline. My father was a big shot in BEAST. Sadly, he died fifteen years ago when I was five. It about wrecked my mom. She’s never been a fan of the monster-hunting profession.

  I don’t blame her. It’s a rough life sometimes, especially when things start getting really crazy. Example: The Penis-Tentacle. Don’t worry, you’ll hear about that unfortunate incident soon enough.

  Anyway, I don’t remember my father much, but the memories I do have of him are good. I share one of those memories in this book later on. It probably has no point in this story but it’s there, mostly for myself.

  Have no fear. This isn’t one of those sad, melodramatic stories you’d find your grandmother watching on Lifetime with a box of tissues nearby. No, this is an awesome account of monster-hunting badassness. And friendship. And sometimes…penis-tentacles. So, allow me to get back on track:

  Those of us at BEAST don’t drive around in a conspicuously painted van with a talking dog solving mysteries and unmasking bad guys. You won’t see us unmask anyone. There are no masks. Usually. Vampires, werewolves, ghosts, goblins, demons, mummies, banshees, Bigfoot (or is the plural form Bigfeet?), abominable snowmen, centaurs, minotaurs, ghouls, zombies—whatever—are scary enough.

  Low-level jobs at BEAST mostly consist of my two best friends, Maddie and Zack, and myself driving around in a PT Cruiser, trying (unsuccessfully) to look cool while hitting up all of the hot zones monsters target civilians at—though there are far worse jobs that that. Did someone say werewolf orgy clean-up crew? Yeah…that’s a thing. Luckily, you won’t see it in this story. But you will see a PT Cruiser.

  And I was in that PT Cruiser the night things turned for the worst.

  Or best.

  Life’s all about perspective.

  Anyway. In a PT Cruiser. That is where this story begins. So, without further ado, allow me to tell it.

  Zack owned the Cruiser. He was driving that night. He pretty much always did because no matter what kind of vehicle he operated, his skills made it look like he was behind the wheel of a Indy 500 race car.

  Zackary Murphy and Madilyn Pepper were my partners. Zack stood about five and a half feet off the ground, from soles to sandy-hair. He had a jaw like a toolbox, and for some reason he always wore sunglasses.

  Madilyn—Maddie for short—had her black hair back in the tightest ponytail you’d ever seen. She’d kick your ass and then talk to you about her favorite poets afterwards. Her beauty knew no bounds, as the romantics liked to say, but her and I would never happen. She’s like a sister to me.

  I’ve known Zack and Maddie ever since I was in the Academy. They were a year away from graduating when I began training. Now we work together. They didn’t like me much at first because of the “special treatment” they thought I was given, but they eventually warmed up enough for us to become best friends.

  So anyway, on that night Zack was driving.

  Maddie was in the front passenger’s seat. I sat in the back holding my modified crossbow. It was modified to shoot wooden stakes by an old cowboy at HQ we called Storm. The wooden stakes were the kind you killed vampires with.

  “We’re here,” Zack said. He slowed the Cruiser to a stop. The brakes squealed. The sign in front of the winding road said Lover’s Pass. All the high schoolers called it Fucker’s Pass, and everyone in BEAST called it Sucker’s Pass on account of the vampires that liked to hang out in the surrounding trees with the hopes of catching a straggling future victim.

  “Yep,” Maddie said. “I hate this place.”

  “Beats cleaning up werewolf…bodily fluids,” I said.

  “Amen,” Maddie replied.

  Zack turned around and faced me. His glasses made him look like a bug. A cool bug.

  “You ready?” he asked me.

  I nodded.

  “Not very talkative tonight, Abraham,” he said, turning back around. His eyes flashed in the rearview mirror as he pulled his sunglasses down. “Usually we can’t get you to shut the hell up.”

  I shrugged. “Just enjoying the night.”

  A lie. Patrol nights were never nights of enjoyment.

  “Not for long,” Maddie said. “Every weekend.” She shook her head. “You think they’d learn, you know? Like, maybe go somewhere else.”

  “Not the smartest creatures, those vampires,” Zack said.

  I wouldn’t go that far. Vampirism isn’t all that different from humanism. You got your garden variety idiots, you got your vampires of normal intelligence, and then you got your smart/genius vamps. It’s just the same as the human race, except for the blood sucking and immortality and stuff. But just like humans, there’s more vampires lacking basic intelligence than there are geniuses.

  “Let’s just get this over with,” Maddie said.

