Monster Hunter Legion-eARC (32 page)

I swiped the card Mitch had given me that allowed access to restricted areas, then pushed the button for the roof. Deep in thought, I leaned against the back of the elevator car and thought about what I was going to say to Julie. There were surely better ways to find out you were pregnant than during a siege from an incorporeal nightmare creature.
How would she react? Happy at first, then terrified, then what?
The doors slid closed.

The elevator began going
down
.

I reached out and pushed the roof button again. It wouldn’t stay lit.

It was dropping so quickly that my stomach floated up into my lungs. This elevator wasn’t fucking around. There was a digital display above the door, and it counted down L3, L2, L1, B3, B2, B1 in under four seconds, then it was blank and I was still going down. There was an emergency stop button. It didn’t do anything. I hit the fire alarm. Nothing happened. “Crap.” There was an emergency phone. I yanked the panel open and pulled the phone out, hoping to contact Mitch, but it was dead. The elevator was still descending.

There was a stab of fear. Had I just reentered the nightmare world?

There had to be a way to stop this thing. There had to be a trap door in the elevator car’s roof, but as soon as I unslung Abomination, a voice came through a speaker in the wall. “Please remain calm, Mr. Pitt. Your excitable nature has already caused you to accrue significant charges since you began your stay here. Damaging one of my elevator cars would be exceedingly expensive.” The voice was deep and commanding. “Please put your firearm away.”

“Who are you?”

“I am the owner of this establishment as well as several other hotel-casino facilities in the Las Vegas metropolitan area. I am the primary sponsor and organizer of the First Annual International Conference of Monster Hunting Professionals. Most importantly, I am your host.”

I lowered my shotgun. “You’re the one they call Management?”

“That is I. You see, I normally operate through a group of intermediaries. Only a handful of my employees have ever met me in person. I do not take a hands-on approach very often. The duty of a good executive is to pick good managers, as they are my public face. Because of this, my existence has taken on something of an air of mystery, a situation which I do not find uncomfortable. I believe that a little fear improves employee productivity. Thus, you may call me Management for your convenience. That name will do as well as any.”

The elevator was still cranking along. I had no idea how deep below the surface I had to be by now. Then the elevator stopped so suddenly that my knees clicked and I had to grab onto the handrails. The door slid smoothly open to reveal a…
mine shaft?
The walls were bare stone, roughly chipped into a rectangular passage, and reinforced every ten feet by a crisscrossing steel beams. Naked lightbulbs were affixed to the ceiling, following a single electrical cable. The tunnel descended into the unknown.

I pushed the roof button repeatedly. The doors didn’t close.

“Please, Mr. Pitt. Time is money. We both have pressing matters to deal with. My office is at the end of the tunnel.” I put my hand back on Abomination’s grip. “Please do not do that. Violence upsets me.”

“Really? Because getting kidnapped upsets me.”

There was no answer. The intercom was quiet. I punched the button one last frustrated time. Since my only other option was to try to climb up the elevator cable for probably twenty stories, that left the tunnel.

The tunnel was clean of dust. The rocks were cool. It was a straight shot with no side branches. It sloped downward for a hundred yards before I noticed a much brighter source of light up ahead. The tunnel gradually widened until it opened up into a huge space.

The cave appeared to have been formed naturally, and was at least as large as DeSoya Caverns, only this place was far brighter. You could play a football game in this cave and leave room for bleachers. The light was coming from intricate golden chandeliers hanging from the roof. Crystal formations were naturally growing out of the walls or sprouting from the floor, and they reflected the light in shades of purple, green, and blue. There were more lamps set all along the interior, some crafted metal, some made of exotic fabric, each of them different, but all of them gaudy.

The entirety of the space was filled with
stuff
. There were great gleaming heaps of coins, goblets, jewelry, crowns, and other expensive trinkets. There were sacks casually stacked off to the side that were spilling over with diamonds. There were rolls of silk so shiny that at first I thought it was an optical illusion. Paintings were casually stacked and leaning everywhere, and though I myself knew very little about artwork, I recognized many of these as the originals that graced the pages of Julie’s many art books. There were pristine old classic cars parked down here, with even more stuff stacked on their roofs.

