MHI Fan Fiction

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MarkD
Posts: 3969
Joined: Mon Aug 18, 2008 5:59 pm

MHI Fan Fiction

Post by MarkD »

Recently I've been using some of my spare time writing fan fiction based on Larry Corriea's Monster Hunters International. Here's my attempt at such, hope you enjoy it.

(BTW, yes, the story stars me, if there can be a whole sub-genre of Star Trek fan fiction revolving around James T. Kirk's illegitimate children (and usually having the same initials as the author), I can star in my own MHI fan fiction. Besides, I can write me, I may suck at writing someone else).



I’m your basic middle-class, middle-aged (assuming I live to be 106), suburbanite with a wife, a house, two cars (one of which is paid off) and a mortgage. I commute to the city each day to work in a cubicle. If you look at the cross-section of American society you’ll find my picture right where the mean, median and midpoint meet.

Last October my world turned upside down.

The night before we’d had a bad thunderstorm, and one of my big oak trees dropped a branch in the front yard. Being frugal (OK, cheap) I cut it up myself rather than hire someone to (it wasn’t a very big branch anyway), so I was out there with my bow saw and hatchet cutting it into the town-proscribed three-foot lengths so I could tie it up and have it hauled away.

I was just about done cutting, and almost ready to start tying, when I looked up and saw someone who for all the world looked like an extra from The Walking Dead. She looked like a teenage girl in a zombie costume, and she was heading my way. Since it was near Halloween, I figured she was going to a party all dressed up, so I was curious but not especially alarmed, until she stepped from the sidewalk onto the yard. I asked “Can I help you?” and got no response. So I stood up, bow-saw still in hand and hatchet stuck in belt, where’d I’d put it earlier after kneeling on it and deciding leaving it on the ground wasn’t a good idea. She kept shuffling toward me, this girl is GOOD at the zombie thing.

Now I’m not the most trusting soul at the best of times. If a young lady came into my yard without apparent reason I’d try to figure out what she needed, but I’d follow my former-Marine father’s advice: Be polite, be professional, and have a plan to kill anyone you meet. This girl was obviously NOT acting normally. I took a quick glance around to see if one of her friends was taking a video, none was apparent. When she got about six feet from me I decided that was close enough and said “I think you should stop”. When I still got no response I yelled “STOP” as loud as I could (and trust me, that’s loud). When she got closer and started reaching toward me I stuck out my saw, pressed it against the center of her chest, and pushed. I’m a big guy, I probably weighed twice what she did, so when I pushed she moved, as in fell flat on her back. I felt a little bad, she was probably just horsing around, but she was on my property and acting strangely, and she certainly could have been nuts or stoned. Then I noticed, when I pushed her away the blade caught her right forearm and tore it open from elbow to wrist. There was no blood. What the ?????? She scrambled back to her feet and came at me again.

You know, there really are two sides to the human psyche, and you really DO get all sorts of messed up when you can’t bring them together. No, not the Jungian Duality of Man, not good and evil, light and dark, Yin and Yang. We live in a constant battle between the human, rational, logical (or at least logically emotional) brain and the lizard brain. So my rational brain insisted that I had a teenage girl in my yard, acting like a zombie, probably just out having some fun and horsing around, or at worst she was drunk or high and really didn’t know what she was doing. My lizard brain reminded me that I had a perfectly good hatchet stuck in my belt, and it could think of something MUCH more useful to use it on than a fallen tree branch. My rational brain insisted I couldn’t POSSIBLY use a hatchet on a teenage girl. The lizard responded by detailing the muscles I would have to contract in order to make it happen.

I might have been in a REALLY bad state had not Ol’ Yeller popped into my head. I’d read it, literally, decades before, in probably fourth or fifth grade. I recall rabies making otherwise normal people act like maniacs. I recalled reading that a grand total of TWO people in all of history had survived rabies once they’d shown symptoms. I lived in suburban New Jersey, where rabid raccoons and bats were not unheard of (in fact a friend of my wife’s had to have rabies shots after being bitten by a bat that came out from under her refrigerator). All this went thru my mind much faster than it takes to tell, I snatched the hatchet from my belt and swung from the shoulder, hitting her with a nice level swing that would have made my tennis-playing mother-in-law proud, and sunk the hatchet just under her jaw and almost all the way thru.

Now in a small town in suburban New Jersey, when you dial 911 and tell them you just defended yourself from a teenage girl, and they should get there as soon as possible, they tend to drop whatever they’re doing and arrive post-haste. Next thing I know I’m at the local police station, telling and retelling my story. I’m wondering if it’s time to lawyer up, but I haven’t been arrested, they didn’t even cuff me for the trip here. In fact they kept assuring me that everything was fine, that I hadn’t done anything wrong. Which I considered an odd thing for a cop to tell someone who’d just made a teenage girl into Nearly Headless Nichole.