  “Let’s” Zack agreed. He turned up the dark road. The Cruiser climbed and wound around the passage. Trees leaned over the path, their bare branches jagged and gnarled, like the claws of the very creatures we’d been sworn to kill.

  At the end of the dirt road was a parking lot. The headlights swept over the wheel ru
ts embedded into the gravel. Follow those ruts and you’d see the few cars parked crookedly by the shaky hands of newly licensed drivers.

  Lover’s Pass was the primo hookup spot for the high schoolers and college kids who still wore their letterman jackets. I smelled the pot smoke and booze through the rolled up windows. The hormones, too—if one can even smell such a thing…

  Zack backed into a spot at the tree line. In front of us were the vehicles and a scenic view of the sleepy little Ohio town called Northington. I counted three cars. Northington High’s Homecoming dance was still going on. These were the students too cool to show up on time and too cool to stay until that last slow dance.

  Soon, I knew, there would be more. We’d spend all night telling them to go somewhere else with a made-up story about live wires nearby or a gas leak. I couldn’t remember which one we had agreed on. That probably wasn’t good.

  “Grab the badges,” Zack said to me. “The weapons, too.”

  I handed Maddie and Zack each a badge and a thick wooden stake, sharpened to an almost invisible point. Including those, we each had a crucifix and vials of holy water. This was your standard fare BEAST weaponry for a patrol job that involved vampires.

  Almost every time BEAST sent out agents to Lover’s Pass, which was almost every weekend, no one ever saw any action. Patrol wasn’t a job you’d expect a lot of action from. Those more dangerous tasks were saved for the vets—the agents who’d proven themselves.

  Maddie, Zack, and myself had not done that yet.

  With my father being who he was, I always felt like I was living beneath his shadow. My dad was not just a vet, he was the vet. He had a million stories, made the job sound like it was the coolest thing on planet earth, but like any good story, he skipped the boring parts, parts like climbing up in rank by doing vamp patrol at Lover’s Pass or cleaning up the aftermath of a zombie massacre.

  I slipped the badge around my neck. They were fake, given to us at HQ, but they looked real enough to me. To a stoned or drunk high schooler? They’d go running for the hills. No one ever questioned a cop when they were up to no good—not even a fake cop.

  “I’ll take the right. Maddie, you got the middle. And Abe, you take the left,” Zack said. With the sunglasses still on his face and the badge reflecting moonlight around his neck, Zack kind of did look like some sort of law enforcement. FBI, maybe. Maddie and I didn’t. I was just starting to grow a beard, hoping that would help, but at the moment it was thin and spotty. Maddie redid her ponytail even tighter and now she looked like law enforcement, too.

  I stared out at the car on the left. It was the farthest one, close to the shadows cast by the trees. Somehow I always got the shit-end of the stick. Weird noises coming from that spooky basement? Abe, check it out. The meat locker full of dead bodies missing their faces? All you, Abe!

  That was okay, though. Not only did I want to prove to others I was monster-hunter material, maybe even monster-master material, I wanted to prove it to myself.

  We closed the car doors quietly and nodded to each other. The gravel crunched beneath our soles. Every now and then, I stepped on a crushed beer or soda can, and accidentally kicked an empty bottle of cheap gas station vodka. None of the cars’ occupants noticed.

  The car, I saw as I came upon it, was pretty nice—a red BMW.

  Music played from the speakers. My eyes saw two combined shadows moving around inside.

  I always felt weird doing this, like an intruder or something. So I didn’t put my face against the glass and embarrass the people. I figured they’d be embarrassed enough.

  Instead, I flashed my badge in clear view and said, “Okay, fun’s over, folks. You don’t have to go home, but you can’t stay here.”

  To my right, Maddie had just sent her first group of delinquents packing. One of the boys in the backseat leaned out of the window and shouted, “Fuck you, pigs!”

  I gave him a friendly wave as if he had said “Thank you, friends!” instead. He looked at me like he had just sucked on a lemon. The wind had been taken right out of his sail.

  Good.

  Unfortunately, I didn’t think that would work with the BMW in front of me.

  The car rocked back and forth and the windows had fogged over. I cringed at the idea of breaking this little escapade up.

  I knocked on the back window a little harder this time.

  “All right, fun’s over, folks. Go home, really,” I said louder.

  No answer. The car kept rocking.

  I shook my head.

  The odd thing was that no sounds came from the inside of the car. Now I pressed my fake badge up against the glass, hoping that would do the trick.

  It didn’t.

  I leaned in and knocked hard enough to probably break the window if I had kept it up.