I’d seen a TV show once about people with a mental problem that caused them to hoard things. This cave had that vibe, only instead of junk, stacks of old newspapers, and cats, this place was absolutely packed with valuables and items that reeked of money. I carefully stepped over what I was fairly certain was a Fabergé egg that had just been left on the floor.

The cave smelled dry, sort of old, like an antique store, or an old lady’s house where all the furniture was covered in plastic and there would be an inevitable dish of hard candies that had gradually melted into a solid, colorful block, and then the grandmother would complain that nobody ever came to visit…But beneath that antique smell there was something else, something that took me a moment to place. Back in college I’d had a roommate with a pet iguana. So the cave smelled like an old lady’s house with a pet iguana.

And judging by the thick, musky lizard smell, we’re talking a really
big
iguana.

“Hello?” I called.

“This way, Mr. Pitt,” came the thunderous response. The noise caused me to instinctively crouch for cover behind a taxidermied white rhino. “No need to be alarmed.” Management’s voice was terribly loud inside the cave. “Please, excuse the mess. I have been meaning to organize but I have been so very busy.”

Peeking over the rhino’s butt, I couldn’t see the source of the epic voice. Cursing myself for being an idiot, I made my way around a suit of armor that had a placard saying that it had belonged to Henry the Eighth and a figure that could only be one of the terracotta warriors. Now I could see that in the center of the cave was a gigantic stone pillar, big as a city bus flipped onto its nose. Something vast moved around the stone. Scales whispered against rock.

It was so big that it took me a second to sort out the images and categorize the horrific giant marvel with a word.

It was a dragon.

We’d covered dragons in Newbie training, but only briefly, since nobody ever thought we’d actually
see
one. There were two known types, eastern and western, and both were very powerful, dangerous, with intelligence ranging from smart to brilliant. They were so absurdly, extremely rare, and since no one had encountered one in generations, they were commonly assumed to be extinct.

They were definitely
not
extinct. There was at least one slithering along right in front of me, and if he wanted to eat me there probably wasn’t a damn thing I could do about it. The gigantic creature took my breath away. He was so big that my brain was having a hard time calculating the dimensions. His head was the size of a small car. His shoulders were like two elephants squeezed together. I could only see the front legs, but they were shaped more like hands, only he could palm a cow like I could palm a basketball. One of the claws hit the floor, but with surprising gentleness. The enormous head dipped, fence-post horns tilting to the side, eyeballs the size of my head blinked. The eyelids actually made an audible
slap
as they closed. “Have a seat, Mr. Pitt.”

The only chair I saw nearby was a gray stone throne. I pointed at that questioningly, but no sounds would come out of my mouth.“Yes, yes. A nice piece. It belonged to Nebuchadnezzar, a fine specimen of human leadership. I picked that up at auction for a very reasonable price. Please, we have much to discuss and there is little time.” The massive head swung away as Management continued his path along the pillar.

I very carefully lowered myself onto the priceless historical artifact. The seat was a little small. The dragon continued speaking, obviously trying to put me at ease. “Forgive my rudeness. I will attempt to keep my voice down. I do not receive many visitors. Would you care for anything to drink? I have some very nice 1907 Heidsieck, purchased for the Russian royal family but then lost at sea, and only recently discovered by divers.” I shook my head
no.
“Are you certain? It was a bargain at two hundred thousand a bottle. Ah yes, I forgot, my sources said you are a teetotaler. Very well, down to business then.”

“You’re a dragon?” Considering my current circumstances, it was a remarkably stupid question, but to be fair, I was still suffering from the awe.

“An astute observation. A dragon, the dark lords of the sky, the fire drakes, the savage lords of a time long since turned to dust. I am one of the last of my fading kind. A man of lesser fiber would have fled at the sight of me, but not you, Mr. Pitt. It appears that I picked the right human for the job.” I had the distinct impression that the giant lizard was trying very hard not to sound patronizing. “Welcome to my humble abode.”