After three or four hours of this (I didn’t have a watch) two new detectives walked in, accompanied by my wife. They sat down, introduced themselves as “Special Agent Myers” and “Special Agent Franks”. Myers reminded me of one of my college English teachers (the crappy one), and Franks was a side of beef in a cheap suit. Myers asked me to repeat my story. After I did so he said “Well, it appears you were attacked by a zombie, and the good news is that you obviously weren’t bitten, if you were you’d be well on your way to turning into one yourself.” Of all the things he might have said, this was just above “I want to be buried in my mother’s wedding dress.” He must’ve noticed the deer-in-the-headlights look, so he continued “Yes, zombies, and other monsters are real. You’ve just survived an attack. Now I have to caution you not to say anything to anyone about this. I work for a government agency tasked with, among other things, keeping the existence of such things as zombies a secret, and we are obviously very good at it because you had no idea they existed until today. If you start talking about today’s events at the very least we’ll ruin your life, and the worst we’ll end it. I’m not kidding. We’ll come up with a believable story, which will be your story, and you ought to stick with it. It’s in everyone’s best interests, especially yours.” Franks just glared at me, as if wondering if any of my parts might be useful after he was thru killing me.

Well, as promised the official story came out. It was that I’d been attacked by a teenage girl who was high on whatever drug is currently popular among suburban teens and can make you nuts. That I’d acted in justifiable self-defense. That I wasn’t being charged with anything. When I went to work Monday morning my manager called me into her office, with a representative from HR, to tell me my services were no longer required. They didn’t say it in so many words, but it appeared that a person who’d kill a teenage girl, even in justifiable self defense, wasn’t a person they wanted around. They handed me a, in my opinion, much too small a severance check for the years I’d worked there, and said they’d be happy to mail me any of my personal stuff I couldn’t carry home that day if I’d just box it up. It’s been nice working with you, have a nice life, sorry we don’t trust you anymore. Assholes.

About two weeks later I’d just about put the whole zombie thing out of my mind when the doorbell rang. I looked out my kitchen window to see who was there,, where I can see them from behind and to their left. Standing on my porch was a man and a woman. The guy was BIG. Actually, big doesn’t do him justice, he was freaking huge. The woman, from my angle, was tall and thin. Great, Jehovah’s Witnesses. I wasn’t sure I should answer the door, but given the size of him if he wanted to come in my door would barely slow him down, and if he decided to come thru the wall it would be only a minor inconvenience. So I opened the door and asked if I could help them. The guy asked “Are you Mark D____?” I replied that I was, and he then said “I understand you killed a zombie.” Great, just what I needed. Either the story got out somehow and these people are reporters who want to interview me, or the government is trying to figure out if I can keep my mouth shut.

I replied “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“My name is Owen Pitt, this is my wife Julie, we work for a company called Monster Hunter International, and if you’ll allow us to come in and talk to you I think it would be mutually beneficial.” Then the woman spoke up “We know you’ve had a visit from Myers and Franks, and you’re not supposed to talk about your experience, but this is how we do our recruiting, among the survivors of monster attacks. If you’ll give us a few minutes of your time we can answer a lot of the questions you no doubt have, and we may be able to work together.”

I said “Suppose I come out there and we talk on the porch?” Like I said, I wasn’t a very trusting person before things got weird, and if anything I was worse now.

“It would be better if we could speak freely, without fear of being overheard by people who don’t know what’s going on.” By this time my wife was behind me, and she said “Let’s let them in and hear what they have to say.” OK, come on in.

So we sat at the dining room table, and Julie starting talking. “Look, I know all this sounds crazy, believe me, I get that. Just hear us out. My name is Julie Pitt, and my family has run a company called Monster Hunters International since the Civil War. I’ve done it my entire life, as did my ancestors. My grandfather still runs the company, although he’s too old to go killing monsters anymore. When Teddy Roosevelt was President he established the Perpetual Unearthly Forces Fund, which pays bounties for killing monsters. Which reminds me…” here she reached into her jacket pocket, pulled out an envelope, set it on the table and slid it over to me.

Owen said “Don’t worry, there’s no zombie in there.” Smart ass. I picked it up, opened it, and found a check for five thousand dollars. Not life-changing, but enough to cover a couple mortgage payments.