  Fortunately for the glass and unfortunately for me I started smelling something sick. A pungent smell that knifed through my nostrils straight down into my stomach. I gagged. It smelled like roadkill and voided bowels.

  Panic flooded my system. I wasn’t expecting this. It had caught me off-guard when it shouldn’t have. The vampires usually just hung out, they never fed in such a open place.

  A hand smacked the glass, leaving long finger-streaks of blood in its wake.

  “Oh, shit,” I said. “Not good, not good at all.”

  2

  Never Trust a Horny Vampire

  “We got a biter!” I yelled.

  “Vamp? No way!” Zack yelled back. He had just directed a convertible out of the park.

  “No, a freaking bear!” I shouted. “Of course it’s a vamp!”

  Inside of the car, someone wheezed, “Hellllllp!”

  I grabbed the door handle, yanked. It was locked. Damn it. The streaks of blood on the window zigzagged now. I couldn’t see the extent of the damage through the foggy glass.

  Maddie reached the other side of the car.

  “I’m gonna break the window,” I said. Zack reached Maddie. He had his stake out.

  I pulled mine out, too. With the blunt end, I rammed it into the window.

  It didn’t break, but sent a painful vibration up my arm that reminded me of hitting a fastball with an aluminum bat. I almost dropped the stake.

  Didn’t.

  Pushing the pain aside, I swung again. This time the glass cracked, spiderweb-like lines racing the length of the window. The next blow shattered it in a burst of glittering shards.

  The vampire hissed from inside.

  “Yeah, nice to see you, too,” I said.

  The smell hit me in a terrible wave, even worse than before. No joke, it had almost knocked me on my ass. That was one thing the Academy hadn’t prepared us for—the smell. Luckily, I stayed on my feet.

  Then, possibly against my better judgment, I reached a hand through the broken window. The feeling that came over me was like sticking your head in an alligator’s open mouth, knowing you’re seconds away from having the beast’s massive jaws clamping down on you, ending it all. But I had to pull the lock if I wanted Maddie and Zack’s help, unless they wanted to try to break the windows, too, which would just waste time. If we had any chance at saving the victim we had to act fast.

  So I opted for unlocking the doors.

  It was then that I really got a good look at what we were dealing with.

  The boy in the seat seemed frozen to the cheap faux leather. He was as pale as a sheet of computer paper except for the rivulets of blood pulsing from the wound in his neck. His eyes were glassy now. He was dead. We were too late to save him, but we weren’t too late to save the others this very vampire might attack tonight.

  Then the horror in the backseat pried my look away from the boy. There, leaning forward, its face wearing a mask of blood, was a she-vampire. I only say she-vampire to help you relate to this creature. She-vamps weren’t female in the same sense that humans were. Before the thing in the backseat had been turned to a vampire, it was a woman, yes, but once the blood ran cold and she wasn’t able to
see her reflection in mirrors anymore, the concept of gender pretty much went out the reflection-less window.

  Vamps only had one goal: Feed. Not reproduce.

  So, though this thing might’ve been wearing a homecoming dress and makeup and hairspray and mousse, and it might’ve once looked like a girl that had coaxed the tuxedo-clad victim into the BMW for a good time, it didn’t look like that anymore.

  “Kill it!” Zack was saying.

  Obviously, I thought. I’m certainly not going to buy it a drink.

  The vampire looked up at me with its golden eyes, its pupils black pinpricks in the sea of yellow, and it seemed to stare into my very soul. Now it pulled away from the bloody gash in the boy’s neck as it came to terms with the fact its feeding frenzy had been interrupted—by a group of monster hunters, no less.

  Staring back at the thing, I was ready to end its immortal life.

  I lunged forward with the stake, aimed right where the she-vamp’s rotten heart lay in its chest, driving with all of my strength.

  But at the last possible second, a thick ripping sound filled the air and one of the vampire’s wings sucker punched me, sending me sprawled out on my ass in the gravel parking lot. It hurt pretty bad. I gasped for breath and vowed to always wear a protective cup for future patrol jobs—a vow I eventually forgot about as I heard Maddie let out an “Ooof.”

  The vamp’s other wing had hit her.

  “I got it!” Zack yelled. As soon as he yelled, I saw his body careening through the air. After he hit the parking lot, I looked up and saw the vampire had decided it didn’t feel like getting staked tonight. Its wings had shot out from its back. Long, leathery bat wings as big as a hang glider when measured together. They hung out of the car, flapped, and beat at the stinking air. The she-vamp was huge. If it wanted to get out of the BMW it would have to find another way.