The dragon turned, somehow not crashing any of its enormous body into any of the piled treasures. Now I could see that he had wings, but they were folded tight against his scaled back. The end of his tail whipped around the opposite end of the pillar, almost but not quite hitting a red supercar. It looked Italian. Too bad Mosh wasn’t here. He would’ve known what it was and probably had the courage to ask the dragon if he could take it for a spin. My mind was reeling, trying to recall everything I’d read in training. Management was obviously a western dragon. The four limbs, long neck, separate wings, and general dinosaur-like build made that obvious. That also meant he could probably breathe fire and fly, all of which were completely irrelevant factoids at this juncture. I wished fantasy-geek Trip was here. He would’ve flipped out.

As Management moved, I realized for the first time that the stone pillar was absolutely covered in flat-screen TVs. There were hundreds of them, all on different channels. The dragon stopped. Once again, he was staring right at me. “Sell. Sell. Yes. Sell that too.”

I looked around, then back at him, confused. “Sell
what?
”

The dragon held up one swordlike fingernail and pointed at his ear, revealing a Bluetooth headset, miniscule against his huge ear hole. “Not you. Yes, you. Sell when it gets to forty dollars a share.” The dragon rolled his eyes. It was a very human expression for a giant lizard. “Do not question my wisdom, Stanley…Very well. Roll it over and purchase more Apple. Give my love to Mary. Goodbye…Now where were we?”

It turned out that talking to a dragon multitasking with a hands-free phone was even more confusing than when it was a person. “Me?”

“Yes, you. Keep up, Mr. Pitt.” The dragon snapped his huge fingers repeatedly at a volume close to gunfire. “Chop chop.”

Then it struck me. Unless his broker was locked upstairs, he was communicating with the outside world. “Your phone works?”

“Obviously. The MCB’s petty jammers mean nothing to me. I own forty-two percent of the company that manufactures their jamming equipment, not to mention redundant shielded cables. Information is power. And if they had thought that far ahead, I have copious backup systems. I must stay connected at all costs. Of all the many things I collect, information is the most important. Display security cameras.” The TVs were on a voice-activated system, and every screen changed to show the same views as Mitch’s office. “Information is the reason why I organized ICMHP to begin with.”

“I don’t understand. Why—”

“By your current human legal definitions, I am classified as a monster. The conference guests, by career choice, are primarily hunters of monsters. The remainder are the administrators of the hunting of monsters or the scholarly that debate the minutia of any poor creature that falls into the category that you so flippantly refer to as PUFF-applicable. It behooves me to keep abreast of trends in the industry that very well might someday attempt to murder me in my sleep, would you not agree?”

“Sounds reasonable.”

“Is there place for such reasonable creatures as I in such an unreasonable world as this?” Management’s laugh shook the entire cavern. The sudden exhalation of hot air caused a stack of bearer’s bonds to fly across the cave. I caught one, and for a split second owned a thousand shares of Ford. I put it back gently on the arm of the throne. “Of course, I have dealt with MHI before. I am fully aware of the character of your organization. Earl Harbinger has developed a reputation for integrity and honor in the monster community. Even foul and otherwise unlikable creatures have been ignored by MHI unless they are believed to be dangerous. You even spare
gnomes.
” The dragon got a wistful look in his eye. “Ahh, gnomes, you can’t eat just one…I believe you humans would say that they are like popcorn. But as I was saying, as long as I mind my own business, then I know I have nothing to fear from MHI. From the lowliest of humanoids to the spectral wendigo, MHI has demonstrated a willingness to put logic over profit…A concept that few of either of our species seem to grasp.”

MHI took pride in being picky. There were far too many examples of creatures that had ended up on the PUFF table somehow, but weren’t really any sort of danger to mankind. Those, we left alone. However, if we believed their type or species to be a threat, then it was game on, and we’d cash that PUFF check with a smile and sleep like a baby. It was an understandable ethic from a company run by a werewolf. “Thanks.”

“However, I do not know so much about your competitors, nor your federal overseers. They worry me. They strike me as a sort of modern knight, ready to destroy that which they have predetermined to be evil, without ever granting the barest thoughts to determining if that classification is just. Do you know many annoying chivalrous knights I have had to eat over the years? I do not enjoy eating knights. Steel does not digest so well.”