Julie went on “That’s the bounty for the zombie you killed, she was pretty new, and thanks to you the outbreak didin’t get very big, but since it was a solo kill you get the whole thing. Bounties change based on the type of monster, the age, and how many people it had killed. I took the liberty of doing the paperwork for you, I figured Myers wouldn’t even tell you that you were eligible.” I shook my head to her questioning, raised eyebrow.
This was a lot to take in, even on top of what I’d experienced a couple weeks before. I said “You mean the government PAYS me to kill a teenage girl?” I admit I was getting a little loud, it sounded so preposterous, but Julie kept calm “No, you didn’t kill her, she was already dead, the virus that made her a zombie killed her, you just made her stop moving and trying to bite other people. Did you notice that she didn’t BLEED? If she touched you, did you notice she was COLD?” I’d noticed the lack of blood, and was secretly thankful I hadn’t actually touched that….thing.

I said “OK, you’ve got my attention, but you certainly didn’t come here to hand me a check you could’ve mailed me, or indeed you could’ve just kept it for yourself and I’d have been none the wiser.”

Here Owen took over “Look, a few years ago I was in a similar situation to you, I’d survived a werewolf attack, and Julie and her…uncle visited me and gave me a check for my bounty. Believe me, you were lucky, to say I got pretty beat up would be a massive understatement, I barely survived.” It was my turn to raise an eyebrow, werewolves must be some impressive beasts. He continued “They made me a job offer, I accepted, and eventually wound up part of the family. We’re here to make you an offer, although there are no single women left in the family, so you probably won’t get that chance.”

“You want ME to join you in monster hunting? I’m not sure I’m young enough, or in shape enough, for that” Hell, I’d been working on getting in shape, but I sure wasn’t up to fighting anything tougher than the teenage girl zombie I’d already encountered.

Julie chuckled “You’d be surprised, but not everyone who joins MHI ends up doing the actual hunting. We have support people, a library of monster lore, computers, medical, even such mundane things as accounts receivable. Owen here is our accountant in addition to being a Hunter. If you take us up on it you’ll go for training. Firearms and weapons, since even the support people have to know how the weapons work. Information about monsters. From what we’ve dug up about you you’re a computer programmer, and you’re a good one. We can use tech help. I’m guessing you’re in your 50’s?” To my nod she continued “Well, someone your age without experience as a Hunter probably wouldn’t go on the teams, but there’s still plenty for you to do.”

Here Owen took over “Oh, in case you’re wondering, the money is great, and if you have any interest in guns or shooting you’ll have plenty of opportunity to indulge. Plus, you get to do work that makes a difference. Our unofficial motto is “Evil looms. Cowboy up. Get paid.”

Back to Julie “We won’t lie to you, it’s dangerous, especially if you do end up on the teams. We have a wall of honor, over the plaques is written ‘Sic Transit Gloria Mundi which means…”

Here I interrupted “The glory of the world is fleeting, roughly translated. I used to have a sign in my office reading ‘Illegitimus Non Carborundum est’” Owen looked a little confused as Julie chuckled, then said “Don’t let the bastards wear you down.”

Well, I needed a job, homes in New Jersey aren’t free to live in even if the mortgage is paid off (which mine isn’t).
Last edited by MarkD on Tue Oct 25, 2016 2:44 pm, edited 1 time in total.
rightisright
Posts: 4286
Joined: Mon Aug 18, 2008 9:41 pm

Re: MHI Fan Fiction

Post by rightisright »

Good start. I'd make some of the paragraphs smaller so they are easier to read.
MarkD
Posts: 3969
Joined: Mon Aug 18, 2008 5:59 pm

Re: MHI Fan Fiction

Post by MarkD »

rightisright wrote:Good start. I'd make some of the paragraphs smaller so they are easier to read.
Yeah, I have to work on formatting. I tried to avoid the paragraph per change in person. Speaking thing during the dialogs, but that may have been a mistake.

Eta:. Now that I'm looking at it for the first time from my phone, I totally get it. I'll reformat tomorrow on a real keyboard.
rightisright
Posts: 4286
Joined: Mon Aug 18, 2008 9:41 pm

Re: MHI Fan Fiction

Post by rightisright »

MarkD wrote: Yeah, I have to work on formatting. I tried to avoid the paragraph per change in person. Speaking thing during the dialogs, but that may have been a mistake.

Eta:. Now that I'm looking at it for the first time from my phone, I totally get it. I'll reformat tomorrow on a real keyboard.
Actually, that is a pretty hard and fast rule in fictional writing. It helps the reader differentiate between speakers and allows the write to not have to name the speaker each time he says something.

Eg.

"Turn off the phone ringer." said Mike.

"Why so?" asked Jane.

"Because it's rude to have your phone on during a movie."

"Oh, that's understandable."

/collegewritingtutor off
MarkD
Posts: 3969
Joined: Mon Aug 18, 2008 5:59 pm

Re: MHI Fan Fiction

Post by MarkD »

Well, I tried to fix the wall-of-text look, broke up some paragraphs and added some blanks.
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